Captains of adventure

by Roger Pocock

II

Australia, being the harshest country on earth, breeds the hardiest pioneers, horsemen, bushmen, trackers, hunters, scouts, who find the worst African or American travel a sort of picnic. The bushie is disappointing to town Australians because he has no swank, and nothing of the brilliant picturesqueness of the American frontiersman. He is only a tall, gaunt man, lithe as a whip, with a tongue like a whip-lash; and it is on bad trips or in battle that one finds what he is like inside, a most knightly gentleman with a vein of poetry.

Anyway the Melbourne people were cracked in 1860 when they wanted an expedition to cross Australia northward, and instead of appointing bushmen for the job selected tenderfeet. Burke was an Irishman, late of the Hungarian cavalry, and the Royal Irish Constabulary, serving as an officer in the Victorian police. Wills was a Devon man, with some frontier training on the sheep runs, but had taken to astronomy and surveying. There were several other white men, and three Afghans with a train of camels.

They left Melbourne with pomp and circumstance, crossed Victoria through civilized country, and made a base camp on the Darling River at Menindie. There Burke sacked two mutinous followers and his doctor scuttled in a funk, so he took on Wright, an old settler who knew the way to Cooper’s Creek four hundred miles farther on. Two hundred miles out Wright was sent back to bring up stores from Menindie, while the expedition went on to make an advanced base at Cooper’s Creek. Everything was to depend on the storage of food at that base.

While they were waiting for Wright to come up with their stores, Wills and another man prospected ninety miles north from Cooper’s Creek to the Stony Desert, a land of white quartz pebbles and polished red sandstone chips. The explorer Sturt had been there, and come back blind. No man had been beyond.

Wills, having mislaid his three camels, came back ninety miles afoot without water, to find the whole expedition stuck at Cooper’s Creek, waiting for stores. Mr. Wright at Menindie burned time, wasting six weeks before he attempted to start with the stores, and Burke at last could bear the delay no longer. There were thunder-storms giving promise of abundant water for once in the northern desert, so Burke marched with Wills, King and Gray, taking a horse and six camels.

William Brahe was left in charge at the camp at Cooper’s Creek, to remain with ample provisions until Wright turned up, but not to leave except in dire extremity.

Burke’s party crossed the glittering Stony Desert, and watching the birds who always know the way to water, they came to a fine lake, where they spent Christmas day. Beyond that they came to the Diamantina and again there was water. The country improved, there were northward flowing streams to cheer them on their way, and at last they came to salt water at the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria. They had crossed the continent from south to north.

With blithe hearts they set out on their return, and if they had to kill the camels for food, then to eat snakes, which disagreed with them, still there would be plenty when they reached Cooper’s Creek. Gray complained of being ill, but pilfering stores is not a proper symptom of any disease, so Burke gave him a thrashing by way of medicine. When he died, they delayed one day for his burial; one day too much, for when they reached Cooper’s Creek they were just nine hours late. Thirty-one miles they made in the last march and reeled exhausted into an empty camp ground. Cut in the bark of a tree were the words “Dig, 21 April 1861.” They dug a few inches into the earth where they found a box of provisions, and a bottle containing a letter.

“The depot party of the V. E. E. leave this camp to-day to return to the Darling. I intend to go S. E. from camp sixty miles to get into our old track near Bulloo. Two of my companions and myself are quite well; the third, Patten, has been unable to walk for the last eighteen days, as his leg has been severely hurt when thrown from one of the horses. No person has been up here from Darling. We have six camels and twelve horses in good working condition. William Brahe.”

It would be hopeless with two exhausted camels to try and catch up with that march. Down Cooper’s Creek one hundred fifty miles the South Australian Mounted Police had an outpost, and the box of provisions would last out that short journey.

They were too heart-sick to make an inscription on the tree, but left a letter in the bottle, buried. A few days later Brahe returned with the industrious Mr. Wright and his supply train. Here is the note in Wright’s diary:—

“May eighth. This morning I reached the Cooper’s Creek depot and found no sign of Mr. Burke’s having visited the creek, or the natives having disturbed the stores.”

Only a few miles away the creek ran out into channels of dry sand where Burke, Wills and King were starving, ragged beggars fed by the charitable black fellows on fish and a seed called nardoo, of which they made their bread. There were nice fat rats also, delicious baked in their skins, and the natives brought them fire-wood for the camp.

Again they attempted to reach the Mounted Police outpost, but the camels died, the water failed, and they starved. Burke sent Wills back to Cooper’s Creek. “No trace,” wrote Wills in his journal, “of any one except the blacks having been here since we left.” Brahe and Wright had left no stores at the camp ground.

Had they only been bushmen the tracks would have told Wills of help within his reach, the fish hooks would have won them food in plenty. It is curious, too, that Burke died after a meal of crow and nardoo, there being neither sugar nor fat in these foods, without which they can not sustain a man’s life. Then King left Burke’s body, shot three crows and brought them to Wills, who was lying dead in camp. Three months afterward a relief party found King living among the natives “wasted to a shadow, and hardly to be distinguished as a civilized being but by the remnants of the clothes upon him.”

“They should not have gone,” said one pioneer of these lost explorers. “They weren’t bushmen.” Afterward a Mr. Collis and his wife lived four years in plenty upon the game and fish at the Innaminka water-hole where poor Burke died of hunger.

Such were the first crossings from east to west, and from south to north of the Australian continent.

XVIII
A. D. 1867 THE HERO-STATESMAN

There is no greater man now living in the world than Diaz the hero-statesman, father of Mexico. What other soldier has scored fourteen sieges and fifty victorious battles? What other statesman, having fought his way to the throne, has built a civilized nation out of chaos?

This Spanish-red Indian half-breed began work at the age of seven as errand boy in a shop. At fourteen he was earning his living as a private tutor while he worked through college for the priesthood. At seventeen he was a soldier in the local militia and saw his country overthrown by the United States, which seized three-fourths of all her territories. At the age of twenty-one, Professor Diaz, in the chair of Roman law at Oaxaca, was working double tides as a lawyer’s clerk.

In the Mexican “republic” it is a very serious offense to vote for the Party-out-of-office, and the only way to support the opposition is to get out with a rifle and fight. So when Professor Diaz voted at the next general election he had to fly for his life. After several months of hard fighting he emerged from his first revolution as mayor of a village.

The villagers were naked Indians, and found their new mayor an unexpected terror. He drilled them into soldiers, marched them to his native city Oaxaca, captured the place by assault, drove out a local usurper who was making things too hot for the citizens, and then amid the wild rejoicings that followed, was promoted to a captaincy in the national guards.

Captain Diaz explained to his national guards that they were fine men, but needed a little tactical exercise. So he took them out for a gentle course of maneuvers, to try their teeth on a rebellion which happened to be camped conveniently in the neighborhood. When he had finished exercising his men, there was no rebellion left, so he marched them home. He had to come home because he was dangerously wounded.

It must be explained that there were two big political parties, the clericals, and the liberals—both pledged to steal everything in sight. Diaz was scarcely healed of his wound, when a clerical excursion came down to steal the city. He thrashed them sick, he chased them until they dropped, and thrashed them again until they scattered in helpless panic.

The liberal president rewarded Colonel Diaz with a post of such eminent danger, that he had to fight for his life through two whole years before he could get a vacation. Then Oaxaca, to procure him a holiday, sent up the young soldier as member of parliament to the capital.

Of course the clerical army objected strongly to the debates of a liberal congress sitting in parliament at the capital. They came and spoiled the session by laying siege to the City of Mexico. Then the member for Oaxaca was deputed to arrange with these clericals.

He left his seat in the house, gathered his forces, and chased that clerical army for two months. At last, dead weary, the clericals had camped for supper, when Diaz romped in and thrashed them. He got that supper.

So disgusted were the clerical leaders that they now invited Napoleon III to send an army of invasion. Undismayed, the unfortunate liberals fought a joint army of French and clericals, checked them under the snows of Mount Orizaba, and so routed them before the walls of Puebla that it was nine months before they felt well enough to renew the attack. The day of that victory is celebrated by the Mexicans as their great national festival.

In time, the French, forty thousand strong, not to mention their clerical allies, returned to the assault of Puebla, and in front of the city found Diaz commanding an outpost. The place was only a large rest-house for pack-trains, and when the outer gate was carried, the French charged in with a rush. One man remained to defend the courtyard, Colonel Diaz, with a field-piece, firing shrapnel, mowing away the French in swathes until his people rallied from their panic, charged across the square, and recovered the lost gates.

The city held out for sixty days, but succumbed to famine, and the French could not persuade such a man as Diaz to give them any parole. They locked him up in a tower, and his dungeon had but a little iron-barred window far up in the walls. Diaz got through those bars, escaped, rallied a handful of Mexicans, armed them by capturing a French convoy camp, raised the southern states of Mexico, and for two years held his own against the armies of France.

President Juarez had been driven away into the northern desert, a fugitive, the Emperor Maximilian reigned in the capital, and Marshal Bazaine commanded the French forces that tried to conquer Diaz in the south. The Mexican hero had three thousand men and a chain of forts. Behind that chain of forts he was busy reorganizing the government of the southern states, and among other details, founding a school for girls in his native city.

Marshal Bazaine, the traitor, who afterward sold France to the Germans, attempted to bribe Diaz, but, failing in that, brought nearly fifty thousand men to attack three thousand. Slowly he drove the unfortunate nationalists to Oaxaca and there Diaz made one of the most glorious defenses in the annals of war. He melted the cathedral bells for cannon-balls, he mounted a gun in the empty belfry, where he and his starving followers fought their last great fight, until he stood alone among the dead, firing charge after charge into the siege lines.

Once more he was cast into prison, only to make such frantic attempts at escape that in the end he succeeded in scaling an impossible wall. He was an outlaw now, living by robbery, hunted like a wolf, and yet on the second day after that escape, he commanded a gang of bandits and captured a French garrison. He ambuscaded an expedition sent against him, raised an army, and reconquered Southern Mexico.

Porfirio Diaz

It was then (1867) that the United States compelled the French to retire. President Juarez marched from the northern deserts, gathering the people as he came, besieged Querétaro, captured and shot the Emperor Maximilian. Diaz marched from the south, entered the City of Mexico, handed over the capital to his triumphant president, resigned his commission as commander-in-chief, and retired in deep contentment to manufacture sugar in Oaxaca.

For nine years the hero made sugar. Over an area in the north as large as France, the Apache Indians butchered every man, woman and child with fiendish tortures. The whole distracted nation cried in its agony for a leader, but every respectable man who tried to help was promptly denounced by the government, stripped of his possessions and driven into exile. At last General Diaz could bear it no longer, made a few remarks and was prosecuted. He fled, and there began a period of the wildest adventures conceivable, while the government attempted to hunt him down. He raised an insurrection in the north, but after a series of extraordinary victories, found the southward march impossible. When next he entered the republic of Mexico, he came disguised as a laborer by sea to the port of Tampico.

At Vera Cruz he landed, and after a series of almost miraculous escapes from capture, succeeded in walking to Oaxaca. There he raised his last rebellion, and with four thousand followers ambuscaded a government army, taking three thousand prisoners, the guns and all the transport. President Lerdo heard the news, and bolted with all the cash. General Diaz took the City of Mexico and declared himself president of the republic.

Whether as bandit or king, Diaz has always been the handsomest man in Mexico, the most courteous, the most charming, and terrific as lightning when in action. The country suffered from a very plague of politicians until one day he dropped in as a visitor, quite unexpected, at Vera Cruz, selected the eleven leading politicians without the slightest bias as to their views, put them up against the city wall and shot them. Politics was abated.

The leading industry of the country was highway robbery, until the president, exquisitely sympathetic, invited all the principal robbers to consult with him as to details of government. He formed them into a body of mounted police, which swept like a whirlwind through the republic and put a sudden end to brigandage. Capital punishment not being permitted by the humane government, the robbers were all shot for “attempting to escape.”

Next in importance was the mining of silver, and the recent decline in its value threatened to ruin Mexico. By the magic of his finance, Diaz used that crushing reverse to lace the country with railroads, equip the cities with electric lights and traction power far in advance of any appliances we have in England, open great seaports, and litter all the states of Mexico with prosperous factories. Meanwhile he paid off the national debt, and made his coinage sound.

He never managed himself to speak any other language than his own majestic, slow Castilian, but he knew that English is to be the tongue of mankind. Every child in Mexico had to go to school to learn English.

And this greatest of modern sovereigns went about among his people the simplest, most accessible of men. “They may kill me if they want to,” he said once, “but they don’t want to. They rather like me.” So one might see him taking his morning ride, wearing the beautiful leather dress of the Mexican horsemen, or later in the day, in a tweed suit going down to the office by tram car, or on his holidays hunting the nine-foot cats which we call cougar, or of a Sunday going to church with his wife and children. On duty he was an absolute monarch, off duty a kindly citizen, and it seemed to all of us who knew the country that he would die as he had lived, still in harness. One did not expect too much—the so-called elections were a pleasant farce, but the country was a deal better governed than the western half of the United States. Any fellow entitled to a linen collar in Europe wore a revolver in Mexico, as part of the dress of a gentleman, but in the wildest districts I never carried a cartridge. Diaz had made his country a land of peace and order, strong, respected, prosperous, with every outward sign of coming greatness. Excepting only Napoleon and the late Japanese emperor, he was both in war and peace the greatest leader our world has ever known. But the people proved unworthy of their chief; to-day he is a broken exile, and Mexico has lapsed back into anarchy.

XIX
A. D. 1870 THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

A lady who remembers John Rowlands at the workhouse school in Denbigh tells me that he was a lazy disagreeable boy. He is also described as a “full-faced, stubborn, self-willed, round-headed, uncompromising, deep fellow. He was particularly strong in the trunk, but not very smart or elegant about the legs, which were disproportionately short. His temperament was unusually secretive; he could stand no chaff nor the least bit of humor.”

Perhaps that is why he ran away to sea; but anyway a sailing ship landed him in New Orleans, where a rich merchant adopted him as a son. Of course a workhouse boy has nothing to be patriotic about, so it was quite natural that this Welsh youth should become a good American, also that he should give up the name his mother bore, taking that of his benefactor, Henry M. Stanley. The old man died, leaving him nothing, and for two years there is no record until the American Civil War gave him a chance of proving his patriotism to his adopted country. He was so tremendously patriotic that he served on both sides, first in the confederate army, then in the federal navy. He proved a very brave man, and after the war, distinguished himself as a special correspondent during an Indian campaign in the West. Then he joined the staff of the New York Herald serving in the Abyssinian War, and the civil war in Spain. He allowed the Herald to contradict a rumor that he was a Welshman. “Mr. Stanley,” said the paper, “is neither an Ap-Jones, nor an Ap-Thomas. Missouri and not Wales is his birthplace.”

Privately he spent his holidays with his mother and family in Wales, speaking Welsh no doubt with a strong American accent. The whitewashed American has always a piercing twang, even if he has adopted as his “native” land, soft-voiced Missouri, or polished Louisiana.

In those days Doctor Livingstone was missing. The gentle daring explorer had found Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika, and to the westward of them, a mile wide river, the Lualaba, which he supposed to be headwaters of the Nile. He was slowly dying of fever, almost penniless, and always when he reached the verge of some new discovery, his cowardly negro carriers revolted, or ran away, leaving him to his fate. No word of him had reached the world for years. England was anxious as to the fate of one of her greatest men, so there were various attempts to send relief, delayed by the expense, and not perhaps handled by really first-rate men. To find Livingstone would be a most tremendous world-wide advertisement, say for a patent-pill man, a soap manufacturer, or a newspaper. All that was needed was unlimited cash, and the services of a first-rate practical traveler, vulgar enough to use the lost hero as so much “copy” for his newspaper. The New York Herald had the money, and in Stanley, the very man for the job.

Not that the Herald, or Stanley cared twopence about the fate of Livingstone. The journal sent the man to make a big journey through Asia Minor and Persia on his way to Zanzibar. The more Livingstone’s rescue was delayed the better the “ad” for Stanley and the Herald.

As to the journey, Stanley’s story has been amply advertised, and we have no other version because his white followers died. He found Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, and had the grace to reverence, comfort and succor a dying man.

As to Stanley’s magnificent feat of exploring the great lakes, and descending Livingstone’s river to the mouth of the Congo, again his story is well exploited while the version of his white followers is missing, because they gave their lives.

In Stanley’s expedition which founded the Congo State, and in his relief of Emin Pasha, the white men were more fortunate, and some lived. It is rumored that they did not like Mr. Stanley, but his negro followers most certainly adored him, serving in one journey after another. There can be no doubt too, that with the unlimited funds that financed and his own fine merits as a traveler, Stanley did more than any other explorer to open up the dark continent, and to solve its age-long mysteries. It was not his fault that Livingstone stayed on in the wilderness to die, that the Congo Free State became the biggest scandal of modern times, or that Emin Pasha flatly refused to be rescued from governing the Soudan.

Henry M. Stanley

Stanley lived to reap the rewards of his great deeds, to forget that he was a native of Missouri and a freeborn American citizen, to accept the honor of knighthood and to sit in the British parliament. Whether as a Welshman, or an American, a confederate, or a federal, a Belgian subject or a Britisher, he always knew on which side his bread was buttered.

XX
A. D. 1871 LORD STRATHCONA

It is nearly a century now since Lord Strathcona was born in a Highland cottage. His father, Alexander Smith, kept a little shop at Forres, in Elgin; his mother, Barbara Stewart, knew while she reared the lad that the world would hear of him. His school, founded by a returned adventurer, was one which sent out settlers for the colonies, soldiers for the army, miners for the gold-fields, bankers for England, men to every corner of the world. As the lad grew, he saw the soldiers, the sailors, the adventurers, who from time to time came tired home to Forres, and among these was his uncle, John Stewart, famous in the annals of the Canadian frontier, rich, distinguished, commending all youngsters to do as he had done. When Donald Smith was in his eighteenth year, this uncle procured him a clerkship in the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Canada was in revolt when in 1837 the youngster reached Montreal, for Robert Nelson had proclaimed a Canadian republic and the British troops were busy driving the republicans into the United States. So there was bloodshed, the burning of houses, the filling of the jails with rebels to be convicted presently and hanged. Out of all this noise and confusion, Donald Smith was sent into the silence of Labrador, the unknown wilderness of the Northeast Territory, where the first explorer, McLean, was searching for tribes of Eskimos that might be induced to trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company. “In September (1838),” wrote McLean, “I was gratified by the arrival of despatches from Canada by a young clerk appointed to the district. By him we received the first intelligence of the stirring events which had taken place in the colonies during the preceding year.” So Smith had taken a year to carry the news of the Canadian revolt to that remote camp of the explorers.

Henceforward, for many years there exists no public record of Donald Smith’s career, and he has flatly refused to tell the story lest he should appear to be advertising. His work consisted of trading with the savages for skins, of commanding small outposts, healing the sick, administering justice, bookkeeping, and of immense journeys by canoe in summer, or cariole drawn by a team of dogs in winter. The winter is arctic in that Northeast Territory, and a very pleasant season between blizzards, but the summer is cursed with a plague of insects, black flies by day, mosquitoes by night almost beyond endurance. Like other men in the service of the company, Mr. Smith had the usual adventures by flood and field, the peril of the snow-storms, the wrecking of canoes. There is but one story extant. His eyesight seemed to be failing, and after much pain he ventured on a journey of many months to seek the help of a doctor in Montreal. Sir George Simpson, governor of the company, met him in the outskirts of the city.

“Well, young man,” he said, “why are you not at your post?”

“My eyes, sir; they got so bad, I’ve come to see a doctor.”

“And who gave you permission to leave your post?”

“No one, sir.” It would have taken a year to get permission, and his need was urgent.

“Then, sir,” answered the governor, “if it’s a question between your eyes, and your service in the Hudson’s Bay Company, you’ll take my advice, and return this instant to your post.”

Without another word, without a glance toward the city this man turned on his tracks, and set off to tramp a thousand miles back to his duty.

The man who has learned to obey has learned to command, and wherever Smith was stationed, the books were accurate, the trade was profitable. He was not heard of save in the return of profits, while step by step he rose to higher and higher command, until at the age of forty-eight he was appointed governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, sovereign from the Atlantic to the Pacific, reigning over a country nearly as large as Europe. To his predecessors this had been the crowning of an ambitious life; to him, it was only the beginning of his great career.

The Canadian colonies were then being welded into a nation and the first act of the new Dominion government was to buy from the Hudson’s Bay Company the whole of its enormous empire, two thousand miles wide and nearly five thousand miles long. Never was there such a sale of land, at such a price, for the cash payment worked out at about two shillings per square mile. Two-thirds of the money went to the sleeping partners of the company in England; one-third—thanks to Mr. Smith’s persuasion—was granted to the working officers in Rupert’s Land. Mr. Smith’s own share seems to have been the little nest egg from which his fortune has hatched.

When the news of the great land sale reached the Red River of the north, the people there broke out in revolt, set up a republic, and installed Louis Riel as president at Fort Garry.

Naturally this did not meet the views of the Canadian government, which had bought the country, or of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which owned the stolen fort. Mr. Smith, governor of the company, was sent at once as commissioner for the Canadian government to restore the settlement to order. On his arrival the rebel president promptly put him in jail, and openly threatened his life. In this awkward situation, Mr. Smith contrived not only to stay alive, but to conduct a public meeting, with President Riel acting as his interpreter to the French half-breed rebels. The temperature at this outdoor meeting was twenty degrees below zero, with a keen wind, but in course of five hours’ debating, Mr. Smith so undermined the rebel authority that from that time it began to collapse. Afterward, although the rebels murdered one prisoner, and times were more than exciting, Mr. Smith’s policy gradually sapped the rebellion, until, when the present Lord Wolseley arrived with British troops, Riel and his deluded half-breeds bolted. So, thanks to Mr. Smith, Fort Garry is now Winnipeg, the central city of Canada, capital of her central province, Manitoba.

But when Sir Donald Smith had resigned from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s service, and became a politician, he schemed, with unheard-of daring, for even greater ends. At his suggestion, the Northwest Mounted Police was formed and sent out to take possession of the Great Plains. That added a wheat field to Canada which will very soon be able to feed the British empire. Next he speculated with every dollar he could raise, on a rusty railway track, which some American builders had abandoned because they were bankrupt. He got the rail head into Winnipeg, and a large trade opened with the United States. So began the boom that turned Manitoba into a populous country, where the buffalo had ranged before his coming. Now he was able to startle the Canadian government with the warning that unless they hurried up with a railway, binding the whole Dominion from ocean to ocean, all this rich western country would drift into the United States. When the government had failed in an attempt to build the impossible railway, Sir Donald got Montreal financiers together, cousins and friends of his own, staked every dollar he had, made them gamble as heavily, and set to work on the biggest road ever constructed. The country to be traversed was almost unexplored, almost uninhabited except by savages, fourteen hundred miles of rock and forest, a thousand miles of plains, six hundred miles of high alps.

The syndicate building the road consisted of merchants in a provincial town not bigger then than Bristol, and when they met for business it was to wonder vaguely where the month’s pay was to come from for their men. They would part for the night to think, and by morning, Donald Smith would say, “Well, here’s another million—that ought to do for a bit.” On November seven, 1885, he drove the last spike, the golden spike, that completed the Canadian Pacific railway, and welded Canada into a living nation.

Since then Lord Strathcona has endowed a university and given a big hospital to Montreal. At a cost of three hundred thousand pounds he presented the famous regiment known as Strathcona’s Horse, to the service of his country, and to-day, in his ninety-third year is working hard as Canadian high commissioner in London.

XXI
A. D. 1872 THE SEA HUNTERS

The Japanese have heroes and adventurers just as fine as our own, most valiant and worthy knights. Unhappily I am too stupid to remember their honorable names, to understand their motives, or to make out exactly what they were playing at. It is rather a pity they have to be left out, but at least we can deal with one very odd phase of adventure in the Japan seas.

The daring seamen of old Japan used to think nothing of crossing the Pacific to raid the American coast for slaves. But two or three hundred years ago the reigning shogun made up his mind that slaving was immoral. So he pronounced an edict by which the builders of junks were forbidden to fill in their stern frame with the usual panels. The junks were still good enough for coastwise trade at home, but if they dared the swell of the outer ocean a following sea would poop them and send them to the bottom. That put a stop to the slave trade; but no king can prevent storms, and law or no law, disabled junks were sometimes swept by the big black current and the westerly gales right across the Pacific Ocean. The law made only one difference, that the crippled junks never got back to Japan; and if their castaway seamen reached America the native tribes enslaved them. I find that during the first half of the nineteenth century the average was one junk in forty-two months cast away on the coasts of America.

Now let us turn to another effect of this strange law that disabled Japanese shipping. Northward of Japan are the Kuril Islands in a region of almost perpetual fog, bad storms and bitter cold, ice pack, strong currents and tide rips, combed by the fanged reefs, with plenty of earthquakes and eruptions to allay any sense of monotony. The large and hairy natives are called the Ainu, who live by fishing, and used to catch sea otter and fur seal. These furs found their way via Japan to China, where sea-otter fur was part of the costly official winter dress of the Chinese mandarins. As to the seal, their whiskers are worth two shillings a set for cleaning opium pipes, and one part of the carcass sells at a shilling a time for medicine, apart from the worth of the fur.

Now the law that disabled the junks made it impossible for Japan to do much trade in the Kurils, so that the Russians actually got there first as colonists.

But no law disabled the Americans, and when the supply of sea otter failed on the Californian coast in 1872 a schooner called the Cygnet crossed the Pacific to the Kuril Islands. There the sea-otters were plentiful in the kelp beds, tame as cats and eager to inspect the hunters’ boats. Their skins fetched from eighty to ninety dollars.

When news came to Japan of this new way of getting rich, a young Englishman, Mr. H. J. Snow, bought a schooner, a hog-backed relic called the Swallow in which he set out for the hunting. Three days out, a gale dismasted her, and putting in for shelter she was cast away in the Kuriles. Mr. Snow’s second venture was likewise cast away on a desert isle, where the crew wintered. “My vessels,” he says, “were appropriately named. The Swallow swallowed up part of my finances, and the Snowdrop caused me to drop the rest.”

During the winter another crew of white men were in quarters on a distant headland of the same Island Yeturup, and were cooking their Christmas dinner when they met with an accident. A dispute had arisen between two rival cooks as to how to fry fritters, and during the argument a pan of boiling fat capsized into the stove and caught alight. The men escaped through the flames half dressed, their clothes on fire, into the snow-clad wilderness and a shrewd wind. Then they set up a shelter of driftwood with the burning ruin in front to keep them warm, while they gravely debated as to whether they ought to cremate the cooks upon the ashes of their home and of their Christmas dinner.

To understand the adventures of the sea hunters we must follow the story of the leased islands. The Alaska Commercial Company, of San Francisco, leased the best islands for seal and otter fishing. From the United States the company leased the Pribilof Islands in Bering Sea, a great fur-seal metropolis with a population of nearly four millions. They had armed native gamekeepers and the help of an American gunboat. From Russia the company leased Bering and Copper Islands off Kamchatka, and Cape Patience on Saghalian with its outlier Robber Island. There also they had native gamekeepers, a patrol ship, and the help of Russian troops and gunboats. The company had likewise tame newspapers to preach about the wickedness of the sea hunters and call them bad names. As a rule the sea hunters did their hunting far out at sea where it was perfectly lawful. At the worst they landed on the forbidden islands as poachers. The real difference between the two parties was that the sea hunters took all the risks, while the company had no risks and took all the profits.

In 1883 Snow made his first raid on Bering Island. Night fell while his crew were busy clubbing seals, and they had killed about six hundred when the garrison rushed them. Of course the hunters made haste to the boats, but Captain Snow missed his men who should have followed him, and as hundreds of seals were taking to the water he joined them until an outlying rock gave shelter behind which he squatted down, waist-deep. When the landscape became more peaceful he set off along the shore of boulders, stumbling, falling and molested by yapping foxes. He had to throw rocks to keep them off. When he found the going too bad he took to the hills, but sea boots reaching to the hips are not comfy for long walks, and when he pulled them off he found how surprisingly sharp are the stones in an Arctic tundra. He pulled them on again, and after a long time came abreast of his schooner, where he found one of the seamen. They hailed and a boat took them on board, where the shipkeeper was found to be drunk, and the Japanese bos’n much in need of a thrashing. Captain Snow supplied what was needed to the bos’n and had a big supper, but could not sail as the second mate was still missing. He turned in for a night’s rest.

Next morning bright and early came a company’s steamer with a Russian officer and two soldiers who searched the schooner. There was not a trace of evidence on board, but on general principles the vessel was seized and condemned, all her people suffering some months of imprisonment at Vladivostok.

In 1888, somewhat prejudiced against the virtuous company, Captain Snow came with the famous schooner Nemo, back to the scene of his misadventure. One morning with three boats he went prospecting for otter close along shore, shot four, and his hunters one, then gave the signal of return to the schooner. At that moment two shots rang out from behind the boulders ashore, and a third, which peeled some skin from his hand, followed by a fusillade like a hail storm. Of the Japanese seamen in Snow’s boat the boat steerer was shot through the backbone. A second man was hit first in one leg, then in the other, but went on pulling. The stroke oar, shot in the calf, fell and lay, seemingly dead, but really cautious. Then the other two men bent down and Snow was shot in the leg.

So rapid was the firing that the guns ashore must have heated partly melting the leaden bullets, for on board the boat there was a distinct perfume of molten lead. Three of the bullets which struck the captain seem to have been deflected by his woolen jersey, and one which got through happened to strike a fold. It had been noted in the Franco-Prussian War that woolen underclothes will sometimes turn leaden bullets.

“I remember,” says Captain Snow, “weighing the chances ... of swimming beside the boat, but decided that we should be just as liable to be drowned as shot, as no one could stand the cold water for long. For the greater part of the time I was vigorously plying my paddle ... and only presenting the edge of my body, the left side, to the enemy. This is how it was that the bullets which struck me all entered my clothing on the left side. I expected every moment to be shot through the body, and I could not help wondering how it would feel.”

With three dying men, and three wounded, he got the sinking boat under sail and brought her alongside the schooner.

Of course it was very good of the Alaska Commercial Company to preserve the wild game of the islands, but even gamekeepers may show excess of zeal when it comes to wholesale murder. To all of us who were in that trade it is a matter of keen regret that the officers ashore took such good cover. Their guards, and the Cossacks, were kindly souls enough, ready and willing—in the absence of the officers to sell skins to the raiders or even, after some refreshments, to help in clubbing a few hundred seals. It was rather awkward, though, for one of the schooners at Cape Patience when in the midst of these festivities a gunboat came round the corner.

The American and the Japanese schooners were not always quite good friends, and there is a queer story of a triangular duel between three vessels, fought in a fog. Mr. Kipling had the Rhyme of the Three Sealers, he told me, from Captain Lake in Yokohama. I had it from the mate of one of the three schooners, The Stella. She changed her name to Adele, and the mate became master, a little, round, fox-faced Norseman, Hans Hansen, of Christiania. In 1884 the Adele was captured by an American gunboat and taken to San Francisco. Hansen said that he and his men were marched through the streets shackled, and great was the howl about pirates, but when the case came up for trial the court had no jurisdiction, and the ship was released. From that event dates the name “Yokohama Pirates,” and Hansen’s nickname as the Flying Dutchman. Because at the time of capture he had for once been a perfectly innocent deep sea sealer, he swore everlasting war against the United States, transferred his ship to the port of Victoria, British Columbia, and would hoist by turns the British, Japanese, German, Norwegian or even American flag, as suited his convenience.

Once when I asked him why not the Black Flag, he grinned, remarking that them old-fashioned pirates had no business sense. Year after year he raided the forbidden islands to subvert the garrisons, rob warehouses, or plunder the rookeries, while gunboats of four nations failed to effect his capture. In port he was a pattern of innocent virtue, at sea his superb seamanship made him as hard to catch as a ghost, and his adventures beat the Arabian Nights. I was with him as an ordinary seaman in the voyage of 1889, a winter raid upon the Pribilof Islands. At the first attempt we clawed off a lee shore in a hurricane, the second resulted in a mutiny, and the third landing was not very successful, because the boats were swamped, and the garrison a little too prevalent ashore. On the voyage of 1890 the Adele took four hundred skins, but in 1891 was cast away on the North Island of the Queen Charlotte group, without any loss of life. The Flying Dutchman took to mining on the outer coast of Vancouver, where he rescued a shipwrecked crew, but afterward perished in the attempt to save a drowning Indian.

Quite apart from the so-called Yokohama pirates, a large fleet of law-abiding Canadian schooners hunted the fur seal at sea, a matter which led to some slight unpleasantness between the American and the British governments. There was hunting also in the seas about Cape Horn; but the Yokohama schooners have left behind them by far the finest memories. Captain Snow says that from first to last some fifty white men’s schooners sailed out of Yokohama. Of five there is no record, two took to sealing when the sea otter no longer paid, and four were sold out of the business. The Russians sank one, captured and lost two, captured and condemned three, all six being a dead loss to their owners. For the rest, twenty-two were cast away, and twelve foundered with all hands at sea, so that the total loss was forty ships out of fifty. For daring seamanship and gallant adventure sea hunting made a school of manhood hard to match in this tame modern world, and war is a very tame affair to those who shared the fun.

XXII
A. D. 1879 THE BUSHRANGERS

It is a merit to love dumb animals, but to steal them is an excess of virtue that is sure to cause trouble with the police. All Australians have a passion for horses, but thirty years ago, the Australian bushmen developed such a mania for horse-stealing, that the mounted police were fairly run off their legs. The feeling between bushmen and police became so exceedingly bitter that in 1878 a constable, attempting to make arrests, was beset and wounded. The fight took place in the house of a Mrs. Kelly, who got penal servitude, whereas her sons, Ned and Dan, who did the actual shooting, escaped to the hills. A hundred pounds were offered for their arrest.

Both of Mrs. Kelly’s sons were tainted, born and raised thieves. At the age of sixteen Ned had served an apprenticeship in robbery under arms with Power the bushranger, who described him as a cowardly young brute. Now, in his twenty-fifth year he was far from brave. Dan, aged seventeen, was a ferocious young wolf, but manly. As the brothers lurked in hiding they were joined by Joe Byrne, aged twenty-one, a gallant and sweet-tempered lad gone wrong, and by Steve Hart, a despicable little cur. All four were superb as riders, scouts and bushmen, fairly good shots, intimate with every inch of the country, supported by hundreds of kinsmen and the sympathy of the people generally in the war they had declared against the police.

In October, Sergeant Kennedy and three constables patroling in search of the gang, were surprised by the outlaws in camp, and, as they showed fight, Ned and Dan Kelly attacked them. Only one trooper escaped. At this outrage, Byrne was horrified, Hart scared, but the Kellys forced them to fire into Sergeant Kennedy’s corpse that they might share the guilt. Then Ned Kelly, touched by the gallantry with which the sergeant had fought, brought a cloak and reverently covered his body.

In December, the outlaws stuck up a sheep station, and robbed the bank at Euroa.

In February, 1879, they surprised the police station at Jerilderie, locked two policemen in the cells, disguised themselves as constables, captured the town, imprisoning a crowd of people in the hotel, then sacked the bank, and rode away shouting and singing with their plunder.

By this time the rewards offered for their capture amounted to eight thousand pounds, and the whole strength of the Victoria police was engaged, with native trackers, in hunting them. Had these wicked robbers ever showed rudeness to a woman, or plundered a poor man, or behaved meanly with their stolen wealth, they would have been betrayed at once to the police, but the Australians are sportsmen, and there is a gallantry in robbery under arms that appeals to misguided hearts.

The four bad men were so polite to all women, so kindly to unarmed citizens, so humorous in their methods, so generous with their gold, so daring in making war against a powerful British state, that they were esteemed as heroes. Even bad heroes are better than none at all, and they were not betrayed even by poor folk to whom the rewards would have been a fortune. For two years they outwitted the whole force of police, scouts and trackers at a cost to the state of one hundred fifteen thousand pounds.

But with all this the best of Australian manhood was engaged in the hunt, and the real heroes of this adventure were the police, who made no moan through months of outrageous labor and suffering in the mountains.

Superintendent Hare, in charge of the hunt, made friends with a kinsman of the outlaws, a young horse-thief, named Aaron Sherritt. This lad knew all the secrets of the outlaws, was like a brother to them, and yet, so worshiped Mr. Hare that he served with the police as a spy. In treachery to his kinsmen, he was at least faithful to his master, knowing that he went to his own death.

