any of their vessels they may meet on those seas, and treating their crews as enemies and even pirates.  For they call by that opprobrious name all of any nation, themselves alone excepted, who dare to navigate those waters.  Nor do they profess to have any other or better right for this than reliance on some ridiculous donation of the Pope, and the fact that they were the first discoverers of some parts of that western region ...  Certainly it would have been disgraceful and unworthy in us, in possession as we were, by God’s bounty, of so many ships, furnished, equipped, and ready for every use of maritime warfare, to have chosen to let them rot idly at home, rather than employ them in those parts in avenging the blood of the English, so unjustly, so inhumanly, and so often, shed by the Spaniards there,—­nay, the blood too of the Indians, inasmuch as God ’hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation’ [Acts xvii. 26] ...  Our purpose, however, is to show the right and equity of the transaction itself, rather than to state all our several reasons for it.  And, that we may do this the more clearly, and explain general assertions by particulars, it will be proper to cast our eyes back a little into the past, and to run strictly over the transactions between the English and the Spaniards, observing the state of affairs on both sides, as far as mutual relations were concerned, from the time of the first discovery of the West Indies and of the Reformation of Religion.  For those two great events, as they were nearly contemporary, occasioned everywhere in the world vast changes, but especially as between the English and the Spaniards; which two nations have from that time followed diverse and almost opposite methods and principles in the management of their affairs.”

The manifesto, accordingly, then reviews the history of the relations between Spain and England from the time of Henry VIII., appending at last a long list of more recent outrages by the Spaniards on English ships and settlements in the West Indies, the dates all duly given, with the names of the ships and their captains, and the values of the cargoes.  After which, returning to more general considerations, it discusses the two pretexts of the Spaniards for their sole sovereignty in the West Indies,—­the Papal donation, and the right of first discovery.  Both are dismissed as absurd; and the document ends with an appeal to the common interests of Protestantism throughout Europe.  Even the recent massacre of the Vaudois Protestants is brought into the plea.  Thus:—­