author
active 1602 Edward Hayes
A little-known Elizabethan writer, he is remembered for vivid firsthand accounts of early English voyages to North America. His surviving work captures both the danger of Atlantic exploration and the persuasive pitch behind England’s first colonial ambitions.
1 Audiobook
Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland
by active 1602 Edward Hayes
About the author
Edward Hayes, sometimes spelled Haies, was an English writer associated with the age of exploration in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Reliable reference sources identify him chiefly through a small surviving body of travel writing rather than through a full personal biography.
He is best known for his account of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 voyage to Newfoundland, a text valued as an eyewitness narrative of one of the earliest English colonial ventures in North America. Sources also connect him to a 1602 treatise arguing for settlement and for seeking a passage to Asia by way of the northwest.
Because so little is firmly documented about his life, Hayes stands out less as a fully known historical figure than as a rare voice from the beginnings of English expansion across the Atlantic. His writing remains useful to readers interested in exploration, colonization, and the language of ambition that shaped those projects.