FIRST ATTEMPTS AT DISCOVERY. 145 
eastern settlements, the energies of her com- 
mercial genius were more and more roused, and 
a passage to India became the object of eager 
and unremitting search. Still, either respect for 
the claims of Portugal, or dread of her naval pre- 
dominance, deterred any other nation from follow- 
ing in the same track. It was not, therefore, by 
any known course through tropical seas, but by 
the Northern ocean, and across the storms of the 
icy pole, that our navigators sought to reach the 
golden treasures of India. These efforts were 
made for a long series of years, and with extra- 
ordinary perseverance. But when fleet after fleet 
had returned disappointed and shattered, and 
when the pale and exhausted navigators had only 
to tell of desolate shores, eternal snows, and moun- 
tains of moving ice, the courage of the nation was 
exhausted, perhaps even before the experiment 
had been fully tried. They turned their views to 
another quarter, and began to inquire v/hy the 
oceans of the south should be traversed by one 
nation only, and why the safe and easy route 
around Africa should be so inexorably shut against 
British navigators. Eden, in his preface to the 
narrative of the first English voyage to Guinea, 
animadverts strongly on the unreasonableness of 
those ^ (who, though not named, are evidently the 
Portuguese), who, because they have landed at 
some remote points, and erected a few forts, 
VOL. I, K 
