Chapter II: Part 2

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.

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.

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.

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.