228 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



a share in them, partly by their ordinary human 

 desires of gain and partly by the dynamic force 

 exerted upon them by their ungenial climates, now 

 appeared on the scene, and very soon made it manifest 

 that if they were late in the field they did not intend 

 to allow that fact to cramp their operations. The 

 Dutch, as if a compact had been made by them with 

 the English to divide the watery world between them, 

 started on the track of the Portuguese, and in their 

 thorough methodical but slow way pressed on around 

 the Cape and into the far Eastern seas. Theirs, how- 

 ever, was a far more peaceful cutting into the dis- 

 coveries of their predecessors than that developed by 

 the English. For one thing, there was an enormously 

 varied and extended area open to their operations, 

 and, either by accident or design, or a combination 

 of both, they hardly encroached upon the Portuguese 

 discoveries in Hindostan and Africa at all ; but, going 

 farther east, opened up the amazingly rich islands of 

 the East Indian archipelago. With quiet persistence 

 they established themselves among those mysterious 

 isles, and set about enriching the mother-land from 

 thence, not in the splendid unstable fashion of the 

 Spaniards, who traded in gold, silver, pearls, and 

 precious stones, and scorned the humbler commodities 

 of life, but in spices, valuable woods, fabrics, and 

 fibres a far more sure if a much slower means of 

 adding to the national wealth. 



The English, on the other hand, retaining as they 

 did many of the piratical instincts of their Viking 

 ancestors, and fired by the reports of incalculable 

 wealth being acquired by the Spaniards, did not 

 attempt to make any discoveries of their own, but 



