The prefatory address “to the Favourable Reader” discloses the thoroughness of the compiler’s work. He has been careful in every possible case to present exact copies of the original narratives. Wherever he has copied from an historian, or “authour of authoritie,” either “stranger or naturall”—foreigner or native—he has “recorded the same word for word with his particular name and page of booke” where the “testimonie” is extant. “If the same were not reduced into our common language,” he has given it in the original followed by a translation. And “to the ende that those men which were the paynefull and personall travellers might reape that good opinion and iust [just] commendation which they haue deserued, and further, that euery man might answere for himselfe, iustifie [justify] his reports, and stand accountable for his own doings,” he has “referred euery voyage to his Author which both in person hath performed, and in writing hath left the same.” He adds that while he “meddles” in this work with the navigations only of the English nation he quotes in a few places “some strangers as witnesses of the things done”; yet these foreigners are only such as “either faythfully remember, or sufficiently confirme” the Englishmen’s travels. A map of the world inserted in this volume was taken by Hakluyt from the atlas of Abraham Ortelius, a celebrated Flemish geographer, published at Antwerp in 1570. It was substituted temporarily for one in preparation for the book, but not completed by the engraver in time. Hakluyt alludes to this, in the address “to the Favourable Reader,” as “a very large and most exact terrestriall Globe collected and reformed according to the newest, secretest, and latest discoveries, both Spanish, Portugall, and English, composed by M[aster] Emmerie Mollineux of Lambeth, a rare gentleman in his profession, being therein for divers yeares, greatly supported by the purse and liberalitie of the worshipfull marchant M[aster] William Sanderson.” What is supposed to be the Mollineux map has been found in rare copies of this volume and of the second edition. A map bound in a treasured copy of the 1589 edition in the Boston Public Library contains this memorandum written on the back: "This map is a facsimile of the map of the world found in _some_ of the first editions of this book. By Sabin and others it is attributed to Emmerie Mollineux of Lambeth, by Capt. Markham and others, to Edward Wright, the mathematician who perfected and rendered practicable what we know to-day as Mercator’s projection. Hallam describes this as ‘the best map of the 16th century and one of uncommon rarity.’ Only nine copies are known to exist."