narrowest part of the
mountain-channel, and learned that the whole Spanish fleet was in the Bay
of Gibraltar.

The marble pillar of Hercules rose before him. Heemskerk was of a poetic
temperament, and his imagination was inflamed by the spectacle which met
his eyes. Geographical position, splendour of natural scenery, immortal
fable, and romantic history, had combined to throw a spell over that
region. It seemed marked out for perpetual illustration by human valour.
The deeds by which, many generations later, those localities were to
become identified with the fame of a splendid empire--then only the most
energetic rival of the young republic, but destined under infinitely
better geographical conditions to follow on her track of empire, and with
far more prodigious results--were still in the womb of futurity. But St.
Vincent, Trafalgar, Gibraltar--words which were one day to stir the
English heart, and to conjure heroic English shapes from the depths so
long as history endures--were capes and promontories already familiar to
legend and romance.

Those Netherlanders had come forth from their slender little fatherland
to offer battle at last within his own harbours and under his own
fortresses to the despot who aspired to universal monarchy, and who
claimed the lordship of the seas. The Hollanders and Zeelanders had
gained victories on the German Ocean, in the Channel, throughout the
Indies, but now they were to measure strength with the ancient enemy in
this most conspicuous theatre, and before the eyes of Christendom. It was
on this famous spot that the ancient demigod had torn asunder by main
strength the continents of Europe and Africa. There stood the opposite
fragments of the riven mountain-chain, Calpe and Abyla, gazing at each
other, in eternal separation, across the gulf, emblems of those two
antagonistic races which the terrible hand of Destiny has so ominously
disjoined. Nine centuries before, the African king, Moses son of Nuzir,
and his lieutenant, Tarik son of Abdallah, had crossed that strait and
burned the ships which brought them. Black Africa had conquered a portion
of whiter Europe, and laid the foundation of the deadly mutual repugnance
which nine hundred years of bloodshed had heightened into insanity of
hatred. Tarik had taken the town and mountain, Carteia and Calpe, and
given to both his own name. Gib-al-Tarik, the cliff of Tarik, they are
called to this day.

Within the two horns of that beaut