Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/683

 Alarc Lescarbot 673 In the second half of the century, however, matters were com- pletely altered. France, weakened by constant religious and civil wars, had no force to waste in foreign adventure ; on the other hand England, blessed, especially during Elizabeth's reign, with domestic peace and growing prosperity, seemed to awaken to new life ; and expeditions were despatched in unremitting succession to almost all the four corners of the globe. At the close of the century not only could a writer say that " many valiant attempts had been made in searching al-most all the corners of the vaste and new world of America," but two separate expeditions had also gone around the world in the short interval of eleven years. The exploits, however, of Drake and Cavendish in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, of Frobisher and Davis in the northern seas, of Raleigh and Gilbert in Virginia and Newfoundland, of the Hawkinses in the Spanish Main, of Oxenham, Barker, Fenton and the Earl of Cumberland against Spanish commerce in general, are too well known to need recital here. Opposed to the wonderful exploits of these men, such achieve- ments as those of Villegagnon in Brazil, of Ribaut, Laudonniere and Gourgues in Florida, of Strozzi and de Chaste in the Azores and of de la Roche and Chefdostel at Sable Island, seem extremely moderate ones. Fortunately they do not represent all that was done by Frenchmen in America at this time. It is to be sure a most strange fact that no French writer yet discovered has anything to say of the exploits of his countrymen at this time in the West Indies. When one considers how great a portion of Hakluyt's col- lection is filled with minute accounts of the doings of the English rovers then famous, one recognizes what the loss of these French narratives means to the fame of the French seamen of that day. The French, however, might reply that like the Spartans of old they were too busy performing brave deeds, to find the time to de- scribe them ; for in Spanish sources we now and again get glimpses of their doings. Thus in July 1553 the town of Santiago was taken and only given up when a large ransom had been paid.' In the following year, in which eight different French vessels touched at Porto Rico alone," these rovers so lorded it over this whole re- gion that the governors thereof complained to the Emperor Charles the Fifth that the French were as complete masters of those seas, as the Emperor himself of the River Guadalquivir in Spain.^ In the year 1555 Havana was destroyed for the second time in seventeen years ; • Colec. de Doc. /neJ. Je Iiui., second series, VI. 360, Nos. 492 and 494, p. 42S, and pp. 434-443. 2 IHd, pp. 427-428. '^ Ibid., p. 360, No. 492.