SOURCE: "Hakluyt," in The London Mercury, Vol. XVII, No. 97, November, 1927, pp. 62-9.

In the following laudatory essay, Wilkinson provides an overview of Hakluyt's life and work and considers his qualities as an editor. Wilkinson suggests that the strength of The Principal Voyages lies in Hakluyt's artless editing and his skill at finding the romance in true stories.

I think it was Mr. Hilaire Belloc who once divided funny stories into two classes—those which are funny simply because they are funny, and those which are funny because they are true. He might have gone further and applied his theory to stories of all sorts. Even then he would not have reached the central fact, which is that true stories have a particular quality, a manner and charm of their own, which distinguishes them from all others. "Truth is stranger than fiction," we say; and certainly its strangeness, its...