The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent,
the Planetary system, and the Infinite deep of
the Heavens have now become common and familiar
facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of
our school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism
with our earliest breath of consciousness; it is all but
impossible to throw back our imagination into the time
when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred every mind
which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation
which God had sent down among mankind. Vast
spiritual and material continents lay for the first time
displayed, opening fields of thought and fields of
enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old
routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on
their own strength and their own power, unshackled
to accomplish whatever they might dare. And although
we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of
that enormous force of heart and intellect which
accompanied them (for they were as much the effect
as the cause, and one reacted on the other), yet at
any rate they afforded scope and room for the play
of powers which, without such scope, let them have
been as transcendent as they would, must have passed
away unproductive and blighted.
An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely
real conviction of the divine and devilish forces by
which the universe was guided and misguided, was
the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic
Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did
then really and truly believe in the actual personal
presence of God or the devil in every accident, or scene,
or action. They brought to the contemplation of the
new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated
with the spiritual convictions of the old era, which
were not lost, but only infinitely expanded. The
planets whose vastness they now learnt to recognize
were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for
good; the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon;
and the idolatrous American tribes were real worshippers
of the real devil, and were assisted with the
full power of his evil army.
It is a form of thought which, however in a vague
and general way we may continue to use its phraseology,
has become, in its detailed application to life, utterly
strange to us. We congratulate ourselves on the
enlargement of our understanding when we read the
decisions of grave law-courts in cases of supposed
witchcraft; we smile complacently over Raleigh's story
of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are
not such as he--entangled in the cobwebs of effete
and foolish superstition. The true conclusion is the
opposite of the conclusion which we draw. That
Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed,
and could be what they were notwithstanding, is to
us a proof that the injury which such mistakes can
inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as they
arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness
and mystery of the world, and of the life of human
souls upon it, they witness to the presence in such
minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most perfect
acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation
moves can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur,
the moral majesty, of some of Shakespeare's characters,
so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can
imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the
genius of the poet who has outstripped nature in his
creations; but we are misunderstanding the power
and the meaning of poetry in attributing creativeness
to it in any such sense; Shakespeare created, but only
as the spirit of nature created around him, working
in him as it worked abroad in those among whom he
lived. The men whom he draws were such men as he
saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he
heard in the ordinary conversations in which he joined.
At the Mermaid with Raleigh and with Sidney, and
at a thousand un-named English firesides, he found
the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos,
his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer
personal acquaintance which we can form with the
English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are
satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more
than the rhythmic echo of the life which it depicts.
It was, therefore, with no little interest that we
heard of the formation of a society which was to employ
itself, as we understood, in republishing in accessible
form some, if not all, of the invaluable records compiled
or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything
else, have their appointed death-day; the souls
of them, unless they be found worthy of a second birth
in a new body, perish with the paper in which they
lived, and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their
own want of merit, but from our neglect of them, were
expiring of old age. The five-volume quarto edition,
published in 1811, so little people then cared for the
exploits of their ancestors, was but of 270 copies;
it was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries,
or for the great libraries, where it could be
consulted as a book of reference; and among a people,
the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's
name, the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never
so much as occurred to them that general readers would
ever come to care to have it within their reach.
And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose
Epic of the modern English nation. They contain the
heroic tales of the exploits of the great men in whom
the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of
substantial facts, which rival them in interest and
grandeur. What the old epics were to the royally or
nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people.
We have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to
whom the heroism, like the dominion, of the world had
in time past been confined. But, as it was in the days
of the apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an
obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the divine
mission, the spiritual authority over mankind, so, in
the days of our own Elizabeth, the seamen from the
banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the
Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but
what was beating in their own royal hearts, went out
across the unknown seas fighting, discovering, colonizing,
and grayed out the channels, and at last paved them
with their bones, through which the commerce and
enterprise of England has flowed out over all the
world. We can conceive nothing, not the songs of
Homer himself, which would be read, among us at
least, with more enthusiastic interest than these plain
massive tales; and a people's edition of them in these
days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugene Sue
circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the
most blessed antidote which could be bestowed upon
us. The heroes themselves were the men of the people
--the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes;
and no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh,
lent its polish or its varnish to set them off. In most
cases the captain himself, or his clerk or servant, or
some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and
chronicled the voyage which he had shared, and thus
inorganically arose a collection of writings which, with
all their simplicity, are for nothing more striking than
for the high moral beauty, warmed with natural feeling,
which displays itself through all their pages. With us,
the sailor is scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck.
