ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the travels experience of a poet Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Gilbert's voyage is not a recreational excursion, but a speculative enterprise, with the straining of 'restlesse lims, & labring thoughtes' a sign of heroic virtue. Although the meanings of the word 'trauel' were becoming separated in the sixteenth century, travel and travail are still interchangeable terms with the meanings closely associated, as Churchyard's poem to Gilbert makes clear. Gilbert's heroic travels testify to his virtuous choice of toilsome but manly adventure rather than slothful, effeminate ease at home. Churchyard's panegyric to Gilbert, and the spirit of heroic adventuring abroad that he seems to embody, is part of the euphoric discourse of Elizabethan mercantile and colonial expansion. Sir Francis Drake, contributing some prefatory verses to George Peckham's account of Gilbert's last and fatal voyage in 1583, challenged others to join the enterprise of overseas exploration.
