The First Colonists

This selection from Richard Hakluyt's late-sixteenth-century Principal Navigations gathers English voyage accounts aimed at North America. The pieces follow reconnaissance and planting attempts along the Atlantic coast, including the Roanoke ventures: sailing directions, meetings with Native peoples, hunger, and the search for commodities and a site that might hold. Hakluyt, a clerical promoter of expansion, arranges testimony from captains, soldiers, and colonists rather than writing a single story. The volume is a documentary anthology of early English colonial voyages, not a later history of Virginia's survival.

Bound in light brown cloth cover blocked with a brown design. Cream or pale blue slipcase printed front and back with a brown design. Cream endpapers. The Presentation Volume for North American members for 1987 and in 1988 for British Commonwealth and European members.