If he is distinguished in his profession, he is professional
merely; or if he is more than that, he owes it not to
his work as a sailor, but to independent domestic
culture. With them their profession was the school
of their nature, a high moral education which most
brought out what was most nobly human in them; and
the wonders of earth, and air, and sea, and sky, were a
real intelligible language in which they heard Almighty
God speaking to them.
That such hopes of what might be accomplished by
the Hakluyt Society should in some measure be disappointed,
is only what might naturally be anticipated
of all very sanguine expectation. Cheap editions are
expensive editions to the publisher, and historical
societies, from a necessity which appears to encumber
all corporate English action, rarely fail to do their work
expensively and infelicitously; yet, after all allowances
and deductions, we cannot reconcile ourselves to the
mortification of having found but one volume in the
series to be even tolerably edited, and that one to be
edited by a gentleman to whom England is but an
adopted country--Sir Robert Schomburgk. Raleigh's
"Conquest of Guiana," with Sir Robert's sketch of
Raleigh's history and character, form in everything but
its cost a very model of an excellent volume. For
every one of the rest we are obliged to say of them,
that they have left little undone to paralyze whatever
interest was reviving in Hakluyt, and to consign their
own volumes to the same obscurity to which time and
accident were consigning the earlier editions. Very
little which was really noteworthy escaped the industry
of Hakiuyt himself, and we looked to find reprints of
the most remarkable of the stories which were to be
found in his collection. They began unfortunately
with proposing to continue the work where he had
left it, and produce narratives hitherto unpublished
of other voyages of inferior interest, or not of English
origin. Better thoughts appear to have occurred
to them in the course of the work; but their evil
destiny overtook them before their thoughts could get
themselves executed. We opened one volume with
eagerness, bearing the title of "Voyages to the Northwest,"
in hope of finding our old friends Davis and
Frobisher, and we found a vast unnecessary Editor's
Preface; and instead of the voyages themselves, which
with their picturesqueness and moral beauty shine
among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of
Hakluyt, an analysis and digest of their results,
which Milton was called in to justify in an inappropriate
quotation. It is much as if they had undertaken to
edit "Bacon's Essays," and had retailed
what they conceived to be the substance of them in
their own language; strangely failing to see that the
real value of the actions or the thought of remarkable
men does not lie in the material result which can be
gathered from them, but in the heart and soul of those
who do or utter them. Consider what Homer's
"Odyssey" would be, reduced into an analysis.
The editor of the "Letters of Columbus" apologizes
for the rudeness of their phraseology. Columbus, he
tells us, was not so great a master of the pen as of the
art of navigation. We are to make excuses for him.
We are put on our guard, and warned not to be
offended, before we are introduced to the sublime record
of sufferings under which his great soul was staggering
towards the end of its earthly calamities, where the
inarticulate fragments in which his thought breaks out
from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of
which the highest literary pathos is poor and meaningless.
And even in the subjects which they select they are
pursued by the same curious fatality. Why is Drake
to be best known, or to be only known, in his last
voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to
immortalize the failure? When Drake climbed the tree
in Panama, and saw both oceans, and vowed that he
would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out
upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head
over the southernmost angle of the world; when he
scored a furrow round the globe with his keel, and
received the homage of the barbarians of the antipodes
in the name of the Virgin Queen; he was another man
from what he had become after twenty years of court
life and intrigue, and Spanish fighting, and gold-hunting.
There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we take it as
the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his death,
which we desire--not what he failed to do, but what
he did.
But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive
than all these is the editor of Hawkins's "Voyage to
the South Sea." The book is striking in itself; it is
not one of the best, but it is very good; and as it is
republished complete, if we read it through, carefully
shutting off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand,
we shall then find in it the same beauty which breathes
in the tone of all the writings of the period.
