Its publication was a revelation to the English public. Before it appeared the people in general of that day had little knowledge of the accomplishments of either their own or foreign voyagers in discovery and for commercial advantage. Merchants engaged in foreign trade or ventures—and adventurous mariners, to be sure—kept themselves informed on what was going on and had gone on. But the information they collected was exclusively for the purposes of their own traffic. They were not interested in making it public. The real object, too, of many expeditions professing to aim at higher purposes, was, as John Winter Jones points out in his Introduction to the modern reprint of _Divers Voyages_, a gold-mine, or a treasure-laden galleon on the high seas. Hakluyt’s little book immediately gave a fresh turn to public interest. Its practical effect was the speedy forwarding of the expedition of Sir Humphrey Gilbert in the summer of 1583, the first of the English nation to carry people directly to erect a colony in the north countries of America. This was an unsuccessful attempt at an establishment at Newfoundland, and was followed by the loss of Sir Humphrey with the foundering of his cockle-shell of a ship on the return voyage. Two years after the appearance of _Divers Voyages_ a second work came from the same hand for the same general object. This was a work of broader scope and of larger significance. It was prepared not for the press but for private and confidential circulation. It was, in effect, a state paper, marshalling arguments in behalf of a specific policy, and was intended expressly for the eye of queen Elizabeth, and her principal advisers. It exhibited the political, commercial, and religious advantages to be derived by England from American colonization at a critical juncture of affairs. The Catholic Philip the second of Spain was now aiming at the “suppression of heretics throughout the world,” and Elizabeth of England was his main object of insidious attack as “the principal of the princes of the reformed religion.” The particular purpose of the work was to enlist the throne in the large projects formed by Walter Raleigh in continuation of the scheme of Sir Humphrey Gilbert (Raleigh’s half-brother) after the lamentable fate of that chivalrous gentleman. Only three or four copies of this paper are supposed to have been made. Its existence was unknown to the historians for more than two and a half centuries. The credit for bringing it to public light and for its reproduction in print was due to American bibliophiles and scholars.