When a vessel of the old navigators was approaching the coast, the precaution was taken of sending sailors to the mast-head. These lookouts were relieved every two hours until night-fall, at which time, if the land was not yet in sight, they furled their sails so as to make little or no way during the night. It was a matter of emulation among the ship's company who should first discover the land, as the passengers usually presented the lucky one with some pistoles. One writer mentions that on board French vessels, after sighting Cape Race, the ceremony known among us as "crossing the line" was performed by the old salts on the green hands, without regard to season. [Illustration: SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT.] The method of taking possession of a new country is thus described in the old chronicles: Jacques Cartier erected a cross thirty feet high, on which was suspended a shield with the arms of France and the words "_Vive le Roy_." Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in 1583, raised a pillar at Newfoundland, with a plate of lead, having the queen's arms "graven thereon." A turf and a twig were presented to him, which he received with a hazel wand. The expression "by turf and twig," a symbol of actual possession of the soil and its products, is still to be met with in older New England records. Douglass, the American historian, speaking of Henry IV., says, "He planted a colony in Canada which subsists to this day. May it not long subsist; it is a nuisance to our North American settlements: _Delenda est Carthago_." The insignificant attempt of Gosnold, in 1603, and the disastrous one of Popham, in 1607, contributed little to the knowledge of New England. But the absence of any actual possession of the soil did not prevent the exercise of unworthy violence toward intruders on the territory claimed by the English crown. In 1613 Sir Samuel Argall broke up the French settlement begun at Mount Desert in that year, opening fire on the unsuspecting colonists before he gave himself the trouble of a formal summons. Those of other nations fared little better, as the following recital will show: Purchas relates that "Sir Bernard Drake, a Devonshire knight, came to Newfoundland with a commission; and having divers good ships under his command, he took many Portugal ships, and brought them into England as prizes.