THE SEA KINGS.

When one thinks of the resounding chorus of gratulations with which the four hundredth anniversary of the Discovery of America was lately heralded to a listening world, it is curious and instructive to notice the sort of comment which that great event called forth upon the occasion of its third centenary, while the independence of the United States was as yet a novel and ill-appreciated fact. In America very little fuss was made. Railroads were as yet unknown, and the era of world's fairs had not begun. Of local celebrations there were two; one held in New York, the other in Boston; and as in 1892, so in 1792, New York followed the Old Style date, the twelfth of October, while Boston undertook to correct the date for New Style. This work was discreditably bungled, however, and the twenty-third of October was selected instead of the true date, the twenty-first. In New York the affair was conducted by the newly founded political society named for the Delaware chieftain Tammany, in Boston by the Massachusetts Historical Society, whose founder, Dr. Jeremy Belknap, delivered a thoughtful and scholarly address upon the occasion. Both commemorations of the day were very quiet and modest.[1]

In Europe little heed was paid to America and its discovery, except in France, which, after taking part in our Revolutionary War, was at length embarking upon its own Revolution, so different in its character and fortunes. Without knowing much about America, the Frenchmen of that day were fond of using it to point a moral and adorn a tale. In 1770 the famous AbbÉ Raynal had published his "Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies," a book in ten volumes, which for a time enjoyed immense popularity. Probably not less than one third of it was written by Diderot, and more than a dozen other writers contributed to its pages, while the abbÉ, in editing these various chapters and adding more from his own hand, showed himself blissfully ignorant of the need for any such thing as critical judgment in writing history. In an indescribably airy and superficial manner the narrative flits over the whole vast field of the intercourse of Europeans with the outlying parts of the earth discovered since the days of Columbus and Gama; and at length, in the last chapter of the last volume, we are confronted with the question, What is all this worth? Our author answers confidently, Nothing! worse than nothing! the world would have been much better off if America had never been discovered and the ocean route to Asia had remained unknown!

This opinion seems to have been a favourite hobby with the worthy Raynal; for in 1787, in view of the approaching tercentenary, we find him proposing to the Academy of Lyons the offer of a prize of fifty louis for the best essay upon the question whether the discovery of America had been a blessing or a curse to mankind. It was furthermore suggested that the essay should discuss the most practicable methods of increasing the benefits and diminishing the ills that had flowed and continued to flow from that memorable event. The announcement of the question aroused considerable interest, and a few essays were written, but the prize seems never to have been awarded. One of these essays was by the Marquis de Chastellux, who had served in America as major-general in the army of Count Rochambeau. The accomplished author maintains, chiefly on economic grounds, that the discovery has been beneficial to mankind; in one place, mindful of the triumph of the American cause in the grand march upon Yorktown wherein he had himself taken part, he exclaims, "O land of Washington and Franklin, of Hancock and Adams, who could ever wish thee non-existent for them and for us?" To this Baron Grimm[2] replied, "Perhaps he will wish it who reflects that the independence of the United States has cost France nearly two thousand million francs, and is hastening in Europe a revolutionary outbreak which had better be postponed or averted." To most of these philosophers no doubt Chastellux seemed far too much of an optimist, and the writer who best expressed their sentiments was the AbbÉ Genty, who published at Orleans, in 1787, an elaborate essay, in two tiny volumes, entitled "The Influence of the Discovery of America upon the Happiness of the Human Race." Genty has no difficulty in reaching the conclusion that the influence has been chiefly for the bad. Think what a slaughter there had been of innocent and high-minded red men by brutal and ruthless whites! for the real horrors described by Las Casas were viewed a century ago in the light of Rousseau's droll notions as to the exalted virtues of the noble savage. Think, too, how most of the great European wars since the Peace of Westphalia had grown out of quarrels about colonial empire! Clearly Columbus had come with a sword, not with an olive branch, and had but opened a new chapter in the long Iliad of human woe. Against such undeniable evils, what benefits could be alleged except the extension of commerce, and that, says Genty, means merely the multiplication of human wants, which is not in itself a thing to be desired.[3] One unqualified benefit, however, Genty and all the other writers freely admit; the introduction of quinine into Europe and its use in averting fevers. That item of therapeutics is the one cheery note in the mournful chorus of disparagement, so long as our attention is confined to the past. In the future, perhaps, better things might be hoped for. Along the Atlantic coast of North America a narrow fringe of English-speaking colonies had lately established their political independence and succeeded in setting on foot a federal government under the presidency of George Washington. The success of this enterprise might put a new face upon things and ultimately show that after all the discovery of the New World was a blessing to mankind.[4] So says the AbbÉ Genty in his curious little book, which even to-day is well worth reading.

If now, after the lapse of another century, we pause to ask the question why the world was so much more interested in the Western hemisphere in 1892 than in 1792, we may fairly say that it is because of the constructive work, political and social, that has been done here in the interval by men who speak English. Surely, if there were nothing to show but the sort of work in colonization and nation-making that characterized Spanish America under its Old RÉgime, there would be small reason for celebrating the completion of another century of such performance. During the present century, indeed, various parts of Spanish America have begun to take on a fresh political and social life, so that in the future much may be hoped for them. But the ideas and methods which have guided this revival have been largely the ideas and methods of English-speaking people, however imperfectly conceived and reproduced. The whole story of this western hemisphere since Genty wrote gives added point to his opinion that its value to mankind would be determined chiefly by what the people of the United States were likely to do.

