Sir Francis Bacon regarded Spain's progressive decline in the seventeenth century as a divine retribution for the country's cruelty and hubris. He noted that there was not one

Invoking translatio imperii, the Pillars of Hercules, so symbolic for Philip, appeared on the title page of Bacon's unfinished work, Instauratio Magna (Great Renewal), published in 1620. The work included his famous treatise of empiricism, Novum Organum, sive Indicia Vera de Interpretatione Naturae (New organum, or true directions concerning the interpretation of nature) which advocated a scientific method that was inspired by such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei. The pillars bore the following inscription: “Multi pertransibunt et augebitur Scientia” (Many will pass through and knowledge will be the greater). The frontispiece featured a Stuart vessel passing beyond the Pillars on voyage to America. The message, “many will pass,” constituted Bacon's “call to expand English science,” in order to “curtail Spanish dominance of overseas expansion.”

Nevertheless, while the Age of Exploration widened England's knowledge of the world, planting the seeds of an Age of Reason, it simultaneously prompted belief in the fabulous and improbable, including the exotic faerielands of contemporary romance. This chapter associates the return to faerieland with both the dominant reason (logic) and unreason (rumors, as propagated in poetry, romance, and ancient writings) that informed the geographical heurism of the seventeenth century, as evidenced by the 1652 Cosmographie in four bookes of Peter Heylyn. Reviving tales of classical warrior women and of dubious quests, from Amadís and Espejo to The Faerie Queene and Midsummer, Heylyn appealed to poetry's universality, using romance maxims in order to call upon England to expand its exploratory ventures in the project of global conquest.

Of Poets, Lovers, and Madmen

During the first Anglo-Spanish War of 1585 to 1604, there was a real and present need for madmen willing to dream of America.