678 GEOGRAPHY 



of Devon at the southwest corner of the land bears the same relation 

 to the rest of England as in the earlier work the Iberian Peninsula 

 bore to the rest of Europe, giving the Devon men for the time a 

 positive advantage in the voyages undertaken to the famous cry of 

 Westward, Ho! The period of their activity is ever recalled by the 

 happy rhyme, which couples the dashing Drake with the famous 

 Virgin Queen 



"Oh! Nature, to old England still 

 Continue these mistakes; 

 Still give us for our Kings such Queens, 

 And for our Dux such Drakes." 



It was an English merchant, resident in Spain, who first sug- 

 gested that, if feasible, a polar passage to Cathay would prove the 

 shortest route, shorter than either the Portuguese path round Africa 

 or the Spanish one across the Pacific, and that England was most 

 favorably placed for undertaking the attempt to find one. 



Attempts w r ere accordingly made to discover a northeast passage, 

 but soon a rival w r as found in the Dutch, who were equally well 

 placed for such an undertaking. That the passage should eventually 

 be completed long afterwards by Sweden is appropriate, when the 

 position of that country is remembered. 



It is, however, rather with the long search for a northwest passage 

 that our countrymen are associated. From the time of Sir Martin 

 Frobisher, the Columbus of the scheme, Davis of the Straits, and 

 Baffin of the Bay, their names have been written largely on the 

 map of North America, until the last link w r as forged with the life 

 of Sir John Franklin. 



When once England had ceased to lie on the outskirts of the 

 known world, and had by the course of events become the centre 

 of the land-masses of the globe, the path was clear to supremacy 

 in maritime affairs. That the brilliant achievements of the sixteenth 

 century were not continued in the seventeenth w y as due to internal 

 political conditions. A century that saw the unhappy introduction 

 of the Stuart dynasty, and its collapse after all the horrors of civil 

 war, was not favorable to external development. A period of in- 

 ternal commotion is not adapted to external activity. Consequently, 

 it is rather with the Dutch that the honors of exploration in the 

 seventeenth century must rest. Boldly disputing the monopoly of 

 the Cape route to the East Indies, they obtained a footing among 

 those islands, and from that vantage-point prosecuted the unveiling 

 of the great adjacent continent of Australia. 



Unfortunately the region of New Holland, as they called it. 

 which was first discovered, was mainly the arid western parts, and 

 even when the continent was circumnavigated by Tasman, the 

 fertile eastern coast was entirely missed. Hence, for the Dutch, 



