The First Colonists: Hakluyt's Voyages to North America - A Modern Version (The Folio Society)

ix, [3], 142 pp. Color plates and black-and-white illustrations throughout. Introduction by A.L. Rowse. The plates reproduce 16 watercolours of maps, scenes, flora and fauna of North America, made by John White in 1585 and 1586. In addition there are 28 monochrome illustrations in the text, reproducing contemporary prints and drawings, including Theodor de Bry's etchings from the English edition of his America... (1590 - 1591), based on White's watercolours. Hakluyt was a staunch promoter of a petition to James I for letters patent to colonize Virginia, which were granted to the London Company and Plymouth Company (collectively, the Virginia Company) in 1606. He lends his name to the Hakluyt Society, which publishes scholarly editions of primary records of voyages and travels. English geographer noted for his political influence, his voluminous writings, and his persistent promotion of Elizabethan overseas expansion, especially the colonization of North America. His major publication, The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), provides almost everything known about the early English voyages to North America. Hakluyt's family was of some social standing in the Welsh Marches and held property at Eaton. His father died when Richard was five years old, leaving his family to the care of a cousin, another Richard Hakluyt, a lawyer who had many friends among prominent city merchants, geographers, and explorers of the day. Because of these connections, and his own expertise in overseas trade and economics, the man was well placed to assist young Richard in his life work. With the help of various scholarships, Hakluyt was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, entering in 1570 and taking his M.A. degree in 1577. His interest in geography and travel had been aroused on a visit to the Middle Temple, one of the four English legal societies, while in his early teens. As he writes in the "Epistle Dedicatorie" to The Principall Navigations, his cousin spoke to him of recent discoveries and of the new opportunities for trade and showed him "certeine bookes of Cosmographie, with an universall Mappe." His imagination thus stirred, the schoolboy had thereupon resolved to "prosecute that knowledge and kinde of literature" at the university. Some time before 1580 he took holy orders, and, though he never shirked his religious duties, he spent considerable time reading whatever accounts he could find about contemporary voyages and discoveries. - Britannica