The smile with which one regards the world-historic importance accorded to the discovery of quinine is an index of the feeling that there are broad ways and narrow ways of dealing with such questions. To one looking through a glass of small calibre a great historical problem may resolve itself into a question of food and drugs. Your anti-tobacco fanatic might contend that civilized men would have been much better off had they never become acquainted with the Indian weed. An economist might more reasonably point to potatoes and maize—to say nothing of many other products peculiar to the New World—as an acquisition of which the value can hardly be overestimated. To reckon the importance of a new piece of territory from a survey of its material productions is of course the first and most natural method. The Spanish conquerors valued America for its supply of precious metals and set little store by other things in comparison. But for the discovery of gold mines in 1496 the Spanish colony founded by Columbus in Hispaniola would probably have been abandoned. That was but the first step in the finding of gold and silver in enormous quantities, and thenceforth for a long time the Spanish crown regarded its transatlantic territories as an inexhaustible mine of wealth. But the value of money to mankind depends upon the uses to which it is put; and here it is worth our while to notice the chief use to which Spain applied her American treasure during the sixteenth century.

The relief of the church from threatening dangers was in those days the noblest and most sacred function of wealth. When Columbus aimed his prow westward from the Canaries, in quest of the treasures of Asia, its precious stones, its silk-stuffs, its rich shawls and rugs, its corals and dye-woods, its aromatic spices, he expected to acquire vast wealth for the sovereigns who employed him and no mean fortune for himself. In all negotiations he insisted upon a good round percentage, and could no more be induced to budge from his price than the old Roman Sibyl with her books. Of petty self-seeking and avarice there was probably no more in this than in commercial transactions generally. The wealth thus sought by Columbus was not so much an end as a means. His spirit was that of a Crusader, and his aim was not to discover a New World (an idea which seems never once to have entered his head), but to acquire the means for driving the Turk from Europe and setting free the Holy Sepulchre. Had he been told upon his melancholy death-bed that instead of finding a quick route to Cathay he had only discovered a New World, it would probably have added fresh bitterness to death.

But if this lofty and ill-understood enthusiast failed in his search for the treasures of Cathay, it was at all events not long before Cortes and Pizarro succeeded in finding the treasures of Mexico and Peru, and the crusading scheme of Columbus descended as a kind of legacy to the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella, the magnanimous but sometimes misguided Charles, the sombre and terrible Philip. It remained a crusading scheme, but, no longer patterned after that of Godfrey and Tancred, it imitated the mad folly which had once extinguished in southern Gaul the most promising civilization of its age. Instead of a Spanish crusade which might have expelled the most worthless and dangerous of barbarians from eastern Europe, it became a Spanish crusade against everything in the shape of political and religious freedom, whether at home or abroad. The year in which Spanish eyes first beheld the carved serpents on Central American temples was the year in which Martin Luther nailed his defiance to the church door at Wittenberg. From the outworn crust of mediÆvalism the modern spirit of individual freedom and individual responsibility was emerging, and for ninety years all Europe was rent with the convulsions that ensued. In the doubtful struggle Spain engaged herself further and further, until by 1570 she had begun to sacrifice to it all her energies. Whence did Philip II. get the sinews of war with which he supported Alva and Farnese, and built the Armada called Invincible? Largely from America, partly also from the East Indies, since Portugal and her colonies were seized by Philip in 1580. Thus were the first-fruits of the heroic age of discovery, both to east and to west of Borgia's meridian, devoted to the service of the church with a vengeance, as one might say, a lurid vengeance withal and ruthless. By the year 1609, when Spain sullenly retired, baffled and browbeaten, from the Dutch Netherlands, she had taken from America more gold and silver than would to-day be represented by five thousand million dollars, and most of this huge treasure she had employed in maintaining the gibbet for political reformers and the stake for heretics. In view of this grewsome fact, Mr. Charles Francis Adams has lately asked the question whether the discovery of America was not, after all, for at least a century, fraught with more evil than benefit to mankind. One certainly cannot help wondering what might have been the immediate result had such an immense revenue been at the disposal of William and Elizabeth rather than Philip.

Such questions are after all not so simple as they may seem. It is not altogether clear that such a reversal of the conditions from the start would have been of unmixed benefit to the English and Dutch. After the five thousand millions had been scattered to the winds, altering the purchasing power of money in all directions, it was Spain that was impoverished while her adversaries were growing rich and strong. A century of such unproductive expenditure went far toward completing the industrial ruin of Spain, already begun in the last Moorish wars, and afterward consummated by the expulsion of the Moriscos. The Spanish discovery of America abundantly illustrates the truths that if gold were to become as plentiful as iron it would be worth much less than iron, and that it is not inflation but production that makes a nation wealthy. In so far as the discovery of America turned men's minds from steady industry to gold-hunting, it was a dangerous source of weakness to Spain; and it was probably just as well for England that the work of Cortes and Pizarro was not done for her.

But the great historic fact, most conspicuous among the consequences of the discovery of America, is the fact that colonial empire, for England and for Holland, grew directly out of the long war in which Spain used American and East Indian treasure with which to subdue the English and Dutch peoples and to suppress the principles of civil and religious liberty which they represented. The Dutch tore away from Spain the best part of her East Indian empire, and the glorious Elizabethan sea kings, who began the work of crippling Philip II. in America, led the way directly to the English colonization of Virginia. Thus we are introduced to the most important aspect of the discovery of America. It opened up a fresh soil, enormous in extent and capacity, for the possession of which the lower and higher types of European civilization and social polity were to struggle. In this new arena the maritime peoples of western Europe fought for supremacy; and the conquest of so vast a field has given to the ideas of the victorious people, and to their type of social polity, an unprecedented opportunity for growth and development. Sundry sturdy European ideas, transplanted into this western soil, have triumphed over all competitors and thriven so mightily as to react upon all parts of the Old World, some more, some less, and thus to modify the whole course of civilization. This is the deepest significance of the discovery of America; and a due appreciation of it gives to our history from its earliest stages an epic grandeur, as the successive situations unfold themselves and events with unmistakable emphasis record their moral. In the conflict of Titans that absorbed the energies of the sixteenth century, the question whether it should be the world of Calderon or the world of Shakespeare that was to gain indefinite power of future expansion was a question of incalculable importance to mankind.

