Even more persistent and reassuring than the Protestant myth of the origins of the British Empire was the belief that it was an empire ofthe seas. The conventional chronology of the Empire's origins, which located them in the reign of Elizabeth I, nourished that belief and anchored it in a particular maritime history. The originating agents of empire were the Elizabethan sea-dogs, Gloriana's sailor-heroes who had circumnavigated the globe, singed the King of Spain's beard, swept the oceans of pirates and Catholics, and thereby opened up the searoutes across which English migrants would travel, and English trade would flow, until Britannia majestically ruled the waves. The myth was persistent not least because it enshrined an inescapable truth: the British Empire was an empire of the seas, and without the Royal Navy's mastery of the oceans, it could never have become the global empire upon which the sun never set. Yet that maritime mastery was not complete until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the force of the myth derives in large part from the nineteenth-century celebration of an oceanic hegemony whose origins were traced back to the exploits of Drake, Hawkins and Ralegh. The myth was reassuring, not least in the two centuries before the Victorian zenith of the British Empire, because it served to distinguish the Empire from the territorial empires of antiquity (especially Rome's) and from contemporary land-empires such as the Holy Roman Empire or the Spanish Monarchy's possessions in the Americas.