Richard Hakluyt was the preeminent collector and editor of documents relating to the first decades of England's trade and exploration outside of Europe, chiefly in his massive, three-volume Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation (1598-1600)--a work the historian James A. Froude labeled "the prose epic of the modern English nation." Hakluyt was not the first Englishman to publish collections of such narratives--Richard Eden in the 1550s and Richard Willis in 1577 had preceded him--nor the most comprehensive: after his death Samuel Purchas would take over his unpublished papers and acquire more of his own until Hakluytus Posthumus: or, Purchas His Pilgrims (1625) filled four folio volumes. Nonetheless, Hakluyt has become a general name for the activity of publishing and promulgating such accounts. His books are valued by historians as unmatched sources of relatively untouched primary documents on English mercantile and colonial expansions and as a...