Book Description

The age of Elizabeth and James—the age of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Bacon—was a new point of departure in the history of the English race. All the conditions excited men to unwonted intellectual activity. The art of printing was yet a modern invention; the New World with its novelties and unexplained mysteries was a modern discovery; and there were endless discussions and agitations of spirit growing out of the recent reformation in religion. Imagination was powerfully stimulated by the progress of American exploration, by the romantic adventures of the Spaniards in the West Indies, and their dazzling conquest of new-found empires in Mexico and Peru. It was an age of creation in poetry, in science, and in religion, and men of action were everywhere set on deeds of daring. The world had regained something of the vigor and spontaneity of youth, but the credulity and curiosity of youth were not wanting. The mind of the time accepted and reveled in marvelous stories. The stage plays of that drama-loving age reflected the interest in the supernatural and the eager curiosity about far-away countries. Books of travel fitted the prevailing taste. He who could afford to buy them regaled himself with the great folios of Hakluyt's Voyages and Purchas his Pilgrimes. General readers delighted in little tracts and pamphlets relating incidents of far-away travels, or describing remote countries and the peoples inhabiting them, or the "monstrous strange beasts" found in lands beyond the bounds of Christendom. America excited the most lively curiosity as a world by itself and the least known of all the "four parts" into which the globe was then divided. There were those, indeed, who made six parts of the world by adding an arctic continent, which included Greenland and a vast southern land supposed to stretch from Magellan's Strait southward to the pole. It was easy to believe in these two superfluous continents; they were mirages of the New World. Every great discovery excites expectation of others like it. And in a time when vague report or well-worn tradition counted for more than observation or experimental knowledge, it was inevitable that current information about America should be distorted and mixed with fable. In that age, still pre-Baconian, men had few standards by which to measure probabilities, and to those shut in by the narrow limits of mediæval knowledge the mere uncovering of a new continent whose existence contravened the fixed beliefs of the ages was so marvelous that nothing told about it afterward seemed incredible.