So ended the first great military expedition of the English to the tropics, the first of many attempts, nearly all of them disastrous, to wrest from Spain her Empire in the West. I have dwelt upon it at some length, for it is the opening chapter of a long and melancholy story, whereof one recitation will almost serve for the whole. We have still to go with Wentworth to Carthagena and with Albemarle to Havanna; we shall accompany Abercromby and Moore to St. Vincent and St. Lucia, and other less noted officers to Demarara and Surinam; we shall even see Wellington himself drawing up a plan for operations on the Orinoco: but in spite of a hundred experiences and a thousand warnings we shall find the mistakes of Oliver Cromwell eternally repeated, and though we may never again have to tell so disgraceful a story as that of the repulse from St. Domingo, yet we shall seldom fail to encounter such mournful complaints as were made by Fortescue, Sedgwicke, and Brayne, of regiments decimated as soon as disembarked, and annihilated before the firing of a shot. We have now well-nigh learned how to conduct a tropical expedition, and life in the tropics is a thing familiar to tens of thousands of Englishmen; but it is worth while to give a thought to these poor soldiers of the Commonwealth. They were the first Englishmen who went to the tropics, not like Drake's crews as fellow-adventurers, but simply as hired fighting men. Yet the traditions of Drake's golden voyages were strong upon them, and they landed, big with expectations of endless gold told up in bags.[186] We can picture their joy at coming ashore, bronzed healthy Englishmen, and their open-mouthed wonder at all that they saw; and then after a few hours the first cases of sickness, the puzzled surgeons with busy lancets, the first death and the first grave; the instant spread of fever on the turning of the virgin soil, and then a hideous iteration of ghastly symptoms, and, sundown after sundown, the row of silent forms and shrouded faces. Englishmen had faced such terrors in the flooded leaguers of Flanders, but it was hard to find them in a fruitful and pleasant land, where the sun shone brighter and the forest grew greener than in England, the loved England that lay so far away over the glorious mocking blue of the tropic sea.[187] [Sidenote: 1655, Sept. 9.] [Sidenote: 1657, March.]