This volume covers a period when Europeans were making great advances in the production and application of pure knowledge, especially in the fields of navigation and discovery. Thus European powers gained empires around the globe and the benefits that came with them, while the rest of the world had to be content with supplying the raw material (i.e labour, bullion, wood, plants, ore) of these good things. This would not have been possible without navies and trading monopolies, enterprises in which the freedom of the seas was disputed, then gained or lost.The essays in this volume range between three eras in the age of discovery: first, the excitement of seeing something for the first time; second, the experience of understanding the importance of the new thing; and third, the disillusion incident to reframing the prehistory of humanity and its destiny without the usual signposts of an anthropocentric journey from innocence to salvation via sin, atonement and judgment. The maritime contribution to all three eras was enormous not simply because it provided a mobile platform for the inspection of the new but because it proved experimentally that there were no extremes of heroic virtue or of brutal depravity to which humans might not tend when necessity or wantonness called for them.