Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/308

292 Portuguese colonies of South America were hardly more exalted in their origin. The Dutch East Indies were colonized by a band of landless resolutes from the Texel—disorderly youths (says the old chronicler), "whose absence was more desired" there "than their presence." The gentlemen adventurers who founded Acadia, like the two La Tours, the renegade Frenchmen (like De Castin and his half-breed son) and the forest rangers who "blazed the track" in Canada for future settlers, Kipling's "gentlemen rovers" and "lost legion," Mr. Cecil Rhodes himself, when he seized Matabeleland, are types of this class. The Jamieson raid was only the last of the daring burglaries by which ancient and modern colonial empires have been built up."

The toilers who reap the harvest of the sea, half savage as they have always been and often still are, have at least more honest ways. It was mariners from Biscay, and Guipuzcoa, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, who sailed down the African coast as far as the Canaries and led the modern colonizing movement. Basque, Breton, and Norman fishermen were the first authentic visitors to the New World, and they were soon followed by fishermen from the west of England. They did not at first settle. Like the whalers and the Labrador fishermen of to-day, they went home as soon as they had filled their barks, returning each successive season. Their next step was to establish headquarters, as the Newfoundland fishermen at St. John's. Finally, they came for good, as did the English fishermen who settled on the Plymouth coast. Newfoundland may be described as the fishing colony par excellence. Few of the ancient colonies had a similar origin, but the five Greek colonies in the Gulf of Tarentum, together with Cumæ and famous Byzantium, may partly have so begun.

The establishment of commercial relations with indigenous peoples has been at the foundation of a much larger number of colonies. Commerce possibly arose out of fishing. As may still be observed on any seacoast, fishing vessels were converted into merchant ships and fishermen differentiated into seamen, some of whom were specialized into merchants. The first ships were also shops. The poet of the Odyssey describes a Phænician ship as lying for a whole year off a port in the Grecian archipelago, engaged in constant traffic with the natives, and only departing when she had sold her entire cargo and taken a fresh one on board. Cutters laden with cheap drapery still coast along thinly populated countries, running up rivers and creeks and disposing of their merchandise to visitors conveyed to