streamed across my memory, and a shadowy procession of great figures who
have printed their names in history. Columbus and Cortez, Vasco Nunez,
and Las Casas; the millions of innocent Indians who, according to Las
Casas, were destroyed out of the islands, the Spanish grinding them to
death in their gold mines; the black swarms who were poured in to take
their place, and the frightful story of the slave trade. Behind it all
was the European drama of the sixteenth century--Charles V. and Philip
fighting against the genius of the new era, and feeding their armies
with the ingots of the new world. The convulsion spread across the
Atlantic. The English Protestants and the French Huguenots took to sea
like water dogs, and challenged their enemies in their own special
domain. To the popes and the Spaniards the new world was the property of
the Church and of those who had discovered it. A papal bull bestowed on
Spain all the countries which lay within the tropics west of the
Atlantic--a form of Monroe doctrine, not unreasonable as long as there
was force to maintain it, but the force was indispensable, and the
Protestant adventurers tried the question with them at the cannon's
mouth. They were of the reformed faith all of them, these sea rovers of
the early days, and, like their enemies, they were of a very mixed
complexion. The Spaniards, gorged with plunder and wading in blood,
were at the same time, and in their own eyes, crusading soldiers of the
faith, missionaries of the Holy Church, and defenders of the doctrines
which were impiously assailed in Europe. The privateers from Plymouth
and Rochelle paid also for the cost of their expeditions with the
pillage of ships and towns and the profits of the slave trade; and they
too were the unlicensed champions of spiritual freedom in their own
estimate of themselves. The gold which was meant for Alva's troops in
Flanders found its way into the treasure houses of the London companies.
The logs of the voyages of the Elizabethan navigators represent them
faithfully as they were, freebooters of the ocean in one aspect of them;
in another, the sea warriors of the Reformation--uncommissioned,
unrecognised, fighting on their own responsibility, liable to be
disowned when they failed, while the Queen herself would privately be a
shareholder in the adventure. It was a wild anarchic scene, fit cradle
of the spiritual freedom of a new age, when the nations of the earth
were breaking the chains