‘I by experience’—that is the very voice of Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages,’ its unique and authentic value, the quality which makes it no book but a living document of the English people. In his labour to make it that Hakluyt drew to himself all he needed, from the humble and from the great. He tells us how many ‘virtuous gentlemen’ helped him, and gives us a galaxy of great Elizabethan names—Sir John Hawkins (who knew something of ‘sea-sorrows,’ for when he returned from his West Indies voyage he said to Walsingham, ‘If I should write of all our calamities I am sure a volume as great as the Bible will scarce suffice’), Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Walsingham, Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord Treasurer Burghley, Sir Robert Cecil, foreign cosmographers and scholars like Mercator, Ortelius, and Thevet, were his friends and correspondents. He valued them all, and not less did he value each humble sailor he came across, such as Mr. Jennings and Mr. Smith, ‘the master and master’s mate of the ship called the _Toby_, belonging to Bristol,’ or a nameless seaman, ‘One of mine acquaintance of Ratcliffe.’ He travelled two hundred miles on horseback to speak with one Thomas Buts, the sole survivor of a Labrador voyage. From the lips of all he learned, and nothing was insignificant to him if it bore upon the sea or far countries or the restless adventures and heroisms of the men of his race. It is the story of the travels of individual men, he truly says, which brings us to a full knowledge of the world, ‘not those weary volumes bearing the titles of Universal Cosmography, which some men that I could name have published as their own.’ It came too late for inclusion in his book; but how he would appreciate the saying of Sir Henry Middleton when the Red Sea was ‘discovered’ (a hundred years after the Portuguese discovered it), and the Turks claimed it as a close sea. ‘To come into this sea,’ Middleton answered splendidly, ‘I needed no leave but God’s and my King’s,’ and followed up his answer with cannon shot. Hakluyt, like most passionate pioneers of Empire, lacked the humour that was Shakespeare’s: ‘Master,’ says one of the fishermen in _Pericles_, ‘I marvel how the fishes live in the sea,’ and was answered: ‘Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.’ The gravity of a great purpose is seldom seasoned with humour, and more to Hakluyt’s liking than Shakespeare’s jest would have been the thought of Samuel Daniel: ‘And who, in time, knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue? to what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent To enrich unknowing nations with our stores?’ He was filled with a spacious philanthropy to the unknown world, and would bestow on it the benefits of our tongue and our laws. His gentleness and wisdom did not fail him even on the thorny question of the propagation of the Christian religion among the ‘salvages’ of the Indies: