millions. But, better than even this,
Drake found among her papers the secrets of the wonderful trade with
the East, a trade now taken over by the Spaniards from the conquered
Portuguese. With these papers in English hands the English oversea
traders set to work and formed the great East India Company on the last
day of the year 1600. This Company--founded, held, and always helped
by British sea-power--went on, step by step, for the next two hundred
and fifty-seven years, after which India, taken over by the British
Crown, at last grew into the present Indian Empire, a country
containing three times as many people as the whole population of the
United States, and yet a country which is only one of the many parts of
the British Empire all round the Seven Seas.

Crippled by English sea-power both in New Spain and Old, threatened by
English sea-power in his trade with the Far East, and harassed by
English sea-power everywhere between Spain and the Spanish Netherlands,
where the Duke of Parma was preparing an army for the invasion of
England, King Philip kept working on with murder in his heart. At
last, in the summer of 1588, his Great Invincible Spanish Armada seemed
to be as Great, Invincible, and Spanish as he could ever hope to make
it. All the landlubbers, even in England, thought it very great
indeed; and most of them think so still. The best Spanish soldiers,
like all the few really good Spanish sailors, had very grave doubts.
Those who knew the English Navy best expected nothing but disaster:
their letters still remain to prove it. But most people, then as now,
knew nothing about navies; and so the Armada went on collecting ships
and men together, heartening the landsmen of Spain, and disheartening
far too many landsmen in England.

The fatal weakness of the Great Armada was its being out of date.
Though little better than an ancient floating army, it had to fight
what then was the one really modern fleet; and this was its undoing.
Time out of mind, as we have seen already, battles on the water had
always been made as much like battles on the land as the wit of man
could make them. They were fought by soldiers under generals, not by
sailors under admirals. They were fought mostly on the platforms of
huge rowboats called galleys; and the despised galley-slaves were
almost the only seamen. Even the officers and men who handled the
clumsy old sailing craft, or the still clumsier sail aboard a galley,
were