The beginnings of the history of English-speaking America are thus to be sought in the history of the antagonism between Spain and England that grew out of the circumstances of the Protestant Reformation. It was as the storehouse of the enemy's treasure and the chief source of his supplies that America first excited real interest among the English people.

English ships had indeed crossed the Atlantic many years before this warfare broke out. The example set by Columbus had been promptly followed by John Cabot and his young son Sebastian, in the two memorable voyages of 1497 and 1498, but the interest aroused by those voyages was very short-lived. In later days it suited the convenience of England to cite them in support of her claim to priority in the discovery of the continent of North America; but many years elapsed before the existence of any such continent was distinctly known and before England cared to put forth any such claim. All that contemporaries could see was that the Cabots had sailed westward in search of the boundless treasures of Cathay, and had come home empty-handed without finding any of the cities described by Marco Polo or meeting any civilized men. So little work was found for Sebastian Cabot that he passed into the service of Spain, and turned his attention to voyages in the South Atlantic. Such scanty record was kept of the voyages of 1497 and 1498 that we cannot surely tell what land the Cabots first saw; whether it was the bleak coast of northern Labrador or some point as far south as Cape Breton is still a matter of dispute. The case was almost the same as with the voyage of Pinzon and Vespucius, whose ships were off Cape Honduras within a day or two after Cabot's northern landfall, and who, after a sojourn at Tampico, passed between Cuba and Florida at the end of April, 1498. In the one case, as in the other, the expeditions sank into obscurity because they found no gold.

The triumphant return of Gama from Hindustan, in the summer of 1499, turned all men's eyes to southern routes, and little heed was paid to the wild inhospitable shores visited by John Cabot and his son. The sole exception to the general neglect was the case of the fisheries on the banks of Newfoundland. From the beginning of the sixteenth century European vessels came almost yearly to catch fish there, but at first Englishmen took little or no part in this, for they had long been wont to get their fish in the waters about Iceland, and it took them some years to make the change. On the bright August day of 1527 when Master John Rut sailed into the bay of St. John, in Newfoundland, he found two Portuguese, one Breton, and eleven Norman ships fishing there. Basques also came frequently to the spot. Down to that time it is not likely that the thought of the western shores of the Atlantic entered the heads of Englishmen more frequently than the thought of the Antarctic continent, discovered sixty years ago, enters the heads of men in Boston to-day.

The lack of general interest in maritime discovery is shown by the fact that down to 1576, so far as we can make out, only twelve books upon the subject had been published in England, and these were in great part translations of works published in other countries. The earliest indisputable occurrence of the name America in any printed English document is in a play called "A new interlude and a mery of the nature of the iiii elements," which was probably published in 1519.[5] About the same time there appeared from an Antwerp press a small book entitled "Of the newe landes and of y^e people found by the messengers of the Kynge of Portugal;" in it occurs the name Armenica, which is probably a misprint for America, since the account of it is evidently taken from the account which Vespucius gives of the natives of Brazil, and in its earliest use the name America was practically equivalent to Brazil. With the exception of a dim allusion to Columbus in Sebastian Brandt's "Ship of Fools," these are the only references to the New World that have been found in English literature previous to 1553.

The youthful Edward VI., who died that year, had succeeded in recalling Sebastian Cabot from Spain, and under the leadership of that navigator was formed the joint-stock company quaintly entitled, "The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places unknown." It was the first of that series of sagacious and daring combinations of capital of which the East India Company has been the most famous. It was afterwards more briefly known as the Muscovy Company. Under its auspices, on the 21st of May, 1553, an English fleet of exploration, under Sir Hugh Willoughby, set sail down the Thames while the cheers of thronging citizens were borne through the windows of the palace at Greenwich to the ears of the sick young king. The ill-fated expedition, seeking a northeasterly passage to Cathay, was wrecked on the coast of Lapland, and only one of the ships got home, but the interest in maritime adventure grew rapidly. A few days before Edward's death, Richard Eden published his "Treatyse of the Newe India," which was largely devoted to the discoveries in America. Two years later, in 1555, Eden followed this by his "Decades of the Newe World," in great part a version of Peter Martyr's Latin. This delightful book for the first time made the English people acquainted with the results of maritime discovery in all quarters since the great voyage of 1492. It enjoyed a wide popularity; poets and dramatists of the next generation read it in their boyhood and found their horizon wondrously enlarged. In its pages doubtless Shakespeare found the name of that Patagonian deity Setebos, which Caliban twice lets fall from his grotesque lips. Three years after Eden's second book saw the light the long reign of Queen Elizabeth began, and with it the antagonism, destined year by year to wax more violent and deadly, between England and Spain.

Meanwhile English mariners had already taken a hand in the African slave-trade, which since 1442 had been monopolized by the Portuguese. It is always difficult to say with entire confidence just who first began anything, but William Hawkins, an enterprising merchant of Plymouth, made a voyage on the Guinea coast as early as 1530, or earlier, and carried away a few slaves. It was his son, the famous Captain John Hawkins, who became the real founder of the English trade in slaves. In this capacity Americans have little reason to remember his name with pleasure, yet it would be a grave mistake to visit him with unmeasured condemnation. Few sturdier defenders of political freedom for white men have ever existed, and among the valiant sea kings who laid the foundations of England's maritime empire he was one of the foremost. It is worthy of notice that Queen Elizabeth regarded the opening of the slave-trade as an achievement worthy of honourable commemoration, for when she made Hawkins a knight she gave him for a crest the device of a negro's head and bust with the arms tightly pinioned, or, in the language of heraldry, "a demi-Moor proper bound with a cord." Public opinion on the subject of slavery was neatly expressed by Captain Lok, who declared that the negroes were "a people of beastly living, without God, law, religion, or commonwealth,"[6] so that he deemed himself their benefactor in carrying them off to a Christian land where their bodies might be decently clothed and their souls made fit for heaven. Exactly three centuries after Captain Lok, in the decade preceding our Civil War, I used to hear the very same defence of slavery preached in a Connecticut pulpit; so that perhaps we are not entitled to frown too severely upon Elizabeth's mariners. It takes men a weary while to learn the wickedness of anything that puts gold in their purses.

