In the decades leading up to England's first permanent American colony, the literature that emerged needed to establish certain realities against a background of skepticism, and it also had to find ways of theorizing the enterprise. The voyage narratives evolved almost from the outset as a genre concerned with recuperating failure--as noble, strategic, even as a form of success. Reception of these texts since the Victorian era has often accepted their claims of heroism and mastery; this study argues for a more complicated, less glorious history.