1552-1616
Richard Hakluyt (pronounced HACK-loot) was an English geographer, historian, editor, and a leading promoter of English colonial expansion in North America. He was known as ”Richard Hakluyt of Oxford” to distinguish him from his older cousin, Richard Hakluyt of the Middle Temple, who was a lawyer and also an advocate of English colonization.
Richard Hakluyt of Oxford was born in London in 1552 and was educated at Christ Church, a college of Oxford University. He later taught at Oxford, was ordained as a priest in the Church of England, and pursued a career as both a scholar and clergyman. He was well connected to many of the leading political figures of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, including Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1554-1618).
Hakluyt’s earliest writings on English overseas expansion included plans for establishing a colony on the Strait of Magellan at the southern tip of South America. He soon abandoned this plan, however, in favor of English settlement of the Atlantic coast of North America.
In 1584 Hakluyt completed one of his major works, titled Discourse of Western Planting, which was presented to Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) in manuscript but was not actually printed until almost three hundred years later. This text established English legal claims to North America (based in part on the writings of John Dee [1527-1608]) and discussed in depth the benefits of English settlement, including the commercial and strategic advantages that England stood to gain from colonizing the region. Although Elizabeth was in agreement with the sentiments of this manuscript, England was engaged in a rivalry with Spain and unable to finance the colonial project that Hakluyt proposed, though Hakluyt’s writing probably had an influence on the formation of the unsuccessful colony established in 1585 on Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina.
Hakluyt’s next great work, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589 (with later editions published under a slightly different title), was a compilation of reports and documents pertaining to English voyages of exploration to America, the Arctic, Russia, Asia, and Africa. Unlike earlier compilations of this kind, Hakluyt’s text was based on original documents and explorers’ reports, and on his own translations of foreign texts. The Principal Navigations narrates the history of English exploration, and also constitutes a kind of prose epic of the heroic exploits of the English. This work was hugely influential in stimulating English interest in establishing colonies in North America, especially because it was published only one year after England’s defeat of the invading Spanish Armada in 1588. Spain’s defeat gave the English a freer hand in exploring and colonizing North America north of Florida and allowed for the rise of English imperialism more generally.
Hakluyt died in 1616 and was buried in Westminster Abbey in London. Many of the unpublished documents he left at the time of his death were later edited and published by Samuel Purchas (ca. 1577-1626) in Purchas His Pilgrimes, which continued Hakluyt’s project of documenting English exploration. The London-based Hakluyt Society, founded in the nineteenth century and named after him, continues to publish important documents in the history of exploration.
