Voyages of Hawkins, Frobisher and Drake

This selection of narratives from Richard Hakluyt's epochal “The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation” (1582) is veering rather close to primary source material, so it presents a challenging read. Payne's editing is minimal, restricted mostly to modernising the spelling, substituting a handful of (possibly offensive) terms, and removing some of the more superfluous passages. We are presented with lightly reconstituted first person accounts, with all their imperfections and juddering narrative flow. The value is, of course, in the wealth of first hand detail. But don't expect an easy read. It can be in turns tedious, difficult to follow, virtually unintelligible, or downright fascinating. The notes are useful, but the major faults of this particular volume include a lack of maps of any detail, or a supplementary timeline.