and horses of chivalry, embark with artisans and miners for another
voyage, now without solicitude or fear, but with unbounded hopes of
wealth,--especially hardy adventurers and broken-down families of
rank anxious to retrieve their fortunes. The pendulum of a
nation's thought swings from the extreme of doubt and cynicism to
the opposite extreme of faith and exhilaration. Spain was ripe for
the harvest. Eight hundred years' desperate contest with the Moors
had made the nation bold, heroic, adventurous. There were no such
warriors in all Europe. Nowhere were there such chivalric virtues.
No people were then animated with such martial enthusiasm, such
unfettered imagination, such heroic daring, as were the subjects of
Ferdinand and Isabella. They were a people to conquer a world; not
merely heroic and enterprising, but fresh with religious
enthusiasm. They had expelled the infidels from Spain; they would
fight for the honor of the Cross in any clime or land.

The hopes held out by Columbus were extravagant; and these
extravagant expectations were the occasion of his fall and
subsequent sorrows and humiliation. Doubtless he was sincere, but
he was infatuated. He could only see the gold of Cipango. He was
as confident of enriching his followers as he had been of
discovering new realms. He was as enthusiastic as Sir Walter
Raleigh a century later, and made promises as rash as he, and
created the same exalted hopes, to be followed by bitter
disappointments; and consequently he incurred the same hostilities
and met the same downfall.

This second expedition was undertaken in seventeen vessels,
carrying fifteen hundred people, all full of animation and hope,
and some of them with intentions to settle in the newly discovered