The Beginnings of European Exploration towards the New World
In mid-August , 1612 the western shores of Hudson Bay lay as they had for unnumbered eons, that is level and low, unmarked by headland as well as being unrelieved by rearward hills. The rocky beaches from their ragged crests shelved slowly out beneath the shoal waters, running in their brief season’s sunlight or surging sullenly beneath the quick fogs of summer. No high land was to be seen , and no deep water found. Save for the cry of gulls along the breaker’s wash or dash of caribou across the landless plains, the shores were still with the stillness of the sub-Arctic, and silent as their prehistory is silent. But in mid-August of 1612 that pre-history was ending. To seaward stood up the white sails of two ships bearing down on the blue line of shore.
The two ships were English and came from a world astir with things old and new. In England itself learned King James was betrothing his daugter Elizabeth to Elector Palatine and busily seeking a bride for Henry , Prince of Wales. One being sought was in the Louvre, where the fair , fat widow of Henri IV, Marie de Medici, tuled unhappily as the regent in a swirl of great intrigue, with neither the finesse nor the success of her “house”. One of her subjects , Samuel de Champlain, sickened for the “woods” and waters of the broad St. Lawence as he stuggled at court , to save the four year old colony of New France. Down the coast of North America from the St Lawrence, at Jamestown, the haggard survivors of the “Starving Time” groaned under the most harsh rule of Govenor Dale. Further still , beneath the tropics and southern lattitudes , the life of century old colonies of Spain established and langrous patterns, fed by the vast rivers of silver precious metals from Potosi and Zacatecas. Across the long roll of the Pacific, in the “Further Indies” , Portuguese factors in indolent unease watched Englishmen and Hollanders press in jealous rivalries in the spiceries which after all had drawn Da Gama around the Cape of Good Hope and Columbus to the Antilles.
