The predominance of Portugal in the East had been finally broken. French, Dutch, and English all had sailed round the Cape and formed settlements in India and the Malay Archipelago, disputing with Spain and Portugal the trade of the East. In the West, in the New World, Spain for the most part was content to develop, in such peace as the English seamen would grant her, her empire in Mexico and South America. The occupation of Bermuda and of Barbadoes by the English was accomplished without as much opposition from Spain as we should expect to find, and Sir Walter Raleigh's settlement of Virginia, named after the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, was achieved without {82} fighting except against the native Red Indians, was from this expedition that Sir Walter has the credit of introducing into England potatoes and tobacco. Even before the beginning of the century we have seen the settlement of England's first Colony, Newfoundland, and it was in the first years of the seventeenth century that a trading port was established on the St. Lawrence river, soon to grow into the city of Quebec. Spaniards had settled along the coast of what now is Florida, England had planted the colony which commemorates the Virgin Queen; and southward of Virginia lies a state still named after Louis, King of France--Louisiana. At that time it formed but a small part of a far larger territory so-called and claimed as a French possession. England and France, however, did not come to blows in this part of the newly found great continent, but they did fall to fighting over their settlements on the shore of the St. Lawrence. In the meantime settlers from England had formed a colony in what was called New England, between the St. Lawrence in the north and Virginia southward. Among these were the colonists who received the name of the Pilgrim Fathers--pilgrims flying from England for their religion's sake, to become the fathers of an important part of the great American nation. [Sidenote: Religious differences] We may pay a little further attention now to the reasons that induced them to go this pilgrimage. Their principal motive was to escape persecution on account of their religion. That desire led to several pilgrimages and movements of people of the same kind in course of the story. It was a similar motive, for instance, which made many of the Huguenots come to England and other foreign lands. Some went to Canada, where they encountered, as we have said, the English on the St. Lawrence. To understand the violent intolerance of any differences of religious belief {83} and practice which produced these movements, we have to understand the way in which the men of that date viewed those differences.