Menendez was summoned back in haste to the court. There was counsel,
deep and ominous, in the chambers of the Escurial. His force must be
strengthened. Three hundred and ninety-four men were added at the royal
charge, and a corresponding number of transport and supply ships. It was
a holy war, a crusade, and as such was preached by priest and monk along
the western coasts of Spain. All the Biscayan ports flamed with zeal,
and adventurers crowded to enroll themselves; since to plunder heretics
is good for the soul as well as the purse, and broil and massacre have
double attraction, when promoted to a means of salvation: a fervor, deep
and hot, but not of celestial kindling; nor yet that buoyant and
inspiring zeal, which, when the Middle Age was in its youth and prime,
glowed in the soul of Tancred, Godfrey, and St. Louis, and which, when
its day was long since past, could still find its home in the great
heart of Columbus. A darker spirit urged the new crusade,--born, not of
hope, but of fear, slavish in its nature, the creature and the tool of
despotism. For the typical Spaniard of the sixteenth century was not in
strictness a fanatic; he was bigotry incarnate.

Heresy was a plague-spot, an ulcer to be eradicated with fire and the
knife, and this foul abomination was infecting the shores which the
Vicegerent of Christ had given to the King of Spain, and which the Most
Catholic King had given to the Adelantado. Thus would countless heathen
tribes be doomed to an eternity of flame, shut out from that saving
communion with Holy Church, to which, by the sword and the whip and the
fagot, dungeons and slavery, they would otherwise have been mercifully
driven, to the salvation of their souls, and the greater glory of God.
And, for the Adelantado himself, should the vast outlays, the vast
debts, of his bold Floridian venture be all in vain? Should his fortunes
be wrecked past redemption through these tools of Satan? As a Catholic,
as a Spaniard, as an adventurer, his course was clear. Woe, then, to the