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A remarkable travel guide compiled from first-hand records of Tudor seafarers in the 16th century.

Professor Nandini Das explores Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, which records accounts of ventures in search of lucrative spices and dyes. It is a prototype for today's travel guides with advice, warnings, descriptions of remarkable people and a list of vocabulary to converse with foreigners. It became a book that all English seafarers kept on board ship. But the descriptions of encounters with foreigners also lay the foundations for later colonialism and conquest.