With Drake on the Spanish Main

by Herbert Strang

The Spanish Whip

Dennis had given up the idea of building a boat as a means of escape from the island; but now that time again hung heavy on his hands, he reverted to it as a refuge from the tedium of idleness. It promised to give him much labour, for, unless he stripped the planking from the Maid Marian, he must needs fell trees for himself, and prepare his timbers as well as his unskill could devise. The trees of the island were for the most part unknown to him; and he was not aware of the Indian practice of hollowing out a cedar trunk with fire or hatchet. In his wanderings he now began to take note of the different species, with a view to selecting one that would best suit his tools.

One day, when he was strolling through the woodland on this errand, he was amazed, and not a little alarmed, to hear, from some spot far to his right, what seemed to him to be the ring of axes. He halted, incredulous. The island, he was assured, had no other inhabitant; yet he could not be mistaken; the sound of tree-felling reminded him of home, and he felt a sudden deep yearning for the combes and holts of far-off Devon. But this feeling was immediately quelled by a sense of danger. Who were these woodcutters? No friends, he was sure; he had given up hope of finding friends upon these remote coasts. And if not friends, discovery by these spelt death to him, or slavery to which death would be preferable.

He was minded to turn about and seek safety in his hut. Built upon the edge of the chine, it could only be discovered by careful exploration of the woodland, and the chine was all but invisible from the sea. There he might remain in hiding, with a fair chance that he would not be found. But this first impulse passed. He felt an overmastering curiosity to see who these visitors were. Whence had they come, he wondered? Why, if they came from the distant mainland, had they crossed the sea? He could not suppose that wood was lacking upon the shores of the great continent.

Slowly, with infinite caution, he began to thread his way towards the sound. There were open spaces amid the woodland; these he durst not cross, but kept always in the shelter of the trees. He dreaded lest Mirandola should betray him by a cry; but the monkey leapt from bough to bough almost noiselessly, as if he too had taken alarm from the unwonted sound. A few weeks before, Dennis himself would have found it difficult to make his way through the woods and the undergrowth without giving signs of his presence by the snapping of twigs or the rustle of parting foliage; but the abiding sense of danger which had oppressed him during his earlier passages across the island had bred in him a wariness of movement that was now almost as instinctive as in the wild creatures whose lives depended on their caution.

Guiding himself by the sounds, he was drawn towards a grove of trees that lay about two hundred yards from the southern beach. Only a day or two before he had struck his hatchet into one of them, and concluded from its soft white sappy rind that it would not provide fit timber for his boat. Yet it was clearly these trees upon which the unseen woodmen were at work. He stole forward, and coming to a dense fringe of undergrowth beyond which the grove lay, he edged his way into the thicket, and very stealthily pressed the foliage aside until he got a view of what was doing.

The trees grew somewhat far apart, and across a fairly open space he saw the strangers whose unexpected presence was causing him such concern. Five men, stripped to the waist, were hard at work with axes. Four of them had dusky skins of reddish hue; the fifth, a short, thickset, brawny man, the muscles of whose arms showed like great globes, was clearly a white man, though his hands and arms were stained a bright scarlet quite different from the red duskiness of southern natives, or the red-brown caused by exposure to sun and wind. As they moved, the five men clanked the chains that fettered their ankles to stout logs of wood. A little apart stood three men looking on, laughing and talking together in a tongue strange to Dennis. They were big swarthy fellows, with soft wide-brimmed hats, each decked with a feather, brown leather doublets and hose, and long boots. Each bore a caliver and a whip.

The sun was high in the heavens, its beams beating down through the trees upon the unprotected backs of the toilers. Sweat was pouring from them. The trees were thick, some at least two yards in circumference; to cut them through needed no slight exertion. The white labourer paused to draw his arm across his reeking brow. Then one of the watchers strolled across from the tree against which he had been lolling, and raising his whip, brought the thong with a stinging cut across the back of the slave who had dared to intermit his labours. A red streak showed livid on the white skin. For a moment it seemed to Dennis, watching the scene, that the victim was about to turn upon his assailant with the axe, his sole weapon. An expression of deadly rage writhed the features of his red, bearded face. His grip tightened upon the axe. But he controlled his impulse with an effort. The warder laughed brutally, flung a taunt, and cracked his whip in the air in challenge and menace. Sullenly the woodman resumed his task, and his persecutor, with another laugh, turned and rejoined his companions, applauded by their grins.

