Shortly after Hubbard had ejected MacGregor from Amelia Island, along came one of the latter’s friends and companions in arms, Commodore Louis de Aury, who, as I have related in “Adventurers All,” had himself been ousted from Galveston Island by Lafitte, and kicked out Hubbard. De Aury’s plan was to make Florida a free and independent republic, such as her sister provinces in South America had become. But it was not to be. The government at Washington, which had other plans for Florida, now decided it was time to interfere, for it seemed probable that Florida might soon be sold to the United States, provided the spirit of revolution and independence which was rapidly stripping Spain of her colonial possessions left her Florida to sell. Nothing was further from the intention of the United States, therefore, than to let these South American adventurers get a foothold in the province she had so long had a covetous eye upon; so, in the autumn of 1817, General Gaines was ordered to march on Fernandina and eject De Aury, while a fleet under Commodore Henley went down the coast for the same purpose. Henley reached there first and successfully accomplished the ejection, and the green-cross flag of the filibusters came down for good and all.
About this time Indian depredations had recommenced along the Florida frontier, and in November, 1817, General Gaines despatched a detachment of troops to an Indian village called Fowltown, the headquarters of the hostile Seminoles and Creeks. The troops approached the town at dawn and were fired upon, the village was taken and burned, and the United States had another Indian war upon its hands. Jackson was immediately ordered to take command of the operations. He jumped at the chance, for was this not the very opportunity for which he had been longing and praying? The Indians caused him no concern, mind you; it was the Spaniards—and Florida—that he was after. Disregarding his instructions to raise his command from the militia of the border States, he recruited a volunteer force from the Tennesseeans who had served under him at the Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans and whom he could count on to follow him anywhere, and with these veterans at his back straightway crossed the Florida border. On the site of the Negro Fort he built and garrisoned another, which he called Fort Gadsden—all this in Spanish territory, mind you, though the United States was (officially, at least) at peace with Spain. Easily dispersing the few Seminoles who ventured to dispute his progress, he pushed southward to St. Marks (the port of Tallahassee), where a war party of Indians, he heard, had taken refuge. The fact that his information was incorrect and that there were no Indians in the town did not disconcert him in the least: he took the place, hauled down the Spanish colors, replaced them with the stars and stripes, and left an American garrison in occupation. Not only this, but he captured two Englishmen who had taken refuge in the town. One was a well-known trader named Alexander Arbuthnot, who had had commercial dealings of one sort and another with the Indians; the other was a young officer of marines named Ambrister, a nephew of the governor of the Bahamas, who had been suspended from duty for a year for engaging in a duel and who had joined the Florida Indians out of a boyish love for adventure. Though captured on Spanish soil, Jackson ordered both men tried by court martial for inciting the Indians to rebellion. Both were sentenced to death. Ambrister died before a firing-party; Arbuthnot was hung from the yard-arm of one of his own ships. Needlessly drastic and unquestionably illegal as these executions were, they brought home to those who were plotting against the United States that Spanish territory could not protect them.
From St. Marks Jackson struck across country to Suwanee, which was the headquarters of the notorious Billy Bowlegs; but in the skirmish that ensued that chieftain and his followers escaped, though, by means of a ruse unworthy of a civilized commander, he captured two of the most celebrated of the Seminole chieftains, Francis and Himollimico. Seeing a vessel enter the harbor, the two chieftains, who had just returned from a visit to England, rowed out and asked to be afforded protection. They were courteously received, laid aside their weapons, and went below to have a drink with the commander, when they were seized, bound, and, upon protesting at this breach of hospitality, were informed that they were prisoners on an American gunboat which Jackson had despatched to patrol the coast in the hope of intercepting fugitives. The next day the two prisoners, by orders of Jackson, were summarily hung. By such ruthless methods as these did the grim backwoodsman, who well deserved the title of “Old Hickory,” which his soldiers bestowed upon him, impress on Indians and Spaniards alike the fact that those who opposed him need expect no mercy. He had reached Fort Gadsden on his return march when a protest against this unwarranted invasion of Spanish territory was sent him by the governor of Pensacola, the same place, you will remember, which he had captured three years before. Jackson, who always carried a chip on his shoulder and lived in hopes that some one would dare to knock it off, turned back on the instant, occupied Pensacola for the second time, captured the governor and his troops, deported them to Havana with a warning never to return, and left an American garrison in occupation. He regretted afterward, as he wrote to a friend, that he had not carried the place by storm and hanged the governor out of hand.
In five months Jackson had broken the Indian power, established peace along the border, and to all intents and purposes added Florida to the Union. Though the Spanish minister at Washington (for after the fall of Napoleon Spain resumed the foreign relations he had so rudely interrupted) vigorously protested against this invasion of the territory of his sovereign, he nevertheless hastened—whether it was intended or not that his movements should be thus accelerated—to negotiate a treaty ceding Florida to the United States in consideration of our paying the claims held by American citizens against Spain to the amount of five million dollars. Though the historians dismiss the subject with the bald assertion that Florida was acquired by purchase—which, no doubt, is technically correct—I think you will agree with me that “conquest” is a more appropriate word and that its conqueror was the backwoods soldier Andrew Jackson. No wonder that the land he gave us yields so many oranges after having been fertilized with so much blood. No wonder that it has restored so many sick men after having swallowed up so many well ones.
