| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America. By Peter C. Mancall. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xii, 378 pp. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-300-11054-8.)

Of the early promoters of England's overseas expansion, no one played a more important role than the English geographer Richard Hakluyt the younger. Born into a middling Herefordshire family around 1552, Hakluyt became one of Europe's foremost authorities on the exploration of the extra-European world, and he was probably the "most important promoter of the English settlement of North America" at the time of his death in 1616 (pp. 3–4). Yet, as Peter C. Mancall observes in this impressive new biography, Hakluyt's library and most of his papers disappeared after his death, and the few personal effects that do survive indicate that he "was not a man who indulged in much introspection," either about himself or about the reasons for his "obsession" with the New World (p. 7). "The sea and the shore can be found," writes Mancall. "Hakluyt has vanished" (ibid.).

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