Miscellaneous Addresses

Of all the inhabitants of the New World, they were the most terrible foes and the most capable of organized and sustained warfare; and of all the inhabitants north of Mexico they were the most civilized and intelligent.The century which followed the voyages of Columbus had been for the northern continent a period of exploration and discovery, of search for gold and for fabulous cities and for a passage to the Indies, of fugitive fur trade with the natives, of fisheries on the Banks, and of feeble, disastrous attempts at occupation, but not of permanent settlement.Ponce de Leon and DeSoto and Verrazano, Cartier and the Cabots and Drake and Frobisher and Gilbert and Gosnold, had brought the western coast of the Atlantic out from the mists of fable; but they had left no trace upon its shores.Jean Ribaut and his French Huguenots had attempted to do for their religion in Florida what the Pilgrims did in the follow- ing century on the coast of Massachusetts; but their colony was destroyed with incredible cruelty, in the name of religion, by the ferocious Spaniard, Menendez; and the colony of Menendez was in turn destroyed by the Gascon, De Gourgues, save a feeble remnant on the site of Saint Augustine.Raleigh, with noble constancy and persistency, had wasted his fortune in repeated and vain attempts to establish a colony in

Archaeology and Natural History · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Computer Science · Latin American history and culture