There's a naivety about many of the accounts that leaves you wondering how the English ever managed to get established as a seafaring nation at all. The downside of this collection, in which every account could be expanded to make an implausible novel, is that the accounts of distant lands are brief and sketchy though occasionally intriguing. Landing on Newfoundland, to make friends with the locals the English reasonably enough give them iron knives but also play instruments and then bizarrely engage in leaping competitions.
