Hakluyt is our first serious geographer – the Englishman who decisively parts company with medieval cosmography, weighed down as it was by the authority of classical texts and the astronomy of Ptolemy. [12]

His rough-and-ready shipmasters can have had no inbuilt prejudice against a Copernican world. They knew that circumnavigation was possible. Sun and stars overhead were not symbols of perfection, but useful signals of whereabouts; the stars control a navigator’s fate by telling him his latitude.

He is the human link in Elizabethan London between ship’s captain, merchant, map-maker, courtier, statesman, speculator and foreign geographer.

[…]

Just before Hakluyt’s time at Oxford, the continental mapmakers Mercator [on Mercator and Dee see here] and Ortelius had begun to arouse intellectual interest by presenting an augmented picture of our world in the light of new discoveries. Hakluyt gave geographical lectures on the use of these new maps and globes, but much of his time must have been spent learning languages: a decisive study in his chosen career. [15]

The Spaniards were beginning to publish descriptions of the lands they had discovered: so were the French. In 1580, Hakluyt is found writing to Mercator for information about Siberian coasts and currents which might be of use to an English expedition setting out once more to find the Northeast Passage.

In 1582, Hakluyt published hi Divers Voyages touching the discovery of America, dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. To furnish timely argument for Walsingham’s policy of planting an English colony on the American mainland, Hakluyt had brought together, from written records, an account of much it might be well to know about America. From this response to a need of practical politics, his documentary method was beginning to emerge.

He baits the argument for the CIty of London with a somewhat overstated list of American products available for trade, and gives again the arguments for a Northwest Passage to Cathay […]

In his later Particular Discourse on the Western Planting – presented to Queen Elizabeth in Walter Raleigh’s name […] Hakluyt was at liberty to give more thoroughly the argument for colonial expansion. Strategic reasons were given emphasis. Spain, the dominant European power – financing the Counter-Reformation with American gold, trying to impose Catholicism on France and the Low Countries – is identified as the enemy of an England already hoping to prosper by the inroads that may be made upon the Spanish colonial monopoly. An English colony midway along the North American coast could serve as a naval base for attacks on the West Indies and the Spanish Main, not to mention on the Plate Fleet – Spain’s annual convoy bringing gold and silver in bulk across the Atlantic to Seville.

He goes on in his Particular Discourse, to suggest how America could ultimately make England economically independent of Europe.

The real source of wealth in the New World, Hakluyt insists, will be not those imaginary gold mines that had blinded Gilbert’s and Frobisher’s backers, but the fur trade, not to mention the timber and naval stores and potash that might make England independent of the Baltic.

Hakluyt for the moment drops the modest mask of archivist to show uncommon powers of historical insight into the problems, then entirely novel, of colonisation. 

[…]

In the autumn of 1583, the thirty-one-year-old Oxford scholar Richard Hakluyt made his way to Paris: Hakluyt described his prime duty in Paris as ‘diligent inquiry of such things as may yield any light unto our western discovery.’

This was a time when exact geographical knowledge of America was politically vital. As late as 1583 there had been no certain knowledge in England of the coast of Newfoundland […]

In 1585 the first colonising expedition to Virginia had sailed ill-prepared, to be brought back in distress by Drake in ’86. French knowledge of America was wider and better. […] Paris was as close as Walsingham could reasonably get to the organised secrets of Spanish navigation, and the threatening, covert motions of Spanish policy.

But Hakluyt was only a part-time spy. He was primarily a scholar in the magnificent Renaissance tradition – a man for whom the gratuitous pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was life’s most important end.

In 1587 he spent half a year’s income from his Bristol sinecure on financing the Paris publication, in Latin, the cosmopolitan language of learning, of the complete Decades of Peter Martyr – a collection in seven volumes of New World discoveries, not available in full for nearly sixty years.

The first quarto edition of Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations emerged into the afterglow of Armada year. At once it took its place amid that cluster of works – Spencer’s Faerie Queen, Holinshed’s History, Camden’s Britannia, Stow’s Antiquities, which together helped to give the nascent English patriotism a tone of voice, indeed a life-style, it was not to discard until very recent times.

Once the Protestant Englishman had been accorded his distinctive profile, the conquest of Empire had from then on a subtle moral sanction. The world was to be mastered for its own good. This new type – imperialist as godfearing knight-errant – had already been marvellously delineated throughout hundreds of Spenserian stanzas, written down, many of them, in a lonely castle amid bog and forest, surrounded by the fierce papist denizens of a temporarily conquered Ireland. To Hakluyt just then, imperialism must have seemed a worthy national destiny.

The counterpart of Spenser’s knight-errant was the gallant English sea-dog – another representative national hero; even though, like John Hawkins, he may have condemned the world that came after him to the horrid and interminable consequences of the slave trade.

Respected, pillaged, but seldom read critically – ‘the prose epic of our modern English nation’, as one enthusiastic Victorian imperialist described his Principal Navigations – Richard Hakluyt’s value, not merely as a geographer but as an originator across a broad spectrum of social sciences, has too long been obscured by the glowing patriotic penumbra diffused about his work since the Armada.