The charge that the three cruising voyages were anachronistic is understandable but does not bear scrutiny. It is based on the contention that the high point of English plundering adventure in the South Sea was reached in the reign of Elizabeth I and was built almost entirely on the spectacularly successful voyages of Drake and Cavendish. These voyages, it is maintained, were followed by over one hundred years of failed projects and abandoned schemes which, by the turn of the eighteenth century, had resulted in the state turning its attention away from the Spanish South Sea and towards its Atlantic and Caribbean possessions. The three cruising voyages were thus backward-looking private expeditions which had little connection with British maritime policy. This chapter aims to show that the voyages form part of a continuum of British activity in the South Sea which began, certainly, with Drake's circumnavigation, but which was revived in the seventeenth century whenever England was able to turn its gaze away from its immediate national and European concerns. In times of war with Spain, the object would be plunder, in times of peace, trade, but the ‘obsession’ with the Spanish South Sea remained and continued until the end of the eighteenth century.

The naming of the South Sea was an accident of geography. From the peak in Darien where Vasco Núñez de Balboa stood in September 1513 the ocean stretched out to the southern horizon, while behind him lay what the conquistadores had already named the North Sea. Had he faced the ocean almost anywhere else on the Pacific coast of America he might more accurately have called it the West Sea. Nevertheless the name stuck and ‘remained for over two centuries, in fact nearly three, the South Sea not only in common speech (especially that of seamen) but very generally on maps and in academic discourse’. Six years after Balboa's first sighting, Ferdinand Magellan battled through the straits named after him and became the first European to enter the South Sea.