From the beginning of things men of the Old World, with the salt of adventure in their blood, had passed “the forelands of the tideless sea” to look upon the green distances beyond; those more greatly daring had swept through the gate and brought back stories of the Hesperides. Phœnicians seeking trade, ocean thieves their prey, poet adventurers they knew not what, had sighted on the Barbary Coast the “Pilot’s” “little Hommock which appeareth like a Castle,” and sailed perhaps down by Arzille and Lavrache, Fedale and Azamoor, names of sorcery with the soft purr of Eastern tongues. Another and another slipped by Spartel, “shooting far into the Sea, the very Point guarded with a Rock,” the “Pilot” tells us, and circled northward through stormy cross-currents to Britain, or southward by the treacherous coasts where “the grown Sea cometh rowling in so hard.” Then sailors, north and south, put the land behind them, and turned their prows due west: here lay the great adventure for men who loved to play at chance, and they won, beyond dreams, a new world. Norsemen, Portuguese, Basque, and Briton found, not Cathaia, but the fishing-banks of Newfoundland, or boundless forests where men might be free, or those magic islands of the South where Spain was the first to gather her fleet of plate-ships for the homeward run to Cadiz, where secret landlocked harbors sheltered evil, and simple natives, bearing gifts, were kidnapped for their pains. Other mariners, whose thirst for gold was not to be slaked with a New World, made for the Far East by the Cape of “Buena Esperanza.” Slipping down the coast of Africa beyond Blanco, they skirted a sullen coast where the shore is broken by distorted trees and rocks and the mouths of great rivers that cast their freight from the sinister entrails of the land far out into a protesting ocean. These men, and others, nameless and forgotten mariners, with a keen eye for coast configuration and accurate soundings, made calculations and drawings and passed them on to their mates, until Messrs. Mount & Page winnowed out something of the truth of it all and constructed their “English Pilot.” And now should you devise a voyage about the seas of old romance, here is the chart for your venture. Swashbuckler pirates sailed this way, and discreet men who would elude them; slavers skulked down malign African coasts; clean, hardy voyagers, who sought only glory and the Northwest Passage, battered frail ships against the everlasting barriers of ice; adventurers in quest of gold worked their way down the Spanish Main; and, turn about, our fine young seamen of the New World wrung their vantage from the Old.