Compared to other Elizabethan mariners who also engaged in exploratory voyages and maritime expeditions, such as Martin Frobisher, Sir Francis Drake or Sir Walter Ralegh, John Davis has received surprisingly little attention in recent years. In her recent book about early modern voyages and English travel narratives, Mary Fuller devotes ample space to Frobisher's voyages but makes only two passing remarks about John Davis, whose name features only once in her introductory chapter about ‘the English Worthies’ in a similar fashion, Robert McGhee acknowledges that Davis outmatched Frobisher in terms of both his sailing and cartographic skills, and yet his brief comments on Davis's three expeditions are confined to the end of his chapter on ‘Martin Frobisher's Gold Mines’. If, as Fuller explains, ‘the celebration of a “heroic Age of Discovery” depends on a number of deliberate and specific omissions – in other words on remembering some things and forgetting others’, then it seems fair to say that John Davis's early contribution to the discovery of the Northwest Passage has often been ‘forgotten’ by the historians of the field. Fuller goes on to remind her readers that: