ghastly and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the cold, callous
cruelty of those times. Generally death was the least penalty that
capture entailed. When the Spaniards made prisoners of the English, the
Inquisition took them in hand, and what that meant all the world knows.
When the English captured a Spanish vessel the prisoners were tortured,
either for the sake of revenge or to compel them to disclose where
treasure lay hidden. Cruelty begat cruelty, and it would be hard to
say whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Latin showed himself to be most
proficient in torturing his victim.

When Cobham, for instance, captured the Spanish ship in the Bay of
Biscay, after all resistance was over and the heat of the battle had
cooled, he ordered his crew to bind the captain and all of the crew and
every Spaniard aboard--whether in arms or not--to sew them up in the
mainsail and to fling them overboard. There were some twenty dead bodies
in the sail when a few days later it was washed up on the shore.

Of course such acts were not likely to go unavenged, and many an
innocent life was sacrificed to pay the debt of Cobham's cruelty.

Nothing could be more piratical than all this. Nevertheless, as was
said, it was winked at, condoned, if not sanctioned, by the law; and it
was not beneath people of family and respectability to take part in it.
But by and by Protestantism and Catholicism began to be at somewhat less
deadly enmity with each other; religious wars were still far enough from
being ended, but the scabbard of the sword was no longer flung away
when the blade was drawn. And so followed a time of nominal peace, and a
generation arose with whom it was no longer respectable and worthy--one
might say a matter of duty--to fight a country with which one's own
land was not at war. Nevertheless, the seed had been sown; it had been