Page:Early English adventurers in the East (1917).djvu/21

 CHAPTER I

The Dawn of the Empire

HEN the long reign of Elizabeth was drawing towards its splendid close there was planted in the minds of Englishmen a mighty idea. Their conception was of an England no longer self-centred and self-contained—no mere "sceptred isle" seated in splendid isolation upon the inviolate sea, but of a power which, bursting the artificial bonds imposed by an arrogant foreign domination, would make its commercial frontiers, co-terminous with the utmost limits of the known world. Many causes contributed to produce this awakening of the national consciousness to the country's higher destinies. The voyages of the early navigators, by lifting the curtain upon the realities of that mysterious outer world which had existed hitherto to a large extent only in the imagination, created an interest in strange peoples