He expected the outlaws to come by night to the house of Joe Byrne’s mother, and led Mr. Hare’s patrol, which lay for the next month in hiding upon a hill overlooking the homestead. Aaron was engaged to Byrne’s sister, was daily at the house and slowly a dim suspicion dawned on the outlaw’s mother. Then the old woman, uneasily searching the hills, stumbled into the police bivouac, and saw Aaron Sherritt, the spy, asleep in that company. His dress betrayed him to her, a white shirt, breeches and long boots, impossible to mistake. And when he knew what had happened, the lad turned white. “Now,” he muttered, “I am a dead man.”

Mrs. Byrne sent the news of Aaron’s treachery to her outlawed son in the hills. On June twenty-sixth, the spy was called out of his mother’s cabin by some one who cried that he had lost his way. Aaron opened the door, and Joe Byrne shot him through the heart.

So the outlaws had broken cover after months of hiding, and at once Superintendent Hare brought police and trackers by a special train that they might take up the trail of their retreat back to the mountains. The outlaws, foreseeing this movement, tore up the railway track, so that the train, with its load of police, might be thrown into a gully, and all who survived the wreck were to be shot down without mercy.

This snare which they set for their enemies was badly planned. Instead of tearing up the tracks themselves, they brought men for the job from Glenrowan station close by; and then, to prevent their presence from being reported, they had to hold the village instead of mounting guard upon the trap. They cut the wires, secured the station and herded all the villagers into the Glenrowan hotel some two hundred yards from the railway. Then they had to wait for the train from three o’clock on Monday morning all through the long day, and the dreary night, guarding sixty prisoners and watching for the police. They amused the prisoners, men, women and children with an impromptu dance in which they shared by turns, then with raids upon outlying houses, and with athletic feats, but always on the alert lest any man escape to give the alarm, or the police arrive unobserved. The strain was beyond human endurance. So Byrne, fresh from the murder of his chum Aaron Sherritt, relieved his mind by getting drunk, Ned Kelly kept up his courage by bragging of the death prepared for his enemies, and, worst of all, the local schoolmaster was allowed to take his sick wife home.

The schoolmaster had been most sympathetic all day long, helping the outlaws until he won their confidence; but now, escaped to his house, he made haste to prepare a lantern covered with a red shawl with which to signal the train. He stood upon the track waving the red light, when in the pitchy darkness before dawn, the train-load of police came blindly straight for the death-trap. The train slowed, stopped and was saved.

Out of plowshares and scrap iron, a blacksmith had forged for each of the outlaws a cuirass and helmet of plate armor, and now at the sound of the approaching train they dressed in this bullet-proof harness. Ned Kelly’s suit weighed ninety-seven pounds, and the others were similar, so clumsy that the wearer could neither run to attack nor mount a horse to escape. Moreover, with a rifle at the shoulder, it was impossible to see for taking aim. So armed, the robbers had got no farther than the hotel veranda when the police charged, and a fierce engagement began. The prisoners huddled within the house had no shelter from its frail board walls, and two of the children were wounded.

Byrne was drinking at the bar when a bullet struck him dead. Ned Kelly, attempting to desert his comrades, made for the yard, but finding that all the horses had been shot, strolled back laughing amid a storm of lead. Every bullet striking his armor made him reel, and he had been five times wounded, but now he began to walk about the yard emptying his revolvers into the police. Then a sergeant fired at his legs and the outlaw dropped, appealing abjectly for his life.

The escape of the panic-stricken prisoners had been arranged, but for hours the fight went on until toward noon the house stood a riddled and ghastly shell, with no sign of life. A bundle of straw was lighted against the gable end, and the building was soon ablaze. Rumors now spread that an old man lay wounded in the house, and a priest gallantly led in a rush of police to the rescue. The old man was saved, and under the thick smoke, Dan Kelly and Hart were seen lying dead upon the floor in their armor.

Ned Kelly died as he had lived, a coward, being almost carried to the gallows, and that evening his sister Kate exhibited herself as a show in a music-hall at Melbourne. So ended this bloody tragedy in hideous farce, and with the destruction of the outlaws closed a long period of disorder. Except in remote regions of the frontier, robbery under arms has ceased forever in the Australasian states.

XXIII
A. D. 1883 THE PASSING OF THE BISON

May I recommend a better book than this? If anybody wants to feel the veritable spirit of adventure, let him read My Life as an Indian, by F. W. Schultz. His life is an example in manliness, his record the best we have of a red Indian tribe, his book the most spacious and lovely in frontier literature.

The Blackfeet got their name from the oil-dressed, arrow-proof leather of their moccasins (skin shoes) which were dark in color. They were profoundly religious, scrupulously clean—bathing daily, even through thick ice, fastidiously moral, a gay light-hearted people of a temper like the French, and even among Indians, the most generous race in the world, they were famed for their hospitality. The savage is to the white man, what the child is to the grown-up, of lesser intellect, but much nearer to God.

When the white men reached the plains, the Blackfeet mustered about forty thousand mounted men, hunters. The national sport was stealing horses and scalps, but there was no organized war until the pressure of the whites drove the tribes westward, crowding them together, so that they had to fight for the good hunting grounds. Then there were wars in which the Blackfeet more than held their own. Next came the smallpox, and afterward the West was not so crowded. Whole nations were swept away, and those that lived were sorely reduced in numbers. After that came white frontiersmen to trade, to hunt, or as missionaries. The Indians called them Hat-wearers, but the Blackfeet had another name—the Stone-hearts. The whites were nearly always welcomed, but presently they came in larger numbers, claiming the land for mining camps and ranching, which drove away the game. The Indians fought the whites, fought for their land and their food, their liberty; but a savage with bow and arrows has no chance against a soldier with a rifle. For every white man killed a hundred would come to the funeral, so the Blackfeet saw that it was no use fighting.

In 1853 they made a treaty that secured them their hunting ground, forever free. The Great Father at Washington pledged his honor, and they were quite content. It was the same with every western tribe that the United States was pledged by solemn treaty which the Indians kept, and the white men always broke. Troops drove the settlers off, but went away and the settlers came back. So young warriors broke loose from the chiefs to scalp those settlers and burn their homes; and the army would break vengeance. Such were the conditions when Schultz, a green New England boy of nineteen, came by steamer up the Missouri to Fort Benton.

The truly respectable reader will be shocked to learn that this misguided youth went into partnership with a half-breed trader, selling water with a flavoring of whisky at very high prices to the Indians. In other words, he earned his living at a very risky trade. He married a Blackfoot girl, becoming a squaw-man, which, as everybody knows, is beneath contempt. In other words, he was honest enough to marry a most charming woman instead of betraying her to ruin. He went on guilty expeditions to snatch scalps and steal horses. He shared the national sports and so learned the inmost heart of a brave people.

When our own countrymen get too self-righteous, bigoted, priggish, smug and generally beyond bearing, what a blessing it would be if we had a few wild Indians to collect their scalps!

Schultz had a chum, a Blackfoot warrior called Wolverine, who taught him the sign language and a deal of bush craft. At times this Wolverine was unhappy, and once the white man asked him what was wrong. “There is nothing troubling me,” answered the Indian, then after a long pause: “I lied. I am in great trouble. I love Piks-ah’-ki, and she loves me, but I can not have her; her father will not give her to me.”

The father, Bull’s Head, was a Gros Ventre, and hated Wolverine for being a Blackfoot.

“I am going,” said Wolverine, “to steal the girl. Will you go with me?”

So one evening the pair stole away from the Blackfoot camp, rode eastward across the plains, marching by night, hiding by day. Once, at a river crossing they discovered the trails of a large war party of Crees on the way to the Gros Ventre camp. “I knew,” said Wolverine, laughing happily, “that my medicine would not desert me, and see, the way is clear before us. We will ride boldly into camp, to the lodge of the great chief, Three Bears. I will say that our chief sent me to warn him of a war party working this way. I will say that we ourselves have seen their tracks along the bars of the river. Then the Gros Ventres will guard their horses; they will ambush the enemy; there will be a big fight, big excitement. All the men will rush to the fight, and that will be my time. I will call Piks-ah’-ki, we will mount our horses and fly.” So riding hard, they came in sight of the Gros Ventre camp. “Ah!” said Wolverine, “there is the camp. Now for the big lie.” Then more seriously, “Pity me, great Sun! Pity me, you under water creatures of my dream! Help me to obtain that which I seek here.”

So they came to the lodge of Three Bears, presented tobacco as a present from the chief Big Lake and were welcomed with a special feast of boiled dog, which had to be eaten, no matter how sick they felt. Gros Ventres believed the enemy were coming and kept close watch on their herd, but Bull’s Head sat in the chief’s lodge, sneering at the visitors, “To-night,” he said, “I shall sit in my lodge and watch for women stealers, and my gun will be loaded.”

So he got up, and flounced out of the lodge.

That night all happened as Wolverine had said, for the Cree war party attempted to stampede the herd, and all the Gros Ventres, including Bull’s Head, ran out of camp for the battle. Wolverine and Schultz found Bull’s Head’s daughter ready but crying in her mother’s arms at parting. They mounted, they rode, they thought they were clear of the battle-field, when suddenly a gun exploded in front of Wolverine, and down he went with his horse. Then the girl screamed, “They have killed him! Help, white man, they have killed him!”

But Wolverine fired his gun at something that moved in the sage brush, and a deep groan followed. Wolverine clubbed something three of four times with his rifle. Then stooping, he picked up the gun which had been fired at him. “I count a coup,” he laughed, and handed the enemy’s weapon to Schultz.

At that moment Bull’s Head appeared, and in a frightful passion seized his daughter’s horse by the head attempting to drag her from the saddle. She shrieked, while Wolverine sprang at her father, threw him, disarmed him and flung away his gun. Then the young lover leaped lightly behind the girl upon her pony, and the father raged astern while they fled.

Four days’ ride brought them home to the Blackfoot camp, but Bull’s Head got there first, and whined about his poverty until Wolverine gave him ten ponies, also the captured gun. It was not much to pay for a beautiful woman who became a faithful and loving wife.

One day news reached the three main camps of the Blackfoot nation that a white buffalo had been sighted in the herds. Midwinter as it was, the hunters turned out, for the man who killed a white buffalo was held to have the especial favor of the Sun, and not only he, but his tribe. The head chief of a nation has been known to use the robe for a seat, but it could never be sold, and at the next building of a temple to the Sun it was offered up as a national sacrifice.

Great was the hunting through many days of bitter cold, until at last the white buffalo was found by a lone horseman who brought it down with his arrows “When we rode up,” says Schultz, “the hunter was standing over it, hands raised, fervently praying, promising the Sun the robe and tongue of the animal.... Medicine Weasel was so excited, he trembled so that he could not use his knife ... and some of our party took off the hide for him, and cut out the tongue, he standing over them all the time and begging them to be careful, to make no gashes, for they were doing the work for the Sun. None of the meat was taken. It was considered a sacrilege to eat it; the tongue was to be dried and given to the Sun with the robe.”

Only one more white buffalo was ever taken, in 1881, two years before the last herds were destroyed.

Heavy Breast and Schultz were once out hunting, and the chief’s saddle was newly loaded with mountain sheep meat, when the hunters met a first-class grizzly bear. He sat up, fifty yards distant and wriggled his nose as he sniffed the air. Both men fired and with a hair-lifting roar old sticky mouth rolled over, biting and clawing his wound, then sprang up and charged, open mouthed. The hunters rode hard, Schultz firing backward a couple of shots while the bear with long bounds, closed upon the Indian. “I fired again, and made another miss and just then Heavy Breast, his saddle and his sheep meat parted company with the fleeing pony. The cinch, an old worn rawhide band, had broken.

“‘Hai Ya, my friend,’ he cried pleadingly, as he soared up in the air, still astride the saddle. Down they came with a loud thud not two strides in front of the onrushing bear. And that animal, with a dismayed and frightened ‘woof,’ turned sharply about and fled back toward the timber, I after him. I kept firing and firing, and finally a lucky shot broke his backbone.

“‘Do not laugh, my friend,’ said Heavy Breast; ‘surely the Sun listened to my prayer. I promised to sacrifice to him, intending to hang up that fine white blanket I have just bought. I will hang up the blanket and my otter-skin cap.’”

There was no end of trouble about that bear, for Mrs. Schultz dared not skin a sacred animal until she had sacrificed her best blue frock, also one of her husband’s revolvers—the same being out of order. And when the skin was dressed, nobody dared to visit the lodge until it had been hidden.

I want to copy out the whole book, for every paragraph contains some fresh delight, but these two or three stories must have shown something at least of Blackfoot character. I knew, and loved these people.

It was in January, 1870, that Colonel Baker was sent with a force of United States regular troops to chasten a band of Blackfeet who had killed a trader. The band accused of the crime, belonged to the Northern Blackfeet of Canada, whose camp at the time was on Belly River, two hundred miles north of the boundary. The band found by Baker belonged to the Piegans, a southern tribe camped on their own lands in Montana. There were eighty families in camp, but the men were nearly all away hunting buffalo when Baker’s force attacked at the break of dawn. The chief, Bear’s Head, ran toward the white men, waving a paper, a certificate of good character. He fell. Then the slaughter began in cold blood: Fifteen fighting men, eighteen elder men, ninety women, fifty-five little children, and when the last wounded mothers and their babies had been put out of their misery, the soldiers piled the corpses upon the wreckage before they burned the camp.

The whisky traders, like Schultz, have been blamed for the ruin of the Blackfeet; but since they had to die, it seems to me that the liquor gave them a certain amount of fun and excitement not so bad for them as Baker, or smallpox, or their Indian agent, or the white robbers who slaughtered their herds of buffalo, and stole their treaty lands. In 1874, Schultz was one of fifty-seven white men hunting or trading with the Canadian or Northern Blackfeet. They had trading forts at Whoop-up, Standoff, Slideout, the Leavings, all in Canada. But the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian wolfers made complaint against these American rivals; and so the Canadian government raised the Northwest Mounted Police. Three hundred men were sent across the plains to take possession and run the American traders out of the country. But the police were only tenderfeet in those days, eastern Canadians unused to the western ways, who came hungry through the countless herds of the bison. A band of hunters brought news to the Blackfeet. “Some men are coming,” they said, “who wear red coats, and they are drawing a cannon.”

“Oh,” said the Blackfeet, “these must be Hudson’s Bay.” For in old times the company’s officers are said to have worn red coats when they administered justice, so that the color was a sign of honest dealing. So the police were not attacked by the Blackfeet, and they were welcomed by the American traders, who sold them food in abundance.

The liquor trade ceased altogether but the police and the traders became fast friends, while the police and the Northern Blackfeet have been loyal allies ever since. After the buffalo vanished, the tribes were fed by the Canadian government and not lavishly, perhaps rather stingily, helped to learn the important arts of ranching.

Meanwhile far away to the southward, the white men were slaughtering buffalo for their hides, and in Kansas alone during ten years, thirty-five million carcasses were left to rot on the plains. The bison herds still seemed as large as ever, the country black with them as far as the eye could reach. But men like Schultz who had brains, had news that away from these last migrating herds, the plains were empty for thousands of miles. I remember the northern plains like a vast graveyard, reaching in all directions to the sky-line, bare save for its tombstones, the bleached skulls of millions of bison. Afterward the sugar refiners sent wagons and took them all away.

In 1880, the whole of the prairie nations surrounded the last herds, and white men took a hundred thousand robes leaving the carcasses to rot as usual. The Indians slaughtered also but sold the robes for groceries, and dried the whole of the meat for winter food.

“We are near the end of it,” said Red Bird’s Tail. “I fear that this is our last buffalo hunt. Are you sure,” he asked Schultz, “that the white men have seen all the land between the two salt waters?”

“There is no place,” answered the trader, “where the white men have not traveled, and none of them can find buffalo.”

“That being the case,” said the chief with a deep sigh, “misery and death are at hand for me and mine.”

The Indians were compelled to strip the plains of every living creature, the Blackfeet, despite their religion, to eat fish and birds. Then came the winter; Schultz and his wife rode at dusk to the camp of Lodge-Pole chief.

“Hurry,” he commanded his women, “cook a meal for our friends. They must be hungry after their long ride.”

His wives brought out three small potatoes and two little trout, which they boiled. “’Tis all we have,” said one of them, brushing the tears from her eyes, and then the chief broke down.

“We have nothing,” he said haltingly. “There are no more buffalo. The Great Father sends us but a little food, gone in a day. We are very hungry. There are fish, to be sure, forbidden by the Gods, unclean. We eat them, but they do not give us any strength, and I doubt not we will be punished for eating them. It seems as if our gods had forsaken us.”

Mrs. Schultz went out and brought back a sack of food, and they made a feast, merry as in the days of plenty, which were gone forever.

Schultz came from the starving camps to write a letter to a New York paper, but it was never printed—a matter of politics. Then he advised the Indians to kill their agent, but they remembered Colonel Baker’s visit.

In his next annual report the agent wrote much about the Blackfeet, whose “heathenish rites were most deplorable.” And then came the Winter of Death, when a chief, Almost-a-dog, checked off daily the fate of a starving people. Women crowded round the windows of the agent’s office, holding out skinny children. “Go,” he would say; “go away! I have nothing for you!”

The thirty thousand dollars provided for their food had all been stolen, but there was plenty of corn to fatten fifty chickens, some geese and ducks.

Wolf Head, once known as Wolverine, rode south to Schultz’s trading post where he and his partner were feeding hosts of people, but when they heard his story of death after death, one by one they stole away out into the darkness, sitting upon the frozen ground where they wailed for their dead.

That night Schultz wrote to a friend of his in New York, known to the Indians as Fisher Cap. Then he rode hard and far to consult with Father Prando, a Jesuit priest, who had also been writing letters. Thanks to Fisher Cap, perhaps, or to Father Prando, the government sent an inspector, and one day he drove into the agency. “Where is that chicken house?” he yelled, and when he found the place, kicked it open. “Here you!” he called to the Indians, and they did the rest.

Next, he kicked open the agent’s office. “You —— —— ——,” said he.

Since then some agents have been honest, but the Piegan tribe has never recovered from the Winter of Death, for in their weakness, they fell a prey to disease, and only a remnant is left of that ruined people. But for Schultz, the despised squaw-man, not one would be left alive.

XXIV
A. D. 1885 GORDON

During the Crimean war, when our men in the trenches before Sebastopol crowded under their earthworks to escape the Russian fire, one of the subalterns showed fear unbecoming an officer. The young chap meant no harm, but as he had to be taught manners, a lieutenant slightly his senior, invited him up upon the ramparts. There, arm in arm, the two walked up and down, the senior making amusing remarks about the weather, while the storm of lead swept round them, and the Tommies watched horror-struck, expecting both to fall. That officer who gave lessons in courage, was Charles George Gordon.

After eight years of varied service in many lands, Major Gordon came to Shanghai, where the British officer commanding had need of such a man. The Taiping rebels at war with the Chinese government numbered one million five hundred thousand, holding impregnable cities, and threatening the British merchants of Shanghai. These had raised a force of four thousand Chinese with white officers, known as the Ever Victorious Army because they were always thrashed, and Gordon took over the command. He was helped by Li Hung Chang, commander-in-chief of the Chinese armies, but no great impression had as yet been made upon fifteen hundred thousand rebels, trenched in the impregnable rock cities, which stood as islands over flat lands laced with canals. Those channels made the land impassable for troops, but Gordon brought steamers, and where a city fronted him with hundreds of guns and tier upon tier of unscalable walls, he steamed round the canals, cut off the line of communications, then dropped in, unexpected, in the rear. His attack was always a most unpleasant surprise to the rebels, beginning with gunnery that battered down the walls, until up a slope of ruins the storming party charged. The Taipings, led by white adventurers, defended the breach with desperation, and Gordon would weep because of the slaughter, his gentle spirit shocked at the streams of blood. “Two men,” he says, “of the Thirty-first Regiment were on the breach at Fort San, as Taiping leaders for the defense. One was killed, the other, struck by a shell splinter, was taken prisoner. ‘Mr. Gordon, Mr. Gordon, you will not let me be killed!’

“‘Take him down to the river and shoot him!’ And aside: ‘Put him in my boat, let the doctor attend him, and send him down to Shankhai.’”

Gordon not only saved the poor adventurers, but where he captured garrisons of Taipings, he would arm his prisoners, drill them, and lead them on to attack fresh cities in the march of the Ever Victorious Army. The odds were slightly against him, three hundred and seventy-five to one—an army against three hundred and seventy-five armies—but his third siege reduced the rebel capital, which he starved into surrender. The Taiping generals laid down their arms to Gordon because he gave them their lives. Then Li Hung Chang jumped in and murdered the whole gang of generals, and Gordon, sorely annoyed, for the only time in his life carried a gun. For a whole day, revolver in hand, he hunted the Chinese commander-in-chief through the streets of Soo Chow, but Li was too sly for him, and hid under some matting in a boat until Gordon’s rage cooled down.

This Scotchman who, with forty men in a steamer, destroyed a Taiping army near Quin San, had only one weapon for his personal use—a little bamboo swagger cane, such as Tommy carries in the street. It was known to the Chinese as his Magic Wand of Victory, with which he had overthrown an army seven times as big as that of Great Britain.

The Chinese emperor sent an imperial decree conferring four thousand pounds and all sorts of honors. Gordon wrote on the back of the parchment: “Regret that owing to the circumstances which occurred since the capture of Soo Chow, I am unable to receive any mark of his majesty the emperor’s recognition.” So he sent the thing back—a slap in the face for China. The emperor sent a gold medal, but Gordon, scratching out the inscription, gave it to a charity bazaar. The emperor made him a prince of the Chinese empire, and with the uniform of that rank as a curio in his trunk, he returned to England.

In China he was prince and conqueror; in Gravesend Major Gordon did garrison duty and kept ducks, which he delighted to squirt with the garden syringe.

He was a Sunday-school teacher, and reared slum boys to manhood, he was lady bountiful in the parish, he was cranky as an old maid, full of odd whims, a little man, with tender gray eyes, and a voice like a peal of bells. For six years he rotted in Gravesend, then served a couple of years as British commissioner on the Danube, and then in 1874 was borrowed by Egypt to be viceroy of the equatorial provinces. There he made history.

The Turkish empire got its supply of slaves from this big Soudan, a tract the size of Europe, whose only trade was the sale of human flesh. If Gordon stopped the selling of slaves, the savages ate them. But the Egyptian government wanted money, so Gordon’s work was to stop the slave trade, get the people prosperous, and tax them. To aid him he had Egyptian officials, whose only interest in the job was the collecting of bribes, plunder and slaves for their private use; also a staff of Europeans, all of whom died of fever within the first few months. Moreover, the whole native population was, more or less, at war with the Egyptian government.

Gordon had a swift camel, and a reputation for sorcery, because leaving his escort days astern in the desert, he would ride alone into the midst of a hostile nation, dressed in a diplomatic uniform consisting of gold lace and trousers, quite unarmed, but compelling everybody to obey his orders. He was so tired that he wanted to die, and when the tribes disobeyed he merely cut off their whole supply of water until they learned to behave. So for five years, the only honest man in all that region fought the Soudanese, the Egyptian government and the British ministry, to put an end to slavery. He failed.

Charles George Gordon

Long chapters would be required for the story of Gordon’s work in Bessarabia, Armenia, India, South Africa, or the second period in China.

In 1884, England, having taken charge of Egypt, was responsible for the peace of Soudan. But the Arabs, united for once, and led by their prophet—the Mahdi—had declared a holy war against everybody, and wiped out an Egyptian army. So England said, “This is very awkward; let us pray”; and the government made up its mind to scuttle, to abandon the whole Soudan. Of course the Egyptians in the Soudan, officials, troops and people, would all get their throats cut, so our government had a qualm of conscience. Instead of sending an army to their rescue, they sent Gordon, with orders to bring the Egyptians to the coast. With a view to further economies they then let the Arabs cut off Gordon’s retreat to the coast. England folded her hands and left him to perish.

As soon as Gordon reached Khartoum, he began to send away the more helpless of the Egyptian people, and before the siege closed down some two thousand five hundred women, children and servants escaped from the coming death. At the last moment he managed to send the Englishmen, the Europeans and forty-five soldiers down the Nile. They were saved, and he remained to die with his soldiers. “May our Lord,” he wrote, “not visit us as a nation for our sins; but may His wrath fall on me.”

He could not believe in England’s cowardice, but walled his city with ramp and bastion, planned mines and raids, kept discipline while his troops were starving to death, and the Union Jack afloat above the palace, praying for his country in abasement, waiting for the army which had been sent too late. So for nine months the greatest of all England’s engineers held at bay an army of seventy-five thousand fighting Arabs. And when the city fell, rallying the last fifty men of his garrison, he went to his death, glad that he was not doomed to outlive England’s honor.

Year after year our army fought through the burning deserts, to win back England’s honor, to make amends for the death of her hero-saint, the knightliest of modern men, the very pattern of all chivalry. And then his grave was found, a heap of bloodstained ashes, which once had been Khartoum.

Now, in Trafalgar Square, men lay wreaths at the base of his statue, where with his Magic Wand of Victory, that Prince of the Chinese Empire and Viceroy of the African Equatorial Provinces, stands looking sorrowfully on a people who were not worthy to be his countrymen. But there is a greater monument to Gordon, a new Soudan, where men live at peace under the Union Jack, and slavery is at an end forever.

XXV
A. D. 1896 THE OUTLAW

Dawn was breaking of a summer’s day in 1896, when Green-Grass-growing-in-the-water, a red Indian scout, came trotting into Fort MacLeod with a despatch from Standoff for Superintendent Steele, of the Mounted Police. He brought news that the body of a Blood warrior, Medicine-Pipe-Stem, shot through the skull, and three weeks dead, had been found in an empty cabin.

The Blood tribe knew how Bad-Young-Man, known to the whites as Charcoal, had three weeks before come home from a hunting trip to his little cabin where his wife, the Marmot, lived. He had found his wife in the arms of Medicine-Pipe-Stem, and by his warrior’s right to defend his own honor, had shot the intruder down. Charcoal had done justice, and the tribe was ready to take his part, whatever the agent might say or the Mounted Police might do for the white man’s law.

A week had passed of close inquiry, when one of the scouts rode up to the ration house, where the people were drawing their supplies of beef, and gave warning that Charcoal was betrayed to the Mounted Police. Charcoal demanded the name of his betrayer, and learned that Mr. Wilson, the agent, was his enemy. That evening Charcoal waited outside the agent’s house, watching the lighted windows, where, on the yellow blinds there were passing shadows cast by the lamp within, as various members of the household went about their business. At last he saw Mr. Wilson’s shadow on the blind, fired and shot the agent through the thigh. The household covered the lamps, closed the shutters, sent for help and hid the wounded man on a couch behind the front door, well out of range from the windows. Next morning, in broad daylight, Charcoal went up to the house with a rifle to finish Wilson, walked in and looked about him, but failed to discover his victim behind the open door. He turned away and rode for the hills. The Mounted Police, turned out for the pursuit, were misled by a hundred rumors.

D Troop at the time numbered one hundred seventy men, the pick of the regiment, including some of the greatest riders and teamsters in North America, and led by Colonel S. B. Steele, the most distinguished of all Canadian frontiersmen. After he had posted men to guard all passes through the Rocky Mountains, he had a district about ninety miles square combed over incessantly by strong patrols, so that Charcoal’s escape seemed nearly impossible. The district however, was one of foothills, bush, winding gorges, tracts of boulders, and to the eastward prairie, where the whole Blood and Piegan tribes were using every subtlety of Indian craft to hide the fugitive.

Inspector Jervis, with twenty police and some scouts, had been seventy hours in the saddle, and camped at Big Bend exhausted, when a rider came flying in reporting Charcoal as seen at Kootenai. The white men rallied for the twenty-eight-mile march, but the Indians lay, and were kicked, done for, refusing to move. The white men scrambled to their saddles, and reeled off on the trail, unconquerable.

One day a Mormon settler brought news to Mr. Jervis that while cutting fence rails, he had seen Charcoal creep out from the bush and make off with his coat. So this Mormon led them to a little meadow, where they found and surrounded a tent. Then Mr. Jervis took two men and pulled aside the door, while they covered the place with their revolvers. Two Mormons were brought out, shaking with fright, from the tent.

Further on in the gray dawn, they came to another clearing, and a second tent, which they surrounded. Some noise disturbed the Marmot, who crept sleepily to the door, looked out, then with a scream, warned her husband. Charcoal slashed with his knife through the back of the tent, crept into the bush, and thence fired, his bullet knocking the cap from the officer’s head; but a volley failed to reach the Indian. The tent was Charcoal’s winter quarters, stored with a carcass of beef, five sacks of flour, bacon, sugar and deerskin for his shoes, and there the Marmot was taken, with a grown daughter, and a little son called Running Bear, aged eight.

So far, in many weeks of the great hunt Charcoal had his loyal wife to ride with him, and they used to follow the police patrols in order to be sure of rest when the pursuers camped. Two police horses, left half dead, were taken up and ridden by this couple an extra forty miles. An officer and a buck were feeding at Boundary Creek detachment when Mr. and Mrs. Charcoal stole their chargers out of the stable. But now Charcoal had to face the prospect of a lone fight, and with the loss of his family, fell into blind despair. Then all his kinsfolk to the number of thirty-seven, were arrested and lodged in prison.

Since his raid on the horses at Boundary Creek, all police stables were locked, and visited frequently at night. Corporal Armour, at Lee’s Creek came out swinging his lantern, sniffing at the night, bound for the stable, when he saw a sudden blaze revealing an Indian face behind the horse trough, while a bullet whisked through his sleeve. He bolted for the house, grabbed his gun and returned, only to hear a horse galloping away into the night. Charcoal for once, had failed to get a remount. Sergeant Wilde was universally loved by the tribes. The same feeling caused his old regiment, the Blues, at Windsor, to beg for Black Prince, his charger, after his death, and sent the whole body of the Northwest Mounted Police into mourning when he fell. Tradition made him a great aristocrat under an assumed name, and I remember well how we recruits, in the olden times, were impressed by his unusual physical beauty, his stature, horsemanship and singular personal distinction. Ambrose attended him when he rode out for the last time on Black Prince, followed by an interpreter and a body of Indian scouts. They were in deep snow on a plain where there stands a line of boulders, gigantic rocks, the subject of weird legends among the tribes. Far off against the sky was seen riding fast, an Indian who swerved at the sight of the pursuit and was recognized for Charcoal. Wilde ordered Ambrose to gallop the twenty miles to Pincher Creek, turn the people out in the queen’s name, send a despatch to Fort Macleod, and return at once. The Indians tried for Charcoal at long range, but their new rifles were clogged with factory grease hard frozen, so that the pin failed of its impact, and they all missed fire. Wilde’s great horse was drawing ahead of the ponies, and he called back:—

“Don’t fire, or you’ll hit me by mistake!”

As he overtook Charcoal he drew his revolver, the orders being to fire at sight, then laid the weapon before him, wanting for the sake of a great tradition, to make the usual arrest—the taking of live outlaws by hand. Charcoal’s rifle lay across the saddle, and he held the reins Indian fashion with the right hand, but when Wilde grabbed at his shoulder, he swerved, touching the trigger with his left. The bullet went through Wilde’s body, then deflecting on the bone of the right arm, traversed the forearm, came out of the palm, and dropped into his gauntlet where it was found.

Wilde rolled slowly from the saddle while Black Prince went on and Charcoal also, but then the outlaw turned, galloped back and fired straight downward into the dying man. Black Prince had stopped at a little distance snorting, and when the Indian came grabbing at his loose rein, he struck with his forefeet in rage at his master’s murderer. Charcoal had fired to disable Wilde as the only way left him of escaping “slavery”; now he had to conquer the dead man’s horse to make his escape from the trackers.

Some three weeks ago, Charcoal’s brothers, Left Hand and Bear Paw, had been released from jail, with the offer of forty pounds from the government and ten pounds from the officer commanding, if they could capture the outlaw. The tribes had decided that Charcoal’s body belonged of right to the police, and after Wilde’s death he could expect no mercy on earth, no help or succor from any living man. From the slaying, like a wounded beast to his lair, he rode direct for home, came to the little cabin, tied Black Prince to a bush and staggered toward the door. Out of the house came Left Hand, who ran toward him, while the outlaw, moved by some brute instinct, fled for the horse. But Left Hand, overtaking his brother, threw his arms about him, kissing him upon both cheeks, and Bear Paw, following, cast his rope over the helpless man, throwing him down, a prisoner. The brothers carried Charcoal into the cabin, pitched him down in a corner, then Left Hand rode for the police while Bear Paw stayed on guard.

It was Sergeant Macleod who came first to the cabin where Bear Paw squatted waiting, and Charcoal lay to all appearance dead in a great pool of blood upon the earthen floor. He had found a cobbler’s awl used in mending skin shoes, and opened the arteries of his arm, that he might take refuge from treachery in death. From ankle to groin his legs were skinned with incessant riding, and never again was he able to stand upon his feet.

For four months Charcoal had been hunted as an enemy by D Troop, now for a like time he was nursed in the guard-room at Fort Macleod, and, though he lay chained to the floor in mortal pain, his brothers of the guard did their best. As he had been terrible in the field, so this poor hero was brave in suffering—humble, and of so sweet a disposition that he won all men’s hearts. Once he choked himself with a blanket; once poisoned himself with a month’s collection of cigarette stubs; each time nearly achieving his purpose, but he never flinched, never gave utterance even to a sigh, except for the moaning in his sleep.

At the trial his counsel called no witnesses, but read the man’s own defense, a document so sad, so wonderfully beautiful in expression, that the court appealed to the crown for mercy, where mercy had become impossible.

When he was taken out to die, the troop was on guard surrounding the barracks, the whole of the tribes being assembled outside the fence. The prisoner sat in a wagon face to face with the executioner, who wore a mask of black silk, and beside him was the priest. Charcoal began to sing his death song.

“Stay,” said the priest, “make no cry. You’re far too brave a man for that.” The song ceased, and Charcoal died as he had lived.

XXVI
A. D. 1898 A KING AT TWENTY-FIVE

When a boy has the sea in his blood, when he prays in church for plague, pestilence and famine, for battle and murder and sudden death, his parents will do well to thrash him tame. For then if he can be tamed he may turn out well as a respectable clerk; but if he has the force of character to get what he wants he will prove himself and be, perhaps, like John Boyes, of Hull, a king at twenty-five.

Boyes ran away to sea, and out of the tame humdrum life of the modern merchant service made for himself a world of high adventure. As a seaman he landed at Durban, then earned his way up-country in all sorts of trades until he enlisted in the Matabeleland Mounted Police, then fought his way through the second Matabele war. Afterward he was a trader, then an actor, next at sea again, and at Zanzibar joined an Arab trading dhow. When the dhow was wrecked, and the crew appealed to Allah, Boyes took command, so coming to Mombasa. From here the crown colony was building a railway to Uganda, a difficult job because the lions ate all the laborers they could catch, and had even the cheek to gobble up white officials. Up-country, the black troops were enjoying a mutiny, the native tribes were prickly, the roads were impossible and there was no food to be had. Boyes was very soon at the head of a big transport company, working with donkey carts and native carriers to carry food for the authorities.

Northward of the railway was Mount Kenia, a lofty snow-clad volcano; and round his foothills covering a tract the size of Yorkshire or of Massachusetts lived the Kikuyu, a negro people numbering half a million, who always made a point of besieging British camps, treating our caravans to volleys of poisoned darts, and murdering every visitor who came within their borders. Boyes went into that country to buy food to supply to the railway workers (1898).

He went with an old Martini-Henry rifle, and seven carriers, over a twelve thousand foot pass of the hills, and down through bamboo forest into a populous country, where at sight of him the war cry went from hill to hill, and five hundred warriors assembled for their first look at a white man. Through his interpreter he explained that he came to trade for food. Presently he showed what his old rifle could do, and when the bullet bored a hole through a tree he told them that it had gone through the mountain beyond and out at the other side. A man with such a gun was worthy of respect, especially when his drugs worked miracles among the sick. Next day the neighbors attacked this tribe which had received a white man instead of killing him, but Boyes with his rifle turned defeat to victory, and with iodoform treated the wounded. The stuff smelt so strong that there could be no doubt of its magic.

