ants of those Iberian conquistadores who first set foot on the neck of a wondering continent.

The tale of the early Iberian navigators is clear enough, from the brave band of Portuguese voyagers, fathered by Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, to Columbus and his comrades. It was the Portuguese who first drove boldly into the Western Ocean. Their seniority as discoverers is not to be questioned. It was some three quarters of a century before Columbus set sail for the West when their two seamen, Bartholomeu Perestrello and Joan Gonçalves Zarco, discovered the islands of Porto Santo and Madeira respectively in 1419 and 1420: But after this the more famous of the Portuguese navigators, such as Nuño Tristão, Vasco da Gama, and Pedro Alvarez Cabral (although this last was at a later period responsible for the discovery of Brazil), forsook the western course for the southern, and, fringing the African coast, turned to the east, and sought India and China by way of the Cape of Good Hope.

The significance of the voyages of Columbus and of the other navigators in the service of the neighboring kingdom of Spain is perhaps even more generally understood. The manner in which one of these great events followed on the heels of another has been made abundantly clear. But what of the English? How did these Northern islanders come to put their spoke into these new wheels of land and water from which their home was so remotely situated? What was it that first set on the track of the tropical seas the bearers of such charmed names as Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh, Cavendish, and Dampier? For a sufficiently comprehensive answer to all this it is necessary to hark back to a precolonial age, almost three centuries before the discovery of Madeira.

It was as early as 1147 that a number of English crusaders, on their way to the Holy Land, halted on the banks of the Tagus, and assisted the Portuguese to capture the city of Lisbon from the Moors. The men of the

oak and the men of the olive found that, however much they might differ in complexion, they had at least much sympathy in common. Thus was begun the alliance between England and Portugal.

The relations between the two countries rapidly became consolidated. The following year, 1148, we find an Englishman, Gilbert of Hastings, as Bishop of Lisbon. In 1217 another fillip was given to this international friendship by the arrival of a second, and more formidable, army of English crusaders, by whose assistance a Moorish army of fifty-five thousand men was completely defeated.

Nearly twenty years after the falling through of a proposed matrimonial alliance between the English and Portuguese royal houses, the earls of Lancaster and Arundel arrived in Portugal in 1344, charged with an important mission of friendship, and three years after this some further matrimonial schemes were drawn up, but these, too, proved abortive. These delicate failures seemed to have no ill effect on the relations between the two countries. Commercial bonds had now entered into the field to strengthen the military friendship. Through the instrumentality of a young Portuguese wine merchant, sent on a mission to London, many special agreements and clauses were arrived at between the English and Portuguese merchants. As a result, the red wines of the Douro Mountains and the Collares and Algarve slopes began a northward journey in ships, which they have continued practically without intermission from that day to this, while the first consignments of an equally lengthy and unbroken procession of English clothes began to come rolling southwards across the Bay of Biscay.

It is certainly curious that in those days of small and cranky ships we should have established our most intimate relations with a people dwelling just the wrong side of the dreaded Bay of Biscay! The bay whose entrance

is guarded by the jagged and equally menacing rocks of Ushant! But so it was. At the beginning of the fourteenth century English merchants were already familiar with Portuguese soil, while in 1381 two thousand fresh English men-at-arms set sail for the Tagus. Four years later these were followed by five hundred English archers, who fought side by side with the Portuguese among the vines and olives, and whose long-bows twanged to some purpose on the field of Aljubarrota, where the Castilian knights went down before them.

In 1386, the following year, the treaty of Windsor confirmed the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, and this friendship-no new thing even at the time of the compact-has lasted, practically unbroken, from that day to this. Surely this must constitute the oldest-standing known treaty in the history of the world!

The following year John of Gaunt triumphantly entered Portugal at the head of an English army of two thousand lances and three thousand archers, and on the second of February, 1387, his daughter Philippa, by his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, was married to King John of the then solid realm of Portugal.

Those who have taken the trouble to wonder what these affairs of crusaders, cloth, and port wine have to do with the English in South America will now begin to obtain some inkling. For one of the issue of this marriage was Prince Henry the Navigator, the first and greatest patron of deep-sea voyagers, who devoted himself heart and soul to the science of discovery. It was he who called astronomers and mathematicians to his aid, and who, zealously studying the problems of the ocean in his austere Sagre Castle on the southern Portuguese coast by Cape St. Vincent-the nearest point in all Europe to tropical America!-directed the voyages of those famous mariners who sailed into the unknown.

Thus the friend and patron of the Portuguese sea cap

tains the leading navigators of their day-was of English blood on his mother's side. It was under his auspices that central and southern Africa, India, and Brazil were discovered, and that Lisbon became the western gate of Europe, while decaying Venice bewailed the loss of her monopoly of the overland trade route to India.

From the modern point of view it can scarcely fail to militate against Prince Henry's repute that he should have been the founder of the Negro slave-trade. But, according to the morality of the fifteenth century, the procedure was not only excusable; it was sound policy. For centuries the Portuguese had become accustomed to the enslaving of prisoners in the hands of the Moors, and they themselves-in common with all the European nations of the Mediterranean coast line-had retaliated in similar fashion, until that degraded condition had grown to be regarded as a part of ordinary life. The war-worn and depopulated lands of Southern Portugal were sorely in need of tillers. It must be the business of his captains, the Navigator decided, to supply this need. A point of interest in connection with this is that it was owing to their intimate association with the Portuguese, whose example they copied, that the English first approached the coasts of Spanish America as carriers of those slaves who were destined to labor in the mines and plantations of the conquistadores.

The noises of these great discoveries sounded but dully in the ears of most of the Northern Europeans, who had small means of grasping fully what was afoot. But the case was very different with those English who, encouraged by the crown and welcomed by the inhabitants, found themselves in Portugal at that period. These saw with their own eyes the return of the deeply laden galleons, as their painted bows breasted the rapid tide of the broad Tagus. They watched the processions bearing treasure, spices, strange woods, and stranger aborig

inal human beings from the landing place at Belem to the center of Lisbon.

They heard, moreover, with their own ears the barking of the cannon and the booming of the church bells that saluted the return of a rich armada from the Indies or Brazil. Many of them made overtures to the returned mariners, and, over deep cups of Lisbon wine, listened eagerly to the tales of the glittering South-tales of what the sailors had actually seen, as well as those vaporings of their vivid imaginings concerning what lay behind the mere fringe of the New World that they had so far explored.

When these tales floated northwards from the blue skies to the gray, they were answered by a stir in the blood of the Englishmen, more especially in the West, the center of the chief intercourse with Portugal, where the bales of cloth slid down into the holds and the barrels of wine rumbled out on to the quays. We thus at length arrive in England, together with these amazing reports and rumors! Very soon the echoes of these began to be heard in Plymouth, where William Hawkins, a fine old sailor of King Henry the Eighth's, was preparing to unfurl his sails for the first equatorial voyage ever made by an Englishman with an English crew.

But before we get into the stride of this-or into the wash of Hawkins' wake, whichever you prefer-let us dispose of three remaining preliminary matters and thus clear the decks for consecutive action.

The first of these concerns the story of Robert Machin, almost certainly the first Englishman, mythical or physical, to sail the Western Ocean. The legend runs that in the first half of the fourteenth century there lived in the southwest of England a man, Robert Machin, of a gentle but impoverished family. In an ill-starred moment he became enamored of a lady, Anna d'Arset, of a rank superior to his own. In addition to her noble birth, Anna d'Arset possessed rare beauty, large fortune, and stern