Imbued with these convictions he early set out, perhaps while still delivering the “Public Lectures,” definitely to promote this policy with voice and pen. Early he is found in close touch with men leading in state affairs and in bold enterprises. He is much in correspondence with Sir Francis Walsingham, the queen’s chief secretary. He gets points from Sir Francis Drake after that great navigator’s return, in 1580, from the first circumnavigation of the globe by an Englishman, loaded with treasure, the spoil of Spanish harbours on the Pacific, and crowned with honours for the discovery of California for the English and its occupation as “New Albion.” He has intimate intercourse with Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to whom, in 1578, Elizabeth had given her letters patent to discover and to colonize “remote, heathen, and barbarous lands”—the first grant of the kind ever made by an English sovereign,—and, as we have seen, prepares his first book, _Divers Voyages_, in aid of Sir Humphrey’s project. Walter Raleigh, Gilbert’s half-brother and associate, who had known Hakluyt and was conversant with his studies in cosmography when he was at college, became his patron. Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicates the _Divers Voyages_, had been his fellow-student at Oxford. Hakluyt planned to accompany Gilbert’s fatal expedition of 1583, but before its departure he was appointed chaplain to Sir Edward Stafford, the queen’s ambassador to Paris. This preferment evidently came to him directly through his interest in nautical affairs. Those who obtained it for him believed that his services to the cause of Western discoveries and colonization would then be most valuable from that post of observation and influence. Walsingham expected him to make diligent enquiry of “such things as may yield any light unto our Western discoveries,” and he justified this hope by undertaking shrewdly to collect information of the movements of the Spanish and as well the French, and to recommend measures for the furtherance of the cause which he had most at heart. No sooner was he established at Paris than he became absorbed in this special mission, and it continued almost his sole occupation while he remained with the embassy, which was for a period of five years.