Five books provide eyewitness accounts of the three voyages. These narratives were of wide and lasting cultural significance in that they contributed to the growing demand for knowledge about the world led by organisations like the Royal Society but enthusiastically supported by a substantial educated readership. The accounts given in the five books are of varying reliability and truthfulness and it is useful to compare their credibility with that of the seminal travel narrative of its age, Dampier's A New Voyage Round the World. The influence of the voyage narratives was sustained and extended through their reproduction in several voyage anthologies, which in turn provided source material for British strategic thinking throughout the eighteenth century.

The publishing boom in travel literature that reached its zenith in the first half of the eighteenth century was unprecedented. The English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists 2,222 books with ‘voyage’ or ‘voyages’ in the title published between 1688 and 1815. As early as 1710 the Earl of Shaftesbury noted that voyage narratives ‘are the chief materials to furnish out a library … These are in our present day what books of chivalry were in those of our forefathers.’ The eyewitness accounts contained in the seven (if we include the pamphlets produced by Dampier and Welbe) published works immediately arising from the cruising voyages of Dampier, Rogers and Shelvocke made a considerable impact on the publishing world of the time. Most were reprinted, some several times. Along with the various accounts of the Anson circumnavigation they formed the backbone of voyage collections such as John Campbell's Navigantium atque Itinerantium and provided inspiration and source material for Defoe and Swift.

Recent scholarly work on European voyages of discovery, exploration and plunder has progressed from noting and regretting the extraordinary difficulty with which travellers’ tales could be verified to a philosophical investigation of the varying definitions and forms of fact and fiction to be encountered in this most colourful and expressive of genres.