This book focuses on three undertakings at Nova Scotia (1620s), East New Jersey (1680s) and the Isthmus of Panama, then known as Darien (1690s). Analysing works written in the larger context of the Scottish Atlantic, it examines how the Atlantic influenced seventeenth-century Scottish
literature and vice versa. The relationship between art and ideology is key to the author's discussion as Sandrock argues early modern writing employed utopianism as a tool for empire-building and as a means of claiming power over the Atlantic.