It took the whole sixteenth century for the English and French to get thoroughly into the colonial contest. During that period the activities of the English were confined to exploration and piracy, with the exception of the ill-starred attempts of Gilbert and Raleigh to colonize Newfoundland and North Carolina. The voyages of the Anglo- Italian John Cabot in 1497-1498 were later to be the basis of British claims to North America. The search for a northwest passage drove Frobisher (1576-1578), Davis (1585-1587), Hudson (1610-1611), and Baffin (1616) to explore the northern extremity of North America, to leave the record of their exploits in names of bays, islands, and straits, and to establish England's claim to northern Canada; while the search for a northeast passage enticed Willoughby and Chancellor (1553) around Lapland, and Jenkinson (1557-1558) to the icebound port of Archangel in northern Russia. Elizabethan England had neither silver mines nor spice islands, but the deficiency was never felt while British privateers sailed the seas. Hawkins, the great slaver, Drake, the second circumnavigator of the globe, Davis, and Cavendish were but four of the bold captains who towed home many a stately Spanish galleon laden with silver plate and with gold. As for spices, the English East India Company, chartered in 1600, was soon to build up an empire in the East in competition with the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the French, but that story belongs to a later chapter. France was less active. The rivalry of Francis I [Footnote: See below, pp. 77 ff.] with Charles I of Spain had extended even to the New World. Verrazano (1524) sailed the coast from Carolina to Labrador, and Cartier (1534-1535) pushed up the Saint Lawrence to Montreal, looking for a northwest passage, and demonstrating that France had no respect for the Spanish claim to all America. After 1535, however, nothing of permanence was done until the end of the century, and the founding of French colonies in India and along the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi rivers belongs rather to the history of the seventeenth century. [Sidenote: Motives for Colonization] One of the most amazing spectacles in history is the expansion of Europe since the sixteenth century. Not resting content with discovering the rest of the world, the European nations with sublime confidence pressed on to divide the new continents among them, to conquer, Christianize, and civilize the natives, and to send out millions of new emigrants to establish beyond the seas a New England, a New France, a New Spain, and a New Netherland. The Spaniards in Spain to-day are far outnumbered by the Spanish-speaking people in Argentina, Chili, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Central America, and the Philippine Islands. [Sidenote: Religion]