THE ENGLISH "SEA DOGS"
When the English realized how little profit was to be gained by voyages to the cold and desolate north, they turned southward to warmer waters. Here, of course, they came upon the Spaniards, who had no disposition to share with foreigners the profitable trade of the New World. Though England and Spain were not at war, the English "sea dogs," as they called themselves, did not scruple to ravage the Spanish colonies and to capture the huge, clumsy treasure-ships carrying gold and silver to Spain. The most famous of the "sea dogs," Sir Francis Drake, was the first Englishman to sail round the world (1577-1580 A.D.).
THE RALEIGH COLONIES, 1584-1590 A.D.
Four years after Drake had completed his voyage, another English seaman, Sir Walter Raleigh, sent out an expedition to find a good site for a settlement in North America. The explorers reached the coast of North Carolina and returned with glowing accounts of the country, which was named Virginia, in honor of Elizabeth, the "Virgin Queen." But Raleigh's colonies in Virginia failed miserably, and the English made no further attempt to settle there till the reign of James I, early in the seventeenth century.
227. THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW
EXPANSION OF EUROPE
The New World contained two virgin continents, full of natural resources and capable in a high degree of colonization. The native peoples, comparatively few in number and barbarian in culture, could not offer much resistance to the explorers, missionaries, traders, and colonists from the Old World. The Spanish and Portuguese in the sixteenth century, followed by the French, English, and Dutch in the seventeenth century, repeopled America and brought to it European civilization. Europe expanded into a Greater Europe beyond the ocean.
SHIFTING OF TRADE ROUTES
In the Middle Ages the Mediterranean and the Baltic had been the principal highways of commerce. The discovery of America, followed immediately by the opening of the Cape route to the Indies, shifted commercial activity from these enclosed seas to the Atlantic Ocean. Venice, Genoa, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bruges gradually gave way, as trading centers, to Lisbon and Cadiz, Bordeaux and Cherbourg, Antwerp and Amsterdam, London and Liverpool. One may say, therefore, that the year 1492 A.D. inaugurated the Atlantic period of European history. The time may come, perhaps even now it is dawning, when the center of gravity of the commercial world will shift still farther westward to the Pacific.