Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Cavendish

A young Elizabethan adventurer is basically pitching the original networking agenda: go meet strangers, especially the ones with clout. Cavendish frames curiosity as strategy. "To see" is the romance of travel - the sensory promise that sells exploration to patrons back home. "Be acquainted with strangers" is the practical payload: knowledge doesn’t just live in maps and goods, it lives in people you can read, bargain with, enlist, flatter, or outmaneuver. The line is a neat little fusion of wonder and instrumentality, the kind that powered England’s early imperial self-image.

The loaded phrase is "in especial". Cavendish isn’t advocating egalitarian cultural exchange; he’s advocating selective access. "Men in honour and authority" signals a world where encounters matter in proportion to rank. Strangers aren’t inherently interesting, they’re useful - as gatekeepers to ports, permission, information, supplies, and legitimacy. Even the word "acquainted" implies a controlled intimacy: not friendship, not understanding, but a relationship you can activate.

Context does the rest. Cavendish sailed in the 1580s, when England was scrambling to expand its reach against Spanish dominance. Exploration was expensive theater performed for investors and monarchs. This sentence reads like a justification for the voyage itself: the explorer as a collector of elite contacts, proof that travel can translate into influence. Beneath the polite Renaissance phrasing is a colder logic: the world is a hierarchy, and the smart traveler learns to climb it by shaking the right hands.