But if political boundaries were little altered in Europe by the fighting of the Napoleonic wars, a very extensive change will be seen to have occurred during those years if we take the whole world-stage into our view. The Anglo-Saxon had been extending his possessions and his domination almost immeasurably. Since Great Britain was the strongest sea-power, and at war, at one time or other of the Napoleonic period, with France, Spain, and Holland--that is to say, with all the colonising nations, except Portugal--it was only to be expected that she should have captured nearly all the colonial possessions of each. And this actually is what had occurred. Moreover, on her own account she had established new settlements in places which seemed favourable for trade. The boundaries of Canada and most of what now is British in the North of America had been settled by the wars with the French in that region, and by the War of American Independence, before the French Revolution and all that followed it. One of its consequences was indeed a renewed and lamentable outbreak of war, in 1812, between the now independent States and the mother country. The integrity of Canada was threatened by it at one moment, but in the end the boundaries were left as before. {180} New Zealand, as we have seen, had been declared a British possession in 1787. British colonists had established themselves in New South Wales in the year following. Honduras had become British some years earlier. And Britain had her African West Coast Settlement at Sierra Leone. Then in 1795 Ceylon was ceded to her by the Dutch, and from that time onward until the end of the wars almost every year added to her colonies. Already she had many of the West Indian islands. Now she acquired Trinidad, a little later St. Lucia, and in the same year Tasmania and British Guiana. In 1800 she gained Malta. In 1806 the Cape of Good Hope and the Seychelles, which had been held by the Dutch, were given up to her. A year later she took the island of Heligoland. Mauritius passed to her by capitulation in 1810; and at the conclusion of the war she was confirmed by the King of the Netherlands in her unquestioned domination in South Africa. All the while, moreover, she was consolidating and extending her hold on India. Many of these settlements and acquisitions were no more than the formation of so many nuclei or starting centres whence the Anglo-Saxon was swiftly to extend his power over vast regions--in Australia most notably. But despite all this nearly world-wide expansion of what we have now to begin to call the old Anglo-Saxon stock, an addition which was to prove of scarcely, if at all, less importance in the story was made to the territories of the younger branch of that stock when the United States, in 1803, purchased Louisiana.