It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which
did no dishonour to him who sunk under it; and there
is a melancholy dignity in the style in which Hawkins
tells his story, which seems to say, that though he had
been defeated, and had never again an opportunity of
winning back his lost laurels, he respects himself still
for the heart with which he endured a shame which
would have broken a smaller man. It would have
required no large exertion of editorial self-denial to
have abstained from marring the pages with puns of
which Punch would be ashamed, and with the vulgar
affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of
the nineteenth century condescends to criticize and
approve of his half-barbarous precursor; but it must
have been a defect in his heart, rather than in his
understanding, which betrayed him into such an offence
as this which follows. The war of freedom of the
Araucan Indians is the most gallant episode in the
history of the New World. The Spaniards themselves
were not behindhand in acknowledging the chivalry before
which they quailed, and, after many years of ineffectual
attempts to crush them, they gave up a conflict which they
never afterwards resumed; leaving the Araucans alone,
of all the American races with which they came in
contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear from
them. It is a subject for an epic poem, and whatever
admiration is due to the heroism of a brave people
whom no inequality of strength could appal and no
defeats could crush, these poor Indians have a right to
demand of us. The story of the war was well known in
Europe: and Hawkins, in coasting the western shores of
South America, fell in with them, and the finest passage
in his book is the relation of one of the incidents of
the war.
"An Indian captain was taken prisoner by the Spaniards,
and for that he was of name, and known to have done
his devoir against them, they cut off his hands, thereby
intending to disenable him to fight any more against them.
But he, returning home, desirous to revenge this injury,
to maintain his liberty, with the reputation of his nation,
and to help to banish the Spaniard, with his tongue intreated
and incited them to persevere in their accustomed
valour and reputation, abasing the enemy and advancing
his nation; condemning their contraries of cowardliness.
and confirming it by the cruelty used with him and other
his companions in their mishaps; showing them his arms
without hands, and naming his brethren whose half feet
they had cut off, because they might be unable to sit on
horseback: with force arguing that if they feared them not.
they would not have used so great inhumanity--for fear
produceth cruelty, the companion of cowardice. Thus
encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs, and
liberty, choosing rather to die an honourable death fighting,
than to live in servitude as fruitless members of the
commonwealth. Thus using the office of a sergeant-major, and
having loaden his two stumps with bundles of arrows, he
succoured them who, in the succeeding battle, had their
store wasted; and changing himself from place to place,
animated and encouraged his countrymen with such comfortable
persuasions, as it is reported and credibly believed,
that he did more good with his words and presence,
without striking a stroke, than a great part of the army
did with fighting to the utmost."
It is an action which may take its place by the side
of the myth of Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of
that brother of the poet AEschylus, who, when the Persians
were flying from Marathon, clung to a ship till
both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it
with his teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in
the splendid calendar of Athenian heroes. Captain
Bethune, without call or need, making his notes merely,
as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as
he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom
of the page, that "it reminds him of the familiar
lines,--
"For Widdrington I needs must wail,
As one in doleful dumps;
For, when his legs were smitten off,
He fought upon his stumps."
It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the
ballad of Chevy Chase. It is the most deformed stanza *
of the modern deformed version which was composed
in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration of
the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for
serious poetry, they have ceased to sound in any ear as
other than a burlesque; the associations which they
arouse are only absurd, and they could only have
continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous
doggerel.
____
* Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us
too hard on Captain Bethune compare them.
"For Wetharrington my harte was wo,
That even he slayne sholde be;
For when both his leggis were hewen in to,
He knyied and fought on his knee."
Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad,
gives up this stanza as hopeless.
____
When to these offences of the Society we add, that
in the long laboured appendices and introductions,
which fill up valuable space, which increase the
expense of the edition, and into reading which many
readers are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing
which assists the understanding of the stories which
they are supposed to illustrate, when we have found what
is most uncommon passed without notice, and what is
most trite and familiar encumbered with comment: we
have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these
volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave
of them and go on with our own more grateful subject.
Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that
of the Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English
constitution were limited in the highest degree, was,
notwithstanding, more beloved by her subjects than
any sovereign before or since. It was because,
substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it
was given to her to conduct the outgrowth of the
national life through its crisis of change, and the weight
of her great mind and her great place were thrown on
the people's side. She was able to paralyze the dying
efforts with which, if a Stuart had been on the throne,
the representatives of an effete system might have made
the struggle a deadly one; and the history of England
is not the history of France, because the inflexible will
of one person held the Reformation firm till it had
rooted itself in the heart of the nation, and could not
be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was no longer
able to furnish standing ground on which the English
or any other nation could live a manly and a godly
life. Feudalism, as a social organization, was not any
more a system under which their energies could have
scope to move. Thenceforward not the Catholic Church,
but any man to whom God had given a heart to feel
and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom
men were to listen; and great actions were not to
remain the privilege of the families of the Norman
nobles, but were to be laid within the reach of the
poorest plebeian who had the stuff in him to perform
them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth
saw the change which had passed over the world. She
saw it, and saw it in faith, and accepted it. The
England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the Norman Baron,
was to cast its shell and to become the England of free
thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to
plough the ocean with its navies, and sow its colonies
over the globe; and the first thunder birth of these
enormous forces and the flash of the earliest achievements of
the new era roll and glitter through the forty years of the
reign of Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its
history is written, will be seen to be among the most
sublime phenomena which the earth as yet has witnessed.
The work was not of her creation; the heart of the
whole English nation was stirred to its depths; and
Elizabeth's place was to recognize, to love, to foster,
and to guide. The government originated nothing;
at such a time it was neither necessary nor desirable
that it should do so; but wherever expensive enterprises
were on foot which promised ultimate good, but no
immediate profit, we never fail to find among the lists
of contributors the Queen's Majesty, Burleigh, Leicester,
Walsingham. Never chary of her presence, for Elizabeth
could afford to condescend, when ships were fitting for
distant voyages in the river, the Queen would go down
in her barge and inspect. Frobisher, who was but a
poor sailor adventurer, sees her wave her handkerchief
to him from the Greenwich Palace windows, and he
brings her home a narwhal's horn for a present. She
honoured her people, and her people loved her; and
the result was that, with no cost to the government,
she saw them scattering the fleets of the Spaniards,
planting America with colonies, and exploring the most
distant seas. Either for honour or for expectation of
profit, or from that unconscious necessity by which a
great people, like a great man, will do what is right, and
must do it at the right time, whoever had the means to
furnish a ship, and whoever had the talent to command
one, laid their abilities together and went out to pioneer,
and to conquer, and take possession, in the name of
the Queen of the Sea. There was no nation so remote
but what some one or other was found ready to undertake
an expedition there, in the hope of opening a trade;
and let them go where they would, they were sure of
Elizabeth's countenance. We find letters written by
her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every
potentate of whom she had ever heard, to the Emperors
of China, Japan, and India, the Grand Duke of Russia,
the Grand Turk, the Persian Sofee, and other unheardof
Asiatic and African princes; whatever was to be
done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted
when she could, and admired when she could not. The
springs of great actions are always difficult to analyze--
impossible to analyze perfectly--possible to analyze
only very proximately, and the force by which a man
throws a good action out of himself is invisible and
mystical, like that which brings out the blossom and
the fruit upon the tree. The motives which we find
men urging for their enterprises seem often insufficient
to have prompted them to so large a daring. They did
what they did from the great unrest in them which
made them do it, and what it was may be best measured
by the results, by the present England and America.
Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the
world, and in the position of England, to have furnished
abundance of conscious motive, and to have stirred the
drowsiest routinier statesman.
Among material occasions for exertion, the population
began to outgrow the employment, and there
was a necessity for plantations to serve as an outlet.
Men who, under happier circumstances, might have
led decent lives, and done good service, were now
driven by want to desperate courses--"witness," as
Richard Hakluyt says, "twenty tall fellows hanged last
Rochester assizes for small robberies;" and there is an
admirable paper addressed to the Privy Council by
Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law, pointing
out the possible openings to be made in or through.
such plantations for home produce and manufacture.
Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile
ambitions, however, lay a noble enthusiasm which
in these dull days we can hardly, without an effort,
realize. The life-and-death wrestle between the Reformation
and the old religion had settled in the last quarter
of the sixteenth century into a permanent struggle
between England and Spain. France was disabled.
