In reviewing the period from 1492 to 1606,--practically the sixteenth century,--we see that it was notable for the extraordinary interest displayed in discovery and settlement. Attention has been called to the part played by the general desire of Europeans to secure the trade of India. But we must not forget as well that, as a feature of the great Renaissance and Reformation movement, the spirit of investigation was abroad, in religion, philosophy, and the arts; there had grown up great commercial and trading cities, in which the successful foreign merchant became a part of a powerful aristocracy; popular imagination had been fired by traders' stories of India, China, and Japan; there was an eagerness to reach out into the regions of mystery, to enlarge the horizon of human knowledge. The effect was greatly to increase skill in navigation, to build up a merchant marine, and--it being an age of universal freebooting--to cultivate an experience in naval warfare which was a preparation for the great sea-fights of the eighteenth century. Sidenote: Causes of failure in North American colonization. Of the three nations which, in the sixteenth century, attempted to colonize America north of the Gulf of Mexico, all had practically failed. Spain had with comparative ease conquered the unwarlike natives of Mexico and Peru upon their cultivated plains. That very ease took away the disposition, even had her people been capable of the effort, slowly and painfully to subdue the tangled forests and savage warriors of Florida, with no other promise of reward than the possession of unredeemed soil. Not suited to the task, she utterly wasted alike the resources of the home government applicable to colonization, and those of the established colonies. France had failed because of dissensions at home, inferior powers of organization, the want of the proper colonizing temper, and the severity of the climate in that portion of the New World which she had seized upon as the seat of her colonies. English colonization thus far had been unproductive because there was a want of understanding of the difficulties, because of the selection of colonists who lacked experience in agriculture, because poor harbors were generally chosen, because there was difficulty in keeping up communications with the mother-land, because the resident leaders lacked courage and had not the staying qualities which were in after years the salvation of the Plymouth Pilgrims. But the effect of these early English efforts was important in giving the people needed training in navigation and colonization, and a knowledge of the country. Sidenote: European claims in America, 1600.