In Lines Drawn across the Globe, Mary Fuller takes on a monumental task: she aims to create a comprehensive guide to Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1589, 1598–1600), to supplement the more detailed work of the in-progress critical edition, and to help readers access, understand, and navigate Hakluyt's complex three-volume compendium. Written in an engaging, readable style, Fuller's book fulfils these aims beautifully and goes well beyond them; her meticulous research and multi-scale thinking enables her to guide readers through Hakluyt's editorial practices and to re-examine critical commonplaces about figures like Francis Drake and John Davies, about early English participation in the Atlantic slave trade, and about the role Principal Navigations played in English imperial aspirations. Lines Drawn across the Globe is essential reading for scholars beginning to study Hakluyt, but anyone with an interest in Principal Navigations and its broad contexts will also find valuable new insights here.

Fuller uses Hakluyt's geographical divisions as a framework for her own book. Part one, “North and Northeast,” focuses on documents in Hakluyt's volume one, and parts two and three—“South and Southeast” and “Americas and the Pacific”—likewise follow Hakluyt's volumes two and three. In each chapter, though, Fuller draws attention to materials that challenge Hakluyt's organizational scheme, providing help in locating and comparing often confusing, scattered materials like those on West Africa (chapter 6), the Anglo-Spanish wars (chapter 7), or Francis Drake (chapter 10). She additionally provides ten appendices that model multiple ways to organize the materials in Principal Navigations and that aid those seeking materials on a particular topic or location.

Fuller moves deftly between detailed readings and larger contexts throughout the book, focusing our attention on what Hakluyt chose to include in or to exclude from his collection. For example, in chapter 4, “Encounters with the North,” Fuller describes the range of attitudes that Hakluyt and his contemporaries held about northern people, from admiration for Muscovite and Persian sophistication to bigoted disdain for the supposed backwardness of the Samoyeds (135–9). With this larger context in place, Fuller examines Arngrímur Jónsson's defense of Iceland, a little-studied text in which Jónsson refutes European assertions about Icelandic primitivism and savagery. Fuller shows that in his editorial choices and omissions, Hakluyt, like Jónsson, seeks to combat the idea that an environment determines a people's capacity for civility and rationality while also maintaining the notion of supposedly natural English superiority over the people they encountered. In chapter 6, “West Africa and Beyond: Into the Tropics,” Fuller examines John Hawkins's slaving voyages of the 1550s, aiming to break a persistent scholarly silence about slavery in Principal Navigations. She shows that while the “peripheral presence of the Atlantic slave trade” across Hakluyt's three volumes is “not always easy to trace,” doing so showcases how much of Hakluyt's editing aims to convince readers to “‘get cleare’ of the North in order to access the resources of the South,” namely: “the riches of precious metals and readily commodified people” (245). Fuller's invitation to attend to enslavement in the Principal Navigations adds crucial documents to histories of race, racism, and slavery.

Fuller's nuanced reading of pronouns and authorial voice in maritime travel writing weaves throughout the book but comes to the forefront in chapters 7 to 10; she guides readers through controversial, heavily edited documents about the Anglo-Spanish wars (chapter 7) and Hakluyt's translations from French, Italian, and Spanish (chapter 8) as well as materials on the search for a northwest passage and Cavendish's circumnavigation (chapter 9). Across these chapters, Fuller tracks the “maritime first person” (391), a convention whereby authors use “we” to narrate the unified actions of ship and crew, and use “I” only occasionally. The “maritime ‘we’” (409) of the ship or fleet in these texts generates a powerful cultural narrative about united national identity, but gaps in that narrative frequently appear, as when gentleman sailors employ an “I” or “they” to distance themselves from common mariners. Fuller repeatedly shows that the maritime “we” was a tenuous, constructed group, responsive to constant environmental, social, and cultural stressors.

In chapter 10, “Famous Voyages: The Caribbean and the Pacific,” Fuller turns to Drake's career and addresses the critical commonplace that Hakluyt's Principal Navigation is a work of Protestant propaganda, with Drake as an exemplar of the Protestant hero. Fuller surveys evidence supporting this reading—Hakluyt's profession as a preacher, his editorial goals, the clear confessional bias of many documents in the collection (443-61)—but she also points out that Hakluyt elected not to include material that he might have about Drake's heroism (446–8), the Cadiz raids (448–50), and the colonizing project in Roanoke (458–9) that emphasizes English Protestant identity as a motivator for war and colonial control. Fuller reads the absence of some materials and the placement of others as meaningfully complicating our view of the purpose of Principal Navigations. She seeks not to downplay the biases in Hakluyt's editorial choices, but rather to add a textured understanding of his interest in exchanges of hostilities, information, secrets, money and goods, and of stories on the global stage.

Ultimately, Fuller's book offers a fascinating set of suggestions about how to read Hakluyt's complex editorial project; since that project was itself multiple, fluid, and shifting, Fuller provides a flexible critical approach, moving deftly between large- and small-scale observations, directing readers to intersecting scholarly conversations for further reading, and adding to these conversations with new documents and new ways of reading. She invites us to “think of Principal Navigations … as a collection of borders, of lines drawn across the field of its world” (462), investigating the idea of a border within Hakluyt's book in multiple senses: temporal, national, religious, mercantile, individual/collective, bibliographical, paratextual, and organizational. She guides her readers generously and gives us the tools to begin our own new investigations and observations of Principal Navigations.