Possibly at these lectures, certainly soon after, he was advocating with much earnestness the pressing need of popular technical education to produce informed and skilful mariners, and this he continued persistently to urge in all his after writings. He would have had established in London a lectureship, or a school of nautical crafts, from which English seamen might be graduated complete navigators. To this end he dwelt much upon the advantages of the navigators of rival nations, gained largely through their scientific training. At that time Spain was maintaining in Seville, at the “Contractation House,” or Exchange, a “Learned Reader” in the art of navigation and a board of examiners, of which the reader was a member, and no man in Spain could obtain the charge of a ship for the Indies till he had attended the reader’s course and had passed the examining board. A century earlier the “hero nation” of Portugal had established a school of navigation, instituted by that heroic figure in maritime discovery, Prince Henry, surnamed “The Navigator.” Despite, however, the force of Hakluyt’s sound arguments, and the endorsement of his proposition by such seasoned mariners as Sir Francis Drake and by various men of affairs, the lectureship never was founded, greatly to his regret. When Hakluyt began his studies in cosmography systematically the only English work at his hand touching the subject was the _Historie of Travayle_ by Richard Eden, dating from 1555. This was the first work of its kind produced in England, and a new edition was brought out while Hakluyt was a student at Oxford. Although it was a classic from a scholarly Englishman, it presented only a limited view of maritime discovery. Consequently the young student was obliged to pursue his investigations chiefly in various foreign works, and among manuscripts deposited in private libraries or collections. He had not progressed far before he had become impressed with the backwardness of England in Western occupation since the discovery of the North American continent under her auspices in 1497 and 1498. Great deeds had been performed by intrepid English explorers to the North and Northeast, and English commerce had been advanced in the rich regions of the East; but on the Western continent no further attempt of moment toward exploration or settlement had been made by Englishmen from the finish of Henry the seventh’s reign to Elizabeth’s time. Meanwhile other nations had established foothold in these “fair and fruitful parts,” to England’s disadvantage. Thus Hakluyt came clearly to see that maritime traffic united with American colonization must be the means that England should adopt, without further delay, if she were to improve the condition of her people and become a naval power in the world.