cotton, potash, naval stores, and many other necessary commodities.
Even of the fish which formed a staple food on the English workman's
table, two-thirds of the supply was purchased from the Dutch.
Moreover, wherever English traders sought to take the products of
English industry, mostly woolen goods, they were met by
handicaps--tariffs, Sound dues, monopolies, exclusions, retaliations,
and even persecutions.

So England was eager to expand under her own flag. With the fresh
courage and buoyancy of youth she fitted out ships and sent forth
expeditions. And while she shared with the rest of the Europeans the
vision of India and the Orient, her "gentlemen adventurers" were not
long in seeing the possibilities that lay concealed beyond the
inviting harbors, the navigable rivers, and the forest-covered valleys
of North America. With a willing heart they believed their quaint
chronicler, Richard Hakluyt, when he declared that America could bring
"_as great a profit to the Realme of England as the Indes to the King
of Spain_," that "_golde, silver, copper, leade and perales in
aboundaunce_" had been found there: also "_precious stones, as
turquoises and emauraldes; spices and drugges; silke worms fairer than
ours in Europe; white and red cotton; infinite multitude of all kind
of fowles; excellent vines in many places for wines; the soyle apte to
beare olyves for oyle; all kinds of fruites; all kindes of odoriferous
trees and date trees, cypresses, and cedars; and in New-founde-lande
aboundaunce of pines and firr trees to make mastes and deale boards,
pitch, tar, rosen; hempe for cables and cordage; and upp within the
Graunde Baye excedinge quantitie of all kinde of precious furres_."
Such a catalogue of resources led him to conclude that "_all the
commodities of our olde decayed and daungerous trades in all Europe,
Africa and Asia haunted by us, may in short space and for little or