Chapter V: Part 5

The villagers were naked Indians, and found their new mayor an unexpected terror. He drilled them into soldiers, marched them to his native city Oaxaca, captured the place by assault, drove out a local usurper who was making things too hot for the citizens, and then amid the wild rejoicings that followed, was promoted to a captaincy in the national guards.

Captain Diaz explained to his national guards that they were fine men, but needed a little tactical exercise. So he took them out for a gentle course of maneuvers, to try their teeth on a rebellion which happened to be camped conveniently in the neighborhood. When he had finished exercising his men, there was no rebellion left, so he marched them home. He had to come home because he was dangerously wounded.

It must be explained that there were two big political parties, the clericals, and the liberals--both pledged to steal everything in sight. Diaz was scarcely healed of his wound, when a clerical excursion came down to steal the city. He thrashed them sick, he chased them until they dropped, and thrashed them again until they scattered in helpless panic.

The liberal president rewarded Colonel Diaz with a post of such eminent danger, that he had to fight for his life through two whole years before he could get a vacation. Then Oaxaca, to procure him a holiday, sent up the young soldier as member of parliament to the capital.

Of course the clerical army objected strongly to the debates of a liberal congress sitting in parliament at the capital. They came and spoiled the session by laying siege to the City of Mexico. Then the member for Oaxaca was deputed to arrange with these clericals.

He left his seat in the house, gathered his forces, and chased that clerical army for two months. At last, dead weary, the clericals had camped for supper, when Diaz romped in and thrashed them. He got that supper.

So disgusted were the clerical leaders that they now invited Napoleon III to send an army of invasion. Undismayed, the unfortunate liberals fought a joint army of French and clericals, checked them under the snows of Mount Orizaba, and so routed them before the walls of Puebla that it was nine months before they felt well enough to renew the attack. The day of that victory is celebrated by the Mexicans as their great national festival.

In time, the French, forty thousand strong, not to mention their clerical allies, returned to the assault of Puebla, and in front of the city found Diaz commanding an outpost. The place was only a large rest-house for pack-trains, and when the outer gate was carried, the French charged in with a rush. One man remained to defend the courtyard, Colonel Diaz, with a field-piece, firing shrapnel, mowing away the French in swathes until his people rallied from their panic, charged across the square, and recovered the lost gates.

The city held out for sixty days, but succumbed to famine, and the French could not persuade such a man as Diaz to give them any parole. They locked him up in a tower, and his dungeon had but a little iron-barred window far up in the walls. Diaz got through those bars, escaped, rallied a handful of Mexicans, armed them by capturing a French convoy camp, raised the southern states of Mexico, and for two years held his own against the armies of France.

President Juarez had been driven away into the northern desert, a fugitive, the Emperor Maximilian reigned in the capital, and Marshal Bazaine commanded the French forces that tried to conquer Diaz in the south. The Mexican hero had three thousand men and a chain of forts. Behind that chain of forts he was busy reorganizing the government of the southern states, and among other details, founding a school for girls in his native city.

Marshal Bazaine, the traitor, who afterward sold France to the Germans, attempted to bribe Diaz, but, failing in that, brought nearly fifty thousand men to attack three thousand. Slowly he drove the unfortunate nationalists to Oaxaca and there Diaz made one of the most glorious defenses in the annals of war. He melted the cathedral bells for cannon-balls, he mounted a gun in the empty belfry, where he and his starving followers fought their last great fight, until he stood alone among the dead, firing charge after charge into the siege lines.

Once more he was cast into prison, only to make such frantic attempts at escape that in the end he succeeded in scaling an impossible wall. He was an outlaw now, living by robbery, hunted like a wolf, and yet on the second day after that escape, he commanded a gang of bandits and captured a French garrison. He ambuscaded an expedition sent against him, raised an army, and reconquered Southern Mexico.

It was then (1867) that the United States compelled the French to retire. President Juarez marched from the northern deserts, gathering the people as he came, besieged Querétaro, captured and shot the Emperor Maximilian. Diaz marched from the south, entered the City of Mexico, handed over the capital to his triumphant president, resigned his commission as commander-in-chief, and retired in deep contentment to manufacture sugar in Oaxaca.

For nine years the hero made sugar. Over an area in the north as large as France, the Apache Indians butchered every man, woman and child with fiendish tortures. The whole distracted nation cried in its agony for a leader, but every respectable man who tried to help was promptly denounced by the government, stripped of his possessions and driven into exile. At last General Diaz could bear it no longer, made a few remarks and was prosecuted. He fled, and there began a period of the wildest adventures conceivable, while the government attempted to hunt him down. He raised an insurrection in the north, but after a series of extraordinary victories, found the southward march impossible. When next he entered the republic of Mexico, he came disguised as a laborer by sea to the port of Tampico.

