226 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



until, Spain on the west and Portugal on the east, 

 they seemed as if they had divided the remaining 

 world between them. Talk as we may of the de- 

 generacy of the modern Latins, we ought never to 

 forget that to do what they did in the discovery or 

 rediscovery of those far-away lands by means of ocean 

 traffic exhibited some of the very highest qualities of 

 the human race, with the exception of justice and 

 mercy or any form of altruism whatever. It should 

 also be remembered that the commanders of those 

 ships were entirely dominated by the idea that they 

 were of the chosen ones of earth, and those whom 

 they commanded born only to serve them. The idea 

 is not yet extinct, but it is doomed. In their case it 

 served to energize them, to carry them high above 

 all such trivial obstacles as hunger or thirst or insub- 

 ordination. They believed in themselves almost as 

 gods, and the unlimited power over the persons of 

 their crews, the utter absence of any check upon them 

 when once they had left home for the unknown, could 

 not but foster and confirm that belief. 



Another incentive which they had in their voyaging 

 was undoubtedly the very powerful one of religion. 

 Their belief in themselves was buttressed by their 

 absolute certainty that they were divinely commis- 

 sioned to carry the banner of the Cross all over the 

 world and propagate their religion in much the same 

 manner and with quite as much ruthlessness as their 

 Saracenic predecessors had done, and their Moorish 

 contemporaries were even then doing ; for while they 

 were intensely religious, their religion was of the 

 fanatical type, which entirely separates theory from 

 practice, even to the amazing extent of spreading the 