It was in 1562 that John Hawkins made his first famous expedition to the coast of Guinea, where he took three hundred slaves and carried them over to San Domingo. It was illicit traffic, of course, but the Spanish planters and miners were too much in need of cheap labour to scrutinize too jealously the source from which it was offered. The Englishman found no difficulty in selling his negroes, and sailed for home with his three ships loaded with sugar and ginger, hides and pearls. The profits were large, and in 1564 the experiment was repeated with still greater success. On the way home, early in August, 1565, Hawkins stopped at the mouth of the St. John's River in Florida, and found there a woebegone company of starving Frenchmen. They were the party of RenÉ de LaudonniÈre, awaiting the return of their chief commander, Jean Ribaut, from France. Their presence on that shore was the first feeble expression of the master thought that in due course of time originated the United States of America, and the author of that master thought was the great Admiral Coligny. The Huguenot wars had lately broken out in France, but already that far-sighted statesman had seen the commercial and military advantages to be gained by founding a Protestant state in America. After an unsuccessful attempt upon the coast of Brazil, he had sent Jean Ribaut to Florida, and the little colony was now suffering the frightful hardships that were the lot of most new-comers into the American wilderness. Hawkins treated these poor Frenchmen with great kindness, and his visit with them was pleasant. He has left an interesting account of the communal house of the Indians in the neighbourhood, an immense barn-like frame house, with stanchions and rafters of untrimmed logs, and a roof thatched with palmetto leaves. Hawkins liked the flavour of Indian meal, and in his descriptions of the ways of cooking it one easily recognizes both "hasty pudding" and hoe-cake. He thought it would have been more prudent in the Frenchmen if they had raised corn for themselves instead of stealing it from the Indians and arousing a dangerous hostility. For liquid refreshment they had been thrown upon their own resources, and had contrived to make a thousand gallons or more of claret from the native grapes of the country. A letter of John Winthrop reminds us that the Puritan settlers of Boston in their first summer also made wine of wild grapes,[7] and according to Adam of Bremen the same thing was done by the Northmen in Vinland in the eleventh century,[8] showing that in one age and clime as well as in another thirst is the mother of invention.

As the Frenchmen were on the verge of despair, Hawkins left them one of his ships in which to return to France, but he had scarcely departed when the long expected Ribaut arrived with reinforcements, and soon after him came that terrible Spaniard, Menendez, who butchered the whole company, men, women, and children, about 700 Huguenots in all. Some half dozen escaped and were lucky enough to get picked up by a friendly ship and carried to England. Among them was the painter Le Moine, who became a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and aroused much interest with his drawings of American beasts, birds, trees, and flowers. The story of the massacre awakened fierce indignation. Hostility to Spain was rapidly increasing in England, and the idea of Coligny began to be entertained by a few sagacious heads. If France could not plant a Protestant state in America, perhaps England could. A little later we find Le Moine consulted by the gifted half-brothers, Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh.

Meanwhile, in 1567, the gallant Hawkins went on an eventful voyage, with five stout ships, one of which was commanded by a very capable and well educated young man, afterwards and until Nelson's time celebrated as the greatest of English seamen. Francis Drake was a native of Devonshire, son of a poor clergyman who had been molested for holding Protestant opinions. The young sea king had already gathered experience in the West Indies and on the Spanish Main; this notable voyage taught him the same kind of feeling toward Spaniards that Hannibal cherished toward Romans. After the usual traffic among the islands the little squadron was driven by stress of weather to seek shelter in the port of San Juan de Ulua, at the present site of Vera Cruz. There was no force there fit to resist Hawkins, and it is droll to find that pious hero, such a man of psalms and prayers, pluming himself upon his virtue in not seizing some Spanish ships in the harbour laden with what we should call five million dollars' worth of silver. The next day a fleet of thirteen ships from Spain arrived upon the scene. Hawkins could perhaps have kept them from entering the harbour, but he shrank from the responsibility of bringing on a battle in time of peace; the queen might disapprove of it. So Hawkins parleyed with the Spaniards, a solemn covenant of mutual forbearance was made and sworn to, and he let them into the harbour. But the orthodox Catholic of those days sometimes entertained peculiar views about keeping faith with heretics. Had not his Holiness Alexander VI. given all this New World to Spain? Poachers must be warned off; the Huguenots had learned a lesson in Florida, and it was now the Englishmen's turn. So Hawkins was treacherously attacked, and after a desperate combat, in which fireships were used, three of his vessels were destroyed. The other two got out to sea, but with so scanty a larder that the crews were soon glad to eat cats and dogs, rats and mice, and boiled parrots. It became necessary to set 114 men ashore somewhere to the north of Tampico. Some of these men took northeasterly trails, and mostly perished in the woods, but David Ingram and two companions actually made their way across the continent and after eleven months were picked up on the coast of Nova Scotia by a friendly French vessel and taken back to Europe. About seventy, led by Anthony Goddard, less prudently marched toward the city of Mexico, and fell into the clutches of the Inquisition; three were burned at the stake and all the rest were cruelly flogged and sent to the galleys for life. When the news of this affair reached England a squadron of Spanish treasure-ships, chased into the Channel by Huguenot cruisers, had just sought refuge in English harbours, and the queen detained them in reprisal for the injury done to Hawkins.