Dennis felt himself stung to anger. This swarthy ruffian, he doubted not, was a Spaniard, a subject of King Philip, once the consort of an English queen. It was not a pleasant introduction to the race dominating the Americas. Apparently Mirandola liked them no better than he, for at the first sight of the strangers the monkey had fled away. Dennis found him a good quarter-mile distant when, taking advantage of an interval during which the Spaniards ate and drank, and the flagging toilers rested, he strode away to a banana grove to refresh himself.

He watched the group till near sundown. Several trees having been felled, the men proceeded to hack off the branches and to chip away the white rind. Then the strange scarlet colour of their arms and hands was explained. The heart of the trees was a brilliant red. As the rind was stripped off, the Spaniards drew near and examined the core, and under their direction the labourers cut and trimmed certain selected logs. The work was still unfinished when the sun went down, and the leader of the Spaniards gave the word for returning to the shore. The logs were struck off the slaves' ankles and replaced by manacles; then they set off. Dennis followed them at a safe distance, and when he came within view of the sea, there was a small vessel riding at anchor some little distance off shore, and the slaves were in the act of dragging a row boat through the white surf. In this they all put off, and darkness covered them up as they regained the ship.

Dennis returned to his hut, joined by the monkey on the way.

"Here is food for thought, Mirandola, my friend," he said. "No fire for us to-night! Are you acquainted with don Spaniards and their ways? You kept a wide berth: have you too suffered at their hands? Who is the poor wretch the ruffian lashed? By his looks he would pass for an Englishman: I hope he is not of English breed. Yet I hope he is: what do you make of that, Mirandola? I protest I love your wise and friendly countenance; but there is something warming to the heart in the sight of one of my own kind, if such he be. We must be up betimes, my friend; maybe the morrow will give us assurance."

Thinking over the incident before he slept, Dennis wondered why the party had returned to the ship. If the purpose of their visit was to obtain any quantity of this strange red wood, doubtless they had several days' work before them; why had they not camped on shore? Perhaps they felt that the slaves were safer on board; perhaps, too, they did not care to weaken the ship's company during the hours of night. It was a small vessel; probably there was not a large number of Spaniards aboard; but doubtless they were all armed like the three who had come ashore, and their slaves, being fettered, would need but a few to control them. Dennis hoped that when they returned next day they would not make too thorough a search for similar groves elsewhere in the island, for if they should discover his hut, he had little doubt they would seek to impress him into the hapless gang.

His sleep was restless. Many times he woke with a start and sprang up trembling, feeling that the Spaniards were on his track. At daybreak he was on his way towards the western shore, and took up his position in the same thicket, the leafy screen being almost impenetrable. The monkey was with him now; but when his ears caught first the measured thud of oars, then the clank of chains drawing nearer, Mirandola chattered angrily, sprang into a tree, and disappeared.

The party came into view: five slaves, three Spaniards. The former were, to all appearance, the same as those Dennis had seen on the previous day; but it seemed to him that their armed guards were different; probably the men of the ship took it in turns to come ashore. But if the individuals were different, their methods were much the same. Indeed, before Dennis had been watching the work many minutes, he had reason to know that the warders of to-day were even more ingeniously brutal than those of yesterday. The first thing he noticed was a change in their manner of rendering their slaves harmless. One of them carried a large wooden mallet; the others had between them iron staples with sharp-pointed ends. These staples they drove one by one with the mallet into the boles of the five trees selected for the day's operations. Secured to each staple was one end of a long chain, the other end of which was fastened to the captive's ankle band. Thus the hapless woodmen were fettered not merely by the logs of wood, as on the previous day, but by chains that bound them to the very trees they were to cut down. The staples were driven into the trunks below the line of the cleft to be made; but the chains, though long, seemed to Dennis scarcely long enough to enable the men to escape crushing should the trees happen to fall the wrong way. That was a chance which evidently did not trouble the guards.

Dennis wondered why this additional precaution had been taken to ensure the safe custody of the wretched men. Had they shown signs of mutiny? It would not be surprising after the treatment of the previous day. Certainly the ingenious device lightened the task of surveillance, for the wood-cutters, however exasperated, could not turn upon their guards until they had forced out the staples with their axes.

