SOURCE: Helfers, James P. “The Explorer or the Pilgrim? Modern critical opinion and the editorial methods of Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas.” Studies in Philology 94, No. 2 (Spring 1997): 160-86.

In the following essay, Helfers compares Hakluyt and Purchas, their methods, goals, and critics. Helfers concludes that the harshness of modern critical opinion of Purchas is unwarranted.

Victorian critic J. A. Froude calls Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations¹ “the prose epic of the English Nation.”² On the other hand, G. B. Parks characterizes Samuel Purchas, editor of Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, as a “mere worker in archives” who “arranged a museum,” in contrast with Hakluyt, who “gathered the materials of a history and dealt so cunningly with them that they became a history while retaining the guise of raw materials.”³

These two critical opinions rehearse the relative importance given by modern scholars to the two greatest English Renaissance collections...