At Vera Cruz he landed, and after a series of almost miraculous escapes from capture, succeeded in walking to Oaxaca. There he raised his last rebellion, and with four thousand followers ambuscaded a government army, taking three thousand prisoners, the guns and all the transport. President Lerdo heard the news, and bolted with all the cash. General Diaz took the City of Mexico and declared himself president of the republic.

Whether as bandit or king, Diaz has always been the handsomest man in Mexico, the most courteous, the most charming, and terrific as lightning when in action. The country suffered from a very plague of politicians until one day he dropped in as a visitor, quite unexpected, at Vera Cruz, selected the eleven leading politicians without the slightest bias as to their views, put them up against the city wall and shot them. Politics was abated.

The leading industry of the country was highway robbery, until the president, exquisitely sympathetic, invited all the principal robbers to consult with him as to details of government. He formed them into a body of mounted police, which swept like a whirlwind through the republic and put a sudden end to brigandage. Capital punishment not being permitted by the humane government, the robbers were all shot for “attempting to escape.”

Next in importance was the mining of silver, and the recent decline in its value threatened to ruin Mexico. By the magic of his finance, Diaz used that crushing reverse to lace the country with railroads, equip the cities with electric lights and traction power far in advance of any appliances we have in England, open great seaports, and litter all the states of Mexico with prosperous factories. Meanwhile he paid off the national debt, and made his coinage sound.

He never managed himself to speak any other language than his own majestic, slow Castilian, but he knew that English is to be the tongue of mankind. Every child in Mexico had to go to school to learn English.

And this greatest of modern sovereigns went about among his people the simplest, most accessible of men. “They may kill me if they want to,” he said once, “but they don’t want to. They rather like me.” So one might see him taking his morning ride, wearing the beautiful leather dress of the Mexican horsemen, or later in the day, in a tweed suit going down to the office by tram car, or on his holidays hunting the nine-foot cats which we call cougar, or of a Sunday going to church with his wife and children. On duty he was an absolute monarch, off duty a kindly citizen, and it seemed to all of us who knew the country that he would die as he had lived, still in harness. One did not expect too much--the so-called elections were a pleasant farce, but the country was a deal better governed than the western half of the United States. Any fellow entitled to a linen collar in Europe wore a revolver in Mexico, as part of the dress of a gentleman, but in the wildest districts I never carried a cartridge. Diaz had made his country a land of peace and order, strong, respected, prosperous, with every outward sign of coming greatness. Excepting only Napoleon and the late Japanese emperor, he was both in war and peace the greatest leader our world has ever known. But the people proved unworthy of their chief; to-day he is a broken exile, and Mexico has lapsed back into anarchy.

XIX

A. D. 1870

THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

A lady who remembers John Rowlands at the workhouse school in Denbigh tells me that he was a lazy disagreeable boy. He is also described as a “full-faced, stubborn, self-willed, round-headed, uncompromising, deep fellow. He was particularly strong in the trunk, but not very smart or elegant about the legs, which were disproportionately short. His temperament was unusually secretive; he could stand no chaff nor the least bit of humor.”

Perhaps that is why he ran away to sea; but anyway a sailing ship landed him in New Orleans, where a rich merchant adopted him as a son. Of course a workhouse boy has nothing to be patriotic about, so it was quite natural that this Welsh youth should become a good American, also that he should give up the name his mother bore, taking that of his benefactor, Henry M. Stanley. The old man died, leaving him nothing, and for two years there is no record until the American Civil War gave him a chance of proving his patriotism to his adopted country. He was so tremendously patriotic that he served on both sides, first in the confederate army, then in the federal navy. He proved a very brave man, and after the war, distinguished himself as a special correspondent during an Indian campaign in the West. Then he joined the staff of the New York _Herald_ serving in the Abyssinian War, and the civil war in Spain. He allowed the _Herald_ to contradict a rumor that he was a Welshman. “Mr. Stanley,” said the paper, “is neither an Ap-Jones, nor an Ap-Thomas. Missouri and not Wales is his birthplace.”

Privately he spent his holidays with his mother and family in Wales, speaking Welsh no doubt with a strong American accent. The whitewashed American has always a piercing twang, even if he has adopted as his “native” land, soft-voiced Missouri, or polished Louisiana.

