With that grand awakening of interest in education, industry, and discovery which took place in the fourteenth century, the city of Venice gained the lead in power, and her merchants became the most enterprising and wealthy. It was the expansion of commerce that urged the explorations that marked the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for by this time Venice had her banks—the first in the world to approach the character of modern banks—and her exchange on the famous Rialto bridge; Genoa was in close rivalry; Spain was gathering immense quantities of gold in South America; and England was coming to the front as a maritime power. The trade with Cathay—as India, China, and the Oriental islands were called collectively—was chiefly by caravans across the Persian deserts, and Spain, England, and Holland had small shares in it, since the only water-route known was through the Mediterranean and Red seas, where, between the perils of the ocean, the extortionate charges and stealings of the Arabs (who carried the cargoes from vessel to vessel across the Isthmus of Suez), and the risk of capture by Algerian pirates, there was little chance left for profit to either merchants or ship-owners. To western Europe, then, Vasco de Gama’s discovery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope was a long advantage, and England and Holland at least were quick to seize it. The great “East India Companies” of the Dutch and English were formed by a group of powerful merchants in London and in Amsterdam, who were given vast privileges by their governments in respect to trading in the East. The Dutch company was not founded until 1602, two years after the English company, but it soon became the more prominent of the two, and was one of the principal means by which the Netherlands secured the preponderance of the carrying trade of the world, bringing to her ports, by the middle of the seventeenth century, almost all the commerce previously enjoyed by Cadiz, Lisbon, and Antwerp, and making very serious inroads upon that of London and Bristol. The Dutch East India ships, copied from the Genoese carracks, were the biggest merchant vessels then afloat, well able to cope with many of the war-ships; and two hundred of them were at this time engaged in the Asiatic trade alone. [Illustration: A CLIPPER ESCAPING FROM THE “ALABAMA.”]