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.