In those days Doctor Livingstone was missing. The gentle daring explorer had found Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika, and to the westward of them, a mile wide river, the Lualaba, which he supposed to be headwaters of the Nile. He was slowly dying of fever, almost penniless, and always when he reached the verge of some new discovery, his cowardly negro carriers revolted, or ran away, leaving him to his fate. No word of him had reached the world for years. England was anxious as to the fate of one of her greatest men, so there were various attempts to send relief, delayed by the expense, and not perhaps handled by really first-rate men. To find Livingstone would be a most tremendous world-wide advertisement, say for a patent-pill man, a soap manufacturer, or a newspaper. All that was needed was unlimited cash, and the services of a first-rate practical traveler, vulgar enough to use the lost hero as so much “copy” for his newspaper. The New York _Herald_ had the money, and in Stanley, the very man for the job.

Not that the _Herald_, or Stanley cared twopence about the fate of Livingstone. The journal sent the man to make a big journey through Asia Minor and Persia on his way to Zanzibar. The more Livingstone’s rescue was delayed the better the “ad” for Stanley and the _Herald_.

As to the journey, Stanley’s story has been amply advertised, and we have no other version because his white followers died. He found Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, and had the grace to reverence, comfort and succor a dying man.

As to Stanley’s magnificent feat of exploring the great lakes, and descending Livingstone’s river to the mouth of the Congo, again his story is well exploited while the version of his white followers is missing, because they gave their lives.

In Stanley’s expedition which founded the Congo State, and in his relief of Emin Pasha, the white men were more fortunate, and some lived. It is rumored that they did not like Mr. Stanley, but his negro followers most certainly adored him, serving in one journey after another. There can be no doubt too, that with the unlimited funds that financed and his own fine merits as a traveler, Stanley did more than any other explorer to open up the dark continent, and to solve its age-long mysteries. It was not his fault that Livingstone stayed on in the wilderness to die, that the Congo Free State became the biggest scandal of modern times, or that Emin Pasha flatly refused to be rescued from governing the Soudan.

Stanley lived to reap the rewards of his great deeds, to forget that he was a native of Missouri and a freeborn American citizen, to accept the honor of knighthood and to sit in the British parliament. Whether as a Welshman, or an American, a confederate, or a federal, a Belgian subject or a Britisher, he always knew on which side his bread was buttered.

XX

A. D. 1871

LORD STRATHCONA

It is nearly a century now since Lord Strathcona was born in a Highland cottage. His father, Alexander Smith, kept a little shop at Forres, in Elgin; his mother, Barbara Stewart, knew while she reared the lad that the world would hear of him. His school, founded by a returned adventurer, was one which sent out settlers for the colonies, soldiers for the army, miners for the gold-fields, bankers for England, men to every corner of the world. As the lad grew, he saw the soldiers, the sailors, the adventurers, who from time to time came tired home to Forres, and among these was his uncle, John Stewart, famous in the annals of the Canadian frontier, rich, distinguished, commending all youngsters to do as he had done. When Donald Smith was in his eighteenth year, this uncle procured him a clerkship in the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Canada was in revolt when in 1837 the youngster reached Montreal, for Robert Nelson had proclaimed a Canadian republic and the British troops were busy driving the republicans into the United States. So there was bloodshed, the burning of houses, the filling of the jails with rebels to be convicted presently and hanged. Out of all this noise and confusion, Donald Smith was sent into the silence of Labrador, the unknown wilderness of the Northeast Territory, where the first explorer, McLean, was searching for tribes of Eskimos that might be induced to trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company. “In September (1838),” wrote McLean, “I was gratified by the arrival of despatches from Canada by a young clerk appointed to the district. By him we received the first intelligence of the stirring events which had taken place in the colonies during the preceding year.” So Smith had taken a year to carry the news of the Canadian revolt to that remote camp of the explorers.

Henceforward, for many years there exists no public record of Donald Smith’s career, and he has flatly refused to tell the story lest he should appear to be advertising. His work consisted of trading with the savages for skins, of commanding small outposts, healing the sick, administering justice, bookkeeping, and of immense journeys by canoe in summer, or cariole drawn by a team of dogs in winter. The winter is arctic in that Northeast Territory, and a very pleasant season between blizzards, but the summer is cursed with a plague of insects, black flies by day, mosquitoes by night almost beyond endurance. Like other men in the service of the company, Mr. Smith had the usual adventures by flood and field, the peril of the snow-storms, the wrecking of canoes. There is but one story extant. His eyesight seemed to be failing, and after much pain he ventured on a journey of many months to seek the help of a doctor in Montreal. Sir George Simpson, governor of the company, met him in the outskirts of the city.

