'A mirror of Indian newes': North American Indian ethnographic writing in Richard Hakluyt's

Abstract

The publication of texts describing the first Anglo-Indian encounters in Richard Hakluyt's three volume work, Principall Navigations of the English Nation, published between 1598-1600, was driven by the desire to make complex and descriptive writings both comprehensible and usable to a sixteenth century audience. These texts, while they contain valuable ethnographic material, are nonetheless shaped and constrained by the comparative discourses of their authors. To achieve a high degree of understandability, the English authors of these texts drew frequently upon pre-existing medieval, classical and local accounts to construct a truly comparative ethnographic discourse. Primarily, this study is to serve as the first printed critical edition of the American Indian ethnographic material from Hakluyt's three-volume work. A critical introduction and commentary throughout these accounts will allow the modern reader to understand better the complexity and problems of description and intelligibility that affected these encounters. This paper examines the development of ethnographic sensitivity, textual sophistication and comparative discourses that illuminate sixteenth century English attitudes evident in the writings about North American Indians.