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 m