Customer Reviews

Voyages and Discoveries: Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries ofthe English Nat (Penguin English Library)

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History is best not written by historians. In particular I mean the present day academic types who always have some 'politically correct' axe to grind or new theory purposely designed to shock and distort for the sole purpose of making a name for themselves. To really enjoy history, it is better to sidestep this self-aggrandizement of the historian and go straight to the source, reading genuine narratives written by those closest to the events and the period described. This is why I highly recommend this book which covers the period of Elizabethan exploration, trade, and piracy.

In terms of its effects on our modern World, this great impulse to cross oceans, to trade, fight, and colonize was of vital importance. Without the daring and ambition of a few hundred gentlemen and merchants and the toughness of the 'sea dogs' they employed, there would have been no British Empire and no United States, as we now know it.

During his life, Richard Hakluyt compiled an enormous collection of documents and narratives relating to this great outward impulse. This volume represents a selection of only about one tenth of the original work. Besides ocean voyages, Hakluyt also documented overland explorations, particularly the attempts by the Muscovy Company to establish trade routes from the Arctic Sea ports to Persia and Central Asia.

According to the sleeve notes, Hakluyt compiled this collection of narratives by seamen and traders to encourage further voyages of discovery and trade with distant lands, however, this is no sane man's impression. Apart from a few, most of the stories herein contained reveal such suffering and danger that reading this book would dampen the enthusiasm of even the most adventurous person today. We have terrible tales of shipwreck, cannibalism, starvation, scurvy, disease, betrayal, slavery, torture, fatigue, exposure, freezing and simple butchery that it seems miraculous that men could be found to fill ships such as these. But filled they were!

The more upbeat tales usually involve successful pirating expeditions such as Drake's incredibly successful foray around the World from 1577 to 1580, which broke in upon Spain's monopoly of plunder from the New World. The proceeds of this voyage effectively set Britain up as a capitalist power.

Whereas most of the expeditions had realistic objectives, that is to discover feasible routes to known places, there are occasionally misdirected attempts to discover El Dorados, most notably Sir Walter Raleigh's exploration of Guiana where he continuously talks about glittering rocks and shiny ores, and undiscovered cities stacked with gold greater than that of the Incas and Aztecs.

The pure, simple, unaffected way the voyagers and merchants describe the peoples and cultures they encounter is a real pleasure, and often very funny. I particularly enjoyed Sir Walter Raleigh's chaste lechery towards the native women of Guiana:

"I protest before the majesty of the living God, that I neither know nor believe, that any of our company, by violence or otherwise, ever knew any of their women, and yet we saw many hundreds, and had many in our power, and of those very young, and excellently favoured, which came among us without deceit, stark naked."

A very early case of 'No sex, please, we're English'!!!

The book has some drawbacks. The narratives by merchants often smell too much of the counting house, the focus being on the details of trade, therefore the reader shouldn't feel bad about skipping the occasional page or two. A more serious problem was the complete lack of maps, very surprising in a work of this nature. Also, I think a lot more could have been done with footnotes, as several of the narratives don't tell the full story and it would be interesting to hear what subsequently happened to the men and their ships.

An excellent resource for anyone interested in the early English voyages to North America (16th and 17th centuries). It is an abridged edition, however, not the complete text. I believe that a new edition of the full text (the last one was in 1909) is about to be undertaken. For Hakluyt scholars, there is a seminar planned at the Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England, in May 2008. Details are available from the museum's website.

My only real complaint about this Penguin Classics version of Hakluyt's "Voyages And Discoveries" is that it is extremely abridged. Then again, I don't imagine that even Penguin could pull off publishing the over 4,000 page original, which was in the library at Winchester when I was a schoolboy, and - need I say - was a favourite of even those who feigned indifference to matters literary.

It's the quintessential English "sea-dog" book, mostly composed by said sea-dogs themselves and has always served as a companion piece to the national anthem, with its chorus about Britannia ruling the waves and what not. These excerpts - ending slightly after the defeat of the Spanish Armada - cover, however, tales that took place BEFORE England ruled the waves. Spain is the pre-eminent sea power through almost all of the book, and Spain and RCs get rather a bad rap herein. All for the better, I say. The book was written by men who had been imprisoned by the Spanish, tortured by the Spanish and who had fought to the death with the Spanish. Should we gloss their feelings to create a book more suited to modern global sensibilities? Heaven forefend!

