TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

This book was published in 1905; only 440 copies were printed.

The first chapter, [Verrazano’s voyage] in 1524, is a modern translation of the original Italian. The other chapters are literal reproductions of their original English publications, and so retain the spelling, the hyphenation and punctuation seen in those books.

This etext maintains this careful reproduction of the original English text. Variant spellings of names and place names have not been changed.

A double space, in the narrative of the [Popham voyage] (pp. 155-175), is denoted by ·· and indicates, in most cases, the start of a new sentence.

Multiple spaces in a paragraph are denoted by ······· and indicate a blank space in the original text for a missing name or date.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Three minor changes have been made to the etext:
[Page 27]: ‘Com of _Essex_’ has a ~ (tilde) over the m in the original text.
[Page 123]: ‘assoone as they’ replaced by ‘as soone as they’.
[Page 155] Sidenote: ‘1605 June’ replaced by ‘1607 June’.