HAKLUYT, PURCHAS, AND THE ROMANCE OF VIRGINIA

Abstract

Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, the two great editors of English travel accounts in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, were also among the leading promoters of England’s major colonial experiment in the period – Virginia. From the faltering attempts to found a colony under Sir Walter Ralegh’s patent of 1584, through the uncertain period of re-establishment at Jamestown over twenty years later, both gures edited, summarized, and saw into print a series of narratives associated with the venture, as well as writing at length on the project in their own names. e latter writings form the subject of my essay. ey testify, inevitably, to crucial dierences of historical moment, reected in divergent representations of relations with indigenous peoples that mark the period before and aer settlement. Hakluyt’s early account in his so-called ‘Discourse of Western Planting’ (1584) anticipated peaceable exchange with the native population and largely unproblematic access to abundant resources, while Purchas’s major contribution, ‘Virginias Verger’ (1625), appeared aer the ‘Virginia Massacre’ of 1622 in which nearly 350 settlers were killed, and renewed eorts were made to justify an English presence in legal terms.1