News had lately arrived of the bloody vengeance wreaked by Dominique de Gourgues upon the Spaniards in Florida, while the cruelties of Alva were fast goading the Netherlands into rebellion. Next year, 1570, on a fresh May morning, the Papal Bull "declaring Elizabeth deposed and her subjects absolved from their allegiance was found nailed against the Bishop of London's door,"[9] and when the rash young gentleman who had put it there was discovered he was taken back to that doorstep and quartered alive. Two years later came the Paris Matins on the day of St. Bartholomew, and the English ambassador openly gave shelter to Huguenots in his house. Elizabeth's policy leaned more and more decidedly toward defiance of the Catholic powers until it culminated in alliance with the revolted Netherlands in January, 1578. Meanwhile the interest in America quickly increased. Those were the years when Martin Frobisher made his glorious voyages in the Arctic Ocean, soon to be followed by John Davis. Almost yearly Drake crossed the Atlantic and more than once attacked and ravaged the Spanish settlements in revenge for the treachery at San Juan de Ulua. Books and pamphlets about America began to come somewhat frequently from the press.

It is worth our while here to pause for a moment and remark upon the size and strength of the nation that was so soon to contend successfully for the mastery of the sea. There is something so dazzling in the brilliancy of the age of Queen Bess, it is so crowded with romantic incidents, it fills so large a place in our minds, that we hardly realize how small England then was according to modern standards of measurement. Two centuries earlier, in the reign of Edward III., the population of England had reached about 5,000,000, when the Black Death at one fell swoop destroyed at least half the number. In Elizabeth's time the loss had just about been repaired. Her England was therefore slightly less populous, and it was surely far less wealthy, than either New York or Pennsylvania in 1890. The Dutch Netherlands had perhaps somewhat fewer people than England, but surpassed her in wealth. These two allies were pitted against the greatest military power that had existed in Europe since the days of Constantine the Great. To many the struggle seemed hopeless. For England the true policy was limited by circumstances. She could send troops across the Channel to help the Dutch in their stubborn resistance, but to try to land a force in the Spanish peninsula for aggressive warfare would be sheer madness. The shores of America and the open sea were the proper field of war for England. Her task was to paralyze the giant by cutting off his supplies, and in this there was hope of success, for no defensive fleet, however large, could watch all Philip's enormous possessions at once. The English navy, first permanently organized under Henry VIII., grew rapidly in Elizabeth's reign under the direction of her incomparable seamen; and the policy she adopted was crowned with such success that Philip II. lived to see his treasury bankrupt.

This policy was gradually adopted soon after the fight at San Juan de Ulua, and long before there was any declaration of war. The extreme laxness of that age, in respect of international law, made it possible for such things to go on to an extent that now seems scarcely comprehensible. The wholesale massacre of Frenchmen in Florida, for example, occurred at a time of profound peace between France and Spain, and reprisal was made, not by the French government but by a private gentleman who had to sell his ancestral estate to raise the money. It quite suited Elizabeth's tortuous policy, in contending against formidable odds, to be able either to assume or to disclaim responsibility for the deeds of her captains. Those brave men well understood the situation, and with earnest patriotism and chivalrous loyalty not only accepted it, but even urged the queen to be allowed to serve her interests at their own risk. In a letter handed to her in November, 1577, the writer begs to be allowed to destroy all Spanish ships caught fishing on the banks of Newfoundland, and adds, "If you will let us first do this we will next take the West Indies from Spain. You will have the gold and silver mines and the profit of the soil. You will be monarch of the seas and out of danger from every one. I will do it if you will allow me; only you must resolve and not delay or dally—the wings of man's life are plumed with the feathers of death."[10] The signature to this bold letter has been obliterated, but it sounds like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and is believed to be his.

In connection with this it should be remembered that neither in England nor elsewhere at that time had the navy become fully a national affair as at present. It was to a considerable extent supported by private speculation, and as occasion required a commercial voyage or a voyage of discovery might be suddenly transformed into a naval campaign. A flavour of buccaneering pervades nearly all the maritime operations of that age and often leads modern writers to misunderstand or misjudge them. Thus it sometimes happens that so excellent a man as Sir Francis Drake, whose fame is forever a priceless possession for English-speaking people, is mentioned in popular books as a mere corsair, a kind of gentleman pirate. Nothing could show a more hopeless confusion of ideas. In a later generation the warfare characteristic of the Elizabethan age degenerated into piracy, and when Spain, fallen from her greatness, became a prey to the spoiler, a swarm of buccaneers infested the West Indies and added another hideous chapter to the lurid history of those beautiful islands. They were mere robbers, and had nothing in common with the Elizabethan heroes except courage. From the deeds of Drake and Hawkins to the deeds of Henry Morgan, the moral distance is as great as from slaying your antagonist in battle to murdering your neighbour for his purse.

It was Drake who first put into practice the policy of weakening Philip II. by attacking him in America. It served the direct purpose of destroying the sinews of war, and indirectly it neutralized for Europe some of Spain's naval strength by diverting it into American waters for self-defence. To do such work most effectively it seemed desirable to carry the warfare into the Pacific Ocean. The circumstances of its discovery had made Spanish America almost more of a Pacific than an Atlantic power. The discoverers happened to approach the great double continent where it is narrowest, and the hunt for precious metals soon drew them to the Cordilleras and their western slopes. The mountain region, with its untold treasures of gold and silver, from New Mexico to Bolivia, became theirs. In acquiring it they simply stepped into the place of the aboriginal conquering tribes, and carried on their work of conquest to completion. The new rulers conducted the government by their own Spanish methods, and the white race was superposed upon a more or less dense native population. There was no sort of likeness to colonies planted by England, but there were some points of resemblance to the position of the English in recent times as a ruling race in Hindustan. Such was the kind of empire which Spain had founded in America. Its position, chiefly upon the Pacific coast, rendered it secure against English conquest, though not against occasional damaging attacks. In South America, where it reached back in one or two remote points to the Atlantic coast, the chief purpose was to protect the approach to the silver mines of Bolivia by the open route of the river La Plata. It was this military need that was met by the growth of Buenos Ayres and the settlements in Paraguay, guarding the entrance and the lower reaches of the great silver river.

