holding until near the present century. Portugal
made good its claim to Brazil, and at the beginning
of the colonising period England, France, and Holland
each got a small foothold at Guiana; but otherwise
she kept all South America until her colonies
one by one revolted and gained their independence.
Save for a little British spot at Honduras, she kept
Central America and Mexico into the present century,
when Mexico included T ex a s and California
and all between. She also had, as the result of De
So to ’s explorations, Florida, extending indefinitely
westward from the peninsula, and at one time
Louisiana, when it stretched all the way up the
Mississippi valley and over to the Pacific coast
“ where rolls the Oregon.”
Near the end of the sixteenth century Sir Richard
Grenville and Sir Walter Raleigh, and a little later
Captain John Smith and others, in their hunt for
eligible sites for colonies, paid special attention for
a while to the Orinoco region, lured partly by the
enticing legends of E l Dorado. In their wanderings
from South to North America, where they founded
the Virginia colony, they were wont to pause
among the Caribbees, and they did not forget the
goodly prospect for colonising hereabouts for such
adventurous spirits as had no respect for the Spanish
title of possession or fear of the native inhabitants.
For a time, however, English colonisers were kept
busy in Guiana and on the North American coast at
Virginia and New England. The French had made
a beginning still farther north in Canada and had
been feeding an appetite for possessions in newly
discovered lands. T h e y grew covetous of a share
in the tropical islands with whose charms the corsairs
had already made intimate acquaintance. The
Netherlands had begun operations with a trading
company, which first took possession where now
flourishes the goodly city of New Y o rk ; and Dutch
smugglers had long been prowling about the Spanish
islands with a special headquarters in the island of
St. Eustatius, from which they were driven only to
return. A so-called admiral of the Dutch took San
Juan de Puerto Rico in 1615, but was killed for his
pains and no advantage came of it. But in 1621 the
Dutch West India Company was incorporated, which
had serious colonising as well as trading purposes.
T h e Spanish colonies had been confined virtually
to the Greater Antilles. A few settlers had taken
possession of the islands adjacent to the Spanish
Main, including Trinidad and Curagao, or Querisao,
as it is quaintly called in Dampier’s Voyages. T h e y
were practically left undisturbed in Trinidad until
near the close of the last century, save for the unceremonious
call of Sir W a lte r Raleigh two hundred
years before. T h e Dutch, whose title was altogether
one of conquest, acquired during the war between
Spain and the Netherlands, captured Curagao and
its neighbours Buen Aire and Aruba in 1634, and
slowly colonised them. Spain retained the rest of
what she called the “ Sotavento,” or Leeward, group
of islands, the finest of which was Margarita, until
they went with Venezuela upon the achievement of
her independence.
T h e first English settlement in the West Indies