"[T]he idea of a maritime empire did not immediately seize the imagination of the English people, nor did it arise spontaneously. It had to be propagated. John Dee, who invented the phrase "British Impire", was the most diligent and influential of the first generation of imperialists. He it was who sketched out the English claim to an empire of the North Atlantic, embracing the Arctic to the east and the west, the northern islands, including mythical Frisland, conquered allegedly by King Arthur and King Malgo, and Atlantis (the continent of North America), first discovered by the Welsh prince Owen Madoc in the twelfth century. All this Dee set down in 1578 in a statement for the queen of "Her Majesty's Title Royal" to the lands in question, depicted in his 1580 map of Atlantis. Thus the necessary underpinning of myth was provided, to be duly repeated by Peckham, Hakluyt and many more."
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Kenneth Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (1984), p. 35
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Dee
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John Dee
John Dee (13 July 1527 – 1608 or 1609) was a British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy.
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