Introduction: Romance and the Globe

Abstract

When Martin Frobisher and his crew set off in search of a northwest passage to China in 1576, they were outfitted with a host of charts, maps, globes, sea manuals, and other books and navigational equipment. These purchases included “a greate globe of metal in blanke in a case,” “a great mappe universall of Mercator in prente,” a “bible Englishe great volume,” and, perhaps the most surprising item in the inventory, “Sir John Mandevylle (Englishe)” (Collinson ix-x).¹ The notoriously fantastical Mandeville’s Travels (which Frobisher most likely read in any of its five English editions up to 1576) thus sat alongside material such as Gerard Mercator’s landmark 1569 world map, a set of texts that seem to point in very different epistemological and even chronological directions.² Sir Walter Ralegh, too, had read his Mandeville; his description in The Discovery of Guiana of the “Ewaipanoma,” “a nation of people whose heads appear not above their shoulders” receives verification from the book.³ “Such a nation was written of by Mandeville, whose reports were holden for fables many years; and yet since the East Indies were discovered, we find his relations true of such things as heretofore were held incredible” (93). Territorial expansion had transformed old “fables” into new truths, a pattern of discovery that Ralegh himself hoped to replicate in his search for El Dorado, the city of gold.⁴