The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This account of Frobisher's voyages in search of the North-West Passage in the sixteenth century was compiled in 1867 from the first edition of Hakluyt's Voyages (1589) with additional manuscript documents. The southern areas of the New World having been claimed by Spain and Portugal, British and Dutch sailors took the lead in exploring the North Atlantic, both in search of profit from the lands first discovered by Cabot in 1500, but also in an effort to find an alternative route to the East.
