About the time when the impetuous Dominic de Gourgues returned to France from his swoop of vengeance in Florida, Sir Walter Raleigh, one of the most gallant spirits of the age, suddenly left his studies at Oxford to take part with the Huguenots in their struggles against the catholics. From his protestant friends he heard of the massacre which De Gourgues had avenged, and from that brave man himself, and his associates, learnt much also of the country where these scenes had occurred. The imagination of Raleigh was inflamed; on his return to England he found the same spirit afloat; a few of the unfortunate Huguenots had escaped to England, and their tale of wrong had interested even Queen Elizabeth herself. Hawkins, too, the slaver, who had relieved the famishing settlement, had much to tell of the wonderful regions where these things had been done; so had De Morgues, the landscape painter, who had fortunately escaped with, many sketches of its scenery. The leading minds of England were turned to Florida. From the time of Cabot, England had never wholly given up her intercourse with the New World. English mariners, as well as French, frequented the fisheries of Newfoundland. Henry VIII. declared that he considered the discovery of the North “to be his charge and duty;” and Hakluyt records a wild sea-voyage, conducted by a man named Hore, in which marvellous things are told far outdoing those of the Ancient Mariner. The search for the north-western passage still continued; the fleets of Willoughby and Chancellor set sail. In the north their ships parted company. The fate of Willoughby was an early tragedy in those mournful and fatal seas. After a winter of great hardship, the vessels which went in search of him the following spring found him dead in his cabin, his journal open before him, containing a record of the ship’s sufferings to the very day of his death, and with his faithful crew lying dead around him. Chancellor, on the contrary, was driven in a north-eastern direction, and reached the harbour of Archangel, and thus the Russian nation, like another New World, emerged, as it were, into being. Joint-stock companies, for the discovery of unknown lands, were first formed in 1555. The marriage of Mary with Philip of Spain brought the magnificent discoveries and productions of that country into a closer proximity with England, and a desire to emulate the successes of Spain in the New World was excited.