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In 1680, a band of English buccaneers marched across the Isthmus of Darien from the Atlantic to the Pacific and, off Panama, captured several Spanish vessels, one of which they made their flagship. From this vessel they terrorized Spanish possessions on the west coast of the Americas. On July 29, 1681, they captured another Spanish ship, from which they obtained a derrotero, or book of charts and sailing directions. Their depredations over, the pirates sailed eastward around Cape Horn to the Caribbean, where they distributed their booty. When they arrived in England, the Spanish ambassador demanded that the buccaneers be brought to trial. The derrotero was ordered to be brought to King Charles II, who apparently appreciated its great intelligence value. The buccaneers were acquitted; as a result the English ambassador to Spain was expelled from Madrid. The derrotero was subsequently translated, and one of the buccaneers, Basil Ringrose, added a text to the compilation and information to the Spanish charts. The resulting atlas, consisting of 106 pages of charts and 106 pages of text, is published in full for the first time in this volume. Covering the area from California to Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, and Juan Fernandez, Basil Ringrose's south sea waggoner is a rich source of geographical information, with observations on navigational, physical, biological, and cultural features as well as on ethnography, customs, and folklore. After almost exactly three hundred years, this secret atlas is now made available to libraries and individuals. The editors have provided an extensive introduction on historical, geographical, and navigational aspects of the atlas, as well as annotations tothe charts and text, and they have plotted the coverage of the charts on modern map bases.

S o many aspects of the life and activities of Christopher Columbus have come under intensive scrutiny that it is a matter of some surprise that certain areas have never been completely clarified. This, in many cases, is due to conflicting interpretations of the evidence and, in some, to idiosyncrasies of the writers. In still other cases, the evidence remaining is too slight for a clear solution to be possible. In such instances, attempts to obtain a solution have provoked controversy because they are, of their nature, tentative and incomplete. This is especially true of the years between Columbus's departure from Genoa and his decisive voyage in 1492. Of his earlier life Paulo Emilio Taviani and Jacques Heers1 have written with some conclusiveness, but even they show a reluctance to define to what extent Columbus was a seaman before 1475 and how far a merchant. It is reasonable to assume that he was involved in both capacities. It is also reasonably clear that he was brought up as much a merchant as a seaman (in spite of his own and of Samuel Eliot Morison's assertions to the contrary).2 His role in his expedition to Chios in 1475, for example, is best seen as that of a supercargo, engaged in fostering his family's trade in wool and woolen articles in a venture sponsored by two major trading families, the Spinola and the Centurione di Negro (we should probably use the word "clan" to describe their widespread ramifications). This association continued into the 1480s and may be considered one of Columbus's principal links with commerce in Genoa, in Portugal, and in Madeira as well as, it will be suggested here, intermediately, in the year 1477 in England, Iceland, and Ireland. One question cannot, apparently, be answered at all-that is, when his interest in the written word began. Was he sufficiently educated in Genoa to launch him in the career of amateur scholarship which was to be the

B ) ORN in Dublin on April 24, i909, I had my elementary schooling in Clara in the Irish midlands, an unusual village because it had an exceptionally large and active Protestant element dominated by a Quaker hierarchy. My secondary education was at a famous Belfast public day school, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, from which I went to The Queen's University. There I was taught by James Eadie Todd, who demanded a great deal from his students and gave them much in return. I was also influenced by E. Estyn Evans, a polymath geographer, who left me forever dissatisfied with the narrower kinds of history. When I graduated in I93 I, I went to King's College and the Institute of Historical Research in London to study under A. P. Newton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History, who set me to work on British colonial history and, in parallel, on that of Ireland in the early modern period. It was he who got me my first post at University College Southampton, I934-I939, where my special responsibility was British colonial history, although my dissertation had been on early Tudor rule in Ireland. From there I moved to Belfast where, at Queen's, I helped Todd develop Irish history, but soon I found myself, somehow, in I 944 as professor and head of department at a campus of the University of Wales at Swansea, where I remained until I957, when I moved to the Andrew Geddes and John Rankin chair of modern history at the University of Liverpool. There my developing concern with early European expansion, North America, and Ireland could find fuller expression. Between I927 and I 946 1 had lived in a regime of one professor, one lecturer, and one assistant lecturer (the earlier assistant to the sole professor). From I 946, things began to move and specialist appointments made it possible to cover more and more extra-European history, in Liverpool as elsewhere. My North American preoccupations led me to visit the United States in summers in I948, I957, and I959, as I became recognized as something of an authority in the early history of North America. My authority was admittedly minor, but it was enough to enable me to obtain my first sabbatical in i963, when with Alison, my wife and working companion since I 937, I ranged through the land and libraries of North America. We had another fine year in i969-i970, when I was Visiting Harrison Professor at the College of William and Mary. The years down to I976, when I retired at age sixty-seven, were punctuated by research or lecturing opportunities in Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, and Hungary, and we visited New Zealand universities for the British Council. On retirement I became visiting professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland, for some part

W T THAT we have too little of for the early stages of English investment and settlement overseas is the personal touch. For Virginia under the Company most of our literature is propagandist, and there is, especially, little record of the people who stayed at home but whose interests, material and intellectual, were involved in the New World. Sir Stephen Powle' has left us a little of this sort of information Powle spent the greater part of his adult life as a legal official. The summit of his achievement was to succeed his father as one of the Six Clerks of Chancery-a lucrative office-and to be knighted by King James at Theobalds in i604. Like many of his kind, he collected copies of legal documents as formularies and precedents, and it is probable that his extensive commonplace book, which is now Tanner Manuscripts i68 and i69 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, was intended originally as a legal reference book. But as it proceeded he got his clerk to copy into it many other materials: public documents which interested him, some of his Latin poems, letters to him and from him, tracts, and medical recipes. A few of these are in his own hand, and some have his marginal notes and corrections-in all, an interesting skeleton for a biography. On the preliminary leaves of the commonplace book Powle wrote down a series of personal memoranda during the years i6o8-io, interspersed with jottings of Latin verses and crossed-out notes of financial transactions rang

