THE EXPAKSIOX OF ENGLAND 251 



colonies should bu\' slaves onh' from Spanish ships. Sir John Hawk- 

 ins would have none of this, and her colonists bought them at the can- 

 non's mouth. While they were on this business these pious i)eoi)le 

 seem to have had little idea what sort of business it was. The chap- 

 lain of one of the ships on that slave business thanks God for send- 

 ing a calm to " save his elect " from the waves in a storm. He prays 

 Him not to let his elect suffer ; and so, he says, there was a great calm. 



The boldest and most ambitious of these adventurers was Sir Francis 

 Drake, sailing out from Plymouth for the circumnavigation of the 

 world. He had sailed on daring voyages before that. I think there 

 are few scenes in that Elizabethan time more interesting than that of 

 Francis Drake climbingto thetopof a tree on the Panama mountains 

 from which he could look east to one ocean and Avest to another, with 

 lieart full of longings to sail those Pacific seas. One thrills at the 

 thought of his sailing in his few ships, scarcely larger than our little 

 coasters, pushing through Magellan Strait, along the west coast of 

 the continent, and over the Pacific to the Phili})pines and other 

 places which the history of these last two years has made so familiar 

 to our own students of geography. Occasionally, Avhen he had a 

 chance to put in a fight with a Spanish ship, he "annexed " goods ; 

 and finally, after all his incredible adventures, he got back to Ply- 

 mouth. It is a great stor3^ 



We might follow Davis and Frobisher in their efforts to push up to 

 Greenland and through to India b3'the northwest i)assage, for that is 

 one of the most interesting moments in this early history of English 

 expansion. Put little came of it. There is a certain poetic fitness in 

 Drake and HaAvkins sailing together and both finding their deaths in 

 the West Indies — one at Porto Bello and the other at Porto Rico — 

 where the English rivalry with Spain had been so long and violent. 



What was the result of all tliese adventurous sailings of the sea? 

 At the end of the reign of Elizabeth not one inch of settled territory 

 in the New World remained in the possession of England. But this 

 was accomplished by it : These wonderful dare-devil adventures of 

 Hawkins and Drake and the rest were great training experiences 

 whereby Drake, Hawkins, and the rest were fitted to face Spain, and 

 to face Spain successfull3',by and by, when the Armada came, and to 

 crush that power forever as the great foe of libert}' in the north of 

 Europe. That the English came out of that conflict as conquerors 

 was due to the fact that b\'' all these adventures, many of them so 

 questional^le, they had Iteen trained, and that their navy had been 



