A notable result of the struggle with Spain was the growth of an active interest in colonization. Knowledge of the wide world, which Richard Eden had freshly revealed to Englishmen in the reign of Mary, was greatly enriched by the voyages of the Elizabethan seamen. John Davis, returning from the Far East, made known "as well the King of Portugal his places of Trade and Strength, as of the interchangeable trades of the eastern Nations among themselves"; and Cavendish, who was the third to "circompasse the whole globe of the world," brought to the queen "certain intelligence of all the rich places that ever were known or discovered by any Christian." By the side of Drake and his followers, whose ambition it was to destroy the power of Spain in the New World, stand the brilliant Gentlemen Adventurers, who labored to plant there the power of England: Frobisher and Davis, the gentle and heroic Gilbert, and Raleigh, poet and statesman, the very perfect knight-errant of his age, whose faith in America survived many failures and is registered in words as prophetic as they are pathetic--"I shall yet live to see it an English nation." The adventurous and pioneering spirit of the time is forever preserved in that true epic of the Elizabethan age, the incomparable _Voyages_ of Richard Hakluyt; and in the _Discourse on Western Plantinge_, which he wrote at the request of Raleigh for the enlightenment of the queen, as well as in the general literature of the next fifty years, are revealed to us the ideas, mostly mistaken and often naive, which gave to America the glamour of a promised land. Of the motives which inspired the colonizing activity of England at the close of the sixteenth century, the desire to spread the Protestant religion was no unreal one. The war for independence, having taken on the character of a crusade, had touched with emotional fervor the Englishman's loyalty to the national faith. Religion became a national asset when it was thought to be served by an extension of the queen's domain. The pride of patriotism, as well as the sense of duty, was stirred by the fact that whereas Spanish Papists had been "the converters of many millions of infidells," English Protestants had done nothing for "thinlargement of the Gospell of Christe." It was felt to be the duty of Englishmen to take on this "white man's burden," and for the sake of the true faith plant "one or two colonies upon that fyrme, learn the language of the people, and so with discretion and myldeness Instill into their purged myndes the swete and lively liquor of the Gospell."