I have been accompanied with many sorrows, with labour, hunger, heat, sickness, and peril; it appeareth, notwithstanding, that I made no other bravado of going to the sea, than was meant.
These seven accounts move from the ancient fathers of historical prose Herodotus and Tacitus in Egypt and Germany, respectively, to the great Elizabethan explorers Drake, Gilbert and Raleigh as they colonize new lands.