The white man made a friend of the Chief Karuri, and through the adventures which followed they were loyal allies. Little by little he taught the tribesmen to hold themselves in check, to act together. He began to drill them in military formation, a front rank of spearmen with shields touching, a rear rank of bowmen with poisoned arrows. So when they were next attacked they captured the enemy’s chief, and here again the white man’s magic was very powerful—“Don’t waste him,” said Boyes. The captive leader was put to ransom, released, and made an ally, a goat being clubbed to death in token that the tribes were friends. Then a night raid obtained thirty rifles and plenty of ammunition, and a squad of picked men with modern arms soon formed the nucleus of the white man’s growing army. When the Masai came up against him Boyes caught them in ambush, cut their line of retreat, killed fifty, took hundreds of prisoners and proved that raiding his district was an error. He was a great man now, and crowds would assemble when he refreshed himself with a dose of fruit salts that looked like boiling water. His district was at peace, and soon made prosperous with a carrier trade supplying food to the white men.

Many attempts were made by the witch doctors against his life, but he seemed to thrive on all the native poisons. It was part of his clever policy to take his people by rail drawn by a railway engine, which they supposed to be alive, in a fever, and most frightfully thirsty. He took them down to the sea at Mombasa, even on board a ship, and on his return from all these wonders he rode a mule into the Kikuyu country—“Some sort of lion,” the natives thought. It impressed the whole nation when they heard of the white man riding a lion. He had a kettle too, with a cup and saucer to brew tea for the chiefs, and a Union Jack at the head of his marching column, and his riflemen in khaki uniform. All that was good stage management, but Boyes had other tricks beyond mere bluff. A native chief defied him and had five hundred warriors in line of battle; but Boyes, with ten followers only, marched up, clubbed him over the head, and ordered the warriors to lay down their arms on pain of massacre. The five hundred supposed themselves to be ambushed, and obeyed. It was really a great joke.

So far the adventurer had met only with little chiefs, but now at the head of a fairly strong caravan he set forth on a tour of the whole country, sending presents to the great Chiefs Karkerrie and Wagomba, and word that he wanted to trade for ivory. Karkerrie came to call and was much excited over a little clock that played tunes to order, especially when a few drops of rain seemed to follow the music. “Does it make rain?” asked Karkerrie.

“Certainly, it makes rain all right,” answered Boyes.

But it so happened that rain was very badly needed, and when Boyes failed to produce a proper downpour the folk got tired of hearing his excuses. They blamed him for the drought, refused to trade and conspired with one of his men to murder him. Boyes’ camp became a fort, surrounded by several thousands of hostile savages. One pitch-dark evening the war cry of the tribe ran from village to village and there was wailing among the women and children. The hyenas, knowing the signs of a coming feast, howled, and all through the neighborhood of the camp the warriors were shouting, “Kill the white man!”

As hour by hour went by the sounds and the silences got on the white man’s nerves. It was always very difficult to keep Kikuyu sentries awake, and as he kept on his rounds, waiting the inevitable storming of his camp at dawn, Boyes felt the suspense become intolerable. At last, hearing from one of his spies that Karkerrie was close at hand disposing his men for the assault, Boyes stole out with a couple of men, and by a miracle of luck kidnaped the hostile chief, whom he brought back into the fort a prisoner. Great was the amazement of the natives when at the gray of dawn, the very moment fixed for their attack, they heard Karkerrie shouting from the midst of the fort orders to retreat, and to disperse. A revolver screwed into his ear hole had converted the Chief Karkerrie. Within a few days more came the copious rains brought by the white chief’s clock, and he became more popular than ever.

Boyes made his next journey to visit Wakamba, biggest of all the chiefs, whose seat was on the foothills of the great snow mountain. This chief was quite friendly, and delightfully frank, describing the foolishness of Arabs, Swahili and that class of travelers who neglected to take proper precautions and deserved their fate. He was making quite a nice collection of their rifles. With his camp constantly surrounded and infested by thousands of savages, Boyes complained to Wakamba about the cold weather, said he would like to put up a warm house, and got plenty of help in building a fort. The chief thought this two-storied tower with its outlying breastworks was quite a good idea. “What a good thing,” said he, “to keep a rush of savages out.”

After long negotiations, Boyes managed to bring the whole of the leading chiefs of the nation together in friendly conference. The fact that they all hated one another like poison may explain some slight delay, for the white man’s purpose was nothing less than a solemn treaty of blood-brotherhood with them all.

The ceremony began with the cutting into small pieces of a sheep’s heart and liver, these being toasted upon a skewer, making a mutton Kabob. Olomondo, chief of the Wanderobo, a nation of hunters, then took a sharp arrow with which he cut into the flesh of each Blood-Brother just above the heart. The Kabob was then passed round, and each chief, taking a piece of meat, rubbed it in his own blood and gave it to his neighbor to be eaten. When Boyes had eaten blood of all the chiefs, and all had eaten his, the peace was sealed which made him in practise king of the Kikuyu. He was able at last to take a holiday, and spent some months out hunting among the Wanderobo.

While the Kikuyu nation as a whole fed out of the white chief’s hand, he still had the witch doctors for his enemies, and one very powerful sorcerer caused the Chinga tribes to murder three Goa Portuguese. These Eurasian traders, wearing European dress, were mistaken for white men, and their death showed the natives that it would be quite possible to kill Boyes, who was now returning toward civilization with an immense load of ivory. Boyes came along in a hurry, riding ahead of his slow caravan with only four attendants and these he presently distanced, galloping along a path between two hedges among the fields of a friendly tribe—straight into a deadly native ambush. Then the mule shied out of the path, bolted across the fields and saved his life. Of the four attendants behind, two were speared. Moreover the whole country was wild with excitement, and five thousand fighting men were marching against Boyes. He camped, fenced his position and stood to arms all night, short of ammunition, put to the last, the greatest of many tests. Once more his nerves were overstrung, the delay terrified him, the silence appalled him waiting for dawn, and death. And as usual he treated the natives to a new kind of surprise, taking his tiny force against the enemy’s camp: “They had not thought it necessary to put any sentries out.”

“Here,” says Boyes, “we found the warriors still drinking and feasting, sitting round their fires, so engrossed in their plans for my downfall that they entirely failed to notice our approach; so, stealthily creeping up till we were close behind them, we prepared to complete our surprise.... Not a sound had betrayed our advance, and they were still quite ignorant of our presence almost in the midst of them. The echoing crack of my rifle, which was to be the signal for the general attack, was immediately drowned in the roar of the other guns as my men poured in a volley that could not fail to be effective at that short range, while accompanying the leaden missiles was a cloud of arrows sent by that part of my force which was not armed with rifles. The effect of this unexpected onslaught was electrical, the savages starting up with yells of terror in a state of utter panic. Being taken so completely by surprise, they could not at first realize what had happened, and the place was for a few minutes a pandemonium of howling niggers, who rushed about in the faint light of the camp-fires, jostling each other and stumbling over the bodies of those who had fallen at the first volley, but quite unable to see who had attacked them; while, before they had recovered from the first shock of surprise, my men had reloaded, and again a shower of bullets and arrows carried death into the seething, disorganized mass. This volley completed the rout, and without waiting a moment longer the whole crowd rushed pell-mell into the bush, not a savage who could get away, remaining in the clearing, and the victory was complete.”

It had taken Boyes a year to fight his way to that kingdom which had no throne, and for another eighteen months of a thankless reign he dealt with famine, smallpox and other worries until one day there came two Englishmen, official tenderfeet, into that big wild land which Boyes had tamed. They came to take possession, but instead of bringing Boyes an appointment as commissioner for King Edward they made him prisoner in presence of his retinue of a thousand followers, and sent him to escort himself down-country charged with “dacoity,” murder, flying the Union Jack, cheeking officials, and being a commercial bounder. At Mombasa there was a comedy of imprisonment, a farce of trial, an apology from the judge, but never a word of thanks to the boyish adventurer who had tamed half a million savages until they were prepared to enter the British Peace.

XXVII
A. D. 1898 JOURNEY OF EWART GROGAN

From the Right Honorable Cecil Rhodes to Ewart S. Grogan in the year 1900:—

“I must say I envy you, for you have done that which has been for centuries the ambition of every explorer, namely, to walk through Africa from South to North. The amusement of the whole thing is that a youth from Cambridge during his vacation should have succeeded in doing that which the ponderous explorers of the world have failed to accomplish. There is a distinct humor in the whole thing. It makes me the more certain that we shall complete the telegraph and railway, for surely I am not going to be beaten by the legs of a Cambridge undergraduate.”

It took death himself to beat Rhodes. Two years after that letter was written news went out through the army in South Africa that he was dead. We were stunned; we felt too sick to fight. For a moment the guns were hushed, and silence fell on the veldt after years of war. That silence was the herald of lasting peace for British Africa, united by stronger bonds than rail or telegraph.

* * * * *

Grogan was an undergraduate not only of Cambridge, but also of the bigger schools called War and Adventure, for he had traveled in the South Seas, climbed in the Alps, and fought in the Matabele campaigns, before he made his holiday walking tour from the Cape to Cairo. He was not the usual penniless adventurer, but, reckoned by frontier standards, a man of means, with the good manners that ease the way for any traveler. From the Cape to the Zambesi he had no need to tread old trails again, and far into the heart of Africa there were already colonies with steamers to speed the journey up to Lake Tanganyika, where his troubles really began. Through two-thirds of the journey Grogan had a partner, Mr. A. H. Sharp, but they were seldom in company, for one would explore ahead while the other handled their caravan of one hundred fifty negro carriers, or one or both went hunting, or lay at the verge of death with a dose of fever.

Their route lay along the floor of a gash in the continent, a deep abyss called the Great Rift, in which lies a chain of lakes: Nyassa, Tanganyika, Kevu, Albert Edward, and Albert, whence the Nile flows down into distant Egypt. This rift is walled and sometimes blocked by live volcanoes, fouled with swamps, gigantic forests and new lava floods, reeking with fever, and at the time of the journey was beset by tribes of hostile cannibals. This pleasant path led to Khartoum, held in those days by the Khalifa with his dervish army. The odds were about a thousand to one that these two British adventurers were marching straight to death or slavery. Their attempt was madness—that divine madness that inspires all pioneers.

Now for a glimpse into this great adventure:

“I had shot a zebra ... and turning out at five-thirty A. M. crept up within sixty yards.... I saw in the middle of a circle of some two hundred vultures a grand old lion, leisurely gnawing the ribs, and behind, four little jackals sitting in a row.... Behind stretched the limitless plain, streaked with mists shimmering in the growing light of the rising sun, clumps of graceful palms fenced in a sandy arena where the zebra had fallen and round his attenuated remains, and just out of reach of the swish of the monarch’s tail, the solid circle of waiting vultures, craning their bald necks, chattering and hustling one another, and the more daring quartette within the magic circle like four little images of patience, while the lion in all his might and matchless grandeur of form, leisurely chewed and scrunched the titbits, magnificently regardless of the watchful eyes of the encircling canaille.... I watched the scene for fully ten minutes, then as he showed signs of moving I took the chance afforded of a broadside shot and bowled him over with the .500 magnum. In inserting another cartridge the gun jammed, and he rose, but after looking round for the cause of the interruption, without success, started off at a gallop. With a desperate effort I closed the gun and knocked him over again. He was a fine black-maned lion and as he lay in a straight line from tip to top ten feet, four inches, a very unusual length.”

Among the volcanoes near Lake Kivo, Grogan discovered a big one that had been thrown up within the last two years, and there were vast new floods of lava, hard to cross. One day, while searching out a route for the expedition, he had just camped at a height of nine thousand feet in the forest when he found the fresh tracks of a bull elephant, and the spoor was much larger than he had ever seen. When he overtook this giant the jungle was so dense that only the ridge of his back was visible, and for some time he watched the animal picking the leaves off a tree. When fodder ran short he tore down a tree whose trunk was two feet thick, and fearing he might move on, Grogan fired. The elephant fell, but recovered and clashed away, so that there were some hours of tracking before the hunter could catch up again. And now on a flaw of wind the giant scented him.

“The noise was terrific, and it suddenly dawned upon me that so far from moving off he was coming on. I was powerless to move—a fall would have been fatal—so I waited; but the forest was so dense that I never saw him till his head was literally above me, when I fired both barrels of the .500 magnum in his face. The whole forest seemed to crumple up, and a second later I found myself ten feet above the ground, well home in a thorn bush, while my gun was lying ten yards away in the opposite direction; and I heard a roar as of thunder disappearing into the distance. A few seconds later the most daring of my boys, Zowanji, came hurrying along with that sickly green hue that a nigger’s face assumes in moments of fear, and with his assistance I descended from my spiky perch. I was drenched with blood, which fortunately proved to be not mine, but that of the elephant; my gun, which I recovered, was also covered with blood, even to the inside of the barrels. The only damage I sustained was a slightly twisted knee. I can not say whether the elephant actually struck me, or whether I was carried there by the rush of the country.”

Following up, Grogan found enormous pools of blood, and half a mile farther on heard grunts that showed that the elephant had scented him. The animal rushed about with terrifying shrieks, devastated half an acre of forest, and then moved on again. Several times the hunter caught up, but the elephant moved on at an increasing pace, until sunset put an end to Grogan’s hopes.

This part of the Rift has belts of forest, and close beside them are patches of rich populous country where black nations live in fat contentment. But for five years there had been trouble to the westward where the Congo army had chased out the Belgian officials and run the country to suit themselves. Still worse, there were certain cannibal tribes moving like a swarm of locusts through Central Africa, eating the settled nations. Lately the swarm had broken into the Rift, and as Grogan explored northward he found the forest full of corpses. Here and there lurked starving fugitives, but despite their frantic warnings he moved on until he came to a wide province of desolated farms and ruined villages. Seeing that he had but a dozen followers a mob of cannibals attacked at night; but as they rushed, six fell to the white man’s rifle, and when the rest fled he picked them off at the range of a mile, as long as he could find victims. Then he entered a house where they had been feasting. “A cloud of vultures hovering over, the spot gave me an inkling of what I was about to see; but the realization defies description; it haunts me in my dreams, at dinner it sits on my leg-of-mutton, it bubbles in my soup, in fine, Watonga (the negro gun bearer) would not eat the potatoes that grew in the same country.”

Grogan fled, and starved, for the mountain streams were choked with corpses, the woods were a nightmare horror, to eat and sleep were alike impossible. He warned his partner and the expedition marched by another route.

Two very queer kinds of folk he met in the forests: the pygmies and the ape-men. The pygmies are little hunters and not more than three feet tall, but sturdy and compact, immensely strong, able to travel through the pig-runs of the jungle, and brave enough to kill elephants with their tiny poisoned arrows. He found them kindly, clever little folk, though all the other explorers have disliked them.

The ape-men were tall, with hanging paunch and short legs, a small skull and huge jaws, face, body and legs covered with wiry hair. The hang of the long powerful arms, the slight stoop of the trunk, and the hunted vacant expression of the face were marked. The twenty or thirty of them Grogan met were frightened at first but afterward became very friendly, proud to show him their skill in making fire with their fire sticks.

Once in the forest he found the skeleton of an ape of gigantic size. The natives explained that such apes were plentiful, although no white man has ever seen one. They have a bad habit of stealing negro women.

At the northern end of the Rift, where the country flattens out toward the Nile, Grogan and Sharp met with the officials of British Uganda, which was then in a shocking muddle of mutinous black troops, raids from the Congo, drought and famine. There Mr. Sharp left the expedition, making his way to Mombasa; the carriers were sent back home as a good riddance, and Mr. Grogan, with only five faithful attendants, pushed on down the Nile Valley. The river was blocked with a weed called the sudd, which a British expedition was trying to clear away, and Grogan was forced to the eastward through horrible marshlands. He had in all only fourteen men when he came to the Dinka country, and met that queer race of swamp folk. They are very tall, some even gigantic, beautifully built, but broad-footed, walking with feet picked up high and thrust far forward—the gait of a pelican. At rest they stand on one leg like a wading bird, the loose leg akimbo with its foot on the straight leg’s knee. They are fierce, too, and one tribe made an attack on Grogan’s party. His men threw down their loads, screaming that they were lost, and the best Congo soldier fell stabbed to the heart, while two others went down with cracked skulls.

“I took the chief,” says Grogan, “and his right-hand man with the double barrel, then, turning round, found that my boy had bolted with my revolver. At the same moment a Dinka hurled his spear at me; I dodged it, but he rushed in and dealt me a swinging blow with his club, which I fortunately warded with my arm, receiving no more damage than a wholesome bruise. I poked my empty gun at his stomach, and he turned, receiving a second afterwards a dum-dum in the small of his back. Then they broke and ran, my army with eight guns having succeeded in firing two shots. I climbed up an ant hill that was close by, and could see them watching at about three hundred yards for our next move, which was an unexpected one, for I planted a dum-dum apparently in the stomach of one of the most obtrusive ruffians, whom I recognized by his great height. They then hurried off and bunched at about seven hundred yards, and another shot, whether fatal or not I could not see, sent them off in all directions.”

The battle was finished, and Grogan toiled on with his wounded men, famished, desperate, almost hopeless. One day in desert country he came to the camp of Captain Dunn, a British officer.

“Captain Dunn: ‘How do you do?’

“I: ‘Oh, very fit, thanks; how are you? Had any sport?’

“Dunn: ‘Oh, pretty fair, but there is nothing here. Have a drink?’

“Then we washed, lunched, discussed the war, (South Africa), and eventually Dunn asked where the devil I had come from.”

The battle of Omdurman had destroyed the dervish power, and opened the Nile so that Grogan went on in ease and comfort by steamer to Khartoum, to Cairo, and home. Still he heard in his sleep the night melody of the lions—“The usual cry is a sort of vast sigh, taken up by the chorus with a deep sob, sob, sob, or a curious rumbling noise. But the pukka roar is indescribable ... it seems to permeate the whole universe, thundering, rumbling, majestic: there is no music in the world so sweet.”

It is hard to part with this Irish gentleman, whose fourteen months’ traverse of the Dark Continent is the finest deed in the history of African exploration.

XXVIII
A. D. 1900 THE COWBOY PRESIDENT

Let others appraise the merits of this great American gentleman as governor of New York, secretary of the United States Navy, colonel of the Rough Riders, historian of his pet hero, Oliver Cromwell, and, finally, president of the republic. He had spent half his life as an adventurer on the wild frontier breaking horses, punching cows, fighting grizzly bears, before he ever tackled the politicians, and he had much more fun by the camp-fire than he got in his marble palace. Here is his memory of a prairie fire:—“As I galloped by I saw that the fire had struck the trees a quarter of a mile below me, in the dried timber it instantly sprang aloft like a giant, and roared in a thunderous monotone as it swept up the coulée. I galloped to the hill ridge ahead, saw that the fire line had already reached the divide, and turned my horse sharp on his haunches. As I again passed under the trees the fire, running like a race horse in the bush, had reached the road; its breath was hot in my face; tongues of quivering flame leaped over my head, and kindled the grass on the hillside fifty yards away.”

Thus having prospected the ground he discovered means of saving himself, his companions, and his camp from the rushing flames. It is an old artifice of the frontier to start a fresh fire, burn a few acres, and take refuge on the charred ground while the storm of flame sweeps by on either hand. But this was not enough. The fire was burning the good pasture of his cattle and, unless stayed, might sweep away not only leagues of grass, but ricks and houses. “Before dark,” he continues, “we drove to camp and shot a stray steer, and then split its carcass in two length ways with an ax. After sundown the wind lulled—two of us on horseback dragging a half carcass bloody side down, by means of ropes leading from our saddle-horns to the fore and hind legs, the other two following on foot with slickers and wet blankets. There was a reddish glow in the night air, and the waving bending lines of flame showed in great bright curves against the hillside ahead of us. The flames stood upright two or three feet high. Lengthening the ropes, one of us spurred his horse across the fire line, and then wheeling, we dragged the carcass along it, one horseman being on the burnt ground, the other on the unburnt grass, while the body of the steer lay lengthwise across the line. The weight and the blood smothered the fire as we twitched the carcass over the burning grass, and the two men following behind with their blankets and slickers (oilskins) readily beat out any isolated tufts of flame. Sometimes there would be a slight puff of wind, and then the man on the grass side of the line ran the risk of a scorching.

“We were blackened with smoke, and the taut ropes hurt our thighs, while at times the plunging horses tried to break or bolt. It was worse when we came to some deep gully or ravine—we could see nothing, and simply spurred our horses into it anywhere, taking our chances. Down we would go, stumbling, sliding and pitching, over cut banks and into holes and bushes, while the carcass bounded behind, now catching on a stump, and now fetching loose with a ‘pluck’ that brought it full on the horses’ haunches, driving them nearly crazy with fright. By midnight the half carcass was worn through, but we had stifled the fire in the comparatively level country to the eastwards. Back we went to camp, drank huge drafts of muddy water, devoured roast ox-ribs, and dragged out the other half carcass to fight the fire in the west. There was some little risk to us who were on horseback, dragging the carcass; we had to feel our way along knife-like ridges in the dark, one ahead and the other behind while the steer dangled over the precipice on one side, and in going down the buttes and into the cañons only by extreme care could we avoid getting tangled in the ropes and rolling down in a heap.” So at last the gallant fight was abandoned, and looking back upon the fire which they had failed to conquer: “In the darkness it looked like the rush of a mighty army.”

Short of cowboys and lunatics, nobody could have imagined such a feat of horsemanship. Of that pattern is frontier adventure—daring gone mad; and yet it is very rarely that the frontiersman finds the day’s work worth recording, or takes the trouble to set down on paper the stark naked facts of an incident more exciting than a shipwreck, more dangerous than a battle, and far transcending the common experience of men.

Theodore Roosevelt

Traveling alone in the Rockies, Colonel Roosevelt came at sundown to a little ridge whence he could look into the hollow beyond—and there he saw a big grizzly walking thoughtfully home to bed. At the first shot, “he uttered a loud moaning grunt and plunged forward at a heavy gallop, while I raced obliquely down the hill to cut him off. After going a few hundred feet he reached a laurel thicket ... which he did not leave.... As I halted I heard a peculiar savage whine from the heart of the brush. Accordingly I began to skirt the edge standing on tiptoe, and gazing earnestly in to see if I could not get a glimpse of his hide. When I was at the narrowest part of the thicket he suddenly left it directly opposite, and then wheeled and stood broadside to me on the hillside a little above. He turned his head stiffly toward me, scarlet strings of froth hung from his lips, his eyes burned like embers in the gloom. I held true, aiming behind the shoulder, and my bullet shattered the point or lower end of his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and challenge, blowing the bloody foam from his mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white fangs; and then he charged straight at me, crashing and bounding through the laurel bushes so that it was hard to aim.

“I waited until he came to a fallen tree, raking him as he topped it with a ball which entered his chest and went through the cavity of his body, but he neither swerved nor flinched, and at the moment I did not know that I had struck him. He came unsteadily on, and in another moment was close upon me. I fired for his forehead, but my bullet went low, entering his open mouth, smashing his lower jaw, and going into the neck. I leaped to one side almost as I pulled trigger, and through the hanging smoke the first thing I saw was his paw as he made a vicious side blow at me. The rest of his charge carried him past. As he struck he lurched forward, leaving a pool of bright blood where his muzzle hit the ground; but he recovered himself and made two or three jumps onward, while I hurriedly jammed a couple of cartridges into the magazine, my rifle only holding four, all of which I had fired. Then he tried to pull up, but as he did so his muscles seemed to give way, his head drooped, and he rolled over—each of my first three bullets had inflicted a mortal wound.”

This man who had fought grizzly bears came rather as a surprise among the politicians in silk hats who run the United States. He had all the gentry at his back because he is the first man of unquestioned birth and breeding who has entered the political bear-pit since the country squires who followed George Washington. He had all the army at his back because he had charged the heights at Santiago de Cuba with conspicuous valor at the head of his own regiment of cowboys. He had the navy at his back because as secretary for the navy he had successfully governed the fleet. But he was no politician when he came forward to claim the presidency of the United States. Seeing that he could not be ignored the wire-puller set a trap for this innocent and gave him the place of vice-president. The vice-president has little to do, can only succeed to the throne in the event of the president’s death, and is, after a brief term, barred for life from any further progress. “Teddy” walked into the trap and sat down.

But when President McKinley was murdered the politicians found that they had made a most surprising and gigantic blunder. By their own act the cowboy bear fighter must succeed to the vacant seat as chief magistrate of the republic. President Roosevelt happened to be away at the time, hunting bears in the Adirondack wilderness, and there began a frantic search of mountain peaks and forest solitudes for the missing ruler of seventy million people. When he was found, and had paid the last honors to his dead friend, William McKinley, he was obliged to proceed to Washington, and there take the oaths. His women folk had a terrible time before they could persuade him to wear the silk hat and frock coat which there serve in lieu of coronation robes, but he consented even to that for the sake of the gorgeous time he was to have with the politicians afterward.

XXIX
A. D. 1905 THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

Once upon a time the Foul Fiend wanted a death-trap that would pick out all the bravest men and destroy them, so he invented the Northwest Passage.

So when Europe needed a short route to China round the north end of the Americas our seamen set out to find a channel, and even when they knew that any route must lie through the high Arctic, still they were not going to be beaten. Our white men rule the world because we refuse to be beaten.

The seamen died of scurvy, and it was two hundred years before they found out how to stay alive on salted food, by drinking lime juice. Safe from scurvy, they reached the gate of the passage at Lancaster Sound, but there the winter caught them, so that their ships were squashed in driving ice, and the men died of cold and hunger. Then the explorers got ships too strong to be crushed; they copied the dress of the Eskimo to keep them warm; and they carried food enough to last for years. Deeper and deeper they forced their way into the Arctic, but now they neared the magnetic pole where the compass is useless, in belts of drifting fog darker than midnight. Still they dared to go on, but the inner channels of the Arctic were found to be frozen until the autumn gales broke up the ice-fields, leaving barely six weeks for navigation before the winter frosts. At that rate the three-thousand-mile passage would take three years. Besides, the ship must carry a deck load of sledge dogs with their food, so that the men might escape overland in case they were cast away. Only a big ship could carry the supplies, but once again the seamen dared to try. And now came the last test to break men’s hearts—the sea lane proved to be so foul with shoals and rocks that no large vessel could possibly squeeze through. At last, after three hundred years, the British seamen had to own defeat. Our explorers had mapped the entire route, but no ship could make the passage because it was impossible to raise money for the venture.

Why should we want to get through this useless channel? Because it was the test for perfect manhood free from all care for money, utterly unselfish, of the highest intellect, patience, endurance and the last possible extremity of valor.

And where the English failed a Norseman, Nordenskjöld made the Northeast passage round the coast of Asia. Still nobody dared to broach the Northwest passage round America, until a young Norse seaman solved the riddle. Where no ship could cross the shoals it might be possible with a fishing boat drawing only six feet of water. But she could not carry five years’ supplies for men and dogs. Science came to the rescue with foods that would pack into a tenth part of their proper bulk, and as to the dog food, one might risk a deck load big as a haystack, to be thrown off if the weather got too heavy. Still, how could a fishing boat carry twenty men for the different expert jobs? Seven men might be discovered each an expert in three or four different trades; the captain serving as the astronomer and doctor, the cook as a naturalist and seaman. So Roald Amundsen got Doctor Nansen’s help, and that great explorer was backed by the king. Help came from all parts of Scandinavia, and a little from Great Britain.

The Gjöa was a forty-seven ton herring boat with a thirteen horse-power motor for ship’s pet, loaded with five years’ stores for a crew of seven men, who off duty were comrades as in a yachting cruise. In 1903 she sailed from Christiania and spent July climbing the north current in full view of the Greenland coast, the Arctic wonderland. At Godhaven she picked up stores, bidding farewell to civilization, passed Upernivik the last village, and Tassinssak, the last house on earth, then entered Melville Bay with its three-hundred-mile frontage of glacier, the most dangerous place in the Arctic. Beyond, near Cape York, she found a deck load of stores left for her by one of the Dundee whalers. There the people met the last white men, three Danish explorers whose leader, Mylius Erichsen, was making his way to death on the north coast of Greenland. So, like a barge with a hayrick, the overload Joy crossed from the Greenland coast to Lancaster Sound, the gate of the Northwest passage, whose gatepost is Beechey Island, sacred to the memory of Sir John Franklin, and the dead of the Franklin search. The Joy found some sole leather better than her own, a heap of useful coal and an anvil, among the litter of old expeditions; made the graves tidy; left a message at Franklin’s monument, and went on. For three hundred years the channels ahead were known to have been blocked; only by a miracle of good fortune could they be free from ice; and this miracle happened, for the way was clear.

* * * * *

“I was sitting,” writes Amundsen on August thirty-first, “entering the day’s events in my journal, when I heard a shriek—a terrific shriek, which thrilled me to the very marrow. It takes something to make a Norseman shriek, but a mighty flame with thick suffocating smoke was leaping up from the engine room skylight. There the tanks held two thousand two hundred gallons of petroleum, and close beside them a pile of soaked cotton waste had burst with a loud explosion. If the tanks got heated the ship would be blown into chips, but after a hard fight the fire was got under. All hands owed their lives to their fine discipline.”

A few days later the Joy grounded in a labyrinth of shoals, and was caught aground by a storm which lifted and bumped her until the false keel was torn off. The whole of the deck load had to be thrown overboard. The only hope was to sail over the rocks, and with all her canvas set she charged, smashing from rock to rock until she reached the farther edge of the reef which was nearly dry. “The spray and sleet were washing over the vessel, the mast trembled, and the Gjöa seemed to pull herself together for a last final leap. She was lifted up and flung bodily on the bare rocks, bump, bump, with terrific force.... In my distress I sent up (I honestly confess it) an ardent prayer to the Almighty. Yet another bump worse than ever, then one more, and we slid off.”

The shock had lifted the rudder so that it rested with the pintles on the mountings, and she would not steer; then somehow the pins dropped back into their sockets, the steersmen regained control and the Joy was saved, after a journey across dry rocks which ought to have smashed any ship afloat. She did not even leak.

Near the south end of King William’s Land a pocket harbor was found, and named Joy Haven. There the stores were landed, cabins were built, the ship turned into a winter house, and the crew became men of science. For two years they were hard at work studying the magnetism of the earth beside the Magnetic Pole. They collected fossils and natural history specimens, surveyed the district, studied the heavens and the weather, hunted reindeer for their meat and clothing, fished, and made friends with the scented, brave and merry Eskimos. During the first winter the thermometer dropped to seventy-nine degrees below zero, which is pretty near the world record for cold, but as long as one is well fed, with bowels in working order, and has Eskimo clothes to wear, the temperature feels much the same after forty below zero. Below that point the wind fails to a breathless calm, the keen dry air is refreshing as champagne, and one can keep up a dog-trot for miles without being winded. It is not the winter night that people dread, but the summer day with its horrible torment of mosquitoes. Then there is in spring and autumn, a hot misty glare upon the snow-fields which causes blindness with a deal of pain. The Arctic has its drawbacks, but one remembers afterward the fields of flowers, the unearthly beauty of the northern lights, the teeming game, and those long summer nights when the sun is low, filling the whole sky with sunset colors.

The greatest event of the first year was the finding of an Eskimo hunter to carry letters, who came back in the second summer, having found in Hudson’s Bay an exploring vessel of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada. Major Moody, also the captain of the Arctic, and the Master of an American whaler, sent their greetings, news of the outer world, some useful charts, and a present of husky dogs.

The second summer was over. The weather had begun to turn cold before a northerly gale smashed the ice, and sea lanes opened along the Northwest passage. On August thirteenth the Joy left her anchorage, under sail and steam, to pick her way without compass through blinding fog, charging and butting through fields of ice, dodging zigzag through shoals, or squeezing between ice-fields and the shore. There was no sleep for anybody during the first three nights, but racking anxiety and tearing overstrain until they reached known waters, a channel charted by the old explorers. They met an American whaler, and afterward had clear open water as far as the mouths of the Mackenzie River. A few miles beyond that the ice closed in from the north and piled up-shore so that the passage was blocked and once more the Joy went into winter quarters. But not alone. Ladies must have corsets ribbed with whalebone from the bowhead whale. Each whale head is worth two thousand pounds, so a fleet of American whalers goes hunting in the Arctic. Their only port of refuge is Herschel Island off the Canadian coast, so there is an outpost of the Northwest Mounted Police, a mission station and a village of Eskimos.

The Joy came to anchor thirty-six miles to the east of Herschel Island, beside a stranded ship in charge of her Norse mate, and daily came passengers to and fro on the Fort Macpherson trail. From that post runs a dog-train service of mails connecting the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company all the way up the Mackenzie Valley to Edmonton on the railway within two thousand miles. The crew of the Joy had company news, letters from home, and Captain Amundsen went by dog-train to the mining camps on the Yukon where at Eagle City he sent telegrams.

At last in the summer of 1906 the Joy sailed on the final run of her great voyage, but her crew of seven was now reduced to six, and at parting she dipped her colors to the cross on a lone grave. The ice barred her passage, but she charged, smashing her engines, and charged again, losing her peak which left the mainsail useless. So she won past Cape Prince of Wales, completing the Northwest passage, and entering Bering Sea called at Cape Nome for repairs. There a thousand American gold miners welcomed the sons of the vikings with an uproarious triumph, and greeted Captain Amundsen with the Norse national anthem.

XXX
A. D. 1588 JOHN HAWKINS

Master John Hawkins, mariner, was a trader’s son, familiar from childhood with the Guinea coast of Africa. Worshipful merchants of London trusted him with three ridiculously small ships, the size of our fishing smacks, but manned by a hundred men. With these, in 1562—the “spacious times” of great Elizabeth—he swooped down on the West African coast, and horribly scared were his people when they saw the crocodiles. The nature of this animal “is ever when he would have his prey, to sob and cry like a Christian bodie, to provoke them to come to him, and then he snatcheth at them.” In spite of the reptiles, Master Hawkins “got into his possession, partly by the sword, and partly by other means,” three hundred wretched negroes.

The king of Spain had a law that no Protestant heretic might trade with his Spanish colonies of the West Indies, so Master Hawkins, by way of spitting in his majesty’s eye, went straight to Hispaniola, where he exchanged his slaves with the settlers for a shipload of hides, ginger, sugar and pearls.

On his second voyage Master Hawkins attempted to enslave a whole city, hard by Sierra Leone, but the Almighty, “who worketh all things for the best, would not have it so, and by Him we escaped without danger, His name be praised for it.” Hawkins had nearly been captured by the negroes, and was compelled to make his pious raids elsewhere. Moreover, when he came with a fleet loaded with slaves to Venezuela, the Spanish merchants were scared to trade with him. Of course, for the sake of his negroes, he had to get them landed somehow, so he went ashore, “having in his greate boate two falcons of brasse, and in the other boates double bases in their noses.” Such artillery backed by a hundred men in plate armor, convinced the Spaniards that it would be wise to trade.

On his third voyage, Master Hawkins found the Spaniards his friends along the Spanish main, but the weather, a deadly enemy, drove him for refuge and repair to San Juan d’Ullua, the port of Mexico. Here was an islet, the only shelter on that coast from the northerly gales. He sent a letter to the capital for leave to hold that islet with man and guns while he bought provisions and repaired his ships. But as it happened, a new viceroy came with a fleet of thirteen great ships to claim that narrow anchorage, and Hawkins must let them in or fight. “On the faith of a viceroy” Don Martin de Henriquez pledged his honor before Hawkins let him in, then set his ships close aboard those of England, trained guns to bear upon them, secretly filled them with troops hid below hatches, and when his treason was found out, sounded a trumpet, the signal for attack. The Englishmen on the isle were massacred except three, the queen’s ship Jesus, of Lubeck, was so sorely hurt that she had to be abandoned, and only two small barks, the Minion and the Judith, escaped to sea. The Spaniards lost four galleons in that battle.

Sir John Hawkins

As to the English, they were in great peril, and parted by a storm. The Judith fared best, commanded by a man from before the mast, one Francis Drake, who brought the news to England that Hawkins had more than two hundred people crowded upon the Minion without food or water. “With many sorrowful hearts,” says Hawkins, “we wandered in an unknown sea by the span of fourteen dayes, till hunger forced us to seeke the lande, for birdes were thought very goode meate, rattes, cattes, mise and dogges.”

It was then that one hundred fourteen men volunteered to go ashore and the ship continued a very painful voyage.

