zation. The proudest nobles, with the armor and
horses of chivalry, embark with artisans and miners for another voyage,
now without solicitude or fear, but with unbounded hopes of
wealth,--especially hardy adventurers and broken-down families of rank
anxious to retrieve their fortunes. The pendulum of a nation's thought
swings from the extreme of doubt and cynicism to the opposite extreme of
faith and exhilaration. Spain was ripe for the harvest. Eight hundred
years' desperate contest with the Moors had made the nation bold,
heroic, adventurous. There were no such warriors in all Europe. Nowhere
were there such chivalric virtues. No people were then animated with
such martial enthusiasm, such unfettered imagination, such heroic
daring, as were the subjects of Ferdinand and Isabella. They were a
people to conquer a world; not merely heroic and enterprising, but fresh
with religious enthusiasm. They had expelled the infidels from Spain;
they would fight for the honor of the Cross in any clime or land.

The hopes held out by Columbus were extravagant; and these extravagant
expectations were the occasion of his fall and subsequent sorrows and
humiliation. Doubtless he was sincere, but he was infatuated. He could
only see the gold of Cipango. He was as confident of enriching his
followers as he had been of discovering new realms. He was as
enthusiastic as Sir Walter Raleigh a century later, and made promises as
rash as he, and created the same exalted hopes, to be followed by bitter
disappointments; and consequently he incurred the same hostilities and
met the same downfall.

This second expedition was undertaken in seventeen vessels, carrying
fifteen hundred people, all full of animation and hope, and some of them
with intentions to settle in the newly discovered country until they had
made their fortunes. They arrived at Hispaniola in March, of the year
1493, only to discover that the men left behind on the first voyage to
secure their settlement were all despoiled or murdered; that the
natives had proved treacherous, or that the Spaniards had abused their
confidence and forfeited their friendship. They were exposed to new
hostilities: they found the climate unhealthy; their numbers rapidly
dwindled away from disease or poor food; starvation stared them in the
face, in spite of the fertility of the soil; dissensions and jealousies
arose; they were governed with great difficulty, for the haughty
hidalgoes were unused to me