Books: An Elizabethan Epic

HAKLUYT'S VOYAGES. Selected and edited by Irwin R. Blacker. 522 pages. Viking. $8.50.

Why then the world's mine oyster,

Which I with sword will open!

The spirit of the age finds utterance in Shakespeare's swaggering lines. In 1533, when Elizabeth was born, England was an igneous interruption in the North Sea that mattered rather less to Europe than Cuba does to the U.S. In 1603, when Elizabeth died, England was the mightiest sea power in the world, a nation of adventurers whose wily merchants and intrepid captains had struck into all seven seas, set up commercial interests from the Caribbees to Cathay, set down precarious colonies in North America, and in two decades of continual conflict had defeated the dominant empire of the era.

All this is surely matter for an epic, and at the close of the 16th century the epic was brought forth. Like most of the great national chronicles, The Principall Navigations Voiages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation is a collective composition: an amazing compendium of travel diaries, personal letters, on-the-scene descriptions, geographical treatises, ships' logs, company reports and even promotional brochures—all industriously assembled and brilliantly edited by one Richard Hakluyt, a shy professor of cosmography at Oxford who organized an informal ministry of science to mastermind the nation's policy of expansion and then published The Principall Navigations as a running report on the progress of empire.

Talk With Ivan. All through the 17th century, English masters would as soon set sail without a compass as without a Hakluyt. Then for a century the great book lay obsolete. But in 1846 the Hakluyt Society was established in its honor. Historian Irwin Blacker, a U.S. member of the society, has now published a 200,000-word' recension of the 1,700,000-word original, a sort of handy Hakluyt that preserves the most significant and exciting passages for the nonprofessional reader and vividly suggests that the original is at least a magnificent eyewitness account of England's most glorious adventure, and at best the greatest epic in the language.

England came late into the race for empire. It was not until 1553 that Willoughby and Chancelor, "seeing that the wealth of the Spaniards and Portingales, by the discoverie and search of newe trades and Countreys was marveilously increased," set sail to find a Northeast Passage to Asia. Willoughby had bad luck: he froze to death in Lapland. But Chancelor turned the North Cape, and "came at last to the place where hee found no night at all, but a continuall light and brightnesse of the Sunne shining clearely upon the huge and mightie Sea." Landing near Archangel, he sledded south to "Mosco," where he found a palace "not of the neatest," had a nice talk with Ivan the Terrible, and instituted a profitable fur trade with Muscovy.