ABSTRACT
Edward Webbe was born at St Katherine’s by the Tower of London, the son of Richard Webbe, a ‘master gunner of England’, but nothing else is known about his family background. He was eventually ransomed for ‘three hundred crownes which is seven shillings sixe pence a peece, of currant English money’. This section of his narrative, however, remains suspect because elsewhere in The Rare and Most Wonderfull Thinges Webbe states that he was serving in the Royal as a master gunner with the Christian forces under Don Juan of Austria when Tunis was captured from the Turks in October 1572. After returning to England Webbe sailed again aboard the Hart and with thirty other ships to Russia but on the return journey was shipwrecked and lost all of his possessions. Continuing on to Naples, he was denounced as an English spy by an unnamed Genoese, leading to his imprisonment and severe torture.
