Excerpt from Stories From Hakluyt Hakluyt died in the same year as Shakespeare, having accomplished the task of compiling the great prose epic of the English nation. His story is dif fused and lacks form, balance, proportion. It is long and it is usually printed in a manner which gives a first impression of confusion and incoherence - solid pages of small type in old spelling, unattractive to the eye, and therefore unwelcome to the mind. Will the reader sample his pages with me, not by picking out disconnected extracts, with neither beginning nor ending, but by reading a complete voyage here and there, and especially those of the Elizabethan sea-farers? The stories are here printed in Open type on a small page. The spelling is modernised and the longest paragraphs are broken up to allow time for breathing and for the pauses necessary to contemplate at leisure, and wonder over, some of the most marvel lous feats of daring and endurance of which the world holds record. Told without rhetoric too, and always (even when the matter in hand is piracy ) As ever in the great task-master's Eye. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.