ord of human courage to illuminate its annals.

For us in our own day, the romance that once clung about the northern
seas has drifted well nigh to oblivion. To understand it we must turn
back in fancy three hundred years. We must picture to ourselves the
aspect of the New World at the time when Elizabeth sat on the throne of
England, and when the kingdoms of western Europe, Britain, France, and
Spain, were rising from the confusion of the Middle Ages to national
greatness. The existence of the New World had been known for nearly a
hundred years. But it still remained shadowed in mystery and
uncertainty. It was known that America lay as a vast continent, or
island, as men often called it then, midway between Europe and the
great empires of the East. Columbus, and after him Verrazano and
others, had explored its eastern coast, finding everywhere a land of
dense forests, peopled here and there with naked savages that fled at
their {4} approach. The servants of the king of Spain had penetrated
its central part and reaped, in the spoils of Mexico, the reward of
their savage bravery. From the central isthmus Balboa had first seen
the broad expanse of the Pacific. On this ocean the Spaniard Pizarro
had been borne to the conquest of Peru. Even before that conquest
Magellan had passed the strait that bears his name, and had sailed
westward from America over the vast space that led to the island
archipelago of Eastern Asia. Far towards the northern end of the great
island, the fishermen of the Channel ports had found their way in
yearly sailings to the cod banks of Newfoundland. There they had
witnessed the silent procession of the great icebergs that swept out of
the frozen seas of the north, and spoke of oceans still unknown,
leading one knew not whither. The boldest of such sailors, one Jacques
Cartier, fighting his way westward had entered a great gulf that yawned
in the opening side of the continent, and from it he had advanced up a
vast river, the like of which no man had seen. Hundreds of miles from
the gulf he had found villages of savages, who pointed still westward
and told him of wonderful countries of gold and silver that lay beyond
the palisaded settlement of Hochelaga.

{5}

But the discoveries of Columbus and those who followed him had not
solved but had only opened the mystery of the western seas. True, a
way to the Asiatic empire had been found. The road discovered by the
Portuguese round the