All the help which Elizabeth could spare barely enabled
the Netherlands to defend themselves. Protestantism,
if it conquered, must conquer on another field; and by
the circumstances of the time the championship of the
Reformed faith fell to the English sailors. The sword
of Spain was forged in the gold-mines of Peru; the
legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting
the gold ships on their passage; and, inspired by an
enthusiasm like that which four centuries before had
precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East, the
same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our
bays and rivers with pleasure yachts then fitted out
armed privateers, to sweep the Atlantic, and plunder
and destroy Spanish ships wherever they could meet
them.
Thus, from a combination of causes, the whole force
and energy of the age was directed towards the sea.
The wide excitement and the greatness of the interests
at stake, raised even common men above themselves;
and people who in ordinary times would have been no
more than mere seamen, or mere money-making merchants,
appear before us with a largeness and greatness
of heart and mind in which their duties to God and
their country are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt
to be paramount to every other.
Ordinary English traders we find fighting Spanish war
ships in behalf of the Protestant faith; the cruisers of
the Spanish main were full of generous eagerness for the
conversion of the savage nations to Christianity; and
what is even more surprising, sites for colonization were
examined and scrutinized by such men in a lofty statesmanlike
spirit, and a ready insight was displayed by
them into the indirect effects of a wisely-extended
commerce on every highest human interest.
Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a
further feeling, a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was
spurring on the English, and one which must be well
understood and well remembered, if men like Drake,
and Hawkins, and Raleigh, are to be tolerably understood.
One of the English Reviews, a short time ago,
was much amused with a story of Drake having excommunicated
a petty officer as a punishment for some
moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in
Drake, as a man, anything more than; a highly brave
and successful buccaneer, whose pretences to religion
might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit to the
Madonna. And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are
regarded by superficial persons, who see only such outward
circumstances of their history as correspond with
their own impressions. The high nature of these men,
and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise
out and become visible to us as we can throw ourselves
back into their times and teach our hearts to feel as
they felt. We do not find in the language of the
voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their
help at home, any of that weak watery talk of "protection
of aborigines," which as soon as it is translated
into fact becomes the most active policy for their
destruction, soul and body. But the stories of the
dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians,
which were widely known in England, seem to have
affected all classes of people, not with pious passive
horror, but with a genuine human indignation. A
thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and
down the pages of Hakluyt, who, with a view to make
them known, translated Peter Martyr's letters; and
each commonest sailor-boy who had heard them from
his childhood among the tales of his father's fire-side,
had longed to be a man, that he might go out and
become the avenger of a gallant and suffering people.
A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart;
seldom fails to make those worthy of it to whom it is
given; and it was a point of honour, if of nothing more,
among the English sailors, to do no discredit by their
conduct to the greatness of their cause. The high
courtesy, the chivalry of the Spanish nobles, so
conspicuous in their dealings with their European rivals, either
failed to touch them in their dealings with uncultivated
idolaters, or the high temper of the aristocracy was
unable to restrain or to influence the masses of the
soldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it would be untrue,
to charge upon their religion the grievous actions
of men who called themselves the armed missionaries of
Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and bishops
were the loudest in the indignation with which they
denounced them. But we are obliged to charge upon
it that slow and subtle influence so inevitably exercised
by any religion which is divorced from life, and converted
into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or system,
which could permit the same men to be extravagant in
a sincere devotion to the Queen of Heaven, whose
entire lower nature, unsubdued and unaffected, was
given up to thirst of gold, and plunder, and sensuality.
If religion does not make men more humane than they
would be without it, it makes them fatally less so; and
it is to be feared that the spirit of the pilgrim fathers,
which had oscillated to the other extreme, and had
again crystallized into a formal antinomian fanaticism,
reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the
Spaniards had set them their unworthy precedent. But
the Elizabethan navigators, full without exception of
large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty, bear
names untainted, as far as we know, with a single crime
against the savages; and the name of England was as
famous in the Indian seas as that of Spain was
infamous. On the banks of the Oronooko there was
remembered for a hundred years the noble captain who
had come there from the great Queen beyond the seas;
and Raleigh speaks the language of the heart of his
country, when he urges the English statesmen to colonize
Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driving
the white marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the
Incas to the throne of Peru.
