8. =Mariners and Pirates.=--Of all Elizabeth's subjects there were none who stood their country in such good stead in the impending conflict with Spain and the Papacy as the mariners. Hardy and reckless, they cared little for theological distinctions or for forms of Church government, their first instinct being to fill their own purses either by honest trade if it might be, or by piracy if that seemed likely to be more profitable. Even before Elizabeth's accession, the Channel and the seas beyond it swarmed with English pirates. Though the pirates cared nothing for the nationality of the vessels which they plundered, it was inevitable that the greatest loss should fall on Spain. Spain was the first maritime power in the world, and her galleons as they passed up to Antwerp to exchange the silks and spices of the East for the commodities of Europe, fell an easy prey to the swift and well-armed cruisers which put out from English harbours. The Spaniards retaliated by seizing English sailors wherever they could lay their hands upon them, sometimes hanging them out of hand, sometimes destroying them with starvation and misery in fetid dungeons, sometimes handing them over to the Inquisition--a court the function of which was the suppression of heresy--in other words, to the torture-room or the stake. 9. =Westward Ho!=--Every year the hatred between the mariners of Spain and England grew more bitter, and it was not long before English sailors angered the king of Spain by crossing the Atlantic to trade or plunder in the West Indies, where both the islands and the mainland of Mexico and South America were full of Spanish settlements. In those days a country which sent out colonies claimed the sole right of trading with them; besides which the king of Spain claimed a right of refusing to foreigners an entrance into his American dominions because, towards the end of the fifteenth century, Pope Alexander VI. being called on to mediate between Spain and Portugal, had drawn a line on the map to the east of which was to be the Portuguese colony of Brazil, whilst all the rest of America to the west of it was to be Spanish. From this the Spaniards reasoned that all America except Brazil was theirs by the gift of the Pope--which in their eyes was equivalent to the gift of God. English sailors refusing to recognise this pretension, sailed to the Spanish settlements to trade, and attacked the Spanish officials who tried to prevent them. The Spanish settlers were eager to get negro slaves to cultivate their plantations, and Englishmen were equally eager to kidnap negroes in Africa and to sell them in the West Indies. A curious combination of the love of gain and of Protestantism sprang up amongst the sailors, who had no idea that to sell black men was in any way wrong. One engaged in this villanous work explained how he had been saved from the perils of the sea by 'Almighty God, who never suffers his elect to perish!' There was