Most early English travel was carried out (explicitly or implicitly) in the name of trade, and the profit motive marks most of the period’s published accounts – whether in the author’s and printer’s desire to make money or in the sponsorship of specific ventures. The earliest travel publications on the Continent had been collections of letters and relations written by merchants, and in the Principal Navigations Hakluyt placed a heavy emphasis on mercantile travel. His foregrounding accounts from Muscovy Company merchants reflects what Michael Nerlich has described as a shift in the early modern period from chivalric adventure to venture capitalism. In classical travel writing, adventures were fates to be passively endured, and in the Middle Ages they began to be sought out through quests. During the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and particularly in England (where the name ‘adventurer’ was first applied to merchants), they became risks to be undertaken in the name of business.

The chivalric quest was the other major paradigm inherited from medieval travel writers, and it sometimes overlapped with the spiritual quest of the pilgrims.

The pilgrimage was the dominant medieval framework for long-distance, non-utilitarian travel.

The two centuries of travel writing covered in this chapter have sometimes been characterized as a period in which the pilgrim gave way to the merchant, the explorer, and the philosopher.

English travelers had made sporadic voyages to Brazil, the Caribbean, Newfoundland, and Northern Russia from the 1480s to the 1550s, but few of their forays had any lasting impact and as late as the 1550s they had not yet made a concerted effort to travel, to write about, or take possession of other parts of the globe.

Indeed, the English did not have a figure to set alongside Columbus in the national imagination until 1580, when Francis Drake returned from his three-year voyage around the world.