English discoverers.
It is significant how large a part in the cardinal discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was taken by Italian navigators, seamen, shipwrights, mathematicians, and merchants, whether in Portugal or Spain, France or England. It is curious, too, to observe how, when the theoretical work and confirmatory explorations were finished, and the commercial spirit succeeded to that of science, England embarked with her adventurous spirit. The death of Queen Mary in 1558 was the signal for English exertion, and that exertion became ominous to all Europe in the reign of Elizabeth, accompanied by an intellectual movement, typified in Bacon and Shakespeare, similar to that which stirred the age of Columbus and the Italian renaissance.
John Hawkins.
John Hawkins and African marauders of his English kind were selling negro slaves in Española in 1562 and subsequent years, and from them we get our first English accounts of the Florida coast, which on their return voyages they skirted.
New France.
Spanish settlements fail at the north.
America had at this time been abandoned for a long while to Spain and France, and the latter power had only entered into competition with Charles V., when Francis I., as we have seen, had sent out Verrazano in 1521 to take possession of the north Atlantic coasts. Out of this grew upon the maps the designation of New France, which was attached to the main portion of the North American continent. And this French claim is recognized in the maps, painted about 1562, on the walls of the geographical gallery in the Vatican. So the French stole upon the possession of Spain in the West Indies; and the English followed in their wake, when the death of Mary rendered it easier for the English to smother their inherited antipathy to France. This done, the English in due time joined the French in efforts to gain an ascendency over Spain in the Indies, to compensate for the loss of such power in Italy. The Spaniards, though they had attempted to make settlements along the Chesapeake at different times between 1566 and 1573, never succeeded in making any impression on the history of this northern region.
The cartography of the north was at this period subject to two new influences; and both of them make large demands upon the credulity of scholarship in these latter days.