Hakeluytt

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The sixteenth-century English geographer who compiled and published accounts of English voyages and overseas exploration
2. A late Elizabethan English clergyman and writer who gathered narratives of maritime travel and discovery into a famous collection
3. The English scholar renowned for collecting and publishing the records of overseas voyages during the age of exploration

Etymology: Richard Hakluyt (c. 1552–1616) was an English clergyman and geographer who spent decades gathering accounts of English voyages and trade. In 1589 he published "The Principall Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation," a collection of sailors' journals, letters and reports, which he expanded into three volumes between 1598 and 1600. Those volumes preserved many records that would otherwise have been lost, and they helped shape the English view of exploration as a national project. The surname itself is much older than the writer. Hakluyt family members lived in Herefordshire and the Welsh Marches before Richard's time, but the name's ultimate source is uncertain, and some scholars have suggested a Low Countries origin. Nearly three centuries after the first volumes appeared, the Hakluyt Society was founded in London in 1846 to publish original travel and exploration texts, and it still carries his name.