Menendez was summoned back in haste to the court.  There was counsel, deep and ominous, in the chambers of the Escurial.  His force must be strengthened.  Three hundred and ninety-four men were added at the royal charge, and a corresponding number of transport and supply ships.  It was a holy war, a crusade, and as such was preached by priest and monk along the western coasts of Spain.  All the Biscayan ports flamed with zeal, and adventurers crowded to enroll themselves; since to plunder heretics is good for the soul as well as the purse, and broil and massacre have double attraction, when promoted to a means of salvation:  a fervor, deep and hot, but not of celestial kindling; nor yet that buoyant and inspiring zeal, which, when the Middle Age was in its youth and prime, glowed in the soul of Tancred, Godfrey, and St. Louis, and which, when its day was long since past, could still find its home in the great heart of Columbus.  A darker spirit urged the new crusade,—­born, not of hope, but of fear, slavish in its nature, the creature and the tool of despotism.  For the typical Spaniard of the sixteenth century was not in strictness a fanatic; he was bigotry incarnate.

Heresy was a plague-spot, an ulcer to be eradicated with fire and the knife, and this foul abomination was infecting the shores which the Vicegerent of Christ had given to the King of Spain, and which the Most Catholic King had given to the Adelantado.  Thus would countless heathen tribes be doomed to an eternity of flame, shut out from that saving communion with Holy Church, to which, by the sword and the whip and the fagot, dungeons and slavery, they would otherwise have been mercifully driven, to the salvation of their souls, and the greater glory of God.  And, for the Adelantado himself, should the vast outlays, the vast debts, of his bold Floridian venture be all in vain?  Should his fortunes be wrecked past redemption through these tools of Satan?  As a Catholic, as a Spaniard, as an adventurer, his course was clear.  Woe, then, to the Huguenot in the gripe of Pedro Menendez!

But what was the scope of this enterprise, and the limits of the Adelantado’s authority?  He was invested with power almost absolute, not merely over the peninsula which now retains the name of Florida, but over all North America, from Labrador to Mexico,—­for this was the Florida of the old Spanish geographers, and the Florida designated in the commission of Menendez.  It was a continent which he was to conquer and occupy out of his own purse.  The impoverished King contracted with his daring and ambitious subject to win and hold for him the territory of the future United States and British Provinces.  His plan, as subsequently developed and exposed at length in his unpublished letters to Philip II., was, first, to plant a garrison at Port Royal, and next to fortify strongly on Chesapeake Bay, called by him St. Mary’s.  He believed that this bay was an arm of the sea, running northward