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The capture of Fort Sumter, with its garrison of less than a hundred men, was hardly Gibraltar; yet it would put the grandiloquent hidalgoes of Spain on their mettle to make more clatter over the downfall of the cross of St. George from that historic rock. McClellan was the young Napoleon, the very god of war in his latest avatar.
The commandant took the information very coolly. He prided himself, I observed, on his dignified behaviour on all occasions; for though he had joined the Republicans, he could still boast that the bluest of blue blood of the ancient hidalgoes of Castille flowed in his veins. "Care shall be taken that the sentries keep their eyes open," he replied; "and we will be prepared for the savages."
And the "somebody else," in the case of the colonists, was, by universal consent, the foreign sea captain who had deluded Spanish hidalgoes by his wild projects, and had become a grandee under false pretences.
They complained of the despotic rule of Columbus; of the disregard of distinctions of rank which he had manifested by placing the hidalgoes on the same footing as the common men, as regards work and rations, during the construction of the settlement; and of his mania for discovery, which made him abandon the colony already formed, in the unremunerative search for new countries.
Some of the sisters were the daughters of neighbouring Hidalgoes, as poor as they were proud and ignorant; others were women immured there on account of their vicious conduct.
English and Spanish ships dipped colors to each other as courteous hidalgoes might have doffed hats; and the guns roared each other salutes, that set the seas churning. Master John Hawkins quaffed mug after mug of foaming beer with a boisterous boast that if the Spaniards thought to frighten him with a waste of powder and smoke, he could play the same game, and "singe the don's beard."
But one of our Surgeon's mates, a young medico of fine family but slender fortune, must have created by far the strongest impression among the hidalgoes of Rio. He had read Don Quixote, and, instead of curing him of his Quixotism, as it ought to have done, it only made him still more Quixotic. Indeed, there are some natures concerning whose moral maladies the grand maxim of Mr.
Such was their effrontery that when the Catholic king came forth they all surrounded him, and got him into the midst of them, saying, 'Pay! pay! and if by chance I and my brother, who were pages to the most serene Queen, happened to pass where they were, they shouted to the very heavens saying, 'Look at the sons of the admiral of Mosquitoland, of that man who has discovered the lands of deceit and disappointment, a place of sepulchre and wretchedness to Spanish hidalgoes: adding many other insulting expressions, on which account we excused ourselves from passing by them."
Scant fare and hard work were having their effect; sickness pervaded the whole armament; and men of all ranks and stations, hidalgoes, people of the court and ecclesiastics, were obliged to labour manually under regulations strictly enforced. A mutiny, headed by Bernal Diaz, a man high in authority, was detected and quelled before the mutineers could effect their intention of seizing the ships.
They were exposed to new hostilities: they found the climate unhealthy; their numbers rapidly dwindled away from disease or poor food; starvation stared them in the face, in spite of the fertility of the soil; dissensions and jealousies arose; they were governed with great difficulty, for the haughty hidalgoes were unused to menial labor, and labor of the most irksome kind was necessary; law and order were relaxed.
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