If you like books about the perils and glories of the sea, you'll love these abridged narratives. If not, not. I couldn't help, whilst poring over these tales, of which my favourite is of the - no doubt mad - Lord Grenville, a sort of apologia written by Raleigh for his seemingly unaccountable derring-do, recall Johnson's remark to Boswell about ships and sailors:

"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned."

And one can't help agreeing with the lexicographic curmudgeon on this one. As Hakluyt puts it regarding the relatively "prosperous" voyage of James Lancaster:

"By this may be seen that there is no sure safety of things in this world."

To be sure, but it's quite an innocuous thrill to read about such bracing tales of dangerous feats upon the main - whilst tilling the ships from the safety of one's armchair.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and its compilation of real accounts of navigators and explorers of the 16th century. Written in 1590, Hakluyt work provided the navigators of the time of a handy and resourceful aid to deal with places and different cultures that were expected on those voyages of discoveries. Some of the stories really deserve a documentary, even a movie of it, for instance the story of Miles Philip and his 16 years of miseries, captured by the spaniards in Mexico.

Other voyages depicted here are those made by Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish. I have already read a biography of Drake, which I recommend it for sure, but this was the only source I was able to find for the voyages of Cavendish, so that is another reason for my interest in this book. "Slain" is one of the words that is most frequently used in these accounts, showing that the people involve in those voyages suffered a great deal -- and I have only admiration for them.

Richard Hakluyt (pronounced Hacket') compiled the original version of this book over virtually his lifetime and meant it to be a lot more than a mere entertaining read. `The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation', was meant to be an aid for both navigation and trade. Hakluyt was an interesting man too, educated at Christ Church, Oxford he took holy orders and started his love of travel writing -not the Rough Guide type of today, but great stories of derring do and foreign lands with weird, smelly foreigners who sometimes had `horrible ears'. He had his first book published in 1582 when he was about thirty years old. He went on to be called a `Renaissance diplomat, scholar and part time spy'.

But enough of him, back to the book, this is an edited version of the real thing by Jack Beeching and at over 400 tightly printed pages it packs many a punch. What makes it so interesting is that all of the many stories in the book are firsthand accounts of the travails of the participants. Hakluyt went out of his way to track them down or get written testimony and also tried to elicit as much information as possible on customs, geography and ease of travel so that the next time any one went there it would be a tad easier. England was playing catch up on the International trade front and so needed all the help it could get.

The tales often feature people from history who you will be aware of like Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, but the breadth is amazing from Cathay to South America. There are tales of shipwreck, slavery, religious persecution, and a `request to be advised in the killing of the whale', so not one for animal lovers this. The language is of the Tudor period, but Beeching has done his best to make this easily accessible in terms of updating where necessary, but still leaves enough in to make anyone interested in language and etymology fully hooked.

A note on Beeching who is to be applauded for this remarkable book, he is an author in his own right and his book `The Chinese Opium Wars The Chinese Opium Warsis an absolute classic - one of the best history books I have ever read and he is the main reason why I bought this in the first place. An essential read for anyone interested in history.

These tales vary from 2 pages to 25. The longer ones are the best, the most engaging. The short ones set the tone and establish the mentality of these commercially motivated expeditions.

The first half of the book is practically all dedicated to trading trips to Russia and Persia via the White Sea, the river Dvina, the river Volga and the Caspian Sea.

The second half is devoted to seafaring tales, including pirating, which is always fun. The descriptions of attempts to find a North West or North East passage to China were tedious to me since they're all doomed to tragic failure.

The description of the famous battle with the Spanish Armada is kind of irritating, it's been repeated to me since I was a little shaver. It was interesting to learn that one reason the Armada ships were so big was that they were troop carriers hoping to land an invasion force. It was also interesting to learn that a second fleet of smaller ships lead by the Duke of Parma was planned to rendezvous with the Armada: maybe if that had happened I'd be typing this in Spanish right now. It would be interesting to read an impartial military analysis of this famous battle, as it stands it leaves the impression that the Spanish had way more money than brains. The Spanish are portrayed in a very bad light throughout this book, which I'm sure is pretty accurate.

The 16th century style of speech made this a little difficult but by reading it aloud I was able to comprehend and appreciate it.

The main text is 411 pages. After the main text there are: 1) a few pages of end notes, 2) a few pages of short bios of some of the principal actors in these expeditions, 3) a glossary of some of the archaic terms, and 4) an index.