Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States

[572] just risen above the horizon, and is but repeating the history of the world. The oppressed has struggled against the oppressor since time began. The struggle is going on still. It will go on forever, for the nature of man will always be the same. The cockatrice's egg has been hatched, and swarms of the Puritan have come forth to overrun the fair fields of the South that they may possess them; just as the wild Germans overran the plains of Italy centuries before.

But away with such thoughts for the present. We came on shore to get rid of them. They madden the brain, and quicken the pulse. The little craft, with the strange flag, has borne her captain hither, on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the great discoverer, whose history may be written in a single couplet.

A Castilla, y Leon
Nuevo Mundo, dio Colon.

On her way hither, her keel has crossed the very track of the three little vessels from Palos—two of them mere open caravels—that first ventured across the vast Atlantic; and now her commander is standing where the great admiral himself once stood—on the very theatre of his early glory. And alas! for Spain, on the theatre of his shame, or rather of her shame, too; for there stands the fortress still, in which are exhibited to the curious spectator the rings in the solid masonry of the wall, to which Columbus was chained!

A short walk will take us to the ruins of the palace of Diego Columbus. We must ascend the river a few hundred yards. Here it is, a little below the port of the present day. When built it stood alone, and we may remember that the townspeople complained of it, on this account—saying that it was intended as a fortress, to keep them in subjection. It is now surrounded, as you see, by the ruins of many houses. If you have read Oviedo's description of it, you are disappointed in its appearance; for that historian tells us, that ‘no man in Spain had a house to compare with it.’ Its form is that of two quadrangles connected by a colonnade, but it, by no means, comes up to the modern idea of a palace. The roof has entirely disappeared, and the quadrangles are mere shells filled with the accumulating debris of centuries, amid which