One of Pring's patrons was Richard Hakluyt, to whom all Englishmen are indebted for his great prose epic and for the stimulus he gave to the early founders of the British Empire. Hakluyt was born in London about the year 1552. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1574. His interest in geography and discovery had been aroused when quite a boy by seeing a map in the possession of a relative, and from that moment, he writes, "I constantly resolved, if ever I was preferred to the University, where better time and more convenient place might be ministred for those studies, I would, by God's assistance, prosecute that knowledge and kinde of literature, the doores whereof (after a sort) were so happily opened before me."[33] Hakluyt's first book was published in 1582, under the title, _Divers Voyages touching the discoverie of America and the Ilands adjacent unto the same, made first of all by Englishmen and afterwards by the Frenchmen and Britons_. This work consisted of a collection of documents to support England's claim to the prior discovery of America. In the autumn of 1584 he presented to Queen Elizabeth his _Discourse of Western Planting_, the writing of which was largely due to the inspiration of Sir Walter Raleigh. The subject matter had been supplied by the two voyagers to Virginia, Captains Amidas and Barlow. The first edition of his great work saw light in the year after the Armada; but Hakluyt was not satisfied, and for nine more years laboured on, until in 1598 he produced the second edition in three volumes, and the world was infinitely the richer for the _Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation_. The year that Hakluyt sent out Pring to make discoveries is ever famous for the death of Queen Elizabeth. The great queen, whatever her faults may have been, had indeed bound her subjects to her by affection and admiration, and created amongst them a remarkable spirit of both patriotism and gallantry. It was therefore a fitting and happy circumstance that associated the last of the Tudors with the first of our American colonies. Virginia, named from Elizabeth, the child, so to speak, of a queen, came in time to be the mother of Presidents. It is not, however, until the accession of the pedantic James that a stern resolve to accomplish the establishment of a colony seems to have been taken. The irony of history is better illustrated in this fact than perhaps elsewhere. The mean mind and timid heart of James I. could never arouse or inspire enthusiasm as Elizabeth's actions had done. And yet the appreciation of the importance of a great Empire was reserved for the reign of the first Stuart rather than during the rule of the greatest of the Tudors.