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T. E. Lawrence, Hakluyt - First Naval Propagandist
The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, &c. By Richard Hakluyt. With introduction by John Masefield. Illustrated. In 8 Volumes (April-October, 1927.) (J.M. Dent and Sons. £3 the set.) [Vol. 1. only reviewed.]
The Spectator, 10 September 1927
Parts of Hakluyt are no end good. We have all heard of his writings
as the sea-epic of England, which does for our ocean story what Malory
did for the dim beginning of the homeland: and like Malory, Hakluyt
was a clergyman, with an unclerical bee in his bonnet. Only there
the parallel ends, Hakluyt preaches. He thought that England's heritage
was the high sea and feared (in the days of Elizabeth!) that we were
neglecting it. So he compiled a blue-bookish thesis, to prove that
we had been, were, and would ever be great in so far as we were active
on the seas and beyond them. His book was propaganda, himself more
sustained and more industrious than most writers-with-a-moral; and
he has been justified in the ten generations which have succeeded
him.
More than most writers. Yet I'm not sure that Hakluyt
is a writer, really. Take this first volume. It starts with Geoffrey
of Monmouth, and goes through Bede, to the Cinque Ports, via the
Steelyard
to the Hansa towns, and back to the Libel of English Policy. The
first 250 pages are dry and dusty quotations (except the history of
King Edgar, where Dr. Dee makes us chuckle) in the manner of some
schools of Modern History. His own age, by the voice of Michael Drayton,
called him 'industrious.' Mr. Masefield quotes this in his
interesting introduction, but goes further, to call him an 'almost
perfect' editor. I doubt whether many people will agree. Hakluyt's
English is not fine, but plain and sensible. His adjectives are
judicious,
his sentences cumbrous and involved, like so much sixteenth-century
prose, in its elaborate adolescence. His language is sober: whereas
Adlington (for example) had a trick of words which clash on his reader's
minds, and jet out sparks of delight. Hakluyt does not surprise us. It
would be difficult to write well with your eye on a Secretary of State.
He
tries to keep his eyes on two or three Secretaries of State at once,
to judge by his epistles dedicatory.
Perhaps he was too conscientious. He was marshalling
facts in his brief, and scorned to rush his hearers away on a current
of emotion. Also he thought completeness the duty of an editor. Did
not Raleigh begin his history with the Creation? We would have preferred
from him 'Memoirs of the Court of Elizabeth.' Hakluyt was
collecting the materials of the maritime history of England, and aimed
to be exhaustive, every-sided and authoritative. The Times
Law Reports do much the same in their province. If his questions were
still being ventilated, in suspense, we might approve such seriousness.
But
the very completeness of his victory has made him superfluous with
the superfluousness which would have been Nelson's had he survived
Trafalgar. Especially to-day when our national mind is wandering
in the shades of a spiritual Jutland, trying to turn over a new leaf.
Are
we to thank God for the R.A.F., in the new phase?
Pending our assault upon the next element, we can
give Hakluyt thanks for having started our ancestors so well with
the history of the last one. He made researches into all the past
that was available to him, and collected the yet abundant but fading
stories of his contemporaries. The contemporaries were the better
activity, for him. Since the age of Elizabeth the archives and muniment
rooms of England have been ransacked, and we no longer want his help
to study Florence of Worcester and the rest. But without Hakluyt
any quantity of Elizabethan sailors' tales would have been lost. We
owe him Purchas, too. He inlaid everything he came across, good or
bad, in his collections. Where his sources wrote well, we have it
well. Where they wrote badly, we have it unadorned. That is one
conception of the duty of an editor; and Hakluyt, being scientific,
accordingly robbed us of what might have been a masterpiece. Malory
passed all his stuff through the mill of his personality, and gave
us a miracle of goodness. He reaps the reward of being yet read,
though a fairy-tale; and of having brought forth masterpieces. This
Arthurian cycle has a way of transfiguring its servants, even when
they are old men, and called Tennyson. From Spenser to the 'Waste Land' our thought-maggoty poets have forgotten their riddled minds
in the splendid legend.
Poor Hakluyt's truth has had a more homespun fate:
and I do not think that even this brave effort of Messrs. Dent (the
volumes are handy and well-printed) will bring him into fashion. He
is more a quarry than a book, though a most excellent quarry. For
me the peak of this first volume of the new edition is Richard Johnson's
four pages (352-356) of life among the Samoyedes. He was a servant
of Richard Chancelour, who writes many dull pages about his voyages
to Russia. Among them this story of Johnson glows like a jewel. If
only the servant had written more and the master less! There is colour,
too, in the title grant of the Merchant Adventurers, and Master Steven
Burrough, in a single priceless paragraph, brings Sebastian Cabot
to life among his lusty ship's company. Henry Lane pleads his case
in the Russian manner before the Czar, and gives us the thrill of
strange proceedings, as strange as Anthony Jenkinson's Malestrand,
the great whirlpool, into which whales were sucked, with a strange
pitiful cry.
Anthony Jenkinson was a friend of Mr. Hakluyt, and
his journeys in Russia bulk largely in this first volume. Unfortunately
Hakluyt let him off the writing of a proper account of his adventures,
and printed, instead, the severely business-like reports rendered
by him to his firm in London. These are the notes for a book rather
than a book, and they are tantalizing, because they lift the veil
of life for a moment, only to drop it. Jenkinson saw a review of
the Russian army (123), made notes of mujik life (434-436), visited
semi-nomad Tartars in their hordes (441, 450), was nearly shipwrecked
in the Caspian, rode across Persia, compounded with brigands on the
banks of the Oxus, and spent Christmas in Boklara, after manifold
adventures. He could write, too, and had a bright eye and the spirit
of his time. He tells us how he set up the red cross of St. George over
the waves of Caspian 'for honour of the Christians,'
supposing it had not been seen there before. Hakluyt should have
provoked his friend to write him a special tale, which would have
been worth all the careful scholarship which goes before and after. It
would have been alive, with the liveliness of some of the tales which
follow in the succeeding volumes. But they must wait for another
time, lest I grow as long as Hakluyt, in reviewing him.
C.D.
Source: | MIP |
Checked: | jw/ |
Last revised: | 6 January 2006 |
T. E. Lawrence chronology
1888 16 August: born at Tremadoc, Wales
1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys
1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909
1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish
1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo
1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt
1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference
1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office
1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF
1923 January: discharged from the RAF
1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps
1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant
1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah
1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven Pillars, published
1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey
1929-33: stationed at Plymouth
1931: started working on RAF boats
1932: his translation of the Odyssey published
1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe
1935 February: retired from the RAF
1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May
1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset