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-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE ***

-

-

-

-

-

-Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional

-notes will be found near the end of this ebook.

-

-

-

-

-CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration: NAPOLEON BONAPARTE]

-

-

-

-

-                                CAPTAINS

-                              OF ADVENTURE

-

-

-                                  _By_

-                              ROGER POCOCK

-

-                              _Author of_

-                        A Man in the Open, etc.

-

-

-                       ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS

-

-

-                              INDIANAPOLIS

-                       THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

-                               PUBLISHERS

-

-

-

-

-                             COPYRIGHT 1913

-                       THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

-

-

-                                PRESS OF

-                            BRAUNWORTH & CO.

-                        BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS

-                            BROOKLYN, N. Y.

-

-

-

-

-ADVENTURERS

-

-

-What is an adventurer? One who has adventures? Surely not. A person

-charged by a wild rhinoceros is having an adventure, yet however wild

-the animal, however wild the person, he is only somebody wishing

-himself at home, not an adventurer. In dictionaries the adventurer

-is “one who seeks his fortune in new and hazardous or perilous

-enterprises.” But outside the pages of a dictionary, the man who seeks

-his fortune, who really cares for money and his own advantage, sits

-at some desk deriding the fools who take thousand-to-one chances in a

-gamble with Death. Did the patron saint of adventurers, Saint Paul, or

-did Saint Louis, or Francis Drake, or Livingstone, or Gordon seek their

-own fortune, think you? In real life the adventurer is one who seeks,

-not his fortune, but the new and hazardous or perilous enterprises.

-There are holy saints and scoundrels among adventurers, but all the

-thousands I have known were fools of the romantic temperament, dealing

-with life as an artist does with canvas, to color it with fierce and

-vivid feeling, deep shade and radiant light, exulting in the passions

-of the sea, the terrors of the wilderness, the splendors of sunshine

-and starlight, the exaltation of battle, fire and hurricane.

-

-All nations have bred great adventurers, but the living nation

-remembers them sending the boys out into the world enriched with

-memories of valor, a heritage of national honor, an inspiration to

-ennoble their manhood. That is the only real wealth of men and of

-peoples. For such purposes this book is written, but so vast is the

-theme that this volume would outgrow all reasonable size unless we set

-some limit. A man in the regular standing forces of his native state

-is not dubbed adventurer. When, for example, the immortal heroes Tromp

-and De Ruyter fought the British generals at sea, Blake and Monk, they

-were no more adventurers than are the police constables who guard our

-homes at night. Were Clive and Warren Hastings adventurers? They would

-turn in their graves if one brought such a charge. The true type of

-adventurer is the lone-hand pioneer.

-

-It is not from any bias of mine that the worthies of Switzerland, the

-Teutonic empires and Russia, are shut out of this poor little record;

-but because it seems that the lone-hand oversea and overland pioneers

-come mainly from nations directly fronting upon the open sea. As far

-as I am prejudiced, it is in favor of old Norway, whose heroes have

-entranced me with the sheer glory of their perfect manhood. For the

-rest, our own English-speaking folk are easier for us to understand

-than any foreigners.

-

-As to the manner of record, we must follow the stream of history if we

-would shoot the rapids of adventure.

-

-Now as to the point of view: My literary pretensions are small and

-humble, but I claim the right of an adventurer, trained in thirty-three

-trades of the Lost Region, to absolute freedom of speech concerning

-frontiersmen. Let history bow down before Columbus, but as a foremast

-seaman, I hold he was not fit to command a ship. Let history ignore

-Captain John Smith, but as an ex-trooper, I worship him for a leader,

-the paladin of Anglo-Saxon chivalry, and very father of the United

-States. Literature admires the well advertised Stanley, but we

-frontiersmen prefer Commander Cameron, who walked across Africa without

-blaming others for his own defects, or losing his temper, or shedding

-needless blood. All the celebrities may go hang, but when we take the

-field, send us leaders like Patrick Forbes, who conquered Rhodesia

-without journalists in attendance to write puffs, or any actual deluge

-of public gratitude.

-

-The historic and literary points of view are widely different from that

-of our dusty rankers.

-

-When the Dutchmen were fighting Spain, they invented and built the

-first iron-clad war-ship--all honor to their seamanship for that! But

-when the winter came, a Spanish cavalry charge across the ice captured

-the ship--and there was fine adventure. Both sides had practical men.

-

-In the same wars, a Spanish man-at-arms in the plundering of a city,

-took more gold than he could carry, so he had the metal beaten into

-a suit of armor, and painted black to hide its worth from thieves.

-From a literary standpoint, that was all very fine, but from our

-adventurer point of view, the man was a fool for wearing armor useless

-for defense, and so heavy he could not run. He was killed, and a good

-riddance.

-

-We value most the man who knows his business, and the more practical

-the adventurer, the fewer his misadventures.

-

-From that point of view, the book is attempted with all earnestness;

-and if the results appear bizarre, let the shocked reader turn to

-better written works, mention of which is made in notes.

-

-As to the truthfulness of adventurers, perhaps we are all more or less

-truthful when we try to be good. But there are two kinds of adventurers

-who need sharply watching. The worst is F. C. Selous. Once he lectured

-to amuse the children at the Foundling Hospital, and when he came to

-single combats with a wounded lion, or a mad elephant he was forced

-to mention himself as one of the persons present. He blushed. Then

-he would race through a hair-lifting story of the fight, and in an

-apologetic manner, give all the praise to the elephant, or the lion

-lately deceased. Surely nobody could suspect him of any merit, yet

-all the children saw through him for a transparent fraud, and even we

-grown-ups felt the better for meeting so grand a gentleman.

-

-The other sort of liar, who does not understate his own merits, is

-Jim Beckwourth. He told his story, quite truthfully at first, to a

-journalist who took it down in shorthand. But when the man gaped with

-admiration at the merest trifles, Jim was on his mettle, testing this

-person’s powers of belief, which were absolutely boundless. After that,

-of course he hit the high places, striking the facts about once in

-twenty-four hours, and as one reads the book, one can catch the thud

-whenever he hit the truth.

-

-Let no man dream that adventure is a thing of the past or that

-adventurers are growing scarce. The only difficulty of this book

-was to squeeze the past in order to make-space for living men worthy

-as their forerunners. The list is enormous, and I only dared to

-estimate such men of our own time as I have known by correspondence,

-acquaintance, friendship, enmity, or by serving under their leadership.

-Here again, I could only speak safely in cases where there were

-records, as with Lord Strathcona, Colonel S. B. Steele, Colonel Cody,

-Major Forbes, Captain Grogan, Captain Amundsen, Captain Hansen, Mr.

-John Boyes. Left out, among Americans, are M. H. de Hora who, in a

-Chilian campaign, with only a boat’s crew, cut out the battle-ship

-_Huascar_, plundered a British tramp of her bunker coal, and fought H.

-M. S. _Shah_ on the high seas. Another American, Doctor Bodkin, was

-for some years prime minister of Makualand, an Arab sultanate. Among

-British adventurers, Caid Belton, is one of four successive British

-commanders-in-chief to the Moorish sultans. Colonel Tompkins was

-commander-in-chief to Johore. C. W. Mason was captured with a shipload

-of arms in an attempt to make himself emperor of China. Charles Rose

-rode from Mazatlan in Mexico to Corrientes in Paraguay. A. W. V.

-Crawley, a chief of scouts to Lord Roberts in South Africa, rode out of

-action after being seven times shot, and he rides now a little askew in

-consequence.

-

-To sum up, if one circle of acquaintances includes such a group to-day,

-the adventurer is not quite an extinct species, and indeed, we seem not

-at the end, but at the beginning of the greatest of all adventurous

-eras, that of the adventurers of the air.

-

-

-

-

-CONTENTS

-

-

-  Chapter                                                           Page

-

-        I  THE VIKINGS IN AMERICA                                      1

-

-       II  THE CRUSADERS                                               7

-

-      III  THE MIDDLE AGES IN ASIA                                    18

-

-       IV  THE MARVELOUS ADVENTURES OF SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE           25

-

-        V  COLUMBUS                                                   32

-

-       VI  THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO                                     37

-

-      VII  THE CONQUEST OF PERU                                       44

-

-     VIII  THE CORSAIRS                                               50

-

-       IX  PORTUGAL IN THE INDIES                                     55

-

-        X  RAJAH BROOKE                                               62

-

-       XI  THE SPIES                                                  69

-

-      XII  A YEAR’S ADVENTURES                                        81

-

-     XIII  KIT CARSON                                                 88

-

-      XIV  THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD                                     100

-

-       XV  THE GREAT FILIBUSTER                                      106

-

-      XVI  BUFFALO BILL                                              112

-

-     XVII  THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT                                     123

-

-    XVIII  THE HERO-STATESMAN                                        131

-

-      XIX  THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT                                 138

-

-       XX  LORD STRATHCONA                                           142

-

-      XXI  THE SEA HUNTERS                                           148

-

-     XXII  THE BUSHRANGERS                                           156

-

-    XXIII  THE PASSING OF THE BISON                                  162

-

-     XXIV  GORDON                                                    173

-

-      XXV  THE OUTLAW                                                179

-

-     XXVI  A KING AT TWENTY-FIVE                                     186

-

-    XXVII  JOURNEY OF EWART GROGAN                                   194

-

-   XXVIII  THE COWBOY PRESIDENT                                      202

-

-     XXIX  THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE                                     208

-

-      XXX  JOHN HAWKINS                                              215

-

-     XXXI  FRANCIS DRAKE                                             219

-

-    XXXII  THE FOUR ARMADAS                                          223

-

-   XXXIII  SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT                                      231

-

-    XXXIV  SIR WALTER RALEIGH                                        234

-

-     XXXV  CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH                                        237

-

-    XXXVI  THE BUCCANEERS                                            246

-

-   XXXVII  THE VOYAGEURS                                             252

-

-  XXXVIII  THE EXPLORERS                                             260

-

-    XXXIX  THE PIRATES                                               266

-

-       XL  DANIEL BOONE                                              272

-

-      XLI  ANDREW JACKSON                                            280

-

-     XLII  SAM HOUSTON                                               282

-

-    XLIII  DAVY CROCKETT                                             285

-

-     XLIV  ALEXANDER MACKENZIE                                       292

-

-      XLV  THE WHITE MAN’S COMING                                    298

-

-     XLVI  THE BEAVER                                                302

-

-    XLVII  THE CONQUEST OF THE POLES                                 307

-

-   XLVIII  WOMEN                                                     315

-

-     XLIX  THE CONQUERORS OF INDIA                                   321

-

-        L  THE MAN WHO SHOT LORD NELSON                              327

-

-       LI  THE FALL OF NAPOLEON                                      333

-

-      LII  RISING WOLF                                               340

-

-     LIII  SIMON BOLIVAR                                             350

-

-      LIV  THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE                                    357

-

-       LV  THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS                                   363

-

-      LVI  A TALE OF VENGEANCE                                       371

-

-

-

-

-CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE

-

-

-

-

-CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE

-

-

-

-

-I

-

-A. D. 984

-

-THE VIKINGS IN AMERICA

-

-

-A reverent study of heroes in novels, also in operas and melodramas,

-where one may see them for half-a-crown, has convinced me that they

-must be very trying to live with. They get on people’s nerves. Hence

-the villains.

-

-Now Harold of the Fair Hair was a hero, and he fell in love with a

-lady, but she would not marry him unless he made himself king of

-Norway. So he made himself the first king of all Norway, and she had to

-marry him, which served her right.

-

-But then there were the gentlemen of his majesty’s opposition who did

-not want him to be king, who felt that there was altogether too much

-Harold in Norway. They left, and went to Iceland to get away from the

-hero.

-

-Iceland had been shown on the map since the year A. D. 115, and when

-the vikings arrived they found a colony of Irish monks who said they

-had come there “because they desired for the love of God to be in a

-state of pilgrimage, they recked not where.”

-

-Perhaps the vikings sent them to Heaven. Later on it seems they found

-a little Irish settlement on the New England coast, and heard of great

-Ireland, a colony farther south. That is the first rumor we have about

-America.

-

-The Norsemen settled down, pagans in Christian Iceland. They earned

-a living with fish and cattle, and made an honest penny raiding the

-Mediterranean. They had internecine sports of their own, and on the

-whole were reasonably happy. Then in course of trade Captain Gunbjorn

-sighted an unknown land two hundred fifty miles to the westward. That

-made the Icelanders restless, for there is always something which calls

-to Northern blood from beyond the sea line.

-

-Most restless of all was Red Eric, hysterical because he hated a

-humdrum respectable life; indeed, he committed so many murders that he

-had to be deported as a public nuisance. He set off exultant to find

-Gunbjorn’s unknown land. So any natural born adventurer commits little

-errors of taste unless he can find an outlet. It is too much dog-chain

-that makes biting dogs.

-

-When he found the new land it was all green, with swaths of wild

-flowers. I know that land and its bright lowlands, backed by sheer

-walled mountains, with splintered pinnacles robed in the splendors

-of the inland ice. The trees were knee high, no crops could possibly

-ripen, but Eric was so pleased that after two winters he went back

-to Iceland advertising for settlers to fill his colony. Greenland

-he called the place, because “Many will go there if the place has

-a fair name.” They did, and when the sea had wiped out most of the

-twenty-five ships, the surviving colonists found Greenland commodious

-and residential as the heart could wish.

-

-They were not long gone from the port of Skalholt when young Captain

-Bjarni came in from the sea and asked for his father. But father

-Heljulf had sailed for Greenland, so the youngster set off in pursuit

-although nobody knew the way. Bjarni always spent alternate yuletides

-at his father’s hearth, so if the hearth-stone moved he had to find it

-somehow. These vikings are so human and natural that one can follow

-their thought quite easily. When, for instance, Bjarni, instead of

-coming to Greenland, found a low, well timbered country, he knew he had

-made a mistake, so it was no use landing. Rediscovering the American

-mainland was a habit which persisted until the time of Columbus, and

-not a feat to make a fuss about. A northerly course and a pure stroke

-of luck carried Bjarni to Greenland and his father’s house.

-

-Because they had no timber, and driftwood was scarce, the colonists

-were much excited when they heard of forests, and cursed Bjarni for

-not having landed. Anyway, here was a fine excuse for an expedition

-in search of fire-wood, so Leif, the son of Red Eric, bought Bjarni’s

-ship. Being tall and of commanding presence he rallied thirty-five of

-a crew, and, being young, expected that his father would take command.

-Eric indeed rode a distance of four hundred feet from his house against

-the rock, which was called Brattelid, to the shore of the inlet, but

-his pony fell and threw him, such a bad omen that he rode home again.

-Leif Ericsen, therefore, with winged helmet and glittering breastplate,

-mounted the steerboard, laid hands on the steer-oar and bade his men

-shove off. The colonists on rugged dun ponies lined the shore to cheer

-the adventurers, and the ladies waved their kerchiefs from the rock

-behind the house while the dragon ship, shield-lines ablaze in the

-sun, oars thrashing blue water, and painted square-sail set, took the

-fair wind on that famous voyage. She discovered Stoneland, which is

-the Newfoundland-Labrador coast, and Woodland, which is Nova Scotia.

-Then came the Further Strand, the long and wonderful beaches of

-Massachusetts, and beyond was Narragansett Bay, where they built winter

-houses, pastured their cattle, and found wild grapes. It was here that

-Tyrkir, the little old German man slave who was Leif’s nurse, made wine

-and got most gorgeously drunk. On the homeward passage Leif brought

-timber and raisins to Greenland.

-

-Leif went away to Norway, where as a guest of King Olaf he became a

-Christian, and in his absence his brother Thorwald made the second

-voyage to what is now New England. After wintering at Leif’s house in

-Wineland the Good he went southward and, somewhere near the site of New

-York, met with savages. Nine of them lay under three upturned canoes on

-the beach, so the vikings killed eight just for fun, but were fools,

-letting the ninth escape to raise the tribes for war. So there was a

-battle, and Thorwald the Helpless was shot in the eye, which served him

-right. One of his brothers came afterward in search of the body, which

-may have been that same seated skeleton in bronze armor that nine

-hundred years later was dug up at Cross Point.

-

-Two or three years after Thorwald’s death his widow married a visitor

-from Norway, Eric’s guest at Brattelid, the rich Thorfin Karlsefne. He

-also set out for Vinland, taking Mrs. Karlsefne and four other women,

-also a Scottish lad and lass (very savage) and an Irishman, besides a

-crew of sixty and some cattle. They built a fort where the natives came

-trading skins for strips of red cloth, or to fight a battle, or to be

-chased, shrieking with fright, by Thorfin’s big red bull. There Mrs.

-Karlsefne gave birth to Snorri the Firstborn, whose sons Thorlak and

-Brand became priests and were the first two bishops of Greenland.

-

-After Karlsefne’s return to Greenland the next voyage was made by one

-of Eric’s daughters; and presently Leif the Fortunate came home from

-Norway to his father’s house, bringing a priest. Then Mrs. Leif built a

-church at Brattelid, old Eric the Red being thoroughly disgusted, and

-Greenland and Vinland became Christian, but Eric never.

-

-As long as Norway traded with her American colonies Vinland exported

-timber and dried fruit, while Greenland sent sheepskins, ox hides,

-sealskins, walrus-skin rope and tusks to Iceland and Europe. In return

-they got iron and settlers. But then began a series of disasters, for

-when the Black Death swept Europe, the colonies were left to their

-fate, and some of the colonists in despair renounced their faith to

-turn Eskimo. In 1349 the last timber ship from Nova Scotia was lately

-returned to Europe when the plague struck Norway. There is a gap of

-fifty-two years in the record, and all we know of Greenland is that

-the western villages were destroyed by Eskimos who killed eighteen

-Norsemen and carried off the boys. Then the plague destroyed two-thirds

-of the people in Iceland, a bad winter killed nine tenths of all their

-cattle, and what remained of the hapless colony was ravaged by English

-fishermen. No longer could Iceland send any help to Greenland, but

-still there was intercourse because we know that seven years later the

-vicar of Garde married a girl in the east villages to a young Icelander.

-

-Meanwhile, in plague-stricken England, Bristol, our biggest seaport,

-had not enough men living even to bury the dead, and labor was so

-scarce that the crops rotted for lack of harvesters. That is why an

-English squadron raided Iceland, Greenland, perhaps even Vinland, for

-slaves, and the people were carried away into captivity. Afterward

-England paid compensation to Denmark and returned the folk to their

-homes, but in 1448 the pope wrote to a Norse bishop concerning their

-piteous condition. And there the story ends, for in that year the

-German merchants at Bergen in Norway squabbled with the forty master

-mariners of the American trade. The sailors had boycotted their

-Hanseatic League, so the Germans asked them to dinner, and murdered

-them. From that time no man knew the way to lost America.

-

-

-

-

-II

-

-A. D. 1248

-

-THE CRUSADERS

-

-

-In the seventh century of the reign of Our Lord Christ, arose the

-Prophet Mahomet. To his followers he generously gave Heaven, and

-as much of the earth as they could get, so the true believers made

-haste to occupy goodly and fruitful possessions of Christian powers,

-including the Holy Land. The owners were useful as slaves.

-

-Not having been consulted in this matter, the Christians took offense,

-making war upon Islam in seven warm campaigns, wherein they held and

-lost by turns the holy sepulcher, so that the country where our Lord

-taught peace, was always drenched with blood. In the end, our crusades

-were not a success.

-

-About Saint Louis and the sixth crusade:

-

-At the opening of the story, that holy but delightful king of France

-lay so near death that his two lady nurses had a squabble, the one

-pulling a cloth over his face because he was dead, while the other

-snatched it away because he was still alive. At last he sent the pair

-of them to fetch the cross, on which he vowed to deliver the Holy Land.

-Then he had to get well, so he did, sending word to his barons to roll

-up their men for war.

-

-Among the nobles was the young Lord of Joinville, seneschal of

-Champagne--a merry little man with eight hundred pounds a year of

-his own. But then, what with an expensive mother, his wife, and some

-little worries, he had to pawn his lands before he could take the

-field with his two knights-banneret, nine knights, their men-at-arms,

-and the servants. He shared with another lord the hire of a ship from

-Marseilles, but when they joined his majesty in Cyprus he had only a

-few pounds left, and the knights would have deserted but that the king

-gave him a staff appointment at eight hundred pounds a year.

-

-The king was a holy saint, a glorious knight errant, full of fun,

-but a thoroughly incompetent general. Instead of taking Jerusalem by

-surprise, he must needs raid Egypt, giving the soldan of Babylon the

-Less (Cairo) plenty of time to arrange a warm reception. The rival

-armies had a battle on the beach, after which Saint Louis sat down in

-front of Damietta, where he found time to muddle his commissariat.

-

-On the other hand, the soldan was not at all well, having been poisoned

-by a rival prince, and paid no heed to the carrier pigeons with their

-despairing messages from the front. This discouraged the Moslems, who

-abandoned Damietta and fled inland, hotly pursued by the French. As a

-precaution, however, they sent round their ships, which collected the

-French supplies proceeding to the front. The Christians had plenty

-of fighting and a deal of starving to do, not to mention pestilence

-in their ill-managed camps. So they came to a canal which had to be

-bridged, but the artful paynim cut away the land in front of the

-bridge head, so that there was no ground on which the French could

-arrive. In the end the Christians had to swim and, as they were heavily

-armored, many were drowned in the mud. Joinville’s party found a dry

-crossing up-stream, and their troubles began at the enemy’s camp whence

-the Turks were flying.

-

-“While we were driving them through their camp, I perceived a Saracen

-who was mounting his horse, one of his knights holding the bridle. At

-the moment he had his two hands on the saddle to mount, I gave him

-of my lance under the armpit, and laid him dead. When his knight saw

-that, he left his lord and the horse, and struck me with his lance as

-I passed, between the two shoulders, holding me so pressed down that

-I could not draw the sword at my belt. I had, therefore, to draw the

-sword attached to my horse, and when he saw that he withdrew his lance

-and left me.”

-

-Here in the camp Joinville’s detachment was rushed by six thousand

-Turks, “who pressed upon me with their lances. My horse knelt under the

-weight, and I fell forward over the horse’s ears. I got up as soon as

-ever I could with my shield at my neck, and my sword in my hand.

-

-“Again a great rout of Turks came rushing upon us, and bore me to the

-ground and went over me, and caused my shield to fly from my neck.”

-

-So the little party gained the wall of a ruined house, where they were

-sorely beset: Lord Hugh, of Ecot, with three lance wounds in the face,

-Lord Frederick, of Loupey, with a lance wound between the shoulders,

-so large that the blood flowed from his body as from the bung hole

-of a cask, and my Lord of Sivery with a sword-stroke in the face, so

-that his nose fell over his lips. Joinville, too badly wounded to

-fight, was holding horses, while Turks who had climbed to the roof were

-prodding from above with their lances. Then came Anjou to the rescue,

-and presently the king with his main army. The fight became a general

-engagement, while slowly the Christian force was driven backward upon

-the river. The day had become very hot, and the stream was covered with

-lances and shields, and with horses and men drowning and perishing.

-

-Near by De Joinville’s position, a streamlet entered the river, and

-across that ran a bridge by which the Turks attempted to cut the king’s

-retreat. This bridge the little hero, well mounted now, held for hours,

-covering the flight of French detachments. At the head of one such

-party rode Count Peter, of Brittany, spitting the blood from his mouth

-and shouting “Ha! by God’s head, have you ever seen such riffraff?”

-

-“In front of us were two of the king’s sergeants; ... and the Turks

-... brought a large number of churls afoot, who pelted them with lumps

-of earth, but were never able to force them back upon us. At last they

-brought a churl on foot, who thrice threw Greek fire at them. Once

-William of Boon received the pot of Greek fire on his target, for if

-the fire had caught any of his garments he must have been burnt alive.

-We were all covered with the darts that failed to hit the sergeants.

-Now, it chanced that I found a Saracen’s quilted tunic lined with tow;

-I turned the open side towards me, and made a shield ... which did me

-good service, for I was only wounded by their darts in five places, and

-my horse in fifteen.... The good Count of Soissons, in that point of

-danger, jested with me and said,

-

-“‘Seneschal, let these curs howl! By God’s bonnet we shall talk of this

-day yet, you and I, in ladies’ chambers!’”

-

-So came the constable of France, who relieved Joinville and sent him to

-guard the king.

-

-“So as soon as I came to the king, I made him take off his helmet, and

-lent him my steel cap so that he might have air.”

-

-Presently a knight brought news that the Count of Artois, the king’s

-brother, was in paradise.

-

-“Ah, Sire,” said the provost, “be of good comfort herein, for never did

-king of France gain so much honor as you have gained this day. For in

-order to fight your enemies you have passed over a river swimming, and

-you have discomfited them and driven them from the field, and taken

-their engines, and also their tents wherein you will sleep this night.”

-

-And the king replied: “Let God be worshiped for all He has given me,”

-and then the big tears fell from his eyes.

-

-That night the captured camp was attacked in force, much to the grief

-of De Joinville and his knights, who ruefully put on chain mail over

-their aching wounds. Before they were dressed De Joinville’s chaplain

-engaged eight Saracens and put them all to flight.

-

-Three days later came a general attack of the whole Saracen army upon

-the Christian camp, but thanks to the troops of Count William, of

-Flanders, De Joinville and his wounded knights were not in the thick of

-the fray.

-

-“Wherein,” he says, “God showed us great courtesy, for neither I nor my

-knights had our hawberks (chain shirts) and shields, because we had all

-been wounded.”

-

-You see De Joinville had the sweet faith that his God was a gentleman.

-

-After that the sorrowful army lay nine days in camp till the bodies of

-the dead floated to the surface of the canal, and eight days more while

-a hundred hired vagabonds cleared the stream. But the army lived on

-eels and water from that canal, while all of them sickened of scurvy,

-and hundreds died. Under the hands of the surgeons the men of that

-dying army cried like women. Then came an attempt to retreat in ships

-to the coast, but the way was blocked, the little galleys were captured

-one by one, the king was taken, and what then remained of the host were

-prisoners, the sick put to death, the rich held for ransom, the poor

-sold away into slavery.

-

-Saint Louis appeared to be dying of dysentery and scurvy, he was

-threatened with torture, but day after day found strength and courage

-to bargain with the soldan of Babylon for the ransom of his people.

-Once the negotiations broke down because the soldan was murdered by his

-own emirs, but the king went on bargaining now with the murderers. For

-his own ransom he gave the city of Damietta, for that of his knights he

-paid the royal treasure that was on board a galley in the port, and for

-the deliverance of the common men, he had to raise money in France.

-

-So came the release, and the emirs would have been ashamed to let their

-captive knights leave the prison fasting. So De Joinville’s party had

-“fritters of cheese roasted in the sun so that worms should not come

-therein, and hard boiled eggs cooked four or five days before, and

-these, in our honor, had been painted with divers colors.”

-

-After that came the counting of the ransom on board the royal galley,

-with the dreadful conclusion that they were short of the sum by thirty

-thousand livres. De Joinville went off to the galley of the marshal of

-the Knights Templars, where he tried to borrow the money.

-

-“Many were the hard and angry words which passed between him and me.”

-

-For one thing the borrower, newly released from prison, looked like

-a ragged beggar, and for the rest, the treasure of the Templars was

-a trust fund not to be lent to any one. They stood in the hold in

-front of the chest of treasure, De Joinville demanding the key, then

-threatening with an ax to make of it the king’s key.

-

-“We see right well,” said the treasurer, “that you are using force

-against us.” And on that excuse yielded the key to the ragged beggar,

-tottering with weakness, a very specter of disease and famine.

-

-“I threw out the silver I found therein and went, and sat on the prow

-of our little vessel that had brought me. And I took the marshal of

-France and left him with the silver in the Templars’ galley and on the

-galley I put the minister of the Trinity. On the galley the marshal

-handed the silver to the minister, and the minister gave it over to me

-on the little vessel where I sat. When we had ended and came towards

-the king’s galley, I began to shout to the king.

-

-“‘Sire! Sire! see how well I am furnished!’

-

-“And the saintly man received me right willingly and right joyfully.”

-

-So the ransom was completed, the king’s ransom and that of the greatest

-nobles of France, this group of starving ragged beggars in a dingey.

-

-Years followed of hard campaigning in Palestine. Once Saint Louis was

-even invited by the soldan of Damascus to visit as a pilgrim that Holy

-City which he could never enter as a conqueror. But Saint Louis and his

-knights were reminded of a story about Richard the Lion-Hearted, king

-of England. For Richard once marched almost within sight of the capital

-so that a knight cried out to him:

-

-“Sire, come so far hither, and I will show you Jerusalem!”

-

-But the Duke of Burgundy had just deserted with half the crusading

-army, lest it be said that the English had taken Jerusalem. So when

-Richard heard the knight calling he threw his coat armor before his

-eyes, all in tears, and said to our Savior,

-

-“Fair Lord God, I pray Thee suffer me not to see Thy Holy City since I

-can not deliver it from the hands of thine enemies.”

-

-King Louis the Saint followed the example of King Richard the Hero, and

-both left Palestine broken-hearted because they had not the strength

-to take Jerusalem.

-

-Very queer is the tale of the queen’s arrival from France.

-

-“When I heard tell that she was come,” said De Joinville, “I rose from

-before the king and went to meet her, and led her to the castle, and

-when I came back to the king, who was in his chapel, he asked me if

-the queen and his children were well; and I told him yes. And he said,

-‘I knew when you rose from before me that you were going to meet the

-queen, and so I have caused the sermon to wait for you.’ And these

-things I tell you,” adds De Joinville, “because I had then been five

-years with the king, and never before had he spoken to me, nor so far

-as ever I heard, to any one else, of the queen, and of his children;

-and so it appears to me, it was not seemly to be thus a stranger to

-one’s wife and children.”

-

-To do the dear knight justice, he was always brutally frank to the

-king’s face, however much he loved him behind his back.

-

-The return of the king and queen to France was full of adventure, and

-De Joinville still had an appetite for such little troubles as a wreck

-and a sea fight. Here is a really nice story of an accident.

-

-“One of the queen’s bedwomen, when she had put the queen to bed, was

-heedless, and taking the kerchief that had been wound about her head,

-threw it into the iron stove on which the queen’s candle was burning,

-and when she had gone into the cabin where the women slept, below the

-queen’s chamber, the candle burnt on, till the kerchief caught fire,

-and from the kerchief the fire passed to the cloths with which the

-queen’s garments were covered. When the queen awoke she saw her cabin

-all in flames, and jumped up quite naked and took the kerchief and

-threw it all burning into the sea, and took the cloths and extinguished

-them. Those who were in the barge behind the ship cried, but not very

-loud, ‘Fire! fire!’ I lifted up my head and saw that the kerchief still

-burned with a clear flame on the sea, which was very still.

-

-“I put on my tunic as quickly as I could, and went and sat with the

-mariners.

-

-“While I sat there my squire, who slept before me, came to me and

-said that the king was awake, and asked where I was. ‘And I told

-him,’ said he, ‘that you were in your cabin; and the king said to me,

-“Thou liest!”’ While we were thus speaking, behold the queen’s clerk

-appeared, Master Geoffrey, and said to me, ‘Be not afraid, nothing has

-happened.’ And I said, ‘Master Geoffrey, go and tell the queen that the

-king is awake, and she should go to him, and set his mind at ease.’

-

-“On the following day the constable of France, and my Lord Peter the

-chamberlain, and my Lord Gervais, the master of the pantry, said to the

-king, ‘What happened in the night that we heard mention of fire?’ and I

-said not a word. Then said the king, ‘What happened was by mischance,

-and the seneschal (De Joinville) is more reticent than I. Now I will

-tell you,’ said he, ‘how it came about that we might all have been

-burned this night,’ and he told them what had befallen, and said to

-me, ‘I command you henceforth not to go to rest until you have put out

-all fires, except the great fire that is in the hold of the ship.’

-(Cooking fire on the ship’s ballast). ‘And take note that I shall not

-go to rest till you come back to me.’”

-

-It is pleasant to think of the queen’s pluck, the knight’s silence, the

-king’s tact, and to see the inner privacies of that ancient ship. After

-seven hundred years the gossip is fresh and vivid as this morning’s

-news.

-

-The king brought peace, prosperity and content to all his kingdom, and

-De Joinville was very angry when in failing health Saint Louis was

-persuaded to attempt another crusade in Africa.

-

-“So great was his weakness that he suffered me to carry him in my

-arms from the mansion of the Count of Auxerre to the abbey of the

-Franciscans.”

-

-So went the king to his death in Tunis, a bungling soldier, but a saint

-on a throne, the noblest of all adventurers, the greatest sovereign

-France has ever known.

-

-Long afterward the king came in a dream to see De Joinville:

-“Marvelously joyous and glad of heart, and I myself was right glad to

-see him in my castle. And I said to him, ‘Sire, when you go hence, I

-will lodge you in a house of mine, that is in a city of mine, called

-Chevillon.’ And he answered me laughing, and said to me, ‘Lord of

-Joinville, by the faith I owe you, I have no wish so soon to go hence.’”

-

-It was at the age of eighty-five De Joinville wrote his memoirs, still

-blithe as a boy because he was not grown up.

-

-    NOTE. From _Memoirs of the Crusaders_, by Villehardouine and De

-    Joinville. Dent & Co.

-

-

-

-

-III

-

-A. D. 1260

-

-THE MIDDLE AGES IN ASIA

-

-

-THE year 1260 found Saint Louis of France busy reforming his kingdom,

-while over the way the English barons were reforming King Henry III on

-the eve of the founding of parliament, and the Spaniards were inventing

-the bull fight by way of a national sport. Our own national pastime

-then was baiting Jews. They got twopence per week in the pound for the

-use of their money, but next year one of them was caught in the act of

-cheating, a little error which led to the massacre of seven hundred.

-

-That year the great Khan Kublai came to the throne of the Mongol

-Empire, a pastoral realm of the grass lands extending from the edge

-of Europe to the Pacific Ocean. Kublai began to build his capital,

-the city of Pekin, and in all directions his people extended their

-conquests. The looting and burning of Bagdad took them seven days and

-the resistless pressure of their hordes was forcing the Turks upon

-Europe.

-

-Meanwhile in the dying Christian empire of the East, the Latins held

-Constantinople with Beldwin on the throne, but next year the Greek army

-led by Michael Paleologus crept through a tunnel and managed to capture

-the city.

-

-Among the merchants at Constantinople in 1260 were the two Polo

-brothers, Nicolo and Matteo, Venetian nobles, who invested the whole of

-their capital in gems, and set off on a trading voyage to the Crimea.

-Their business finished, they went on far up the Volga River to the

-court of a Mongol prince, and to him they gave the whole of their gems

-as a gift, getting a present in return with twice the money. But now

-their line of retreat was blocked by a war among the Mongol princes, so

-they went off to trade at Bokhara in Persia where they spent a year.

-And so it happened that the Polo brothers met with certain Mongol

-envoys who were returning to the court of their Emperor Kublai. “Come

-with us,” said the envoys. “The great khan has never seen a European

-and will be glad to have you as his guests.” So the Polos traveled

-under safe conduct with the envoys, a year’s journey, until they

-reached the court of the great khan at Pekin and were received with

-honor and liberality.

-

-Now it so happened that Kublai sought for himself and his people the

-faith of Christ, and wanted the pope to send him a hundred priests, so

-he despatched these Italian gentlemen as his ambassadors to the court

-of Rome. He gave them a passport engraved on a slab of gold, commanding

-his subjects to help the envoys upon their way with food and horses,

-and thus, traveling in state across Asia, the Polos returned from a

-journey, the greatest ever made up to that time by any Christian men.

-

-At Venice, Nicolo, the elder of the brothers, found that his wife had

-died leaving to him a son, then aged sixteen, young Marco Polo, a

-gallant, courageous, hardy lad, it seems, and very truthful, without

-the slightest symptoms of any sense of humor.

-

-The schoolboy who defined the Vatican as a great empty space without

-air, was perfectly correct, for when the Polos arrived there was a sort

-of vacuum in Rome, the pope being dead and no new appointment made

-because the electors were squabbling. Two years the envoys waited,

-and when at last a new pope was elected, he proved to be a friend

-of theirs, the legate Theobald on whom they waited at the Christian

-fortress of Acre in Palestine.

-

-But instead of sending a hundred clergymen to convert the Mongol

-empire, the new pope had only one priest to spare, who proved to be a

-coward, and deserted.

-

-Empty handed, their mission a failure, the Polos went back, a three and

-one-half years’ journey to Pekin, taking with them young Marco Polo, a

-handsome gallant, who at once found favor with old Kublai Khan. Marco

-“sped wondrously in learning the customs of the Tartars, as well as

-their language, their manner of writing, and their practise of war ...

-insomuch that the emperor held him in great esteem. And so when he

-discerned Mark to have so much sense, and to conduct himself so well

-and beseemingly, he sent him on an embassage of his, to a country which

-was a good six months’ journey distant. The young gallant executed

-his commission well and with discretion.” The fact is that Kublai’s

-ambassadors, returning from different parts of the world, “were able

-to tell him nothing except the business on which they had gone, and

-that the prince in consequence held them for no better than dolts and

-fools.” Mark brought back plenty of gossip, and was a great success,

-for seventeen years being employed by the emperor on all sorts of

-missions. “And thus it came about that Messer Marco Polo had knowledge

-of or had actually visited a greater number of the different countries

-of the world than any other man.”

-

-In the Chinese annals of the Mongol dynasty there is record in 1277 of

-one Polo nominated a second-class commissioner or agent attached to

-the privy council. Marco had become a civil servant, and his father

-and uncle were both rich men, but as the years went on, and the aged

-emperor began to fail, they feared as to their fate after his death.

-Yet when they wanted to go home old Kublai growled at them.

-

-“Now it came to pass in those days that the Queen Bolgana, wife of

-Argon, lord of the Levant (court of Persia), departed this life. And in

-her will she had desired that no lady should take her place, or succeed

-her as Argon’s wife except one of her own family (in Cathay). Argon

-therefore despatched three of his barons ... as ambassadors to the

-great khan, attended by a very gallant company, in order to bring back

-as his bride a lady of the family of Queen Bolgana, his late wife.

-

-“When these three barons had reached the court of the great khan,

-they delivered their message explaining wherefore they were come. The

-khan received them with all honor and hospitality, and then sent for

-a lady whose name was Cocachin, who was of the family of the deceased

-Queen Bolgana. She was a maiden of seventeen, a very beautiful and

-charming person, and on her arrival at court she was presented to the

-three barons as the lady chosen in compliance with their demand. They

-declared that the lady pleased them well.

-

-“Meanwhile Messer Marco chanced to return from India, whither he had

-gone as the lord’s ambassador, and made his report of all the different

-things that he had seen in his travels, and of the sundry seas over

-which he had voyaged. And the three barons, having seen that Messer

-Nicolo, Messer Matteo and Messer Marco were not only Latins but men of

-marvelous good sense withal, took thought among themselves to get the

-three to travel to Persia with them, their intention being to return

-to their country by sea, on account of the great fatigue of that long

-land journey for a lady. So they went to the great khan, and begged as

-a favor that he would send the three Latins with them, as it was their

-desire to return home by sea.

-

-“The lord, having that great regard that I have mentioned for those

-three Latins, was very loath to do so. But at last he did give them

-permission to depart, enjoining them to accompany the three barons and

-the lady.”

-

-In the fleet that sailed on the two years’ voyage to Persia there were

-six hundred persons, not counting mariners; but what with sickness and

-little accidents of travel, storms for instance and sharks, only eight

-persons arrived, including the lady, one of the Persian barons, and the

-three Italians. They found the handsome King Argon dead, so the lady

-had to put up with his insignificant son Casan, who turned out to be a

-first-rate king. The lady wept sore at parting with the Italians. They

-set out for Venice, arriving in 1295 after an absence of twenty-seven

-years.

-

-There is a legend that two aged men, and one of middle age, in ragged

-clothes, of very strange device, came knocking at the door of the

-Polo’s town house in Venice, and were denied admission by the family

-who did not know them. It was only when the travelers had unpacked

-their luggage, and given a banquet, that the family and their guests

-began to respect these vagrants. Three times during dinner the

-travelers retired to change their gorgeous oriental robes for others

-still more splendid. Was it possible that the long dead Polos had

-returned alive? Then the tables being cleared, Marco brought forth the

-dirty ragged clothes in which they had come to Venice, and with sharp

-knives they ripped open the seams and welts, pouring out vast numbers

-of rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds and emeralds, gems to the

-value of a million ducats. The family was entirely convinced, the

-public nicknamed the travelers as the millionaires, the city conferred

-dignities, and the two elder gentlemen spent their remaining years in

-peace and splendor surrounded by hosts of friends.

-

-Three years later a sea battle was fought between the fleets of Genoa

-and Venice, and in the Venetian force one of the galleys was commanded

-by Marco Polo. There Venice was totally defeated, and Marco was one

-of the seven thousand prisoners carried home to grace the triumph of

-the Genoese. It was in prison that he met the young literary person

-to whom he dictated his book, not of travel, not of adventure,

-but a geography, a description of all Asia, its countries, peoples

-and wonders. Sometimes he got excited and would draw the long bow,

-expanding the numbers of the great khan’s armies. Sometimes his marvels

-were such as nobody in his senses could be expected to swallow, as

-for instance, when he spoke of the Tartars as burning black stones to

-keep them warm in winter. Yet on the whole this book, of the greatest

-traveler that ever lived, awakened Europe of the Dark Ages to the

-knowledge of that vast outer world that has mainly become the heritage

-of the Christian Powers.

-

-    See the Book of Sir Marco Polo, translated and edited by Colonel

-    Sir Henry Yule. John Murray.

-

-

-

-

-IV

-

-A. D. 1322

-

-THE MARVELOUS ADVENTURES OF SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE

-

-

-“I, John Maundeville, Knight, all be it I am not worthy, that was born

-in England, in the town of St. Allans, passed the sea in the year of

-our Lord 1322 ... and hitherto have been long time on the sea, and have

-seen and gone through many diverse lands ... with good company of many

-lords. God be thankful!”

-

-So wrote a very gentle and pious knight. His book of travels begins

-with the journey to Constantinople, which in his day was the seat of

-a Christian emperor. Beyond was the Saracen empire, whose sultans

-reigned in the name of the Prophet Mahomet over Asia Minor, Syria, the

-Holy Land and Egypt. For three hundred years Christian and Saracen had

-fought for the possession of Jerusalem, but now the Moslem power was

-stronger than ever.

-

-Sir John Maundeville found the sultan of Babylon the Less at his

-capital city in Egypt, and there entered in his service as a soldier

-for wars against the Arab tribes of the desert. The sultan grew to love

-this Englishman, talked with him of affairs in Europe, urged him to

-turn Moslem, and offered to him the hand of a princess in marriage.

-But when Maundeville insisted on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, his

-master let him go, and granted him letters with the great seal, before

-which even generals and governors were obliged to prostrate themselves.

-

-Sir John went all over Palestine, devoutly believing everything he was

-told. Here is his story of the Field Beflowered. “For a fair maiden was

-blamed with wrong, and slandered ... for which cause she was condemned

-to death, and to be burnt in that place, to the which she was led. And

-as the fire began to burn about her, she made her prayers to our Lord,

-that as certainly as she was not guilty of that sin, that he would help

-her, and make it to be known to all men of his merciful grace. And when

-she had thus said she entered into the fire, and anon was the fire

-quenched and out; and the brands which were burning became red rose

-trees, and the brands that were not kindled became white rose trees

-full of roses. And these were the first rose trees and roses, both

-white and red, which ever any man saw.”

-

-All this part of his book is very beautiful concerning the holy places,

-and there are nice bits about incubators for chickens and the use of

-carrier pigeons. But it is in the regions beyond the Holy Land that Sir

-John’s wonderful power of believing everything that he had heard makes

-his chapters more and more exciting.

-

-“In Ethiopia ... there be folk that have but one foot and they go so

-fast that it is a marvel. And the foot is so large that it shadoweth

-all the body against the sun when they will lie and rest them.”

-

-Beyond that was the isle of Nacumera, where all the people have

-hounds’ heads, being reasonable and of good understanding save that

-they worship an ox for their god. And they all go naked save a little

-clout, and if they take any man in battle anon they eat him. The

-dog-headed king of that land is most pious, saying three hundred

-prayers by way of grace before meat.

-

-Next he came to Ceylon. “In that land is full much waste, for it is

-full of serpents, of dragons and of cockodrills, so that no man may

-dwell there.

-

-“In one of these isles be folk as of great stature as giants. And they

-be hideous to look upon. And they have but one eye, and that is in the

-middle of the forehead. And they eat nothing but raw flesh and raw

-fish. And in another isle towards the south dwell folk of foul stature

-and of cursed nature that have no heads. And their eyes be in their

-shoulders and their mouths be round shapen, like an horseshoe, amidst

-their breasts. And in another isle be men without heads, and their eyes

-and mouths be behind in their shoulders. And in another isle be folk

-that have the face all flat, all plain, without nose and without mouth.

-But they have two small holes, all round, instead of their eyes, and

-their mouth is flat also without lips. And in another isle be folk of

-foul fashion and shape that have the lip above the mouth so great that

-when they sleep in the sun they cover all the face with that lip.”

-

-If Sir John had been untruthful he might have been here tempted to tell

-improbable stories, but he merely refers to these isles in passing

-with a few texts from the Holy Scriptures to express his entire

-disapproval. His chapters on the Chinese empire are a perfect model

-of veracity, and he merely cocks on a few noughts to the statistics.

-In outlying parts of Cathay he feels once more the need of a little

-self-indulgence. One province is covered with total and everlasting

-darkness, enlivened by the neighing of unseen horses and the crowing of

-mysterious cocks. In the next province he found a fruit, which, when

-ripe, is cut open, disclosing “a little beast in flesh and bone and

-blood, as though it were a little lamb without wool. And men eat both

-the fruit and the beast. And that is a great marvel. Of that fruit have

-I eaten, although it were wonderful, but that I know well that God is

-marvelous in all his works. And nevertheless I told them of as great a

-marvel to them, that is amongst us, and that was of the barnacle geese:

-for I told them that in our country were trees that bear a fruit that

-become birds flying, and those that fall on the water live, and they

-that fall on the earth die anon, and they be right good to man’s meat,

-and thereof had they so great marvel that some of them trowed it were

-an impossible thing to be.”

-

-This mean doubt as to his veracity must have cut poor Maundeville

-to the quick. In his earnest way he goes on to describe the people

-who live entirely on the smell of wild apples, to the Amazon nation

-consisting solely of women warriors, and so on past many griffins,

-popinjays, dragons and other wild fowl to the Adamant Rocks of

-loadstone which draw all the iron nails out of a ship to her great

-inconvenience. “I myself, have seen afar off in that sea, as though it

-had been a great isle full of trees and bush, full of thorns and briers

-great plenty. And the shipmen told us that all that was of ships that

-were drawn thither by the Adamants, for the iron that was in them.”

-Beyond that Sir John reports a sea consisting of gravel, ebbing and

-flowing in great waves, but containing no drop of water, a most awkward

-place for shipping.

-

-So far is Sir John moderate in his statements, but when he gets to the

-Vale Perilous at last he turns himself loose. That vale is disturbed by

-thunders and tempests, murmurs and noises, a great noise of “tabors,

-drums and trumps.” This vale is all full of devils, and hath been

-alway. In that vale is great plenty of gold and silver.

-

-“Wherefore many misbelieving men and many Christian men also go in

-oftentime to have of the treasure that there is; but few come back

-again, and especially of the misbelieving men, nor of the Christian men

-either, for they be anon strangled of devils. And in the mid place of

-that vale, under a rock, is an head and the visage of a devil bodily,

-full horrible and dreadful to see ... for he beholdeth every man so

-sharply with dreadful eyes, that be evermore moving and sparkling like

-fire, and changeth and stareth so often in diverse manner, with so

-horrible countenance that no man dare draw nigh towards him. And from

-him cometh smoke and stink and fire, and so much abomination, that

-scarcely any man may there endure.

-

-“And ye shall understand that when my fellows and I were in that vale

-we were in great thought whether we durst put our bodies in adventure

-to go in or not.... So there were with us two worthy men, friars

-minors, that were of Lombardy, that said that if any man would enter

-they would go in with us. And when they had said so upon the gracious

-trust of God and of them, we made sing mass, and made every man to be

-shriven and houseled. And then we entered fourteen persons; but at

-our going out we were only nine.... And thus we passed that perilous

-vale, and found therein gold and silver and precious stones, and rich

-jewels great plenty ... but whether it was as it seemed to us I wot

-never. For I touched none.... For I was more devout then, than ever I

-was before or after, and all for the dread of fiends, that I saw in

-diverse figures, and also for the great multitude of dead bodies, that

-I saw there lying by the way ... and therefore were we more devout a

-great deal, and yet we were cast down and beaten many times to the hard

-earth by winds, thunder and tempests ... and so we passed that perilous

-vale.... Thanked be Almighty God!

-

-“After this beyond the vale is a great isle where the folk be great

-giants ... and in an isle beyond that were giants of greater stature,

-some of forty-five foot or fifty foot long, and as some men say of

-fifty cubits long. But I saw none of these, for I had no lust to go to

-those parts, because no man cometh neither into that isle nor into the

-other but he be devoured anon. And among these giants be sheep as great

-as oxen here, and they bear great wool and rough. Of the sheep I have

-seen many times ... those giants take men in the sea out of their ships

-and bring them to land, two in one hand and two in another, eating them

-going, all raw and all alive.

-

-“Of paradise can not I speak properly, for I was not there. It is far

-beyond. And that grieveth me. And also I was not worthy.”

-

-So, regretting that he had not been allowed into paradise, the hoary

-old liar came homeward to Rome, where he claims that the pope absolved

-him of all his sins, and gave him a certificate that his book was

-proved for true in every particular, “albeit that many men list not to

-give credence to anything but to that that they have seen with their

-eye, be the author or the person never so true.” Yet, despite these

-unkind doubts as to its veracity, Maundeville’s book lives after five

-hundred years, and ranks as the most stupendous masterpiece in the art

-of lying.

-

-

-

-

-V

-

-A. D. 1492

-

-COLUMBUS

-

-

-Columbus was blue-eyed, red-haired and tall, of a sunny honesty, humane

-and panic-proof. In other words he came of the Baltic and not of the

-Mediterranean stock, although his people lived in Italy and he was born

-in the suburbs of Genoa. By caste he was a peasant, and by trade, up to

-the age of twenty-eight, a weaver, except at times when his Northern

-blood broke loose and drove him to sea for a voyage. He made himself a

-scholar and a draftsman, and when at last he escaped from an exacting

-family, he earned his living by copying charts at Lisbon. A year later,

-as a navigating officer, he found his way, via the wine trade, to

-Bristol. There he slouched dreaming about the slums, dressed like a

-foreign monk. He must needs pose to himself in some ideal character,

-and was bound to dress the part. The artistic temperament is the

-mainspring of adventure.

-

-In our own day we may compare Boston, that grand old home of the dying

-sailing ship, with New York, a bustling metropolis for the steam

-liners. In the days of Columbus Genoa was an old-fashioned, declining,

-but still splendid harbor of the oared galleys, while Lisbon was the

-up-to-date metropolis of the new square-rigged sailing ships.

-

-From these two greatest seaports of his age, Columbus came to Bristol,

-the harbor of England, in the Middle Ages, of the slow, scholarly,

-artistic, stately English. They were building that prayer in stone,

-Saint Mary Redcliffe, a jewel of intricate red masonry, the setting for

-Portuguese stained glass which glowed like precious gems.

-

-“In the month of February,” says Columbus, “and in the year 1477, I

-navigated as far as the Island of Tile (Thule is Iceland) a hundred

-leagues, and to this island which is as large as England, the English,

-especially those of Bristol, go with merchandise. And at the time that

-I was there the sea was not frozen over, although there were very high

-tides.”

-

-Here, then, is the record of Columbus himself that in his long inquiry

-concerning the regions beyond the Atlantic, he actually visited

-Iceland. A scholar himself, he was able to converse with the learned

-Icelanders in Latin, the trade jargon of that age. From them he surely

-must have known how one hundred thirty years ago the last timber ship

-had come home from Nova Scotia, and twenty-nine years since, within his

-own lifetime, the Greenland trade had closed. The maps of the period

-showed the American coast as far south as the Carolines,--the current

-geography book was equally clear:

-

-“From Biameland (Siberia) the country stretches as far as the desert

-regions in the north until Greenland begins. From Greenland lies

-southerly Helluland (Labrador and Newfoundland), then Markland (Nova

-Scotia); thence it is not far from Vinland (New England), which some

-believe goes out from Africa. England and Scotland are one island, yet

-each country is a kingdom by itself. Ireland is a large island, Iceland

-is also a large island north of Ireland.” Indeed Columbus seems almost

-to be quoting this from memory when he says of Iceland, “this island,

-which is as large as England.” I strongly suspect that Columbus when in

-Iceland, took a solemn oath not to “discover” America.

-

-The writers of books have spent four centuries in whitewashing,

-retouching, dressing up and posing this figure of Columbus. The

-navigator was indeed a man of powerful intellect and of noble

-character, but they have made him seem a monumental prig as well as an

-insufferable bore. He is the dead and helpless victim, dehumanized by

-literary art until we feel that we really ought to pray for him on All

-Prigs’ Day in the churches.

-

-Columbus came home from his Icelandic and Guinea expeditions with two

-perfectly sound ideas. “The world is a globe, so if I sail westerly I

-shall find Japan and the Indies.” For fifteen bitter years he became

-the laughing-stock of Europe.

-

-[Illustration: CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS]

-

-Now note how the historians, the biographers and the commentators, the

-ponderous and the mawkish, the smug and the pedantic alike all fail to

-see why their hero was laughed at. His name was Cristo-fero Colombo,

-to us a good enough label for tying to any man, but to the Italians

-and all educated persons of that age, a joke. The words mean literally

-the Christ-Carrying Dove. Suppose a modern man with some invention or

-a great idea, called himself Mr. Christ-Carrying Dove, and tried to

-get capitalists in New York or London to finance his enterprise! In the

-end he changed his name to Cristoval Colon and got himself financed,

-but by that time his hair was white, and his nerve was gone, and his

-health failing.

-

-In the ninth century the vikings sailed from Norway by the great circle

-course north of the gulf stream. They had no compass or any instruments

-of navigation, and they braved the unknown currents, the uncharted

-reefs, the unspeakable terrors of pack-ice, berg-streams and fog on

-Greenland’s awful coast. They made no fuss.

-

-But Columbus sailing in search of Japan, had one Englishman and one

-Irishman, the rest of the people being a pack of dagoes. In lovely

-weather they were ready to run away from their own shadows.

-

-From here onward throughout the four voyages which disclosed the West

-Indies and the Spanish Main, Columbus allowed his men to shirk their

-duties, to disobey his orders, to mutiny, to desert and even to make

-war upon him.

-

-Between voyages he permitted everybody from the mean king downward,

-to snub, swindle, plunder and defame himself and all who were loyal

-to him in misfortune. Because Columbus behaved like an old woman, his

-swindling pork contractor, Amerigo Vespucci, was allowed to give his

-name to the Americas. Because he had not the manhood to command, the

-hapless red Indians were outraged, enslaved and driven to wholesale

-suicide, leaping in thousands from the cliffs. For lack of a master

-the Spaniards performed such prodigies of cowardice and cruelty as the

-world has never known before or since, the native races were swept out

-of existence, and Spain set out upon a downward path, a moral lapse

-beyond all human power to arrest.

-

-Yet looking back, how wonderful is the prophecy in that name,

-Christ-Carrying Dove, borne by a saintly and heroic seaman whose

-mission, in the end, added two continents to Christianity.

-

-    This text mainly contradicts a _Life of Columbus_, by Clements R.

-    Markham, C. B. Phillip & Son, 1892.

-

-[Illustration: AMERICUS VESPUCCIUS]

-

-

-

-

-VI

-

-A. D. 1519

-

-THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO

-

-

-“Hernando Cortes spent an idle and unprofitable youth.”

-

-So did I. And every other duffer is with me in being pleased with

-Cortes for setting an example. We, not the good boys, need a little

-encouragement.

-

-He was seven years old when Columbus found the Indies. That was a time

-when boys hurried to get grown up and join the search for the Fountain

-of Youth, the trail to Eldorado. All who had time to sleep dreamed

-tremendous dreams.

-

-Cortes became a colonist in Cuba, a sore puzzle to the rascal in

-command. When he clapped Cortes in irons the youngster slipped free and

-defied him. When he gave Cortes command of an expedition the fellow

-cheeked him. When he tried to arrest him the bird had flown, and was

-declared an outlaw.

-

-The soldiers and seamen of the expedition were horrified by this

-adventurer who landed them in newly discovered Mexico, then sank the

-ships lest they should wish to go home. They stood in the deadly mists

-of the tropic plains, and far above them glowed the Star of the Sea,

-white Orizaba crowned with polar snows. They marched up a hill a mile

-and a half in sheer height through many zones of climate, and every

-circumstance of pain and famine to the edge of a plateau crowned by

-immense volcanoes, a land of plenty, densely peopled, full of opulent

-cities. They found that this realm was ruled by an emperor, famous

-for his victorious wars, able, it seemed, to place a million warriors

-in the field, and hungry for captives to be first sacrificed to the

-gods, and afterward eaten at the banquets of the nobility and gentry.

-The temples were actually fed with twenty thousand victims a year. The

-Spanish invading force of four hundred men began to feel uncomfortable.

-

-Yet if this Cortes puzzled the governor of Cuba, and horrified his men,

-he paralyzed the Emperor Montezuma. Hundreds of years ago a stranger

-had come to Mexico from the eastern sea, a bearded man who taught the

-people the arts of civilized life. Then birds first sang and flowers

-blossomed, the fields were fruitful and the sun shone in glory upon

-that plateau of eternal spring. The hero, Bird-Serpent, was remembered,

-loved and worshiped as a god. It was known to all men that as he had

-gone down into the eastern sea so he would return again in later ages.

-Now the prophecy was fulfilled. He had come with his followers, all

-bearded white men out of the eastern sea in mysterious winged vessels.

-Bird-Serpent and his people were dressed in gleaming armor, had weapons

-that flashed lightning, were mounted on terrible beasts--where steel

-and guns and horses were unknown; and Montezuma felt as we should do if

-our land were invaded by winged men riding dragons. To the supernatural

-visitors the emperor sent embassy after embassy, loaded with treasure,

-begging the hero not to approach his capital.

-

-Set in the midst of Montezuma’s empire was the poor valiant republic

-of Tlascala, at everlasting war with the Aztec nation. Invading this

-republic Cortes was met by a horde of a hundred thousand warriors, whom

-he thrashed in three engagements, and when they were humbled, accepted

-as allies against the Aztecs. Attended by an Tlascalan force he entered

-the ancient Aztec capital, Cholula, famed for its temple. This is a

-stone-faced mound of rubble, four times the size and half the height of

-the Great Pyramid, a forty-acre building larger by four acres than any

-structure yet attempted by white men.

-

-By the emperor’s orders the Cholulans welcomed the Spaniards, trapped

-them within their city, and attacked them. In reply, Cortes used their

-temple as the scene of a public massacre, slaughtered three thousand

-men, and having thus explained things, marched on the City of Mexico.

-

-In those days a salt lake, since drained, filled the central hollow

-of the vale of Mexico, and in the midst of it stood the city built

-on piles, and threaded with canals, a barbaric Venice, larger,

-perhaps even grander than Venice with its vast palace and gardens,

-and numberless mound temples whose flaming altars lighted the town at

-night. Three causeways crossed the lake and met just as they do to-day

-at the central square. Here, on the site of the mound temple, stands

-one of the greatest of the world’s cathedrals, and across the square

-are public buildings marking the site of Montezuma’s palace, and that

-in which he entertained the Spaniards. The white men were astonished

-at the zoological gardens, the aviary, the floating market gardens on

-the lake, the cleanliness of the streets, kept by a thousand sweepers,

-and a metropolitan police which numbered ten thousand men, arrangements

-far in advance of any city of Europe. Then, as now, the place was a

-great and brilliant capital.

-

-Yet from the Spanish point of view these Aztecs were only barbarians to

-be conquered, and heathen cannibals doomed to hell unless they accepted

-the faith. To them the Cholula massacre was only a military precaution.

-They thought it right to seize their generous host the emperor, to hold

-him as a prisoner under guard, and one day even to put him in irons.

-For six months Montezuma reigned under Spanish orders, overwhelmed with

-shame. He loved his captors because they were gallant gentlemen, he

-freely gave them his royal treasure of gems, and gold, and brilliant

-feather robes. Over the plunder--a million and a half sterling in gold

-alone--they squabbled; clear proof to Montezuma that they were not all

-divine. Yet still they were friends, so he gave them all the spears

-and bows from his arsenal as fuel to burn some of his nobles who had

-affronted them.

-

-It was at this time that the hostile governor of Cuba sent Narvaes

-with seventeen ships and a strong force to arrest the conqueror

-for rebellion. The odds were only three to one, instead of the

-usual hundred to one against him, so Cortes went down to the coast,

-gave Narvaes a thrashing, captured him, enrolled his men by way of

-reinforcements, and returned with a force of eleven hundred troops.

-

-He had left his friend, Alvarado, with a hundred men to hold the

-capital and guard the emperor. This Alvarado, so fair that the natives

-called him Child of the Sun, was such a fool that he massacred six

-hundred unarmed nobles and gentlefolk for being pagans, violated the

-great temple, and so aroused the whole power of the fiercest nation on

-earth to a war of vengeance. Barely in time to save Alvarado, Cortes

-reentered the city to be besieged. Again and again the Aztecs attempted

-to storm the palace. The emperor in his robes of state addressed them

-from the ramparts, and they shot him. They seized the great temple

-which overlooked the palace, and this the Spaniards stormed. In face of

-awful losses day by day the Spaniards, starving and desperate, cleared

-a road through the city, and on the night of Montezuma’s death they

-attempted to retreat by one of the causeways leading to the mainland.

-Three canals cut this road, and the drawbridges had been taken away,

-but Cortes brought a portable bridge to span them. They crossed the

-first as the gigantic sobbing gong upon the heights of the temple

-aroused the entire city.

-

-Heavily beset from the rear, and by thousands of men in canoes, they

-found that the weight of their transport had jammed the bridge which

-could not be removed. They filled the second gap with rocks, with their

-artillery and transport, with chests of gold, horses, and dead men.

-So they came to the third gap, no longer an army but as a flying mob

-of Spaniards and Tlascalan warriors bewildered in the rain and the

-darkness by the headlong desperation of the attacking host. They were

-compelled to swim, and at least fifty of the recruits were drowned by

-the weight of gold they refused to leave, while many were captured to

-be sacrificed upon the Aztec altars. Montezuma’s children were drowned,

-and hundreds more, while Cortes and his cavaliers, swimming their

-horses back and forth convoyed the column, and Alvarado with his rear

-guard held the causeway.

-

-Last in the retreat, grounding his spear butt, he leaped the chasm,

-a feat of daring which has given a name forever to this place as

-Alvarado’s Leap. And just beyond, upon the mainland there is an ancient

-tree beneath which Cortes, as the dawn broke out, sat on the ground

-and cried. He had lost four hundred fifty Spaniards, and thousands of

-Tlascalans, his records, artillery, muskets, stores and treasure in

-that lost battle of the Dreadful Night.

-

-A week later the starved and wounded force was beset by an army of two

-hundred thousand Aztecs. They had only their swords now, but, after

-long hours of fighting, Cortes himself killed the Aztec general, so by

-his matchless valor and leadership gaining a victory.

-

-The rest is a tale of horror beyond telling, for, rested and

-reinforced, the Spaniards went back. They invested, besieged, stormed

-and burned the famine-stricken, pestilence-ridden capital, a city

-choked and heaped with the unburied dead of a most valiant nation.

-

-Afterward, under the Spanish viceroys, Mexico was extended and enlarged

-to the edge of Alaska, a Christian civilized state renowned for mighty

-works of engineering, the splendor of her architecture, and for such

-inventions as the national pawn-shop, as a bank to help the poor. One

-of the so-called native “slaves” of the mines once wrote to the king

-of Spain, begging his majesty to visit Mexico and offering to make a

-royal road for him, paving the two hundred fifty miles from Vera Cruz

-to the capital with ingots of pure silver as a gift to Spain.

-

-

-

-

-VII

-

-A. D. 1532

-

-THE CONQUEST OF PERU

-

-

-Pizarro was reared for a swineherd; long years of soldiering made

-him no more than a captain, and when at the age of fifty he turned

-explorer, he discovered nothing but failure.

-

-For seven years he and his followers suffered on trails beset by snakes

-and alligators, in feverish jungles haunted by man-eating savages, to

-be thrown at last battered, ragged and starving on the Isle of Hell.

-Then a ship offered them passage, but old Pizarro drew a line in the

-dust with his sword. “Friends,” said he, “and comrades, on that side

-are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion and death;

-on this side ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here

-Panama and its poverty. Choose each man, what best becomes a brave

-Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.”

-

-Thirteen of all his people crossed the line with Pizarro, the rest

-deserting him, and he was seven months marooned on his desert isle in

-the Pacific. When the explorer’s partners at last were able to send a

-ship from Panama, it brought him orders to return, a failure. He did

-not return but took the ship to the southward, his guide the great

-white Andes, along a coast no longer of horrible swamps but now more

-populous, more civilized than Spain, by hundreds of miles on end of

-well-tilled farms, fair villages and rich cities where the temples

-were sheathed with plates of pure red gold. As in the Mexico of eight

-years ago, the Spaniards were welcomed as superhuman, their ship, their

-battered armor and their muskets accounted as possessions of strayed

-gods. They dined in the palaces of courtly nobles, rested in gardens

-curiously enriched with foliage and flowers of beaten gold and silver,

-and found native gentlemen eager to join them in their ship as guests.

-So with a shipload of wonders to illustrate this discovery they went

-back to Panama, and Pizarro returned home to seek in Spain the help

-of Charles V. There, at the emperor’s court, he met Cortes, who came

-to lay the wealth of conquered Mexico at his sovereign’s feet, and

-Charles, with a lively sense of more to come, despatched Pizarro to

-overthrow Peru.

-

-Between the Eastern and the Western Andes lies a series of lofty plains

-and valleys, in those days irrigated and farmed by an immense civilized

-population. A highway, in length 1,100 miles, threaded the settlements

-together. The whole empire was ruled by a foreign dynasty, called the

-Incas, a race of fighting despots by whom the people had been more or

-less enslaved. The last Inca had left the northern kingdom of Quito to

-his younger son, the ferocious Atahuallpa, and the southern realm of

-Cuzco to his heir, the gentle Huascar.

-

-These brothers fought until Atahuallpa subdued the southern kingdom,

-imprisoned Huascar, and reigned so far as he knew over the whole

-world. It was then that from outside the world came one hundred

-sixty-eight men of an unknown race possessed of ships, horses, armor

-and muskets--things very marvelous, and useful to have. The emperor

-invited these strangers to cross the Andes, intending, when they came,

-to take such blessings as the Sun might send him. The city of Caxamalca

-was cleared of its people, and the buildings enclosing the market place

-were furnished for the reception of the Spaniards.

-

-The emperor’s main army was seven hundred miles to the southward, but

-the white men were appalled by the enormous host attending him in his

-camp, where he had halted to bathe at the hot springs, three miles from

-their new quarters. The Peruvian watch fires on the mountain sides were

-as thick as the stars of heaven.

-

-The sun was setting next day when a procession entered the Plaza

-of Caxamalca, a retinue of six thousand guards, nobles, courtiers,

-dignitaries, surrounding the litter on which was placed the gently

-swaying golden throne of the young emperor.

-

-Of all the Spaniards, only one came forward, a priest who, through an

-interpreter, preached, explaining from the commencement of the world

-the story of his faith, Saint Peter’s sovereignty, the papal office,

-and Pizarro’s mission to receive the homage of this barbarian. The

-emperor listened, amused at first, then bored, at last affronted,

-throwing down the book he was asked to kiss. On that a scarf waved and

-the Spaniards swept from their ambush, blocking the exits, charging

-as a wolf-pack on a sheepfold, riding the people down while they

-slaughtered. So great was the pressure that a wall of the courtyard

-fell, releasing thousands whose panic flight stampeded the Incas’ army.

-But the nobles had rallied about their sovereign, unarmed but with

-desperate valor clinging to the legs of the horses and breaking the

-charge of cavalry. They threw themselves in the way of the fusillades,

-their bodies piled in mounds, their blood flooding the pavement. Then,

-as the bearers fell, the golden throne was overturned, and the emperor

-hurried away a prisoner. Two thousand people had perished in the

-attempt to save him.

-

-The history of the Mexican conquest was repeated here, and once more a

-captive emperor reigned under Spanish dictation.

-

-This Atahuallpa was made of sterner stuff than Montezuma, and had his

-defeated brother Huascar drowned, lest the Spaniards should make use of

-his rival claim to the throne. The Peruvian prince had no illusions as

-to the divinity of the white men, saw clearly that their real religion

-was the adoration of gold, and in contempt offered a bribe for his

-freedom. Reaching the full extent of his arm to a height of nine feet,

-he boasted that to that level he would fill the throne room with gold

-as the price of his liberty, and twice he would fill the anteroom with

-silver. So he sent orders to every city of his empire commanding that

-the shrines, the temples, palaces and gardens be stripped of their

-gold and silver ornaments, save only the bodies of the dead kings, his

-fathers. Of course, the priests made haste to bury their treasures,

-but the Spaniards went to see the plunder collected and when they had

-finished no treasures were left in sight save a course of solid golden

-ingots in the walls of the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco, and certain

-massive beams of silver too heavy for shipment. Still the plunder of an

-empire failed to reach the nine-foot line on the walls of the throne

-room at Caxamalca, but the soldiers were tired of waiting, especially

-when the goldsmiths took a month to melt the gold into ingots. So the

-royal fifth was shipped to the king of Spain, Pizarro’s share was set

-apart, a tithe was dedicated to the Church, and the remainder divided

-among the soldiers according to their rank, in all three and a half

-millions sterling by modern measurement, the greatest king’s ransom

-known to history. Then the emperor was tried by a mock court-martial,

-sentenced to death and murdered. It is comforting to note that of all

-who took part in that infamy not one escaped an early and a violent

-death.

-

-Pizarro had been in a business partnership with the schoolmaster

-Luque of Panama cathedral, and with Almagro, a little fat, one-eyed

-adventurer, who now arrived on the scene with reinforcements. Pizarro’s

-brothers also came from Spain. So when the emperor’s death lashed the

-Peruvians to desperation, there were Spaniards enough to face odds of

-a hundred to one in a long series of battles, ending with the siege of

-the adventurers who held Cuzco against the Inca Manco for five months.

-The city, vast in extent, was thatched, and burned for seven days with

-the Spaniards in the midst. They fought in sheer despair, and the

-Indians with heroism, their best weapon the lasso, their main hope that

-of starving the garrison to death. No valor could possibly save these

-heroic robbers, shut off from escape or from rescue by the impenetrable

-rampart of the Andes. They owed their salvation to the fact that the

-Indians must disperse to reap their crops lest the entire nation perish

-of hunger, and the last of the Incas ended his life a fugitive lost in

-the recesses of the mountains.

-

-Then came a civil war between the Pizarros, and Almagro, whose share

-of the plunder turned out to be a snowy desolation to the southward.

-It was not until after this squalid feud had been ended by Almagro’s

-execution and Pizarro’s murder, that the desolate snows were uncovered,

-revealing the incomparable treasures of silver Potosi, Spain’s share of

-the plunder.

-

-

-

-

-VIII

-

-A. D. 1534

-

-THE CORSAIRS

-

-

-In 1453 Constantinople was besieged and stormed by the Turks, the

-Christian emperor fell with sixty thousand of his men in battle, and

-the Caliph Mahomet II raised the standard of Islam over the last ruins

-of the Roman empire.

-

-Four years later a sailorman, a Christian from the Balkan States,

-turned Moslem and was banished from the city. He married a Christian

-widow in Mitylene and raised two sons to his trade. At a very tender

-age, Uruj, the elder son, went into business as a pirate, and on his

-maiden cruise was chased and captured by a galley of the Knights of

-Saint John who threw him into the hold to be a slave at the oars.

-That night a slave upon the nearest oar-bench disturbed the crew by

-groaning, and to keep him quiet was thrown overboard. Not liking his

-situation or prospects, Uruj slipped his shackles, crept out and

-swam ashore. On his next voyage, being still extremely young, he was

-captured and swam ashore again. Then the sultan’s brother fitted him

-out as a corsair at the cost of five thousand ducats, to be paid by

-the basha of Egypt, and so, thanks to this act of princely generosity,

-Uruj was able to open a general practise. His young brother Khizr,

-also a pirate, joined him; the firm was protected by the sultan of

-Tunis who got a commission of twenty per cent. on the loot; and being

-steady, industrious and thrifty, by strict application to business,

-they made a reputation throughout the Middle Sea. Indeed the Grand Turk

-bestowed upon Khizr the title “Protector of Religion,” a distinction

-never granted before or since to any professional robber. Once after

-a bitter hard fight the brothers captured a first-rate ship of war,

-_The Galley of Naples_, and six lady passengers besides three hundred

-men were marched ashore into slavery. “See,” said the sultan of Tunis,

-“how Heaven recompenses the brave!” Uruj, by the way, was laid up some

-months for repairs, and in his next engagement, a silly attack on a

-fortress, happened to lose an arm as part of his recompense.

-

-By this time the brothers were weary of that twenty per cent.

-commission to the unctuous sultan of Tunis, and by way of cheating him,

-took to besieging fortresses, or sacking towns, Christian or Moslem as

-the case might be, until they had base camps of their own, Uruj as king

-of Tlemcen, and Khizr as king of Algiers. Then Uruj fell in battle,

-and Khizr Barbarossa began to do business as a wholesale pirate with a

-branch kingdom of Tunis, and fleets to destroy all commerce, to wreck

-and burn settlements of the Christian powers until he had command of

-the sea as a first-class nuisance. The gentle Moors, most civilized

-of peoples, expelled from Spain (1493) by the callous ill-faith of

-Ferdinand and Isabella, and stranded upon North Africa to starve,

-manned Barbarossa’s fleets for a bloody vengeance upon Christian

-Europe. Then Charles V brought the strength of Spain, Germany and Italy

-to bear in an expedition against Barbarossa, but his fleet was wrecked

-by a storm, clear proof that Allah had taken sides with the strong

-pirate king. Barbarossa then despatched his lieutenant Hassan to ravage

-the coast of Valencia.

-

-It was upon this venture that Hassan met a transport merchantman with

-a hundred veteran Spanish infantry, too strong to attack; so when this

-lieutenant returned to Algiers deep-laden with spoil and captives from

-his raid, he found King Barbarossa far from pleased. The prisoners

-were butchered, and Hassan was flogged in public for having shirked an

-engagement. That is why Hassan joined with Venalcadi, a brother officer

-who was also in disgrace, and together they drove Barbarossa out of

-Algeria. Presently the king came back with a whole fleet of his fellow

-corsairs, brother craftsmen, the Jew, and Hunt-the-Devil, Salærrez and

-Tabas, all moved to grief and rage by the tears of a sorely ill-treated

-hero. With the aid of sixty captive Spanish soldiers, who won their

-freedom, they captured Algiers, wiped out the mutineers, and restored

-the most perfect harmony. Indeed, by way of proof that there really was

-no trouble among the corsairs, King Barbarossa sent off Hunt-the-Devil

-with seventeen ships to burn Spain. Ever in blood and tears, their

-homes in flames, their women ravished, their very children enslaved,

-the Spaniards had to pay for breaking faith with the Moors of Granada.

-

-Barbarossa was not yet altogether king of Algiers. For twenty years the

-Peñon, a fortress fronting that city, had been held by Martin de Vargas

-and his garrison. Worn out with disease and famine these Spaniards

-now fought Barbarossa to the last breath, but their walls went down in

-ruin, the breach was stormed, and all were put to the sword. De Vargas,

-taken prisoner, demanded the death of a Spaniard who had betrayed

-him. The traitor was promptly beheaded, but Barbarossa turned upon De

-Vargas. “You and yours,” he said, “have caused me too much trouble,”

-and he again signed to the headsman. So De Vargas fell.

-

-Terrible was the rage of Charles V, emperor of half Europe, thus defied

-and insulted by the atrocious corsair. It was then that he engaged the

-services of Andrea Doria, the greatest Christian admiral of that age,

-for war against Barbarossa. And at the same time the commander of the

-faithful, Suleiman the Magnificent, sent for King Barbarossa to command

-the Turkish fleet.

-

-He came, with gifts for the calif: two hundred women bearing presents

-of gold or silver; one hundred camels laden with silks and gold; then

-lions and other strange beasts; and more loads of brocades, or rich

-garments, all in procession through Constantinople, preceding the

-pirate king on his road to the palace. The sultan gave him not only a

-big fleet, but also vice-regal powers to make war or peace. Next summer

-(1534) eleven thousand Christian slaves, and a long procession of ships

-loaded with the plunder of smoking Italy were sent to the Golden Horn.

-Incidentally, Barbarossa seized the kingdom of Tunis for himself, and

-slaughtered three thousand of the faithful, just to encourage the rest.

-

-It was to avenge the banished King Hassan, and these poor slaughtered

-citizens that the Emperor Charles V, attended by his admiral, Andrea

-Doria, came with an army and a mighty fleet to Tunis.

-

-He drove out Barbarossa, a penniless, discredited fugitive; and his

-soldiers slaughtered thirty thousand citizens of Tunis to console them

-for the pirate’s late atrocities.

-

-Poor old Barbarossa, past seventy years of age, had lost a horde of

-fifty thousand men, his kingdom of Tunis, fleet and arsenal; but he

-still had fifteen galleys left at Bona, his kingdom of Algiers to fall

-back upon, and his Moorish seamen, who had no trade to win them honest

-bread except as pirates. “Cheer up,” said he, to these broken starving

-men, and after a little holiday they sacked the Balearic Isles taking

-five thousand, seven hundred slaves, and any amount of shipping. Then

-came the building of a Turkish fleet; and with one hundred twenty sail,

-Barbarossa went to his last culminating triumph, the defeat of Andrea

-Doria, who had at Prevesa one hundred ninety-five ships, sixty thousand

-men, and two thousand, five hundred ninety-four guns. With that victory

-he retired, and after eight years of peace, he died in his bed, full of

-years and honors. For centuries to come all Turkish ships saluted with

-their guns, and dipped their colors whenever they passed the grave of

-the King of the Sea.

-

-    _Sea Wolves of the Mediterranean_, Commander E. Hamilton Currey,

-    R.N. John Murray.

-

-

-

-

-IX

-

-A. D. 1542

-

-PORTUGAL IN THE INDIES

-

-

-It was Italian trade that bought and paid for the designs of Raphael,

-the temples of Michelangelo, the sculptures of Cellini, the inventions

-of Da Vinci, for all the wonders, the glories, the splendors of

-inspired Italy. And it was not good for the Italian trade that

-Barbarossa, and the corsairs of three centuries in his wake, beggared

-the merchants and enslaved their seamen. But Italian commerce had its

-source in the Indian Seas, and the ruin of Italy began when the sea

-adventures of Portugal rounded the Cape of Good Hope to rob, to trade,

-to govern and convert at the old centers of Arabian business.

-

-Poverty is the mother of labor, labor the parent of wealth and genius.

-It is the poverty of Attica, and the Roman swamps, of sterile Scotland,

-boggy Ireland, swampy Holland, stony New England, which drove them to

-high endeavor and great reward. Portugal, too, had that advantage of

-being small and poor, without resources, or any motive to keep the

-folk at home. So the fishermen took to trading and exploration led by

-Cao who found the Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama who smelt out the

-way to India, Almeida who gained command of the Indian Seas, Cabral

-who discovered Brazil, Albuquerque who, seizing Goa and Malacca,

-established a Christian empire in the Indies, and Magellan, who showed

-Spain the way to the Pacific.

-

-Of these the typical man was Da Gama, a noble with the motives of a

-crusader and the habits of a pirate, who once set fire to a shipload

-of Arab pilgrims, and watched unmoved while the women on her blazing

-deck held out little babies in the vain hope of mercy. On his first

-voyage he came to Calicut, a center of Hindu civilization, a seat of

-Arab commerce, and to the rajah sent a present of washing basins, casks

-of oil, a few strings of coral, fit illustration of the poverty of his

-brave country, accepted as a joke in polished, wealthy, weary India.

-The king gave him leave to trade, but seized the poor trade goods until

-the Portuguese ships had been ransacked for two hundred twenty-three

-pounds in gold to pay the customs duties. The point of the joke was

-only realized when on his second voyage Da Gama came with a fleet,

-bombarded Calicut, and loaded his ships with spices, leaving a trail of

-blood and ashes along the Indian coast. Twenty years later he came a

-third time, but now as viceroy to the Portuguese Indies. Portugal was

-no longer poor, but the richest state in Europe, bleeding herself to

-death to find the men for her ventures.

-

-Now these arrogant and ferocious officials, military robbers, fishermen

-turned corsairs, and ravenous traders taught the whole East to hate

-and fear the Christ. And then came a tiny little monk no more than

-five feet high, a white-haired, blue-eyed mendicant, who begged the

-rice he lived on. Yet so sweet was his temper, so magical the charm,

-so supernatural the valor of this barefoot monk that the children

-worshiped him, the lepers came to him to be healed, and the pirates

-were proud to have him as their guest. He was a gentleman, a Spanish

-Basque, by name Francis de Xavier, and in the University of Paris had

-been a fellow student with the reformer Calvin, then a friend and

-follower of Ignatius de Loyola, helping him to found the Society of

-Jesus. Xavier came to the Indies in 1542 as a Jesuit priest.

-

-Once on a sea voyage Xavier stood for some time watching a soldier

-at cards, who gambled away all his money and then a large sum which

-had been entrusted to his care. When the soldier was in tears and

-threatening suicide, Xavier borrowed for him the sum of one shilling

-twopence, shuffled and dealt for him, and watched him win back all

-that he had lost. At that point Saint Francis set to work to save

-the soldier’s soul, but this disreputable story is not shown in the

-official record of his miracles.

-

-From his own letters one sees how the heathen puzzled this little

-saint, “‘Was God black or white?’ For as there is so great variety of

-color among man, and the Indians are themselves black, they esteem

-their own color most highly, and hold that their gods are also black.”

-

-He does not say how he answered, indeed it was hardly by words that

-this hidalgo of Spain preached in the many languages he could never

-learn. Once when his converts were threatened by a hostile army he went

-alone to challenge the invaders, and with uplifted crucifix rebuked

-them in the name of God. The front ranks wavered and halted. Their

-comrades and leaders vainly pressed them to advance, but no man dared

-pass the black-robed figure which barred the way, and presently the

-whole force retreated.

-

-Once in the Spice Islands while he was saying mass on the feast of

-the Archangel Saint Michael a tremendous earthquake scattered the

-congregation. The priest held up the shaking altar and went on with

-mass, while, as he says, “Perhaps Saint Michael, by his heavenly power,

-was driving into the depths of hell all the wicked spirits of the

-country who were opposing the worship of the true God.”

-

-Such was the apostle of the Indies, and it is a pleasant thing to trace

-the story of his mission in Japan in the _Peregrination_, a book by a

-thorough rogue.

-

-Fernão Mendes Pinto was a distant relative of Ananias. He sailed for

-India in 1537 “meanly accommodated.” At Diu he joined an expedition

-to watch the Turkish fleet in the Red Sea, and from Massawa was sent

-with letters to the king of Abyssinia. That was great luck, because

-the very black and more or less Christian kingdom was supposed to be

-the seat of the legendary, immortal, shadowy, Prester John. On his way

-back to Massawa the adventurer was wrecked, captured by Arabs, sold

-into slavery, bought by a Jew, and resold in the commercial city of

-Ormus where there were Christian buyers. He found his way to Goa, the

-capital of the Portuguese Indies, thence to Malacca, where he got a job

-as political agent in Sumatra. With this ended the dull period of his

-travels.

-

-[Illustration: FRANCIS XAVIER]

-

-In those days there were ships manned by Portuguese rogues very good in

-port, but unpleasant to meet with at sea. They were armed with cannon,

-pots of wild fire, unslaked lime to be flung in the Chinese manner,

-stones, javelins, arrows, half-pikes, axes and grappling irons,

-all used to collect toll from Chinese, Malay, or even Arab merchants.

-Pinto found that this life suited him, and long afterward, writing as a

-penitent sinner, described the fun of torturing old men and children:

-“Made their brains fly out of their heads with a cord” or looked on

-while the victims died raving “like mad dogs.” It was great sport to

-surprise some junk at anchor, and fling pots of gunpowder among the

-sleeping crew, then watch them dive and drown. “The captain of one such

-junk was ‘a notorious Pyrat,’ and Pinto complacently draws the moral

-‘Thus you see how it pleased God, out of His Divine justice to make the

-arrogant confidence of this cursed dog a means to chastise him for his

-cruelties.’”

-

-So Christians set an example to the heathen.

-

-Antonio de Faria, Pinto’s captain, had vowed to wipe out Kwaja Hussain,

-a Moslem corsair from Gujerat in Western India. In search of Hussain he

-had many adventures in the China seas, capturing pirate crews, dashing

-out their brains, and collecting amber, gold and pearls. Off Hainan he

-so frightened the local buccaneers that they proclaimed him their king

-and arranged to pay him tribute.

-

-Luckily for them Faria’s ship was cast away upon a desert island. The

-crew found a deer which had been left by a tiger, half eaten; their

-shouts would scare the gulls as they flew overhead, so that the birds

-dropped such fish as they had captured; and then by good luck they

-discovered a Chinese junk whose people, going ashore, had left her

-in charge of an old man and a child. Amid the clamors of the Chinese

-owners Faria made off with this junk. He was soon at the head of a

-new expedition in quest of that wicked pirate, Kwaja Hussain. This

-ambition was fulfilled, and with holds full of plunder the virtuous

-Faria put into Liampo. Back among the Christians he had a royal

-welcome, but actually blushed when a sermon was preached in his honor.

-The preacher waxed too eloquent, “whereupon some of his friends plucked

-him three or four times by the surplice, for to make him give over.” It

-seems that even godly Christian pirates have some sense of humor.

-

-Once in the Malay states, Pinto and a friend of his, a Moslem, were

-asked to dine with a bigwig, also a True Believer. At dinner they spoke

-evil about the local rajah, who got wind of the slander. Pinto watched

-both of these Moslem gentlemen having their feet sawn off, then their

-hands, and finally their heads. As for himself, he talked about his

-rich relations, claiming Dom Pedro de Faria, a very powerful noble, as

-his uncle. He said the factor had embezzled his uncle’s money and fully

-deserved his fate. “All this,” says Pinto, “was extemporized on the

-spur of the moment, not knowing well what I said.” The liar got off.

-

-Pinto’s career as a pirate ended in shipwreck, capture, slavery and a

-journey in China where he was put to work on the repairing of the Great

-Wall. He was at a city called Quinsay in 1544 when Altan Khan, king of

-the Tumeds--a Mongolian horde--swept down out of the deserts.

-

-The Mongols sacked Quinsay, and Pinto as a prisoner was brought before

-Altan Khan who was besieging Pekin. When the siege was raised he

-accompanied the Mongol army on its retreat into the heart of Asia. In

-time he found favor with his masters and was allowed to accompany

-an embassy to Cochin China. On this journey he saw some cannon with

-iron breeches and wooden muzzles made, he was told, by certain Almains

-(Germans) who came out of Muscovy (Russia), and had been banished by

-the king of Denmark. Then comes Pinto’s account of Tibet, of Lhasa,

-and the Grand Lama, and so to Cochin China, and the sea. If it is

-true, Pinto made a very great journey, and he claims to have been

-afterward with Xavier in Japan. In the end he returned to Lisbon after

-twenty-one years of adventure in which he was five times shipwrecked,

-and seventeen times sold as a slave.

-

-It is disheartening to have so little space for the great world of

-Portuguese adventure in the Indies, where Camoens, one of the world’s

-great poets, wrote the immortal _Lusiads_.

-

-However ferocious, these Portuguese adventurers were loyal, brave

-and strong. They opened the way of Europe to the East Indies, they

-Christianized and civilized Brazil. Once, at sea, a Portuguese lady

-spoke to me of England’s good-humored galling disdain toward her

-people. “Ah, you English!” she cried. “What you are, we were once! what

-we are, you will be!”

-

-    _Vasco da Gama and his Successors_, by K. G. Jayne. Methuen.

-

-

-

-

-X

-

-A. D. 1841

-

-RAJAH BROOKE

-

-

-Borneo is a hot forest about five hundred miles long, and as wide,

-inhabited by connoisseurs called Dyaks, keen collectors. They collect

-human heads and some of their pieces are said to be very valuable. They

-are a happy little folk with most amusing manners and customs. Here is

-their ritual for burial of the dead:

-

-“When a man dies his friends and relations meet in the house and take

-their usual seats around the room. The deceased is then brought in

-attired in his best clothes, with a cigar fixed in his mouth; and,

-being placed on the mat in the same manner as when alive, his betel box

-is set by his side. The friends go through the form of conversing with

-him, and offer him the best advice concerning his future proceedings,

-and then, having feasted, the body is deposited in a large coffin and

-kept in the house for several months.”

-

-The habits of the natives have been interfered with by the Malays, who

-conquered most of them and carved their island up into kingdoms more or

-less civilized, but not managed at all in the interests of the Dyaks.

-These kingdoms were decayed and tumbling to pieces when the Dutch came

-in to help, and helped themselves to the whole of Borneo except the

-northwestern part. They pressingly invited themselves there also, but

-the Malay rajah kept putting them off with all sorts of polite excuses.

-

-While the rajah’s minister was running short of excuses to delay the

-Dutch an English yacht arrived in Sarawak. The owner was Mr. James

-Brooke, who had been an officer in the East India Company, but being

-hit with a slug in the lungs during the first Burma war, was retired

-with a pension of seventy pounds for wounds. Afterward he came into a

-fortune of thirty thousand pounds, took to yachting, traveled a great

-deal in search of adventure, and so in 1839 arrived in Sarawak on the

-lookout for trouble.

-

-An Englishman of gentle birth is naturally expected to tell the truth,

-to be clean in all his dealings, to keep his temper, and not to show

-his fears. Not being a beastly cad, Brooke as a matter of course

-conformed to the ordinary standards and, having no worries, was able

-to do so cheerfully. One may meet men of this stock, size and pattern

-by thousands the world over, but in a decayed Malay state, at war with

-the Dyaks ashore and the pirates afloat, Brooke was a phenomenon just

-as astonishing as a first-class comet, an earthquake eruption, or a

-cyclone. His arrival was the only important event in the whole history

-of North Borneo. The rajah sought his advice in dealing with the Dutch,

-the Dyaks and the pirates. The Malays, Dyaks, pirates and everybody

-else consulted him as to their dealings with the rajah. On his second

-visit he took a boat’s crew from his yacht and went to the seat of war.

-There he tried to the verge of tears to persuade the hostile forces

-either to fight or make friends, and when nobody could be induced to

-do anything at all, he, with his boat’s crew and one native warrior,

-stormed the Dyak position, putting the enemy to total rout and flight.

-Luckily, nobody was hurt, for even a cut finger would have spoiled the

-perfect bloodlessness of Brooke’s victory. Then the Dyaks surrendered

-to Brooke. Afterward the pirate fleet appeared at the capital, not to

-attack the rajah, but to be inspected by Brooke, and when he had patted

-the pirates they went away to purr. Moreover the rajah offered to hand

-over his kingdom to Brooke as manager, and the Englishman expected him

-to keep his word. Brooke brought a shipload of stores in payment for a

-cargo of manganese, but the rajah was so contented with that windfall

-that he forgot to send to his mines for the ore.

-

-Further up the coast a British ship was destroyed by lightning, and

-her crew got ashore where they were held as captives pending a large

-ransom. Even when the captain’s wife had a baby the local bigwig

-thereabouts saw a new chance of plunder, and stole the baby-clothes.

-Then the shipwrecked mariners sent a letter to Brooke appealing for his

-help; but nothing on earth could induce the spineless boneless rajah to

-send the relief he had promised. Then Brooke wrote to Singapore whence

-the East India Company despatched a war-ship which rescued the forty

-castaways.

-

-The rajah’s next performance was to arrange for a percentage with two

-thousand, five hundred robbers who proposed to plunder and massacre his

-own subjects. Brooke from his yacht stampeded the raiders with a few

-rounds from the big guns--blank of course. Brooke was getting rather

-hard up, and could not spare ball ammunition on weekdays.

-

-So King Muda Hassim lied, cheated, stole, betrayed, and occasionally

-murdered--a mean rogue, abject, cringing to Brooke, weeping at the

-Englishman’s threats to depart, holding his throne so long as the white

-yacht gave him prestige; but all this with pomp and circumstance,

-display of gems and gold, a gorgeous retinue, plenty of music, and

-royal salutes on the very slightest pretext. But all the population was

-given over to rapine and slaughter, and the forest was closing in on

-ruined farms. The last and only hope of the nation was in Brooke.

-

-Behind every evil in the state was Makota, the prime minister, a polite

-and gentlemanly rascal, and at the end of two years he annoyed Brooke

-quite seriously by putting arsenic in the interpreter’s rice. Brooke

-cleared his ship for action, and with a landing party under arms

-marched to the palace gates. In a few well-chosen words he explained

-Makota’s villainy, showed that neither the rajah’s life nor his own was

-safe, and that the only course was to proclaim Brooke as governor.

-

-No shot was fired, no blow was struck, but Makota’s party vanished, the

-villain fled, the rajah began to behave, the government of the country

-was handed over to the Englishman amid great popular rejoicings. “My

-darling mother,” he wrote, “I am very poor, but I want some things from

-home very much; so I must trust to your being rich enough to afford

-them to me. Imprimis, a circle for taking the latitude; secondly, an

-electrifying machine of good power; thirdly, a large magic lantern;

-fourthly, a rifle which carries fifty balls; and last, a peep-show.

-The circle and rifle I want very much; and the others are all for

-political purposes.” Did ever king begin his reign with such an act as

-that letter?

-

-But then, look at the government he replaced: “The sultan and his

-chiefs rob all classes of Malays to the utmost of their power; the

-Malays rob the Dyaks, and the Dyaks hide their goods as much as they

-dare, consistent with the safety of their wives and children.” Brooke

-found his private income a very slender fund when he had to pay the

-whole expense of governing a kingdom until the people recovered from

-their ruin.

-

-February the first, 1842, a pirate chief called to make treaty with

-the new king. “He inquired, if a tribe pirated on my territory what

-I intended to do. My answer was ‘to enter their country and lay it

-waste.’ ‘But,’ he asked me again, ‘you will give me--your friend--leave

-to steal a few heads occasionally?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I shall have a

-hundred Sakarran heads for every one you take here!’ He recurred to

-this request several times--‘just to steal one or two’-as a schoolboy

-asks for apples.”

-

-Brooke used to give the pirates his laughing permission to go to

-Singapore and attack the English.

-

-[Illustration: SIR JAMES BROOKE]

-

-“The Santah River,” he wrote, “is famous for its diamonds. The

-workers seem jealous and superstitious, disliking noise, particularly

-laughter, as it is highly offensive to the spirit who presides over the

-diamonds.... A Chinese Mohammedan with the most solemn face requested

-me to give him an old letter; and he engraved some Chinese characters,

-which, being translated signify ‘Rajah Muda Hassim, James Brooke,

-and Hadju Ibrahim present their compliments to the spirit and request

-his permission to work at the mine.’”

-

-There were great doings when the sultan of Borneo had Mr. Brooke

-proclaimed king in Sarawak. Then he went off to the Straits

-Settlements, where he made friends with Henry Keppel, captain of

-H. M. S. _Dido_, a sportsman who delighted in hunting pirates, and

-accepted Brooke’s invitation to a few days’ shooting. Keppel describes

-the scene of Brooke’s return to his kingdom, received by all the chiefs

-with undisguised delight, mingled with gratitude and respect for their

-newly-elected ruler. “The scene was both novel and exciting, presenting

-to us--just anchored in a large fresh water river, and surrounded by

-a densely wooded jungle--the whole surface of the water covered with

-canoes and boats dressed with colored silken flags, filled with natives

-beating their tom-toms, and playing on wind instruments, with the

-occasional discharge of firearms. To them it must have been equally

-striking to witness the _Dido_ anchored almost in the center of their

-town, her mastheads towering above the highest trees of that jungle,

-the loud report of her heavy thirty-two-pounder guns, the manning

-aloft to furl sails of one hundred fifty seamen in their clean white

-dresses, and with the band playing. I was anxious that Mr. Brooke

-should land with all the honors due to so important a personage, which

-he accordingly did, under a salute.”

-

-It was a little awkward that the _Dido_ struck a rock and sank, but

-she chose a convenient spot just opposite Mr. Brooke’s house, so that

-Brooke’s officers and those of the ship formed one mess there, a

-band of brothers, while the damage was being repaired. Then came the

-promised sport, a joint boat expedition up all sorts of queer back

-channels and rivers fouled by the pirates with stakes and booms under

-fire of the artillery in their hill fortresses. The sportsmen burst the

-booms, charged the hills, stormed the forts, burned out the pirates and

-obtained their complete submission. Brooke invited them all to a pirate

-conference at his house and, just as with the land rogues, charmed them

-out of their skins. He fought like a man, but his greatest victories

-were scored by perfect manners.

-

-The next adventure was a visit from the Arctic explorer, Sir Edward

-Belcher, sent by the British government to inspect Brooke’s kingdom,

-now a peaceful and happy country.

-

-Later came Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane with a squadron to smash up a

-few more pirates, and the smashing of pirates continued for many years

-a popular sport for the navy. The pirate states to the northward became

-in time the British colonies of Labuan, and North Borneo, but Sarawak

-is still a protected Malay state, the hereditary kingdom of Sir James

-Brooke and his descendants. May that dynasty reign so long as the sun

-shines.

-

-

-

-

-XI

-

-A. D. 1842

-

-THE SPIES

-

-

-I

-

-From earliest childhood Eldred Pottinger was out of place in crowded

-England. Gunpowder is good exciting stuff to play with, and there could

-be no objection to his blowing up himself and his little brother,

-because that was all in the family; but when he mined the garden wall

-and it fell on a couple of neighbors, they highly took offense; and

-when his finely invented bomb went off at Addiscombe College he rose

-to the level of a public nuisance. On the whole it must have been a

-relief to his friends when he went to India. There he had an uncle, the

-president in Scinde, a shrewd man who shipped young Pottinger to the

-greatest possible distance in the hinder parts of Afghanistan.

-

-The political situation in Afghanistan was the usual howling chaos of

-oriental kingdoms, and the full particulars would bore the reader just

-as they bored me. It was Pottinger’s business to find out and report

-the exact state of affairs at a time when any white man visiting the

-country was guaranteed, if and when found, to have his throat cut.

-Being clever at native languages, with a very foxy shrewdness, the

-young spy set off, disguised as a native horse dealer, and reached

-Cabul, the Afghan capital.

-

-The reigning ameer was Dost Mahomet, who was not on speaking terms with

-Kamran, king of Herat, and Pottinger’s job was to get through to Herat

-without being caught by Dost. The horse-copper disguise was useless

-now, so Pottinger became a Mahomedan _syed_, or professional holy man.

-He sent his attendants and horses ahead, slipped out of the capital on

-foot by night and made his way to his camp. So he reached the country

-of the Hazareh tribes where his whole expedition was captured by the

-principal robber Jakoob Beg, who did a fairly good business in selling

-travelers, as slaves, except when they paid blackmail. “The chief,”

-says Pottinger, “was the finest Hazareh I had seen, and appeared a

-well-meaning, sensible person. He, however, was quite in the hands of

-his cousin--an ill-favored, sullen and treacherous-looking rascal. I,

-by way of covering my silence, and to avoid much questioning, took to

-my beads and kept telling them with great perseverance, much to the

-increase of my reputation as a holy personage.”

-

-The trouble was that Pottinger and his devout followers were of the

-Sounee faith, whereas the robber castle was of the Sheeah persuasion.

-The difference was something like that between our Catholics and

-Protestants, and Pottinger was like a Methodist minister trying to

-pass himself off for a cardinal without knowing the little points

-of etiquette. The prisoners prompted one another into all sorts

-of ridiculous blunders, so that the ill-favored cousin suspected

-Pottinger of being a fraud. “Why he may be a Feringhee himself,” said

-the cousin. “I have always heard that the Hindustanees are black,

-and this man is fairer than we are.” But then the Feringhees--the

-British--were supposed to be monsters, and Pottinger was in no way

-monstrous to look at, so that he managed to talk round the corner, and

-at the end of a week ransomed his party with the gift of a fine gun to

-the chief. They set off very blithely into the mountains, but had not

-gone far when the chief’s riders came romping in pursuit, and herded

-them back, presumably to have their throats cut according to local

-manners and customs. The chief, it turned out, had been unable to make

-the gun go off, but finding it worked all right if handled properly

-dismissed the spy with his blessing. Eighteen days’ journey brought

-him to Herat, where he felt perfectly safe, strolling unarmed in the

-country outside the walls, until a gang of slave catchers made him an

-easy prey. His follower, Synd Ahmed, scared them off by shouting to an

-imaginary escort.

-

-Shah Kamran with his vizier Yar Mahomed had been out of town, but on

-their return to Herat, Pottinger introduced himself to the king as a

-British officer, and his gift of a brace of pistols was graciously

-accepted.

-

-Not long afterward a Persian army came up against Herat, and with that

-force there were Russian officers. For once the Heratis could look for

-no help from Afghanistan; and for once this mighty fortress, the key

-to the gates of India, was guarded by a cur. If Herat fell the way was

-open for Russia, the ancient road to India of all the conquerors.

-There is the reason why the British had sent a spy to Herat.

-

-The Heratis were quick to seek the advice of the British officer who

-organized the defense and in the end took charge, the one competent

-man in the garrison. Shah Kamran sent him with a flag of truce to the

-Persian army. The Persian soldiers hailed him with rapture, thinking

-they would soon get home to their wives and families; they patted his

-legs, they caressed his horse, they shouted “Bravo! Bravo! Welcome! The

-English were always friends of the king of kings!”

-

-So Pottinger was brought before the shah of Persia, who would accept no

-terms except surrender, which the Englishman ridiculed. He went back to

-the city, and the siege went on for months.

-

-A shell burst the house next door to his quarters, but he took no

-harm. One day he leaned against a loophole in the ramparts, watching a

-Persian attempt to spring a mine, and as he moved away his place was

-taken by a eunuch who at once got a ball in the lungs. He had narrow

-escapes without end.

-

-At the end of six months, June twenty-fourth, 1838, the Persians

-tried to carry the place by assault. “At four points the assault was

-repulsed, but at the fifth point the storming column threw itself

-into the trench of the lower fausse-braye. The struggle was brief

-but bloody. The defenders fell at their posts to a man, and the work

-was carried by the besiegers. Encouraged by this first success, the

-storming party pushed on up the slope, but a galling fire from the

-garrison met them as they advanced. The officers and men of the column

-were mown down; there was a second brief and bloody struggle, and the

-upper fausse-braye was carried, while a few of the most daring of the

-assailants, pushing on in advance of their comrades, gained the head of

-the breach. But now Deen Mahomed came down with the Afghan reserve, and

-thus recruited the defenders gathered new heart, so that the Persians

-in the breach were driven back. Again and again with desperate courage

-they struggled to effect a lodgment, only to be repulsed and thrown

-back in confusion upon their comrades, who were pressing on behind. The

-conflict was fierce, the issue doubtful. Now the breach was well-nigh

-carried; and now the stormers, recoiling from the shock of the defense,

-fell back upon the exterior slope of the fausse-braye.

-

-“Startled by the noise of the assault Yar Mahomed (the vizier) had

-risen up, left his quarters, and ridden down to the works. Pottinger

-went forth at the same time and on the same errand. Giving instructions

-to his dependents to be carried out in the event of his falling in the

-defense, he hastened to join the vizier.... As they neared the point

-of the attack the garrison were seen retreating by twos and threes;

-others were quitting the works on the pretext of carrying off the

-wounded.... Pottinger was eager to push on to the breach; Yar Mahomed

-sat himself down. The vizier had lost heart; his wonted high courage

-and collectedness had deserted him. Astonished and indignant ...

-the English officer called upon the vizier again and again to rouse

-himself. The Afghan chief rose up and advanced further into the works,

-and neared the breach where the conflict was raging.... Yar Mahomed

-called upon his men in God’s name to fight; but they wavered and stood

-still. Then his heart failed him again. He turned back, said he would

-go for aid.... Alarmed by the backwardness of their chief the men were

-now retreating in every direction.” Pottinger swore.

-

-Yar roused himself, again advanced, but again wavered, and a third

-time Pottinger by word and deed put him to shame. “He reviled, he

-threatened, he seized him by the arm and dragged him forward to the

-breach.” Now comes the fun, and we can forsake the tedious language of

-the official version. Yar, hounded to desperation by Pottinger, seized

-a staff, rushed like a wildcat on the retreating soldiers, and so

-horrified them that they bolted back over the breach down the outside

-into the face of the Persians. And the Persians fled! Herat was saved.

-

-An envoy came from the Persian army to explain that it was infamous of

-the Shah Kamran to have an infidel in charge of the defense. “Give him

-up,” said the Persians, “and we’ll raise the siege.” But the shah was

-not in a position to surrender Pottinger. That gentleman might take it

-into his head to surrender the shah of Herat.

-

-Another six months of siege, with famine, mutiny and all the usual

-worries of beleaguered towns finished Pottinger’s work, the saving of

-Herat.

-

-

-II

-

-Now we take up the life of another spy, also an army officer, old

-Alexander Burnes. At eighteen he had been adjutant of his regiment and

-rose very steadily from rank to rank until he was sent as an envoy

-to Runjeet Singh, the ruler of Punjab, and to the ameers of Scinde.

-In those days Northwestern India was an unknown region and Burnes was

-pioneer of the British power.

-

-In 1832 he set out on his second mission through Afghanistan, Bokhara

-and Persia. See how he wrote from Cabul: “I do not despair of reaching

-Istamboul (Constantinople) in safety. They may seize me and sell me for

-a slave, but no one will attack me for my riches.... I have no tent, no

-chair or table, no bed, and my clothes altogether amount to the value

-of one pound sterling. You would disown your son if you saw him. My

-dress is purely Asiatic, and since I came into Cabul has been changed

-to that of the lowest orders of the people. My head is shaved of its

-brown locks, and my beard dyed black grieves ... for the departed

-beauty of youth. I now eat my meals with my hands, and greasy digits

-they are, though I must say in justification, that I wash before and

-after meals.... I frequently sleep under a tree, but if a villager

-will take compassion on me I enter his house. I never conceal that I

-am a European, and I have as yet found the character advantageous to

-my comfort. The people know me by the name of Sekunder, which is the

-Persian for Alexander.... With all my assumed poverty I have a bag

-of ducats round my waist, and bills for as much money as I choose to

-draw.... When I go into company I put my hand on my heart, and say

-with all humility to the master of the house, ‘Peace be unto thee,’

-according to custom, and then I squat myself down on the ground. This

-familiarity has given me an insight into the character of the people

-... kind-hearted and hospitable, they have no prejudices against a

-Christian and none against our nation. When they ask me if I eat pork,

-I of course shudder, and say that it is only outcasts that commit such

-outrages. God forgive me! for I am very fond of bacon.... I am well

-mounted on a good horse in case I should find it necessary to take to

-my heels. My whole baggage on earth goes on one mule, which my servant

-sits supercargo.... I never was in better spirits.”

-

-After his wonderful journey Burnes was sent to England to make his

-report to the government, and King William IV must needs hear the whole

-of the story at Brighton pavilion.

-

-The third journey of this great spy was called the commercial mission

-to Cabul. There he learned that the Persian siege of Herat was being

-more or less conducted by Russian officers. Russians swarmed at the

-court of Dost Mahomed, and an ambassador from the czar was there trying

-to make a treaty.

-

-Great was the indignation and alarm in British India, and for fear of

-a Russian invasion in panic haste the government made a big famous

-blunder, for without waiting to know how Dost was fooling the Russians,

-an army was sent through the terrible Bolan Pass. That sixty-mile abyss

-with hanging walls belongs to the Pathans, the fiercest and wildest

-of all the tribes of men. The army climbed through the death trap,

-marched, starving, on from Quetta to Candahar and then advanced on

-Cabul. But Dost’s son Akbar held the great fortress of Ghuznee, a quite

-impregnable place that had to be taken.

-

-One night while a sham attack was made on the other side of the

-fortress, Captain Thomson placed nine hundred pounds of gunpowder at

-the foot of a walled-up gate, and then touched off the charge. The

-twenty-first light infantry climbed over the smoking ruins and at the

-head of his storming column Colonel Dennie, in three hours’ fighting,

-took the citadel. Dost Mahomed fled, and the British entered Cabul to

-put a puppet sovereign on the throne.

-

-Cabul was a live volcano where English women gave dances. There were

-cricket matches, theatricals, sports. The governor-general in camp

-gave a state dinner in honor of Major Pottinger, who had come in from

-the siege of Herat. During the reception of the guests a shabby Afghan

-watched, leaning against a door-post, and the court officials were

-about to remove this intruder when the governor-general approached

-leading his sister. “Let me present you,” said Lord Auckland, “to

-Eldred Pottinger, the hero of Herat.” This shabby Afghan was the guest

-of honor, but nobody would listen to his warnings, or to the warnings

-of Sir Alexander Burnes, assistant resident. Only the two spies knew

-what was to come. Then the volcano blew up.

-

-Burnes had a brother staying with him in Cabul, also his military

-secretary; and when the mob, savage, excited, bent on massacre, swarmed

-round his house he spoke to them from the balcony. While he talked

-Lieutenant Broadfoot fell at his side, struck by a ball in the chest.

-The stables were on fire, the mob filled his garden. He offered to

-pay then in cash for his brother’s life and his own, so a Cashmiri

-volunteered to save them in disguise. They put on native clothes,

-they slipped into the garden, and then their guide shouted, “This is

-Sekunder Burnes!” The two brothers were cut to pieces.

-

-Pottinger was political agent at Kohistan to the northward, and when

-the whole Afghan nation rose in revolt his fort was so sorely beset

-that he and his retinue stole away in the dark, joining a Ghoorka

-regiment. But the regiment was also beset, and its water supply cut

-off. Pottinger fought the guns; the men repelled attacks by night

-and day until worn out; dying of thirst in an intolerable agony the

-regiment broke, scattering into the hills. Only a few men rallied round

-Pottinger to fight through to Cabul, and he was fearfully wounded,

-unable to command. Of his staff and the Ghoorka regiment only five men

-were alive when they entered Cabul.

-

-Our officer commanding at Cabul was not in good health, but his death

-was unfortunately delayed while the Afghans murdered men, women and

-children, and the British troops, for lack of a leader, funked. Envoys

-waited on Akbar Khan, and were murdered. The few officers who kept

-their heads were without authority, blocked at every turn by cowards,

-by incompetents. Then the council of war made treaty with Akbar, giving

-him all the guns except six, all the treasure, three officers as

-hostages, bills drawn on India for forty thousand rupees, the honor of

-their country, everything for safe conduct in their disgrace. Dying of

-cold and hunger, the force marched into the Khoord-Cabul Pass, and at

-the end of three days the married officers were surrendered with their

-wives and children. Of the sixteen thousand men three-fourths were

-dead when the officer commanding and the gallant Brigadier Skelton

-were given up as hostages to Akbar. The survivors pushed on through

-the Jugduluk Pass, which the Afghans had barricaded, and there was the

-final massacre. Of the whole army, one man, Doctor Brydon, on a starved

-pony, sinking with exhaustion, rode in through the gates of Fort

-Jellalabad.

-

-The captured general had sent orders for the retreat of the Jellalabad

-garrison through the awful defiles of the Khyber Pass in face

-of a hostile army, and in the dead of winter; but General Sale,

-commanding, was not such a fool. For three months he had worked his

-men to desperation rebuilding the fortress, and now when he saw the

-white tents of Akbar’s camp he was prepared for a siege. That day

-an earthquake razed the whole fortress into a heap of ruins, but

-the garrison rebuilt the walls. Then they sallied and, led by Henry

-Havelock, assaulted Akbar’s camp, smashed his army to flying fragments,

-captured his guns, baggage, standards, ammunition and food. Nine days

-later the bands of the garrison marched out to meet a relieving army

-from India. They were playing an old tune, _Oh, but ye’ve been lang o’

-comin’_.

-

-Meanwhile the British prisoners, well treated, were hurried from

-fort to fort, with some idea of holding them for sale at so much a

-slave, until they managed to bribe an Afghan chief. The bribed man

-led a revolt against Akbar, and one chief after another joined him,

-swearing on the Koran allegiance to Eldred Pottinger. When Akbar fell,

-Pottinger marched as leader of the revolted chiefs on the way to Cabul.

-One day, as the ladies and children were resting in an old fort for

-shelter during the great heat of the afternoon, they heard the tramp of

-horsemen, and in the dead silence of a joy and gratitude too great for

-utterance, received the relieving force.

-

-

-

-

-XII

-

-A. D. 1842

-

-A YEAR’S ADVENTURES

-

-

-A thousand adventures are taking place every day, all at once in the

-several continents and the many seas. A few are reported, many are

-noted in the private journals of adventurers, most of them are just

-taken as a matter of course in the day’s work, but nobody has ever

-attempted to make a picture of all the world’s adventures for a day or

-a year.

-

-Let us make magic. Any date will do, or any year. Here for instance is

-a date--the twelfth of September, 1842--that will serve our purpose as

-well as any other.

-

-In Afghanistan a British force of twenty-six thousand people had

-perished, an army of vengeance had marched to the rescue of Major

-Pottinger, Lady Sale, Lady McNaughton and other captives held by the

-Afghan chiefs. On September twelfth they were rescued.

-

-In China the people had refused to buy our Indian opium, so we

-carefully and methodically bombarded all Chinese seaports until she

-consented to open them to foreign trade. Then Major Pottinger’s uncle,

-Sir Henry, made a treaty which the Chinese emperor signed on September

-eighth.

-

-In the Malacca Straits Captain Henry Keppel of H. M. S. _Dido_ was busy

-smashing up pirates.

-

-In Tahiti poor little Queen Pomaré, being in childbed, was so bullied

-by the French admiral that she surrendered her kingdom to France on

-September ninth. Next morning her child was born, but her kingdom was

-gone forever.

-

-In South Africa Captain Smith made a disgraceful attack upon the Boers

-at Port Natal, and on June twenty-sixth they got a tremendous thrashing

-which put an end to the republic of Natalia. In September they began to

-settle down as British subjects, not at all content.

-

-Norfolk Island is a scrap of paradise, about six miles by four, lying

-nine hundred miles from Sydney, in Australia. In 1842 it was a convict

-settlement, and on June twenty-first the brig _Governor Philip_ was to

-sail for Sydney, having landed her stores at the island. During the

-night she stood off and on, and two prisoners coming on deck at dawn

-for a breath of air noticed that discipline seemed slack, although

-a couple of drowsy sentries guarded their hatchway. Within a few

-minutes the prisoners were all on deck. One sentry was disarmed, the

-other thrown overboard. Two soldiers off duty had a scuffle with the

-mutineers, but one took refuge in the main chains, while the other was

-drowned trying to swim ashore. The sergeant in charge ran on deck and

-shot a mutineer before he was knocked over, stunned. As to the seamen,

-they ran into the forecastle.

-

-The prisoners had now control of the ship, but none of them knew how

-to handle their prize, so they loosed a couple of sailors and made

-them help. Woolfe, one of the convicts, then rescued a soldier who was

-swimming alongside. The officers and soldiers aft were firing through

-the grated hatches and wounded several convicts, until they were

-allayed with a kettle of boiling water. So far the mutiny had gone off

-very nicely, but now the captain, perched on the cabin table, fired

-through the woodwork at a point where he thought a man was standing.

-By luck the bullet went through the ringleader’s mouth and blew out

-the back of his head, whereon a panic seized the mutineers, who fled

-below hatches. The sailor at the wheel released the captain, and the

-afterguard recaptured the ship. One mutineer had his head blown off,

-and the rest surrendered. The whole deck was littered with the wounded

-and the dying and the dead, and there were not many convicts left. In

-the trial at Sydney, Wheelan, who proved innocent, was spared, also

-Woolfe for saving a soldier’s life, but four were hanged, meeting their

-fate like men.

-

-It was in August that the sultan of Borneo confirmed Mr. James Brooke

-as rajah of Sarawak, and the new king was extremely busy executing

-robbers, rescuing shipwrecked mariners from slavery, reopening old

-mines for diamonds, gold and manganese. “I breathe peace and comfort to

-all who obey,” so he wrote to his mother, “and wrath and fury to the

-evil-doer.”

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Captain Ross was in the Antarctic, coasting the great ice barrier. Last

-year he had given to two tall volcanoes the names of his ships, the

-_Erebus_ and _Terror_. This year on March twelfth in a terrific gale

-with blinding snow at midnight the two ships tried to get shelter under

-the lee of an iceberg, but the _Terror_ rammed the _Erebus_ so that her

-bow-sprit, fore topmast and a lot of smaller spars were carried away,

-and she was jammed against the wall of the berg totally disabled. She

-could not make sail and had no room to wear round, so she sailed out

-backward, one of the grandest feats of seamanship on record; then,

-clear of the danger, steered between two bergs, her yard-arms almost

-scraping both of them, until she gained the smoother water to leeward,

-where she found her consort.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-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.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-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.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-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.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-Fremont was exploring from the Mississippi Valley a route for emigrants

-to Oregon, and in that journey climbed the Rocky Mountains to plant Old

-Glory on one of the highest peaks. He was a very fine explorer, and not

-long afterward conquered the Mexican state of California, completing

-the outline of the modern United States. But Fremont’s guide will be

-remembered long after Fremont is forgotten, for he was the greatest of

-American frontiersmen, the ideal of modern chivalry, Kit Carson. Of

-course he must have a chapter to himself.

-

-

-

-

-XIII

-

-A.D. 1843

-

-KIT CARSON

-

-

-Once Colonel Inman, an old frontiersman, bought a newspaper which had a

-full page picture of Kit Carson. The hero stood in a forest, a gigantic

-figure in a buckskin suit, heavily armed, embracing a rescued heroine,

-while at his feet sprawled six slain Indian braves, his latest victims.

-

-“What do you think of this?” said the colonel handing the picture to a

-delicate little man, who wiped his spectacles, studied the work of art,

-and replied in a gentle drawl, “That may be true, but I hain’t got no

-recollection of it.” And so Kit Carson handed the picture back.

-

-He stood five feet six, and looked frail, but his countrymen, and all

-the boys of all the world think of this mighty frontiersman as a giant.

-

-At seventeen he was a remarkably green and innocent boy for his years,

-his home a log cabin on the Missouri frontier. Past the door ran the

-trail to the west where trappers went by in buckskin, traders among the

-Indians, and soldiers for the savage wars of the plains.

-

-One day came Colonel S. Vrain, agent of a big fur-trading company,

-with his long train of wagons hitting the Santa Fe trail. Kit got a

-job with that train, to herd spare stock, hunt bison, mount guard and

-fight Indians. They were three weeks out in camp when half a dozen

-Pawnee Indians charged, yelling and waving robes to stampede the herd,

-but a brisk fusillade from the white men sent them scampering back

-over the sky-line. Next day, after a sixteen mile march the outfit

-corraled their wagons for defense at the foot of Pawnee Rock beside the

-Arkansas River. “I had not slept any of the night before,” says Kit,

-“for I stayed awake watching to get a shot at the Pawnees that tried to

-stampede our animals, expecting they would return; and I hadn’t caught

-a wink all day, as I was out buffalo hunting, so I was awfully tired

-and sleepy when we arrived at Pawnee Rock that evening, and when I was

-posted at my place at night, I must have gone to sleep leaning against

-the rocks; at any rate, I was wide enough awake when the cry of Indians

-was given by one of the guard. I had picketed my mule about twenty

-paces from where I stood, and I presume he had been lying down; all I

-remember is, that the first thing I saw after the alarm was something

-rising up out of the grass, which I thought was an Indian. I pulled the

-trigger; it was a center shot, and I don’t believe the mule ever kicked

-after he was hit!”

-

-At daylight the Pawnees attacked in earnest and the fight lasted nearly

-three days, the mule teams being shut in the corral without food or

-water. At midnight of the second day they hitched up, fighting their

-way for thirteen miles, then got into bad trouble fording Pawnee Fork

-while the Indians poured lead and arrows into the teams until the

-colonel and Kit Carson led a terrific charge which dispersed the

-enemy. That fight cost the train four killed and seven wounded.

-

-It was during this first trip that Carson saved the life of a wounded

-teamster by cutting off his arm. With a razor he cut the flesh, with

-a saw got through the bone, and with a white-hot king-bolt seared the

-wound, stopping the flow of blood.

-

-In 1835 Carson was hunter for Bent’s Fort, keeping the garrison of

-forty men supplied with buffalo meat. Once he was out hunting with six

-others and they made their camp tired out. “I saw,” says Kit, “two big

-wolves sneaking about, one of them quite close to us. Gordon, one of my

-men, wanted to fire his rifle at it, but I would not let him for fear

-he would hit a dog. I admit that I had a sort of idea that these wolves

-might be Indians; but when I noticed one of them turn short around and

-heard the clashing of his teeth as he rushed at one of the dogs, I felt

-easy then, and was certain that they were wolves sure enough. But the

-red devil fooled me after all, for he had two dried buffalo bones in

-his hands under the wolf-skin and he rattled them together every time

-he turned to make a dash at the dogs! Well, by and by we all dozed

-off, and it wasn’t long before I was suddenly aroused by a noise and a

-big blaze. I rushed out the first thing for our mules and held them.

-If the savages had been at all smart, they could have killed us in a

-trice, but they ran as soon as they fired at us. They killed one of my

-men, putting five shots in his body and eight in his buffalo robe. The

-Indians were a band of snakes, and found us by sheer accident. They

-endeavored to ambush us the next morning, but we got wind of their

-little game and killed three of them, including the chief.”

-

-It was in his eight years as hunter for Bent’s Fort that Kit learned

-to know the Indians, visiting their camps to smoke with the chiefs and

-play with the little boys. When the Sioux nation invaded the Comanche

-and Arrapaho hunting-grounds he persuaded them to go north, and so

-averted war.

-

-In 1842 when he was scout to Fremont, he went buffalo hunting to get

-meat for the command. One day he was cutting up a beast newly killed

-when he left his work in pursuit of a large bull that came rushing

-past him. His horse was too much blown to run well, and when at last

-he got near enough to fire, things began to happen all at once. The

-bullet hitting too low enraged the bison just as the horse, stepping

-into a prairie-dog hole, shot Kit some fifteen feet through the air.

-Instead of Kit hunting bison, Mr. Buffalo hunted Kit, who ran for all

-he was worth. So they came to the Arkansas River where Kit dived while

-the bison stayed on the bank to hook him when he landed. But while the

-bison gave Kit a swimming lesson, one of the hunters made an unfair

-attack from behind, killing the animal. So Kit crawled out and skinned

-his enemy.

-

-One of his great hunting feats was the killing of five buffalo with

-only four bullets. Being short of lead he had to cut out the ball from

-number four, then catch up, and shoot number five.

-

-On another hunt, chasing a cow bison down a steep hill, he fired just

-as the animal took a flying leap, so that the carcass fell, not to the

-ground, but spiked on a small cedar. The Indians persuaded him to

-leave that cow impaled upon a tree-top because it was big magic; but to

-people who do not know the shrubs of the southwestern desert, it must

-sound like a first-class lie.

-

-One night as the expedition lay in camp, far up among the mountains,

-Fremont sat for hours reading some letters just arrived from home, then

-fell asleep to dream of his young wife. Presently a soft sound, rather

-like the blow of an ax made Kit start broad awake, to find Indians in

-camp. They fled, but two of the white men were lying dead in their

-blankets, and the noise that awakened Carson was the blow of a tomahawk

-braining his own chum, the voyageur, La Jeunesse.

-

-In the following year Carson was serving as hunter to a caravan

-westward bound across the plains, when he met Captain Cooke in camp,

-with four squadrons of United States Cavalry. The captain told him that

-following on the trail was a caravan belonging to a wealthy Mexican and

-so richly loaded that a hundred riders had been hired as guards.

-

-Presently the Mexican train came up and the majordomo offered Carson

-three hundred dollars if he would ride to the Mexican governor at

-Santa Fe and ask him for an escort of troops from the point where they

-entered New Mexico. Kit, who was hard up, gladly accepted the cash,

-and rode to Bent’s Fort. There he had news that the Utes were on the

-war-path, but Mr. Bent lent him the swiftest horse in the stables. Kit

-walked, leading the horse by the rein, to have him perfectly fresh in

-case there was need for flight. He reached the Ute village, hid, and

-passed the place at night without being seen. So he reached Taos, his

-own home in New Mexico, whence the alcalde sent his message to the

-governor of the state at Santa Fe.

-

-The governor had already sent a hundred riders but these had been

-caught and wiped out by a force of Texans, only one escaping, who,

-during the heat of the fight, caught a saddled Texan pony and rode off.

-

-Meanwhile the governor--Armijo--sent his reply for Carson to carry to

-the caravan. He said he was marching with a large force, and he did so.

-But when the survivor of the lost hundred rode into Armijo’s camp with

-his bad news, the whole outfit rolled their tails for home.

-

-Carson, with the governor’s letter, and the news of plentiful trouble,

-reached the Mexican caravan, which decided not to leave the protecting

-American cavalry camped on the boundary-line. What with Texan raiders,

-border ruffians, Utes, Apaches, Comanches, and other little drawbacks,

-the caravan trade on the Santa Fe trail was never dull for a moment.

-

-During these years one finds Kit Carson’s tracks all over the West

-about as hard to follow as those of a flea in a blanket.

-

-Here, for example, is a description of the American army of the Bear

-Flag republic seizing California in 1846. “A vast cloud of dust

-appeared first, and thence, a long file, emerged this wildest wild

-party. Fremont rode ahead--a spare, active-looking man, with such an

-eye! He was dressed in a blouse and leggings and wore a felt hat.

-After him came five Delaware Indians, who were his body-guard, and

-have been with him through all his wanderings; they had charge of

-the baggage horses. The rest, many of them blacker than the Indians,

-rode two and two, the rifle held in one hand across the pommel of the

-saddle. Thirty-nine of them there are his regular men, the rest are

-loafers picked up lately; his original men are principally backwoodsmen

-from the state of Tennessee, and the banks of the upper waters of the

-Missouri.... The dress of these men was principally a long loose coat

-of deerskin, tied with thongs in front; trousers of the same, which

-when wet through, they take off, scrape well inside with a knife, and

-put on as soon as dry. The saddles were of various fashions, though

-these and a large drove of horses, and a brass field gun, were things

-they had picked up about California. They are allowed no liquor; this,

-no doubt, has much to do with their good conduct; and the discipline,

-too, is very strict.”

-

-One of these men was Kit Carson, sent off in October to Washington on

-the Atlantic, three thousand miles away, with news that California

-was conquered for the United States, by a party of sixty men. In New

-Mexico, Kit met General Kearney, and told him that the Californians

-were a pack of cowards. So the general sent back his troops, marching

-on with only one hundred dragoons. But the Californians were not

-cowards, they had risen against the American invasion, they were

-fighting magnificently, and Fremont had rather a bad time before he

-completed the conquest.

-

-It was during the Californian campaign that Carson made his famous

-ride, the greatest feat of horsemanship the world has ever known. As

-a despatch rider, he made his way through the hostile tribes, and

-terrific deserts from the Missouri to California and back, a total of

-four thousand, four hundred miles. But while he rested in California,

-before he set out on the return, he joined a party of Californian

-gentlemen on a trip up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

-Two of the six men had a remount each, but four of them rode the six

-hundred miles without change of horses in six days. Add that, and

-the return to Kit Carson’s journey, and it makes a total of five

-thousand, six hundred miles. So for distance, he beats world records

-by one hundred miles, at a speed beyond all comparison, and in face of

-difficulties past all parallel.

-

-For some of us old western reprobates who were cow hands, despising a

-sheep man more than anything else alive, it is very disconcerting to

-know that Carson went into that business. He became a partner of his

-lifelong friend, Maxwell, whose rancho in New Mexico was very like a

-castle of the Middle Ages. The dinner service was of massive silver,

-but the guests bedded down with a cowhide on the floor. New Mexico was

-a conquered country owned by the United States, at intervals between

-the Mexican revolts, when Kit settled down as a rancher. The words

-settled down, mean that he served as a colonel of volunteers against

-the Mexicans, and spent the rest of the time fighting Apaches, the most

-ferocious of all savages.

-

-Near Santa Fe, lived Mr. White and his son who fell in defense of their

-ranch, having killed three Apaches, while the women and children of the

-household met with a much worse fate than that of death. The settlers

-refused to march in pursuit until Carson arrived, but by mistake he was

-not given command, a Frenchman having been chosen as leader.

-

-The retreat of the savages was far away in the mountains, and well

-fortified. The only chance of saving the women and children was to

-rush this place before there was time to kill them, and Carson dashed

-in with a yell, expecting all hands to follow. So he found himself

-alone, surrounded by the Apaches, and as they rushed, he rode, throwing

-himself on the off side of his horse, almost concealed behind its neck.

-Six arrows struck his horse, and one bullet lodged in his coat before

-he was out of range. He cursed his Mexicans, he put them to shame,

-he persuaded them to fight, then led a gallant charge, killing five

-Indians as they fled. The delay had given them time to murder the women

-and children.

-

-Once, after his camp had been attacked by Indians, Carson discovered

-that the sentry failed to give an alarm because he was asleep. The

-Indian punishment followed, and the soldier was made for one day to

-wear the dress of a squaw.

-

-[Illustration: KIT CARSON]

-

-We must pass by Kit’s capture of a gang of thirty-five desperadoes for

-the sake of a better story. The officer, commanding a detachment of

-troops on the march, flogged an Indian chief, the result being war.

-Carson was the first white man to pass, and while the chiefs were

-deciding how to attack his caravan, he walked alone into the council

-lodge. So many years were passed since the Cheyennes had seen him

-that he was not recognized, and nobody suspected that he knew their

-language, until he made a speech in Cheyenne, introducing himself,

-recalling ancient friendships, offering all courtesies. As to their

-special plan for killing the leader of the caravan, and taking his

-scalp, he claimed that he might have something to say on the point.

-They parted, Kit to encourage his men, the Indians to waylay the

-caravan; but from the night camp he despatched a Mexican boy to ride

-three hundred miles for succor. When the Cheyennes charged the camp

-at dawn, he ordered them to halt, and walked into the midst of them,

-explaining the message he had sent, and what their fate would be if the

-troops found they had molested them. When the Indians found the tracks

-that proved Kit’s words, they knew they had business elsewhere.

-

-In 1863 Carson was sent with a strong military force to chasten the

-hearts of the Navajo nation. They had never been conquered, and the

-flood of Spanish invasion split when it rolled against their terrific

-sand-rock desert. The land is one of unearthly grandeur where natural

-rocks take the shapes of towers, temples, palaces and fortresses of

-mountainous height blazing scarlet in color. In one part a wave of rock

-like a sea breaker one hundred fifty feet high and one hundred miles

-in length curls overhanging as though the rushing gray waters had been

-suddenly struck into ice. On one side lies the hollow Painted Desert,

-where the sands refract prismatic light like a colossal rainbow, and

-to the west the walls of the Navajo country drop a sheer mile into the

-stupendous labyrinth of the Grand Cañon. Such is the country of a race

-of warriors who ride naked, still armed with bow and arrows, their

-harness of silver and turquoise....

-

-They are handsome, cleanly, proud and dignified. They till their

-fields beside the desert springs, and their villages are set in native

-orchards, while beyond their settlements graze the flocks and herds

-tended by women herders.

-

-The conquest was a necessity, and it was well that this was entrusted

-to gentle, just, wise, heroic Carson. He was obliged to destroy their

-homes, to fell their peach trees, lay waste their crops, and sweep away

-their stock, starving them to surrender. He herded eleven thousand

-prisoners down to the lower deserts, where the chiefs crawled to him on

-their bellies for mercy, but the governor had no mercy, and long after

-Carson’s death, the hapless people were held in the Boique Redondo. A

-fourth part of them died of want, and their spirit was utterly broken

-before they were given back their lands. It is well for them that the

-Navajo desert is too terrible a region for the white men, and nobody

-tries to rob their new prosperity.

-

-In one more campaign Colonel Carson was officer commanding and gave a

-terrible thrashing to the Cheyennes, Kiowas and Comanches.

-

-Then came the end, during a visit to a son of his who lived in

-Colorado. Early in the morning of May twenty-third, 1868, he was

-mounting his horse when an artery broke in his neck, and within a few

-moments he was dead.

-

-But before we part with the frontier hero, it is pleasant to think of

-him still as a living man whose life is an inspiration and his manhood

-an example.

-

-Colonel Inman tells of nights at Maxwell’s ranch. “I have sat there,”

-he writes, “in the long winter evenings when the great room was

-lighted only by the crackling logs, roaring up the huge throats of

-its two fireplaces ... watching Maxwell, Kit Carson and half a dozen

-chiefs silently interchange ideas in the wonderful sign language, until

-the glimmer of Aurora announced the advent of another day. But not a

-sound had been uttered during the protracted hours, save an occasional

-grunt of satisfaction on the part of the Indians, or when we white men

-exchanged a sentence.”

-

-

-

-

-XIV

-

-A. D. 1845

-

-THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD

-

-

-John Nicholson was a captain in the twenty-seventh native infantry of

-India. He was very tall, gaunt, haggard, with a long black beard, a

-pale face, lips that never smiled, eyes which burned flame and green

-like those of a tiger when he was angry. He rarely spoke.

-

-Once in a frontier action he was entirely surrounded by the enemy

-when one of his Afghans saw him in peril from a descending sword. The

-Pathan sprang forward, received the blow, and died. In a later fight

-Nicholson saw that warrior’s only son taken prisoner, and carried

-off by the enemy. Charging alone, cutting a lane with his sword, the

-officer rescued his man, hoisted him across the saddle, and fought

-his way back. Ever afterward the young Pathan, whose father had died

-for Nicholson, rode at the captain’s side, served him at table with a

-cocked pistol on one hand, slept across the door of his tent. By the

-time Nicholson’s special service began he had a personal following of

-two hundred and fifty wild riders who refused either to take any pay or

-to leave his service.

-

-So was he guarded, but also a sword must be found fit for the hand of

-the greatest swordsman in India. The Sikh leaders sent out word to

-their whole nation for such a blade as Nicholson might wear. Hundreds

-were offered and after long and intricate tests three were found

-equally perfect, two of the blades being curved, one straight. Captain

-Nicholson chose the straight sword, which he accepted as a gift from a

-nation of warriors.

-

-This man was only a most humble Christian, but the Sikhs, observing

-the perfection of his manhood, supposed him to be divine, and offered

-that if he would accept their religion they would raise such a temple

-in his honor as India had never seen. Many a time while he sat at work

-in his tent, busy with official papers, a dozen Sikh warriors would

-squat in the doorway silent, watching their god. He took no notice,

-but sometimes a worshiper, overcome with the conviction of sin, would

-prostrate himself in adoration. For this offense the punishment was

-three dozen lashes with the cat, but the victims liked it. “Our god

-knew that we had been doing wrong, and, therefore, punished us.”

-

-There is no need to explain the Indian mutiny to English readers. It is

-burned deep into our memory that in 1857 our native army, revolting,

-seized Delhi, the ancient capital, and set up a descendant of the Great

-Mogul as emperor of India. The children, the women, the men who were

-tortured to death, or butchered horribly, were of our own households.

-Your uncle fought, your cousin fell, my mother escaped. Remember

-Cawnpore!

-

-Nicholson at Peshawur seized the mails, had the letters translated,

-then made up his copies into bundles. At a council of officers the

-colonels of the native regiments swore to the loyalty of their men,

-but Nicholson dealt out his packages of letters to them all, saying,

-“Perhaps these will interest you.”

-

-The colonels read, and were chilled with horror at finding in their

-trusted regiments an abyss of treachery. Their troops were disarmed and

-disbanded.

-

-To disarm and disperse the native army throughout Northwestern India a

-flying column was formed of British troops, and Nicholson, although he

-was only a captain, was sent to take command of the whole force with

-the rank of brigadier-general. There were old officers under him, yet

-never a murmur rose from them at that strange promotion.

-

-Presently Sir John Lawrence wrote to Nicholson a fierce official

-letter, demanding, “Where are you? What are you doing? Send instantly a

-return of court-martial held upon insurgent natives, with a list of the

-various punishments inflicted.”

-

-Nicholson’s reply was a sheet of paper bearing his present address,

-the date, and the words, “The punishment of mutiny is death.” He

-wanted another regiment to strengthen his column, and demanded the

-eighty-seventh, which was guarding our women and children in the hills.

-Lawrence said these men could not be spared. Nicholson wrote back,

-“When an empire is at stake, women and children cease to be of any

-consideration whatever.” What chance had they if he failed to hold this

-district?

-

-[Illustration: GENERAL NICHOLSON]

-

-Nicholson’s column on the march was surrounded by his own wild guards

-riding in couples, so that he, their god, searched the whole country

-with five hundred eyes. After one heart-breaking night march he drew up

-his infantry and guns, then rode along the line giving his orders:

-“In a few minutes you will see two native regiments come round that

-little temple. If they bring their muskets to the ‘ready,’ fire a

-volley into them without further orders.”

-

-As the native regiments appeared from behind the little temple,

-Nicholson rode to meet them. He was seen to speak to them and then they

-grounded their arms. Two thousand men had surrendered to seven hundred,

-but had the mutineers resisted Nicholson himself must have perished

-between two fires. He cared nothing for his life.

-

-Only once did this leader blow mutineers from the guns, and then it

-was to fire the flesh and blood of nine conspirators into the faces of

-a doubtful regiment. For the rest he had no powder to waste, but no

-mercy, and from his awful executions of rebels he would go away to hide

-in his tent and weep.

-

-He had given orders that no native should be allowed to ride past

-a white man. One morning before dawn the orderly officer, a lad of

-nineteen, seeing natives passing him on an elephant, ordered them

-sharply to dismount and make their salaam. They obeyed--an Afghan

-prince and his servant, sent by the king of Cabul as an embassy to

-Captain Nicholson. Next day the ambassador spoke of this humiliation.

-“No wonder,” he said, “you English conquer India when mere boys obey

-orders as this one did.”

-

-Nicholson once fought a Bengal tiger, and slew it with one stroke of

-his sword; but could the English subdue this India in revolt? The

-mutineers held the impregnable capital old Delhi--and under the red

-walls lay four thousand men--England’s forlorn hope--which must storm

-that giant fortress. If they failed the whole population would rise.

-“If ordained to fail,” said Nicholson, “I hope the British will drag

-down with them in flames and blood as many of the queen’s enemies

-as possible.” If they had failed not one man of our race would have

-escaped to the sea.

-

-Nicholson brought his force to aid in the siege of Delhi, and now he

-was only a captain under the impotent and hopeless General Wilson. “I

-have strength yet,” said Nicholson when he was dying, “to shoot him if

-necessary.”

-

-The batteries of the city walls from the Lahore Gate to the Cashmere

-Gate were manned by Sikh gunners, loyal to the English, but detained

-against their will by the mutineers. One night they saw Nicholson

-without any disguise walk in at the Lahore Gate, and through battery

-after battery along the walls he went in silence to the Cashmere Gate,

-by which he left the city. At the sight of that gaunt giant, the man

-they believed to be an incarnate god, they fell upon their faces. So

-Captain Nicholson studied the defenses of a besieged stronghold as

-no man on earth had ever dared before. To him was given command of

-the assault which blew up the Cashmere Gate, and stormed the Cashmere

-breach. More than half his men perished, but an entry was made, and in

-six days the British fought their way through the houses, breaching

-walls as they went until they stormed the palace, hoisted the flag

-above the citadel, and proved with the sword who shall be masters of

-India.

-

-But Nicholson had fallen. Mortally wounded he was carried to his tent,

-and there lay through the hot days watching the blood-red towers and

-walls of Delhi, listening to the sounds of the long fight, praying

-that he might see the end before his passing.

-

-Outside the tent waited his worshipers, clutching at the doctors as

-they passed to beg for news of him. Once when they were noisy he

-clutched a pistol from the bedside table, and fired a shot through the

-canvas. “Oh! Oh!” cried the Pathans, “there is the general’s order.”

-Then they kept quiet. Only at the end, when his coffin was lowered into

-the earth, these men who had forsaken their hills to guard him, broke

-down and flung themselves upon the ground, sobbing like children.

-

-Far off in the hills the Nicholson fakirs--a tribe who had made him

-their only god--heard of his passing. Two chiefs killed themselves that

-they might serve him in another world; but the third chief spoke to the

-people: “Nickelseyn always said that he was a man like as we are, and

-that he worshiped a God whom he could not see, but who was always near

-us. Let us learn to worship Nickelseyn’s God.” So the tribe came down

-from their hills to the Christian teachers at Peshawur, and there were

-baptized.

-

-

-

-

-XV

-

-A. D. 1853

-

-THE GREAT FILIBUSTER

-

-

-William Walker, son of a Scotch banker, was born in Tennessee,

-cantankerous from the time he was whelped. He never swore or drank,

-or loved anybody, but was rigidly respectable and pure, believed in

-negro slavery, bristled with points of etiquette and formality, liked

-squabbling, had a nasty sharp tongue, and a taste for dueling. The

-little dry man was by turns a doctor, editor and lawyer, and when he

-wanted to do anything very outrageous, always began by taking counsel’s

-opinion. He wore a black tail-coat, and a black wisp of necktie even

-when in 1853 he landed an army of forty-five men to conquer Mexico.

-His followers were California gold miners dressed in blue shirts, duck

-trousers, long boots, bowie knives, revolvers and rifles. After he had

-taken the city of La Paz by assault, called an election and proclaimed

-himself president of Sonora, he was joined by two or three hundred more

-of the same breed from San Francisco. These did not think very much of

-a leader twenty-eight years old, standing five feet six, and weighing

-only nine stone four, so they merrily conspired to blow him up with

-gunpowder, and disperse with what plunder they could grab. Mr. Walker

-shot two, flogged a couple, disarmed the rest without showing any sign

-of emotion. He could awe the most truculent desperado into abject

-obedience with one glance of his cool gray eye, and never allowed his

-men to drink, play cards, or swear. “Our government,” he wrote, “has

-been formed upon a firm and sure basis.”

-

-The Mexicans and Indians thought otherwise, for while the new president

-of Sonora marched northward, they gathered in hosts and hung like

-wolves in the rear of the column, cutting off stragglers, who were

-slowly tortured to death. Twice they dared an actual attack, but

-Walker’s grim strategies, and the awful rifles of despairing men, cut

-them to pieces. So the march went on through hundreds of miles of

-blazing hot desert, where the filibusters dropped with thirst, and blew

-their own brains out rather than be captured. Only thirty-four men were

-left when they reached the United States boundary, the president of

-Sonora, in a boot and a shoe, his cabinet in rags, his army and navy

-bloody, with dried wounds, gaunt, starving, but too terrible for the

-Mexican forces to molest. The filibusters surrendered to the United

-States garrison as prisoners of war.

-

-Just a year later, with six of these veterans, and forty-eight other

-Californians, Walker landed on the coast of Nicaragua. This happy

-republic was blessed at the time with two rival presidents, and the one

-who got Walker’s help very soon had possession of the country. As hero

-of several brilliant engagements, Walker was made commander-in-chief,

-and at the next election chosen by the people themselves as president.

-He had now a thousand Americans in his following, and when the native

-statesmen and generals proved treacherous, they were promptly shot.

-Walker’s camp of wild desperadoes was like a Sunday-school, his

-government the cleanest ever known in Central America, and his dignity

-all prickles, hard to approach. He depended for existence on the

-services of Vanderbilt’s steamship lines, but seized their warehouse

-for cheating. He was surrounded by four hostile republics, Costa

-Rica, San Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and insulted them all.

-He suspended diplomatic relations with the United States, demanded

-for his one schooner-of-war salutes from the British navy, and had no

-sense of humor whatsoever. Thousands of brave men died for this prim

-little lawyer, and tens of thousands fell by pestilence and battle in

-his wars, but with all his sweet unselfishness, his purity, and his

-valor, poor Walker was a prig. So the malcontents of Nicaragua, and the

-republics from Mexico to Peru, joined the steamship company, the United

-States and Great Britain to wipe out his hapless government.

-

-The armies of four republics were closing in on Walker’s capital, the

-city of Granada. He marched out to storm the allies perched on an

-impregnable volcano, and was carrying his last charge to a victorious

-issue, when news reached him that Zavala with eight hundred men had

-jumped on Granada. He forsook his victory and rushed for the capital

-city.

-

-There were only one hundred and fifty invalids and sick in the Granada

-garrison to man the church, armory and hospital against Zavala, but

-the women loaded rifles for the wounded and after twenty-two hours of

-ghastly carnage, the enemy were thrown out of the city. They fell back

-to lie in Walker’s path as he came to the rescue. Walker saw the trap,

-carried it with a charge, drove Zavala back into the city, broke him

-between two fires, then sent a detachment to intercept his flight. In

-this double battle, fighting eight times his own force, Walker killed

-half the allied army.

-

-But the pressure of several invasions at once was making it impossible

-for Walker to keep his communication open with the sea while he held

-his capital. Granada, the most beautiful of all Central American

-cities, must be abandoned, and, lest the enemy win the place, it must

-be destroyed. So Walker withdrew his sick men to an island in the big

-Lake Nicaragua; while Henningsen, an Englishman, his second in command,

-burned and abandoned the capital.

-

-But now, while the city burst into flames, and the smoke went up as

-from a volcano, the American garrison broke loose, rifled the liquor

-stores and lay drunk in the blazing streets, so the allied army swooped

-down, cutting off the retreat to the lake. Henningsen, veteran of the

-Carlist and Hungarian revolts, a knight errant of lost causes, took

-three weeks to fight his way three miles, before Walker could cover

-his embarkment on the lake. There had been four hundred men in the

-garrison, but only one hundred and fifty answered the roll-call in

-their refuge on the Isle of Omotepe. In the plaza of the capital city

-they had planted a spear, and on the spear hung a rawhide with this

-inscription:--

-

-“Here was Granada!”

-

-In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousand out of six

-thousand of the allies had perished; but even they were more fortunate

-than a Costa Rican army of invasion, which killed fifty of the

-filibusters, at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence.

-It always worked out that the killing of one filibuster cost on the

-average eight of his adversaries.

-

-Four months followed of confused fighting, in which the Americans

-slowly lost ground, until at last they were besieged in the town of

-Rivas, melting the church bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts

-of starvation. The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by two

-thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted to dislodge. His

-final charge was made with fifteen men into the heart of the town. No

-valor could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat began on

-Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to take Walker at a planter’s

-house by the wayside, and as he rode wearily at the head of his men

-they opened fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker reined

-in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the windows, then rode on

-quietly erect while the storm of lead raged about him, and saddle after

-saddle was emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted Rivas, but

-left six hundred men dead in the field, so terrific was the fire from

-the ramparts.

-

-It was in these days that a British naval officer came under flag of

-truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s surrender.

-

-“I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that you have come to

-apologize for the outrage offered to my flag, and to the commander of

-the Nicaraguan schooner-of-war _Granada_.”

-

-“If they had another schooner,” said the Englishman afterward, “I

-believe they would have declared war on Great Britain.”

-

-Then the United States navy treated with this peppery little lawyer,

-and on the first of May, 1857, he grudgingly consented to being rescued.

-

-During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker had enlisted three

-thousand five hundred Americans--and the proportion of wounds was one

-hundred and thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell. The

-allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers and ten thousand

-Indians--and lost fifteen thousand killed.

-

-Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred men to conquer

-Central America, in defiance of the British and United States

-squadrons, sent to catch him, and in the teeth of five armed republics.

-He was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans upon a sea

-beach in Honduras, and so perished, fearless to the end.

-

-

-

-

-XVI

-

-A. D. 1857

-

-BUFFALO BILL

-

-

-The Mormons are a sect of Christians with some queer ideas, for they

-drink no liquor, hold all their property in common, stamp out any

-member who dares to think or work for himself, and believe that the

-more wives a man has the merrier he will be. The women, so far as I met

-them are like fat cows, the men a slovenly lot, and not too honest, but

-they are hard workers and first-rate pioneers.

-

-Because they made themselves unpopular they were persecuted, and fled

-from the United States into the desert beside the Great Salt Lake.

-There they got water from the mountain streams and made their land a

-garden. They only wanted to be left alone in peace, but that was a poor

-excuse for slaughtering emigrants. Murdering women and children is not

-in good taste.

-

-The government sent an army to attend to these saints, but the soldiers

-wanted food to eat, and the Mormons would not sell, so provisions had

-to be sent a thousand miles across the wilderness to save the starving

-troops. So we come to the herd of beef cattle which in May, 1857, was

-drifting from the Missouri River, and to the drovers’ camp beside the

-banks of the Platte.

-

-A party of red Indians on the war-path found that herd and camp; they

-scalped the herders on guard, stampeded the cattle and rushed the

-camp, so that the white men were driven to cover under the river bank.

-Keeping the Indians at bay with their rifles, the party marched for the

-settlements wading, sometimes swimming, while they pushed a raft that

-carried a wounded man. Always a rear guard kept the Indians from coming

-too near. And so the night fell.

-

-“I, being the youngest and smallest,” says one of them, “had fallen

-behind the others.... When I happened to look up to the moonlit sky,

-and saw the plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank.... I

-instantly aimed my gun at his head, and fired. The report rang out

-sharp and loud in the night air, and was immediately followed by an

-Indian whoop; and the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came

-tumbling into the river. I was not only overcome with astonishment, but

-was badly scared, as I could hardly realize what I had done.”

-

-Back came Frank McCarthy, the leader, with all his men. “Who fired that

-shot?”

-

-“I did.”

-

-“Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone-dead--too dead to

-skin!”

-

-At the age of nine Billy Cody had taken the war-path.

-

-In those days the army had no luck. When the government sent a herd

-of cattle the Indians got the beef, and the great big train of

-seventy-five wagons might just as well have been addressed to the

-Mormons, who burned the transport, stole the draft oxen and turned the

-teamsters, including little Billy, loose in the mountains, where they

-came nigh starving. The boy was too thin to cast a shadow when in the

-spring he set out homeward across the plains with two returning trains.

-

-One day these trains were fifteen miles apart when Simpson, the wagon

-boss, with George Woods, a teamster, and Billy Cody, set off riding

-mules from the rear outfit to catch up the teams in front. They were

-midway when a war party of Indians charged at full gallop, surrounding

-them, but Simpson shot the three mules and used their carcasses to make

-a triangular fort. The three whites, each with a rifle and a brace of

-revolvers were more than a match for men with bows and arrows, and the

-Indians lost so heavily that they retreated out of range. That gave

-the fort time to reload, but the Indians charged again, and this time

-Woods got an arrow in the shoulder. Once more the Indians retired to

-consult, while Simpson drew the arrow from Woods’ shoulder, plugging

-the hole with a quid of chewing tobacco. A third time the Indians

-charged, trying to ride down the stockade, but they lost a man and a

-horse. Four warriors had fallen now in this battle with two men and a

-little boy, but the Indians are a painstaking, persevering race, so

-they waited until nightfall and set the grass on fire. But the whites

-had been busy with knives scooping a hole from whence the loose earth

-made a breastwork over the dead mules, so that the flames could not

-reach them, and they had good cover to shoot from when the Indians

-charged through the smoke. After that both sides had a sleep, and at

-dawn they were fresh for a grand charge, handsomely repulsed. The

-redskins sat down in a ring to starve the white men out, and great was

-their disappointment when Simpson’s rear train of wagons marched to the

-rescue. The red men did not stay to pick flowers.

-

-It seems like lying to state that at the age of twelve Billy Cody began

-to take rank among the world’s great horsemen, and yet he rode on the

-pony express, which closed in 1861, his fourteenth year.

-

-The trail from the Missouri over the plains, the deserts and the

-mountains into California was about two thousand miles through a

-country infested with gangs of professional robbers and hostile Indian

-tribes. The gait of the riders averaged twelve miles an hour, which

-means a gallop, to allow for the slow work in mountain passes. There

-were one hundred ninety stations at which the riders changed ponies

-without breaking their run, and each must be fit and able for one

-hundred miles a day in time of need. Pony Bob afterward had contracts

-by which he rode one hundred miles a day for a year.

-

-Now, none of the famous riders of history, like Charles XII, of Sweden;

-Dick, King of Natal, or Dick Turpin, of England, made records to beat

-the men of the pony express, and in that service Billy was counted a

-hero. He is outclassed by the Cossack Lieutenant Peschkov, who rode one

-pony at twenty-eight miles a day the length of the Russian empire, from

-Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, and by Kit Carson who with one horse

-rode six hundred miles in six days. There are branches of horsemanship,

-too, in which he would have been proud to take lessons from Lord

-Lonsdale, or Evelyn French, but Cody is, as far as I have seen, of all

-white men incomparable for grace, for beauty of movement, among the

-horsemen of the modern world.

-

-But to turn back to the days of the boy rider.

-

-“One day,” he writes, “when I galloped into my home station I found

-that the rider who was expected to take the trip out on my arrival had

-gotten into a drunken row the night before, and had been killed.... I

-pushed on ... entering every relay station on time, and accomplished

-the round trip of three hundred twenty-two miles back to Red Buttes

-without a single mishap, and on time. This stands on the record as

-being the longest pony express journey ever made.”

-

-One of the station agents has a story to tell of this ride, made

-without sleep, and with halts of only a few minutes for meals. News had

-leaked out of a large sum of money to be shipped by the express, and

-Cody, expecting robbers, rolled the treasure in his saddle blanket,

-filling the official pouches with rubbish. At the best place for an

-ambush two men stepped out on to the trail, halting him with their

-muskets. As he explained, the pouches were full of rubbish, but the

-road agents knew better. “Mark my words,” he said as he unstrapped,

-“you’ll hang for this.”

-

-“We’ll take chances on that, Bill.”

-

-“If you will have them, take them!” With that he hurled the pouches,

-and as robber number one turned to pick them up, robber number two had

-his gun-arm shattered with the boy’s revolver-shot. Then with a yell he

-rode down the stooping man, and spurring hard, got out of range unhurt.

-He had saved the treasure, and afterward both robbers were hanged by

-vigilantes.

-

-Once far down a valley ahead Cody saw a dark object above a boulder

-directly on his trail, and when it disappeared he knew he was caught

-in an ambush. Just as he came into range he swerved wide to the right,

-and at once a rifle smoked from behind the rock. Two Indians afoot

-ran for their ponies while a dozen mounted warriors broke from the

-timbered edge of the valley, racing to cut him off. One of these had a

-war bonnet of eagle plumes, the badge of a chief, and his horse, being

-the swiftest, drew ahead. All the Indians were firing, but the chief

-raced Cody to head him off at a narrow pass of the valley. The boy was

-slightly ahead, and when the chief saw that the white rider would have

-about thirty yards to spare he fitted an arrow, drawing for the shot.

-But Cody, swinging round in the saddle, lashed out his revolver, and

-the chief, clutching at the air, fell, rolling over like a ball as he

-struck the ground. At the chief’s death-cry a shower of arrows from the

-rear whizzed round the boy, one slightly wounding his pony who, spurred

-by the pain, galloped clear, leaving the Indians astern in a ten mile

-race to the next relay.

-

-After what seems to the reader a long life of adventure, Mr. Cody had

-just reached the age of twenty-two when a series of wars broke out

-with the Indian tribes, and he was attached to the troops as a scout.

-A number of Pawnee Indians who thought nothing of this white man,

-were also serving. They were better trackers, better interpreters and

-thought themselves better hunters. One day a party of twenty had been

-running buffalo, and made a bag of thirty-two head when Cody got leave

-to attack a herd by himself. Mounted on his famous pony Buckskin Joe

-he made a bag of thirty-six head on a half-mile run, and his name was

-Buffalo Bill from that time onward.

-

-That summer he led a squadron of cavalry that attacked six hundred

-Sioux, and in that fight against overwhelming odds he brought down a

-chief at a range of four hundred yards, in those days a very long shot.

-His victim proved to be Tall Bull, one of the great war leaders of

-the Sioux. The widow of Tall Bull was proud that her husband had been

-killed by so famous a warrior as Prairie Chief, for that was Cody’s

-name among the Indians.

-

-There is one very nice story about the Pawnee scouts. A new general had

-taken command who must have all sorts of etiquette proper to soldiers.

-It was all very well for the white sentries to call at intervals of the

-night from post to post: “Post Number One, nine o’clock, all’s well!”

-“Post Number Two, etc.”

-

-But when the Pawnee sentries called, “Go to hell, I don’t care!” well,

-the practise had to be stopped.

-

-Of Buffalo Bill’s adventures in these wars the plain record would only

-take one large volume, but he was scouting in company with Texas Jack,

-John Nelson, Belden, the White Chief, and so many other famous frontier

-heroes, each needing at least one book volume, that I must give the

-story up as a bad job. At the end of the Sioux campaign Buffalo Bill

-was chief of scouts with the rank of colonel.

-

-[Illustration: COLONEL CODY

-

-(“Buffalo Bill”)]

-

-In 1876, General Custer, with a force of nearly four hundred cavalry,

-perished in an attack on the Sioux, and the only survivor was his

-pet boy scout, Billy Jackson, who got away at night disguised as an

-Indian. Long afterward Billy, who was one of God’s own gentlemen,

-told me that story while we sat on a grassy hillside watching a great

-festival of the Blackfeet nation.

-

-After the battle in which Custer--the Sun Child--fell, the big Sioux

-army scattered, but a section of it was rounded up by a force under the

-guidance of Buffalo Bill.

-

-“One of the Indians,” he says, “who was handsomely decorated with all

-the ornaments usually worn by a war chief ... sang out to me ‘I know

-you, Prairie Chief; if you want to fight come ahead and fight me!’

-

-“The chief was riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as

-if to banter me, and I accepted the challenge. I galloped toward him

-for fifty yards and he advanced toward me about the same distance, both

-of us riding at full speed, and then when we were only about thirty

-yards apart I raised my rifle and fired. His horse fell to the ground,

-having been killed by my bullet. Almost at the same instant my horse

-went down, having stepped in a gopher-hole. The fall did not hurt me

-much, and I instantly sprang to my feet. The Indian had also recovered

-himself, and we were now both on foot, and not more than twenty paces

-apart. We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not

-desert me on this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine struck

-him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched

-the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged

-weapon to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war-bonnet off, I

-scientifically scalped him in about five seconds....

-

-“The Indians came charging down upon me from a hill in hopes of

-cutting me off. General Merritt ... ordered ... Company K to hurry

-to my rescue. The order came none too soon.... As the soldiers came

-up I swung the Indian chieftain’s topknot and bonnet in the air, and

-shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer!’”

-

-Far up to the northward, Sitting Bull, with the war chief Spotted Tail

-and about three thousand warriors fled from the scene of the Custer

-massacre. And as they traveled on the lonely plains they came to a

-little fort with the gates closed. “Open your gates and hand out your

-grub,” said the Indians.

-

-“Come and get the grub,” answered the fort.

-

-So the gates were thrown open and the three thousand warriors stormed

-in to loot the fort. They found only two white men standing outside a

-door, but all round the square the log buildings were loopholed and

-from every hole stuck out the muzzle of a rifle. The Indians were

-caught in such a deadly trap that they ran for their lives back to camp.

-

-Very soon news reached the Blackfeet that their enemies the Sioux were

-camped by the new fort at Wood Mountain, so the whole nation marched to

-wipe them out, and Sitting Bull appealed for help to the white men. “Be

-good,” said the fort, “and nobody shall hurt you.”

-

-So the hostile armies camped on either side, and the thirty white men

-kept the peace between them. One day the Sioux complained that the

-Blackfeet had stolen fifty horses. So six of the white men were sent

-to the Blackfoot herd to bring the horses back. They did not know which

-horses to select so they drove off one hundred fifty for good measure

-straight at a gallop through the Blackfoot camp, closely pursued by

-that indignant nation. Barely in time they ran the stock within the

-fort, and slammed the gates home in the face of the raging Blackfeet.

-They were delighted with themselves until the officer commanding fined

-them a month’s pay each for insulting the Blackfoot nation.

-

-The winter came, the spring and then the summer, when those thirty

-white men arrived at the Canada-United States boundary where they

-handed over three thousand Sioux prisoners to the American troops. From

-that time the redcoats of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada

-have been respected on the frontier.

-

-And now came a very wonderful adventure. Sitting Bull, the leader

-of the Sioux nation who had defeated General Custer’s division and

-surrendered his army to thirty Canadian soldiers, went to Europe to

-take part in a circus personally conducted by the chief of scouts of

-the United States Army, Buffalo Bill. Poor Sitting Bull was afterward

-murdered by United States troops in the piteous massacre of Wounded

-Knee. Buffalo Bill for twenty-six years paraded Europe and America

-with his gorgeous Wild West show, slowly earning the wealth which he

-lavished in the founding of Cody City, Wyoming.

-

-Toward the end of these tours I used to frequent the show camp much

-like a stray dog expecting to be kicked, would spend hours swapping

-lies with the cowboys in the old Deadwood Coach, or sit at meat with

-the colonel and his six hundred followers. On the last tour the old man

-was thrown by a bad horse at Bristol and afterward rode with two broken

-bones in splints. Only the cowboys knew, who told me, as day by day I

-watched him back his horse from the ring with all the old incomparable

-grace.

-

-He went back to build a million dollar irrigation ditch for his little

-city on the frontier, and shortly afterward the newspapers reported

-that my friends--the Buffalo Creek Gang of robbers--attacked his bank,

-and shot the cashier. May civilization never shut out the free air of

-the frontier while the old hero lives, in peace and honor, loved to the

-end and worshiped by all real frontiersmen.

-

-

-

-

-XVII

-

-A. D. 1860

-

-THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT

-

-

-I

-

-When the Eternal Father was making the earth, at one time He filled the

-sea with swimming dragons, the air with flying dragons, and the land

-with hopping dragons big as elephants; but they were not a success, and

-so He swept them all away. After that he filled the southern continents

-with a small improved hopping dragon, that laid no eggs, but carried

-the baby in a pouch. There were queer half-invented fish, shadeless

-trees, and furry running birds like the emu and the moa. Then He

-swamped that southern world under the sea, and moved the workshop to

-our northern continents. But He left New Zealand and Australia just as

-they were, a scrap of the half-finished world with furry running birds,

-the hopping kangaroo, the shadeless trees, and half-invented fish.

-

-So when the English went to Australia it was not an ordinary voyage,

-but a journey backward through the ages, through goodness only knows

-how many millions of years to the fifth day of creation. It was like

-visiting the moon or Mars. To live and travel in such a strange land a

-man must be native born, bush raised, and cunning at that, on pain of

-death by famine.

-

-The first British settlers, too, were convicts. The laws were so bad in

-England that a fellow might be deported merely for giving cheek to a

-judge; and the convicts on the whole were very decent people, brutally

-treated in the penal settlements. They used to escape to the bush,

-and runaway convicts explored Australia mainly in search of food. One

-of them, in Tasmania, used, whenever he escaped, to take a party with

-him and eat them one by one, until he ran short of food and had to

-surrender.

-

-Later on gold was discovered, and free settlers drifted in, filling the

-country, but the miners and the farmers were too busy earning a living

-to do much exploration. So the exploring fell to English gentlemen,

-brave men, but hopeless tenderfeet, who knew nothing of bushcraft and

-generally died of hunger or thirst in districts where the native-born

-colonial grows rich to-day.

-

-Edgar John Eyre, for instance, a Yorkshireman, landed in Sydney at the

-age of sixteen, and at twenty-five was a rich sheep-farmer, appointed

-by government protector of the black fellows. In 1840 the colonists

-of South Australia wanted a trail for drifting sheep into Western

-Australia, and young Eyre, from what he had learned among the savages,

-said the scheme was all bosh, in which he was perfectly right. He

-thought that the best line for exploring was northward, and set out

-to prove his words, but got tangled up in the salt bogs surrounding

-Torrens, and very nearly lost his whole party in an attempt to wade

-across. After that failure he felt that he had wasted the money

-subscribed in a wildcat project, so to make good set out again to find

-a route for sheep along the waterless south coast of the continent. He

-knew the route was impossible, but it is a poor sort of courage that

-has to feed on hope, and the men worth having are those who leave their

-hopes behind to march light while they do their duty.

-

-Eyre’s party consisted of himself and his ranch foreman Baxter, a

-favorite black boy Wylie, who was his servant, and two other natives

-who had been on the northward trip. They had nine horses, a pony, six

-sheep, and nine weeks’ rations on the pack animals.

-

-The first really dry stage was one hundred twenty-eight miles without

-a drop of water, and it was not the black fellows, but Eyre, the

-tenderfoot, who went ahead and found the well that saved them. The

-animals died off one by one, so that the stores had to be left behind,

-and there was no food but rotten horse-flesh which caused dysentery, no

-water save dew collected with a sponge from the bushes after the cold

-nights. The two black fellows deserted, but after three days came back

-penitent and starving, thankful to be reinstated.

-

-These black fellows did not believe the trip was possible, they wanted

-to go home, they thought the expedition well worth plundering, and so

-one morning while Eyre was rounding up the horses they shot Baxter,

-plundered the camp and bolted. Only Eyre and his boy Wylie were left,

-but if they lived the deserters might be punished. So the two black

-fellows, armed with Baxter’s gun, tried to hunt down Eyre and his boy

-with a view to murder. They came so near at night that Eyre once heard

-them shout to Wylie to desert. Eyre and the boy stole off, marching so

-rapidly that the murderers were left behind and perished.

-

-A week later, still following the coast of the Great Bight, Wylie

-discovered a French ship lying at anchor, and the English skipper fed

-the explorers for a fortnight until they were well enough to go on.

-Twenty-three more days of terrible suffering brought Eyre and his boy,

-looking like a brace of scarecrows, to a hilltop overlooking the town

-of Albany. They had reached Western Australia, the first travelers to

-cross from the eastern to the western colonies.

-

-In after years Eyre was governor of Jamaica.

-

-

-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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.”

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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_.”

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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!”

-

-[Illustration: 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.

-

-[Illustration: 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

-

-

-

-

-Transcriber’s Notes

-

-

-Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a

-predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they

-were not changed.

-

-Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation

-marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left

-unbalanced.

-

-Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and

-outside quotations.

-

-The pages in the introductory chapter “Adventurers” were not numbered.

-Transcriber did so with Roman numbers.

-

-Page 210: “the overload Joy” may be a misprint for “the overloaded Joy”.

-

-

-

+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE ***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
+notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: NAPOLEON BONAPARTE]
+
+
+
+
+                                CAPTAINS
+                              OF ADVENTURE
+
+
+                                  _By_
+                              ROGER POCOCK
+
+                              _Author of_
+                        A Man in the Open, etc.
+
+
+                       ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS
+
+
+                              INDIANAPOLIS
+                       THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
+                               PUBLISHERS
+
+
+
+
+                             COPYRIGHT 1913
+                       THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
+
+
+                                PRESS OF
+                            BRAUNWORTH & CO.
+                        BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
+                            BROOKLYN, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+ADVENTURERS
+
+
+What is an adventurer? One who has adventures? Surely not. A person
+charged by a wild rhinoceros is having an adventure, yet however wild
+the animal, however wild the person, he is only somebody wishing
+himself at home, not an adventurer. In dictionaries the adventurer
+is “one who seeks his fortune in new and hazardous or perilous
+enterprises.” But outside the pages of a dictionary, the man who seeks
+his fortune, who really cares for money and his own advantage, sits
+at some desk deriding the fools who take thousand-to-one chances in a
+gamble with Death. Did the patron saint of adventurers, Saint Paul, or
+did Saint Louis, or Francis Drake, or Livingstone, or Gordon seek their
+own fortune, think you? In real life the adventurer is one who seeks,
+not his fortune, but the new and hazardous or perilous enterprises.
+There are holy saints and scoundrels among adventurers, but all the
+thousands I have known were fools of the romantic temperament, dealing
+with life as an artist does with canvas, to color it with fierce and
+vivid feeling, deep shade and radiant light, exulting in the passions
+of the sea, the terrors of the wilderness, the splendors of sunshine
+and starlight, the exaltation of battle, fire and hurricane.
+
+All nations have bred great adventurers, but the living nation
+remembers them sending the boys out into the world enriched with
+memories of valor, a heritage of national honor, an inspiration to
+ennoble their manhood. That is the only real wealth of men and of
+peoples. For such purposes this book is written, but so vast is the
+theme that this volume would outgrow all reasonable size unless we set
+some limit. A man in the regular standing forces of his native state
+is not dubbed adventurer. When, for example, the immortal heroes Tromp
+and De Ruyter fought the British generals at sea, Blake and Monk, they
+were no more adventurers than are the police constables who guard our
+homes at night. Were Clive and Warren Hastings adventurers? They would
+turn in their graves if one brought such a charge. The true type of
+adventurer is the lone-hand pioneer.
+
+It is not from any bias of mine that the worthies of Switzerland, the
+Teutonic empires and Russia, are shut out of this poor little record;
+but because it seems that the lone-hand oversea and overland pioneers
+come mainly from nations directly fronting upon the open sea. As far
+as I am prejudiced, it is in favor of old Norway, whose heroes have
+entranced me with the sheer glory of their perfect manhood. For the
+rest, our own English-speaking folk are easier for us to understand
+than any foreigners.
+
+As to the manner of record, we must follow the stream of history if we
+would shoot the rapids of adventure.
+
+Now as to the point of view: My literary pretensions are small and
+humble, but I claim the right of an adventurer, trained in thirty-three
+trades of the Lost Region, to absolute freedom of speech concerning
+frontiersmen. Let history bow down before Columbus, but as a foremast
+seaman, I hold he was not fit to command a ship. Let history ignore
+Captain John Smith, but as an ex-trooper, I worship him for a leader,
+the paladin of Anglo-Saxon chivalry, and very father of the United
+States. Literature admires the well advertised Stanley, but we
+frontiersmen prefer Commander Cameron, who walked across Africa without
+blaming others for his own defects, or losing his temper, or shedding
+needless blood. All the celebrities may go hang, but when we take the
+field, send us leaders like Patrick Forbes, who conquered Rhodesia
+without journalists in attendance to write puffs, or any actual deluge
+of public gratitude.
+
+The historic and literary points of view are widely different from that
+of our dusty rankers.
+
+When the Dutchmen were fighting Spain, they invented and built the
+first iron-clad war-ship--all honor to their seamanship for that! But
+when the winter came, a Spanish cavalry charge across the ice captured
+the ship--and there was fine adventure. Both sides had practical men.
+
+In the same wars, a Spanish man-at-arms in the plundering of a city,
+took more gold than he could carry, so he had the metal beaten into
+a suit of armor, and painted black to hide its worth from thieves.
+From a literary standpoint, that was all very fine, but from our
+adventurer point of view, the man was a fool for wearing armor useless
+for defense, and so heavy he could not run. He was killed, and a good
+riddance.
+
+We value most the man who knows his business, and the more practical
+the adventurer, the fewer his misadventures.
+
+From that point of view, the book is attempted with all earnestness;
+and if the results appear bizarre, let the shocked reader turn to
+better written works, mention of which is made in notes.
+
+As to the truthfulness of adventurers, perhaps we are all more or less
+truthful when we try to be good. But there are two kinds of adventurers
+who need sharply watching. The worst is F. C. Selous. Once he lectured
+to amuse the children at the Foundling Hospital, and when he came to
+single combats with a wounded lion, or a mad elephant he was forced
+to mention himself as one of the persons present. He blushed. Then
+he would race through a hair-lifting story of the fight, and in an
+apologetic manner, give all the praise to the elephant, or the lion
+lately deceased. Surely nobody could suspect him of any merit, yet
+all the children saw through him for a transparent fraud, and even we
+grown-ups felt the better for meeting so grand a gentleman.
+
+The other sort of liar, who does not understate his own merits, is
+Jim Beckwourth. He told his story, quite truthfully at first, to a
+journalist who took it down in shorthand. But when the man gaped with
+admiration at the merest trifles, Jim was on his mettle, testing this
+person’s powers of belief, which were absolutely boundless. After that,
+of course he hit the high places, striking the facts about once in
+twenty-four hours, and as one reads the book, one can catch the thud
+whenever he hit the truth.
+
+Let no man dream that adventure is a thing of the past or that
+adventurers are growing scarce. The only difficulty of this book
+was to squeeze the past in order to make-space for living men worthy
+as their forerunners. The list is enormous, and I only dared to
+estimate such men of our own time as I have known by correspondence,
+acquaintance, friendship, enmity, or by serving under their leadership.
+Here again, I could only speak safely in cases where there were
+records, as with Lord Strathcona, Colonel S. B. Steele, Colonel Cody,
+Major Forbes, Captain Grogan, Captain Amundsen, Captain Hansen, Mr.
+John Boyes. Left out, among Americans, are M. H. de Hora who, in a
+Chilian campaign, with only a boat’s crew, cut out the battle-ship
+_Huascar_, plundered a British tramp of her bunker coal, and fought H.
+M. S. _Shah_ on the high seas. Another American, Doctor Bodkin, was
+for some years prime minister of Makualand, an Arab sultanate. Among
+British adventurers, Caid Belton, is one of four successive British
+commanders-in-chief to the Moorish sultans. Colonel Tompkins was
+commander-in-chief to Johore. C. W. Mason was captured with a shipload
+of arms in an attempt to make himself emperor of China. Charles Rose
+rode from Mazatlan in Mexico to Corrientes in Paraguay. A. W. V.
+Crawley, a chief of scouts to Lord Roberts in South Africa, rode out of
+action after being seven times shot, and he rides now a little askew in
+consequence.
+
+To sum up, if one circle of acquaintances includes such a group to-day,
+the adventurer is not quite an extinct species, and indeed, we seem not
+at the end, but at the beginning of the greatest of all adventurous
+eras, that of the adventurers of the air.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  Chapter                                                           Page
+
+        I  THE VIKINGS IN AMERICA                                      1
+
+       II  THE CRUSADERS                                               7
+
+      III  THE MIDDLE AGES IN ASIA                                    18
+
+       IV  THE MARVELOUS ADVENTURES OF SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE           25
+
+        V  COLUMBUS                                                   32
+
+       VI  THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO                                     37
+
+      VII  THE CONQUEST OF PERU                                       44
+
+     VIII  THE CORSAIRS                                               50
+
+       IX  PORTUGAL IN THE INDIES                                     55
+
+        X  RAJAH BROOKE                                               62
+
+       XI  THE SPIES                                                  69
+
+      XII  A YEAR’S ADVENTURES                                        81
+
+     XIII  KIT CARSON                                                 88
+
+      XIV  THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD                                     100
+
+       XV  THE GREAT FILIBUSTER                                      106
+
+      XVI  BUFFALO BILL                                              112
+
+     XVII  THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT                                     123
+
+    XVIII  THE HERO-STATESMAN                                        131
+
+      XIX  THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT                                 138
+
+       XX  LORD STRATHCONA                                           142
+
+      XXI  THE SEA HUNTERS                                           148
+
+     XXII  THE BUSHRANGERS                                           156
+
+    XXIII  THE PASSING OF THE BISON                                  162
+
+     XXIV  GORDON                                                    173
+
+      XXV  THE OUTLAW                                                179
+
+     XXVI  A KING AT TWENTY-FIVE                                     186
+
+    XXVII  JOURNEY OF EWART GROGAN                                   194
+
+   XXVIII  THE COWBOY PRESIDENT                                      202
+
+     XXIX  THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE                                     208
+
+      XXX  JOHN HAWKINS                                              215
+
+     XXXI  FRANCIS DRAKE                                             219
+
+    XXXII  THE FOUR ARMADAS                                          223
+
+   XXXIII  SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT                                      231
+
+    XXXIV  SIR WALTER RALEIGH                                        234
+
+     XXXV  CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH                                        237
+
+    XXXVI  THE BUCCANEERS                                            246
+
+   XXXVII  THE VOYAGEURS                                             252
+
+  XXXVIII  THE EXPLORERS                                             260
+
+    XXXIX  THE PIRATES                                               266
+
+       XL  DANIEL BOONE                                              272
+
+      XLI  ANDREW JACKSON                                            280
+
+     XLII  SAM HOUSTON                                               282
+
+    XLIII  DAVY CROCKETT                                             285
+
+     XLIV  ALEXANDER MACKENZIE                                       292
+
+      XLV  THE WHITE MAN’S COMING                                    298
+
+     XLVI  THE BEAVER                                                302
+
+    XLVII  THE CONQUEST OF THE POLES                                 307
+
+   XLVIII  WOMEN                                                     315
+
+     XLIX  THE CONQUERORS OF INDIA                                   321
+
+        L  THE MAN WHO SHOT LORD NELSON                              327
+
+       LI  THE FALL OF NAPOLEON                                      333
+
+      LII  RISING WOLF                                               340
+
+     LIII  SIMON BOLIVAR                                             350
+
+      LIV  THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE                                    357
+
+       LV  THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS                                   363
+
+      LVI  A TALE OF VENGEANCE                                       371
+
+
+
+
+CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE
+
+
+
+
+CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+A. D. 984
+
+THE VIKINGS IN AMERICA
+
+
+A reverent study of heroes in novels, also in operas and melodramas,
+where one may see them for half-a-crown, has convinced me that they
+must be very trying to live with. They get on people’s nerves. Hence
+the villains.
+
+Now Harold of the Fair Hair was a hero, and he fell in love with a
+lady, but she would not marry him unless he made himself king of
+Norway. So he made himself the first king of all Norway, and she had to
+marry him, which served her right.
+
+But then there were the gentlemen of his majesty’s opposition who did
+not want him to be king, who felt that there was altogether too much
+Harold in Norway. They left, and went to Iceland to get away from the
+hero.
+
+Iceland had been shown on the map since the year A. D. 115, and when
+the vikings arrived they found a colony of Irish monks who said they
+had come there “because they desired for the love of God to be in a
+state of pilgrimage, they recked not where.”
+
+Perhaps the vikings sent them to Heaven. Later on it seems they found
+a little Irish settlement on the New England coast, and heard of great
+Ireland, a colony farther south. That is the first rumor we have about
+America.
+
+The Norsemen settled down, pagans in Christian Iceland. They earned
+a living with fish and cattle, and made an honest penny raiding the
+Mediterranean. They had internecine sports of their own, and on the
+whole were reasonably happy. Then in course of trade Captain Gunbjorn
+sighted an unknown land two hundred fifty miles to the westward. That
+made the Icelanders restless, for there is always something which calls
+to Northern blood from beyond the sea line.
+
+Most restless of all was Red Eric, hysterical because he hated a
+humdrum respectable life; indeed, he committed so many murders that he
+had to be deported as a public nuisance. He set off exultant to find
+Gunbjorn’s unknown land. So any natural born adventurer commits little
+errors of taste unless he can find an outlet. It is too much dog-chain
+that makes biting dogs.
+
+When he found the new land it was all green, with swaths of wild
+flowers. I know that land and its bright lowlands, backed by sheer
+walled mountains, with splintered pinnacles robed in the splendors
+of the inland ice. The trees were knee high, no crops could possibly
+ripen, but Eric was so pleased that after two winters he went back
+to Iceland advertising for settlers to fill his colony. Greenland
+he called the place, because “Many will go there if the place has
+a fair name.” They did, and when the sea had wiped out most of the
+twenty-five ships, the surviving colonists found Greenland commodious
+and residential as the heart could wish.
+
+They were not long gone from the port of Skalholt when young Captain
+Bjarni came in from the sea and asked for his father. But father
+Heljulf had sailed for Greenland, so the youngster set off in pursuit
+although nobody knew the way. Bjarni always spent alternate yuletides
+at his father’s hearth, so if the hearth-stone moved he had to find it
+somehow. These vikings are so human and natural that one can follow
+their thought quite easily. When, for instance, Bjarni, instead of
+coming to Greenland, found a low, well timbered country, he knew he had
+made a mistake, so it was no use landing. Rediscovering the American
+mainland was a habit which persisted until the time of Columbus, and
+not a feat to make a fuss about. A northerly course and a pure stroke
+of luck carried Bjarni to Greenland and his father’s house.
+
+Because they had no timber, and driftwood was scarce, the colonists
+were much excited when they heard of forests, and cursed Bjarni for
+not having landed. Anyway, here was a fine excuse for an expedition
+in search of fire-wood, so Leif, the son of Red Eric, bought Bjarni’s
+ship. Being tall and of commanding presence he rallied thirty-five of
+a crew, and, being young, expected that his father would take command.
+Eric indeed rode a distance of four hundred feet from his house against
+the rock, which was called Brattelid, to the shore of the inlet, but
+his pony fell and threw him, such a bad omen that he rode home again.
+Leif Ericsen, therefore, with winged helmet and glittering breastplate,
+mounted the steerboard, laid hands on the steer-oar and bade his men
+shove off. The colonists on rugged dun ponies lined the shore to cheer
+the adventurers, and the ladies waved their kerchiefs from the rock
+behind the house while the dragon ship, shield-lines ablaze in the
+sun, oars thrashing blue water, and painted square-sail set, took the
+fair wind on that famous voyage. She discovered Stoneland, which is
+the Newfoundland-Labrador coast, and Woodland, which is Nova Scotia.
+Then came the Further Strand, the long and wonderful beaches of
+Massachusetts, and beyond was Narragansett Bay, where they built winter
+houses, pastured their cattle, and found wild grapes. It was here that
+Tyrkir, the little old German man slave who was Leif’s nurse, made wine
+and got most gorgeously drunk. On the homeward passage Leif brought
+timber and raisins to Greenland.
+
+Leif went away to Norway, where as a guest of King Olaf he became a
+Christian, and in his absence his brother Thorwald made the second
+voyage to what is now New England. After wintering at Leif’s house in
+Wineland the Good he went southward and, somewhere near the site of New
+York, met with savages. Nine of them lay under three upturned canoes on
+the beach, so the vikings killed eight just for fun, but were fools,
+letting the ninth escape to raise the tribes for war. So there was a
+battle, and Thorwald the Helpless was shot in the eye, which served him
+right. One of his brothers came afterward in search of the body, which
+may have been that same seated skeleton in bronze armor that nine
+hundred years later was dug up at Cross Point.
+
+Two or three years after Thorwald’s death his widow married a visitor
+from Norway, Eric’s guest at Brattelid, the rich Thorfin Karlsefne. He
+also set out for Vinland, taking Mrs. Karlsefne and four other women,
+also a Scottish lad and lass (very savage) and an Irishman, besides a
+crew of sixty and some cattle. They built a fort where the natives came
+trading skins for strips of red cloth, or to fight a battle, or to be
+chased, shrieking with fright, by Thorfin’s big red bull. There Mrs.
+Karlsefne gave birth to Snorri the Firstborn, whose sons Thorlak and
+Brand became priests and were the first two bishops of Greenland.
+
+After Karlsefne’s return to Greenland the next voyage was made by one
+of Eric’s daughters; and presently Leif the Fortunate came home from
+Norway to his father’s house, bringing a priest. Then Mrs. Leif built a
+church at Brattelid, old Eric the Red being thoroughly disgusted, and
+Greenland and Vinland became Christian, but Eric never.
+
+As long as Norway traded with her American colonies Vinland exported
+timber and dried fruit, while Greenland sent sheepskins, ox hides,
+sealskins, walrus-skin rope and tusks to Iceland and Europe. In return
+they got iron and settlers. But then began a series of disasters, for
+when the Black Death swept Europe, the colonies were left to their
+fate, and some of the colonists in despair renounced their faith to
+turn Eskimo. In 1349 the last timber ship from Nova Scotia was lately
+returned to Europe when the plague struck Norway. There is a gap of
+fifty-two years in the record, and all we know of Greenland is that
+the western villages were destroyed by Eskimos who killed eighteen
+Norsemen and carried off the boys. Then the plague destroyed two-thirds
+of the people in Iceland, a bad winter killed nine tenths of all their
+cattle, and what remained of the hapless colony was ravaged by English
+fishermen. No longer could Iceland send any help to Greenland, but
+still there was intercourse because we know that seven years later the
+vicar of Garde married a girl in the east villages to a young Icelander.
+
+Meanwhile, in plague-stricken England, Bristol, our biggest seaport,
+had not enough men living even to bury the dead, and labor was so
+scarce that the crops rotted for lack of harvesters. That is why an
+English squadron raided Iceland, Greenland, perhaps even Vinland, for
+slaves, and the people were carried away into captivity. Afterward
+England paid compensation to Denmark and returned the folk to their
+homes, but in 1448 the pope wrote to a Norse bishop concerning their
+piteous condition. And there the story ends, for in that year the
+German merchants at Bergen in Norway squabbled with the forty master
+mariners of the American trade. The sailors had boycotted their
+Hanseatic League, so the Germans asked them to dinner, and murdered
+them. From that time no man knew the way to lost America.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A. D. 1248
+
+THE CRUSADERS
+
+
+In the seventh century of the reign of Our Lord Christ, arose the
+Prophet Mahomet. To his followers he generously gave Heaven, and
+as much of the earth as they could get, so the true believers made
+haste to occupy goodly and fruitful possessions of Christian powers,
+including the Holy Land. The owners were useful as slaves.
+
+Not having been consulted in this matter, the Christians took offense,
+making war upon Islam in seven warm campaigns, wherein they held and
+lost by turns the holy sepulcher, so that the country where our Lord
+taught peace, was always drenched with blood. In the end, our crusades
+were not a success.
+
+About Saint Louis and the sixth crusade:
+
+At the opening of the story, that holy but delightful king of France
+lay so near death that his two lady nurses had a squabble, the one
+pulling a cloth over his face because he was dead, while the other
+snatched it away because he was still alive. At last he sent the pair
+of them to fetch the cross, on which he vowed to deliver the Holy Land.
+Then he had to get well, so he did, sending word to his barons to roll
+up their men for war.
+
+Among the nobles was the young Lord of Joinville, seneschal of
+Champagne--a merry little man with eight hundred pounds a year of
+his own. But then, what with an expensive mother, his wife, and some
+little worries, he had to pawn his lands before he could take the
+field with his two knights-banneret, nine knights, their men-at-arms,
+and the servants. He shared with another lord the hire of a ship from
+Marseilles, but when they joined his majesty in Cyprus he had only a
+few pounds left, and the knights would have deserted but that the king
+gave him a staff appointment at eight hundred pounds a year.
+
+The king was a holy saint, a glorious knight errant, full of fun,
+but a thoroughly incompetent general. Instead of taking Jerusalem by
+surprise, he must needs raid Egypt, giving the soldan of Babylon the
+Less (Cairo) plenty of time to arrange a warm reception. The rival
+armies had a battle on the beach, after which Saint Louis sat down in
+front of Damietta, where he found time to muddle his commissariat.
+
+On the other hand, the soldan was not at all well, having been poisoned
+by a rival prince, and paid no heed to the carrier pigeons with their
+despairing messages from the front. This discouraged the Moslems, who
+abandoned Damietta and fled inland, hotly pursued by the French. As a
+precaution, however, they sent round their ships, which collected the
+French supplies proceeding to the front. The Christians had plenty
+of fighting and a deal of starving to do, not to mention pestilence
+in their ill-managed camps. So they came to a canal which had to be
+bridged, but the artful paynim cut away the land in front of the
+bridge head, so that there was no ground on which the French could
+arrive. In the end the Christians had to swim and, as they were heavily
+armored, many were drowned in the mud. Joinville’s party found a dry
+crossing up-stream, and their troubles began at the enemy’s camp whence
+the Turks were flying.
+
+“While we were driving them through their camp, I perceived a Saracen
+who was mounting his horse, one of his knights holding the bridle. At
+the moment he had his two hands on the saddle to mount, I gave him
+of my lance under the armpit, and laid him dead. When his knight saw
+that, he left his lord and the horse, and struck me with his lance as
+I passed, between the two shoulders, holding me so pressed down that
+I could not draw the sword at my belt. I had, therefore, to draw the
+sword attached to my horse, and when he saw that he withdrew his lance
+and left me.”
+
+Here in the camp Joinville’s detachment was rushed by six thousand
+Turks, “who pressed upon me with their lances. My horse knelt under the
+weight, and I fell forward over the horse’s ears. I got up as soon as
+ever I could with my shield at my neck, and my sword in my hand.
+
+“Again a great rout of Turks came rushing upon us, and bore me to the
+ground and went over me, and caused my shield to fly from my neck.”
+
+So the little party gained the wall of a ruined house, where they were
+sorely beset: Lord Hugh, of Ecot, with three lance wounds in the face,
+Lord Frederick, of Loupey, with a lance wound between the shoulders,
+so large that the blood flowed from his body as from the bung hole
+of a cask, and my Lord of Sivery with a sword-stroke in the face, so
+that his nose fell over his lips. Joinville, too badly wounded to
+fight, was holding horses, while Turks who had climbed to the roof were
+prodding from above with their lances. Then came Anjou to the rescue,
+and presently the king with his main army. The fight became a general
+engagement, while slowly the Christian force was driven backward upon
+the river. The day had become very hot, and the stream was covered with
+lances and shields, and with horses and men drowning and perishing.
+
+Near by De Joinville’s position, a streamlet entered the river, and
+across that ran a bridge by which the Turks attempted to cut the king’s
+retreat. This bridge the little hero, well mounted now, held for hours,
+covering the flight of French detachments. At the head of one such
+party rode Count Peter, of Brittany, spitting the blood from his mouth
+and shouting “Ha! by God’s head, have you ever seen such riffraff?”
+
+“In front of us were two of the king’s sergeants; ... and the Turks
+... brought a large number of churls afoot, who pelted them with lumps
+of earth, but were never able to force them back upon us. At last they
+brought a churl on foot, who thrice threw Greek fire at them. Once
+William of Boon received the pot of Greek fire on his target, for if
+the fire had caught any of his garments he must have been burnt alive.
+We were all covered with the darts that failed to hit the sergeants.
+Now, it chanced that I found a Saracen’s quilted tunic lined with tow;
+I turned the open side towards me, and made a shield ... which did me
+good service, for I was only wounded by their darts in five places, and
+my horse in fifteen.... The good Count of Soissons, in that point of
+danger, jested with me and said,
+
+“‘Seneschal, let these curs howl! By God’s bonnet we shall talk of this
+day yet, you and I, in ladies’ chambers!’”
+
+So came the constable of France, who relieved Joinville and sent him to
+guard the king.
+
+“So as soon as I came to the king, I made him take off his helmet, and
+lent him my steel cap so that he might have air.”
+
+Presently a knight brought news that the Count of Artois, the king’s
+brother, was in paradise.
+
+“Ah, Sire,” said the provost, “be of good comfort herein, for never did
+king of France gain so much honor as you have gained this day. For in
+order to fight your enemies you have passed over a river swimming, and
+you have discomfited them and driven them from the field, and taken
+their engines, and also their tents wherein you will sleep this night.”
+
+And the king replied: “Let God be worshiped for all He has given me,”
+and then the big tears fell from his eyes.
+
+That night the captured camp was attacked in force, much to the grief
+of De Joinville and his knights, who ruefully put on chain mail over
+their aching wounds. Before they were dressed De Joinville’s chaplain
+engaged eight Saracens and put them all to flight.
+
+Three days later came a general attack of the whole Saracen army upon
+the Christian camp, but thanks to the troops of Count William, of
+Flanders, De Joinville and his wounded knights were not in the thick of
+the fray.
+
+“Wherein,” he says, “God showed us great courtesy, for neither I nor my
+knights had our hawberks (chain shirts) and shields, because we had all
+been wounded.”
+
+You see De Joinville had the sweet faith that his God was a gentleman.
+
+After that the sorrowful army lay nine days in camp till the bodies of
+the dead floated to the surface of the canal, and eight days more while
+a hundred hired vagabonds cleared the stream. But the army lived on
+eels and water from that canal, while all of them sickened of scurvy,
+and hundreds died. Under the hands of the surgeons the men of that
+dying army cried like women. Then came an attempt to retreat in ships
+to the coast, but the way was blocked, the little galleys were captured
+one by one, the king was taken, and what then remained of the host were
+prisoners, the sick put to death, the rich held for ransom, the poor
+sold away into slavery.
+
+Saint Louis appeared to be dying of dysentery and scurvy, he was
+threatened with torture, but day after day found strength and courage
+to bargain with the soldan of Babylon for the ransom of his people.
+Once the negotiations broke down because the soldan was murdered by his
+own emirs, but the king went on bargaining now with the murderers. For
+his own ransom he gave the city of Damietta, for that of his knights he
+paid the royal treasure that was on board a galley in the port, and for
+the deliverance of the common men, he had to raise money in France.
+
+So came the release, and the emirs would have been ashamed to let their
+captive knights leave the prison fasting. So De Joinville’s party had
+“fritters of cheese roasted in the sun so that worms should not come
+therein, and hard boiled eggs cooked four or five days before, and
+these, in our honor, had been painted with divers colors.”
+
+After that came the counting of the ransom on board the royal galley,
+with the dreadful conclusion that they were short of the sum by thirty
+thousand livres. De Joinville went off to the galley of the marshal of
+the Knights Templars, where he tried to borrow the money.
+
+“Many were the hard and angry words which passed between him and me.”
+
+For one thing the borrower, newly released from prison, looked like
+a ragged beggar, and for the rest, the treasure of the Templars was
+a trust fund not to be lent to any one. They stood in the hold in
+front of the chest of treasure, De Joinville demanding the key, then
+threatening with an ax to make of it the king’s key.
+
+“We see right well,” said the treasurer, “that you are using force
+against us.” And on that excuse yielded the key to the ragged beggar,
+tottering with weakness, a very specter of disease and famine.
+
+“I threw out the silver I found therein and went, and sat on the prow
+of our little vessel that had brought me. And I took the marshal of
+France and left him with the silver in the Templars’ galley and on the
+galley I put the minister of the Trinity. On the galley the marshal
+handed the silver to the minister, and the minister gave it over to me
+on the little vessel where I sat. When we had ended and came towards
+the king’s galley, I began to shout to the king.
+
+“‘Sire! Sire! see how well I am furnished!’
+
+“And the saintly man received me right willingly and right joyfully.”
+
+So the ransom was completed, the king’s ransom and that of the greatest
+nobles of France, this group of starving ragged beggars in a dingey.
+
+Years followed of hard campaigning in Palestine. Once Saint Louis was
+even invited by the soldan of Damascus to visit as a pilgrim that Holy
+City which he could never enter as a conqueror. But Saint Louis and his
+knights were reminded of a story about Richard the Lion-Hearted, king
+of England. For Richard once marched almost within sight of the capital
+so that a knight cried out to him:
+
+“Sire, come so far hither, and I will show you Jerusalem!”
+
+But the Duke of Burgundy had just deserted with half the crusading
+army, lest it be said that the English had taken Jerusalem. So when
+Richard heard the knight calling he threw his coat armor before his
+eyes, all in tears, and said to our Savior,
+
+“Fair Lord God, I pray Thee suffer me not to see Thy Holy City since I
+can not deliver it from the hands of thine enemies.”
+
+King Louis the Saint followed the example of King Richard the Hero, and
+both left Palestine broken-hearted because they had not the strength
+to take Jerusalem.
+
+Very queer is the tale of the queen’s arrival from France.
+
+“When I heard tell that she was come,” said De Joinville, “I rose from
+before the king and went to meet her, and led her to the castle, and
+when I came back to the king, who was in his chapel, he asked me if
+the queen and his children were well; and I told him yes. And he said,
+‘I knew when you rose from before me that you were going to meet the
+queen, and so I have caused the sermon to wait for you.’ And these
+things I tell you,” adds De Joinville, “because I had then been five
+years with the king, and never before had he spoken to me, nor so far
+as ever I heard, to any one else, of the queen, and of his children;
+and so it appears to me, it was not seemly to be thus a stranger to
+one’s wife and children.”
+
+To do the dear knight justice, he was always brutally frank to the
+king’s face, however much he loved him behind his back.
+
+The return of the king and queen to France was full of adventure, and
+De Joinville still had an appetite for such little troubles as a wreck
+and a sea fight. Here is a really nice story of an accident.
+
+“One of the queen’s bedwomen, when she had put the queen to bed, was
+heedless, and taking the kerchief that had been wound about her head,
+threw it into the iron stove on which the queen’s candle was burning,
+and when she had gone into the cabin where the women slept, below the
+queen’s chamber, the candle burnt on, till the kerchief caught fire,
+and from the kerchief the fire passed to the cloths with which the
+queen’s garments were covered. When the queen awoke she saw her cabin
+all in flames, and jumped up quite naked and took the kerchief and
+threw it all burning into the sea, and took the cloths and extinguished
+them. Those who were in the barge behind the ship cried, but not very
+loud, ‘Fire! fire!’ I lifted up my head and saw that the kerchief still
+burned with a clear flame on the sea, which was very still.
+
+“I put on my tunic as quickly as I could, and went and sat with the
+mariners.
+
+“While I sat there my squire, who slept before me, came to me and
+said that the king was awake, and asked where I was. ‘And I told
+him,’ said he, ‘that you were in your cabin; and the king said to me,
+“Thou liest!”’ While we were thus speaking, behold the queen’s clerk
+appeared, Master Geoffrey, and said to me, ‘Be not afraid, nothing has
+happened.’ And I said, ‘Master Geoffrey, go and tell the queen that the
+king is awake, and she should go to him, and set his mind at ease.’
+
+“On the following day the constable of France, and my Lord Peter the
+chamberlain, and my Lord Gervais, the master of the pantry, said to the
+king, ‘What happened in the night that we heard mention of fire?’ and I
+said not a word. Then said the king, ‘What happened was by mischance,
+and the seneschal (De Joinville) is more reticent than I. Now I will
+tell you,’ said he, ‘how it came about that we might all have been
+burned this night,’ and he told them what had befallen, and said to
+me, ‘I command you henceforth not to go to rest until you have put out
+all fires, except the great fire that is in the hold of the ship.’
+(Cooking fire on the ship’s ballast). ‘And take note that I shall not
+go to rest till you come back to me.’”
+
+It is pleasant to think of the queen’s pluck, the knight’s silence, the
+king’s tact, and to see the inner privacies of that ancient ship. After
+seven hundred years the gossip is fresh and vivid as this morning’s
+news.
+
+The king brought peace, prosperity and content to all his kingdom, and
+De Joinville was very angry when in failing health Saint Louis was
+persuaded to attempt another crusade in Africa.
+
+“So great was his weakness that he suffered me to carry him in my
+arms from the mansion of the Count of Auxerre to the abbey of the
+Franciscans.”
+
+So went the king to his death in Tunis, a bungling soldier, but a saint
+on a throne, the noblest of all adventurers, the greatest sovereign
+France has ever known.
+
+Long afterward the king came in a dream to see De Joinville:
+“Marvelously joyous and glad of heart, and I myself was right glad to
+see him in my castle. And I said to him, ‘Sire, when you go hence, I
+will lodge you in a house of mine, that is in a city of mine, called
+Chevillon.’ And he answered me laughing, and said to me, ‘Lord of
+Joinville, by the faith I owe you, I have no wish so soon to go hence.’”
+
+It was at the age of eighty-five De Joinville wrote his memoirs, still
+blithe as a boy because he was not grown up.
+
+    NOTE. From _Memoirs of the Crusaders_, by Villehardouine and De
+    Joinville. Dent & Co.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+A. D. 1260
+
+THE MIDDLE AGES IN ASIA
+
+
+THE year 1260 found Saint Louis of France busy reforming his kingdom,
+while over the way the English barons were reforming King Henry III on
+the eve of the founding of parliament, and the Spaniards were inventing
+the bull fight by way of a national sport. Our own national pastime
+then was baiting Jews. They got twopence per week in the pound for the
+use of their money, but next year one of them was caught in the act of
+cheating, a little error which led to the massacre of seven hundred.
+
+That year the great Khan Kublai came to the throne of the Mongol
+Empire, a pastoral realm of the grass lands extending from the edge
+of Europe to the Pacific Ocean. Kublai began to build his capital,
+the city of Pekin, and in all directions his people extended their
+conquests. The looting and burning of Bagdad took them seven days and
+the resistless pressure of their hordes was forcing the Turks upon
+Europe.
+
+Meanwhile in the dying Christian empire of the East, the Latins held
+Constantinople with Beldwin on the throne, but next year the Greek army
+led by Michael Paleologus crept through a tunnel and managed to capture
+the city.
+
+Among the merchants at Constantinople in 1260 were the two Polo
+brothers, Nicolo and Matteo, Venetian nobles, who invested the whole of
+their capital in gems, and set off on a trading voyage to the Crimea.
+Their business finished, they went on far up the Volga River to the
+court of a Mongol prince, and to him they gave the whole of their gems
+as a gift, getting a present in return with twice the money. But now
+their line of retreat was blocked by a war among the Mongol princes, so
+they went off to trade at Bokhara in Persia where they spent a year.
+And so it happened that the Polo brothers met with certain Mongol
+envoys who were returning to the court of their Emperor Kublai. “Come
+with us,” said the envoys. “The great khan has never seen a European
+and will be glad to have you as his guests.” So the Polos traveled
+under safe conduct with the envoys, a year’s journey, until they
+reached the court of the great khan at Pekin and were received with
+honor and liberality.
+
+Now it so happened that Kublai sought for himself and his people the
+faith of Christ, and wanted the pope to send him a hundred priests, so
+he despatched these Italian gentlemen as his ambassadors to the court
+of Rome. He gave them a passport engraved on a slab of gold, commanding
+his subjects to help the envoys upon their way with food and horses,
+and thus, traveling in state across Asia, the Polos returned from a
+journey, the greatest ever made up to that time by any Christian men.
+
+At Venice, Nicolo, the elder of the brothers, found that his wife had
+died leaving to him a son, then aged sixteen, young Marco Polo, a
+gallant, courageous, hardy lad, it seems, and very truthful, without
+the slightest symptoms of any sense of humor.
+
+The schoolboy who defined the Vatican as a great empty space without
+air, was perfectly correct, for when the Polos arrived there was a sort
+of vacuum in Rome, the pope being dead and no new appointment made
+because the electors were squabbling. Two years the envoys waited,
+and when at last a new pope was elected, he proved to be a friend
+of theirs, the legate Theobald on whom they waited at the Christian
+fortress of Acre in Palestine.
+
+But instead of sending a hundred clergymen to convert the Mongol
+empire, the new pope had only one priest to spare, who proved to be a
+coward, and deserted.
+
+Empty handed, their mission a failure, the Polos went back, a three and
+one-half years’ journey to Pekin, taking with them young Marco Polo, a
+handsome gallant, who at once found favor with old Kublai Khan. Marco
+“sped wondrously in learning the customs of the Tartars, as well as
+their language, their manner of writing, and their practise of war ...
+insomuch that the emperor held him in great esteem. And so when he
+discerned Mark to have so much sense, and to conduct himself so well
+and beseemingly, he sent him on an embassage of his, to a country which
+was a good six months’ journey distant. The young gallant executed
+his commission well and with discretion.” The fact is that Kublai’s
+ambassadors, returning from different parts of the world, “were able
+to tell him nothing except the business on which they had gone, and
+that the prince in consequence held them for no better than dolts and
+fools.” Mark brought back plenty of gossip, and was a great success,
+for seventeen years being employed by the emperor on all sorts of
+missions. “And thus it came about that Messer Marco Polo had knowledge
+of or had actually visited a greater number of the different countries
+of the world than any other man.”
+
+In the Chinese annals of the Mongol dynasty there is record in 1277 of
+one Polo nominated a second-class commissioner or agent attached to
+the privy council. Marco had become a civil servant, and his father
+and uncle were both rich men, but as the years went on, and the aged
+emperor began to fail, they feared as to their fate after his death.
+Yet when they wanted to go home old Kublai growled at them.
+
+“Now it came to pass in those days that the Queen Bolgana, wife of
+Argon, lord of the Levant (court of Persia), departed this life. And in
+her will she had desired that no lady should take her place, or succeed
+her as Argon’s wife except one of her own family (in Cathay). Argon
+therefore despatched three of his barons ... as ambassadors to the
+great khan, attended by a very gallant company, in order to bring back
+as his bride a lady of the family of Queen Bolgana, his late wife.
+
+“When these three barons had reached the court of the great khan,
+they delivered their message explaining wherefore they were come. The
+khan received them with all honor and hospitality, and then sent for
+a lady whose name was Cocachin, who was of the family of the deceased
+Queen Bolgana. She was a maiden of seventeen, a very beautiful and
+charming person, and on her arrival at court she was presented to the
+three barons as the lady chosen in compliance with their demand. They
+declared that the lady pleased them well.
+
+“Meanwhile Messer Marco chanced to return from India, whither he had
+gone as the lord’s ambassador, and made his report of all the different
+things that he had seen in his travels, and of the sundry seas over
+which he had voyaged. And the three barons, having seen that Messer
+Nicolo, Messer Matteo and Messer Marco were not only Latins but men of
+marvelous good sense withal, took thought among themselves to get the
+three to travel to Persia with them, their intention being to return
+to their country by sea, on account of the great fatigue of that long
+land journey for a lady. So they went to the great khan, and begged as
+a favor that he would send the three Latins with them, as it was their
+desire to return home by sea.
+
+“The lord, having that great regard that I have mentioned for those
+three Latins, was very loath to do so. But at last he did give them
+permission to depart, enjoining them to accompany the three barons and
+the lady.”
+
+In the fleet that sailed on the two years’ voyage to Persia there were
+six hundred persons, not counting mariners; but what with sickness and
+little accidents of travel, storms for instance and sharks, only eight
+persons arrived, including the lady, one of the Persian barons, and the
+three Italians. They found the handsome King Argon dead, so the lady
+had to put up with his insignificant son Casan, who turned out to be a
+first-rate king. The lady wept sore at parting with the Italians. They
+set out for Venice, arriving in 1295 after an absence of twenty-seven
+years.
+
+There is a legend that two aged men, and one of middle age, in ragged
+clothes, of very strange device, came knocking at the door of the
+Polo’s town house in Venice, and were denied admission by the family
+who did not know them. It was only when the travelers had unpacked
+their luggage, and given a banquet, that the family and their guests
+began to respect these vagrants. Three times during dinner the
+travelers retired to change their gorgeous oriental robes for others
+still more splendid. Was it possible that the long dead Polos had
+returned alive? Then the tables being cleared, Marco brought forth the
+dirty ragged clothes in which they had come to Venice, and with sharp
+knives they ripped open the seams and welts, pouring out vast numbers
+of rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds and emeralds, gems to the
+value of a million ducats. The family was entirely convinced, the
+public nicknamed the travelers as the millionaires, the city conferred
+dignities, and the two elder gentlemen spent their remaining years in
+peace and splendor surrounded by hosts of friends.
+
+Three years later a sea battle was fought between the fleets of Genoa
+and Venice, and in the Venetian force one of the galleys was commanded
+by Marco Polo. There Venice was totally defeated, and Marco was one
+of the seven thousand prisoners carried home to grace the triumph of
+the Genoese. It was in prison that he met the young literary person
+to whom he dictated his book, not of travel, not of adventure,
+but a geography, a description of all Asia, its countries, peoples
+and wonders. Sometimes he got excited and would draw the long bow,
+expanding the numbers of the great khan’s armies. Sometimes his marvels
+were such as nobody in his senses could be expected to swallow, as
+for instance, when he spoke of the Tartars as burning black stones to
+keep them warm in winter. Yet on the whole this book, of the greatest
+traveler that ever lived, awakened Europe of the Dark Ages to the
+knowledge of that vast outer world that has mainly become the heritage
+of the Christian Powers.
+
+    See the Book of Sir Marco Polo, translated and edited by Colonel
+    Sir Henry Yule. John Murray.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+A. D. 1322
+
+THE MARVELOUS ADVENTURES OF SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE
+
+
+“I, John Maundeville, Knight, all be it I am not worthy, that was born
+in England, in the town of St. Allans, passed the sea in the year of
+our Lord 1322 ... and hitherto have been long time on the sea, and have
+seen and gone through many diverse lands ... with good company of many
+lords. God be thankful!”
+
+So wrote a very gentle and pious knight. His book of travels begins
+with the journey to Constantinople, which in his day was the seat of
+a Christian emperor. Beyond was the Saracen empire, whose sultans
+reigned in the name of the Prophet Mahomet over Asia Minor, Syria, the
+Holy Land and Egypt. For three hundred years Christian and Saracen had
+fought for the possession of Jerusalem, but now the Moslem power was
+stronger than ever.
+
+Sir John Maundeville found the sultan of Babylon the Less at his
+capital city in Egypt, and there entered in his service as a soldier
+for wars against the Arab tribes of the desert. The sultan grew to love
+this Englishman, talked with him of affairs in Europe, urged him to
+turn Moslem, and offered to him the hand of a princess in marriage.
+But when Maundeville insisted on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, his
+master let him go, and granted him letters with the great seal, before
+which even generals and governors were obliged to prostrate themselves.
+
+Sir John went all over Palestine, devoutly believing everything he was
+told. Here is his story of the Field Beflowered. “For a fair maiden was
+blamed with wrong, and slandered ... for which cause she was condemned
+to death, and to be burnt in that place, to the which she was led. And
+as the fire began to burn about her, she made her prayers to our Lord,
+that as certainly as she was not guilty of that sin, that he would help
+her, and make it to be known to all men of his merciful grace. And when
+she had thus said she entered into the fire, and anon was the fire
+quenched and out; and the brands which were burning became red rose
+trees, and the brands that were not kindled became white rose trees
+full of roses. And these were the first rose trees and roses, both
+white and red, which ever any man saw.”
+
+All this part of his book is very beautiful concerning the holy places,
+and there are nice bits about incubators for chickens and the use of
+carrier pigeons. But it is in the regions beyond the Holy Land that Sir
+John’s wonderful power of believing everything that he had heard makes
+his chapters more and more exciting.
+
+“In Ethiopia ... there be folk that have but one foot and they go so
+fast that it is a marvel. And the foot is so large that it shadoweth
+all the body against the sun when they will lie and rest them.”
+
+Beyond that was the isle of Nacumera, where all the people have
+hounds’ heads, being reasonable and of good understanding save that
+they worship an ox for their god. And they all go naked save a little
+clout, and if they take any man in battle anon they eat him. The
+dog-headed king of that land is most pious, saying three hundred
+prayers by way of grace before meat.
+
+Next he came to Ceylon. “In that land is full much waste, for it is
+full of serpents, of dragons and of cockodrills, so that no man may
+dwell there.
+
+“In one of these isles be folk as of great stature as giants. And they
+be hideous to look upon. And they have but one eye, and that is in the
+middle of the forehead. And they eat nothing but raw flesh and raw
+fish. And in another isle towards the south dwell folk of foul stature
+and of cursed nature that have no heads. And their eyes be in their
+shoulders and their mouths be round shapen, like an horseshoe, amidst
+their breasts. And in another isle be men without heads, and their eyes
+and mouths be behind in their shoulders. And in another isle be folk
+that have the face all flat, all plain, without nose and without mouth.
+But they have two small holes, all round, instead of their eyes, and
+their mouth is flat also without lips. And in another isle be folk of
+foul fashion and shape that have the lip above the mouth so great that
+when they sleep in the sun they cover all the face with that lip.”
+
+If Sir John had been untruthful he might have been here tempted to tell
+improbable stories, but he merely refers to these isles in passing
+with a few texts from the Holy Scriptures to express his entire
+disapproval. His chapters on the Chinese empire are a perfect model
+of veracity, and he merely cocks on a few noughts to the statistics.
+In outlying parts of Cathay he feels once more the need of a little
+self-indulgence. One province is covered with total and everlasting
+darkness, enlivened by the neighing of unseen horses and the crowing of
+mysterious cocks. In the next province he found a fruit, which, when
+ripe, is cut open, disclosing “a little beast in flesh and bone and
+blood, as though it were a little lamb without wool. And men eat both
+the fruit and the beast. And that is a great marvel. Of that fruit have
+I eaten, although it were wonderful, but that I know well that God is
+marvelous in all his works. And nevertheless I told them of as great a
+marvel to them, that is amongst us, and that was of the barnacle geese:
+for I told them that in our country were trees that bear a fruit that
+become birds flying, and those that fall on the water live, and they
+that fall on the earth die anon, and they be right good to man’s meat,
+and thereof had they so great marvel that some of them trowed it were
+an impossible thing to be.”
+
+This mean doubt as to his veracity must have cut poor Maundeville
+to the quick. In his earnest way he goes on to describe the people
+who live entirely on the smell of wild apples, to the Amazon nation
+consisting solely of women warriors, and so on past many griffins,
+popinjays, dragons and other wild fowl to the Adamant Rocks of
+loadstone which draw all the iron nails out of a ship to her great
+inconvenience. “I myself, have seen afar off in that sea, as though it
+had been a great isle full of trees and bush, full of thorns and briers
+great plenty. And the shipmen told us that all that was of ships that
+were drawn thither by the Adamants, for the iron that was in them.”
+Beyond that Sir John reports a sea consisting of gravel, ebbing and
+flowing in great waves, but containing no drop of water, a most awkward
+place for shipping.
+
+So far is Sir John moderate in his statements, but when he gets to the
+Vale Perilous at last he turns himself loose. That vale is disturbed by
+thunders and tempests, murmurs and noises, a great noise of “tabors,
+drums and trumps.” This vale is all full of devils, and hath been
+alway. In that vale is great plenty of gold and silver.
+
+“Wherefore many misbelieving men and many Christian men also go in
+oftentime to have of the treasure that there is; but few come back
+again, and especially of the misbelieving men, nor of the Christian men
+either, for they be anon strangled of devils. And in the mid place of
+that vale, under a rock, is an head and the visage of a devil bodily,
+full horrible and dreadful to see ... for he beholdeth every man so
+sharply with dreadful eyes, that be evermore moving and sparkling like
+fire, and changeth and stareth so often in diverse manner, with so
+horrible countenance that no man dare draw nigh towards him. And from
+him cometh smoke and stink and fire, and so much abomination, that
+scarcely any man may there endure.
+
+“And ye shall understand that when my fellows and I were in that vale
+we were in great thought whether we durst put our bodies in adventure
+to go in or not.... So there were with us two worthy men, friars
+minors, that were of Lombardy, that said that if any man would enter
+they would go in with us. And when they had said so upon the gracious
+trust of God and of them, we made sing mass, and made every man to be
+shriven and houseled. And then we entered fourteen persons; but at
+our going out we were only nine.... And thus we passed that perilous
+vale, and found therein gold and silver and precious stones, and rich
+jewels great plenty ... but whether it was as it seemed to us I wot
+never. For I touched none.... For I was more devout then, than ever I
+was before or after, and all for the dread of fiends, that I saw in
+diverse figures, and also for the great multitude of dead bodies, that
+I saw there lying by the way ... and therefore were we more devout a
+great deal, and yet we were cast down and beaten many times to the hard
+earth by winds, thunder and tempests ... and so we passed that perilous
+vale.... Thanked be Almighty God!
+
+“After this beyond the vale is a great isle where the folk be great
+giants ... and in an isle beyond that were giants of greater stature,
+some of forty-five foot or fifty foot long, and as some men say of
+fifty cubits long. But I saw none of these, for I had no lust to go to
+those parts, because no man cometh neither into that isle nor into the
+other but he be devoured anon. And among these giants be sheep as great
+as oxen here, and they bear great wool and rough. Of the sheep I have
+seen many times ... those giants take men in the sea out of their ships
+and bring them to land, two in one hand and two in another, eating them
+going, all raw and all alive.
+
+“Of paradise can not I speak properly, for I was not there. It is far
+beyond. And that grieveth me. And also I was not worthy.”
+
+So, regretting that he had not been allowed into paradise, the hoary
+old liar came homeward to Rome, where he claims that the pope absolved
+him of all his sins, and gave him a certificate that his book was
+proved for true in every particular, “albeit that many men list not to
+give credence to anything but to that that they have seen with their
+eye, be the author or the person never so true.” Yet, despite these
+unkind doubts as to its veracity, Maundeville’s book lives after five
+hundred years, and ranks as the most stupendous masterpiece in the art
+of lying.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A. D. 1492
+
+COLUMBUS
+
+
+Columbus was blue-eyed, red-haired and tall, of a sunny honesty, humane
+and panic-proof. In other words he came of the Baltic and not of the
+Mediterranean stock, although his people lived in Italy and he was born
+in the suburbs of Genoa. By caste he was a peasant, and by trade, up to
+the age of twenty-eight, a weaver, except at times when his Northern
+blood broke loose and drove him to sea for a voyage. He made himself a
+scholar and a draftsman, and when at last he escaped from an exacting
+family, he earned his living by copying charts at Lisbon. A year later,
+as a navigating officer, he found his way, via the wine trade, to
+Bristol. There he slouched dreaming about the slums, dressed like a
+foreign monk. He must needs pose to himself in some ideal character,
+and was bound to dress the part. The artistic temperament is the
+mainspring of adventure.
+
+In our own day we may compare Boston, that grand old home of the dying
+sailing ship, with New York, a bustling metropolis for the steam
+liners. In the days of Columbus Genoa was an old-fashioned, declining,
+but still splendid harbor of the oared galleys, while Lisbon was the
+up-to-date metropolis of the new square-rigged sailing ships.
+
+From these two greatest seaports of his age, Columbus came to Bristol,
+the harbor of England, in the Middle Ages, of the slow, scholarly,
+artistic, stately English. They were building that prayer in stone,
+Saint Mary Redcliffe, a jewel of intricate red masonry, the setting for
+Portuguese stained glass which glowed like precious gems.
+
+“In the month of February,” says Columbus, “and in the year 1477, I
+navigated as far as the Island of Tile (Thule is Iceland) a hundred
+leagues, and to this island which is as large as England, the English,
+especially those of Bristol, go with merchandise. And at the time that
+I was there the sea was not frozen over, although there were very high
+tides.”
+
+Here, then, is the record of Columbus himself that in his long inquiry
+concerning the regions beyond the Atlantic, he actually visited
+Iceland. A scholar himself, he was able to converse with the learned
+Icelanders in Latin, the trade jargon of that age. From them he surely
+must have known how one hundred thirty years ago the last timber ship
+had come home from Nova Scotia, and twenty-nine years since, within his
+own lifetime, the Greenland trade had closed. The maps of the period
+showed the American coast as far south as the Carolines,--the current
+geography book was equally clear:
+
+“From Biameland (Siberia) the country stretches as far as the desert
+regions in the north until Greenland begins. From Greenland lies
+southerly Helluland (Labrador and Newfoundland), then Markland (Nova
+Scotia); thence it is not far from Vinland (New England), which some
+believe goes out from Africa. England and Scotland are one island, yet
+each country is a kingdom by itself. Ireland is a large island, Iceland
+is also a large island north of Ireland.” Indeed Columbus seems almost
+to be quoting this from memory when he says of Iceland, “this island,
+which is as large as England.” I strongly suspect that Columbus when in
+Iceland, took a solemn oath not to “discover” America.
+
+The writers of books have spent four centuries in whitewashing,
+retouching, dressing up and posing this figure of Columbus. The
+navigator was indeed a man of powerful intellect and of noble
+character, but they have made him seem a monumental prig as well as an
+insufferable bore. He is the dead and helpless victim, dehumanized by
+literary art until we feel that we really ought to pray for him on All
+Prigs’ Day in the churches.
+
+Columbus came home from his Icelandic and Guinea expeditions with two
+perfectly sound ideas. “The world is a globe, so if I sail westerly I
+shall find Japan and the Indies.” For fifteen bitter years he became
+the laughing-stock of Europe.
+
+[Illustration: CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS]
+
+Now note how the historians, the biographers and the commentators, the
+ponderous and the mawkish, the smug and the pedantic alike all fail to
+see why their hero was laughed at. His name was Cristo-fero Colombo,
+to us a good enough label for tying to any man, but to the Italians
+and all educated persons of that age, a joke. The words mean literally
+the Christ-Carrying Dove. Suppose a modern man with some invention or
+a great idea, called himself Mr. Christ-Carrying Dove, and tried to
+get capitalists in New York or London to finance his enterprise! In the
+end he changed his name to Cristoval Colon and got himself financed,
+but by that time his hair was white, and his nerve was gone, and his
+health failing.
+
+In the ninth century the vikings sailed from Norway by the great circle
+course north of the gulf stream. They had no compass or any instruments
+of navigation, and they braved the unknown currents, the uncharted
+reefs, the unspeakable terrors of pack-ice, berg-streams and fog on
+Greenland’s awful coast. They made no fuss.
+
+But Columbus sailing in search of Japan, had one Englishman and one
+Irishman, the rest of the people being a pack of dagoes. In lovely
+weather they were ready to run away from their own shadows.
+
+From here onward throughout the four voyages which disclosed the West
+Indies and the Spanish Main, Columbus allowed his men to shirk their
+duties, to disobey his orders, to mutiny, to desert and even to make
+war upon him.
+
+Between voyages he permitted everybody from the mean king downward,
+to snub, swindle, plunder and defame himself and all who were loyal
+to him in misfortune. Because Columbus behaved like an old woman, his
+swindling pork contractor, Amerigo Vespucci, was allowed to give his
+name to the Americas. Because he had not the manhood to command, the
+hapless red Indians were outraged, enslaved and driven to wholesale
+suicide, leaping in thousands from the cliffs. For lack of a master
+the Spaniards performed such prodigies of cowardice and cruelty as the
+world has never known before or since, the native races were swept out
+of existence, and Spain set out upon a downward path, a moral lapse
+beyond all human power to arrest.
+
+Yet looking back, how wonderful is the prophecy in that name,
+Christ-Carrying Dove, borne by a saintly and heroic seaman whose
+mission, in the end, added two continents to Christianity.
+
+    This text mainly contradicts a _Life of Columbus_, by Clements R.
+    Markham, C. B. Phillip & Son, 1892.
+
+[Illustration: AMERICUS VESPUCCIUS]
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+A. D. 1519
+
+THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO
+
+
+“Hernando Cortes spent an idle and unprofitable youth.”
+
+So did I. And every other duffer is with me in being pleased with
+Cortes for setting an example. We, not the good boys, need a little
+encouragement.
+
+He was seven years old when Columbus found the Indies. That was a time
+when boys hurried to get grown up and join the search for the Fountain
+of Youth, the trail to Eldorado. All who had time to sleep dreamed
+tremendous dreams.
+
+Cortes became a colonist in Cuba, a sore puzzle to the rascal in
+command. When he clapped Cortes in irons the youngster slipped free and
+defied him. When he gave Cortes command of an expedition the fellow
+cheeked him. When he tried to arrest him the bird had flown, and was
+declared an outlaw.
+
+The soldiers and seamen of the expedition were horrified by this
+adventurer who landed them in newly discovered Mexico, then sank the
+ships lest they should wish to go home. They stood in the deadly mists
+of the tropic plains, and far above them glowed the Star of the Sea,
+white Orizaba crowned with polar snows. They marched up a hill a mile
+and a half in sheer height through many zones of climate, and every
+circumstance of pain and famine to the edge of a plateau crowned by
+immense volcanoes, a land of plenty, densely peopled, full of opulent
+cities. They found that this realm was ruled by an emperor, famous
+for his victorious wars, able, it seemed, to place a million warriors
+in the field, and hungry for captives to be first sacrificed to the
+gods, and afterward eaten at the banquets of the nobility and gentry.
+The temples were actually fed with twenty thousand victims a year. The
+Spanish invading force of four hundred men began to feel uncomfortable.
+
+Yet if this Cortes puzzled the governor of Cuba, and horrified his men,
+he paralyzed the Emperor Montezuma. Hundreds of years ago a stranger
+had come to Mexico from the eastern sea, a bearded man who taught the
+people the arts of civilized life. Then birds first sang and flowers
+blossomed, the fields were fruitful and the sun shone in glory upon
+that plateau of eternal spring. The hero, Bird-Serpent, was remembered,
+loved and worshiped as a god. It was known to all men that as he had
+gone down into the eastern sea so he would return again in later ages.
+Now the prophecy was fulfilled. He had come with his followers, all
+bearded white men out of the eastern sea in mysterious winged vessels.
+Bird-Serpent and his people were dressed in gleaming armor, had weapons
+that flashed lightning, were mounted on terrible beasts--where steel
+and guns and horses were unknown; and Montezuma felt as we should do if
+our land were invaded by winged men riding dragons. To the supernatural
+visitors the emperor sent embassy after embassy, loaded with treasure,
+begging the hero not to approach his capital.
+
+Set in the midst of Montezuma’s empire was the poor valiant republic
+of Tlascala, at everlasting war with the Aztec nation. Invading this
+republic Cortes was met by a horde of a hundred thousand warriors, whom
+he thrashed in three engagements, and when they were humbled, accepted
+as allies against the Aztecs. Attended by an Tlascalan force he entered
+the ancient Aztec capital, Cholula, famed for its temple. This is a
+stone-faced mound of rubble, four times the size and half the height of
+the Great Pyramid, a forty-acre building larger by four acres than any
+structure yet attempted by white men.
+
+By the emperor’s orders the Cholulans welcomed the Spaniards, trapped
+them within their city, and attacked them. In reply, Cortes used their
+temple as the scene of a public massacre, slaughtered three thousand
+men, and having thus explained things, marched on the City of Mexico.
+
+In those days a salt lake, since drained, filled the central hollow
+of the vale of Mexico, and in the midst of it stood the city built
+on piles, and threaded with canals, a barbaric Venice, larger,
+perhaps even grander than Venice with its vast palace and gardens,
+and numberless mound temples whose flaming altars lighted the town at
+night. Three causeways crossed the lake and met just as they do to-day
+at the central square. Here, on the site of the mound temple, stands
+one of the greatest of the world’s cathedrals, and across the square
+are public buildings marking the site of Montezuma’s palace, and that
+in which he entertained the Spaniards. The white men were astonished
+at the zoological gardens, the aviary, the floating market gardens on
+the lake, the cleanliness of the streets, kept by a thousand sweepers,
+and a metropolitan police which numbered ten thousand men, arrangements
+far in advance of any city of Europe. Then, as now, the place was a
+great and brilliant capital.
+
+Yet from the Spanish point of view these Aztecs were only barbarians to
+be conquered, and heathen cannibals doomed to hell unless they accepted
+the faith. To them the Cholula massacre was only a military precaution.
+They thought it right to seize their generous host the emperor, to hold
+him as a prisoner under guard, and one day even to put him in irons.
+For six months Montezuma reigned under Spanish orders, overwhelmed with
+shame. He loved his captors because they were gallant gentlemen, he
+freely gave them his royal treasure of gems, and gold, and brilliant
+feather robes. Over the plunder--a million and a half sterling in gold
+alone--they squabbled; clear proof to Montezuma that they were not all
+divine. Yet still they were friends, so he gave them all the spears
+and bows from his arsenal as fuel to burn some of his nobles who had
+affronted them.
+
+It was at this time that the hostile governor of Cuba sent Narvaes
+with seventeen ships and a strong force to arrest the conqueror
+for rebellion. The odds were only three to one, instead of the
+usual hundred to one against him, so Cortes went down to the coast,
+gave Narvaes a thrashing, captured him, enrolled his men by way of
+reinforcements, and returned with a force of eleven hundred troops.
+
+He had left his friend, Alvarado, with a hundred men to hold the
+capital and guard the emperor. This Alvarado, so fair that the natives
+called him Child of the Sun, was such a fool that he massacred six
+hundred unarmed nobles and gentlefolk for being pagans, violated the
+great temple, and so aroused the whole power of the fiercest nation on
+earth to a war of vengeance. Barely in time to save Alvarado, Cortes
+reentered the city to be besieged. Again and again the Aztecs attempted
+to storm the palace. The emperor in his robes of state addressed them
+from the ramparts, and they shot him. They seized the great temple
+which overlooked the palace, and this the Spaniards stormed. In face of
+awful losses day by day the Spaniards, starving and desperate, cleared
+a road through the city, and on the night of Montezuma’s death they
+attempted to retreat by one of the causeways leading to the mainland.
+Three canals cut this road, and the drawbridges had been taken away,
+but Cortes brought a portable bridge to span them. They crossed the
+first as the gigantic sobbing gong upon the heights of the temple
+aroused the entire city.
+
+Heavily beset from the rear, and by thousands of men in canoes, they
+found that the weight of their transport had jammed the bridge which
+could not be removed. They filled the second gap with rocks, with their
+artillery and transport, with chests of gold, horses, and dead men.
+So they came to the third gap, no longer an army but as a flying mob
+of Spaniards and Tlascalan warriors bewildered in the rain and the
+darkness by the headlong desperation of the attacking host. They were
+compelled to swim, and at least fifty of the recruits were drowned by
+the weight of gold they refused to leave, while many were captured to
+be sacrificed upon the Aztec altars. Montezuma’s children were drowned,
+and hundreds more, while Cortes and his cavaliers, swimming their
+horses back and forth convoyed the column, and Alvarado with his rear
+guard held the causeway.
+
+Last in the retreat, grounding his spear butt, he leaped the chasm,
+a feat of daring which has given a name forever to this place as
+Alvarado’s Leap. And just beyond, upon the mainland there is an ancient
+tree beneath which Cortes, as the dawn broke out, sat on the ground
+and cried. He had lost four hundred fifty Spaniards, and thousands of
+Tlascalans, his records, artillery, muskets, stores and treasure in
+that lost battle of the Dreadful Night.
+
+A week later the starved and wounded force was beset by an army of two
+hundred thousand Aztecs. They had only their swords now, but, after
+long hours of fighting, Cortes himself killed the Aztec general, so by
+his matchless valor and leadership gaining a victory.
+
+The rest is a tale of horror beyond telling, for, rested and
+reinforced, the Spaniards went back. They invested, besieged, stormed
+and burned the famine-stricken, pestilence-ridden capital, a city
+choked and heaped with the unburied dead of a most valiant nation.
+
+Afterward, under the Spanish viceroys, Mexico was extended and enlarged
+to the edge of Alaska, a Christian civilized state renowned for mighty
+works of engineering, the splendor of her architecture, and for such
+inventions as the national pawn-shop, as a bank to help the poor. One
+of the so-called native “slaves” of the mines once wrote to the king
+of Spain, begging his majesty to visit Mexico and offering to make a
+royal road for him, paving the two hundred fifty miles from Vera Cruz
+to the capital with ingots of pure silver as a gift to Spain.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+A. D. 1532
+
+THE CONQUEST OF PERU
+
+
+Pizarro was reared for a swineherd; long years of soldiering made
+him no more than a captain, and when at the age of fifty he turned
+explorer, he discovered nothing but failure.
+
+For seven years he and his followers suffered on trails beset by snakes
+and alligators, in feverish jungles haunted by man-eating savages, to
+be thrown at last battered, ragged and starving on the Isle of Hell.
+Then a ship offered them passage, but old Pizarro drew a line in the
+dust with his sword. “Friends,” said he, “and comrades, on that side
+are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion and death;
+on this side ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here
+Panama and its poverty. Choose each man, what best becomes a brave
+Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.”
+
+Thirteen of all his people crossed the line with Pizarro, the rest
+deserting him, and he was seven months marooned on his desert isle in
+the Pacific. When the explorer’s partners at last were able to send a
+ship from Panama, it brought him orders to return, a failure. He did
+not return but took the ship to the southward, his guide the great
+white Andes, along a coast no longer of horrible swamps but now more
+populous, more civilized than Spain, by hundreds of miles on end of
+well-tilled farms, fair villages and rich cities where the temples
+were sheathed with plates of pure red gold. As in the Mexico of eight
+years ago, the Spaniards were welcomed as superhuman, their ship, their
+battered armor and their muskets accounted as possessions of strayed
+gods. They dined in the palaces of courtly nobles, rested in gardens
+curiously enriched with foliage and flowers of beaten gold and silver,
+and found native gentlemen eager to join them in their ship as guests.
+So with a shipload of wonders to illustrate this discovery they went
+back to Panama, and Pizarro returned home to seek in Spain the help
+of Charles V. There, at the emperor’s court, he met Cortes, who came
+to lay the wealth of conquered Mexico at his sovereign’s feet, and
+Charles, with a lively sense of more to come, despatched Pizarro to
+overthrow Peru.
+
+Between the Eastern and the Western Andes lies a series of lofty plains
+and valleys, in those days irrigated and farmed by an immense civilized
+population. A highway, in length 1,100 miles, threaded the settlements
+together. The whole empire was ruled by a foreign dynasty, called the
+Incas, a race of fighting despots by whom the people had been more or
+less enslaved. The last Inca had left the northern kingdom of Quito to
+his younger son, the ferocious Atahuallpa, and the southern realm of
+Cuzco to his heir, the gentle Huascar.
+
+These brothers fought until Atahuallpa subdued the southern kingdom,
+imprisoned Huascar, and reigned so far as he knew over the whole
+world. It was then that from outside the world came one hundred
+sixty-eight men of an unknown race possessed of ships, horses, armor
+and muskets--things very marvelous, and useful to have. The emperor
+invited these strangers to cross the Andes, intending, when they came,
+to take such blessings as the Sun might send him. The city of Caxamalca
+was cleared of its people, and the buildings enclosing the market place
+were furnished for the reception of the Spaniards.
+
+The emperor’s main army was seven hundred miles to the southward, but
+the white men were appalled by the enormous host attending him in his
+camp, where he had halted to bathe at the hot springs, three miles from
+their new quarters. The Peruvian watch fires on the mountain sides were
+as thick as the stars of heaven.
+
+The sun was setting next day when a procession entered the Plaza
+of Caxamalca, a retinue of six thousand guards, nobles, courtiers,
+dignitaries, surrounding the litter on which was placed the gently
+swaying golden throne of the young emperor.
+
+Of all the Spaniards, only one came forward, a priest who, through an
+interpreter, preached, explaining from the commencement of the world
+the story of his faith, Saint Peter’s sovereignty, the papal office,
+and Pizarro’s mission to receive the homage of this barbarian. The
+emperor listened, amused at first, then bored, at last affronted,
+throwing down the book he was asked to kiss. On that a scarf waved and
+the Spaniards swept from their ambush, blocking the exits, charging
+as a wolf-pack on a sheepfold, riding the people down while they
+slaughtered. So great was the pressure that a wall of the courtyard
+fell, releasing thousands whose panic flight stampeded the Incas’ army.
+But the nobles had rallied about their sovereign, unarmed but with
+desperate valor clinging to the legs of the horses and breaking the
+charge of cavalry. They threw themselves in the way of the fusillades,
+their bodies piled in mounds, their blood flooding the pavement. Then,
+as the bearers fell, the golden throne was overturned, and the emperor
+hurried away a prisoner. Two thousand people had perished in the
+attempt to save him.
+
+The history of the Mexican conquest was repeated here, and once more a
+captive emperor reigned under Spanish dictation.
+
+This Atahuallpa was made of sterner stuff than Montezuma, and had his
+defeated brother Huascar drowned, lest the Spaniards should make use of
+his rival claim to the throne. The Peruvian prince had no illusions as
+to the divinity of the white men, saw clearly that their real religion
+was the adoration of gold, and in contempt offered a bribe for his
+freedom. Reaching the full extent of his arm to a height of nine feet,
+he boasted that to that level he would fill the throne room with gold
+as the price of his liberty, and twice he would fill the anteroom with
+silver. So he sent orders to every city of his empire commanding that
+the shrines, the temples, palaces and gardens be stripped of their
+gold and silver ornaments, save only the bodies of the dead kings, his
+fathers. Of course, the priests made haste to bury their treasures,
+but the Spaniards went to see the plunder collected and when they had
+finished no treasures were left in sight save a course of solid golden
+ingots in the walls of the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco, and certain
+massive beams of silver too heavy for shipment. Still the plunder of an
+empire failed to reach the nine-foot line on the walls of the throne
+room at Caxamalca, but the soldiers were tired of waiting, especially
+when the goldsmiths took a month to melt the gold into ingots. So the
+royal fifth was shipped to the king of Spain, Pizarro’s share was set
+apart, a tithe was dedicated to the Church, and the remainder divided
+among the soldiers according to their rank, in all three and a half
+millions sterling by modern measurement, the greatest king’s ransom
+known to history. Then the emperor was tried by a mock court-martial,
+sentenced to death and murdered. It is comforting to note that of all
+who took part in that infamy not one escaped an early and a violent
+death.
+
+Pizarro had been in a business partnership with the schoolmaster
+Luque of Panama cathedral, and with Almagro, a little fat, one-eyed
+adventurer, who now arrived on the scene with reinforcements. Pizarro’s
+brothers also came from Spain. So when the emperor’s death lashed the
+Peruvians to desperation, there were Spaniards enough to face odds of
+a hundred to one in a long series of battles, ending with the siege of
+the adventurers who held Cuzco against the Inca Manco for five months.
+The city, vast in extent, was thatched, and burned for seven days with
+the Spaniards in the midst. They fought in sheer despair, and the
+Indians with heroism, their best weapon the lasso, their main hope that
+of starving the garrison to death. No valor could possibly save these
+heroic robbers, shut off from escape or from rescue by the impenetrable
+rampart of the Andes. They owed their salvation to the fact that the
+Indians must disperse to reap their crops lest the entire nation perish
+of hunger, and the last of the Incas ended his life a fugitive lost in
+the recesses of the mountains.
+
+Then came a civil war between the Pizarros, and Almagro, whose share
+of the plunder turned out to be a snowy desolation to the southward.
+It was not until after this squalid feud had been ended by Almagro’s
+execution and Pizarro’s murder, that the desolate snows were uncovered,
+revealing the incomparable treasures of silver Potosi, Spain’s share of
+the plunder.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+A. D. 1534
+
+THE CORSAIRS
+
+
+In 1453 Constantinople was besieged and stormed by the Turks, the
+Christian emperor fell with sixty thousand of his men in battle, and
+the Caliph Mahomet II raised the standard of Islam over the last ruins
+of the Roman empire.
+
+Four years later a sailorman, a Christian from the Balkan States,
+turned Moslem and was banished from the city. He married a Christian
+widow in Mitylene and raised two sons to his trade. At a very tender
+age, Uruj, the elder son, went into business as a pirate, and on his
+maiden cruise was chased and captured by a galley of the Knights of
+Saint John who threw him into the hold to be a slave at the oars.
+That night a slave upon the nearest oar-bench disturbed the crew by
+groaning, and to keep him quiet was thrown overboard. Not liking his
+situation or prospects, Uruj slipped his shackles, crept out and
+swam ashore. On his next voyage, being still extremely young, he was
+captured and swam ashore again. Then the sultan’s brother fitted him
+out as a corsair at the cost of five thousand ducats, to be paid by
+the basha of Egypt, and so, thanks to this act of princely generosity,
+Uruj was able to open a general practise. His young brother Khizr,
+also a pirate, joined him; the firm was protected by the sultan of
+Tunis who got a commission of twenty per cent. on the loot; and being
+steady, industrious and thrifty, by strict application to business,
+they made a reputation throughout the Middle Sea. Indeed the Grand Turk
+bestowed upon Khizr the title “Protector of Religion,” a distinction
+never granted before or since to any professional robber. Once after
+a bitter hard fight the brothers captured a first-rate ship of war,
+_The Galley of Naples_, and six lady passengers besides three hundred
+men were marched ashore into slavery. “See,” said the sultan of Tunis,
+“how Heaven recompenses the brave!” Uruj, by the way, was laid up some
+months for repairs, and in his next engagement, a silly attack on a
+fortress, happened to lose an arm as part of his recompense.
+
+By this time the brothers were weary of that twenty per cent.
+commission to the unctuous sultan of Tunis, and by way of cheating him,
+took to besieging fortresses, or sacking towns, Christian or Moslem as
+the case might be, until they had base camps of their own, Uruj as king
+of Tlemcen, and Khizr as king of Algiers. Then Uruj fell in battle,
+and Khizr Barbarossa began to do business as a wholesale pirate with a
+branch kingdom of Tunis, and fleets to destroy all commerce, to wreck
+and burn settlements of the Christian powers until he had command of
+the sea as a first-class nuisance. The gentle Moors, most civilized
+of peoples, expelled from Spain (1493) by the callous ill-faith of
+Ferdinand and Isabella, and stranded upon North Africa to starve,
+manned Barbarossa’s fleets for a bloody vengeance upon Christian
+Europe. Then Charles V brought the strength of Spain, Germany and Italy
+to bear in an expedition against Barbarossa, but his fleet was wrecked
+by a storm, clear proof that Allah had taken sides with the strong
+pirate king. Barbarossa then despatched his lieutenant Hassan to ravage
+the coast of Valencia.
+
+It was upon this venture that Hassan met a transport merchantman with
+a hundred veteran Spanish infantry, too strong to attack; so when this
+lieutenant returned to Algiers deep-laden with spoil and captives from
+his raid, he found King Barbarossa far from pleased. The prisoners
+were butchered, and Hassan was flogged in public for having shirked an
+engagement. That is why Hassan joined with Venalcadi, a brother officer
+who was also in disgrace, and together they drove Barbarossa out of
+Algeria. Presently the king came back with a whole fleet of his fellow
+corsairs, brother craftsmen, the Jew, and Hunt-the-Devil, Salærrez and
+Tabas, all moved to grief and rage by the tears of a sorely ill-treated
+hero. With the aid of sixty captive Spanish soldiers, who won their
+freedom, they captured Algiers, wiped out the mutineers, and restored
+the most perfect harmony. Indeed, by way of proof that there really was
+no trouble among the corsairs, King Barbarossa sent off Hunt-the-Devil
+with seventeen ships to burn Spain. Ever in blood and tears, their
+homes in flames, their women ravished, their very children enslaved,
+the Spaniards had to pay for breaking faith with the Moors of Granada.
+
+Barbarossa was not yet altogether king of Algiers. For twenty years the
+Peñon, a fortress fronting that city, had been held by Martin de Vargas
+and his garrison. Worn out with disease and famine these Spaniards
+now fought Barbarossa to the last breath, but their walls went down in
+ruin, the breach was stormed, and all were put to the sword. De Vargas,
+taken prisoner, demanded the death of a Spaniard who had betrayed
+him. The traitor was promptly beheaded, but Barbarossa turned upon De
+Vargas. “You and yours,” he said, “have caused me too much trouble,”
+and he again signed to the headsman. So De Vargas fell.
+
+Terrible was the rage of Charles V, emperor of half Europe, thus defied
+and insulted by the atrocious corsair. It was then that he engaged the
+services of Andrea Doria, the greatest Christian admiral of that age,
+for war against Barbarossa. And at the same time the commander of the
+faithful, Suleiman the Magnificent, sent for King Barbarossa to command
+the Turkish fleet.
+
+He came, with gifts for the calif: two hundred women bearing presents
+of gold or silver; one hundred camels laden with silks and gold; then
+lions and other strange beasts; and more loads of brocades, or rich
+garments, all in procession through Constantinople, preceding the
+pirate king on his road to the palace. The sultan gave him not only a
+big fleet, but also vice-regal powers to make war or peace. Next summer
+(1534) eleven thousand Christian slaves, and a long procession of ships
+loaded with the plunder of smoking Italy were sent to the Golden Horn.
+Incidentally, Barbarossa seized the kingdom of Tunis for himself, and
+slaughtered three thousand of the faithful, just to encourage the rest.
+
+It was to avenge the banished King Hassan, and these poor slaughtered
+citizens that the Emperor Charles V, attended by his admiral, Andrea
+Doria, came with an army and a mighty fleet to Tunis.
+
+He drove out Barbarossa, a penniless, discredited fugitive; and his
+soldiers slaughtered thirty thousand citizens of Tunis to console them
+for the pirate’s late atrocities.
+
+Poor old Barbarossa, past seventy years of age, had lost a horde of
+fifty thousand men, his kingdom of Tunis, fleet and arsenal; but he
+still had fifteen galleys left at Bona, his kingdom of Algiers to fall
+back upon, and his Moorish seamen, who had no trade to win them honest
+bread except as pirates. “Cheer up,” said he, to these broken starving
+men, and after a little holiday they sacked the Balearic Isles taking
+five thousand, seven hundred slaves, and any amount of shipping. Then
+came the building of a Turkish fleet; and with one hundred twenty sail,
+Barbarossa went to his last culminating triumph, the defeat of Andrea
+Doria, who had at Prevesa one hundred ninety-five ships, sixty thousand
+men, and two thousand, five hundred ninety-four guns. With that victory
+he retired, and after eight years of peace, he died in his bed, full of
+years and honors. For centuries to come all Turkish ships saluted with
+their guns, and dipped their colors whenever they passed the grave of
+the King of the Sea.
+
+    _Sea Wolves of the Mediterranean_, Commander E. Hamilton Currey,
+    R.N. John Murray.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+A. D. 1542
+
+PORTUGAL IN THE INDIES
+
+
+It was Italian trade that bought and paid for the designs of Raphael,
+the temples of Michelangelo, the sculptures of Cellini, the inventions
+of Da Vinci, for all the wonders, the glories, the splendors of
+inspired Italy. And it was not good for the Italian trade that
+Barbarossa, and the corsairs of three centuries in his wake, beggared
+the merchants and enslaved their seamen. But Italian commerce had its
+source in the Indian Seas, and the ruin of Italy began when the sea
+adventures of Portugal rounded the Cape of Good Hope to rob, to trade,
+to govern and convert at the old centers of Arabian business.
+
+Poverty is the mother of labor, labor the parent of wealth and genius.
+It is the poverty of Attica, and the Roman swamps, of sterile Scotland,
+boggy Ireland, swampy Holland, stony New England, which drove them to
+high endeavor and great reward. Portugal, too, had that advantage of
+being small and poor, without resources, or any motive to keep the
+folk at home. So the fishermen took to trading and exploration led by
+Cao who found the Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama who smelt out the
+way to India, Almeida who gained command of the Indian Seas, Cabral
+who discovered Brazil, Albuquerque who, seizing Goa and Malacca,
+established a Christian empire in the Indies, and Magellan, who showed
+Spain the way to the Pacific.
+
+Of these the typical man was Da Gama, a noble with the motives of a
+crusader and the habits of a pirate, who once set fire to a shipload
+of Arab pilgrims, and watched unmoved while the women on her blazing
+deck held out little babies in the vain hope of mercy. On his first
+voyage he came to Calicut, a center of Hindu civilization, a seat of
+Arab commerce, and to the rajah sent a present of washing basins, casks
+of oil, a few strings of coral, fit illustration of the poverty of his
+brave country, accepted as a joke in polished, wealthy, weary India.
+The king gave him leave to trade, but seized the poor trade goods until
+the Portuguese ships had been ransacked for two hundred twenty-three
+pounds in gold to pay the customs duties. The point of the joke was
+only realized when on his second voyage Da Gama came with a fleet,
+bombarded Calicut, and loaded his ships with spices, leaving a trail of
+blood and ashes along the Indian coast. Twenty years later he came a
+third time, but now as viceroy to the Portuguese Indies. Portugal was
+no longer poor, but the richest state in Europe, bleeding herself to
+death to find the men for her ventures.
+
+Now these arrogant and ferocious officials, military robbers, fishermen
+turned corsairs, and ravenous traders taught the whole East to hate
+and fear the Christ. And then came a tiny little monk no more than
+five feet high, a white-haired, blue-eyed mendicant, who begged the
+rice he lived on. Yet so sweet was his temper, so magical the charm,
+so supernatural the valor of this barefoot monk that the children
+worshiped him, the lepers came to him to be healed, and the pirates
+were proud to have him as their guest. He was a gentleman, a Spanish
+Basque, by name Francis de Xavier, and in the University of Paris had
+been a fellow student with the reformer Calvin, then a friend and
+follower of Ignatius de Loyola, helping him to found the Society of
+Jesus. Xavier came to the Indies in 1542 as a Jesuit priest.
+
+Once on a sea voyage Xavier stood for some time watching a soldier
+at cards, who gambled away all his money and then a large sum which
+had been entrusted to his care. When the soldier was in tears and
+threatening suicide, Xavier borrowed for him the sum of one shilling
+twopence, shuffled and dealt for him, and watched him win back all
+that he had lost. At that point Saint Francis set to work to save
+the soldier’s soul, but this disreputable story is not shown in the
+official record of his miracles.
+
+From his own letters one sees how the heathen puzzled this little
+saint, “‘Was God black or white?’ For as there is so great variety of
+color among man, and the Indians are themselves black, they esteem
+their own color most highly, and hold that their gods are also black.”
+
+He does not say how he answered, indeed it was hardly by words that
+this hidalgo of Spain preached in the many languages he could never
+learn. Once when his converts were threatened by a hostile army he went
+alone to challenge the invaders, and with uplifted crucifix rebuked
+them in the name of God. The front ranks wavered and halted. Their
+comrades and leaders vainly pressed them to advance, but no man dared
+pass the black-robed figure which barred the way, and presently the
+whole force retreated.
+
+Once in the Spice Islands while he was saying mass on the feast of
+the Archangel Saint Michael a tremendous earthquake scattered the
+congregation. The priest held up the shaking altar and went on with
+mass, while, as he says, “Perhaps Saint Michael, by his heavenly power,
+was driving into the depths of hell all the wicked spirits of the
+country who were opposing the worship of the true God.”
+
+Such was the apostle of the Indies, and it is a pleasant thing to trace
+the story of his mission in Japan in the _Peregrination_, a book by a
+thorough rogue.
+
+Fernão Mendes Pinto was a distant relative of Ananias. He sailed for
+India in 1537 “meanly accommodated.” At Diu he joined an expedition
+to watch the Turkish fleet in the Red Sea, and from Massawa was sent
+with letters to the king of Abyssinia. That was great luck, because
+the very black and more or less Christian kingdom was supposed to be
+the seat of the legendary, immortal, shadowy, Prester John. On his way
+back to Massawa the adventurer was wrecked, captured by Arabs, sold
+into slavery, bought by a Jew, and resold in the commercial city of
+Ormus where there were Christian buyers. He found his way to Goa, the
+capital of the Portuguese Indies, thence to Malacca, where he got a job
+as political agent in Sumatra. With this ended the dull period of his
+travels.
+
+[Illustration: FRANCIS XAVIER]
+
+In those days there were ships manned by Portuguese rogues very good in
+port, but unpleasant to meet with at sea. They were armed with cannon,
+pots of wild fire, unslaked lime to be flung in the Chinese manner,
+stones, javelins, arrows, half-pikes, axes and grappling irons,
+all used to collect toll from Chinese, Malay, or even Arab merchants.
+Pinto found that this life suited him, and long afterward, writing as a
+penitent sinner, described the fun of torturing old men and children:
+“Made their brains fly out of their heads with a cord” or looked on
+while the victims died raving “like mad dogs.” It was great sport to
+surprise some junk at anchor, and fling pots of gunpowder among the
+sleeping crew, then watch them dive and drown. “The captain of one such
+junk was ‘a notorious Pyrat,’ and Pinto complacently draws the moral
+‘Thus you see how it pleased God, out of His Divine justice to make the
+arrogant confidence of this cursed dog a means to chastise him for his
+cruelties.’”
+
+So Christians set an example to the heathen.
+
+Antonio de Faria, Pinto’s captain, had vowed to wipe out Kwaja Hussain,
+a Moslem corsair from Gujerat in Western India. In search of Hussain he
+had many adventures in the China seas, capturing pirate crews, dashing
+out their brains, and collecting amber, gold and pearls. Off Hainan he
+so frightened the local buccaneers that they proclaimed him their king
+and arranged to pay him tribute.
+
+Luckily for them Faria’s ship was cast away upon a desert island. The
+crew found a deer which had been left by a tiger, half eaten; their
+shouts would scare the gulls as they flew overhead, so that the birds
+dropped such fish as they had captured; and then by good luck they
+discovered a Chinese junk whose people, going ashore, had left her
+in charge of an old man and a child. Amid the clamors of the Chinese
+owners Faria made off with this junk. He was soon at the head of a
+new expedition in quest of that wicked pirate, Kwaja Hussain. This
+ambition was fulfilled, and with holds full of plunder the virtuous
+Faria put into Liampo. Back among the Christians he had a royal
+welcome, but actually blushed when a sermon was preached in his honor.
+The preacher waxed too eloquent, “whereupon some of his friends plucked
+him three or four times by the surplice, for to make him give over.” It
+seems that even godly Christian pirates have some sense of humor.
+
+Once in the Malay states, Pinto and a friend of his, a Moslem, were
+asked to dine with a bigwig, also a True Believer. At dinner they spoke
+evil about the local rajah, who got wind of the slander. Pinto watched
+both of these Moslem gentlemen having their feet sawn off, then their
+hands, and finally their heads. As for himself, he talked about his
+rich relations, claiming Dom Pedro de Faria, a very powerful noble, as
+his uncle. He said the factor had embezzled his uncle’s money and fully
+deserved his fate. “All this,” says Pinto, “was extemporized on the
+spur of the moment, not knowing well what I said.” The liar got off.
+
+Pinto’s career as a pirate ended in shipwreck, capture, slavery and a
+journey in China where he was put to work on the repairing of the Great
+Wall. He was at a city called Quinsay in 1544 when Altan Khan, king of
+the Tumeds--a Mongolian horde--swept down out of the deserts.
+
+The Mongols sacked Quinsay, and Pinto as a prisoner was brought before
+Altan Khan who was besieging Pekin. When the siege was raised he
+accompanied the Mongol army on its retreat into the heart of Asia. In
+time he found favor with his masters and was allowed to accompany
+an embassy to Cochin China. On this journey he saw some cannon with
+iron breeches and wooden muzzles made, he was told, by certain Almains
+(Germans) who came out of Muscovy (Russia), and had been banished by
+the king of Denmark. Then comes Pinto’s account of Tibet, of Lhasa,
+and the Grand Lama, and so to Cochin China, and the sea. If it is
+true, Pinto made a very great journey, and he claims to have been
+afterward with Xavier in Japan. In the end he returned to Lisbon after
+twenty-one years of adventure in which he was five times shipwrecked,
+and seventeen times sold as a slave.
+
+It is disheartening to have so little space for the great world of
+Portuguese adventure in the Indies, where Camoens, one of the world’s
+great poets, wrote the immortal _Lusiads_.
+
+However ferocious, these Portuguese adventurers were loyal, brave
+and strong. They opened the way of Europe to the East Indies, they
+Christianized and civilized Brazil. Once, at sea, a Portuguese lady
+spoke to me of England’s good-humored galling disdain toward her
+people. “Ah, you English!” she cried. “What you are, we were once! what
+we are, you will be!”
+
+    _Vasco da Gama and his Successors_, by K. G. Jayne. Methuen.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A. D. 1841
+
+RAJAH BROOKE
+
+
+Borneo is a hot forest about five hundred miles long, and as wide,
+inhabited by connoisseurs called Dyaks, keen collectors. They collect
+human heads and some of their pieces are said to be very valuable. They
+are a happy little folk with most amusing manners and customs. Here is
+their ritual for burial of the dead:
+
+“When a man dies his friends and relations meet in the house and take
+their usual seats around the room. The deceased is then brought in
+attired in his best clothes, with a cigar fixed in his mouth; and,
+being placed on the mat in the same manner as when alive, his betel box
+is set by his side. The friends go through the form of conversing with
+him, and offer him the best advice concerning his future proceedings,
+and then, having feasted, the body is deposited in a large coffin and
+kept in the house for several months.”
+
+The habits of the natives have been interfered with by the Malays, who
+conquered most of them and carved their island up into kingdoms more or
+less civilized, but not managed at all in the interests of the Dyaks.
+These kingdoms were decayed and tumbling to pieces when the Dutch came
+in to help, and helped themselves to the whole of Borneo except the
+northwestern part. They pressingly invited themselves there also, but
+the Malay rajah kept putting them off with all sorts of polite excuses.
+
+While the rajah’s minister was running short of excuses to delay the
+Dutch an English yacht arrived in Sarawak. The owner was Mr. James
+Brooke, who had been an officer in the East India Company, but being
+hit with a slug in the lungs during the first Burma war, was retired
+with a pension of seventy pounds for wounds. Afterward he came into a
+fortune of thirty thousand pounds, took to yachting, traveled a great
+deal in search of adventure, and so in 1839 arrived in Sarawak on the
+lookout for trouble.
+
+An Englishman of gentle birth is naturally expected to tell the truth,
+to be clean in all his dealings, to keep his temper, and not to show
+his fears. Not being a beastly cad, Brooke as a matter of course
+conformed to the ordinary standards and, having no worries, was able
+to do so cheerfully. One may meet men of this stock, size and pattern
+by thousands the world over, but in a decayed Malay state, at war with
+the Dyaks ashore and the pirates afloat, Brooke was a phenomenon just
+as astonishing as a first-class comet, an earthquake eruption, or a
+cyclone. His arrival was the only important event in the whole history
+of North Borneo. The rajah sought his advice in dealing with the Dutch,
+the Dyaks and the pirates. The Malays, Dyaks, pirates and everybody
+else consulted him as to their dealings with the rajah. On his second
+visit he took a boat’s crew from his yacht and went to the seat of war.
+There he tried to the verge of tears to persuade the hostile forces
+either to fight or make friends, and when nobody could be induced to
+do anything at all, he, with his boat’s crew and one native warrior,
+stormed the Dyak position, putting the enemy to total rout and flight.
+Luckily, nobody was hurt, for even a cut finger would have spoiled the
+perfect bloodlessness of Brooke’s victory. Then the Dyaks surrendered
+to Brooke. Afterward the pirate fleet appeared at the capital, not to
+attack the rajah, but to be inspected by Brooke, and when he had patted
+the pirates they went away to purr. Moreover the rajah offered to hand
+over his kingdom to Brooke as manager, and the Englishman expected him
+to keep his word. Brooke brought a shipload of stores in payment for a
+cargo of manganese, but the rajah was so contented with that windfall
+that he forgot to send to his mines for the ore.
+
+Further up the coast a British ship was destroyed by lightning, and
+her crew got ashore where they were held as captives pending a large
+ransom. Even when the captain’s wife had a baby the local bigwig
+thereabouts saw a new chance of plunder, and stole the baby-clothes.
+Then the shipwrecked mariners sent a letter to Brooke appealing for his
+help; but nothing on earth could induce the spineless boneless rajah to
+send the relief he had promised. Then Brooke wrote to Singapore whence
+the East India Company despatched a war-ship which rescued the forty
+castaways.
+
+The rajah’s next performance was to arrange for a percentage with two
+thousand, five hundred robbers who proposed to plunder and massacre his
+own subjects. Brooke from his yacht stampeded the raiders with a few
+rounds from the big guns--blank of course. Brooke was getting rather
+hard up, and could not spare ball ammunition on weekdays.
+
+So King Muda Hassim lied, cheated, stole, betrayed, and occasionally
+murdered--a mean rogue, abject, cringing to Brooke, weeping at the
+Englishman’s threats to depart, holding his throne so long as the white
+yacht gave him prestige; but all this with pomp and circumstance,
+display of gems and gold, a gorgeous retinue, plenty of music, and
+royal salutes on the very slightest pretext. But all the population was
+given over to rapine and slaughter, and the forest was closing in on
+ruined farms. The last and only hope of the nation was in Brooke.
+
+Behind every evil in the state was Makota, the prime minister, a polite
+and gentlemanly rascal, and at the end of two years he annoyed Brooke
+quite seriously by putting arsenic in the interpreter’s rice. Brooke
+cleared his ship for action, and with a landing party under arms
+marched to the palace gates. In a few well-chosen words he explained
+Makota’s villainy, showed that neither the rajah’s life nor his own was
+safe, and that the only course was to proclaim Brooke as governor.
+
+No shot was fired, no blow was struck, but Makota’s party vanished, the
+villain fled, the rajah began to behave, the government of the country
+was handed over to the Englishman amid great popular rejoicings. “My
+darling mother,” he wrote, “I am very poor, but I want some things from
+home very much; so I must trust to your being rich enough to afford
+them to me. Imprimis, a circle for taking the latitude; secondly, an
+electrifying machine of good power; thirdly, a large magic lantern;
+fourthly, a rifle which carries fifty balls; and last, a peep-show.
+The circle and rifle I want very much; and the others are all for
+political purposes.” Did ever king begin his reign with such an act as
+that letter?
+
+But then, look at the government he replaced: “The sultan and his
+chiefs rob all classes of Malays to the utmost of their power; the
+Malays rob the Dyaks, and the Dyaks hide their goods as much as they
+dare, consistent with the safety of their wives and children.” Brooke
+found his private income a very slender fund when he had to pay the
+whole expense of governing a kingdom until the people recovered from
+their ruin.
+
+February the first, 1842, a pirate chief called to make treaty with
+the new king. “He inquired, if a tribe pirated on my territory what
+I intended to do. My answer was ‘to enter their country and lay it
+waste.’ ‘But,’ he asked me again, ‘you will give me--your friend--leave
+to steal a few heads occasionally?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I shall have a
+hundred Sakarran heads for every one you take here!’ He recurred to
+this request several times--‘just to steal one or two’-as a schoolboy
+asks for apples.”
+
+Brooke used to give the pirates his laughing permission to go to
+Singapore and attack the English.
+
+[Illustration: SIR JAMES BROOKE]
+
+“The Santah River,” he wrote, “is famous for its diamonds. The
+workers seem jealous and superstitious, disliking noise, particularly
+laughter, as it is highly offensive to the spirit who presides over the
+diamonds.... A Chinese Mohammedan with the most solemn face requested
+me to give him an old letter; and he engraved some Chinese characters,
+which, being translated signify ‘Rajah Muda Hassim, James Brooke,
+and Hadju Ibrahim present their compliments to the spirit and request
+his permission to work at the mine.’”
+
+There were great doings when the sultan of Borneo had Mr. Brooke
+proclaimed king in Sarawak. Then he went off to the Straits
+Settlements, where he made friends with Henry Keppel, captain of
+H. M. S. _Dido_, a sportsman who delighted in hunting pirates, and
+accepted Brooke’s invitation to a few days’ shooting. Keppel describes
+the scene of Brooke’s return to his kingdom, received by all the chiefs
+with undisguised delight, mingled with gratitude and respect for their
+newly-elected ruler. “The scene was both novel and exciting, presenting
+to us--just anchored in a large fresh water river, and surrounded by
+a densely wooded jungle--the whole surface of the water covered with
+canoes and boats dressed with colored silken flags, filled with natives
+beating their tom-toms, and playing on wind instruments, with the
+occasional discharge of firearms. To them it must have been equally
+striking to witness the _Dido_ anchored almost in the center of their
+town, her mastheads towering above the highest trees of that jungle,
+the loud report of her heavy thirty-two-pounder guns, the manning
+aloft to furl sails of one hundred fifty seamen in their clean white
+dresses, and with the band playing. I was anxious that Mr. Brooke
+should land with all the honors due to so important a personage, which
+he accordingly did, under a salute.”
+
+It was a little awkward that the _Dido_ struck a rock and sank, but
+she chose a convenient spot just opposite Mr. Brooke’s house, so that
+Brooke’s officers and those of the ship formed one mess there, a
+band of brothers, while the damage was being repaired. Then came the
+promised sport, a joint boat expedition up all sorts of queer back
+channels and rivers fouled by the pirates with stakes and booms under
+fire of the artillery in their hill fortresses. The sportsmen burst the
+booms, charged the hills, stormed the forts, burned out the pirates and
+obtained their complete submission. Brooke invited them all to a pirate
+conference at his house and, just as with the land rogues, charmed them
+out of their skins. He fought like a man, but his greatest victories
+were scored by perfect manners.
+
+The next adventure was a visit from the Arctic explorer, Sir Edward
+Belcher, sent by the British government to inspect Brooke’s kingdom,
+now a peaceful and happy country.
+
+Later came Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane with a squadron to smash up a
+few more pirates, and the smashing of pirates continued for many years
+a popular sport for the navy. The pirate states to the northward became
+in time the British colonies of Labuan, and North Borneo, but Sarawak
+is still a protected Malay state, the hereditary kingdom of Sir James
+Brooke and his descendants. May that dynasty reign so long as the sun
+shines.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+A. D. 1842
+
+THE SPIES
+
+
+I
+
+From earliest childhood Eldred Pottinger was out of place in crowded
+England. Gunpowder is good exciting stuff to play with, and there could
+be no objection to his blowing up himself and his little brother,
+because that was all in the family; but when he mined the garden wall
+and it fell on a couple of neighbors, they highly took offense; and
+when his finely invented bomb went off at Addiscombe College he rose
+to the level of a public nuisance. On the whole it must have been a
+relief to his friends when he went to India. There he had an uncle, the
+president in Scinde, a shrewd man who shipped young Pottinger to the
+greatest possible distance in the hinder parts of Afghanistan.
+
+The political situation in Afghanistan was the usual howling chaos of
+oriental kingdoms, and the full particulars would bore the reader just
+as they bored me. It was Pottinger’s business to find out and report
+the exact state of affairs at a time when any white man visiting the
+country was guaranteed, if and when found, to have his throat cut.
+Being clever at native languages, with a very foxy shrewdness, the
+young spy set off, disguised as a native horse dealer, and reached
+Cabul, the Afghan capital.
+
+The reigning ameer was Dost Mahomet, who was not on speaking terms with
+Kamran, king of Herat, and Pottinger’s job was to get through to Herat
+without being caught by Dost. The horse-copper disguise was useless
+now, so Pottinger became a Mahomedan _syed_, or professional holy man.
+He sent his attendants and horses ahead, slipped out of the capital on
+foot by night and made his way to his camp. So he reached the country
+of the Hazareh tribes where his whole expedition was captured by the
+principal robber Jakoob Beg, who did a fairly good business in selling
+travelers, as slaves, except when they paid blackmail. “The chief,”
+says Pottinger, “was the finest Hazareh I had seen, and appeared a
+well-meaning, sensible person. He, however, was quite in the hands of
+his cousin--an ill-favored, sullen and treacherous-looking rascal. I,
+by way of covering my silence, and to avoid much questioning, took to
+my beads and kept telling them with great perseverance, much to the
+increase of my reputation as a holy personage.”
+
+The trouble was that Pottinger and his devout followers were of the
+Sounee faith, whereas the robber castle was of the Sheeah persuasion.
+The difference was something like that between our Catholics and
+Protestants, and Pottinger was like a Methodist minister trying to
+pass himself off for a cardinal without knowing the little points
+of etiquette. The prisoners prompted one another into all sorts
+of ridiculous blunders, so that the ill-favored cousin suspected
+Pottinger of being a fraud. “Why he may be a Feringhee himself,” said
+the cousin. “I have always heard that the Hindustanees are black,
+and this man is fairer than we are.” But then the Feringhees--the
+British--were supposed to be monsters, and Pottinger was in no way
+monstrous to look at, so that he managed to talk round the corner, and
+at the end of a week ransomed his party with the gift of a fine gun to
+the chief. They set off very blithely into the mountains, but had not
+gone far when the chief’s riders came romping in pursuit, and herded
+them back, presumably to have their throats cut according to local
+manners and customs. The chief, it turned out, had been unable to make
+the gun go off, but finding it worked all right if handled properly
+dismissed the spy with his blessing. Eighteen days’ journey brought
+him to Herat, where he felt perfectly safe, strolling unarmed in the
+country outside the walls, until a gang of slave catchers made him an
+easy prey. His follower, Synd Ahmed, scared them off by shouting to an
+imaginary escort.
+
+Shah Kamran with his vizier Yar Mahomed had been out of town, but on
+their return to Herat, Pottinger introduced himself to the king as a
+British officer, and his gift of a brace of pistols was graciously
+accepted.
+
+Not long afterward a Persian army came up against Herat, and with that
+force there were Russian officers. For once the Heratis could look for
+no help from Afghanistan; and for once this mighty fortress, the key
+to the gates of India, was guarded by a cur. If Herat fell the way was
+open for Russia, the ancient road to India of all the conquerors.
+There is the reason why the British had sent a spy to Herat.
+
+The Heratis were quick to seek the advice of the British officer who
+organized the defense and in the end took charge, the one competent
+man in the garrison. Shah Kamran sent him with a flag of truce to the
+Persian army. The Persian soldiers hailed him with rapture, thinking
+they would soon get home to their wives and families; they patted his
+legs, they caressed his horse, they shouted “Bravo! Bravo! Welcome! The
+English were always friends of the king of kings!”
+
+So Pottinger was brought before the shah of Persia, who would accept no
+terms except surrender, which the Englishman ridiculed. He went back to
+the city, and the siege went on for months.
+
+A shell burst the house next door to his quarters, but he took no
+harm. One day he leaned against a loophole in the ramparts, watching a
+Persian attempt to spring a mine, and as he moved away his place was
+taken by a eunuch who at once got a ball in the lungs. He had narrow
+escapes without end.
+
+At the end of six months, June twenty-fourth, 1838, the Persians
+tried to carry the place by assault. “At four points the assault was
+repulsed, but at the fifth point the storming column threw itself
+into the trench of the lower fausse-braye. The struggle was brief
+but bloody. The defenders fell at their posts to a man, and the work
+was carried by the besiegers. Encouraged by this first success, the
+storming party pushed on up the slope, but a galling fire from the
+garrison met them as they advanced. The officers and men of the column
+were mown down; there was a second brief and bloody struggle, and the
+upper fausse-braye was carried, while a few of the most daring of the
+assailants, pushing on in advance of their comrades, gained the head of
+the breach. But now Deen Mahomed came down with the Afghan reserve, and
+thus recruited the defenders gathered new heart, so that the Persians
+in the breach were driven back. Again and again with desperate courage
+they struggled to effect a lodgment, only to be repulsed and thrown
+back in confusion upon their comrades, who were pressing on behind. The
+conflict was fierce, the issue doubtful. Now the breach was well-nigh
+carried; and now the stormers, recoiling from the shock of the defense,
+fell back upon the exterior slope of the fausse-braye.
+
+“Startled by the noise of the assault Yar Mahomed (the vizier) had
+risen up, left his quarters, and ridden down to the works. Pottinger
+went forth at the same time and on the same errand. Giving instructions
+to his dependents to be carried out in the event of his falling in the
+defense, he hastened to join the vizier.... As they neared the point
+of the attack the garrison were seen retreating by twos and threes;
+others were quitting the works on the pretext of carrying off the
+wounded.... Pottinger was eager to push on to the breach; Yar Mahomed
+sat himself down. The vizier had lost heart; his wonted high courage
+and collectedness had deserted him. Astonished and indignant ...
+the English officer called upon the vizier again and again to rouse
+himself. The Afghan chief rose up and advanced further into the works,
+and neared the breach where the conflict was raging.... Yar Mahomed
+called upon his men in God’s name to fight; but they wavered and stood
+still. Then his heart failed him again. He turned back, said he would
+go for aid.... Alarmed by the backwardness of their chief the men were
+now retreating in every direction.” Pottinger swore.
+
+Yar roused himself, again advanced, but again wavered, and a third
+time Pottinger by word and deed put him to shame. “He reviled, he
+threatened, he seized him by the arm and dragged him forward to the
+breach.” Now comes the fun, and we can forsake the tedious language of
+the official version. Yar, hounded to desperation by Pottinger, seized
+a staff, rushed like a wildcat on the retreating soldiers, and so
+horrified them that they bolted back over the breach down the outside
+into the face of the Persians. And the Persians fled! Herat was saved.
+
+An envoy came from the Persian army to explain that it was infamous of
+the Shah Kamran to have an infidel in charge of the defense. “Give him
+up,” said the Persians, “and we’ll raise the siege.” But the shah was
+not in a position to surrender Pottinger. That gentleman might take it
+into his head to surrender the shah of Herat.
+
+Another six months of siege, with famine, mutiny and all the usual
+worries of beleaguered towns finished Pottinger’s work, the saving of
+Herat.
+
+
+II
+
+Now we take up the life of another spy, also an army officer, old
+Alexander Burnes. At eighteen he had been adjutant of his regiment and
+rose very steadily from rank to rank until he was sent as an envoy
+to Runjeet Singh, the ruler of Punjab, and to the ameers of Scinde.
+In those days Northwestern India was an unknown region and Burnes was
+pioneer of the British power.
+
+In 1832 he set out on his second mission through Afghanistan, Bokhara
+and Persia. See how he wrote from Cabul: “I do not despair of reaching
+Istamboul (Constantinople) in safety. They may seize me and sell me for
+a slave, but no one will attack me for my riches.... I have no tent, no
+chair or table, no bed, and my clothes altogether amount to the value
+of one pound sterling. You would disown your son if you saw him. My
+dress is purely Asiatic, and since I came into Cabul has been changed
+to that of the lowest orders of the people. My head is shaved of its
+brown locks, and my beard dyed black grieves ... for the departed
+beauty of youth. I now eat my meals with my hands, and greasy digits
+they are, though I must say in justification, that I wash before and
+after meals.... I frequently sleep under a tree, but if a villager
+will take compassion on me I enter his house. I never conceal that I
+am a European, and I have as yet found the character advantageous to
+my comfort. The people know me by the name of Sekunder, which is the
+Persian for Alexander.... With all my assumed poverty I have a bag
+of ducats round my waist, and bills for as much money as I choose to
+draw.... When I go into company I put my hand on my heart, and say
+with all humility to the master of the house, ‘Peace be unto thee,’
+according to custom, and then I squat myself down on the ground. This
+familiarity has given me an insight into the character of the people
+... kind-hearted and hospitable, they have no prejudices against a
+Christian and none against our nation. When they ask me if I eat pork,
+I of course shudder, and say that it is only outcasts that commit such
+outrages. God forgive me! for I am very fond of bacon.... I am well
+mounted on a good horse in case I should find it necessary to take to
+my heels. My whole baggage on earth goes on one mule, which my servant
+sits supercargo.... I never was in better spirits.”
+
+After his wonderful journey Burnes was sent to England to make his
+report to the government, and King William IV must needs hear the whole
+of the story at Brighton pavilion.
+
+The third journey of this great spy was called the commercial mission
+to Cabul. There he learned that the Persian siege of Herat was being
+more or less conducted by Russian officers. Russians swarmed at the
+court of Dost Mahomed, and an ambassador from the czar was there trying
+to make a treaty.
+
+Great was the indignation and alarm in British India, and for fear of
+a Russian invasion in panic haste the government made a big famous
+blunder, for without waiting to know how Dost was fooling the Russians,
+an army was sent through the terrible Bolan Pass. That sixty-mile abyss
+with hanging walls belongs to the Pathans, the fiercest and wildest
+of all the tribes of men. The army climbed through the death trap,
+marched, starving, on from Quetta to Candahar and then advanced on
+Cabul. But Dost’s son Akbar held the great fortress of Ghuznee, a quite
+impregnable place that had to be taken.
+
+One night while a sham attack was made on the other side of the
+fortress, Captain Thomson placed nine hundred pounds of gunpowder at
+the foot of a walled-up gate, and then touched off the charge. The
+twenty-first light infantry climbed over the smoking ruins and at the
+head of his storming column Colonel Dennie, in three hours’ fighting,
+took the citadel. Dost Mahomed fled, and the British entered Cabul to
+put a puppet sovereign on the throne.
+
+Cabul was a live volcano where English women gave dances. There were
+cricket matches, theatricals, sports. The governor-general in camp
+gave a state dinner in honor of Major Pottinger, who had come in from
+the siege of Herat. During the reception of the guests a shabby Afghan
+watched, leaning against a door-post, and the court officials were
+about to remove this intruder when the governor-general approached
+leading his sister. “Let me present you,” said Lord Auckland, “to
+Eldred Pottinger, the hero of Herat.” This shabby Afghan was the guest
+of honor, but nobody would listen to his warnings, or to the warnings
+of Sir Alexander Burnes, assistant resident. Only the two spies knew
+what was to come. Then the volcano blew up.
+
+Burnes had a brother staying with him in Cabul, also his military
+secretary; and when the mob, savage, excited, bent on massacre, swarmed
+round his house he spoke to them from the balcony. While he talked
+Lieutenant Broadfoot fell at his side, struck by a ball in the chest.
+The stables were on fire, the mob filled his garden. He offered to
+pay then in cash for his brother’s life and his own, so a Cashmiri
+volunteered to save them in disguise. They put on native clothes,
+they slipped into the garden, and then their guide shouted, “This is
+Sekunder Burnes!” The two brothers were cut to pieces.
+
+Pottinger was political agent at Kohistan to the northward, and when
+the whole Afghan nation rose in revolt his fort was so sorely beset
+that he and his retinue stole away in the dark, joining a Ghoorka
+regiment. But the regiment was also beset, and its water supply cut
+off. Pottinger fought the guns; the men repelled attacks by night
+and day until worn out; dying of thirst in an intolerable agony the
+regiment broke, scattering into the hills. Only a few men rallied round
+Pottinger to fight through to Cabul, and he was fearfully wounded,
+unable to command. Of his staff and the Ghoorka regiment only five men
+were alive when they entered Cabul.
+
+Our officer commanding at Cabul was not in good health, but his death
+was unfortunately delayed while the Afghans murdered men, women and
+children, and the British troops, for lack of a leader, funked. Envoys
+waited on Akbar Khan, and were murdered. The few officers who kept
+their heads were without authority, blocked at every turn by cowards,
+by incompetents. Then the council of war made treaty with Akbar, giving
+him all the guns except six, all the treasure, three officers as
+hostages, bills drawn on India for forty thousand rupees, the honor of
+their country, everything for safe conduct in their disgrace. Dying of
+cold and hunger, the force marched into the Khoord-Cabul Pass, and at
+the end of three days the married officers were surrendered with their
+wives and children. Of the sixteen thousand men three-fourths were
+dead when the officer commanding and the gallant Brigadier Skelton
+were given up as hostages to Akbar. The survivors pushed on through
+the Jugduluk Pass, which the Afghans had barricaded, and there was the
+final massacre. Of the whole army, one man, Doctor Brydon, on a starved
+pony, sinking with exhaustion, rode in through the gates of Fort
+Jellalabad.
+
+The captured general had sent orders for the retreat of the Jellalabad
+garrison through the awful defiles of the Khyber Pass in face
+of a hostile army, and in the dead of winter; but General Sale,
+commanding, was not such a fool. For three months he had worked his
+men to desperation rebuilding the fortress, and now when he saw the
+white tents of Akbar’s camp he was prepared for a siege. That day
+an earthquake razed the whole fortress into a heap of ruins, but
+the garrison rebuilt the walls. Then they sallied and, led by Henry
+Havelock, assaulted Akbar’s camp, smashed his army to flying fragments,
+captured his guns, baggage, standards, ammunition and food. Nine days
+later the bands of the garrison marched out to meet a relieving army
+from India. They were playing an old tune, _Oh, but ye’ve been lang o’
+comin’_.
+
+Meanwhile the British prisoners, well treated, were hurried from
+fort to fort, with some idea of holding them for sale at so much a
+slave, until they managed to bribe an Afghan chief. The bribed man
+led a revolt against Akbar, and one chief after another joined him,
+swearing on the Koran allegiance to Eldred Pottinger. When Akbar fell,
+Pottinger marched as leader of the revolted chiefs on the way to Cabul.
+One day, as the ladies and children were resting in an old fort for
+shelter during the great heat of the afternoon, they heard the tramp of
+horsemen, and in the dead silence of a joy and gratitude too great for
+utterance, received the relieving force.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A. D. 1842
+
+A YEAR’S ADVENTURES
+
+
+A thousand adventures are taking place every day, all at once in the
+several continents and the many seas. A few are reported, many are
+noted in the private journals of adventurers, most of them are just
+taken as a matter of course in the day’s work, but nobody has ever
+attempted to make a picture of all the world’s adventures for a day or
+a year.
+
+Let us make magic. Any date will do, or any year. Here for instance is
+a date--the twelfth of September, 1842--that will serve our purpose as
+well as any other.
+
+In Afghanistan a British force of twenty-six thousand people had
+perished, an army of vengeance had marched to the rescue of Major
+Pottinger, Lady Sale, Lady McNaughton and other captives held by the
+Afghan chiefs. On September twelfth they were rescued.
+
+In China the people had refused to buy our Indian opium, so we
+carefully and methodically bombarded all Chinese seaports until she
+consented to open them to foreign trade. Then Major Pottinger’s uncle,
+Sir Henry, made a treaty which the Chinese emperor signed on September
+eighth.
+
+In the Malacca Straits Captain Henry Keppel of H. M. S. _Dido_ was busy
+smashing up pirates.
+
+In Tahiti poor little Queen Pomaré, being in childbed, was so bullied
+by the French admiral that she surrendered her kingdom to France on
+September ninth. Next morning her child was born, but her kingdom was
+gone forever.
+
+In South Africa Captain Smith made a disgraceful attack upon the Boers
+at Port Natal, and on June twenty-sixth they got a tremendous thrashing
+which put an end to the republic of Natalia. In September they began to
+settle down as British subjects, not at all content.
+
+Norfolk Island is a scrap of paradise, about six miles by four, lying
+nine hundred miles from Sydney, in Australia. In 1842 it was a convict
+settlement, and on June twenty-first the brig _Governor Philip_ was to
+sail for Sydney, having landed her stores at the island. During the
+night she stood off and on, and two prisoners coming on deck at dawn
+for a breath of air noticed that discipline seemed slack, although
+a couple of drowsy sentries guarded their hatchway. Within a few
+minutes the prisoners were all on deck. One sentry was disarmed, the
+other thrown overboard. Two soldiers off duty had a scuffle with the
+mutineers, but one took refuge in the main chains, while the other was
+drowned trying to swim ashore. The sergeant in charge ran on deck and
+shot a mutineer before he was knocked over, stunned. As to the seamen,
+they ran into the forecastle.
+
+The prisoners had now control of the ship, but none of them knew how
+to handle their prize, so they loosed a couple of sailors and made
+them help. Woolfe, one of the convicts, then rescued a soldier who was
+swimming alongside. The officers and soldiers aft were firing through
+the grated hatches and wounded several convicts, until they were
+allayed with a kettle of boiling water. So far the mutiny had gone off
+very nicely, but now the captain, perched on the cabin table, fired
+through the woodwork at a point where he thought a man was standing.
+By luck the bullet went through the ringleader’s mouth and blew out
+the back of his head, whereon a panic seized the mutineers, who fled
+below hatches. The sailor at the wheel released the captain, and the
+afterguard recaptured the ship. One mutineer had his head blown off,
+and the rest surrendered. The whole deck was littered with the wounded
+and the dying and the dead, and there were not many convicts left. In
+the trial at Sydney, Wheelan, who proved innocent, was spared, also
+Woolfe for saving a soldier’s life, but four were hanged, meeting their
+fate like men.
+
+It was in August that the sultan of Borneo confirmed Mr. James Brooke
+as rajah of Sarawak, and the new king was extremely busy executing
+robbers, rescuing shipwrecked mariners from slavery, reopening old
+mines for diamonds, gold and manganese. “I breathe peace and comfort to
+all who obey,” so he wrote to his mother, “and wrath and fury to the
+evil-doer.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Captain Ross was in the Antarctic, coasting the great ice barrier. Last
+year he had given to two tall volcanoes the names of his ships, the
+_Erebus_ and _Terror_. This year on March twelfth in a terrific gale
+with blinding snow at midnight the two ships tried to get shelter under
+the lee of an iceberg, but the _Terror_ rammed the _Erebus_ so that her
+bow-sprit, fore topmast and a lot of smaller spars were carried away,
+and she was jammed against the wall of the berg totally disabled. She
+could not make sail and had no room to wear round, so she sailed out
+backward, one of the grandest feats of seamanship on record; then,
+clear of the danger, steered between two bergs, her yard-arms almost
+scraping both of them, until she gained the smoother water to leeward,
+where she found her consort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+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.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Fremont was exploring from the Mississippi Valley a route for emigrants
+to Oregon, and in that journey climbed the Rocky Mountains to plant Old
+Glory on one of the highest peaks. He was a very fine explorer, and not
+long afterward conquered the Mexican state of California, completing
+the outline of the modern United States. But Fremont’s guide will be
+remembered long after Fremont is forgotten, for he was the greatest of
+American frontiersmen, the ideal of modern chivalry, Kit Carson. Of
+course he must have a chapter to himself.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+A.D. 1843
+
+KIT CARSON
+
+
+Once Colonel Inman, an old frontiersman, bought a newspaper which had a
+full page picture of Kit Carson. The hero stood in a forest, a gigantic
+figure in a buckskin suit, heavily armed, embracing a rescued heroine,
+while at his feet sprawled six slain Indian braves, his latest victims.
+
+“What do you think of this?” said the colonel handing the picture to a
+delicate little man, who wiped his spectacles, studied the work of art,
+and replied in a gentle drawl, “That may be true, but I hain’t got no
+recollection of it.” And so Kit Carson handed the picture back.
+
+He stood five feet six, and looked frail, but his countrymen, and all
+the boys of all the world think of this mighty frontiersman as a giant.
+
+At seventeen he was a remarkably green and innocent boy for his years,
+his home a log cabin on the Missouri frontier. Past the door ran the
+trail to the west where trappers went by in buckskin, traders among the
+Indians, and soldiers for the savage wars of the plains.
+
+One day came Colonel S. Vrain, agent of a big fur-trading company,
+with his long train of wagons hitting the Santa Fe trail. Kit got a
+job with that train, to herd spare stock, hunt bison, mount guard and
+fight Indians. They were three weeks out in camp when half a dozen
+Pawnee Indians charged, yelling and waving robes to stampede the herd,
+but a brisk fusillade from the white men sent them scampering back
+over the sky-line. Next day, after a sixteen mile march the outfit
+corraled their wagons for defense at the foot of Pawnee Rock beside the
+Arkansas River. “I had not slept any of the night before,” says Kit,
+“for I stayed awake watching to get a shot at the Pawnees that tried to
+stampede our animals, expecting they would return; and I hadn’t caught
+a wink all day, as I was out buffalo hunting, so I was awfully tired
+and sleepy when we arrived at Pawnee Rock that evening, and when I was
+posted at my place at night, I must have gone to sleep leaning against
+the rocks; at any rate, I was wide enough awake when the cry of Indians
+was given by one of the guard. I had picketed my mule about twenty
+paces from where I stood, and I presume he had been lying down; all I
+remember is, that the first thing I saw after the alarm was something
+rising up out of the grass, which I thought was an Indian. I pulled the
+trigger; it was a center shot, and I don’t believe the mule ever kicked
+after he was hit!”
+
+At daylight the Pawnees attacked in earnest and the fight lasted nearly
+three days, the mule teams being shut in the corral without food or
+water. At midnight of the second day they hitched up, fighting their
+way for thirteen miles, then got into bad trouble fording Pawnee Fork
+while the Indians poured lead and arrows into the teams until the
+colonel and Kit Carson led a terrific charge which dispersed the
+enemy. That fight cost the train four killed and seven wounded.
+
+It was during this first trip that Carson saved the life of a wounded
+teamster by cutting off his arm. With a razor he cut the flesh, with
+a saw got through the bone, and with a white-hot king-bolt seared the
+wound, stopping the flow of blood.
+
+In 1835 Carson was hunter for Bent’s Fort, keeping the garrison of
+forty men supplied with buffalo meat. Once he was out hunting with six
+others and they made their camp tired out. “I saw,” says Kit, “two big
+wolves sneaking about, one of them quite close to us. Gordon, one of my
+men, wanted to fire his rifle at it, but I would not let him for fear
+he would hit a dog. I admit that I had a sort of idea that these wolves
+might be Indians; but when I noticed one of them turn short around and
+heard the clashing of his teeth as he rushed at one of the dogs, I felt
+easy then, and was certain that they were wolves sure enough. But the
+red devil fooled me after all, for he had two dried buffalo bones in
+his hands under the wolf-skin and he rattled them together every time
+he turned to make a dash at the dogs! Well, by and by we all dozed
+off, and it wasn’t long before I was suddenly aroused by a noise and a
+big blaze. I rushed out the first thing for our mules and held them.
+If the savages had been at all smart, they could have killed us in a
+trice, but they ran as soon as they fired at us. They killed one of my
+men, putting five shots in his body and eight in his buffalo robe. The
+Indians were a band of snakes, and found us by sheer accident. They
+endeavored to ambush us the next morning, but we got wind of their
+little game and killed three of them, including the chief.”
+
+It was in his eight years as hunter for Bent’s Fort that Kit learned
+to know the Indians, visiting their camps to smoke with the chiefs and
+play with the little boys. When the Sioux nation invaded the Comanche
+and Arrapaho hunting-grounds he persuaded them to go north, and so
+averted war.
+
+In 1842 when he was scout to Fremont, he went buffalo hunting to get
+meat for the command. One day he was cutting up a beast newly killed
+when he left his work in pursuit of a large bull that came rushing
+past him. His horse was too much blown to run well, and when at last
+he got near enough to fire, things began to happen all at once. The
+bullet hitting too low enraged the bison just as the horse, stepping
+into a prairie-dog hole, shot Kit some fifteen feet through the air.
+Instead of Kit hunting bison, Mr. Buffalo hunted Kit, who ran for all
+he was worth. So they came to the Arkansas River where Kit dived while
+the bison stayed on the bank to hook him when he landed. But while the
+bison gave Kit a swimming lesson, one of the hunters made an unfair
+attack from behind, killing the animal. So Kit crawled out and skinned
+his enemy.
+
+One of his great hunting feats was the killing of five buffalo with
+only four bullets. Being short of lead he had to cut out the ball from
+number four, then catch up, and shoot number five.
+
+On another hunt, chasing a cow bison down a steep hill, he fired just
+as the animal took a flying leap, so that the carcass fell, not to the
+ground, but spiked on a small cedar. The Indians persuaded him to
+leave that cow impaled upon a tree-top because it was big magic; but to
+people who do not know the shrubs of the southwestern desert, it must
+sound like a first-class lie.
+
+One night as the expedition lay in camp, far up among the mountains,
+Fremont sat for hours reading some letters just arrived from home, then
+fell asleep to dream of his young wife. Presently a soft sound, rather
+like the blow of an ax made Kit start broad awake, to find Indians in
+camp. They fled, but two of the white men were lying dead in their
+blankets, and the noise that awakened Carson was the blow of a tomahawk
+braining his own chum, the voyageur, La Jeunesse.
+
+In the following year Carson was serving as hunter to a caravan
+westward bound across the plains, when he met Captain Cooke in camp,
+with four squadrons of United States Cavalry. The captain told him that
+following on the trail was a caravan belonging to a wealthy Mexican and
+so richly loaded that a hundred riders had been hired as guards.
+
+Presently the Mexican train came up and the majordomo offered Carson
+three hundred dollars if he would ride to the Mexican governor at
+Santa Fe and ask him for an escort of troops from the point where they
+entered New Mexico. Kit, who was hard up, gladly accepted the cash,
+and rode to Bent’s Fort. There he had news that the Utes were on the
+war-path, but Mr. Bent lent him the swiftest horse in the stables. Kit
+walked, leading the horse by the rein, to have him perfectly fresh in
+case there was need for flight. He reached the Ute village, hid, and
+passed the place at night without being seen. So he reached Taos, his
+own home in New Mexico, whence the alcalde sent his message to the
+governor of the state at Santa Fe.
+
+The governor had already sent a hundred riders but these had been
+caught and wiped out by a force of Texans, only one escaping, who,
+during the heat of the fight, caught a saddled Texan pony and rode off.
+
+Meanwhile the governor--Armijo--sent his reply for Carson to carry to
+the caravan. He said he was marching with a large force, and he did so.
+But when the survivor of the lost hundred rode into Armijo’s camp with
+his bad news, the whole outfit rolled their tails for home.
+
+Carson, with the governor’s letter, and the news of plentiful trouble,
+reached the Mexican caravan, which decided not to leave the protecting
+American cavalry camped on the boundary-line. What with Texan raiders,
+border ruffians, Utes, Apaches, Comanches, and other little drawbacks,
+the caravan trade on the Santa Fe trail was never dull for a moment.
+
+During these years one finds Kit Carson’s tracks all over the West
+about as hard to follow as those of a flea in a blanket.
+
+Here, for example, is a description of the American army of the Bear
+Flag republic seizing California in 1846. “A vast cloud of dust
+appeared first, and thence, a long file, emerged this wildest wild
+party. Fremont rode ahead--a spare, active-looking man, with such an
+eye! He was dressed in a blouse and leggings and wore a felt hat.
+After him came five Delaware Indians, who were his body-guard, and
+have been with him through all his wanderings; they had charge of
+the baggage horses. The rest, many of them blacker than the Indians,
+rode two and two, the rifle held in one hand across the pommel of the
+saddle. Thirty-nine of them there are his regular men, the rest are
+loafers picked up lately; his original men are principally backwoodsmen
+from the state of Tennessee, and the banks of the upper waters of the
+Missouri.... The dress of these men was principally a long loose coat
+of deerskin, tied with thongs in front; trousers of the same, which
+when wet through, they take off, scrape well inside with a knife, and
+put on as soon as dry. The saddles were of various fashions, though
+these and a large drove of horses, and a brass field gun, were things
+they had picked up about California. They are allowed no liquor; this,
+no doubt, has much to do with their good conduct; and the discipline,
+too, is very strict.”
+
+One of these men was Kit Carson, sent off in October to Washington on
+the Atlantic, three thousand miles away, with news that California
+was conquered for the United States, by a party of sixty men. In New
+Mexico, Kit met General Kearney, and told him that the Californians
+were a pack of cowards. So the general sent back his troops, marching
+on with only one hundred dragoons. But the Californians were not
+cowards, they had risen against the American invasion, they were
+fighting magnificently, and Fremont had rather a bad time before he
+completed the conquest.
+
+It was during the Californian campaign that Carson made his famous
+ride, the greatest feat of horsemanship the world has ever known. As
+a despatch rider, he made his way through the hostile tribes, and
+terrific deserts from the Missouri to California and back, a total of
+four thousand, four hundred miles. But while he rested in California,
+before he set out on the return, he joined a party of Californian
+gentlemen on a trip up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
+Two of the six men had a remount each, but four of them rode the six
+hundred miles without change of horses in six days. Add that, and
+the return to Kit Carson’s journey, and it makes a total of five
+thousand, six hundred miles. So for distance, he beats world records
+by one hundred miles, at a speed beyond all comparison, and in face of
+difficulties past all parallel.
+
+For some of us old western reprobates who were cow hands, despising a
+sheep man more than anything else alive, it is very disconcerting to
+know that Carson went into that business. He became a partner of his
+lifelong friend, Maxwell, whose rancho in New Mexico was very like a
+castle of the Middle Ages. The dinner service was of massive silver,
+but the guests bedded down with a cowhide on the floor. New Mexico was
+a conquered country owned by the United States, at intervals between
+the Mexican revolts, when Kit settled down as a rancher. The words
+settled down, mean that he served as a colonel of volunteers against
+the Mexicans, and spent the rest of the time fighting Apaches, the most
+ferocious of all savages.
+
+Near Santa Fe, lived Mr. White and his son who fell in defense of their
+ranch, having killed three Apaches, while the women and children of the
+household met with a much worse fate than that of death. The settlers
+refused to march in pursuit until Carson arrived, but by mistake he was
+not given command, a Frenchman having been chosen as leader.
+
+The retreat of the savages was far away in the mountains, and well
+fortified. The only chance of saving the women and children was to
+rush this place before there was time to kill them, and Carson dashed
+in with a yell, expecting all hands to follow. So he found himself
+alone, surrounded by the Apaches, and as they rushed, he rode, throwing
+himself on the off side of his horse, almost concealed behind its neck.
+Six arrows struck his horse, and one bullet lodged in his coat before
+he was out of range. He cursed his Mexicans, he put them to shame,
+he persuaded them to fight, then led a gallant charge, killing five
+Indians as they fled. The delay had given them time to murder the women
+and children.
+
+Once, after his camp had been attacked by Indians, Carson discovered
+that the sentry failed to give an alarm because he was asleep. The
+Indian punishment followed, and the soldier was made for one day to
+wear the dress of a squaw.
+
+[Illustration: KIT CARSON]
+
+We must pass by Kit’s capture of a gang of thirty-five desperadoes for
+the sake of a better story. The officer, commanding a detachment of
+troops on the march, flogged an Indian chief, the result being war.
+Carson was the first white man to pass, and while the chiefs were
+deciding how to attack his caravan, he walked alone into the council
+lodge. So many years were passed since the Cheyennes had seen him
+that he was not recognized, and nobody suspected that he knew their
+language, until he made a speech in Cheyenne, introducing himself,
+recalling ancient friendships, offering all courtesies. As to their
+special plan for killing the leader of the caravan, and taking his
+scalp, he claimed that he might have something to say on the point.
+They parted, Kit to encourage his men, the Indians to waylay the
+caravan; but from the night camp he despatched a Mexican boy to ride
+three hundred miles for succor. When the Cheyennes charged the camp
+at dawn, he ordered them to halt, and walked into the midst of them,
+explaining the message he had sent, and what their fate would be if the
+troops found they had molested them. When the Indians found the tracks
+that proved Kit’s words, they knew they had business elsewhere.
+
+In 1863 Carson was sent with a strong military force to chasten the
+hearts of the Navajo nation. They had never been conquered, and the
+flood of Spanish invasion split when it rolled against their terrific
+sand-rock desert. The land is one of unearthly grandeur where natural
+rocks take the shapes of towers, temples, palaces and fortresses of
+mountainous height blazing scarlet in color. In one part a wave of rock
+like a sea breaker one hundred fifty feet high and one hundred miles
+in length curls overhanging as though the rushing gray waters had been
+suddenly struck into ice. On one side lies the hollow Painted Desert,
+where the sands refract prismatic light like a colossal rainbow, and
+to the west the walls of the Navajo country drop a sheer mile into the
+stupendous labyrinth of the Grand Cañon. Such is the country of a race
+of warriors who ride naked, still armed with bow and arrows, their
+harness of silver and turquoise....
+
+They are handsome, cleanly, proud and dignified. They till their
+fields beside the desert springs, and their villages are set in native
+orchards, while beyond their settlements graze the flocks and herds
+tended by women herders.
+
+The conquest was a necessity, and it was well that this was entrusted
+to gentle, just, wise, heroic Carson. He was obliged to destroy their
+homes, to fell their peach trees, lay waste their crops, and sweep away
+their stock, starving them to surrender. He herded eleven thousand
+prisoners down to the lower deserts, where the chiefs crawled to him on
+their bellies for mercy, but the governor had no mercy, and long after
+Carson’s death, the hapless people were held in the Boique Redondo. A
+fourth part of them died of want, and their spirit was utterly broken
+before they were given back their lands. It is well for them that the
+Navajo desert is too terrible a region for the white men, and nobody
+tries to rob their new prosperity.
+
+In one more campaign Colonel Carson was officer commanding and gave a
+terrible thrashing to the Cheyennes, Kiowas and Comanches.
+
+Then came the end, during a visit to a son of his who lived in
+Colorado. Early in the morning of May twenty-third, 1868, he was
+mounting his horse when an artery broke in his neck, and within a few
+moments he was dead.
+
+But before we part with the frontier hero, it is pleasant to think of
+him still as a living man whose life is an inspiration and his manhood
+an example.
+
+Colonel Inman tells of nights at Maxwell’s ranch. “I have sat there,”
+he writes, “in the long winter evenings when the great room was
+lighted only by the crackling logs, roaring up the huge throats of
+its two fireplaces ... watching Maxwell, Kit Carson and half a dozen
+chiefs silently interchange ideas in the wonderful sign language, until
+the glimmer of Aurora announced the advent of another day. But not a
+sound had been uttered during the protracted hours, save an occasional
+grunt of satisfaction on the part of the Indians, or when we white men
+exchanged a sentence.”
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+A. D. 1845
+
+THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD
+
+
+John Nicholson was a captain in the twenty-seventh native infantry of
+India. He was very tall, gaunt, haggard, with a long black beard, a
+pale face, lips that never smiled, eyes which burned flame and green
+like those of a tiger when he was angry. He rarely spoke.
+
+Once in a frontier action he was entirely surrounded by the enemy
+when one of his Afghans saw him in peril from a descending sword. The
+Pathan sprang forward, received the blow, and died. In a later fight
+Nicholson saw that warrior’s only son taken prisoner, and carried
+off by the enemy. Charging alone, cutting a lane with his sword, the
+officer rescued his man, hoisted him across the saddle, and fought
+his way back. Ever afterward the young Pathan, whose father had died
+for Nicholson, rode at the captain’s side, served him at table with a
+cocked pistol on one hand, slept across the door of his tent. By the
+time Nicholson’s special service began he had a personal following of
+two hundred and fifty wild riders who refused either to take any pay or
+to leave his service.
+
+So was he guarded, but also a sword must be found fit for the hand of
+the greatest swordsman in India. The Sikh leaders sent out word to
+their whole nation for such a blade as Nicholson might wear. Hundreds
+were offered and after long and intricate tests three were found
+equally perfect, two of the blades being curved, one straight. Captain
+Nicholson chose the straight sword, which he accepted as a gift from a
+nation of warriors.
+
+This man was only a most humble Christian, but the Sikhs, observing
+the perfection of his manhood, supposed him to be divine, and offered
+that if he would accept their religion they would raise such a temple
+in his honor as India had never seen. Many a time while he sat at work
+in his tent, busy with official papers, a dozen Sikh warriors would
+squat in the doorway silent, watching their god. He took no notice,
+but sometimes a worshiper, overcome with the conviction of sin, would
+prostrate himself in adoration. For this offense the punishment was
+three dozen lashes with the cat, but the victims liked it. “Our god
+knew that we had been doing wrong, and, therefore, punished us.”
+
+There is no need to explain the Indian mutiny to English readers. It is
+burned deep into our memory that in 1857 our native army, revolting,
+seized Delhi, the ancient capital, and set up a descendant of the Great
+Mogul as emperor of India. The children, the women, the men who were
+tortured to death, or butchered horribly, were of our own households.
+Your uncle fought, your cousin fell, my mother escaped. Remember
+Cawnpore!
+
+Nicholson at Peshawur seized the mails, had the letters translated,
+then made up his copies into bundles. At a council of officers the
+colonels of the native regiments swore to the loyalty of their men,
+but Nicholson dealt out his packages of letters to them all, saying,
+“Perhaps these will interest you.”
+
+The colonels read, and were chilled with horror at finding in their
+trusted regiments an abyss of treachery. Their troops were disarmed and
+disbanded.
+
+To disarm and disperse the native army throughout Northwestern India a
+flying column was formed of British troops, and Nicholson, although he
+was only a captain, was sent to take command of the whole force with
+the rank of brigadier-general. There were old officers under him, yet
+never a murmur rose from them at that strange promotion.
+
+Presently Sir John Lawrence wrote to Nicholson a fierce official
+letter, demanding, “Where are you? What are you doing? Send instantly a
+return of court-martial held upon insurgent natives, with a list of the
+various punishments inflicted.”
+
+Nicholson’s reply was a sheet of paper bearing his present address,
+the date, and the words, “The punishment of mutiny is death.” He
+wanted another regiment to strengthen his column, and demanded the
+eighty-seventh, which was guarding our women and children in the hills.
+Lawrence said these men could not be spared. Nicholson wrote back,
+“When an empire is at stake, women and children cease to be of any
+consideration whatever.” What chance had they if he failed to hold this
+district?
+
+[Illustration: GENERAL NICHOLSON]
+
+Nicholson’s column on the march was surrounded by his own wild guards
+riding in couples, so that he, their god, searched the whole country
+with five hundred eyes. After one heart-breaking night march he drew up
+his infantry and guns, then rode along the line giving his orders:
+“In a few minutes you will see two native regiments come round that
+little temple. If they bring their muskets to the ‘ready,’ fire a
+volley into them without further orders.”
+
+As the native regiments appeared from behind the little temple,
+Nicholson rode to meet them. He was seen to speak to them and then they
+grounded their arms. Two thousand men had surrendered to seven hundred,
+but had the mutineers resisted Nicholson himself must have perished
+between two fires. He cared nothing for his life.
+
+Only once did this leader blow mutineers from the guns, and then it
+was to fire the flesh and blood of nine conspirators into the faces of
+a doubtful regiment. For the rest he had no powder to waste, but no
+mercy, and from his awful executions of rebels he would go away to hide
+in his tent and weep.
+
+He had given orders that no native should be allowed to ride past
+a white man. One morning before dawn the orderly officer, a lad of
+nineteen, seeing natives passing him on an elephant, ordered them
+sharply to dismount and make their salaam. They obeyed--an Afghan
+prince and his servant, sent by the king of Cabul as an embassy to
+Captain Nicholson. Next day the ambassador spoke of this humiliation.
+“No wonder,” he said, “you English conquer India when mere boys obey
+orders as this one did.”
+
+Nicholson once fought a Bengal tiger, and slew it with one stroke of
+his sword; but could the English subdue this India in revolt? The
+mutineers held the impregnable capital old Delhi--and under the red
+walls lay four thousand men--England’s forlorn hope--which must storm
+that giant fortress. If they failed the whole population would rise.
+“If ordained to fail,” said Nicholson, “I hope the British will drag
+down with them in flames and blood as many of the queen’s enemies
+as possible.” If they had failed not one man of our race would have
+escaped to the sea.
+
+Nicholson brought his force to aid in the siege of Delhi, and now he
+was only a captain under the impotent and hopeless General Wilson. “I
+have strength yet,” said Nicholson when he was dying, “to shoot him if
+necessary.”
+
+The batteries of the city walls from the Lahore Gate to the Cashmere
+Gate were manned by Sikh gunners, loyal to the English, but detained
+against their will by the mutineers. One night they saw Nicholson
+without any disguise walk in at the Lahore Gate, and through battery
+after battery along the walls he went in silence to the Cashmere Gate,
+by which he left the city. At the sight of that gaunt giant, the man
+they believed to be an incarnate god, they fell upon their faces. So
+Captain Nicholson studied the defenses of a besieged stronghold as
+no man on earth had ever dared before. To him was given command of
+the assault which blew up the Cashmere Gate, and stormed the Cashmere
+breach. More than half his men perished, but an entry was made, and in
+six days the British fought their way through the houses, breaching
+walls as they went until they stormed the palace, hoisted the flag
+above the citadel, and proved with the sword who shall be masters of
+India.
+
+But Nicholson had fallen. Mortally wounded he was carried to his tent,
+and there lay through the hot days watching the blood-red towers and
+walls of Delhi, listening to the sounds of the long fight, praying
+that he might see the end before his passing.
+
+Outside the tent waited his worshipers, clutching at the doctors as
+they passed to beg for news of him. Once when they were noisy he
+clutched a pistol from the bedside table, and fired a shot through the
+canvas. “Oh! Oh!” cried the Pathans, “there is the general’s order.”
+Then they kept quiet. Only at the end, when his coffin was lowered into
+the earth, these men who had forsaken their hills to guard him, broke
+down and flung themselves upon the ground, sobbing like children.
+
+Far off in the hills the Nicholson fakirs--a tribe who had made him
+their only god--heard of his passing. Two chiefs killed themselves that
+they might serve him in another world; but the third chief spoke to the
+people: “Nickelseyn always said that he was a man like as we are, and
+that he worshiped a God whom he could not see, but who was always near
+us. Let us learn to worship Nickelseyn’s God.” So the tribe came down
+from their hills to the Christian teachers at Peshawur, and there were
+baptized.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+A. D. 1853
+
+THE GREAT FILIBUSTER
+
+
+William Walker, son of a Scotch banker, was born in Tennessee,
+cantankerous from the time he was whelped. He never swore or drank,
+or loved anybody, but was rigidly respectable and pure, believed in
+negro slavery, bristled with points of etiquette and formality, liked
+squabbling, had a nasty sharp tongue, and a taste for dueling. The
+little dry man was by turns a doctor, editor and lawyer, and when he
+wanted to do anything very outrageous, always began by taking counsel’s
+opinion. He wore a black tail-coat, and a black wisp of necktie even
+when in 1853 he landed an army of forty-five men to conquer Mexico.
+His followers were California gold miners dressed in blue shirts, duck
+trousers, long boots, bowie knives, revolvers and rifles. After he had
+taken the city of La Paz by assault, called an election and proclaimed
+himself president of Sonora, he was joined by two or three hundred more
+of the same breed from San Francisco. These did not think very much of
+a leader twenty-eight years old, standing five feet six, and weighing
+only nine stone four, so they merrily conspired to blow him up with
+gunpowder, and disperse with what plunder they could grab. Mr. Walker
+shot two, flogged a couple, disarmed the rest without showing any sign
+of emotion. He could awe the most truculent desperado into abject
+obedience with one glance of his cool gray eye, and never allowed his
+men to drink, play cards, or swear. “Our government,” he wrote, “has
+been formed upon a firm and sure basis.”
+
+The Mexicans and Indians thought otherwise, for while the new president
+of Sonora marched northward, they gathered in hosts and hung like
+wolves in the rear of the column, cutting off stragglers, who were
+slowly tortured to death. Twice they dared an actual attack, but
+Walker’s grim strategies, and the awful rifles of despairing men, cut
+them to pieces. So the march went on through hundreds of miles of
+blazing hot desert, where the filibusters dropped with thirst, and blew
+their own brains out rather than be captured. Only thirty-four men were
+left when they reached the United States boundary, the president of
+Sonora, in a boot and a shoe, his cabinet in rags, his army and navy
+bloody, with dried wounds, gaunt, starving, but too terrible for the
+Mexican forces to molest. The filibusters surrendered to the United
+States garrison as prisoners of war.
+
+Just a year later, with six of these veterans, and forty-eight other
+Californians, Walker landed on the coast of Nicaragua. This happy
+republic was blessed at the time with two rival presidents, and the one
+who got Walker’s help very soon had possession of the country. As hero
+of several brilliant engagements, Walker was made commander-in-chief,
+and at the next election chosen by the people themselves as president.
+He had now a thousand Americans in his following, and when the native
+statesmen and generals proved treacherous, they were promptly shot.
+Walker’s camp of wild desperadoes was like a Sunday-school, his
+government the cleanest ever known in Central America, and his dignity
+all prickles, hard to approach. He depended for existence on the
+services of Vanderbilt’s steamship lines, but seized their warehouse
+for cheating. He was surrounded by four hostile republics, Costa
+Rica, San Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, and insulted them all.
+He suspended diplomatic relations with the United States, demanded
+for his one schooner-of-war salutes from the British navy, and had no
+sense of humor whatsoever. Thousands of brave men died for this prim
+little lawyer, and tens of thousands fell by pestilence and battle in
+his wars, but with all his sweet unselfishness, his purity, and his
+valor, poor Walker was a prig. So the malcontents of Nicaragua, and the
+republics from Mexico to Peru, joined the steamship company, the United
+States and Great Britain to wipe out his hapless government.
+
+The armies of four republics were closing in on Walker’s capital, the
+city of Granada. He marched out to storm the allies perched on an
+impregnable volcano, and was carrying his last charge to a victorious
+issue, when news reached him that Zavala with eight hundred men had
+jumped on Granada. He forsook his victory and rushed for the capital
+city.
+
+There were only one hundred and fifty invalids and sick in the Granada
+garrison to man the church, armory and hospital against Zavala, but
+the women loaded rifles for the wounded and after twenty-two hours of
+ghastly carnage, the enemy were thrown out of the city. They fell back
+to lie in Walker’s path as he came to the rescue. Walker saw the trap,
+carried it with a charge, drove Zavala back into the city, broke him
+between two fires, then sent a detachment to intercept his flight. In
+this double battle, fighting eight times his own force, Walker killed
+half the allied army.
+
+But the pressure of several invasions at once was making it impossible
+for Walker to keep his communication open with the sea while he held
+his capital. Granada, the most beautiful of all Central American
+cities, must be abandoned, and, lest the enemy win the place, it must
+be destroyed. So Walker withdrew his sick men to an island in the big
+Lake Nicaragua; while Henningsen, an Englishman, his second in command,
+burned and abandoned the capital.
+
+But now, while the city burst into flames, and the smoke went up as
+from a volcano, the American garrison broke loose, rifled the liquor
+stores and lay drunk in the blazing streets, so the allied army swooped
+down, cutting off the retreat to the lake. Henningsen, veteran of the
+Carlist and Hungarian revolts, a knight errant of lost causes, took
+three weeks to fight his way three miles, before Walker could cover
+his embarkment on the lake. There had been four hundred men in the
+garrison, but only one hundred and fifty answered the roll-call in
+their refuge on the Isle of Omotepe. In the plaza of the capital city
+they had planted a spear, and on the spear hung a rawhide with this
+inscription:--
+
+“Here was Granada!”
+
+In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousand out of six
+thousand of the allies had perished; but even they were more fortunate
+than a Costa Rican army of invasion, which killed fifty of the
+filibusters, at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence.
+It always worked out that the killing of one filibuster cost on the
+average eight of his adversaries.
+
+Four months followed of confused fighting, in which the Americans
+slowly lost ground, until at last they were besieged in the town of
+Rivas, melting the church bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts
+of starvation. The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by two
+thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted to dislodge. His
+final charge was made with fifteen men into the heart of the town. No
+valor could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat began on
+Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to take Walker at a planter’s
+house by the wayside, and as he rode wearily at the head of his men
+they opened fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker reined
+in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the windows, then rode on
+quietly erect while the storm of lead raged about him, and saddle after
+saddle was emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted Rivas, but
+left six hundred men dead in the field, so terrific was the fire from
+the ramparts.
+
+It was in these days that a British naval officer came under flag of
+truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s surrender.
+
+“I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that you have come to
+apologize for the outrage offered to my flag, and to the commander of
+the Nicaraguan schooner-of-war _Granada_.”
+
+“If they had another schooner,” said the Englishman afterward, “I
+believe they would have declared war on Great Britain.”
+
+Then the United States navy treated with this peppery little lawyer,
+and on the first of May, 1857, he grudgingly consented to being rescued.
+
+During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker had enlisted three
+thousand five hundred Americans--and the proportion of wounds was one
+hundred and thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell. The
+allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers and ten thousand
+Indians--and lost fifteen thousand killed.
+
+Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred men to conquer
+Central America, in defiance of the British and United States
+squadrons, sent to catch him, and in the teeth of five armed republics.
+He was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans upon a sea
+beach in Honduras, and so perished, fearless to the end.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+A. D. 1857
+
+BUFFALO BILL
+
+
+The Mormons are a sect of Christians with some queer ideas, for they
+drink no liquor, hold all their property in common, stamp out any
+member who dares to think or work for himself, and believe that the
+more wives a man has the merrier he will be. The women, so far as I met
+them are like fat cows, the men a slovenly lot, and not too honest, but
+they are hard workers and first-rate pioneers.
+
+Because they made themselves unpopular they were persecuted, and fled
+from the United States into the desert beside the Great Salt Lake.
+There they got water from the mountain streams and made their land a
+garden. They only wanted to be left alone in peace, but that was a poor
+excuse for slaughtering emigrants. Murdering women and children is not
+in good taste.
+
+The government sent an army to attend to these saints, but the soldiers
+wanted food to eat, and the Mormons would not sell, so provisions had
+to be sent a thousand miles across the wilderness to save the starving
+troops. So we come to the herd of beef cattle which in May, 1857, was
+drifting from the Missouri River, and to the drovers’ camp beside the
+banks of the Platte.
+
+A party of red Indians on the war-path found that herd and camp; they
+scalped the herders on guard, stampeded the cattle and rushed the
+camp, so that the white men were driven to cover under the river bank.
+Keeping the Indians at bay with their rifles, the party marched for the
+settlements wading, sometimes swimming, while they pushed a raft that
+carried a wounded man. Always a rear guard kept the Indians from coming
+too near. And so the night fell.
+
+“I, being the youngest and smallest,” says one of them, “had fallen
+behind the others.... When I happened to look up to the moonlit sky,
+and saw the plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank.... I
+instantly aimed my gun at his head, and fired. The report rang out
+sharp and loud in the night air, and was immediately followed by an
+Indian whoop; and the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came
+tumbling into the river. I was not only overcome with astonishment, but
+was badly scared, as I could hardly realize what I had done.”
+
+Back came Frank McCarthy, the leader, with all his men. “Who fired that
+shot?”
+
+“I did.”
+
+“Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone-dead--too dead to
+skin!”
+
+At the age of nine Billy Cody had taken the war-path.
+
+In those days the army had no luck. When the government sent a herd
+of cattle the Indians got the beef, and the great big train of
+seventy-five wagons might just as well have been addressed to the
+Mormons, who burned the transport, stole the draft oxen and turned the
+teamsters, including little Billy, loose in the mountains, where they
+came nigh starving. The boy was too thin to cast a shadow when in the
+spring he set out homeward across the plains with two returning trains.
+
+One day these trains were fifteen miles apart when Simpson, the wagon
+boss, with George Woods, a teamster, and Billy Cody, set off riding
+mules from the rear outfit to catch up the teams in front. They were
+midway when a war party of Indians charged at full gallop, surrounding
+them, but Simpson shot the three mules and used their carcasses to make
+a triangular fort. The three whites, each with a rifle and a brace of
+revolvers were more than a match for men with bows and arrows, and the
+Indians lost so heavily that they retreated out of range. That gave
+the fort time to reload, but the Indians charged again, and this time
+Woods got an arrow in the shoulder. Once more the Indians retired to
+consult, while Simpson drew the arrow from Woods’ shoulder, plugging
+the hole with a quid of chewing tobacco. A third time the Indians
+charged, trying to ride down the stockade, but they lost a man and a
+horse. Four warriors had fallen now in this battle with two men and a
+little boy, but the Indians are a painstaking, persevering race, so
+they waited until nightfall and set the grass on fire. But the whites
+had been busy with knives scooping a hole from whence the loose earth
+made a breastwork over the dead mules, so that the flames could not
+reach them, and they had good cover to shoot from when the Indians
+charged through the smoke. After that both sides had a sleep, and at
+dawn they were fresh for a grand charge, handsomely repulsed. The
+redskins sat down in a ring to starve the white men out, and great was
+their disappointment when Simpson’s rear train of wagons marched to the
+rescue. The red men did not stay to pick flowers.
+
+It seems like lying to state that at the age of twelve Billy Cody began
+to take rank among the world’s great horsemen, and yet he rode on the
+pony express, which closed in 1861, his fourteenth year.
+
+The trail from the Missouri over the plains, the deserts and the
+mountains into California was about two thousand miles through a
+country infested with gangs of professional robbers and hostile Indian
+tribes. The gait of the riders averaged twelve miles an hour, which
+means a gallop, to allow for the slow work in mountain passes. There
+were one hundred ninety stations at which the riders changed ponies
+without breaking their run, and each must be fit and able for one
+hundred miles a day in time of need. Pony Bob afterward had contracts
+by which he rode one hundred miles a day for a year.
+
+Now, none of the famous riders of history, like Charles XII, of Sweden;
+Dick, King of Natal, or Dick Turpin, of England, made records to beat
+the men of the pony express, and in that service Billy was counted a
+hero. He is outclassed by the Cossack Lieutenant Peschkov, who rode one
+pony at twenty-eight miles a day the length of the Russian empire, from
+Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, and by Kit Carson who with one horse
+rode six hundred miles in six days. There are branches of horsemanship,
+too, in which he would have been proud to take lessons from Lord
+Lonsdale, or Evelyn French, but Cody is, as far as I have seen, of all
+white men incomparable for grace, for beauty of movement, among the
+horsemen of the modern world.
+
+But to turn back to the days of the boy rider.
+
+“One day,” he writes, “when I galloped into my home station I found
+that the rider who was expected to take the trip out on my arrival had
+gotten into a drunken row the night before, and had been killed.... I
+pushed on ... entering every relay station on time, and accomplished
+the round trip of three hundred twenty-two miles back to Red Buttes
+without a single mishap, and on time. This stands on the record as
+being the longest pony express journey ever made.”
+
+One of the station agents has a story to tell of this ride, made
+without sleep, and with halts of only a few minutes for meals. News had
+leaked out of a large sum of money to be shipped by the express, and
+Cody, expecting robbers, rolled the treasure in his saddle blanket,
+filling the official pouches with rubbish. At the best place for an
+ambush two men stepped out on to the trail, halting him with their
+muskets. As he explained, the pouches were full of rubbish, but the
+road agents knew better. “Mark my words,” he said as he unstrapped,
+“you’ll hang for this.”
+
+“We’ll take chances on that, Bill.”
+
+“If you will have them, take them!” With that he hurled the pouches,
+and as robber number one turned to pick them up, robber number two had
+his gun-arm shattered with the boy’s revolver-shot. Then with a yell he
+rode down the stooping man, and spurring hard, got out of range unhurt.
+He had saved the treasure, and afterward both robbers were hanged by
+vigilantes.
+
+Once far down a valley ahead Cody saw a dark object above a boulder
+directly on his trail, and when it disappeared he knew he was caught
+in an ambush. Just as he came into range he swerved wide to the right,
+and at once a rifle smoked from behind the rock. Two Indians afoot
+ran for their ponies while a dozen mounted warriors broke from the
+timbered edge of the valley, racing to cut him off. One of these had a
+war bonnet of eagle plumes, the badge of a chief, and his horse, being
+the swiftest, drew ahead. All the Indians were firing, but the chief
+raced Cody to head him off at a narrow pass of the valley. The boy was
+slightly ahead, and when the chief saw that the white rider would have
+about thirty yards to spare he fitted an arrow, drawing for the shot.
+But Cody, swinging round in the saddle, lashed out his revolver, and
+the chief, clutching at the air, fell, rolling over like a ball as he
+struck the ground. At the chief’s death-cry a shower of arrows from the
+rear whizzed round the boy, one slightly wounding his pony who, spurred
+by the pain, galloped clear, leaving the Indians astern in a ten mile
+race to the next relay.
+
+After what seems to the reader a long life of adventure, Mr. Cody had
+just reached the age of twenty-two when a series of wars broke out
+with the Indian tribes, and he was attached to the troops as a scout.
+A number of Pawnee Indians who thought nothing of this white man,
+were also serving. They were better trackers, better interpreters and
+thought themselves better hunters. One day a party of twenty had been
+running buffalo, and made a bag of thirty-two head when Cody got leave
+to attack a herd by himself. Mounted on his famous pony Buckskin Joe
+he made a bag of thirty-six head on a half-mile run, and his name was
+Buffalo Bill from that time onward.
+
+That summer he led a squadron of cavalry that attacked six hundred
+Sioux, and in that fight against overwhelming odds he brought down a
+chief at a range of four hundred yards, in those days a very long shot.
+His victim proved to be Tall Bull, one of the great war leaders of
+the Sioux. The widow of Tall Bull was proud that her husband had been
+killed by so famous a warrior as Prairie Chief, for that was Cody’s
+name among the Indians.
+
+There is one very nice story about the Pawnee scouts. A new general had
+taken command who must have all sorts of etiquette proper to soldiers.
+It was all very well for the white sentries to call at intervals of the
+night from post to post: “Post Number One, nine o’clock, all’s well!”
+“Post Number Two, etc.”
+
+But when the Pawnee sentries called, “Go to hell, I don’t care!” well,
+the practise had to be stopped.
+
+Of Buffalo Bill’s adventures in these wars the plain record would only
+take one large volume, but he was scouting in company with Texas Jack,
+John Nelson, Belden, the White Chief, and so many other famous frontier
+heroes, each needing at least one book volume, that I must give the
+story up as a bad job. At the end of the Sioux campaign Buffalo Bill
+was chief of scouts with the rank of colonel.
+
+[Illustration: COLONEL CODY
+
+(“Buffalo Bill”)]
+
+In 1876, General Custer, with a force of nearly four hundred cavalry,
+perished in an attack on the Sioux, and the only survivor was his
+pet boy scout, Billy Jackson, who got away at night disguised as an
+Indian. Long afterward Billy, who was one of God’s own gentlemen,
+told me that story while we sat on a grassy hillside watching a great
+festival of the Blackfeet nation.
+
+After the battle in which Custer--the Sun Child--fell, the big Sioux
+army scattered, but a section of it was rounded up by a force under the
+guidance of Buffalo Bill.
+
+“One of the Indians,” he says, “who was handsomely decorated with all
+the ornaments usually worn by a war chief ... sang out to me ‘I know
+you, Prairie Chief; if you want to fight come ahead and fight me!’
+
+“The chief was riding his horse back and forth in front of his men, as
+if to banter me, and I accepted the challenge. I galloped toward him
+for fifty yards and he advanced toward me about the same distance, both
+of us riding at full speed, and then when we were only about thirty
+yards apart I raised my rifle and fired. His horse fell to the ground,
+having been killed by my bullet. Almost at the same instant my horse
+went down, having stepped in a gopher-hole. The fall did not hurt me
+much, and I instantly sprang to my feet. The Indian had also recovered
+himself, and we were now both on foot, and not more than twenty paces
+apart. We fired at each other simultaneously. My usual luck did not
+desert me on this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine struck
+him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched
+the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged
+weapon to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war-bonnet off, I
+scientifically scalped him in about five seconds....
+
+“The Indians came charging down upon me from a hill in hopes of
+cutting me off. General Merritt ... ordered ... Company K to hurry
+to my rescue. The order came none too soon.... As the soldiers came
+up I swung the Indian chieftain’s topknot and bonnet in the air, and
+shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer!’”
+
+Far up to the northward, Sitting Bull, with the war chief Spotted Tail
+and about three thousand warriors fled from the scene of the Custer
+massacre. And as they traveled on the lonely plains they came to a
+little fort with the gates closed. “Open your gates and hand out your
+grub,” said the Indians.
+
+“Come and get the grub,” answered the fort.
+
+So the gates were thrown open and the three thousand warriors stormed
+in to loot the fort. They found only two white men standing outside a
+door, but all round the square the log buildings were loopholed and
+from every hole stuck out the muzzle of a rifle. The Indians were
+caught in such a deadly trap that they ran for their lives back to camp.
+
+Very soon news reached the Blackfeet that their enemies the Sioux were
+camped by the new fort at Wood Mountain, so the whole nation marched to
+wipe them out, and Sitting Bull appealed for help to the white men. “Be
+good,” said the fort, “and nobody shall hurt you.”
+
+So the hostile armies camped on either side, and the thirty white men
+kept the peace between them. One day the Sioux complained that the
+Blackfeet had stolen fifty horses. So six of the white men were sent
+to the Blackfoot herd to bring the horses back. They did not know which
+horses to select so they drove off one hundred fifty for good measure
+straight at a gallop through the Blackfoot camp, closely pursued by
+that indignant nation. Barely in time they ran the stock within the
+fort, and slammed the gates home in the face of the raging Blackfeet.
+They were delighted with themselves until the officer commanding fined
+them a month’s pay each for insulting the Blackfoot nation.
+
+The winter came, the spring and then the summer, when those thirty
+white men arrived at the Canada-United States boundary where they
+handed over three thousand Sioux prisoners to the American troops. From
+that time the redcoats of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada
+have been respected on the frontier.
+
+And now came a very wonderful adventure. Sitting Bull, the leader
+of the Sioux nation who had defeated General Custer’s division and
+surrendered his army to thirty Canadian soldiers, went to Europe to
+take part in a circus personally conducted by the chief of scouts of
+the United States Army, Buffalo Bill. Poor Sitting Bull was afterward
+murdered by United States troops in the piteous massacre of Wounded
+Knee. Buffalo Bill for twenty-six years paraded Europe and America
+with his gorgeous Wild West show, slowly earning the wealth which he
+lavished in the founding of Cody City, Wyoming.
+
+Toward the end of these tours I used to frequent the show camp much
+like a stray dog expecting to be kicked, would spend hours swapping
+lies with the cowboys in the old Deadwood Coach, or sit at meat with
+the colonel and his six hundred followers. On the last tour the old man
+was thrown by a bad horse at Bristol and afterward rode with two broken
+bones in splints. Only the cowboys knew, who told me, as day by day I
+watched him back his horse from the ring with all the old incomparable
+grace.
+
+He went back to build a million dollar irrigation ditch for his little
+city on the frontier, and shortly afterward the newspapers reported
+that my friends--the Buffalo Creek Gang of robbers--attacked his bank,
+and shot the cashier. May civilization never shut out the free air of
+the frontier while the old hero lives, in peace and honor, loved to the
+end and worshiped by all real frontiersmen.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+A. D. 1860
+
+THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT
+
+
+I
+
+When the Eternal Father was making the earth, at one time He filled the
+sea with swimming dragons, the air with flying dragons, and the land
+with hopping dragons big as elephants; but they were not a success, and
+so He swept them all away. After that he filled the southern continents
+with a small improved hopping dragon, that laid no eggs, but carried
+the baby in a pouch. There were queer half-invented fish, shadeless
+trees, and furry running birds like the emu and the moa. Then He
+swamped that southern world under the sea, and moved the workshop to
+our northern continents. But He left New Zealand and Australia just as
+they were, a scrap of the half-finished world with furry running birds,
+the hopping kangaroo, the shadeless trees, and half-invented fish.
+
+So when the English went to Australia it was not an ordinary voyage,
+but a journey backward through the ages, through goodness only knows
+how many millions of years to the fifth day of creation. It was like
+visiting the moon or Mars. To live and travel in such a strange land a
+man must be native born, bush raised, and cunning at that, on pain of
+death by famine.
+
+The first British settlers, too, were convicts. The laws were so bad in
+England that a fellow might be deported merely for giving cheek to a
+judge; and the convicts on the whole were very decent people, brutally
+treated in the penal settlements. They used to escape to the bush,
+and runaway convicts explored Australia mainly in search of food. One
+of them, in Tasmania, used, whenever he escaped, to take a party with
+him and eat them one by one, until he ran short of food and had to
+surrender.
+
+Later on gold was discovered, and free settlers drifted in, filling the
+country, but the miners and the farmers were too busy earning a living
+to do much exploration. So the exploring fell to English gentlemen,
+brave men, but hopeless tenderfeet, who knew nothing of bushcraft and
+generally died of hunger or thirst in districts where the native-born
+colonial grows rich to-day.
+
+Edgar John Eyre, for instance, a Yorkshireman, landed in Sydney at the
+age of sixteen, and at twenty-five was a rich sheep-farmer, appointed
+by government protector of the black fellows. In 1840 the colonists
+of South Australia wanted a trail for drifting sheep into Western
+Australia, and young Eyre, from what he had learned among the savages,
+said the scheme was all bosh, in which he was perfectly right. He
+thought that the best line for exploring was northward, and set out
+to prove his words, but got tangled up in the salt bogs surrounding
+Torrens, and very nearly lost his whole party in an attempt to wade
+across. After that failure he felt that he had wasted the money
+subscribed in a wildcat project, so to make good set out again to find
+a route for sheep along the waterless south coast of the continent. He
+knew the route was impossible, but it is a poor sort of courage that
+has to feed on hope, and the men worth having are those who leave their
+hopes behind to march light while they do their duty.
+
+Eyre’s party consisted of himself and his ranch foreman Baxter, a
+favorite black boy Wylie, who was his servant, and two other natives
+who had been on the northward trip. They had nine horses, a pony, six
+sheep, and nine weeks’ rations on the pack animals.
+
+The first really dry stage was one hundred twenty-eight miles without
+a drop of water, and it was not the black fellows, but Eyre, the
+tenderfoot, who went ahead and found the well that saved them. The
+animals died off one by one, so that the stores had to be left behind,
+and there was no food but rotten horse-flesh which caused dysentery, no
+water save dew collected with a sponge from the bushes after the cold
+nights. The two black fellows deserted, but after three days came back
+penitent and starving, thankful to be reinstated.
+
+These black fellows did not believe the trip was possible, they wanted
+to go home, they thought the expedition well worth plundering, and so
+one morning while Eyre was rounding up the horses they shot Baxter,
+plundered the camp and bolted. Only Eyre and his boy Wylie were left,
+but if they lived the deserters might be punished. So the two black
+fellows, armed with Baxter’s gun, tried to hunt down Eyre and his boy
+with a view to murder. They came so near at night that Eyre once heard
+them shout to Wylie to desert. Eyre and the boy stole off, marching so
+rapidly that the murderers were left behind and perished.
+
+A week later, still following the coast of the Great Bight, Wylie
+discovered a French ship lying at anchor, and the English skipper fed
+the explorers for a fortnight until they were well enough to go on.
+Twenty-three more days of terrible suffering brought Eyre and his boy,
+looking like a brace of scarecrows, to a hilltop overlooking the town
+of Albany. They had reached Western Australia, the first travelers to
+cross from the eastern to the western colonies.
+
+In after years Eyre was governor of Jamaica.
+
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.”
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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_.”
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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!”
+
+[Illustration: 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Notes
+
+
+Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
+predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
+were not changed.
+
+Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
+marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
+unbalanced.
+
+Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and
+outside quotations.
+
+The pages in the introductory chapter “Adventurers” were not numbered.
+Transcriber did so with Roman numbers.
+
+Page 210: “the overload Joy” may be a misprint for “the overloaded Joy”.
+
+
+
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-<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE ***</div>

-

-<div class="transnote section">

-<p class="center larger">Transcriber’s Note</p>

-

-<p>Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them

-and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or

-stretching them.</p>

-

-<p><a href="#Transcribers_Notes">Additional notes</a> will be found near the end of this ebook.</p>

-<div>                                                                                                                                                                                                                           </div>

-</div>

-

-<div class="section">

-<h1>CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE</h1>

-<div>                                                                                                                                                                                                                           </div>

-</div>

-

-<div class="section">

-<figure id="i_1" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_001.jpg" width="1462" height="2185" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Napoleon Bonaparte</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-<div>                                                                                                                                                                                                                           </div>

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter section p2 center wspace">

-<p class="xxlarge">

-CAPTAINS<br>

-OF ADVENTURE</p>

-

-<p class="p2 vspace"><i>By</i><br>

-<span class="larger gesperrt">ROGER POCOCK</span></p>

-

-<p class="p1 smaller"><i>Author of</i><br>

-A Man in the Open, etc.</p>

-

-<p class="p2 smaller">ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS</p>

-

-<p class="p2 larger">INDIANAPOLIS<br>

-THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY<br>

-PUBLISHERS</p>

-</div>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter section center vspace">

-<p class="smaller">

-<span class="smcap">Copyright 1913</span><br>

-<span class="smcap">The Bobbs-Merrill Company</span></p>

-

-<p class="p4 xsmall">PRESS OF<br>

-BRAUNWORTH &amp; CO.<br>

-BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS<br>

-BROOKLYN, N. Y.

-</p>

-<div>                                                                                                                                                                                                                           </div>

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_i">i</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="ADVENTURERS">ADVENTURERS</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p>What is an adventurer? One who has adventures?

-Surely not. A person charged by a wild rhinoceros

-is having an adventure, yet however wild the animal,

-however wild the person, he is only somebody wishing

-himself at home, not an adventurer. In dictionaries

-the adventurer is “one who seeks his fortune

-in new and hazardous or perilous enterprises.” But

-outside the pages of a dictionary, the man who seeks

-his fortune, who really cares for money and his own

-advantage, sits at some desk deriding the fools who

-take thousand-to-one chances in a gamble with Death.

-Did the patron saint of adventurers, Saint Paul, or did

-Saint Louis, or Francis Drake, or Livingstone, or Gordon

-seek their own fortune, think you? In real life the

-adventurer is one who seeks, not his fortune, but the

-new and hazardous or perilous enterprises. There

-are holy saints and scoundrels among adventurers,

-but all the thousands I have known were fools of the

-romantic temperament, dealing with life as an artist

-does with canvas, to color it with fierce and vivid

-feeling, deep shade and radiant light, exulting in the

-passions of the sea, the terrors of the wilderness, the

-splendors of sunshine and starlight, the exaltation

-of battle, fire and hurricane.</p>

-

-<p>All nations have bred great adventurers, but the

-living nation remembers them sending the boys out<span class="pagenum" id="Page_ii">ii</span>

-into the world enriched with memories of valor, a

-heritage of national honor, an inspiration to ennoble

-their manhood. That is the only real wealth of men

-and of peoples. For such purposes this book is

-written, but so vast is the theme that this volume

-would outgrow all reasonable size unless we set some

-limit. A man in the regular standing forces of his

-native state is not dubbed adventurer. When, for

-example, the immortal heroes Tromp and De Ruyter

-fought the British generals at sea, Blake and Monk,

-they were no more adventurers than are the police

-constables who guard our homes at night. Were

-Clive and Warren Hastings adventurers? They

-would turn in their graves if one brought such a

-charge. The true type of adventurer is the lone-hand

-pioneer.</p>

-

-<p>It is not from any bias of mine that the worthies

-of Switzerland, the Teutonic empires and Russia,

-are shut out of this poor little record; but because it

-seems that the lone-hand oversea and overland

-pioneers come mainly from nations directly fronting

-upon the open sea. As far as I am prejudiced, it is

-in favor of old Norway, whose heroes have entranced

-me with the sheer glory of their perfect manhood.

-For the rest, our own English-speaking folk

-are easier for us to understand than any foreigners.</p>

-

-<p>As to the manner of record, we must follow the

-stream of history if we would shoot the rapids of

-adventure.</p>

-

-<p>Now as to the point of view: My literary pretensions

-are small and humble, but I claim the right

-of an adventurer, trained in thirty-three trades of the

-Lost Region, to absolute freedom of speech concerning<span class="pagenum" id="Page_iii">iii</span>

-frontiersmen. Let history bow down before

-Columbus, but as a foremast seaman, I hold he was

-not fit to command a ship. Let history ignore Captain

-John Smith, but as an ex-trooper, I worship

-him for a leader, the paladin of Anglo-Saxon

-chivalry, and very father of the United States.

-Literature admires the well advertised Stanley, but

-we frontiersmen prefer Commander Cameron, who

-walked across Africa without blaming others for his

-own defects, or losing his temper, or shedding needless

-blood. All the celebrities may go hang, but when

-we take the field, send us leaders like Patrick

-Forbes, who conquered Rhodesia without journalists

-in attendance to write puffs, or any actual deluge of

-public gratitude.</p>

-

-<p>The historic and literary points of view are widely

-different from that of our dusty rankers.</p>

-

-<p>When the Dutchmen were fighting Spain, they invented

-and built the first iron-clad war-ship—all

-honor to their seamanship for that! But when the

-winter came, a Spanish cavalry charge across the ice

-captured the ship—and there was fine adventure.

-Both sides had practical men.</p>

-

-<p>In the same wars, a Spanish man-at-arms in the

-plundering of a city, took more gold than he could

-carry, so he had the metal beaten into a suit of

-armor, and painted black to hide its worth from

-thieves. From a literary standpoint, that was all

-very fine, but from our adventurer point of view, the

-man was a fool for wearing armor useless for defense,

-and so heavy he could not run. He was

-killed, and a good riddance.</p>

-

-<p>We value most the man who knows his business,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_iv">iv</span>

-and the more practical the adventurer, the fewer his

-misadventures.</p>

-

-<p>From that point of view, the book is attempted with

-all earnestness; and if the results appear bizarre, let

-the shocked reader turn to better written works,

-mention of which is made in notes.</p>

-

-<p>As to the truthfulness of adventurers, perhaps we

-are all more or less truthful when we try to be good.

-But there are two kinds of adventurers who need

-sharply watching. The worst is F.&nbsp;C. Selous. Once

-he lectured to amuse the children at the Foundling

-Hospital, and when he came to single combats with

-a wounded lion, or a mad elephant he was forced to

-mention himself as one of the persons present. He

-blushed. Then he would race through a hair-lifting

-story of the fight, and in an apologetic manner, give

-all the praise to the elephant, or the lion lately deceased.

-Surely nobody could suspect him of any

-merit, yet all the children saw through him for a

-transparent fraud, and even we grown-ups felt the

-better for meeting so grand a gentleman.</p>

-

-<p>The other sort of liar, who does not understate his

-own merits, is Jim Beckwourth. He told his story,

-quite truthfully at first, to a journalist who took it

-down in shorthand. But when the man gaped with

-admiration at the merest trifles, Jim was on his

-mettle, testing this person’s powers of belief, which

-were absolutely boundless. After that, of course he

-hit the high places, striking the facts about once in

-twenty-four hours, and as one reads the book, one

-can catch the thud whenever he hit the truth.</p>

-

-<p>Let no man dream that adventure is a thing of the

-past or that adventurers are growing scarce. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">v</span>

-only difficulty of this book was to squeeze the past in

-order to make-space for living men worthy as their

-forerunners. The list is enormous, and I only dared

-to estimate such men of our own time as I have

-known by correspondence, acquaintance, friendship,

-enmity, or by serving under their leadership. Here

-again, I could only speak safely in cases where there

-were records, as with Lord Strathcona, Colonel S.

-B. Steele, Colonel Cody, Major Forbes, Captain

-Grogan, Captain Amundsen, Captain Hansen, Mr.

-John Boyes. Left out, among Americans, are M.

-H. de Hora who, in a Chilian campaign, with only a

-boat’s crew, cut out the battle-ship <i>Huascar</i>, plundered

-a British tramp of her bunker coal, and fought H.

-M.&nbsp;S. <i>Shah</i> on the high seas. Another American, Doctor

-Bodkin, was for some years prime minister of

-Makualand, an Arab sultanate. Among British adventurers,

-Caid Belton, is one of four successive

-British commanders-in-chief to the Moorish sultans.

-Colonel Tompkins was commander-in-chief to

-Johore. C.&nbsp;W. Mason was captured with a shipload

-of arms in an attempt to make himself emperor of

-China. Charles Rose rode from Mazatlan in Mexico

-to Corrientes in Paraguay. A.&nbsp;W.&nbsp;V. Crawley, a

-chief of scouts to Lord Roberts in South Africa,

-rode out of action after being seven times shot, and

-he rides now a little askew in consequence.</p>

-

-<p>To sum up, if one circle of acquaintances includes

-such a group to-day, the adventurer is not quite an

-extinct species, and indeed, we seem not at the end,

-but at the beginning of the greatest of all adventurous

-eras, that of the adventurers of the air.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">vii</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>

-</div>

-

-<table id="toc">

-<tr class="small">

-  <td class="tdr">Chapter  </td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="tdr">Page</td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">I</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Vikings in America</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#I">1</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">II</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Crusaders</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#II">7</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">III</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Middle Ages in Asia</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#III">18</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">IV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Marvelous Adventures of Sir John Maundeville</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#IV">25</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">V</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Columbus</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#V">32</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">VI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Conquest of Mexico</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#VI">37</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">VII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Conquest of Peru</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#VII">44</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">VIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Corsairs</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#VIII">50</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">IX</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Portugal in the Indies</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#IX">55</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">X</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Rajah Brooke</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#X">62</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Spies</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XI">69</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A Year’s Adventures</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XII">81</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Kit Carson</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XIII">88</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XIV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Man Who Was a God</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XIV">100</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Great Filibuster</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XV">106</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XVI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Buffalo Bill</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XVI">112</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XVII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Australian Desert</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XVII">123</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XVIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Hero-Statesman</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XVIII">131</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XIX</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Special Correspondent</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XIX">138</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XX</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Lord Strathcona</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XX">142</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Sea Hunters</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXI">148</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Bushrangers</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXII">156</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Passing of the Bison</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXIII">162</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXIV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Gordon</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXIV">173</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Outlaw</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXV">179</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXVI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A King at Twenty-Five</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXVI">186</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXVII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Journey of Ewart Grogan</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXVII">194</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXVIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Cowboy President</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXVIII">202</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXIX</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Northwest Passage</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXIX">208</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXX</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">John Hawkins</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXX">215</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXXI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Francis Drake</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXI">219</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXXII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Four Armadas</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXII">223</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXXIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Sir Humphrey Gilbert</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXIII">231</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXXIV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Sir Walter Raleigh</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXIV">234</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">viii</span></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXXV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Captain John Smith</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXV">237</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXXVI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Buccaneers</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXVI">246</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXXVII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Voyageurs</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXVII">252</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXXVIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Explorers</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXVIII">260</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XXXIX</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Pirates</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXIX">266</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XL</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Daniel Boone</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XL">272</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XLI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Andrew Jackson</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLI">280</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XLII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Sam Houston</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLII">282</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XLIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Davy Crockett</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLIII">285</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XLIV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Alexander Mackenzie</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLIV">292</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XLV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The White Man’s Coming</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLV">298</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XLVI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Beaver</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLVI">302</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XLVII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Conquest of the Poles</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLVII">307</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XLVIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Women</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLVIII">315</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">XLIX</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Conquerors of India</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLIX">321</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">L</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Man Who Shot Lord Nelson</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#L">327</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">LI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Fall of Napoleon</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LI">333</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">LII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Rising Wolf</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LII">340</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">LIII</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Simon Bolivar</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LIII">350</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">LIV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Almirante Cochrane</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LIV">357</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">LV</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The South Sea Cannibals</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LV">363</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdr top">LVI</td>

-  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A Tale of Vengeance</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LVI">371</a></td>

-</tr>

-</table>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">1</span></p>

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CAPTAINS_OF_ADVENTURE">CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE</h2>

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="CAPTAINS"><span class="larger">CAPTAINS<br>

-OF ADVENTURE</span></h2>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="I">I<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A. D. 984

-

-<span class="subhead">THE VIKINGS IN AMERICA</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap a"><span class="smcap1">A reverent</span> study of heroes in novels, also in

-operas and melodramas, where one may see

-them for half-a-crown, has convinced me that they

-must be very trying to live with. They get on

-people’s nerves. Hence the villains.</p>

-

-<p>Now Harold of the Fair Hair was a hero, and he

-fell in love with a lady, but she would not marry him

-unless he made himself king of Norway. So he

-made himself the first king of all Norway, and she

-had to marry him, which served her right.</p>

-

-<p>But then there were the gentlemen of his majesty’s

-opposition who did not want him to be king, who felt

-that there was altogether too much Harold in Norway.

-They left, and went to Iceland to get away from the

-hero.</p>

-

-<p>Iceland had been shown on the map since the year

-A.&nbsp;D. 115, and when the vikings arrived they found

-a colony of Irish monks who said they had come<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">2</span>

-there “because they desired for the love of God to

-be in a state of pilgrimage, they recked not where.”</p>

-

-<p>Perhaps the vikings sent them to Heaven. Later

-on it seems they found a little Irish settlement on

-the New England coast, and heard of great Ireland,

-a colony farther south. That is the first rumor we

-have about America.</p>

-

-<p>The Norsemen settled down, pagans in Christian

-Iceland. They earned a living with fish and cattle,

-and made an honest penny raiding the Mediterranean.

-They had internecine sports of their own, and on the

-whole were reasonably happy. Then in course of

-trade Captain Gunbjorn sighted an unknown land two

-hundred fifty miles to the westward. That made the

-Icelanders restless, for there is always something

-which calls to Northern blood from beyond the sea

-line.</p>

-

-<p>Most restless of all was Red Eric, hysterical because

-he hated a humdrum respectable life; indeed,

-he committed so many murders that he had to be

-deported as a public nuisance. He set off exultant

-to find Gunbjorn’s unknown land. So any natural

-born adventurer commits little errors of taste unless

-he can find an outlet. It is too much dog-chain

-that makes biting dogs.</p>

-

-<p>When he found the new land it was all green, with

-swaths of wild flowers. I know that land and its

-bright lowlands, backed by sheer walled mountains,

-with splintered pinnacles robed in the splendors of

-the inland ice. The trees were knee high, no crops

-could possibly ripen, but Eric was so pleased that

-after two winters he went back to Iceland advertising

-for settlers to fill his colony. Greenland<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">3</span>

-he called the place, because “Many will go there if

-the place has a fair name.” They did, and when the

-sea had wiped out most of the twenty-five ships, the

-surviving colonists found Greenland commodious and

-residential as the heart could wish.</p>

-

-<p>They were not long gone from the port of Skalholt

-when young Captain Bjarni came in from the

-sea and asked for his father. But father Heljulf

-had sailed for Greenland, so the youngster set off in

-pursuit although nobody knew the way. Bjarni always

-spent alternate yuletides at his father’s hearth,

-so if the hearth-stone moved he had to find it somehow.

-These vikings are so human and natural that

-one can follow their thought quite easily. When,

-for instance, Bjarni, instead of coming to Greenland,

-found a low, well timbered country, he knew

-he had made a mistake, so it was no use landing.

-Rediscovering the American mainland was a habit

-which persisted until the time of Columbus, and not

-a feat to make a fuss about. A northerly course and

-a pure stroke of luck carried Bjarni to Greenland

-and his father’s house.</p>

-

-<p>Because they had no timber, and driftwood was

-scarce, the colonists were much excited when they

-heard of forests, and cursed Bjarni for not having

-landed. Anyway, here was a fine excuse for an expedition

-in search of fire-wood, so Leif, the son of

-Red Eric, bought Bjarni’s ship. Being tall and of

-commanding presence he rallied thirty-five of a crew,

-and, being young, expected that his father would take

-command. Eric indeed rode a distance of four hundred

-feet from his house against the rock, which was

-called Brattelid, to the shore of the inlet, but his pony<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">4</span>

-fell and threw him, such a bad omen that he rode

-home again. Leif Ericsen, therefore, with winged

-helmet and glittering breastplate, mounted the steerboard,

-laid hands on the steer-oar and bade his men

-shove off. The colonists on rugged dun ponies lined

-the shore to cheer the adventurers, and the ladies

-waved their kerchiefs from the rock behind the house

-while the dragon ship, shield-lines ablaze in the sun,

-oars thrashing blue water, and painted square-sail

-set, took the fair wind on that famous voyage.

-She discovered Stoneland, which is the Newfoundland-Labrador

-coast, and Woodland, which is Nova

-Scotia. Then came the Further Strand, the long

-and wonderful beaches of Massachusetts, and beyond

-was Narragansett Bay, where they built winter

-houses, pastured their cattle, and found wild

-grapes. It was here that Tyrkir, the little old German

-man slave who was Leif’s nurse, made wine and

-got most gorgeously drunk. On the homeward passage

-Leif brought timber and raisins to Greenland.</p>

-

-<p>Leif went away to Norway, where as a guest of

-King Olaf he became a Christian, and in his absence

-his brother Thorwald made the second voyage to

-what is now New England. After wintering at

-Leif’s house in Wineland the Good he went southward

-and, somewhere near the site of New York,

-met with savages. Nine of them lay under three upturned

-canoes on the beach, so the vikings killed

-eight just for fun, but were fools, letting the ninth

-escape to raise the tribes for war. So there was a

-battle, and Thorwald the Helpless was shot in the

-eye, which served him right. One of his brothers

-came afterward in search of the body, which may<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">5</span>

-have been that same seated skeleton in bronze armor

-that nine hundred years later was dug up at Cross

-Point.</p>

-

-<p>Two or three years after Thorwald’s death his

-widow married a visitor from Norway, Eric’s guest

-at Brattelid, the rich Thorfin Karlsefne. He also set

-out for Vinland, taking Mrs. Karlsefne and four

-other women, also a Scottish lad and lass (very

-savage) and an Irishman, besides a crew of sixty and

-some cattle. They built a fort where the natives

-came trading skins for strips of red cloth, or to

-fight a battle, or to be chased, shrieking with fright,

-by Thorfin’s big red bull. There Mrs. Karlsefne

-gave birth to Snorri the Firstborn, whose sons Thorlak

-and Brand became priests and were the first two

-bishops of Greenland.</p>

-

-<p>After Karlsefne’s return to Greenland the next

-voyage was made by one of Eric’s daughters; and

-presently Leif the Fortunate came home from Norway

-to his father’s house, bringing a priest. Then

-Mrs. Leif built a church at Brattelid, old Eric the

-Red being thoroughly disgusted, and Greenland and

-Vinland became Christian, but Eric never.</p>

-

-<p>As long as Norway traded with her American

-colonies Vinland exported timber and dried fruit,

-while Greenland sent sheepskins, ox hides, sealskins,

-walrus-skin rope and tusks to Iceland and Europe.

-In return they got iron and settlers. But then began

-a series of disasters, for when the Black Death

-swept Europe, the colonies were left to their fate,

-and some of the colonists in despair renounced their

-faith to turn Eskimo. In 1349 the last timber ship

-from Nova Scotia was lately returned to Europe<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">6</span>

-when the plague struck Norway. There is a gap of

-fifty-two years in the record, and all we know of

-Greenland is that the western villages were destroyed

-by Eskimos who killed eighteen Norsemen and carried

-off the boys. Then the plague destroyed two-thirds

-of the people in Iceland, a bad winter killed nine tenths

-of all their cattle, and what remained of the

-hapless colony was ravaged by English fishermen.

-No longer could Iceland send any help to Greenland,

-but still there was intercourse because we know that

-seven years later the vicar of Garde married a girl

-in the east villages to a young Icelander.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile, in plague-stricken England, Bristol,

-our biggest seaport, had not enough men living even

-to bury the dead, and labor was so scarce that the

-crops rotted for lack of harvesters. That is why an

-English squadron raided Iceland, Greenland, perhaps

-even Vinland, for slaves, and the people were carried

-away into captivity. Afterward England paid compensation

-to Denmark and returned the folk to their

-homes, but in 1448 the pope wrote to a Norse

-bishop concerning their piteous condition. And

-there the story ends, for in that year the German

-merchants at Bergen in Norway squabbled with the

-forty master mariners of the American trade. The

-sailors had boycotted their Hanseatic League, so the

-Germans asked them to dinner, and murdered them.

-From that time no man knew the way to lost America.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">7</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="II">II<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1248

-

-<span class="subhead">THE CRUSADERS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">In</span> the seventh century of the reign of Our Lord

-Christ, arose the Prophet Mahomet. To his followers

-he generously gave Heaven, and as much of

-the earth as they could get, so the true believers

-made haste to occupy goodly and fruitful possessions

-of Christian powers, including the Holy Land. The

-owners were useful as slaves.</p>

-

-<p>Not having been consulted in this matter, the

-Christians took offense, making war upon Islam in

-seven warm campaigns, wherein they held and lost by

-turns the holy sepulcher, so that the country where

-our Lord taught peace, was always drenched with

-blood. In the end, our crusades were not a success.</p>

-

-<p>About Saint Louis and the sixth crusade:</p>

-

-<p>At the opening of the story, that holy but delightful

-king of France lay so near death that his two lady

-nurses had a squabble, the one pulling a cloth over

-his face because he was dead, while the other snatched

-it away because he was still alive. At last he sent

-the pair of them to fetch the cross, on which he

-vowed to deliver the Holy Land. Then he had to

-get well, so he did, sending word to his barons to roll

-up their men for war.</p>

-

-<p>Among the nobles was the young Lord of Joinville,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">8</span>

-seneschal of Champagne—a merry little man with

-eight hundred pounds a year of his own. But then,

-what with an expensive mother, his wife, and some

-little worries, he had to pawn his lands before he

-could take the field with his two knights-banneret,

-nine knights, their men-at-arms, and the servants.

-He shared with another lord the hire of a ship from

-Marseilles, but when they joined his majesty in

-Cyprus he had only a few pounds left, and the

-knights would have deserted but that the king gave

-him a staff appointment at eight hundred pounds a

-year.</p>

-

-<p>The king was a holy saint, a glorious knight errant,

-full of fun, but a thoroughly incompetent general.

-Instead of taking Jerusalem by surprise, he must

-needs raid Egypt, giving the soldan of Babylon the

-Less (Cairo) plenty of time to arrange a warm reception.

-The rival armies had a battle on the beach,

-after which Saint Louis sat down in front of

-Damietta, where he found time to muddle his commissariat.</p>

-

-<p>On the other hand, the soldan was not at all well,

-having been poisoned by a rival prince, and paid no

-heed to the carrier pigeons with their despairing

-messages from the front. This discouraged the

-Moslems, who abandoned Damietta and fled inland,

-hotly pursued by the French. As a precaution, however,

-they sent round their ships, which collected the

-French supplies proceeding to the front. The Christians

-had plenty of fighting and a deal of starving to

-do, not to mention pestilence in their ill-managed

-camps. So they came to a canal which had to be

-bridged, but the artful paynim cut away the land in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">9</span>

-front of the bridge head, so that there was no ground

-on which the French could arrive. In the end the

-Christians had to swim and, as they were heavily

-armored, many were drowned in the mud. Joinville’s

-party found a dry crossing up-stream, and their

-troubles began at the enemy’s camp whence the Turks

-were flying.</p>

-

-<p>“While we were driving them through their camp,

-I perceived a Saracen who was mounting his horse,

-one of his knights holding the bridle. At the moment

-he had his two hands on the saddle to mount,

-I gave him of my lance under the armpit, and laid

-him dead. When his knight saw that, he left his

-lord and the horse, and struck me with his lance as

-I passed, between the two shoulders, holding me so

-pressed down that I could not draw the sword at my

-belt. I had, therefore, to draw the sword attached

-to my horse, and when he saw that he withdrew his

-lance and left me.”</p>

-

-<p>Here in the camp Joinville’s detachment was

-rushed by six thousand Turks, “who pressed upon

-me with their lances. My horse knelt under the

-weight, and I fell forward over the horse’s ears. I

-got up as soon as ever I could with my shield at my

-neck, and my sword in my hand.</p>

-

-<p>“Again a great rout of Turks came rushing upon

-us, and bore me to the ground and went over me, and

-caused my shield to fly from my neck.”</p>

-

-<p>So the little party gained the wall of a ruined

-house, where they were sorely beset: Lord Hugh, of

-Ecot, with three lance wounds in the face, Lord

-Frederick, of Loupey, with a lance wound between the

-shoulders, so large that the blood flowed from his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">10</span>

-body as from the bung hole of a cask, and my Lord

-of Sivery with a sword-stroke in the face, so that

-his nose fell over his lips. Joinville, too badly

-wounded to fight, was holding horses, while Turks

-who had climbed to the roof were prodding from

-above with their lances. Then came Anjou to the

-rescue, and presently the king with his main army.

-The fight became a general engagement, while slowly

-the Christian force was driven backward upon the

-river. The day had become very hot, and the stream

-was covered with lances and shields, and with horses

-and men drowning and perishing.</p>

-

-<p>Near by De Joinville’s position, a streamlet entered

-the river, and across that ran a bridge by which the

-Turks attempted to cut the king’s retreat. This

-bridge the little hero, well mounted now, held for

-hours, covering the flight of French detachments. At

-the head of one such party rode Count Peter, of

-Brittany, spitting the blood from his mouth and

-shouting “Ha! by God’s head, have you ever seen

-such riffraff?”</p>

-

-<p>“In front of us were two of the king’s sergeants;

-... and the Turks ... brought a large number

-of churls afoot, who pelted them with lumps of earth,

-but were never able to force them back upon us. At

-last they brought a churl on foot, who thrice threw

-Greek fire at them. Once William of Boon received

-the pot of Greek fire on his target, for if the fire had

-caught any of his garments he must have been burnt

-alive. We were all covered with the darts that failed

-to hit the sergeants. Now, it chanced that I found a

-Saracen’s quilted tunic lined with tow; I turned the

-open side towards me, and made a shield ...<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">11</span>

-which did me good service, for I was only wounded

-by their darts in five places, and my horse in fifteen....

-The good Count of Soissons, in that point of

-danger, jested with me and said,</p>

-

-<p>“‘Seneschal, let these curs howl! By God’s bonnet

-we shall talk of this day yet, you and I, in ladies’

-chambers!’”</p>

-

-<p>So came the constable of France, who relieved

-Joinville and sent him to guard the king.</p>

-

-<p>“So as soon as I came to the king, I made him

-take off his helmet, and lent him my steel cap so that

-he might have air.”</p>

-

-<p>Presently a knight brought news that the Count of

-Artois, the king’s brother, was in paradise.</p>

-

-<p>“Ah, Sire,” said the provost, “be of good comfort

-herein, for never did king of France gain so much

-honor as you have gained this day. For in order

-to fight your enemies you have passed over a river

-swimming, and you have discomfited them and

-driven them from the field, and taken their engines,

-and also their tents wherein you will sleep this

-night.”</p>

-

-<p>And the king replied: “Let God be worshiped

-for all He has given me,” and then the big tears fell

-from his eyes.</p>

-

-<p>That night the captured camp was attacked in

-force, much to the grief of De Joinville and his

-knights, who ruefully put on chain mail over their

-aching wounds. Before they were dressed De Joinville’s

-chaplain engaged eight Saracens and put them

-all to flight.</p>

-

-<p>Three days later came a general attack of the

-whole Saracen army upon the Christian camp, but<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">12</span>

-thanks to the troops of Count William, of Flanders,

-De Joinville and his wounded knights were not in the

-thick of the fray.</p>

-

-<p>“Wherein,” he says, “God showed us great courtesy,

-for neither I nor my knights had our hawberks

-(chain shirts) and shields, because we had all been

-wounded.”</p>

-

-<p>You see De Joinville had the sweet faith that his

-God was a gentleman.</p>

-

-<p>After that the sorrowful army lay nine days in

-camp till the bodies of the dead floated to the surface

-of the canal, and eight days more while a hundred

-hired vagabonds cleared the stream. But the army

-lived on eels and water from that canal, while all of

-them sickened of scurvy, and hundreds died. Under

-the hands of the surgeons the men of that dying army

-cried like women. Then came an attempt to retreat

-in ships to the coast, but the way was blocked, the

-little galleys were captured one by one, the king was

-taken, and what then remained of the host were

-prisoners, the sick put to death, the rich held for ransom,

-the poor sold away into slavery.</p>

-

-<p>Saint Louis appeared to be dying of dysentery and

-scurvy, he was threatened with torture, but day after

-day found strength and courage to bargain with the

-soldan of Babylon for the ransom of his people.

-Once the negotiations broke down because the

-soldan was murdered by his own emirs, but the

-king went on bargaining now with the murderers.

-For his own ransom he gave the city of Damietta,

-for that of his knights he paid the royal treasure

-that was on board a galley in the port, and for the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">13</span>

-deliverance of the common men, he had to raise

-money in France.</p>

-

-<p>So came the release, and the emirs would have

-been ashamed to let their captive knights leave the

-prison fasting. So De Joinville’s party had “fritters

-of cheese roasted in the sun so that worms should not

-come therein, and hard boiled eggs cooked four or

-five days before, and these, in our honor, had been

-painted with divers colors.”</p>

-

-<p>After that came the counting of the ransom on

-board the royal galley, with the dreadful conclusion

-that they were short of the sum by thirty thousand

-livres. De Joinville went off to the galley of the

-marshal of the Knights Templars, where he tried to

-borrow the money.</p>

-

-<p>“Many were the hard and angry words which

-passed between him and me.”</p>

-

-<p>For one thing the borrower, newly released from

-prison, looked like a ragged beggar, and for the rest,

-the treasure of the Templars was a trust fund not to

-be lent to any one. They stood in the hold in front

-of the chest of treasure, De Joinville demanding the

-key, then threatening with an ax to make of it the

-king’s key.</p>

-

-<p>“We see right well,” said the treasurer, “that you

-are using force against us.” And on that excuse

-yielded the key to the ragged beggar, tottering with

-weakness, a very specter of disease and famine.</p>

-

-<p>“I threw out the silver I found therein and went,

-and sat on the prow of our little vessel that had

-brought me. And I took the marshal of France and

-left him with the silver in the Templars’ galley and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">14</span>

-on the galley I put the minister of the Trinity. On

-the galley the marshal handed the silver to the minister,

-and the minister gave it over to me on the little

-vessel where I sat. When we had ended and came

-towards the king’s galley, I began to shout to the

-king.</p>

-

-<p>“‘Sire! Sire! see how well I am furnished!’</p>

-

-<p>“And the saintly man received me right willingly

-and right joyfully.”</p>

-

-<p>So the ransom was completed, the king’s ransom

-and that of the greatest nobles of France, this group

-of starving ragged beggars in a dingey.</p>

-

-<p>Years followed of hard campaigning in Palestine.

-Once Saint Louis was even invited by the soldan of

-Damascus to visit as a pilgrim that Holy City which

-he could never enter as a conqueror. But Saint Louis

-and his knights were reminded of a story about

-Richard the Lion-Hearted, king of England. For

-Richard once marched almost within sight of the

-capital so that a knight cried out to him:</p>

-

-<p>“Sire, come so far hither, and I will show you

-Jerusalem!”</p>

-

-<p>But the Duke of Burgundy had just deserted with

-half the crusading army, lest it be said that the English

-had taken Jerusalem. So when Richard heard

-the knight calling he threw his coat armor before

-his eyes, all in tears, and said to our Savior,</p>

-

-<p>“Fair Lord God, I pray Thee suffer me not to see

-Thy Holy City since I can not deliver it from the

-hands of thine enemies.”</p>

-

-<p>King Louis the Saint followed the example of

-King Richard the Hero, and both left Palestine<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">15</span>

-broken-hearted because they had not the strength to

-take Jerusalem.</p>

-

-<p>Very queer is the tale of the queen’s arrival from

-France.</p>

-

-<p>“When I heard tell that she was come,” said De

-Joinville, “I rose from before the king and went to

-meet her, and led her to the castle, and when I came

-back to the king, who was in his chapel, he asked me

-if the queen and his children were well; and I told

-him yes. And he said, ‘I knew when you rose from

-before me that you were going to meet the queen,

-and so I have caused the sermon to wait for you.’

-And these things I tell you,” adds De Joinville, “because

-I had then been five years with the king, and

-never before had he spoken to me, nor so far as ever

-I heard, to any one else, of the queen, and of his

-children; and so it appears to me, it was not seemly

-to be thus a stranger to one’s wife and children.”</p>

-

-<p>To do the dear knight justice, he was always

-brutally frank to the king’s face, however much he

-loved him behind his back.</p>

-

-<p>The return of the king and queen to France was

-full of adventure, and De Joinville still had an appetite

-for such little troubles as a wreck and a sea fight.

-Here is a really nice story of an accident.</p>

-

-<p>“One of the queen’s bedwomen, when she had

-put the queen to bed, was heedless, and taking the

-kerchief that had been wound about her head, threw

-it into the iron stove on which the queen’s candle was

-burning, and when she had gone into the cabin where

-the women slept, below the queen’s chamber, the

-candle burnt on, till the kerchief caught fire, and

-from the kerchief the fire passed to the cloths with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">16</span>

-which the queen’s garments were covered. When

-the queen awoke she saw her cabin all in flames, and

-jumped up quite naked and took the kerchief and

-threw it all burning into the sea, and took the cloths

-and extinguished them. Those who were in the

-barge behind the ship cried, but not very loud, ‘Fire!

-fire!’ I lifted up my head and saw that the kerchief

-still burned with a clear flame on the sea, which was

-very still.</p>

-

-<p>“I put on my tunic as quickly as I could, and went

-and sat with the mariners.</p>

-

-<p>“While I sat there my squire, who slept before

-me, came to me and said that the king was awake,

-and asked where I was. ‘And I told him,’ said he,

-‘that you were in your cabin; and the king said to

-me, “Thou liest!”’ While we were thus speaking, behold

-the queen’s clerk appeared, Master Geoffrey,

-and said to me, ‘Be not afraid, nothing has happened.’

-And I said, ‘Master Geoffrey, go and tell

-the queen that the king is awake, and she should go

-to him, and set his mind at ease.’</p>

-

-<p>“On the following day the constable of France, and

-my Lord Peter the chamberlain, and my Lord Gervais,

-the master of the pantry, said to the king, ‘What

-happened in the night that we heard mention of fire?’

-and I said not a word. Then said the king, ‘What

-happened was by mischance, and the seneschal (De

-Joinville) is more reticent than I. Now I will tell

-you,’ said he, ‘how it came about that we might all

-have been burned this night,’ and he told them what

-had befallen, and said to me, ‘I command you henceforth

-not to go to rest until you have put out all fires,

-except the great fire that is in the hold of the ship.’<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">17</span>

-(Cooking fire on the ship’s ballast). ‘And take note

-that I shall not go to rest till you come back to me.’”</p>

-

-<p>It is pleasant to think of the queen’s pluck, the

-knight’s silence, the king’s tact, and to see the inner

-privacies of that ancient ship. After seven hundred

-years the gossip is fresh and vivid as this morning’s

-news.</p>

-

-<p>The king brought peace, prosperity and content to

-all his kingdom, and De Joinville was very angry when

-in failing health Saint Louis was persuaded to attempt

-another crusade in Africa.</p>

-

-<p>“So great was his weakness that he suffered me

-to carry him in my arms from the mansion of the

-Count of Auxerre to the abbey of the Franciscans.”</p>

-

-<p>So went the king to his death in Tunis, a bungling

-soldier, but a saint on a throne, the noblest of all

-adventurers, the greatest sovereign France has ever

-known.</p>

-

-<p>Long afterward the king came in a dream to see

-De Joinville: “Marvelously joyous and glad of

-heart, and I myself was right glad to see him in my

-castle. And I said to him, ‘Sire, when you go hence,

-I will lodge you in a house of mine, that is in a city

-of mine, called Chevillon.’ And he answered me

-laughing, and said to me, ‘Lord of Joinville, by the

-faith I owe you, I have no wish so soon to go hence.’”</p>

-

-<p>It was at the age of eighty-five De Joinville wrote

-his memoirs, still blithe as a boy because he was not

-grown up.</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot wide">

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Note.</span> From <cite>Memoirs of the Crusaders</cite>, by Villehardouine

-and De Joinville. Dent &amp; Co.</p>

-</div>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">18</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="III">III<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1260

-

-<span class="subhead">THE MIDDLE AGES IN ASIA</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> year 1260 found Saint Louis of France busy

-reforming his kingdom, while over the way the

-English barons were reforming King Henry III on

-the eve of the founding of parliament, and the

-Spaniards were inventing the bull fight by way of a

-national sport. Our own national pastime then was

-baiting Jews. They got twopence per week in the

-pound for the use of their money, but next year one of

-them was caught in the act of cheating, a little error

-which led to the massacre of seven hundred.</p>

-

-<p>That year the great Khan Kublai came to the

-throne of the Mongol Empire, a pastoral realm of the

-grass lands extending from the edge of Europe to

-the Pacific Ocean. Kublai began to build his capital,

-the city of Pekin, and in all directions his people extended

-their conquests. The looting and burning of

-Bagdad took them seven days and the resistless pressure

-of their hordes was forcing the Turks upon

-Europe.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile in the dying Christian empire of the

-East, the Latins held Constantinople with Beldwin on

-the throne, but next year the Greek army led by

-Michael Paleologus crept through a tunnel and

-managed to capture the city.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">19</span></p>

-

-<p>Among the merchants at Constantinople in 1260

-were the two Polo brothers, Nicolo and Matteo,

-Venetian nobles, who invested the whole of their

-capital in gems, and set off on a trading voyage to

-the Crimea. Their business finished, they went on

-far up the Volga River to the court of a Mongol

-prince, and to him they gave the whole of their gems

-as a gift, getting a present in return with twice the

-money. But now their line of retreat was blocked

-by a war among the Mongol princes, so they went off

-to trade at Bokhara in Persia where they spent a year.

-And so it happened that the Polo brothers met with

-certain Mongol envoys who were returning to the

-court of their Emperor Kublai. “Come with us,”

-said the envoys. “The great khan has never seen

-a European and will be glad to have you as his

-guests.” So the Polos traveled under safe conduct

-with the envoys, a year’s journey, until they reached

-the court of the great khan at Pekin and were received

-with honor and liberality.</p>

-

-<p>Now it so happened that Kublai sought for himself

-and his people the faith of Christ, and wanted the

-pope to send him a hundred priests, so he despatched

-these Italian gentlemen as his ambassadors to the

-court of Rome. He gave them a passport engraved

-on a slab of gold, commanding his subjects to help

-the envoys upon their way with food and horses, and

-thus, traveling in state across Asia, the Polos returned

-from a journey, the greatest ever made up to

-that time by any Christian men.</p>

-

-<p>At Venice, Nicolo, the elder of the brothers, found

-that his wife had died leaving to him a son, then

-aged sixteen, young Marco Polo, a gallant, courageous,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">20</span>

-hardy lad, it seems, and very truthful, without

-the slightest symptoms of any sense of humor.</p>

-

-<p>The schoolboy who defined the Vatican as a great

-empty space without air, was perfectly correct, for

-when the Polos arrived there was a sort of vacuum

-in Rome, the pope being dead and no new appointment

-made because the electors were squabbling.

-Two years the envoys waited, and when at last a

-new pope was elected, he proved to be a friend of

-theirs, the legate Theobald on whom they waited at

-the Christian fortress of Acre in Palestine.</p>

-

-<p>But instead of sending a hundred clergymen to

-convert the Mongol empire, the new pope had only

-one priest to spare, who proved to be a coward, and

-deserted.</p>

-

-<p>Empty handed, their mission a failure, the Polos

-went back, a three and one-half years’ journey to

-Pekin, taking with them young Marco Polo, a handsome

-gallant, who at once found favor with old Kublai

-Khan. Marco “sped wondrously in learning the

-customs of the Tartars, as well as their language,

-their manner of writing, and their practise of war ...

-insomuch that the emperor held him in great esteem.

-And so when he discerned Mark to have so much

-sense, and to conduct himself so well and beseemingly,

-he sent him on an embassage of his, to a country which

-was a good six months’ journey distant. The young

-gallant executed his commission well and with discretion.”

-The fact is that Kublai’s ambassadors, returning

-from different parts of the world, “were able

-to tell him nothing except the business on which they

-had gone, and that the prince in consequence held

-them for no better than dolts and fools.” Mark<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">21</span>

-brought back plenty of gossip, and was a great success,

-for seventeen years being employed by the

-emperor on all sorts of missions. “And thus it

-came about that Messer Marco Polo had knowledge

-of or had actually visited a greater number of the

-different countries of the world than any other man.”</p>

-

-<p>In the Chinese annals of the Mongol dynasty

-there is record in 1277 of one Polo nominated a second-class

-commissioner or agent attached to the privy

-council. Marco had become a civil servant, and his

-father and uncle were both rich men, but as the years

-went on, and the aged emperor began to fail, they

-feared as to their fate after his death. Yet when

-they wanted to go home old Kublai growled at them.</p>

-

-<p>“Now it came to pass in those days that the

-Queen Bolgana, wife of Argon, lord of the Levant

-(court of Persia), departed this life. And in her

-will she had desired that no lady should take her

-place, or succeed her as Argon’s wife except one of

-her own family (in Cathay). Argon therefore

-despatched three of his barons ... as ambassadors

-to the great khan, attended by a very gallant

-company, in order to bring back as his bride a lady

-of the family of Queen Bolgana, his late wife.</p>

-

-<p>“When these three barons had reached the court of

-the great khan, they delivered their message explaining

-wherefore they were come. The khan received

-them with all honor and hospitality, and then sent for

-a lady whose name was Cocachin, who was of the

-family of the deceased Queen Bolgana. She was a

-maiden of seventeen, a very beautiful and charming

-person, and on her arrival at court she was presented

-to the three barons as the lady chosen in compliance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">22</span>

-with their demand. They declared that the lady

-pleased them well.</p>

-

-<p>“Meanwhile Messer Marco chanced to return from

-India, whither he had gone as the lord’s ambassador,

-and made his report of all the different things that

-he had seen in his travels, and of the sundry seas

-over which he had voyaged. And the three barons,

-having seen that Messer Nicolo, Messer Matteo and

-Messer Marco were not only Latins but men of marvelous

-good sense withal, took thought among

-themselves to get the three to travel to Persia with

-them, their intention being to return to their country

-by sea, on account of the great fatigue of that long

-land journey for a lady. So they went to the great

-khan, and begged as a favor that he would send the

-three Latins with them, as it was their desire to return

-home by sea.</p>

-

-<p>“The lord, having that great regard that I have

-mentioned for those three Latins, was very loath to

-do so. But at last he did give them permission to

-depart, enjoining them to accompany the three barons

-and the lady.”</p>

-

-<p>In the fleet that sailed on the two years’ voyage

-to Persia there were six hundred persons, not counting

-mariners; but what with sickness and little accidents

-of travel, storms for instance and sharks,

-only eight persons arrived, including the lady, one of

-the Persian barons, and the three Italians. They

-found the handsome King Argon dead, so the lady

-had to put up with his insignificant son Casan, who

-turned out to be a first-rate king. The lady wept

-sore at parting with the Italians. They set out for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">23</span>

-Venice, arriving in 1295 after an absence of twenty-seven

-years.</p>

-

-<p>There is a legend that two aged men, and one of

-middle age, in ragged clothes, of very strange device,

-came knocking at the door of the Polo’s town house

-in Venice, and were denied admission by the family

-who did not know them. It was only when the

-travelers had unpacked their luggage, and given a

-banquet, that the family and their guests began to

-respect these vagrants. Three times during dinner

-the travelers retired to change their gorgeous oriental

-robes for others still more splendid. Was it possible

-that the long dead Polos had returned alive? Then

-the tables being cleared, Marco brought forth the

-dirty ragged clothes in which they had come to

-Venice, and with sharp knives they ripped open the

-seams and welts, pouring out vast numbers of

-rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds and emeralds,

-gems to the value of a million ducats. The family

-was entirely convinced, the public nicknamed the

-travelers as the millionaires, the city conferred dignities,

-and the two elder gentlemen spent their remaining

-years in peace and splendor surrounded by

-hosts of friends.</p>

-

-<p>Three years later a sea battle was fought between

-the fleets of Genoa and Venice, and in the Venetian

-force one of the galleys was commanded by Marco

-Polo. There Venice was totally defeated, and Marco

-was one of the seven thousand prisoners carried home

-to grace the triumph of the Genoese. It was in

-prison that he met the young literary person to whom

-he dictated his book, not of travel, not of adventure,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">24</span>

-but a geography, a description of all Asia, its countries,

-peoples and wonders. Sometimes he got excited

-and would draw the long bow, expanding the

-numbers of the great khan’s armies. Sometimes his

-marvels were such as nobody in his senses could be

-expected to swallow, as for instance, when he spoke

-of the Tartars as burning black stones to keep them

-warm in winter. Yet on the whole this book, of the

-greatest traveler that ever lived, awakened Europe

-of the Dark Ages to the knowledge of that vast outer

-world that has mainly become the heritage of the

-Christian Powers.</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot wide">

-

-<p>See the Book of Sir Marco Polo, translated and edited by

-Colonel Sir Henry Yule. John Murray.</p>

-</div>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">25</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1322

-

-<span class="subhead">THE MARVELOUS ADVENTURES OF SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap i"><span class="smcap1">“I, John Maundeville</span>, Knight, all be it I

-am not worthy, that was born in England, in the

-town of St. Allans, passed the sea in the year of our

-Lord 1322 ... and hitherto have been long time on

-the sea, and have seen and gone through many diverse

-lands ... with good company of many lords. God

-be thankful!”</p>

-

-<p>So wrote a very gentle and pious knight. His

-book of travels begins with the journey to Constantinople,

-which in his day was the seat of a Christian

-emperor. Beyond was the Saracen empire,

-whose sultans reigned in the name of the Prophet

-Mahomet over Asia Minor, Syria, the Holy Land

-and Egypt. For three hundred years Christian and

-Saracen had fought for the possession of Jerusalem,

-but now the Moslem power was stronger than ever.</p>

-

-<p>Sir John Maundeville found the sultan of Babylon

-the Less at his capital city in Egypt, and there entered

-in his service as a soldier for wars against the Arab

-tribes of the desert. The sultan grew to love this

-Englishman, talked with him of affairs in Europe,

-urged him to turn Moslem, and offered to him the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">26</span>

-hand of a princess in marriage. But when Maundeville

-insisted on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, his

-master let him go, and granted him letters with the

-great seal, before which even generals and governors

-were obliged to prostrate themselves.</p>

-

-<p>Sir John went all over Palestine, devoutly believing

-everything he was told. Here is his story of the

-Field Beflowered. “For a fair maiden was blamed

-with wrong, and slandered ... for which cause she

-was condemned to death, and to be burnt in that place,

-to the which she was led. And as the fire began to

-burn about her, she made her prayers to our Lord,

-that as certainly as she was not guilty of that sin, that

-he would help her, and make it to be known to all

-men of his merciful grace. And when she had thus

-said she entered into the fire, and anon was the fire

-quenched and out; and the brands which were burning

-became red rose trees, and the brands that were not

-kindled became white rose trees full of roses. And

-these were the first rose trees and roses, both white

-and red, which ever any man saw.”</p>

-

-<p>All this part of his book is very beautiful concerning

-the holy places, and there are nice bits about incubators

-for chickens and the use of carrier pigeons.

-But it is in the regions beyond the Holy Land that

-Sir John’s wonderful power of believing everything

-that he had heard makes his chapters more and more

-exciting.</p>

-

-<p>“In Ethiopia ... there be folk that have but one

-foot and they go so fast that it is a marvel. And the

-foot is so large that it shadoweth all the body against

-the sun when they will lie and rest them.”</p>

-

-<p>Beyond that was the isle of Nacumera, where all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">27</span>

-the people have hounds’ heads, being reasonable and

-of good understanding save that they worship an ox

-for their god. And they all go naked save a little

-clout, and if they take any man in battle anon they

-eat him. The dog-headed king of that land is most

-pious, saying three hundred prayers by way of grace

-before meat.</p>

-

-<p>Next he came to Ceylon. “In that land is full

-much waste, for it is full of serpents, of dragons and

-of cockodrills, so that no man may dwell there.</p>

-

-<p>“In one of these isles be folk as of great stature as

-giants. And they be hideous to look upon. And they

-have but one eye, and that is in the middle of the

-forehead. And they eat nothing but raw flesh and

-raw fish. And in another isle towards the south

-dwell folk of foul stature and of cursed nature that

-have no heads. And their eyes be in their shoulders

-and their mouths be round shapen, like an horseshoe,

-amidst their breasts. And in another isle be men

-without heads, and their eyes and mouths be behind in

-their shoulders. And in another isle be folk that

-have the face all flat, all plain, without nose and without

-mouth. But they have two small holes, all round,

-instead of their eyes, and their mouth is flat also

-without lips. And in another isle be folk of foul

-fashion and shape that have the lip above the mouth

-so great that when they sleep in the sun they cover all

-the face with that lip.”</p>

-

-<p>If Sir John had been untruthful he might have been

-here tempted to tell improbable stories, but he merely

-refers to these isles in passing with a few texts from

-the Holy Scriptures to express his entire disapproval.

-His chapters on the Chinese empire are a perfect<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">28</span>

-model of veracity, and he merely cocks on a few

-noughts to the statistics. In outlying parts of Cathay

-he feels once more the need of a little self-indulgence.

-One province is covered with total and everlasting

-darkness, enlivened by the neighing of unseen horses

-and the crowing of mysterious cocks. In the next

-province he found a fruit, which, when ripe, is cut

-open, disclosing “a little beast in flesh and bone and

-blood, as though it were a little lamb without wool.

-And men eat both the fruit and the beast. And that

-is a great marvel. Of that fruit have I eaten, although

-it were wonderful, but that I know well that

-God is marvelous in all his works. And nevertheless

-I told them of as great a marvel to them, that is

-amongst us, and that was of the barnacle geese: for

-I told them that in our country were trees that bear a

-fruit that become birds flying, and those that fall on

-the water live, and they that fall on the earth die anon,

-and they be right good to man’s meat, and thereof

-had they so great marvel that some of them trowed

-it were an impossible thing to be.”</p>

-

-<p>This mean doubt as to his veracity must have cut

-poor Maundeville to the quick. In his earnest way

-he goes on to describe the people who live entirely on

-the smell of wild apples, to the Amazon nation consisting

-solely of women warriors, and so on past many

-griffins, popinjays, dragons and other wild fowl to the

-Adamant Rocks of loadstone which draw all the iron

-nails out of a ship to her great inconvenience. “I

-myself, have seen afar off in that sea, as though it

-had been a great isle full of trees and bush, full

-of thorns and briers great plenty. And the shipmen

-told us that all that was of ships that were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">29</span>

-drawn thither by the Adamants, for the iron that

-was in them.” Beyond that Sir John reports a

-sea consisting of gravel, ebbing and flowing in great

-waves, but containing no drop of water, a most awkward

-place for shipping.</p>

-

-<p>So far is Sir John moderate in his statements, but

-when he gets to the Vale Perilous at last he turns himself

-loose. That vale is disturbed by thunders and

-tempests, murmurs and noises, a great noise of “tabors,

-drums and trumps.” This vale is all full of

-devils, and hath been alway. In that vale is great

-plenty of gold and silver.</p>

-

-<p>“Wherefore many misbelieving men and many

-Christian men also go in oftentime to have of the

-treasure that there is; but few come back again, and

-especially of the misbelieving men, nor of the Christian

-men either, for they be anon strangled of devils.

-And in the mid place of that vale, under a rock, is an

-head and the visage of a devil bodily, full horrible and

-dreadful to see ... for he beholdeth every man so

-sharply with dreadful eyes, that be evermore moving

-and sparkling like fire, and changeth and stareth so

-often in diverse manner, with so horrible countenance

-that no man dare draw nigh towards him. And from

-him cometh smoke and stink and fire, and so much

-abomination, that scarcely any man may there endure.</p>

-

-<p>“And ye shall understand that when my fellows

-and I were in that vale we were in great thought

-whether we durst put our bodies in adventure to go

-in or not.... So there were with us two worthy

-men, friars minors, that were of Lombardy, that said

-that if any man would enter they would go in with

-us. And when they had said so upon the gracious<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">30</span>

-trust of God and of them, we made sing mass, and

-made every man to be shriven and houseled. And

-then we entered fourteen persons; but at our going

-out we were only nine.... And thus we passed that

-perilous vale, and found therein gold and silver and

-precious stones, and rich jewels great plenty ... but

-whether it was as it seemed to us I wot never. For I

-touched none.... For I was more devout then,

-than ever I was before or after, and all for the dread

-of fiends, that I saw in diverse figures, and also for

-the great multitude of dead bodies, that I saw there

-lying by the way ... and therefore were we more

-devout a great deal, and yet we were cast down and

-beaten many times to the hard earth by winds, thunder

-and tempests ... and so we passed that perilous

-vale.... Thanked be Almighty God!</p>

-

-<p>“After this beyond the vale is a great isle where

-the folk be great giants ... and in an isle beyond

-that were giants of greater stature, some of forty-five

-foot or fifty foot long, and as some men say of

-fifty cubits long. But I saw none of these, for I

-had no lust to go to those parts, because no man

-cometh neither into that isle nor into the other but

-he be devoured anon. And among these giants be

-sheep as great as oxen here, and they bear great

-wool and rough. Of the sheep I have seen many

-times ... those giants take men in the sea out of

-their ships and bring them to land, two in one hand

-and two in another, eating them going, all raw and

-all alive.</p>

-

-<p>“Of paradise can not I speak properly, for I was

-not there. It is far beyond. And that grieveth me.

-And also I was not worthy.”</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">31</span></p>

-

-<p>So, regretting that he had not been allowed into

-paradise, the hoary old liar came homeward to Rome,

-where he claims that the pope absolved him of all his

-sins, and gave him a certificate that his book was

-proved for true in every particular, “albeit that many

-men list not to give credence to anything but to that

-that they have seen with their eye, be the author or

-the person never so true.” Yet, despite these unkind

-doubts as to its veracity, Maundeville’s book lives

-after five hundred years, and ranks as the most stupendous

-masterpiece in the art of lying.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">32</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="V">V<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1492

-

-<span class="subhead">COLUMBUS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Columbus</span> was blue-eyed, red-haired and tall,

-of a sunny honesty, humane and panic-proof.

-In other words he came of the Baltic and not of the

-Mediterranean stock, although his people lived in Italy

-and he was born in the suburbs of Genoa. By caste

-he was a peasant, and by trade, up to the age of

-twenty-eight, a weaver, except at times when his

-Northern blood broke loose and drove him to sea for

-a voyage. He made himself a scholar and a draftsman,

-and when at last he escaped from an exacting

-family, he earned his living by copying charts at Lisbon.

-A year later, as a navigating officer, he found

-his way, via the wine trade, to Bristol. There he

-slouched dreaming about the slums, dressed like a

-foreign monk. He must needs pose to himself in

-some ideal character, and was bound to dress the part.

-The artistic temperament is the mainspring of adventure.</p>

-

-<p>In our own day we may compare Boston, that grand

-old home of the dying sailing ship, with New York, a

-bustling metropolis for the steam liners. In the days

-of Columbus Genoa was an old-fashioned, declining,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">33</span>

-but still splendid harbor of the oared galleys, while

-Lisbon was the up-to-date metropolis of the new

-square-rigged sailing ships.</p>

-

-<p>From these two greatest seaports of his age, Columbus

-came to Bristol, the harbor of England, in the

-Middle Ages, of the slow, scholarly, artistic, stately

-English. They were building that prayer in stone,

-Saint Mary Redcliffe, a jewel of intricate red masonry,

-the setting for Portuguese stained glass which glowed

-like precious gems.</p>

-

-<p>“In the month of February,” says Columbus, “and

-in the year 1477, I navigated as far as the Island of

-Tile (Thule is Iceland) a hundred leagues, and to

-this island which is as large as England, the English,

-especially those of Bristol, go with merchandise. And

-at the time that I was there the sea was not frozen

-over, although there were very high tides.”</p>

-

-<p>Here, then, is the record of Columbus himself that

-in his long inquiry concerning the regions beyond the

-Atlantic, he actually visited Iceland. A scholar himself,

-he was able to converse with the learned Icelanders

-in Latin, the trade jargon of that age. From

-them he surely must have known how one hundred

-thirty years ago the last timber ship had come home

-from Nova Scotia, and twenty-nine years since,

-within his own lifetime, the Greenland trade had

-closed. The maps of the period showed the American

-coast as far south as the Carolines,—the current

-geography book was equally clear:</p>

-

-<p>“From Biameland (Siberia) the country stretches

-as far as the desert regions in the north until Greenland

-begins. From Greenland lies southerly Helluland

-(Labrador and Newfoundland), then Markland<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">34</span>

-(Nova Scotia); thence it is not far from Vinland

-(New England), which some believe goes out from

-Africa. England and Scotland are one island, yet

-each country is a kingdom by itself. Ireland is a

-large island, Iceland is also a large island north of

-Ireland.” Indeed Columbus seems almost to be

-quoting this from memory when he says of Iceland,

-“this island, which is as large as England.” I

-strongly suspect that Columbus when in Iceland, took

-a solemn oath not to “discover” America.</p>

-

-<p>The writers of books have spent four centuries in

-whitewashing, retouching, dressing up and posing this

-figure of Columbus. The navigator was indeed a man

-of powerful intellect and of noble character, but they

-have made him seem a monumental prig as well as an

-insufferable bore. He is the dead and helpless victim,

-dehumanized by literary art until we feel that we

-really ought to pray for him on All Prigs’ Day in the

-churches.</p>

-

-<p>Columbus came home from his Icelandic and Guinea

-expeditions with two perfectly sound ideas. “The

-world is a globe, so if I sail westerly I shall find

-Japan and the Indies.” For fifteen bitter years he became

-the laughing-stock of Europe.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_34" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 26em;">

-  <img src="images/i_034.jpg" width="2048" height="2465" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Christopher Columbus</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>Now note how the historians, the biographers and

-the commentators, the ponderous and the mawkish,

-the smug and the pedantic alike all fail to see why

-their hero was laughed at. His name was Cristo-fero

-Colombo, to us a good enough label for tying to any

-man, but to the Italians and all educated persons of

-that age, a joke. The words mean literally the Christ-Carrying

-Dove. Suppose a modern man with some

-invention or a great idea, called himself Mr. Christ-Carrying<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">35</span>

-Dove, and tried to get capitalists in New

-York or London to finance his enterprise! In the end

-he changed his name to Cristoval Colon and got himself

-financed, but by that time his hair was white, and

-his nerve was gone, and his health failing.</p>

-

-<p>In the ninth century the vikings sailed from Norway

-by the great circle course north of the gulf

-stream. They had no compass or any instruments of

-navigation, and they braved the unknown currents, the

-uncharted reefs, the unspeakable terrors of pack-ice,

-berg-streams and fog on Greenland’s awful coast.

-They made no fuss.</p>

-

-<p>But Columbus sailing in search of Japan, had one

-Englishman and one Irishman, the rest of the people

-being a pack of dagoes. In lovely weather they were

-ready to run away from their own shadows.</p>

-

-<p>From here onward throughout the four voyages

-which disclosed the West Indies and the Spanish Main,

-Columbus allowed his men to shirk their duties, to

-disobey his orders, to mutiny, to desert and even to

-make war upon him.</p>

-

-<p>Between voyages he permitted everybody from the

-mean king downward, to snub, swindle, plunder and

-defame himself and all who were loyal to him in misfortune.

-Because Columbus behaved like an old

-woman, his swindling pork contractor, Amerigo Vespucci,

-was allowed to give his name to the Americas.

-Because he had not the manhood to command, the hapless

-red Indians were outraged, enslaved and driven

-to wholesale suicide, leaping in thousands from the

-cliffs. For lack of a master the Spaniards performed

-such prodigies of cowardice and cruelty as the world

-has never known before or since, the native races were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">36</span>

-swept out of existence, and Spain set out upon a downward

-path, a moral lapse beyond all human power to

-arrest.</p>

-

-<p>Yet looking back, how wonderful is the prophecy in

-that name, Christ-Carrying Dove, borne by a saintly

-and heroic seaman whose mission, in the end, added

-two continents to Christianity.</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot wide">

-

-<p>This text mainly contradicts a <cite>Life of Columbus</cite>, by

-Clements R. Markham, C.&nbsp;B. Phillip &amp; Son, 1892.</p>

-</div>

-

-<figure id="i_36" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_036.jpg" width="1465" height="2196" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Americus Vespuccius</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">37</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1519

-

-<span class="subhead">THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">“Hernando Cortes</span> spent an idle and unprofitable

-youth.”</p>

-

-<p>So did I. And every other duffer is with me in

-being pleased with Cortes for setting an example.

-We, not the good boys, need a little encouragement.</p>

-

-<p>He was seven years old when Columbus found the

-Indies. That was a time when boys hurried to get

-grown up and join the search for the Fountain of

-Youth, the trail to Eldorado. All who had time to

-sleep dreamed tremendous dreams.</p>

-

-<p>Cortes became a colonist in Cuba, a sore puzzle to

-the rascal in command. When he clapped Cortes in

-irons the youngster slipped free and defied him.

-When he gave Cortes command of an expedition the

-fellow cheeked him. When he tried to arrest him the

-bird had flown, and was declared an outlaw.</p>

-

-<p>The soldiers and seamen of the expedition were

-horrified by this adventurer who landed them in newly

-discovered Mexico, then sank the ships lest they should

-wish to go home. They stood in the deadly mists of

-the tropic plains, and far above them glowed the Star

-of the Sea, white Orizaba crowned with polar snows.

-They marched up a hill a mile and a half in sheer<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">38</span>

-height through many zones of climate, and every circumstance

-of pain and famine to the edge of a plateau

-crowned by immense volcanoes, a land of plenty,

-densely peopled, full of opulent cities. They found

-that this realm was ruled by an emperor, famous for

-his victorious wars, able, it seemed, to place a million

-warriors in the field, and hungry for captives to be

-first sacrificed to the gods, and afterward eaten at the

-banquets of the nobility and gentry. The temples

-were actually fed with twenty thousand victims a year.

-The Spanish invading force of four hundred men began

-to feel uncomfortable.</p>

-

-<p>Yet if this Cortes puzzled the governor of Cuba, and

-horrified his men, he paralyzed the Emperor Montezuma.

-Hundreds of years ago a stranger had come to

-Mexico from the eastern sea, a bearded man who

-taught the people the arts of civilized life. Then

-birds first sang and flowers blossomed, the fields were

-fruitful and the sun shone in glory upon that plateau

-of eternal spring. The hero, Bird-Serpent, was remembered,

-loved and worshiped as a god. It was

-known to all men that as he had gone down into the

-eastern sea so he would return again in later ages.

-Now the prophecy was fulfilled. He had come with

-his followers, all bearded white men out of the eastern

-sea in mysterious winged vessels. Bird-Serpent and

-his people were dressed in gleaming armor, had

-weapons that flashed lightning, were mounted on

-terrible beasts—where steel and guns and horses were

-unknown; and Montezuma felt as we should do if our

-land were invaded by winged men riding dragons. To

-the supernatural visitors the emperor sent embassy<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">39</span>

-after embassy, loaded with treasure, begging the hero

-not to approach his capital.</p>

-

-<p>Set in the midst of Montezuma’s empire was the

-poor valiant republic of Tlascala, at everlasting war

-with the Aztec nation. Invading this republic Cortes

-was met by a horde of a hundred thousand warriors,

-whom he thrashed in three engagements, and when

-they were humbled, accepted as allies against the

-Aztecs. Attended by an Tlascalan force he entered

-the ancient Aztec capital, Cholula, famed for its temple.

-This is a stone-faced mound of rubble, four

-times the size and half the height of the Great Pyramid,

-a forty-acre building larger by four acres than

-any structure yet attempted by white men.</p>

-

-<p>By the emperor’s orders the Cholulans welcomed

-the Spaniards, trapped them within their city, and attacked

-them. In reply, Cortes used their temple as

-the scene of a public massacre, slaughtered three thousand

-men, and having thus explained things, marched

-on the City of Mexico.</p>

-

-<p>In those days a salt lake, since drained, filled the

-central hollow of the vale of Mexico, and in the

-midst of it stood the city built on piles, and threaded

-with canals, a barbaric Venice, larger, perhaps even

-grander than Venice with its vast palace and gardens,

-and numberless mound temples whose flaming altars

-lighted the town at night. Three causeways crossed

-the lake and met just as they do to-day at the central

-square. Here, on the site of the mound temple, stands

-one of the greatest of the world’s cathedrals, and

-across the square are public buildings marking the site

-of Montezuma’s palace, and that in which he entertained<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">40</span>

-the Spaniards. The white men were astonished

-at the zoological gardens, the aviary, the floating

-market gardens on the lake, the cleanliness of the

-streets, kept by a thousand sweepers, and a metropolitan

-police which numbered ten thousand men,

-arrangements far in advance of any city of Europe.

-Then, as now, the place was a great and brilliant

-capital.</p>

-

-<p>Yet from the Spanish point of view these Aztecs

-were only barbarians to be conquered, and heathen

-cannibals doomed to hell unless they accepted the

-faith. To them the Cholula massacre was only a military

-precaution. They thought it right to seize their

-generous host the emperor, to hold him as a prisoner

-under guard, and one day even to put him in irons.

-For six months Montezuma reigned under Spanish

-orders, overwhelmed with shame. He loved his captors

-because they were gallant gentlemen, he freely

-gave them his royal treasure of gems, and gold, and

-brilliant feather robes. Over the plunder—a million

-and a half sterling in gold alone—they squabbled;

-clear proof to Montezuma that they were not all divine.

-Yet still they were friends, so he gave them all

-the spears and bows from his arsenal as fuel to burn

-some of his nobles who had affronted them.</p>

-

-<p>It was at this time that the hostile governor of Cuba

-sent Narvaes with seventeen ships and a strong force

-to arrest the conqueror for rebellion. The odds were

-only three to one, instead of the usual hundred to one

-against him, so Cortes went down to the coast, gave

-Narvaes a thrashing, captured him, enrolled his men

-by way of reinforcements, and returned with a force

-of eleven hundred troops.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">41</span></p>

-

-<p>He had left his friend, Alvarado, with a hundred

-men to hold the capital and guard the emperor. This

-Alvarado, so fair that the natives called him Child of

-the Sun, was such a fool that he massacred six

-hundred unarmed nobles and gentlefolk for being

-pagans, violated the great temple, and so aroused the

-whole power of the fiercest nation on earth to a war of

-vengeance. Barely in time to save Alvarado, Cortes

-reentered the city to be besieged. Again and again

-the Aztecs attempted to storm the palace. The emperor

-in his robes of state addressed them from the

-ramparts, and they shot him. They seized the great

-temple which overlooked the palace, and this the

-Spaniards stormed. In face of awful losses day by

-day the Spaniards, starving and desperate, cleared a

-road through the city, and on the night of Montezuma’s

-death they attempted to retreat by one of the

-causeways leading to the mainland. Three canals cut

-this road, and the drawbridges had been taken away,

-but Cortes brought a portable bridge to span them.

-They crossed the first as the gigantic sobbing gong

-upon the heights of the temple aroused the entire city.</p>

-

-<p>Heavily beset from the rear, and by thousands of

-men in canoes, they found that the weight of their

-transport had jammed the bridge which could not be

-removed. They filled the second gap with rocks, with

-their artillery and transport, with chests of gold, horses,

-and dead men. So they came to the third gap, no

-longer an army but as a flying mob of Spaniards and

-Tlascalan warriors bewildered in the rain and the darkness

-by the headlong desperation of the attacking host.

-They were compelled to swim, and at least fifty of the

-recruits were drowned by the weight of gold they refused<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">42</span>

-to leave, while many were captured to be sacrificed

-upon the Aztec altars. Montezuma’s children

-were drowned, and hundreds more, while Cortes and

-his cavaliers, swimming their horses back and forth

-convoyed the column, and Alvarado with his rear

-guard held the causeway.</p>

-

-<p>Last in the retreat, grounding his spear butt, he

-leaped the chasm, a feat of daring which has given a

-name forever to this place as Alvarado’s Leap. And

-just beyond, upon the mainland there is an ancient tree

-beneath which Cortes, as the dawn broke out, sat on

-the ground and cried. He had lost four hundred

-fifty Spaniards, and thousands of Tlascalans, his

-records, artillery, muskets, stores and treasure in that

-lost battle of the Dreadful Night.</p>

-

-<p>A week later the starved and wounded force was

-beset by an army of two hundred thousand Aztecs.

-They had only their swords now, but, after long hours

-of fighting, Cortes himself killed the Aztec general, so

-by his matchless valor and leadership gaining a victory.</p>

-

-<p>The rest is a tale of horror beyond telling, for,

-rested and reinforced, the Spaniards went back. They

-invested, besieged, stormed and burned the famine-stricken,

-pestilence-ridden capital, a city choked and

-heaped with the unburied dead of a most valiant

-nation.</p>

-

-<p>Afterward, under the Spanish viceroys, Mexico

-was extended and enlarged to the edge of Alaska, a

-Christian civilized state renowned for mighty works

-of engineering, the splendor of her architecture, and

-for such inventions as the national pawn-shop, as a

-bank to help the poor. One of the so-called native<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">43</span>

-“slaves” of the mines once wrote to the king of

-Spain, begging his majesty to visit Mexico and offering

-to make a royal road for him, paving the two

-hundred fifty miles from Vera Cruz to the capital

-with ingots of pure silver as a gift to Spain.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">44</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="VII">VII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1532

-

-<span class="subhead">THE CONQUEST OF PERU</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Pizarro</span> was reared for a swineherd; long years

-of soldiering made him no more than a captain,

-and when at the age of fifty he turned explorer, he

-discovered nothing but failure.</p>

-

-<p>For seven years he and his followers suffered on

-trails beset by snakes and alligators, in feverish jungles

-haunted by man-eating savages, to be thrown at last

-battered, ragged and starving on the Isle of Hell.

-Then a ship offered them passage, but old Pizarro drew

-a line in the dust with his sword. “Friends,” said he,

-“and comrades, on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness,

-the drenching storm, desertion and death; on

-this side ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its

-riches; here Panama and its poverty. Choose each

-man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my

-part, I go to the south.”</p>

-

-<p>Thirteen of all his people crossed the line with

-Pizarro, the rest deserting him, and he was seven

-months marooned on his desert isle in the Pacific.

-When the explorer’s partners at last were able to send

-a ship from Panama, it brought him orders to return, a

-failure. He did not return but took the ship to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">45</span>

-southward, his guide the great white Andes, along a

-coast no longer of horrible swamps but now more

-populous, more civilized than Spain, by hundreds of

-miles on end of well-tilled farms, fair villages and

-rich cities where the temples were sheathed with plates

-of pure red gold. As in the Mexico of eight years

-ago, the Spaniards were welcomed as superhuman,

-their ship, their battered armor and their muskets

-accounted as possessions of strayed gods. They dined

-in the palaces of courtly nobles, rested in gardens

-curiously enriched with foliage and flowers of beaten

-gold and silver, and found native gentlemen eager to

-join them in their ship as guests. So with a shipload

-of wonders to illustrate this discovery they went back

-to Panama, and Pizarro returned home to seek in

-Spain the help of Charles V. There, at the emperor’s

-court, he met Cortes, who came to lay the wealth

-of conquered Mexico at his sovereign’s feet, and

-Charles, with a lively sense of more to come,

-despatched Pizarro to overthrow Peru.</p>

-

-<p>Between the Eastern and the Western Andes lies a

-series of lofty plains and valleys, in those days irrigated

-and farmed by an immense civilized population.

-A highway, in length 1,100 miles, threaded the settlements

-together. The whole empire was ruled by a

-foreign dynasty, called the Incas, a race of fighting

-despots by whom the people had been more or less

-enslaved. The last Inca had left the northern kingdom

-of Quito to his younger son, the ferocious Atahuallpa,

-and the southern realm of Cuzco to his heir,

-the gentle Huascar.</p>

-

-<p>These brothers fought until Atahuallpa subdued the

-southern kingdom, imprisoned Huascar, and reigned<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">46</span>

-so far as he knew over the whole world. It was then

-that from outside the world came one hundred sixty-eight

-men of an unknown race possessed of ships,

-horses, armor and muskets—things very marvelous,

-and useful to have. The emperor invited these

-strangers to cross the Andes, intending, when they

-came, to take such blessings as the Sun might send

-him. The city of Caxamalca was cleared of its

-people, and the buildings enclosing the market place

-were furnished for the reception of the Spaniards.</p>

-

-<p>The emperor’s main army was seven hundred miles

-to the southward, but the white men were appalled by

-the enormous host attending him in his camp, where

-he had halted to bathe at the hot springs, three miles

-from their new quarters. The Peruvian watch fires

-on the mountain sides were as thick as the stars of

-heaven.</p>

-

-<p>The sun was setting next day when a procession

-entered the Plaza of Caxamalca, a retinue of six thousand

-guards, nobles, courtiers, dignitaries, surrounding

-the litter on which was placed the gently swaying

-golden throne of the young emperor.</p>

-

-<p>Of all the Spaniards, only one came forward, a

-priest who, through an interpreter, preached, explaining

-from the commencement of the world the story of

-his faith, Saint Peter’s sovereignty, the papal office,

-and Pizarro’s mission to receive the homage of this

-barbarian. The emperor listened, amused at first, then

-bored, at last affronted, throwing down the book he

-was asked to kiss. On that a scarf waved and the

-Spaniards swept from their ambush, blocking the exits,

-charging as a wolf-pack on a sheepfold, riding the

-people down while they slaughtered. So great was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">47</span>

-the pressure that a wall of the courtyard fell, releasing

-thousands whose panic flight stampeded the Incas’

-army. But the nobles had rallied about their sovereign,

-unarmed but with desperate valor clinging

-to the legs of the horses and breaking the charge of

-cavalry. They threw themselves in the way of the

-fusillades, their bodies piled in mounds, their blood

-flooding the pavement. Then, as the bearers fell, the

-golden throne was overturned, and the emperor hurried

-away a prisoner. Two thousand people had

-perished in the attempt to save him.</p>

-

-<p>The history of the Mexican conquest was repeated

-here, and once more a captive emperor reigned under

-Spanish dictation.</p>

-

-<p>This Atahuallpa was made of sterner stuff than

-Montezuma, and had his defeated brother Huascar

-drowned, lest the Spaniards should make use of his

-rival claim to the throne. The Peruvian prince had no

-illusions as to the divinity of the white men, saw

-clearly that their real religion was the adoration of

-gold, and in contempt offered a bribe for his freedom.

-Reaching the full extent of his arm to a height of

-nine feet, he boasted that to that level he would fill

-the throne room with gold as the price of his liberty,

-and twice he would fill the anteroom with silver. So

-he sent orders to every city of his empire commanding

-that the shrines, the temples, palaces and gardens be

-stripped of their gold and silver ornaments, save only

-the bodies of the dead kings, his fathers. Of course,

-the priests made haste to bury their treasures, but the

-Spaniards went to see the plunder collected and when

-they had finished no treasures were left in sight save

-a course of solid golden ingots in the walls of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">48</span>

-Temple of the Sun at Cuzco, and certain massive

-beams of silver too heavy for shipment. Still the

-plunder of an empire failed to reach the nine-foot line

-on the walls of the throne room at Caxamalca, but the

-soldiers were tired of waiting, especially when the

-goldsmiths took a month to melt the gold into ingots.

-So the royal fifth was shipped to the king of Spain,

-Pizarro’s share was set apart, a tithe was dedicated to

-the Church, and the remainder divided among the

-soldiers according to their rank, in all three and a half

-millions sterling by modern measurement, the greatest

-king’s ransom known to history. Then the emperor

-was tried by a mock court-martial, sentenced to death

-and murdered. It is comforting to note that of all

-who took part in that infamy not one escaped an early

-and a violent death.</p>

-

-<p>Pizarro had been in a business partnership with the

-schoolmaster Luque of Panama cathedral, and with

-Almagro, a little fat, one-eyed adventurer, who now

-arrived on the scene with reinforcements. Pizarro’s

-brothers also came from Spain. So when the emperor’s

-death lashed the Peruvians to desperation,

-there were Spaniards enough to face odds of a hundred

-to one in a long series of battles, ending with the siege

-of the adventurers who held Cuzco against the Inca

-Manco for five months. The city, vast in extent, was

-thatched, and burned for seven days with the Spaniards

-in the midst. They fought in sheer despair, and

-the Indians with heroism, their best weapon the lasso,

-their main hope that of starving the garrison to death.

-No valor could possibly save these heroic robbers,

-shut off from escape or from rescue by the impenetrable

-rampart of the Andes. They owed their salvation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">49</span>

-to the fact that the Indians must disperse to

-reap their crops lest the entire nation perish of hunger,

-and the last of the Incas ended his life a fugitive lost

-in the recesses of the mountains.</p>

-

-<p>Then came a civil war between the Pizarros, and

-Almagro, whose share of the plunder turned out to be

-a snowy desolation to the southward. It was not until

-after this squalid feud had been ended by Almagro’s

-execution and Pizarro’s murder, that the desolate

-snows were uncovered, revealing the incomparable

-treasures of silver Potosi, Spain’s share of the plunder.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">50</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII">VIII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1534

-

-<span class="subhead">THE CORSAIRS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">In</span> 1453 Constantinople was besieged and stormed

-by the Turks, the Christian emperor fell with sixty

-thousand of his men in battle, and the Caliph Mahomet

-II raised the standard of Islam over the last ruins of

-the Roman empire.</p>

-

-<p>Four years later a sailorman, a Christian from the

-Balkan States, turned Moslem and was banished from

-the city. He married a Christian widow in Mitylene

-and raised two sons to his trade. At a very tender

-age, Uruj, the elder son, went into business as a

-pirate, and on his maiden cruise was chased and

-captured by a galley of the Knights of Saint

-John who threw him into the hold to be a slave at

-the oars. That night a slave upon the nearest oar-bench

-disturbed the crew by groaning, and to

-keep him quiet was thrown overboard. Not liking

-his situation or prospects, Uruj slipped his shackles,

-crept out and swam ashore. On his next voyage, being

-still extremely young, he was captured and swam

-ashore again. Then the sultan’s brother fitted him

-out as a corsair at the cost of five thousand ducats,

-to be paid by the basha of Egypt, and so, thanks to

-this act of princely generosity, Uruj was able to open<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">51</span>

-a general practise. His young brother Khizr, also

-a pirate, joined him; the firm was protected by the

-sultan of Tunis who got a commission of twenty

-per cent. on the loot; and being steady, industrious

-and thrifty, by strict application to business,

-they made a reputation throughout the Middle Sea.

-Indeed the Grand Turk bestowed upon Khizr the title

-“Protector of Religion,” a distinction never granted

-before or since to any professional robber. Once after

-a bitter hard fight the brothers captured a first-rate

-ship of war, <i>The Galley of Naples</i>, and six lady passengers

-besides three hundred men were marched

-ashore into slavery. “See,” said the sultan of Tunis,

-“how Heaven recompenses the brave!” Uruj, by the

-way, was laid up some months for repairs, and in his

-next engagement, a silly attack on a fortress, happened

-to lose an arm as part of his recompense.</p>

-

-<p>By this time the brothers were weary of that twenty

-per cent. commission to the unctuous sultan of Tunis,

-and by way of cheating him, took to besieging

-fortresses, or sacking towns, Christian or Moslem as

-the case might be, until they had base camps of their

-own, Uruj as king of Tlemcen, and Khizr as king of

-Algiers. Then Uruj fell in battle, and Khizr Barbarossa

-began to do business as a wholesale pirate

-with a branch kingdom of Tunis, and fleets to destroy

-all commerce, to wreck and burn settlements of the

-Christian powers until he had command of the sea as

-a first-class nuisance. The gentle Moors, most

-civilized of peoples, expelled from Spain (1493) by

-the callous ill-faith of Ferdinand and Isabella, and

-stranded upon North Africa to starve, manned Barbarossa’s

-fleets for a bloody vengeance upon Christian<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">52</span>

-Europe. Then Charles V brought the strength of

-Spain, Germany and Italy to bear in an expedition

-against Barbarossa, but his fleet was wrecked by a

-storm, clear proof that Allah had taken sides with the

-strong pirate king. Barbarossa then despatched his

-lieutenant Hassan to ravage the coast of Valencia.</p>

-

-<p>It was upon this venture that Hassan met a transport

-merchantman with a hundred veteran Spanish

-infantry, too strong to attack; so when this lieutenant

-returned to Algiers deep-laden with spoil and captives

-from his raid, he found King Barbarossa far from

-pleased. The prisoners were butchered, and Hassan

-was flogged in public for having shirked an engagement.

-That is why Hassan joined with Venalcadi, a

-brother officer who was also in disgrace, and together

-they drove Barbarossa out of Algeria. Presently the

-king came back with a whole fleet of his fellow corsairs,

-brother craftsmen, the Jew, and Hunt-the-Devil,

-Salærrez and Tabas, all moved to grief and rage by

-the tears of a sorely ill-treated hero. With the aid of

-sixty captive Spanish soldiers, who won their freedom,

-they captured Algiers, wiped out the mutineers,

-and restored the most perfect harmony. Indeed, by

-way of proof that there really was no trouble among

-the corsairs, King Barbarossa sent off Hunt-the-Devil

-with seventeen ships to burn Spain. Ever in blood

-and tears, their homes in flames, their women ravished,

-their very children enslaved, the Spaniards had to pay

-for breaking faith with the Moors of Granada.</p>

-

-<p>Barbarossa was not yet altogether king of Algiers.

-For twenty years the Peñon, a fortress fronting that

-city, had been held by Martin de Vargas and his garrison.

-Worn out with disease and famine these Spaniards<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">53</span>

-now fought Barbarossa to the last breath, but

-their walls went down in ruin, the breach was stormed,

-and all were put to the sword. De Vargas, taken

-prisoner, demanded the death of a Spaniard who had

-betrayed him. The traitor was promptly beheaded,

-but Barbarossa turned upon De Vargas. “You and

-yours,” he said, “have caused me too much trouble,”

-and he again signed to the headsman. So De Vargas

-fell.</p>

-

-<p>Terrible was the rage of Charles V, emperor of half

-Europe, thus defied and insulted by the atrocious corsair.

-It was then that he engaged the services of

-Andrea Doria, the greatest Christian admiral of that

-age, for war against Barbarossa. And at the same

-time the commander of the faithful, Suleiman the

-Magnificent, sent for King Barbarossa to command

-the Turkish fleet.</p>

-

-<p>He came, with gifts for the calif: two hundred

-women bearing presents of gold or silver; one hundred

-camels laden with silks and gold; then lions and other

-strange beasts; and more loads of brocades, or rich

-garments, all in procession through Constantinople,

-preceding the pirate king on his road to the palace.

-The sultan gave him not only a big fleet, but also vice-regal

-powers to make war or peace. Next summer

-(1534) eleven thousand Christian slaves, and a long

-procession of ships loaded with the plunder of smoking

-Italy were sent to the Golden Horn. Incidentally,

-Barbarossa seized the kingdom of Tunis for himself,

-and slaughtered three thousand of the faithful, just

-to encourage the rest.</p>

-

-<p>It was to avenge the banished King Hassan, and

-these poor slaughtered citizens that the Emperor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">54</span>

-Charles V, attended by his admiral, Andrea Doria,

-came with an army and a mighty fleet to Tunis.</p>

-

-<p>He drove out Barbarossa, a penniless, discredited

-fugitive; and his soldiers slaughtered thirty thousand

-citizens of Tunis to console them for the pirate’s late

-atrocities.</p>

-

-<p>Poor old Barbarossa, past seventy years of age, had

-lost a horde of fifty thousand men, his kingdom of

-Tunis, fleet and arsenal; but he still had fifteen galleys

-left at Bona, his kingdom of Algiers to fall back upon,

-and his Moorish seamen, who had no trade to win

-them honest bread except as pirates. “Cheer up,” said

-he, to these broken starving men, and after a little

-holiday they sacked the Balearic Isles taking five

-thousand, seven hundred slaves, and any amount of

-shipping. Then came the building of a Turkish fleet;

-and with one hundred twenty sail, Barbarossa went

-to his last culminating triumph, the defeat of Andrea

-Doria, who had at Prevesa one hundred ninety-five

-ships, sixty thousand men, and two thousand, five

-hundred ninety-four guns. With that victory he retired,

-and after eight years of peace, he died in his

-bed, full of years and honors. For centuries to come

-all Turkish ships saluted with their guns, and dipped

-their colors whenever they passed the grave of the

-King of the Sea.</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot wide">

-

-<p><cite>Sea Wolves of the Mediterranean</cite>, Commander E.

-Hamilton Currey, R.N. John Murray.</p>

-</div>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">55</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="IX">IX<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1542

-

-<span class="subhead">PORTUGAL IN THE INDIES</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> was Italian trade that bought and paid for the

-designs of Raphael, the temples of Michelangelo,

-the sculptures of Cellini, the inventions of Da Vinci,

-for all the wonders, the glories, the splendors of inspired

-Italy. And it was not good for the Italian

-trade that Barbarossa, and the corsairs of three centuries

-in his wake, beggared the merchants and enslaved

-their seamen. But Italian commerce had its

-source in the Indian Seas, and the ruin of Italy began

-when the sea adventures of Portugal rounded the Cape

-of Good Hope to rob, to trade, to govern and convert

-at the old centers of Arabian business.</p>

-

-<p>Poverty is the mother of labor, labor the parent

-of wealth and genius. It is the poverty of Attica,

-and the Roman swamps, of sterile Scotland, boggy

-Ireland, swampy Holland, stony New England, which

-drove them to high endeavor and great reward.

-Portugal, too, had that advantage of being small and

-poor, without resources, or any motive to keep the

-folk at home. So the fishermen took to trading and

-exploration led by Cao who found the Cape of Good

-Hope, Vasco da Gama who smelt out the way to India,

-Almeida who gained command of the Indian Seas,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">56</span>

-Cabral who discovered Brazil, Albuquerque who, seizing

-Goa and Malacca, established a Christian empire

-in the Indies, and Magellan, who showed Spain the

-way to the Pacific.</p>

-

-<p>Of these the typical man was Da Gama, a noble with

-the motives of a crusader and the habits of a pirate,

-who once set fire to a shipload of Arab pilgrims, and

-watched unmoved while the women on her blazing

-deck held out little babies in the vain hope of mercy.

-On his first voyage he came to Calicut, a center of

-Hindu civilization, a seat of Arab commerce, and to

-the rajah sent a present of washing basins, casks of

-oil, a few strings of coral, fit illustration of the poverty

-of his brave country, accepted as a joke in polished,

-wealthy, weary India. The king gave him leave to

-trade, but seized the poor trade goods until the Portuguese

-ships had been ransacked for two hundred

-twenty-three pounds in gold to pay the customs duties.

-The point of the joke was only realized when on his

-second voyage Da Gama came with a fleet, bombarded

-Calicut, and loaded his ships with spices, leaving a

-trail of blood and ashes along the Indian coast.

-Twenty years later he came a third time, but now as

-viceroy to the Portuguese Indies. Portugal was no

-longer poor, but the richest state in Europe, bleeding

-herself to death to find the men for her ventures.</p>

-

-<p>Now these arrogant and ferocious officials, military

-robbers, fishermen turned corsairs, and ravenous traders

-taught the whole East to hate and fear the Christ.

-And then came a tiny little monk no more than five

-feet high, a white-haired, blue-eyed mendicant, who

-begged the rice he lived on. Yet so sweet was his

-temper, so magical the charm, so supernatural the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">57</span>

-valor of this barefoot monk that the children worshiped

-him, the lepers came to him to be healed, and

-the pirates were proud to have him as their guest. He

-was a gentleman, a Spanish Basque, by name Francis

-de Xavier, and in the University of Paris had been a

-fellow student with the reformer Calvin, then a friend

-and follower of Ignatius de Loyola, helping him to

-found the Society of Jesus. Xavier came to the Indies

-in 1542 as a Jesuit priest.</p>

-

-<p>Once on a sea voyage Xavier stood for some time

-watching a soldier at cards, who gambled away all his

-money and then a large sum which had been entrusted

-to his care. When the soldier was in tears and threatening

-suicide, Xavier borrowed for him the sum of

-one shilling twopence, shuffled and dealt for him, and

-watched him win back all that he had lost. At that

-point Saint Francis set to work to save the

-soldier’s soul, but this disreputable story is not shown

-in the official record of his miracles.</p>

-

-<p>From his own letters one sees how the heathen

-puzzled this little saint, “‘Was God black or white?’

-For as there is so great variety of color among man,

-and the Indians are themselves black, they esteem their

-own color most highly, and hold that their gods are

-also black.”</p>

-

-<p>He does not say how he answered, indeed it was

-hardly by words that this hidalgo of Spain preached

-in the many languages he could never learn. Once

-when his converts were threatened by a hostile army

-he went alone to challenge the invaders, and with uplifted

-crucifix rebuked them in the name of God. The

-front ranks wavered and halted. Their comrades and

-leaders vainly pressed them to advance, but no man<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">58</span>

-dared pass the black-robed figure which barred the

-way, and presently the whole force retreated.</p>

-

-<p>Once in the Spice Islands while he was saying mass

-on the feast of the Archangel Saint Michael a tremendous

-earthquake scattered the congregation. The

-priest held up the shaking altar and went on with mass,

-while, as he says, “Perhaps Saint Michael, by his

-heavenly power, was driving into the depths of hell all

-the wicked spirits of the country who were opposing

-the worship of the true God.”</p>

-

-<p>Such was the apostle of the Indies, and it is a pleasant

-thing to trace the story of his mission in Japan in

-the <i>Peregrination</i>, a book by a thorough rogue.</p>

-

-<p>Fernão Mendes Pinto was a distant relative of Ananias.

-He sailed for India in 1537 “meanly accommodated.”

-At Diu he joined an expedition to watch the

-Turkish fleet in the Red Sea, and from Massawa was

-sent with letters to the king of Abyssinia. That was

-great luck, because the very black and more or less

-Christian kingdom was supposed to be the seat of the

-legendary, immortal, shadowy, Prester John. On his

-way back to Massawa the adventurer was wrecked,

-captured by Arabs, sold into slavery, bought by a Jew,

-and resold in the commercial city of Ormus where

-there were Christian buyers. He found his way to

-Goa, the capital of the Portuguese Indies, thence to

-Malacca, where he got a job as political agent in Sumatra.

-With this ended the dull period of his travels.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_58" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_058.jpg" width="1457" height="2193" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Francis Xavier</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>In those days there were ships manned by Portuguese

-rogues very good in port, but unpleasant to meet

-with at sea. They were armed with cannon, pots of

-wild fire, unslaked lime to be flung in the Chinese

-manner, stones, javelins, arrows, half-pikes, axes and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">59</span>

-grappling irons, all used to collect toll from Chinese,

-Malay, or even Arab merchants. Pinto found that

-this life suited him, and long afterward, writing as a

-penitent sinner, described the fun of torturing old men

-and children: “Made their brains fly out of their

-heads with a cord” or looked on while the victims died

-raving “like mad dogs.” It was great sport to surprise

-some junk at anchor, and fling pots of gunpowder

-among the sleeping crew, then watch them dive and

-drown. “The captain of one such junk was ‘a notorious

-Pyrat,’ and Pinto complacently draws the

-moral ‘Thus you see how it pleased God, out of His

-Divine justice to make the arrogant confidence of this

-cursed dog a means to chastise him for his cruelties.’”</p>

-

-<p>So Christians set an example to the heathen.</p>

-

-<p>Antonio de Faria, Pinto’s captain, had vowed to wipe

-out Kwaja Hussain, a Moslem corsair from Gujerat

-in Western India. In search of Hussain he had many

-adventures in the China seas, capturing pirate crews,

-dashing out their brains, and collecting amber, gold

-and pearls. Off Hainan he so frightened the local

-buccaneers that they proclaimed him their king and

-arranged to pay him tribute.</p>

-

-<p>Luckily for them Faria’s ship was cast away upon a

-desert island. The crew found a deer which had been

-left by a tiger, half eaten; their shouts would scare

-the gulls as they flew overhead, so that the birds

-dropped such fish as they had captured; and then by

-good luck they discovered a Chinese junk whose people,

-going ashore, had left her in charge of an old man

-and a child. Amid the clamors of the Chinese owners

-Faria made off with this junk. He was soon at

-the head of a new expedition in quest of that wicked<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">60</span>

-pirate, Kwaja Hussain. This ambition was fulfilled,

-and with holds full of plunder the virtuous Faria put

-into Liampo. Back among the Christians he had a

-royal welcome, but actually blushed when a sermon

-was preached in his honor. The preacher waxed too

-eloquent, “whereupon some of his friends plucked

-him three or four times by the surplice, for to make

-him give over.” It seems that even godly Christian

-pirates have some sense of humor.</p>

-

-<p>Once in the Malay states, Pinto and a friend of his,

-a Moslem, were asked to dine with a bigwig, also a

-True Believer. At dinner they spoke evil about the

-local rajah, who got wind of the slander. Pinto

-watched both of these Moslem gentlemen having their

-feet sawn off, then their hands, and finally their heads.

-As for himself, he talked about his rich relations,

-claiming Dom Pedro de Faria, a very powerful noble,

-as his uncle. He said the factor had embezzled his

-uncle’s money and fully deserved his fate. “All this,”

-says Pinto, “was extemporized on the spur of the

-moment, not knowing well what I said.” The liar

-got off.</p>

-

-<p>Pinto’s career as a pirate ended in shipwreck, capture,

-slavery and a journey in China where he was put

-to work on the repairing of the Great Wall. He was

-at a city called Quinsay in 1544 when Altan Khan,

-king of the Tumeds—a Mongolian horde—swept

-down out of the deserts.</p>

-

-<p>The Mongols sacked Quinsay, and Pinto as a prisoner

-was brought before Altan Khan who was besieging

-Pekin. When the siege was raised he accompanied

-the Mongol army on its retreat into the heart

-of Asia. In time he found favor with his masters<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">61</span>

-and was allowed to accompany an embassy to Cochin

-China. On this journey he saw some cannon with

-iron breeches and wooden muzzles made, he was told,

-by certain Almains (Germans) who came out of Muscovy

-(Russia), and had been banished by the king

-of Denmark. Then comes Pinto’s account of Tibet,

-of Lhasa, and the Grand Lama, and so to Cochin

-China, and the sea. If it is true, Pinto made a very

-great journey, and he claims to have been afterward

-with Xavier in Japan. In the end he returned to

-Lisbon after twenty-one years of adventure in which

-he was five times shipwrecked, and seventeen times

-sold as a slave.</p>

-

-<p>It is disheartening to have so little space for the

-great world of Portuguese adventure in the Indies,

-where Camoens, one of the world’s great poets, wrote

-the immortal <i>Lusiads</i>.</p>

-

-<p>However ferocious, these Portuguese adventurers

-were loyal, brave and strong. They opened the way

-of Europe to the East Indies, they Christianized and

-civilized Brazil. Once, at sea, a Portuguese lady

-spoke to me of England’s good-humored galling disdain

-toward her people. “Ah, you English!” she

-cried. “What you are, we were once! what we are,

-you will be!”</p>

-

-<div class="blockquot wide">

-

-<p><cite>Vasco da Gama and his Successors</cite>, by K.&nbsp;G. Jayne.

-Methuen.</p>

-</div>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">62</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="X">X<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1841

-

-<span class="subhead">RAJAH BROOKE</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Borneo</span> is a hot forest about five hundred miles

-long, and as wide, inhabited by connoisseurs

-called Dyaks, keen collectors. They collect human

-heads and some of their pieces are said to be very

-valuable. They are a happy little folk with most

-amusing manners and customs. Here is their ritual

-for burial of the dead:</p>

-

-<p>“When a man dies his friends and relations meet

-in the house and take their usual seats around the

-room. The deceased is then brought in attired in his

-best clothes, with a cigar fixed in his mouth; and, being

-placed on the mat in the same manner as when alive,

-his betel box is set by his side. The friends go

-through the form of conversing with him, and offer

-him the best advice concerning his future proceedings,

-and then, having feasted, the body is deposited in a

-large coffin and kept in the house for several months.”</p>

-

-<p>The habits of the natives have been interfered with

-by the Malays, who conquered most of them and

-carved their island up into kingdoms more or less

-civilized, but not managed at all in the interests of

-the Dyaks. These kingdoms were decayed and

-tumbling to pieces when the Dutch came in to help,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">63</span>

-and helped themselves to the whole of Borneo except

-the northwestern part. They pressingly invited themselves

-there also, but the Malay rajah kept putting

-them off with all sorts of polite excuses.</p>

-

-<p>While the rajah’s minister was running short of

-excuses to delay the Dutch an English yacht arrived

-in Sarawak. The owner was Mr. James Brooke, who

-had been an officer in the East India Company, but

-being hit with a slug in the lungs during the first

-Burma war, was retired with a pension of seventy

-pounds for wounds. Afterward he came into a

-fortune of thirty thousand pounds, took to yachting,

-traveled a great deal in search of adventure, and so in

-1839 arrived in Sarawak on the lookout for trouble.</p>

-

-<p>An Englishman of gentle birth is naturally expected

-to tell the truth, to be clean in all his dealings, to keep

-his temper, and not to show his fears. Not being a

-beastly cad, Brooke as a matter of course conformed

-to the ordinary standards and, having no worries, was

-able to do so cheerfully. One may meet men of this

-stock, size and pattern by thousands the world over,

-but in a decayed Malay state, at war with the Dyaks

-ashore and the pirates afloat, Brooke was a phenomenon

-just as astonishing as a first-class comet, an earthquake

-eruption, or a cyclone. His arrival was the

-only important event in the whole history of North

-Borneo. The rajah sought his advice in dealing with

-the Dutch, the Dyaks and the pirates. The Malays,

-Dyaks, pirates and everybody else consulted him as to

-their dealings with the rajah. On his second visit he

-took a boat’s crew from his yacht and went to the seat

-of war. There he tried to the verge of tears to persuade

-the hostile forces either to fight or make friends,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">64</span>

-and when nobody could be induced to do anything at

-all, he, with his boat’s crew and one native warrior,

-stormed the Dyak position, putting the enemy to total

-rout and flight. Luckily, nobody was hurt, for even

-a cut finger would have spoiled the perfect bloodlessness

-of Brooke’s victory. Then the Dyaks surrendered

-to Brooke. Afterward the pirate fleet appeared

-at the capital, not to attack the rajah, but to

-be inspected by Brooke, and when he had patted the

-pirates they went away to purr. Moreover the rajah

-offered to hand over his kingdom to Brooke as manager,

-and the Englishman expected him to keep his

-word. Brooke brought a shipload of stores in payment

-for a cargo of manganese, but the rajah was so

-contented with that windfall that he forgot to send

-to his mines for the ore.</p>

-

-<p>Further up the coast a British ship was destroyed

-by lightning, and her crew got ashore where they

-were held as captives pending a large ransom. Even

-when the captain’s wife had a baby the local bigwig

-thereabouts saw a new chance of plunder, and stole

-the baby-clothes. Then the shipwrecked mariners

-sent a letter to Brooke appealing for his help; but

-nothing on earth could induce the spineless boneless

-rajah to send the relief he had promised. Then

-Brooke wrote to Singapore whence the East India

-Company despatched a war-ship which rescued the

-forty castaways.</p>

-

-<p>The rajah’s next performance was to arrange for a

-percentage with two thousand, five hundred robbers

-who proposed to plunder and massacre his own subjects.

-Brooke from his yacht stampeded the raiders

-with a few rounds from the big guns—blank of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">65</span>

-course. Brooke was getting rather hard up, and

-could not spare ball ammunition on weekdays.</p>

-

-<p>So King Muda Hassim lied, cheated, stole, betrayed,

-and occasionally murdered—a mean rogue,

-abject, cringing to Brooke, weeping at the Englishman’s

-threats to depart, holding his throne so long as

-the white yacht gave him prestige; but all this with

-pomp and circumstance, display of gems and gold,

-a gorgeous retinue, plenty of music, and royal salutes

-on the very slightest pretext. But all the population

-was given over to rapine and slaughter, and the forest

-was closing in on ruined farms. The last and only

-hope of the nation was in Brooke.</p>

-

-<p>Behind every evil in the state was Makota, the

-prime minister, a polite and gentlemanly rascal, and

-at the end of two years he annoyed Brooke quite seriously

-by putting arsenic in the interpreter’s rice.

-Brooke cleared his ship for action, and with a landing

-party under arms marched to the palace gates. In

-a few well-chosen words he explained Makota’s villainy,

-showed that neither the rajah’s life nor his own

-was safe, and that the only course was to proclaim

-Brooke as governor.</p>

-

-<p>No shot was fired, no blow was struck, but Makota’s

-party vanished, the villain fled, the rajah began to behave,

-the government of the country was handed over

-to the Englishman amid great popular rejoicings.

-“My darling mother,” he wrote, “I am very poor, but

-I want some things from home very much; so I must

-trust to your being rich enough to afford them to me.

-Imprimis, a circle for taking the latitude; secondly,

-an electrifying machine of good power; thirdly, a large

-magic lantern; fourthly, a rifle which carries fifty<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">66</span>

-balls; and last, a peep-show. The circle and rifle I

-want very much; and the others are all for political

-purposes.” Did ever king begin his reign with such

-an act as that letter?</p>

-

-<p>But then, look at the government he replaced:

-“The sultan and his chiefs rob all classes of Malays

-to the utmost of their power; the Malays rob the

-Dyaks, and the Dyaks hide their goods as much as

-they dare, consistent with the safety of their wives

-and children.” Brooke found his private income a

-very slender fund when he had to pay the whole expense

-of governing a kingdom until the people recovered

-from their ruin.</p>

-

-<p>February the first, 1842, a pirate chief called to

-make treaty with the new king. “He inquired, if a

-tribe pirated on my territory what I intended to do.

-My answer was ‘to enter their country and lay it

-waste.’ ‘But,’ he asked me again, ‘you will give me—your

-friend—leave to steal a few heads occasionally?’

-‘No,’ I replied, ‘I shall have a hundred

-Sakarran heads for every one you take here!’ He

-recurred to this request several times—‘just to steal

-one or two’-as a schoolboy asks for apples.”</p>

-

-<p>Brooke used to give the pirates his laughing permission

-to go to Singapore and attack the English.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_66" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 26em;">

-  <img src="images/i_066.jpg" width="2010" height="3000" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir James Brooke</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>“The Santah River,” he wrote, “is famous for its

-diamonds. The workers seem jealous and superstitious,

-disliking noise, particularly laughter, as it is

-highly offensive to the spirit who presides over the

-diamonds.... A Chinese Mohammedan with the

-most solemn face requested me to give him an old

-letter; and he engraved some Chinese characters,

-which, being translated signify ‘Rajah Muda Hassim,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">67</span>

-James Brooke, and Hadju Ibrahim present their compliments

-to the spirit and request his permission to

-work at the mine.’”</p>

-

-<p>There were great doings when the sultan of Borneo

-had Mr. Brooke proclaimed king in Sarawak.

-Then he went off to the Straits Settlements, where

-he made friends with Henry Keppel, captain of

-H.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Dido</i>, a sportsman who delighted in hunting

-pirates, and accepted Brooke’s invitation to a few

-days’ shooting. Keppel describes the scene of

-Brooke’s return to his kingdom, received by all the

-chiefs with undisguised delight, mingled with gratitude

-and respect for their newly-elected ruler. “The

-scene was both novel and exciting, presenting to us—just

-anchored in a large fresh water river, and surrounded

-by a densely wooded jungle—the whole surface

-of the water covered with canoes and boats

-dressed with colored silken flags, filled with natives

-beating their tom-toms, and playing on wind instruments,

-with the occasional discharge of firearms. To

-them it must have been equally striking to witness the

-<i>Dido</i> anchored almost in the center of their town, her

-mastheads towering above the highest trees of that

-jungle, the loud report of her heavy thirty-two-pounder

-guns, the manning aloft to furl sails of one

-hundred fifty seamen in their clean white dresses, and

-with the band playing. I was anxious that Mr.

-Brooke should land with all the honors due to so important

-a personage, which he accordingly did, under

-a salute.”</p>

-

-<p>It was a little awkward that the <i>Dido</i> struck a rock

-and sank, but she chose a convenient spot just opposite

-Mr. Brooke’s house, so that Brooke’s officers<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">68</span>

-and those of the ship formed one mess there, a

-band of brothers, while the damage was being repaired.

-Then came the promised sport, a joint boat

-expedition up all sorts of queer back channels and

-rivers fouled by the pirates with stakes and booms

-under fire of the artillery in their hill fortresses. The

-sportsmen burst the booms, charged the hills, stormed

-the forts, burned out the pirates and obtained their

-complete submission. Brooke invited them all to a

-pirate conference at his house and, just as with the

-land rogues, charmed them out of their skins. He

-fought like a man, but his greatest victories were

-scored by perfect manners.</p>

-

-<p>The next adventure was a visit from the Arctic

-explorer, Sir Edward Belcher, sent by the British government

-to inspect Brooke’s kingdom, now a peaceful

-and happy country.</p>

-

-<p>Later came Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane with a

-squadron to smash up a few more pirates, and the

-smashing of pirates continued for many years a popular

-sport for the navy. The pirate states to the

-northward became in time the British colonies of

-Labuan, and North Borneo, but Sarawak is still a

-protected Malay state, the hereditary kingdom of

-Sir James Brooke and his descendants. May that

-dynasty reign so long as the sun shines.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">69</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XI">XI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1842

-

-<span class="subhead">THE SPIES</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<h3>I</h3>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">From</span> earliest childhood Eldred Pottinger was out

-of place in crowded England. Gunpowder is

-good exciting stuff to play with, and there could be

-no objection to his blowing up himself and his little

-brother, because that was all in the family; but when

-he mined the garden wall and it fell on a couple of

-neighbors, they highly took offense; and when his

-finely invented bomb went off at Addiscombe College

-he rose to the level of a public nuisance. On the whole

-it must have been a relief to his friends when he went

-to India. There he had an uncle, the president in

-Scinde, a shrewd man who shipped young Pottinger

-to the greatest possible distance in the hinder parts of

-Afghanistan.</p>

-

-<p>The political situation in Afghanistan was the usual

-howling chaos of oriental kingdoms, and the full

-particulars would bore the reader just as they bored

-me. It was Pottinger’s business to find out and report

-the exact state of affairs at a time when any

-white man visiting the country was guaranteed, if

-and when found, to have his throat cut. Being clever

-at native languages, with a very foxy shrewdness, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">70</span>

-young spy set off, disguised as a native horse dealer,

-and reached Cabul, the Afghan capital.</p>

-

-<p>The reigning ameer was Dost Mahomet, who was

-not on speaking terms with Kamran, king of Herat,

-and Pottinger’s job was to get through to Herat without

-being caught by Dost. The horse-copper disguise

-was useless now, so Pottinger became a Mahomedan

-<em>syed</em>, or professional holy man. He sent his attendants

-and horses ahead, slipped out of the capital on

-foot by night and made his way to his camp. So he

-reached the country of the Hazareh tribes where his

-whole expedition was captured by the principal robber

-Jakoob Beg, who did a fairly good business in

-selling travelers, as slaves, except when they paid

-blackmail. “The chief,” says Pottinger, “was the

-finest Hazareh I had seen, and appeared a well-meaning,

-sensible person. He, however, was quite in the

-hands of his cousin—an ill-favored, sullen and

-treacherous-looking rascal. I, by way of covering

-my silence, and to avoid much questioning, took to

-my beads and kept telling them with great perseverance,

-much to the increase of my reputation as a holy

-personage.”</p>

-

-<p>The trouble was that Pottinger and his devout followers

-were of the Sounee faith, whereas the robber

-castle was of the Sheeah persuasion. The difference

-was something like that between our Catholics and

-Protestants, and Pottinger was like a Methodist minister

-trying to pass himself off for a cardinal without

-knowing the little points of etiquette. The prisoners

-prompted one another into all sorts of ridiculous

-blunders, so that the ill-favored cousin suspected<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">71</span>

-Pottinger of being a fraud. “Why he may be a

-Feringhee himself,” said the cousin. “I have always

-heard that the Hindustanees are black, and this man is

-fairer than we are.” But then the Feringhees—the

-British—were supposed to be monsters, and Pottinger

-was in no way monstrous to look at, so that he

-managed to talk round the corner, and at the end of

-a week ransomed his party with the gift of a fine gun

-to the chief. They set off very blithely into the

-mountains, but had not gone far when the chief’s

-riders came romping in pursuit, and herded them back,

-presumably to have their throats cut according to

-local manners and customs. The chief, it turned

-out, had been unable to make the gun go off, but finding

-it worked all right if handled properly dismissed

-the spy with his blessing. Eighteen days’ journey

-brought him to Herat, where he felt perfectly safe,

-strolling unarmed in the country outside the walls,

-until a gang of slave catchers made him an easy prey.

-His follower, Synd Ahmed, scared them off by shouting

-to an imaginary escort.</p>

-

-<p>Shah Kamran with his vizier Yar Mahomed had

-been out of town, but on their return to Herat, Pottinger

-introduced himself to the king as a British

-officer, and his gift of a brace of pistols was

-graciously accepted.</p>

-

-<p>Not long afterward a Persian army came up

-against Herat, and with that force there were Russian

-officers. For once the Heratis could look for

-no help from Afghanistan; and for once this mighty

-fortress, the key to the gates of India, was guarded

-by a cur. If Herat fell the way was open for Russia,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">72</span>

-the ancient road to India of all the conquerors.

-There is the reason why the British had sent a spy

-to Herat.</p>

-

-<p>The Heratis were quick to seek the advice of the

-British officer who organized the defense and in the

-end took charge, the one competent man in the garrison.

-Shah Kamran sent him with a flag of truce to

-the Persian army. The Persian soldiers hailed him

-with rapture, thinking they would soon get home to

-their wives and families; they patted his legs, they

-caressed his horse, they shouted “Bravo! Bravo!

-Welcome! The English were always friends of the

-king of kings!”</p>

-

-<p>So Pottinger was brought before the shah of

-Persia, who would accept no terms except surrender,

-which the Englishman ridiculed. He went back to

-the city, and the siege went on for months.</p>

-

-<p>A shell burst the house next door to his quarters,

-but he took no harm. One day he leaned against a

-loophole in the ramparts, watching a Persian attempt

-to spring a mine, and as he moved away his place was

-taken by a eunuch who at once got a ball in the

-lungs. He had narrow escapes without end.</p>

-

-<p>At the end of six months, June twenty-fourth, 1838,

-the Persians tried to carry the place by assault. “At

-four points the assault was repulsed, but at the fifth

-point the storming column threw itself into the trench

-of the lower fausse-braye. The struggle was brief but

-bloody. The defenders fell at their posts to a man,

-and the work was carried by the besiegers. Encouraged

-by this first success, the storming party

-pushed on up the slope, but a galling fire from the

-garrison met them as they advanced. The officers<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">73</span>

-and men of the column were mown down; there was

-a second brief and bloody struggle, and the upper

-fausse-braye was carried, while a few of the most

-daring of the assailants, pushing on in advance of

-their comrades, gained the head of the breach. But

-now Deen Mahomed came down with the Afghan

-reserve, and thus recruited the defenders gathered

-new heart, so that the Persians in the breach were

-driven back. Again and again with desperate courage

-they struggled to effect a lodgment, only to be repulsed

-and thrown back in confusion upon their comrades,

-who were pressing on behind. The conflict

-was fierce, the issue doubtful. Now the breach was

-well-nigh carried; and now the stormers, recoiling

-from the shock of the defense, fell back upon the exterior

-slope of the fausse-braye.</p>

-

-<p>“Startled by the noise of the assault Yar Mahomed

-(the vizier) had risen up, left his quarters, and ridden

-down to the works. Pottinger went forth at the same

-time and on the same errand. Giving instructions to

-his dependents to be carried out in the event of his

-falling in the defense, he hastened to join the vizier....

-As they neared the point of the attack the

-garrison were seen retreating by twos and threes;

-others were quitting the works on the pretext of

-carrying off the wounded.... Pottinger was eager

-to push on to the breach; Yar Mahomed sat himself

-down. The vizier had lost heart; his wonted high

-courage and collectedness had deserted him. Astonished

-and indignant ... the English officer called

-upon the vizier again and again to rouse himself.

-The Afghan chief rose up and advanced further

-into the works, and neared the breach where the conflict<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">74</span>

-was raging.... Yar Mahomed called upon his

-men in God’s name to fight; but they wavered and

-stood still. Then his heart failed him again. He

-turned back, said he would go for aid.... Alarmed

-by the backwardness of their chief the men were now

-retreating in every direction.” Pottinger swore.</p>

-

-<p>Yar roused himself, again advanced, but again

-wavered, and a third time Pottinger by word and deed

-put him to shame. “He reviled, he threatened, he

-seized him by the arm and dragged him forward to

-the breach.” Now comes the fun, and we can forsake

-the tedious language of the official version.

-Yar, hounded to desperation by Pottinger, seized a

-staff, rushed like a wildcat on the retreating soldiers,

-and so horrified them that they bolted back over the

-breach down the outside into the face of the Persians.

-And the Persians fled! Herat was saved.</p>

-

-<p>An envoy came from the Persian army to explain

-that it was infamous of the Shah Kamran to have an

-infidel in charge of the defense. “Give him up,”

-said the Persians, “and we’ll raise the siege.” But

-the shah was not in a position to surrender Pottinger.

-That gentleman might take it into his head to surrender

-the shah of Herat.</p>

-

-<p>Another six months of siege, with famine, mutiny

-and all the usual worries of beleaguered towns finished

-Pottinger’s work, the saving of Herat.</p>

-

-<h3>II</h3>

-

-<p>Now we take up the life of another spy, also an

-army officer, old Alexander Burnes. At eighteen

-he had been adjutant of his regiment and rose

-very steadily from rank to rank until he was sent as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">75</span>

-an envoy to Runjeet Singh, the ruler of Punjab, and

-to the ameers of Scinde. In those days Northwestern

-India was an unknown region and Burnes was

-pioneer of the British power.</p>

-

-<p>In 1832 he set out on his second mission through

-Afghanistan, Bokhara and Persia. See how he

-wrote from Cabul: “I do not despair of reaching

-Istamboul (Constantinople) in safety. They may

-seize me and sell me for a slave, but no one will attack

-me for my riches.... I have no tent, no chair

-or table, no bed, and my clothes altogether amount to

-the value of one pound sterling. You would disown

-your son if you saw him. My dress is purely Asiatic,

-and since I came into Cabul has been changed to that

-of the lowest orders of the people. My head is

-shaved of its brown locks, and my beard dyed black

-grieves ... for the departed beauty of youth. I

-now eat my meals with my hands, and greasy digits

-they are, though I must say in justification, that I

-wash before and after meals.... I frequently sleep

-under a tree, but if a villager will take compassion on

-me I enter his house. I never conceal that I am a

-European, and I have as yet found the character advantageous

-to my comfort. The people know me by

-the name of Sekunder, which is the Persian for

-Alexander.... With all my assumed poverty I

-have a bag of ducats round my waist, and bills for as

-much money as I choose to draw.... When I go

-into company I put my hand on my heart, and say

-with all humility to the master of the house, ‘Peace

-be unto thee,’ according to custom, and then I squat

-myself down on the ground. This familiarity has

-given me an insight into the character of the people<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">76</span>

-... kind-hearted and hospitable, they have no prejudices

-against a Christian and none against our nation.

-When they ask me if I eat pork, I of course shudder,

-and say that it is only outcasts that commit such outrages.

-God forgive me! for I am very fond of bacon....

-I am well mounted on a good horse in case I

-should find it necessary to take to my heels. My

-whole baggage on earth goes on one mule, which my

-servant sits supercargo.... I never was in better

-spirits.”</p>

-

-<p>After his wonderful journey Burnes was sent to

-England to make his report to the government, and

-King William IV must needs hear the whole of the

-story at Brighton pavilion.</p>

-

-<p>The third journey of this great spy was called the

-commercial mission to Cabul. There he learned that

-the Persian siege of Herat was being more or less

-conducted by Russian officers. Russians swarmed

-at the court of Dost Mahomed, and an ambassador

-from the czar was there trying to make a treaty.</p>

-

-<p>Great was the indignation and alarm in British

-India, and for fear of a Russian invasion in panic

-haste the government made a big famous blunder,

-for without waiting to know how Dost was fooling

-the Russians, an army was sent through the terrible

-Bolan Pass. That sixty-mile abyss with hanging

-walls belongs to the Pathans, the fiercest and

-wildest of all the tribes of men. The army climbed

-through the death trap, marched, starving, on from

-Quetta to Candahar and then advanced on Cabul.

-But Dost’s son Akbar held the great fortress of

-Ghuznee, a quite impregnable place that had to be

-taken.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">77</span></p>

-

-<p>One night while a sham attack was made on the

-other side of the fortress, Captain Thomson placed

-nine hundred pounds of gunpowder at the foot of

-a walled-up gate, and then touched off the charge.

-The twenty-first light infantry climbed over the smoking

-ruins and at the head of his storming column

-Colonel Dennie, in three hours’ fighting, took the citadel.

-Dost Mahomed fled, and the British entered

-Cabul to put a puppet sovereign on the throne.</p>

-

-<p>Cabul was a live volcano where English women

-gave dances. There were cricket matches, theatricals,

-sports. The governor-general in camp gave a state

-dinner in honor of Major Pottinger, who had come

-in from the siege of Herat. During the reception

-of the guests a shabby Afghan watched, leaning

-against a door-post, and the court officials were about

-to remove this intruder when the governor-general

-approached leading his sister. “Let me present

-you,” said Lord Auckland, “to Eldred Pottinger, the

-hero of Herat.” This shabby Afghan was the guest

-of honor, but nobody would listen to his warnings,

-or to the warnings of Sir Alexander Burnes, assistant

-resident. Only the two spies knew what was to

-come. Then the volcano blew up.</p>

-

-<p>Burnes had a brother staying with him in Cabul,

-also his military secretary; and when the mob,

-savage, excited, bent on massacre, swarmed round

-his house he spoke to them from the balcony. While

-he talked Lieutenant Broadfoot fell at his side,

-struck by a ball in the chest. The stables were on

-fire, the mob filled his garden. He offered to pay

-then in cash for his brother’s life and his own, so a

-Cashmiri volunteered to save them in disguise. They<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">78</span>

-put on native clothes, they slipped into the garden,

-and then their guide shouted, “This is Sekunder

-Burnes!” The two brothers were cut to pieces.</p>

-

-<p>Pottinger was political agent at Kohistan to the

-northward, and when the whole Afghan nation rose

-in revolt his fort was so sorely beset that he and his

-retinue stole away in the dark, joining a Ghoorka

-regiment. But the regiment was also beset, and its

-water supply cut off. Pottinger fought the guns; the

-men repelled attacks by night and day until worn out;

-dying of thirst in an intolerable agony the regiment

-broke, scattering into the hills. Only a few men

-rallied round Pottinger to fight through to Cabul,

-and he was fearfully wounded, unable to command.

-Of his staff and the Ghoorka regiment only five men

-were alive when they entered Cabul.</p>

-

-<p>Our officer commanding at Cabul was not in good

-health, but his death was unfortunately delayed while

-the Afghans murdered men, women and children, and

-the British troops, for lack of a leader, funked. Envoys

-waited on Akbar Khan, and were murdered.

-The few officers who kept their heads were without

-authority, blocked at every turn by cowards, by incompetents.

-Then the council of war made treaty

-with Akbar, giving him all the guns except six, all the

-treasure, three officers as hostages, bills drawn on

-India for forty thousand rupees, the honor of their

-country, everything for safe conduct in their disgrace.

-Dying of cold and hunger, the force marched into the

-Khoord-Cabul Pass, and at the end of three days the

-married officers were surrendered with their wives

-and children. Of the sixteen thousand men three-fourths

-were dead when the officer commanding and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">79</span>

-the gallant Brigadier Skelton were given up as hostages

-to Akbar. The survivors pushed on through

-the Jugduluk Pass, which the Afghans had barricaded,

-and there was the final massacre. Of the

-whole army, one man, Doctor Brydon, on a starved

-pony, sinking with exhaustion, rode in through the

-gates of Fort Jellalabad.</p>

-

-<p>The captured general had sent orders for the retreat

-of the Jellalabad garrison through the awful

-defiles of the Khyber Pass in face of a hostile army,

-and in the dead of winter; but General Sale, commanding,

-was not such a fool. For three months he

-had worked his men to desperation rebuilding the

-fortress, and now when he saw the white tents of

-Akbar’s camp he was prepared for a siege. That day

-an earthquake razed the whole fortress into a heap

-of ruins, but the garrison rebuilt the walls. Then

-they sallied and, led by Henry Havelock, assaulted

-Akbar’s camp, smashed his army to flying fragments,

-captured his guns, baggage, standards, ammunition

-and food. Nine days later the bands of the garrison

-marched out to meet a relieving army from India.

-They were playing an old tune, <em>Oh, but ye’ve been

-lang o’ comin’</em>.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile the British prisoners, well treated, were

-hurried from fort to fort, with some idea of holding

-them for sale at so much a slave, until they managed

-to bribe an Afghan chief. The bribed man led a

-revolt against Akbar, and one chief after another

-joined him, swearing on the Koran allegiance to

-Eldred Pottinger. When Akbar fell, Pottinger

-marched as leader of the revolted chiefs on the way

-to Cabul. One day, as the ladies and children were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">80</span>

-resting in an old fort for shelter during the great heat

-of the afternoon, they heard the tramp of horsemen,

-and in the dead silence of a joy and gratitude too

-great for utterance, received the relieving force.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">81</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XII">XII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1842

-

-<span class="subhead">A YEAR’S ADVENTURES</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap a"><span class="smcap1">A thousand</span> adventures are taking place every

-day, all at once in the several continents and the

-many seas. A few are reported, many are noted in

-the private journals of adventurers, most of them are

-just taken as a matter of course in the day’s work,

-but nobody has ever attempted to make a picture of

-all the world’s adventures for a day or a year.</p>

-

-<p>Let us make magic. Any date will do, or any year.

-Here for instance is a date—the twelfth of September,

-1842—that will serve our purpose as well as any

-other.</p>

-

-<p>In Afghanistan a British force of twenty-six

-thousand people had perished, an army of vengeance

-had marched to the rescue of Major Pottinger, Lady

-Sale, Lady McNaughton and other captives held by

-the Afghan chiefs. On September twelfth they were

-rescued.</p>

-

-<p>In China the people had refused to buy our Indian

-opium, so we carefully and methodically bombarded

-all Chinese seaports until she consented to open them

-to foreign trade. Then Major Pottinger’s uncle, Sir

-Henry, made a treaty which the Chinese emperor

-signed on September eighth.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">82</span></p>

-

-<p>In the Malacca Straits Captain Henry Keppel of

-H.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Dido</i> was busy smashing up pirates.</p>

-

-<p>In Tahiti poor little Queen Pomaré, being in childbed,

-was so bullied by the French admiral that she

-surrendered her kingdom to France on September

-ninth. Next morning her child was born, but her

-kingdom was gone forever.</p>

-

-<p>In South Africa Captain Smith made a disgraceful

-attack upon the Boers at Port Natal, and on June

-twenty-sixth they got a tremendous thrashing which

-put an end to the republic of Natalia. In September

-they began to settle down as British subjects, not at all

-content.</p>

-

-<p>Norfolk Island is a scrap of paradise, about six

-miles by four, lying nine hundred miles from Sydney,

-in Australia. In 1842 it was a convict settlement,

-and on June twenty-first the brig <i>Governor Philip</i>

-was to sail for Sydney, having landed her stores at

-the island. During the night she stood off and on,

-and two prisoners coming on deck at dawn for a

-breath of air noticed that discipline seemed slack,

-although a couple of drowsy sentries guarded their

-hatchway. Within a few minutes the prisoners were

-all on deck. One sentry was disarmed, the other

-thrown overboard. Two soldiers off duty had a

-scuffle with the mutineers, but one took refuge in the

-main chains, while the other was drowned trying to

-swim ashore. The sergeant in charge ran on deck

-and shot a mutineer before he was knocked over,

-stunned. As to the seamen, they ran into the forecastle.</p>

-

-<p>The prisoners had now control of the ship, but

-none of them knew how to handle their prize, so they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">83</span>

-loosed a couple of sailors and made them help.

-Woolfe, one of the convicts, then rescued a soldier

-who was swimming alongside. The officers and

-soldiers aft were firing through the grated hatches and

-wounded several convicts, until they were allayed

-with a kettle of boiling water. So far the mutiny had

-gone off very nicely, but now the captain, perched on

-the cabin table, fired through the woodwork at a

-point where he thought a man was standing. By luck

-the bullet went through the ringleader’s mouth and

-blew out the back of his head, whereon a panic

-seized the mutineers, who fled below hatches. The

-sailor at the wheel released the captain, and the afterguard

-recaptured the ship. One mutineer had his

-head blown off, and the rest surrendered. The whole

-deck was littered with the wounded and the dying

-and the dead, and there were not many convicts left.

-In the trial at Sydney, Wheelan, who proved innocent,

-was spared, also Woolfe for saving a soldier’s life,

-but four were hanged, meeting their fate like men.</p>

-

-<p>It was in August that the sultan of Borneo confirmed

-Mr. James Brooke as rajah of Sarawak, and

-the new king was extremely busy executing robbers,

-rescuing shipwrecked mariners from slavery, reopening

-old mines for diamonds, gold and manganese.

-“I breathe peace and comfort to all who obey,” so

-he wrote to his mother, “and wrath and fury to the

-evil-doer.”</p>

-

-<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>

-

-<p>Captain Ross was in the Antarctic, coasting the

-great ice barrier. Last year he had given to two tall

-volcanoes the names of his ships, the <i>Erebus</i> and <i>Terror</i>.

-This year on March twelfth in a terrific gale<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">84</span>

-with blinding snow at midnight the two ships tried to

-get shelter under the lee of an iceberg, but the <i>Terror</i>

-rammed the <i>Erebus</i> so that her bow-sprit, fore topmast

-and a lot of smaller spars were carried away,

-and she was jammed against the wall of the berg

-totally disabled. She could not make sail and had no

-room to wear round, so she sailed out backward, one

-of the grandest feats of seamanship on record; then,

-clear of the danger, steered between two bergs, her

-yard-arms almost scraping both of them, until she

-gained the smoother water to leeward, where she

-found her consort.</p>

-

-<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>

-

-<p>In Hayti there was an earthquake, in Brazil a revolution;

-in Jamaica a storm on the tenth which

-wrecked H.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Spitfire</i>, and in the western states

-Mount Saint Helen’s gave a fine volcanic eruption.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">85</span>

-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.&nbsp;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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>

-

-<p>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.&nbsp;B. ship <i>Cowlitz</i>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>The Hudson’s Bay Company had a lease from the

-Russians of all the fur-trading forts of Southeastern<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">86</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">87</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>

-

-<p>Fremont was exploring from the Mississippi Valley

-a route for emigrants to Oregon, and in that journey

-climbed the Rocky Mountains to plant Old Glory on

-one of the highest peaks. He was a very fine explorer,

-and not long afterward conquered the Mexican

-state of California, completing the outline of the

-modern United States. But Fremont’s guide will be

-remembered long after Fremont is forgotten, for he

-was the greatest of American frontiersmen, the ideal

-of modern chivalry, Kit Carson. Of course he must

-have a chapter to himself.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">88</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIII">XIII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.D. 1843

-

-<span class="subhead">KIT CARSON</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Once</span> Colonel Inman, an old frontiersman, bought

-a newspaper which had a full page picture of

-Kit Carson. The hero stood in a forest, a gigantic

-figure in a buckskin suit, heavily armed, embracing a

-rescued heroine, while at his feet sprawled six slain

-Indian braves, his latest victims.</p>

-

-<p>“What do you think of this?” said the colonel

-handing the picture to a delicate little man, who

-wiped his spectacles, studied the work of art, and replied

-in a gentle drawl, “That may be true, but I

-hain’t got no recollection of it.” And so Kit Carson

-handed the picture back.</p>

-

-<p>He stood five feet six, and looked frail, but his

-countrymen, and all the boys of all the world think

-of this mighty frontiersman as a giant.</p>

-

-<p>At seventeen he was a remarkably green and innocent

-boy for his years, his home a log cabin on the

-Missouri frontier. Past the door ran the trail to

-the west where trappers went by in buckskin, traders

-among the Indians, and soldiers for the savage wars

-of the plains.</p>

-

-<p>One day came Colonel S. Vrain, agent of a big fur-trading

-company, with his long train of wagons hitting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">89</span>

-the Santa Fe trail. Kit got a job with that train,

-to herd spare stock, hunt bison, mount guard and

-fight Indians. They were three weeks out in camp

-when half a dozen Pawnee Indians charged, yelling

-and waving robes to stampede the herd, but a brisk

-fusillade from the white men sent them scampering

-back over the sky-line. Next day, after a sixteen

-mile march the outfit corraled their wagons for defense

-at the foot of Pawnee Rock beside the

-Arkansas River. “I had not slept any of the night

-before,” says Kit, “for I stayed awake watching to

-get a shot at the Pawnees that tried to stampede our

-animals, expecting they would return; and I hadn’t

-caught a wink all day, as I was out buffalo hunting,

-so I was awfully tired and sleepy when we arrived

-at Pawnee Rock that evening, and when I was posted

-at my place at night, I must have gone to sleep leaning

-against the rocks; at any rate, I was wide enough

-awake when the cry of Indians was given by one of

-the guard. I had picketed my mule about twenty

-paces from where I stood, and I presume he had been

-lying down; all I remember is, that the first thing I

-saw after the alarm was something rising up out of

-the grass, which I thought was an Indian. I pulled

-the trigger; it was a center shot, and I don’t believe

-the mule ever kicked after he was hit!”</p>

-

-<p>At daylight the Pawnees attacked in earnest and

-the fight lasted nearly three days, the mule teams

-being shut in the corral without food or water. At

-midnight of the second day they hitched up, fighting

-their way for thirteen miles, then got into bad trouble

-fording Pawnee Fork while the Indians poured lead

-and arrows into the teams until the colonel and Kit<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">90</span>

-Carson led a terrific charge which dispersed the

-enemy. That fight cost the train four killed and

-seven wounded.</p>

-

-<p>It was during this first trip that Carson saved the

-life of a wounded teamster by cutting off his arm.

-With a razor he cut the flesh, with a saw got through

-the bone, and with a white-hot king-bolt seared the

-wound, stopping the flow of blood.</p>

-

-<p>In 1835 Carson was hunter for Bent’s Fort, keeping

-the garrison of forty men supplied with buffalo

-meat. Once he was out hunting with six others and

-they made their camp tired out. “I saw,” says Kit,

-“two big wolves sneaking about, one of them quite

-close to us. Gordon, one of my men, wanted to fire

-his rifle at it, but I would not let him for fear he

-would hit a dog. I admit that I had a sort of idea

-that these wolves might be Indians; but when I noticed

-one of them turn short around and heard the

-clashing of his teeth as he rushed at one of the dogs,

-I felt easy then, and was certain that they were

-wolves sure enough. But the red devil fooled me

-after all, for he had two dried buffalo bones in his

-hands under the wolf-skin and he rattled them together

-every time he turned to make a dash at the

-dogs! Well, by and by we all dozed off, and it

-wasn’t long before I was suddenly aroused by a noise

-and a big blaze. I rushed out the first thing for our

-mules and held them. If the savages had been at all

-smart, they could have killed us in a trice, but they

-ran as soon as they fired at us. They killed one of

-my men, putting five shots in his body and eight in

-his buffalo robe. The Indians were a band of

-snakes, and found us by sheer accident. They endeavored<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">91</span>

-to ambush us the next morning, but we got

-wind of their little game and killed three of them,

-including the chief.”</p>

-

-<p>It was in his eight years as hunter for Bent’s Fort

-that Kit learned to know the Indians, visiting their

-camps to smoke with the chiefs and play with the

-little boys. When the Sioux nation invaded the Comanche

-and Arrapaho hunting-grounds he persuaded

-them to go north, and so averted war.</p>

-

-<p>In 1842 when he was scout to Fremont, he went

-buffalo hunting to get meat for the command. One

-day he was cutting up a beast newly killed when he

-left his work in pursuit of a large bull that came

-rushing past him. His horse was too much blown

-to run well, and when at last he got near enough to

-fire, things began to happen all at once. The bullet

-hitting too low enraged the bison just as the horse,

-stepping into a prairie-dog hole, shot Kit some fifteen

-feet through the air. Instead of Kit hunting

-bison, Mr. Buffalo hunted Kit, who ran for all he

-was worth. So they came to the Arkansas River

-where Kit dived while the bison stayed on the bank

-to hook him when he landed. But while the bison

-gave Kit a swimming lesson, one of the hunters made

-an unfair attack from behind, killing the animal. So

-Kit crawled out and skinned his enemy.</p>

-

-<p>One of his great hunting feats was the killing of

-five buffalo with only four bullets. Being short of

-lead he had to cut out the ball from number four,

-then catch up, and shoot number five.</p>

-

-<p>On another hunt, chasing a cow bison down a steep

-hill, he fired just as the animal took a flying leap, so

-that the carcass fell, not to the ground, but spiked on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">92</span>

-a small cedar. The Indians persuaded him to leave

-that cow impaled upon a tree-top because it was big

-magic; but to people who do not know the shrubs of

-the southwestern desert, it must sound like a first-class

-lie.</p>

-

-<p>One night as the expedition lay in camp, far up

-among the mountains, Fremont sat for hours reading

-some letters just arrived from home, then fell asleep

-to dream of his young wife. Presently a soft sound,

-rather like the blow of an ax made Kit start broad

-awake, to find Indians in camp. They fled, but two

-of the white men were lying dead in their blankets,

-and the noise that awakened Carson was the blow

-of a tomahawk braining his own chum, the voyageur,

-La Jeunesse.</p>

-

-<p>In the following year Carson was serving as hunter

-to a caravan westward bound across the plains, when

-he met Captain Cooke in camp, with four squadrons

-of United States Cavalry. The captain told him that

-following on the trail was a caravan belonging to a

-wealthy Mexican and so richly loaded that a hundred

-riders had been hired as guards.</p>

-

-<p>Presently the Mexican train came up and the majordomo

-offered Carson three hundred dollars if he

-would ride to the Mexican governor at Santa Fe and

-ask him for an escort of troops from the point where

-they entered New Mexico. Kit, who was hard up,

-gladly accepted the cash, and rode to Bent’s Fort.

-There he had news that the Utes were on the war-path,

-but Mr. Bent lent him the swiftest horse in the stables.

-Kit walked, leading the horse by the rein, to have him

-perfectly fresh in case there was need for flight. He

-reached the Ute village, hid, and passed the place at<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">93</span>

-night without being seen. So he reached Taos, his

-own home in New Mexico, whence the alcalde sent

-his message to the governor of the state at Santa Fe.</p>

-

-<p>The governor had already sent a hundred riders

-but these had been caught and wiped out by a force

-of Texans, only one escaping, who, during the heat

-of the fight, caught a saddled Texan pony and rode

-off.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile the governor—Armijo—sent his reply

-for Carson to carry to the caravan. He said he was

-marching with a large force, and he did so. But

-when the survivor of the lost hundred rode into

-Armijo’s camp with his bad news, the whole outfit

-rolled their tails for home.</p>

-

-<p>Carson, with the governor’s letter, and the news

-of plentiful trouble, reached the Mexican caravan,

-which decided not to leave the protecting American

-cavalry camped on the boundary-line. What with

-Texan raiders, border ruffians, Utes, Apaches, Comanches,

-and other little drawbacks, the caravan

-trade on the Santa Fe trail was never dull for a

-moment.</p>

-

-<p>During these years one finds Kit Carson’s tracks

-all over the West about as hard to follow as those of a

-flea in a blanket.</p>

-

-<p>Here, for example, is a description of the American

-army of the Bear Flag republic seizing California in

-1846. “A vast cloud of dust appeared first, and

-thence, a long file, emerged this wildest wild party.

-Fremont rode ahead—a spare, active-looking man,

-with such an eye! He was dressed in a blouse and

-leggings and wore a felt hat. After him came five

-Delaware Indians, who were his body-guard, and have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">94</span>

-been with him through all his wanderings; they had

-charge of the baggage horses. The rest, many of

-them blacker than the Indians, rode two and two, the

-rifle held in one hand across the pommel of the saddle.

-Thirty-nine of them there are his regular men, the

-rest are loafers picked up lately; his original men are

-principally backwoodsmen from the state of Tennessee,

-and the banks of the upper waters of the

-Missouri.... The dress of these men was principally

-a long loose coat of deerskin, tied with thongs

-in front; trousers of the same, which when wet

-through, they take off, scrape well inside with a knife,

-and put on as soon as dry. The saddles were of various

-fashions, though these and a large drove of

-horses, and a brass field gun, were things they had

-picked up about California. They are allowed no

-liquor; this, no doubt, has much to do with their

-good conduct; and the discipline, too, is very strict.”</p>

-

-<p>One of these men was Kit Carson, sent off in October

-to Washington on the Atlantic, three thousand

-miles away, with news that California was conquered

-for the United States, by a party of sixty men. In

-New Mexico, Kit met General Kearney, and told him

-that the Californians were a pack of cowards. So

-the general sent back his troops, marching on with

-only one hundred dragoons. But the Californians

-were not cowards, they had risen against the American

-invasion, they were fighting magnificently, and Fremont

-had rather a bad time before he completed the

-conquest.</p>

-

-<p>It was during the Californian campaign that Carson

-made his famous ride, the greatest feat of horsemanship

-the world has ever known. As a despatch<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">95</span>

-rider, he made his way through the hostile tribes, and

-terrific deserts from the Missouri to California and

-back, a total of four thousand, four hundred miles.

-But while he rested in California, before he set out

-on the return, he joined a party of Californian gentlemen

-on a trip up the coast from Los Angeles to San

-Francisco. Two of the six men had a remount each,

-but four of them rode the six hundred miles without

-change of horses in six days. Add that, and the return

-to Kit Carson’s journey, and it makes a total of

-five thousand, six hundred miles. So for distance,

-he beats world records by one hundred miles, at a

-speed beyond all comparison, and in face of difficulties

-past all parallel.</p>

-

-<p>For some of us old western reprobates who were

-cow hands, despising a sheep man more than anything

-else alive, it is very disconcerting to know that

-Carson went into that business. He became a partner

-of his lifelong friend, Maxwell, whose rancho in

-New Mexico was very like a castle of the Middle

-Ages. The dinner service was of massive silver, but

-the guests bedded down with a cowhide on the floor.

-New Mexico was a conquered country owned by the

-United States, at intervals between the Mexican revolts,

-when Kit settled down as a rancher. The

-words settled down, mean that he served as a colonel

-of volunteers against the Mexicans, and spent the

-rest of the time fighting Apaches, the most ferocious

-of all savages.</p>

-

-<p>Near Santa Fe, lived Mr. White and his son who

-fell in defense of their ranch, having killed three

-Apaches, while the women and children of the household

-met with a much worse fate than that of death.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">96</span>

-The settlers refused to march in pursuit until Carson

-arrived, but by mistake he was not given command,

-a Frenchman having been chosen as leader.</p>

-

-<p>The retreat of the savages was far away in the

-mountains, and well fortified. The only chance of

-saving the women and children was to rush this place

-before there was time to kill them, and Carson

-dashed in with a yell, expecting all hands to follow.

-So he found himself alone, surrounded by the

-Apaches, and as they rushed, he rode, throwing himself

-on the off side of his horse, almost concealed

-behind its neck. Six arrows struck his horse, and

-one bullet lodged in his coat before he was out of

-range. He cursed his Mexicans, he put them to

-shame, he persuaded them to fight, then led a gallant

-charge, killing five Indians as they fled. The delay

-had given them time to murder the women and

-children.</p>

-

-<p>Once, after his camp had been attacked by Indians,

-Carson discovered that the sentry failed to give an

-alarm because he was asleep. The Indian punishment

-followed, and the soldier was made for one day

-to wear the dress of a squaw.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_96" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_096.jpg" width="1455" height="2187" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Kit Carson</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>We must pass by Kit’s capture of a gang of thirty-five

-desperadoes for the sake of a better story. The

-officer, commanding a detachment of troops on the

-march, flogged an Indian chief, the result being war.

-Carson was the first white man to pass, and while

-the chiefs were deciding how to attack his caravan,

-he walked alone into the council lodge. So many

-years were passed since the Cheyennes had seen him

-that he was not recognized, and nobody suspected

-that he knew their language, until he made a speech<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">97</span>

-in Cheyenne, introducing himself, recalling ancient

-friendships, offering all courtesies. As to their

-special plan for killing the leader of the caravan, and

-taking his scalp, he claimed that he might have something

-to say on the point. They parted, Kit to encourage

-his men, the Indians to waylay the caravan;

-but from the night camp he despatched a Mexican

-boy to ride three hundred miles for succor. When

-the Cheyennes charged the camp at dawn, he ordered

-them to halt, and walked into the midst of them, explaining

-the message he had sent, and what their fate

-would be if the troops found they had molested them.

-When the Indians found the tracks that proved Kit’s

-words, they knew they had business elsewhere.</p>

-

-<p>In 1863 Carson was sent with a strong military

-force to chasten the hearts of the Navajo nation.

-They had never been conquered, and the flood of

-Spanish invasion split when it rolled against their

-terrific sand-rock desert. The land is one of unearthly

-grandeur where natural rocks take the shapes

-of towers, temples, palaces and fortresses of mountainous

-height blazing scarlet in color. In one part

-a wave of rock like a sea breaker one hundred fifty

-feet high and one hundred miles in length curls overhanging

-as though the rushing gray waters had been

-suddenly struck into ice. On one side lies the hollow

-Painted Desert, where the sands refract prismatic light

-like a colossal rainbow, and to the west the walls of the

-Navajo country drop a sheer mile into the stupendous

-labyrinth of the Grand Cañon. Such is the country

-of a race of warriors who ride naked, still armed with

-bow and arrows, their harness of silver and turquoise....</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">98</span></p>

-

-<p>They are handsome, cleanly, proud and dignified.

-They till their fields beside the desert springs, and their

-villages are set in native orchards, while beyond their

-settlements graze the flocks and herds tended by

-women herders.</p>

-

-<p>The conquest was a necessity, and it was well that

-this was entrusted to gentle, just, wise, heroic Carson.

-He was obliged to destroy their homes, to fell their

-peach trees, lay waste their crops, and sweep away

-their stock, starving them to surrender. He herded

-eleven thousand prisoners down to the lower deserts,

-where the chiefs crawled to him on their bellies for

-mercy, but the governor had no mercy, and long after

-Carson’s death, the hapless people were held in the

-Boique Redondo. A fourth part of them died of

-want, and their spirit was utterly broken before they

-were given back their lands. It is well for them that

-the Navajo desert is too terrible a region for the

-white men, and nobody tries to rob their new prosperity.</p>

-

-<p>In one more campaign Colonel Carson was officer

-commanding and gave a terrible thrashing to the Cheyennes,

-Kiowas and Comanches.</p>

-

-<p>Then came the end, during a visit to a son of his

-who lived in Colorado. Early in the morning of May

-twenty-third, 1868, he was mounting his horse when

-an artery broke in his neck, and within a few moments

-he was dead.</p>

-

-<p>But before we part with the frontier hero, it is

-pleasant to think of him still as a living man whose

-life is an inspiration and his manhood an example.</p>

-

-<p>Colonel Inman tells of nights at Maxwell’s ranch.

-“I have sat there,” he writes, “in the long winter<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">99</span>

-evenings when the great room was lighted only by the

-crackling logs, roaring up the huge throats of its two

-fireplaces ... watching Maxwell, Kit Carson and

-half a dozen chiefs silently interchange ideas in the

-wonderful sign language, until the glimmer of Aurora

-announced the advent of another day. But not a

-sound had been uttered during the protracted hours,

-save an occasional grunt of satisfaction on the part of

-the Indians, or when we white men exchanged a sentence.”</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">100</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIV">XIV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1845

-

-<span class="subhead">THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">John Nicholson</span> was a captain in the twenty-seventh

-native infantry of India. He was very

-tall, gaunt, haggard, with a long black beard, a pale

-face, lips that never smiled, eyes which burned flame

-and green like those of a tiger when he was angry.

-He rarely spoke.</p>

-

-<p>Once in a frontier action he was entirely surrounded

-by the enemy when one of his Afghans saw

-him in peril from a descending sword. The Pathan

-sprang forward, received the blow, and died. In a

-later fight Nicholson saw that warrior’s only son taken

-prisoner, and carried off by the enemy. Charging

-alone, cutting a lane with his sword, the officer rescued

-his man, hoisted him across the saddle, and fought his

-way back. Ever afterward the young Pathan, whose

-father had died for Nicholson, rode at the captain’s

-side, served him at table with a cocked pistol on one

-hand, slept across the door of his tent. By the time

-Nicholson’s special service began he had a personal

-following of two hundred and fifty wild riders who

-refused either to take any pay or to leave his service.</p>

-

-<p>So was he guarded, but also a sword must be found

-fit for the hand of the greatest swordsman in India.

-The Sikh leaders sent out word to their whole nation

-for such a blade as Nicholson might wear. Hundreds

-were offered and after long and intricate tests three

-were found equally perfect, two of the blades being

-curved, one straight. Captain Nicholson chose the

-straight sword, which he accepted as a gift from a

-nation of warriors.</p>

-

-<p>This man was only a most humble Christian, but the

-Sikhs, observing the perfection of his manhood, supposed

-him to be divine, and offered that if he would

-accept their religion they would raise such a temple in

-his honor as India had never seen. Many a time

-while he sat at work in his tent, busy with official

-papers, a dozen Sikh warriors would squat in the doorway

-silent, watching their god. He took no notice, but

-sometimes a worshiper, overcome with the conviction

-of sin, would prostrate himself in adoration. For

-this offense the punishment was three dozen lashes

-with the cat, but the victims liked it. “Our god knew

-that we had been doing wrong, and, therefore, punished

-us.”</p>

-

-<p>There is no need to explain the Indian mutiny to

-English readers. It is burned deep into our memory

-that in 1857 our native army, revolting, seized Delhi,

-the ancient capital, and set up a descendant of the

-Great Mogul as emperor of India. The children, the

-women, the men who were tortured to death, or butchered

-horribly, were of our own households. Your

-uncle fought, your cousin fell, my mother escaped.

-Remember Cawnpore!</p>

-

-<p>Nicholson at Peshawur seized the mails, had the letters

-translated, then made up his copies into bundles.

-At a council of officers the colonels of the native regiments

-swore to the loyalty of their men, but Nicholson

-dealt out his packages of letters to them all, saying,

-“Perhaps these will interest you.”</p>

-

-<p>The colonels read, and were chilled with horror at

-finding in their trusted regiments an abyss of treachery.

-Their troops were disarmed and disbanded.</p>

-

-<p>To disarm and disperse the native army throughout

-Northwestern India a flying column was formed

-of British troops, and Nicholson, although he was only

-a captain, was sent to take command of the whole

-force with the rank of brigadier-general. There were

-old officers under him, yet never a murmur rose from

-them at that strange promotion.</p>

-

-<p>Presently Sir John Lawrence wrote to Nicholson a

-fierce official letter, demanding, “Where are you?

-What are you doing? Send instantly a return of

-court-martial held upon insurgent natives, with a list

-of the various punishments inflicted.”</p>

-

-<p>Nicholson’s reply was a sheet of paper bearing his

-present address, the date, and the words, “The punishment

-of mutiny is death.” He wanted another regiment

-to strengthen his column, and demanded the

-eighty-seventh, which was guarding our women and

-children in the hills. Lawrence said these men could

-not be spared. Nicholson wrote back, “When an

-empire is at stake, women and children cease to be

-of any consideration whatever.” What chance had

-they if he failed to hold this district?</p>

-

-<figure id="i_102" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 18em;">

-  <img src="images/i_102.jpg" width="1412" height="2101" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">General Nicholson</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>Nicholson’s column on the march was surrounded

-by his own wild guards riding in couples, so that he,

-their god, searched the whole country with five hundred

-eyes. After one heart-breaking night march he

-drew up his infantry and guns, then rode along the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">103</span>

-line giving his orders: “In a few minutes you will

-see two native regiments come round that little temple.

-If they bring their muskets to the ‘ready,’ fire a volley

-into them without further orders.”</p>

-

-<p>As the native regiments appeared from behind the

-little temple, Nicholson rode to meet them. He was

-seen to speak to them and then they grounded their

-arms. Two thousand men had surrendered to seven

-hundred, but had the mutineers resisted Nicholson

-himself must have perished between two fires. He

-cared nothing for his life.</p>

-

-<p>Only once did this leader blow mutineers from the

-guns, and then it was to fire the flesh and blood of

-nine conspirators into the faces of a doubtful regiment.

-For the rest he had no powder to waste, but no

-mercy, and from his awful executions of rebels he

-would go away to hide in his tent and weep.</p>

-

-<p>He had given orders that no native should be allowed

-to ride past a white man. One morning before

-dawn the orderly officer, a lad of nineteen, seeing natives

-passing him on an elephant, ordered them sharply

-to dismount and make their salaam. They obeyed—an

-Afghan prince and his servant, sent by the king of

-Cabul as an embassy to Captain Nicholson. Next day

-the ambassador spoke of this humiliation. “No wonder,”

-he said, “you English conquer India when mere

-boys obey orders as this one did.”</p>

-

-<p>Nicholson once fought a Bengal tiger, and slew it

-with one stroke of his sword; but could the English

-subdue this India in revolt? The mutineers held the

-impregnable capital old Delhi—and under the red

-walls lay four thousand men—England’s forlorn

-hope—which must storm that giant fortress. If they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">104</span>

-failed the whole population would rise. “If ordained

-to fail,” said Nicholson, “I hope the British will drag

-down with them in flames and blood as many of the

-queen’s enemies as possible.” If they had failed

-not one man of our race would have escaped to the

-sea.</p>

-

-<p>Nicholson brought his force to aid in the siege of

-Delhi, and now he was only a captain under the impotent

-and hopeless General Wilson. “I have

-strength yet,” said Nicholson when he was dying, “to

-shoot him if necessary.”</p>

-

-<p>The batteries of the city walls from the Lahore

-Gate to the Cashmere Gate were manned by Sikh

-gunners, loyal to the English, but detained against

-their will by the mutineers. One night they saw Nicholson

-without any disguise walk in at the Lahore Gate,

-and through battery after battery along the walls he

-went in silence to the Cashmere Gate, by which he left

-the city. At the sight of that gaunt giant, the man

-they believed to be an incarnate god, they fell upon

-their faces. So Captain Nicholson studied the defenses

-of a besieged stronghold as no man on earth

-had ever dared before. To him was given command

-of the assault which blew up the Cashmere Gate, and

-stormed the Cashmere breach. More than half his

-men perished, but an entry was made, and in six days

-the British fought their way through the houses,

-breaching walls as they went until they stormed the

-palace, hoisted the flag above the citadel, and proved

-with the sword who shall be masters of India.</p>

-

-<p>But Nicholson had fallen. Mortally wounded he

-was carried to his tent, and there lay through the hot

-days watching the blood-red towers and walls of Delhi,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">105</span>

-listening to the sounds of the long fight, praying that

-he might see the end before his passing.</p>

-

-<p>Outside the tent waited his worshipers, clutching

-at the doctors as they passed to beg for news of him.

-Once when they were noisy he clutched a pistol from

-the bedside table, and fired a shot through the canvas.

-“Oh! Oh!” cried the Pathans, “there is the general’s

-order.” Then they kept quiet. Only at the

-end, when his coffin was lowered into the earth, these

-men who had forsaken their hills to guard him, broke

-down and flung themselves upon the ground, sobbing

-like children.</p>

-

-<p>Far off in the hills the Nicholson fakirs—a tribe

-who had made him their only god—heard of his passing.

-Two chiefs killed themselves that they might

-serve him in another world; but the third chief spoke

-to the people: “Nickelseyn always said that he was

-a man like as we are, and that he worshiped a God

-whom he could not see, but who was always near us.

-Let us learn to worship Nickelseyn’s God.” So the

-tribe came down from their hills to the Christian teachers

-at Peshawur, and there were baptized.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">106</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XV">XV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1853

-

-<span class="subhead">THE GREAT FILIBUSTER</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">William Walker</span>, son of a Scotch banker,

-was born in Tennessee, cantankerous from the

-time he was whelped. He never swore or drank, or

-loved anybody, but was rigidly respectable and pure,

-believed in negro slavery, bristled with points of etiquette

-and formality, liked squabbling, had a nasty

-sharp tongue, and a taste for dueling. The little dry

-man was by turns a doctor, editor and lawyer, and

-when he wanted to do anything very outrageous, always

-began by taking counsel’s opinion. He wore a

-black tail-coat, and a black wisp of necktie even when

-in 1853 he landed an army of forty-five men to conquer

-Mexico. His followers were California gold

-miners dressed in blue shirts, duck trousers, long

-boots, bowie knives, revolvers and rifles. After he

-had taken the city of La Paz by assault, called an

-election and proclaimed himself president of Sonora,

-he was joined by two or three hundred more of the

-same breed from San Francisco. These did not think

-very much of a leader twenty-eight years old, standing

-five feet six, and weighing only nine stone four, so

-they merrily conspired to blow him up with gunpowder,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">107</span>

-and disperse with what plunder they could grab.

-Mr. Walker shot two, flogged a couple, disarmed the

-rest without showing any sign of emotion. He could

-awe the most truculent desperado into abject obedience

-with one glance of his cool gray eye, and never allowed

-his men to drink, play cards, or swear. “Our

-government,” he wrote, “has been formed upon a

-firm and sure basis.”</p>

-

-<p>The Mexicans and Indians thought otherwise, for

-while the new president of Sonora marched northward,

-they gathered in hosts and hung like wolves in

-the rear of the column, cutting off stragglers, who

-were slowly tortured to death. Twice they dared an

-actual attack, but Walker’s grim strategies, and the

-awful rifles of despairing men, cut them to pieces. So

-the march went on through hundreds of miles of

-blazing hot desert, where the filibusters dropped with

-thirst, and blew their own brains out rather than be

-captured. Only thirty-four men were left when they

-reached the United States boundary, the president of

-Sonora, in a boot and a shoe, his cabinet in rags, his

-army and navy bloody, with dried wounds, gaunt,

-starving, but too terrible for the Mexican forces to

-molest. The filibusters surrendered to the United

-States garrison as prisoners of war.</p>

-

-<p>Just a year later, with six of these veterans, and

-forty-eight other Californians, Walker landed on the

-coast of Nicaragua. This happy republic was blessed

-at the time with two rival presidents, and the one who

-got Walker’s help very soon had possession of the

-country. As hero of several brilliant engagements,

-Walker was made commander-in-chief, and at the

-next election chosen by the people themselves as president.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">108</span>

-He had now a thousand Americans in his following,

-and when the native statesmen and generals

-proved treacherous, they were promptly shot. Walker’s

-camp of wild desperadoes was like a Sunday-school,

-his government the cleanest ever known in

-Central America, and his dignity all prickles, hard to

-approach. He depended for existence on the services

-of Vanderbilt’s steamship lines, but seized their warehouse

-for cheating. He was surrounded by four hostile

-republics, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Honduras

-and Guatemala, and insulted them all. He suspended

-diplomatic relations with the United States, demanded

-for his one schooner-of-war salutes from the British

-navy, and had no sense of humor whatsoever.

-Thousands of brave men died for this prim little lawyer,

-and tens of thousands fell by pestilence and battle

-in his wars, but with all his sweet unselfishness, his

-purity, and his valor, poor Walker was a prig. So

-the malcontents of Nicaragua, and the republics from

-Mexico to Peru, joined the steamship company, the

-United States and Great Britain to wipe out his hapless

-government.</p>

-

-<p>The armies of four republics were closing in on

-Walker’s capital, the city of Granada. He marched

-out to storm the allies perched on an impregnable volcano,

-and was carrying his last charge to a victorious

-issue, when news reached him that Zavala with eight

-hundred men had jumped on Granada. He forsook

-his victory and rushed for the capital city.</p>

-

-<p>There were only one hundred and fifty invalids and

-sick in the Granada garrison to man the church, armory

-and hospital against Zavala, but the women

-loaded rifles for the wounded and after twenty-two<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">109</span>

-hours of ghastly carnage, the enemy were thrown out

-of the city. They fell back to lie in Walker’s path as

-he came to the rescue. Walker saw the trap, carried

-it with a charge, drove Zavala back into the city, broke

-him between two fires, then sent a detachment to intercept

-his flight. In this double battle, fighting eight

-times his own force, Walker killed half the allied

-army.</p>

-

-<p>But the pressure of several invasions at once was

-making it impossible for Walker to keep his communication

-open with the sea while he held his capital.

-Granada, the most beautiful of all Central American

-cities, must be abandoned, and, lest the enemy win the

-place, it must be destroyed. So Walker withdrew his

-sick men to an island in the big Lake Nicaragua;

-while Henningsen, an Englishman, his second in command,

-burned and abandoned the capital.</p>

-

-<p>But now, while the city burst into flames, and the

-smoke went up as from a volcano, the American garrison

-broke loose, rifled the liquor stores and lay drunk

-in the blazing streets, so the allied army swooped down,

-cutting off the retreat to the lake. Henningsen, veteran

-of the Carlist and Hungarian revolts, a knight

-errant of lost causes, took three weeks to fight his way

-three miles, before Walker could cover his embarkment

-on the lake. There had been four hundred men

-in the garrison, but only one hundred and fifty

-answered the roll-call in their refuge on the Isle of

-Omotepe. In the plaza of the capital city they had

-planted a spear, and on the spear hung a rawhide with

-this <span class="locked">inscription:—</span></p>

-

-<p>“Here was Granada!”</p>

-

-<p>In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">110</span>

-out of six thousand of the allies had perished;

-but even they were more fortunate than a Costa Rican

-army of invasion, which killed fifty of the filibusters,

-at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence.

-It always worked out that the killing of one

-filibuster cost on the average eight of his adversaries.</p>

-

-<p>Four months followed of confused fighting, in which

-the Americans slowly lost ground, until at last they

-were besieged in the town of Rivas, melting the church

-bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts of starvation.

-The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by

-two thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted

-to dislodge. His final charge was made with

-fifteen men into the heart of the town. No valor

-could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat

-began on Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to

-take Walker at a planter’s house by the wayside, and as

-he rode wearily at the head of his men they opened

-fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker

-reined in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the

-windows, then rode on quietly erect while the storm of

-lead raged about him, and saddle after saddle was

-emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted

-Rivas, but left six hundred men dead in the field, so

-terrific was the fire from the ramparts.</p>

-

-<p>It was in these days that a British naval officer came

-under flag of truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s

-surrender.</p>

-

-<p>“I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that

-you have come to apologize for the outrage offered to

-my flag, and to the commander of the Nicaraguan

-schooner-of-war <i>Granada</i>.”</p>

-

-<p>“If they had another schooner,” said the Englishman<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">111</span>

-afterward, “I believe they would have declared

-war on Great Britain.”</p>

-

-<p>Then the United States navy treated with this peppery

-little lawyer, and on the first of May, 1857, he

-grudgingly consented to being rescued.</p>

-

-<p>During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker

-had enlisted three thousand five hundred Americans—and

-the proportion of wounds was one hundred and

-thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell.

-The allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers

-and ten thousand Indians—and lost fifteen thousand

-killed.</p>

-

-<p>Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred

-men to conquer Central America, in defiance of

-the British and United States squadrons, sent to catch

-him, and in the teeth of five armed republics. He

-was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans

-upon a sea beach in Honduras, and so perished,

-fearless to the end.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">112</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVI">XVI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1857

-

-<span class="subhead">BUFFALO BILL</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> Mormons are a sect of Christians with some

-queer ideas, for they drink no liquor, hold all

-their property in common, stamp out any member who

-dares to think or work for himself, and believe that

-the more wives a man has the merrier he will be.

-The women, so far as I met them are like fat cows, the

-men a slovenly lot, and not too honest, but they are

-hard workers and first-rate pioneers.</p>

-

-<p>Because they made themselves unpopular they were

-persecuted, and fled from the United States into the

-desert beside the Great Salt Lake. There they got

-water from the mountain streams and made their land

-a garden. They only wanted to be left alone in peace,

-but that was a poor excuse for slaughtering emigrants.

-Murdering women and children is not in good taste.</p>

-

-<p>The government sent an army to attend to these

-saints, but the soldiers wanted food to eat, and the

-Mormons would not sell, so provisions had to be sent

-a thousand miles across the wilderness to save the

-starving troops. So we come to the herd of beef

-cattle which in May, 1857, was drifting from the Missouri

-River, and to the drovers’ camp beside the banks

-of the Platte.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">113</span></p>

-

-<p>A party of red Indians on the war-path found that

-herd and camp; they scalped the herders on guard,

-stampeded the cattle and rushed the camp, so that

-the white men were driven to cover under the river

-bank. Keeping the Indians at bay with their rifles,

-the party marched for the settlements wading, sometimes

-swimming, while they pushed a raft that carried

-a wounded man. Always a rear guard kept the

-Indians from coming too near. And so the night fell.</p>

-

-<p>“I, being the youngest and smallest,” says one of

-them, “had fallen behind the others.... When I

-happened to look up to the moonlit sky, and saw the

-plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank....

-I instantly aimed my gun at his head, and fired. The

-report rang out sharp and loud in the night air, and

-was immediately followed by an Indian whoop; and

-the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came

-tumbling into the river. I was not only overcome with

-astonishment, but was badly scared, as I could hardly

-realize what I had done.”</p>

-

-<p>Back came Frank McCarthy, the leader, with all his

-men. “Who fired that shot?”</p>

-

-<p>“I did.”</p>

-

-<p>“Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone-dead—too

-dead to skin!”</p>

-

-<p>At the age of nine Billy Cody had taken the war-path.</p>

-

-<p>In those days the army had no luck. When the government

-sent a herd of cattle the Indians got the beef,

-and the great big train of seventy-five wagons might

-just as well have been addressed to the Mormons, who

-burned the transport, stole the draft oxen and

-turned the teamsters, including little Billy, loose in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">114</span>

-the mountains, where they came nigh starving. The

-boy was too thin to cast a shadow when in the spring

-he set out homeward across the plains with two returning

-trains.</p>

-

-<p>One day these trains were fifteen miles apart when

-Simpson, the wagon boss, with George Woods, a

-teamster, and Billy Cody, set off riding mules from

-the rear outfit to catch up the teams in front. They

-were midway when a war party of Indians charged at

-full gallop, surrounding them, but Simpson shot the

-three mules and used their carcasses to make a triangular

-fort. The three whites, each with a rifle and

-a brace of revolvers were more than a match for men

-with bows and arrows, and the Indians lost so heavily

-that they retreated out of range. That gave the fort

-time to reload, but the Indians charged again, and this

-time Woods got an arrow in the shoulder. Once more

-the Indians retired to consult, while Simpson drew the

-arrow from Woods’ shoulder, plugging the hole with

-a quid of chewing tobacco. A third time the Indians

-charged, trying to ride down the stockade, but they

-lost a man and a horse. Four warriors had fallen

-now in this battle with two men and a little boy, but

-the Indians are a painstaking, persevering race, so they

-waited until nightfall and set the grass on fire. But

-the whites had been busy with knives scooping a hole

-from whence the loose earth made a breastwork over

-the dead mules, so that the flames could not reach

-them, and they had good cover to shoot from when

-the Indians charged through the smoke. After that

-both sides had a sleep, and at dawn they were fresh

-for a grand charge, handsomely repulsed. The redskins<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">115</span>

-sat down in a ring to starve the white men out,

-and great was their disappointment when Simpson’s

-rear train of wagons marched to the rescue. The

-red men did not stay to pick flowers.</p>

-

-<p>It seems like lying to state that at the age of twelve

-Billy Cody began to take rank among the world’s great

-horsemen, and yet he rode on the pony express, which

-closed in 1861, his fourteenth year.</p>

-

-<p>The trail from the Missouri over the plains, the

-deserts and the mountains into California was about

-two thousand miles through a country infested with

-gangs of professional robbers and hostile Indian

-tribes. The gait of the riders averaged twelve miles

-an hour, which means a gallop, to allow for the slow

-work in mountain passes. There were one hundred

-ninety stations at which the riders changed ponies

-without breaking their run, and each must be fit and

-able for one hundred miles a day in time of need.

-Pony Bob afterward had contracts by which he rode

-one hundred miles a day for a year.</p>

-

-<p>Now, none of the famous riders of history, like

-Charles XII, of Sweden; Dick, King of Natal, or Dick

-Turpin, of England, made records to beat the men of

-the pony express, and in that service Billy was

-counted a hero. He is outclassed by the Cossack Lieutenant

-Peschkov, who rode one pony at twenty-eight

-miles a day the length of the Russian empire, from

-Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, and by Kit Carson who

-with one horse rode six hundred miles in six days.

-There are branches of horsemanship, too, in which he

-would have been proud to take lessons from Lord

-Lonsdale, or Evelyn French, but Cody is, as far as I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">116</span>

-have seen, of all white men incomparable for grace,

-for beauty of movement, among the horsemen of the

-modern world.</p>

-

-<p>But to turn back to the days of the boy rider.</p>

-

-<p>“One day,” he writes, “when I galloped into my

-home station I found that the rider who was expected

-to take the trip out on my arrival had gotten into a

-drunken row the night before, and had been killed....

-I pushed on ... entering every relay station on

-time, and accomplished the round trip of three

-hundred twenty-two miles back to Red Buttes without

-a single mishap, and on time. This stands on the

-record as being the longest pony express journey ever

-made.”</p>

-

-<p>One of the station agents has a story to tell of this

-ride, made without sleep, and with halts of only a few

-minutes for meals. News had leaked out of a large

-sum of money to be shipped by the express, and Cody,

-expecting robbers, rolled the treasure in his saddle

-blanket, filling the official pouches with rubbish. At

-the best place for an ambush two men stepped out

-on to the trail, halting him with their muskets. As he

-explained, the pouches were full of rubbish, but the

-road agents knew better. “Mark my words,” he said

-as he unstrapped, “you’ll hang for this.”</p>

-

-<p>“We’ll take chances on that, Bill.”</p>

-

-<p>“If you will have them, take them!” With that he

-hurled the pouches, and as robber number one turned

-to pick them up, robber number two had his gun-arm

-shattered with the boy’s revolver-shot. Then with a

-yell he rode down the stooping man, and spurring

-hard, got out of range unhurt. He had saved the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">117</span>

-treasure, and afterward both robbers were hanged by

-vigilantes.</p>

-

-<p>Once far down a valley ahead Cody saw a dark

-object above a boulder directly on his trail, and when

-it disappeared he knew he was caught in an ambush.

-Just as he came into range he swerved wide to the

-right, and at once a rifle smoked from behind the rock.

-Two Indians afoot ran for their ponies while a dozen

-mounted warriors broke from the timbered edge of

-the valley, racing to cut him off. One of these had a

-war bonnet of eagle plumes, the badge of a chief, and

-his horse, being the swiftest, drew ahead. All the Indians

-were firing, but the chief raced Cody to head

-him off at a narrow pass of the valley. The boy was

-slightly ahead, and when the chief saw that the white

-rider would have about thirty yards to spare he fitted

-an arrow, drawing for the shot. But Cody, swinging

-round in the saddle, lashed out his revolver, and

-the chief, clutching at the air, fell, rolling over like a

-ball as he struck the ground. At the chief’s death-cry

-a shower of arrows from the rear whizzed round the

-boy, one slightly wounding his pony who, spurred by

-the pain, galloped clear, leaving the Indians astern in

-a ten mile race to the next relay.</p>

-

-<p>After what seems to the reader a long life of adventure,

-Mr. Cody had just reached the age of twenty-two

-when a series of wars broke out with the Indian

-tribes, and he was attached to the troops as a scout. A

-number of Pawnee Indians who thought nothing of

-this white man, were also serving. They were better

-trackers, better interpreters and thought themselves

-better hunters. One day a party of twenty had been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">118</span>

-running buffalo, and made a bag of thirty-two head

-when Cody got leave to attack a herd by himself.

-Mounted on his famous pony Buckskin Joe he made a

-bag of thirty-six head on a half-mile run, and his name

-was Buffalo Bill from that time onward.</p>

-

-<p>That summer he led a squadron of cavalry that attacked

-six hundred Sioux, and in that fight against

-overwhelming odds he brought down a chief at a range

-of four hundred yards, in those days a very long shot.

-His victim proved to be Tall Bull, one of the great war

-leaders of the Sioux. The widow of Tall Bull was

-proud that her husband had been killed by so famous

-a warrior as Prairie Chief, for that was Cody’s name

-among the Indians.</p>

-

-<p>There is one very nice story about the Pawnee

-scouts. A new general had taken command who must

-have all sorts of etiquette proper to soldiers. It was

-all very well for the white sentries to call at intervals

-of the night from post to post: “Post Number One,

-nine o’clock, all’s well!” “Post Number Two, etc.”</p>

-

-<p>But when the Pawnee sentries called, “Go to

-hell, I don’t care!” well, the practise had to be

-stopped.</p>

-

-<p>Of Buffalo Bill’s adventures in these wars the plain

-record would only take one large volume, but he was

-scouting in company with Texas Jack, John Nelson,

-Belden, the White Chief, and so many other famous

-frontier heroes, each needing at least one book volume,

-that I must give the story up as a bad job. At the end

-of the Sioux campaign Buffalo Bill was chief of scouts

-with the rank of colonel.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_118" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_118.jpg" width="1469" height="2187" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Colonel Cody</span></p>

-

-<p>(“Buffalo Bill”)</p>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>In 1876, General Custer, with a force of nearly four

-hundred cavalry, perished in an attack on the Sioux,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">119</span>

-and the only survivor was his pet boy scout, Billy

-Jackson, who got away at night disguised as an Indian.

-Long afterward Billy, who was one of God’s own

-gentlemen, told me that story while we sat on a grassy

-hillside watching a great festival of the Blackfeet

-nation.</p>

-

-<p>After the battle in which Custer—the Sun Child—fell,

-the big Sioux army scattered, but a section of it

-was rounded up by a force under the guidance of Buffalo

-Bill.</p>

-

-<p>“One of the Indians,” he says, “who was handsomely

-decorated with all the ornaments usually worn

-by a war chief ... sang out to me ‘I know you,

-Prairie Chief; if you want to fight come ahead and

-fight me!’</p>

-

-<p>“The chief was riding his horse back and forth in

-front of his men, as if to banter me, and I accepted

-the challenge. I galloped toward him for fifty yards

-and he advanced toward me about the same distance,

-both of us riding at full speed, and then when we were

-only about thirty yards apart I raised my rifle and

-fired. His horse fell to the ground, having been

-killed by my bullet. Almost at the same instant my

-horse went down, having stepped in a gopher-hole.

-The fall did not hurt me much, and I instantly sprang

-to my feet. The Indian had also recovered himself,

-and we were now both on foot, and not more than

-twenty paces apart. We fired at each other simultaneously.

-My usual luck did not desert me on

-this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine

-struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before

-he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him,

-knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">120</span>

-to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war-bonnet off, I

-scientifically scalped him in about five seconds....</p>

-

-<p>“The Indians came charging down upon me from a

-hill in hopes of cutting me off. General Merritt ...

-ordered ... Company K to hurry to my rescue. The

-order came none too soon.... As the soldiers came

-up I swung the Indian chieftain’s topknot and bonnet

-in the air, and shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer!’”</p>

-

-<p>Far up to the northward, Sitting Bull, with the war

-chief Spotted Tail and about three thousand warriors

-fled from the scene of the Custer massacre. And as

-they traveled on the lonely plains they came to a little

-fort with the gates closed. “Open your gates and

-hand out your grub,” said the Indians.</p>

-

-<p>“Come and get the grub,” answered the fort.</p>

-

-<p>So the gates were thrown open and the three thousand

-warriors stormed in to loot the fort. They found

-only two white men standing outside a door, but all

-round the square the log buildings were loopholed

-and from every hole stuck out the muzzle of a rifle.

-The Indians were caught in such a deadly trap that

-they ran for their lives back to camp.</p>

-

-<p>Very soon news reached the Blackfeet that their

-enemies the Sioux were camped by the new fort at

-Wood Mountain, so the whole nation marched to wipe

-them out, and Sitting Bull appealed for help to the

-white men. “Be good,” said the fort, “and nobody

-shall hurt you.”</p>

-

-<p>So the hostile armies camped on either side, and

-the thirty white men kept the peace between them.

-One day the Sioux complained that the Blackfeet had

-stolen fifty horses. So six of the white men were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">121</span>

-sent to the Blackfoot herd to bring the horses back.

-They did not know which horses to select so they drove

-off one hundred fifty for good measure straight at a

-gallop through the Blackfoot camp, closely pursued

-by that indignant nation. Barely in time they ran the

-stock within the fort, and slammed the gates home in

-the face of the raging Blackfeet. They were delighted

-with themselves until the officer commanding fined

-them a month’s pay each for insulting the Blackfoot

-nation.</p>

-

-<p>The winter came, the spring and then the summer,

-when those thirty white men arrived at the Canada-United

-States boundary where they handed over three

-thousand Sioux prisoners to the American troops.

-From that time the redcoats of the Royal Northwest

-Mounted Police of Canada have been respected on

-the frontier.</p>

-

-<p>And now came a very wonderful adventure. Sitting

-Bull, the leader of the Sioux nation who had defeated

-General Custer’s division and surrendered his army to

-thirty Canadian soldiers, went to Europe to take part

-in a circus personally conducted by the chief of scouts

-of the United States Army, Buffalo Bill. Poor Sitting

-Bull was afterward murdered by United States troops

-in the piteous massacre of Wounded Knee. Buffalo

-Bill for twenty-six years paraded Europe and America

-with his gorgeous Wild West show, slowly earning the

-wealth which he lavished in the founding of Cody City,

-Wyoming.</p>

-

-<p>Toward the end of these tours I used to frequent

-the show camp much like a stray dog expecting to be

-kicked, would spend hours swapping lies with the

-cowboys in the old Deadwood Coach, or sit at meat<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">122</span>

-with the colonel and his six hundred followers. On

-the last tour the old man was thrown by a bad horse

-at Bristol and afterward rode with two broken bones

-in splints. Only the cowboys knew, who told me, as

-day by day I watched him back his horse from the

-ring with all the old incomparable grace.</p>

-

-<p>He went back to build a million dollar irrigation

-ditch for his little city on the frontier, and shortly

-afterward the newspapers reported that my friends—the

-Buffalo Creek Gang of robbers—attacked his

-bank, and shot the cashier. May civilization never

-shut out the free air of the frontier while the old hero

-lives, in peace and honor, loved to the end and worshiped

-by all real frontiersmen.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">123</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVII">XVII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1860

-

-<span class="subhead">THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<h3>I</h3>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">When</span> the Eternal Father was making the earth,

-at one time He filled the sea with swimming

-dragons, the air with flying dragons, and the land with

-hopping dragons big as elephants; but they were not a

-success, and so He swept them all away. After that

-he filled the southern continents with a small improved

-hopping dragon, that laid no eggs, but carried the baby

-in a pouch. There were queer half-invented fish,

-shadeless trees, and furry running birds like the emu

-and the moa. Then He swamped that southern world

-under the sea, and moved the workshop to our northern

-continents. But He left New Zealand and Australia

-just as they were, a scrap of the half-finished world

-with furry running birds, the hopping kangaroo, the

-shadeless trees, and half-invented fish.</p>

-

-<p>So when the English went to Australia it was not an

-ordinary voyage, but a journey backward through the

-ages, through goodness only knows how many millions

-of years to the fifth day of creation. It was like

-visiting the moon or Mars. To live and travel in such

-a strange land a man must be native born, bush raised,

-and cunning at that, on pain of death by famine.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">124</span></p>

-

-<p>The first British settlers, too, were convicts. The

-laws were so bad in England that a fellow might be

-deported merely for giving cheek to a judge; and the

-convicts on the whole were very decent people, brutally

-treated in the penal settlements. They used to escape

-to the bush, and runaway convicts explored Australia

-mainly in search of food. One of them, in Tasmania,

-used, whenever he escaped, to take a party with him

-and eat them one by one, until he ran short of food

-and had to surrender.</p>

-

-<p>Later on gold was discovered, and free settlers

-drifted in, filling the country, but the miners and the

-farmers were too busy earning a living to do much exploration.

-So the exploring fell to English gentlemen,

-brave men, but hopeless tenderfeet, who knew nothing

-of bushcraft and generally died of hunger or

-thirst in districts where the native-born colonial grows

-rich to-day.</p>

-

-<p>Edgar John Eyre, for instance, a Yorkshireman,

-landed in Sydney at the age of sixteen, and at twenty-five

-was a rich sheep-farmer, appointed by government

-protector of the black fellows. In 1840 the colonists

-of South Australia wanted a trail for drifting sheep

-into Western Australia, and young Eyre, from what

-he had learned among the savages, said the scheme

-was all bosh, in which he was perfectly right. He

-thought that the best line for exploring was northward,

-and set out to prove his words, but got tangled

-up in the salt bogs surrounding Torrens, and very

-nearly lost his whole party in an attempt to wade

-across. After that failure he felt that he had wasted

-the money subscribed in a wildcat project, so to make

-good set out again to find a route for sheep along the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">125</span>

-waterless south coast of the continent. He knew

-the route was impossible, but it is a poor sort of courage

-that has to feed on hope, and the men worth

-having are those who leave their hopes behind to

-march light while they do their duty.</p>

-

-<p>Eyre’s party consisted of himself and his ranch

-foreman Baxter, a favorite black boy Wylie, who

-was his servant, and two other natives who had been

-on the northward trip. They had nine horses, a pony,

-six sheep, and nine weeks’ rations on the pack animals.</p>

-

-<p>The first really dry stage was one hundred twenty-eight

-miles without a drop of water, and it was not

-the black fellows, but Eyre, the tenderfoot, who went

-ahead and found the well that saved them. The animals

-died off one by one, so that the stores had to be

-left behind, and there was no food but rotten horse-flesh

-which caused dysentery, no water save dew collected

-with a sponge from the bushes after the cold

-nights. The two black fellows deserted, but after

-three days came back penitent and starving, thankful

-to be reinstated.</p>

-

-<p>These black fellows did not believe the trip was

-possible, they wanted to go home, they thought the

-expedition well worth plundering, and so one morning

-while Eyre was rounding up the horses they shot Baxter,

-plundered the camp and bolted. Only Eyre and

-his boy Wylie were left, but if they lived the deserters

-might be punished. So the two black fellows, armed

-with Baxter’s gun, tried to hunt down Eyre and his

-boy with a view to murder. They came so near at

-night that Eyre once heard them shout to Wylie to

-desert. Eyre and the boy stole off, marching so<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">126</span>

-rapidly that the murderers were left behind and

-perished.</p>

-

-<p>A week later, still following the coast of the Great

-Bight, Wylie discovered a French ship lying at anchor,

-and the English skipper fed the explorers for a fortnight

-until they were well enough to go on. Twenty-three

-more days of terrible suffering brought Eyre and

-his boy, looking like a brace of scarecrows, to a hilltop

-overlooking the town of Albany. They had reached

-Western Australia, the first travelers to cross from

-the eastern to the western colonies.</p>

-

-<p>In after years Eyre was governor of Jamaica.</p>

-

-<h3>II</h3>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">127</span>

-surveying. There were several other white men, and

-three Afghans with a train of camels.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">128</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“The depot party of the V.&nbsp;E.&nbsp;E. leave this camp

-to-day to return to the Darling. I intend to go S.&nbsp;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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">129</span>

-twelve horses in good working condition. William

-Brahe.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <span class="locked">diary:—</span></p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Had they only been bushmen the tracks would have

-told Wills of help within his reach, the fish hooks<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">130</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>Such were the first crossings from east to west,

-and from south to north of the Australian continent.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">131</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVIII">XVIII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1867

-

-<span class="subhead">THE HERO-STATESMAN</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">There</span> 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?</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">132</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">133</span>

-member for Oaxaca was deputed to arrange with these

-clericals.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">134</span>

-raised the southern states of Mexico, and for two

-years held his own against the armies of France.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_134" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_134.jpg" width="1467" height="2181" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Porfirio Diaz</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">135</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Whether as bandit or king, Diaz has always been

-the handsomest man in Mexico, the most courteous,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">136</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">137</span>

-“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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">138</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIX">XIX<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1870

-

-<span class="subhead">THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap a"><span class="smcap1">A lady</span> 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.”</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">139</span>

-the war, distinguished himself as a special correspondent

-during an Indian campaign in the West.

-Then he joined the staff of the New York <i>Herald</i>

-serving in the Abyssinian War, and the civil war in

-Spain. He allowed the <i>Herald</i> 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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">140</span>

-<i>Herald</i> had the money, and in Stanley, the very man

-for the job.</p>

-

-<p>Not that the <i>Herald</i>, 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 <i>Herald</i>.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_140" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_140.jpg" width="1468" height="2242" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Henry M. Stanley</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>Stanley lived to reap the rewards of his great deeds,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">141</span>

-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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">142</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XX">XX<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1871

-

-<span class="subhead">LORD STRATHCONA</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">143</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">144</span></p>

-

-<p>“Well, young man,” he said, “why are you not at

-your post?”</p>

-

-<p>“My eyes, sir; they got so bad, I’ve come to see a

-doctor.”</p>

-

-<p>“And who gave you permission to leave your

-post?”</p>

-

-<p>“No one, sir.” It would have taken a year to get

-permission, and his need was urgent.</p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">145</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">146</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">147</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">148</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXI">XXI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1872

-

-<span class="subhead">THE SEA HUNTERS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">149</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>But no law disabled the Americans, and when the

-supply of sea otter failed on the Californian coast in

-1872 a schooner called the <i>Cygnet</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p>When news came to Japan of this new way of getting

-rich, a young Englishman, Mr. H.&nbsp;J. Snow,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">150</span>

-bought a schooner, a hog-backed relic called the

-<i>Swallow</i> 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 <i>Swallow</i>

-swallowed up part of my finances, and the <i>Snowdrop</i>

-caused me to drop the rest.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">151</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">152</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>In 1888, somewhat prejudiced against the virtuous

-company, Captain Snow came with the famous

-schooner <i>Nemo</i>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">153</span>

-woolen underclothes will sometimes turn leaden

-bullets.</p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>With three dying men, and three wounded, he got

-the sinking boat under sail and brought her alongside

-the schooner.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Rhyme of the Three<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">154</span>

-Sealers</i>, he told me, from Captain Lake in Yokohama.

-I had it from the mate of one of the three

-schooners, <i>The Stella</i>. She changed her name to

-<i>Adele</i>, and the mate became master, a little, round,

-fox-faced Norseman, Hans Hansen, of Christiania.

-In 1884 the <i>Adele</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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

-<i>Arabian Nights</i>. 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">155</span>

-because the boats were swamped, and the garrison

-a little too prevalent ashore. On the voyage of

-1890 the <i>Adele</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">156</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXII">XXII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1879

-

-<span class="subhead">THE BUSHRANGERS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">157</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>In December, the outlaws stuck up a sheep station,

-and robbed the bank at Euroa.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">158</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">159</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">160</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">161</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">162</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXIII">XXIII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1883

-

-<span class="subhead">THE PASSING OF THE BISON</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">May</span> I recommend a better book than this? If

-anybody wants to feel the veritable spirit of

-adventure, let him read <cite>My Life as an Indian</cite>, by

-F.&nbsp;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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">163</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>The truly respectable reader will be shocked to learn

-that this misguided youth went into partnership with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">164</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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!</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>The father, Bull’s Head, was a Gros Ventre, and

-hated Wolverine for being a Blackfoot.</p>

-

-<p>“I am going,” said Wolverine, “to steal the girl.

-Will you go with me?”</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">165</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>So he got up, and flounced out of the lodge.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">166</span>

-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!”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">167</span></p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>Only one more white buffalo was ever taken, in

-1881, two years before the last herds were destroyed.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“‘Hai Ya, my friend,’ he cried pleadingly, as he

-soared up in the air, still astride the saddle. Down<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">168</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.’”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">169</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>“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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">170</span>

-So the police were not attacked by the Blackfeet, and

-they were welcomed by the American traders, who

-sold them food in abundance.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“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?”</p>

-

-<p>“There is no place,” answered the trader, “where<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">171</span>

-the white men have not traveled, and none of them

-can find buffalo.”</p>

-

-<p>“That being the case,” said the chief with a deep

-sigh, “misery and death are at hand for me and mine.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“Hurry,” he commanded his women, “cook a meal

-for our friends. They must be hungry after their

-long ride.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>In his next annual report the agent wrote much

-about the Blackfeet, whose “heathenish rites were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">172</span>

-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!”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Next, he kicked open the agent’s office. “You ——

-—— ——,” said he.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">173</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXIV">XXIV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1885

-

-<span class="subhead">GORDON</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">During</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">174</span>

-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!’</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.’”</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">175</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>He was a Sunday-school teacher, and reared slum

-boys to manhood, he was lady bountiful in the parish,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">176</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_176" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_176.jpg" width="1473" height="2198" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Charles George Gordon</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>Long chapters would be required for the story of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">177</span>

-Gordon’s work in Bessarabia, Armenia, India, South

-Africa, or the second period in China.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">178</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">179</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXV">XXV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1896

-

-<span class="subhead">THE OUTLAW</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Dawn</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">180</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.&nbsp;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.</p>

-

-<p>Inspector Jervis, with twenty police and some scouts,

-had been seventy hours in the saddle, and camped at<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">181</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">182</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">183</span>

-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

-<span class="locked">back:—</span></p>

-

-<p>“Don’t fire, or you’ll hit me by mistake!”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Some three weeks ago, Charcoal’s brothers, Left<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">184</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">185</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">186</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXVI">XXVI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1898

-

-<span class="subhead">A KING AT TWENTY-FIVE</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">When</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">187</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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).</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">188</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">189</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“Certainly, it makes rain all right,” answered Boyes.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">190</span>

-and all through the neighborhood of the camp the

-warriors were shouting, “Kill the white man!”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">191</span>

-a good idea. “What a good thing,” said he, “to

-keep a rush of savages out.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">192</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">193</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">194</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXVII">XXVII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1898

-

-<span class="subhead">JOURNEY OF EWART GROGAN</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">From</span> the Right Honorable Cecil Rhodes to Ewart

-S. Grogan in the year <span class="locked">1900:—</span></p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>

-

-<p>Grogan was an undergraduate not only of Cambridge,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">195</span>

-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.&nbsp;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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">196</span></p>

-

-<p>Now for a glimpse into this great adventure:</p>

-

-<p>“I had shot a zebra ... and turning out at five-thirty

-A.&nbsp;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.”</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">197</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">198</span>

-actually struck me, or whether I was carried there by

-the rush of the country.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">199</span>

-in my soup, in fine, Watonga (the negro gun

-bearer) would not eat the potatoes that grew in the

-same country.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">200</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">201</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“Captain Dunn: ‘How do you do?’</p>

-

-<p>“I: ‘Oh, very fit, thanks; how are you? Had any

-sport?’</p>

-

-<p>“Dunn: ‘Oh, pretty fair, but there is nothing

-here. Have a drink?’</p>

-

-<p>“Then we washed, lunched, discussed the war,

-(South Africa), and eventually Dunn asked where the

-devil I had come from.”</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">202</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXVIII">XXVIII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1900

-

-<span class="subhead">THE COWBOY PRESIDENT</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap al"><span class="smcap1">Let</span> 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.”</p>

-

-<p>Thus having prospected the ground he discovered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">203</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">204</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_204" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 25em;">

-  <img src="images/i_204.jpg" width="1986" height="3117" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Theodore Roosevelt</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">205</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">206</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">207</span>

-for life from any further progress. “Teddy”

-walked into the trap and sat down.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">208</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXIX">XXIX<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1905

-

-<span class="subhead">THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Once</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">209</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">210</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>The <i>Gjöa</i> 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 <i>Joy</i> 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 <i>Joy</i> found

-some sole leather better than her own, a heap of useful<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">211</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>A few days later the <i>Joy</i> 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 <i>Gjöa</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">212</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Joy</i>

-was saved, after a journey across dry rocks which

-ought to have smashed any ship afloat. She did not

-even leak.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">213</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Joy</i> 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 <i>Joy</i> went into winter quarters. But not alone.

-Ladies must have corsets ribbed with whalebone from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">214</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>The <i>Joy</i> 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 <i>Joy</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p>At last in the summer of 1906 the <i>Joy</i> 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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">215</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXX">XXX<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1588

-

-<span class="subhead">JOHN HAWKINS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Master John Hawkins</span>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">216</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Jesus</i>, of Lubeck, was so sorely hurt that

-she had to be abandoned, and only two small barks,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">217</span>

-the <i>Minion</i> and the <i>Judith</i>, escaped to sea. The

-Spaniards lost four galleons in that battle.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_216" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 26em;">

-  <img src="images/i_216.jpg" width="2002" height="3015" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir John Hawkins</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>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 <i>Minion</i> 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.”</p>

-

-<p>It was then that one hundred fourteen men volunteered

-to go ashore and the ship continued a very

-painful voyage.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">218</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">219</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXI">XXXI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1573

-

-<span class="subhead">FRANCIS DRAKE</span></span></h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> <i>Judith</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">220</span>

-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!</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_220" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_220.jpg" width="1463" height="1848" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir Francis Drake</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>Greatly refreshed, the English went on northward,

-carefully inspecting the coast. At one place a sleeping<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">221</span>

-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 <i>Cacafuego</i>,

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">222</span></p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Next year Drake was vice-admiral to Lord Howard

-in the destruction of the Spanish armada.</p>

-

-<p>In 1589 he led a fleet to deliver Portugal from the

-Spaniards, wherein he failed.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_222" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_222.jpg" width="1462" height="2188" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Queen Elizabeth</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">223</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXII">XXXII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1587

-

-<span class="subhead">THE FOUR ARMADAS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Here</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Portugal and Spain, under one crown, shared the

-plunder of the Indies and the mastery of the sea.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">224</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Arreliquias</i> capsized and sank.</p>

-

-<p>The <i>San Iago</i>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>As to the pilot who caused this little accident, he

-afterward had charge of the <i>San Thomas</i> “full of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">225</span>

-people, and most of the gentility of India,” and lost

-with all hands.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">226</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">227</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Revenge</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">228</span>

-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 <i>Revenge</i>; 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.</p>

-

-<p>On board the <i>Revenge</i> 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 <i>Revenge</i>. 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.</p>

-

-<p>Grenville was carried on board the <i>Flagship</i>, 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.”</p>

-

-<figure id="i_228" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_228.jpg" width="1455" height="2189" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir Richard Grenville</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">229</span></p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Revenge</i>.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>

-

-<p>The Portuguese were by no means the first seamen

-to round the Cape of Good Hope. About six hundred

-years B.&nbsp;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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">230</span>

-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).

-<cite>Herodotus</cite>.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">231</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXIII">XXXIII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1583

-

-<span class="subhead">SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">“He</span> is not worthy to live at all, that for any fear

-of danger of death, shunneth his countrey’s

-service and his own honor.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">232</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Delight</i>, who, failing to bring them, got

-a terrific thrashing.</p>

-

-<p>When the <i>Delight</i>, 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 <i>Squirrel</i>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>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

-<i>Squirrel</i>.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">233</span></p>

-

-<p>A green sea filled the <i>Squirrel</i> and she was near

-sinking, but as she shook the water off, Sir Humphrey

-Gilbert waved his hand to the <i>Golden Hind</i>. “Fear

-not, my masters!” he shouted, “we are as near to

-Heaven by sea as by land.”</p>

-

-<p>As the night fell, he was still seen sitting abaft with

-a book in his hand.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">234</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXIV">XXXIV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1603

-

-<span class="subhead">SIR WALTER RALEIGH</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">To</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_234" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_234.jpg" width="1464" height="1903" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir Walter Raleigh</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">235</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“I have,” he said on the scaffold, “a long journey

-to take, and must bid the company farewell.”</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>Then the executioner lost his nerve altogether,

-“What dost thou fear?” asked Raleigh. “Strike,

-man, strike!”</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">236</span></p>

-

-<p>“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:</p>

-

-<p>“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,

-<i lang="la">Hic jacet</i>.”</p>

-

-<figure id="i_236" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_236.jpg" width="1455" height="2079" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">James I</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">237</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXV">XXXV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1608

-

-<span class="subhead">CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> sentence just quoted, the most beautiful perhaps

-in English prose, is copied from the <cite>History

-of the World</cite>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>In presence of the ladies and both armies, Lord

-Turbishaw entered the lists on a prancing Arab, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">238</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>After the taking and massacre of Reigall, Smith<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">239</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">240</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">241</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">242</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_242" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 26em;">

-  <img src="images/i_242.jpg" width="2011" height="3015" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Captain John Smith</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">243</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>After hard bargaining Powhatan managed to get a

-very few beads for a hundred bushels of grain.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">244</span>

-officials and wasters were sent out from England to

-suppress the captain.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">245</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Mayflower</i>,

-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.”</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">246</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXVI">XXXVI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1670

-

-<span class="subhead">THE BUCCANEERS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> 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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>The buccaneers of the West Indies were of many<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">247</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">248</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_248" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_248.jpg" width="1450" height="2184" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir Henry Morgan</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">249</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">250</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">251</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">252</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXVII">XXXVII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1682

-

-<span class="subhead">THE VOYAGEURS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">This</span> chapter must begin with a very queer tale

-of rivers as adventurers exploring for new

-channels.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">253</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">254</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">255</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Griffin</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">256</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_256" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 20em;">

-  <img src="images/i_256.jpg" width="1534" height="2169" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Robert Cavalier de la Salle</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">257</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>The officer he had left in charge at Fort Brokenheart<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">258</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>And La Salle returned. He found the Illinois town

-in ashes, littered with human bones. He found an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">259</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">260</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXVIII">XXXVIII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1741

-

-<span class="subhead">THE EXPLORERS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">From</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">261</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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?</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">262</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Stv Petr</i> and the <i>Stv Pavl</i>, and launched

-them, two years from the time of their outsetting from

-Saint Petersburg. Thirteen years they spent in exploring<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">263</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Stv Petr</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">264</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">265</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">266</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXIX">XXXIX<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1750

-

-<span class="subhead">THE PIRATES</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">There</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>This is a respectable world, my masters, but it is

-getting dull.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>There were so many pirates one hardly knows which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">267</span>

-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 <i>Duke</i>, 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?”</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>On the coast of Madagascar, lying in a bay, two

-sloops were found, whose seamen supposed the <i>Duke</i>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>Now, as it happened, the Great Mogul, emperor of

-Hindustan, was sending his daughter with a splendid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">268</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Duke</i>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">269</span>

-of grief at Bideford in Devon, leaving no money even

-to pay for his coffin.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">270</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>So Captain Woods found them when he went in the

-ship <i>Delicia</i>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>After that he kept their majesties at a distance,

-sending officers ashore to trade with them until he had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">271</span>

-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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">272</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XL">XL<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1776

-

-<span class="subhead">DANIEL BOONE</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap al"><span class="smcap1">As</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">273</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">274</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Under a giant elm the settlers, being British, had

-church and parliament, but only on one Sunday did<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">275</span>

-the parson pray for King George before the news

-came that congress needed prayers for the new republic

-at war with the motherland.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">276</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_276" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_276.jpg" width="1460" height="2189" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Daniel Boone</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">277</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">278</span>

-the famished garrison dared to throw open their

-gates.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">279</span>

-As he swam the river Israel died, but the father

-carried his body on into the shelter of the forest.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">280</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLI">XLI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1813

-

-<span class="subhead">ANDREW JACKSON</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">281</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">282</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLII">XLII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1836

-

-<span class="subhead">SAM HOUSTON</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Serving</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">283</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">284</span>

-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!</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">285</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLIII">XLIII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1836

-

-<span class="subhead">DAVY CROCKETT</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Far</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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:</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">286</span></p>

-

-<div class="poetry-container">

-<div class="poetry">

-  <div class="stanza">

-    <div class="verse indentq">“Saddled and bridled, and booted rode he,</div>

-    <div class="verse indent0">A plume in his helmet, a sword at his knee.”</div>

-  </div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>But the girl took up the verse, her song broken

-with sobbing:</p>

-

-<div class="poetry-container">

-<div class="poetry">

-  <div class="stanza">

-    <div class="verse indentq">“But toom’ cam’ the saddle, all bluidy to see,</div>

-    <div class="verse indent0">And hame cam’ the steed, but hame never cam’ he.”</div>

-  </div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>On the twenty-fourth the bombardment commenced,

-and thirty cowboys broke in through the Mexican lines

-to aid the garrison.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">287</span></p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>March third.—“We have given over all hope.”</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">288</span></p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">289</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.</p>

-

-<div class="poetry-container">

-<div class="poetry">

-  <div class="stanza">

-    <div class="verse indentdq">“‘But toom’ cam’ the saddle, all bluidy to see,</div>

-    <div class="verse indent0">And hame cam’ the steed, but hame never cam’ he.’</div>

-  </div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>“He spoke no more, and a few minutes after, died.

-Poor Kate! who will tell this to thee?”</p>

-

-<p>March fifth: “Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom!

-throughout the day—no time for memorandums now—go

-ahead. Liberty and independence forever!”</p>

-

-<figure id="i_288" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_288.jpg" width="1491" height="1950" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">David Crockett</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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?”</p>

-

-<p>“Have I not told you before how to dispose of

-them—why do you bring them to me?”</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">290</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<div class="poetry-container">

-<div class="poetry">

-  <div class="stanza">

-    <div class="verse indent0">Up with your banner, Freedom.</div>

-    <div class="verse indent2">Thy champions cling to thee.</div>

-    <div class="verse indent0">They’ll follow where’er you lead ’em—</div>

-    <div class="verse indent2">To death or victory.</div>

-    <div class="verse indent0">Up with your banner, Freedom!</div>

-  </div>

-  <div class="stanza">

-    <div class="verse indent0">Tyrants and slaves are rushing</div>

-    <div class="verse indent2">To tread thee in the dust;</div>

-    <div class="verse indent0">Their blood will soon be gushing</div>

-    <div class="verse indent2">And stain our knives with rust,</div>

-    <div class="verse indent0">But not thy banner, Freedom!</div>

-  </div>

-  <div class="stanza">

-    <div class="verse indent0">While Stars and Stripes are flying</div>

-    <div class="verse indent2">Our blood we’ll freely shed;</div>

-    <div class="verse indent0">No groan will ’scape the dying,</div>

-    <div class="verse indent2">Seeing thee o’er his head.</div>

-    <div class="verse indent0">Up with your banner, Freedom!</div>

-  </div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">291</span>

-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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">292</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLIV">XLIV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1793

-

-<span class="subhead">ALEXANDER MACKENZIE</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">293</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>The Russian fur trade passed the Ural Hills, explored

-Siberia and crossed to Russian America.</p>

-

-<p>Westward the French and British fur trade opened

-up the length and breadth of North America.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">294</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>When MacKenzie reached Clear-water River, Mr.

-Peter Pond of the Nor’westers had just shot Mr. Ross

-of the X.&nbsp;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.</p>

-

-<p>MacKenzie took with him four French voyageurs,

-a German and some Indians, working them as a rule

-from three <span class="smcap">A.&nbsp;M.</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">295</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">296</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>Each canoe was a cedar log hollowed with fire, then

-spread with boiling water, a vessel not unlike a gondola.

-One such canoe, the <i>Tillicum</i>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">297</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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:</p>

-

-<p>“Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada by land 22nd

-July, 1793.”</p>

-

-<p>He had discovered one of the world’s great rivers,

-and made the first crossing of North America.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">298</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLV">XLV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">THE WHITE MAN’S COMING</span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">299</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">300</span>

-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!</p>

-

-<p>“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!”</p>

-

-<p>But as the man bragged he kept twitching the rope,

-and down fell the pot, smash on the ground, and

-broken all to pieces.</p>

-

-<p>Now as to the first white man who came up Skeena

-River:</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">301</span>

-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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">302</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLVI">XLVI

-

-<span class="subhead">THE BEAVER</span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">In</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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

-<i>Beaver</i>. Then the merchant adventurers of the

-Hudson’s Bay Company, in bell toppers, Hessian boots

-and white chokers, gave three hearty cheers.</p>

-

-<p>The <i>Beaver</i> 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 <i>Columbia</i>,

-a slow and rather helpless chaperon, who fouled and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">303</span>

-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 <i>Columbia’s</i> doctor, found

-his chief engineer “in a beastly state of intoxication,”

-and finally, at the Columbia River, hounded his

-crew into mutiny.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Beaver</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">304</span></p>

-

-<p>In her days of glory, the <i>Beaver</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p>It was in 1851 that the <i>Beaver</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">305</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>News spread along the coast and soon a ship appeared,

-the H.&nbsp;B.&nbsp;C. brigantine <i>Una</i>. 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 <i>Una</i>

-sailed with a load of gold, but was cast away with her

-cargo in the Straits of Fuca.</p>

-

-<p>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.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Thetis</i> had gone away

-when the schooner <i>Susan Sturgis</i> 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.&nbsp;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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">306</span></p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Beaver</i>. Now it

-so happened that on the passage southward the

-<i>Beaver</i> 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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">307</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLVII">XLVII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1911

-

-<span class="subhead">THE CONQUEST OF THE POLES</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">308</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">309</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Roosevelt</i>,

-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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">310</span>

-Teddy! Bite ’em in two! Go it! That’s fine, my

-beauty! Now again! Once more!”</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Roosevelt</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>It was a clever scheme, and in theory the officers,

-turned back with their Eskimo parties, were needed to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">311</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">312</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>Here is the record left at the North <span class="locked">Pole:—</span></p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">313</span></p>

-

-<div class="blockquot">

-<p class="right">

-“90 N. Lat., North Pole,<br>

-“April 6th, 1909.

-</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“I leave this record and United States flag in possession.</p>

-

-<p class="right">

-<span style="margin-right: 6em;">“<span class="smcap">Robert E. Peary</span>,</span><br>

-“United States Navy.”

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">314</span>

-a race, to call one another liars, and were sorry that

-Peary should for a moment lapse from the dignity

-expected of brave men.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">315</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLVIII">XLVIII

-

-<span class="subhead">WOMEN</span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Two</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Mr. Murray Hall, a well-known Tammany politician

-and a successful business man, died in New York,

-and was found to be a woman.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">316</span></p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Levant</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">317</span>

-sherifa of Wazan, whose son is reverenced by the

-Moslems in North Africa as a sacred personage.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Doctor James Barry, M.&nbsp;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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_318">318</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Swallow</i>.

-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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_319">319</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>Anna Mills, able seaman on board the <i>Maidstone</i>

-frigate in 1740, made herself famous for desperate

-valor.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Mary Dixon did sixteen years’ service, and fought

-at Waterloo. She was still living fifty years afterward,

-“a strong, powerful, old woman.”</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_320">320</span>

-was pensioned by the prince regent, George IV. A

-tombstone is inscribed to her memory in the old churchyard

-at Brighton.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Medusa</i>, 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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_321">321</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLIX">XLIX

-

-<span class="subhead">THE CONQUERORS OF INDIA</span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Only</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_322">322</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_323">323</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>De Boigne had been succeeded as commander-in-chief<span class="pagenum" id="Page_324">324</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>That night Thomas dined with the officers, and all

-were merry when Bourguien proposed a toast insulting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_325">325</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>Perron had no need of Scindhia now, but was

-leagued with Napoleon to hand over the Indian empire

-to France. He betrayed his master.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_326">326</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>And Arthur Wellesley, victor in that stupendous

-triumph of Assaye, became the Iron Duke of Wellington,

-destined to liberate Europe at Waterloo.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_327">327</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="L">L<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1805

-

-<span class="subhead">THE MAN WHO SHOT LORD NELSON</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">This</span> 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 <i>Redoubtable</i>. 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.</p>

-

-<p>Then Nelson came, with twenty-seven battle-ships,

-raging for a fight, and Villeneuve had to oblige for

-fear of Napoleon’s anger.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Redoubtable</i>, engaged

-Lord Nelson’s <i>Victory</i>, losing thirty men to her

-first discharge.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_328">328</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>Guillemard goes on to describe a duel between the

-topmen of the <i>Redoubtable</i> and those of the <i>Victory</i>

-only a few yards distant, and when it was finished he

-lay alone among the dead who crowded the swaying

-platform.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_329">329</span></p>

-

-<p>“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 <i>Redoubtable</i>. 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 <i>Victory</i>; 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 <i>Victory</i>

-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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_330">330</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>When these were taken on board the <i>Victory</i>, 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

-<i>Redoubtable</i>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Aigle</i> was cast

-away, and not one man escaped; the <i>Santissima Trinidad</i>,

-the largest ship in the world, foundered; the <i>Indomitable</i>

-sank with fifteen hundred wounded; the

-<i>Achille</i>, with her officers shooting themselves, her<span class="pagenum" id="Page_331">331</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<figure id="i_330" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">

-  <img src="images/i_330.jpg" width="1462" height="2200" alt=" ">

-  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Lord Nelson</span>

-</figcaption></figure>

-

-<p>When the day broke Admiral Villeneuve was

-brought on board the <i>Victory</i>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_332">332</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>So it was the fate of the slayer of Nelson to be

-alone with Villeneuve at his death.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>The lad kept his mouth shut.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_333">333</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="LI">LI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1812

-

-<span class="subhead">THE FALL OF NAPOLEON</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_334">334</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>In mortal fear the emperor attempted to treat for

-peace, but Russia kept him waiting for a month, while<span class="pagenum" id="Page_335">335</span>

-her troops closed down on the line of escape, and

-the winter was coming on—the Russian winter.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>No words of mine could ever tell the story, but here

-are passages from the <i>Memoirs</i> 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 <span class="locked">die:—</span></p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_336">336</span>

-to God’s mercy, taking care to avoid the dead

-bodies.</p>

-

-<p>“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!’</p>

-

-<p>“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!’</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_337">337</span>

-... 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.”</p>

-

-<p>Such was the road, and here was the passing of the

-army which Burgogne had overtaken.</p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>So far the army had kept its discipline, and at the

-passage of the River Berezina the engineers contrived<span class="pagenum" id="Page_338">338</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_339">339</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_340">340</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="LII">LII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1813

-

-<span class="subhead">RISING WOLF</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">This</span> is the story of Rising Wolf, condensed from

-the beautiful narrative in <cite>My Life as an Indian</cite>,

-by J.&nbsp;B. Schultz.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“Hugh, junior, was born on the family estate at

-Three Rivers (Quebec) and attended the parish school<span class="pagenum" id="Page_341">341</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_342">342</span>

-their competition. Monroe was to do his best to prevent

-it.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_343">343</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.’</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_344">344</span></p>

-

-<p>“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!</p>

-

-<p>“Monroe often referred to that first trip with the

-Piegans as the happiest time of his life.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_345">345</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.”</p>

-

-<p>“‘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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_346">346</span>

-I bought. Surely the girl was not for me. I

-suffered.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.”</p>

-

-<p>“‘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.’</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_347">347</span>

-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?</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_348">348</span></p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_349">349</span>

-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.’”</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_350">350</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="LIII">LIII<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1819

-

-<span class="subhead">SIMON BOLIVAR</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Once</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“Now tell me,” a lady said once, “what animal

-reminds one most of the Señor Bolivar?”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_351">351</span></p>

-

-<p>“I don’t know,” drawled a Spaniard of that time,

-“to what class of beasts these South Americans

-belong.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_352">352</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_353">353</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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 <em>in the hospital</em>, without any

-exception whatever.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_354">354</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>It was in 1819 that Bolivar led a force of two thousand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_355">355</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_356">356</span>

-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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_357">357</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="LIV">LIV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1812

-

-<span class="subhead">THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">When</span> Lieutenant Lord Thomas Cochrane commanded

-the brig of war <i>Speedy</i>, 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.</p>

-

-<p>For thirteen months the <i>Speedy</i> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_358">358</span>

-a French fleet in the anchorage at Aix. The

-fleet got into a panic and destroyed itself.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_359">359</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>He had a fancy for the frigate, <i>Esmeralda</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_360">360</span>

-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 <i>Esmeralda</i>. 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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <i>Pedro

-Primeiro</i>. This he manned with British and Yankee

-adventurers. He had two other small but fairly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_361">361</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_362">362</span>

-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.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_363">363</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="LV">LV<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.D. 1823

-

-<span class="subhead">THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Far</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_364">364</span>

-a little particular as to their meat being really

-pig, but otherwise well mannered and popular.</p>

-

-<p>Now of these Pakeha Maoris, one has left a book.

-He omitted his name from the book of <cite>Old New Zealand</cite>,

-and never mentioned dates, but tradition says

-he was Mr. F.&nbsp;C. Maning, and that he lived as a

-Maori and trader for forty years, from 1823 to 1863

-when the work was published.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>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?”</p>

-

-<p>But then came a powerful chief, by name Relation-eater.

-“Pretty work this,” he began, “<em>good</em> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_365">365</span>

-turn round, to keep correct time.) “Who killed the

-Pakeha? It was Melons. You are a nice man, killing

-<em>my</em> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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 <em>werry</em> scarce—they

-had to tattoo a slave a bit ago, and the villain ran

-away, tattooin’ and all!”</p>

-

-<p>“What!”</p>

-

-<p>“Bolted before he was fit to kill,” said the sailor,

-mournful to think how dishonest people could be.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_366">366</span></p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“An old man-of-war’s man defending <em>his</em> washing,

-called out, ‘Hit out, sir! ... our mob will be here in

-five minutes!’</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“Then came our mob to the rescue and the assailants

-fled.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_367">367</span></p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.’</p>

-

-<p>“He made no answer but a scowl of defiance. ‘I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_368">368</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_369">369</span>

-killed him, I might have serious difficulties with his

-tribe.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“He spoke for the first time, ‘Enough! I am

-beaten; let me rise.’</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>“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 <i lang="fr">coup de grace</i>. 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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.”</p>

-

-<p>In the sequel this desperado committed two more

-murders “and also killed in fair fight, with his own<span class="pagenum" id="Page_370">370</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>Mr. Maning was never again molested, and making

-full allowance for their foibles, speaks with a very

-tender love for that race of warriors.</p>

-<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_371">371</span></p>

-

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="LVI">LVI<br>

-

-<span class="subhead">A.D. 1840

-

-<span class="subhead">A TALE OF VENGEANCE</span></span>

-</h2>

-</div>

-

-<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">In</span> 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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_372">372</span>

-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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“Please marry me,” said Jim, as she rode beside

-him.</p>

-

-<p>“Yes, when the pine leaves turn yellow.”</p>

-

-<p>Jim thought this over, and complained that pine

-leaves do not turn yellow.</p>

-

-<p>“Please!” he said.</p>

-

-<p>“Yes,” answered Pine Leaf, “when you see a red-headed

-Indian.”</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_373">373</span></p>

-

-<p>Jim, who had wives enough already as became his

-position, sulked for this heroine.</p>

-

-<p>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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.’”</p>

-

-<p>She was soon at his side chasing the flying enemy,

-who left ninety-one killed in the field.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_374">374</span>

-presence at his side in battle gave him increased

-strength and courage, while daily his love for her

-flamed higher.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>“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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>While Pine Leaf sat in the lodge, her heart was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_375">375</span>

-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.”</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_376">376</span>

-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!”</p>

-

-<p>So Jim Beckwourth, who was Medicine Calf, head

-chief of the Crow nation, was wedded to Pine Leaf,

-their great heroine.</p>

-

-<p>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.</p>

-

-<p class="p2 center smaller">THE END</p>

-

-<div class="chapter transnote">

-<h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcriber’s Notes</h2>

-

-<p>Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made

-consistent when a predominant preference was found

-in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.</p>

-

-<p>Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced

-quotation marks were remedied when the change was

-obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.</p>

-

-<p>Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned

-between paragraphs and outside quotations.</p>

-

-<p>The pages in the introductory chapter “Adventurers”