IN I933 Memorial College, St. John's Newfoundland, acquired from the London booksellers Messrs. Francis Edwards a single-sheet newsletter, handwritten though not addressed, which is now in the Library of Memorial University, St. John's. It is dated June 29, i6ii, and provides a useful conspectus of what news was considered worth sending from London to the country at that date. It has a particular interest in that it is largely concerned with the new plantations begun since i6o6 which were attracting investors and settlers to Virginia, Newfoundland, Ulster, and Bermuda. There is, besides, both internal and external evidence that this Newsletter was deliberately slanted so as to attract financial support and settlers for the new colonies. Newsletters as well as diaries' help us to extend the somewhat exiguous official documentation of the early years of colonial settlement. News material was found in considerable quantities in the letters of such men as John Chamberlain who, for a generation, towards the end of the sixteenth century and in the early part of the seventeenth century, gathered and disseminated information about current happenings in London and elsewhere in a professional manner if not for financial reward. Besides the gossipy letters which were exchanged between friends there were more professional newsletters exchanged between unofficial as well as official agents and their home government. European archives of the early modern period contain very many newsletters from such agentswe should call them intelligence reports-which supplement the formal dispatches of diplomatic envoys. Sometimes, as in the case of the Fugger correspondents, the agents were posted primarily to report on business conditions, though they included, incidentally, much that was of political or social interest. At the same time there were, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, more direct precursors of the newspaper press.2 Many of the topical tracts published in the period filled the place

M . ~Y own interest in the settlement of eastern North America is with origins. The establishment of San Augustin, of Jamestown, of Quebec, of Plymouth, of the Bay Colony are all, from this aspect, terminal points, when, one after another, groups of Europeans not only reach North America but stay there. The arrival of the Pilgrims of i620 is from this point of view the end of a story, rather a long story, one chapter of which is concerned with the First Pilgrims, those who came briefly to North America in I597, but who did not remain there. In the sixteenth century each of the "national" Protestant churches, after it had established itself, settled down to persecute other kinds of Protestants or Catholics: few Catholic powers ever ceased persecution. Always there were dissident groups in hiding or running to find refuge. The French Huguenots, then one of the most powerful dissident

The letter which John Day wrote to the 'Almirante Mayor' on John Cabot's American voyage of 1497 (Spanish, Vigneras, 1961, pp. 666-8, Almagia, 1960, PP2-3; English, Williamson, 1962, pp. 211-14) continues to provide material for comment and controversy. Much of the latter will be stifled by Dr. A. A. Ruddock's brilliant identification of John Day of Bristol with Hugh Say of London as two manifestations of the same individual (Ruddock, 1966, pp. 222-233). As she says, John Day emerges as a member of a cultivated London merchant family, the Says, so that the evident sophistication of his letter is more easy to understand and to evaluate, and his correspondence with a Spanish admiral no longer appears somewhat anomalous. Professor L. A. Vigneras, who found the Day letter in 1955, has already demonstrated that the 'Almirante Mayor* to whom the letter was addressed was, almost eertainly, Columbus (Vigneras, 1957, p. 226, 1961, pp. 663, 669), whose title of 'Almirante del Mar Oceano' was frequently generalized to 'El Almirante Mayor', while he often signed himself 'El Almirante*. The other territorial official with a similar title was the hereditary 'Almirante de Castilla', Fadrique Enriquez, who was also addressed as 'El Almirante Mayor', but who had no associations with overseas voyages and was probably in Italy, as Professor Vigneras has shown, when the Day letter was written. From the external evidence the letter makes better sense, indeed only makes sense, as part of the correspondence between an exceptionally well-informed Englishman and the now-famous discoverer, as he still regarded himself, of the offshore islands of Cathay. It may seem that, judged on internal evidence, the letter also fits into the Columbus picture. Why, we may ask, should Columbus have been so concerned with what the English were doing in 1497 as to be in contact by letter, and perhaps also in person, with John Day? The reason is that, most probably, he was engaged in a systematic re-evaluation of his ideas and discoveries for the first time since his departure on his first transAtlantic voyage in 1492. Returning to Spain from his second voyage on 11 June 1496, he did not leave on his third until 30 May 1498. In the meantime he had an opportunity to go over his books and notes and to search for fresh information. His new dis? coveries were puzzling. Though he had strenuously maintained on his second voyage that Cuba must be a peninsular extension of the mainland of Asia, he cannot have been too happy that in two expeditions he had gone well beyond his calculated limits of the ocean and had still not found any north-south coastline which would allow him to place his discoveries on the globe as he knew it. That he had re-thought his position is to be seen from his south-west course in 1498, which he had originally intended should bring him south of the Equator, since he expected the mainland of Asia to be within easier reach in these latitudes than from the Antilles. The evidence for his continued study of the older authorities is equally indirect but none the less convinc? ing. In the letter he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella from Hispaniola in October 1498 (Columbus, 1892, II, 26-40, 1933, II, 1-47, 1961, pp. 219-39, 441-64, 1963