nd the tool of
despotism. For the typical Spaniard of the sixteenth century was not in
strictness a fanatic; he was bigotry incarnate.

Heresy was a plague-spot, an ulcer to be eradicated with fire and the
knife, and this foul abomination was infecting the shores which the
Vicegerent of Christ had given to the King of Spain, and which the Most
Catholic King had given to the Adelantado. Thus would countless heathen
tribes be doomed to an eternity of flame, shut out from that saving
communion with Holy Church, to which, by the sword and the whip and the
fagot, dungeons and slavery, they would otherwise have been mercifully
driven, to the salvation of their souls, and the greater glory of God.
And, for the Adelantado himself, should the vast outlays, the vast
debts, of his bold Floridian venture be all in vain? Should his fortunes
be wrecked past redemption through these tools of Satan? As a Catholic,
as a Spaniard, as an adventurer, his course was clear. Woe, then, to the
Huguenot in the gripe of Pedro Menendez!

But what was the scope of this enterprise, and the limits of the
Adelantado's authority? He was invested with power almost absolute, not
merely over the peninsula which now retains the name of Florida, but
over all North America, from Labrador to Mexico,--for this was the
Florida of the old Spanish geographers, and the Florida designated in
the commission of Menendez. It was a continent which he was to conquer
and occupy out of his own purse. The impoverished King contracted with
his daring and ambitious subject to win and hold for him the territory
of the future United States and British Provinces. His plan, as
subsequently developed and exposed at length in his unpublished letters
to Philip II., was, first, to plant a garrison at Port Royal, and next
to fortify strongly on Chesapeake Bay, called by him St. Mary's. He
believed that this bay was an arm of the sea, running northward and
eastward, and communicating with the Gulf of St. Lawrence, thus making
New England, with adjacent districts, an island. His proposed fort on
the Chesapeake, giving access, by this imaginary passage, to the seas of
Newfoundland, would enable the Spaniards to command the fisheries, on
which both the French and the English had long encroached, to the great
prejudice of Spanish rights. Doubtless, too, these inland waters gave
access to the South Sea, and their occupation was necessary to prevent
the French from penetrating thither; fo