ENGLISH SEAMEN UNDER THE TUDORS. BY HER FOX BOURNE, AUTHOR OF "A MEMOIR OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY," "ENGLISH MERCHANTS," FTC. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOLUME I. LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET, 1868. PREFACE. THE great deeds of England's heroes on the sea during the memorable period of Tudor rule have furnished material for many volumes of special biography, and for numberless briefer memoirs in biographical dictionaries, in antiquarian repertories, and in miscellaneous publications. They have also yielded topics for brilliant episodes and instructive generalizations in histories of all sorts. But nowhere, I believe, except in John Campbell's Inves of the British Admirals (1761), in the Lives of the British Admirals begun by Robert Southey and continued by Robert Bell (1833-1840), and in the Memoirs of the Naval Worthies of Queen Elizabeth's Reign by Mr. John Barrow (1845), has any complete or consecutive account of these deeds been attempted; and there seems to be fair excuse for supplementing these good books with another and a differently planned work. I have here attempted to set forth all that is most memorable in the careers of the great leaders of English navigation and English sea-fighting under the Tudors, so far as they had anything to do with naval affairs; but, instead of writing a number of short biographies, it seemed to me better to make the biographical details subordinate to the history of the famous enterprises to which they belong. After a short introductory chapter, and three other chapters which, relating to the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., and Edward VI., may also be looked upon as introductory to the fuller narrative of English sea-going under Elizabeth, I have therefore so arranged my materials as to present, in each of the following volumes, a separate historical episode. In the first is given, as concisely as seemed possible with due regard to the interest of the subject, the story of the efforts made by Elizabethan navigators to reach the Indies and acquire their wealth by arctic voyaging, and of the efforts issuing therefrom, by which were begun the English colonization of America, and the English mastery of India. In the second, the same memorable half-century has been traversed, chiefly to show the way in which, while trading enterprise and bold love of adventure were being peaceably exercised by the arctic explorers and the founders of our colonial empire, another set of men, or the same men applying themselves to a different |