Thus, from a combination of causes, the whole force and energy of the age was directed towards the sea.  The wide excitement and the greatness of the interests at stake, raised even common men above themselves; and people who in ordinary times would have been no more than mere seamen, or mere money-making merchants, appear before us with a largeness and greatness of heart and mind in which their duties to God and their country are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt to be paramount to every other.

Ordinary English traders we find fighting Spanish war ships in behalf of the Protestant faith; the cruisers of the Spanish main were full of generous eagerness for the conversion of the savage nations to Christianity; and what is even more surprising, sites for colonization were examined and scrutinized by such men in a lofty statesmanlike spirit, and a ready insight was displayed by them into the indirect effects of a wisely-extended commerce on every highest human interest.

Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a further feeling, a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was spurring on the English, and one which must be well understood and well remembered, if men like Drake, and Hawkins, and Raleigh, are to be tolerably understood.  One of the English Reviews, a short time ago, was much amused with a story of Drake having excommunicated a petty officer as a punishment for some moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in Drake, as a man, anything more than; a highly brave and successful buccaneer, whose pretences to religion might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit to the Madonna.  And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are regarded by superficial persons, who see only such outward circumstances of their history as correspond with their own impressions.  The high nature of these men, and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise out and become visible to us as we can throw ourselves back into their times and teach our hearts to feel as they felt.  We do not find in the language of the voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their help at home, any of that weak watery talk of “protection of aborigines,” which as soon as it is translated into fact becomes the most active policy for their destruction, soul and body.  But the stories of the dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians, which were widely known in England, seem to have affected all classes of people, not with pious passive horror, but with a genuine human indignation.  A thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and down the pages of Hakluyt, who, with a view to make them known, translated Peter Martyr’s letters; and each commonest sailor-boy who had heard them from his childhood among the tales of his father’s fire-side, had longed to be a man, that he might go out and become the avenger of a gallant and suffering people.  A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart; seldom fails to make those worthy of it to