Elizabethan travel books – and particularly the epoch-making anthologies of Richard Hakluyt – have been seen (and celebrated) as evidence of England's first great age of maritime expansion. This paper suggests, in terms first suggested by F. O. Matthiessen, that the work of the translator was closely connected with that of the voyager and the merchant. The role played by the translation of Classical and Continental materials is crucial to understanding the intellectual and practical outlook of those involved in overseas ventures and, in particular, to contextualising Hakluyt's patriotic claims and strategies in hisPrinciple Navigations(1598–1600).