"Who will not be persuaded," he says, "that now at length
the great Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans,
and lamentations, hath seen the tears and blood of so many
millions of innocent men, women, and children, afflicted,
robbed, reviled, branded with hot irons, roasted, dismembered,
mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked, scalded with hot
oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in sport,
drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by
mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed, and
purposeth to scourge and plague that cursed nation, and to
take the yoke of servitude from that distressed people, as
free by nature as any Christian."
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; but, 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 him 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, and 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 he 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 Vasco Nunnez, praying to the Virgin on the mountains
of Darien, and going down from off them into the
valleys to hunt the Indian caciques, and fling them alive
to his bloodhounds; there was, at least, with all this
fierceness and cruelty, a desperate courage which we
cannot refuse to admire, and which mingles with and
corrects our horror. It is the refinement of the Spaniards'
cruelty in the settled and conquered provinces, excused
by no danger and provoked by no resistance, the details
of which witness to the infernal coolness with which it
was perpetrated; and the great bearing of the Indians
themselves under an oppression which they despaired of
resisting, which raises the whole history to the rank of a
world-wide tragedy, in which the nobler but weaker
nature was crushed under a malignant force which was
stronger and yet meaner than itself. Gold hunting
and lust were the two passions for which the Spaniards
cared; and the fate of the Indian women was only more
dreadful than that of the men, who were ganged and
chained to a labour in the mines which was only to cease
with their lives, in a land where but a little before they
had lived a free contented people, more innocent of
crime than perhaps any people upon earth. If we can
conceive what our own feelings would be, if, in the
"development of the mammalia" some baser but more
powerful race than man were to appear upon this planet,
and we and our wives and children at our own happy
firesides were degraded from our freedom, and became
to them what the lower animals are to us, we can
perhaps realize the feelings of the enslaved nations of
Hispaniola.
As a harsh justification of slavery, it is sometimes
urged, that men who do not deserve to be slaves will
prefer death to the endurance of it; and that if they
prize their liberty, it is always in their power to assert
it in the old Roman fashion. Tried even by so hard a
rule, the Indians vindicated their right, and before
the close of the sixteenth century, the entire group of
the Western Islands in the hands of the Spaniards,
containing, when Columbus discovered them, many
millions of inhabitants, were left literally desolate from
suicide. Of the anecdotes of this terrible self-immolation,
as they were then known in England, here are a
few out of many.
The first is simple, and a specimen of the ordinary
method. A Yucaian cacique, who was forced with his
old subjects to labour in the mines, at last "calling
those miners into an house, to the number of ninety-
five, he thus debateth with them:"--
"'My worthy companions and friends, why desire we to
live any longer under so cruel a servitude? Let us now go
unto the perpetual seat of our ancestors, for we shall there
have rest from these intolerable cares and grievances which
we endure under the subjection of the unthankful. Go ye
before, I will presently follow you.' Having so spoken, he
held out whole handfuls of those leaves which take away life,
prepared for the purpose, and giving every one part thereof,
being kindled to suck up the fume; who obeyed his command,
the king and his chief kinsmen reserving the last
place for themselves."
We speak of the crime of suicide, but few persons
will see a crime in this sad and stately leave-taking of
a life which it was no longer possible to bear with
unbroken hearts. We do not envy the Indian, who,
with Spaniards before him as an evidence of the fruits
which their creed brought forth, deliberately exchanged
for it the old religion of his country, which could sustain
him in an action of such melancholy grandeur. But
the Indians did not always reply to their oppressors
with escaping passively beyond their hands. Here is a
story with matter in it for as rich a tragedy as OEdipus
or Agamemnon; and in its stern and tremendous
features, more nearly resembling them than any which
were conceived even by Shakespeare.
An officer named Orlando had taken the daughter
of a Cuban cacique to be his mistress. She was with
child by him, but, suspecting her of being engaged in
some other intrigue, he had her fastened to two wooden
spits, not intending to kill her, but to terrify her; and
setting her before the fire, he ordered that she should
be turned by the servants of the kitchen.
"The maiden, stricken with fear through the cruelty
thereof, and strange kind of torment, presently gave up the
ghost. The cacique her father, understanding the matter,
took thirty of his men and went to the house of the captain,
who was then absent, and slew his wife, whom he had
married after that wicked act committed, and the women
who were companions of the wife, and her servants every
one. Then shutting the door of the house, and putting fire
under it, he burnt himself and all his companions that
assisted him, together with the captain's dead family and
goods."
