This gave the haughty rajah something to think about. The fearless demeanor and impressive stature of this keen-eyed mariner made his words convincing. After due reflection, the rajah sent for the captain of a proa, and told him to take these troublesome white men to Macassar with all possible haste. Woodard was worn out, his bare back terribly burned and festered, his strength almost ebbed, and he had to be hoisted aboard the proa upon a litter; but he was still the resolute, unconquerable seaman and leader. The accommodations were so wretched that after three days of suffering he ordered the proa to set him ashore and to send word to the nearest rajah.
This was done, and the dusky potentate who received the message did all in his power to make the party comfortable, fitting out a proa, which enabled them to make the final run of the voyage with no more hardship. Tales of Woodard had passed by word of mouth along the coasts of Celebes until he was almost a legendary character. It was on June 15, 1795, that these five wanderers reached their goal of Macassar after two years and five months of captivity among the Malays. They were not only alive, every man of them, but not one was permanently broken in health.
The Dutch governor of the island and the officers of the garrison of the Dutch East India Company treated them with the most generous hospitality, providing clothes and money and refusing to listen to promises of recompense. They soon sailed for Batavia, where the four sailors, William Gideon, John Cole, Robert Gilbert, and George Williams signed articles in an American ship bound to Boston, and resumed the hard and hazardous toil of the sea to earn their bread. Their extraordinary experience was all in the day’s work, and it is unlikely that they thought very much about it.
Woodard took a berth as chief mate in another American ship that was sailing for Calcutta and while in that port was offered command of a country ship engaged in the coastwise trade. During one of his voyages he was strolling ashore when he came face to face with Captain Hubbard of the Enterprise, which had vanished in the Straits of Macassar and left its unlucky boat adrift. The delighted captain explained that he had waited and cruised about for three days in a search for the missing boat and had given it up for lost.
He warmly urged Woodard to join him in his fine new ship, the America, and go to Mauritius. The former chief mate gladly accepted the invitation, for he was homesick for his own flag and people. At Mauritius Captain Hubbard gave up the command because of ill health and turned it over to David Woodard. Thus the true story all turned out precisely as should be, and it was Captain Woodard who trod the quarterdeck of his taut ship America as she lifted her lofty spars in the lovely harbor of Mauritius.
Coincidence is often stranger in fact than in fiction. Before he left Mauritius, Captain Woodard ran across three of his old sailors of the open boat and the two years of captivity among the Malays. They had been wrecked on another China voyage, and were in distress for lack of clothes and money. Their old chief mate, now a prosperous shipmaster, with a share in the profits of the voyage, outfitted them handsomely and left them with dollars in their pockets.
In later years Captain David Woodard traded to Batavia, and met more than one Malay who had seen him or had listened to fabulous tales of his prowess during his long durance in the jungles and mountains of Celebes. In 1804 this splendid adventurer of the old merchant marine was able to retire from the sea with an independent income. Near Boston he bought a farm and lived on it, and this was the proper way to cast anchor, for such is the ambition of all worthy mariners when they cease to furrow the blue sea.
CHAPTER VI
CAPTAIN PADDOCK ON THE COAST OF BARBARY
The veterans of the Revolution of ’76, who had won a war for freedom, were still young men when American sailors continued to be bought and sold as slaves for a few dollars a head on the farther side of the Atlantic. It was a trade which had flourished during the colonial period, and was unmolested even after the Stars and Stripes proclaimed the sovereign pride and independence of this Union of States. Indeed, while hundreds of American mariners were held in this inhuman bondage, their Government actually sent to the Dey of Algiers a million dollars in money and other gifts, including a fine new frigate, as humble tribute to this bloody heathen pirate in the hope of softening his heart.
It was the bitterest touch of humiliation that this frigate, the Crescent, sailed from the New England harbor of Portsmouth, whose free tides had borne a few years earlier the brave keels of John Paul Jones’s Ranger and America.