With the discovery of a sea-route both to the East and West Indies, the whole future of the Mercantile Marine was altered. Instead of carrying merchandise and pilgrims across Europe, there came the demand for great ocean-going vessels that could carry home large quantities of rich produce, that would make the European markets surprised when they beheld these goods. Thus the Portuguese and Spaniards, like the Venetians and Genoese, began to amass great wealth from their merchant ships. Noble caracks were built, more and more men embarked on a seafaring career, the art of navigation received much more careful study, and mercantile maritime supremacy passed to the Iberian peninsula. Thus the work of great shipbuilders and sea-carriers, discoverers, colonisers and traders had for a time passed into other hands. But success in one party always breeds jealousy in another: indeed, if you examine the causes of all the great wars in history, or look into the reasons for most private quarrels, you will find usually that they come under the heading either of commercial jealousy or religious intolerance. And when, as was the case in the sixteenth century, you have both these factors united, you have the maximum of intense feeling. The English seamen, perfectly naturally, began to be jealous and envious of the lectureships and instruction which were being given to these southern seamen. At Seville Charles V had founded a lectureship on navigation in the sixteenth century. In England Henry VIII founded three guilds, at Deptford-on-Thames, Kingston-on-Hull and Newcastle-on-Tyne, for the same purpose, and Edward VI selected Sebastian Cabot to be Grand Pilot of England. Henry VII encouraged his shipbuilders by giving them a bounty on the tonnage built, and in Henry VIII’s reign dockyards were established at Woolwich, Erith and Deptford, in addition to Portsmouth. Books on the sea arts began to be written in English, so that by the time the full force of the commercial and religious hatred of the Spanish and Portuguese was let loose, the English mercantile mariners were something more than mere coastal seamen. From their fishing they had gradually become cross-Channel carriers; from this they had risen to the ability to trade regularly with Spain, with an occasional voyage even to the Mediterranean; but now they were qualified by their ambition and their greater knowledge to go wherever the sea existed. And thus we get Drake going all the way round the world; the many voyages across the Atlantic to the West Indies; the fights with the Spanish treasure ships; the capture of the _Madre de Dios_ and _San Felipe_, thus discovering the long-kept secrets of the sea-route to India. From the captured caracks and galleons which had been built in the Iberian peninsula, the English shipwright was able to enlarge his ideas and to learn how to build real ocean-going craft bigger than most of the Elizabethan ships. The introduction of cannon had been an additional