’To cleere the course scarse knowne’: a re-evaluation of Richard Hakluyt’s ‘Voyage of Master Hore’ and the development of English Atlantic enterprise in the early sixteenth century

Abstract

This article overturns a century of scholarship concerning Master Hore’s infamous voyage to North America in 1536. Richard Hakluyt’s sensational account of this expedition provided the earliest narrative of an English experience of the New World, which has long been deemed to be corroborated by several High Court of Admiralty documents. However, it is demonstrated here that these sources do not corroborate each other, and that Hakluyt’s account is highly unreliable. More significantly, the existence of two previously unidentified commercial fishing ventures are discovered and analysed, thereby shedding new light on the pioneering mercantile forays of Englishmen across the Atlantic.