vellers following in the wake of the great discoverers and
explorers, rise almost to the importance of documentary evidence, when
they attempt to deal with such questions as the attitude of the
Spaniards towards the natives of the New World. But mainly they are
narratives, setting down simply and unpretentiously the impressions made
upon European visitors by the bigness of dimensions and proportions and
the abundance of natural products of all sorts. There is a spirit of
wonderment at the riches so profusely bestowed upon this Western world;
but there is not yet a trace of the jealousy so apparent in later
writings, when commercial rivalry had divided the nations of Europe into
hostile camps and finally arrayed all of them against Spain. Though not
always written by men who had set out in pursuit of adventure, they
convey to the reader a breath of the oldtime romance of travel in
countries the plants and animals and native residents of which are so
many objects of curious interest. But viewed as a whole, these books are
full of information, at times strangely quickened by an individual human
touch, and read at leisure in a certain order, reconstruct the panorama
of West Indian life in a period which had no parallel in the history of
the world.

CHAPTER XXVIII

It was the inscrutable irony of fate that Cuba should remain so
negligible a quantity during one of the most momentous and progressive
periods of human history. No other era since man began his career had
been on the whole so marked with greatness. Discovery and exploration
had doubled the known area of the globe, and the intellectual
achievements of the race had even more than kept pace with the material.
The era of which we have been writing in this volume saw the completion
of Columbus's work in his fourth voyage, the exploits of Magellan,
Balboa and Cabot, the enterprises of Cortez and Pizarro, of Cartier and
Raleigh. It saw the rise of religious liberty, and of modern philosophy
and science. It saw the art of printing, invented in the preceding
century, developed into world-wide significance.

This was the era of genius. Its annals were adorned with the names of
Shakespeare and Cervantes, of Rafael and Titian and Michael Angelo, of
Holbein and Durer, of Luther and Erasmus, of Ariosto and Rabelais, of
Tyndale and Knox, of Calvin, Loyola and Xavier, of Copernicus and
Vesalius, of Montaigne and Camoens, of Tycho Brahe and Kepler, of Tasso
and Spenser,