and Africke: Did not the Valiant English knight sir Hugh Willoughby;
did not the famous Pilots...accoast Nova Zembla, Colgoieve, and
Vaigatz to the North of Europe and Asia? ( 1 :xl; emphasis added)Strikingly, however, the touchstone of “Africke” marks advances in other di-
rections. In this list of accomplishments (which goes on), it is the continent
that the Portuguese have bypassed and surpassed to reach eastern lands and
seas, that Columbus has bypassed and surpassed to reach the West, and that
the English have, even more impressively, bypassed and surpassed by to head
north. Within the body of his collection, Hakluyt does, of course, include the
African expeditions as a subject in themselves, though he chose only some of
the accounts of Africa that he had collected and so limited an already rela-
tively limited set of materials.^36 But importantly, throughout the Navigations—
and especially in the prefacing, selection, and arrangement of materials, where
Hakluyt’s hand shows most—Africa figures as a place of passage, a place to go
through, literally and figuratively, rather than to, en route to greater gains. To
engage in traffic there, the narratives themselves suggest, is to enter a network
of exchange framed and mediated not simply by Africa’s own people but also
by the Portuguese, Turks, and Spanish.^37
To look at the structural layout of the Navigationsis to notice that, rather
than having a coherent space to themselves, the narratives on Africa are em-
bedded in other geographies and other stories. In both the first and second
edition, Hakluyt arranges his records chronologically and geographically: he
begins with England’s early past (with the travels, in the first edition, of “He-
lena, the Empresse, daughter of Coelus, King of Britaine and mother of Con-
stantine the great” in 337 and, in the second, of King Arthur in 517 ) and
moves toward the present, dividing what follows into three expansive regions,
partitioned relative to England: the South and Southeast; the North and
Northeast; and the West, Southwest, and Northwest.^38 Before the publication
of the Navigations, Hakluyt had been preoccupied with New World projects
and had already produced two texts devoted to them, Divers voyages touching
the discoverie of America and the Ilands adjacent to the same( 1582 ) and the Dis-
course concerning western planting( 1584 ). In both editions of the Navigations,
he gives the New World narratives a similar priority, setting them apart at the
very end, as the culmination of a move through time and space, from past to
present, East to West, the Old World to the New.^39 In the case of Africa, how-
ever, he not only does not assign the narratives their own section; he also dis-
perses them between two sections. The main cluster appears in the section on
52 chapter two