w World, and Portugal was too busy with its discoveries in
Africa and India to claim more than the territory of Brazil. Though
Francis the First sent seamen to explore the American coast, his
ambition found other work at home; and a Huguenot colony which settled
in Florida was cut to pieces by the Spaniards. Only in the far north did
a few French settlers find rest beside the waters of the St. Lawrence.
England had reached the mainland even earlier than Spain, for before
Columbus touched its shores Sebastian Cabot, a seaman of Genoese blood
but born and bred in England, sailed with an English crew from Bristol
in 1497, and pushed along the coast of America to the south as far as
Florida, and northward as high as Hudson's Bay. But no Englishman
followed on the track of this bold adventurer; and while Spain built up
her empire in the New World, the English seamen reaped a humbler harvest
in the fisheries of Newfoundland.

[Sidenote: The Sea-dogs.]

There was little therefore in the circumstances which attended the first
discovery of the western continent that promised well for freedom. Its
one result as yet was to give an enormous impulse to the most bigoted
and tyrannical among the powers of Europe, and to pour the gold of
Mexico and Peru into the treasury of Spain. But as the reign of
Elizabeth went on the thoughts of Englishmen turned again to the New
World. A happy instinct drew them from the first not to the southern
shores that Spain was conquering, but to the ruder and more barren
districts of the north. In 1576 the dream of finding a passage to Asia
by a voyage round the northern coast of the American continent drew a
west-country seaman, Martin Frobisher, to the coast of Labrador; and,
foiled as he was in his quest, the news he brought back of the existence
of gold mines there set adventurers cruising among the icebergs of
Baffin's Bay. Elizabeth herself joined in the venture; but the
settlement proved a failure, the ore which the ships brought back turned
out to be worthless, and England was saved from that greed of gold which
was to be fatal to the energies of Spain. But, failure as it was,
Frobisher's venture had shown the readiness of Englishmen to defy the
claims of Spain to the exclusive possession of America or the American
seas. They were already defying these claims in a yet more galling way.
The seamen of the southern and south-western coasts had long been
carrying on a half-piratical war on their own