THE VOYAGERS 



Where the dishevelled ghastly sea-nymph sings, Jk 



Our well-rigged ships shall stretch their swelling wings, *^ 



And drag their anchors through the sandy foam, 

 About the world in every clime to roam ; 

 And those unchristened countries call our own 

 Where scarce the name of England hath been known.' 



The North East and North West voyages failed in 

 their primary purpose ; and the men of peace gave 

 place, in the end, to the men of war. But before the 

 Queen and her Ministers recognised the necessity of an 

 armed conflict with Spain, all pacific devices for the 

 readjustment of the balance had been examined and 

 patiently put to the test. One more series of these 

 remains to be chronicled. The idea of colonisation, of Colonisation. 

 appropriating some part of America as yet unsettled 

 by the Spaniards, and there establishing a prosperous 

 English community, whose imports and exports might 

 benefit the mother country, received its first effective 

 impulse from Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Already in 

 1555 Richard Eden had outlined this idea, in the 

 preface to his translation of Peter Martyr's Decades. 

 From Florida northward to Newfoundland, says Eden, Eden's 

 there are lands * not yet known but only by the sea- ^^^^^ ^^^' 

 coasts, neither inhabited by Christian men.' His sug- 

 gestion that England should take possession of these 

 was not likely to bear fruit while Mary reigned and 

 Philip governed. In his notable Discourse of 1576 

 Gilbert pointed not obscurely in the same direction. 

 There are ' divers very rich countries,' he says, ' both 

 civil and others, . . . where there is to be found great 

 abundance of gold, silver, precious stones, cloth of gold, 

 silks, all manner of spices, grocery wares, and other 

 kinds of merchandise of an inestimable price, which 



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