charter of adventure: the first protecting himself against liability
for the cost, the second stipulating for a share of the profits. It is
to the robust insight of Henry VIII. into the conditions of our
national existence that the beginnings of the English Navy are to be
ascribed, and it was under this stubborn prince that English trade
began to depend upon English bottoms. But the real explanation of
Anglo-Saxon backwardness lies somewhat deeper. Foreign adventure and
the planting of settlements must proceed, if they are to be
successful, from an exuberant State; neither in resources, nor in
population, nor, perhaps it must be added, in the spirit of adventure,
was the England of King Henry VII. sufficiently equipped. Hence it
happened that foreign vessels sailed up the Thames, or anchored by the
quays of Bideford in the service of English trade, at a time when the
spirit of Prince Henry the Navigator had breathed into the Portuguese
service, when Diaz was discovering the Cape, and the tiny vessels of
Da Gama were adventuring the immense voyage to Cathay.

It is now clearly established that the earliest adventurers in America
were men of Norse stock. More than a thousand years ago Greenland was
explored by Vikings from Iceland, and a hundred years later Leif
Ericsson discovered a land--Markland, the land of woods--which is
plausibly identified with Newfoundland. Still keeping a southern
course, the adventurer came to a country where grew vines, and where
the climate was strangely mild; it is likely enough that this landfall
was in Massachusetts or Virginia. The name Vinland was given to the
newly-discovered country. The later voyages of Thorwald Ericsson, of
Thorlstein Ericsson--both brothers of Leif--and of Thorfinn Karlsefne,
are recounted in the Sagas. The story of these early colonists or
"builders," as they called themselves, is weakened by an infusion of
fable, such as the tale of the fast-running one-legged people; but