Think of the great Elizabethan seafarers and explorers - Raleigh, Drake, Frobisher and the rest - and the name of the one-time Suffolk parson, Richard Hakluyt, might not come to mind. But Hakluyt was their contemporary and chronicler; indeed he was perhaps the first geographer in the modern sense of the word. So detailed were his accounts of expeditions to foreign lands drawn from those that made them that he became the essential consultant for new explorers.

Richard Hakluyt was born in 1551 or 1552, probably of a Herefordshire family although he was educated at Westminster school. His formal career was in the church but spurred by a teenage glance at maps in his cousin's law chambers, he became fascinated by the world and the explorations of the Elizabethan seadogs and their foreign contemporaries. He learned languages to gather information and would travel across England to seek out survivors of past expeditions and their stories.

Hakluyt didn't travel abroad much himself despite a few unsuccessful attempts to get to America in the earlier years, and yet his knowledge of the New World in particular gained patronage among society notables who liked to gather poets and intellectuals about them. Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Edward Dyer were among his earliest patrons, while Sir Walter Raleigh was a close friend.

He was probably a bit stodgy for their company - he was plain, practical, patriotic and religious, and at times ingenuous; in 1604 he was moving in Gunpowder Plot circles, apparently without suspecting a thing. But his researches were useful to them, for he also had a commercial agenda.
With Spain, the main colonial and commercial competitor, was funding itself through New World wealth, he petitioned Queen Elizabeth for more colonial expansion, listing 54 New World items for which the English were paying more highly elsewhere. The real New World wealth, he insisted, would not be the gold sought by some but the fur, timber and potash that might make England independent of the Baltic.

Alongside his research, he pursued his church career and the two sometimes overlapped, particularly in the gathering of intelligence. In 1583, after a spell as prebendary in Bristol, he became chaplain to the English Ambassador in Paris which, in the absence of an English diplomatic presence in Spain, was the next best listening post on Spanish activity. His Suffolk connection began in 1590 when he was appointed rector of Wetheringsett and Blockford, a parish with 200 communicants, in what seemed a stingy establishment reward for a successful spy and a scholar. He retained the post when in 1603, he became prebendary at Westminster Abbey - and archdeacon the following year - through to his death in 1616 at Gedney in Lincolnshire by which time he was also vicar there. His Wetheringsett duties during his absences were probably left to a curate - he seems to have kept one, a certain Antonie Harvey, a holder of that office, having been buried there in 1608.

He nevertheless spent enough time in Wetheringsett to marry Douglasse Cavendish, a relative of Thomas Cavendish the circumnavigator and part of a prominent Trimley St Mary family. Their son, Edmond, was born in 1595 though Douglasse died two years later. Where they lived is unclear although in 1612, Richard and Edmund bought Bridge Place Manor in Coddenham a dozen miles to the south, by which time Richard had married again.

And if there is something incongruous about an intellectual of international standing going to ground in deepest Suffolk, it probably provided the time for his great work, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, the second and enlarged edition of which, published in 1598 to 1600, runs to a million and a half words. A distillation of earlier works, it is also a series of rattling good yarns compiled from ships' logs, secret economic intelligence and personal accounts of journeys. It has been mined many times by novelists.
For years after his death, the world atlas carried scattered small memorials to him.

In 1615, Robert Fotherby named Mount Hakluyt on the island now called Jan Mayen north of Iceland. In 1616, Hakluyt Island off the northwest coast of Greenland was named by William Baffin. There was once a Hakluyt's River on the island of Kolguyef, off the north Russian coast.

Barents, the Dutchman, in search of the north-east passage in 1595-96 abandoned a winter camp on the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlaya. It was rediscovered on 17th August 1875 with a Dutch manuscript of an English Voyage of 1580 provided by Hakluyt with 56 pages of clear handwriting still surviving. No Hakluyt place names now feature on the world map but there is a Hakluyt Society (01986 788359) devoted to his works and their analysis. The man himself lies in an unmarked grave in Westminster Abbey.

* available from Edgar Spelman, Booksales and Publicity Department, Round Tower Churches Society, 105 Norwich Road, New Costessey, Norwich NR5 0LF, price £18.40 inc p&p. A booklet, East Anglian Round Tower Churches is also available, price £1.20 inc p&p.

Reproduced by kind permission of John Worrall © 2002