For it was not as colonists that most of them went, but in a spirit compounded of that of the crusader, the knight-errant, and the pirate.

If there is anything in the paradox that artists have created natural beauty, it is a truer one to say that the Spanish romances created the Spanish colonial empire.

The men who sailed on the great adventure had feasted {436} on tales of paladins and hippogrifs, of enchanted palaces and fountains of youth, and miraculously fair women to be rescued and then claimed by knights.
They read in books of travel purporting to tell the sober truth of satyrs and of purple unicorns and of men who spread their feet over their heads for umbrellas and of others whose heads grew between their shoulders.

No wonder that when they went to a strange country they found the River of Life in the Orinoco, colonies of Amazons in the jungle, and El Dorado, the land of gold, in the riches of Mexico and Peru! It is a testimony to the imaginative mood of Europe, as well as to the power of the pen, that the whole continent came to be called, not after its discoverer, but after the man who wrote the best romances--mostly fictions--about his travels in it.
[Sidenote: Exploitation of natives] In the Greater Antilles, where Spain made her first colonies, her rule showed at its worst.

The soft native race, the Caribs, almost completely disappeared within half a century.