When the English settled they lost the sense of the sea; they became a little parochial people, tilling fields and tending cattle, wool-gathering and wool-bartering, their shipping confined to cross-Channel merchandise, and coastwise sailing from port to port.

Chaucer's shipman, almost the sole representative of the sea in mediaeval English literature, plied a coastwise trade.

But with the Cabots and their followers, Frobisher and Gilbert and Drake and Hawkins, all this was changed; once more the ocean became the highway of our national progress and adventure, and by virtue of our shipping we became competitors for the dominion of the earth.

The rising tide of national enthusiasm and exaltation that this occasioned flooded popular literature.

The voyagers themselves wrote down the stories of their adventures; and collections of these--Hakluyt's and Purchas's--were among the most popular books of the age.