With this account of the Great Queen and her captains and their struggle to master a great prize—the Nein World—ice commence a series of articles specially prepared for AMERICAN HERITAGE by A. L. Rowse, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and author of many distinguished books, among them The England of Elizabeth. The series is based on Dr. Rowse’s recent George Macaulay Trerelyan Lectures, given at Cambridge University and named for the dean of British historians. The second article, on Virginia, will appear in June.

The discovery of the New World, it has been said, is much the greatest event in the history of the Old. Certainly as that discovery went further and gathered momentum it marked a vast difference, after all, between the modern world and the Middle Ages—which, in contemplation, have a certain static, enclosed quality in contrast with the ceaseless dynamism, the expansiveness characteristic of our world. In this connotation—it is the heart of the subject—the discovery of America ultimately made the fortune of Great Britain and transformed its situation in the world. In Trevelyan’s words, here was a very taut, efficient little society within an island lying athwart the main seaways from America to northwestern Europe, a situation from which the country profited more and more. As America prospered and became more important, so did England.

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