The discovery of an Indian passage
is the true key to the maritime movements of the fifteenth and
the first half of the sixteenth centuries. It was the great
leading idea that gave the character to the enterprise of the
age.
It is not easy at this time to comprehend the impulse given to
Europe by the discovery of America. It was not the gradual
acquisition of some border territory, a province or a kingdom
that had been gained, but a New World that was now thrown open to
the European. The races of animals, the mineral treasures, the
vegetable forms, and the varied aspects of nature, man in the
different phases of civilization, filled the mind with entirely
new sets of ideas, that changed the habitual current of thought
and stimulated it to indefinite conjecture. The eagerness to
explore the wonderful secrets of the new hemisphere became so
active, that the principal cities of Spain were, in a manner,
depopulated, as emigrants thronged one after another to take
their chance upon the deep. *2 It was a world of romance that was
thrown open; for, whatever might be the luck of the adventurer,
his reports on his return were tinged with a coloring of romance
that stimulated still higher the sensitive fancies of his
countrymen, and nourished the chimerical sentiments of an age of
chivalry. They listened with attentive ears to tales of Amazons
which seemed to realize the classic legends of antiquity, to
stories of Patagonian giants, to flaming pictures of an El
Dorado, where the sands sparkled with gems, and golden pebbles as
large as birds' eggs were dragged in nets out of the rivers.
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