In the marvelous 1580’s everything was beginning to ripen together in the heat ol the tension between England and Spain. Poetry and the drama that had been so sparse and backward were coming to a head with Sidney and Spenser and Marlowe; the first Elizabethan madrigals appear in the very year the war against Spain begins. And this is the moment when the idea ol American colonization takes shape and wing—or, perhaps I should say, takes sail.

The person who had first undertaken to carry out the idea, as to which there had been so much discussion and so many abortive gestures in the direction of it, was Humphrey Gilbert. And from the Crown’s patent he was granted in 1578 sprang the ultimate achievement. That patent gave him license l’or six years “to search, find out and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories not actually possessed ol any Christian prince or people.” That was the regular formula, in pursuance ol the government’s consistent stand on American settlement.

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