-were not numbered. Transcriber did so with

-Roman numbers.</p>

-

-<p><a href="#Page_210">Page 210</a>: “the overload Joy” may be a misprint

-for “the overloaded Joy”.</p>

-</div>

-

-<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE ***</div>

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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE ***</div>
+
+<div class="transnote section">
+<p class="center larger">Transcriber’s Note</p>
+
+<p>Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them
+and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or
+stretching them.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#Transcribers_Notes">Additional notes</a> will be found near the end of this ebook.</p>
+<div>                                                                                                                                                                                                                           </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="section">
+<h1>CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE</h1>
+<div>                                                                                                                                                                                                                           </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="section">
+<figure id="i_1" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_001.jpg" width="1462" height="2185" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Napoleon Bonaparte</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+<div>                                                                                                                                                                                                                           </div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter section p2 center wspace">
+<p class="xxlarge">
+CAPTAINS<br>
+OF ADVENTURE</p>
+
+<p class="p2 vspace"><i>By</i><br>
+<span class="larger gesperrt">ROGER POCOCK</span></p>
+
+<p class="p1 smaller"><i>Author of</i><br>
+A Man in the Open, etc.</p>
+
+<p class="p2 smaller">ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS</p>
+
+<p class="p2 larger">INDIANAPOLIS<br>
+THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY<br>
+PUBLISHERS</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter section center vspace">
+<p class="smaller">
+<span class="smcap">Copyright 1913</span><br>
+<span class="smcap">The Bobbs-Merrill Company</span></p>
+
+<p class="p4 xsmall">PRESS OF<br>
+BRAUNWORTH &amp; CO.<br>
+BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS<br>
+BROOKLYN, N. Y.
+</p>
+<div>                                                                                                                                                                                                                           </div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_i">i</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="ADVENTURERS">ADVENTURERS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p>What is an adventurer? One who has adventures?
+Surely not. A person charged by a wild rhinoceros
+is having an adventure, yet however wild the animal,
+however wild the person, he is only somebody wishing
+himself at home, not an adventurer. In dictionaries
+the adventurer is “one who seeks his fortune
+in new and hazardous or perilous enterprises.” But
+outside the pages of a dictionary, the man who seeks
+his fortune, who really cares for money and his own
+advantage, sits at some desk deriding the fools who
+take thousand-to-one chances in a gamble with Death.
+Did the patron saint of adventurers, Saint Paul, or did
+Saint Louis, or Francis Drake, or Livingstone, or Gordon
+seek their own fortune, think you? In real life the
+adventurer is one who seeks, not his fortune, but the
+new and hazardous or perilous enterprises. There
+are holy saints and scoundrels among adventurers,
+but all the thousands I have known were fools of the
+romantic temperament, dealing with life as an artist
+does with canvas, to color it with fierce and vivid
+feeling, deep shade and radiant light, exulting in the
+passions of the sea, the terrors of the wilderness, the
+splendors of sunshine and starlight, the exaltation
+of battle, fire and hurricane.</p>
+
+<p>All nations have bred great adventurers, but the
+living nation remembers them sending the boys out<span class="pagenum" id="Page_ii">ii</span>
+into the world enriched with memories of valor, a
+heritage of national honor, an inspiration to ennoble
+their manhood. That is the only real wealth of men
+and of peoples. For such purposes this book is
+written, but so vast is the theme that this volume
+would outgrow all reasonable size unless we set some
+limit. A man in the regular standing forces of his
+native state is not dubbed adventurer. When, for
+example, the immortal heroes Tromp and De Ruyter
+fought the British generals at sea, Blake and Monk,
+they were no more adventurers than are the police
+constables who guard our homes at night. Were
+Clive and Warren Hastings adventurers? They
+would turn in their graves if one brought such a
+charge. The true type of adventurer is the lone-hand
+pioneer.</p>
+
+<p>It is not from any bias of mine that the worthies
+of Switzerland, the Teutonic empires and Russia,
+are shut out of this poor little record; but because it
+seems that the lone-hand oversea and overland
+pioneers come mainly from nations directly fronting
+upon the open sea. As far as I am prejudiced, it is
+in favor of old Norway, whose heroes have entranced
+me with the sheer glory of their perfect manhood.
+For the rest, our own English-speaking folk
+are easier for us to understand than any foreigners.</p>
+
+<p>As to the manner of record, we must follow the
+stream of history if we would shoot the rapids of
+adventure.</p>
+
+<p>Now as to the point of view: My literary pretensions
+are small and humble, but I claim the right
+of an adventurer, trained in thirty-three trades of the
+Lost Region, to absolute freedom of speech concerning<span class="pagenum" id="Page_iii">iii</span>
+frontiersmen. Let history bow down before
+Columbus, but as a foremast seaman, I hold he was
+not fit to command a ship. Let history ignore Captain
+John Smith, but as an ex-trooper, I worship
+him for a leader, the paladin of Anglo-Saxon
+chivalry, and very father of the United States.
+Literature admires the well advertised Stanley, but
+we frontiersmen prefer Commander Cameron, who
+walked across Africa without blaming others for his
+own defects, or losing his temper, or shedding needless
+blood. All the celebrities may go hang, but when
+we take the field, send us leaders like Patrick
+Forbes, who conquered Rhodesia without journalists
+in attendance to write puffs, or any actual deluge of
+public gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>The historic and literary points of view are widely
+different from that of our dusty rankers.</p>
+
+<p>When the Dutchmen were fighting Spain, they invented
+and built the first iron-clad war-ship—all
+honor to their seamanship for that! But when the
+winter came, a Spanish cavalry charge across the ice
+captured the ship—and there was fine adventure.
+Both sides had practical men.</p>
+
+<p>In the same wars, a Spanish man-at-arms in the
+plundering of a city, took more gold than he could
+carry, so he had the metal beaten into a suit of
+armor, and painted black to hide its worth from
+thieves. From a literary standpoint, that was all
+very fine, but from our adventurer point of view, the
+man was a fool for wearing armor useless for defense,
+and so heavy he could not run. He was
+killed, and a good riddance.</p>
+
+<p>We value most the man who knows his business,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_iv">iv</span>
+and the more practical the adventurer, the fewer his
+misadventures.</p>
+
+<p>From that point of view, the book is attempted with
+all earnestness; and if the results appear bizarre, let
+the shocked reader turn to better written works,
+mention of which is made in notes.</p>
+
+<p>As to the truthfulness of adventurers, perhaps we
+are all more or less truthful when we try to be good.
+But there are two kinds of adventurers who need
+sharply watching. The worst is F.&nbsp;C. Selous. Once
+he lectured to amuse the children at the Foundling
+Hospital, and when he came to single combats with
+a wounded lion, or a mad elephant he was forced to
+mention himself as one of the persons present. He
+blushed. Then he would race through a hair-lifting
+story of the fight, and in an apologetic manner, give
+all the praise to the elephant, or the lion lately deceased.
+Surely nobody could suspect him of any
+merit, yet all the children saw through him for a
+transparent fraud, and even we grown-ups felt the
+better for meeting so grand a gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>The other sort of liar, who does not understate his
+own merits, is Jim Beckwourth. He told his story,
+quite truthfully at first, to a journalist who took it
+down in shorthand. But when the man gaped with
+admiration at the merest trifles, Jim was on his
+mettle, testing this person’s powers of belief, which
+were absolutely boundless. After that, of course he
+hit the high places, striking the facts about once in
+twenty-four hours, and as one reads the book, one
+can catch the thud whenever he hit the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Let no man dream that adventure is a thing of the
+past or that adventurers are growing scarce. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_v">v</span>
+only difficulty of this book was to squeeze the past in
+order to make-space for living men worthy as their
+forerunners. The list is enormous, and I only dared
+to estimate such men of our own time as I have
+known by correspondence, acquaintance, friendship,
+enmity, or by serving under their leadership. Here
+again, I could only speak safely in cases where there
+were records, as with Lord Strathcona, Colonel S.
+B. Steele, Colonel Cody, Major Forbes, Captain
+Grogan, Captain Amundsen, Captain Hansen, Mr.
+John Boyes. Left out, among Americans, are M.
+H. de Hora who, in a Chilian campaign, with only a
+boat’s crew, cut out the battle-ship <i>Huascar</i>, plundered
+a British tramp of her bunker coal, and fought H.
+M.&nbsp;S. <i>Shah</i> on the high seas. Another American, Doctor
+Bodkin, was for some years prime minister of
+Makualand, an Arab sultanate. Among British adventurers,
+Caid Belton, is one of four successive
+British commanders-in-chief to the Moorish sultans.
+Colonel Tompkins was commander-in-chief to
+Johore. C.&nbsp;W. Mason was captured with a shipload
+of arms in an attempt to make himself emperor of
+China. Charles Rose rode from Mazatlan in Mexico
+to Corrientes in Paraguay. A.&nbsp;W.&nbsp;V. Crawley, a
+chief of scouts to Lord Roberts in South Africa,
+rode out of action after being seven times shot, and
+he rides now a little askew in consequence.</p>
+
+<p>To sum up, if one circle of acquaintances includes
+such a group to-day, the adventurer is not quite an
+extinct species, and indeed, we seem not at the end,
+but at the beginning of the greatest of all adventurous
+eras, that of the adventurers of the air.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_vii">vii</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+</div>
+
+<table id="toc">
+<tr class="small">
+  <td class="tdr">Chapter  </td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdr">Page</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">I</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Vikings in America</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#I">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">II</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Crusaders</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#II">7</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">III</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Middle Ages in Asia</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#III">18</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">IV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Marvelous Adventures of Sir John Maundeville</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#IV">25</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">V</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Columbus</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#V">32</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">VI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Conquest of Mexico</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#VI">37</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">VII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Conquest of Peru</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#VII">44</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">VIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Corsairs</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#VIII">50</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">IX</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Portugal in the Indies</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#IX">55</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">X</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Rajah Brooke</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#X">62</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Spies</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XI">69</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A Year’s Adventures</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XII">81</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Kit Carson</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XIII">88</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XIV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Man Who Was a God</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XIV">100</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Great Filibuster</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XV">106</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XVI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Buffalo Bill</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XVI">112</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XVII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Australian Desert</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XVII">123</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XVIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Hero-Statesman</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XVIII">131</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XIX</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Special Correspondent</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XIX">138</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XX</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Lord Strathcona</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XX">142</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Sea Hunters</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXI">148</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Bushrangers</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXII">156</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Passing of the Bison</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXIII">162</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXIV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Gordon</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXIV">173</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Outlaw</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXV">179</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXVI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A King at Twenty-Five</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXVI">186</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXVII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Journey of Ewart Grogan</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXVII">194</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXVIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Cowboy President</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXVIII">202</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXIX</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Northwest Passage</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXIX">208</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXX</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">John Hawkins</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXX">215</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXXI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Francis Drake</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXI">219</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXXII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Four Armadas</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXII">223</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXXIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Sir Humphrey Gilbert</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXIII">231</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXXIV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Sir Walter Raleigh</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXIV">234</a><span class="pagenum" id="Page_viii">viii</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXXV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Captain John Smith</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXV">237</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXXVI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Buccaneers</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXVI">246</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXXVII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Voyageurs</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXVII">252</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXXVIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Explorers</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXVIII">260</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XXXIX</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Pirates</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XXXIX">266</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XL</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Daniel Boone</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XL">272</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XLI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Andrew Jackson</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLI">280</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XLII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Sam Houston</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLII">282</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XLIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Davy Crockett</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLIII">285</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XLIV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Alexander Mackenzie</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLIV">292</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XLV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The White Man’s Coming</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLV">298</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XLVI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Beaver</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLVI">302</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XLVII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Conquest of the Poles</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLVII">307</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XLVIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Women</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLVIII">315</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">XLIX</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Conquerors of India</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#XLIX">321</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">L</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Man Who Shot Lord Nelson</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#L">327</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">LI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Fall of Napoleon</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LI">333</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">LII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Rising Wolf</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LII">340</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">LIII</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Simon Bolivar</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LIII">350</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">LIV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Almirante Cochrane</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LIV">357</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">LV</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The South Sea Cannibals</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LV">363</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdr top">LVI</td>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">A Tale of Vengeance</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#LVI">371</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">1</span></p>
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CAPTAINS_OF_ADVENTURE">CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE</h2>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CAPTAINS"><span class="larger">CAPTAINS<br>
+OF ADVENTURE</span></h2>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="I">I<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A. D. 984
+
+<span class="subhead">THE VIKINGS IN AMERICA</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap a"><span class="smcap1">A reverent</span> study of heroes in novels, also in
+operas and melodramas, where one may see
+them for half-a-crown, has convinced me that they
+must be very trying to live with. They get on
+people’s nerves. Hence the villains.</p>
+
+<p>Now Harold of the Fair Hair was a hero, and he
+fell in love with a lady, but she would not marry him
+unless he made himself king of Norway. So he
+made himself the first king of all Norway, and she
+had to marry him, which served her right.</p>
+
+<p>But then there were the gentlemen of his majesty’s
+opposition who did not want him to be king, who felt
+that there was altogether too much Harold in Norway.
+They left, and went to Iceland to get away from the
+hero.</p>
+
+<p>Iceland had been shown on the map since the year
+A.&nbsp;D. 115, and when the vikings arrived they found
+a colony of Irish monks who said they had come<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">2</span>
+there “because they desired for the love of God to
+be in a state of pilgrimage, they recked not where.”</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the vikings sent them to Heaven. Later
+on it seems they found a little Irish settlement on
+the New England coast, and heard of great Ireland,
+a colony farther south. That is the first rumor we
+have about America.</p>
+
+<p>The Norsemen settled down, pagans in Christian
+Iceland. They earned a living with fish and cattle,
+and made an honest penny raiding the Mediterranean.
+They had internecine sports of their own, and on the
+whole were reasonably happy. Then in course of
+trade Captain Gunbjorn sighted an unknown land two
+hundred fifty miles to the westward. That made the
+Icelanders restless, for there is always something
+which calls to Northern blood from beyond the sea
+line.</p>
+
+<p>Most restless of all was Red Eric, hysterical because
+he hated a humdrum respectable life; indeed,
+he committed so many murders that he had to be
+deported as a public nuisance. He set off exultant
+to find Gunbjorn’s unknown land. So any natural
+born adventurer commits little errors of taste unless
+he can find an outlet. It is too much dog-chain
+that makes biting dogs.</p>
+
+<p>When he found the new land it was all green, with
+swaths of wild flowers. I know that land and its
+bright lowlands, backed by sheer walled mountains,
+with splintered pinnacles robed in the splendors of
+the inland ice. The trees were knee high, no crops
+could possibly ripen, but Eric was so pleased that
+after two winters he went back to Iceland advertising
+for settlers to fill his colony. Greenland<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">3</span>
+he called the place, because “Many will go there if
+the place has a fair name.” They did, and when the
+sea had wiped out most of the twenty-five ships, the
+surviving colonists found Greenland commodious and
+residential as the heart could wish.</p>
+
+<p>They were not long gone from the port of Skalholt
+when young Captain Bjarni came in from the
+sea and asked for his father. But father Heljulf
+had sailed for Greenland, so the youngster set off in
+pursuit although nobody knew the way. Bjarni always
+spent alternate yuletides at his father’s hearth,
+so if the hearth-stone moved he had to find it somehow.
+These vikings are so human and natural that
+one can follow their thought quite easily. When,
+for instance, Bjarni, instead of coming to Greenland,
+found a low, well timbered country, he knew
+he had made a mistake, so it was no use landing.
+Rediscovering the American mainland was a habit
+which persisted until the time of Columbus, and not
+a feat to make a fuss about. A northerly course and
+a pure stroke of luck carried Bjarni to Greenland
+and his father’s house.</p>
+
+<p>Because they had no timber, and driftwood was
+scarce, the colonists were much excited when they
+heard of forests, and cursed Bjarni for not having
+landed. Anyway, here was a fine excuse for an expedition
+in search of fire-wood, so Leif, the son of
+Red Eric, bought Bjarni’s ship. Being tall and of
+commanding presence he rallied thirty-five of a crew,
+and, being young, expected that his father would take
+command. Eric indeed rode a distance of four hundred
+feet from his house against the rock, which was
+called Brattelid, to the shore of the inlet, but his pony<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">4</span>
+fell and threw him, such a bad omen that he rode
+home again. Leif Ericsen, therefore, with winged
+helmet and glittering breastplate, mounted the steerboard,
+laid hands on the steer-oar and bade his men
+shove off. The colonists on rugged dun ponies lined
+the shore to cheer the adventurers, and the ladies
+waved their kerchiefs from the rock behind the house
+while the dragon ship, shield-lines ablaze in the sun,
+oars thrashing blue water, and painted square-sail
+set, took the fair wind on that famous voyage.
+She discovered Stoneland, which is the Newfoundland-Labrador
+coast, and Woodland, which is Nova
+Scotia. Then came the Further Strand, the long
+and wonderful beaches of Massachusetts, and beyond
+was Narragansett Bay, where they built winter
+houses, pastured their cattle, and found wild
+grapes. It was here that Tyrkir, the little old German
+man slave who was Leif’s nurse, made wine and
+got most gorgeously drunk. On the homeward passage
+Leif brought timber and raisins to Greenland.</p>
+
+<p>Leif went away to Norway, where as a guest of
+King Olaf he became a Christian, and in his absence
+his brother Thorwald made the second voyage to
+what is now New England. After wintering at
+Leif’s house in Wineland the Good he went southward
+and, somewhere near the site of New York,
+met with savages. Nine of them lay under three upturned
+canoes on the beach, so the vikings killed
+eight just for fun, but were fools, letting the ninth
+escape to raise the tribes for war. So there was a
+battle, and Thorwald the Helpless was shot in the
+eye, which served him right. One of his brothers
+came afterward in search of the body, which may<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">5</span>
+have been that same seated skeleton in bronze armor
+that nine hundred years later was dug up at Cross
+Point.</p>
+
+<p>Two or three years after Thorwald’s death his
+widow married a visitor from Norway, Eric’s guest
+at Brattelid, the rich Thorfin Karlsefne. He also set
+out for Vinland, taking Mrs. Karlsefne and four
+other women, also a Scottish lad and lass (very
+savage) and an Irishman, besides a crew of sixty and
+some cattle. They built a fort where the natives
+came trading skins for strips of red cloth, or to
+fight a battle, or to be chased, shrieking with fright,
+by Thorfin’s big red bull. There Mrs. Karlsefne
+gave birth to Snorri the Firstborn, whose sons Thorlak
+and Brand became priests and were the first two
+bishops of Greenland.</p>
+
+<p>After Karlsefne’s return to Greenland the next
+voyage was made by one of Eric’s daughters; and
+presently Leif the Fortunate came home from Norway
+to his father’s house, bringing a priest. Then
+Mrs. Leif built a church at Brattelid, old Eric the
+Red being thoroughly disgusted, and Greenland and
+Vinland became Christian, but Eric never.</p>
+
+<p>As long as Norway traded with her American
+colonies Vinland exported timber and dried fruit,
+while Greenland sent sheepskins, ox hides, sealskins,
+walrus-skin rope and tusks to Iceland and Europe.
+In return they got iron and settlers. But then began
+a series of disasters, for when the Black Death
+swept Europe, the colonies were left to their fate,
+and some of the colonists in despair renounced their
+faith to turn Eskimo. In 1349 the last timber ship
+from Nova Scotia was lately returned to Europe<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">6</span>
+when the plague struck Norway. There is a gap of
+fifty-two years in the record, and all we know of
+Greenland is that the western villages were destroyed
+by Eskimos who killed eighteen Norsemen and carried
+off the boys. Then the plague destroyed two-thirds
+of the people in Iceland, a bad winter killed nine tenths
+of all their cattle, and what remained of the
+hapless colony was ravaged by English fishermen.
+No longer could Iceland send any help to Greenland,
+but still there was intercourse because we know that
+seven years later the vicar of Garde married a girl
+in the east villages to a young Icelander.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, in plague-stricken England, Bristol,
+our biggest seaport, had not enough men living even
+to bury the dead, and labor was so scarce that the
+crops rotted for lack of harvesters. That is why an
+English squadron raided Iceland, Greenland, perhaps
+even Vinland, for slaves, and the people were carried
+away into captivity. Afterward England paid compensation
+to Denmark and returned the folk to their
+homes, but in 1448 the pope wrote to a Norse
+bishop concerning their piteous condition. And
+there the story ends, for in that year the German
+merchants at Bergen in Norway squabbled with the
+forty master mariners of the American trade. The
+sailors had boycotted their Hanseatic League, so the
+Germans asked them to dinner, and murdered them.
+From that time no man knew the way to lost America.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">7</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="II">II<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1248
+
+<span class="subhead">THE CRUSADERS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">In</span> the seventh century of the reign of Our Lord
+Christ, arose the Prophet Mahomet. To his followers
+he generously gave Heaven, and as much of
+the earth as they could get, so the true believers
+made haste to occupy goodly and fruitful possessions
+of Christian powers, including the Holy Land. The
+owners were useful as slaves.</p>
+
+<p>Not having been consulted in this matter, the
+Christians took offense, making war upon Islam in
+seven warm campaigns, wherein they held and lost by
+turns the holy sepulcher, so that the country where
+our Lord taught peace, was always drenched with
+blood. In the end, our crusades were not a success.</p>
+
+<p>About Saint Louis and the sixth crusade:</p>
+
+<p>At the opening of the story, that holy but delightful
+king of France lay so near death that his two lady
+nurses had a squabble, the one pulling a cloth over
+his face because he was dead, while the other snatched
+it away because he was still alive. At last he sent
+the pair of them to fetch the cross, on which he
+vowed to deliver the Holy Land. Then he had to
+get well, so he did, sending word to his barons to roll
+up their men for war.</p>
+
+<p>Among the nobles was the young Lord of Joinville,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">8</span>
+seneschal of Champagne—a merry little man with
+eight hundred pounds a year of his own. But then,
+what with an expensive mother, his wife, and some
+little worries, he had to pawn his lands before he
+could take the field with his two knights-banneret,
+nine knights, their men-at-arms, and the servants.
+He shared with another lord the hire of a ship from
+Marseilles, but when they joined his majesty in
+Cyprus he had only a few pounds left, and the
+knights would have deserted but that the king gave
+him a staff appointment at eight hundred pounds a
+year.</p>
+
+<p>The king was a holy saint, a glorious knight errant,
+full of fun, but a thoroughly incompetent general.
+Instead of taking Jerusalem by surprise, he must
+needs raid Egypt, giving the soldan of Babylon the
+Less (Cairo) plenty of time to arrange a warm reception.
+The rival armies had a battle on the beach,
+after which Saint Louis sat down in front of
+Damietta, where he found time to muddle his commissariat.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, the soldan was not at all well,
+having been poisoned by a rival prince, and paid no
+heed to the carrier pigeons with their despairing
+messages from the front. This discouraged the
+Moslems, who abandoned Damietta and fled inland,
+hotly pursued by the French. As a precaution, however,
+they sent round their ships, which collected the
+French supplies proceeding to the front. The Christians
+had plenty of fighting and a deal of starving to
+do, not to mention pestilence in their ill-managed
+camps. So they came to a canal which had to be
+bridged, but the artful paynim cut away the land in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">9</span>
+front of the bridge head, so that there was no ground
+on which the French could arrive. In the end the
+Christians had to swim and, as they were heavily
+armored, many were drowned in the mud. Joinville’s
+party found a dry crossing up-stream, and their
+troubles began at the enemy’s camp whence the Turks
+were flying.</p>
+
+<p>“While we were driving them through their camp,
+I perceived a Saracen who was mounting his horse,
+one of his knights holding the bridle. At the moment
+he had his two hands on the saddle to mount,
+I gave him of my lance under the armpit, and laid
+him dead. When his knight saw that, he left his
+lord and the horse, and struck me with his lance as
+I passed, between the two shoulders, holding me so
+pressed down that I could not draw the sword at my
+belt. I had, therefore, to draw the sword attached
+to my horse, and when he saw that he withdrew his
+lance and left me.”</p>
+
+<p>Here in the camp Joinville’s detachment was
+rushed by six thousand Turks, “who pressed upon
+me with their lances. My horse knelt under the
+weight, and I fell forward over the horse’s ears. I
+got up as soon as ever I could with my shield at my
+neck, and my sword in my hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Again a great rout of Turks came rushing upon
+us, and bore me to the ground and went over me, and
+caused my shield to fly from my neck.”</p>
+
+<p>So the little party gained the wall of a ruined
+house, where they were sorely beset: Lord Hugh, of
+Ecot, with three lance wounds in the face, Lord
+Frederick, of Loupey, with a lance wound between the
+shoulders, so large that the blood flowed from his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">10</span>
+body as from the bung hole of a cask, and my Lord
+of Sivery with a sword-stroke in the face, so that
+his nose fell over his lips. Joinville, too badly
+wounded to fight, was holding horses, while Turks
+who had climbed to the roof were prodding from
+above with their lances. Then came Anjou to the
+rescue, and presently the king with his main army.
+The fight became a general engagement, while slowly
+the Christian force was driven backward upon the
+river. The day had become very hot, and the stream
+was covered with lances and shields, and with horses
+and men drowning and perishing.</p>
+
+<p>Near by De Joinville’s position, a streamlet entered
+the river, and across that ran a bridge by which the
+Turks attempted to cut the king’s retreat. This
+bridge the little hero, well mounted now, held for
+hours, covering the flight of French detachments. At
+the head of one such party rode Count Peter, of
+Brittany, spitting the blood from his mouth and
+shouting “Ha! by God’s head, have you ever seen
+such riffraff?”</p>
+
+<p>“In front of us were two of the king’s sergeants;
+... and the Turks ... brought a large number
+of churls afoot, who pelted them with lumps of earth,
+but were never able to force them back upon us. At
+last they brought a churl on foot, who thrice threw
+Greek fire at them. Once William of Boon received
+the pot of Greek fire on his target, for if the fire had
+caught any of his garments he must have been burnt
+alive. We were all covered with the darts that failed
+to hit the sergeants. Now, it chanced that I found a
+Saracen’s quilted tunic lined with tow; I turned the
+open side towards me, and made a shield ...<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">11</span>
+which did me good service, for I was only wounded
+by their darts in five places, and my horse in fifteen....
+The good Count of Soissons, in that point of
+danger, jested with me and said,</p>
+
+<p>“‘Seneschal, let these curs howl! By God’s bonnet
+we shall talk of this day yet, you and I, in ladies’
+chambers!’”</p>
+
+<p>So came the constable of France, who relieved
+Joinville and sent him to guard the king.</p>
+
+<p>“So as soon as I came to the king, I made him
+take off his helmet, and lent him my steel cap so that
+he might have air.”</p>
+
+<p>Presently a knight brought news that the Count of
+Artois, the king’s brother, was in paradise.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, Sire,” said the provost, “be of good comfort
+herein, for never did king of France gain so much
+honor as you have gained this day. For in order
+to fight your enemies you have passed over a river
+swimming, and you have discomfited them and
+driven them from the field, and taken their engines,
+and also their tents wherein you will sleep this
+night.”</p>
+
+<p>And the king replied: “Let God be worshiped
+for all He has given me,” and then the big tears fell
+from his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>That night the captured camp was attacked in
+force, much to the grief of De Joinville and his
+knights, who ruefully put on chain mail over their
+aching wounds. Before they were dressed De Joinville’s
+chaplain engaged eight Saracens and put them
+all to flight.</p>
+
+<p>Three days later came a general attack of the
+whole Saracen army upon the Christian camp, but<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">12</span>
+thanks to the troops of Count William, of Flanders,
+De Joinville and his wounded knights were not in the
+thick of the fray.</p>
+
+<p>“Wherein,” he says, “God showed us great courtesy,
+for neither I nor my knights had our hawberks
+(chain shirts) and shields, because we had all been
+wounded.”</p>
+
+<p>You see De Joinville had the sweet faith that his
+God was a gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>After that the sorrowful army lay nine days in
+camp till the bodies of the dead floated to the surface
+of the canal, and eight days more while a hundred
+hired vagabonds cleared the stream. But the army
+lived on eels and water from that canal, while all of
+them sickened of scurvy, and hundreds died. Under
+the hands of the surgeons the men of that dying army
+cried like women. Then came an attempt to retreat
+in ships to the coast, but the way was blocked, the
+little galleys were captured one by one, the king was
+taken, and what then remained of the host were
+prisoners, the sick put to death, the rich held for ransom,
+the poor sold away into slavery.</p>
+
+<p>Saint Louis appeared to be dying of dysentery and
+scurvy, he was threatened with torture, but day after
+day found strength and courage to bargain with the
+soldan of Babylon for the ransom of his people.
+Once the negotiations broke down because the
+soldan was murdered by his own emirs, but the
+king went on bargaining now with the murderers.
+For his own ransom he gave the city of Damietta,
+for that of his knights he paid the royal treasure
+that was on board a galley in the port, and for the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">13</span>
+deliverance of the common men, he had to raise
+money in France.</p>
+
+<p>So came the release, and the emirs would have
+been ashamed to let their captive knights leave the
+prison fasting. So De Joinville’s party had “fritters
+of cheese roasted in the sun so that worms should not
+come therein, and hard boiled eggs cooked four or
+five days before, and these, in our honor, had been
+painted with divers colors.”</p>
+
+<p>After that came the counting of the ransom on
+board the royal galley, with the dreadful conclusion
+that they were short of the sum by thirty thousand
+livres. De Joinville went off to the galley of the
+marshal of the Knights Templars, where he tried to
+borrow the money.</p>
+
+<p>“Many were the hard and angry words which
+passed between him and me.”</p>
+
+<p>For one thing the borrower, newly released from
+prison, looked like a ragged beggar, and for the rest,
+the treasure of the Templars was a trust fund not to
+be lent to any one. They stood in the hold in front
+of the chest of treasure, De Joinville demanding the
+key, then threatening with an ax to make of it the
+king’s key.</p>
+
+<p>“We see right well,” said the treasurer, “that you
+are using force against us.” And on that excuse
+yielded the key to the ragged beggar, tottering with
+weakness, a very specter of disease and famine.</p>
+
+<p>“I threw out the silver I found therein and went,
+and sat on the prow of our little vessel that had
+brought me. And I took the marshal of France and
+left him with the silver in the Templars’ galley and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">14</span>
+on the galley I put the minister of the Trinity. On
+the galley the marshal handed the silver to the minister,
+and the minister gave it over to me on the little
+vessel where I sat. When we had ended and came
+towards the king’s galley, I began to shout to the
+king.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Sire! Sire! see how well I am furnished!’</p>
+
+<p>“And the saintly man received me right willingly
+and right joyfully.”</p>
+
+<p>So the ransom was completed, the king’s ransom
+and that of the greatest nobles of France, this group
+of starving ragged beggars in a dingey.</p>
+
+<p>Years followed of hard campaigning in Palestine.
+Once Saint Louis was even invited by the soldan of
+Damascus to visit as a pilgrim that Holy City which
+he could never enter as a conqueror. But Saint Louis
+and his knights were reminded of a story about
+Richard the Lion-Hearted, king of England. For
+Richard once marched almost within sight of the
+capital so that a knight cried out to him:</p>
+
+<p>“Sire, come so far hither, and I will show you
+Jerusalem!”</p>
+
+<p>But the Duke of Burgundy had just deserted with
+half the crusading army, lest it be said that the English
+had taken Jerusalem. So when Richard heard
+the knight calling he threw his coat armor before
+his eyes, all in tears, and said to our Savior,</p>
+
+<p>“Fair Lord God, I pray Thee suffer me not to see
+Thy Holy City since I can not deliver it from the
+hands of thine enemies.”</p>
+
+<p>King Louis the Saint followed the example of
+King Richard the Hero, and both left Palestine<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">15</span>
+broken-hearted because they had not the strength to
+take Jerusalem.</p>
+
+<p>Very queer is the tale of the queen’s arrival from
+France.</p>
+
+<p>“When I heard tell that she was come,” said De
+Joinville, “I rose from before the king and went to
+meet her, and led her to the castle, and when I came
+back to the king, who was in his chapel, he asked me
+if the queen and his children were well; and I told
+him yes. And he said, ‘I knew when you rose from
+before me that you were going to meet the queen,
+and so I have caused the sermon to wait for you.’
+And these things I tell you,” adds De Joinville, “because
+I had then been five years with the king, and
+never before had he spoken to me, nor so far as ever
+I heard, to any one else, of the queen, and of his
+children; and so it appears to me, it was not seemly
+to be thus a stranger to one’s wife and children.”</p>
+
+<p>To do the dear knight justice, he was always
+brutally frank to the king’s face, however much he
+loved him behind his back.</p>
+
+<p>The return of the king and queen to France was
+full of adventure, and De Joinville still had an appetite
+for such little troubles as a wreck and a sea fight.
+Here is a really nice story of an accident.</p>
+
+<p>“One of the queen’s bedwomen, when she had
+put the queen to bed, was heedless, and taking the
+kerchief that had been wound about her head, threw
+it into the iron stove on which the queen’s candle was
+burning, and when she had gone into the cabin where
+the women slept, below the queen’s chamber, the
+candle burnt on, till the kerchief caught fire, and
+from the kerchief the fire passed to the cloths with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">16</span>
+which the queen’s garments were covered. When
+the queen awoke she saw her cabin all in flames, and
+jumped up quite naked and took the kerchief and
+threw it all burning into the sea, and took the cloths
+and extinguished them. Those who were in the
+barge behind the ship cried, but not very loud, ‘Fire!
+fire!’ I lifted up my head and saw that the kerchief
+still burned with a clear flame on the sea, which was
+very still.</p>
+
+<p>“I put on my tunic as quickly as I could, and went
+and sat with the mariners.</p>
+
+<p>“While I sat there my squire, who slept before
+me, came to me and said that the king was awake,
+and asked where I was. ‘And I told him,’ said he,
+‘that you were in your cabin; and the king said to
+me, “Thou liest!”’ While we were thus speaking, behold
+the queen’s clerk appeared, Master Geoffrey,
+and said to me, ‘Be not afraid, nothing has happened.’
+And I said, ‘Master Geoffrey, go and tell
+the queen that the king is awake, and she should go
+to him, and set his mind at ease.’</p>
+
+<p>“On the following day the constable of France, and
+my Lord Peter the chamberlain, and my Lord Gervais,
+the master of the pantry, said to the king, ‘What
+happened in the night that we heard mention of fire?’
+and I said not a word. Then said the king, ‘What
+happened was by mischance, and the seneschal (De
+Joinville) is more reticent than I. Now I will tell
+you,’ said he, ‘how it came about that we might all
+have been burned this night,’ and he told them what
+had befallen, and said to me, ‘I command you henceforth
+not to go to rest until you have put out all fires,
+except the great fire that is in the hold of the ship.’<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">17</span>
+(Cooking fire on the ship’s ballast). ‘And take note
+that I shall not go to rest till you come back to me.’”</p>
+
+<p>It is pleasant to think of the queen’s pluck, the
+knight’s silence, the king’s tact, and to see the inner
+privacies of that ancient ship. After seven hundred
+years the gossip is fresh and vivid as this morning’s
+news.</p>
+
+<p>The king brought peace, prosperity and content to
+all his kingdom, and De Joinville was very angry when
+in failing health Saint Louis was persuaded to attempt
+another crusade in Africa.</p>
+
+<p>“So great was his weakness that he suffered me
+to carry him in my arms from the mansion of the
+Count of Auxerre to the abbey of the Franciscans.”</p>
+
+<p>So went the king to his death in Tunis, a bungling
+soldier, but a saint on a throne, the noblest of all
+adventurers, the greatest sovereign France has ever
+known.</p>
+
+<p>Long afterward the king came in a dream to see
+De Joinville: “Marvelously joyous and glad of
+heart, and I myself was right glad to see him in my
+castle. And I said to him, ‘Sire, when you go hence,
+I will lodge you in a house of mine, that is in a city
+of mine, called Chevillon.’ And he answered me
+laughing, and said to me, ‘Lord of Joinville, by the
+faith I owe you, I have no wish so soon to go hence.’”</p>
+
+<p>It was at the age of eighty-five De Joinville wrote
+his memoirs, still blithe as a boy because he was not
+grown up.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot wide">
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Note.</span> From <cite>Memoirs of the Crusaders</cite>, by Villehardouine
+and De Joinville. Dent &amp; Co.</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">18</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="III">III<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1260
+
+<span class="subhead">THE MIDDLE AGES IN ASIA</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> year 1260 found Saint Louis of France busy
+reforming his kingdom, while over the way the
+English barons were reforming King Henry III on
+the eve of the founding of parliament, and the
+Spaniards were inventing the bull fight by way of a
+national sport. Our own national pastime then was
+baiting Jews. They got twopence per week in the
+pound for the use of their money, but next year one of
+them was caught in the act of cheating, a little error
+which led to the massacre of seven hundred.</p>
+
+<p>That year the great Khan Kublai came to the
+throne of the Mongol Empire, a pastoral realm of the
+grass lands extending from the edge of Europe to
+the Pacific Ocean. Kublai began to build his capital,
+the city of Pekin, and in all directions his people extended
+their conquests. The looting and burning of
+Bagdad took them seven days and the resistless pressure
+of their hordes was forcing the Turks upon
+Europe.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile in the dying Christian empire of the
+East, the Latins held Constantinople with Beldwin on
+the throne, but next year the Greek army led by
+Michael Paleologus crept through a tunnel and
+managed to capture the city.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">19</span></p>
+
+<p>Among the merchants at Constantinople in 1260
+were the two Polo brothers, Nicolo and Matteo,
+Venetian nobles, who invested the whole of their
+capital in gems, and set off on a trading voyage to
+the Crimea. Their business finished, they went on
+far up the Volga River to the court of a Mongol
+prince, and to him they gave the whole of their gems
+as a gift, getting a present in return with twice the
+money. But now their line of retreat was blocked
+by a war among the Mongol princes, so they went off
+to trade at Bokhara in Persia where they spent a year.
+And so it happened that the Polo brothers met with
+certain Mongol envoys who were returning to the
+court of their Emperor Kublai. “Come with us,”
+said the envoys. “The great khan has never seen
+a European and will be glad to have you as his
+guests.” So the Polos traveled under safe conduct
+with the envoys, a year’s journey, until they reached
+the court of the great khan at Pekin and were received
+with honor and liberality.</p>
+
+<p>Now it so happened that Kublai sought for himself
+and his people the faith of Christ, and wanted the
+pope to send him a hundred priests, so he despatched
+these Italian gentlemen as his ambassadors to the
+court of Rome. He gave them a passport engraved
+on a slab of gold, commanding his subjects to help
+the envoys upon their way with food and horses, and
+thus, traveling in state across Asia, the Polos returned
+from a journey, the greatest ever made up to
+that time by any Christian men.</p>
+
+<p>At Venice, Nicolo, the elder of the brothers, found
+that his wife had died leaving to him a son, then
+aged sixteen, young Marco Polo, a gallant, courageous,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">20</span>
+hardy lad, it seems, and very truthful, without
+the slightest symptoms of any sense of humor.</p>
+
+<p>The schoolboy who defined the Vatican as a great
+empty space without air, was perfectly correct, for
+when the Polos arrived there was a sort of vacuum
+in Rome, the pope being dead and no new appointment
+made because the electors were squabbling.
+Two years the envoys waited, and when at last a
+new pope was elected, he proved to be a friend of
+theirs, the legate Theobald on whom they waited at
+the Christian fortress of Acre in Palestine.</p>
+
+<p>But instead of sending a hundred clergymen to
+convert the Mongol empire, the new pope had only
+one priest to spare, who proved to be a coward, and
+deserted.</p>
+
+<p>Empty handed, their mission a failure, the Polos
+went back, a three and one-half years’ journey to
+Pekin, taking with them young Marco Polo, a handsome
+gallant, who at once found favor with old Kublai
+Khan. Marco “sped wondrously in learning the
+customs of the Tartars, as well as their language,
+their manner of writing, and their practise of war ...
+insomuch that the emperor held him in great esteem.
+And so when he discerned Mark to have so much
+sense, and to conduct himself so well and beseemingly,
+he sent him on an embassage of his, to a country which
+was a good six months’ journey distant. The young
+gallant executed his commission well and with discretion.”
+The fact is that Kublai’s ambassadors, returning
+from different parts of the world, “were able
+to tell him nothing except the business on which they
+had gone, and that the prince in consequence held
+them for no better than dolts and fools.” Mark<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">21</span>
+brought back plenty of gossip, and was a great success,
+for seventeen years being employed by the
+emperor on all sorts of missions. “And thus it
+came about that Messer Marco Polo had knowledge
+of or had actually visited a greater number of the
+different countries of the world than any other man.”</p>
+
+<p>In the Chinese annals of the Mongol dynasty
+there is record in 1277 of one Polo nominated a second-class
+commissioner or agent attached to the privy
+council. Marco had become a civil servant, and his
+father and uncle were both rich men, but as the years
+went on, and the aged emperor began to fail, they
+feared as to their fate after his death. Yet when
+they wanted to go home old Kublai growled at them.</p>
+
+<p>“Now it came to pass in those days that the
+Queen Bolgana, wife of Argon, lord of the Levant
+(court of Persia), departed this life. And in her
+will she had desired that no lady should take her
+place, or succeed her as Argon’s wife except one of
+her own family (in Cathay). Argon therefore
+despatched three of his barons ... as ambassadors
+to the great khan, attended by a very gallant
+company, in order to bring back as his bride a lady
+of the family of Queen Bolgana, his late wife.</p>
+
+<p>“When these three barons had reached the court of
+the great khan, they delivered their message explaining
+wherefore they were come. The khan received
+them with all honor and hospitality, and then sent for
+a lady whose name was Cocachin, who was of the
+family of the deceased Queen Bolgana. She was a
+maiden of seventeen, a very beautiful and charming
+person, and on her arrival at court she was presented
+to the three barons as the lady chosen in compliance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">22</span>
+with their demand. They declared that the lady
+pleased them well.</p>
+
+<p>“Meanwhile Messer Marco chanced to return from
+India, whither he had gone as the lord’s ambassador,
+and made his report of all the different things that
+he had seen in his travels, and of the sundry seas
+over which he had voyaged. And the three barons,
+having seen that Messer Nicolo, Messer Matteo and
+Messer Marco were not only Latins but men of marvelous
+good sense withal, took thought among
+themselves to get the three to travel to Persia with
+them, their intention being to return to their country
+by sea, on account of the great fatigue of that long
+land journey for a lady. So they went to the great
+khan, and begged as a favor that he would send the
+three Latins with them, as it was their desire to return
+home by sea.</p>
+
+<p>“The lord, having that great regard that I have
+mentioned for those three Latins, was very loath to
+do so. But at last he did give them permission to
+depart, enjoining them to accompany the three barons
+and the lady.”</p>
+
+<p>In the fleet that sailed on the two years’ voyage
+to Persia there were six hundred persons, not counting
+mariners; but what with sickness and little accidents
+of travel, storms for instance and sharks,
+only eight persons arrived, including the lady, one of
+the Persian barons, and the three Italians. They
+found the handsome King Argon dead, so the lady
+had to put up with his insignificant son Casan, who
+turned out to be a first-rate king. The lady wept
+sore at parting with the Italians. They set out for<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">23</span>
+Venice, arriving in 1295 after an absence of twenty-seven
+years.</p>
+
+<p>There is a legend that two aged men, and one of
+middle age, in ragged clothes, of very strange device,
+came knocking at the door of the Polo’s town house
+in Venice, and were denied admission by the family
+who did not know them. It was only when the
+travelers had unpacked their luggage, and given a
+banquet, that the family and their guests began to
+respect these vagrants. Three times during dinner
+the travelers retired to change their gorgeous oriental
+robes for others still more splendid. Was it possible
+that the long dead Polos had returned alive? Then
+the tables being cleared, Marco brought forth the
+dirty ragged clothes in which they had come to
+Venice, and with sharp knives they ripped open the
+seams and welts, pouring out vast numbers of
+rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds and emeralds,
+gems to the value of a million ducats. The family
+was entirely convinced, the public nicknamed the
+travelers as the millionaires, the city conferred dignities,
+and the two elder gentlemen spent their remaining
+years in peace and splendor surrounded by
+hosts of friends.</p>
+
+<p>Three years later a sea battle was fought between
+the fleets of Genoa and Venice, and in the Venetian
+force one of the galleys was commanded by Marco
+Polo. There Venice was totally defeated, and Marco
+was one of the seven thousand prisoners carried home
+to grace the triumph of the Genoese. It was in
+prison that he met the young literary person to whom
+he dictated his book, not of travel, not of adventure,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">24</span>
+but a geography, a description of all Asia, its countries,
+peoples and wonders. Sometimes he got excited
+and would draw the long bow, expanding the
+numbers of the great khan’s armies. Sometimes his
+marvels were such as nobody in his senses could be
+expected to swallow, as for instance, when he spoke
+of the Tartars as burning black stones to keep them
+warm in winter. Yet on the whole this book, of the
+greatest traveler that ever lived, awakened Europe
+of the Dark Ages to the knowledge of that vast outer
+world that has mainly become the heritage of the
+Christian Powers.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot wide">
+
+<p>See the Book of Sir Marco Polo, translated and edited by
+Colonel Sir Henry Yule. John Murray.</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">25</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1322
+
+<span class="subhead">THE MARVELOUS ADVENTURES OF SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap i"><span class="smcap1">“I, John Maundeville</span>, Knight, all be it I
+am not worthy, that was born in England, in the
+town of St. Allans, passed the sea in the year of our
+Lord 1322 ... and hitherto have been long time on
+the sea, and have seen and gone through many diverse
+lands ... with good company of many lords. God
+be thankful!”</p>
+
+<p>So wrote a very gentle and pious knight. His
+book of travels begins with the journey to Constantinople,
+which in his day was the seat of a Christian
+emperor. Beyond was the Saracen empire,
+whose sultans reigned in the name of the Prophet
+Mahomet over Asia Minor, Syria, the Holy Land
+and Egypt. For three hundred years Christian and
+Saracen had fought for the possession of Jerusalem,
+but now the Moslem power was stronger than ever.</p>
+
+<p>Sir John Maundeville found the sultan of Babylon
+the Less at his capital city in Egypt, and there entered
+in his service as a soldier for wars against the Arab
+tribes of the desert. The sultan grew to love this
+Englishman, talked with him of affairs in Europe,
+urged him to turn Moslem, and offered to him the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">26</span>
+hand of a princess in marriage. But when Maundeville
+insisted on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, his
+master let him go, and granted him letters with the
+great seal, before which even generals and governors
+were obliged to prostrate themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Sir John went all over Palestine, devoutly believing
+everything he was told. Here is his story of the
+Field Beflowered. “For a fair maiden was blamed
+with wrong, and slandered ... for which cause she
+was condemned to death, and to be burnt in that place,
+to the which she was led. And as the fire began to
+burn about her, she made her prayers to our Lord,
+that as certainly as she was not guilty of that sin, that
+he would help her, and make it to be known to all
+men of his merciful grace. And when she had thus
+said she entered into the fire, and anon was the fire
+quenched and out; and the brands which were burning
+became red rose trees, and the brands that were not
+kindled became white rose trees full of roses. And
+these were the first rose trees and roses, both white
+and red, which ever any man saw.”</p>
+
+<p>All this part of his book is very beautiful concerning
+the holy places, and there are nice bits about incubators
+for chickens and the use of carrier pigeons.
+But it is in the regions beyond the Holy Land that
+Sir John’s wonderful power of believing everything
+that he had heard makes his chapters more and more
+exciting.</p>
+
+<p>“In Ethiopia ... there be folk that have but one
+foot and they go so fast that it is a marvel. And the
+foot is so large that it shadoweth all the body against
+the sun when they will lie and rest them.”</p>
+
+<p>Beyond that was the isle of Nacumera, where all<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">27</span>
+the people have hounds’ heads, being reasonable and
+of good understanding save that they worship an ox
+for their god. And they all go naked save a little
+clout, and if they take any man in battle anon they
+eat him. The dog-headed king of that land is most
+pious, saying three hundred prayers by way of grace
+before meat.</p>
+
+<p>Next he came to Ceylon. “In that land is full
+much waste, for it is full of serpents, of dragons and
+of cockodrills, so that no man may dwell there.</p>
+
+<p>“In one of these isles be folk as of great stature as
+giants. And they be hideous to look upon. And they
+have but one eye, and that is in the middle of the
+forehead. And they eat nothing but raw flesh and
+raw fish. And in another isle towards the south
+dwell folk of foul stature and of cursed nature that
+have no heads. And their eyes be in their shoulders
+and their mouths be round shapen, like an horseshoe,
+amidst their breasts. And in another isle be men
+without heads, and their eyes and mouths be behind in
+their shoulders. And in another isle be folk that
+have the face all flat, all plain, without nose and without
+mouth. But they have two small holes, all round,
+instead of their eyes, and their mouth is flat also
+without lips. And in another isle be folk of foul
+fashion and shape that have the lip above the mouth
+so great that when they sleep in the sun they cover all
+the face with that lip.”</p>
+
+<p>If Sir John had been untruthful he might have been
+here tempted to tell improbable stories, but he merely
+refers to these isles in passing with a few texts from
+the Holy Scriptures to express his entire disapproval.
+His chapters on the Chinese empire are a perfect<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">28</span>
+model of veracity, and he merely cocks on a few
+noughts to the statistics. In outlying parts of Cathay
+he feels once more the need of a little self-indulgence.
+One province is covered with total and everlasting
+darkness, enlivened by the neighing of unseen horses
+and the crowing of mysterious cocks. In the next
+province he found a fruit, which, when ripe, is cut
+open, disclosing “a little beast in flesh and bone and
+blood, as though it were a little lamb without wool.
+And men eat both the fruit and the beast. And that
+is a great marvel. Of that fruit have I eaten, although
+it were wonderful, but that I know well that
+God is marvelous in all his works. And nevertheless
+I told them of as great a marvel to them, that is
+amongst us, and that was of the barnacle geese: for
+I told them that in our country were trees that bear a
+fruit that become birds flying, and those that fall on
+the water live, and they that fall on the earth die anon,
+and they be right good to man’s meat, and thereof
+had they so great marvel that some of them trowed
+it were an impossible thing to be.”</p>
+
+<p>This mean doubt as to his veracity must have cut
+poor Maundeville to the quick. In his earnest way
+he goes on to describe the people who live entirely on
+the smell of wild apples, to the Amazon nation consisting
+solely of women warriors, and so on past many
+griffins, popinjays, dragons and other wild fowl to the
+Adamant Rocks of loadstone which draw all the iron
+nails out of a ship to her great inconvenience. “I
+myself, have seen afar off in that sea, as though it
+had been a great isle full of trees and bush, full
+of thorns and briers great plenty. And the shipmen
+told us that all that was of ships that were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">29</span>
+drawn thither by the Adamants, for the iron that
+was in them.” Beyond that Sir John reports a
+sea consisting of gravel, ebbing and flowing in great
+waves, but containing no drop of water, a most awkward
+place for shipping.</p>
+
+<p>So far is Sir John moderate in his statements, but
+when he gets to the Vale Perilous at last he turns himself
+loose. That vale is disturbed by thunders and
+tempests, murmurs and noises, a great noise of “tabors,
+drums and trumps.” This vale is all full of
+devils, and hath been alway. In that vale is great
+plenty of gold and silver.</p>
+
+<p>“Wherefore many misbelieving men and many
+Christian men also go in oftentime to have of the
+treasure that there is; but few come back again, and
+especially of the misbelieving men, nor of the Christian
+men either, for they be anon strangled of devils.
+And in the mid place of that vale, under a rock, is an
+head and the visage of a devil bodily, full horrible and
+dreadful to see ... for he beholdeth every man so
+sharply with dreadful eyes, that be evermore moving
+and sparkling like fire, and changeth and stareth so
+often in diverse manner, with so horrible countenance
+that no man dare draw nigh towards him. And from
+him cometh smoke and stink and fire, and so much
+abomination, that scarcely any man may there endure.</p>
+
+<p>“And ye shall understand that when my fellows
+and I were in that vale we were in great thought
+whether we durst put our bodies in adventure to go
+in or not.... So there were with us two worthy
+men, friars minors, that were of Lombardy, that said
+that if any man would enter they would go in with
+us. And when they had said so upon the gracious<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">30</span>
+trust of God and of them, we made sing mass, and
+made every man to be shriven and houseled. And
+then we entered fourteen persons; but at our going
+out we were only nine.... And thus we passed that
+perilous vale, and found therein gold and silver and
+precious stones, and rich jewels great plenty ... but
+whether it was as it seemed to us I wot never. For I
+touched none.... For I was more devout then,
+than ever I was before or after, and all for the dread
+of fiends, that I saw in diverse figures, and also for
+the great multitude of dead bodies, that I saw there
+lying by the way ... and therefore were we more
+devout a great deal, and yet we were cast down and
+beaten many times to the hard earth by winds, thunder
+and tempests ... and so we passed that perilous
+vale.... Thanked be Almighty God!</p>
+
+<p>“After this beyond the vale is a great isle where
+the folk be great giants ... and in an isle beyond
+that were giants of greater stature, some of forty-five
+foot or fifty foot long, and as some men say of
+fifty cubits long. But I saw none of these, for I
+had no lust to go to those parts, because no man
+cometh neither into that isle nor into the other but
+he be devoured anon. And among these giants be
+sheep as great as oxen here, and they bear great
+wool and rough. Of the sheep I have seen many
+times ... those giants take men in the sea out of
+their ships and bring them to land, two in one hand
+and two in another, eating them going, all raw and
+all alive.</p>
+
+<p>“Of paradise can not I speak properly, for I was
+not there. It is far beyond. And that grieveth me.
+And also I was not worthy.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">31</span></p>
+
+<p>So, regretting that he had not been allowed into
+paradise, the hoary old liar came homeward to Rome,
+where he claims that the pope absolved him of all his
+sins, and gave him a certificate that his book was
+proved for true in every particular, “albeit that many
+men list not to give credence to anything but to that
+that they have seen with their eye, be the author or
+the person never so true.” Yet, despite these unkind
+doubts as to its veracity, Maundeville’s book lives
+after five hundred years, and ranks as the most stupendous
+masterpiece in the art of lying.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">32</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="V">V<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1492
+
+<span class="subhead">COLUMBUS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Columbus</span> was blue-eyed, red-haired and tall,
+of a sunny honesty, humane and panic-proof.
+In other words he came of the Baltic and not of the
+Mediterranean stock, although his people lived in Italy
+and he was born in the suburbs of Genoa. By caste
+he was a peasant, and by trade, up to the age of
+twenty-eight, a weaver, except at times when his
+Northern blood broke loose and drove him to sea for
+a voyage. He made himself a scholar and a draftsman,
+and when at last he escaped from an exacting
+family, he earned his living by copying charts at Lisbon.
+A year later, as a navigating officer, he found
+his way, via the wine trade, to Bristol. There he
+slouched dreaming about the slums, dressed like a
+foreign monk. He must needs pose to himself in
+some ideal character, and was bound to dress the part.
+The artistic temperament is the mainspring of adventure.</p>
+
+<p>In our own day we may compare Boston, that grand
+old home of the dying sailing ship, with New York, a
+bustling metropolis for the steam liners. In the days
+of Columbus Genoa was an old-fashioned, declining,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">33</span>
+but still splendid harbor of the oared galleys, while
+Lisbon was the up-to-date metropolis of the new
+square-rigged sailing ships.</p>
+
+<p>From these two greatest seaports of his age, Columbus
+came to Bristol, the harbor of England, in the
+Middle Ages, of the slow, scholarly, artistic, stately
+English. They were building that prayer in stone,
+Saint Mary Redcliffe, a jewel of intricate red masonry,
+the setting for Portuguese stained glass which glowed
+like precious gems.</p>
+
+<p>“In the month of February,” says Columbus, “and
+in the year 1477, I navigated as far as the Island of
+Tile (Thule is Iceland) a hundred leagues, and to
+this island which is as large as England, the English,
+especially those of Bristol, go with merchandise. And
+at the time that I was there the sea was not frozen
+over, although there were very high tides.”</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, is the record of Columbus himself that
+in his long inquiry concerning the regions beyond the
+Atlantic, he actually visited Iceland. A scholar himself,
+he was able to converse with the learned Icelanders
+in Latin, the trade jargon of that age. From
+them he surely must have known how one hundred
+thirty years ago the last timber ship had come home
+from Nova Scotia, and twenty-nine years since,
+within his own lifetime, the Greenland trade had
+closed. The maps of the period showed the American
+coast as far south as the Carolines,—the current
+geography book was equally clear:</p>
+
+<p>“From Biameland (Siberia) the country stretches
+as far as the desert regions in the north until Greenland
+begins. From Greenland lies southerly Helluland
+(Labrador and Newfoundland), then Markland<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">34</span>
+(Nova Scotia); thence it is not far from Vinland
+(New England), which some believe goes out from
+Africa. England and Scotland are one island, yet
+each country is a kingdom by itself. Ireland is a
+large island, Iceland is also a large island north of
+Ireland.” Indeed Columbus seems almost to be
+quoting this from memory when he says of Iceland,
+“this island, which is as large as England.” I
+strongly suspect that Columbus when in Iceland, took
+a solemn oath not to “discover” America.</p>
+
+<p>The writers of books have spent four centuries in
+whitewashing, retouching, dressing up and posing this
+figure of Columbus. The navigator was indeed a man
+of powerful intellect and of noble character, but they
+have made him seem a monumental prig as well as an
+insufferable bore. He is the dead and helpless victim,
+dehumanized by literary art until we feel that we
+really ought to pray for him on All Prigs’ Day in the
+churches.</p>
+
+<p>Columbus came home from his Icelandic and Guinea
+expeditions with two perfectly sound ideas. “The
+world is a globe, so if I sail westerly I shall find
+Japan and the Indies.” For fifteen bitter years he became
+the laughing-stock of Europe.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_34" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 26em;">
+  <img src="images/i_034.jpg" width="2048" height="2465" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Christopher Columbus</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>Now note how the historians, the biographers and
+the commentators, the ponderous and the mawkish,
+the smug and the pedantic alike all fail to see why
+their hero was laughed at. His name was Cristo-fero
+Colombo, to us a good enough label for tying to any
+man, but to the Italians and all educated persons of
+that age, a joke. The words mean literally the Christ-Carrying
+Dove. Suppose a modern man with some
+invention or a great idea, called himself Mr. Christ-Carrying<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">35</span>
+Dove, and tried to get capitalists in New
+York or London to finance his enterprise! In the end
+he changed his name to Cristoval Colon and got himself
+financed, but by that time his hair was white, and
+his nerve was gone, and his health failing.</p>
+
+<p>In the ninth century the vikings sailed from Norway
+by the great circle course north of the gulf
+stream. They had no compass or any instruments of
+navigation, and they braved the unknown currents, the
+uncharted reefs, the unspeakable terrors of pack-ice,
+berg-streams and fog on Greenland’s awful coast.
+They made no fuss.</p>
+
+<p>But Columbus sailing in search of Japan, had one
+Englishman and one Irishman, the rest of the people
+being a pack of dagoes. In lovely weather they were
+ready to run away from their own shadows.</p>
+
+<p>From here onward throughout the four voyages
+which disclosed the West Indies and the Spanish Main,
+Columbus allowed his men to shirk their duties, to
+disobey his orders, to mutiny, to desert and even to
+make war upon him.</p>
+
+<p>Between voyages he permitted everybody from the
+mean king downward, to snub, swindle, plunder and
+defame himself and all who were loyal to him in misfortune.
+Because Columbus behaved like an old
+woman, his swindling pork contractor, Amerigo Vespucci,
+was allowed to give his name to the Americas.
+Because he had not the manhood to command, the hapless
+red Indians were outraged, enslaved and driven
+to wholesale suicide, leaping in thousands from the
+cliffs. For lack of a master the Spaniards performed
+such prodigies of cowardice and cruelty as the world
+has never known before or since, the native races were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">36</span>
+swept out of existence, and Spain set out upon a downward
+path, a moral lapse beyond all human power to
+arrest.</p>
+
+<p>Yet looking back, how wonderful is the prophecy in
+that name, Christ-Carrying Dove, borne by a saintly
+and heroic seaman whose mission, in the end, added
+two continents to Christianity.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot wide">
+
+<p>This text mainly contradicts a <cite>Life of Columbus</cite>, by
+Clements R. Markham, C.&nbsp;B. Phillip &amp; Son, 1892.</p>
+</div>
+
+<figure id="i_36" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_036.jpg" width="1465" height="2196" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Americus Vespuccius</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">37</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1519
+
+<span class="subhead">THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">“Hernando Cortes</span> spent an idle and unprofitable
+youth.”</p>
+
+<p>So did I. And every other duffer is with me in
+being pleased with Cortes for setting an example.
+We, not the good boys, need a little encouragement.</p>
+
+<p>He was seven years old when Columbus found the
+Indies. That was a time when boys hurried to get
+grown up and join the search for the Fountain of
+Youth, the trail to Eldorado. All who had time to
+sleep dreamed tremendous dreams.</p>
+
+<p>Cortes became a colonist in Cuba, a sore puzzle to
+the rascal in command. When he clapped Cortes in
+irons the youngster slipped free and defied him.
+When he gave Cortes command of an expedition the
+fellow cheeked him. When he tried to arrest him the
+bird had flown, and was declared an outlaw.</p>
+
+<p>The soldiers and seamen of the expedition were
+horrified by this adventurer who landed them in newly
+discovered Mexico, then sank the ships lest they should
+wish to go home. They stood in the deadly mists of
+the tropic plains, and far above them glowed the Star
+of the Sea, white Orizaba crowned with polar snows.
+They marched up a hill a mile and a half in sheer<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">38</span>
+height through many zones of climate, and every circumstance
+of pain and famine to the edge of a plateau
+crowned by immense volcanoes, a land of plenty,
+densely peopled, full of opulent cities. They found
+that this realm was ruled by an emperor, famous for
+his victorious wars, able, it seemed, to place a million
+warriors in the field, and hungry for captives to be
+first sacrificed to the gods, and afterward eaten at the
+banquets of the nobility and gentry. The temples
+were actually fed with twenty thousand victims a year.
+The Spanish invading force of four hundred men began
+to feel uncomfortable.</p>
+
+<p>Yet if this Cortes puzzled the governor of Cuba, and
+horrified his men, he paralyzed the Emperor Montezuma.
+Hundreds of years ago a stranger had come to
+Mexico from the eastern sea, a bearded man who
+taught the people the arts of civilized life. Then
+birds first sang and flowers blossomed, the fields were
+fruitful and the sun shone in glory upon that plateau
+of eternal spring. The hero, Bird-Serpent, was remembered,
+loved and worshiped as a god. It was
+known to all men that as he had gone down into the
+eastern sea so he would return again in later ages.
+Now the prophecy was fulfilled. He had come with
+his followers, all bearded white men out of the eastern
+sea in mysterious winged vessels. Bird-Serpent and
+his people were dressed in gleaming armor, had
+weapons that flashed lightning, were mounted on
+terrible beasts—where steel and guns and horses were
+unknown; and Montezuma felt as we should do if our
+land were invaded by winged men riding dragons. To
+the supernatural visitors the emperor sent embassy<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">39</span>
+after embassy, loaded with treasure, begging the hero
+not to approach his capital.</p>
+
+<p>Set in the midst of Montezuma’s empire was the
+poor valiant republic of Tlascala, at everlasting war
+with the Aztec nation. Invading this republic Cortes
+was met by a horde of a hundred thousand warriors,
+whom he thrashed in three engagements, and when
+they were humbled, accepted as allies against the
+Aztecs. Attended by an Tlascalan force he entered
+the ancient Aztec capital, Cholula, famed for its temple.
+This is a stone-faced mound of rubble, four
+times the size and half the height of the Great Pyramid,
+a forty-acre building larger by four acres than
+any structure yet attempted by white men.</p>
+
+<p>By the emperor’s orders the Cholulans welcomed
+the Spaniards, trapped them within their city, and attacked
+them. In reply, Cortes used their temple as
+the scene of a public massacre, slaughtered three thousand
+men, and having thus explained things, marched
+on the City of Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>In those days a salt lake, since drained, filled the
+central hollow of the vale of Mexico, and in the
+midst of it stood the city built on piles, and threaded
+with canals, a barbaric Venice, larger, perhaps even
+grander than Venice with its vast palace and gardens,
+and numberless mound temples whose flaming altars
+lighted the town at night. Three causeways crossed
+the lake and met just as they do to-day at the central
+square. Here, on the site of the mound temple, stands
+one of the greatest of the world’s cathedrals, and
+across the square are public buildings marking the site
+of Montezuma’s palace, and that in which he entertained<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">40</span>
+the Spaniards. The white men were astonished
+at the zoological gardens, the aviary, the floating
+market gardens on the lake, the cleanliness of the
+streets, kept by a thousand sweepers, and a metropolitan
+police which numbered ten thousand men,
+arrangements far in advance of any city of Europe.
+Then, as now, the place was a great and brilliant
+capital.</p>
+
+<p>Yet from the Spanish point of view these Aztecs
+were only barbarians to be conquered, and heathen
+cannibals doomed to hell unless they accepted the
+faith. To them the Cholula massacre was only a military
+precaution. They thought it right to seize their
+generous host the emperor, to hold him as a prisoner
+under guard, and one day even to put him in irons.
+For six months Montezuma reigned under Spanish
+orders, overwhelmed with shame. He loved his captors
+because they were gallant gentlemen, he freely
+gave them his royal treasure of gems, and gold, and
+brilliant feather robes. Over the plunder—a million
+and a half sterling in gold alone—they squabbled;
+clear proof to Montezuma that they were not all divine.
+Yet still they were friends, so he gave them all
+the spears and bows from his arsenal as fuel to burn
+some of his nobles who had affronted them.</p>
+
+<p>It was at this time that the hostile governor of Cuba
+sent Narvaes with seventeen ships and a strong force
+to arrest the conqueror for rebellion. The odds were
+only three to one, instead of the usual hundred to one
+against him, so Cortes went down to the coast, gave
+Narvaes a thrashing, captured him, enrolled his men
+by way of reinforcements, and returned with a force
+of eleven hundred troops.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">41</span></p>
+
+<p>He had left his friend, Alvarado, with a hundred
+men to hold the capital and guard the emperor. This
+Alvarado, so fair that the natives called him Child of
+the Sun, was such a fool that he massacred six
+hundred unarmed nobles and gentlefolk for being
+pagans, violated the great temple, and so aroused the
+whole power of the fiercest nation on earth to a war of
+vengeance. Barely in time to save Alvarado, Cortes
+reentered the city to be besieged. Again and again
+the Aztecs attempted to storm the palace. The emperor
+in his robes of state addressed them from the
+ramparts, and they shot him. They seized the great
+temple which overlooked the palace, and this the
+Spaniards stormed. In face of awful losses day by
+day the Spaniards, starving and desperate, cleared a
+road through the city, and on the night of Montezuma’s
+death they attempted to retreat by one of the
+causeways leading to the mainland. Three canals cut
+this road, and the drawbridges had been taken away,
+but Cortes brought a portable bridge to span them.
+They crossed the first as the gigantic sobbing gong
+upon the heights of the temple aroused the entire city.</p>
+
+<p>Heavily beset from the rear, and by thousands of
+men in canoes, they found that the weight of their
+transport had jammed the bridge which could not be
+removed. They filled the second gap with rocks, with
+their artillery and transport, with chests of gold, horses,
+and dead men. So they came to the third gap, no
+longer an army but as a flying mob of Spaniards and
+Tlascalan warriors bewildered in the rain and the darkness
+by the headlong desperation of the attacking host.
+They were compelled to swim, and at least fifty of the
+recruits were drowned by the weight of gold they refused<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">42</span>
+to leave, while many were captured to be sacrificed
+upon the Aztec altars. Montezuma’s children
+were drowned, and hundreds more, while Cortes and
+his cavaliers, swimming their horses back and forth
+convoyed the column, and Alvarado with his rear
+guard held the causeway.</p>
+
+<p>Last in the retreat, grounding his spear butt, he
+leaped the chasm, a feat of daring which has given a
+name forever to this place as Alvarado’s Leap. And
+just beyond, upon the mainland there is an ancient tree
+beneath which Cortes, as the dawn broke out, sat on
+the ground and cried. He had lost four hundred
+fifty Spaniards, and thousands of Tlascalans, his
+records, artillery, muskets, stores and treasure in that
+lost battle of the Dreadful Night.</p>
+
+<p>A week later the starved and wounded force was
+beset by an army of two hundred thousand Aztecs.
+They had only their swords now, but, after long hours
+of fighting, Cortes himself killed the Aztec general, so
+by his matchless valor and leadership gaining a victory.</p>
+
+<p>The rest is a tale of horror beyond telling, for,
+rested and reinforced, the Spaniards went back. They
+invested, besieged, stormed and burned the famine-stricken,
+pestilence-ridden capital, a city choked and
+heaped with the unburied dead of a most valiant
+nation.</p>
+
+<p>Afterward, under the Spanish viceroys, Mexico
+was extended and enlarged to the edge of Alaska, a
+Christian civilized state renowned for mighty works
+of engineering, the splendor of her architecture, and
+for such inventions as the national pawn-shop, as a
+bank to help the poor. One of the so-called native<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">43</span>
+“slaves” of the mines once wrote to the king of
+Spain, begging his majesty to visit Mexico and offering
+to make a royal road for him, paving the two
+hundred fifty miles from Vera Cruz to the capital
+with ingots of pure silver as a gift to Spain.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">44</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VII">VII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1532
+
+<span class="subhead">THE CONQUEST OF PERU</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Pizarro</span> was reared for a swineherd; long years
+of soldiering made him no more than a captain,
+and when at the age of fifty he turned explorer, he
+discovered nothing but failure.</p>
+
+<p>For seven years he and his followers suffered on
+trails beset by snakes and alligators, in feverish jungles
+haunted by man-eating savages, to be thrown at last
+battered, ragged and starving on the Isle of Hell.
+Then a ship offered them passage, but old Pizarro drew
+a line in the dust with his sword. “Friends,” said he,
+“and comrades, on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness,
+the drenching storm, desertion and death; on
+this side ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its
+riches; here Panama and its poverty. Choose each
+man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my
+part, I go to the south.”</p>
+
+<p>Thirteen of all his people crossed the line with
+Pizarro, the rest deserting him, and he was seven
+months marooned on his desert isle in the Pacific.
+When the explorer’s partners at last were able to send
+a ship from Panama, it brought him orders to return, a
+failure. He did not return but took the ship to the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">45</span>
+southward, his guide the great white Andes, along a
+coast no longer of horrible swamps but now more
+populous, more civilized than Spain, by hundreds of
+miles on end of well-tilled farms, fair villages and
+rich cities where the temples were sheathed with plates
+of pure red gold. As in the Mexico of eight years
+ago, the Spaniards were welcomed as superhuman,
+their ship, their battered armor and their muskets
+accounted as possessions of strayed gods. They dined
+in the palaces of courtly nobles, rested in gardens
+curiously enriched with foliage and flowers of beaten
+gold and silver, and found native gentlemen eager to
+join them in their ship as guests. So with a shipload
+of wonders to illustrate this discovery they went back
+to Panama, and Pizarro returned home to seek in
+Spain the help of Charles V. There, at the emperor’s
+court, he met Cortes, who came to lay the wealth
+of conquered Mexico at his sovereign’s feet, and
+Charles, with a lively sense of more to come,
+despatched Pizarro to overthrow Peru.</p>
+
+<p>Between the Eastern and the Western Andes lies a
+series of lofty plains and valleys, in those days irrigated
+and farmed by an immense civilized population.
+A highway, in length 1,100 miles, threaded the settlements
+together. The whole empire was ruled by a
+foreign dynasty, called the Incas, a race of fighting
+despots by whom the people had been more or less
+enslaved. The last Inca had left the northern kingdom
+of Quito to his younger son, the ferocious Atahuallpa,
+and the southern realm of Cuzco to his heir,
+the gentle Huascar.</p>
+
+<p>These brothers fought until Atahuallpa subdued the
+southern kingdom, imprisoned Huascar, and reigned<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">46</span>
+so far as he knew over the whole world. It was then
+that from outside the world came one hundred sixty-eight
+men of an unknown race possessed of ships,
+horses, armor and muskets—things very marvelous,
+and useful to have. The emperor invited these
+strangers to cross the Andes, intending, when they
+came, to take such blessings as the Sun might send
+him. The city of Caxamalca was cleared of its
+people, and the buildings enclosing the market place
+were furnished for the reception of the Spaniards.</p>
+
+<p>The emperor’s main army was seven hundred miles
+to the southward, but the white men were appalled by
+the enormous host attending him in his camp, where
+he had halted to bathe at the hot springs, three miles
+from their new quarters. The Peruvian watch fires
+on the mountain sides were as thick as the stars of
+heaven.</p>
+
+<p>The sun was setting next day when a procession
+entered the Plaza of Caxamalca, a retinue of six thousand
+guards, nobles, courtiers, dignitaries, surrounding
+the litter on which was placed the gently swaying
+golden throne of the young emperor.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the Spaniards, only one came forward, a
+priest who, through an interpreter, preached, explaining
+from the commencement of the world the story of
+his faith, Saint Peter’s sovereignty, the papal office,
+and Pizarro’s mission to receive the homage of this
+barbarian. The emperor listened, amused at first, then
+bored, at last affronted, throwing down the book he
+was asked to kiss. On that a scarf waved and the
+Spaniards swept from their ambush, blocking the exits,
+charging as a wolf-pack on a sheepfold, riding the
+people down while they slaughtered. So great was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">47</span>
+the pressure that a wall of the courtyard fell, releasing
+thousands whose panic flight stampeded the Incas’
+army. But the nobles had rallied about their sovereign,
+unarmed but with desperate valor clinging
+to the legs of the horses and breaking the charge of
+cavalry. They threw themselves in the way of the
+fusillades, their bodies piled in mounds, their blood
+flooding the pavement. Then, as the bearers fell, the
+golden throne was overturned, and the emperor hurried
+away a prisoner. Two thousand people had
+perished in the attempt to save him.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the Mexican conquest was repeated
+here, and once more a captive emperor reigned under
+Spanish dictation.</p>
+
+<p>This Atahuallpa was made of sterner stuff than
+Montezuma, and had his defeated brother Huascar
+drowned, lest the Spaniards should make use of his
+rival claim to the throne. The Peruvian prince had no
+illusions as to the divinity of the white men, saw
+clearly that their real religion was the adoration of
+gold, and in contempt offered a bribe for his freedom.
+Reaching the full extent of his arm to a height of
+nine feet, he boasted that to that level he would fill
+the throne room with gold as the price of his liberty,
+and twice he would fill the anteroom with silver. So
+he sent orders to every city of his empire commanding
+that the shrines, the temples, palaces and gardens be
+stripped of their gold and silver ornaments, save only
+the bodies of the dead kings, his fathers. Of course,
+the priests made haste to bury their treasures, but the
+Spaniards went to see the plunder collected and when
+they had finished no treasures were left in sight save
+a course of solid golden ingots in the walls of the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">48</span>
+Temple of the Sun at Cuzco, and certain massive
+beams of silver too heavy for shipment. Still the
+plunder of an empire failed to reach the nine-foot line
+on the walls of the throne room at Caxamalca, but the
+soldiers were tired of waiting, especially when the
+goldsmiths took a month to melt the gold into ingots.
+So the royal fifth was shipped to the king of Spain,
+Pizarro’s share was set apart, a tithe was dedicated to
+the Church, and the remainder divided among the
+soldiers according to their rank, in all three and a half
+millions sterling by modern measurement, the greatest
+king’s ransom known to history. Then the emperor
+was tried by a mock court-martial, sentenced to death
+and murdered. It is comforting to note that of all
+who took part in that infamy not one escaped an early
+and a violent death.</p>
+
+<p>Pizarro had been in a business partnership with the
+schoolmaster Luque of Panama cathedral, and with
+Almagro, a little fat, one-eyed adventurer, who now
+arrived on the scene with reinforcements. Pizarro’s
+brothers also came from Spain. So when the emperor’s
+death lashed the Peruvians to desperation,
+there were Spaniards enough to face odds of a hundred
+to one in a long series of battles, ending with the siege
+of the adventurers who held Cuzco against the Inca
+Manco for five months. The city, vast in extent, was
+thatched, and burned for seven days with the Spaniards
+in the midst. They fought in sheer despair, and
+the Indians with heroism, their best weapon the lasso,
+their main hope that of starving the garrison to death.
+No valor could possibly save these heroic robbers,
+shut off from escape or from rescue by the impenetrable
+rampart of the Andes. They owed their salvation<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">49</span>
+to the fact that the Indians must disperse to
+reap their crops lest the entire nation perish of hunger,
+and the last of the Incas ended his life a fugitive lost
+in the recesses of the mountains.</p>
+
+<p>Then came a civil war between the Pizarros, and
+Almagro, whose share of the plunder turned out to be
+a snowy desolation to the southward. It was not until
+after this squalid feud had been ended by Almagro’s
+execution and Pizarro’s murder, that the desolate
+snows were uncovered, revealing the incomparable
+treasures of silver Potosi, Spain’s share of the plunder.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">50</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII">VIII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1534
+
+<span class="subhead">THE CORSAIRS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">In</span> 1453 Constantinople was besieged and stormed
+by the Turks, the Christian emperor fell with sixty
+thousand of his men in battle, and the Caliph Mahomet
+II raised the standard of Islam over the last ruins of
+the Roman empire.</p>
+
+<p>Four years later a sailorman, a Christian from the
+Balkan States, turned Moslem and was banished from
+the city. He married a Christian widow in Mitylene
+and raised two sons to his trade. At a very tender
+age, Uruj, the elder son, went into business as a
+pirate, and on his maiden cruise was chased and
+captured by a galley of the Knights of Saint
+John who threw him into the hold to be a slave at
+the oars. That night a slave upon the nearest oar-bench
+disturbed the crew by groaning, and to
+keep him quiet was thrown overboard. Not liking
+his situation or prospects, Uruj slipped his shackles,
+crept out and swam ashore. On his next voyage, being
+still extremely young, he was captured and swam
+ashore again. Then the sultan’s brother fitted him
+out as a corsair at the cost of five thousand ducats,
+to be paid by the basha of Egypt, and so, thanks to
+this act of princely generosity, Uruj was able to open<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">51</span>
+a general practise. His young brother Khizr, also
+a pirate, joined him; the firm was protected by the
+sultan of Tunis who got a commission of twenty
+per cent. on the loot; and being steady, industrious
+and thrifty, by strict application to business,
+they made a reputation throughout the Middle Sea.
+Indeed the Grand Turk bestowed upon Khizr the title
+“Protector of Religion,” a distinction never granted
+before or since to any professional robber. Once after
+a bitter hard fight the brothers captured a first-rate
+ship of war, <i>The Galley of Naples</i>, and six lady passengers
+besides three hundred men were marched
+ashore into slavery. “See,” said the sultan of Tunis,
+“how Heaven recompenses the brave!” Uruj, by the
+way, was laid up some months for repairs, and in his
+next engagement, a silly attack on a fortress, happened
+to lose an arm as part of his recompense.</p>
+
+<p>By this time the brothers were weary of that twenty
+per cent. commission to the unctuous sultan of Tunis,
+and by way of cheating him, took to besieging
+fortresses, or sacking towns, Christian or Moslem as
+the case might be, until they had base camps of their
+own, Uruj as king of Tlemcen, and Khizr as king of
+Algiers. Then Uruj fell in battle, and Khizr Barbarossa
+began to do business as a wholesale pirate
+with a branch kingdom of Tunis, and fleets to destroy
+all commerce, to wreck and burn settlements of the
+Christian powers until he had command of the sea as
+a first-class nuisance. The gentle Moors, most
+civilized of peoples, expelled from Spain (1493) by
+the callous ill-faith of Ferdinand and Isabella, and
+stranded upon North Africa to starve, manned Barbarossa’s
+fleets for a bloody vengeance upon Christian<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">52</span>
+Europe. Then Charles V brought the strength of
+Spain, Germany and Italy to bear in an expedition
+against Barbarossa, but his fleet was wrecked by a
+storm, clear proof that Allah had taken sides with the
+strong pirate king. Barbarossa then despatched his
+lieutenant Hassan to ravage the coast of Valencia.</p>
+
+<p>It was upon this venture that Hassan met a transport
+merchantman with a hundred veteran Spanish
+infantry, too strong to attack; so when this lieutenant
+returned to Algiers deep-laden with spoil and captives
+from his raid, he found King Barbarossa far from
+pleased. The prisoners were butchered, and Hassan
+was flogged in public for having shirked an engagement.
+That is why Hassan joined with Venalcadi, a
+brother officer who was also in disgrace, and together
+they drove Barbarossa out of Algeria. Presently the
+king came back with a whole fleet of his fellow corsairs,
+brother craftsmen, the Jew, and Hunt-the-Devil,
+Salærrez and Tabas, all moved to grief and rage by
+the tears of a sorely ill-treated hero. With the aid of
+sixty captive Spanish soldiers, who won their freedom,
+they captured Algiers, wiped out the mutineers,
+and restored the most perfect harmony. Indeed, by
+way of proof that there really was no trouble among
+the corsairs, King Barbarossa sent off Hunt-the-Devil
+with seventeen ships to burn Spain. Ever in blood
+and tears, their homes in flames, their women ravished,
+their very children enslaved, the Spaniards had to pay
+for breaking faith with the Moors of Granada.</p>
+
+<p>Barbarossa was not yet altogether king of Algiers.
+For twenty years the Peñon, a fortress fronting that
+city, had been held by Martin de Vargas and his garrison.
+Worn out with disease and famine these Spaniards<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">53</span>
+now fought Barbarossa to the last breath, but
+their walls went down in ruin, the breach was stormed,
+and all were put to the sword. De Vargas, taken
+prisoner, demanded the death of a Spaniard who had
+betrayed him. The traitor was promptly beheaded,
+but Barbarossa turned upon De Vargas. “You and
+yours,” he said, “have caused me too much trouble,”
+and he again signed to the headsman. So De Vargas
+fell.</p>
+
+<p>Terrible was the rage of Charles V, emperor of half
+Europe, thus defied and insulted by the atrocious corsair.
+It was then that he engaged the services of
+Andrea Doria, the greatest Christian admiral of that
+age, for war against Barbarossa. And at the same
+time the commander of the faithful, Suleiman the
+Magnificent, sent for King Barbarossa to command
+the Turkish fleet.</p>
+
+<p>He came, with gifts for the calif: two hundred
+women bearing presents of gold or silver; one hundred
+camels laden with silks and gold; then lions and other
+strange beasts; and more loads of brocades, or rich
+garments, all in procession through Constantinople,
+preceding the pirate king on his road to the palace.
+The sultan gave him not only a big fleet, but also vice-regal
+powers to make war or peace. Next summer
+(1534) eleven thousand Christian slaves, and a long
+procession of ships loaded with the plunder of smoking
+Italy were sent to the Golden Horn. Incidentally,
+Barbarossa seized the kingdom of Tunis for himself,
+and slaughtered three thousand of the faithful, just
+to encourage the rest.</p>
+
+<p>It was to avenge the banished King Hassan, and
+these poor slaughtered citizens that the Emperor<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">54</span>
+Charles V, attended by his admiral, Andrea Doria,
+came with an army and a mighty fleet to Tunis.</p>
+
+<p>He drove out Barbarossa, a penniless, discredited
+fugitive; and his soldiers slaughtered thirty thousand
+citizens of Tunis to console them for the pirate’s late
+atrocities.</p>
+
+<p>Poor old Barbarossa, past seventy years of age, had
+lost a horde of fifty thousand men, his kingdom of
+Tunis, fleet and arsenal; but he still had fifteen galleys
+left at Bona, his kingdom of Algiers to fall back upon,
+and his Moorish seamen, who had no trade to win
+them honest bread except as pirates. “Cheer up,” said
+he, to these broken starving men, and after a little
+holiday they sacked the Balearic Isles taking five
+thousand, seven hundred slaves, and any amount of
+shipping. Then came the building of a Turkish fleet;
+and with one hundred twenty sail, Barbarossa went
+to his last culminating triumph, the defeat of Andrea
+Doria, who had at Prevesa one hundred ninety-five
+ships, sixty thousand men, and two thousand, five
+hundred ninety-four guns. With that victory he retired,
+and after eight years of peace, he died in his
+bed, full of years and honors. For centuries to come
+all Turkish ships saluted with their guns, and dipped
+their colors whenever they passed the grave of the
+King of the Sea.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot wide">
+
+<p><cite>Sea Wolves of the Mediterranean</cite>, Commander E.
+Hamilton Currey, R.N. John Murray.</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">55</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="IX">IX<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1542
+
+<span class="subhead">PORTUGAL IN THE INDIES</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> was Italian trade that bought and paid for the
+designs of Raphael, the temples of Michelangelo,
+the sculptures of Cellini, the inventions of Da Vinci,
+for all the wonders, the glories, the splendors of inspired
+Italy. And it was not good for the Italian
+trade that Barbarossa, and the corsairs of three centuries
+in his wake, beggared the merchants and enslaved
+their seamen. But Italian commerce had its
+source in the Indian Seas, and the ruin of Italy began
+when the sea adventures of Portugal rounded the Cape
+of Good Hope to rob, to trade, to govern and convert
+at the old centers of Arabian business.</p>
+
+<p>Poverty is the mother of labor, labor the parent
+of wealth and genius. It is the poverty of Attica,
+and the Roman swamps, of sterile Scotland, boggy
+Ireland, swampy Holland, stony New England, which
+drove them to high endeavor and great reward.
+Portugal, too, had that advantage of being small and
+poor, without resources, or any motive to keep the
+folk at home. So the fishermen took to trading and
+exploration led by Cao who found the Cape of Good
+Hope, Vasco da Gama who smelt out the way to India,
+Almeida who gained command of the Indian Seas,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">56</span>
+Cabral who discovered Brazil, Albuquerque who, seizing
+Goa and Malacca, established a Christian empire
+in the Indies, and Magellan, who showed Spain the
+way to the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>Of these the typical man was Da Gama, a noble with
+the motives of a crusader and the habits of a pirate,
+who once set fire to a shipload of Arab pilgrims, and
+watched unmoved while the women on her blazing
+deck held out little babies in the vain hope of mercy.
+On his first voyage he came to Calicut, a center of
+Hindu civilization, a seat of Arab commerce, and to
+the rajah sent a present of washing basins, casks of
+oil, a few strings of coral, fit illustration of the poverty
+of his brave country, accepted as a joke in polished,
+wealthy, weary India. The king gave him leave to
+trade, but seized the poor trade goods until the Portuguese
+ships had been ransacked for two hundred
+twenty-three pounds in gold to pay the customs duties.
+The point of the joke was only realized when on his
+second voyage Da Gama came with a fleet, bombarded
+Calicut, and loaded his ships with spices, leaving a
+trail of blood and ashes along the Indian coast.
+Twenty years later he came a third time, but now as
+viceroy to the Portuguese Indies. Portugal was no
+longer poor, but the richest state in Europe, bleeding
+herself to death to find the men for her ventures.</p>
+
+<p>Now these arrogant and ferocious officials, military
+robbers, fishermen turned corsairs, and ravenous traders
+taught the whole East to hate and fear the Christ.
+And then came a tiny little monk no more than five
+feet high, a white-haired, blue-eyed mendicant, who
+begged the rice he lived on. Yet so sweet was his
+temper, so magical the charm, so supernatural the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">57</span>
+valor of this barefoot monk that the children worshiped
+him, the lepers came to him to be healed, and
+the pirates were proud to have him as their guest. He
+was a gentleman, a Spanish Basque, by name Francis
+de Xavier, and in the University of Paris had been a
+fellow student with the reformer Calvin, then a friend
+and follower of Ignatius de Loyola, helping him to
+found the Society of Jesus. Xavier came to the Indies
+in 1542 as a Jesuit priest.</p>
+
+<p>Once on a sea voyage Xavier stood for some time
+watching a soldier at cards, who gambled away all his
+money and then a large sum which had been entrusted
+to his care. When the soldier was in tears and threatening
+suicide, Xavier borrowed for him the sum of
+one shilling twopence, shuffled and dealt for him, and
+watched him win back all that he had lost. At that
+point Saint Francis set to work to save the
+soldier’s soul, but this disreputable story is not shown
+in the official record of his miracles.</p>
+
+<p>From his own letters one sees how the heathen
+puzzled this little saint, “‘Was God black or white?’
+For as there is so great variety of color among man,
+and the Indians are themselves black, they esteem their
+own color most highly, and hold that their gods are
+also black.”</p>
+
+<p>He does not say how he answered, indeed it was
+hardly by words that this hidalgo of Spain preached
+in the many languages he could never learn. Once
+when his converts were threatened by a hostile army
+he went alone to challenge the invaders, and with uplifted
+crucifix rebuked them in the name of God. The
+front ranks wavered and halted. Their comrades and
+leaders vainly pressed them to advance, but no man<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">58</span>
+dared pass the black-robed figure which barred the
+way, and presently the whole force retreated.</p>
+
+<p>Once in the Spice Islands while he was saying mass
+on the feast of the Archangel Saint Michael a tremendous
+earthquake scattered the congregation. The
+priest held up the shaking altar and went on with mass,
+while, as he says, “Perhaps Saint Michael, by his
+heavenly power, was driving into the depths of hell all
+the wicked spirits of the country who were opposing
+the worship of the true God.”</p>
+
+<p>Such was the apostle of the Indies, and it is a pleasant
+thing to trace the story of his mission in Japan in
+the <i>Peregrination</i>, a book by a thorough rogue.</p>
+
+<p>Fernão Mendes Pinto was a distant relative of Ananias.
+He sailed for India in 1537 “meanly accommodated.”
+At Diu he joined an expedition to watch the
+Turkish fleet in the Red Sea, and from Massawa was
+sent with letters to the king of Abyssinia. That was
+great luck, because the very black and more or less
+Christian kingdom was supposed to be the seat of the
+legendary, immortal, shadowy, Prester John. On his
+way back to Massawa the adventurer was wrecked,
+captured by Arabs, sold into slavery, bought by a Jew,
+and resold in the commercial city of Ormus where
+there were Christian buyers. He found his way to
+Goa, the capital of the Portuguese Indies, thence to
+Malacca, where he got a job as political agent in Sumatra.
+With this ended the dull period of his travels.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_58" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_058.jpg" width="1457" height="2193" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Francis Xavier</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>In those days there were ships manned by Portuguese
+rogues very good in port, but unpleasant to meet
+with at sea. They were armed with cannon, pots of
+wild fire, unslaked lime to be flung in the Chinese
+manner, stones, javelins, arrows, half-pikes, axes and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">59</span>
+grappling irons, all used to collect toll from Chinese,
+Malay, or even Arab merchants. Pinto found that
+this life suited him, and long afterward, writing as a
+penitent sinner, described the fun of torturing old men
+and children: “Made their brains fly out of their
+heads with a cord” or looked on while the victims died
+raving “like mad dogs.” It was great sport to surprise
+some junk at anchor, and fling pots of gunpowder
+among the sleeping crew, then watch them dive and
+drown. “The captain of one such junk was ‘a notorious
+Pyrat,’ and Pinto complacently draws the
+moral ‘Thus you see how it pleased God, out of His
+Divine justice to make the arrogant confidence of this
+cursed dog a means to chastise him for his cruelties.’”</p>
+
+<p>So Christians set an example to the heathen.</p>
+
+<p>Antonio de Faria, Pinto’s captain, had vowed to wipe
+out Kwaja Hussain, a Moslem corsair from Gujerat
+in Western India. In search of Hussain he had many
+adventures in the China seas, capturing pirate crews,
+dashing out their brains, and collecting amber, gold
+and pearls. Off Hainan he so frightened the local
+buccaneers that they proclaimed him their king and
+arranged to pay him tribute.</p>
+
+<p>Luckily for them Faria’s ship was cast away upon a
+desert island. The crew found a deer which had been
+left by a tiger, half eaten; their shouts would scare
+the gulls as they flew overhead, so that the birds
+dropped such fish as they had captured; and then by
+good luck they discovered a Chinese junk whose people,
+going ashore, had left her in charge of an old man
+and a child. Amid the clamors of the Chinese owners
+Faria made off with this junk. He was soon at
+the head of a new expedition in quest of that wicked<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">60</span>
+pirate, Kwaja Hussain. This ambition was fulfilled,
+and with holds full of plunder the virtuous Faria put
+into Liampo. Back among the Christians he had a
+royal welcome, but actually blushed when a sermon
+was preached in his honor. The preacher waxed too
+eloquent, “whereupon some of his friends plucked
+him three or four times by the surplice, for to make
+him give over.” It seems that even godly Christian
+pirates have some sense of humor.</p>
+
+<p>Once in the Malay states, Pinto and a friend of his,
+a Moslem, were asked to dine with a bigwig, also a
+True Believer. At dinner they spoke evil about the
+local rajah, who got wind of the slander. Pinto
+watched both of these Moslem gentlemen having their
+feet sawn off, then their hands, and finally their heads.
+As for himself, he talked about his rich relations,
+claiming Dom Pedro de Faria, a very powerful noble,
+as his uncle. He said the factor had embezzled his
+uncle’s money and fully deserved his fate. “All this,”
+says Pinto, “was extemporized on the spur of the
+moment, not knowing well what I said.” The liar
+got off.</p>
+
+<p>Pinto’s career as a pirate ended in shipwreck, capture,
+slavery and a journey in China where he was put
+to work on the repairing of the Great Wall. He was
+at a city called Quinsay in 1544 when Altan Khan,
+king of the Tumeds—a Mongolian horde—swept
+down out of the deserts.</p>
+
+<p>The Mongols sacked Quinsay, and Pinto as a prisoner
+was brought before Altan Khan who was besieging
+Pekin. When the siege was raised he accompanied
+the Mongol army on its retreat into the heart
+of Asia. In time he found favor with his masters<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">61</span>
+and was allowed to accompany an embassy to Cochin
+China. On this journey he saw some cannon with
+iron breeches and wooden muzzles made, he was told,
+by certain Almains (Germans) who came out of Muscovy
+(Russia), and had been banished by the king
+of Denmark. Then comes Pinto’s account of Tibet,
+of Lhasa, and the Grand Lama, and so to Cochin
+China, and the sea. If it is true, Pinto made a very
+great journey, and he claims to have been afterward
+with Xavier in Japan. In the end he returned to
+Lisbon after twenty-one years of adventure in which
+he was five times shipwrecked, and seventeen times
+sold as a slave.</p>
+
+<p>It is disheartening to have so little space for the
+great world of Portuguese adventure in the Indies,
+where Camoens, one of the world’s great poets, wrote
+the immortal <i>Lusiads</i>.</p>
+
+<p>However ferocious, these Portuguese adventurers
+were loyal, brave and strong. They opened the way
+of Europe to the East Indies, they Christianized and
+civilized Brazil. Once, at sea, a Portuguese lady
+spoke to me of England’s good-humored galling disdain
+toward her people. “Ah, you English!” she
+cried. “What you are, we were once! what we are,
+you will be!”</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot wide">
+
+<p><cite>Vasco da Gama and his Successors</cite>, by K.&nbsp;G. Jayne.
+Methuen.</p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">62</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="X">X<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1841
+
+<span class="subhead">RAJAH BROOKE</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Borneo</span> is a hot forest about five hundred miles
+long, and as wide, inhabited by connoisseurs
+called Dyaks, keen collectors. They collect human
+heads and some of their pieces are said to be very
+valuable. They are a happy little folk with most
+amusing manners and customs. Here is their ritual
+for burial of the dead:</p>
+
+<p>“When a man dies his friends and relations meet
+in the house and take their usual seats around the
+room. The deceased is then brought in attired in his
+best clothes, with a cigar fixed in his mouth; and, being
+placed on the mat in the same manner as when alive,
+his betel box is set by his side. The friends go
+through the form of conversing with him, and offer
+him the best advice concerning his future proceedings,
+and then, having feasted, the body is deposited in a
+large coffin and kept in the house for several months.”</p>
+
+<p>The habits of the natives have been interfered with
+by the Malays, who conquered most of them and
+carved their island up into kingdoms more or less
+civilized, but not managed at all in the interests of
+the Dyaks. These kingdoms were decayed and
+tumbling to pieces when the Dutch came in to help,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">63</span>
+and helped themselves to the whole of Borneo except
+the northwestern part. They pressingly invited themselves
+there also, but the Malay rajah kept putting
+them off with all sorts of polite excuses.</p>
+
+<p>While the rajah’s minister was running short of
+excuses to delay the Dutch an English yacht arrived
+in Sarawak. The owner was Mr. James Brooke, who
+had been an officer in the East India Company, but
+being hit with a slug in the lungs during the first
+Burma war, was retired with a pension of seventy
+pounds for wounds. Afterward he came into a
+fortune of thirty thousand pounds, took to yachting,
+traveled a great deal in search of adventure, and so in
+1839 arrived in Sarawak on the lookout for trouble.</p>
+
+<p>An Englishman of gentle birth is naturally expected
+to tell the truth, to be clean in all his dealings, to keep
+his temper, and not to show his fears. Not being a
+beastly cad, Brooke as a matter of course conformed
+to the ordinary standards and, having no worries, was
+able to do so cheerfully. One may meet men of this
+stock, size and pattern by thousands the world over,
+but in a decayed Malay state, at war with the Dyaks
+ashore and the pirates afloat, Brooke was a phenomenon
+just as astonishing as a first-class comet, an earthquake
+eruption, or a cyclone. His arrival was the
+only important event in the whole history of North
+Borneo. The rajah sought his advice in dealing with
+the Dutch, the Dyaks and the pirates. The Malays,
+Dyaks, pirates and everybody else consulted him as to
+their dealings with the rajah. On his second visit he
+took a boat’s crew from his yacht and went to the seat
+of war. There he tried to the verge of tears to persuade
+the hostile forces either to fight or make friends,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">64</span>
+and when nobody could be induced to do anything at
+all, he, with his boat’s crew and one native warrior,
+stormed the Dyak position, putting the enemy to total
+rout and flight. Luckily, nobody was hurt, for even
+a cut finger would have spoiled the perfect bloodlessness
+of Brooke’s victory. Then the Dyaks surrendered
+to Brooke. Afterward the pirate fleet appeared
+at the capital, not to attack the rajah, but to
+be inspected by Brooke, and when he had patted the
+pirates they went away to purr. Moreover the rajah
+offered to hand over his kingdom to Brooke as manager,
+and the Englishman expected him to keep his
+word. Brooke brought a shipload of stores in payment
+for a cargo of manganese, but the rajah was so
+contented with that windfall that he forgot to send
+to his mines for the ore.</p>
+
+<p>Further up the coast a British ship was destroyed
+by lightning, and her crew got ashore where they
+were held as captives pending a large ransom. Even
+when the captain’s wife had a baby the local bigwig
+thereabouts saw a new chance of plunder, and stole
+the baby-clothes. Then the shipwrecked mariners
+sent a letter to Brooke appealing for his help; but
+nothing on earth could induce the spineless boneless
+rajah to send the relief he had promised. Then
+Brooke wrote to Singapore whence the East India
+Company despatched a war-ship which rescued the
+forty castaways.</p>
+
+<p>The rajah’s next performance was to arrange for a
+percentage with two thousand, five hundred robbers
+who proposed to plunder and massacre his own subjects.
+Brooke from his yacht stampeded the raiders
+with a few rounds from the big guns—blank of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">65</span>
+course. Brooke was getting rather hard up, and
+could not spare ball ammunition on weekdays.</p>
+
+<p>So King Muda Hassim lied, cheated, stole, betrayed,
+and occasionally murdered—a mean rogue,
+abject, cringing to Brooke, weeping at the Englishman’s
+threats to depart, holding his throne so long as
+the white yacht gave him prestige; but all this with
+pomp and circumstance, display of gems and gold,
+a gorgeous retinue, plenty of music, and royal salutes
+on the very slightest pretext. But all the population
+was given over to rapine and slaughter, and the forest
+was closing in on ruined farms. The last and only
+hope of the nation was in Brooke.</p>
+
+<p>Behind every evil in the state was Makota, the
+prime minister, a polite and gentlemanly rascal, and
+at the end of two years he annoyed Brooke quite seriously
+by putting arsenic in the interpreter’s rice.
+Brooke cleared his ship for action, and with a landing
+party under arms marched to the palace gates. In
+a few well-chosen words he explained Makota’s villainy,
+showed that neither the rajah’s life nor his own
+was safe, and that the only course was to proclaim
+Brooke as governor.</p>
+
+<p>No shot was fired, no blow was struck, but Makota’s
+party vanished, the villain fled, the rajah began to behave,
+the government of the country was handed over
+to the Englishman amid great popular rejoicings.
+“My darling mother,” he wrote, “I am very poor, but
+I want some things from home very much; so I must
+trust to your being rich enough to afford them to me.
+Imprimis, a circle for taking the latitude; secondly,
+an electrifying machine of good power; thirdly, a large
+magic lantern; fourthly, a rifle which carries fifty<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">66</span>
+balls; and last, a peep-show. The circle and rifle I
+want very much; and the others are all for political
+purposes.” Did ever king begin his reign with such
+an act as that letter?</p>
+
+<p>But then, look at the government he replaced:
+“The sultan and his chiefs rob all classes of Malays
+to the utmost of their power; the Malays rob the
+Dyaks, and the Dyaks hide their goods as much as
+they dare, consistent with the safety of their wives
+and children.” Brooke found his private income a
+very slender fund when he had to pay the whole expense
+of governing a kingdom until the people recovered
+from their ruin.</p>
+
+<p>February the first, 1842, a pirate chief called to
+make treaty with the new king. “He inquired, if a
+tribe pirated on my territory what I intended to do.
+My answer was ‘to enter their country and lay it
+waste.’ ‘But,’ he asked me again, ‘you will give me—your
+friend—leave to steal a few heads occasionally?’
+‘No,’ I replied, ‘I shall have a hundred
+Sakarran heads for every one you take here!’ He
+recurred to this request several times—‘just to steal
+one or two’-as a schoolboy asks for apples.”</p>
+
+<p>Brooke used to give the pirates his laughing permission
+to go to Singapore and attack the English.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_66" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 26em;">
+  <img src="images/i_066.jpg" width="2010" height="3000" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir James Brooke</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>“The Santah River,” he wrote, “is famous for its
+diamonds. The workers seem jealous and superstitious,
+disliking noise, particularly laughter, as it is
+highly offensive to the spirit who presides over the
+diamonds.... A Chinese Mohammedan with the
+most solemn face requested me to give him an old
+letter; and he engraved some Chinese characters,
+which, being translated signify ‘Rajah Muda Hassim,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">67</span>
+James Brooke, and Hadju Ibrahim present their compliments
+to the spirit and request his permission to
+work at the mine.’”</p>
+
+<p>There were great doings when the sultan of Borneo
+had Mr. Brooke proclaimed king in Sarawak.
+Then he went off to the Straits Settlements, where
+he made friends with Henry Keppel, captain of
+H.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Dido</i>, a sportsman who delighted in hunting
+pirates, and accepted Brooke’s invitation to a few
+days’ shooting. Keppel describes the scene of
+Brooke’s return to his kingdom, received by all the
+chiefs with undisguised delight, mingled with gratitude
+and respect for their newly-elected ruler. “The
+scene was both novel and exciting, presenting to us—just
+anchored in a large fresh water river, and surrounded
+by a densely wooded jungle—the whole surface
+of the water covered with canoes and boats
+dressed with colored silken flags, filled with natives
+beating their tom-toms, and playing on wind instruments,
+with the occasional discharge of firearms. To
+them it must have been equally striking to witness the
+<i>Dido</i> anchored almost in the center of their town, her
+mastheads towering above the highest trees of that
+jungle, the loud report of her heavy thirty-two-pounder
+guns, the manning aloft to furl sails of one
+hundred fifty seamen in their clean white dresses, and
+with the band playing. I was anxious that Mr.
+Brooke should land with all the honors due to so important
+a personage, which he accordingly did, under
+a salute.”</p>
+
+<p>It was a little awkward that the <i>Dido</i> struck a rock
+and sank, but she chose a convenient spot just opposite
+Mr. Brooke’s house, so that Brooke’s officers<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">68</span>
+and those of the ship formed one mess there, a
+band of brothers, while the damage was being repaired.
+Then came the promised sport, a joint boat
+expedition up all sorts of queer back channels and
+rivers fouled by the pirates with stakes and booms
+under fire of the artillery in their hill fortresses. The
+sportsmen burst the booms, charged the hills, stormed
+the forts, burned out the pirates and obtained their
+complete submission. Brooke invited them all to a
+pirate conference at his house and, just as with the
+land rogues, charmed them out of their skins. He
+fought like a man, but his greatest victories were
+scored by perfect manners.</p>
+
+<p>The next adventure was a visit from the Arctic
+explorer, Sir Edward Belcher, sent by the British government
+to inspect Brooke’s kingdom, now a peaceful
+and happy country.</p>
+
+<p>Later came Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane with a
+squadron to smash up a few more pirates, and the
+smashing of pirates continued for many years a popular
+sport for the navy. The pirate states to the
+northward became in time the British colonies of
+Labuan, and North Borneo, but Sarawak is still a
+protected Malay state, the hereditary kingdom of
+Sir James Brooke and his descendants. May that
+dynasty reign so long as the sun shines.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">69</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XI">XI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1842
+
+<span class="subhead">THE SPIES</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">From</span> earliest childhood Eldred Pottinger was out
+of place in crowded England. Gunpowder is
+good exciting stuff to play with, and there could be
+no objection to his blowing up himself and his little
+brother, because that was all in the family; but when
+he mined the garden wall and it fell on a couple of
+neighbors, they highly took offense; and when his
+finely invented bomb went off at Addiscombe College
+he rose to the level of a public nuisance. On the whole
+it must have been a relief to his friends when he went
+to India. There he had an uncle, the president in
+Scinde, a shrewd man who shipped young Pottinger
+to the greatest possible distance in the hinder parts of
+Afghanistan.</p>
+
+<p>The political situation in Afghanistan was the usual
+howling chaos of oriental kingdoms, and the full
+particulars would bore the reader just as they bored
+me. It was Pottinger’s business to find out and report
+the exact state of affairs at a time when any
+white man visiting the country was guaranteed, if
+and when found, to have his throat cut. Being clever
+at native languages, with a very foxy shrewdness, the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">70</span>
+young spy set off, disguised as a native horse dealer,
+and reached Cabul, the Afghan capital.</p>
+
+<p>The reigning ameer was Dost Mahomet, who was
+not on speaking terms with Kamran, king of Herat,
+and Pottinger’s job was to get through to Herat without
+being caught by Dost. The horse-copper disguise
+was useless now, so Pottinger became a Mahomedan
+<em>syed</em>, or professional holy man. He sent his attendants
+and horses ahead, slipped out of the capital on
+foot by night and made his way to his camp. So he
+reached the country of the Hazareh tribes where his
+whole expedition was captured by the principal robber
+Jakoob Beg, who did a fairly good business in
+selling travelers, as slaves, except when they paid
+blackmail. “The chief,” says Pottinger, “was the
+finest Hazareh I had seen, and appeared a well-meaning,
+sensible person. He, however, was quite in the
+hands of his cousin—an ill-favored, sullen and
+treacherous-looking rascal. I, by way of covering
+my silence, and to avoid much questioning, took to
+my beads and kept telling them with great perseverance,
+much to the increase of my reputation as a holy
+personage.”</p>
+
+<p>The trouble was that Pottinger and his devout followers
+were of the Sounee faith, whereas the robber
+castle was of the Sheeah persuasion. The difference
+was something like that between our Catholics and
+Protestants, and Pottinger was like a Methodist minister
+trying to pass himself off for a cardinal without
+knowing the little points of etiquette. The prisoners
+prompted one another into all sorts of ridiculous
+blunders, so that the ill-favored cousin suspected<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">71</span>
+Pottinger of being a fraud. “Why he may be a
+Feringhee himself,” said the cousin. “I have always
+heard that the Hindustanees are black, and this man is
+fairer than we are.” But then the Feringhees—the
+British—were supposed to be monsters, and Pottinger
+was in no way monstrous to look at, so that he
+managed to talk round the corner, and at the end of
+a week ransomed his party with the gift of a fine gun
+to the chief. They set off very blithely into the
+mountains, but had not gone far when the chief’s
+riders came romping in pursuit, and herded them back,
+presumably to have their throats cut according to
+local manners and customs. The chief, it turned
+out, had been unable to make the gun go off, but finding
+it worked all right if handled properly dismissed
+the spy with his blessing. Eighteen days’ journey
+brought him to Herat, where he felt perfectly safe,
+strolling unarmed in the country outside the walls,
+until a gang of slave catchers made him an easy prey.
+His follower, Synd Ahmed, scared them off by shouting
+to an imaginary escort.</p>
+
+<p>Shah Kamran with his vizier Yar Mahomed had
+been out of town, but on their return to Herat, Pottinger
+introduced himself to the king as a British
+officer, and his gift of a brace of pistols was
+graciously accepted.</p>
+
+<p>Not long afterward a Persian army came up
+against Herat, and with that force there were Russian
+officers. For once the Heratis could look for
+no help from Afghanistan; and for once this mighty
+fortress, the key to the gates of India, was guarded
+by a cur. If Herat fell the way was open for Russia,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">72</span>
+the ancient road to India of all the conquerors.
+There is the reason why the British had sent a spy
+to Herat.</p>
+
+<p>The Heratis were quick to seek the advice of the
+British officer who organized the defense and in the
+end took charge, the one competent man in the garrison.
+Shah Kamran sent him with a flag of truce to
+the Persian army. The Persian soldiers hailed him
+with rapture, thinking they would soon get home to
+their wives and families; they patted his legs, they
+caressed his horse, they shouted “Bravo! Bravo!
+Welcome! The English were always friends of the
+king of kings!”</p>
+
+<p>So Pottinger was brought before the shah of
+Persia, who would accept no terms except surrender,
+which the Englishman ridiculed. He went back to
+the city, and the siege went on for months.</p>
+
+<p>A shell burst the house next door to his quarters,
+but he took no harm. One day he leaned against a
+loophole in the ramparts, watching a Persian attempt
+to spring a mine, and as he moved away his place was
+taken by a eunuch who at once got a ball in the
+lungs. He had narrow escapes without end.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of six months, June twenty-fourth, 1838,
+the Persians tried to carry the place by assault. “At
+four points the assault was repulsed, but at the fifth
+point the storming column threw itself into the trench
+of the lower fausse-braye. The struggle was brief but
+bloody. The defenders fell at their posts to a man,
+and the work was carried by the besiegers. Encouraged
+by this first success, the storming party
+pushed on up the slope, but a galling fire from the
+garrison met them as they advanced. The officers<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">73</span>
+and men of the column were mown down; there was
+a second brief and bloody struggle, and the upper
+fausse-braye was carried, while a few of the most
+daring of the assailants, pushing on in advance of
+their comrades, gained the head of the breach. But
+now Deen Mahomed came down with the Afghan
+reserve, and thus recruited the defenders gathered
+new heart, so that the Persians in the breach were
+driven back. Again and again with desperate courage
+they struggled to effect a lodgment, only to be repulsed
+and thrown back in confusion upon their comrades,
+who were pressing on behind. The conflict
+was fierce, the issue doubtful. Now the breach was
+well-nigh carried; and now the stormers, recoiling
+from the shock of the defense, fell back upon the exterior
+slope of the fausse-braye.</p>
+
+<p>“Startled by the noise of the assault Yar Mahomed
+(the vizier) had risen up, left his quarters, and ridden
+down to the works. Pottinger went forth at the same
+time and on the same errand. Giving instructions to
+his dependents to be carried out in the event of his
+falling in the defense, he hastened to join the vizier....
+As they neared the point of the attack the
+garrison were seen retreating by twos and threes;
+others were quitting the works on the pretext of
+carrying off the wounded.... Pottinger was eager
+to push on to the breach; Yar Mahomed sat himself
+down. The vizier had lost heart; his wonted high
+courage and collectedness had deserted him. Astonished
+and indignant ... the English officer called
+upon the vizier again and again to rouse himself.
+The Afghan chief rose up and advanced further
+into the works, and neared the breach where the conflict<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">74</span>
+was raging.... Yar Mahomed called upon his
+men in God’s name to fight; but they wavered and
+stood still. Then his heart failed him again. He
+turned back, said he would go for aid.... Alarmed
+by the backwardness of their chief the men were now
+retreating in every direction.” Pottinger swore.</p>
+
+<p>Yar roused himself, again advanced, but again
+wavered, and a third time Pottinger by word and deed
+put him to shame. “He reviled, he threatened, he