Soon after the affair of San Juan de Ulua, Drake conceived the idea of striking at this Spanish domain upon its unguarded Pacific side. In 1573, after marching across the isthmus of Darien, the English mariner stood upon a mountain peak, not far from where Balboa sixty years before had stood and looked down upon the waste of waters stretching away to shores unvisited and under stars unknown. And as he looked, says Camden, "vehemently transported with desire to navigate that sea, he fell upon his knees and implored the divine assistance that he might at some time sail thither and make a perfect discovery of the same." On the 15th of November, 1577, Drake set sail from Plymouth, on this hardy enterprise, with five good ships. It was a curious coincidence that in the following July and August, while wintering on the Patagonia coast at Port St. Julian, Drake should have discovered symptoms of conspiracy and felt obliged to behead one of his officers, as had been the case with Magellan at the same place. By the time he had passed the straits in his flagship, the Golden Hind,[11] he had quite lost sight of his consorts, who had deserted him in that watery labyrinth, as Gomez had stolen away from Magellan. For men of common mould a voyage in the remote South Sea still had its terrors; but the dauntless captain kept on with his single ship of twenty guns, and from Valparaiso northward along the Peruvian coast dashed into seaports and captured vessels, carrying away enormous treasures in gold and silver and jewels, besides such provisions as were needed for his crew. With other property he meddled but little, and no acts of wanton cruelty sullied his performances. After taking plunder worth millions of dollars, this corsair-work gave place to scientific discovery, and the Golden Hind sailed far northward in search of a northeast passage into the Atlantic. Drake visited a noble bay, which may have been that of San Francisco, and sailed some distance along that coast, which he called New Albion. It is probable, though not quite certain, that he saw some portion of the coast of Oregon. Not finding any signs of a northeast passage, he turned his prow westward, crossed the Pacific, and returned home by way of the Cape of Good Hope, arriving at Plymouth in September, 1580. Some time afterward he went up the Thames to Deptford, where the queen came to dinner on board the Golden Hind, and knighted on his own quarter-deck the bold captain who had first carried the English flag around the world. The enthusiastic chronicler Holinshed wished that in memory of this grand achievement the ship should be set upon the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, "that being discerned farre and neere, it might be noted and pointed at of people with these true termes: Yonder is the barke that hath sailed round about the world."[12] A different career awaited the sturdy Golden Hind; for many a year she was kept at Deptford, a worthy object of popular admiration, and her cabin was made into a banquet room wherein young and old might partake of the mutton and ale of merry England; until at last, when the venerable ship herself had succumbed to the tooth of Time, a capacious chair was carved from her timbers and presented to the University of Oxford, where it may still be seen in the Bodleian Library. In it sat Abraham Cowley when he wrote the poem in which occur the following verses:—

Meanwhile in the autumn of 1578, while the coasts of Chili were echoing the roar of the Golden Hind's cannon, a squadron of seven ships sailed from England, with intent to found a permanent colony on the Atlantic coast of North America. Its captain was one of the most eminent of Devonshire worthies, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and one of the ships was commanded by his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, a young man of six-and-twenty who had lately returned from volunteer service in the Netherlands. The destination of the voyage was "Norumbega," which may have meant any place between the Hudson and Penobscot rivers, but was conceived with supreme vagueness, as may be seen from Michael Lok's map of 1582.[13] This little fleet had at least one savage fight with Spaniards, and returned to Plymouth without accomplishing anything. In 1583 Gilbert sought a favourable place for settlement on the southern coast of Newfoundland, probably with a view to driving the Spaniards away from the fishing grounds, but an ill fate overtook him. On the American coast his principal vessel crushed its bows against a sunken rock and nearly all hands were lost. With two small ships the captain soon set sail for home, but his own tiny craft foundered in a terrible storm near Fayal. As she sank, Gilbert cheerily shouted over the tafferel to his consort, "The way to heaven is as near by sea as by land," a speech, says his chronicler, "well beseeming a soldier resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify he was."

It was not Raleigh's fault that he did not share the fate of his revered half-brother, for the queen's mind had been full of forebodings and she had refused to let him go on the voyage. It was since the former disastrous expedition that Raleigh had so quickly risen in favour at court; that he had thrown down his velvet cloak as a mat for Elizabeth's feet and had written on a window-pane the well-known verse which that royal coquette so cleverly capped. He became Captain of the Queen's Guard and Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and was presented with the confiscated estates of traitors in England and Ireland. In 1584, when his late half-brother's patent for land in America expired, it was renewed in Raleigh's name. On March 25th was sealed the document that empowered him to "hold by homage remote heathen and barbarous lands, not actually possessed by any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people, which he might discover within the next six years."[14] As had been the custom with Spanish and Portuguese grants to explorers, one fifth of the gold and silver to be obtained was to be reserved for the crown. The heathen and barbarous land which Raleigh had in view was the Atlantic coast of North America so far as he might succeed in occupying it. He knew that Spain claimed it all as her own by virtue of the bull of Pope Alexander VI., but Elizabeth had already declared in 1581 that she cared nothing for papal bulls and would recognize no Spanish claims to America save such as were based upon discovery followed by actual possession.[15] Raleigh's attention had long been turned toward Florida. In youth he had served in France under Coligny, and had opportunities for hearing that statesman's plan for founding a Protestant state in America discussed. We have seen Le Moine, the French artist who escaped from the Florida massacre, consorting with Raleigh and with Sir Philip Sidney. Upon those men fell the mantle of Coligny, and the people of the United States may well be proud to point to such noble figures standing upon the threshold of our history.

