looking for chances to colonise shunned the islands.
Sir Walter Raleigh, on one of his prospecting trips
to Guiana and the Orinoco region, stopped in Trinidad,
and in 1595 captured the Spanish town of St.
Josef, but did not try to retain it. T h e contiguity
of Trinidad to the South American coast, and
the fact that its population was divided between the
Arawaks and the Caribs, who still came from the
mainland, explain the existence of a Spanish town
here. It belonged rather to Venezuela than the
West Indies. In none of the Caribbee Islands
properly so called did the Spaniards effect a settlement.
C H A P T E R V I I
ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND DUTCH COLONISERS
IF the sixteenth century was one of discovery and
conquest in the western world, the seventeenth
was a century of colonising, and it speedily became
evident that Spain could not have it all to herself.
When the infallible Pope drew his line across the
face of the waters and awarded to that nation all the
heathen land to the west thereof, he did not know
what a gigantic contract he assumed, and when, in
1494, b y the treaty of Tordesillas, Spain and Portugal
agreed to remove the dividing line two hundred
and seventy leagues farther west, the continent was
still undiscovered.
Great Britain, having become a Protestant power,
had no respect for the title of possession which
rested upon the Pope’s bull, and France lost respect
for it as soon as she was on hostile terms with Spain.
When the Netherlands got out of the clutches of
Spain and was at war with her, she did not care by
what title possession was claimed. She had no regard
for it on any ground. I t is remarkable what a
proportion of her vast domain Spain succeeded in