Richard Hakluyt’s Stolen Ruttiers

Carla Pestana (UCLA) will give a talk titled Richard Hakluyt’s Stolen Ruttiers.

The two versions of the Principal Navigations, Richard Hakluyt’s massive collection of travel narratives, include a second set of documents that are less famous and less well studied. Alongside the accounts he gathered far and wide, he printed supplemental documents related to the recounted travels. In the West Indies section, these documents tended to be official texts granting permission to travelers and giving instructions on behalf of investors.  The later revised and enlarged version included another sort of text, those acquired in the course of travels as opposed to those guiding them in the first place. Among these acquired texts were a couple of ruttiers (or sailing guides) stolen from Spanish ships. These texts will be the focus of this talk, exploring their origins, their significance, and the reasons for their inclusion.

Carla Pestana is a Distinguished Professor and Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World at the University of California-Los Angeles. Professor Pestana has published books on religion and empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most notably Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (2009). On the subject of empire, she authored The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (2004); and The English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell’s Bid for Empire (2017); She is also the co-editor with Sharon V. Salinger of Inequality in Early America (1991), and a multi-volume collection of primary texts on the early English engagement in the Caribbean, The Early English Caribbean, 1570-1700. Her most recent books are The World of Plymouth Plantation (2020) and, co-edited with Eliga Gould and Paul Mapp, volume 1 of the Cambridge History of America and the World, 1500-1820.