These men were landed on the coast of Mexico, unarmed, to be stripped naked presently by red Indians, and by the Spaniards marched as slaves to the city of Mexico, where after long imprisonment those left alive were sold. The Spanish gentlemen, the clergy and the monks were kind to these servants, who earned positions of trust on mines and ranches, some of them becoming in time very wealthy men though still rated as slaves. Then came the “Holy Hellish Inquisition” to inquire into the safety of their souls. All were imprisoned, nearly all were tortured on the rack, and flogged in public with five hundred lashes. Even the ten gentlemen landed by Hawkins as hostages for his good faith shared the fate of the shipwrecked mariners who, some in Mexico and some in Spain, were in the end condemned to the galleys. And those who kept the faith were burned alive. From that time onward, whatever treaties there might be in Europe, there was never a moment’s peace for the Spanish Indies. All honest Englishmen were at war with Spain until the Inquisition was stamped out, and the British liberators had helped to drive the Spaniards from the last acre of their American empire.

When Hawkins returned to England, Mary, Queen of Scots, was there a prisoner. The sailor went to Elizabeth’s minister, Lord Burleigh, and proposed a plot. By this plot he entered into a treaty with the queen of Scots to set her on the throne. He was to join the Duke of Alva for the invasion and overthrow of England. So pleased was the Spanish king that he paid compensation to Hawkins for his losses at San Juan d’Ullua and restored to freedom such of the English prisoners as could be discovered. Then Hawkins turned loyal again, and Queen Elizabeth knighted him for fooling her enemies.

XXXI
A. D. 1573 FRANCIS DRAKE

The Judith had escaped from San Juan d’Ullua and her master, Francis Drake, of Devon, was now a bitter vengeful adversary, from that time onward living to be the scourge of Spain. Four years he raided, plundered, burned along the Spanish main, until the name Drake was changed to Dragon in the language of the dons.

Then in 1573 he sailed from Plymouth with five little ships to carry fire and sword into the South Seas, where the flag of England had never been before. When he had captured some ships near the Cape de Verde Islands, he was fifty-four days in unknown waters before he sighted the Brazils, then after a long time came to Magellan’s Straits, where he put in to refresh his men. One of the captains had been unfaithful and was now tried by a court-martial, which found him guilty of mutiny and treason against the admiral. Drake offered him a ship to return to England and throw himself on the queen’s mercy, or he might land and take his chance among the savages, or he could have his death, and carry his case to the Almighty. The prisoner would not rob the expedition of a ship, nor would he consort with the degraded tribes of that wild Land of Fire, but asked that he might die at the hands of his countrymen because of the wrong he had done them. So the date was set for his execution, when all the officers received the holy communion, the prisoner kneeling beside the admiral. After that they dined together for the last time, and when they had risen from table, shook hands at parting, the one to his death, the others to their voyage. May England ever breed such gentlemen!

The squadron had barely got clear of the straits and gained the Pacific Ocean, when bad weather scattered all the ships. Drake went on alone, and on the coast of Chili, met with an Indian in a canoe, who had news of a galleon at Santiago, laden with gold from Peru. The Spaniards were not at all prepared for birds of Drake’s feather on the South Seas, so that when he dropped in at Santiago they were equally surprised and annoyed.

The galleon’s crew were ashore save for six Spaniards and three negroes, so bored with themselves that they welcomed the visitors by beating a drum and setting out Chilian wine. But when Master Moon arrived on board with a boat’s crew, he laid about him outrageously with a large sword, saying, “Down, dog!” to each discomfited Spaniard, until they fled for the hold. Only one leaped overboard, who warned the town, whereat the people escaped to the bush, leaving the visitors to enjoy themselves. The cargo of gold and wine must have been worth about fifty thousand pounds, while Santiago yielded a deal of good cheer besides, Master Fletcher, the parson, getting for his “spoyle” a silver chalice, two cruets and an altar cloth.

Sir Francis Drake

Greatly refreshed, the English went on northward, carefully inspecting the coast. At one place a sleeping Spaniard was found on the beach with thirteen bars of silver. “We took the silver and left the man.” Another place yielded a pack-train of llamas, the local beast of burden, with leather wallets containing eight hundred pounds’ weight of silver. Three small barks were searched next, one of them being laden with silver; then twelve ships at anchor, which were cut adrift; and a bark with eighty pounds’ weight of gold, and a golden crucifix set with emeralds. But best of all was the galleon Cacafuego, overtaken at sea, and disabled at the third shot, which brought down her mizzenmast. Her cargo consisted of “great riches, as jewels and precious stones, thirteen chests full of royals of plate, four score pounds weight of golde, and six and twentie tunne of silver.” The pilot being the possessor of two nice silver cups, had to give one to Master Drake, and the other to the steward, “because hee could not otherwise chuse.”

Every town, every ship was rifled along that coast. There was neither fighting nor killing, but much politeness, until at last the ship had a full cargo of silver, gold and gems, with which she reached England, having made a voyage round the world. When Queen Elizabeth dined in state on board Drake’s ship at Greenwich, she struck him with a sword and dubbed him knight. Of course he must have armorial bearings now, but when he adopted the three wiverns—black fowl of sorts—of the Drake family, there were angry protests against his insolence. So the queen made him a coat-of-arms, a terrestrial globe, and a ship thereon led with a string by a hand that reached out of a cloud, and in the rigging of the said ship, a wivern hanged by the neck.

It was Parson Fletcher who wrote the story of that illustrious voyage, but he does not say how he himself fell afterward from grace, being solemnly consigned by Drake to the “devil and all his angells,” threatened with a hanging at the yard-arm, and made to bear a posy on his breast with these frank words, “Francis Fletcher, ye falsest knave that liveth.”

Drake always kept his chaplain, and dined “alone with musick,” did all his public actions with large piety and gallant courtesy, while he led English fleets on insolent piracies against the Spaniards.

From his next voyage he returned leaving the Indies in flames, loaded with plunder, and smoking the new herb tobacco to the amazement of his countrymen.

Philip II was preparing a vast armada against England, when Drake appeared with thirty sail on the Spanish coast, destroyed a hundred ships, swept like a hurricane from port to port, took a galleon laden with treasure off the western islands, and returned to Plymouth with his enormous plunder.

Next year Drake was vice-admiral to Lord Howard in the destruction of the Spanish armada.

In 1589 he led a fleet to deliver Portugal from the Spaniards, wherein he failed.

Then came his last voyage in company with his first commander, Sir John Hawkins. Once more the West Indies felt the awful weight of his arm, but now there were varying fortunes of defeat, of reprisals, and at the end, pestilence, which struck the fleet at Nombre de Dios, and felled this mighty seaman. His body was committed to the sea, his memory to the hearts of all brave men.

Queen Elizabeth

XXXII
A. D. 1587 THE FOUR ARMADAS

Here let us call a halt. We have come to the climax of the great century, the age of the Renaissance, when Europe was born again; of the Reformation, when the Protestants of the Baltic fought the Catholics of the Mediterranean for the right to worship in freedom; and of the sea kings who laid the foundations of our modern world.

Islam had reached her fullest flood of glory with the fleets of Barbarossa, the armies of the Sultan Suleiman, and all the splendors of Akbar the Magnificent, before her ebb set downward into ruin.

Portugal and Spain, under one crown, shared the plunder of the Indies and the mastery of the sea.

Then, as the century waned, a third-class power, the island state of England, claimed the command of the sea, and planted the seeds of an empire destined to overshadow the ruins of Spain, as well as the wreck of Islam.

Here opened broad fields of adventure. There were German and English envoys at the court of Russia; English merchants seeking trade in India, Dutch gunners in the service of eastern princes, French fishermen finding the way into Canada, seamen of all these nations as slaves in Turkish galleys or in Spanish mines; everywhere sea fights, shipwrecks, trails of lost men wandering in unknown lands, matters of desert islands, and wrecked treasures with all the usual routine of plague, pestilence and famine, of battle, of murder and of sudden death.

In all this tangle we must take one thread, with most to learn, I think, from a Hollander, Mynheer, J. H. van Linschoten, who was clerk to the Portuguese archbishop of the Indies and afterward in business at Terceira in the Azores, where he wrote a famous book on pilotage. He tells us about the seamanship of Portuguese and Spaniards in terms of withering contempt as a mixture of incompetence and cowardice, enough to explain the downfall and ruin of their empires.

The worst ships, he says, which cleared from Cochin were worth, with their cargo, one million, eight hundred thousand pounds of our modern money. Not content with that, the swindlers in charge removed the ballast to make room for more cinnamon, whereby the Arreliquias capsized and sank.

The San Iago, having her bottom ripped out by a coral reef, her admiral, pilot, master and a dozen others entered into a boat, keeping it with naked rapiers until they got clear, and deserted. Left without any officers, the people on the wreck were addressed by an Italian seaman who cried, “Why are we thus abashed?” So ninety valiant mariners took the longboat and cleared, hacking off the fingers, hands and arms of the drowning women who held on to her gunwale.

As to the pilot who caused this little accident, he afterward had charge of the San Thomas “full of people, and most of the gentility of India,” and lost with all hands.

But if the seamanship of the Portuguese made it a miracle if they escaped destruction, that of the Spaniards was on a much larger scale. Where Portugal lost a ship Spain bungled away a fleet, and never was incompetence more frightfully punished than in the doom of the four armadas.

Philip II was busy converting Protestant Holland, and in 1587 he resolved to send a Catholic mission to England also, but while he was preparing the first armada Drake came and burned his hundred ships under the guns of Cadiz.

A year later the second, the great armada, was ready, one hundred thirty ships in line of battle, which was to embark the army in Holland, and invade England with a field force of fifty-three thousand men, the finest troops in Europe.

Were the British fleet of to-day to attack the Dutch the situation would be much the same. It was a comfort to the English that they had given most ample provocation and to spare, but still they felt it was very awkward. They had five million people, only the ninth part of their present strength; no battle-ships, and only thirty cruisers. The merchant service rallied a hundred vessels, the size of the fishing smacks, the Flemings lent forty, and nobody in England dared to hope.

To do Spain justice she made plenty of noise, giving ample warning. Her fleet was made invincible by the pope’s blessing, the sacred banners and the holy relics, while for England’s spiritual comfort there was a vicar of the inquisition with his racks and thumbscrews. Only the minor details were overlooked: that the cordage was rotten, the powder damp, the wine sour, the water putrid, the biscuits and the beef a mass of maggots, while the ship’s drainage into the ballast turned every galleon into a floating pest-house. The admiral was a fool, the captains were landlubbers, the ships would not steer, and the guns could not be fought. The soldiers, navigators, boatswains and quartermasters were alike too proud to help the short-handed, overworked seamen, while two thousand of the people were galley slaves waiting to turn on their masters. Worst of all, this sacred, fantastic, doomed armada was to attack from Holland, without pilotage to turn our terrific fortifications of shoals and quicksands.

Small were our ships and woefully short of powder, but they served the wicked valiant queen who pawned her soul for England. Her admiral was Lord Howard the Catholic, whose squadron leaders were Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher. The leaders were practical seamen who led, not drove, the English. The Spanish line of battle was seven miles across, but when the armada was sighted, Drake on Plymouth Hoe had time to finish his game of bowls before he put to sea.

From hill to hill through England the beacon fires roused the men, the church bells called them to prayer, and all along the southern coast fort echoed fort while guns and trumpets announced the armada’s coming. The English fleet, too weak to attack, but fearfully swift to eat up stragglers, snapped like a wolf-pack at the heels of Spain. Four days and nights on end the armada was goaded and torn in sleepless misery, no longer in line of battle, but huddled and flying. At the Straits they turned at bay with thirty-five hundred guns, but eight ships bore down on fire, stampeding the broken fleet to be slaughtered, foundered, burned or cast away, strewing the coast with wreckage from Dover to Cape Wrath and down the Western Isles. Fifty-three ruined ships got back to Spain with a tale of storms and the English which Europe has never forgotten, insuring the peace of English homes for three whole centuries.

A year passed, and the largest of all the armadas ventured to sea, this time from the West Indies, a treasure fleet for Spain. Of two hundred twenty ships clearing not more than fifteen arrived, the rest being “drowned, burst, or taken.” Storms and the English destroyed that third armada.

The fourth year passed, marked by a hurricane in the Western Isles, and a great increase of England’s reckoning, but the climax of Spain’s undoing was still to come in 1591, the year of the fourth armada.

To meet and convoy her treasure fleet of one hundred ten sail from the Indies, Spain sent out thirty battle-ships to the Azores. There lay an English squadron of sixteen vessels, also in waiting for the treasure fleet, whose policy was not to attack the escort, which carried no plunder worth taking. Lord Howard’s vice-admiral was Sir Richard Grenville, commanding Drake’s old flagship, the Revenge, of seven hundred tons. This Grenville, says Linschoten, was a wealthy man, a little eccentric also, for dining once with some Spanish officers he must needs play the trick of crunching wine-glasses, and making believe to swallow the glass while blood ran from his lips. He was “very unquiet in his mind, and greatly affected to war,” dreaded by the Spaniards, detested by his men. On sighting the Spanish squadron of escort, Howard put to sea but Grenville had a hundred sick men to bring on board the Revenge; his hale men were skylarking ashore. He stayed behind, when he attempted to rejoin the squadron the Spanish fleet of escort was in his way.

On board the Revenge the master gave orders to alter course for flight until Grenville threatened to hang him. It was Grenville’s sole fault that he was presently beset by eight ships, each of them double the size of the Revenge. So one small cruiser for the rest of the day and all night fought a whole fleet, engaging from first to last thirteen ships of the line. She sank two ships and well-nigh wrecked five more, the Spaniards losing four hundred men in a fight with seventy. Only when their admiral lay shot through the head, and their last gun was silenced, their last boarding pike broken, the sixty wounded men who were left alive, made terms with the Spaniards and laid down their arms.

Grenville was carried on board the Flagship, where the officers of the Spanish fleet assembled to do him honor, and in their own language he spoke that night his last words: “Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, queen, religion and honor; whereby my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body; and shall leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.”

Sir Richard Grenville

With that he died, and his body was committed to the sea. As to those who survived of his ship’s company, the Spaniards treated them with honor; sending them as free men home to England. But they believed that the body of Grenville being in the sea raised that appalling cyclone that presently destroyed the treasure fleet and its escort, in all one hundred seven ships, including the Revenge.

So perished the fourth armada, making within five years a total loss of four hundred eighty-nine capital ships, in all the greatest sea calamity that ever befell a nation. Hear then the comment of Linschoten the Dutchman. The Spaniards thought that “Fortune, or rather God, was wholly against them. Which is a sufficient cause to make the Spaniards out of heart; and on the contrary to give the Englishmen more courage, and to make them bolder. For they are victorious, stout and valiant; and all their enterprises do take so good an effect that they are, hereby, become the lords and masters of the sea.”

* * * * *

The Portuguese were by no means the first seamen to round the Cape of Good Hope. About six hundred years B. C. the Pharaoh of Egypt, Niko, sent a Phœnician squadron from the Red Sea, to find their way round Africa and through Gibraltar Strait, back to the Nile. “When autumn came they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited till the grain was fit to eat. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not until the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On their return, they declared—for my part, do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing round Lybia (Africa), they had the sun on their right hand” (i. e. in the northern sky). Herodotus.

XXXIII
A. D. 1583 SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT

“He is not worthy to live at all, that for any fear of danger of death, shunneth his countrey’s service and his own honor.”

This message to all men of every English nation was written by a man who once with his lone sword covered a retreat, defending a bridge against twenty horsemen, of whom he killed one, dismounted two and wounded six.

In all his wars and voyages Sir Humphrey Gilbert won the respect of his enemies, and even of his friends, while in his writings one finds the first idea of British colonies overseas. At the end of his life’s endeavor he commanded a squadron that set out to found a first British colony in Virginia, and on the way he called at the port of Saint Johns in Newfoundland. Six years after the first voyage of Columbus, John Cabot had rediscovered the American mainland, naming and claiming this New-found Land, and its port for Henry VII of England. Since then for nearly a hundred years the fishermen of Europe had come to this coast for cod, but the Englishmen claimed and held the ports where the fish were smoked. Now in 1583 Gilbert met the fishermen, English and strangers alike, who delivered to him a stick of the timber and a turf of the soil in token of his possession of the land, while he hoisted the flag of England over her first colony, by this act founding the British empire.

When Gilbert left Saint Johns, he had a secret that made him beam with joy and hint at mysterious wealth. Perhaps his mining expert had found pyrites and reported the stuff as gold, or glittering crystals that looked like precious stones. Maybe it was the parcel of specimens for which he sent his page boy on board the Delight, who, failing to bring them, got a terrific thrashing.

When the Delight, his flagship, was cast away on Sable Island, with a hundred men drowned and the sixteen survivors missing, Gilbert mourned, it was thought, more for his secret than for ship or people. From that time the wretchedness of his men aboard the ten-ton frigate, the Squirrel, weighed upon him. They were in rags, hungry and frightened, so to cheer them up he left his great ship and joined them. The Virginia voyage was abandoned, they squared away for England, horrified by a walrus passing between the ships, which the mariners took for a demon jeering at their misfortunes.

They crossed the Atlantic in foul weather, with great seas running, so that the people implored their admiral no longer to risk his life in the half-swamped Squirrel.

“I will not forsake my little company,” was all his answer. The seas became terrific and the weird corposants, Saint Elmo’s electric fires “flamed amazement,” from masts and spars, sure harbinger of still more dreadful weather.

A green sea filled the Squirrel and she was near sinking, but as she shook the water off, Sir Humphrey Gilbert waved his hand to the Golden Hind. “Fear not, my masters!” he shouted, “we are as near to Heaven by sea as by land.”

As the night fell, he was still seen sitting abaft with a book in his hand.

Then at midnight all of a sudden the frigate’s lights were out, “for in that moment she was devoured, and swallowed up by the sea,” and the soul of Humphrey Gilbert passed out of the great unrest.

XXXIV
A. D. 1603 SIR WALTER RALEIGH

To its nether depths of shame and topmost heights of glory, the sixteenth century is summed up in Sir Walter Raleigh. He was Gilbert’s young half-brother, thirteen years his junior, and a kinsman of Drake, Hawkins and Grenville, all men of Devon.

He played the dashing young gallant, butchering Irish prisoners of war; he played the leader in the second sack of Cadiz; he played the knight errant in the Azores, when all alone he stormed the breached walls of a fort; he played the hero of romance in a wild quest up the Orinoco for the dream king El Dorado, and the mythical golden city of Manoa. Always he played to the gallery, and when he must dress the part of Queen Elizabeth’s adoring lover, he let it be known that his jeweled shoes had cost six thousand pieces of gold. He wrote some of the noblest prose in our language besides most exquisite verse, invented distilling of fresh water from the sea, and paid for the expeditions which founded Virginia.

Sir Walter Raleigh

So many and varied parts this mighty actor played supremely well, holding the center of the stage as long as there was an audience to hiss, or to applaud him. Only in private he shirked heights of manliness that he saw but dared not climb and was by turns a sneak, a toady, a whining hypocrite whose public life is one of England’s greatest memories, and his death of almost superhuman grandeur.

When James the Cur sat on the throne of great Elizabeth, his courtiers had Raleigh tried and condemned to death. The charge was treason in taking Spanish bribes, not a likely act of Spain’s great enemy, one of the few items omitted from Sir Walter’s menu of little peccadillos. James as lick-spittle and flunkey-in-chief to the king of Spain, kept Raleigh for fifteen years awaiting execution in the tower of London. Then Raleigh appealed to the avarice of the court, talked of Manoa and King El Dorado, offered to fetch gold from the Orinoco, and got leave, a prisoner on parole, to sail once more for the Indies.

They say that the myth of El Dorado is based on the curious mirage of a city which in some kinds of weather may still be seen across Lake Maracaibo. Raleigh and his people found nothing but mosquitoes, fever and hostile Spaniards; the voyage was a failure, and he came home, true to his honor, to have his head chopped off.

“I have,” he said on the scaffold, “a long journey to take, and must bid the company farewell.”

The headsman knelt to receive his pardon. Testing with his finger the edge of the ax, Raleigh lifted and kissed the blade. “It is a sharp and fair medicine,” he said smiling, “to cure me of all my diseases.”

Then the executioner lost his nerve altogether, “What dost thou fear?” asked Raleigh. “Strike, man, strike!”

“Oh eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou hast cast out of the world and despised:

“Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet.”

James I

XXXV
A. D. 1608 CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

The sentence just quoted, the most beautiful perhaps in English prose, is copied from the History of the World, which Raleigh wrote when a prisoner in the tower, while wee James sat on the throne. It was then that a gentleman and adventurer, Captain John Smith, came home from foreign parts.

At the age of seventeen Mr. Smith was a trooper serving with the Dutch in their war with Spain. As a mariner and gunner he fought in a little Breton ship which captured one of the great galleons of Venice. As an engineer, his inventions of “flying dragons” saved a Hungarian town besieged by the Turks, then captured from the infidel the impregnable city of Stuhlweissenburg. So he became a captain, serving Prince Sigismund at the siege of Reigall. Here the attack was difficult and the assault so long delayed “that the Turks complained they were getting quite fat for want of exercise.” So the Lord Turbishaw, their commander, sent word that the ladies of Reigall longed to see some courtly feat of arms, and asked if any Christian officer would fight him for his head, in single combat. The lot fell to Captain Smith.

In presence of the ladies and both armies, Lord Turbishaw entered the lists on a prancing Arab, in shining armor, and from his shoulders rose great wings of eagle feathers spangled with gold and gems. Perhaps these fine ornaments marred the Turk’s steering, for at the first onset Smith’s lance entered the eye-slit of his visor, piercing between the eyes and through the skull. Smith took the head to his general and kept the charger.

Next morning a challenge came to Smith from the dead man’s greatest friend, by name Grualgo. This time the weapons were lances, and these being shattered, pistols, the fighting being prolonged, and both men wounded, but Smith took Grualgo’s head, his horse and armor.

As soon as his wound was healed, at the request of his officer commanding, Smith sent a letter to the ladies of Reigall, saying he did not wish to keep the heads of their two servants. Would they please send another champion to take the heads and his own? They sent an officer of high rank named Bonni Mulgro. This third fight began with pistols, followed by a prolonged and well-matched duel with battle-axes. Each man in turn reeled senseless in the saddle, but the fight was renewed without gain to either, until the Englishman, letting his weapon slip, made a dive to catch it, and was dragged from his horse by the Turk. Then Smith’s horse, grabbed by the bridle, reared, compelling the Turk to let go, and giving the Christian time to regain his saddle. As Mulgro charged, Smith’s falchion caught him between the plates of his armor, and with a howl of anguish the third champion fell. So it was that Smith won for his coat of arms the three Turks’ heads erased.

After the taking and massacre of Reigall, Smith with his nine English comrades, and his fine squadron of cavalry, joined an army, which was presently caught in the pass of Rothenthurm between a Turkish force and a big Tartar horde. By Smith’s advice, the Christian cavalry got branches of trees soaked in pitch and ablaze, with which they made a night charge, stampeding the Turkish army. Next day the eleven thousand Christians were enclosed by the Tartars, the pass was heaped with thirty thousand dead and wounded men, and with the remnant only two Englishmen escaped. The pillagers found Smith wounded but still alive, and by his jeweled armor, supposed him to be some very wealthy noble, worth holding for ransom. So he was sold into slavery, and sent as a gift by a Turkish chief to his lady in Constantinople. This lady fell in love with her slave, and sent him to her brother, a pasha in the lands north of the Caucasus, begging for kindness to the prisoner until he should be converted to the Moslem faith. But the pasha, furious at his sister’s kindness to a dog of a Christian, had him stripped, flogged, and with a spiked collar of iron riveted on his neck, made servant to wait upon four hundred slaves.

One day the pasha found Smith threshing corn, in a barn some three miles distant from his castle. For some time he amused himself flogging this starved and naked wretch who had once been the champion of a Christian army; but Smith presently caught him a clip behind the ear with his threshing bat, beat his brains out, put on his clothes, mounted his Arab horse, and fled across the steppes into Christian Russia. Through Russia and Poland he made his way to the court of Prince Sigismund, who gave him a purse of fifteen thousand ducats. As a rich man he traveled in Germany, Spain and Morocco, and there made friends with Captain Merstham, whose ship lay at Saffee. He was dining on board one day when a gale drove the ship to sea, and there fell in with two Spanish battle-ships. From noon to dusk they fought, and in the morning Captain Merstham said, “The dons mean to chase us again to-day. They shall have some good sport for their pains.”

“Oh, thou old fox!” cried Smith, slapping him on the shoulders. So after prayers and breakfast the battle began again, Smith in command of the guns, and Merstham pledging the Spaniards in a silver cup of wine, then giving a dram to the men. Once the enemy managed to board the little merchantman, but Merstham and Smith touched off a few bags of powder, blowing away the forecastle with thirty or forty Spaniards. That set the ship on fire, but the English put out the flames and still refused to parley. So afternoon wore into evening and evening into night, when the riddled battle-ships sheered off at last, their scuppers running with blood.

When Captain Smith reached England he was twenty-five years old, of singular strength and beauty, a learned and most rarely accomplished soldier, a man of saintly life with a boy’s heart. I doubt if in the long annals of our people, there is one hero who left so sweet a memory.

Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement in Virginia had been wiped out by the red Indians, so the second expedition to that country had an adventurous flavor that appealed to Captain Smith. He gave all that he had to the venture, but being somewhat masterful, was put in irons during the voyage to America, and landed in deep disgrace, when every man was needed to work in the founding of the colony. Had all the officers of the expedition been drowned, and most of the members left behind, the enterprise would have had some chance of success, for it was mainly an expedition of wasters led by idiots. The few real workers followed Captain Smith in the digging and the building, the hunting and trading; while the idlers gave advice, and the leaders obstructed the proceedings. The summer was one of varied interest, attacks by the Indians, pestilence, famine and squabbles, so that the colony would have come to a miserable end but that Captain Smith contrived to make friends with the tribes, and induced them to sell him a supply of maize. He was up-country in December when the savages managed to scalp his followers and to take him prisoner. When they tried to kill him he seemed only amused, whereas they were terrified by feats of magic that made him seem a god. He was taken to the king—Powhatan—who received the prisoner in state, gave him a dinner, then ordered his head to be laid on a block and his brains dashed out. But before the first club crashed down a little Indian maid ran forward, pushed the executioners aside, taking his head in her arms, and holding on so tightly that she could not be pulled away. So Pocahontas, the king’s daughter, pleaded for the Englishman and saved him.

King Powhatan, with an eye to business, would now give the prisoner his liberty, provided that he might send two messengers with Smith for a brace of the demi-culverins with which the white men had defended the bastions of their fort. So the captain returned in triumph to his own people, and gladly presented the demi-culverins. At this the king’s messengers were embarrassed, because the pair of guns weighed four and a half tons. Moreover, when the weapons were fired to show their good condition, the Indians were quite cured of any wish for culverins, and departed with glass toys for the king and his family. In return came Pocahontas with her attendants laden with provisions for the starving garrison.

The English leaders were so grateful for succor that they charged Captain Smith with the first thing that entered their heads, condemned him on general principles, and would have hanged him, but that he asked what they would do for food when he was gone, then cheered the whole community by putting the prominent men in irons and taking sole command. Every five days came the Indian princess and her followers with a load of provisions for Captain Smith. The people called her the Blessed Pocahontas, for she saved them all from dying of starvation.

During the five weeks of his captivity, Smith had told the Indians fairy tales about Captain Newport, whose ship was expected soon with supplies for the colony. Newport was the great Merowames, king of the sea.

Captain John Smith

When Newport arrived he was fearfully pleased at being the great Merowames, but shared the disgust of the officials at Captain Smith’s importance. When he went to trade with the tribes he traveled in state, with Smith for interpreter, and began by presenting to Powhatan a red suit, a hat, and a white dog—gifts from the king of England. Then to show his own importance he heaped up all his trading goods, and offered them for such maize as Powhatan cared to sell, expecting tons and getting exactly four bushels. Smith, seeing that the colony would starve, produced some bright blue beads, “very precious jewels,” he told Powhatan, “composed of a most rare substance, and of the color of the skies, of a sort, indeed, only to be worn by the greatest kings of the world.”

After hard bargaining Powhatan managed to get a very few beads for a hundred bushels of grain.

The Virginia Company sent out more idlers from England, and some industrious Dutchmen who stole most of their weapons from the English to arm the Indian tribes; James I had Powhatan treated as a brother sovereign, and crowned with all solemnity, so that he got a swollen head and tried to starve the settlement. The colonists swaggered, squabbled and loafed, instead of storing granaries; but all parties were united in one ambition—planning unpleasant surprises for Captain Smith.

Once his trading party was trapped for slaughter in a house at Powhatan’s camp, but Pocahontas, at the risk of her life, warned her hero, so that all escaped. Another tribe caught Smith in a house where he had called to buy grain of their chief. Smith led the chief outside, with a pistol at his ear-hole, paraded his fifteen musketeers, and frightened seven hundred warriors into laying down their arms. And then he made them load his ship with corn. This food he served out in daily rations to working colonists only. After the next Indian attempt on his life, Smith laid the whole country waste until the tribes were reduced to submission. So his loafers reported him to the company for being cruel to the Indians, and seven shiploads of officials and wasters were sent out from England to suppress the captain.

This was in September of the third year of the colony, and Smith, as it happened, was returning to Jamestown from work up-country. He lay asleep in the boat against a bag of powder, on which one of the sailors was pleased to knock out the ashes of his pipe. The explosion failed to kill, but almost mortally wounded Captain Smith, who was obliged to return to England in search of a doctor’s aid. After his departure, the colony fell into its customary ways, helpless for lack of leadership, butchered by the Indians, starved, until, when relief ships arrived, there were only sixty survivors living on the bodies of the dead. The relieving ships brought Lord Delaware to command, and with him, the beginnings of prosperity.

When the great captain was recovered, his next expedition explored the coast farther north, which he named New England. His third voyage was to have planted a colony, but for Smith’s capture, charged with piracy, by a French squadron. His escape in a dingey seems almost miraculous, for it was on that night that the flagship which had been his prison foundered in a storm, and the squadron was cast away on the coast of France.

Meanwhile, the Princess Pocahontas, had been treacherously captured as a hostage by the Virginian colonists, which led to a sweet love story, and her marriage with Master John Rolfe. With him she presently came on a visit to England, and everywhere the Lady Rebecca Rolfe was received with royal honors as a king’s daughter, winning all hearts by her beauty, her gentleness and dignity. In England she again met Captain Smith, whom she had ever reverenced as a god. But then the bitter English winter struck her down, and she died before a ship could take her home, being buried in the churchyard in Gravesend.

The captain never again was able to adventure his life overseas, but for sixteen years, broken with his wounds and disappointment, wrote books commending America to his countrymen. To the New England which he explored and named, went the Pilgrim Fathers, inspired by his works to sail with the Mayflower, that they might found the colony which he projected. Virginia and New England were called his children, those English colonies which since have grown into the giant republic. So the old captain finished such a task as “God, after His manner, assigns to His Englishmen.”

XXXVI
A. D. 1670 THE BUCCANEERS

It is only a couple of centuries since Spain was the greatest nation on earth, with the Atlantic for her duck pond, the American continents for her back yard, and a notice up to warn away the English, “No dogs admitted.”

England was a little power then, Charles II had to come running when the French king whistled, and we were so weak that the Dutch burned our fleet in London River. Every year a Spanish fleet came from the West Indies to Cadiz, laden deep with gold, silver, gems, spices and all sorts of precious merchandise.

Much as our sailors hated to see all that treasure wasted on Spaniards, England had to keep the peace with Spain, because Charles II had his crown jewels in pawn and no money for such luxuries as war. The Spanish envoy would come to him making doleful lamentations about our naughty sailors, who, in the far Indies, had insolently stolen a galleon or sacked a town. Charles, with his mouth watering at such a tale of loot, would be inexpressibly shocked. The “lewd French” must have done this, or the “pernicious Dutch,” but not our woolly lambs—our innocent mariners.

The buccaneers of the West Indies were of many nations besides the British, and they were not quite pirates. For instance, they would scorn to seize a good Protestant shipload of salt fish, but always attacked the papist who flaunted golden galleons before the nose of the poor. They were serious-minded Protestants with strong views on doctrine, and only made their pious excursions to seize the goods of the unrighteous. Their opinions were so sound on all really important points of dogmatic theology that they could allow themselves a little indulgence in mere rape, sacrilege, arson, robbery and murder, or fry Spaniards in olive oil for concealing the cash box. Then, enriched by such pious exercises, they devoutly spent the whole of their savings on staying drunk for a month.

The first buccaneers sallied out in a small boat and captured a war-ship. From such small beginnings arose a pirate fleet, which, under various leaders, French, Dutch, Portuguese, became a scourge to the Spanish empire overseas. When they had wiped out Spain’s merchant shipping and were short of plunder, they attacked fortified cities, held them to ransom, and burned them for fun, then in chase of the fugitive citizens, put whole colonies to an end by sword and fire.

Naturally only the choicest scoundrels rose to captaincies, and the worst of the lot became admiral. It should thrill the souls of all Welshmen to learn that Henry Morgan gained that bad eminence. He had risen to the command of five hundred cutthroats when he pounced down on Maracaibo Bay in Venezuela. At the entrance stood Fort San Carlos, the place which has lately resisted the attack of a German squadron. Morgan was made of sterner stuff than these Germans, for when the garrison saw him coming, they took to the woods, leaving behind them a lighted fuse at the door of the magazine. Captain Morgan grabbed that fuse himself in time to save his men from a disagreeable hereafter.

Beyond its narrow entrance at Fort San Carlos, the inlet widens to an inland sea, surrounded in those days by Spanish settlements, with the two cities of Gibraltar and Maracaibo. Morgan sacked these towns and chased their flying inhabitants into the mountains. His prisoners, even women and children, were tortured on the rack until they revealed all that they knew of hidden money, and some were burned by inches, starved to death, or crucified.

These pleasures had been continued for five weeks, when a squadron of three heavy war-ships arrived from Spain, and blocked the pirates’ only line of retreat to the sea at Fort San Carlos. Morgan prepared a fire ship, with which he grappled and burned the Spanish admiral. The second ship was wrecked, the third captured by the pirates, and the sailors of the whole squadron were butchered while they drowned. Still Fort San Carlos, now bristling with new guns, had to be dealt with before the pirates could make their escape to the sea. Morgan pretended to attack from the land, so that all the guns were shifted to that side of the fort ready to wipe out his forces. This being done, he got his men on board, and sailed through the channel in perfect safety.

Sir Henry Morgan

And yet attacks upon such places as Maracaibo were mere trifling, for the Spaniards held all the wealth of their golden Indies at Panama. This gorgeous city was on the Pacific Ocean, and to reach it, one must cross the Isthmus of Darien by the route in later times of the Panama railway and the Panama Canal, through the most unwholesome swamps, where to sleep at night in the open was almost sure death from fever. Moreover, the landing place at Chagres was covered by a strong fortress, the route was swarming with Spanish troops and wild savages in their pay, and their destination was a walled city esteemed impregnable.

By way of preparing for his raid, Morgan sent four hundred men who stormed the castle of Chagres, compelling the wretched garrison to jump off a cliff to destruction. The English flag shone from the citadel when Morgan’s fleet arrived. The captain landed one thousand two hundred men and set off up the Chagres River with five boats loaded with artillery, thirty-two canoes and no food. This was a mistake, because the Spaniards had cleared the whole isthmus, driving off the cattle, rooting out the crops, carting away the grain, burning every roof, and leaving nothing for the pirates to live on except the microbes of fever. As the pirates advanced they retreated, luring them on day by day into the heart of the wilderness. The pirates broiled and ate their sea boots, their bandoleers, and certain leather bags. The river being foul with fallen timber, they took to marching. On the sixth day they found a barn full of maize and ate it up, but only on the ninth day had they a decent meal, when, sweating, gasping and swearing, they pounced upon a herd of asses and cows, and fell to roasting flesh on the points of their swords.

On the tenth day they debouched upon a plain before the City of Panama, where the governor awaited with his troops. There were two squadrons of cavalry and four regiments of foot, besides guns, and the pirates heartily wished themselves at home with their mothers. Happily the Spanish governor was too sly, for he had prepared a herd of wild bulls with Indian herders to drive into the pirate ranks, which bulls, in sheer stupidity, rushed his own battalions. Such bulls as tried to fly through the pirate lines were readily shot down, but the rest brought dire confusion. Then began a fierce battle, in which the Spaniards lost six hundred men before they bolted. Afterward through a fearful storm of fire from great artillery, the pirates stormed the city and took possession.

