that
capture entailed. When the Spaniards made prisoners of the English, the
Inquisition took them in hand, and what that meant all the world knows.
When the English captured a Spanish vessel the prisoners were tortured,
either for the sake of revenge or to compel them to disclose where
treasure lay hidden. Cruelty begat cruelty, and it would be hard to
say whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Latin showed himself to be most
proficient in torturing his victim.

When Cobham, for instance, captured the Spanish ship in the Bay of
Biscay, after all resistance was over and the heat of the battle had
cooled, he ordered his crew to bind the captain and all of the crew and
every Spaniard aboard--whether in arms or not--to sew them up in the
mainsail and to fling them overboard. There were some twenty dead bodies
in the sail when a few days later it was washed up on the shore.

Of course such acts were not likely to go unavenged, and many an
innocent life was sacrificed to pay the debt of Cobham's cruelty.

Nothing could be more piratical than all this. Nevertheless, as was
said, it was winked at, condoned, if not sanctioned, by the law; and it
was not beneath people of family and respectability to take part in it.
But by and by Protestantism and Catholicism began to be at somewhat less
deadly enmity with each other; religious wars were still far enough from
being ended, but the scabbard of the sword was no longer flung away
when the blade was drawn. And so followed a time of nominal peace, and a
generation arose with whom it was no longer respectable and worthy--one
might say a matter of duty--to fight a country with which one's own
land was not at war. Nevertheless, the seed had been sown; it had been
demonstrated that it was feasible to practice piracy against Spain and
not to suffer therefor. Blood had been shed and cruelty practiced, and,
once indulged, no lust seems stronger than that of shedding blood and
practicing cruelty.

Though Spain might be ever so well grounded in peace at home, in the
West Indies she was always at war with the whole world--English, French,
Dutch. It was almost a matter of life or death with her to keep her hold
upon the New World. At home she was bankrupt and, upon the earthquake
of the Reformation, her power was already beginning to totter and to
crumble to pieces. America was her treasure house, and from it alone
could she hope to keep her leaking purse full of gold and silver. So it
was that sh