George Sandys--traveler and travel-account writer, poet, classical scholar, civil servant, and courtier--has been called by Richard Beale Davis the author of the "first piece of real literary merit produced on the Atlantic seaboard." As a writer, Sandys produced a prose travel account that was one of the most popular in the seventeenth century, a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses that is still a standard edition, and verse paraphrases of sacred poetry that were widely popular for at least half a century. One of the best-known Caroline poets, Sandys was a member of the Privy Council to Charles I and an intimate of Lord Falkland's Great Tew Circle. Sandys's personal affairs and career as a civil servant were tied to the destiny of the colony of Virginia for most of his adult life--as a Virginia Company stockholder, resident treasurer of the colony, a member of the first Board of Trade...