44 Singing Valleys 



lishmen felt, was a distinct slap in their faces. While they 

 had been undergoing the throes of the Reformation, Spain 

 had been stretching greedy hands into the west. True, for a 

 half century and more there had been merchants in the City 

 who had been thinking of the possibilities of trade with Span- 

 ish colonies in the Americas, and sent factors there in advance. 

 Hakluyt refers to a Thomas Tison, who several years before 

 1 526 lived in the West Indies and "seems to have been some 

 secret agent for Mr. Thorne and other English merchants." 

 Too, when Edward Fenton made his epochal voyage to China 

 in 1582, he found in Brazil "an Englishman named Richard 

 Carter, born in Limehouse, who had been out of England four 

 and twenty years; and near twelve years dwelling in the River 

 Plata at a town named Ascension, three hundred leagues up 

 the river." 



But the Pope had declared the Americas to be the sole 

 property of Spain and Portugal; and this, despite the fact that 

 an English seaman, stout John Cabot, had sailed his own ship 

 to the New World while Columbus's caravels were still churn- 

 ing up the waters, and claimed for King Harry a part of the 

 continent Spain had never touched. 



Was it not time England laid hold of Cabot's claim? Could 

 not England, as well as Spain, profit by additional wealth? 

 And would not colonies overseas answer the problems of over- 

 population, unemployment, high prices and low wages which 

 had been brought about largely by the turning of farms into 

 sheep-grazing lands, and the overdevelopment of the wool 

 trade at the expense of grain? 



So argued Captain Walter Raleigh. He gave voice to his 

 belief everywhere he went; in the Queen's presence, in the 

 councils of the Navy where stout sea-dogs like Drake and 

 Frobisher heard him with respect, and in the ale houses of 

 London, whenever he and the company he loved to keep 

 sailors, adventurers and poets came together for a pint or two. 



It was said, with a grin, there never was an Englishman so 

 mad to get himself and others out of England as was Raleigh. 



