CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 420, 11 July 1947, Page 12

CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS

RICHARD HAKLUYT AND HIS SUC.CESSORS. Edited by Edward Lynam (The Hakluyt Society, London). Through the N.Z. Secretary, C. R. H. Taylor, Turnbull Library. HE conversion of the English to the sea, a self-conversion of the sanguine and the unscrupulous in that Queen’s reign which makes the very name Elizabethan synonymous with bold, hardy, and ruthless enterprise stretching across oceans to wrest prizes from the grip of giant antagonists, is one of the remarkable and heartening facts of history. The English, late-comers in sea-going for all Chaucer’s Shipmaster (a more outrageous pirate than any Elizabethan) or the Libelle of English Policie (by an anonymous 15th Century Mahan), had not the "natural" impulse of the Dutch, fenced into 4 narrow room by their oppressors, to plant their strength in their ships. The Elizabethans chose the sea; it did not choose them. The superb achievements of Elizabethan navigators were celebrated with equal love and industry by Richard Hakluyt, parson turned geographer, whose collections of the voyages of his countrymen and of seamen -of other nations were virtually best-sellers in 1666; and he, more than any other man, captured the imagination of his landsmen contemporaries and taught them to look to the sea for fulfilment and for greatness. His collections were eagerly read because their subject was already popular, but sea adventure was recog-

nised as the natural outlet for English energy because Hakluyt had charted the way. This book, published to commemorate the centenary of the learned society which bears his name, begins with a short biography of Hakluyt himself by Dr. J. A. Williamson; this sketches a personage, modest but active, diligent but discriminating, who used the moderate prosperity to which he was born to gratify an overmastering passion. Hakluyt (I am interested to find that Dr. Williamson prefers the more manageable pronunciation of the name-Hack-lit) Was a sagacious advocate of trade and colonies, in many of his ideas a precursor of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. His expert knowledge was well recognised by the governments of his time, and the East India Company found that his information could save it money, In scholarship, as well as in enthusiasm, Hakluyt was at least the equal of most of his successors. The volume also includes an essay on the work of Purchas, Hakluyt’s literary executor and a publisher of new collections of travels, and a critical biblio- ~ graphy of English vayages between 1625 and 1846. The popular demand for books of travel and adventure remained persistent through three centuries. There is also an outline of the history of the Society, and a candid discussion by its president, Dr. Lynam, of its present aims and difficulties. The Hakluyt Sociaty is a publishing society, on a co-operative basis. In exchange for a subscription, an offence to economists as it remains the same in 1947 as it was a century before, its members receive its publications, usually two volumes a year. The Society now has a list of nearly two hundred volumes (available only to its .members), an eclectic and varied library of travel in all its phases. Filling gaps is naturally one purpose of the Society, particularly by translations from foreign sources never before printed in English. One of the most recent Hakluyt Society books is a two-volume translation of the antarctic voyage of Bellingshausen, a Russian navigator who touched the New Zealand coast in the early 19th Century, The editors have been successful in striking a balance between pure scholarship and general interest, and prove in their publication of earlier and later voyages that the spirit of the Elizabethans is the perennial spirit of England, and also, to rebuke the arrogance of nationalism, that the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and other countries have not wanted for captains Courageous. |

David

Hall