They described it as a land flowing with milk and honey. "The second of July, we found shole water, wher we smelt so sweet and so strong a smel, as if we had been in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with all kinde of odoriferous flowers.... We found the people most gentle, loving, and faithfull, voide of all guile and treason, and such as live after the maner of the golden age."[29] Amidas and Barlow thus brought back to their patron Raleigh a story full of hope and wondrous possibilities. They had found a land worthy of colonisation and well suited to the English; and this land of promise and of future greatness was christened by the Virgin Queen--Virginia. The days of exploration and discovery by sea in the West had practically come to an end; the great epoch of colonisation was about to begin. When Elizabeth came to the throne, English ships had seldom sailed further than Iceland in the north and the Levant in the south-east, where a lucrative trade had sprung up as early as 1511. But by the end of the sixteenth century, owing to the encouragement of the Tudor sovereigns, the religious persecutions, and the "peculiar" policy of Elizabeth, the English flag had been proudly borne into all the seas of the world. The globe had been circumnavigated by Drake and Cavendish; trade through Archangel had been established with Russia; spices had been brought from the Indies by the East India Company; "the commodious and gainful voyage to Brazil"[30] was regularly undertaken by the merchants of Southampton; while a vast fishing trade had steadily grown up off the coasts of Newfoundland. Above all the "navigations, voyages, traffiques, and discoveries of the English nation" had laid the foundation for greater things. Raleigh's dreams were to be accomplished, though not by himself. Like so many others he was attracted by gold; his thoughts lay too readily in the discovery of an El Dorado in South America, of which the Elizabethan poet wrote:-- "Guiana whose rich feet are mines of gold." The grain of mustard seed had, however, been planted; the idea had been put forth to the world; a new nation was to rise in the Western hemisphere; and, although no definite results were to be seen by the eyes of the Elizabethans, yet their wild adventures, their acts of knight-errantry, their perils and their sufferings had paved the way for the industrious, sober, steady, and more prudent enterprises of Stuart Cavaliers and of Puritan Pilgrims. FOOTNOTES: [1] _Hakluyt's Voyages_ (ed. 1904), vii. p. 154. [2] _Hakluyt's Voyages_, vii. p. 143. [3] _Bacon's Works_ (ed. 1870), vi. 196. [4] _Hakluyt's Voyages_ (ed. 1904), vii. p. 153. [5] Barrett, _History and Antiquities of Bristol_ (1789), p. 172. [6] _Hakluyt's Voyages_ (ed. 1904), vii. p. 155. [7] It is thought by some that Cabot sailed to Greenland. Cf. Biggar, _Voyages of the Cabots and of the Corte Reals_ (Paris, 1903). [8] _Hakluyt's Voyages_, vii. p. 150. [9] _Ibid._, viii. p. 37.