under the ban, and a price offered for the assassination of the Prince of Orange, the deputies in the assembly at the Hague, on the twenty-sixth of July, 1581, making few changes in their ancient laws, declared their independence by abjuring their king. "The prince," said they, in their manifesto, "is made for the subjects, without whom there would be no prince; and if, instead of protecting them, he seeks to take from them their old freedom and use them as slaves, he must be holden not a prince, but a tyrant, and may justly be deposed by the authority of the state." A rude structure of a commonwealth was the unpremeditated result of the revolution.

The republic of the United Netherlands was by its origin and its nature commercial. The device on an early Dutch coin was a ship laboring on the billows without oar or sails. The rendezvous of its martyrs had been the sea; the muster of its patriot emigrants had been on shipboard; and they had hunted their enemy, as the whale-ships pursue their game, in every corner of the ocean. The two leading members of the confederacy, from their situation, could seek subsistence only on the water. Holland is but a peninsula, intersected by navigable rivers; protruding itself into the sea; crowded with a dense population on a soil saved from the deep by embankments, and kept dry only with pumps driven by windmills. Its houses were rather in the water than on land.

And Zealand is composed of islands. Its inhabitants were nearly all fishermen; its villages were as nests of sea-fowl. In both provinces every house was by nature a nursery of sailors; the sport of children was among the breakers; their boyish pastimes in boats; and, if their first excursions were but voyages to some neighboring port, they soon braved the dangers of every sea. The states advanced to sudden opulence; before the insurrection, they could with difficulty keep their embankments in repair; and now they were able to support large fleets and armies. Their commerce gathered into their harbors the fruits of the wide world. Producing almost no grain of any kind, Holland had the best-supplied granary of Europe; without fields of flax, it swarmed with weavers of linen; destitute of flocks, it became the centre of all woollen manufactures; and provinces which had not a forest built more ships than all

Europe besides. They connected hemispheres. Their enterprising mariners displayed the flag of the republic from Southern Africa to the arctic circle. The ships of the Dutch, said Raleigh, outnumber those of England and ten other kingdoms. To the Italian cardinal the number seemed infinite. Amsterdam was the seat of the commerce of Europe. The sea not only bathed its walls, but flowed through its streets; and its merchantmen lay so crowded together that the beholder from the ramparts could not look through the thick forests of masts and yards. War for liberty became unexpectedly a well-spring of opulence; Holland plundered the commerce of Spain by its maritime force, and supplanted its rivals in the gainful traffic with the Indies. Lisbon and Antwerp were despoiled; Amsterdam, the depot of the merchandise of Europe and of the east, was become beyond dispute the first commercial city of the world; the Tyre of modern times; the Venice of the north; the queen of all the seas.

In 1581, the year after Portugal had been forcibly annexed to Spain and the Portuguese settlements in Asia were become for a season Spanish provinces, the epoch of the independence of the Netherlands, Thomas Buts, an Englishman who had five times crossed the Atlantic, offered to the states to conduct four ships-of-war to America. The adventure was declined by the government; but no obstacles were offered to private enterprise. Ten years afterward, William Usselinx, who had lived some years in Castile, Portugal, and the Azores, proposed a West India company; but the dangers of the undertaking were still too appalling.

In 1594 the port of Lisbon was closed by the king of Spain against the Low Countries. Their carrying trade in Indian goods was lost, unless their ships could penetrate to the seas of Asia. A company of merchants, believing that the coast of Siberia fell away to the southeast, hoped to shorten the voyage at least eight thousand miles by using a northeastern route. A double expedition was sent forth on discovery; two fly-boats vainly tried to pass through the Straits of Veigatz, while, in a large ship, William Barentsen, whom Grotius honored as the peer of Columbus, coasted Nova Zembla to the seventy-seventh degree, without finding a passage.

Netherlanders in the service of Portugal had visited India, Malacca, China, and even Japan. Of these, Cornelius Houtman, in April, 1595, sailed for India by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and before his return circumnavigated Java. In the same year, Jacob van Heemskerk, the great mariner and naval hero, aided by Barentsen, renewed the search on the northeast, but attempted in vain to pass to the south of Nova Zembla. The republic, disheartened by the repeated failure, refused to fit out another expedition; but the city of Amsterdam, in 1596, dispatched two ships under Heemskerk and Barentsen to look for the open sea, which, it had been said, was to be found to the north of all known land. Braver men never battled with arctic dangers; they discovered the jagged cliffs of Spitzbergen, and came within ten degrees of the pole. Then Barentsen sought to go around Nova Zembla, and, when his ship was hopelessly enveloped by ice, had the courage to encamp his crew on the desolate northern shore of the island, and cheer them during a winter rendered horrible by famine, cold, and the fierce attacks of huge white bears, whom hunger had maddened. When spring came, the gallant company, traversing more than sixteen hundred miles in two open boats, were tossed for three months by storms and among icebergs, before they could reach the shelter of the White sea. Barentsen sunk under his trials, but was engaged in poring over a seachart as he died. The expeditions of the Dutch were without a parallel for daring.

