Americas from one side of the present United States right round to the
other.

Such, in brief, was the position of maritime Europe when Henry found
himself menaced by the three Roman Catholic powers of Scotland, France,
and Spain. In 1533 he had divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon,
thereby defying the Pope and giving offence to Spain. He had again
defied the Pope by suppressing the monasteries and severing the Church
of England from the Roman discipline. The Pope had struck back with a
bull of excommunication designed to make Henry the common enemy of
Catholic Europe.

Henry had been steadily building ships for years. Now he redoubled his
activity. He blooded the fathers of his daughter's sea-dogs by smashing
up a pirate fleet and sinking a flotilla of Flemish privateers. The
mouth of the Scheldt, in 1539, was full of vessels ready to take a
hostile army into England. But such a fighting fleet prepared to meet
them that Henry's enemies forbore to strike.

In 1539, too, came the discovery of the art of tacking, by Fletcher of
Rye, Henry's shipwright friend, a discovery forever memorable in the
annals of seamanship. Never before had any kind of craft been sailed a
single foot against the wind. The primitive dugout on which the
prehistoric savage hoisted the first semblance of a sail, the ships of
Tarshish, the Roman transport in which St. Paul was wrecked, and the
Spanish caravels with which Columbus sailed to worlds unknown, were, in
principle of navigation, all the same. But now Fletcher ran out his
epoch-making vessel, with sails trimmed fore and aft, and dumbfounded
all the shipping in the Channel by beating his way to windward against a
good stiff breeze. This achievement marked the dawn of the modern