Even the exact place and date of his birth are not stated by any of his biographers. All that appears to be definitely fixed is that he was born near London about the year 1553. That was the year that Edmund Spenser was born; one year after the birth of Sir Walter Raleigh, and one year before the birth of Sir Philip Sidney, both of whom were to become his confrères in schemes of American colonization. He was five years old when Elizabeth came to the throne. Eleven years after his birth Shakspere was born, and he died the same year that Shakspere died. Thus we have the chronology of his life, 1553–1616, his active career extending through the blossom and the bloom of the dazzling Elizabethan period. Richard Hakluyt was of an ancient Hertfordshire family, dating back in that historic county to the thirteenth century. The family seat was at Yatton, or Eyton, not far from the old town of Leominster. They were of Welsh extraction, and our cosmographer may have indulged a personal pride in the legend of “the most ancient discovery of the West Indies,” made by a Welshman in the twelfth century, three hundred years before Columbus. Hakluyts appear to have been early preferred for public station in Hertfordshire. The name (then generally spelled Hackluit) is found in the lists of high sheriffs for the county from the reign of Edward the second to Henry the eighth. In the second year of Henry the fourth Leonard Hackluit, knight, was sheriff. Walter Hakelut was knighted in the thirty-fourth year of Edward the first. Others of the name are seen among early members of Parliament. Thomas Hakeluyt was chancellor of the diocese of Hertford in 1349, in the latter part of Edward the third’s reign. Richard Hakluyt of Yatton, afterward of London, an elder cousin of our Richard, was a cosmographer before him, and esteemed in his time “as well by some principal ministers of state as by several most noted persons among the mercantile part of the kingdom, as a great encourager of navigation and improvement of trade, art, and manufactures.” Our Richard Hakluyt was the second of four brothers, all of whom were liberally educated. The eldest, Thomas, was trained at the Westminster School and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He became a celebrated physician. Richard followed Thomas at the Westminster School when he was fourteen years old, being elected one of the queen’s scholars to that “fruitfull nurserie,” as he terms it. He remained at Westminster for six years and then passed up to Christ College, Oxford. While a schoolboy the love of geography and maritime discovery was implanted in him by his cousin Richard, and so agreeably that he determined to make the pursuit of these branches of science his life-avocation. How this came about let him relate in his own quaint language, translated, for more comfortable reading, into modern English.