SOURCE: "Hakluyt's Voyages: An Epic of Discovery," in The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, Vol. XII, No. 3, July, 1955, pp. 447-55.

In the following essay, Francis notes the commercial and patriotic origins of English seafaring in the late sixteenth century. Providing a brief sketch of a typical voyage from The Principal Voyages, Francis praises Hakluyt's restrained editorial style and his industrious scholarship.

In an age when tales of strange voyages are reasserting their age-old fascination, when any strange craft from Heyerdahl's primitive balsa raft to Beebe's super-scientific bathysphere is almost sure to produce a best seller, an older classic of the literature of discovery deserves to be known. I call it an epic, though it was not primarily intended as a work of literature at all; most of its many authors were blunt men of action, to whom the pen was an unwieldy instrument at best. Yet in...