Twenty years after the production of the ‘Discourse of Western Planting’, the English had precious little to show for their colonizing endeavours; their presence in the western hemisphere remained epiphenomenal. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the arguments of Hakluyt and his promoting counterparts may well have been all too familiar – and, perhaps, stale – in the eyes of readers even as the promoter published a second edition of his Principal Navigations of the English Nation in 1600. After all, as they fretted over the succession to a queen who had lived too long, the English had little but memories to show for the endeavours of their adventurers: the celebrated ‘sea-dogs’ Drake and Hawkins had died miserable deaths, while the Earl of Essex, the leading advocate of opposing Spain on all fronts, had gone to the block after his madcap rebellion and his leading supporters had either suffered the same fate or languished in the Tower. The efforts of Sir Walter Ralegh, his brother-in-law Sir Humphrey Gilbert and others to establish a beachhead in the Americas had come to naught. Indeed, the litany of Ralegh's failures – in 1585–8 to establish the Roanoke colony and then in 1595 to find cities of gold in Guiana – underscored the high degree of risk involved in pursuing overseas exploration and colonization.