Soon began seizures of undoubted Spanish territory: the English first picked up various small islands in the West Indies, in 1655 wrested away the Spanish island of Jamaica, and thereupon made a little settlement on the coast of Honduras. The next step was a determined onset against the nearer neighbors in North America. Quebec was taken and held from 1629 to 1632; the Dutch, who had absorbed the Swedish colonies, were dispossessed in 1664;[2] and the English proceeded to contest Hudson Bay with the French. These conflicts marked a deliberate intention to seize points of vantage like Belize and Jamaica, and to uproot the colonies of other European powers in North America; it was part of a process of English expansion which was going on also on the opposite side of the globe. As the eighteenth century began, France, England, and Spain were still in antagonism for the possession of North America; and the French, in 1699, succeeded in planting a colony on the Gulf in the side of the Spanish colonial empire. These international rivalries were soon altered by the struggle of England against the attempt of Louis XIV. to bring about the practical consolidation of Spain and France, which would have made an immense Latin colonial empire. To some degree on religious grounds, partly to protect their commerce, and partly from inscrutable international jealousies, the nations of Europe were plunged into a series of five land and naval wars between 1689 and 1783, in each of which North American territory was attacked, and in several of which great changes were made in the map. In these wars the colonies formed an ideal as to the duty of a mother-country to protect daughter colonies, and aided in developing a policy which has been described by one of the most brilliant of modern writers as that of “sea power.”[3] The illustration of that theory was a succession of fleet engagements in the West Indies, always followed by a picking up of enemy’s islands; and also the repeated efforts of the colonists in separate or joint expeditions to conquer the neighboring French or Spanish territory. The final result was the destruction of the French-American power and the serious weakening of the Spanish. In 1732 the charter of Georgia was a denial of the Spanish claims to Florida. By the treaty of 1763 France was pressed altogether out of the continent, yielding up to England that splendid region of the eastern part of the Mississippi Valley which the English coveted, and with it the St. Lawrence Valley. For the first time since the capture of Jamaica, a considerable area of Spanish territory was transferred to England by the cession of the Floridas. Louisiana to the west of the Mississippi, together with New Orleans, on the east bank, were allowed to pass to Spain. From that time to the Revolution the only two North American powers were England and Spain, who substantially divided the continent between them by the line of the Mississippi River.[4]