BOOKS
God's Englishman and his Empire.
By CHRISTOPHER HILL THE dust jacket of this useful volume, of selections from The Principal Navigations* speaks of Hakluyt's 'great prose epic.' It is the cliché we all use. What, if anything, does it mean? The Principal Navigations has at least one of the qualities attributed to Homer : it is a collective work, much of which Hakluyt left in the original words of its various authors. But its epic claim springs from an attitude towards history. Together with Foxe's Book of Martyrs, it helped to establish the Protestant legend of English history, the bloodless ghost of which still haunts our schools. This legend saw God's Englishmen fighting throughout the centuries against the machinations of cruel papists : withstanding the persecutions of Bloody Mary (married to a Spaniard), the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, the onslaught of the Armada, and (later, but thoroughly in character) the treachery of Gunpowder Plot. Foxe traced the struggles and sufferings of God's people down' to the Marian martyrs; Hakluyt's Englishmen Pass over to the offensive, bringing the Gospel to parts of the world which had never yet heard it. But their way was blocked by the same anti- Christian enemy, who closed the whole American Continent to English goods and English religion. The fight to break down Spain's monopoly, though its motives seem to us mainly commercial, Was felt by many who took part in it as a continua- tion of the struggle of light against darkness.
In one sense The Principal Navigations is an elaborate commercial prospectus. Hakluyt aimed to put the interests and policies of Elizabethan Merchants into a deep historical setting. This selec- tion very properly omits The Voyage of Arthur King of Britain to Iceland,' and The Memorable Voyage of. Sighelmus Bishop of Sherborne, sent by King Alfred unto St. Thomas of India.' But they were essential to Hakluyt's purpose. Overseas trade was a respectable occupation with a glorious history. If Englishmen returned to this tradition even greater possibilities opened up before them. Thus in Edward VI's reign 'certain grave citizens of London . . . careful for the good of their country,' noticed that 'those merchandizes Which strangers . . . [used to] desire were now neglected,' and 'began to think with themselves how this mischief might be remedied.' So they opened up the sea route to Archangel, 'a way and Passage to our men for travel to new and unknown .kIngdoms.' Englishmen got to North America 1°118 before Spaniards. The latter have stolen a march on us, but 'God hath reserved the same to be reduced unto Christian civility by the English nation.' Spaniards will not retain their lead once they realise and live up to our responsibilities. For .bey are cruel, treacherous and boastful, inferior 1_11 courage and resourcefulness to Englishmen. Frobisher prayed in 1577 for safe return to Eng- land so that his discoveries 'might redound to the * RICHARD HAKLUYT, VOYAGES AND DOCUMENTS. Selected with an introduction by Janet Hampden. (World's Classic : O.U.P., 8s. 6d.) more honour of [God's] holy name, and conse- quently to the advancement of our common wealth.' Trade is both a patriotic and a religious duty.
Hakluyt therefore selected his narratives care- fully. Experience on the Guinea coast shows the stupidity of neglecting the spice or slave trades in a scramble for gold. Courtesy to natives, if combined with firmness, always pays. Severe discipline for crews is as essential as capital for a coloniser. In days before atlases, dictionaries and guide books, Hakluyt's volumes provided invaluable information. He anticipated that care- ful collection of facts which Bacon was soon to postulate as the necessary groundwork of any science. Often the detail testifies to the sheer exuberant curiosity of men to whom new worlds were opening their. doors. 'In the river of Panuco there is a fish like a calf, the Spaniards call it a Mallatin, he hath a stone in his head, which the Indians use for the disease of the colic, in the night he cometh on land and eateth grass. I have eaten of it, and it eateth not much unlike to bacon.' That is the spirit of the early scientists. But the notes of commodities available for exchange, of social customs and trading habits in strange parts, the lists of native words, of the uses to which cocoanuts could be put—all such details served a practical purpose. 'The town of Polesco is fre- quented of merchants for the good store of honey and wax that it yieldeth.' A merchant needs to know just that about Polesco: he is told no more.
The religious and trading motifs lead to the same conclusion : Englishmen must fight Spain. The crucial area, in both respects, was America. Colonisation there would be 'as well grateful to the savages as gainful to the Christians.' The people in the southerly parts of the West Indies,' Sir Humphrey Gilbert was told, 'are easily re- duced to civility, both in manners and garments. Which being so, what vent for our English cloths will thereby ensue . . . !' England's pressing unemployment problem will be solved by stimulus
to home industries; surplus population can be exported. Hakluyt's propaganda initiated a lasting trend of imperial thought which saw America marked out by providence for English occupation and trade. This trend links the activities of the sea- dogs, the New England colonisers and the Provi- dence Island Company (whose Treasurer was John Pym, and which seated as undercover organisation for the opposition to Charles 1) with Cromwell's conquest of Jamaica in 1655; William III's wars were fought against a popish king for the heritage of Spanish America; and Chatham still needed a Protestant Hero as ally in conquer- ing America on the plains of Germany.
Religion made the whole operation respectable, as well as providing the Moral qualities which ensured success. There was, of course, plenty of humbug and self-deception here. Missionary zeal figured more largely in prospectuses than in the activities of merchants and colonists. But many good Protestants were really shocked to hear how Spain had done to death millions of 'poor and harmless people created of God,' who `might have been won to his knowledge.' In 1655 Milton drafted a manifesto justifying war on Spain, in which for the first time in European history ill- treatment of native peoples was described as cry- ing for retribution. There is continuity both of idealism and of self-deception. John Hawkins, frustrated in his attempts to sell bootleg Negro slaves in Spanish America, saw himself as the suc- cessor of Foxe's martyrs; the officers of the army occupying Jamaica declared in 1655 that 'the propagation of the gospel was the thing principally aimed at and intended in this expedition.' It may have been the aim : the consequence, however, was that Jamaica became a prosperous base for the slave trade. Eighteenth:century merchants of Liverpool and Bristol no longer suffered Haw- kins's martyrdom; and their cargoes had not read Foxe.
And the prose? The seventeenth century saw the plain man's plain prose successfully challenge the elaborate periods of the scholar. Early pro- tagonists of the new style were journalists and novelists like Deloncy and Dekker. The political conflicts of the Civil War were adumbrated in a rivalry of sermon styles, between the mannered academic prose of Lancelot Andrewes and the deliberately unadorned style of the Puritan preachers. The battle was fought out in the pam- phlets of the revolutionary decades, when Level- lers, Diggers and others appealed direct to the common man in a racy conversational style. Simplicity triumphed after the Restoration with the functional prose of the new civil servants— Marvell, Pepys—and was justified in theory by the ex-Parliamentarians of the Royal Society— `preferring the language of artisans, countrymen and merchants before that of wits and scholars.' The essential feature of the new prose which triumphed with Parliament was that it was utili- tarian, not decorative; that it did a job. The excellence of many of the pieces in Hakluyt de- rives from the fact that they are the straightfor- ward, unadorned observations of merchants and sailors. 'Our refreshing in this place was very small, only of oysters growing on rocks, great whelks, and some few fish which we took with our hooks. Here we landed our sick men on these uninhabited islands for their health, nevertheless 26 of them died in this place, whereof John Hall our master was one, and Mr. Reynold Golding another, a merchant of great honesty and much discretion. In these islands are abundance of trees of white wood, so right and tall that a man may make masts of them, being an hundred foot long.' That is the new manner, looking across a century and a quarter to Robinson Crusoe.
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