s no one but will easily understand if only he
will reflect in what manner that King and his subjects have always
conducted themselves towards the English nation in that tract of
America ... Whenever they have opportunity, though without the
least reason of justice, and with no provocation of injury, they
are incessantly killing, murdering, nay butchering in cold blood,
our countrymen there, as they think fit, seizing their goods and
fortunes, destroying their plantations and houses, capturing any of
their vessels they may meet on those seas, and treating their crews
as enemies and even pirates. For they call by that opprobrious name
all of any nation, themselves alone excepted, who dare to navigate
those waters. Nor do they profess to have any other or better right
for this than reliance on some ridiculous donation of the Pope, and
the fact that they were the first discoverers of some parts of that
western region ... Certainly it would have been disgraceful and
unworthy in us, in possession as we were, by God's bounty, of so
many ships, furnished, equipped, and ready for every use of
maritime warfare, to have chosen to let them rot idly at home,
rather than employ them in those parts in avenging the blood of the
English, so unjustly, so inhumanly, and so often, shed by the
Spaniards there,--nay, the blood too of the Indians, inasmuch as
God 'hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all
the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before
appointed, and the bounds of their habitation' [Acts xvii. 26] ...
Our purpose, however, is to show the right and equity of the
transaction itself, rather than to state all our several reasons
for it. And, that we may do this the more clearly, and explain
general assertions by particulars, it will be proper to cast our
eyes back a little into the past, and to run strictly over the
transactions between the English and the Spaniards, observing the
state of affairs on both sides, as far as mutual relations were
concerned, from the time of the first discovery of the West Indies
and of the Reformation of Religion. For those two great events, as
they were nearly contemporary, occasioned everywhere in the world
vast changes, but especially as between the English and the
Spaniards; which two nations have from that time followed diverse
and almost opposite methods and principles in the management of