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garded the newly discovered sea-route round the Cape of Good Hope as in some sort the exclusive possession of the Portuguese. They did not recognise that the trade of Asia was also Portugal's peculiar property, but they seem to have held that if it were to be tapped by them some new means of getting at it must be devised. For a pe- riod, therefore, while all the maritime European peoples were fired to emulate the golden successes reaped by Spain and Portugal, the former tried to enlarge her field of operations by beating out a road to the East round Cape Horn and across the Pacific, while the British and the Dutch struggled again and again to discover a North- west Passage, urged thereto by the common hunger for the riches of the Indies.

"The doctrine that the ocean is the common property of the human race," writes Mr. Albert Gray," was as- serted first by Elizabeth and her bold seamen, and after- wards defended on legal principles by Grotius in his Mare Liberum. Owing to the disputes with the Dutch as to the North Sca fisheries, the doctrines of Elizabeth were abandoned by James, whose legal champion, Selden, re- plied to Grotius by his treatise, Mare Clausum. It is hardly necessary to add that time has been on the side of Grotius."

The defeat of the great Armada in 1588, however, was the real death-blow dealt to the pretensions, so long ad- vanced by Spain and Portugal, which claimed that the sea was the exclusive property of certain nations, and im- mediately after that event the invasion of the East by the white races began in earnest.