place, up to this period, and including the capture of Constantinople, were before the invention of gunpowder; for if Henry V. had cannon at Agincourt, as is claimed by some writers, they were certainly not used in naval warfare. From that time all the combinations of naval armaments were entirely changed; and this revolution took place—if I may use that expression—at the time when the invention of the mariner's compass and the discovery of America and of the Cape of Good Hope were about to turn the maritime commerce of the world into new channels and to establish an entirely new system of colonial dependencies.
I shall not mention in detail the expeditions of the Spaniards to America, or those of the Portuguese, Dutch, and English to India by doubling the Cape of Good Hope. Notwithstanding their great influence upon the commerce of the world,—notwithstanding the genius of Gama, Albuquerque, and Cortez,—these expeditions, undertaken by small bodies of two or three thousand men against tribes who knew nothing of fire-arms, are of no interest in a military point of view.