When at the end of The Tempest Prospero is asked to tell his former enemies of his preservation on his strange island, he dismisses their request as untimely but provides instead a ‘wonder’ to content them: the sight of Ferdinand and Miranda's false play at chess, with the two characters looking at the company gazing at them, their own eyes similarly caught in a wonderful vision. The discourse of ‘wonder’ is an essential element of travel narratives: it marks the encounter with difference, when in the course of a long journey the Self comes across the Other. The narrative which results from such encounters purposes to tell readers at home about different people and exotic places, and above all to make them experience astonishment or admiration.

In The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake (1628), which relates the circumnavigation accomplished by Sir Francis Drake between 1577 and 1580, the rhetoric of the wonderful is particularly needed, as the navigator can hardly boast of any major discovery at the end of his three-year voyage. When he returns to Plymouth Harbour in September 1580, Drake may be the first Englishman in history to have sailed around the earth, but he comes second to Magellan, whose men had accomplished the first circumnavigation more than half a century earlier (1519–22), entering what they called the Mar Pacifico, i.e. the Pacific Ocean, from the ‘Strait of Magellan’, which the Portuguese explorer discovered in 1520. Though difficult to navigate, this route, sheltered by mainland South America and the Tierra Del Fuego archipelago, is still safer than the ‘Drake Passage’, which the Englishman discovered after passing through the Strait, and where one of his three remaining ships was lost far South (September 1578) while another was forced to turn back to England. Throughout his journey, the English navigator follows in the steps of the Spanish, or the Portuguese.