    57

    the  time of Henry VIII.  Nonetheless, the country had its dreams of glory,

    and those dreams were associated with the notion of expansion. The single

    form of expansion the English could imagine, however, was conquering

    some of the only world they knew--Europe. The British vainly bumped their

    heads against a brick wall, attempting to saw off pieces of France in the futile

    bloodbath known as the Hundred Years War.  They had their share of

    victories, suffered humiliations at the hands of folks like Joan of Arc, and

    were utterly thwarted in their efforts, eventually losing even the one scrap of

    territory they'd managed to cut out for themselves--Calais.  Meanwhile, they

    mauled  five  generations  of  French  peasants  innocently  trying  to  plant  the

    next year's crops.153

    Historian A. L. Rowse, a leading British expert on the Elizabethan age,

    considers Henry VIII's final failure to conquer the French one of the luckiest

    embarrassments England ever endured.154  It forced the English to turn their

    attentions away from the Continent and made them focus on a sphere in

    which England would eventually make a fortune--the New World.

    The Old World England reluctantly turned its back on was a land of

    little opportunity.  Hungry Italians were reduced to eating songbirds off the

    trees.  (Tourists in southern Europe 200 years later would be puzzled by the

    eerie silence of the countryside.  Melodious warblers like robins, titmice and

    wrens had disappeared into the cooking pots of the area's humbler

    citizens.)155   Meanwhile, the average French peasant was living so close to

    starvation that in the fairy tales he recited to his children, the hero was

    rewarded--not with a pot of gold, but with a decent meal.156

    At first, the New World looked equally unrewarding.  Christopher

    Columbus was bitterly disappointed by this hulking mass of landscape.  He

    had set off to find the riches of China and ended up in a territory no one ever

    heard of.  The poor sailor insisted for years that this had to be some previous-

    ly unreported part of the Chinese Empire.157

    But Columbus' disappointment became England's New Frontier.  The

    British missed out on the easy pickings.  The Spanish beat them to the Aztec

    and Inca lands, where a few hundred Europeans armed with steel swords,

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