Of course, by this time, the rich galleons had made away to sea with their treasure, and the citizens had carried off everything worth moving, to the woods. Moreover, the pirates were hasty in burning the town, so that the treasures which had been buried in wells or cellars were lost beyond all finding. During four weeks, this splendid capital of the Indies burned, while the people hid in the woods; and the pirates tortured everybody they could lay hands on with fiendish cruelty. Morgan himself, caught a beautiful lady and threw her into a cellar full of filth because she would not love him. Even in their retreat to the Atlantic, the pirates carried off six hundred prisoners, who rent the air with their lamentations, and were not even fed until their ransoms arrived.

Before reaching Chagres, Morgan had every pirate stripped to make sure that all loot was fairly divided. The common pirates were bitterly offended at the dividend of only two hundred pieces of eight per man, but Morgan stole the bulk of the plunder for himself, and returned a millionaire to Jamaica.

Charles II knighted him and made him governor of Jamaica as a reward for robbing the Spaniards. Afterwards his majesty changed his mind, and Morgan died a prisoner in the tower of London as a punishment for the very crime which had been rewarded with a title and a vice-royalty.

XXXVII
A. D. 1682 THE VOYAGEURS

This chapter must begin with a very queer tale of rivers as adventurers exploring for new channels.

Millions of years ago the inland seas—Superior, Michigan and Huron—had their overflow down the Ottawa Valley, reaching the Saint Lawrence at the Island of Montreal.

But, when the glaciers of the great ice age blocked the Ottawa Valley, the three seas had to find another outlet, so they made a channel through the Chicago River, down the Des Plaines, and the Illinois, into the Mississippi.

And when the glaciers made, across that channel, an embankment which is now the town site of Chicago, the three seas had to explore for a new outlet. So they filled the basin of Lake Erie, and poured over the edge of Queenstown Heights into Lake Ontario. The Iroquois called that fall the “Thunder of Waters,” which in their language is Niagara.

All the vast region which was flooded by the ice-field of the great ice age became a forest, and every river turned by the ice out of its ancient channel became a string of lakes and waterfalls. This beautiful wilderness was the scene of tremendous adventures, where the red Indians fought the white men, and the English fought the French, and the Americans fought the Canadians, until the continent was cut into equal halves, and there was peace.

Now let us see what manner of men were the Indians. At the summit of that age of glory—the sixteenth century—the world was ruled by the despot Akbar the Magnificent at Delhi, the despot Ivan the Terrible at Moscow, the despot Phillip II at Madrid, and a little lady despot, Elizabeth of the sea.

Yet at that time the people in the Saint Lawrence Valley, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, Cayugas and, in the middle, the Onondagas, were free republics with female suffrage and women as members of parliament. Moreover the president of the Onondagas, Hiawatha, formed these five nations into the federal republic of the Iroquois, and they admitted the Tuscaroras into that United States which was created to put an end to war. In the art of government we have not yet caught up with the Iroquois.

They were farmers, with rich fisheries, had comfortable houses, and fortified towns. In color they were like outdoor Spaniards, a tall, very handsome race, and every bit as able as the whites. Given horses, hard metals for their tools, and some channel or mountain range to keep off savage raiders, and they might well have become more civilized than the French, with fleets to attack old Europe, and missionaries to teach us their religion.

Their first visitor from Europe was Jacques Cartier and they gave him a hearty welcome at Quebec. When his men were dying of scurvy an Indian doctor cured them. But to show his gratitude Cartier kidnaped the five principal chiefs, and ever after that, with very brief intervals, the French had reason to fear the Iroquois. Like many another Indian nation, driven away from its farms and fisheries, the six nation republic lapsed to savagery, lived by hunting and robbery, ravaged the white men’s settlements and the neighbor tribes for food, outraged and scalped the dead, burned or even ate their prisoners.

The French colonies were rather over-governed. There was too much parson and a great deal too much squire to suit the average peasant, so all the best of the men took to the fur trade. They wore the Indian dress of long fringed deerskin, coon cap, embroidered moccasins, and a French sash like a rainbow. They lived like Indians, married among the tribes, fought in their wars; lawless, gay, gallant, fierce adventurers, the voyageurs of the rivers, the runners of the woods.

With them went monks into the wilderness, heroic, saintly Jesuits and Franciscans, and some of the quaintest rogues in holy orders. And there were gentlemen, reckless explorers, seeking a way to China. Of this breed came La Salle, whose folk were merchant-princes at Rouen, and himself pupil and enemy of the Jesuits. At the time of the plague and burning of London he founded a little settlement on the island of Mount Royal, just by the head of the Rapids. His dream was the opening of trade with China by way of the western rivers, so the colonists, chaffing him, gave the name La Chine to his settlement and the rapids. To-day the railway trains come swirling by, with loads of tea from China to ship from Montreal, but not to France.

During La Salle’s first five years in the wilderness he discovered the Ohio and the Illinois, two of the head waters of the Mississippi. The Indians told him of that big river, supposed to be the way to the Pacific. A year later the trader Joliet, and the Jesuit Saint Marquette descended the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas. So La Salle dreamed of a French empire in the west, shutting the English between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, with a base at the mouth of the Mississippi for raiding the Spanish Indies, and a trade route across the western sea to China. All this he told to Count Frontenac, the new governor general, a man of business who saw the worth of the adventure. Frontenac sent La Salle to talk peace with the Iroquois, while he himself founded Fort Frontenac at the outlet of Lake Ontario. From here he cut the trade routes of the west, so that no furs would ever reach the French traders of Montreal or the English of New York. The governor had not come to Canada for his health.

La Salle was penniless, but his mind went far beyond this petty trading; he charmed away the dangers from hostile tribes; his heroic record won him help from France. Within a year he began his adventure of the Mississippi by buying out Fort Frontenac as his base camp. Here he built a ship, and though she was wrecked he saved stores enough to cross the Niagara heights, and build a second vessel on Lake Erie. With the Griffin he came to the meeting place of the three upper seas—Machilli-Mackinac—the Jesuit headquarters. Being a good-natured man bearing no malice, it was with a certain pomp of drums, flags and guns that he saluted the fort, quite forgetting that he came as a trespasser into the Jesuit mission. A Jesuit in those days was a person with a halo at one end and a tail at the other, a saint with modest black draperies to hide cloven hoofs, who would fast all the week, and poison a guest on Saturday, who sought the glory of martyrdom not always for the faith, but sometimes to serve a devilish wicked political secret society. Leaving the Jesuit mission an enemy in his rear, La Salle built a fort at the southern end of Lake Michigan, sent off his ship for supplies, and entered the unknown wilderness. As winter closed down he came with thirty-three men in eight birchbark canoes to the Illinois nation on the river Illinois.

Meanwhile the Jesuits sent Indian messengers to raise the Illinois tribes for war against La Salle, to kill him by poison, and to persuade his men to desert. La Salle put a rising of the Illinois to shame, ate three dishes of poison without impairing his very sound digestion, and made his men too busy for revolt; building Fort Brokenheart, and a third ship for the voyage down the Mississippi to the Spanish Indies.

Then came the second storm of trouble, news that his relief ship from France was cast away, his fort at Frontenac was seized for debt, and his supply vessel on the upper lakes was lost. He must go to Canada.

The third storm was still to come, the revenge of the English for the cutting of their fur trade at Fort Frontenac. They armed five hundred Iroquois to massacre the Illinois who had befriended him in the wilderness.

Robert Cavalier de la Salle

At Fort Brokenheart La Salle had a valiant priest named Hennepin, a disloyal rogue and a quite notable liar. With two voyageurs Pere Hennepin was sent to explore the river down to the Mississippi, and there the three Frenchmen were captured by the Sioux. Their captors took them by canoe up the Mississippi to the Falls of Saint Anthony, so named by Hennepin. Thence they were driven afoot to the winter villages of the tribe. The poor unholy father being slow afoot, they mended his pace by setting the prairie afire behind him. Likewise they anointed him with wildcat fat to give him the agility of that animal. Still he was never popular, and in the end the three wanderers were turned loose. Many were their vagabond adventures before they met the explorer Greysolon Du Luth, who took them back with him to Canada. They left La Salle to his fate.

Meanwhile La Salle set out from Fort Brokenheart in March, attended by a Mohegan hunter who loved him, and by four gallant Frenchmen. Their journey was a miracle of courage across the unexplored woods to Lake Erie, and on to Frontenac. There La Salle heard that the moment his back was turned his garrison had looted and burned Fort Brokenheart; but he caught these deserters as they attempted to pass Fort Frontenac, and left them there in irons.

Every man has power to make of his mind an empire or a desert. At this time Louis the Great was master of Europe, La Salle a broken adventurer, but it was the king’s mind which was a desert, compared with the imperial brain of this haughty, silent, manful pioneer. The creditors forgot that he owed them money, the governor caught fire from his enthusiasm, and La Salle went back equipped for his gigantic venture in the west.

The officer he had left in charge at Fort Brokenheart was an Italian gentleman by the name of Tonty, son of the man who invented the tontine life insurance. He was a veteran soldier whose left hand, blown off, had been replaced with an iron fist, which the Indians found to be strong medicine. One clout on the head sufficed for the fiercest warrior. When his garrison sacked the fort and bolted, he had two fighting men left, and a brace of priests. They all sought refuge in the camp of the Illinois.

Presently this pack of curs had news that La Salle was leading an army of Iroquois to their destruction, so instead of preparing for defense they proposed to murder Tonty and his Frenchmen, until the magic of his iron fist quite altered their point of view. Sure enough the Iroquois arrived in force, and the cur pack, three times as strong, went out to fight. Then through the midst of the battle Tonty walked into the enemy’s lines. He ordered the Iroquois to go home and behave themselves, and told such fairy tales about the strength of his curs that these ferocious warriors were frightened. Back walked Tonty to find his cur pack on their knees in tears of gratitude. Again he went to the Iroquois, this time with stiff terms if they wanted peace, but an Illinois envoy gave his game away, with such extravagant bribes and pleas for mercy that the Iroquois laughed at Tonty. They burned the Illinois town, dug up their graveyard, chased the flying nation, butchered the abandoned women and children, and hunted the cur pack across the Mississippi. Tonty and his Frenchmen made their way to their nearest friends, the Pottawattomies, to await La Salle’s return.

And La Salle returned. He found the Illinois town in ashes, littered with human bones. He found an island of the river where women and children by hundreds had been outraged, tortured and burned. His fort was a weed-grown ruin. In all the length of the valley there was no vestige of human life, or any clue as to the fate of Tonty and his men. For the third time La Salle made that immense journey to the settlements, wrung blood from stones to equip an expedition, and coming to Lake Michigan rallied the whole of the native tribes in one strong league, a red Indian colony with himself as chief, for defense from the Iroquois. The scattered Illinois returned to their abandoned homes, tribes came from far and wide to join the colony and in the midst, upon Starved Rock, La Salle built Fort Saint Louis as their stronghold. When Tonty joined him, for once this iron man showed he had a heart.

So, after all, La Salle led an expedition down the whole length of the Mississippi. He won the friendship of every tribe he met, bound them to French allegiance, and at the end erected the standard of France on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. “In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre,” on the nineteenth of April, 1682. La Salle annexed the valley of the Mississippi from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, from the lakes to the gulf, and named that empire Louisiana.

As to the fate of this great explorer, murdered in the wilderness by followers he disdained to treat as comrades, “his enemies were more in earnest than his friends.”

XXXVIII
A. D. 1741 THE EXPLORERS

From the time of Henry VII of England down to the present day, the nations of Europe have been busy with one enormous adventure, the search for the best trade route to India and the China seas. For four whole centuries this quest for a trade route has been the main current of the history of the world. Look what the nations have done in that long fight for trade.

Portugal found the sea route by Magellan’s Strait, and occupied Brazil; the Cape route, and colonized the coasts of Africa. She built an empire.

Spain mistook the West Indies for the real Indies, and the red men for the real Indians, found the Panama route, and occupied the new world from Cape Horn up to the southern edge of Alaska. She built an empire.

France, in the search of a route across North America, occupied Canada and the Mississippi Valley. She built an empire. That lost, she attempted under Napoleon to occupy Egypt, Palestine and the whole overland road to India. That failing, she has dug the Suez Canal and attempted the Panama, both sea routes to the Indies.

Holland, searching for a route across North America, found Hudson’s Bay and occupied Hudson River (New York). On the South Sea route she built her rich empire in the East Indian Islands.

Britain, searching eastward first, opened up Russia to civilization, then explored the sea passage north of Asia. Searching westward, she settled Newfoundland, founded the United States, built Canada, which created the Canadian Pacific route to the Indies, and traversed the sea passage north of America. On the Panama route, she built a West Indian empire; on the Mediterranean route, her fortress line of Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, Adon. By holding all routes, she holds her Indian empire. Is not this the history of the world?

But there remains to be told the story of Russia’s search for routes to India and China. That story begins with Martha Rabe, the Swedish nursery governess, who married a dragoon, left him to be mistress of a Russian general, became servant to the Princess Menchikoff, next the lover, then the wife of Peter the Great, and finally succeeded him as empress of all the Russias. To the dazzling court of this Empress Catherine came learned men and travelers who talked about the search of all the nations for a route through North America to the Indies. Long ago, they said, an old Greek mariner, one Juan de Fuca, had bragged on the quays of Venice, of his voyages. He claimed to have rounded Cape Horn, and thence beat up the west coast of America, until he came far north to a strait which entered the land. Through this sea channel he had sailed for many weeks, until it brought him out again into the ocean. One glance at the map will show these straits of Juan de Fuca, and how the old Greek, sailing for many weeks, came out again into the ocean, having rounded the back of Vancouver’s Island. But the legend as told to Catherine the Great of Russia, made these mysterious straits of Anian lead from the Pacific right across North America to the Atlantic Ocean. Here was a sea route from Russia across the Atlantic, across North America, across the Pacific, direct to the gorgeous Indies. With such a possession as this channel Russia could dominate the world.

Catherine set her soothsayers and wiseacres to make a chart, displaying these straits of Anian which Juan de Fuca had found, and they marked the place accordingly at forty-eight degrees of north latitude on the west coast of America. But there were also rumors and legends in those days of a great land beyond the uttermost coasts of Siberia, an island that was called Aliaska, filling the North Pacific. All such legends and rumors the astrologers marked faithfully upon their map until the thing was of no more use than a dose of smallpox. Then Catherine gave the precious chart to two of her naval officers, Vitus Bering, the Dane—a mighty man in the late wars with Sweden and a Russian lieutenant—Tschirikoff—and bade them go find the straits of Anian.

The expedition set out overland across the Russian and Siberian plains, attended by hunters who kept the people alive on fish and game until they reached the coasts of the North Pacific. There they built two ships, the Stv Petr and the Stv Pavl, and launched them, two years from the time of their outsetting from Saint Petersburg. Thirteen years they spent in exploring the Siberian coast, northward to the Arctic, southward to the borders of China, then in 1741 set out into the unknown to search for the Island of Aliaska, and the Straits of Anian so plainly marked upon their chart.

Long months they cruised about in quest of that island, finding nothing, while the crews sickened of scurvy, and man after man died in misery, until only a few were left.

The world had not been laid out correctly, but Bering held with fervor to his faith in that official chart for which his men were dying. At last Tschirikoff, unable to bear it any longer, deserted Bering, and sailing eastward many days, came at last to land at the mouth of Cross Straits in Southern Alaska.

Beyond a rocky foreshore and white surf, forests of pine went up to mountains lost in trailing clouds. Behind a little point rose a film of smoke from some savage camp-fire. Tschirikoff landed a boat’s crew in search of provisions and water, which vanished behind the point and was seen no more. Heart-sick, he sent a second boat, which vanished behind the point and was seen no more, but the fire of the savages blazed high. Two days he waited, watching that pillar of smoke, and listened to a far-off muttering of drums, then with the despairing remnant of his crew, turned back to the lesser perils of the sea, and fled to Siberia. Farther to the northward, some three hundred miles, was Bering in the Stv Petr, driving his mutinous people in a last search for land. It was the day after Tschirikoff’s discovery, and the ship, flying winged out before the southwest wind, came to green shallows of the sea, and fogs that lay in violet gloom ahead, like some mysterious coast crowned with white cloud heights towering up the sky. At sunset, when these clouds had changed to flame color, they parted, suddenly revealing high above the mastheads the most tremendous mountain in the world. The sailors were terrified, and Bering, called suddenly to the tall after-castle of the ship, went down on his knees in awestruck wonder. By the Russian calendar, the day was that of the dread Elijah, who had been taken up from the earth drawn by winged horses of flame in a chariot of fire, and to these lost mariners it seemed that this was no mere mountain of ice walls glowing rose and azure through a rift of the purple clouds, but a vision of the translation of the prophet. Bering named the mountain Saint Elias.

There is no space here for the detail of Bering’s wanderings thereafter through those bewildering labyrinths of islands which skirt the Alps of Saint Elias westward, and reach out as the Aleutian Archipelago the whole way across the Pacific Ocean. The region is an awful sub-arctic wilderness of rock-set gaps between bleak arctic islands crowned by flaming volcanoes, lost in eternal fog. It has been my fate to see the wonders and the terrors of that coast, which Bering’s seamen mistook for the vestibule of the infernal regions. Scurvy and hunger made them more like ghosts of the condemned than living men, until their nightmare voyage ended in wreck on the last of the islands, within two hundred miles of the Siberian coast.

Stellar, the German naturalist, who survived the winter, has left record of Bering laid between two rocks for shelter, where the sand drift covered his legs and kept him warm through the last days, then made him a grave afterward. The island was frequented by sea-cows, creatures until then unknown, and since wholly extinct, Stellar’s being the only account of them. There were thousands of sea otter, another species that will soon become extinct, and the shipwrecked men had plenty of wild meat to feed on while they passed the winter building from the timbers of the wreck, a boat to carry them home. In the spring they sailed with a load of sea-otter skins and gained the Chinese coast, where their cargo fetched a fortune for all hands, the furs being valued for the official robes of mandarins.

At the news of this new trade in sea-otter skins, the hunters of Siberia went wild with excitement, so that the survivors of Bering’s crew led expeditions of their own to Alaska. By them a colony was founded, and though the Straits of Anian were never discovered, because they did not exist, the czars added to their dominions a new empire called Russian America. This Alaska was sold in 1867 to the United States for one million, five hundred thousand pounds, enough money to build such a work as London Bridge, and the territory yields more than that by far in annual profits from fisheries, timber and gold.

XXXIX
A. D. 1750 THE PIRATES

There are very few pirates left. The Riff Moors of Gibraltar Straits will grab a wind-bound ship when they get the chance; the Arabs of the Red Sea take stranded steamers; Chinese practitioners shipped as passengers on a liner, will rise in the night, cut throats, and steal the vessel; moreover some little retail business is done by the Malays round Singapore, but trade as a whole is slack, and sea thieves are apt to get themselves disliked by the British gunboats.

This is a respectable world, my masters, but it is getting dull.

It was very different in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Sallee rovers, the Algerian corsairs, buccaneers of the West Indies, the Malays and the Chinese put pirate fleets to sea to prey on great commerce, when Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Bartholomew, Roberts, Lafitte, Avery and a hundred other corsairs under the Jolly Roger could seize tall ships and make their unwilling seamen walk the plank. They and their merry men went mostly to the gallows, richly deserved the same, and yet—well, nobody need complain that times were dull.

There were so many pirates one hardly knows which to deal with, but Avery was such a mean rogue, and there is such a nice confused story—well, here goes! He was mate of the ship Duke, forty-four guns, a merchant cruiser chartered from Bristol for the Spanish service. His skipper was mightily addicted to punch, and too drunk to object when Avery, conspiring with the men, made bold to seize the ship. Then he went down-stairs to wake the captain, who, in a sudden fright, asked, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, nothing,” said Avery. The skipper gobbled at him, “But something’s the matter,” he cried. “Does she drive? What weather is it?” “No, no,” answered Avery, “we’re at sea.” “At sea! How can that be?”

“Come,” says Avery, “don’t be in a fright, but put on your clothes, and I’ll let you into the secret—and if you’ll turn sober and mind your business perhaps, in time, I may make you one of my lieutenants, if not, here’s a boat alongside, and you shall be set ashore.” The skipper, still in a fright, was set ashore, together with such of the men as were honest. Then Avery sailed away to seek his fortune.

On the coast of Madagascar, lying in a bay, two sloops were found, whose seamen supposed the Duke to be a ship of war and being rogues, having stolen these vessels to go pirating, they fled with rueful faces into the woods. Of course they were frightfully pleased when they found out that they were not going to be hanged just yet, and delighted when Captain Avery asked them to sail in his company. They could fly at big game now, with this big ship for a consort.

Now, as it happened, the Great Mogul, emperor of Hindustan, was sending his daughter with a splendid retinue to make pilgrimage to Mecca and worship at the holy places of Mahomet. The lady sailed in a ship with chests of gold to pay the expenses of the journey, golden vessels for the table, gifts for the shrines, an escort of princes covered with jewels, troops, servants, slaves and a band to play tunes with no music, after the eastern manner. And it was their serious misfortune to meet with Captain Avery outside the mouth of the Indus. Avery’s sloops, being very swift, got the prize, and stripped her of everything worth taking, before they let her go.

It shocked Avery to think of all that treasure in the sloops where it might get lost; so presently, as they sailed in consort, he invited the captains of the sloops to use the big ship as their strong room. They put their treasure on board the Duke, and watched close, for fear of accidents. Then came a dark night when Captain Avery mislaid both sloops, and bolted with all the plunder, leaving two crews of simple mariners to wonder where he had gone.

Avery made off to the New England colonies, where he made a division of the plunder, handing the gold to the men, but privily keeping all the diamonds for himself. The sailors scattered out through the American settlements and the British Isles, modestly changing their names. Mr. Avery went home to Bristol, where he found some honest merchants to sell his diamonds, and lend him a small sum on account. When, however, he called on them for the rest of the money, he met with a most shocking repulse, because the merchants had never heard, they said, of him or his diamonds, but would give him to the justices as a pirate unless he shut his mouth. He went away and died of grief at Bideford in Devon, leaving no money even to pay for his coffin.

Meanwhile the Great Mogul at Delhi was making such dismal lamentations about the robbery of his daughter’s diamonds that the news of Avery’s riches spread to England. Rumor made him husband to the princess, a reigning sovereign, with a pirate fleet of his own—at the very time he was dying of want at Bideford.

We left two sloops full of pirates mourning over the total depravity of Captain Avery. Sorely repenting his sins, they resolved to amend their lives, and see what they could steal in Madagascar. Landing on that great island they dismantled their sloops, taking their plentiful supply of guns and powder ashore, where they camped, making their sails into tents. Here they met with another party of English pirates who were also penitent, having just plundered a large and richly-laden ship at the mouth of the Red Sea. Their dividend was three thousand pounds a man, and they were resolved to settle in Madagascar instead of going home to be hanged. The two parties, both in search of a peaceful and simple life, made friends with the various native princes, who were glad of white men to assist in the butchering of adjacent tribes. Two or three pirates at the head of an attacking force would put the boldest tribes to flight. Each pirate acquired his own harem of wives, his own horde of black slaves, his own plantations, fishery and hunting grounds, his kingdom wherein he reigned an absolute monarch. If a native said impudent words he was promptly shot, and any attack of the tribes on a white man was resented by the whole community of pirate kings. Once the negroes conspired for a general rising to wipe out their oppressors at one fell swoop, but the wife of a white man getting wind of the plot, ran twenty miles in three hours to alarm her lord. When the native forces arrived they were warmly received. After that each of their lordships built a fortress for his resting place with rampart and ditch set round with a labyrinth of thorny entanglements, so that the barefoot native coming as a stranger by night, trod on spikes, and sounded a loud alarm which roused the garrison.

Long years went by. Their majesties grew stout from high feeding and lack of exercise, hairy, dressed in skins of wild beasts, reigning each in his kingdom with a deal of dirty state and royalty.

So Captain Woods found them when he went in the ship Delicia, to buy slaves. At the sight of his forty-gun ship they hid themselves in the woods, very suspicious, but presently learned his business, and came out of the woods, offering to sell their loyal negro subjects by hundreds in exchange for tobacco and suits of sailor clothes, tools, powder, and ball. They had now been twenty-five years in Madagascar, and, what with wars, accidents, sickness, there remained eleven sailor kings, all heartily bored with their royalty. Despite the attachments of their harems, children and swarms of grandchildren and dependents, they were sick for blue water, hungry for a cruise. Captain Woods observed that they got very friendly with his seamen, and learned that they were plotting to seize the ship, hoist the black flag, and betake themselves once more to piracy on the high seas.

After that he kept their majesties at a distance, sending officers ashore to trade with them until he had completed his cargo of slaves. So he sailed, leaving eleven disconsolate pirate kings in a mournful row on the tropic beach, and no more has ever transpired as to them or the fate of their kingdoms. Still, they had fared much better than Captain Avery with his treasure of royal diamonds.

XL
A. D. 1776 DANIEL BOONE

As a matter of unnatural history the British lion is really and truly a lioness with a large and respectable family. When only a cub she sharpened her teeth on Spain, in her youth crushed Holland, and in her prime fought France, wresting from each in turn the command of the sea.

She was nearing her full strength when France with a chain of forts along the Saint Lawrence and the Mississippi attempted to strangle the thirteen British cubs in America. By the storming of Quebec the lion smashed that chain; but the long and world-wide wars with France had bled her dry, and unless she could keep the sea her cubs were doomed, so bluntly she told them they must help.

The cubs had troubles of their own and could not help. Theirs was the legal, hers the moral right, but both sides fell in the wrong when they lost their tempers. Since then the mother of nations has reared her second litter with some of that gentleness which comes of sorrow.

So far the French in Canada were not settlers so much as gay adventurers for the Christ, or for beaver skins, living among the Indians, or in a holiday mood leading the tribes against the surly British.

So far the British overseas were not adventurers so much as dour fugitives from injustice at home, or from justice, or merely deported as a general nuisance, to join in one common claim to liberty, the fanatics of freedom.

Unlike the French and Spaniards, the northern folk—British or Dutch, German or Scandinavian—had no mission, except by smallpox to convert the heathen. Nothing cared they for glory or adventure, but only for homes and farms. Like a hive of bees they filled the Atlantic coast lands with tireless industry until they began to feel crowded; then like a hive they swarmed, over the Appalachian ranges, across the Mississippi, over the Rocky Mountains, and now in our own time to lands beyond the sea.

Among the hard fierce colonists a very few loved nature and in childhood took to the wilds. Such was the son of a tame Devon Quaker, young Daniel Boone, a natural marksman, axman, bushman, tracker and scout of the backwoods who grew to be a freckled ruddy man, gaunt as a wolf, and subtle as a snake from his hard training in the Indian wars.

When first he crossed the mountains on the old warrior trail into Kentucky, hunting and trapping paid well in that paradise of noble timber and white clover meadows. The country swarmed with game, a merry hunting ground and battle-field of rival Indian tribes.

There Boone and his wife’s brother Stuart were captured by Shawnees, who forced the prisoners to lead the way to their camp where the other four hunters were taken. The Indians took their horses, rifles, powder, traps and furs, all lawful plunder, but gave them food to carry them to the settlements with a warning for the whites that trespassers would be prosecuted. That was enough for four of the white hunters, but Boone and Stuart tracked the Indians and stole back some of their plunder, only to be trailed in their turn and recaptured. The Shawnees were annoyed, and would have taken these trespassers home to be burned alive, but for Boone’s queer charm of manner which won their liking, and his ghostlike vanishing with Stuart into the cane brakes. The white men got away with rifles, bullets and powder, and they were wise enough not to be caught again. Still it needed some courage to stay in Kentucky, and after Stuart got scalped Boone said he felt unutterably lonely. Yet he remained, dodging so many and such varied perils that his loneliness must really have been a comfort, for it is better to be dull in solitude than scalped in company. He owed money for his outfit, and would not return to the settlements until he had earned the skins that paid his debt.

At the moment when the big colonial hive began to swarm Boone led a party of thirty frontiersmen to cut a pack-trail over the mountains into the plains of Kentucky. This wilderness trail—some two hundred miles of mud-holes, rocks and stumps—opened the way for settlement in Kentucky, a dark and bloody ground, for white invaders. At a cost of two or three scalps Boone’s outfit reached this land, to build a stockaded village named for the leader, Boonesborough, and afterward he was very proud that his wife and daughters were the first women to brave the perils of that new settlement.

Under a giant elm the settlers, being British, had church and parliament, but only on one Sunday did the parson pray for King George before the news came that congress needed prayers for the new republic at war with the motherland.

Far to the northwest of Kentucky the forts of Illinois were held by a British officer named Hamilton. He had with him a handful of American Tories loyal to the king, some newly conquered French Canadians not much in love with British government, and savage Indian tribes. All these he sent to strike the revolting colonies in their rear, but the whole brunt of the horror fell upon poor Kentucky. The settlements were wrecked, the log cabins burned, and the Indians got out of hand, committing crimes; but the settlers held four forts and cursed King George through seven years of war.

It was in a lull of this long storm that Boone led a force of thirty men to get salt from the salt-licks frequented by the buffalo and deer, on the banks of Licking River. One day while he was scouting ten miles from camp, and had just loaded his horse with meat to feed his men, he was caught, in a snow-storm, by four Shawnees. They led him to their camp where some of the hundred warriors had helped to capture Boone eight years before. These, with much ceremony and mock politeness, introduced him to two American Tories, a brace of French Canadians, and their Shawnee chiefs. Then Boone found out that this war party was marching on Fort Boonesborough where lived his own wife and children and many women, but scarcely any men. But knowing the ways of the redskins Boone saw that if he let them capture his own men in camp at the salt-licks they would go home without attacking Boonesborough. He must risk the fighting men to save the fort; he must guide the enemy to his own camp and order his men to surrender; and if they laid down all their lives for the sake of their women and children—well, they must take their chance. Boone’s men laid down their arms.

A council followed at which fifty-nine Indians voted to burn these Americans at the stake against sixty-one who preferred to sell them to Hamilton as prisoners of war. Saved by two votes, they marched on a winter journey dreadful to the Indians as well as to the prisoners; but all shared alike when dogs and horses had to be killed for food. Moreover the savages became so fond of Boone that they resolved to make an Indian of him. Not wanting to be an Indian he pleaded with Hamilton the Hair Buyer, promising to turn loyalist and fight the rebels, but when the British officer offered a hundred pounds for this one captive it was not enough for these loving savages. They took Boone home, pulled out his hair, leaving only a fine scalp-lock adorned with feathers, bathed him in the river to wash all his white blood out, painted him, and named him Big Turtle. As the adopted son of the chief, Black Fish, Boone pretended to be happy, and in four months had become a popular chief, rather closely watched, but allowed to go out hunting. Then a large Indian force assembled to march against Fort Boonesborough.

Daniel Boone

Boone easily got leave to go out hunting, and a whole day passed before his flight was known. Doubling on his course, setting blind trails, wading along the streams to hide his tracks, sleeping in thickets or in hollow logs, starving because he dared not fire a gun to get food, his clothes in rags, his feet bloody, he made his way across country, and on the fifth day staggered into Fort Boonesborough.

The enemy were long on the way. There was time to send riders for succor and scouts to watch, to repair the fort, even to raid the Shawnee country before the invaders arrived—one hundred Canadians and four hundred Indians, while Boone’s garrison numbered fifty men and boys, with twenty-five brave women.

By Hamilton’s orders there must be no bloodshed, and he sent forty horses for the old folks, the women and children to ride on their way northward as prisoners of war.

Very solemn was Boone, full of negotiations for surrender, gaining day after day with talk, waiting in a fever for expected succor from the colonies. Nine commissioners on either side were to sign the treaty, but the Indians—for good measure—sent eighteen envoys to clasp the hands of their nine white brothers, and drag them into the bush for execution. The white commissioners broke loose, gained the fort, slammed the gates and fired from the ramparts.

Long, bitter and vindictive was the siege. A pretended retreat failed to lure Boone’s men into ambush. The Indians dug a mine under the walls, but threw the dirt from the tunnel into the river where a streak of muddy water gave their game away. Torches were thrown on the roofs, but women put out the flames. When at last the siege was raised and the Indians retreated, twenty-four hours lapsed before the famished garrison dared to throw open their gates.

In these days a Kentucky force, led by the hero George Rogers Clark, captured the French forts on the Illinois, won over their garrisons, and marched on the fortress of Vincennes through flooded lands, up to their necks in water, starving, half drowned. They captured the wicked Hamilton and led him away in chains.

Toward the end of the war once more a British force of Frenchmen and Indians raided Kentucky, besieging Logan’s fort, and but for the valor of the women, that sorely stricken garrison would have perished. For when the tanks were empty the women took their buckets and marched out of the gates, laughing and singing, right among the ambushed Indians, got their supply of water from the spring, and returned unhurt because they showed no fear.

With the reliefs to the rescue rode Daniel Boone and his son Israel, then aged twenty-three. At sight of reinforcements the enemy bolted, hotly pursued to the banks of Licking River. Boone implored his people not to cross into the certainty of an ambush, but the Kentuckians took no notice, charging through the river and up a ridge between two bushed ravines.

From both flanks the Wyandots charged with tomahawks, while the Shawnees raked the horsemen with a galling fire, and there was pitiless hewing down of the broken flying settlers. Last in that flight came Boone, bearing in his arms his mortally wounded son, overtaken, cut off, almost surrounded before he struck off from the path, leaping from rock to rock. As he swam the river Israel died, but the father carried his body on into the shelter of the forest.

With the ending of the war of the Revolution, the United States spread gradually westward, and to the close of his long life old Daniel Boone was ever at the front of their advance, taking his rest at last beyond the Mississippi. To-day his patient and heroic spirit inspires all boys, leads every frontiersman, commands the pioneers upon the warrior trails, the ax-hewn paths, the wilderness roads of marching empire.

XLI
A. D. 1813 ANDREW JACKSON

The Nations were playing a ball game: “Catch!” said France, throwing the ball to Spain, who muffed it. “Quick!” cried Napoleon, “or England will get it—catch!” “Caught!” said the first American republic, and her prize was the valley of the Mississippi.

Soon afterward the United States in the name of freedom joined Napoleon the Despot at war with Great Britain; and the old lion had a wild beast fight against a world-at-arms. In our search for great adventure let us turn to the warmest corner of that world-wide struggle, poor Spanish Florida.

Here a large Indian nation, once civilized, but now reduced to savagery, had taken refuge from the Americans; and these people, the Creeks and Seminoles, fighting for freedom themselves, gave shelter to runaway slaves from the United States. A few pirates are said to have lurked there, and some Scottish gentlemen lived with the tribes as traders. Thanks perhaps to them, Great Britain armed the Creeks, who ravaged American settlements to the north, and at Fort Minns butchered four hundred men.

Northward in Tennessee the militia were commanded by Andrew Jackson, born a frontiersman, but by trade a lawyer, a very valiant man of high renown, truculent as a bantam.

Without orders he led two thousand, five hundred frontiersmen to avenge Fort Minns by chasing the Spanish governor (in time of peace) out of Pensacola, and a British garrison from Fort Barrancas, and then (after peace was signed) expelled the British from New Orleans, while his detachment in Florida blew up a fort with two hundred seventy-five refugees, including the women and children. Such was the auspicious prelude to Jackson’s war with the Creeks, who were crushed forever at the battle of Horseshoe Bend.

XLII
A. D. 1836 SAM HOUSTON

Serving in Jackson’s force was young Sam Houston, a hunter and a pioneer from childhood. Rather than be apprenticed to a trade he ran away and joined the Cherokees, and as the adopted son of the head chief became an Indian, except of course during the holidays, when he went to see his very respectable mother. On one of these visits home he met a recruiting sergeant, and enlisted for the year of 1812. At the age of twenty-one he had fought his way up to the rank of ensign, serving with General Andrew Jackson at the battle of Horseshoe Bend.

The Creeks held a line of breastworks, and the Americans were charging these works when an arrow struck deep into young Houston’s thigh. He tried to wrench it out but the barb held, and twice his lieutenant failed. “Try again,” said Houston, “and if you fail I’ll knock you down.” The lieutenant pulled out the arrow, and streaming with blood, the youngster went to a surgeon who dressed his wound. General Jackson told him not to return to the front, but the lad must needs be at the head of his men, no matter what the orders.

