24 



HISTORY OF THE SEA. 



on reaching the Sargasso Sea, where the collected weeds offered 

 an impediment to their progress, thought they had arrived at 

 the limit of navigation and the end of the world. Five years 

 later, the crew of da Gama, on doubling the Cape of Good 

 Hope, imagined they saw, in the threatening clouds that gathered 

 about Table Rock, the form of a spectre waving off their vessel 

 and crying woe to all who should thus invade his dread dominion. 

 The Neptune of the classics, in short, who disported himself in 

 the narrow waters of the Mediterranean, and of whose wrath 

 we have read the famous mythologic accounts, was a deity 

 altogether bland and debonnaire compared to the gloomy and 

 revengeful monopolist of the seas, such as the historians and 

 geographers of the Middle Ages painted him. 



And now Columbus had discovered the Western Continent, 

 da Gama had found an ocean route to the Indies, and Magellan, 

 sailing around the world, had proved its sphericity and approached 

 the Spice Islands from the east. For centuries, now, the two 

 great oceans were the scenes of grand and useful maritime 

 expeditions. The tropical islands of the Pacific arose, one by 

 one, from the bosom of the sea, to reward the navigator or 

 relieve the outcast. The Spanish, by dint of cruelty and 

 rapacity, filled their famous Manilla galleons and Acapulco 

 treasure-ships with the spoils of warfare and the legitimate 

 fruits of trade. The English, seeking to annoy a nation with 

 whom, though not at war, they were certainly not at peace, 

 sent against their golden fleets the piratical squadrons of Anson, 

 Drake, and Hawkins. For years property was not safe upon the 

 sea, and trading-ships went armed, while the armed vessels of 

 nations turned buccaneers. The Portuguese and Dutch colonized 

 the coasts and islands of India, Spain sent Cortez and Pizarro 

 to Mexico and Peru, and England drove the Puritans across a 

 stormy sea to Plymouth. Commerce was spread over the world, 

 and Civilization and Christianity were introduced into the 

 desert and* the wilderness. Two centuries more, and steam 



