They had returned in the Victoria, and the service had to them a special significance in the church of that name.
Mesquita must have heard the acclaiming city.
To the prisoner who had waited in hope, the trumpets of the heralds must have been sweet after his release! Juana, the demented Queen, was yet watching by the tomb in view of her window, hoping at each dawn of the morning that she would find that the dust had awakened to life again. Charles was mapping Europe; his fire of ambition was glowing, and the news of the new fields of the ocean that these discoveries had brought to him filled him with pride and exultation.
He resolved on giving Del Cano and his mariners a splendid reception, after the manner that Isabella had received Columbus.
Del Cano was now the living representative of Magellan. In publicly receiving him with heralds, music, and festival he would do honor to Magellan, whose name was now immortal. So Charles spread his tables of silver and gold to those who had lived on the open sea on scraps of leather, and magnanimously welcomed as knights of the sea those who had followed the sun around the world.
Spain opened the prison doors of Mesquita.
How must Del Cano have welcomed Mesquita as he came forth from his prison, vindicated on these festal days!
Mesquita was a hero now, and a hero among heroes, for he had been a martyr to the cause. The people's hearts overflowed toward him.
So the islands of the new ocean world came to be the possessions of Spain, and from Philip, who succeeded Charles, were called the Philippines. They were to be governed, robbed, taxed, and, in part, reduced to slavery for the enrichment of Spain for nearly four hundred years. Then Spain was to vanish from their history in the smoke of Admiral Dewey's guns, and over them was to float the flag of the republic of the West.
It is a strange allotment of events that these islands should introduce the republic of the West into the Asiatic world. A half century ago the subject of Europe in Asia excited the attention of mankind, but no one ever dreamed that a like topic of America in Asia would ever become one of the political problems of the world.