These is nothing more essentially English than the passion for adventure and exploration, for seeing and colonising the world. It is a strange passion: it leads men to leave the fair and comfortable villages, the meadow-lands and sheltering woods to which they were born, for desolation and strange seas, to exchange the temperate airs of England for the rigours of Arctic nights and the burning of tropic mornings, to give up security and good living for starvation and hardship, for death by thirst or famine, or the cruelties of ‘salvages.’ Yet to this call of the blood few Englishmen turn an utterly deaf ear—for century after century, and generation after generation, they have followed the call and strewed their bones about the world, while those who came home again simply inflamed others to follow their adventuring footsteps. We look upon the Elizabethan age as our perfect flowering time in poetry and drama and the courtly arts. We know, moreover, how in that reign our seamen first fully realised themselves, and one of the greatest among them accomplished his fruitful circumnavigation of the globe. It is singularly fitting, therefore, that such a time should have produced the man who realised the epic quality of the voyagings and travels done in his day and in times past, and who dedicated his life to setting down some worthy record of those things. That man was Richard Hakluyt—or Hacklewit, as his name was commonly pronounced and often spelt by his contemporaries, and that spelling gives it a native English look more in keeping with his nature than the accepted form. Three hundred years ago, in November 1616, the same year as Shakespeare, he died, bequeathing to posterity the work of his life in that noble book called by him ‘The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, made by Sea or Overland to the Remote and furthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the Compasse of these 1600 Yeares.’ Such a work grew from no common inspiration; it was not compiled, as many later ‘monumental’ works have been, from other men’s researches: it was part of the very fabric of his life. He spent laborious days and nights, he gave long patient years to his self-imposed task, he studied and he travelled, he talked with living men and inquired of the works of dead ones; all knowledge was his province, so that it bore on his great subject. It is doubtful if the annals of literature can show a more passionate and more persistent devotion. As Hakluyt himself said to ‘The Reader’ in the second edition of his ‘Voyages’: