A decade before Martin Frobisher had opened the north parts of the North American continent to Englishmen, John Hawkins had surveyed the southern tip at Florida, and upon his return had represented this fair and favoured region, then to indefinite bounds included among Spain’s American possessions, and in a corner of which France for more than a year had maintained a slender foothold, as ripe for England to venture in and colonize. His was the first account in detail of Florida by an Englishman, and it was the germ from which fruitage later developed in Raleigh’s schemes. Hawkins’s were purely trading voyages, and he was a fighting trader, demanding the open market for his wares at the point of the sword when it was denied him by representatives of foreign governments. His wares, too, were more or less fought for. The most profitable of them were Negroes seized on the African coast and bartered into slavery in the West Indies and on the Spanish Main—along the north coast of South America. He was the first (or his father before him as some historians say) to bring the African slave trade into English commerce, and to plant Negro slavery in America. Discovery was only an incident in the pursuit of his trade. Yet what he accomplished in this direction was of no slight import, since it opened the way to others of loftier aims. While his fame is tarnished by the blotch of traffic in human beings (in his day, we must remember, deemed by the godly and godless alike as not an unrighteous traffic), it is enduring by virtue of heroic deeds, and his place is fairly with the great English captains of the sea who had part in the beginnings of America. [Illustration: S^R. JOHN HAWKINS.]