'' So far this law has never
failed to work, but the modern airplane may have changed it.
In the eighteenth century, however, there were no flying machines
and it was the British navy which gained for England
her vast American and Indian and African colonies.
The series of naval wars between England and Holland in
the seventeenth century does not interest us here. It ended as
all such encounters between hopelessly ill-matched powers will
end. But the warfare between England and France (her other
rival) is of greater importance to us, for while the superior
British fleet in the end defeated the French navy, a great deal
of the preliminary fighting was done on our own American
continent. In this vast country, both France and England
claimed everything which had been discovered and a lot more
which the eye of no white man had ever seen. In 1497 Cabot
had landed in the northern part of America and twenty-seven
years later, Giovanni Verrazano had visited these coasts. Cabot
had flown the English flag. Verrazano had sailed under the
French flag. Hence both England and France proclaimed
themselves the owners of the entire continent.
During the seventeenth century, some ten small English
colonies had been founded between Maine and the Carolinas.
They were usually a haven of refuge for some particular sect
of English dissenters, such as the Puritans, who in the year
1620 went to New England, or the Quakers, who settled in
Pennsylvania in 1681.
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