Hakluyt, Richard

Hakluyt, Richard (pron. Hacklit) (c.1552–1616), English collector and editor of sea narratives, born of a Herefordshire family and educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. He found an early delight in reading books of travel and when at Oxford learned five or six languages to assist him in reading books of voyages written in other languages, and to enable him to talk to seamen of other nationalities. While there, he also studied navigation and the art of chartmaking, and by reading as many of the original journals kept by mariners as he could lay his hands on he compiled a collection of voyages to America and the West Indies which was published in 1582 as Divers Voyages Touching upon the Discovery of America.

On leaving Oxford he took holy orders and in 1583 went to Paris as chaplain to the English ambassador. During the next six years he compiled the great work for which he is famous, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, of which a first edition in one folio volume was published in 1589, and a second and enlarged edition in three folio volumes ten years later. It was one of the really great books of the English language, and one of the best loved in marine literature.

Throughout his life Hakluyt was a strong advocate for exploring the American continent and discovering the North-West Passage, and he continued to collect, read, copy, and make notes of every account of a voyage he could find, often travelling long distances to copy original sea journals or to talk with a seaman who had made a long or difficult voyage. He assembled a huge collection of manuscripts, many more than appear in his Principall Navigations, and he was working on these at the time of his death. They were acquired by a friend, a priest called Samuel Purchas (c.1575–1626), who in 1626 published some of them in five folio volumes under the title of Hakluytus Posthumous, or Purchas his Pilgrimes. Sadly Purchas was no editor and many of the accounts Hakluyt had gathered were garbled and truncated.

Among the publications of the Hakluyt Society, which was founded in Britain in 1847 to edit and publish the texts and accounts of voyages, was Hakluyt's Principall Navigations in twelve volumes and Purchas's Pilgrimes in twenty volumes.

Bridges, R., and Hair, P. (eds.), Compassing the Globe: Studies in the History of the Hakluyt Society (1996).