The three Spaniards threw themselves down at some distance from the slaves and lolled negligently against the trees. The wood-cutters plied their axes, sturdily, monotonously, never speaking, their faces expressing nothing but a sullen despair. Dennis fixed his eyes on the white man, and felt an eager longing to hear him speak. One word would be enough to show whether he was indeed an Englishman. But the man was as silent as the rest, and nothing was heard save the ring of the axes and the voices of the Spaniards conversing.

Five trees lay upon the ground; the warders rose to drive the staples into others. It appeared that time hung heavy on their hands. Some demon of mischief suggested to one of them a means of obtaining a little diversion. His proposal was received with shouts of laughter by his companions. Dennis did not understand what was said, but the meaning was soon made plain. The three men drew lots with three twigs of unequal length, and placed themselves by the side of three slaves—the white man and two Indians—as fate determined. Again they drew lots, and proceeded to fasten their men to three new trees. The other two Indians were set to strip the trunks already felled. It was soon evident that the Spaniards' amusement was to be had at the expense of the wood-cutters. They pooled a number of pieces of eight; the Spaniard whose man first felled his tree was to take the stakes.

The three men set to work, the warders standing over them with their whips. The faces of the Indians wore their wonted look of dull apathy; but Dennis saw the lips of the white man tighten, and a grim scowl darken his brow. The sport commenced. Excited by their gamble, the Spaniards urged on their men with loud cries. For some minutes the two Indians smote the trees with feverish energy; the white man plied his axe with measured strokes, neither slower nor faster than before. The warders became more and more excited, and from cries proceeded to blows. One of the Indians flagged, and to stimulate him the Spaniard behind dealt him a savage blow with his whip, and the poor cowed wretch laid on with greater vigour. Hidden in the bush Dennis nervously clutched his sword and felt the blood surge into his cheeks. Fine sport, indeed! The other Spaniards, not to be outdone, began to belabour the backs of their men also, and Dennis, seeing great weals rise on the bare flesh, could scarcely control the impulse to dash at all costs from his hiding-place to the aid of the suffering men. He saw the face of the white man pale beneath the sun-tan and the red stains; perchance the Spaniard would have had a qualm if he had seen the fury his features expressed. But he did not see it; with callous levity he shouted, and brought his whip down with a sickening crack upon the broad red-streaked back.

Then, with a suddenness that took Dennis's breath away, the white man's pent-up rage burst its bounds. At the end of his endurance, he swung round with a nimbleness surprising in a man of his bulk, and flung his axe with unerring aim at his tormentor. The man fell among the logs. In a second, before the other Spaniards had time to recover from the shock of this unheard-of audacity, one of the Indians at work on the fallen tree hurled his weapon at the warder nearest him, and struck him headlong to the ground. The third man had sufficient command of his wits to take to his heels and scamper away.

The wood-cutters were between him and the shore, and the direction of his flight was towards the thicket in which Dennis stood, all tingling with the excitement of this amazing change of scene. He gripped his sword; but the Spaniard stopped short within a few yards of the bushes, uttered a furious oath, and turning about, kindled his match, preparing to shoot at the slaves, who were hacking with frenzied haste at the staples that held them to the trees. The two Indians who were free were hobbling towards the woodland on the other side, appalled by their own temerity. Dennis heard the Spaniard chuckle as he raised his caliver. The man knew full well that, even if the woodmen succeeded in breaking loose, he would have time to shoot them down one by one, hobbled as they were.

Dennis could no longer remain inactive. An enemy of the Spaniards, whatever his colour, was a friend of his. He could not see the poor wretches slaughtered. For an instant he thought of kindling his own match and firing at the Spaniard, who was within easy range. Then, changing his mind, he pushed aside the bushes, sprang into the open, and leapt over the ground with the lightness of a panther. The Spaniard heard his movements and swung round; Dennis saw the startled look of terror in his eyes. Taken aback, he had no time to ward off the musket stock of this assailant who had sprung as it were out of the earth. His cry of alarm was stifled in his throat, and under the blow dealt him with all the force of honest rage he dropped senseless to the ground.