It is an unfortunate truth that voyages of discovery and engagements of great naval fleets too often have at base a commercial motive. In a sense, then, literature of the sea is fundamentally based on commerce—its setting, characters, and plots molded to match particular maritime trades. Even yachting is the most conspicuous reward of successful commercial enterprise.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, maritime commerce undertaken by English-speaking peoples was still largely a function of the British Empire. The worldwide commercial empire predicted for Portugal by the poet Luis Vas de Camoëns in The Lusiad (1572) had been achieved by the British in the eighteenth century—and had been celebrated by William Julius Mickle (1735–1788) in the 150-page introduction to his translation of the Portuguese epic. The superiority and uncorruptibility of the British Empire was as obvious to Mickle in 1776 as it was...