British Scholar: September 2007 Book of the Month

Book of the Month

September 2007

Review by:
Jeffery R. Hankins
Louisiana Tech University

Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America
Peter C. Mancall (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) 378 pages

This well-researched and very accessible book addresses a long-standing
dearth of objective study of the sixteenth-century English geographer and
author, Richard Hakluyt. Peter C. Mancall takes us through the inner workings
of Hakluyt’s treatises on discovery and reveals the many complexities that
accompanied this one man’s dedication to English settlement in the New World.
Mancall explores Richard Hakluyt’s own writings while augmenting these with
references from actual accounts which Hakluyt himself drew upon. In this way,
the reader is able to evaluate at the ground level the progression of Hakluyt’s
interests, set-backs, and successes. Through eleven chapters and forty-one
maps and illustrations, Peter Mancall masterfully reconstructs an investigator
whose comprehensive writings had much to do with the eventual settling of North
America’s Atlantic seaboard.

Like many sixteenth-century Europeans, Richard Hakluyt was intrigued by the
diverse flora, fauna, and peoples reported by sailors and discoverers returning
from around the world. According to Mancall, Hakluyt combined this fascination
with a Protestant zeal to “present knowledge that would allow others to see the
works of the Lord”. (p. 23-24). As reports were printed from each new voyage to
the Americas, Hakluyt complemented scientific findings with second-hand
accounts from those who traveled with Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert,
Francis Drake, and Walter Raleigh. Richard Hakluyt successfully published
books and pamphlets that described a world of glittering abundance, the
geographic touch-points to lead people to that world, and the promise of
benefits for the English realm through settlement, industry, and trade. Mancall
reminds us that while Hakluyt drew from many non-English contributors, it
remained his individual agenda to further England’s superior piety, character,
and prosperity.

Peter Mancall describes his subject as “an elusive quarry” and tries to fill in
some of the evidentiary gaps by “recreating aspects of the world he [Hakluyt]
inhabited”. (pp. 303-304). Through the inventory of Thomas Platter, we are
treated to curious scientific and geographic discoveries that apparently
energized men like Richard Hakluyt. (pp. 156-158). Through the examination of
settler David Ingram, we come face-to-face with the behavior and potential of
America’s natives. (p. 192). But we are also often invited to wonder about
Richard Hakluyt’s mind-set and inner thoughts through suppositions that
“perhaps” Hakluyt passed a certain building or “might have” seen a particular
map. We are assured of things that Hakluyt must have known or was likely
aware of. This of course is the historians’ dilemma, but Peter Mancall makes the
best use of extant materials to successfully give human dimension to Richard
Hakluyt through documented experiences of his contemporaries.

Still, the reader is at times left puzzling over Hakluyt’s true motivations for his
important publications. Is it passion, profit, or piety that drives this Elizabethan
cleric to publish the travel accounts of others? Is Richard Hakluyt genuinely
concerned by London’s excess population, or is he responding to Elizabethan
government routine calls for innovative “projects” to employ England’s poor? To
this end, it would be helpful to know more about the geographer’s patrons:
Francis Walsingham, William and Robert Cecil, and the Cloth-workers’
Company. As political, commercial, and financial patrons, any of these entities
could exercise more than a little influence over Hakluyt’s actions and even his
published products. Similarly, it would be instructive to know more about
Richard Hakluyt’s cousin, “the lawyer”, who seems instrumental in launching
Hakluyt’s career in the 1560s, and whose connections to England’s political and
administrative elite could offer additional explanation for his cousin’s literary
pursuits.

Peter Mancall fills in Richard Hakluyt’s elusive character by building the
geographer’s “obsession for an English America” and convincingly
demonstrating Hakluyt’s competency in promoting this worthy goal. We feel
Hakluyt’s excitement as he gathers and reads reports from Europe’s adventures
and discoverers; and we sense his mounting frustration at England’s systemic
failure to colonize parts of North America not already controlled by Spain or
France. Mancall brilliantly re-constructs the efforts behind Hakluyt’s writings as
each publication builds on new voyages, information, and geographic
milestones. Only in the last two chapters does Richard’s Hakluyt’s enthusiasm
appear to wane, as he turns from the woes of Jamestown to the promise of the
spice trade through the successful East India Company.

The conclusion to Mancall’s stimulating work raises interesting questions about
Richard Hakluyt’s place in history. How much, if any, blame can be ascribed to
Hakluyt for the rosy picture of American abundance that often preceded English
colonial disasters like Jamestown? Can his travel accounts, unaccompanied by
any direct experience, be viewed as impersonal “boosterism” that condemned
men and women to misery in the early colonial period? These questions cannot
be answered definitively or objectively, but Mancall’s book does permit these
intriguing speculations. Peter Mancall has thoroughly mined the sources to
present us with a rich and complex individual, previously viewed as the
disembodied voice of English colonization. This is not only the best work on
Richard Hakluyt to date, but a victory for those who see the European
settlement of North America as a multi-layered, multi-faceted process.