and eastward, and communicating with the Gulf of St. Lawrence, thus making New England, with adjacent districts, an island.  His proposed fort on the Chesapeake, giving access, by this imaginary passage, to the seas of Newfoundland, would enable the Spaniards to command the fisheries, on which both the French and the English had long encroached, to the great prejudice of Spanish rights.  Doubtless, too, these inland waters gave access to the South Sea, and their occupation was necessary to prevent the French from penetrating thither; for that ambitious people, since the time of Cartier, had never abandoned their schemes of seizing this portion of the dominions of the King of Spain.  Five hundred soldiers and one hundred sailors must, he urges, take possession, without delay, of Port Royal and the Chesapeake.

Preparation for his enterprise was pushed with a furious energy.  His force amounted to two thousand six hundred and forty-six persons, in thirty-four vessels, one of which, the San Pelayo, bearing Menendez himself, was of more than nine hundred tons’ burden, and is described as one of the finest ships afloat.  There were twelve Franciscans and eight Jesuits, besides other ecclesiastics; and many knights of Galicia, Biscay, and the Asturias bore part in the expedition.  With a slight exception, the whole was at the Adelantado’s charge.  Within the first fourteen months, according to his admirer, Barcia, the adventure cost him a million ducats.

Before the close of the year, Sancho de Arciniega was commissioned to join Menendez with an additional force of fifteen hundred men.

Red-hot with a determined purpose, he would brook no delay.  To him, says the chronicler, every day seemed a year.  He was eager to anticipate Ribaut, of whose designs and whose force he seems to have been informed to the minutest particular, but whom he hoped to thwart and ruin by gaining Fort Caroline before him.  With eleven ships, then, he sailed from Cadiz on the 29th of June, 1565, leaving the smaller vessels of his fleet to follow with what speed they might.  He touched first at the Canaries, and on the eighth of July left them, steering for Dominica.  A minute account of the voyage has come down to us from the pen of Mendoza, chaplain of the expedition, a somewhat dull and illiterate person, who busily jots down the incidents of each passing day, and is constantly betraying, with a certain awkward simplicity, how the cares of this world and the next jostle each other in his thoughts.

On Friday, the twentieth of July, a storm fell upon them with appalling fury.  The pilots lost head, the sailors gave themselves up to their terrors.  Throughout the night, they beset Mendoza for confession and absolution, a boon not easily granted, for the seas swept the crowded decks in cataracts of foam, and the shriekings of the gale in the rigging drowned the exhortations of the half-drowned priest.  Cannon, cables, spars, water-casks, were thrown overboard,