It was not till 1597 that voyages were undertaken from Holland to America. In that year, Bikker of Amsterdam and Leyen of Enkhuisen each formed a company to traffic with the West Indies. The commerce was continued with success; but Asia had greater attractions. In 1598 two-andtwenty ships sailed from Dutch harbors for the Indian seas, in part by the Cape of Good Hope, in part through the Straits of Magellan. When, in 1600, after years of discussion, a plan for a West India company was reduced to writing, and communicated to the states-general, it was not adopted, though its principle was approved.

But the zeal of merchants and of statesmen was concentred on the east, where jealousy of the Portuguese inclined the

native princes and peoples to welcome the Dutch as allies and protectors. In March, 1602, by the prevailing influence of Olden Barneveldt, the advocate of Holland, the Dutch East India company was chartered, with the exclusive right to commerce beyond the Cape of Good Hope on the one side, and beyond the Straits of Magellan on the other. The states, unwilling to involve themselves in the chances of war, granted all powers requisite for conquests, colonization, and government. In the age of feudalism, privileged bodies formed the balance of the commercial and manufacturing interests against the aristocracy of the sword, and suited the genius of the republic. The Dutch East India company is the first in the series of great European trading corporations, and became the model for those of France and England.

As years rolled away, the progress of English commerce in the west awakened the attention of the Netherlands. England and Holland had been allies in the contest against Spain; had both spread their sails on the Indian seas; had both become competitors for possessions in America. In the same year in which Smith embarked for Virginia, vast designs were ripening among the Dutch; and Grotius, himself of the commission to which they were referred, acquaints us with the opinions of his countrymen. The United Provinces, it was said, abounded in mariners and in unemployed capital: not the plunder of Spanish commerce, not India itself, America alone, so rich in herbs of healing virtues, in forests, and in precious ores, could exhaust their enterprise. Their merchants had perused every work on the western world, had gleaned intelligence from the narratives of sailors; and now they planned a privileged company, which should count the states-general among its stockholders, and possess exclusively the liberty of approaching America from Newfoundland to the Straits of Magellan, and Africa from the tropics to the Cape of Good Hope. The Spaniards are feeblest, it was confidently urged, where they are believed to be strongest; there would be no war but on the water, the home of the Batavians. It would, moreover, be glorious to bear Christianity to the heathen, and rescue them from their oppressors. Principalities might easily

be won from the Spaniards, whose scattered citadels protected but a narrow zone.

To the eagerness of enterprise, it was replied that war had its uncertain events, the sea its treacheries; the Spaniards would learn naval warfare by exercise; and the little fleets of the provinces could hardly blockade an ocean or battle for a continent; the costs of defence would exceed the public resources; home would be lost in the search for a foreign world, of which the air breathed pestilence, the natives were cannibals, the unoccupied regions were hopelessly wild. The party that desired peace with Spain, and counted Grotius and Olden Barneveldt among its leaders, for a long time succeeded in defeating every effort at Batavian settlements in the west.

While the negotiations with Spain postponed the formation of a West India company, the Dutch found their way to the United States through another channel.

In 1607 a company of London merchants, excited by the immense profits of voyages to the east, contributed the means for a new attempt to discover the near passage to Asia; and HENRY HUDSON, an Englishman by birth, was the chosen leader of the expedition. With his only son for his companion, he coasted the shores of Greenland, and hesitated whether to attempt the circumnavigation of that country or the passage across the north. He came nearer the pole than any earlier navigator; but, after he had renewed the discovery of Spitzbergen, vast masses of ice compelled his return.

The next year beheld Hudson once more on a voyage, to ascertain if the seas which divide Spitzbergen from Nova Zembla open a path to China.

The failure of two expeditions daunted Hudson's employers; they could not daunt the great navigator. The discovery of the passage was the desire of his life; and, repairing to Holland, he offered his services to the Dutch East India company. The Zealanders, disheartened by former ill-success, made objections; but they were overruled by the directors for Amsterdam; and on the fourth day of April, 1609, five days before the truce with Spain, the Half Moon, a yacht of about eighty tons' burden, commanded by Hudson and manned by a mixed crew of Netherlanders and Englishmen, his