Hundreds of Creeks had fallen, multitudes were shot or drowned attempting to swim the river, but still a large party of them held a part of the breastwork, a sort of roof spanning a gully, from which, through narrow port-holes, they kept up a murderous fire. Guns could not be placed to bear on this position, the warriors flatly refused all terms of surrender, and when Jackson called for a forlorn hope Houston alone responded. Calling his platoon to follow him he scrambled down the steep side of the gully, but his men hesitated, and from one of them he seized a musket with which he led the way. Within five yards of the Creeks he had turned to rally his platoon for a direct charge through the port-holes, when two bullets struck his right shoulder. For the last time he implored his men to charge, then in despair walked out of range. Many months went by before the three wounds were healed, but from that time, through very stormy years he had the constant friendship of his old leader, Andrew Jackson, president of the United States.

Houston went back to the West and ten years after the battle was elected general of the Tennessee militia. Indeed there seemed no limit to his future, and at thirty-five he was governor of the state, when his wife deserted him, and ugly rumors touched his private life. Throwing his whole career to the winds he turned Indian, not as a chief, but as Drunken Sam, the butt of the Cherokees.

It is quite natural for a man to have two characters, the one commanding while the other rests. Within a few months the eyes of Houston the American statesman looked out from the painted face of Drunken Sam, the savage Cherokee. From Arkansas he looked southward and saw the American frontiersmen, the Texas pioneers, trying to earn a living under the comic opera government of the Mexicans. They would soon sweep away that anarchy if only they found a leader, and perhaps Drunken Sam in his dreams saw Samuel Houston leading the Texas cowboys. Still dressed as a Cherokee warrior he went to Washington, called on his old friend President Jackson, begged for a job, talked of the liberation of Texas—as if the yankees of the North would ever allow another slave state of the South to enter the Union!

Houston went back to the West and preached the revolt against Mexico. There we will leave him for a while, to take up the story of old Davy Crockett.

XLIII
A. D. 1836 DAVY CROCKETT

Far off on his farm in Tennessee, old Davy Crockett heard of the war for freedom. Fifty years of hunting, trapping and Indian warfare had not quenched his thirst for adventure, or dulled his love of fun; but the man had been sent to Washington as a member of congress, and came home horrified by the corruption of political life. He was angry and in his wrath took his gun from over the fireplace. He must kill something, so he went for those Mexicans in the West.

His journey to the seat of war began by steamer down the Mississippi River, and he took a sudden fancy to a sharper who was cheating the passengers. He converted Thimblerig to manhood, and the poor fellow, like a lost dog, followed Davy. So the pair were riding through Texas when they met a bee hunter, riding in search of wild honey—a gallant lad in a splendid deerskin dress, who led them to his home. The bee hunter must join Davy too, but his heart was torn at parting with Kate, the girl he loved, and he turned in the saddle to cheer her with a scrap of song for farewell:

“Saddled and bridled, and booted rode he,

A plume in his helmet, a sword at his knee.”

But the girl took up the verse, her song broken with sobbing:

“But toom’ cam’ the saddle, all bluidy to see,

And hame cam’ the steed, but hame never cam’ he.”

There were adventures on the way, for Davy hunted buffalo, fought a cougar—knife to teeth—and pacified an Indian tribe to get passage. Then they were joined by a pirate from Lafitte’s wicked crew, and a young Indian warrior. So, after thrashing a Mexican patrol, the party galloped into the Alamo, a Texan fortress at San Antonio.

One thousand seven hundred Mexicans had been holding that fort, until after a hundred and twenty hours fighting, they were captured by two hundred and sixteen Americans. The Lone Star flag on the Alamo was defended now by one hundred and fifty white men.

Colonel Travis commanded, and with him was Colonel Bowie, whose broken sword, used as a dagger, had given the name to the “bowie knife.” Crockett, with his followers, Thimblerig, the bee hunter, the pirate and the Indian, were warmly welcomed by the garrison.

February twenty-third, 1836, the Mexican president, Santa Anna, brought up seventeen hundred men to besiege the Alamo, and Travis sent off the pirate to ride to Goliad for help.

On the twenty-fourth the bombardment commenced, and thirty cowboys broke in through the Mexican lines to aid the garrison.

On the twenty-eighth, here is a scrap from Davy’s private diary: “The settlers are flying ... leaving their possessions to the mercy of the ruthless invader ... slaughter is indiscriminate, sparing neither age, sex, nor condition. Buildings have been burned down, farms laid waste ... the enemy draws nigher to the fort.”

On the twenty-ninth: “This business of being shut up makes a man wolfish—I had a little sport this morning before breakfast. The enemy had planted a piece of ordnance within gunshot of the fort during the night, and the first thing in the morning they commenced a brisk cannonade pointblank against the spot where I was snoring. I turned out pretty smart and mounted the rampart. The gun was charged again, a fellow stepped forth to touch her off, but before he could apply the match I let him have it, and he keeled over. A second stepped up, snatched the match from the hand of the dying man, but Thimblerig, who had followed me, handed me his rifle, and the next instant the Mexican was stretched upon the earth beside the first. A third came up to the cannon, my companion handed me another gun, and I fixed him off in like manner. A fourth, then a fifth seized the match, but both met with the same fate, and then the whole party gave it up as a bad job, and hurried off to the camp, leaving the cannon ready charged where they had planted it. I came down, took my bitters and went to breakfast. Thimblerig told me the place from which I had been firing was one of the snuggest stands in the whole fort, for he never failed picking off two or three stragglers before breakfast.”

March third.—“We have given over all hope.”

March fourth.—“Shells have been falling into the fort like hail during the day, but without effect. About dusk in the evening we observed a man running toward the fort, pursued by about a dozen Mexican cavalry. The bee hunter immediately knew him to be the old hunter who had gone to Goliad, and calling to the two hunters, he sallied out to the relief of the old man, who was hard pressed. I followed close after. Before we reached the spot the Mexicans were close on the heels of the old man who stopped suddenly, turned short upon his pursuers, discharged his rifle, and one of the enemy fell from his horse. The chase was renewed, but finding that he would be overtaken and cut to pieces, he now turned again, and to the amazement of the enemy became the assailant in turn. He clubbed his gun, and dashed among them like a wounded tiger, and they fled like sparrows. By this time we reached the spot, and in the ardor of the moment followed some distance before we saw that our retreat to the fort was cut off by another detachment of cavalry. Nothing was to be done but to fight our way through. We were all of the same mind. ‘Go ahead!’ cried I; and they shouted, ‘Go ahead, Colonel!’ We dashed among them, and a bloody conflict ensued. They were about twenty in number, and they stood their ground. After the fight had continued about five minutes a detachment was seen issuing from the fort to our relief, and the Mexicans scampered off, leaving eight of their comrades dead upon the field. But we did not escape unscathed, for both the pirate and the bee hunter were mortally wounded, and I received a saber cut across the forehead. The old man died without speaking, as soon as we entered the fort. We bore my young friend to his bed, dressed his wounds, and I watched beside him. He lay without complaint or manifesting pain until about midnight, when he spoke, and I asked him if he wanted anything.

“‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Poor Kate!’ His eyes filled with tears as he continued: ‘Her words were prophetic, Colonel,’ and then he sang in a low voice.

“‘But toom’ cam’ the saddle, all bluidy to see,

And hame cam’ the steed, but hame never cam’ he.’

“He spoke no more, and a few minutes after, died. Poor Kate! who will tell this to thee?”

March fifth: “Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom! throughout the day—no time for memorandums now—go ahead. Liberty and independence forever!”

David Crockett

* * * * *

So ends Davy’s journal. Before dawn of the sixth a final assault of the Mexican force carried the lost Alamo, and at sunrise there were only six of the defenders left alive. Colonel Crockett was found with his back to the wall, with his broken rifle and his bloody knife. Before him lay Thimblerig, his dagger to the hilt in a Mexican’s throat, his death grip fastened in the dead man’s hair.

The six prisoners were brought before Santa Anna, who stood surrounded by his staff amid the ruins. General Castrillon saluted the president. “Sir, here are six prisoners I have taken alive; how shall I dispose to them?”

“Have I not told you before how to dispose of them—why do you bring them to me?”

The officers of the staff fell upon the prisoners with their swords, but like a tiger Davy sprang at Santa Anna’s throat. Then he fell with a dozen swords through his body.

Up with your banner, Freedom.

Thy champions cling to thee.

They’ll follow where’er you lead ’em—

To death or victory.

Up with your banner, Freedom!

Tyrants and slaves are rushing

To tread thee in the dust;

Their blood will soon be gushing

And stain our knives with rust,

But not thy banner, Freedom!

While Stars and Stripes are flying

Our blood we’ll freely shed;

No groan will ’scape the dying,

Seeing thee o’er his head.

Up with your banner, Freedom!

Let us return to Sam Houston. His life of cyclone passions and whirling change—a white boy turned Indian, then hero of a war against the redskins; lawyer, commander-in-chief and governor of a state, a drunken savage, a broken man begging a job at Washington, an obscure conspirator in Texas—had made him leader of the liberators.

The fall of the Alamo filled the Texans with fury, but when that was followed by the awful massacre of Goliad they went raving mad. Houston, their leader, waited for reinforcements until his men wanted to murder him, but when he marched it was to San Jacinto where, with eight hundred Texans, he scattered one thousand six hundred Mexicans, and captured Santa Anna. He was proclaimed president of the Lone Star republic, which is now the largest star in the American constellation.

XLIV
A. D. 1793 ALEXANDER MACKENZIE

The very greatest events in human annals are those which the historian forgets to mention. Now for example, in 1638 Louis XIV was born; the Scots set up their solemn league and covenant; the Turks romped into poor old Bagdad and wiped out thirty thousand Persians; Van Tromp, the Dutchman, whopped a Spanish fleet; the English founded Madras, the corner-stone of our Indian empire; but the real event of the year, the greatest event of the seventeenth century, was the hat act passed by the British parliament. Hatters were forbidden to make any hats except of beaver felt. Henceforth, for two centuries, slouch hats, cocked hats, top hats, all sorts of hats, were to be made of beaver fur felt, down to the flat brimmed Stetson hat, which was borrowed from the cowboys by the Northwest Mounted Police, adopted by the Irregular Horse of the Empire, and finally copied in rabbit for the Boy Scouts. The hatter must buy beaver, no matter what the cost, so Europe was stripped to the last pelt. Then far away to east and west the hunters and trappers explored from valley to valley. The traders followed, building forts where they dealt with the hunters and trappers, exchanging powder and shot, traps and provisions, for furs at so much a “castor” or beaver skin, and skins were used for money, instead of gold. Then came the settlers to fill the discovered lands, soldiers to guard them from attack by savages, judges and hangmen, flag and empire.

The Russian fur trade passed the Ural Hills, explored Siberia and crossed to Russian America.

Westward the French and British fur trade opened up the length and breadth of North America.

By the time the hatter invented the imitation “beaver,” our silk hat, this mad hat trade had pioneered the Russian empire, the United States and the Dominion of Canada, belting the planet with the white man’s power.

Now in this monstrous adventure the finest of all the adventurers were Scotch, and the greatest Scot of them all was Alexander MacKenzie, of Stornoway, in the Scotch Hebrides. At the age of seventeen he landed in Montreal, soon after Canada was taken by the British, and he grew up in the growing fur trade. In those days the Hudson’s Bay Company was a sleepy old corporation with four forts, but the Nor’westers of Montreal had the aid of the valiant French Canadian voyageurs as guides and canoe men in the far wilderness.

Their trade route crossed the upper lakes to Thunder Bay in Lake Superior, where they built Fort William; thence by Rainy River to the Lake of the Woods, and Rat Portage; thence up Lake Winnipeg to the Grand Saskatchewan. There were the forts where buffalo hunters boiled down pemmican, a sort of pressed beef spiced with service berries, to feed the northern posts. Northward the long trail, by lake and river, reached à la Crosse, which gave its name to a famous Indian ball game, and so to the source of the Churchill River at Lac la Loche, from whence the Methye portage opened the way into the Great Unknown.

When MacKenzie reached Clear-water River, Mr. Peter Pond of the Nor’westers had just shot Mr. Ross of the X. Y. Company. MacKenzie took charge, and he and his cousin moved the trade down to the meeting of the Athabasca and the Peace, at an inland sea, the Athabasca Lake, where they built the future capital of the North, Fort Chipewyan. From here the Slave River ran down to Great Slave Lake, a second inland sea whose outlet was unknown. MacKenzie found that outlet six miles wide. The waters teemed with wild fowl, the bush with deer, and the plains on either side had herds of bison.

MacKenzie took with him four French voyageurs, a German and some Indians, working them as a rule from three A. M. till dusk, while they all with one accord shied at the terrors ahead, the cataracts, the savage tribes, the certainty of starvation. The days lengthened until there was no night, they passed coal fields on fire which a hundred years later were still burning, then frozen ground covered with grass and flowers, where the river parted into three main branches opening on the coast of an ice-clad sea. The water was still fresh, but there were seaweeds, they saw whales, the tides would wash the people out of camp, for this was the Arctic Ocean. So they turned back up that great river which bears MacKenzie’s name, six thousand miles of navigable waters draining a land so warm that wheat will ripen on the Arctic circle, a home for millions of healthy prosperous people in the days to come.

MacKenzie’s second journey was much more difficult, up the Peace River through the Rocky Mountains, then by a portage to the Fraser Valley, and down Bad River. All the rivers were bad, but the birch bark canoe, however much it smashes, can be repaired with fresh sheets of bark, stuck on with gum from the pine trees. Still, after their canoe was totally destroyed in Bad River and the stock of bullets went to the bottom, the Indians sat down and wept, while the Frenchmen, after a square meal with a lot of rum, patched up the wreck to go on. Far down the Fraser Valley there is a meadow of tall grass and flowers with clumps of wild fruit orchard and brier rose, gardens of tiger lilies and goldenrod. Nobody lived there in my time, but the place is known as Alexandria in memory of Alexander Mackenzie and of the only moment in his life when he turned back, beaten. Below Alexandria the Fraser plunges for two hundred miles through a range of mountains in one long roaring swoop.

So the explorers, warned by friendly Indians, climbed back up-stream to the Blackwater River; and if any big game hunter wants to shoot mosquitoes for their hides that valley would make a first-class hunting ground. The journey from here to the coast was made afoot with heavy loads by a broad Indian trail across the coast range to the Bilthqula River, and here the explorers were the guests of rich powerful tribes. One young chief unclasped a splendid robe of sea-otter skins, and threw it around MacKenzie, such a gift as no king could offer now. They feasted on salmon, service berries in grease, and cakes of inner hemlock bark sprinkled with oil of salmon, a three-hour banquet, followed by sleep in beds of furs, and blankets woven from wool of the mountain sheep. The houses were low-pitched barns of cedar, each large enough to seat several hundred people, and at the gable end rose a cedar pole carved in heraldic sculpture gaily painted, with a little round hole cut through for the front door.

Each canoe was a cedar log hollowed with fire, then spread with boiling water, a vessel not unlike a gondola. One such canoe, the Tillicum, has made a voyage round the world, but she is small compared with the larger dugouts up to seven tons burden. An old chief showed MacKenzie a canoe forty-five feet in length, of four foot beam painted with white animals on a black hull, and set with ivory of otter teeth. In this he had made a voyage some years before, when he met white men and saw ships, most likely those of the great Captain Cook. MacKenzie’s account of the native doctors describes them to the life as they are to-day. “They blew on the patient, and then whistled; they rubbed him violently on the stomach; they thrust their forefingers into his mouth, and spouted water into his face.” MacKenzie, had he only waited, would have seen them jump on the patient’s stomach to drive the devils out.

He borrowed canoes for the run down the Bilthqula to Salt Water at the head of one of British Columbia’s giant fiords. There the explorer heard that only two moons ago Captain Vancouver’s boats had been in the inlet. An Indian chief must have been rude, for one officer fired upon him, while another struck him with the flat of a sword. For this the chief must needs get even with Alexander MacKenzie as he wandered about the channels in search of the open sea. He never found the actual Pacific, but made his final camp upon a rock at the entrance of Cascada inlet. Here is Vancouver’s description of the place. “The width of the channel did not anywhere exceed three-quarters of a mile; its shores were bounded by precipices much more perpendicular than any we had yet seen during this excursion; and from the summits of the mountains that overlooked it ... there fell several large cascades. These were extremely grand, and by much the most tremendous of any we had ever beheld.”

Those cataracts, like lace, fell from the cornice glaciers through belt after belt of clouds, to crash through the lower gloom in deafening thunder upon black abysmal channels. The eagles swirl and circle far above, the schools of porpoises are cleaving and gleaming through the white-maned tide. In such a place, beset by hostile Indians, as the dawn broke the great explorer mixed vermilion and grease to paint upon the precipice above him:

“Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada by land 22nd July, 1793.”

He had discovered one of the world’s great rivers, and made the first crossing of North America.

XLV
THE WHITE MAN’S COMING

It is our plain duty here to take up the story of Vancouver, an English merchant seaman from before the mast, who rose to a captaincy in the royal navy, and was sent to explore the British Columbian coast. He was to find “the Straits of Anian leading through Meta Incognita to the Atlantic,” the famous Northwest passage for which so many hundreds of explorers gave their lives. His careful survey proved there was no such strait.

Of course it is our duty to follow Vancouver’s dull and pompous log book, and show what savage tribes he met with in the wilds. But it will be much more fun to give the other side, the story of Vancouver’s visit as told by the Indians whose awful fate it was to be “discovered” by the white man with his measles, his liquor and his smallpox.

In the winter of 1887–8 I was traveling on snowshoes down the Skeena Valley from Gaat-a-maksk to Gaet-wan-gak, which must be railway stations now on the Grand Trunk Pacific. My packer was Willie-the-Bear, so named because a grizzly had eaten off half his face, the side of his face, in fact, which had to be covered with a black veil. We were crossing some low hills when I asked him about the coming of the white men. Promptly he told me of the first ship—a Spaniard; the second—Vancouver’s; and the third—an American, all in correct order after a hundred years. Who told him? His mother. And who told her? Her mother, of course.

So, living as I was among the Indians, and seeing no white man’s face for months on end, I gathered up the various memories of the people.

At Massett, on the north coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands, the Haidas were amazed by a great bird which came to rest in front of the village. When she had folded her wings a lot of little birds shot out from under her, which came to the beach and turned out to be full of men. They were as fair of color as the Haidas, some even more so, and some red as the meat of salmon. The people went out in their dugouts to board the bird, which was a vast canoe. All of them got presents, but there was one, a person of no account, who got the finest gift, better than anything received by the highest chiefs, an iron cooking-pot.

In those days the food was put with water into a wooden trough and red-hot stones thrown in until it boiled. The people had copper, but that was worth many times the present price of gold, not to be wasted on mere cooking pots. So the man with the iron pot, in his joy, called all the people to a feast, and gave away the whole of his property, which of course was the right thing to do. The chiefs were in a rage at his new importance, but they came, as did every one else. And at the feast the man of no account climbed the tall pole in front of his house, the totem pole carved with the arms of his ancestors, passing a rope over the top by which he hauled up the iron pot so that it might be seen by the whole tribe. “See,” he said, “what the great chief has given me, the Big Spirit whose people have tails stiff as a beaver tail behind their heads, whose canoe is loaded with thunder and lightning, the mother of all canoes, with six young canoes growing up, whose medicine is so strong that one dose makes you sick for three days, whose warriors are so brave that one got two black eyes and did not run away, who have a little dog which scratches and says meaou!

“This great chief has given us presents according to our rank, little no-account presents to the common people; but when I came he knew I was his brother, his equal, and to me, to me alone, he gave this pot which sits upon the fire and does not burn, this pot which boils the water, and will not break!”

But as the man bragged he kept twitching the rope, and down fell the pot, smash on the ground, and broken all to pieces.

Now as to the first white man who came up Skeena River:

A very old man of Kitzelash remembered that when he was a boy he stood on the banks of the cañon and there came a canoe with a white man, a big chief called Manson, a Spaniard, and a black man, all searching for gold. He remembered that first one man sang a queer song and then they all took it up and sang, laughing together.

A middle-aged man of Gaet-wan-gak remembered that in his childhood a canoe came up the river full of Indians, and with two white men. Nobody had ever seen the like, and they took the strangers for ghosts, so that the women ran away and hid. The ghosts gave them bread, but they spat it out because it was ghost food and had no taste. They offered tea, but the people spat it out, because it was like earth water out of graves. Rice, too, they would not touch, for it was like—perhaps one should not say what that was like.

XLVI THE BEAVER

In the heart of the city of Victoria I once found an old log barn, the last remnant of Fort Camosun, and climbing into the loft, kicked about in a heap of rubbish from which emerged some damp rat-gnawed manuscript books. From morning to evening, and far into the dusk, I sat reading there the story of a great adventuress, a heroine of tonnage and displacement, the first steamer which ever plied on the Pacific Ocean.

Her builders were Messrs. Boulton and Watt, and Watt was the father of steam navigation. She was built at Blackwall on London River in the days of George IV. She was launched by a duchess in a poke bonnet and shawl, who broke a bottle of wine against the ship’s nose and christened her the Beaver. Then the merchant adventurers of the Hudson’s Bay Company, in bell toppers, Hessian boots and white chokers, gave three hearty cheers.

The Beaver was as ugly as it was safe to make her, but built of honest oak, and copper bolted, her engines packed in the hold, and her masts brigantine-rigged for the sailing voyage round Cape Horn. She went under convoy of the barque Columbia, a slow and rather helpless chaperon, who fouled and nearly wrecked her at Robinson Crusoe’s Island. Her master, to judge by the ship’s books, was a peppery little beast, who logged the mate for a liar: “Not correct D. Home;” drove his officers until they went sick, quarreled with the Columbia’s doctor, found his chief engineer “in a beastly state of intoxication,” and finally, at the Columbia River, hounded his crew into mutiny.

“Mr. Phillips and Mr. Wilson behaved,” says the mate, “in a most mutinous manner.” So the captain had all hands aft to witness their punishment with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Phillips called on the crew to rescue him, and they went for the captain. Calling for his sword, the skipper defended himself like a man, wounding one seaman in the head. Then he “succeeded in tying up Phillips, and punishing him with two dozen lashes with a rope’s end over his clothes,” whereupon William Wilson demanded eleven strokes for himself, so sharing the fun, for better or worse, with a shipmate.

Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, an old stockade of the Nor’westers, was at this time the Hudson’s Bay Company’s capital on the Pacific coast, where reigned the great Doctor McLauchlan, founder of Oregon. Here the Beaver shipped her paddles, started up her engines, and gave an excursion trip for the ladies. So came her voyage under steam out in the open Pacific of eight hundred miles to her station on the British Columbian coast. She sailed on the last day of May in 1836, two years before the Atlantic was crossed under steam. On the Vancouver coast she discovered an outcrop of steam coal, still the best to be had on the Pacific Ocean.

In her days of glory, the Beaver was a smart little war-ship trading with the savages, or bombarding their villages, all the way from Puget Sound to Alaska. In her middle age she was a survey vessel exploring Wonderland. In her old age the boiler leaked, so that the engineer had to plug the holes with a rag on a pointed stick. She was a grimy tug at the last, her story forgotten; and after fifty-two years of gallant service, was allowed to lie a weed-grown wreck within a mile of the new City of Vancouver, until a kindly storm gave her the honor of sea burial.

It was in 1851 that the Beaver brought to the factor at Fort Simpson some nuggets of the newly discovered Californian gold. At first he refused to take the stuff in trade, next bought it in at half its value, and finally showed it to Edenshaw, head chief of the Haida nation. As each little yellow pebble was worth a big pile of blankets, the chief borrowed a specimen and showed it to his tribe in the Queen Charlotte Islands.

There is a legend that in earlier days a trader found the Haidas using golden bullets with their trade guns, which they gladly exchanged for lead. Anyway an old woman told Edenshaw that she knew where to find the stuff, so next day she took him in a small dugout canoe to the outer coast. There she showed him a streak seven inches wide, and eighty feet in length, of quartz and shining gold, which crossed the neck of a headland. They filled a bushel basket with loose bits, and left them in the canoe while they went back for more. But in the stern of the canoe sat Edenshaw’s little son watching the dog fish at play down in the deeps. When the elders came back Charlie had thrown their first load of gold at the dog fish, and later on in life he well remembered the hands of blessing laid on by way of reward.

Still, enough gold was saved to buy many bales of blankets. Edenshaw claimed afterward that, had he only known the value of his find, he would have gone to England and married the queen’s daughter.

News spread along the coast and soon a ship appeared, the H. B. C. brigantine Una. Her people blasted the rocks, while the Indians, naked and well oiled, grabbed the plunder. The sailors wrestled, but could not hold those oily rogues. In time the Una sailed with a load of gold, but was cast away with her cargo in the Straits of Fuca.

Next year Gold Harbor was full of little ships, with a gunboat to keep them in order while they reaped a total harvest of two hundred eighty-nine thousand dollars. H. M. S. Thetis had gone away when the schooner Susan Sturgis came back for a second load, the only vessel to brave the winter storms. One day while all hands were in the cabin at dinner the Indians stole on board, clapped on the hatches and made them prisoners. They were marched ashore and stripped in the deep snow, pleading for their drawers, but only Captain Rooney and the mate were allowed that luxury. The seamen were sold to the H. B. Company at Fort Simpson, but the two officers remained in slavery. By day they chopped fire-wood under a guard, at night crouched in a dark corner of a big Indian house, out of sight of the fire in the middle, fed on such scraps of offal as their masters deigned to throw them.

Only one poor old woman pitied the slaves, hiding many a dried clam under the matting within their reach. Also they made a friend of Chief Bearskin’s son; and Bearskin himself was a good-hearted man, though Edenshaw proved a brute. Rooney was an able-bodied Irishman, Lang a tall broad-shouldered Scot, though this business turned his hair gray. For after the schooner was plundered and broken up, a dispute arose between Bearskin and Edenshaw as to their share of the captives. Edenshaw would kill Lang rather than surrender him to Bearskin, and twice the Scotchman had his head on the block to be chopped off before Bearskin gave in to save his life. At last both slaves were sold to Captain McNeill, who gave them each a striped shirt, corduroy trousers and shoes, then shipped them aboard the Beaver. Now it so happened that on the passage southward the Beaver met with the only accident in her long life, for during a storm the steering gear was carried away. Lang was a ship’s carpenter, and his craftsmanship saved the little heroine from being lost with all hands that night. This rescued slave became the pioneer ship-builder of Western Canada.

XLVII
A. D. 1911 THE CONQUEST OF THE POLES

The North Pole is only a point on the earth’s surface, a point which in itself has no length, breadth or height, neither has it weight nor any substance, being invisible, impalpable, immovable and entirely useless. The continents of men swing at a thousand miles an hour round that point, which has no motion. Beneath it an eternal ice-field slowly drifts across the unfathomed depths of a sea that knows no light.

Above, for a night of six months, the pole star marks the zenith round which the constellations swing their endless race; then for six months the low sun rolls along the sky-line on his level rounds; and each day and night are one year.

The attempt to reach that point began in the reign of Henry VIII of England, when Master John Davis sailed up the Greenland coast to a big cliff which he named after his becker, Sanderson’s Hope. The cliff is sheer from the sea three thousand four hundred feet high, with one sharp streak of ice from base to summit. It towers above Upernivik, the most northerly village in the world, and is one thousand one hundred twenty-eight miles from the Pole.

In 1594 Barentz carried the Dutch flag a little farther north but soon Hudson gave the lead back to Great Britain, and after that, for two hundred seventy-six years the British flag unchallenged went on from victory to victory in the conquest of the North. At last in 1882 Lieutenant Greely of the United States Army beat us by four miles at a cost of nearly his whole expedition, which was destroyed by famine. Soon Doctor Nansen broke the American record for Norway, to be beaten in turn by an Italian prince, the Duke d’Abruzzi. But meanwhile Peary, an American naval officer, had commenced his wonderful course of twenty-three years’ special training; and in 1906 he broke the Italian record. His way was afoot with dog-trains across the ice of the Polar sea, and he would have reached the North Pole, but for wide lanes of open sea, completely barring the way. At two hundred twenty-seven miles from the Pole he was forced to retreat, and camp very near to death before he won back to his base camp.

Peary’s ship was American to the last detail of needles and thread, but the vessel was his own invention, built for ramming ice-pack. The ship’s officers and crew were all Newfoundlanders, trained from boyhood in the seal fishery of the Labrador ice-pack. They were, alas! British, but that could not be helped. To make amends the exploring officers were Americans, but they were specially trained by Peary to live and travel as Eskimos, using the native dress, the dog-trains and the snow houses.

Other explorers had done the same, but Peary went further, for he hired the most northerly of the Eskimo tribes, and from year to year educated the pick of the boys, who grew up to regard him as a father, to obey his orders exactly, and to adopt his improvements on their native methods. So he had hunting parties to store up vast supplies of meat, and skins of musk-ox, ice-bear, reindeer, fox, seal and walrus, each for some special need in the way of clothing. He had women to make the clothes. He had two hundred fifty huskie dogs, sleds of his own device, and Eskimo working parties under his white officers. In twenty-three years he found out how to boil tea in ten minutes, and that one detail saved ninety minutes a day for actual marching—a margin in case of accident. Add to all that Peary’s own enormous strength of mind and body, in perfect training, just at the prime of life. He was so hardened by disaster that he had become almost a maniac, with one idea, one motive in life, one hope—that of reaching the Pole. Long hours before anything went wrong an instinct would awaken him out of the soundest sleep to look out for trouble and avert calamity.

A glance at the map will show how Greenland, and the islands north of Canada, reach to within four hundred miles of the Pole. Between is a channel leading from Baffin’s Bay into the Arctic Ocean. The Roosevelt, Peary’s ship, forced a passage through that channel, then turned to the left, creeping and dodging between the ice-field and the coast of Grant Land. Captain Bartlett was in the crow’s-nest, piloting, and Peary, close below him, clung to the standing rigging while the ship butted and charged and hammered through the floes. Bartlett would coax and wheedle, or shout at the ship to encourage her, “Rip ’em, Teddy! Bite ’em in two! Go it! That’s fine, my beauty! Now again! Once more!”

Who knows? In the hands of a great seaman like Bartlett a ship seems to be a living creature, and no matter what slued the Roosevelt she had a furious habit of her own, coming to rest with her nose to the north for all the world like a compass. Her way was finally blocked just seventy-five miles short of the most northerly headland, Cape Columbia, and the stores had to be carried there for the advanced base. The winter was spent in preparation, and on March first began the dash for the Pole.

No party with dog-trains could possibly carry provisions for a return journey of eight hundred miles. If there had been islands on the route it would have been the right thing to use them as advanced bases for a final rush to the Pole. But there were no islands, and it would be too risky to leave stores upon the shifting ice-pack. There was, therefore, but one scheme possible. Doctor Goodsell marched from the coast to Camp A, unloaded his stores and returned. Using the stores at Camp A, Mr. Borup was able to march to Camp B, where he unloaded and turned back. With the stores at Camp B, Professor Marvin marched to Camp C and turned back. With the stores at Camp C, Captain Bartlett marched to Camp D and turned back. With the stores at Camp D, Peary had his sleds fully loaded, with a selection, besides, of the fittest men and dogs for the last lap of the journey, and above all not too many mouths to feed.

It was a clever scheme, and in theory the officers, turned back with their Eskimo parties, were needed to pilot them to the coast. All the natives got back safely, but Professor Marvin was drowned. If Peary had not sent all his officers back, would he have been playing the game in leaving his Eskimo parties without navigating officers to guide them in the event of a storm? There is no doubt that his conduct was that of a wise and honorable man. But the feeling remains—was it sportsman-like to send Captain Bartlett back—the one man who had done most for his success, denied any share in the great final triumph? Bartlett made no complaint, and in his cheery acceptance of the facts cut a better figure than even Commander Peary.

With his negro servant and four Eskimos, the leader set forth on the last one hundred thirty-three miles across the ice. It was not plain level ice like that of a pond, but heaved into sharp hills caused by the pressure, with broken cliffs and labyrinthine reefs. The whole pack was drifting southward before the wind, here breaking into mile-wide lanes of black and foggy sea, there newly frozen and utterly unsafe. Although the sun did not set, the frost was sharp, at times twenty and thirty degrees below zero, while for the most part a cloudy sky made it impossible to take observations. Here great good fortune awaited Peary, for as he neared the Pole, the sky cleared, giving him brilliant sunlight. By observing the sun at frequent intervals he was able to reckon with his instruments until at last he found himself within five miles of ninety degrees north—the Pole. A ten-mile tramp proved he had passed the apex of the earth, and five miles back he made the final tests. Somewhere within a mile of where he stood was the exact point, the north end of the axis on which the earth revolves. As nearly as he could reckon, the very point was marked for that moment upon the drifting ice-field by a berg-like hill of ice, and on this summit he hoisted the flag, a gift from his wife which he had carried for fifteen years, a tattered silken remnant of Old Glory.

“Perhaps,” he writes, “it ought not to have been so, but when I knew for a certainty that I had reached the goal, there was not a thing in the world I wanted but sleep. But after I had a few hours of it, there succeeded a condition of mental exaltation which made further rest impossible. For more than a score of years that point on the earth’s surface had been the object of my every effort. To obtain it my whole being, physical, mental and moral, had been dedicated. The determination to reach the Pole had become so much a part of my being that, strange as it may seem, I long ago ceased to think of myself save as an instrument for the attainment of that end.... But now I had at last succeeded in planting the flag of my country at the goal of the world’s desire. It is not easy to write about such a thing, but I knew that we were going back to civilization with the last of the great adventure stories—a story the world had been waiting to hear for nearly four hundred years, a story which was to be told at last under the folds of the Stars and Stripes, the flag that during a lonely and isolated life had come to be for me the symbol of home and everything I loved—and might never see again.”

Here is the record left at the North Pole:—

“90 N. Lat., North Pole,
“April 6th, 1909.

“I have to-day hoisted the national ensign of the United States of America at this place, which my observations indicate to be the North Polar axis of the earth, and have formally taken possession of the entire region, and adjacent, for and in the name of the president of the United States of America.

“I leave this record and United States flag in possession.

“Robert E. Peary,
“United States Navy.”

Before the hero of this very grand adventure returned to the world, there also arrived from the Arctic a certain Doctor Cook, an American traveler who claimed to have reached the Pole. The Danish Colony in Greenland received him with joy, the Danish Geographical Society welcomed him with a banquet of honor, and the world rang with his triumph. Then came Commander Peary out of the North, proclaiming that this rival was a liar. So Doctor Cook was able to strike an attitude of injured innocence, hinting that poor old Peary was a fraud; and the world rocked with laughter.

In England we may have envied the glory that Peary had so bravely won for his flag and country, but knew his record too well to doubt his honor, and welcomed his triumph with no ungenerous thoughts. The other claimant had a record of impudent and amusing frauds, but still he was entitled to a hearing, and fair judgment of his claim from men of science. Among sportsmen we do not expect the runners, after a race, to call one another liars, and were sorry that Peary should for a moment lapse from the dignity expected of brave men.

It is perhaps ungenerous to mention such trifling points of conduct, and yet we worship heroes only when we are quite sure that our homage is not a folly. And so we measure Peary with the standard set by his one rival, Roald Amundsen, who conquered the Northwest passage, then added to that immortal triumph the conquest of the South Pole. In that Antarctic adventure Amundsen challenged a fine British explorer, Captain Scott. The British expedition was equipped with every costly appliance wealth could furnish, and local knowledge of the actual route. The Norseman ventured into an unknown route, scantily equipped, facing the handicap of poverty. He won by sheer merit, by his greatness as a man, and by the loyal devotion he earned at the hands of his comrades. Then he returned to Norway, they say, disguised under an assumed name to escape a public triumph, and his one message to the world was a generous tribute to his defeated rival. The modern world has no greater hero, no more perfect gentleman, no finer adventurer than Roald Amundsen.

XLVIII WOMEN

Two centuries ago Miss Mary Read, aged thirteen, entered the Royal Navy as a boy. A little later she deserted, and still disguised as a boy, went soldiering, first in a line regiment, afterward as a trooper. She was very brave. On the peace of Ryswick, seeing that there was to be no more fighting, she went into the merchant service for a change, and was bound for the West Indies when the ship was gathered in by pirates. Rather than walk the plank, she became a pirate herself and rose from rank to rank until she hoisted the black flag with the grade of captain. So she fell in with Mrs. Bonny, widow of a pirate captain. The two amiable ladies, commanding each her own vessel, went into a business partnership, scuttling ships and cutting throats for years with marked success.

In the seventeenth century an escaped nun did well as a seafaring man under the Spanish colors, ruffled as a gallant in Chili, and led a gang of brigands in the Andes. On her return to Spain as a lady, she was very much petted at the court of Madrid. The last of many female bandits was Miss Pearl Hart, who, in 1890, robbed a stage-coach in Arizona.

