enterprising mariners to offer to undertake remote and hazardous expeditions. In the course of sixteen years from the date of his return, no fewer than six of these were equipped and despatched to the southern seas, the commanders mingling the peaceful pursuits of trade with the depredations of pirates whenever circumstances tempted them to plunder; but by these successive voyages the general outline of the main continents of Asia and America became tolerably well understood.
First emigration of the English to America. Somewhere about this period Sir Walter Raleigh[1] furnished the first accurate information respecting the eastern sea-board of North America. In an expedition consisting of two small barks, fitted out by him, Sir Richard Greville, and others, the configuration of the coasts of Florida and Virginia became known, and as these districts were represented as "scenes laid open for the good and gracious Queen to propagate the gospel in," the natives being "soft as wax, innocent, and ignorant of all manner of
- [Footnote: the 26th May, 1572, long before war had been declared between
England and Spain, he had set out with his brothers John and Joseph on an expedition of pure piracy in two small vessels, manned by seventy-three seamen almost as daring as himself. Starting from the Gulf of Florida, he landed near St. Martha, where he built a fort and commenced an attack on the house of the Spanish governor, which he had ascertained contained a very large amount of bar-silver. Defeated in his designs to plunder it, he set out with eighteen Englishmen, part of his crew, and thirty runaway slaves, whom he had entered into his service, for Vera Cruz, which he plundered. Thence he proceeded again toward Nombre de Dios, capturing on the road a caravan of mules laden with silver, appropriating as much of it as he and his gang of marauders could carry away, and returned to England with his ill-gotten spoils in August 1573.]
- ↑ Raleigh's first personal expedition was in 1595; but he had already assisted in equipping no less than seven, the earliest in 1585 ('Maritime and Inland Discovery,' ii. pp. 205-209).
