London's Triumph by Stephen Alford

Author:Stephen Alford
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141978123
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

The elder Hakluyt was one of a European network of like-minded cosmographical enthusiasts, familiar enough with Ortelius to be able to write to him such a robustly self-confident and knowledgeable letter. In fact it is quite possible that Hakluyt knew Ortelius’s sister Elisabeth, for she and her husband Jacob Cool came from Antwerp to live as strangers in London some time in the middle 1560s.8

Like most English cosmographers of his time, the elder Richard Hakluyt exercised his brain by trying to discern a navigable sea route to Asia. It was on his mind when he wrote to Abraham Ortelius, and we can guess with a very high degree of certainty that it formed part of the extempore lesson for his cousin. Sebastian Cabot, Richard Chancellor, John Dee, Anthony Jenkinson, the grandees of the Muscovy Company, Sir Humphrey Gilbert: each and every one of these men believed that there was some way to sail to the empire of Cathay, even if they disagreed on precisely how to get there – by going north-east or by going north-west. Hakluyt was at the very least indirectly involved in what at times became a heated debate at court: when Sir Humphrey Gilbert wrote a treatise in 1566 in support of his ambitious Cathay project, some of the evidence he deployed came probably from Hakluyt’s own researches.9

The two Richard Hakluyts knew what was at stake by the middle 1560s: England’s trade, investors’ money, riches, mercantile ambition, political patronage, reputation and ego. Here were merchants, courtiers and adventurers who wanted to explore the world and make their fortunes. Coming into focus already were some insistent themes of the younger Richard Hakluyt’s life’s work: the essential need for England to trade globally; the patriotic and providential impulse of the kingdom to put its stamp on the world; and the great task of collecting and understanding every possible piece of written material on exploration and navigation.

The Hakluyts were specialists: self-taught men who, through their own efforts, knew the leading cosmographical minds of their day. The elder Hakluyt would have been used to that from his years as a young barrister in London, learning the law in the Middle Temple, not from a syllabus or curriculum – there was none – but from those who practised it. His cousin did the same, at Oxford and in London. They were practitioners as well as theorists; they rolled up their sleeves and got on with the job of making themselves experts. They read books and absorbed the work of fellow specialists. Surely sitting on the shelves of Hakluyt’s chambers were Richard Eden’s English translations of Münster’s Cosmographia (Universal Cosmography, 1553) and The decades of the newe worlde … by Pietro Martire d’Anghiera (1555), the Milanese scholar who had chronicled the voyages of Christopher Columbus. These were books printed in London when the younger Richard was a baby and toddler.

And of course the Hakluyts lived in the city, on the doorstep of news and discovery. The elder Richard arrived in the Middle Temple in the year of the Muscovy Company’s royal charter.

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