In Canada the British governor set up a friendship between the French Canadians and our government which has lasted ever since. That was on the eighth of September, but on the fifth another British dignitary sailed for home, having generously given a large slice of Canada to the United States.
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In Hayti there was an earthquake, in Brazil a revolution; in Jamaica a storm on the tenth which wrecked H. M. S. Spitfire, and in the western states Mount Saint Helen’s gave a fine volcanic eruption.
Northern Mexico was invaded by two filibustering expeditions from the republic of Texas, and both were captured by the Mexicans. There were eight hundred fifty prisoners, some murdered for fun, the rest marched through Mexico exposed to all sorts of cruelty and insult before they were lodged in pestilence-ridden jails. Captain Edwin Cameron and his people on the way to prison overpowered the escort and fled to the mountains, whence some of them escaped to Texas. But the leader and most of his men being captured, President Santa Ana arranged that they should draw from a bag of beans, those who got black beans to be shot. Cameron drew a white bean, but was shot all the same. One youth, G. B. Crittenden, drew a white bean, but gave it to a comrade saying, “You have a wife and children; I haven’t, and I can afford to risk another chance.” Again he drew white and lived to be a general in the great Civil War.
General Green’s party escaped by tunneling their way out of the castle of Perot, but most of the prisoners perished in prison of hunger and disease. The British and American ministers at the City of Mexico won the release of the few who were left alive.
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In 1842 Sir James Simpson, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with his bell-topper hat and his band, came by canoe across the northern wilds to the Pacific Coast. From San Francisco he sailed for Honolulu in the Sandwich Islands, where the company had a large establishment under Sir John Petty. On April sixteenth he arrived in the H. B. ship Cowlitz at the capital of Russian America. “Of all the drunken as well as the dirty places,” says he, “that I had ever visited, New Archangel was the worst. On the holidays in particular, of which, Sundays included, there are one hundred sixty-five in the year, men, women and even children were to be seen staggering about in all directions drunk.” Simpson thought all the world, though, of the Russian bishop.
The Hudson’s Bay Company had a lease from the Russians of all the fur-trading forts of Southeastern Alaska, and one of these was the Redoubt Saint Diogenes. There Simpson found a flag of distress, gates barred, sentries on the bastions and two thousand Indians besieging the fort. Five days ago the officer commanding, Mr. McLoughlin, had made all hands drunk and ran about saying he was going to be killed. So one of the voyagers leveled a rifle and shot him dead. On the whole the place was not well managed.
From New Archangel (Sitka) the Russian Lieutenant Zagoskin sailed in June for the Redoubt Saint Michael on the coast of Behring Sea. Smallpox had wiped out all the local Eskimos, so the Russian could get no guide for the first attempt to explore the river Yukon. A day’s march south he was entertained at an Eskimo camp where there was a feast, and the throwing of little bladders into the bay in honor of Ug-iak, spirit of the sea. On December ninth Zagoskin started inland—“A driving snow-storm set in blinding my eyes ... a blade of grass seventy feet distant had the appearance of a shrub, and sloping valleys looked like lakes with high banks, the illusion vanishing upon nearer approach. At midnight a terrible snow-storm began, and in the short space of ten minutes covered men, dogs and sledges, making a perfect hill above them. We sat at the foot of a hill with the wind from the opposite side and our feet drawn under us to prevent them from freezing, and covered with our parkas. When we were covered up by the snow we made holes with sticks through to the open air. In a short time the warmth of the breath and perspiration melted the snow, so that a man-like cave was formed about each individual.” So they continued for five hours, calling to one another to keep awake, for in that intense cold to sleep was death. There we may as well leave them, before we catch cold from the draft.
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