This is no fiction or poet's romance. It is a tale
of wrath and revenge, which in sober dreadful truth
enacted itself upon this earth, and remains among the
eternal records of the doings of mankind upon it. As
some relief to its most terrible features, we follow it with
a story which has a touch in it of diabolical humour.
The slave-owners finding their slaves escaping thus
unprosperously out of their grasp, set themselves to
find a remedy for so desperate a disease, and were
swift to avail themselves of any weakness, mental or
bodily, through which to retain them in life. One of
these proprietors being informed that a number of his
people intended to kill themselves on a certain day,
at a particular spot, and knowing by experience that
they were too likely to do it, presented himself there
at the time which had been fixed upon, and telling
the Indians when they arrived, that he knew their
intention, and that it was vain for them to attempt to
keep anything a secret from him, he ended with saying,
that he had come there to kill himself with them; that
as he had used them ill in this world, he might use
them worse in the next; "with which he did dissuade
them presently from their purpose." With what efficacy
such believers in the immortality of the soul were likely
to recommend either their faith or their God; rather,
how terribly all the devotion and all the earnestness
with which the poor priests who followed in the wake
of the conquerors laboured to recommend it were
shamed and paralyzed, they themselves too bitterly
lament. It was idle to send out governor after governor
with orders to stay such practices. They had but to
arrive on the scenes to become infected with the same
fever, or if any remnant of Castilian honour, or any
faintest echoes of the faith which they professed, still
flickered in a few of the best and noblest, they could
but look on with folded hands in ineffectual mourning;
they could do nothing without soldiers, and the soldiers
were the worst offenders. Hispaniola became a mere
desert; the gold was in the mines, and there were no
poor slaves left remaining to extract it. One means
which the Spaniards dared to employ to supply the
vacancy, brought about an incident which in its piteous
pathos exceeds any story we have ever heard. Crimes
and criminals are swept away by time, nature finds an
antidote for their poison, and they and their ill
consequences alike are blotted out and perish. If we do
not forgive them, at least we cease to hate them, as it
grows more clear to us that they injured none so deeply
as themselves. But the Theriodes kakia, the enormous
wickedness by which humanity itself has been outraged
and disgraced, we cannot forgive, we cannot cease to
hate that; the years roll away, but the tints of it remain
on the pages of history, deep and horrible as the day
on which they were entered there.
"When the Spaniards understood the simple opinion
of the Yucaian islanders concerning the souls of their
departed, which, after their sins purged in the cold northern
mountains should pass into the south, to the intent that,
leaving their own country of their own accord, they might
suffer themselves to be brought to Hispaniola, they did
persuade those poor wretches, that they came from those
places where they should see their parents and children,
and all their kindred and friends that were dead, and
should enjoy all kinds of delights with the embracements
and fruition of all beloved beings. And they, being infected
and possessed with these crafty and subtle imaginations,
singing and rejoicing left their country, and followed vain
and idle hope. But when they saw that they were deceived,
and neither met their parents nor any that they desired,
but were compelled to undergo grievous sovereignty and
command, and to endure cruel and extreme labour, they
either slew themselves, or, choosing to famish, gave up
their fair spirits, being persuaded by no reason or violence
to take food. So these miserable Yucaians came to their
end."
It was once more as it was in the days of the
apostles. The New World was first offered to the
holders of the old traditions. They were the husbandmen
first chosen for the new vineyard, and blood and
desolation were the only fruits which they reared upon
it. In their hands it was becoming a kingdom not of
God, but of the devil, and a sentence of blight went
out against them and against their works. How fatally
it has worked, let modern Spain and Spanish America
bear witness. We need not follow further the history
of their dealings with the Indians. For their colonies,
a fatality appears to have followed all attempts at
Catholic colonization. Like shoots from an old decaying
tree which no skill and no care can rear, they were
planted, and for a while they might seem to grow; but
their life was never more than a lingering death, a
failure, which to a thinking person would outweigh in
the arguments against Catholicism whole libraries of
faultless calenas, and a consensus patrum unbroken
through fifteen centuries for the supremacy of St.