+seized him by the arm and dragged him forward to
+the breach.” Now comes the fun, and we can forsake
+the tedious language of the official version.
+Yar, hounded to desperation by Pottinger, seized a
+staff, rushed like a wildcat on the retreating soldiers,
+and so horrified them that they bolted back over the
+breach down the outside into the face of the Persians.
+And the Persians fled! Herat was saved.</p>
+
+<p>An envoy came from the Persian army to explain
+that it was infamous of the Shah Kamran to have an
+infidel in charge of the defense. “Give him up,”
+said the Persians, “and we’ll raise the siege.” But
+the shah was not in a position to surrender Pottinger.
+That gentleman might take it into his head to surrender
+the shah of Herat.</p>
+
+<p>Another six months of siege, with famine, mutiny
+and all the usual worries of beleaguered towns finished
+Pottinger’s work, the saving of Herat.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Now we take up the life of another spy, also an
+army officer, old Alexander Burnes. At eighteen
+he had been adjutant of his regiment and rose
+very steadily from rank to rank until he was sent as<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">75</span>
+an envoy to Runjeet Singh, the ruler of Punjab, and
+to the ameers of Scinde. In those days Northwestern
+India was an unknown region and Burnes was
+pioneer of the British power.</p>
+
+<p>In 1832 he set out on his second mission through
+Afghanistan, Bokhara and Persia. See how he
+wrote from Cabul: “I do not despair of reaching
+Istamboul (Constantinople) in safety. They may
+seize me and sell me for a slave, but no one will attack
+me for my riches.... I have no tent, no chair
+or table, no bed, and my clothes altogether amount to
+the value of one pound sterling. You would disown
+your son if you saw him. My dress is purely Asiatic,
+and since I came into Cabul has been changed to that
+of the lowest orders of the people. My head is
+shaved of its brown locks, and my beard dyed black
+grieves ... for the departed beauty of youth. I
+now eat my meals with my hands, and greasy digits
+they are, though I must say in justification, that I
+wash before and after meals.... I frequently sleep
+under a tree, but if a villager will take compassion on
+me I enter his house. I never conceal that I am a
+European, and I have as yet found the character advantageous
+to my comfort. The people know me by
+the name of Sekunder, which is the Persian for
+Alexander.... With all my assumed poverty I
+have a bag of ducats round my waist, and bills for as
+much money as I choose to draw.... When I go
+into company I put my hand on my heart, and say
+with all humility to the master of the house, ‘Peace
+be unto thee,’ according to custom, and then I squat
+myself down on the ground. This familiarity has
+given me an insight into the character of the people<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">76</span>
+... kind-hearted and hospitable, they have no prejudices
+against a Christian and none against our nation.
+When they ask me if I eat pork, I of course shudder,
+and say that it is only outcasts that commit such outrages.
+God forgive me! for I am very fond of bacon....
+I am well mounted on a good horse in case I
+should find it necessary to take to my heels. My
+whole baggage on earth goes on one mule, which my
+servant sits supercargo.... I never was in better
+spirits.”</p>
+
+<p>After his wonderful journey Burnes was sent to
+England to make his report to the government, and
+King William IV must needs hear the whole of the
+story at Brighton pavilion.</p>
+
+<p>The third journey of this great spy was called the
+commercial mission to Cabul. There he learned that
+the Persian siege of Herat was being more or less
+conducted by Russian officers. Russians swarmed
+at the court of Dost Mahomed, and an ambassador
+from the czar was there trying to make a treaty.</p>
+
+<p>Great was the indignation and alarm in British
+India, and for fear of a Russian invasion in panic
+haste the government made a big famous blunder,
+for without waiting to know how Dost was fooling
+the Russians, an army was sent through the terrible
+Bolan Pass. That sixty-mile abyss with hanging
+walls belongs to the Pathans, the fiercest and
+wildest of all the tribes of men. The army climbed
+through the death trap, marched, starving, on from
+Quetta to Candahar and then advanced on Cabul.
+But Dost’s son Akbar held the great fortress of
+Ghuznee, a quite impregnable place that had to be
+taken.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">77</span></p>
+
+<p>One night while a sham attack was made on the
+other side of the fortress, Captain Thomson placed
+nine hundred pounds of gunpowder at the foot of
+a walled-up gate, and then touched off the charge.
+The twenty-first light infantry climbed over the smoking
+ruins and at the head of his storming column
+Colonel Dennie, in three hours’ fighting, took the citadel.
+Dost Mahomed fled, and the British entered
+Cabul to put a puppet sovereign on the throne.</p>
+
+<p>Cabul was a live volcano where English women
+gave dances. There were cricket matches, theatricals,
+sports. The governor-general in camp gave a state
+dinner in honor of Major Pottinger, who had come
+in from the siege of Herat. During the reception
+of the guests a shabby Afghan watched, leaning
+against a door-post, and the court officials were about
+to remove this intruder when the governor-general
+approached leading his sister. “Let me present
+you,” said Lord Auckland, “to Eldred Pottinger, the
+hero of Herat.” This shabby Afghan was the guest
+of honor, but nobody would listen to his warnings,
+or to the warnings of Sir Alexander Burnes, assistant
+resident. Only the two spies knew what was to
+come. Then the volcano blew up.</p>
+
+<p>Burnes had a brother staying with him in Cabul,
+also his military secretary; and when the mob,
+savage, excited, bent on massacre, swarmed round
+his house he spoke to them from the balcony. While
+he talked Lieutenant Broadfoot fell at his side,
+struck by a ball in the chest. The stables were on
+fire, the mob filled his garden. He offered to pay
+then in cash for his brother’s life and his own, so a
+Cashmiri volunteered to save them in disguise. They<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">78</span>
+put on native clothes, they slipped into the garden,
+and then their guide shouted, “This is Sekunder
+Burnes!” The two brothers were cut to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>Pottinger was political agent at Kohistan to the
+northward, and when the whole Afghan nation rose
+in revolt his fort was so sorely beset that he and his
+retinue stole away in the dark, joining a Ghoorka
+regiment. But the regiment was also beset, and its
+water supply cut off. Pottinger fought the guns; the
+men repelled attacks by night and day until worn out;
+dying of thirst in an intolerable agony the regiment
+broke, scattering into the hills. Only a few men
+rallied round Pottinger to fight through to Cabul,
+and he was fearfully wounded, unable to command.
+Of his staff and the Ghoorka regiment only five men
+were alive when they entered Cabul.</p>
+
+<p>Our officer commanding at Cabul was not in good
+health, but his death was unfortunately delayed while
+the Afghans murdered men, women and children, and
+the British troops, for lack of a leader, funked. Envoys
+waited on Akbar Khan, and were murdered.
+The few officers who kept their heads were without
+authority, blocked at every turn by cowards, by incompetents.
+Then the council of war made treaty
+with Akbar, giving him all the guns except six, all the
+treasure, three officers as hostages, bills drawn on
+India for forty thousand rupees, the honor of their
+country, everything for safe conduct in their disgrace.
+Dying of cold and hunger, the force marched into the
+Khoord-Cabul Pass, and at the end of three days the
+married officers were surrendered with their wives
+and children. Of the sixteen thousand men three-fourths
+were dead when the officer commanding and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">79</span>
+the gallant Brigadier Skelton were given up as hostages
+to Akbar. The survivors pushed on through
+the Jugduluk Pass, which the Afghans had barricaded,
+and there was the final massacre. Of the
+whole army, one man, Doctor Brydon, on a starved
+pony, sinking with exhaustion, rode in through the
+gates of Fort Jellalabad.</p>
+
+<p>The captured general had sent orders for the retreat
+of the Jellalabad garrison through the awful
+defiles of the Khyber Pass in face of a hostile army,
+and in the dead of winter; but General Sale, commanding,
+was not such a fool. For three months he
+had worked his men to desperation rebuilding the
+fortress, and now when he saw the white tents of
+Akbar’s camp he was prepared for a siege. That day
+an earthquake razed the whole fortress into a heap
+of ruins, but the garrison rebuilt the walls. Then
+they sallied and, led by Henry Havelock, assaulted
+Akbar’s camp, smashed his army to flying fragments,
+captured his guns, baggage, standards, ammunition
+and food. Nine days later the bands of the garrison
+marched out to meet a relieving army from India.
+They were playing an old tune, <em>Oh, but ye’ve been
+lang o’ comin’</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the British prisoners, well treated, were
+hurried from fort to fort, with some idea of holding
+them for sale at so much a slave, until they managed
+to bribe an Afghan chief. The bribed man led a
+revolt against Akbar, and one chief after another
+joined him, swearing on the Koran allegiance to
+Eldred Pottinger. When Akbar fell, Pottinger
+marched as leader of the revolted chiefs on the way
+to Cabul. One day, as the ladies and children were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">80</span>
+resting in an old fort for shelter during the great heat
+of the afternoon, they heard the tramp of horsemen,
+and in the dead silence of a joy and gratitude too
+great for utterance, received the relieving force.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">81</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XII">XII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1842
+
+<span class="subhead">A YEAR’S ADVENTURES</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap a"><span class="smcap1">A thousand</span> adventures are taking place every
+day, all at once in the several continents and the
+many seas. A few are reported, many are noted in
+the private journals of adventurers, most of them are
+just taken as a matter of course in the day’s work,
+but nobody has ever attempted to make a picture of
+all the world’s adventures for a day or a year.</p>
+
+<p>Let us make magic. Any date will do, or any year.
+Here for instance is a date—the twelfth of September,
+1842—that will serve our purpose as well as any
+other.</p>
+
+<p>In Afghanistan a British force of twenty-six
+thousand people had perished, an army of vengeance
+had marched to the rescue of Major Pottinger, Lady
+Sale, Lady McNaughton and other captives held by
+the Afghan chiefs. On September twelfth they were
+rescued.</p>
+
+<p>In China the people had refused to buy our Indian
+opium, so we carefully and methodically bombarded
+all Chinese seaports until she consented to open them
+to foreign trade. Then Major Pottinger’s uncle, Sir
+Henry, made a treaty which the Chinese emperor
+signed on September eighth.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">82</span></p>
+
+<p>In the Malacca Straits Captain Henry Keppel of
+H.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Dido</i> was busy smashing up pirates.</p>
+
+<p>In Tahiti poor little Queen Pomaré, being in childbed,
+was so bullied by the French admiral that she
+surrendered her kingdom to France on September
+ninth. Next morning her child was born, but her
+kingdom was gone forever.</p>
+
+<p>In South Africa Captain Smith made a disgraceful
+attack upon the Boers at Port Natal, and on June
+twenty-sixth they got a tremendous thrashing which
+put an end to the republic of Natalia. In September
+they began to settle down as British subjects, not at all
+content.</p>
+
+<p>Norfolk Island is a scrap of paradise, about six
+miles by four, lying nine hundred miles from Sydney,
+in Australia. In 1842 it was a convict settlement,
+and on June twenty-first the brig <i>Governor Philip</i>
+was to sail for Sydney, having landed her stores at
+the island. During the night she stood off and on,
+and two prisoners coming on deck at dawn for a
+breath of air noticed that discipline seemed slack,
+although a couple of drowsy sentries guarded their
+hatchway. Within a few minutes the prisoners were
+all on deck. One sentry was disarmed, the other
+thrown overboard. Two soldiers off duty had a
+scuffle with the mutineers, but one took refuge in the
+main chains, while the other was drowned trying to
+swim ashore. The sergeant in charge ran on deck
+and shot a mutineer before he was knocked over,
+stunned. As to the seamen, they ran into the forecastle.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners had now control of the ship, but
+none of them knew how to handle their prize, so they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">83</span>
+loosed a couple of sailors and made them help.
+Woolfe, one of the convicts, then rescued a soldier
+who was swimming alongside. The officers and
+soldiers aft were firing through the grated hatches and
+wounded several convicts, until they were allayed
+with a kettle of boiling water. So far the mutiny had
+gone off very nicely, but now the captain, perched on
+the cabin table, fired through the woodwork at a
+point where he thought a man was standing. By luck
+the bullet went through the ringleader’s mouth and
+blew out the back of his head, whereon a panic
+seized the mutineers, who fled below hatches. The
+sailor at the wheel released the captain, and the afterguard
+recaptured the ship. One mutineer had his
+head blown off, and the rest surrendered. The whole
+deck was littered with the wounded and the dying
+and the dead, and there were not many convicts left.
+In the trial at Sydney, Wheelan, who proved innocent,
+was spared, also Woolfe for saving a soldier’s life,
+but four were hanged, meeting their fate like men.</p>
+
+<p>It was in August that the sultan of Borneo confirmed
+Mr. James Brooke as rajah of Sarawak, and
+the new king was extremely busy executing robbers,
+rescuing shipwrecked mariners from slavery, reopening
+old mines for diamonds, gold and manganese.
+“I breathe peace and comfort to all who obey,” so
+he wrote to his mother, “and wrath and fury to the
+evil-doer.”</p>
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
+
+<p>Captain Ross was in the Antarctic, coasting the
+great ice barrier. Last year he had given to two tall
+volcanoes the names of his ships, the <i>Erebus</i> and <i>Terror</i>.
+This year on March twelfth in a terrific gale<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">84</span>
+with blinding snow at midnight the two ships tried to
+get shelter under the lee of an iceberg, but the <i>Terror</i>
+rammed the <i>Erebus</i> so that her bow-sprit, fore topmast
+and a lot of smaller spars were carried away,
+and she was jammed against the wall of the berg
+totally disabled. She could not make sail and had no
+room to wear round, so she sailed out backward, one
+of the grandest feats of seamanship on record; then,
+clear of the danger, steered between two bergs, her
+yard-arms almost scraping both of them, until she
+gained the smoother water to leeward, where she
+found her consort.</p>
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
+
+<p>In Hayti there was an earthquake, in Brazil a revolution;
+in Jamaica a storm on the tenth which
+wrecked H.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Spitfire</i>, and in the western states
+Mount Saint Helen’s gave a fine volcanic eruption.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">85</span>
+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.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;B. ship <i>Cowlitz</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The Hudson’s Bay Company had a lease from the
+Russians of all the fur-trading forts of Southeastern<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">86</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">87</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
+
+<p>Fremont was exploring from the Mississippi Valley
+a route for emigrants to Oregon, and in that journey
+climbed the Rocky Mountains to plant Old Glory on
+one of the highest peaks. He was a very fine explorer,
+and not long afterward conquered the Mexican
+state of California, completing the outline of the
+modern United States. But Fremont’s guide will be
+remembered long after Fremont is forgotten, for he
+was the greatest of American frontiersmen, the ideal
+of modern chivalry, Kit Carson. Of course he must
+have a chapter to himself.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">88</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIII">XIII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.D. 1843
+
+<span class="subhead">KIT CARSON</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Once</span> Colonel Inman, an old frontiersman, bought
+a newspaper which had a full page picture of
+Kit Carson. The hero stood in a forest, a gigantic
+figure in a buckskin suit, heavily armed, embracing a
+rescued heroine, while at his feet sprawled six slain
+Indian braves, his latest victims.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you think of this?” said the colonel
+handing the picture to a delicate little man, who
+wiped his spectacles, studied the work of art, and replied
+in a gentle drawl, “That may be true, but I
+hain’t got no recollection of it.” And so Kit Carson
+handed the picture back.</p>
+
+<p>He stood five feet six, and looked frail, but his
+countrymen, and all the boys of all the world think
+of this mighty frontiersman as a giant.</p>
+
+<p>At seventeen he was a remarkably green and innocent
+boy for his years, his home a log cabin on the
+Missouri frontier. Past the door ran the trail to
+the west where trappers went by in buckskin, traders
+among the Indians, and soldiers for the savage wars
+of the plains.</p>
+
+<p>One day came Colonel S. Vrain, agent of a big fur-trading
+company, with his long train of wagons hitting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">89</span>
+the Santa Fe trail. Kit got a job with that train,
+to herd spare stock, hunt bison, mount guard and
+fight Indians. They were three weeks out in camp
+when half a dozen Pawnee Indians charged, yelling
+and waving robes to stampede the herd, but a brisk
+fusillade from the white men sent them scampering
+back over the sky-line. Next day, after a sixteen
+mile march the outfit corraled their wagons for defense
+at the foot of Pawnee Rock beside the
+Arkansas River. “I had not slept any of the night
+before,” says Kit, “for I stayed awake watching to
+get a shot at the Pawnees that tried to stampede our
+animals, expecting they would return; and I hadn’t
+caught a wink all day, as I was out buffalo hunting,
+so I was awfully tired and sleepy when we arrived
+at Pawnee Rock that evening, and when I was posted
+at my place at night, I must have gone to sleep leaning
+against the rocks; at any rate, I was wide enough
+awake when the cry of Indians was given by one of
+the guard. I had picketed my mule about twenty
+paces from where I stood, and I presume he had been
+lying down; all I remember is, that the first thing I
+saw after the alarm was something rising up out of
+the grass, which I thought was an Indian. I pulled
+the trigger; it was a center shot, and I don’t believe
+the mule ever kicked after he was hit!”</p>
+
+<p>At daylight the Pawnees attacked in earnest and
+the fight lasted nearly three days, the mule teams
+being shut in the corral without food or water. At
+midnight of the second day they hitched up, fighting
+their way for thirteen miles, then got into bad trouble
+fording Pawnee Fork while the Indians poured lead
+and arrows into the teams until the colonel and Kit<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">90</span>
+Carson led a terrific charge which dispersed the
+enemy. That fight cost the train four killed and
+seven wounded.</p>
+
+<p>It was during this first trip that Carson saved the
+life of a wounded teamster by cutting off his arm.
+With a razor he cut the flesh, with a saw got through
+the bone, and with a white-hot king-bolt seared the
+wound, stopping the flow of blood.</p>
+
+<p>In 1835 Carson was hunter for Bent’s Fort, keeping
+the garrison of forty men supplied with buffalo
+meat. Once he was out hunting with six others and
+they made their camp tired out. “I saw,” says Kit,
+“two big wolves sneaking about, one of them quite
+close to us. Gordon, one of my men, wanted to fire
+his rifle at it, but I would not let him for fear he
+would hit a dog. I admit that I had a sort of idea
+that these wolves might be Indians; but when I noticed
+one of them turn short around and heard the
+clashing of his teeth as he rushed at one of the dogs,
+I felt easy then, and was certain that they were
+wolves sure enough. But the red devil fooled me
+after all, for he had two dried buffalo bones in his
+hands under the wolf-skin and he rattled them together
+every time he turned to make a dash at the
+dogs! Well, by and by we all dozed off, and it
+wasn’t long before I was suddenly aroused by a noise
+and a big blaze. I rushed out the first thing for our
+mules and held them. If the savages had been at all
+smart, they could have killed us in a trice, but they
+ran as soon as they fired at us. They killed one of
+my men, putting five shots in his body and eight in
+his buffalo robe. The Indians were a band of
+snakes, and found us by sheer accident. They endeavored<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">91</span>
+to ambush us the next morning, but we got
+wind of their little game and killed three of them,
+including the chief.”</p>
+
+<p>It was in his eight years as hunter for Bent’s Fort
+that Kit learned to know the Indians, visiting their
+camps to smoke with the chiefs and play with the
+little boys. When the Sioux nation invaded the Comanche
+and Arrapaho hunting-grounds he persuaded
+them to go north, and so averted war.</p>
+
+<p>In 1842 when he was scout to Fremont, he went
+buffalo hunting to get meat for the command. One
+day he was cutting up a beast newly killed when he
+left his work in pursuit of a large bull that came
+rushing past him. His horse was too much blown
+to run well, and when at last he got near enough to
+fire, things began to happen all at once. The bullet
+hitting too low enraged the bison just as the horse,
+stepping into a prairie-dog hole, shot Kit some fifteen
+feet through the air. Instead of Kit hunting
+bison, Mr. Buffalo hunted Kit, who ran for all he
+was worth. So they came to the Arkansas River
+where Kit dived while the bison stayed on the bank
+to hook him when he landed. But while the bison
+gave Kit a swimming lesson, one of the hunters made
+an unfair attack from behind, killing the animal. So
+Kit crawled out and skinned his enemy.</p>
+
+<p>One of his great hunting feats was the killing of
+five buffalo with only four bullets. Being short of
+lead he had to cut out the ball from number four,
+then catch up, and shoot number five.</p>
+
+<p>On another hunt, chasing a cow bison down a steep
+hill, he fired just as the animal took a flying leap, so
+that the carcass fell, not to the ground, but spiked on<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">92</span>
+a small cedar. The Indians persuaded him to leave
+that cow impaled upon a tree-top because it was big
+magic; but to people who do not know the shrubs of
+the southwestern desert, it must sound like a first-class
+lie.</p>
+
+<p>One night as the expedition lay in camp, far up
+among the mountains, Fremont sat for hours reading
+some letters just arrived from home, then fell asleep
+to dream of his young wife. Presently a soft sound,
+rather like the blow of an ax made Kit start broad
+awake, to find Indians in camp. They fled, but two
+of the white men were lying dead in their blankets,
+and the noise that awakened Carson was the blow
+of a tomahawk braining his own chum, the voyageur,
+La Jeunesse.</p>
+
+<p>In the following year Carson was serving as hunter
+to a caravan westward bound across the plains, when
+he met Captain Cooke in camp, with four squadrons
+of United States Cavalry. The captain told him that
+following on the trail was a caravan belonging to a
+wealthy Mexican and so richly loaded that a hundred
+riders had been hired as guards.</p>
+
+<p>Presently the Mexican train came up and the majordomo
+offered Carson three hundred dollars if he
+would ride to the Mexican governor at Santa Fe and
+ask him for an escort of troops from the point where
+they entered New Mexico. Kit, who was hard up,
+gladly accepted the cash, and rode to Bent’s Fort.
+There he had news that the Utes were on the war-path,
+but Mr. Bent lent him the swiftest horse in the stables.
+Kit walked, leading the horse by the rein, to have him
+perfectly fresh in case there was need for flight. He
+reached the Ute village, hid, and passed the place at<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">93</span>
+night without being seen. So he reached Taos, his
+own home in New Mexico, whence the alcalde sent
+his message to the governor of the state at Santa Fe.</p>
+
+<p>The governor had already sent a hundred riders
+but these had been caught and wiped out by a force
+of Texans, only one escaping, who, during the heat
+of the fight, caught a saddled Texan pony and rode
+off.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the governor—Armijo—sent his reply
+for Carson to carry to the caravan. He said he was
+marching with a large force, and he did so. But
+when the survivor of the lost hundred rode into
+Armijo’s camp with his bad news, the whole outfit
+rolled their tails for home.</p>
+
+<p>Carson, with the governor’s letter, and the news
+of plentiful trouble, reached the Mexican caravan,
+which decided not to leave the protecting American
+cavalry camped on the boundary-line. What with
+Texan raiders, border ruffians, Utes, Apaches, Comanches,
+and other little drawbacks, the caravan
+trade on the Santa Fe trail was never dull for a
+moment.</p>
+
+<p>During these years one finds Kit Carson’s tracks
+all over the West about as hard to follow as those of a
+flea in a blanket.</p>
+
+<p>Here, for example, is a description of the American
+army of the Bear Flag republic seizing California in
+1846. “A vast cloud of dust appeared first, and
+thence, a long file, emerged this wildest wild party.
+Fremont rode ahead—a spare, active-looking man,
+with such an eye! He was dressed in a blouse and
+leggings and wore a felt hat. After him came five
+Delaware Indians, who were his body-guard, and have<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">94</span>
+been with him through all his wanderings; they had
+charge of the baggage horses. The rest, many of
+them blacker than the Indians, rode two and two, the
+rifle held in one hand across the pommel of the saddle.
+Thirty-nine of them there are his regular men, the
+rest are loafers picked up lately; his original men are
+principally backwoodsmen from the state of Tennessee,
+and the banks of the upper waters of the
+Missouri.... The dress of these men was principally
+a long loose coat of deerskin, tied with thongs
+in front; trousers of the same, which when wet
+through, they take off, scrape well inside with a knife,
+and put on as soon as dry. The saddles were of various
+fashions, though these and a large drove of
+horses, and a brass field gun, were things they had
+picked up about California. They are allowed no
+liquor; this, no doubt, has much to do with their
+good conduct; and the discipline, too, is very strict.”</p>
+
+<p>One of these men was Kit Carson, sent off in October
+to Washington on the Atlantic, three thousand
+miles away, with news that California was conquered
+for the United States, by a party of sixty men. In
+New Mexico, Kit met General Kearney, and told him
+that the Californians were a pack of cowards. So
+the general sent back his troops, marching on with
+only one hundred dragoons. But the Californians
+were not cowards, they had risen against the American
+invasion, they were fighting magnificently, and Fremont
+had rather a bad time before he completed the
+conquest.</p>
+
+<p>It was during the Californian campaign that Carson
+made his famous ride, the greatest feat of horsemanship
+the world has ever known. As a despatch<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">95</span>
+rider, he made his way through the hostile tribes, and
+terrific deserts from the Missouri to California and
+back, a total of four thousand, four hundred miles.
+But while he rested in California, before he set out
+on the return, he joined a party of Californian gentlemen
+on a trip up the coast from Los Angeles to San
+Francisco. Two of the six men had a remount each,
+but four of them rode the six hundred miles without
+change of horses in six days. Add that, and the return
+to Kit Carson’s journey, and it makes a total of
+five thousand, six hundred miles. So for distance,
+he beats world records by one hundred miles, at a
+speed beyond all comparison, and in face of difficulties
+past all parallel.</p>
+
+<p>For some of us old western reprobates who were
+cow hands, despising a sheep man more than anything
+else alive, it is very disconcerting to know that
+Carson went into that business. He became a partner
+of his lifelong friend, Maxwell, whose rancho in
+New Mexico was very like a castle of the Middle
+Ages. The dinner service was of massive silver, but
+the guests bedded down with a cowhide on the floor.
+New Mexico was a conquered country owned by the
+United States, at intervals between the Mexican revolts,
+when Kit settled down as a rancher. The
+words settled down, mean that he served as a colonel
+of volunteers against the Mexicans, and spent the
+rest of the time fighting Apaches, the most ferocious
+of all savages.</p>
+
+<p>Near Santa Fe, lived Mr. White and his son who
+fell in defense of their ranch, having killed three
+Apaches, while the women and children of the household
+met with a much worse fate than that of death.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">96</span>
+The settlers refused to march in pursuit until Carson
+arrived, but by mistake he was not given command,
+a Frenchman having been chosen as leader.</p>
+
+<p>The retreat of the savages was far away in the
+mountains, and well fortified. The only chance of
+saving the women and children was to rush this place
+before there was time to kill them, and Carson
+dashed in with a yell, expecting all hands to follow.
+So he found himself alone, surrounded by the
+Apaches, and as they rushed, he rode, throwing himself
+on the off side of his horse, almost concealed
+behind its neck. Six arrows struck his horse, and
+one bullet lodged in his coat before he was out of
+range. He cursed his Mexicans, he put them to
+shame, he persuaded them to fight, then led a gallant
+charge, killing five Indians as they fled. The delay
+had given them time to murder the women and
+children.</p>
+
+<p>Once, after his camp had been attacked by Indians,
+Carson discovered that the sentry failed to give an
+alarm because he was asleep. The Indian punishment
+followed, and the soldier was made for one day
+to wear the dress of a squaw.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_96" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_096.jpg" width="1455" height="2187" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Kit Carson</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>We must pass by Kit’s capture of a gang of thirty-five
+desperadoes for the sake of a better story. The
+officer, commanding a detachment of troops on the
+march, flogged an Indian chief, the result being war.
+Carson was the first white man to pass, and while
+the chiefs were deciding how to attack his caravan,
+he walked alone into the council lodge. So many
+years were passed since the Cheyennes had seen him
+that he was not recognized, and nobody suspected
+that he knew their language, until he made a speech<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">97</span>
+in Cheyenne, introducing himself, recalling ancient
+friendships, offering all courtesies. As to their
+special plan for killing the leader of the caravan, and
+taking his scalp, he claimed that he might have something
+to say on the point. They parted, Kit to encourage
+his men, the Indians to waylay the caravan;
+but from the night camp he despatched a Mexican
+boy to ride three hundred miles for succor. When
+the Cheyennes charged the camp at dawn, he ordered
+them to halt, and walked into the midst of them, explaining
+the message he had sent, and what their fate
+would be if the troops found they had molested them.
+When the Indians found the tracks that proved Kit’s
+words, they knew they had business elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>In 1863 Carson was sent with a strong military
+force to chasten the hearts of the Navajo nation.
+They had never been conquered, and the flood of
+Spanish invasion split when it rolled against their
+terrific sand-rock desert. The land is one of unearthly
+grandeur where natural rocks take the shapes
+of towers, temples, palaces and fortresses of mountainous
+height blazing scarlet in color. In one part
+a wave of rock like a sea breaker one hundred fifty
+feet high and one hundred miles in length curls overhanging
+as though the rushing gray waters had been
+suddenly struck into ice. On one side lies the hollow
+Painted Desert, where the sands refract prismatic light
+like a colossal rainbow, and to the west the walls of the
+Navajo country drop a sheer mile into the stupendous
+labyrinth of the Grand Cañon. Such is the country
+of a race of warriors who ride naked, still armed with
+bow and arrows, their harness of silver and turquoise....</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">98</span></p>
+
+<p>They are handsome, cleanly, proud and dignified.
+They till their fields beside the desert springs, and their
+villages are set in native orchards, while beyond their
+settlements graze the flocks and herds tended by
+women herders.</p>
+
+<p>The conquest was a necessity, and it was well that
+this was entrusted to gentle, just, wise, heroic Carson.
+He was obliged to destroy their homes, to fell their
+peach trees, lay waste their crops, and sweep away
+their stock, starving them to surrender. He herded
+eleven thousand prisoners down to the lower deserts,
+where the chiefs crawled to him on their bellies for
+mercy, but the governor had no mercy, and long after
+Carson’s death, the hapless people were held in the
+Boique Redondo. A fourth part of them died of
+want, and their spirit was utterly broken before they
+were given back their lands. It is well for them that
+the Navajo desert is too terrible a region for the
+white men, and nobody tries to rob their new prosperity.</p>
+
+<p>In one more campaign Colonel Carson was officer
+commanding and gave a terrible thrashing to the Cheyennes,
+Kiowas and Comanches.</p>
+
+<p>Then came the end, during a visit to a son of his
+who lived in Colorado. Early in the morning of May
+twenty-third, 1868, he was mounting his horse when
+an artery broke in his neck, and within a few moments
+he was dead.</p>
+
+<p>But before we part with the frontier hero, it is
+pleasant to think of him still as a living man whose
+life is an inspiration and his manhood an example.</p>
+
+<p>Colonel Inman tells of nights at Maxwell’s ranch.
+“I have sat there,” he writes, “in the long winter<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">99</span>
+evenings when the great room was lighted only by the
+crackling logs, roaring up the huge throats of its two
+fireplaces ... watching Maxwell, Kit Carson and
+half a dozen chiefs silently interchange ideas in the
+wonderful sign language, until the glimmer of Aurora
+announced the advent of another day. But not a
+sound had been uttered during the protracted hours,
+save an occasional grunt of satisfaction on the part of
+the Indians, or when we white men exchanged a sentence.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">100</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIV">XIV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1845
+
+<span class="subhead">THE MAN WHO WAS A GOD</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">John Nicholson</span> was a captain in the twenty-seventh
+native infantry of India. He was very
+tall, gaunt, haggard, with a long black beard, a pale
+face, lips that never smiled, eyes which burned flame
+and green like those of a tiger when he was angry.
+He rarely spoke.</p>
+
+<p>Once in a frontier action he was entirely surrounded
+by the enemy when one of his Afghans saw
+him in peril from a descending sword. The Pathan
+sprang forward, received the blow, and died. In a
+later fight Nicholson saw that warrior’s only son taken
+prisoner, and carried off by the enemy. Charging
+alone, cutting a lane with his sword, the officer rescued
+his man, hoisted him across the saddle, and fought his
+way back. Ever afterward the young Pathan, whose
+father had died for Nicholson, rode at the captain’s
+side, served him at table with a cocked pistol on one
+hand, slept across the door of his tent. By the time
+Nicholson’s special service began he had a personal
+following of two hundred and fifty wild riders who
+refused either to take any pay or to leave his service.</p>
+
+<p>So was he guarded, but also a sword must be found
+fit for the hand of the greatest swordsman in India.
+The Sikh leaders sent out word to their whole nation
+for such a blade as Nicholson might wear. Hundreds
+were offered and after long and intricate tests three
+were found equally perfect, two of the blades being
+curved, one straight. Captain Nicholson chose the
+straight sword, which he accepted as a gift from a
+nation of warriors.</p>
+
+<p>This man was only a most humble Christian, but the
+Sikhs, observing the perfection of his manhood, supposed
+him to be divine, and offered that if he would
+accept their religion they would raise such a temple in
+his honor as India had never seen. Many a time
+while he sat at work in his tent, busy with official
+papers, a dozen Sikh warriors would squat in the doorway
+silent, watching their god. He took no notice, but
+sometimes a worshiper, overcome with the conviction
+of sin, would prostrate himself in adoration. For
+this offense the punishment was three dozen lashes
+with the cat, but the victims liked it. “Our god knew
+that we had been doing wrong, and, therefore, punished
+us.”</p>
+
+<p>There is no need to explain the Indian mutiny to
+English readers. It is burned deep into our memory
+that in 1857 our native army, revolting, seized Delhi,
+the ancient capital, and set up a descendant of the
+Great Mogul as emperor of India. The children, the
+women, the men who were tortured to death, or butchered
+horribly, were of our own households. Your
+uncle fought, your cousin fell, my mother escaped.
+Remember Cawnpore!</p>
+
+<p>Nicholson at Peshawur seized the mails, had the letters
+translated, then made up his copies into bundles.
+At a council of officers the colonels of the native regiments
+swore to the loyalty of their men, but Nicholson
+dealt out his packages of letters to them all, saying,
+“Perhaps these will interest you.”</p>
+
+<p>The colonels read, and were chilled with horror at
+finding in their trusted regiments an abyss of treachery.
+Their troops were disarmed and disbanded.</p>
+
+<p>To disarm and disperse the native army throughout
+Northwestern India a flying column was formed
+of British troops, and Nicholson, although he was only
+a captain, was sent to take command of the whole
+force with the rank of brigadier-general. There were
+old officers under him, yet never a murmur rose from
+them at that strange promotion.</p>
+
+<p>Presently Sir John Lawrence wrote to Nicholson a
+fierce official letter, demanding, “Where are you?
+What are you doing? Send instantly a return of
+court-martial held upon insurgent natives, with a list
+of the various punishments inflicted.”</p>
+
+<p>Nicholson’s reply was a sheet of paper bearing his
+present address, the date, and the words, “The punishment
+of mutiny is death.” He wanted another regiment
+to strengthen his column, and demanded the
+eighty-seventh, which was guarding our women and
+children in the hills. Lawrence said these men could
+not be spared. Nicholson wrote back, “When an
+empire is at stake, women and children cease to be
+of any consideration whatever.” What chance had
+they if he failed to hold this district?</p>
+
+<figure id="i_102" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 18em;">
+  <img src="images/i_102.jpg" width="1412" height="2101" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">General Nicholson</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>Nicholson’s column on the march was surrounded
+by his own wild guards riding in couples, so that he,
+their god, searched the whole country with five hundred
+eyes. After one heart-breaking night march he
+drew up his infantry and guns, then rode along the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">103</span>
+line giving his orders: “In a few minutes you will
+see two native regiments come round that little temple.
+If they bring their muskets to the ‘ready,’ fire a volley
+into them without further orders.”</p>
+
+<p>As the native regiments appeared from behind the
+little temple, Nicholson rode to meet them. He was
+seen to speak to them and then they grounded their
+arms. Two thousand men had surrendered to seven
+hundred, but had the mutineers resisted Nicholson
+himself must have perished between two fires. He
+cared nothing for his life.</p>
+
+<p>Only once did this leader blow mutineers from the
+guns, and then it was to fire the flesh and blood of
+nine conspirators into the faces of a doubtful regiment.
+For the rest he had no powder to waste, but no
+mercy, and from his awful executions of rebels he
+would go away to hide in his tent and weep.</p>
+
+<p>He had given orders that no native should be allowed
+to ride past a white man. One morning before
+dawn the orderly officer, a lad of nineteen, seeing natives
+passing him on an elephant, ordered them sharply
+to dismount and make their salaam. They obeyed—an
+Afghan prince and his servant, sent by the king of
+Cabul as an embassy to Captain Nicholson. Next day
+the ambassador spoke of this humiliation. “No wonder,”
+he said, “you English conquer India when mere
+boys obey orders as this one did.”</p>
+
+<p>Nicholson once fought a Bengal tiger, and slew it
+with one stroke of his sword; but could the English
+subdue this India in revolt? The mutineers held the
+impregnable capital old Delhi—and under the red
+walls lay four thousand men—England’s forlorn
+hope—which must storm that giant fortress. If they<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">104</span>
+failed the whole population would rise. “If ordained
+to fail,” said Nicholson, “I hope the British will drag
+down with them in flames and blood as many of the
+queen’s enemies as possible.” If they had failed
+not one man of our race would have escaped to the
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>Nicholson brought his force to aid in the siege of
+Delhi, and now he was only a captain under the impotent
+and hopeless General Wilson. “I have
+strength yet,” said Nicholson when he was dying, “to
+shoot him if necessary.”</p>
+
+<p>The batteries of the city walls from the Lahore
+Gate to the Cashmere Gate were manned by Sikh
+gunners, loyal to the English, but detained against
+their will by the mutineers. One night they saw Nicholson
+without any disguise walk in at the Lahore Gate,
+and through battery after battery along the walls he
+went in silence to the Cashmere Gate, by which he left
+the city. At the sight of that gaunt giant, the man
+they believed to be an incarnate god, they fell upon
+their faces. So Captain Nicholson studied the defenses
+of a besieged stronghold as no man on earth
+had ever dared before. To him was given command
+of the assault which blew up the Cashmere Gate, and
+stormed the Cashmere breach. More than half his
+men perished, but an entry was made, and in six days
+the British fought their way through the houses,
+breaching walls as they went until they stormed the
+palace, hoisted the flag above the citadel, and proved
+with the sword who shall be masters of India.</p>
+
+<p>But Nicholson had fallen. Mortally wounded he
+was carried to his tent, and there lay through the hot
+days watching the blood-red towers and walls of Delhi,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">105</span>
+listening to the sounds of the long fight, praying that
+he might see the end before his passing.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the tent waited his worshipers, clutching
+at the doctors as they passed to beg for news of him.
+Once when they were noisy he clutched a pistol from
+the bedside table, and fired a shot through the canvas.
+“Oh! Oh!” cried the Pathans, “there is the general’s
+order.” Then they kept quiet. Only at the
+end, when his coffin was lowered into the earth, these
+men who had forsaken their hills to guard him, broke
+down and flung themselves upon the ground, sobbing
+like children.</p>
+
+<p>Far off in the hills the Nicholson fakirs—a tribe
+who had made him their only god—heard of his passing.
+Two chiefs killed themselves that they might
+serve him in another world; but the third chief spoke
+to the people: “Nickelseyn always said that he was
+a man like as we are, and that he worshiped a God
+whom he could not see, but who was always near us.
+Let us learn to worship Nickelseyn’s God.” So the
+tribe came down from their hills to the Christian teachers
+at Peshawur, and there were baptized.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">106</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XV">XV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1853
+
+<span class="subhead">THE GREAT FILIBUSTER</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">William Walker</span>, son of a Scotch banker,
+was born in Tennessee, cantankerous from the
+time he was whelped. He never swore or drank, or
+loved anybody, but was rigidly respectable and pure,
+believed in negro slavery, bristled with points of etiquette
+and formality, liked squabbling, had a nasty
+sharp tongue, and a taste for dueling. The little dry
+man was by turns a doctor, editor and lawyer, and
+when he wanted to do anything very outrageous, always
+began by taking counsel’s opinion. He wore a
+black tail-coat, and a black wisp of necktie even when
+in 1853 he landed an army of forty-five men to conquer
+Mexico. His followers were California gold
+miners dressed in blue shirts, duck trousers, long
+boots, bowie knives, revolvers and rifles. After he
+had taken the city of La Paz by assault, called an
+election and proclaimed himself president of Sonora,
+he was joined by two or three hundred more of the
+same breed from San Francisco. These did not think
+very much of a leader twenty-eight years old, standing
+five feet six, and weighing only nine stone four, so
+they merrily conspired to blow him up with gunpowder,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">107</span>
+and disperse with what plunder they could grab.
+Mr. Walker shot two, flogged a couple, disarmed the
+rest without showing any sign of emotion. He could
+awe the most truculent desperado into abject obedience
+with one glance of his cool gray eye, and never allowed
+his men to drink, play cards, or swear. “Our
+government,” he wrote, “has been formed upon a
+firm and sure basis.”</p>
+
+<p>The Mexicans and Indians thought otherwise, for
+while the new president of Sonora marched northward,
+they gathered in hosts and hung like wolves in
+the rear of the column, cutting off stragglers, who
+were slowly tortured to death. Twice they dared an
+actual attack, but Walker’s grim strategies, and the
+awful rifles of despairing men, cut them to pieces. So
+the march went on through hundreds of miles of
+blazing hot desert, where the filibusters dropped with
+thirst, and blew their own brains out rather than be
+captured. Only thirty-four men were left when they
+reached the United States boundary, the president of
+Sonora, in a boot and a shoe, his cabinet in rags, his
+army and navy bloody, with dried wounds, gaunt,
+starving, but too terrible for the Mexican forces to
+molest. The filibusters surrendered to the United
+States garrison as prisoners of war.</p>
+
+<p>Just a year later, with six of these veterans, and
+forty-eight other Californians, Walker landed on the
+coast of Nicaragua. This happy republic was blessed
+at the time with two rival presidents, and the one who
+got Walker’s help very soon had possession of the
+country. As hero of several brilliant engagements,
+Walker was made commander-in-chief, and at the
+next election chosen by the people themselves as president.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">108</span>
+He had now a thousand Americans in his following,
+and when the native statesmen and generals
+proved treacherous, they were promptly shot. Walker’s
+camp of wild desperadoes was like a Sunday-school,
+his government the cleanest ever known in
+Central America, and his dignity all prickles, hard to
+approach. He depended for existence on the services
+of Vanderbilt’s steamship lines, but seized their warehouse
+for cheating. He was surrounded by four hostile
+republics, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Honduras
+and Guatemala, and insulted them all. He suspended
+diplomatic relations with the United States, demanded
+for his one schooner-of-war salutes from the British
+navy, and had no sense of humor whatsoever.
+Thousands of brave men died for this prim little lawyer,
+and tens of thousands fell by pestilence and battle
+in his wars, but with all his sweet unselfishness, his
+purity, and his valor, poor Walker was a prig. So
+the malcontents of Nicaragua, and the republics from
+Mexico to Peru, joined the steamship company, the
+United States and Great Britain to wipe out his hapless
+government.</p>
+
+<p>The armies of four republics were closing in on
+Walker’s capital, the city of Granada. He marched
+out to storm the allies perched on an impregnable volcano,
+and was carrying his last charge to a victorious
+issue, when news reached him that Zavala with eight
+hundred men had jumped on Granada. He forsook
+his victory and rushed for the capital city.</p>
+
+<p>There were only one hundred and fifty invalids and
+sick in the Granada garrison to man the church, armory
+and hospital against Zavala, but the women
+loaded rifles for the wounded and after twenty-two<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">109</span>
+hours of ghastly carnage, the enemy were thrown out
+of the city. They fell back to lie in Walker’s path as
+he came to the rescue. Walker saw the trap, carried
+it with a charge, drove Zavala back into the city, broke
+him between two fires, then sent a detachment to intercept
+his flight. In this double battle, fighting eight
+times his own force, Walker killed half the allied
+army.</p>
+
+<p>But the pressure of several invasions at once was
+making it impossible for Walker to keep his communication
+open with the sea while he held his capital.
+Granada, the most beautiful of all Central American
+cities, must be abandoned, and, lest the enemy win the
+place, it must be destroyed. So Walker withdrew his
+sick men to an island in the big Lake Nicaragua;
+while Henningsen, an Englishman, his second in command,
+burned and abandoned the capital.</p>
+
+<p>But now, while the city burst into flames, and the
+smoke went up as from a volcano, the American garrison
+broke loose, rifled the liquor stores and lay drunk
+in the blazing streets, so the allied army swooped down,
+cutting off the retreat to the lake. Henningsen, veteran
+of the Carlist and Hungarian revolts, a knight
+errant of lost causes, took three weeks to fight his way
+three miles, before Walker could cover his embarkment
+on the lake. There had been four hundred men
+in the garrison, but only one hundred and fifty
+answered the roll-call in their refuge on the Isle of
+Omotepe. In the plaza of the capital city they had
+planted a spear, and on the spear hung a rawhide with
+this <span class="locked">inscription:—</span></p>
+
+<p>“Here was Granada!”</p>
+
+<p>In taking that heap of blackened ruins four thousand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">110</span>
+out of six thousand of the allies had perished;
+but even they were more fortunate than a Costa Rican
+army of invasion, which killed fifty of the filibusters,
+at a cost of ten thousand men slain by war and pestilence.
+It always worked out that the killing of one
+filibuster cost on the average eight of his adversaries.</p>
+
+<p>Four months followed of confused fighting, in which
+the Americans slowly lost ground, until at last they
+were besieged in the town of Rivas, melting the church
+bells for cannon-balls, dying at their posts of starvation.
+The neighboring town of San Jorge was held by
+two thousand Costa Ricans, and these Walker attempted
+to dislodge. His final charge was made with
+fifteen men into the heart of the town. No valor
+could win against such odds, and the orderly retreat
+began on Rivas. Two hundred men lay in ambush to
+take Walker at a planter’s house by the wayside, and as
+he rode wearily at the head of his men they opened
+fire from cover at a range of fifteen yards. Walker
+reined in his horse, fired six revolver-shots into the
+windows, then rode on quietly erect while the storm of
+lead raged about him, and saddle after saddle was
+emptied. A week afterward the allies assaulted
+Rivas, but left six hundred men dead in the field, so
+terrific was the fire from the ramparts.</p>
+
+<p>It was in these days that a British naval officer came
+under flag of truce from the coast to treat for Walker’s
+surrender.</p>
+
+<p>“I presume, sir,” was the filibuster’s greeting, “that
+you have come to apologize for the outrage offered to
+my flag, and to the commander of the Nicaraguan
+schooner-of-war <i>Granada</i>.”</p>
+
+<p>“If they had another schooner,” said the Englishman<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">111</span>
+afterward, “I believe they would have declared
+war on Great Britain.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the United States navy treated with this peppery
+little lawyer, and on the first of May, 1857, he
+grudgingly consented to being rescued.</p>
+
+<p>During his four years’ fight for empire, Walker
+had enlisted three thousand five hundred Americans—and
+the proportion of wounds was one hundred and
+thirty-seven for every hundred men. A thousand fell.
+The allied republics had twenty-one thousand soldiers
+and ten thousand Indians—and lost fifteen thousand
+killed.</p>
+
+<p>Two years later, Walker set out again with a hundred
+men to conquer Central America, in defiance of
+the British and United States squadrons, sent to catch
+him, and in the teeth of five armed republics. He
+was captured by the British, shot by Spanish Americans
+upon a sea beach in Honduras, and so perished,
+fearless to the end.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">112</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVI">XVI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1857
+
+<span class="subhead">BUFFALO BILL</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> Mormons are a sect of Christians with some
+queer ideas, for they drink no liquor, hold all
+their property in common, stamp out any member who
+dares to think or work for himself, and believe that
+the more wives a man has the merrier he will be.
+The women, so far as I met them are like fat cows, the
+men a slovenly lot, and not too honest, but they are
+hard workers and first-rate pioneers.</p>
+
+<p>Because they made themselves unpopular they were
+persecuted, and fled from the United States into the
+desert beside the Great Salt Lake. There they got
+water from the mountain streams and made their land
+a garden. They only wanted to be left alone in peace,
+but that was a poor excuse for slaughtering emigrants.
+Murdering women and children is not in good taste.</p>
+
+<p>The government sent an army to attend to these
+saints, but the soldiers wanted food to eat, and the
+Mormons would not sell, so provisions had to be sent
+a thousand miles across the wilderness to save the
+starving troops. So we come to the herd of beef
+cattle which in May, 1857, was drifting from the Missouri
+River, and to the drovers’ camp beside the banks
+of the Platte.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">113</span></p>
+
+<p>A party of red Indians on the war-path found that
+herd and camp; they scalped the herders on guard,
+stampeded the cattle and rushed the camp, so that
+the white men were driven to cover under the river
+bank. Keeping the Indians at bay with their rifles,
+the party marched for the settlements wading, sometimes
+swimming, while they pushed a raft that carried
+a wounded man. Always a rear guard kept the
+Indians from coming too near. And so the night fell.</p>
+
+<p>“I, being the youngest and smallest,” says one of
+them, “had fallen behind the others.... When I
+happened to look up to the moonlit sky, and saw the
+plumed head of an Indian peeping over the bank....
+I instantly aimed my gun at his head, and fired. The
+report rang out sharp and loud in the night air, and
+was immediately followed by an Indian whoop; and
+the next moment about six feet of dead Indian came
+tumbling into the river. I was not only overcome with
+astonishment, but was badly scared, as I could hardly
+realize what I had done.”</p>
+
+<p>Back came Frank McCarthy, the leader, with all his
+men. “Who fired that shot?”</p>
+
+<p>“I did.”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, and little Billy has killed an Indian stone-dead—too
+dead to skin!”</p>
+
+<p>At the age of nine Billy Cody had taken the war-path.</p>
+
+<p>In those days the army had no luck. When the government
+sent a herd of cattle the Indians got the beef,
+and the great big train of seventy-five wagons might
+just as well have been addressed to the Mormons, who
+burned the transport, stole the draft oxen and
+turned the teamsters, including little Billy, loose in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">114</span>
+the mountains, where they came nigh starving. The
+boy was too thin to cast a shadow when in the spring
+he set out homeward across the plains with two returning
+trains.</p>
+
+<p>One day these trains were fifteen miles apart when
+Simpson, the wagon boss, with George Woods, a
+teamster, and Billy Cody, set off riding mules from
+the rear outfit to catch up the teams in front. They
+were midway when a war party of Indians charged at
+full gallop, surrounding them, but Simpson shot the
+three mules and used their carcasses to make a triangular
+fort. The three whites, each with a rifle and
+a brace of revolvers were more than a match for men
+with bows and arrows, and the Indians lost so heavily
+that they retreated out of range. That gave the fort
+time to reload, but the Indians charged again, and this
+time Woods got an arrow in the shoulder. Once more
+the Indians retired to consult, while Simpson drew the
+arrow from Woods’ shoulder, plugging the hole with
+a quid of chewing tobacco. A third time the Indians
+charged, trying to ride down the stockade, but they
+lost a man and a horse. Four warriors had fallen
+now in this battle with two men and a little boy, but
+the Indians are a painstaking, persevering race, so they
+waited until nightfall and set the grass on fire. But
+the whites had been busy with knives scooping a hole
+from whence the loose earth made a breastwork over
+the dead mules, so that the flames could not reach
+them, and they had good cover to shoot from when
+the Indians charged through the smoke. After that
+both sides had a sleep, and at dawn they were fresh
+for a grand charge, handsomely repulsed. The redskins<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">115</span>
+sat down in a ring to starve the white men out,
+and great was their disappointment when Simpson’s
+rear train of wagons marched to the rescue. The
+red men did not stay to pick flowers.</p>
+
+<p>It seems like lying to state that at the age of twelve
+Billy Cody began to take rank among the world’s great
+horsemen, and yet he rode on the pony express, which
+closed in 1861, his fourteenth year.</p>
+
+<p>The trail from the Missouri over the plains, the
+deserts and the mountains into California was about
+two thousand miles through a country infested with
+gangs of professional robbers and hostile Indian
+tribes. The gait of the riders averaged twelve miles
+an hour, which means a gallop, to allow for the slow
+work in mountain passes. There were one hundred
+ninety stations at which the riders changed ponies
+without breaking their run, and each must be fit and
+able for one hundred miles a day in time of need.
+Pony Bob afterward had contracts by which he rode
+one hundred miles a day for a year.</p>
+
+<p>Now, none of the famous riders of history, like
+Charles XII, of Sweden; Dick, King of Natal, or Dick
+Turpin, of England, made records to beat the men of
+the pony express, and in that service Billy was
+counted a hero. He is outclassed by the Cossack Lieutenant
+Peschkov, who rode one pony at twenty-eight
+miles a day the length of the Russian empire, from
+Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, and by Kit Carson who
+with one horse rode six hundred miles in six days.
+There are branches of horsemanship, too, in which he
+would have been proud to take lessons from Lord
+Lonsdale, or Evelyn French, but Cody is, as far as I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">116</span>
+have seen, of all white men incomparable for grace,
+for beauty of movement, among the horsemen of the
+modern world.</p>
+
+<p>But to turn back to the days of the boy rider.</p>
+
+<p>“One day,” he writes, “when I galloped into my
+home station I found that the rider who was expected
+to take the trip out on my arrival had gotten into a
+drunken row the night before, and had been killed....
+I pushed on ... entering every relay station on
+time, and accomplished the round trip of three
+hundred twenty-two miles back to Red Buttes without
+a single mishap, and on time. This stands on the
+record as being the longest pony express journey ever
+made.”</p>
+
+<p>One of the station agents has a story to tell of this
+ride, made without sleep, and with halts of only a few
+minutes for meals. News had leaked out of a large
+sum of money to be shipped by the express, and Cody,
+expecting robbers, rolled the treasure in his saddle
+blanket, filling the official pouches with rubbish. At
+the best place for an ambush two men stepped out
+on to the trail, halting him with their muskets. As he
+explained, the pouches were full of rubbish, but the
+road agents knew better. “Mark my words,” he said
+as he unstrapped, “you’ll hang for this.”</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll take chances on that, Bill.”</p>
+
+<p>“If you will have them, take them!” With that he
+hurled the pouches, and as robber number one turned
+to pick them up, robber number two had his gun-arm
+shattered with the boy’s revolver-shot. Then with a
+yell he rode down the stooping man, and spurring
+hard, got out of range unhurt. He had saved the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">117</span>
+treasure, and afterward both robbers were hanged by
+vigilantes.</p>
+
+<p>Once far down a valley ahead Cody saw a dark
+object above a boulder directly on his trail, and when
+it disappeared he knew he was caught in an ambush.
+Just as he came into range he swerved wide to the
+right, and at once a rifle smoked from behind the rock.
+Two Indians afoot ran for their ponies while a dozen
+mounted warriors broke from the timbered edge of
+the valley, racing to cut him off. One of these had a
+war bonnet of eagle plumes, the badge of a chief, and
+his horse, being the swiftest, drew ahead. All the Indians
+were firing, but the chief raced Cody to head
+him off at a narrow pass of the valley. The boy was
+slightly ahead, and when the chief saw that the white
+rider would have about thirty yards to spare he fitted
+an arrow, drawing for the shot. But Cody, swinging
+round in the saddle, lashed out his revolver, and
+the chief, clutching at the air, fell, rolling over like a
+ball as he struck the ground. At the chief’s death-cry
+a shower of arrows from the rear whizzed round the
+boy, one slightly wounding his pony who, spurred by
+the pain, galloped clear, leaving the Indians astern in
+a ten mile race to the next relay.</p>
+
+<p>After what seems to the reader a long life of adventure,
+Mr. Cody had just reached the age of twenty-two
+when a series of wars broke out with the Indian
+tribes, and he was attached to the troops as a scout. A
+number of Pawnee Indians who thought nothing of
+this white man, were also serving. They were better
+trackers, better interpreters and thought themselves
+better hunters. One day a party of twenty had been<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">118</span>
+running buffalo, and made a bag of thirty-two head
+when Cody got leave to attack a herd by himself.
+Mounted on his famous pony Buckskin Joe he made a
+bag of thirty-six head on a half-mile run, and his name
+was Buffalo Bill from that time onward.</p>
+
+<p>That summer he led a squadron of cavalry that attacked
+six hundred Sioux, and in that fight against
+overwhelming odds he brought down a chief at a range
+of four hundred yards, in those days a very long shot.
+His victim proved to be Tall Bull, one of the great war
+leaders of the Sioux. The widow of Tall Bull was
+proud that her husband had been killed by so famous
+a warrior as Prairie Chief, for that was Cody’s name
+among the Indians.</p>
+
+<p>There is one very nice story about the Pawnee
+scouts. A new general had taken command who must
+have all sorts of etiquette proper to soldiers. It was
+all very well for the white sentries to call at intervals
+of the night from post to post: “Post Number One,
+nine o’clock, all’s well!” “Post Number Two, etc.”</p>
+
+<p>But when the Pawnee sentries called, “Go to
+hell, I don’t care!” well, the practise had to be
+stopped.</p>
+
+<p>Of Buffalo Bill’s adventures in these wars the plain
+record would only take one large volume, but he was
+scouting in company with Texas Jack, John Nelson,
+Belden, the White Chief, and so many other famous
+frontier heroes, each needing at least one book volume,
+that I must give the story up as a bad job. At the end
+of the Sioux campaign Buffalo Bill was chief of scouts
+with the rank of colonel.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_118" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_118.jpg" width="1469" height="2187" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p><span class="smcap">Colonel Cody</span></p>
+
+<p>(“Buffalo Bill”)</p>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>In 1876, General Custer, with a force of nearly four
+hundred cavalry, perished in an attack on the Sioux,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">119</span>
+and the only survivor was his pet boy scout, Billy
+Jackson, who got away at night disguised as an Indian.
+Long afterward Billy, who was one of God’s own
+gentlemen, told me that story while we sat on a grassy
+hillside watching a great festival of the Blackfeet
+nation.</p>
+
+<p>After the battle in which Custer—the Sun Child—fell,
+the big Sioux army scattered, but a section of it
+was rounded up by a force under the guidance of Buffalo
+Bill.</p>
+
+<p>“One of the Indians,” he says, “who was handsomely
+decorated with all the ornaments usually worn
+by a war chief ... sang out to me ‘I know you,
+Prairie Chief; if you want to fight come ahead and
+fight me!’</p>
+
+<p>“The chief was riding his horse back and forth in
+front of his men, as if to banter me, and I accepted
+the challenge. I galloped toward him for fifty yards
+and he advanced toward me about the same distance,
+both of us riding at full speed, and then when we were
+only about thirty yards apart I raised my rifle and
+fired. His horse fell to the ground, having been
+killed by my bullet. Almost at the same instant my
+horse went down, having stepped in a gopher-hole.
+The fall did not hurt me much, and I instantly sprang
+to my feet. The Indian had also recovered himself,
+and we were now both on foot, and not more than
+twenty paces apart. We fired at each other simultaneously.
+My usual luck did not desert me on
+this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine
+struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before
+he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him,
+knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">120</span>
+to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war-bonnet off, I
+scientifically scalped him in about five seconds....</p>
+
+<p>“The Indians came charging down upon me from a
+hill in hopes of cutting me off. General Merritt ...
+ordered ... Company K to hurry to my rescue. The
+order came none too soon.... As the soldiers came
+up I swung the Indian chieftain’s topknot and bonnet
+in the air, and shouted: ‘The first scalp for Custer!’”</p>
+
+<p>Far up to the northward, Sitting Bull, with the war
+chief Spotted Tail and about three thousand warriors
+fled from the scene of the Custer massacre. And as
+they traveled on the lonely plains they came to a little
+fort with the gates closed. “Open your gates and
+hand out your grub,” said the Indians.</p>
+
+<p>“Come and get the grub,” answered the fort.</p>
+
+<p>So the gates were thrown open and the three thousand
+warriors stormed in to loot the fort. They found
+only two white men standing outside a door, but all
+round the square the log buildings were loopholed
+and from every hole stuck out the muzzle of a rifle.
+The Indians were caught in such a deadly trap that
+they ran for their lives back to camp.</p>
+
+<p>Very soon news reached the Blackfeet that their
+enemies the Sioux were camped by the new fort at
+Wood Mountain, so the whole nation marched to wipe
+them out, and Sitting Bull appealed for help to the
+white men. “Be good,” said the fort, “and nobody
+shall hurt you.”</p>
+
+<p>So the hostile armies camped on either side, and
+the thirty white men kept the peace between them.
+One day the Sioux complained that the Blackfeet had
+stolen fifty horses. So six of the white men were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">121</span>
+sent to the Blackfoot herd to bring the horses back.
+They did not know which horses to select so they drove
+off one hundred fifty for good measure straight at a
+gallop through the Blackfoot camp, closely pursued
+by that indignant nation. Barely in time they ran the
+stock within the fort, and slammed the gates home in
+the face of the raging Blackfeet. They were delighted
+with themselves until the officer commanding fined
+them a month’s pay each for insulting the Blackfoot
+nation.</p>
+
+<p>The winter came, the spring and then the summer,
+when those thirty white men arrived at the Canada-United
+States boundary where they handed over three
+thousand Sioux prisoners to the American troops.
+From that time the redcoats of the Royal Northwest
+Mounted Police of Canada have been respected on
+the frontier.</p>
+
+<p>And now came a very wonderful adventure. Sitting
+Bull, the leader of the Sioux nation who had defeated
+General Custer’s division and surrendered his army to
+thirty Canadian soldiers, went to Europe to take part
+in a circus personally conducted by the chief of scouts
+of the United States Army, Buffalo Bill. Poor Sitting
+Bull was afterward murdered by United States troops
+in the piteous massacre of Wounded Knee. Buffalo
+Bill for twenty-six years paraded Europe and America
+with his gorgeous Wild West show, slowly earning the
+wealth which he lavished in the founding of Cody City,
+Wyoming.</p>
+
+<p>Toward the end of these tours I used to frequent
+the show camp much like a stray dog expecting to be
+kicked, would spend hours swapping lies with the
+cowboys in the old Deadwood Coach, or sit at meat<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">122</span>
+with the colonel and his six hundred followers. On
+the last tour the old man was thrown by a bad horse
+at Bristol and afterward rode with two broken bones
+in splints. Only the cowboys knew, who told me, as
+day by day I watched him back his horse from the
+ring with all the old incomparable grace.</p>
+
+<p>He went back to build a million dollar irrigation
+ditch for his little city on the frontier, and shortly
+afterward the newspapers reported that my friends—the
+Buffalo Creek Gang of robbers—attacked his
+bank, and shot the cashier. May civilization never
+shut out the free air of the frontier while the old hero
+lives, in peace and honor, loved to the end and worshiped
+by all real frontiersmen.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">123</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVII">XVII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1860
+
+<span class="subhead">THE AUSTRALIAN DESERT</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">When</span> the Eternal Father was making the earth,
+at one time He filled the sea with swimming
+dragons, the air with flying dragons, and the land with
+hopping dragons big as elephants; but they were not a
+success, and so He swept them all away. After that
+he filled the southern continents with a small improved
+hopping dragon, that laid no eggs, but carried the baby
+in a pouch. There were queer half-invented fish,
+shadeless trees, and furry running birds like the emu
+and the moa. Then He swamped that southern world
+under the sea, and moved the workshop to our northern
+continents. But He left New Zealand and Australia
+just as they were, a scrap of the half-finished world
+with furry running birds, the hopping kangaroo, the
+shadeless trees, and half-invented fish.</p>
+
+<p>So when the English went to Australia it was not an
+ordinary voyage, but a journey backward through the
+ages, through goodness only knows how many millions
+of years to the fifth day of creation. It was like
+visiting the moon or Mars. To live and travel in such
+a strange land a man must be native born, bush raised,
+and cunning at that, on pain of death by famine.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">124</span></p>
+
+<p>The first British settlers, too, were convicts. The
+laws were so bad in England that a fellow might be
+deported merely for giving cheek to a judge; and the
+convicts on the whole were very decent people, brutally
+treated in the penal settlements. They used to escape
+to the bush, and runaway convicts explored Australia
+mainly in search of food. One of them, in Tasmania,
+used, whenever he escaped, to take a party with him
+and eat them one by one, until he ran short of food
+and had to surrender.</p>
+
+<p>Later on gold was discovered, and free settlers
+drifted in, filling the country, but the miners and the
+farmers were too busy earning a living to do much exploration.
+So the exploring fell to English gentlemen,
+brave men, but hopeless tenderfeet, who knew nothing
+of bushcraft and generally died of hunger or
+thirst in districts where the native-born colonial grows
+rich to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Edgar John Eyre, for instance, a Yorkshireman,
+landed in Sydney at the age of sixteen, and at twenty-five
+was a rich sheep-farmer, appointed by government
+protector of the black fellows. In 1840 the colonists
+of South Australia wanted a trail for drifting sheep
+into Western Australia, and young Eyre, from what
+he had learned among the savages, said the scheme
+was all bosh, in which he was perfectly right. He
+thought that the best line for exploring was northward,
+and set out to prove his words, but got tangled
+up in the salt bogs surrounding Torrens, and very
+nearly lost his whole party in an attempt to wade
+across. After that failure he felt that he had wasted
+the money subscribed in a wildcat project, so to make
+good set out again to find a route for sheep along the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">125</span>
+waterless south coast of the continent. He knew
+the route was impossible, but it is a poor sort of courage
+that has to feed on hope, and the men worth
+having are those who leave their hopes behind to
+march light while they do their duty.</p>
+
+<p>Eyre’s party consisted of himself and his ranch
+foreman Baxter, a favorite black boy Wylie, who
+was his servant, and two other natives who had been
+on the northward trip. They had nine horses, a pony,
+six sheep, and nine weeks’ rations on the pack animals.</p>
+
+<p>The first really dry stage was one hundred twenty-eight
+miles without a drop of water, and it was not
+the black fellows, but Eyre, the tenderfoot, who went
+ahead and found the well that saved them. The animals
+died off one by one, so that the stores had to be
+left behind, and there was no food but rotten horse-flesh
+which caused dysentery, no water save dew collected
+with a sponge from the bushes after the cold
+nights. The two black fellows deserted, but after
+three days came back penitent and starving, thankful
+to be reinstated.</p>
+
+<p>These black fellows did not believe the trip was
+possible, they wanted to go home, they thought the
+expedition well worth plundering, and so one morning
+while Eyre was rounding up the horses they shot Baxter,
+plundered the camp and bolted. Only Eyre and
+his boy Wylie were left, but if they lived the deserters
+might be punished. So the two black fellows, armed
+with Baxter’s gun, tried to hunt down Eyre and his
+boy with a view to murder. They came so near at
+night that Eyre once heard them shout to Wylie to
+desert. Eyre and the boy stole off, marching so<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">126</span>
+rapidly that the murderers were left behind and
+perished.</p>
+
+<p>A week later, still following the coast of the Great
+Bight, Wylie discovered a French ship lying at anchor,
+and the English skipper fed the explorers for a fortnight
+until they were well enough to go on. Twenty-three
+more days of terrible suffering brought Eyre and
+his boy, looking like a brace of scarecrows, to a hilltop
+overlooking the town of Albany. They had reached
+Western Australia, the first travelers to cross from
+the eastern to the western colonies.</p>
+
+<p>In after years Eyre was governor of Jamaica.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">127</span>
+surveying. There were several other white men, and
+three Afghans with a train of camels.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">128</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“The depot party of the V.&nbsp;E.&nbsp;E. leave this camp
+to-day to return to the Darling. I intend to go S.&nbsp;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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">129</span>
+twelve horses in good working condition. William
+Brahe.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class="locked">diary:—</span></p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Had they only been bushmen the tracks would have
+told Wills of help within his reach, the fish hooks<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">130</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>Such were the first crossings from east to west,
+and from south to north of the Australian continent.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">131</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XVIII">XVIII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1867
+
+<span class="subhead">THE HERO-STATESMAN</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">There</span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">132</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">133</span>
+member for Oaxaca was deputed to arrange with these
+clericals.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">134</span>
+raised the southern states of Mexico, and for two
+years held his own against the armies of France.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_134" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_134.jpg" width="1467" height="2181" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Porfirio Diaz</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">135</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Whether as bandit or king, Diaz has always been
+the handsomest man in Mexico, the most courteous,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">136</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">137</span>
+“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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">138</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIX">XIX<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1870
+
+<span class="subhead">THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap a"><span class="smcap1">A lady</span> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">139</span>
+the war, distinguished himself as a special correspondent
+during an Indian campaign in the West.
+Then he joined the staff of the New York <i>Herald</i>
+serving in the Abyssinian War, and the civil war in
+Spain. He allowed the <i>Herald</i> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">140</span>
+<i>Herald</i> had the money, and in Stanley, the very man
+for the job.</p>
+
+<p>Not that the <i>Herald</i>, 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 <i>Herald</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_140" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_140.jpg" width="1468" height="2242" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Henry M. Stanley</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>Stanley lived to reap the rewards of his great deeds,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">141</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">142</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XX">XX<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1871
+
+<span class="subhead">LORD STRATHCONA</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">143</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">144</span></p>
+
+<p>“Well, young man,” he said, “why are you not at
+your post?”</p>
+
+<p>“My eyes, sir; they got so bad, I’ve come to see a
+doctor.”</p>
+
+<p>“And who gave you permission to leave your
+post?”</p>
+
+<p>“No one, sir.” It would have taken a year to get
+permission, and his need was urgent.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">145</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">146</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">147</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">148</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXI">XXI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1872
+
+<span class="subhead">THE SEA HUNTERS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">149</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But no law disabled the Americans, and when the
+supply of sea otter failed on the Californian coast in
+1872 a schooner called the <i>Cygnet</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>When news came to Japan of this new way of getting
+rich, a young Englishman, Mr. H.&nbsp;J. Snow,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">150</span>
+bought a schooner, a hog-backed relic called the
+<i>Swallow</i> 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 <i>Swallow</i>
+swallowed up part of my finances, and the <i>Snowdrop</i>
+caused me to drop the rest.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">151</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">152</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In 1888, somewhat prejudiced against the virtuous
+company, Captain Snow came with the famous
+schooner <i>Nemo</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">153</span>
+woolen underclothes will sometimes turn leaden
+bullets.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>With three dying men, and three wounded, he got
+the sinking boat under sail and brought her alongside
+the schooner.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Rhyme of the Three<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">154</span>
+Sealers</i>, he told me, from Captain Lake in Yokohama.
+I had it from the mate of one of the three
+schooners, <i>The Stella</i>. She changed her name to
+<i>Adele</i>, and the mate became master, a little, round,
+fox-faced Norseman, Hans Hansen, of Christiania.
+In 1884 the <i>Adele</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Arabian Nights</i>. 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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">155</span>
+because the boats were swamped, and the garrison
+a little too prevalent ashore. On the voyage of
+1890 the <i>Adele</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">156</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXII">XXII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1879
+
+<span class="subhead">THE BUSHRANGERS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">157</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In December, the outlaws stuck up a sheep station,
+and robbed the bank at Euroa.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">158</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">159</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">160</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">161</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">162</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXIII">XXIII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1883
+
+<span class="subhead">THE PASSING OF THE BISON</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">May</span> I recommend a better book than this? If
+anybody wants to feel the veritable spirit of
+adventure, let him read <cite>My Life as an Indian</cite>, by
+F.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">163</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The truly respectable reader will be shocked to learn
+that this misguided youth went into partnership with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">164</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>The father, Bull’s Head, was a Gros Ventre, and
+hated Wolverine for being a Blackfoot.</p>
+
+<p>“I am going,” said Wolverine, “to steal the girl.
+Will you go with me?”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_165">165</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>So he got up, and flounced out of the lodge.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_166">166</span>
+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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_167">167</span></p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>Only one more white buffalo was ever taken, in
+1881, two years before the last herds were destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Hai Ya, my friend,’ he cried pleadingly, as he
+soared up in the air, still astride the saddle. Down<span class="pagenum" id="Page_168">168</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.’”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_169">169</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_170">170</span>
+So the police were not attacked by the Blackfeet, and
+they were welcomed by the American traders, who
+sold them food in abundance.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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?”</p>
+
+<p>“There is no place,” answered the trader, “where<span class="pagenum" id="Page_171">171</span>
+the white men have not traveled, and none of them
+can find buffalo.”</p>
+
+<p>“That being the case,” said the chief with a deep
+sigh, “misery and death are at hand for me and mine.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Hurry,” he commanded his women, “cook a meal
+for our friends. They must be hungry after their
+long ride.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In his next annual report the agent wrote much
+about the Blackfeet, whose “heathenish rites were<span class="pagenum" id="Page_172">172</span>
+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!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Next, he kicked open the agent’s office. “You ——
+—— ——,” said he.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_173">173</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXIV">XXIV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1885
+
+<span class="subhead">GORDON</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">During</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_174">174</span>
+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!’</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.’”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_175">175</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He was a Sunday-school teacher, and reared slum
+boys to manhood, he was lady bountiful in the parish,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_176">176</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_176" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_176.jpg" width="1473" height="2198" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Charles George Gordon</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>Long chapters would be required for the story of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_177">177</span>
+Gordon’s work in Bessarabia, Armenia, India, South
+Africa, or the second period in China.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_178">178</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_179">179</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXV">XXV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1896
+
+<span class="subhead">THE OUTLAW</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Dawn</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_180">180</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+<p>Inspector Jervis, with twenty police and some scouts,
+had been seventy hours in the saddle, and camped at<span class="pagenum" id="Page_181">181</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_182">182</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_183">183</span>
+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
+<span class="locked">back:—</span></p>
+
+<p>“Don’t fire, or you’ll hit me by mistake!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Some three weeks ago, Charcoal’s brothers, Left<span class="pagenum" id="Page_184">184</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_185">185</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_186">186</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXVI">XXVI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1898
+
+<span class="subhead">A KING AT TWENTY-FIVE</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">When</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_187">187</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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).</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_188">188</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_189">189</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Certainly, it makes rain all right,” answered Boyes.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_190">190</span>
+and all through the neighborhood of the camp the
+warriors were shouting, “Kill the white man!”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_191">191</span>
+a good idea. “What a good thing,” said he, “to
+keep a rush of savages out.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_192">192</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_193">193</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_194">194</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXVII">XXVII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1898
+
+<span class="subhead">JOURNEY OF EWART GROGAN</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">From</span> the Right Honorable Cecil Rhodes to Ewart
+S. Grogan in the year <span class="locked">1900:—</span></p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
+
+<p>Grogan was an undergraduate not only of Cambridge,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_195">195</span>
+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.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_196">196</span></p>
+
+<p>Now for a glimpse into this great adventure:</p>
+
+<p>“I had shot a zebra ... and turning out at five-thirty
+A.&nbsp;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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_197">197</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_198">198</span>
+actually struck me, or whether I was carried there by
+the rush of the country.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_199">199</span>
+in my soup, in fine, Watonga (the negro gun
+bearer) would not eat the potatoes that grew in the
+same country.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_200">200</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_201">201</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Captain Dunn: ‘How do you do?’</p>
+
+<p>“I: ‘Oh, very fit, thanks; how are you? Had any
+sport?’</p>
+
+<p>“Dunn: ‘Oh, pretty fair, but there is nothing
+here. Have a drink?’</p>
+
+<p>“Then we washed, lunched, discussed the war,
+(South Africa), and eventually Dunn asked where the
+devil I had come from.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_202">202</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXVIII">XXVIII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1900
+
+<span class="subhead">THE COWBOY PRESIDENT</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap al"><span class="smcap1">Let</span> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>Thus having prospected the ground he discovered<span class="pagenum" id="Page_203">203</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_204">204</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_204" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 25em;">
+  <img src="images/i_204.jpg" width="1986" height="3117" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Theodore Roosevelt</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_205">205</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_206">206</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_207">207</span>
+for life from any further progress. “Teddy”
+walked into the trap and sat down.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_208">208</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXIX">XXIX<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1905
+
+<span class="subhead">THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Once</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_209">209</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_210">210</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Gjöa</i> 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 <i>Joy</i> 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 <i>Joy</i> found
+some sole leather better than her own, a heap of useful<span class="pagenum" id="Page_211">211</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>A few days later the <i>Joy</i> 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 <i>Gjöa</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_212">212</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Joy</i>
+was saved, after a journey across dry rocks which
+ought to have smashed any ship afloat. She did not
+even leak.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_213">213</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Joy</i> 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 <i>Joy</i> went into winter quarters. But not alone.
+Ladies must have corsets ribbed with whalebone from<span class="pagenum" id="Page_214">214</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Joy</i> 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 <i>Joy</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>At last in the summer of 1906 the <i>Joy</i> 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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_215">215</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXX">XXX<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1588
+
+<span class="subhead">JOHN HAWKINS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Master John Hawkins</span>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_216">216</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Jesus</i>, of Lubeck, was so sorely hurt that
+she had to be abandoned, and only two small barks,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_217">217</span>
+the <i>Minion</i> and the <i>Judith</i>, escaped to sea. The
+Spaniards lost four galleons in that battle.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_216" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 26em;">
+  <img src="images/i_216.jpg" width="2002" height="3015" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir John Hawkins</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>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 <i>Minion</i> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>It was then that one hundred fourteen men volunteered
+to go ashore and the ship continued a very
+painful voyage.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_218">218</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_219">219</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXI">XXXI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1573
+
+<span class="subhead">FRANCIS DRAKE</span></span></h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> <i>Judith</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_220">220</span>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_220" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_220.jpg" width="1463" height="1848" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir Francis Drake</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>Greatly refreshed, the English went on northward,
+carefully inspecting the coast. At one place a sleeping<span class="pagenum" id="Page_221">221</span>
+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 <i>Cacafuego</i>,
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_222">222</span></p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Next year Drake was vice-admiral to Lord Howard
+in the destruction of the Spanish armada.</p>
+
+<p>In 1589 he led a fleet to deliver Portugal from the
+Spaniards, wherein he failed.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_222" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_222.jpg" width="1462" height="2188" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Queen Elizabeth</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_223">223</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXII">XXXII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1587
+
+<span class="subhead">THE FOUR ARMADAS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Here</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Portugal and Spain, under one crown, shared the
+plunder of the Indies and the mastery of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_224">224</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Arreliquias</i> capsized and sank.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>San Iago</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>As to the pilot who caused this little accident, he
+afterward had charge of the <i>San Thomas</i> “full of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_225">225</span>
+people, and most of the gentility of India,” and lost
+with all hands.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_226">226</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_227">227</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Revenge</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_228">228</span>
+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 <i>Revenge</i>; 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.</p>
+
+<p>On board the <i>Revenge</i> 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 <i>Revenge</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>Grenville was carried on board the <i>Flagship</i>, 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.”</p>
+
+<figure id="i_228" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_228.jpg" width="1455" height="2189" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir Richard Grenville</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_229">229</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Revenge</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
+
+<p>The Portuguese were by no means the first seamen
+to round the Cape of Good Hope. About six hundred
+years B.&nbsp;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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_230">230</span>
+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).
+<cite>Herodotus</cite>.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_231">231</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXIII">XXXIII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1583
+
+<span class="subhead">SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">“He</span> is not worthy to live at all, that for any fear
+of danger of death, shunneth his countrey’s
+service and his own honor.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_232">232</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Delight</i>, who, failing to bring them, got
+a terrific thrashing.</p>
+
+<p>When the <i>Delight</i>, 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 <i>Squirrel</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Squirrel</i>.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_233">233</span></p>
+
+<p>A green sea filled the <i>Squirrel</i> and she was near
+sinking, but as she shook the water off, Sir Humphrey
+Gilbert waved his hand to the <i>Golden Hind</i>. “Fear
+not, my masters!” he shouted, “we are as near to
+Heaven by sea as by land.”</p>
+
+<p>As the night fell, he was still seen sitting abaft with
+a book in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_234">234</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXIV">XXXIV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1603
+
+<span class="subhead">SIR WALTER RALEIGH</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">To</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_234" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_234.jpg" width="1464" height="1903" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir Walter Raleigh</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_235">235</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“I have,” he said on the scaffold, “a long journey
+to take, and must bid the company farewell.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>Then the executioner lost his nerve altogether,
+“What dost thou fear?” asked Raleigh. “Strike,
+man, strike!”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_236">236</span></p>
+
+<p>“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:</p>
+
+<p>“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,
+<i lang="la">Hic jacet</i>.”</p>
+
+<figure id="i_236" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_236.jpg" width="1455" height="2079" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">James I</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_237">237</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXV">XXXV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1608
+
+<span class="subhead">CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> sentence just quoted, the most beautiful perhaps
+in English prose, is copied from the <cite>History
+of the World</cite>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In presence of the ladies and both armies, Lord
+Turbishaw entered the lists on a prancing Arab, in<span class="pagenum" id="Page_238">238</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>After the taking and massacre of Reigall, Smith<span class="pagenum" id="Page_239">239</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_240">240</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_241">241</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_242">242</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_242" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 26em;">
+  <img src="images/i_242.jpg" width="2011" height="3015" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Captain John Smith</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_243">243</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>After hard bargaining Powhatan managed to get a
+very few beads for a hundred bushels of grain.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_244">244</span>
+officials and wasters were sent out from England to
+suppress the captain.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_245">245</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Mayflower</i>,
+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.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_246">246</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXVI">XXXVI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1670
+
+<span class="subhead">THE BUCCANEERS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The buccaneers of the West Indies were of many<span class="pagenum" id="Page_247">247</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_248">248</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_248" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_248.jpg" width="1450" height="2184" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Sir Henry Morgan</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_249">249</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_250">250</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_251">251</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_252">252</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXVII">XXXVII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1682
+
+<span class="subhead">THE VOYAGEURS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">This</span> chapter must begin with a very queer tale
+of rivers as adventurers exploring for new
+channels.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_253">253</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_254">254</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_255">255</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Griffin</i> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_256">256</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_256" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 20em;">
+  <img src="images/i_256.jpg" width="1534" height="2169" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Robert Cavalier de la Salle</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_257">257</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The officer he had left in charge at Fort Brokenheart<span class="pagenum" id="Page_258">258</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And La Salle returned. He found the Illinois town
+in ashes, littered with human bones. He found an<span class="pagenum" id="Page_259">259</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_260">260</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXVIII">XXXVIII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1741
+
+<span class="subhead">THE EXPLORERS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">From</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_261">261</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_262">262</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Stv Petr</i> and the <i>Stv Pavl</i>, and launched
+them, two years from the time of their outsetting from
+Saint Petersburg. Thirteen years they spent in exploring<span class="pagenum" id="Page_263">263</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Stv Petr</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_264">264</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_265">265</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_266">266</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XXXIX">XXXIX<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1750
+
+<span class="subhead">THE PIRATES</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">There</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>This is a respectable world, my masters, but it is
+getting dull.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There were so many pirates one hardly knows which<span class="pagenum" id="Page_267">267</span>
+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 <i>Duke</i>, 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?”</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>On the coast of Madagascar, lying in a bay, two
+sloops were found, whose seamen supposed the <i>Duke</i>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as it happened, the Great Mogul, emperor of
+Hindustan, was sending his daughter with a splendid<span class="pagenum" id="Page_268">268</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Duke</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_269">269</span>
+of grief at Bideford in Devon, leaving no money even
+to pay for his coffin.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_270">270</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>So Captain Woods found them when he went in the
+ship <i>Delicia</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>After that he kept their majesties at a distance,
+sending officers ashore to trade with them until he had<span class="pagenum" id="Page_271">271</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_272">272</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XL">XL<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1776
+
+<span class="subhead">DANIEL BOONE</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap al"><span class="smcap1">As</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_273">273</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_274">274</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Under a giant elm the settlers, being British, had
+church and parliament, but only on one Sunday did<span class="pagenum" id="Page_275">275</span>
+the parson pray for King George before the news
+came that congress needed prayers for the new republic
+at war with the motherland.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_276">276</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_276" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_276.jpg" width="1460" height="2189" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Daniel Boone</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_277">277</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_278">278</span>
+the famished garrison dared to throw open their
+gates.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_279">279</span>
+As he swam the river Israel died, but the father
+carried his body on into the shelter of the forest.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_280">280</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLI">XLI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1813
+
+<span class="subhead">ANDREW JACKSON</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_281">281</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_282">282</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLII">XLII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1836
+
+<span class="subhead">SAM HOUSTON</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Serving</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_283">283</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_284">284</span>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_285">285</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLIII">XLIII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1836
+
+<span class="subhead">DAVY CROCKETT</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Far</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_286">286</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indentq">“Saddled and bridled, and booted rode he,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">A plume in his helmet, a sword at his knee.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the girl took up the verse, her song broken
+with sobbing:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indentq">“But toom’ cam’ the saddle, all bluidy to see,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And hame cam’ the steed, but hame never cam’ he.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>On the twenty-fourth the bombardment commenced,
+and thirty cowboys broke in through the Mexican lines
+to aid the garrison.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_287">287</span></p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>March third.—“We have given over all hope.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_288">288</span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_289">289</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indentdq">“‘But toom’ cam’ the saddle, all bluidy to see,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And hame cam’ the steed, but hame never cam’ he.’</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>“He spoke no more, and a few minutes after, died.
+Poor Kate! who will tell this to thee?”</p>
+
+<p>March fifth: “Pop, pop, pop! Bom, bom, bom!
+throughout the day—no time for memorandums now—go
+ahead. Liberty and independence forever!”</p>
+
+<figure id="i_288" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_288.jpg" width="1491" height="1950" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">David Crockett</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<div class="tb">* * * * *</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?”</p>
+
+<p>“Have I not told you before how to dispose of
+them—why do you bring them to me?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_290">290</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Up with your banner, Freedom.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Thy champions cling to thee.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">They’ll follow where’er you lead ’em—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">To death or victory.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Up with your banner, Freedom!</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Tyrants and slaves are rushing</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">To tread thee in the dust;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Their blood will soon be gushing</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And stain our knives with rust,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">But not thy banner, Freedom!</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">While Stars and Stripes are flying</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Our blood we’ll freely shed;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">No groan will ’scape the dying,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Seeing thee o’er his head.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Up with your banner, Freedom!</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_291">291</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_292">292</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLIV">XLIV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1793
+
+<span class="subhead">ALEXANDER MACKENZIE</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_293">293</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>The Russian fur trade passed the Ural Hills, explored
+Siberia and crossed to Russian America.</p>
+
+<p>Westward the French and British fur trade opened
+up the length and breadth of North America.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_294">294</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>When MacKenzie reached Clear-water River, Mr.
+Peter Pond of the Nor’westers had just shot Mr. Ross
+of the X.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+<p>MacKenzie took with him four French voyageurs,
+a German and some Indians, working them as a rule
+from three <span class="smcap">A.&nbsp;M.</span> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_295">295</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_296">296</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Each canoe was a cedar log hollowed with fire, then
+spread with boiling water, a vessel not unlike a gondola.
+One such canoe, the <i>Tillicum</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_297">297</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>“Alexander MacKenzie, from Canada by land 22nd
+July, 1793.”</p>
+
+<p>He had discovered one of the world’s great rivers,
+and made the first crossing of North America.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_298">298</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLV">XLV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">THE WHITE MAN’S COMING</span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">It</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_299">299</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_300">300</span>
+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!</p>
+
+<p>“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!”</p>
+
+<p>But as the man bragged he kept twitching the rope,
+and down fell the pot, smash on the ground, and
+broken all to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>Now as to the first white man who came up Skeena
+River:</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_301">301</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_302">302</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLVI">XLVI
+
+<span class="subhead">THE BEAVER</span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">In</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>Beaver</i>. Then the merchant adventurers of the
+Hudson’s Bay Company, in bell toppers, Hessian boots
+and white chokers, gave three hearty cheers.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Beaver</i> 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 <i>Columbia</i>,
+a slow and rather helpless chaperon, who fouled and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_303">303</span>
+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 <i>Columbia’s</i> doctor, found
+his chief engineer “in a beastly state of intoxication,”
+and finally, at the Columbia River, hounded his
+crew into mutiny.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Beaver</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_304">304</span></p>
+
+<p>In her days of glory, the <i>Beaver</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>It was in 1851 that the <i>Beaver</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_305">305</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>News spread along the coast and soon a ship appeared,
+the H.&nbsp;B.&nbsp;C. brigantine <i>Una</i>. 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 <i>Una</i>
+sailed with a load of gold, but was cast away with her
+cargo in the Straits of Fuca.</p>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Thetis</i> had gone away
+when the schooner <i>Susan Sturgis</i> 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.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_306">306</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Beaver</i>. Now it
+so happened that on the passage southward the
+<i>Beaver</i> 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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_307">307</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLVII">XLVII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1911
+
+<span class="subhead">THE CONQUEST OF THE POLES</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_308">308</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_309">309</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Roosevelt</i>,
+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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_310">310</span>
+Teddy! Bite ’em in two! Go it! That’s fine, my
+beauty! Now again! Once more!”</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Roosevelt</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was a clever scheme, and in theory the officers,
+turned back with their Eskimo parties, were needed to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_311">311</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_312">312</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>Here is the record left at the North <span class="locked">Pole:—</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_313">313</span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p class="right">
+“90 N. Lat., North Pole,<br>
+“April 6th, 1909.
+</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“I leave this record and United States flag in possession.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span style="margin-right: 6em;">“<span class="smcap">Robert E. Peary</span>,</span><br>
+“United States Navy.”
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_314">314</span>
+a race, to call one another liars, and were sorry that
+Peary should for a moment lapse from the dignity
+expected of brave men.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_315">315</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLVIII">XLVIII
+
+<span class="subhead">WOMEN</span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Two</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Murray Hall, a well-known Tammany politician
+and a successful business man, died in New York,
+and was found to be a woman.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_316">316</span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Levant</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_317">317</span>
+sherifa of Wazan, whose son is reverenced by the
+Moslems in North Africa as a sacred personage.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor James Barry, M.&nbsp;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_318">318</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;M.&nbsp;S. <i>Swallow</i>.
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_319">319</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Anna Mills, able seaman on board the <i>Maidstone</i>
+frigate in 1740, made herself famous for desperate
+valor.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Mary Dixon did sixteen years’ service, and fought
+at Waterloo. She was still living fifty years afterward,
+“a strong, powerful, old woman.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_320">320</span>
+was pensioned by the prince regent, George IV. A
+tombstone is inscribed to her memory in the old churchyard
+at Brighton.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Medusa</i>, 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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_321">321</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XLIX">XLIX
+
+<span class="subhead">THE CONQUERORS OF INDIA</span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Only</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_322">322</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_323">323</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>De Boigne had been succeeded as commander-in-chief<span class="pagenum" id="Page_324">324</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>That night Thomas dined with the officers, and all
+were merry when Bourguien proposed a toast insulting<span class="pagenum" id="Page_325">325</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Perron had no need of Scindhia now, but was
+leagued with Napoleon to hand over the Indian empire
+to France. He betrayed his master.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_326">326</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>And Arthur Wellesley, victor in that stupendous
+triumph of Assaye, became the Iron Duke of Wellington,
+destined to liberate Europe at Waterloo.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_327">327</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="L">L<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1805
+
+<span class="subhead">THE MAN WHO SHOT LORD NELSON</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">This</span> 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 <i>Redoubtable</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>Then Nelson came, with twenty-seven battle-ships,
+raging for a fight, and Villeneuve had to oblige for
+fear of Napoleon’s anger.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Redoubtable</i>, engaged
+Lord Nelson’s <i>Victory</i>, losing thirty men to her
+first discharge.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_328">328</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>Guillemard goes on to describe a duel between the
+topmen of the <i>Redoubtable</i> and those of the <i>Victory</i>
+only a few yards distant, and when it was finished he
+lay alone among the dead who crowded the swaying
+platform.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_329">329</span></p>
+
+<p>“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 <i>Redoubtable</i>. 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 <i>Victory</i>; 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 <i>Victory</i>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_330">330</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>When these were taken on board the <i>Victory</i>, 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
+<i>Redoubtable</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Aigle</i> was cast
+away, and not one man escaped; the <i>Santissima Trinidad</i>,
+the largest ship in the world, foundered; the <i>Indomitable</i>
+sank with fifteen hundred wounded; the
+<i>Achille</i>, with her officers shooting themselves, her<span class="pagenum" id="Page_331">331</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<figure id="i_330" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 19em;">
+  <img src="images/i_330.jpg" width="1462" height="2200" alt=" ">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><span class="smcap">Lord Nelson</span>
+</figcaption></figure>
+
+<p>When the day broke Admiral Villeneuve was
+brought on board the <i>Victory</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_332">332</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>So it was the fate of the slayer of Nelson to be
+alone with Villeneuve at his death.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The lad kept his mouth shut.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_333">333</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LI">LI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1812
+
+<span class="subhead">THE FALL OF NAPOLEON</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">The</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_334">334</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In mortal fear the emperor attempted to treat for
+peace, but Russia kept him waiting for a month, while<span class="pagenum" id="Page_335">335</span>
+her troops closed down on the line of escape, and
+the winter was coming on—the Russian winter.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>No words of mine could ever tell the story, but here
+are passages from the <i>Memoirs</i> 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 <span class="locked">die:—</span></p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_336">336</span>
+to God’s mercy, taking care to avoid the dead
+bodies.</p>
+
+<p>“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!’</p>
+
+<p>“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!’</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_337">337</span>
+... 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.”</p>
+
+<p>Such was the road, and here was the passing of the
+army which Burgogne had overtaken.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>So far the army had kept its discipline, and at the
+passage of the River Berezina the engineers contrived<span class="pagenum" id="Page_338">338</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_339">339</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_340">340</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LII">LII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1813
+
+<span class="subhead">RISING WOLF</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">This</span> is the story of Rising Wolf, condensed from
+the beautiful narrative in <cite>My Life as an Indian</cite>,
+by J.&nbsp;B. Schultz.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“Hugh, junior, was born on the family estate at
+Three Rivers (Quebec) and attended the parish school<span class="pagenum" id="Page_341">341</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_342">342</span>
+their competition. Monroe was to do his best to prevent
+it.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_343">343</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.’</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_344">344</span></p>
+
+<p>“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!</p>
+
+<p>“Monroe often referred to that first trip with the
+Piegans as the happiest time of his life.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_345">345</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_346">346</span>
+I bought. Surely the girl was not for me. I
+suffered.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.”</p>
+
+<p>“‘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.’</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_347">347</span>
+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?</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_348">348</span></p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_349">349</span>
+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.’”</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_350">350</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LIII">LIII<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1819
+
+<span class="subhead">SIMON BOLIVAR</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap b"><span class="smcap1">Once</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Now tell me,” a lady said once, “what animal
+reminds one most of the Señor Bolivar?”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_351">351</span></p>
+
+<p>“I don’t know,” drawled a Spaniard of that time,
+“to what class of beasts these South Americans
+belong.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_352">352</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_353">353</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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 <em>in the hospital</em>, without any
+exception whatever.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_354">354</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It was in 1819 that Bolivar led a force of two thousand<span class="pagenum" id="Page_355">355</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_356">356</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_357">357</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LIV">LIV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.&nbsp;D. 1812
+
+<span class="subhead">THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">When</span> Lieutenant Lord Thomas Cochrane commanded
+the brig of war <i>Speedy</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>For thirteen months the <i>Speedy</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_358">358</span>
+a French fleet in the anchorage at Aix. The
+fleet got into a panic and destroyed itself.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_359">359</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>He had a fancy for the frigate, <i>Esmeralda</i>, 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_360">360</span>
+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 <i>Esmeralda</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Pedro
+Primeiro</i>. This he manned with British and Yankee
+adventurers. He had two other small but fairly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_361">361</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_362">362</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_363">363</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LV">LV<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.D. 1823
+
+<span class="subhead">THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">Far</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_364">364</span>
+a little particular as to their meat being really
+pig, but otherwise well mannered and popular.</p>
+
+<p>Now of these Pakeha Maoris, one has left a book.
+He omitted his name from the book of <cite>Old New Zealand</cite>,
+and never mentioned dates, but tradition says
+he was Mr. F.&nbsp;C. Maning, and that he lived as a
+Maori and trader for forty years, from 1823 to 1863
+when the work was published.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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?”</p>
+
+<p>But then came a powerful chief, by name Relation-eater.
+“Pretty work this,” he began, “<em>good</em> 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_365">365</span>
+turn round, to keep correct time.) “Who killed the
+Pakeha? It was Melons. You are a nice man, killing
+<em>my</em> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <em>werry</em> scarce—they
+had to tattoo a slave a bit ago, and the villain ran
+away, tattooin’ and all!”</p>
+
+<p>“What!”</p>
+
+<p>“Bolted before he was fit to kill,” said the sailor,
+mournful to think how dishonest people could be.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_366">366</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“An old man-of-war’s man defending <em>his</em> washing,
+called out, ‘Hit out, sir! ... our mob will be here in
+five minutes!’</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“Then came our mob to the rescue and the assailants
+fled.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_367">367</span></p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.’</p>
+
+<p>“He made no answer but a scowl of defiance. ‘I<span class="pagenum" id="Page_368">368</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_369">369</span>
+killed him, I might have serious difficulties with his
+tribe.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“He spoke for the first time, ‘Enough! I am
+beaten; let me rise.’</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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 <i lang="fr">coup de grace</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+
+<p>In the sequel this desperado committed two more
+murders “and also killed in fair fight, with his own<span class="pagenum" id="Page_370">370</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Maning was never again molested, and making
+full allowance for their foibles, speaks with a very
+tender love for that race of warriors.</p>
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_371">371</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="LVI">LVI<br>
+
+<span class="subhead">A.D. 1840
+
+<span class="subhead">A TALE OF VENGEANCE</span></span>
+</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="drop-cap"><span class="smcap1">In</span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_372">372</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“Please marry me,” said Jim, as she rode beside
+him.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, when the pine leaves turn yellow.”</p>
+
+<p>Jim thought this over, and complained that pine
+leaves do not turn yellow.</p>
+
+<p>“Please!” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,” answered Pine Leaf, “when you see a red-headed
+Indian.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_373">373</span></p>
+
+<p>Jim, who had wives enough already as became his
+position, sulked for this heroine.</p>
+
+<p>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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.’”</p>
+
+<p>She was soon at his side chasing the flying enemy,
+who left ninety-one killed in the field.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_374">374</span>
+presence at his side in battle gave him increased
+strength and courage, while daily his love for her
+flamed higher.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>While Pine Leaf sat in the lodge, her heart was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_375">375</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_376">376</span>
+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!”</p>
+
+<p>So Jim Beckwourth, who was Medicine Calf, head
+chief of the Crow nation, was wedded to Pine Leaf,
+their great heroine.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p class="p2 center smaller">THE END</p>
+
+<div class="chapter transnote">
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_Notes">Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
+
+<p>Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made
+consistent when a predominant preference was found
+in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.</p>
+
+<p>Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced
+quotation marks were remedied when the change was
+obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.</p>
+
+<p>Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned
+between paragraphs and outside quotations.</p>
+
+<p>The pages in the introductory chapter “Adventurers”
+were not numbered. Transcriber did so with
+Roman numbers.</p>
+
+<p><a href="#Page_210">Page 210</a>: “the overload Joy” may be a misprint
+for “the overloaded Joy”.</p>
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>