Full text: Religion, colonising & trade

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 3 
too were servants of the Empire and cleared a way for 
those who came after them.” In these terms the late 
Sir Walter Raleigh, most worthy beater of a historic 
name, wrote of the voyagers of the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth ; the words will be found in his delightful 
essay published in the last volume of the Glasgow 
(19034) edition of Hakluyt’s ¢ Principal Navigations.” ! 
Earlier in the same essay he wrote, © Men have travelled, 
as they have lived, for religion, for wealth, for 
knowledge, for pleasure, for power and the overthrow 
of rivals > 2—a comprehensive list of motives, for the 
Elizabethans in particular, and in general for all men 
and times. 
The sixteenth century was Hakluyt’s century, in 
which and of which he collected records, to stir up 
his countrymen to what he styled discoveries and 
notable enterprises by sea. Born, we are told in the 
‘ Dictionary of National Biography,” about 1552, he 
lived well on into the next century, till 1616. He saw, 
therefore, the actual beginning of the Empire and, 
what is more, he was a leading adventurer in the 
London section of the Virginia Company, which 
founded Jamestown, the first permanent English 
settlement in America. In 1582 he published ¢ Divers 
Voyages touching the Discovery of America” In 
1584 he wrote ‘A Discourse concerning Western 
Planting’ which, however, was not printed until 1877. 
The first edition, in a single volume, of his great 
collection, © The Principal Navigations, Voyages and 
Discoveries of the English Nation made by Sea or 
* Vol. xii, p. 68. In any further reference to quotations from 
Hakluyt’s Voyages. this edition is implied. 2 Ibid, p. 2.
	        
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