One provision in the Gilbert patent, now renewed for Raleigh, is worth especial mention. It was agreed that the English colonies which should be planted in America "should have all the privileges of free denizens and persons native of England, in such ample manner as if they were born and personally resident in our said realm of England," and that any law to the contrary should be of no effect; furthermore, that the people of those colonies should be governed by such statutes as they might choose to establish for themselves, provided that such statutes "conform as near as conveniently may be with those of England, and do not oppugn the Christian faith, or anyway withdraw the people of those lands from our allegiance." A more unequivocal acknowledgment of the rights of self-government which a British government of two centuries later saw fit to ignore, it would be hard to find. Gilbert and Raleigh demanded and Elizabeth granted in principle just what Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams demanded and George III. refused to concede.

The wealthy Raleigh could act promptly, and before five weeks had elapsed two ships, commanded by Philip Amidas and Arthur Barlow, had started on a reconnoitring voyage. On the 4th of July, 1584, they reached the country now known as North Carolina, at some point not far from Cape Lookout. Thence a northerly run of over a hundred miles brought them to the New Inlet, through which they passed into Pamlico Sound and visited Roanoke Island. They admired the noble pine-trees and red cedars, marvelled at the abundance of game, and found the native barbarians polite and friendly. Their attempt to learn the name of the country resulted as not uncommonly in such first parleys between strange tongues. The Indian of whom the question was asked had no idea what was meant and uttered at random the Ollendorfian reply, "Win-gan-da-coa," which signified, "What pretty clothes you wear!" So when Amidas and Barlow returned to England they said they had visited a country by the name of Wingandacoa; but the queen, with a touch of the euphuism then so fashionable, suggested that it should be called, in honour of herself, Virginia.

In the spring of 1585 Raleigh, who had lately been knighted, sent out a hundred or more men commanded by Ralph Lane, to make the beginnings of a settlement. They were convoyed by Raleigh's cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, with seven well-armed ships. They entered Pamlico Sound through Ocracoke Inlet, and trouble with the natives at once began. One of the Indians stole a silver cup, and Grenville unwisely retaliated by setting fire to their standing corn. Having thus sown the seeds of calamity he set the colonists ashore upon Roanoke Island and went on his way. The sagacious and energetic Lane explored the neighbouring mainland for many miles along the coast and for some distance into the interior, and even tried to find a waterway into the Pacific Ocean. He made up his mind that the country was not favourable for a new colony, and he gathered sundry bits of information which seemed to point to Chesapeake Bay as a much better place. The angry Indians made much trouble, and after a year had passed the colonists were suffering from scarcity of food, when all at once Sir Francis Drake appeared on the scene with a superb fleet of three-and-twenty ships. War between Spain and England had been declared in July, 1585, when Sidney and Drake were about ready to execute a scheme that contemplated the founding of an American colony by Sidney. But the queen interfered and sent Sidney to the Netherlands, where he was so soon to die a noble death. The terrible Drake, whom Spaniards, punning upon his name, had begun to call "Dragon," gave them fresh cause to dread and revile him. He had captured 20 ships with 250 cannon, he had taken and sacked Cartagena, St. Domingo, and St. Augustine, and on his way home looked in at Roanoke Island, in time to take Lane and his starving party on board and carry them back to England. They had not long been gone when Grenville arrived with supplies, and was astonished at finding the island deserted. Knowing nothing of Lane's change of purpose, and believing that his party must still be somewhere in the adjacent country, Grenville left a guard of fifteen men on the island, with ample supplies, and sailed away.

The stirring days of the Armada were approaching. When Lane arrived in England, his services were needed there, and after a while we find him a member of the Council of War. One of this first American colonizing party was the wonderful Suffolk boy, Thomas Cavendish, aged two-and-twenty, who had no sooner landed in England than he set sail in command of three ships, made his way into the Pacific Ocean, and repeated the exploits of Drake from Chili to California, captured one of Spain's finest galleons, and then in two years more completed the circumnavigation of the globe. While the pupil was thus nobly acquitting himself, the master in the spring of 1587 outdid all former achievements. Sailing into the harbour of Cadiz, Drake defeated the warships on guard there, calmly loaded his own vessels with as much Spanish spoil as could safely be carried, then set fire to the storeships and cut their cables. More than a hundred transports, some of them 1,500 tons in burthen, all laden with stores for the Armada, became a tangled and drifting mass of blazing ruin, while amid the thunder of exploding magazines the victor went forth on his way unscathed and rejoicing. Day after day he crouched under the beetling crags of Cintra, catching and sinking every craft that passed that lair, then swept like a tempest into the bay of CoruÑa and wrought similar havoc to that of Cadiz, then stood off for the Azores and captured the great carrack on its way from the Indies with treasure reckoned by millions. Europe stood dumb with amazement. What manner of man was it that could thus "singe the King of Spain's beard"? "Philip one day invited a lady of the court to join him in his barge on the Lake of Segovia. The lady said she dared not trust herself on the water, even with his Majesty," for fear of Sir Francis Drake.[16] Philip's Armada had to wait for another year, while by night and day the music of adze and hammer was heard in English shipyards.

