RELATIVE VALUE OF GEOGRAPHICAL POSITION 677 



in the service of Spain, found a passage through the straits which 

 bear his name, at the southern end of the barrier continent, and, 

 after a voyage of unrivaled difficulties, revealed the vast extent of 

 the Pacific Ocean, which covers nearly half the whole surface of the 

 globe. In this notable voyage, the most notable, as a contemporary 

 chronicler quaintly remarks, since that of the patriarch Noah, the 

 East Indies, where the leader lost his life, were reached by a western 

 route, while one ship out of five completed the circumnavigation of 

 the globe with a handful of men, who on their return crawled as 

 humble penitents in sackcloth and ashes through the streets of 

 Seville, because, having unconsciously lost a day in the voyage, they 

 found that they had been keeping the fasts and festivals of their 

 Church on the wrong dates. 



With the unveiling of the Atlantic in the fifteenth century, the 

 conversion of what had been a pathless barrier into a great field for 

 maritime activity, a new era begins, the medieval Mediterranean 

 epoch closes, and the modern oceanic period succeeds. The relative 

 value of the position of the Iberian Peninsula for carrying out this 

 great work was so preeminent that for some time Portugal and 

 Spain were suffered to proceed unrivaled and unchecked. Indeed, 

 by mutual agreement, a line of demarkation was drawn from north 

 to south, about through the mouth of the Amazon, by which the 

 whole undiscovered portions of the world were divided into two 

 hemispheres, an eastern one for Portugal, a western one for Spain. 

 But the very success which had been won wrought a revolution in 

 the relative positions of the other lands in western Europe. England 

 and France were equally well placed for undertaking western voyages. 



It was the King of France who, in the sixteenth century, is said 

 to have ironically invited Portugal and Spain to produce the will 

 of our father Adam which constituted them his sole heirs. It was 

 England, however, which mainly profited by the great change. Our 

 island race of bold and skillful navigators had been only waiting for 

 the opportunity of a field adequate to the display of latent powers. 

 The time had come, and with the reign of Queen Elizabeth in the 

 second half of the sixteenth century begins the expansion of England. 



Sir John Hawkins was one of the first to dispute the exclusive 

 right of Spain to traffic with the West Indies. Sir Francis Drake, 

 the first to rival Magellan as a circumnavigator of the globe, was 

 the most brilliant leader in the long struggle for the mastery of the 

 sea which led up to the great tragedy of the Spanish Armada. Sir 

 Walter Ralegh, no less an organizer of exploration than an explorer 

 himself, by his attempts to colonize Virginia laid the foundation for 

 the Anglo-Saxon dominion of North America. 



Ralegh, Drake, and Hawkins, with most of their associates, were 

 all Devon men, and this was only to be expected, for the position 



