The New Maritime Powers: How England, France, and the Netherlands Challenged Global Dominance

The Spanish and Portuguese dominated the seas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they began to face competition from other European countries, competition that gradually surpassed them. England, France, and the Netherlands were the rising new sea powers. In the late sixteenth century, under Queen Elizabeth I (1533-603), the English repulsed a Spanish invasion of England, continually harassed Spanish shipping, used pirates and privateers such as Sir Francis Drake (1540-96) to capture Spanish treasure ships, and formed their own colonies in North America. The English also began to explore the world, sending out their own exploratory expeditions.

Sir Francis Drake was the leader of one of these expeditions, which became the second voyage around the world. Another important English explorer was Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-618). Drake, Raleigh, and other English explorers were influenced by English geographers such as John Dee (1527-608) and Richard Hakluyt (1553-616), who urged English colonial expansion and scientific exploration, and produced the maps that helped motivate and record English expeditions.

Of later English explorers, perhaps the best known is Captain James Cook (1728-79). Cook traveled extensively in the Pacific Ocean in the mid-eighteenth century. His four Pacific voyages, accompanied as they were by scientists, are often considered the first expeditions that had a primarily scientific purpose. Now that much of the world was known, mapped, and colonized, the new need was for scientific information, partly for its own sake and partly because new knowledge helped govern empires. Cook’s first Pacific voyage, in 1768, was intended to observe the transit of the planet Venus, which would help astronomers determine the distance between the Earth and the sun. Using Tahiti as his base, Cook explored most of the Pacific, including coastal Australia, New Zealand, Hawai‘i, and Alaska, as well as the ocean itself. These explorations helped stimulate European interest in colonizing Australia, New Zealand, and Hawai‘i.

The French and Dutch were also active ocean explorers, motivated, as were other Europeans, mainly by opening up trade routes, finding new sources of wealth, and establishing colonies that would form the basis of global empires. In the fifteenth century, the French explorer Jacques Cartier (1491-557) sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, naming the place Canada, and laying the foundations of a French colony in North America and a French empire worldwide. The Dutch were also great travelers, exploring the Caribbean and Atlantic but concentrating their efforts in Southeast Asia and beyond. The Dutch reached Australia, which they named New Holland, early in the seventeenth century but were not impressed and established no colony there. The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman (1603-69) reached Tasmania (which he called Van Diemen’s Land) and New Zealand in 1642, but, again, the Dutch did not establish any settlement in those places.

The rise of England, France, and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century meant that the relative global dominance of Spain and Portugal began to decline. The Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans were now all familiar to Europeans and became the waterways that connected their far-flung empires. Only the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Southern Ocean around Antarctica were still something of a mystery and not yet integrated into the emerging global economic system.