Mr. Murray Hall, a well-known Tammany politician and a successful business man, died in New York, and was found to be a woman.

But of women who, without disguise, have excelled in adventurous trades, I have known in Western Canada two who are gold miners and two who are cowboys. Mrs. Langdon, of California, drove a stage-coach for years. Miss Calamity Jane was a noted Montana bull-whacker. Miss Minnie Hill and Miss Collie French are licensed American pilots. Miss Evelyn Smith, of Nova Scotia, was a jailer. Lady Clifford holds Board of Trade certificates as an officer in our mercantile marine. A distinguished French explorer, Madame Dieulafoy, is an officer of the Legion of Honor, entitled to a military salute from all sentries, and has the singular right by law of wearing the dress of a man. Several English ladies have been explorers. Miss Bird explored Japan, conquered Long’s Peak, and was once captured by Mountain Jim, the Colorado robber. Lady Florence Dixie explored Patagonia, Miss Gordon-Cumming explored a hundred of the South Sea Isles, put an end to a civil war in Samoa and was one of the first travelers on the Pamirs. Mrs. Mulhall has traced the sources of the Amazons. Lady Baker, Mrs. Jane Moir, and Miss Kingsley rank among the great pioneers of Africa. Lady Hester Stanhope, traveling in the Levant, the ship being loaded with treasure, her own property, was cast away on a desert island near Rhodes. Escaping thence she traversed the Arabian deserts, and by a gathering of forty thousands of Arabs was proclaimed queen of Palmyra. This beautiful and gifted woman reigned through the first decades of the nineteenth century from her palace on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. Two other British princesses in wild lands were Her Highness Florence, Maharanee of Patiala, and the sherifa of Wazan, whose son is reverenced by the Moslems in North Africa as a sacred personage.

Among women who have been warriors the greatest, perhaps, were the British Queen Boadicea, and the saintly and heroic Joan of Arc, burned, to our everlasting shame, at Rouen. Frances Scanagatti, a noble Italian girl, fought with distinction as an officer in the Austrian army, once led the storming of a redoubt, and after three years in the field against Napoleon, went home, a young lady again, of sweet and mild disposition.

Doctor James Barry, M. D., inspector-general of hospitals in the British Army, a duelist, a martinet, and a hopelessly insubordinate officer, died in 1865 at the age of seventy-one, and was found to be a woman.

Apart from hosts of adventurous camp followers there have been disguised women serving at different times in nearly every army. Loreta Velasquez, of Cuba, married to an American army officer, dressed up in her husband’s clothes, raised a corps of volunteers, took command, was commissioned in the Confederate Army during the Civil War of 1861–5, and fought as Lieutenant Harry Buford. She did extraordinary work as a spy in the northern army. After the war, her husband having fallen in battle, she turned gold miner in California.

Mrs. Christian Davies, born in 1667 in Dublin, was a happy and respectable married woman with a large family, when her life was wrecked by a sudden calamity, for her husband was seized by a press gang and dragged away to serve in the fleet. Mrs. Davis, crazy with grief, got her children adopted by the neighbors, and set off in search of the man she loved. When she returned two years later as a soldier, she found her children happy, the neighbors kind, and herself utterly unknown. She went away contented. She served under the Duke of Marlborough throughout his campaigns in Europe, first as an infantry soldier, but later as a dragoon, for at the battles of Blenheim and Fontenoy she was a squadron leader of the Scots Grays. The second dragoon guards have many curious traditions of “Mother Ross.” When after twelve years military service, she ultimately found her husband, he was busy flirting with a waitress in a Dutch inn, and she passed by, saying nothing. In her capacity as a soldier she was a flirt herself, making love to every girl she met, a gallant, a duelist, and notably brave. At last, after a severe wound, her sex was discovered and she forgave her husband. She died in Chelsea Hospital at the age of one hundred eight, and her monument may be seen in the graveyard.

Hannah Snell left her home because her husband had bolted with another woman, and she wanted to find and kill him. In course of her search, she enlisted, served as a soldier against the Scots rebellion of 1745, and once received a punishment of five hundred lashes. A series of wonderful adventures led her into service as a marine on board H. M. S. Swallow. After a narrow escape from foundering, this vessel joined Admiral Boscawen’s fleet in the East Indies. She showed such extreme gallantry in the attack on Mauritius and in the siege of Areacopong, that she was chosen for special work in a forlorn hope. In this fight she avenged the death of a comrade by killing the author of it with her own hands. At the siege of Pondicherry she received eleven wounds in the legs, and a ball in the body which she extracted herself for fear of revealing the secret of her sex. On her return voyage to England she heard that she need not bother about killing her husband, because he had been decently hanged for murder. So on landing at Portsmouth she revealed herself to her messmates as a woman, and one of them promptly proposed to her. She declined and went on the stage, but ultimately received a pension of thirty pounds a year, and set up as a publican at the sign of the Women in Masquerade.

Anna Mills, able seaman on board the Maidstone frigate in 1740, made herself famous for desperate valor.

Mary Ann, youngest of Lord Talbot’s sixteen natural children, was the victim of a wicked guardian who took her to the wars as his foot-boy. As a drummer boy she served through the campaigns in Flanders, dressing two severe wounds herself. Her subsequent masquerade as a sailor led to countless adventures. She was a seaman on a French lugger, powder monkey on a British ship of the line, fought in Lord Howe’s great victory and was crippled for life. Later she was a merchant seaman, after that a jeweler in London, pensioned for military service, and was last heard of as a bookseller’s housemaid in 1807.

Mary Dixon did sixteen years’ service, and fought at Waterloo. She was still living fifty years afterward, “a strong, powerful, old woman.”

Phœbe Hessel fought in the fifth regiment of foot, and was wounded in the arm at Fontenoy. After many years of soldiering she retired from service and was pensioned by the prince regent, George IV. A tombstone is inscribed to her memory in the old churchyard at Brighton.

In this bald record there is no room for the adventures of such military and naval heroines as prisoners of war, as leaders in battle, as victims of shipwreck, or as partakers in some of the most extraordinary love-affairs ever heard of.

Hundreds of stories might be told of women conspicuous for valor, meeting hazards as great as ever have fallen to the lot of men. In one case, the casting away of the French frigate Medusa, the men, almost without exception, performed prodigies of cowardice, while two or three of the women made a wonderful journey across the Sahara Desert to Senegambia, which is the one bright episode in the most disgraceful disaster on record. In the defenses of Leyden and Haarlem, besieged by Spanish armies, the Dutch women manned the ramparts with the men, inspired them throughout the hopeless months, and shared the general fate when all the survivors were butchered. And the valor of Englishwomen during the sieges of our strongholds in India, China and South Africa, has made some of the brightest pages of our history.

XLIX THE CONQUERORS OF INDIA

Only the other day, the king of England was proclaimed emperor of India, and all the princes and governors of that empire presented their swords in homage. This homage was rendered at Delhi, the ancient capital of Hindustan; and it is only one hundred and ten years since Delhi fell, and Hindustan surrendered to the British arms. We have to deal with the events that led up to the conquest of India.

The Moslem sultans, sons of the Great Mogul, had long reigned over Hindustan, but in 1784 Shah Alam, last of these emperors, was driven from Delhi. In his ruin he appealed for help to Madhoji Scindhia, a Hindu prince from the South, who kindly restored the emperor to his palace, then gave him into the keeping of a jailer, who gouged out the old man’s eyes. Still Shah Alam, the blind, helpless, and at times very hungry prisoner, was emperor of Northern India, and in his august name Scindhia led the armies to collect the taxes of Hindustan. No tax was collected without a battle.

Scindhia himself was one of many turbulent Mahratta princes subject to the peshwa of Poona, near Bombay. He had to sit on the peshwa’s head at Poona, and the emperor’s head at Delhi, while he fought the whole nobility and gentry of India, and kept one eye cocked for British invasions from the seaboard. The British held the ocean, surrounded India, and were advancing inland. Madhoji Scindhia was a very busy man.

He had never heard of tourists, and when De Boigne, an Italian gentleman, came up-country to see the sights, his highness, scenting a spy, stole the poor man’s luggage. De Boigne, veteran of the French and Russian armies, and lately retired from the British service, was annoyed at the loss of his luggage, and having nothing left but his sword, offered the use of that to Scindhia’s nearest enemy. In those days scores of Europeans, mostly French, and scandalous rogues as a rule, were serving in native armies. Though they liked a fight, they so loved money that they would sell their masters to the highest bidder. Scindhia observed that De Boigne was a pretty good man, and the Savoyard adventurer was asked to enter his service.

De Boigne proved honest, faithful to his prince, a tireless worker, a glorious leader, the very pattern of manliness. The battalions which he raised for Scindhia were taught the art of war as known in Europe, they were well armed, fed, disciplined, and paid their wages; they were led by capable white men, and always victorious in the field. At Scindhia’s death, De Boigne handed over to the young prince Daulat Rao, his heir, an army of forty thousand men, which had never known defeat, together with the sovereignty of India.

The new Scindhia was rotten, and now the Italian, broken down with twenty years of service, longed for his home among the Italian vineyards. Before parting with his highness, he warned him rather to disband the whole army than ever be tempted into conflict with the English. So De Boigne laid down the burden of the Indian empire, and retired to his vineyards in Savoy. There for thirty years he befriended the poor, lived simply, entertained royally, and so died full of years and honors.

While De Boigne was still fighting for Scindhia, a runaway Irish sailor had drifted up-country, and taken service in one of the native states as a private soldier. George Thomas was as chivalrous as De Boigne, with a great big heart, a clear head, a terrific sword, and a reckless delight in war. Through years of rough and tumble adventure he fought his way upward, until with his own army of five thousand men he invaded and conquered the Hariana. This district, just to the westward of Delhi, was a desert, peopled by tribes so fierce that they had never been subdued, but their Irish king won all their hearts, and they settled down quite peacefully under his government. His revenue was eighteen hundred thousand pounds a year. At Hansi, his capital town, he coined his own money, cast his own cannon, made muskets and powder, and set up a pension fund for widows and orphans of his soldiers. All round him were hostile states, and whenever he felt dull he conquered a kingdom or so, and levied tribute. If his men went hungry, he starved with them; if they were weary, he marched afoot; the army worshiped him, and the very terror of his name brought strong cities to surrender, put legions of Sikh cavalry to flight. All things seemed possible to such a man, even the conquest of great Hindustan.

De Boigne had been succeeded as commander-in-chief under Scindhia by Perron, a runaway sailor, a Frenchman, able and strong. De Boigne’s power had been a little thing compared with the might and splendor of Perron, who actually reigned over Hindustan, stole the revenues, and treated Scindhia’s orders with contempt. Perron feared only one man on earth, this rival adventurer, this Irish rajah of the Hariana, and sent an expedition to destroy him.

The new master of Hindustan detested the English, and degrading the capable British officers who had served De Boigne, procured Frenchmen to take their place, hairdressers, waiters, scalawags, all utterly useless. Major Bourguien, the worst of the lot, was sent against Thomas and got a thrashing.

But Thomas, poor soul, had a deadlier enemy than this coward, and now lay drunk in camp for a week celebrating his victory instead of attending to business. He awakened to find his force of five thousand men besieged by thirty thousand veterans. There was no water, spies burned his stacks of forage, his battalions were bribed to desert, or lost all hope. Finally with three English officers and two hundred cavalry, Thomas cut his way through the investing army and fled to his capital.

The coward Bourguien had charge of the pursuing force that now invested Hanei. Bourguien’s officers breached the walls and took the town by storm, but Thomas fell back upon the citadel. Then Bourguien sent spies to bribe the garrison that Thomas might be murdered, but his officers went straight to warn the fallen king. To them he surrendered.

That night Thomas dined with the officers, and all were merry when Bourguien proposed a toast insulting his prisoner. The officers turned their glasses down refusing to drink. Thomas burst into tears; but then he drew upon Bourguien, and waving the glittering blade, “One Irish sword,” he cried, “is still sufficient for a hundred Frenchmen!” Bourguien bolted.

Loyal in the days of his greatness, the fallen king was received with honors at the British outposts upon the Ganges. There he was giving valuable advice to the governor-general when a map of India was laid before him, the British possessions marked red. He swept his hand across India: “All this ought to be red.”

It is all red now, and the British conquest of India arose out of the defense made by this great wild hero against General Perron, ruler of Hindustan. Scindhia, who had lifted Perron from the dust, and made him commander-in-chief of his army, was now in grave peril on the Deccan, beset by the league of Mahratta princes. In his bitter need he sent to Perron for succor. Perron, busy against his enemy in the Hariana, left Scindhia to his fate.

Perron had no need of Scindhia now, but was leagued with Napoleon to hand over the Indian empire to France. He betrayed his master.

Now Scindhia, had the Frenchmen been loyal, could have checked the Mahratta princes, but these got out of hand, and one of them, Holkar, drove the Mahratta emperor, the peshwa of Poona, from his throne. The peshwa fled to Bombay, and returned with a British army under Sir Arthur Wellesley. So came the battle of Assaye, wherein the British force of four thousand five hundred men overthrew the Mahratta army of fifty thousand men, captured a hundred guns, and won Poona, the capital of the South. Meanwhile for fear of Napoleon’s coming, Perron, his servant, had to be overthrown. A British army under General Lake swept Perron’s army out of existence and captured Delhi, the capital of the North. Both the capital cities of India fell to English arms, both emperors came under British protection, and that vast empire was founded wherein King George now reigns. As to Perron, his fall was pitiful, a freak of cowardice. He betrayed everybody, and sneaked away to France with a large fortune.

And Arthur Wellesley, victor in that stupendous triumph of Assaye, became the Iron Duke of Wellington, destined to liberate Europe at Waterloo.

L
A. D. 1805 THE MAN WHO SHOT LORD NELSON

This story is from the memoirs of Robert Guillemard, a conscript in the Grand Army of France, and to his horror drafted for a marine on board the battle-ship Redoubtable. The Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three battle-ships lay in Cadiz, and Villeneuve, the nice old gentleman in command, was still breathless after being chased by Lord Nelson across the Atlantic and back again. Now, having given Nelson the slip, he had fierce orders from the Emperor Napoleon to join the French channel fleet, for the invasion of England. The nice old gentleman knew that his fleet was manned largely with helpless recruits, ill-paid, ill-found, most scandalously fed, sick with a righteous terror lest Nelson come and burn them in their harbor.

Then Nelson came, with twenty-seven battle-ships, raging for a fight, and Villeneuve had to oblige for fear of Napoleon’s anger.

The fleets met off the sand-dunes of Cape Trafalgar, drawn up in opposing lines for battle, and when they closed, young Guillemard’s ship, the Redoubtable, engaged Lord Nelson’s Victory, losing thirty men to her first discharge.

Guillemard had never been in action, and as the thunders broke from the gun tiers below, he watched with mingled fear and rage the rush of seamen at their work on deck, and his brothers of the marines at their musketry, until everything was hidden in trailing wreaths of smoke, from which came the screams of the wounded, the groans of the dying.

Some seventy feet overhead, at the caps of the lower masts, were widespread platforms, the fighting tops on which the best marksmen were always posted. “All our topmen,” says Guillemard, “had been killed, when two sailors and four soldiers, of whom I was one, were ordered to occupy their post in the tops. While we were going aloft, the balls and grapeshot showered around us, struck the masts and yards, knocked large splinters from them, and cut the rigging to pieces. One of my companions was wounded beside me, and fell from a height of thirty feet to the deck, where he broke his neck. When I reached the top my first movement was to take a view of the prospect presented by the hostile fleets. For more than a league extended a thick cloud of smoke, above which were discernible a forest of masts and rigging, and the flags, the pendants and the fire of the three nations. Thousands of flashes, more or less near, continually penetrated this cloud, and a rolling noise pretty similar to the sound of thunder, but much stronger, arose from its bosom.”

Guillemard goes on to describe a duel between the topmen of the Redoubtable and those of the Victory only a few yards distant, and when it was finished he lay alone among the dead who crowded the swaying platform.

“On the poop of the English vessel was an officer covered with orders and with only one arm. From what I had heard of Nelson I had no doubt that it was he. He was surrounded by several officers, to whom he seemed to be giving orders. At the moment I first perceived him several of his sailors were wounded beside him by the fire of the Redoubtable. As I had received no orders to go down, and saw myself forgotten in the tops, I thought it my duty to fire on the poop of the English vessel, which I saw quite clearly exposed, and close to me. I could even have taken aim at the men I saw, but I fired at hazard among the groups of sailors and officers. All at once I saw great confusion on board the Victory; the men crowded round the officer whom I had taken for Nelson. He had just fallen, and was taken below covered with a cloak. The agitation shown at this moment left me no doubt that I had judged rightly, and that it really was the English admiral. An instant afterward the Victory ceased from firing, the deck was abandoned.... I hurried below to inform the captain.... He believed me the more readily as the slackening of the fire indicated that an event of the highest importance occupied the attention of the English ship’s crew.... He gave immediate orders for boarding, and everything was prepared for it in a moment. It is even said that young Fontaine, a midshipman ... passed by the ports into the lower deck of the English vessel, found it abandoned, and returned to notify that the ship had surrendered.... However, as a part of our crew, commanded by two officers, were ready to spring upon the enemy’s deck, the fire recommenced with a fury it had never had from the beginning of the action.... In less than half an hour our vessel, without having hauled down her colors, had in fact, surrendered. Her fire had gradually slackened and then had ceased altogether.... Not more than one hundred fifty men survived out of a crew of about eight hundred, and almost all those were more or less severely wounded.”

When these were taken on board the Victory, Guillemard learned how the bullet which struck down through Lord Nelson’s shoulder and shattered the spine below, had come from the fighting tops of the Redoubtable, where he had been the only living soul. He speaks of his grief as a man, his triumph as a soldier of France, who had delivered his country from her great enemy. What it meant for England judge now after nearly one hundred years, when one meets a bluejacket in the street with the three white lines of braid upon his collar in memory of Nelson’s victories at Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar, and the black neckcloth worn in mourning for his death.

It seemed at the time that the very winds sang Nelson’s requiem, for with the night came a storm putting the English shattered fleet in mortal peril, while of the nineteen captured battle-ships not one was fit to brave the elements. For, save some few vessels that basely ran away before the action, both French and Spaniards had fought with sublime desperation, and when the English prize-crews took possession, they and their prisoners were together drowned. The Aigle was cast away, and not one man escaped; the Santissima Trinidad, the largest ship in the world, foundered; the Indomitable sank with fifteen hundred wounded; the Achille, with her officers shooting themselves, her sailors drunk, went blazing through the storm until the fire caught her magazine. And so with the rest of eighteen blood-soaked wrecks, burned, foundered, or cast away, while only one outlived that night of horror.

Lord Nelson

When the day broke Admiral Villeneuve was brought on board the Victory, where Nelson lay in state, for the voyage to England. Villeneuve, wounded in the hand, was unable to write, and sent among the French prisoners for a clerk. For this service Guillemard volunteered as the only uninjured soldier who could write. So Guillemard attended the admiral all through the months of their residence at Arlesford, in Devon, where they were at large on parole. The old man was treated with respect and sympathy.

Prisoners of war are generally released by exchange between fighting powers, rank for rank, man for man; but after five months Villeneuve was allowed to return to France. He pledged his honor that unless duly exchanged he would surrender again on the English coast at the end of ninety days. So, attended by Guillemard and his servant, he crossed the channel, and from the town of Rennes—the place where Dreyfus had his trial not long ago—he wrote despatches to the government in Paris. He was coming, he said in a private letter, to arraign most of his surviving captains on the charge of cowardice at Trafalgar.

Of this it seems the captains got some warning, and decided that for the sake of their own health Villeneuve should not reach Paris alive.

Anyway, Guillemard says that while the admiral lay in the Hotel de Bresil, at Rennes, five strangers appeared—men in civilian dress, who asked him many questions about Villeneuve. The secretary was proud of his master, glad to talk about so distinguished a man, and thought no evil when he gave his answers. The leader of the five was a southern Frenchman, the others foreigners, deeply tanned, who wore mustaches—in those days an unusual ornament.

That night the admiral had gone to bed in his room on the first floor of the inn, and the secretary was asleep on the floor above. A cry disturbed him, and taking his sword and candle, he ran down-stairs in time to see the five strangers sneak by him hurriedly. Guillemard rushed to the admiral’s room “and saw the unfortunate man, whom the balls of Trafalgar had respected, stretched pale and bloody on his bed. He ... breathed hard, and struggled with the agonies of death.... Five deep wounds pierced his breast.”

So it was the fate of the slayer of Nelson to be alone with Villeneuve at his death.

When he reached Paris the youngster was summoned to the Tuileries, and the Emperor Napoleon made him tell the whole story of the admiral’s assassination. Yet officially the death was announced as suicide, and Guillemard met the leader of the five assassins walking in broad daylight on the boulevards.

The lad kept his mouth shut.

Guillemard lived to fight in many of the emperor’s battles, to be one of the ten thousand prisoners of the Spaniards on the desert island of the Cabrera, whence he made a gallant escape; to be a prisoner of the Russians in Siberia; to assist in King Murat’s flight from France; and, finally, after twenty years of adventure, to return with many wounds and few honors to his native village.

LI
A. D. 1812 THE FALL OF NAPOLEON

The greatest of modern adventurers, Napoleon Bonaparte, was something short of a gentleman, a person of mean build, coarse tastes, odious manners and defective courage, yet gifted with Satanic beauty of face, charm that bewitched all fighting men, stupendous genius in war and government. Beginning as a penniless lieutenant of French artillery, he rose to be captain, colonel, general, commander-in-chief, consul of France, emperor of the French, master of Europe, almost conqueror of the world—and he was still only thirty-three years of age, when at the height of his glory, he invaded Russia. His army of invasion was gathered from all his subject nations—Germans, Swiss, Italians, Poles, Austrians, numbering more than half a million men, an irresistible and overwhelming force, launched like a shell into the heart of Russia.

The Russian army could not hope to defeat Napoleon, was routed again and again in attempting to check his advance, yet in retreating laid the country waste, burned all the standing harvest, drove away the cattle, left the towns in ashes. Napoleon’s host marched through a desert, while daily, by waste of battle, wreckage of men left with untended wounds, horrors of starvation, and wolf-like hordes of Cossacks who cut off all the stragglers, the legions were swept away. In Lithuania alone Napoleon lost a hundred thousand men, and that only a fourth part of those who perished before the army reached the gates of Moscow.

That old city, hallowed by centuries of brave endeavor, stored with the spoils of countless victories, that holy place at the very sight of which the Russian traveler prostrated himself in prayer, had been made ready for Napoleon’s coming. Never has any nation prepared so awful a sacrifice as that which wrenched a million people from their homes. The empty capital was left in charge of a few officers, then all the convicts were released and provided with torches. Every vestige of food had been taken away, but the gold, the gems, the silver, the precious things of treasuries, churches and palaces, remained as bait.

Despite the horrors of the march, Napoleon’s entry was attended by all the gorgeous pageantry of the Grand Army, a blaze of gold and color, conquered Europe at the heels of the little Corsican adventurer with waving flags and triumphal music. The cavalry found cathedrals for stabling, the guard had palaces for barracks, where they could lie at ease through the winter; but night after night the great buildings burst into flames, day after day the foraging parties were caught in labyrinths of blazing streets, and the army staled on a diet of wine and gold in the burning capital.

In mortal fear the emperor attempted to treat for peace, but Russia kept him waiting for a month, while her troops closed down on the line of escape, and the winter was coming on—the Russian winter.

From the time when the retreat began through a thousand miles of naked wilderness, not a single ration was issued to the starving army. The men were loaded with furs, brocades, chalices, ingots of silver, bars of gold and jewels, but they had no food. The transport numbered thousands of carts laden with grain, but the horses died because there was no forage, so all the commissariat, except Napoleon’s treasure train, was left wrecked by the wayside.

Then the marching regiments were placed in the wake of the cavalry, that they might get the dying horses for food, but when the cold came there was no fuel to cook the frozen meat, and men’s lips would bleed when they tried to gnaw that ice. So the wake of the army was a wide road blocked with broken carts, dead horses, abandoned guns, corpses of men, where camp followers remained to murder the dying, strip the dead and gather the treasures of Moscow, the swords, the gold lace, the costly uniforms, until they were slaughtered by the Cossacks. Then came the deep snow which covered everything.

No words of mine could ever tell the story, but here are passages from the Memoirs of Sergeant Burgogne (Heineman). I have ventured to condense parts of his narrative, memories of the lost army, told by one who saw. He had been left behind to die:—

“At that moment the moon came out, and I began to walk faster. In this immense cemetery and this awful silence I was alone, and I began to cry like a child. The tears relieved me, gradually my courage came back, and feeling stronger, I set out again, trusting to God’s mercy, taking care to avoid the dead bodies.

“I noticed something I took for a wagon. It was a broken canteen cart, the horses which had drawn it not only dead, but partly cut to pieces for eating. Around the cart were seven dead bodies almost naked, and half covered with snow; one of them still covered with a cloak and a sheepskin. On stooping to look at the body I saw that it was a woman. I approached the dead woman to take the sheepskin for a covering, but it was impossible to move it. A piercing cry came from the cart. ‘Marie! Marie! I am dying!’

“Mounting on the body of the horse in the shafts I steadied myself by the top of the cart. I asked what was the matter. A feeble voice answered, ‘Something to drink!’

“I thought at once of the frozen blood in my pouch, and tried to get down to fetch it, but the moon suddenly disappeared behind a great black cloud, and I as suddenly fell on top of three dead bodies. My head was down lower than my legs, and my face resting on one of the dead hands. I had been accustomed for long enough to this sort of company, but now—I suppose because I was alone—an awful feeling of terror came over me—I could not move, and I began screaming like a madman—I tried to help myself up by my arm, but found my hand on a face, and my thumb went into its mouth. At that moment the moon came out.

“But a change came over me now. I felt ashamed of my weakness, and a wild sort of frenzy instead of terror took possession of me. I got up raving and swearing, and trod on anything that came near me ... and I cursed the sky above me, defying it, and taking my musket, I struck at the cart—very likely I struck also at the poor devils under my feet.”

Such was the road, and here was the passing of the army which Burgogne had overtaken.

“This was November twenty-five, 1812, perhaps about seven o’clock in the morning, and as yet it was hardly light. I was musing on all that I had seen, when the head of the column appeared. Those in advance seemed to be generals, a few on horseback, but the greater part on foot. There were also a great number of other officers, the remnant of the doomed squadron and battalion formed on the twenty-second and barely existing at the end of three days. Those on foot dragged themselves painfully along, almost all of them having their feet frozen and wrapped in rags, and all nearly dying of hunger. Afterward came the small remains of the cavalry of the guard. The emperor came next on foot, carrying a baton, Murat walked on foot at his right, and on his left, the Prince Eugene, viceroy of Italy. Next came the marshals—Berthier, Prince of Neuchâtel, Ney, Mortier, Lefevre, with other marshals and generals whose corps were nearly annihilated. Seven or eight hundred officers and non-commissioned officers followed walking in order, and perfect silence, and carrying the eagles of their different regiments which had so often led them to victory. This was all that remained of sixty thousand men. After them came the imperial guard. And men cried at seeing the emperor on foot.”

So far the army had kept its discipline, and at the passage of the River Berezina the engineers contrived to build a bridge. But while the troops were crossing, the Russians began to drive the rear guard, and the whole herd broke into panic. “The confusion and disorder went on increasing, and reached their full height when Marshal Victor was attacked by the Russians, and shells and bullets showered thickly upon us. To complete our misery, snow began to fall, and a cold wind blew. This dreadful state of things lasted all day and through the next night, and all this time the Berezina became gradually filled with ice, dead bodies of men and horses, while the bridge got blocked up with carts full of wounded men, some of which rolled over the edge into the water. Between eight and nine o’clock that evening, Marshal Victor began his retreat. He and his men had to cross the bridge over a perfect mountain of corpses.”

Still thousands of stragglers had stayed to burn abandoned wagons, and make fires to warm them before they attempted the bridge. On these the Russians descended, but it was too late for flight, and of the hundreds who attempted to swim the river, not one reached the farther bank. To prevent the Russians from crossing, the bridge was set on fire, and so horror was piled on horror that it would be gross offense to add another word.

Of half a million men who had entered Russia, there were only twenty-five thousand left after that crossing of the Berezina. These were veterans for the most part, skilled plunderers, who foraged for themselves, gleaning a few potatoes from stripped fields, shooting stray Cossacks for the food they had in their wallets, trading with the Jews who lurked in ruined towns, or falling back at the worst on frozen horse-flesh. Garrisons left by Napoleon on his advance fell in from time to time with the retreating army, but unused to the new conditions, wasted rapidly. The veterans found their horses useful for food, and left afoot, they perished.

Even to the last, remnants of lost regiments rallied to the golden eagles upon their standards, but these little clusters of men no longer kept their ranks, for as they marched the strong tried to help the weak, and often comrades would die together rather than part. All were frozen, suffering the slow exhaustion of dysentery, the miseries of vermin and starvation, and those who lived to the end were broken invalids, who never again could serve the emperor.

From Smorgony, Napoleon went ahead, traveling rapidly to send the relief of sleighs and food which met the survivors on the German border. Thence he went on to Paris to raise a new army; for now there was conspiracy in France for the overthrow of the despot, and Europe rose to destroy him. So on the field of Leipsic, in the battle of the nations, Napoleon was overwhelmed.

Once again he challenged fate, escaped from his island prison of Elba, and with a third army marched against armed Europe. And so came Waterloo, with that last banishment to Saint Helena, where the great adventurer fretted out his few sore years, dreaming of glories never to be revived and that great empire which was forever lost.

LII
A. D. 1813 RISING WOLF

This is the story of Rising Wolf, condensed from the beautiful narrative in My Life as an Indian, by J. B. Schultz.

“I had heard much of a certain white man named Hugh Monroe, and in Blackfoot, Rising Wolf. One afternoon I was told that he had arrived in camp with his numerous family, and a little later met him at a feast given by Big Lake. In the evening I invited him over to my lodge and had a long talk with him while he ate bread and meat and beans, and smoked numerous pipefuls of tobacco.” White man’s food is good after years without any. “We eventually became firm friends. Even in his old age Rising Wolf was the quickest, most active man I ever saw. He was about five feet six in height, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and his firm square chin and rather prominent nose betokened what he was, a man of courage and determination. His father, Hugh Monroe, was a colonel in the British army, his mother a member of the La Roches, a noble family of French émigrés, bankers of Montreal and large land owners in that vicinity.

“Hugh, junior, was born on the family estate at Three Rivers (Quebec) and attended the parish school just long enough to learn to read and write. All his vacations and many truant days from the class room were spent in the great forest surrounding his home. The love of nature, of adventure and wild life were born in him. He first saw the light in July, 1798. In 1813, when but fifteen years of age, he persuaded his parents to allow him to enter the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company and started westward with a flotilla of that company’s canoes that spring. His father gave him a fine English smoothbore, his mother a pair of the famous La Roche dueling pistols and a prayer book. The family priest gave him a rosary and cross and enjoined him to pray frequently. Traveling all summer, they arrived at Lake Winnipeg in the autumn and wintered there. As soon as the ice went out in the spring the journey was continued and one afternoon in July, Monroe beheld Mountain Fort, a new post of the company’s not far from the Rocky Mountains.

“Around about it were encamped thousands of Blackfeet waiting to trade for the goods the flotilla had brought up and to obtain on credit ammunition, fukes (trade guns), traps and tobacco. As yet the company had no Blackfoot interpreter. The factor perceiving that Monroe was a youth of more than ordinary intelligence at once detailed him to live and travel with the Piegans (a Blackfoot tribe) and learn their language, also to see that they returned to Mountain Fort with their furs the succeeding summer. Word had been received that, following the course of Lewis and Clarke, American traders were yearly pushing farther and farther westward and had even reached the mouth of the Yellowstone. The company feared their competition. Monroe was to do his best to prevent it.

“‘At last,’ Monroe told me, ‘the day came for our departure, and I set out with the chiefs and medicine men at the head of the long procession. There were eight hundred lodges of the Piegans there, about eight thousand souls. They owned thousands of horses. Oh, but it was a grand sight to see that long column of riders and pack animals, and loose horses trooping over the plains. We traveled on southward all the long day, and about an hour or two before sundown we came to the rim of a valley through which flowed a cotton wood-bordered stream. We dismounted at the top of the hill, and spread our robes intending to sit there until the procession passed by into the bottom and put up the lodges. A medicine man produced a large stone pipe, filled it and attempted to light it with flint and steel and a bit of punk (rotten wood), but somehow he could get no spark. I motioned him to hand it to me, and drawing my sunglass from my pocket, I got the proper focus and set the tobacco afire, drawing several mouthfuls of smoke through the long stem.

“‘As one man all those round about sprang to their feet and rushed toward me, shouting and gesticulating as if they had gone crazy. I also jumped up, terribly frightened, for I thought they were going to do me harm, perhaps kill me. The pipe was wrenched out of my grasp by the chief himself, who eagerly began to smoke and pray. He had drawn but a whiff or two when another seized it, and from him it was taken by still another. Others turned and harangued the passing column; men and women sprang from their horses and joined the group, mothers pressing close and rubbing their babes against me, praying earnestly meanwhile. I recognized a word that I had already learned—Natos—Sun—and suddenly the meaning of the commotion became clear; they thought that I was Great Medicine; that I had called upon the Sun himself to light the pipe, and that he had done so. The mere act of holding up my hand above the pipe was a supplication to their God. They had perhaps not noticed the glass, or if they had, had thought it some secret charm or amulet. At all events I had suddenly become a great personage, and from then on the utmost consideration and kindness was accorded to me.

“‘When I entered Lone Walker’s lodge that evening—he was the chief, and my host—I was greeted by deep growls from either side of the doorway, and was horrified to see two nearly grown grizzly bears acting as if about to spring upon me. I stopped and stood quite still, but I believe that my hair was rising; I know that my flesh felt to be shrinking. I was not kept in suspense. Lone Walker spoke to his pets, and they immediately lay down, noses between their paws, and I passed on to the place pointed out to me, the first couch at the chief’s left hand. It was some time before I became accustomed to the bears, but we finally came to a sort of understanding with one another. They ceased growling at me as I passed in and out of the lodge, but would never allow me to touch them, bristling up and preparing to fight if I attempted to do so. In the following spring they disappeared one night and were never seen again.’

“Think how the youth, Rising Wolf, must have felt as he journeyed southward over the vast plains, and under the shadow of the giant mountains which lie between the Saskatchewan and the Missouri, for he knew that he was the first of his race to behold them.” We were born a little too late!

“Monroe often referred to that first trip with the Piegans as the happiest time of his life.”

In the moon of falling leaves they came to Pile of Rocks River, and after three months went on to winter on Yellow River. Next summer they wandered down the Musselshell, crossed the Big River and thence westward by way of the Little Rockies and the Bear Paw Mountains to the Marias. Even paradise has its geography.

“Rifle and pistol were now useless as the last rounds of powder and ball had been fired. But what mattered that? Had they not their bows and great sheaves of arrows? In the spring they had planted on the banks of the Judith a large patch of their own tobacco which they would harvest in due time.

“One by one young Rising Wolf’s garments were worn out and cast aside. The women of the lodge tanned deerskins and bighorn (sheep) and from them Lone Walker himself cut and sewed shirts and leggings, which he wore in their place. It was not permitted for women to make men’s clothing. So ere long he was dressed in full Indian costume, even to the belt and breech-clout, and his hair grew so that it fell in rippling waves down over his shoulders.” A warrior never cut his hair, so white men living with Indians followed their fashion, else they were not admitted to rank as warriors. “He began to think of braiding it. Ap-ah’-ki, the shy young daughter of the chief, made his footwear—thin parfleche (arrow-proof)—soled moccasins (skin-shoes) for summer, beautifully embroidered with colored porcupine quills; thick, soft warm ones of buffalo robe for winter.

“‘I could not help but notice her,’ he said, ‘on the first night I stayed in her father’s lodge.... I learned the language easily, quickly, yet I never spoke to her nor she to me, for, as you know, the Blackfeet think it unseemly for youths and maidens to do so.

