between the Emperor and France; yet this does not entirely explain the activity of the French privateers in Spanish America, for we find them busy there in the years when peace reigned at home. Once unleash the sea-dogs and it was extremely difficult to bring them again under restraint. With the seventeenth century began a new era in the history of the West Indies. If in the sixteenth the English, French and Dutch came to tropical America as piratical intruders into seas and countries which belonged to others, in the following century they came as permanent colonisers and settlers. The Spaniards, who had explored the whole ring of the West Indian islands before 1500, from the beginning neglected the lesser for the larger Antilles--Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto Rico and Jamaica--and for those islands like Trinidad, which lie close to the mainland. And when in 1519 Cortez sailed from Cuba for the conquest of Mexico, and twelve years later Pizarro entered Peru, the emigrants who left Spain to seek their fortunes in the New World flocked to the vast territories which the _Conquistadores_ and their lieutenants had subdued on the Continent. It was consequently to the smaller islands which compose the Leeward and Windward groups that the English, French and Dutch first resorted as colonists. Small, and therefore "easy to settle, easy to depopulate and to re-people, attractive not only on account of their own wealth, but also as a starting-point for the vast and rich continent off which they lie," these islands became the pawns in a game of diplomacy and colonization which continued for 150 years.