SOURCE: An introduction to Richard Hakluyt and the English Voyages, by George Bruner Parks, edited by James A. Williamson, American Geographical Society, 1928, pp. xi-xvii.

In the following excerpt, Williamson places Hakluyt's English Voyages in a historical context. Williamson considers Hakluyt the major historian of Elizabethan colonial expansion, and finds in his work crucial evidence of the "ideas and outlook of the Elizabethans. "

The Elizabethan age was not spacious, as we are sometimes told, but narrow and needy. It was a time of industrious study of man and nature as well as of books, and its adventures were undertaken not from swashbuckling zest but because good men found their country in a tight place and staked their lives and fortunes to redeem it. It was a time of more loss than profit, of more misery than glory. Drake's record has deceived many; he was an exception, not a type...