ristian?

Poor Raleigh! if peace and comfort in this world were of much importance
to him, it was in an ill day that he provoked the revenge of Spain. The
strength of England was needed at the moment at its own door; the Armada
came, and there was no means of executing such an enterprise. And
afterwards the throne of Elizabeth was filled by a Stuart, and Guiana
was to be no scene of glory for Raleigh; rather, as later historians are
pleased to think, it was the grave of his reputation.

But the hope burned clear in him through all the weary years of unjust
imprisonment; and when he was a grey-headed old man, the base son of a
bad mother used it to betray him. The success of his last enterprise was
made the condition under which he was to be pardoned for a crime which
he had not committed; and its success depended, as he knew, on its being
kept secret from the Spaniards. James required of Raleigh on his
allegiance a detail of what he proposed, giving him at the same time his
word as a king that the secret should be safe with him. The next day it
was sweeping out of the port of London in the swiftest of the Spanish
ships, with private orders to the Governor of St. Thomas to provoke a
collision when Raleigh should arrive there, which should afterwards cost
him his heart's blood.

We modern readers may run rapidly over the series of epithets under
which Raleigh has catalogued the Indian sufferings, hoping that they
are exaggerated, seeing that they are horrible, and closing our eyes
against them with swiftest haste; but it was not so when every epithet
suggested a hundred familiar facts; and some of these (not resting on
English prejudice, but on sad Spanish evidence, which is too full of
shame and sorrow to be suspected) shall be given in this place, however
old a story it may be thought; because, as we said above, it is
impossible to understand the actions of these men, unless we are
familiar with the feelings of which their hearts were full.

The massacres under Cortez and Pizarro, terrible as they were, were not
the occasion which stirred the deepest indignation. They had the excuse
of what might be called, for want of a better word, necessity, and of
the desperate position of small bands of men in the midst of enemies who
might be counted by millions. And in De Soto, when he burnt his guides
in Florida (it was his practice, when there was danger of treachery,
that those who were left alive might take warning); or in