These men were the Robin Hoods of the sea, and when from selfish plunderings they rose to be champions of religious freedom as well, their career seemed in most men's minds to be worthy of all admiration. But in order to understand fully the motives which induced the more noble spirits to go forth and do battle with Spain on private grounds, and at their own expense, we ought to have sat at the Mermaid, or other taverns, and heard the mariners' tales as they told them fresh from the salt sea. We should have listened to stories of cruel wrongs inflicted on the brave Indians of South America, which would have stirred any dormant spirit of chivalry within us, and made us long to champion the weak. We should have heard the story of the Indian chief who was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and suffered the penalty of losing his hands because he had fought so strenuously for his mother-land. This Indian returned to his people, and devoted the rest of his life to encouraging and heartening his countrymen to the great work of fighting for life and liberty, showing his maimed arms, and calling to mind how many others had had half a foot hacked off by the Spaniards that they might not sit on horseback. Then, when a battle was being fought, we should have been told how this chief loaded his two stumps with bundles of arrows and supplied the fighters with fresh store, as they lacked them. Surely men so brave as this man challenged admiration and deserved succour. The young Queen of England had suffered herself, and these stories must have stirred her heart to say with the Dido of Virgil-- "Haud ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco." Raleigh and Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher, Shakespeare and Spenser may have sat by a coal-fire and heard or told such stories; for Raleigh writes: "Who will not be persuaded that now at length the great Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans, and lamentations, hath seen the tears and blood of so many millions of innocent men, women, and children, afflicted, robbed, reviled, branded with hot irons, roasted, dismembered, mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked, scalded with hot oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in sport, drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed,--and purposeth to scourge and plague that cursed nation, and to take the yoke of servitude from that distressed people, as free by nature as any Christian." It was not the massacres under Cortez and Pizarro, earlier in this century, which roused the deepest indignation; it was the tales of inhuman cruelty perpetrated by Spanish colonists in time of peace, and of the noble conduct of the conquered Indians under the degrading conditions of their slavery, which most moved pity and wrath and feelings of revenge.