settlements up and down the land from Kansas to Chili—­yes, and did more than that.  They opened the first churches, set up the first presses, printed the first books, wrote the first histories, drew the first accurate maps.  They established schools among the Indians, sent missionaries to them, translated the Bible into twelve Indian dialects, made thousands of converts, and established an Indian policy as humane and enlightened—­once Spanish supremacy was recognized—­as any in the world.  The savages with whom Spain had to contend were the deadliest, the most cruel, that Europeans ever encountered—­no more resembling the warriors of King Philip and the Powhatan than a house-cat resembles a panther.  They conquered them without extermination, and converted them to Christianity!  An amazing feat, and one which disposes for all time of that old, outworn legend that the Spain of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was a moribund and degenerate nation.

But a change was at hand.  The world moved, and Spain, chained to an outworn superstition, did not move with it.  The treasure she drew from Mexico and Peru she poured out to prop the tottering pillars of church despotism; and the end came when, in 1588, Elizabeth’s doughty captains wiped out the “invincible” armada, and dethroned Spain for all time from her position as mistress of the seas.

It was then that English eyes turned toward the New World and that projects of colonization were set afoot in earnest; and the one great dominant hero of that early movement was Sir Walter Raleigh.  He had accompanied his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, on a voyage to the New World ten years earlier, and after Gilbert’s tragic death, took over the patent for land in America which Gilbert held.  It is worth noting that this patent provided in the plainest terms that such colonies as might be planted in America should be self-governing in the fullest sense—­a provision also included in the patent granted to the company which afterwards succeeded in gaining and maintaining a foothold on the James.

Raleigh spent nearly a million dollars in endeavoring to establish a colony on Roanoke Island—­a colony which absolutely disappeared, and whose fate was never certainly discovered; and it was not until the Virgin Queen, after whom all that portion of the country had been named, was dead, and Raleigh himself, shorn of his estates, was a prisoner in the Tower under charge of treason, that a new charter was given to an association of influential men known as the Virginia Company, which was destined to have permanent results.  On New Year’s Day, 1607, an expedition of three ships, carrying, besides their crews, one hundred and five colonists, started on the voyage across the ocean, under command of Captain Christopher Newport.  Among Newport’s company was a scarred and weather-beaten soldier, who was soon to assume control of events through sheer fitness for the task, and who bore that commonest of all English names, John Smith.