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CAPTAINS OF ADVENTURE

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* * * * *