ABSTRACT
To set off across an ocean, even armed with maps that claim to outline the features of the world with unprecedented accuracy, was an act of great boldness in the sixteenth century. Before a means of determining longitude had been devised, when seafarers were acutely conscious that the world's land masses had not yet been charted in full or properly identified, navigation was by its very nature a form of experiment. The volumes publicizing mariners’ accounts therefore took on a bolder epistemological purpose than personal narrative might be assumed to carry; the “voyages” became the occasion for developing a language and method with which to account for the natural world.
