rteenth and fifteenth
centuries.

Fortunately these social troubles were not universal, and it was just at
the period when France was struggling and had become exhausted and
impoverished that the Portuguese extended their discoveries on the same
coast of Africa, and soon after succeeded in rounding the Cape of Good
Hope, and opening a new maritime road to India, a country which was always
attractive from the commercial advantages which it offered.

Some years after, Christopher Columbus, the Genoese, more daring and more
fortunate still, guided by the compass and impelled by his own genius,
discovered a new continent, the fourth continent of the world (Fig. 199).
This unexpected event, the greatest and most remarkable of the age,
necessarily enlarged the field for produce as well as for consumption to
an enormous extent, and naturally added, not only to the variety and
quantity of exchangeable wares, but also to the production of the precious
metals, and brought about a complete revolution in the laws of the whole
civilised world.

Maritime commerce immediately acquired an extraordinary development, and
merchants, forsaking the harbours of the Mediterranean, and even those of
the Levant, which then seemed to them scarcely worthy of notice, sent
their vessels by thousands upon the ocean in pursuit of the wonderful
riches of the New World. The day of caravans and coasting had passed;
Venice had lost its splendour; the sway of the Mediterranean was over; the
commerce of the world was suddenly transferred from the active and
industrious towns of that sea, which had so long monopolized it, to the
Western nations, to the Portuguese and Spaniards first, and then to the
Dutch and English.

France, absorbed in, and almost ruined by civil war, and above all by
religious dissensions, only played a subordinate part in this commercial
and pacific revolution, although it has been said that the sailors of
Dieppe and Honfleur really discovered America before Columbus.
Nevertheless the kings of France, Louis XII., Francis I., and Henry II.,
tried to establish and encourage transatlantic voyages, and to create, in
the interest of French commerce, colonies on the coasts of the New World,
from Florida and Virginia to Canada.

But these colonies had but a precarious and transitory existence;
fisheries alone succeeded, and French commerce continued insignificant,
circumscribed, and domestic, notwithstanding the increasing requirements