A new epoch in colonial history was reached when England adopted a warlike policy to obtain mastery in the West. During the Protectorate, England and Holland were for the first time engaged in desperate warfare. The numerous common interests that existed in the two countries, such as religion and republicanism, were of no avail to keep the peace. The war that brought such honour to Admiral Blake was not a war against a "natural enemy," but rather a contest between trade rivals using the same methods and having the same opinions. The spirit which animated Cromwell in naval affairs was not Puritanic; it was rather that of the Elizabethan epoch. The old naval enthusiasm which had so long slept in the stagnant days of the first Stuarts had now awakened with renewed vigour, as if its long years of drowsiness had afforded true refreshment. The celebrated Navigation Act, "the legislative monument of the Commonwealth,"[166] was the outward and visible sign of this change in 1651. "It was the first manifestation of the newly awakened consciousness of the community, the act which laid the foundation of the English commercial empire.... It consummated the work which had been commenced by Drake, discussed and expounded by Raleigh, continued by Roe, Smith, Winthrop, and Calvert."[167] The Dutch, "the Phoenicians of the modern world, the waggoners of all seas,"[168] were severely injured by the new law, for goods were no longer to be imported into England save in English vessels or those vessels belonging to the country of which the goods were the natural product or manufacture. This important protective enactment was reissued in the reign of Charles II., and, as on the former occasion, it was one of the main causes of embroiling England and Holland. For the proper enforcement of the Navigation Act, the English colonies in the West required a geographical compactness which in the central period of the seventeenth century they did not possess. A formidable foreign rival held a valuable commercial settlement between the northern and southern colonies, for the Dutch possessed in New Amsterdam the very best harbour along the coast. By the reign of Charles II. the hatred of the Dutch had become a passion amongst Englishmen, and it had not only been fostered by the Cromwellian war, but by trade-jealousy both in the East and in the West. In America the rising colonies of New England, in particular, looked with greedy eyes upon the splendid waterway of the River Hudson, which was the finest route for Indian trade. They had, too, suffered at the hands of their rivals; both the settlements in Connecticut and Long Island had for many years engaged in innumerable land disputes with the Dutch, nor did the people of New Haven forget that some of their brethren had been driven out of New Sweden, which the Dutch now held.