ighty harvest.) In the meanwhile, Drake had proved
not merely the possibility of plundering the American coasts, but
of establishing an East Indian trade; Frobisher and Davis, worthy
forefathers of our Parrys and Franklins, had begun to bore their way
upward through the Northern ice, in search of a passage to China which
should avoid the dangers of the Spanish seas; and Anthony Jenkinson, not
the least of English travellers, had, in six-and-twenty years of travel
in behalf of the Muscovite Company, penetrated into not merely Russia
and the Levant, but Persia and Armenia, Bokhara, Tartary, Siberia, and
those waste Arctic shores where, thirty years before, the brave Sir Hugh
Willoughby,

"In Arzina caught,
Perished with all his crew."

Everywhere English commerce, under the genial sunshine of Elizabeth's
wise rule, was spreading and taking root; and as Don Guzman talked
with his new friends, he soon saw (for he was shrewd enough) that they
belonged to a race which must be exterminated if Spain intended to
become (as she did intend) the mistress of the world; and that it was
not enough for Spain to have seized in the Pope's name the whole new
world, and claimed the exclusive right to sail the seas of America; not
enough to have crushed the Hollanders; not enough to have degraded the
Venetians into her bankers, and the Genoese into her mercenaries; not
enough to have incorporated into herself, with the kingdom of Portugal,
the whole East Indian trade of Portugal, while these fierce islanders
remained to assert, with cunning policy and texts of Scripture, and, if
they failed, with sharp shot and cold steel, free seas and free trade
for all the nations upon earth. He saw it, and his countrymen saw it
too: and therefore the Spanish Armada came: but of that hereafter. And
Don Guzman knew also, by hard experience, that these same islanders, who
sat in Salterne's parlor, talking broad Devon through their noses, were
no mere counters of money and hucksters of goods: but men who, though
they thoroughly hated fighting, and loved making money instead, could
fight, upon occasion, after a very dogged and terrible fashion, as well
as the bluest blood in Spain; and who sent out their merchant ships
armed up to the teeth, and filled with men who had been trained from
childhood to use those arms, and had orders to use them without mercy
if either Spaniard, Portugal, or other created being dared to stop their
money-making.