at she could have more money to build more
ships. And if her courtiers did stuff their breeches out with sawdust,
she took equally good care that each fighting man among them donned his
uniform and raised his troops or fitted out his ships when the time was
ripe for action.

CHAPTER V

HAWKINS AND THE FIGHTING TRADERS

Said Francis I of France to Charles V, King of Spain: 'Your Majesty and
the King of Portugal have divided the world between you, offering no
part of it to me. Show me, I pray you, the will of our father Adam, so
that I may see if he has really made you his only universal heirs!' Then
Francis sent out the Italian navigator Verrazano, who first explored the
coast from Florida to Newfoundland. Afterwards Jacques Cartier
discovered the St. Lawrence; Frenchmen took Havana twice, plundered the
Spanish treasure-ships, and tried to found colonies--Catholic in
Canada, Protestant in Florida and Brazil.

Thus, at the time when Elizabeth ascended the throne of England in 1558,
there was a long-established New Spain extending over Mexico, the West
Indies, and most of South America; a small New Portugal confined to part
of Brazil; and a shadowy New France running vaguely inland from the Gulf
of St. Lawrence, nowhere effectively occupied, and mostly overlapping
prior English claims based on the discoveries of the Cabots.

England and France had often been enemies. England and Spain had just
been allied in a war against France as well as by the marriage of Philip
and Mary. William Hawkins had traded with Portuguese Brazil under Henry
VIII, as the Southampton merchants were to do later on. English
merchants lived in Lisbon and Cadiz; a few were even settled in New
Spain; and a friendly Spaniard had been so delighted by the prospective
union of the English with the Spanish crown that he had given the name
of Londres (London) to a new settlement in the Argentine Andes.

Presently, however, Elizabethan England began to part company with
Spain, to become more anti-Papal, to sympathize with Huguenots and other
heretics, and, like Francis I, to wonder why an immense new world should
be nothing but New Spain. Besides, Englishmen knew what the rest of
Europe knew, that the discovery of Potosi had put out of business nearly
all the Old-World silver mines, and that the Burgundian Ass (as Spanish
treasure-mules were called, from Charles's love of Burgundy) had enabled
Spain to make conquests, impose her will on her nei