SOURCE: An introduction to Virginia Voyages from Hakluyt, edited by David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, Oxford University Press, London, 1973, pp. vii-xvii.

In the following essay, the critics provide an overview of Hakluyt's career and chronicle his involvement, along with that of Grenvilie and Ralegh, in the discovery and settlement of North America.

David Freeman Hawke on the unusual nature of Hakluyt's contribution to the exploration voyages:

There is something preposterous about a mild, retiring preacher emerging out of Elizabethan England as one of the giants of the age. Indeed, Hakluyt's whole life skirts the absurd. He knew more about the New World than any other man of the day, yet he never saw it. Salty phrases dot his writings—"it is high time for us to weigh our anchor, to hoist up our sails"—yet he knew nothing firsthand about a sailor's life. He produced the...