THE FIGHT AT QUALLA BATTOO
THE FIGHT AT QUALLA BATTOO
IT was so hot that the little group of sailors under the forward awnings lay stretched upon the deck, panting like hunted rabbits, while rivers of perspiration coursed down their naked chests and backs. The unshaded portions of the deck were as hot to the touch as the top of a stove; bubbles of pitch had formed along the seams between the planks, and turpentine was exuding, like beads of sweat, from the spars. Though occasional puffs of land-wind stirred the folds of the American flag which drooped listlessly from the taffrail sufficiently to disclose the legend Friendship, of Salem in raised and gilded letters on the stern, they brought about as much relief to the exhausted men as a blast from an open furnace door. Even the naked Malays who were at work under the direction of a profane and sweating first mate, transferring innumerable sacks of pepper from a small boat to the vessel’s hold, showed the effects of the suffocating atmosphere by performing their task with more than ordinary listlessness and indolence.
Half a mile away the nipa-thatched huts of Qualla Battoo, built amid a thicket of palms on the sandy shores of a cove where a mountain torrent debouched into the sea, seemed to flicker like a scene on a moving-picture screen in the shifting waves of heat. Immediately at the back of the town rose the green wall of the Sumatran jungle, which bordered the yellow beach in both directions as far as the eye could reach. Behind this impenetrable screen of vegetation, over which the miasma hung in wreathlike clouds, rose the purple peaks of the Bukit Barisan Range, of which Mount Berapi, twelve thousand feet high, is the grim and forbidding overlord. Upon this shore a mighty surf pounds unceasingly. Farming far to seaward, the tremendous rollers come booming in with the speed of an express train, gradually gathering volume as they near the shore until they tower to a height of twenty feet or more, when, striking the beach, they break upon the sands with a roar which on still nights can be heard up-country for many miles. So dangerous is the surf along this coast that when trading vessels drop anchor off its towns to pick up cargoes of pepper, copra, or coffee, they invariably send their boats ashore in charge of natives, who are as familiar with this threatening, thunderous barrier of foam as is a housewife with the cupboards in her kitchen. But even the Malays, marvellously skilful boatmen as they are, can effect a landing only at those places where the mountain streams, of which there are a great number along the western coast of Sumatra, have melted comparatively smooth channels through the angry surf to the open sea. The pepper, which is one of the island’s chief articles of export, is grown on the high table-lands in the interior and is brought down to the trading stations on the coast by means of bamboo rafts, their navigation through the cataracts and rapids which obstruct these mountain streams being a perilous and hair-raising performance.
Thus it came about that while the New England merchantman rocked lazily in the Indian Ocean swells on this scorching afternoon in February, 1831, her master, Mr. Endicott, her second mate, John Barry, and four of her crew, were at the trading station, a short distance up the river from Qualla Battoo, superintending the weighing of the pepper and making sure that it was properly stowed away in the boats where the water could not reach it, for, as Captain Endicott had learned from many and painful experiences, the Malays are not to be trusted in such things. Now, Captain Endicott had not traded along the coasts of Malaysia for a dozen years without learning certain lessons by heart, and one of them was that the lithe and sinewy brown men with whom he was doing business were no less cruel and treacherous than the surf that edged their shores. Hence his suspicions instantly became aroused when he noticed that the first boat, after being loaded at the trading station and starting for the river mouth instead of making straight for the Friendship, as it should have done, stopped on its way through the town and took aboard more men. Concluding, however, that the Malay crew required additional oarsmen in order to negotiate the unusually heavy surf, his suspicions were allayed and he turned again to the business of weighing out pepper for the second boat-load, though he took the precaution, nevertheless, of detailing two of his men to keep their eyes on the boat and to instantly report anything which seemed out of the ordinary.
Instead of taking on more oarsmen, as Captain Endicott had supposed, the boat’s crew had exchanged places with double their number of armed warriors, who, concealing their weapons, sent the boat smashing through the wall of surf and then pulled leisurely out toward the unsuspecting merchantman. Though the first mate, who was in charge of the loading, remarked that the boat had an unusually large crew, he drew the same conclusions as the captain and permitted it to come alongside. No sooner was it made fast to the Friendship’s side, however, than the Malays, concealing their krises in their scanty clothing, began to scramble over the bulwarks, until a score or more of them were gathered on the vessel’s decks. The mate, ever fearful of treachery, ordered them back into their boat, but the Malays, pretending not to understand him, scattered over the ship, staring at the rigging and equipment with the open-mouthed curiosity of children. So well did they play their parts, indeed, that the mate decided that his suspicions were unfounded and turned again to the work of checking up the bags of pepper as they came over the side. When the Malays had satisfied themselves as to the strength and whereabouts of the crew, whom they outnumbered three to one, they unostentatiously took the positions their leader assigned to them. Then, choosing a moment when the mate was leaning over the side giving orders to the men in the boat, one of their number, moving across the deck on naked feet with the stealth and silence of a cat, drew back his arm and with a vicious downward sweep buried his razor-edged kris between the American’s brawny shoulders. Though mortally wounded, the mate uttered a scream of warning, whereupon five of the sailors who had been lounging under the forward awning, snatching up belaying-pins and capstan-bars, ran to his assistance. But the Malays were too many for them and too well armed, and after a brief but desperate struggle two other Americans lay dead upon the blood-stained deck, while the other three, less fortunate, were prisoners with a fate too horrible for words in store for them. The four remaining seamen, who had been below, aroused by the noise of the struggle, had rushed on deck in time to witness the fate of their comrades. Realizing the utter helplessness of their position and appreciating that only butchery or torture awaited them if they remained, they burst through the ring of natives who surrounded them and dived into the sea. They quickly discovered, however, that the shore held no greater safety than the ship, for whenever they were lifted on the crest of a wave they could see that the beach was lined with armed warriors, whooping and brandishing their spears. Seeing that to land was but to invite death in one of its most unpleasant forms, the four swimmers held a brief consultation and then, abruptly changing their course, struck out for a rocky promontory several miles away, which offered them at least temporary safety, as the Malays could not readily reach them.