More effective were the pirate adventurers who preyed upon the
commerce between Spain and her possessions in the Netherlands as
it passed through the Narrow Seas, running the gauntlet of
English, French, and Dutch. More effective still were the attempts
to find new routes to the East, not barred by the Spanish
dominions, by a north-east or a north-west passage; for some of
the earlier of these adventures led to fruitful unintended
consequences, as when the Englishman Chancellor, seeking for a
north-east passage, found the route to Archangel and opened up a
trade with Russia, or as when the Frenchman Cartier, seeking for a
north-west passage, hit upon the great estuary of the St.
Lawrence, and marked out a claim for France to the possession of
the area which it drained. Most effective of all were the
smuggling and piratical raids into the reserved waters of West
Africa and the West Indies, and later into the innermost
penetralia of the Pacific Ocean, which were undertaken with
rapidly increasing boldness by the navigators of all three
nations, but above all by the English. Drake is the supreme
exponent of these methods; and his career illustrates in the
clearest fashion the steady diminution of Spanish prestige under
these attacks, and the growing boldness and maritime skill of its
attackers.

From the time of Drake's voyage round the world (1577) and its
insulting defiance of the Spanish power on the west coast of South
America, it became plain that the maintenance of Spanish monopoly
could not last much longer. It came to its end, finally and
unmistakably, in the defeat of the Grand Armada. That supreme
victory threw the ocean roads of trade open, not to the English
only, but to the sailors of all nations. In its first great