Preoccupied with the task of establishing themselves in India and the Far East, the Portuguese had for thirty years after the discovery of Brazil done almost nothing by way of reducing this district into possession. A few ships frequented the coast for the purpose of trading with the natives, and setting ashore criminals to take their chance of being adopted or eaten by them. The success of Madeira as a sugar-growing island suggested the extension of this form of enterprise in Brazil, to which attention had been drawn by a recent discovery of gold; and the soil, as in Madeira, was granted out in hereditary captaincies, each grantee receiving exclusive rights over 50 leagues of sea-board. Martim Affonso de Sousa, afterwards viceroy in India, obtained the first of the fiefs, and took possession in 1531. Eleven others followed, and in 1549 the direction of the whole colony was vested in a Governor-general, whose seat was fixed at Bahia. The Portuguese settlements were in North and Middle Brazil, and by choosing an insular site far to the south Durand expected to escape disturbance. His first care was to build a fort and mount his guns. He announced his arrival to the Church of Geneva, by whom two pastors were duly ordained and sent out with the next batch of emigrants. Durand began by sharing with these ministers the conduct of divine worship; and specimens of his extemporaneous prayers, in the course of which he gave thanks to God for mercifully visiting the mainland with a depopulating pestilence, whereby the enemies of the elect were destroyed, and the Lord’s path made straight, have come down to us. He devoted to theological studies the abundant leisure left him by his administration. Convinced by the arguments of Cyprian and Clement, he ordered that water should be mingled with the sacramental wine, directed salt and oil to be poured into the baptismal font, and forbade the second marriage of a pastor, fortifying himself in the position he thus assumed by argumentative appeals to Holy Scripture. When he at last publicly announced his adherence to the doctrine of transubstantiation, a breach between him and his Calvinist flock was inevitable. Only one among them, a voluble doctor of the Sorbonne whom he associated with himself in the office of the pulpit, supported his pretensions. When the scandalised colonists absented themselves from public worship, he proceeded to severe disciplinary measures; and in the end they quitted the island, threw themselves on the kindness of the savages of the mainland, and made their way to trading vessels in which they sailed for Europe. Thus the Indonaut colony, the first Protestant community in the New World, ended in a ludicrous failure.
As the struggle between the Catholics and Protestants of France became more and more desperate, the idea of founding a Protestant colony in America was revived: and it was now resolved to use for this purpose the immense tract which Verrazzano’s voyage was understood to have acquired for the French Crown. Coligny, with the assent of Charles IX, equipped two vessels which he despatched on February 18, 1562, under the command of Jean Ribault, to found the first colony attempted in North America since the return of Roberval in 1540. After exploring the coast, Ribault chose Port Royal Sound in the present State of South Carolina, as the most promising site for a colony; began the construction of a fort, to which he gave the name of Charles-fort, for the protection of those whom he intended to leave behind; and returned to Europe. Their supplies being exhausted, the colonising party fell into dissensions, mutinied against the rigorous discipline enforced by their captain, and assassinated him. No reinforcements arriving from Europe, they built a pinnace, intending to return, put to sea, suffered indescribable hardships, and put back again, more dead than alive, towards the American shore. They were picked up by a homeward-bound English barque, one of whose crew had been with Ribault on the outward voyage. Some were landed in France; while those who were not too exhausted to continue the voyage were taken on to England, where the liveliest interest was by this time felt in the question of North American colonisation. How this revived interest arose, may now be briefly explained.
The history of English enterprise in connexion with the New World goes back in substance to the period of the Discovery itself. Even before this, Bristol seamen had sought for the mythical St Brandan’s in the expanses of the Atlantic; possibly the ancient connexion of that port with Iceland had brought the Norse sagas to their ears, and the quest pursued by them was in substance the search for “Vineland” or New England. John Cabot, having obtained on March 5, 1496, the patent referred to on an earlier page, evidently sailed in quest of the “New Land” or “New Island” of the Northmen, and between that date and August, 1497, when he returned to Bristol, reached and investigated the shores of Labrador and Newfoundland which represent the coast called by the Northmen “Hellu-Land” (stony land). A voyage was attempted by him to the New Land in 1498, but not accomplished, and thenceforward English interest in the continent of America relaxed, although the Newfoundland waters were increasingly frequented by fishermen of other nations; so that the voyage of 1496-7 was practically forgotten, when, nearly sixty years afterwards, Englishmen began once more to turn their attention to America. From the untroubled early years of Henry VIII, when America, as yet wholly savage, and its discovery received conspicuous notice in a serious philosophical drama, to the marriage of Philip and Mary, when it stood forth in the eyes of Europe as the source of more wealth than the world had ever seen, the New World is scarcely mentioned in English literature, though the continental press teemed with accounts of it and allusions to it. But an old dramatist’s picture of the new continent, as it presented itself to English eyes about 1515, becomes all the more striking through its isolation. The play, or “interlude,” is entitled The Four Elements; the leading personage, named Experience, discourses at some length on the “Great Ocean”—”so great that never man could tell it, since the world began, till now these twenty year”—and the new continent lately found beyond it; a continent “so large of room” as to be “much longer than all Christendom,” for its coast has been traced above 5000 miles. The inhabitants, from the south, where they “go naked alway,” to the north, where they are clad in the skins of beasts, are everywhere savages, living in woods and caves, and knowing nothing of God and the devil, of heaven and hell, but worshipping the sun for his great light. The fisheries, the timber, and the copper of America are named as its chief sources of wealth; and the speaker laments, in stanzas perfectly rhythmical, though the accent is somewhat forced, that England should have missed the opportunity of discovering and colonising this vast country:
O what a [great] thing had been then, If that they that be Englishmen
Might have been the first of all That there should have taken possession, And made first building and habitation,
A memory perpetual!
And also what an honourable thing, Both to the realm, and to the king, To have had his dominion extending
There into so far a ground, Which the noble king of late memory, The most wise prince the seventh Harry,
[Had] caused first for to be found!
Nor is this all that England has lost. Hers would have been the privilege of introducing civilisation and preaching the Gospel in this Dark Continent—of leading its brute-like tribes “to know of men the manner, and also to know God their Maker.” This task, it is evidently felt, would more fittingly have fallen to the lot of England than of Castile and Portugal.
The American coast was doubtless occasionally sighted from English vessels. But it was only gazed on as a curious spectacle. The Northern shore, the only part accessible to English adventurers without encroachment on the transatlantic possessions of a friendly power, yielded little or nothing to commerce which could not be obtained with less trouble in Europe itself. During these sixty years, which saw no break in the friendly relations between England