From any point of view, the English (not the British,as Britain was yet to be consolidated as a nation), had absolutely nothing to do with the period I´m considering. From1450 to 1600. The British only started to sail the Oceans after the Great Armada Incident, when Phillp III, who was, at the time both King of Spain and European Portugal and about 70% of Europe, managed to sink most of our ships trying to invade England. During the Portuguese Expansion, the British Islands were the backwater of all backwaters and totally irrelevant in the discovery and mapping of the world untill James Cook went and found some Islands in the Pacific, which, by treaty and National design, were never in the Portuguese sphere of influence. Also, the English were our aliies and their eventual arrival in the Caribbean, Brazil, South Africa and India had much to do about it. Also, the British Empire never clashed with our posessions because we had very different approaches to colonization. Portugal was never a land power, and we are talking about two wholly different subjects.