Just as "the Dragon" returned to England another party of Raleigh's colonists was approaching the American coast. There were about 150, including 17 women. John White, a man deft with water-colours, who had been the artist of Lane's expedition, was their governor. Their settlement was to be made on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, but first they must stop at Roanoke Island and pick up the fifteen men left on watch by Grenville. Through some carelessness or misunderstanding or bad faith on the part of the convoy, the people once landed were left in the lurch with only one small vessel, and thus were obliged to stay on that fatal Roanoke Island. They soon found that Grenville's little guard had been massacred by red men. It was under these gloomy circumstances that the first child of English parents was born on the soil of the United States. The governor's daughter Eleanor was wife of Ananias Dare, and their little girl, born August 18, 1587, was named Virginia. Before she was ten days old her grandfather found it necessary to take the ship and return to England for help.

But the day of judgment for Spain and England was at hand, and lesser things must wait. Amid the turmoil of military preparation, Sir Walter was not unmindful of his little colony. Twice he fitted out relief expeditions, but the first was stopped because all the ships were seized for government service, and the second was driven back into port by Spanish cruisers. While the anxious governor waited through the lengthening days into the summer of 1588, there came, with its imperious haste, its deadly agony and fury, its world-astounding triumph, the event most tremendous, perhaps, that mankind have witnessed since the star of the Wise Men stood over the stable at Bethlehem. Then you might have seen the sea kings working in good fellowship together,—Drake and Hawkins, Winter and Frobisher, with Howard of Effingham in the Channel fleet; Raleigh and Grenville active alike in council and afield; the two great ministers, Burghley and Walsingham, ever crafty and vigilant; and in the background on her white palfrey the eccentric figure of the strangely wayward and wilful but always brave and patriotic Queen. Even after three centuries it is with bated breath that we watch those 130 black hulks coming up the Channel, with 3,000 cannon and 30,000 men on board, among them ninety executioners withal, equipped with racks and thumbscrews, to inaugurate on English soil the accursed work of the Inquisition. In camp at Dunkirk the greatest general of the age, Alexander Farnese, with 35,000 veterans is crouching for a spring, like a still greater general at Boulogne in later days; and one wonders if the 80,000 raw militia slowly mustering in the busy little towns and green hamlets of England can withstand these well-trained warriors.

In the English fleet there were about as many ships as the enemy had, much smaller in size and inferior in weight of metal, but at the same time far more nimble in movement. Of cannon and men the English had scarcely half as many as the Spaniards, but this disparity was more than offset by one great advantage. Our forefathers had already begun to display the inventive ingenuity for which their descendants in both hemispheres have since become preËminent. Many of their ships were armed with new guns, of longer range than any hitherto known, and this advantage, combined with their greater nimbleness, made it possible in many cases to pound a Spanish ship to pieces without receiving any serious hurt in return. In such respects, as well as in the seamanship by which the two fleets were handled, it was modern intelligence pitted against mediÆval chivalry. Such captains as served Elizabeth were not reared under the blighting shadow of the Escurial. With the discomfiture of the Invincible Armada before Dunkirk, the army of Farnese at once became useless for invading England. Then came the awful discovery that the mighty fleet was penned up in the German Ocean, for Drake held the Strait of Dover in his iron grip. The horrors of the long retreat through northern seas have never been equalled save when Napoleon's hosts were shattered in Russia. In the disparity of losses, as in the immensity of the issues at stake, we are reminded of the Greeks and Persians at Salamis; of Spaniards more than 20,000 perished, but scarcely 100 Englishmen. The frightful loss of ships and guns announced the overthrow of Spanish supremacy, but the bitter end was yet to come. During the next three years the activity of the sea kings reached such a pitch that more than 800 Spanish ships were destroyed.[17] The final blow came soon after the deaths of Drake and Hawkins in 1596, when Raleigh, with the Earl of Essex and Lord Thomas Howard, destroyed the Spanish fleet in that great battle before Cadiz whereof Raleigh wrote that "if any man had a desire to see Hell itself, it was there most lively figured."[18]

It was not until March, 1591, that Governor White succeeded in getting to sea again for the rescue of his family and friends. He had to go as passenger in a West Indiaman. When he landed, upon the return voyage, at Roanoke Island, it was just in time to have celebrated his little grandchild's fourth birthday. It had been agreed that should the colonists leave that spot they should carve upon a tree the name of the place to which they were going, and if they should add to the name a cross it would be understood as a signal of distress. When White arrived he found grass growing in the deserted blockhouse. Under the cedars hard by five chests had been buried, and somebody had afterwards dug them up and rifled them. Fragments of his own books and pictures lay scattered about. On a great tree was cut in big letters, but without any cross, the word Croatan, which was the name of a neighbouring island. The captain of the ship was at first willing to take White to Croatan, but a fierce storm overtook him and after beating about for some days he insisted upon making for England in spite of the poor man's entreaties. No more did White ever hear of his loved ones. Sixteen years afterward the settlers at Jamestown were told by Indians that the white people abandoned at Roanoke had mingled with the natives and lived with them for some years on amicable terms until at the instigation of certain medicine-men (who probably accused them of witchcraft) they had all been murdered, except four men, two boys, and a young woman, who were spared by request or order of a chief. Whether this young woman was Virginia Dare, the first American girl, we have no means of knowing.[19]

Nothing could better illustrate than the pathetic fate of this little colony how necessary it was to destroy the naval power of Spain before England could occupy the soil of North America. The defeat of the Invincible Armada was the opening event in the history of the United States. It was the event that made all the rest possible. Without it the attempts at Jamestown and Plymouth could hardly have had more success than the attempt at Roanoke Island. An infant colony is like an army at the end of a long line of communications; it perishes if the line is cut. Before England could plant thriving states in America she must control the ocean routes. The far-sighted Raleigh understood the conditions of the problem. When he smote the Spaniards at Cadiz he knew it was a blow struck for America. He felt the full significance of the defeat of the Armada, and in spite of all his disappointments with Virginia, he never lost heart. In 1602 he wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, "I shall yet live to see it an English nation."

In the following chapters we shall see how Raleigh's brave words came true.