It is not known precisely at what time Hariot joined Walter Raleigh, who
was only eight years his senior. From what their friend Hakluyt says of
them both, their intimate friendship and mutually serviceable connection
were already an old story as early as 1587. On the eighth calends of
March 1587, that is on the 22d of February 1588, present reckoning,
Hakluyt wrote from Paris to Raleigh in London,

' To you therefore I have freely desired to give and dedicate these my
labors. For to whom could I present these Decades of the New World [of
Peter Martyr] more appropriately than to yourself, who, at the expense
of nearly one hundred thousand ducats, with new fleets, are showing to
us of modern times new regions, leading forth a third colony [to
Virginia], giving us news of the unknown, and opening up for us pathways
through the inaccessible ; and whose every care, and thought, and effort
tend towards this end, hinge upon and adhere to it ? To whom have been
present and still are present the same ideas, desires, & incentives as
with that most illustrious Charles Howard, the Second Neptune of the
Ocean, and Edward Stafford our most prudent Ambassador at the Court of
France, in order to accomplish great deeds by sea and land. But since by
your skill in the art of navigation you clearly saw that the chief glory
of an insular kingdom would obtain its greatest splendor among us by the
firm support of the mathematical sciences, you have trained up and
supported now a long time, with a most liberal salary, Thomas Hariot, a
young man well versed in those studies, in order that you might acquire
in your spare hours by his instruction a knowledge of these noble
sciences ; and your own numerous Sea Captains might unite profitably
theory with practice. What is to be the result shortly of this your wise
and learned school, they who possess even moderate judgment can have no
difficulty in guessing. This one thing I know, the one and only