THE HAND OF THE GIANT 231 



it was due to the training of able seamen and competent 

 leadership developed by the northern fishing fleets of New- 

 foundland. The English government left room for men to 

 rise from the school of experience and take charge, and to 

 begin with recognized healthy separatism in colonial matters 

 more than the Spanish government permitted. Spain tried 

 to curb Pizarro; England elevated the pirate Henry Morgan 

 to the governorship of Jamaica and knighted him, as the 

 French did Le Clerc. Nevertheless, the weight of Spanish 

 tradition, the combined power of an absolute theology and 

 a legalistic monarchy, though it lost the West Indies, did 

 mold for a time a solid empire on the mainland in Central 

 and South America, and no amount of freshly improvised 

 action by the British was able to destroy it. 



Two things generally turn the tide of history one way or 

 another at any given period: one is timing, and the other is 

 readiness for new things or susceptibility to change. In the 

 case of Spain, the times were ripe for a Mediterranean power 

 to taste the first fruits of long years of preparatory explora- 

 tions and scientific inquiry by the Mediterranean pilots and 

 navigators. Spain, because she had at the right time a strong 

 government that could exercise continued power, was ready to 

 act. But actually by the very nature of that power she was 

 also unable to adjust to the strange requirements of a situation 

 beyond her experience. Spain had expelled the Jews, expelled 

 the Moors, and successfully dominated the powerful nobles 

 and large corporate powers within her realm, and her King 

 reigned supreme at home. Naturally the home government 

 had no intention of letting conquistadors and adventurers set 

 up a new, ungovernable feudal aristocracy in the New World. 

 As a result there was no great movement of individual enter- 

 prise from Spain, but instead an export of judges, lawyers, 

 priests, and administrators. Slaves filled the labor vacuum 

 when the conquered Indians died or refused to work. Mean- 



