The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IV. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton.
§ 1. Richard Knolles’s Compilations
T
They were confronted from the beginning with the monopolies of Portugal and Spain. The Spaniards were firmly seated in central America and Peru. Vasco da Gama and his successors had made their own the route by the cape of Bôa Esperança to the treasures beyond. Magellan had gone to the south-west by the strait that bears his name, and Drake had followed him; but the Pacific coast of southern America had become the monopoly of Spain. If Englishmen, also, were to have monopoly and sway, that they might gather unimpeded the treasures of the unknown and half-fabulous lands of the Pacific, they must penetrate by the sea route of the north-west; and Gilbert and a hundred other seamen persuaded themselves and the merchants, by every argument to be found in heaven or earth, that through the icy passages there was an open way to the west. The temper in which navigators wrestled with the elements was exemplified by the remark of Robert Thorne, the Bristol seaman, who said: “There is no land unhabitable, no sea innavigable.” Failure to pierce icy barriers was the root of all the expansion and rivalry that followed, both in the east and in the west. A hundred projects for penetrating the great Pacific were in the air. The Dutch were grasping at the spoil of the Portuguese, and, in England, men of commerce became men of war, merchant and mariner alike being resolute to snatch the sceptre of the sea from the weakening grasp of Spain. Thus, as Drayton says:
Hakluyt is the recorder of these deeds in queen Elizabeth’s day—not of quite all of them, indeed, for he pays scanty heed to the earlier exploits of Drake, and, in his preface of 1589, excuses himself “to the favourable reader” for so doing. Perhaps he had in mind the comments which a complete narration might have aroused abroad. Navigators were men of action and not of words. Drake, on the famous occasion when he took upon himself to preach in place of Master Fletcher, the chaplain—“Francis Fletcher, the falsest knave that liveth”—declared that he was a very bad orator, “for my bringing up hath not been in learning.” Bacon, in his Considerations Touching the War with Spain, explains the underlying theory and object of their actions:
The strategical theories of Bacon, translated into action by navigators and recorded by Hakluyt, filling many adventurers with a new spirit of conquest and achievement in the years that followed, could not fail to move the imagination of poets and dramatists. We have seen how Spenser set forth the argument and inward character of these voyages; how they had their influence upon Shakespeare, and, we might have added, upon Marlowe and other dramatists. William Warner, in Albion’s England (1602), sings of Willoughby, Chancellor, Jenkinson, Jackman and Pet, of Hawkins, Drake, Gilbert, Frobisher and others, advising resort to the recent pages of the Principall Navigations.
Samuel Daniel, in his Musophilus, or Defence of all Learning (1603), extols the new spirit in a colloquy with Philocosmus:
Ralegh’s discovery and proposed colonisation of Guiana was the subject of George Chapman’s De Guiana Carmen (1596).
It was an age of universal curiosity, and Englishmen were seeking a wider knowledge of the world. The bibliography will show that a copious volume of literature, descriptive or otherwise, relating to history, discovery and navigation, issued from the press at this time. Among writers who contributed the fruit of much solid research to the knowledge then possessed of foreign countries and their history was Richard Knolles, whose General Historie of the Turkes from the first beginning of that Nation to the rising of the Othoman Familie was published in 1603, and long continued to hold a high repute, by reason of the fact that it was written in excellent prose and opened a new field to the English student. A second edition appeared in 1610, in which year Knolles died; and there were later editions in 1621, 1631 and 1638. Johnson thought highly of Knolles’s style; and, though he found it sometimes vitiated by false wit, considered it “pure, nervous, elevated and clear.” To Horace Walpole, Knolles was tiresome, but Southey admired him, and Byron, writing shortly before his death at Missolonghi, said,
Some books issued at the time, like Robert Johnson’s translation, The Traveller’s Breviat, or an historicall description of the most famous Kingdomes in the World (1601), were merely accounts from many sources of the character and peoples of various countries. These were volumes intended for the entertainment of such as remained at home, and the instruction of those who desired to widen their experience by travel. Peter Heylyn’s Microcosmus: a little Description of the Great World, which appeared augmented and revised in 1625, was of the same character. After going through several editions, it was published in an enlarged form in 1652 under the title Cosmographie, in Four Bookes; containing the Chronographie and Historie of the whole World, and, in that form, was several times reprinted. It is an illustration of the avidity with which descriptions of foreign countries were welcomed by English people. Heylyn was no more than an industrious compiler, who surveyed the world at large, its diversities, countries, cities, peoples, customs and resources, with encyclopædic interest and general intelligence. A serious volume much worthy of note is George Sandys’s A Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610, which is descriptive of Turkey, Egypt, the Holy Land, Italy and other places. Narratives of land travel began to increase in number, to satisfy the universal curiosity, which craved a knowledge of the peoples of foreign lands, thereby leading also to the publication, in Italy and elsewhere, of volumes illustrative of the costumes of various countries.