The Ocean Explorer.
CHAPTER I.
THE OLD, THE NEW, AND THE OCEAN BETWEEN.
1504 The great Queen Isabella was dead. She had died amidst the splendor of the richest and most powerful Court on earth, beloved by some for her noble qualities, and execrated by others for her tyrannical laws, for the heartlessness and cruelty she had practiced, for the wars she had kindled, and for the lives she had sacrificed. Because of the turbulence of the elements, the superstitious believed that her unconquerable spirit refused to be tranquilized even by death. Darkness lay upon the world, and the slowly moving funeral cortege made its way the three hundred miles to Granada, menaced by the lightning's flash, and accompanied by the thunder's roar, the rain and the hurricane, and the floods which swept men and horses to their death. At last, after thirty years of a masterful and memorable reign, Isabella lay at rest in the marvelously beautiful Alhambra, the burial place of her choice which she had wrested from the Moorish Kings. And Ferdinand ruled in her stead.
1506 Less than two years, and there was another notable death in Spain. The far-seeing eyes of a kingly man looked out upon the world for the last time. The active hands of a great navigator lay still, folded over the courageous heart that had long been broken; the heart that had been thrilled by the acclaim of the populace, and then chilled by the frowns of its sovereigns; the hands that had been bedecked with jewels by Ferdinand and Isabella, and later laden by them with chains. Columbus, the admiral of the ocean, who had joined two worlds by his genius and accomplished an event whose magnitude and grandeur history can never equal, and who had filled the center of a stage, brilliant with the famous actors of his time, had died; died in poverty and neglect; instead of chimes chanting a requiem in his praise, there was the rattle of the chains his hands had worn, as they went down into his sepulchre for burial with him according to his wish. Even his grave remained unmarked for ten years, until public opinion forced Ferdinand to a tardy recognition of his duty in the erection of a monument in honor of one of the greatest men of any age; a man great in thought and great in action; a man with such a mighty faith that we stand appalled at its mightiness!
Isabella left a united country; a country at the pinnacle of greatness. She left a highly organized army; an army wrought out of a fragment of incompetency. She raised the standard of science and the arts, and advanced the cause of morality. But the greatest and most enduring monument she erected was the result of the slight encouragement and scant help that she gave to the enthusiastic Italian mendicant, who became the founder of a New World and whose fame will continue undimmed to the end of time.
1516 "The King is dead" fell upon Ferdinand's unhearing ears. "Long live the King" greeted the advent of Charles, his successor. Charles, who was the son of the unfortunate Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella; Charles I, King of Spain; Charles V, Emperor of Germany; Ruler over the kingdom of Naples; Monarch of the New World. Power, such as the world has seldom seen, centered in this man; an empire so vast that it encircled the globe, and upon whose domain military activities never ceased. The cruelties of Spain are proverbial, and they reached their climax under the rule of Ferdinand, Isabella and Charles; and under them the decadence of their nation began, which in four hundred years has never ceased. Now, shorn of every dependency, its power forever destroyed, it lies crushed, humiliated and broken by the greatness of its fall.
And here this sketch leaves Old Spain and we sail away across the ocean five thousand miles, to the New Spain of that period, in a ship whose sails flap lazily in the breeze, taking more weeks then than days now by the modern methods of this enlightened age.