Historia, filosofía-biografia-pensamiento

1584. These half-piratical attempts against Spain led continually into American waters, till the notion of forming a permanent outpost here as base for such adventures suggested to Sir Humphrey Gilbert the plan, which he failed to realize, of founding an American settlement. Gilbert visited our shores in 1579, and again in 1583, but was lost on his return from the latter voyage. In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh sent two captains, Amidas and Barlow, to inspect the coast off what is now North Carolina. They reported so favorably that he began, next year, a colony on Roanoke Island. England was now a Protestant land, and no longer heeded Spanish claims to the transatlantic continent, save so far as actual settlements had been made. 1586. Sir Richard Grenville commanded this expedition, but was to return on seeing the one hundred and eight colonists who accompanied him well established. Queen Elizabeth gave the name VIRGINIA to the new country. Drake, tending homeward from one of his raids ...

Moreover, the Spaniards found their first American conquests too easy, and the rewards of these too great. This prevented all thought of developing the country through industry, concentrating expectation solely upon waiting fortunes, to be had from the natives by the sword or through forced labor in mines, Their treatment of the aborigines was nothing short of diabolical. Well has it been said: "The Spaniards had sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty, driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel desperation and mercilessness in passion. The hell which they denounced upon their vict...