SOURCE: Steele, Colin. “1603-1626: Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas.” In English Interpreters of the Iberian New World from Purchas to Stevens: A Bibliographical Study, 1603-1726, pp. 15-51. Oxford: The Dolphin Book Co. Ltd., 1975.

In the following essay, Steele examines the skill with which Purchas and Hakluyt put together travel narratives by which “they, more than any others, made the New World and its narratives known to the Old.”

The translations which appeared between 1603 and 1626 were largely the result of the activity of two men, Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas. Hakluyt continued the work he began in the Elizabethan era, albeit with slightly less intensity, and after his death in 1616 the tradition was maintained by his self-appointed successor, Samuel Purchas. Purchas's Pilgrimage was published in 1613, 1614, 1617 and 1626, whilst his four volumes Pilgrimes was published in 1625. Hakluyt and Purchas had few rivals as translators for no men emerged from the merchant...