Neptune's Needle

British geographer and anthologist of travel literature. Trained at Oxford, where he studied geography and took holy orders. An interest of his older cousin, of the same name, may have stimulated his lifelong interest in the prospects for the English settlement of North America.

His first effort to bring attention to his English audience of the exploratory activities of other European countries was his Diverse Voyages (1582), in which he began publishing in English the accounts of earlier explorers. This won the attention of Queen Elizabeth, who dispatched him to France to look into the French experience with exploring and establishing settlements in America.

In 1584 he published Discourse on Western Plantings which he undertook at the urging odf Walter Raleigh and which argued for the social and economic benefits to England of colonies in America. This was followed five years later by his Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589). He later became one of the original members of the Virginia Company, which sponsored the first permanent English settlement in Virginia and several unsuccessful attempts in New England. He died in 1616 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

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Compiler

Peter Richards