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 5 1 o E. P. Cheyney 1 to Philip of Spain, now king also of England, but he does go so ' far as to say in his " Preface to the Reader " : Besyde the portion of lande perteynyng to the Spanyardes and l^eside I that which perteineth to the Portugales, there yet reniayneth an other J portion of that mayne lande reachynge towarde the northeast, thought j to be as large as the other, and not yet knowen but only by the sea j coastes, neyther inhabyted by any Christian men. I Then still more exactly indicating the very region which was des- tined long afterward to become Virginia and New England, he | declares that it is a reproach to the English race that they who are 1 the nearest people in Europe to that land have not attempted to | christianize or occupy it, nor " to doo for owr partes as the Span- iardes have doone for theyrs, and not ever lyke sheepe to haunte one ! trade, and to doo nothynge woorthy memorie amonge men or ] thankes before god " } Similarly through the growing familiarity of the Englishmen with the Indies during the reign of Elizabeth runs the thought that England also should have an Indian empire. The residence of English merchants and the experience of travellers in Spanish and Portuguese cities, their home correspondence, and their translations of Spanish works on the Indies ;- the productions of pamphleteers and writers of travels, culminating in the work of Hakluyt in 1589; the unwelcome visits of English adventurers to the Indies ; the capture by Drake in 1587 and 1592 of the San Felipe and the Madre de Dios, the two great Portuguese carracks on their way home from the East Indies ; the minute description of the Portuguese East Indies by Linschoten in his work published in England in 1598; the wide experience and thoughtful observation of many Eng- lish statesmen and ambassadors — all these strengthened " im- perialist" sentiment in England. Men of visionary temperament, like Sidney, Raleigh, Drake, Captain John Smith, Sir Thomas Smythe, and many humbler names among London merchants or rest- less adventurers, felt their imaginations stirred by the thought of distant dominions of such extent, interest, and value to the Euro- pean powers that ruled them. It is not to be believed that in a period of strong national self-consciousness and increasing power, when ambition for distant possessions had been growing through more than one generation, a vigorous and effective effort to estab- lish some such colony as Virginia could have been long delayed. Projects indeed were early formed and colonists sent out, but their history is a record of failure. A desire for the possession ' Arber, p. 55. ^Undernill, Spanish Literature in the England of the Tudors, chap. 5.