ity of Cadiz and returned home with ships full of plunder.
It was the last great operation of the war, and the beginning of the end
of the Spanish Empire; for the way was now clear for the maritime and
colonial expansion of her rivals. The Dutch, with independence assured,
organized those India companies through which they ousted the Portuguese
from the spice islands, and established, at the mouth of the river
discovered by Henry Hudson in 1608, the colony of New Netherland in
America. With the civil wars of religion happily closed, France was free
to complete the work of Cartier. In 1603 Champlain, in the service of a
St. Malo merchant, sailed up the St. Lawrence to Montreal; and five
years later he established a post on the Heights of Quebec, destined to
be the capital of the great inland empire of New France. And England,
whose ships now sailed the sea unchallenged, began to build a more
lasting empire in America and the Orient. It was in 1607 that Virginia
was planted; and three years later Captain Hippon, in the service of the
East India Company, established an English factory at Masulipatam in the
Bay of Bengal.

III

A notable result of the struggle with Spain was the growth of an active
interest in colonization. Knowledge of the wide world, which Richard
Eden had freshly revealed to Englishmen in the reign of Mary, was
greatly enriched by the voyages of the Elizabethan seamen. John Davis,
returning from the Far East, made known "as well the King of Portugal
his places of Trade and Strength, as of the interchangeable trades of
the eastern Nations among themselves"; and Cavendish, who was the third
to "circompasse the whole globe of the world," brought to the queen
"certain intelligence of all the rich places that ever were known or
discovered by any Christian." By the side of Drake and his followers,
whose ambition it was to destroy the power of Spain in the New World,
stand the brilliant Gentlemen Adventurers, who labored to plant there
the power of England: Frobisher and Davis, the gentle and heroic
Gilbert, and Raleigh, poet and statesman, the very perfect knight-errant
of his age, whose faith in America survived many failures and is
registered in words as prophetic as they are pathetic--"I shall yet live
to see it an English nation." The adventurous and pioneering spirit of
the time is forever preserved in that true epic of the Elizabethan age,
the incomparable _Voyages_ of Richard Hakluyt; and in the _Dis