in his History of England that in the era of Elizabeth, England entered its period of "modern history" and had "become a power of first rank". The Spanish Armada had been defeated in 1588. At the same time, coinage became standardized. The English East India Company launched its first spice trading expedition in 1598, and England began its first colonization attempts in North America. In commerce, industry and wealth, England experienced unprecedented growth and all of these areas were, by the 1590s, all "regulated and controlled by the state". As England became more powerful and regulated, the accurate measurement of time became crucial to the country's well-being. The accurate measurement of time helped in standardizing the payment of wages for labor, regulating industry, and keeping governance efficient. By the 16th century "life in the cities had become equated with life by the clock", and by the late 16th century, the first minute hands began to appear on public (and private) clocks. Time in the London of 1609 had become highly measured, increasingly accurate, and integrated into the social order; people "ruled themselves by the clock". Dympna Callaghan in the essay, "Confounded by Winter, Speeding Time in Shakespeare's Sonnets", states that Sonnet 60 is one of two sonnets (also 12) which are "keenly concerned with time" and are given the "significantly symbolic numbers". Sonnet 12 concerns the 12 hours on the face of a clock and Sonnet 60 concerns "our minutes". These two sonnets, therefore, Callaghan says, "bespeak mechanical time" and their number signifies the importance of the modern measurement of time. This "measured" and "mechanical" time-keeping changed the way persons experienced time. Time in the ancient world had been marked by the rising of the sun and its setting, the seasons, or the lunar and solar events, by birth and death. With the coming of modern measurements of time, Daniel Boorstin in The Discoverers states that "mankind [was] liberated from the monotony of nature" and "[t]he flow of shadows, sand and water translated into the clock's staccato, became a useful measure of man's movement across the planet" (1). With the increasing dominance of mechanical time in the 1590s—the context of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60—the connection between nature and time began to fracture. The influence of Ovid: Metamorphoses and Sonnet 60 Sections of Book XV of Ovid's Metamorphoses serve as the template for much of Sonnet 60. As in Shakespeare's Sonnet 60,