The idea of colonies beyond the seas.The first idea of all voyages to distant countries had been to get either gold and silver, or precious goods like silk and spices, which could not be grown in Europe. Spain, Portugal, Holland and France had all been ahead of us in the race of discovery; but we were going to beat them all in the long run. Sir Walter Raleigh.It was Sir Walter Raleigh, in Elizabeth's reign, who first imagined a true ‘colony’. He did not mean, as the Spaniards meant, a sort of shop, in which Englishmen were to buy gold or silk or spices; but rather a ‘plantation’ of Englishmen in some distant land who were to buy all their goods, their iron tools, their woollen clothes, their linen and their boots from England. This would, in the first place, give an enormous lift to English manufactures, and, in the second place, would create a piece of ‘England-beyond-the-sea’, a piece, in fact, of an English Empire. Raleigh planned to plant such a colony in Virginia, on the shore of North America; it collapsed for want of funds. But the idea lived on, and in 1606 it was taken up again by a group of London merchants, who subscribed money and sent out colonists. By the year 1620, Virginia was a flourishing little state.
The Pilgrim Fathers in America, 1620.In that year some sturdy Puritans, since called the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’, got leave to emigrate to North America. They objected to being compelled to use the Prayer Book service in England, and wanted to worship God in their own fashion; and they founded a little state called ‘Plymouth’ on the American coast. Other colonies, some religious, some commercial in their British origin, soon followed, and, by 1660, British America in seventeenth century.the whole eastern coast of North America was dotted with little English states; but, between Virginia and the more sternly