The discovery of an Indian passage is the true key to the maritime
movements of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries. It
was the great leading idea that gave the character to the enterprise of the
age.
It is not easy at this time to comprehend the impulse given to Europe by
the discovery of America. It was not the gradual acquisition of some
border territory, a province or a kingdom that had been gained, but a
New World that was now thrown open to the Europeans. The races of
animals, the mineral treasures, the vegetable forms, and the varied
aspects of nature, man in the different phases of civilization, filled the
mind with entirely new sets of ideas, that changed the habitual current of
thought and stimulated it to indefinite conjecture. The eagerness to
explore the wonderful secrets of the new hemisphere became so active,
that the principal cities of Spain were, in a manner, depopulated, as
emigrants thronged one after another to take their chance upon the
deep.2 It was a world of romance that was thrown open; for, whatever
might be the luck of the adventurer, his reports on his return were tinged
with a coloring of romance that stimulated still higher the sensitive
fancies of his countrymen, and nourished the chimerical sentiments of an
age of chivalry.
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