the South and Southeast, which charts the evolving engagement with the
East, and these accounts stand separate from the depictions of stops in
Guinea, which were part of the English travels to the West and which emerge
in the section on the West, as part of the New World’s story.
Though accounts of Barbary and Guinea do comprise a substantial block
within the section on the South and Southeast, narratives on the Levant, East
Indies, and Far East take precedence there. The Levant trade was heating up
just as the Navigationswas coming out: the Turkey Company got its charter
in 1581 , shortly before the appearance of Hakluyt’s first edition ( 1589 ), and was
rechartered in 1592 as the more powerful Levant Company, shortly before the
appearance of the second edition ( 1598 – 1600 ).^40 In the second edition, Hak-
luyt prefaces the section with a dedicatory epistle to Robert Cecil, praising
and promoting “the happie renuing and much increasing of our interrupted
trade in all the Levant” (I:lxix). Moors figure in the epistle, but only as an ex-
ample that helps justify new relations with the Turks. Aware that the new
trade might not be universally embraced since the Turks were “misbeleevers”
( 1 :lxix), Hakluyt asks:
Who can deny that the Emperor of Christendome hath had league with
the Turke, and payd him a long while a pension for a part of Hungarie?
And who doth not acknowledge, that either hath travailed the remote
parts of the world, or read the Histories of this later age, that the
Spaniards and Portugales in Barbarie, in the Indies, and elsewhere, have
ordinarie confederacie and traffike with the Moores, and many kindes
of Gentiles and Pagans, and that which is more, doe pay them
pensions, and use them in their service and warres? Why then should
that be blamed in us, which is usuall and common to the most part of
other Christian nations? ( 1 :lxx)Here “confederacie and traffike with the Moores,” implicated as “misbeleev-
ers,” provides a useful precedent for trading with Turks (and the involvement
of the Spanish and Portuguese, for the involvement of the English), and not
the other way around. In the second edition as well, Hakluyt places several
newly available documents on the Turks just before the narratives on Africa,
including one (on a voyage to Constantinople and Syria in 1593 – 95 ) that de-
scribes an exchange of gifts between Queen Elizabeth and the emperor of
Turkey and then details the power and pervasiveness of the Turks at length,
tallying up their available forces, their sites of conquest, and their ability to
Imperialist Beginnings 53