In Hakluyt’s monumental work of The Principal Navigations we have the whole brave story of English adventure through the centuries from the dim old days of the Saxon kings—when the known world was a little thing, only a spot on the map of to-day—to the Tudors’ times, with the discoveries of the New World, advancement into remote quarters of the Old World, the expansion of commerce, and the planting of colonies in America. It is truly, as aptly termed by James Anthony Froude, the prose epic of the modern English nation.

The first issue of 1589, the single volume in three parts, comprehended the main features of this story; the three-volumed second edition, 1598–1600, amplified it with a wealth of added incident and richness of color. The three parts of the portly volume of 1589, covering eight hundred and twenty-five foolscap pages, comprised successively the narratives of English voyages that had been performed to the South and Southeastern regions of the Old World; the North and Northeastern 33travels; and the Western, or New World, navigations. The contents were elaborately detailed in the full title-page.

FAC-SIMILE OF THE TITLE-PAGE OF THE THIRD, OR AMERICAN, VOLUME OF HAKLUYT’S "VOYAGES," EDITION OF 1598–1600.
From a copy of the original edition in the New York Public Library (Lenox Building).

The prefatory address “to the Favourable Reader” discloses the thoroughness of the compiler’s work. He has been careful in every possible case to present exact copies of the original narratives. Wherever he has copied from an historian, or “authour of authoritie,” either “stranger or naturall”—foreigner or native—he has “recorded the same word for word with his particular name and page of booke” where the “testimonie” is extant. “If the same were not reduced into our common language,” he has given it in the original followed by a translation. And “to the ende that those men which were the paynefull and personall travellers might reape that good opinion and iust [just] commendation which they haue deserued, and further, that euery man might answere for himselfe, iustifie [justify] his reports, and stand accountable for his own doings,” he has “referred euery voyage to his Author which both in person hath performed, and in writing hath left the same.” He adds that while he “meddles” in this work with the navigations only of the English nation he quotes in a few places “some strangers as witnesses of the things done”; yet these foreigners are only such as “either faythfully remember, or sufficiently confirme” the Englishmen’s travels.

A map of the world inserted in this volume was taken by Hakluyt from the atlas of Abraham Ortelius, a celebrated Flemish geographer, published at Antwerp in 341570. It was substituted temporarily for one in preparation for the book, but not completed by the engraver in time. Hakluyt alludes to this, in the address “to the Favourable Reader,” as “a very large and most exact terrestriall Globe collected and reformed according to the newest, secretest, and latest discoveries, both Spanish, Portugall, and English, composed by M[aster] Emmerie Mollineux of Lambeth, a rare gentleman in his profession, being therein for divers yeares, greatly supported by the purse and liberalitie of the worshipfull marchant M[aster] William Sanderson.” What is supposed to be the Mollineux map has been found in rare copies of this volume and of the second edition. A map bound in a treasured copy of the 1589 edition in the Boston Public Library contains this memorandum written on the back: "This map is a facsimile of the map of the world found in some of the first editions of this book. By Sabin and others it is attributed to Emmerie Mollineux of Lambeth, by Capt. Markham and others, to Edward Wright, the mathematician who perfected and rendered practicable what we know to-day as Mercator’s projection. Hallam describes this as ‘the best map of the 16th century and one of uncommon rarity.’ Only nine copies are known to exist."

Professor Walter Raleigh, in his essay on the English Voyages which accompanies the modern reprint of the Navigations (Glasgow, 1903), recalls the belief of Shaksperian authorities, among whom he is counted, that this is the map alluded to in Twelfth Night in the passage (Act III, Scene II), “He does smile his face 35into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies.”

The titles of the three-volumed second edition set forth the contents of each book with the same minute detail as that of the initial volume of 1589.