The claim of Spain would have been more effective had it not included the whole continent of North America, hardly an eighth of which was occupied by Spanish colonies. International law as to the occupation of new countries was in a formative state: everybody admitted that you might seize the territory of pagans, but how did you know when you had seized it? Was the state of which an accredited vessel first followed a coast thereby possessed of all the back country draining into that coast? Did actual exploration of the interior create presumptive title to the surrounding region? Was a trading-post proof that occupation was meant to be permanent? Did actual colonies of settlers, who expected to spend their lives there, make a complete evidence of rightful title? [Illustration: TERRITORIAL GROWTH] These various sorts of claims were singularly tangled and contorted in America. Who had the best title to the Chesapeake--the English, who believed Sebastian Cabot had followed that part of the coast in 1498, or the French, whose commander Verrazzano undoubtedly was there in 1524, or the Spaniards, for whom De Ayllon made a voyage in 1526? Spanish explorers had crossed and followed the Mississippi River, but it is doubtful whether in 1600 they could easily have found its mouth. The French, in like manner, had explored the St. Lawrence, but without permanent results. Therefore, the territorial history of the United States may be said to begin with the almost simultaneous planting of settlements in the New World by France, England, and Holland, between 1600 and 1615. The French happened first on the St. Lawrence, which was the gateway into the interior, with its valuable fur-trade; and they set up their first permanent establishment at Quebec in 1608. The English, after thirty years of attempts on the Virginia coast, finally planted the colony of Jamestown in 1607. The Dutch rediscovered the Hudson River in 1609, and founded New Amsterdam in 1614. The next great river south, the Delaware, was occupied by the Swedes in 1638. It is one of the misfortunes of civilization that Germany, then the richest and most intellectual nation in Europe, and well suited for taking a share in the development of the New World, was in this critical epoch absorbed in the fearful Thirty Years’ War, which in 1648 left the country ruined and helpless, so that no attempt could be made to link the destinies of Germany with those of America.