The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in terms inherited from classical models. Their poetic language neither assimilated contemporary nautical terminology, nor reflected the experience of travelers who had indeed crossed the Atlantic. Their manner of imagining the sea and expressing it in poetic imagery corresponds, therefore, to a preexisting cultural foundation. In material culture, the ex-voto has traditionally marked deliverance from peril, but over the centuries its usage has been significantly broader than this. For example, in western poetry there are many instances of offerings made in recognition of a special bond or commitment between two parties. In this article, Professor Davis traces the evolution of the maritime variant of the motif as it appears in lyric poetry of early modern Iberia, stretching from the Petrarchist sonnets of the sixteenth century to religious poems of remorse and repentance in the seventeenth. In these pages, Davis argues that the texts themselves constitute an offering in the broad sense, an ex-voto sensu lato.