disease, and with these powerful
agents our missionaries and merchants, have succeeded in causing Dagon
to bow down before them--over all the civilized world. New Holland seems
to be the only uncivilized part of this watery ball, but New Holland
holds out no temptations to the missionary; the inhabitants are a little
too cannibally given, and martyrdom is altogether obsolete; besides, it
is doubted by our soundest theologians whether Christianity was ever
intended for a people so brutal and debased.

Spain, at the time I refer to, was renowned in arts and in arms; her
commerce extended from the East to the West Indies, and she was for a
time one of the most powerful of the kingdoms of Europe. Her priests,
finding the New World a land overflowing, not exactly with milk and
honey, but with what in all ages and in all countries is considered
infinitely better, gold and silver, and abounding in every thing that
could pamper the pride and gratify the sense, founded churches and
monasteries, while her viceroys built cities and forts, and South
America became the richest jewel in the diadem of His Catholic Majesty.
To secure this jewel entirely to himself seems to have been his chief
anxiety, and accordingly all foreigners were rigidly excluded from its
sea-ports, and although the "Assiento," or contract for supplying the
colonies with African slaves, was enjoyed successively by the English
and French, both of whom successively abused it by smuggling immense
quantities of their respective manufactures into those colonies, the
duty of supplying them with European merchandise was carried on finally
solely by means of register ships, as they were called, Cadiz being the
only European port where they were permitted to load and discharge.

The whaling ships were only permitted to procure supplies, or "recruit,"
as our unctuous brethren of Nantucket call it, at certain fixed and
well-fortified ports. Still even these managed to carry on quite a
respectable business in the smuggling way, especially with the ports of
Mexico and California.

But a new flea was about getting into Don Diego's ear--the peace of
1783, while it added an infant giant to the catalogue of earthly
"principalities and powers," also liberated from the fetters of
commercial, as well as political restraints, a people active, restless,
daring, prying, and enterprising to the last degree; a people whose
skill in navigation and swift-sailing vessels rendered them ab