Unhappily disillusion followed.  Within two generations from the time of Columbus it became clear that America did not yield bonanza to every adventurer.  Yet throughout the sixteenth century there survived the dream of riches to be quickly gained.  Wherever the European landed in America he looked first of all for mines, as Frobisher did on the unpromising shores of Labrador.  The precious metals proving illusive, his next recourse was to trade.  Hawkins sought his profit from slaves.  The French bought furs from the Indians at Tadoussac.  Gosnold brought back from Cape Cod a mixed cargo of sassafras and cedar.

But wealth from the mines and profits from a coasting trade were only a lure to the cupidity of Europe.  Real colonies, containing the germ of a nation, could not be based on such foundations.  Coligny saw this, and conceived of America as a new home for the French race.  Raleigh, the most versatile of the Elizabethans, lavished his wealth on the patriotic endeavour to make Virginia a strong and self-supporting community.  ’I shall yet live to see it an English nation,’ he wrote—­at the very moment when Champlain was first dreaming of the St Lawrence.  Coligny and Raleigh were both constructive statesmen.  The one was murdered before he could found such a colony as his thought presaged:  the other perished on the scaffold, though not before he had sowed the seed of an American empire.  For Raleigh was the first to teach that agriculture, not mines, is the true basis of a colony.  In itself his colony on Roanoke Island was a failure, but the idea of Roanoke was Raleigh’s greatest legacy to the English race.

With the dawn of the seventeenth century events came thick and fast.  It was a time when the maritime states of Western Europe were all keenly interested in America, without having any clear idea of the problem.  Raleigh, the one man who had a grasp of the situation, entered upon his tragic imprisonment in the same year that Champlain made his first voyage to the St Lawrence.  But while thought was confused and policy unsettled, action could no longer be postponed.  The one fact which England, France, and Holland could not neglect was that to the north of Florida no European colony existed on the American coast.  Urging each of these states to establish settlements in a tract so vast and untenanted was the double desire to possess and to prevent one’s neighbour from possessing.  On the other hand, caution raised doubts as to the balance of cost and gain.  The governments were ready to accept the glory and advantage, if private persons were prepared to take the risk.  Individual speculators, very conscious of the risk, demanded a monopoly of trade before agreeing to plant a colony.  But this caused new difficulty.  The moment a monopoly was granted, unlicensed traders raised an outcry and upbraided the government for injustice.