Peter.
There is no occasion to look for superstitious causes
to explain it. The Catholic faith had ceased to be the
faith of the large mass of earnest thinking capable
persons; and to those who can best do the work, all
work in this world sooner or later is committed.
America was the natural home for Protestants; persecuted
at home, they sought a place where they might
worship God in their own way, without danger of
stake or gibbet, and the French Huguenots, as
afterwards the English Puritans, early found their way
there. The fate of a party of Coligny's people, who
had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these
stories, illustrating, as it does in the highest degree,
the wrath and fury with which the passions on both
sides were boiling. A certain John Ribauk, with about
400 companions, had emigrated to Florida. They were
quiet inoffensive people, and lived in peace there several
years, cultivating the soil, building villages, and on the
best possible terms with the natives. Spain was at
the time at peace with France; we are, therefore, to
suppose that it was in pursuance of the great crusade,
in which they might feel secure of the secret, if not
the confessed, sympathy of the Guises, that a powerful
Spanish fleet bore down upon this settlement. The
French made no resistance, and they were seized and
flayed alive, and their bodies hung out upon the trees,
with an inscription suspended over them, "Not as
Frenchmen, but as heretics." At Paris all was sweetness
and silence. The settlement was tranquilly
surrendered to the same men who had made it the
scene of their atrocity; and two years later, 500 of
the very Spaniards who had been most active in the
murder were living there in peaceable possession, in
two forts which their relation with the natives had
obliged them to build. It was well that there were
other Frenchmen living, of whose consciences the Court
had not the keeping, and who were able on emergencies
to do what was right without consulting it. A certain
privateer named Dominique de Gourges, secretly armed
and equipped a vessel at Rochelle, and, stealing across
the Atlantic and in two days collecting a strong party
of Indians, he came down suddenly upon the forts,
and, taking them by storm, slew or afterwards hanged
every man he found there, leaving their bodies on the
trees on which they had hanged the Huguenots, with
their own inscription reversed against them,--"Not as
Spaniards, but as murderers." For which exploit, well
deserving of all honest men's praise, Dominique de
Gourges had to fly his country for his life; and, coming
to England, was received with honourable welcome by
Elizabeth.
It was at such a time, and to take their part amidst
such scenes as these, that the English navigators
appeared along the shores of South America, as the armed
soldiers of the Reformation, and as the avengers of
humanity; as their enterprise was grand and lofty, so
was the manner in which they bore themselves in all
ways worthy of it. They were no nation of saints,
in the modern sentimental sense of that word; they
were prompt, stern men--more ready ever to strike
an enemy than to parley with him; and, private
adventurers as they all were, it was natural enough
that private foolishness and private badness should be
found among them as among other mortals. Every
Englishman who had the means was at liberty to fit
out a ship or ships, and if he could produce tolerable
vouchers for himself, received at once a commission
from the Court. The battles of England were fought
by her children, at their own risk and cost, and they
were at liberty to repay themselves the expense of their
expeditions by plundering at the cost of the national
enemy. Thus, of course, in a mixed world, there were
found mixed marauding crews of scoundrels, who played
the game which a century later was played with such
effect by the pirates of Tortuga. But we have to
remark, first, that such stories are singularly rare; and
then, that the victims are never the Indians, never any
but the Spaniards or the French, when the English were
at war with them; and, on the whole, the conduct and
character of the English sailors, considering what they
were and the work which they were sent to do, present
us all through that age with such a picture of gallantry,
disinterestedness, and high heroic energy, as has never
been overmatched; the more remarkable, as it was
the fruit of no drill or discipline, no tradition, no
system, no organized training, but was the free native
growth of a noble virgin soil.
Before starting on an expedition, it was usual for the
crew and the officers to meet and arrange among themselves
a series of articles of conduct, to which they
bound themselves by a formal agreement, the entire
body itself undertaking to see to their observance. It
is quite possible that strong religious profession, and
even sincere profession, might be accompanied, as it
was in the Spaniards, with everything most detestable.
It is not sufficient of itself to prove that their actions
would correspond with it, but it is one among a number
of evidences; and, coming, as they come before us,
with hands clear of any blood but of fair and open
enemies, their articles may pass at least as indications
of what they were.