The seventeenth-century historian William Camden described Sir Humphrey Gilbert as "vir acer et alacer, belli pacisque artibus claris" (a zealous and eager man, famous in the arts of war and peace). Gilbert was a man of action rather than a man of letters, more important as a military figure than as a writer. The small body of writing he left, most of it unpublished until several centuries after his death, deals with a series of projects, from finding the Northwest Passage to establishing a third university. Many and varied though these projects were, most of them were unsuccessful or not attempted during Gilbert's lifetime. Gilbert is still seen as an important early figure in the history of English colonization and empire, though less so now than earlier in the twentieth century. He held the first letters patent to settle North America and made two attempts to exercise his...