ch. xii] Hakluyt 
1 1 1 
colonial and maritime enterprise, and it even inspired 
our literature. Shakespeare and Milton owe much to 
Hakluyt. He supplied information and lists of commo- 
dities of various countries and commercial instructions 
to the East India Company and to others engaged in 
similar enterprises. As the years passed on, to quote his 
own quaint language, he " continued to wade still further 
and further in the sweet studie of the historie of cosmo- 
graphies and he achieved his great task, which was, in 
his own words "to incorporate into one body the torn 
and scattered limbs of our ancient and late navigations 
by sea." He declared geography and chronology to be the 
sun and moon, the right eye and the left, of all history. 
When Hakluyt died, on the 23rd November, 1616, 
he was Archdeacon of Westminster and had reached his 
sixty-fourth year. He left a large collection of materials 
which came into the hands of the Rev. Samuel Purchas, 
who, in due course, published Hakluytus Posthumus or 
Purchas his Pilgvimes, an invaluable work, though marred 
by injudicious curtailments and omissions. To the student 
of Arctic history the works of Hakluyt are indispensable. 
In them are to be found the journals and narratives, or 
all that could be saved of them, between the date of the 
earliest English voyages, and that of Hakluyt's death. 
