Paperback. Cream cover with black title on the spine and ship on the front board.

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Renaissance diplomat and part-time spy, William Hakluyt was also England’s first serious geographer, gathering together a wealth of accounts about the wide-ranging travels and discoveries of the sixteenth-century English. One of the epics of this great period of expansion, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation describes, in the words of the explorers themselves, an astonishing era in which the English grew rapidly aware of the sheer size and strangeness of their world. Mingling accounts of the journeys of renowned adventurers such as Drake and Frobisher with descriptions by other explorers and traders to reveal a nation beginning to dominate the seas, Hakluyt’s great work was originally intended principally to assist navigation and trade. It also presents one of the first and greatest modern portraits of the globe.

Review: Richard Hakluyt (pronounced Hacket’) compiled the original version of this book over virtually his lifetime and meant it to be a lot more than a mere entertaining read. ‘The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation’, was meant to be an aid for both navigation and trade. Hakluyt was an interesting man too, educated at Christ Church, Oxford he took holy orders and started his love of travel writing -not the Rough Guide type of today, but great stories of derring do and foreign lands with weird, smelly foreigners who sometimes had `horrible ears’. He had his first book published in 1582 when he was about thirty years old. He went on to be called a `Renaissance diplomat, scholar and part time spy’.

But enough of him, back to the book, this is an edited version of the real thing by Jack Beeching and at over 400 tightly printed pages it packs many a punch. What makes it so interesting is that all of the many stories in the book are firsthand accounts of the travails of the participants. Hakluyt went out of his way to track them down or get written testimony and also tried to elicit as much information as possible on customs, geography and ease of travel so that the next time any one went there it would be a tad easier. England was playing catch up on the International trade front and so needed all the help it could get. The tales often feature people from history who you will be aware of like Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, but the breadth is amazing from Cathay to South America. There are tales of shipwreck, slavery, religious persecution, and a `request to be advised in the killing of the whale’, so not one for animal lovers. The language is of the Tudor period, but Beeching has done his best to make this easily accessible in terms of updating where necessary, but still leaves enough in to make anyone interested in language and etymology fully hooked. A note on Beeching who is to be applauded for this remarkable book, he is an author in his own right and his book `The Chinese Opium Wars’The Chinese Opium Wars (Harvest Book; Hb 350) is an absolute classic – one of the best history books I have ever read and he is the main reason why I bought this in the first place. An essential read for anyone interested in history.