And all this time Britain was at the end of the world.
By the discovery of the ocean and of America, Britain was affected in two ways.
(i) She was found to be open to the ocean, just as were Portugal, Spain, Holland and France. From Britain, as from those lands, men could and did easily sail all over the world; they even attempted to find the Indies. For some twelve years before the voyage of Columbus, merchants of Bristol had sent vessels out into the At lantic to try to discover islands which should at any rate form stepping-stones to the spice lands of the East.
(ii) When traffic developed along the ocean way to the Indies and to America, the southern shores of Britain were in close touch with it, yet the north-west remained remote from all traffic and attack.
Then, as we have learned to expect, the previous history of Britain as well as the geographical conditions controlled the further history. Defending herself on the surrounding seas, saving energy because her govern ment was centralized, and because she was secure, England had taken her place among the states that had arisen in the Middle Ages. Many of her inhabitants were sailors; her merchants, on whom her growing wealth, that is, her accumulated energy, depended, recognized that they drew their wealth from commerce overseas. The sea was not an unknown thing. But at first no very great advantage came to Britain from the discovery of the Indies. , First Portugal and then Holland took the larger share of the trade that had belonged to the Italian Republics, and Spain controlled the lands from which the precious metals came. It is true that the English seamen were more than a match for soldiers of Spain, who, unaccustomed to the sea, came in their great Armada. The English ships, though smaller than the Spanish vessels, were more easily handled, for they were essentially merchant ships, built for sea and used by sailors ; while the Spanish ships were rather floating castles, built for soldiers who were fighting on sea, and suitable for fighting after the manner of land warfare. English seamen such as Raleigh and Drake did attempt to bring home treasure from the Spanish lands on the west, but the rulers of England, unlike those of Spain, were unaccustomed to the idea of conquest, and so were not then eager to hold distant lands beyond the seas ; little resulted from the founding even of Raleigh's colony of Virginia, where he looked for gold but could find none, except to give men of later generations the idea of crossing the seas to cultivate the land.
Nor was Britain's prosperity at once affected, as was that of Portugal and Holland, by the idea of trade. At first, before the Reformation, Portugal, by decree of the Pope, had the monopoly; and later the Dutch, holding the key to the main route by which the produce of the Indies entered Northern Europe, were naturally stimu lated to become the wagoners of the seas, and to accumu late energy enough to enable them to win their inde pendence of Spain, sooner than Britain, through whose land no obvious route passed. But Britain lies so close to Holland that British merchants soon endeavoured to supply Britain with the products of distant lands cheaply, and so found themselves in competition with and opposed to the Dutch. Enmities naturally arose. Britain was brought into conflict with Holland and with France, and in little more than a century became not only a sea-power but the sea-power, the Ocean Power.
The struggle lasted from the end of the sixteenth century till the beginning of the eighteenth, but the first half of the time was spent in nominal peace. From 1600, when the Dutch put up the price of pepper from 3s. to 6s. a lb., and in self-defence the British East India Company was founded, till Cromwell's Navigation Act of 1651, British commerce was spreading and coming more and more into conflict with that of the Dutch, but there was no actual fighting. It is to be noticed that it was during this period of increasing tension that Riche lieu also attempted (1628-1642) to develop a sea-power for France ; but the attempt was not rooted in the natural activities of the people, and the policy was not persisted in, so that the results were not as great as might have been expected.