“‘One evening a man came into the lodge and began to praise a certain youth with whom I had often hunted; spoke of his bravery, his kindness, his wealth, and ended by saying that the young fellow presented to Lone Walker thirty horses, and wished, with Ap-ah’-ki, to set up a lodge of his own. I glanced at the girl and caught her looking at me; such a look! expressing at once fear, despair and something else which I dared not believe I interpreted aright. The chief spoke: “Tell your friend,” he said, “that all you have spoken of him is true; I know that he is a real man, a good, kind, brave, generous young man, yet for all that I can not give him my daughter.”

“‘Again I looked at Ap-ah’-ki and she at me. Now she was smiling and there was happiness in her eyes. But if she smiled I could not. I had heard him refuse thirty head of horses. What hope had I then, who did not even own the horse I rode? I, who received for my services only twenty pounds a year, from which must be deducted the various articles I bought. Surely the girl was not for me. I suffered.

“‘It was a little later, perhaps a couple of weeks, that I met her in the trail, bringing home a bundle of fire-wood. We stopped and looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then I spoke her name. Crash went the fuel on the ground, and we embraced and kissed regardless of those who might be looking.

“‘So, forgetting the bundle of wood, we went hand in hand and stood before Lone Walker, where he sat smoking his long pipe, out on the shady side of the lodge.

“‘The chief smiled. “Why, think you, did I refuse the thirty horses?” he asked, and before I could answer: “Because I wanted you for my son-in-law, wanted a white man because he is more cunning, much wiser than the Indian, and I need a counselor. We have not been blind, neither I nor my women. There is nothing more to say except this: be good to her.”

“‘That very day they set up a small lodge for us, and stored it with robes and parfleches of dried meat and berries, gave us one of their two brass kettles, tanned skins, pack saddles, ropes, all that a lodge should contain. And, not least, Lone Walker told me to choose thirty horses from his large herd. In the evening we took possession of our house and were happy.’

“Monroe remained in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company a number of years, raising a large family of boys and girls, most of whom are alive to-day. The oldest, John, is about seventy-five years of age, but still young enough to go to the Rockies near his home every autumn, and kill a few bighorn and elk, and trap a few beavers. The old man never revisited his home; never saw his parents after they parted with him at the Montreal docks. He intended to return to them for a brief visit some time, but kept deferring it, and then came letters two years old to say that they were both dead. Came also a letter from an attorney, saying that they had bequeathed him a considerable property, that he must go to Montreal and sign certain papers in order to take possession of it. At the time the factor of Mountain Fort was going to England on leave; to him, in his simple trustfulness Monroe gave a power of attorney in the matter. The factor never returned, and by virtue of the papers he had signed the frontiersman lost his inheritance. But that was a matter of little moment to him then. Had he not a lodge and family, good horses and a vast domain actually teeming with game wherein to wander? What more could one possibly want?

“Leaving the Hudson’s Bay Company, Monroe sometimes worked for the American Fur Company, but mostly as a free trapper, wandered from the Saskatchewan to the Yellowstone and from the Rockies to Lake Winnipeg. The headwaters of the South Saskatchewan were one of his favorite hunting grounds. Thither in the early fifties he guided the noted Jesuit Father, De Smet, and at the foot of the beautiful lakes just south of Chief Mountain they erected a huge wooden cross and named the two bodies of water Saint Mary’s Lakes.” Here the Canada and United States boundary climbs the Rocky Mountains.

“One winter after his sons John and François had married they were camping there for the season, the three lodges of the family, when one night a large war party of Assiniboins attacked them. The daughters Lizzie, Amelia and Mary had been taught to shoot, and together they made a brave resistance, driving the Indians away just before daylight, with the loss of five of their number, Lizzie killing one of them as he was about to let down the bars of the horse corral.

“Besides other furs, beaver, fisher, marten and wolverine, they killed more than three hundred wolves that winter by a device so unique, yet simple, that it is well worth recording. By the banks of the outlet of the lakes they built a long pen twelve by sixteen feet at the base, and sloping sharply inward and upward to a height of seven feet. The top of the pyramid was an opening about two feet six inches wide by eight feet in length. Whole deer, quarters of buffalo, any kind of meat handy was thrown into the pen, and the wolves, scenting the flesh and blood, seeing it plainly through the four to six inch spaces between the logs would eventually climb to the top and jump down through the opening. But they could not jump out, and there morning would find them uneasily pacing around and around in utter bewilderment.

“You will remember that the old man was a Catholic, yet I know that he had much faith in the Blackfoot religion, and believed in the efficiency of the medicine-man’s prayers and mysteries. He used often to speak of the terrible power possessed by a man named Old Sun. ‘There was one,’ he would say, ‘who surely talked with the gods, and was given some of their mysterious power. Sometimes of a dark night he would invite a few of us to his lodge, when all was calm and still. After all were seated his wives would bank the fire with ashes so that it was as dark within as without, and he would begin to pray. First to the Sun-chief, then to the wind maker, the thunder and the lightning. As he prayed, entreating them to come and do his will, first the lodge ears would begin to quiver with the first breath of a coming breeze, which gradually grew stronger and stronger till the lodge bent to the blasts, and the lodge poles strained and creaked. Then thunder began to boom, faint and far away, and lightning dimly to blaze, and they came nearer and nearer until they seemed to be just overhead; the crashes deafened us, the flashes blinded us, and all were terror-stricken. Then this wonderful man would pray them to go, and the wind would die down, and the thunder and lightning go on rumbling and flashing into the far distance until we heard and saw them no more.’”

LIII
A. D. 1819 SIMON BOLIVAR

Once at the stilted court of Spain young Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias, had the condescension to play at tennis with a mere colonial; and the bounder won.

Long afterward, when Don Ferdinand was king, the colonial challenged him to another ball game, one played with cannon-balls. This time the stake was the Spanish American empire, but Ferdinand played Bolivar, and again the bounder won.

“Now tell me,” a lady said once, “what animal reminds one most of the Señor Bolivar?”

And Bolivar thought he heard some one say “monkey,” whereat he flew into an awful passion, until the offender claimed that the word was “sparrow.” He stood five feet six inches, with a bird-like quickness, and a puckered face with an odd tang of monkey. Rich, lavish, gaudy, talking mock heroics, vain as a peacock, always on the strut unless he was on the run, there is no more pathetically funny figure in history than tragical Bolivar; who heard liberty, as he thought, knocking at the door of South America, and opened—to let in chaos.

“I don’t know,” drawled a Spaniard of that time, “to what class of beasts these South Americans belong.”

They were dogs, these Spanish colonials, treated as dogs, behaving as dogs. When they wanted a university Spain said they were only provided by Providence to labor in the mines. If they had opinions the Inquisition cured them of their errors. They were not allowed to hold any office or learn the arts of war and government. Spain sent officials to ease them of their surplus cash, and keep them out of mischief. Thanks to Spain they were no more fit for public affairs than a lot of Bengali baboos.

They were loyal as beaten dogs until Napoleon stole the Spanish crown for brother Joseph, and French armies promenaded all over Spain closely pursued by the British. There was no Spain left to love, but the colonials were not Napoleon’s dogs. Napoleon’s envoys to Venezuela were nearly torn to pieces before they escaped to sea, where a little British frigate came and gobbled them up. The sea belonged to the British, and so the colonials sent ambassadors, Bolivar and another gentleman, to King George. Please would he help them to gain their liberty? George had just chased Napoleon out of Spain, and said he would do his best with his allies, the Spaniards.

In London Bolivar unearthed a countryman who loved liberty and had fought for Napoleon, a real professional soldier. General Miranda was able and willing to lead the armies of freedom, until he actually saw the Venezuelan troops. Then he shied hard. He really must draw the line somewhere. Yes, he would take command of the rabble on one condition, that he got rid of Bolivar. To get away from Bolivar he would go anywhere and do anything. So he led his rabble and found them stout fighters, and drove the Spaniards out of the central provinces.

The politicians were sitting down to draft the first of many comic-opera constitutions when an awful sound, louder than any thunder, swept out of the eastern Andes, the earth rolled like a sea in a storm, and the five cities of the new republic crashed down in heaps of ruin. The barracks buried the garrisons, the marching troops were totally destroyed, the politicians were killed, and in all one hundred twenty thousand people perished. The only thing left standing in one church was a pillar bearing the arms of Spain; the only districts not wrecked were those still loyal to the Spanish government. The clergy pointed the moral, the ruined people repented their rebellion, and the Spanish forces took heart and closed in from every side upon the lost republic. Simon Bolivar generously surrendered General Miranda in chains to the victorious Spaniards.

So far one sees only, as poor Miranda did, that this man was a sickening cad. But he was something more. He stuck to the cause for which he had given his life, joined the rebels in what is now Colombia, was given a small garrison command and ordered to stay in his fort. In defiance of orders, he swept the Spaniards out of the Magdalena Valley, raised a large force, liberated the country, then marched into Venezuela, defeated the Spanish forces in a score of brilliant actions, and was proclaimed liberator with absolute power in both Colombia and Venezuela. One begins to marvel at this heroic leader until the cad looms out. “Spaniards and Canary islanders!” he wrote, “reckon on death even if you are neutral, unless you will work actively for the liberty of America. Americans! count on life even if you are culpable.”

Bolivar’s pet hobbies were three in number: Resigning his job as liberator; writing proclamations; committing massacres. “I order you,” he wrote to the governor of La Guayra, “to shoot all the prisoners in those dungeons, and in the hospital, without any exception whatever.”

So the prisoners of war were set to work building a funeral pyre. When this was ready eight hundred of them were brought up in batches, butchered with axes, bayonets and knives, and their bodies thrown on the flames. Meanwhile Bolivar, in his office, refreshed himself by writing a proclamation to denounce the atrocities of the Spaniards.

Southward of the Orinoco River there are vast level prairies called Llanos, a cattle country, handled by wild horsemen known as the Llaneros. In Bolivar’s time their leader called himself Boves, and he had as second in command Morales. Boves said that Morales was “atrocious.” Morales said that “Boves was a man of merit, but too blood-thirsty.” The Spaniards called their command “The Infernal Division.” At first they fought for the Revolution, afterward for Spain, but they were really quite impartial and spared neither age nor sex. This was the “Spanish” army which swept away the second Venezuelan republic, slaughtering the whole population save some few poor starving camps of fugitives. Then Boves reported to the Spanish general, “I have recovered the arms, ammunition, and the honor of the Spanish flag, which your excellency lost at Carabobo.”

From this time onward the situation was rather like a dog fight, with the republican dog somewhere underneath in the middle. At times Bolivar ran like a rabbit, at times he was granted a triumph, but whenever he had time to come up and breathe he fired off volleys of proclamations. In sixteen years a painstaking Colombian counted six hundred ninety-six battles, which makes an average of one every ninth day, not to mention massacres; but for all his puny body and feeble health Bolivar was always to be found in the very thick of the scrimmage.

Europe had entered on the peace of Waterloo, but the ghouls who stripped the dead after Napoleon’s battles had uniforms to sell which went to clothe the fantastic mobs, republican and royalist, who drenched all Spanish America with blood. There were soldiers, too, whose trade of war was at an end in Europe, who gladly listened to Bolivar’s agents, who offered gorgeous uniforms and promised splendid wages—never paid—and who came to join in the war for “liberty.” Three hundred Germans and nearly six thousand British veterans joined Bolivar’s colors to fight for the freedom of America, and nearly all of them perished in battle or by disease. Bolivar was never without British officers, preferred British troops to all others, and in his later years really earned the loyal love they gave him, while they taught the liberator how to behave like a white man.

It was in 1819 that Bolivar led a force of two thousand five hundred men across a flooded prairie. For a week they were up to their knees, at times to their necks in water under a tropic deluge of rain, swimming a dozen rivers beset by alligators. The climate and starvation bore very heavily upon the British troops. Beyond the flood they climbed the eastern Andes and crossed the Paramo at a height of thirteen thousand feet, swept by an icy wind in blinding fog—hard going for Venezuelans.

An Irishman, Colonel Rook, commanded the British contingent. “All,” he reported, “was quite well with his corps, which had had quite a pleasant march” through the awful gorges and over the freezing Paramo. A Venezuelan officer remarked here that one-fourth of the men had perished.

“It was true,” said Rook, “but it really was a very good thing, for the men who had dropped out were all the wastrels and weaklings of the force.”

Great was the astonishment of the royalists when Bolivar dropped on them out of the clouds, and in the battle of Boyacá they were put to rout. Next day Colonel Rook had his arm cut off by the surgeons, chaffing them about the beautiful limb he was losing. He died of the operation, but the British legion went on from victory to victory, melting away like snow until at the end negroes and Indians filled its illustrious companies. Colombia, Venezuela and Equador, Peru and Bolivia were freed from the Spanish yoke and, in the main, released by Bolivar’s tireless, unfailing and undaunted courage. But they could not stand his braggart proclamations, would not have him or any man for master, began a series of squabbles and revolutions that have lasted ever since, and proved themselves unfit for the freedom Bolivar gave. He knew at the end that he had given his life for a myth. On the eighth December, 1830, he dictated his final proclamation and on the tenth received the last rites of the church, being still his old braggart self. “Colombians! my last wishes are for the welfare of the fatherland. If my death contributes to the cessation of party strife, and to the consolidation of the Union, I shall descend in peace to the grave.” On the seventeenth his troubled spirit passed.

LIV
A. D. 1812 THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE

When Lieutenant Lord Thomas Cochrane commanded the brig of war Speedy, he used to carry about a whole broadside of her cannon-balls in his pocket. He had fifty-four men when he laid his toy boat alongside a Spanish frigate with thirty-two heavy guns and three hundred nineteen men, but the Spaniard could not fire down into his decks, whereas he blasted her with his treble-shotted pop-guns. Leaving only the doctor on board he boarded that Spaniard, got more than he bargained for, and would have been wiped out, but that a detachment of his sailors dressed to resemble black demons, charged down from the forecastle head. The Spaniards were so shocked that they surrendered.

For thirteen months the Speedy romped about, capturing in all fifty ships, one hundred and twenty-two guns, five hundred prisoners. Then she gave chase to three French battle-ships by mistake, and met with a dreadful end.

In 1809, Cochrane, being a bit of a chemist, and a first-rate mechanic, was allowed to make fireworks hulks loaded with explosives—with which he attacked a French fleet in the anchorage at Aix. The fleet got into a panic and destroyed itself.

And all his battles read like fairy tales, for this long-legged, red-haired Scot, rivaled Lord Nelson himself in genius and daring. At war he was the hero and idol of the fleet, but in peace a demon, restless, fractious, fiendish in humor, deadly in rage, playing schoolboy jokes on the admiralty and the parliament. He could not be happy without making swarms of powerful enemies, and those enemies waited their chance.

In February, 1814, a French officer landed at Dover with tidings that the Emperor Napoleon had been slain by Cossacks. The messenger’s progress became a triumphal procession, and amid public rejoicings he entered London to deliver his papers at the admiralty. Bells pealed, cannon thundered, the stock exchange went mad with the rise of prices, while the messenger—a Mr. Berenger—sneaked to the lodgings of an acquaintance, Lord Cochrane, and borrowed civilian clothes.

His news was false, his despatch a forgery, he had been hired by Cochrane’s uncle, a stock-exchange speculator, to contrive the whole blackguardly hoax. Cochrane knew nothing of the plot, but for the mere lending of that suit of clothes, he was sentenced to the pillory, a year’s imprisonment, and a fine of a thousand pounds. He was struck from the rolls of the navy, expelled from the house of commons, his banner as a Knight of the Bath torn down and thrown from the doors of Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster. In the end he was driven to disgraceful exile and hopeless ruin.

Four years later Cochrane, commanding the Chilian navy, sailed from Valparaiso to fight the Spanish fleet. Running away from his mother, a son of his—Tom Cochrane, junior—aged five, contrived to sail with the admiral, and in his first engagement, was spattered with the blood and brains of a marine.

“I’m not hurt, papa,” said the imp, “the shot didn’t touch me. Jack says that the ball is not made that will hurt mama’s boy.” Jack proved to be right, but it was in that engagement that Cochrane earned his Spanish title, “The Devil.” Three times he attempted to take Callao from the Spaniards, then in disgusted failure dispersed his useless squadron, and went off with his flag ship to Valdivia. For lack of officers, he kept the deck himself until he dropped. When he went below for a nap, the lieutenant left a middy in command, but the middy went to sleep and the ship was cast away.

Cochrane got her afloat; then, with all his gunpowder wet, went off with his sinking wreck to attack Valdivia. The place was a Spanish stronghold with fifteen forts and one hundred and fifteen guns. Cochrane, preferring to depend on cold steel, left the muskets behind, wrecked his boats in the surf, let his men swim, led them straight at the Spaniards, stormed the batteries, and seized the city. So he found some nice new ships, and an arsenal to equip them, for his next attack on Callao.

He had a fancy for the frigate, Esmeralda, which lay in Callao—thought she would suit him for a cruiser. She happened to be protected by a Spanish fleet, and batteries mounting three hundred guns, but Cochrane did not mind. El Diablo first eased the minds of the Spaniards by sending away two out of his three small vessels, but kept the bulk of their men, and all their boats, a detail not observed by the weary enemy. His boarding party, two hundred and forty strong, stole into the anchorage at midnight, and sorely surprised the Esmeralda. Cochrane, first on board, was felled with the butt end of a musket, and thrown back into his boat grievously hurt, in addition to which he had a bullet through his thigh before he took possession of the frigate. The fleet and batteries had opened fire, but El Diablo noticed that two neutral ships protected themselves with a display of lanterns arranged as a signal, “Please don’t hit me.” “That’s good enough for me,” said Cochrane and copied those lights which protected the neutrals. When the bewildered Spaniards saw his lanterns also, they promptly attacked the neutrals. So Cochrane stole away with his prize.

Although the great sailor delivered Chili and Peru from the Spaniards, the patriots ungratefully despoiled him of all his pay and rewards. Cochrane has been described as “a destroying angel with a limited income and a turn for politics.” Anyway he was misunderstood, and left Chili disgusted, to attend to the liberation of Brazil from the Portuguese. But if the Chilians were thieves, the Brazilians proved to be both thieves and cowards. Reporting to the Brazilian government that all their cartridges, fuses, guns, powder, spars and sails, were alike rotten, and all their men an encumbrance, he dismantled a squadron to find equipment for a single ship, the Pedro Primeiro. This he manned with British and Yankee adventurers. He had two other small but fairly effective ships when he commenced to threaten Bahia. There lay thirteen Portuguese war-ships, mounting four hundred and eighteen guns, seventy merchant ships, and a garrison of several thousand men. El Diablo’s blockade reduced the whole to starvation, the threat of his fireworks sent them into convulsions, and their leaders resolved on flight to Portugal. So the troops were embarked, the rich people took ship with their treasure, and the squadron escorted them to sea, where Cochrane grinned in the offing. For fifteen days he hung in the rear of that fleet, cutting off ships as they straggled. He had not a man to spare for charge of his prizes, but when he caught a ship he staved her water casks, disabled her rigging so that she could only run before the wind back to Bahia, and threw every weapon overboard. He captured seventy odd ships, half the troops, all the treasure, fought and out-maneuvered the war fleet so that he could not be caught, and only let thirteen wretched vessels escape to Lisbon. Such a deed of war has never been matched in the world’s annals, and Cochrane followed it by forcing the whole of Northern Brazil to an abject surrender.

Like the patriots of Chili and Peru, the Brazilians gratefully rewarded their liberator by cheating him out of his pay; so next he turned to deliver Greece from the Turks. Very soon he found that even the Brazilians were perfect gentlemen compared with the Greek patriots, and the heart-sick man went home.

England was sorry for the way she had treated her hero, gave back his naval rank and made him admiral with command-in-chief of a British fleet at sea, restored his banner as a Knight of the Bath in Henry VII’s chapel, granted a pension, and at the end, found him a resting-place in the Abbey. On his father’s death, he succeeded to the earldom of Dundonald, and down to 1860, when the old man went to his rest, his life was devoted to untiring service. He was among the first inventors to apply coal gas to light English streets and homes; he designed the boilers long in use by the English navy; made a bitumen concrete for paving; and offered plans for the reduction of Sebastopol which would have averted all the horrors of the siege. Yet even to his eightieth year he was apt to shock and terrify all official persons, and when he was buried in the nave of the Abbey, Lord Brougham pronounced his strange obituary. “What,” he exclaimed at the grave side, “no cabinet minister, no officer of state to grace this great man’s funeral!” Perhaps they were still scared of the poor old hero.

LV
A.D. 1823 THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS

Far back in the long ago time New Zealand was a crowded happy land. Big Maori fortress villages crowned the hilltops, broad farms covered the hillsides; the chiefs kept a good table, cooking was excellent, and especially when prisoners were in season, the people feasted between sleeps, or, should provisions fail, sacked the next parish for a supply of meat. So many parishes were sacked and eaten, that in the course of time the chiefs led their tribes to quite a distance before they could find a nice fat edible village, but still the individual citizen felt crowded after meals, and all was well.

Then came the Pakehas, the white men, trading, with muskets for sale, and the tribe that failed to get a trader to deal with was very soon wiped out. A musket cost a ton of flax, and to pile up enough to buy one a whole tribe must leave its hill fortress to camp in unwholesome flax swamps. The people worked themselves thin to buy guns, powder and iron tools for farming, but they cherished their Pakeha as a priceless treasure in special charge of the chief, and if a white man was eaten, it was clear proof that he was entirely useless alive, or a quite detestable character. The good Pakehas became Maori warriors, a little particular as to their meat being really pig, but otherwise well mannered and popular.

Now of these Pakeha Maoris, one has left a book. He omitted his name from the book of Old New Zealand, and never mentioned dates, but tradition says he was Mr. F. C. Maning, and that he lived as a Maori and trader for forty years, from 1823 to 1863 when the work was published.

In the days when Mr. Maning reached the North Island a trader was valued at twenty times his weight in muskets, equivalent say, to the sum total of the British National Debt. Runaway sailors however, were quite cheap. “Two men of this description were hospitably entertained one night by a chief, a very particular friend of mine, who, to pay himself for his trouble and outlay, ate one of them next morning.”

Maning came ashore on the back of a warrior by the name of Melons, who capsized in an ebb tide running like a sluice, at which the white man, displeased, held the native’s head under water by way of punishment. When they got ashore Melons wanted to get even, so challenged the Pakeha to a wrestling match. Both were in the pink of condition, the Maori, twenty-five years of age, and a heavy-weight, the other a boy full of animal spirits and tough as leather. After the battle Melons sat up rather dazed, offered his hand, and venting his entire stock of English, said “How do you do?”

But then came a powerful chief, by name Relation-eater. “Pretty work this,” he began, “good work. I won’t stand this not at all! not at all! not at all!” (The last sentence took three jumps, a step and a turn round, to keep correct time.) “Who killed the Pakeha? It was Melons. You are a nice man, killing my Pakeha ... we shall be called the ‘Pakeha killkillers’; I shall be sick with shame; the Pakeha will run away; what if you had killed him dead, or broken his bones”.... (Here poor Melones burst out crying like an infant). “Where is the hat? Where the shoes? The Pakeha is robbed! he is murdered!” Here a wild howl from Melons.

The local trader took Mr. Maning to live with him, but it was known to the tribes that the newcomer really and truly belonged to Relation-eater. Not long had he been settled when there occurred a meeting between his tribe and another, a game of bluff, when the warriors of both sides danced the splendid Haka, most blood-curdling, hair-lifting of all ceremonials. Afterward old Relation-eater singled out the horrible savage who had begun the war-dance, and these two tender-hearted individuals for a full half-hour, seated on the ground hanging on each other’s necks, gave vent to a chorus of skilfully modulated howling. “So there was peace,” and during the ceremonies Maning came upon a circle of what seemed to be Maori chiefs, until drawing near he found that their nodding heads had nobody underneath. Raw heads had been stuck on slender rods, with cross sticks to carry the robes, “Looking at the ’eds, sir?” asked an English sailor. “’Eds was werry scarce—they had to tattoo a slave a bit ago, and the villain ran away, tattooin’ and all!”

“What!”

“Bolted before he was fit to kill,” said the sailor, mournful to think how dishonest people could be.

Once the head chief, having need to punish a rebellious vassal, sent Relation-eater, who plundered and burned the offending village. The vassal decamped with his tribe.

“Well, about three months after this, about daylight I was aroused by a great uproar.... Out I ran at once and perceived that M—’s premises were being sacked by the rebellious vassal who ... was taking this means of revenging himself for the rough handling he had received from our chief. Men were rushing in mad haste through the smashed windows and doors, loaded with everything they could lay hands upon.... A large canoe was floating near to the house, and was being rapidly filled with plunder. I saw a fat old Maori woman who was washerwoman, being dragged along the ground by a huge fellow who was trying to tear from her grasp one of my shirts, to which she clung with perfect desperation. I perceived at a glance that the faithful old creature would probably save a sleeve.

“An old man-of-war’s man defending his washing, called out, ‘Hit out, sir! ... our mob will be here in five minutes!’

“The odds were terrible, but ... I at once floored a native who was rushing by me.... I then perceived that he was one of our own people ... so to balance things I knocked down another! and then felt myself seized round the waist from behind.

“The old sailor was down now but fighting three men at once, while his striped shirt and canvas trousers still hung proudly on the fence.

“Then came our mob to the rescue and the assailants fled.

“Some time after this a little incident worth noting happened at my friend M—’s place. Our chief had for some time back a sort of dispute with another magnate.... The question was at last brought to a fair hearing at my friend’s house. The arguments on both sides were very forcible; so much so that in the course of the arbitration our chief and thirty of his principal witnesses were shot dead in a heap before my friend’s door, and sixty others badly wounded, and my friend’s house and store blown up and burnt to ashes.

“My friend was, however, consoled by hundreds of friends who came in large parties to condole with him, and who, as was quite correct in such cases, shot and ate all his stock, sheep, pigs, ducks, geese, fowls, etc., all in high compliment to himself; he felt proud.... He did not, however, survive these honors long.”

Mr. Maning took this poor gentleman’s place as trader, and earnestly studied native etiquette, on which his comments are always deliciously funny. Two young Australians were his guests when there arrived one day a Maori desperado who wanted blankets; and “to explain his views more clearly knocked both my friends down, threatened to kill them both with his tomahawk, then rushed into the bedroom, dragged out all the bedclothes, and burnt them on the kitchen fire.”

A few weeks later, Mr. Maning being alone, and reading a year-old Sydney paper, the desperado called. “‘Friend,’ said I; ‘my advice to you is to be off.’

“He made no answer but a scowl of defiance. ‘I am thinking, friend, that this is my house,’ said I, and springing upon him I placed my foot to his shoulder, and gave him a shove which would have sent most people heels over head.... But quick as lightning ... he bounded from the ground, flung his mat away over his head, and struck a furious blow at my head with his tomahawk. I caught the tomahawk in full descent; the edge grazed my hand; but my arm, stiffened like a bar of iron, arrested the blow. He made one furious, but ineffectual attempt to wrest the tomahawk from my grasp; and then we seized one another round the middle, and struggled like maniacs in the endeavor to dash each other against the boarded floor; I holding on for dear life to the tomahawk ... fastened to his wrist by a strong thong of leather.... At last he got a lock round my leg; and had it not been for the table on which we both fell, and which in smashing to pieces, broke our fall, I might have been disabled.... We now rolled over and over on the floor like two mad bulldogs; he trying to bite, and I trying to stun him by dashing his bullet head against the floor. Up again! another furious struggle in course of which both our heads and half our bodies were dashed through the two glass windows, and every single article of furniture was reduced to atoms. Down again, rolling like made, and dancing about among the rubbish—wreck of the house. Such a battle it was that I can hardly describe it.

“By this time we were both covered with blood from various wounds.... My friend was trying to kill me, and I was only trying to disarm and tie him up ... as there were no witnesses. If I killed him, I might have serious difficulties with his tribe.

“Up again; another terrific tussle for the tomahawk; down again with a crash; and so this life and death battle went on ... for a full hour ... we had another desperate wrestling match. I lifted my friend high in my arms, and dashed him, panting, furious, foaming at the mouth—but beaten—against the ground. His God has deserted him.

“He spoke for the first time, ‘Enough! I am beaten; let me rise.’

“I, incautiously, let go his left arm. Quick as lightning he snatched at a large carving fork ... which was lying among the debris; his fingers touched the handle and it rolled away out of his reach; my life was saved. He then struck me with all his remaining fire on the side of the head, causing the blood to flow out of my mouth. One more short struggle and he was conquered.

“But now I had at last got angry ... I must kill my man, or sooner or later he would kill me.... I told him to get up and die standing. I clutched the tomahawk for the coup de grace. At this instant a thundering sound of feet ... a whole tribe coming ... my friends!... He was dragged by the heels, stamped on, kicked, and thrown half dead, into his canoe.

“All the time we had been fighting, a little slave imp of a boy belonging to my antagonist had been loading the canoe with my goods and chattels.... These were now brought back.”

In the sequel this desperado committed two more murders “and also killed in fair fight, with his own hand the first man in a native battle ... which I witnessed.... At last having attempted to murder another native, he was shot through the heart ... so there died.”

Mr. Maning was never again molested, and making full allowance for their foibles, speaks with a very tender love for that race of warriors.

LVI
A.D. 1840 A TALE OF VENGEANCE

In the days of the grandfathers, say ninety years ago, the Americans had spread their settlements to the Mississippi, and that river was their frontier. The great plains and deserts beyond, all speckled now with farms and glittering with cities, belonged to the red Indian tribes, who hunted the buffalo, farmed their tobacco, played their games, worshiped the Almighty Spirit, and stole one another’s horses, without paying any heed to the white men. For the whites were only a little tribe among them, a wandering tribe of trappers and traders who came from the Rising Sun Land in search of beaver skins. The beaver skins were wanted for top hats in the Land of the Rising Sun.

These white men had strange and potent magic, being masters of fire, and brought from their own land the fire-water and the firearms which made them welcome among the tribes. Sometimes a white man entered the tribes and became an Indian, winning his rank as warrior, marrying, setting up his lodge, and even rising to the grade of chief. Of such was Jim Beckwourth, part white, part negro, a great warrior, captain of the Dog Soldier regiment in the Crow nation. His lodge was full of robes; his wives, by whom he allied himself to the leading families, were always well fed, well dressed, and well behaved. When he came home with his Dog Soldiers he always returned in triumph, with bands of stolen horses, scalps in plenty.

Long afterward, when he was an old man, Jim told his adventures to a writer, who made them into a book, and in this volume he tells the story of Pine Leaf, an Indian girl. She was little more than a child, when, in an attack of the Cheyennes upon the village, her twin brother was killed. Then, in a passion of rage and grief, she cut off one of her fingers as a sacrifice to the Great Spirit, and took oath that she would avenge her brother’s death, never giving herself in marriage until she had taken a hundred trophies in battle. The warriors laughed when she asked leave to join them on the war-path, but Jim let her come with the Dog Soldiers.

Rapidly she learned the trade of war, able as most of the men with bow, spear and gun, running like an antelope, riding gloriously; and yet withal a woman, modest and gentle except in battle, famed for lithe grace and unusual beauty.

“Please marry me,” said Jim, as she rode beside him.

“Yes, when the pine leaves turn yellow.”

Jim thought this over, and complained that pine leaves do not turn yellow.

“Please!” he said.

“Yes,” answered Pine Leaf, “when you see a red-headed Indian.”

Jim, who had wives enough already as became his position, sulked for this heroine.

She would not marry him, and yet once when a powerful Blackfoot had nigh felled Jim with his battle-ax, Pine Leaf speared the man and saved her chief. In that engagement she killed four warriors, fighting at Jim’s side. A bullet cut through his crown of eagle plumes. “These Blackfeet shoot close,” said Pine Leaf, “but never fear; the Great Spirit will not let them harm us.”

In the next fight, a Blackfoot’s lance pierced Jim’s legging, and then transfixed his horse, pinning him to the animal in its death agony. Pine Leaf hauled out the lance and released him. “I sprang upon the horse,” says Jim, “of a young warrior who was wounded. The heroine then joined me, and we dashed into the conflict. Her horse was immediately after killed, and I discovered her in a hand-to-hand encounter with a dismounted Blackfoot, her lance in one hand and her battle-ax in the other. Three or four springs of my steed brought me upon her antagonist, and striking him with the breast of my horse when at full speed, I knocked him to the earth senseless, and before he could recover, she pinned him to the earth and scalped him. When I had overturned the warrior, Pine Leaf called to me, ‘Ride on, I have him safe now.’”

She was soon at his side chasing the flying enemy, who left ninety-one killed in the field.

In the next raid, Pine Leaf took two prisoners, and offered Jim one of them to wife. But Jim had wives enough of the usual kind, whereas now this girl’s presence at his side in battle gave him increased strength and courage, while daily his love for her flamed higher.

At times the girl was sulky because she was denied the rank of warrior, shut out from the war-path secret, the hidden matters known only to fighting men. This secret was that the warriors shared all knowledge in common as to the frailties of women who erred, but Pine Leaf was barred out.

There is no space here for a tithe of her battles, while that great vengeance for her brother piled up the tale of scalps. In one victorious action, charging at Jim’s side, she was struck by a bullet which broke her left arm. With the wounded arm nursed in her bosom she grew desperate, and three warriors fell to her ax before she fainted from loss of blood.

Before she was well recovered from this wound, she was afield again, despite Jim’s pleading and in defiance of his orders, and in an invasion of the Cheyenne country, was shot through the body.

“Well,” she said afterward, as she lay at the point of death, “I’m sorry that I did not listen to my chief, but I gained two trophies.” The very rescue of her had cost the lives of four warriors.

While she lay through many months of pain, tended by Jim’s head wife, her bosom friend, and by Black Panther, Jim’s little son, the chief was away fighting the great campaigns, which made him famous through all the Indian tribes. Medicine Calf was his title now, and his rank, head chief, for he was one of two sovereigns of equal standing, who reigned over the two tribes of the Crow nation.

While Pine Leaf sat in the lodge, her heart was crying, but at last she was able to ride again to war. So came a disastrous expedition, in which Medicine Calf and Pine Leaf, with fifty Crow warriors and an American gentleman named Hunter, their guest, were caught in a pit on a hillside, hemmed round by several hundred Blackfeet. They had to cut their way through the enemy’s force, and when Hunter fell, the chief stayed behind to die with him. Half the Crows were slain, and still the Blackfeet pressed hardly upon them. Medicine Calf was at the rear when Pine Leaf joined him. “Why do you wait to be killed?” she asked. “If you wish to die, let us return together. I will die with you.”

They escaped, most of them wounded who survived, and almost dying of cold and hunger before they came to the distant village of their tribe.

Jim’s next adventure was a horse-stealing raid into Canada, when he was absent fourteen months, and the Crows mourned Medicine Calf for dead. On his triumphant return, mounted on a piebald charger the chief had presented to her, Pine Leaf rode with him once more in his campaigns. During one of these raids, being afoot, she pursued and caught a young Blackfoot warrior, then made him her prisoner. He became her slave, her brother by tribal law, and rose to eminence as her private warrior.

Jim had founded a trading post for the white men, and the United States paid him four hundred pounds a year for keeping his people from slaughtering pioneers. So growing rich, he tired of Indian warfare, and left his tribe for a long journey. As a white man he came to the house of his own sisters in the city of Saint Louis, but they seemed strangers now, and his heart began to cry for the wild life. Then news came that his Crows were slaying white men, and in haste he rode to the rescue, to find his warriors besieging Fort Cass. He came among them, their head chief, Medicine Calf, black with fury at their misdeeds, so that the council sat bewildered, wondering how to sue for his forgiveness. Into that council came Pine Leaf. “Warriors,” she cried, “I make sacrifice for my people!” She told them of her brother’s death and of her great vengeance, now completed in that she had slain a hundred men to be his servants in the other world. So she laid down her arms. “I have hurled my last lance; I am a warrior no more. To-day Medicine Calf has returned. He has returned angry at the follies of his people, and they fear that he will again leave them. They believe that he loves me, and that my devotion to him will attach him to the nation. I, therefore, bestow myself upon him; perhaps he will be contented with me and will leave us no more. Warriors, farewell!”

So Jim Beckwourth, who was Medicine Calf, head chief of the Crow nation, was wedded to Pine Leaf, their great heroine.

Alas for Jim’s morals, they did not live happily ever after, for the scalawag deserted all his wives, titles and honors, to become a mean trader, selling that fire-water which sapped the manhood of the warrior tribes, and left them naked in the bitter days to come. Pine Leaf and her kindred are gone away into the shadows, and over their wide lands spread green fields, now glittering cities of the great republic.

THE END