“Well, young man,” he said, “why are you not at your post?”

“My eyes, sir; they got so bad, I’ve come to see a doctor.”

“And who gave you permission to leave your post?”

“No one, sir.” It would have taken a year to get permission, and his need was urgent.

“Then, sir,” answered the governor, “if it’s a question between your eyes, and your service in the Hudson’s Bay Company, you’ll take my advice, and return this instant to your post.”

Without another word, without a glance toward the city this man turned on his tracks, and set off to tramp a thousand miles back to his duty.

The man who has learned to obey has learned to command, and wherever Smith was stationed, the books were accurate, the trade was profitable. He was not heard of save in the return of profits, while step by step he rose to higher and higher command, until at the age of forty-eight he was appointed governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, sovereign from the Atlantic to the Pacific, reigning over a country nearly as large as Europe. To his predecessors this had been the crowning of an ambitious life; to him, it was only the beginning of his great career.

The Canadian colonies were then being welded into a nation and the first act of the new Dominion government was to buy from the Hudson’s Bay Company the whole of its enormous empire, two thousand miles wide and nearly five thousand miles long. Never was there such a sale of land, at such a price, for the cash payment worked out at about two shillings per square mile. Two-thirds of the money went to the sleeping partners of the company in England; one-third--thanks to Mr. Smith’s persuasion--was granted to the working officers in Rupert’s Land. Mr. Smith’s own share seems to have been the little nest egg from which his fortune has hatched.

When the news of the great land sale reached the Red River of the north, the people there broke out in revolt, set up a republic, and installed Louis Riel as president at Fort Garry.

Naturally this did not meet the views of the Canadian government, which had bought the country, or of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which owned the stolen fort. Mr. Smith, governor of the company, was sent at once as commissioner for the Canadian government to restore the settlement to order. On his arrival the rebel president promptly put him in jail, and openly threatened his life. In this awkward situation, Mr. Smith contrived not only to stay alive, but to conduct a public meeting, with President Riel acting as his interpreter to the French half-breed rebels. The temperature at this outdoor meeting was twenty degrees below zero, with a keen wind, but in course of five hours’ debating, Mr. Smith so undermined the rebel authority that from that time it began to collapse. Afterward, although the rebels murdered one prisoner, and times were more than exciting, Mr. Smith’s policy gradually sapped the rebellion, until, when the present Lord Wolseley arrived with British troops, Riel and his deluded half-breeds bolted. So, thanks to Mr. Smith, Fort Garry is now Winnipeg, the central city of Canada, capital of her central province, Manitoba.

But when Sir Donald Smith had resigned from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s service, and became a politician, he schemed, with unheard-of daring, for even greater ends. At his suggestion, the Northwest Mounted Police was formed and sent out to take possession of the Great Plains. That added a wheat field to Canada which will very soon be able to feed the British empire. Next he speculated with every dollar he could raise, on a rusty railway track, which some American builders had abandoned because they were bankrupt. He got the rail head into Winnipeg, and a large trade opened with the United States. So began the boom that turned Manitoba into a populous country, where the buffalo had ranged before his coming. Now he was able to startle the Canadian government with the warning that unless they hurried up with a railway, binding the whole Dominion from ocean to ocean, all this rich western country would drift into the United States. When the government had failed in an attempt to build the impossible railway, Sir Donald got Montreal financiers together, cousins and friends of his own, staked every dollar he had, made them gamble as heavily, and set to work on the biggest road ever constructed. The country to be traversed was almost unexplored, almost uninhabited except by savages, fourteen hundred miles of rock and forest, a thousand miles of plains, six hundred miles of high alps.

The syndicate building the road consisted of merchants in a provincial town not bigger then than Bristol, and when they met for business it was to wonder vaguely where the month’s pay was to come from for their men. They would part for the night to think, and by morning, Donald Smith would say, “Well, here’s another million--that ought to do for a bit.” On November seven, 1885, he drove the last spike, the golden spike, that completed the Canadian Pacific railway, and welded Canada into a living nation.

Since then Lord Strathcona has endowed a university and given a big hospital to Montreal. At a cost of three hundred thousand pounds he presented the famous regiment known as Strathcona’s Horse, to the service of his country, and to-day, in his ninety-third year is working hard as Canadian high commissioner in London.

XXI

A. D. 1872

THE SEA HUNTERS

The Japanese have heroes and adventurers just as fine as our own, most valiant and worthy knights. Unhappily I am too stupid to remember their honorable names, to understand their motives, or to make out exactly what they were playing at. It is rather a pity they have to be left out, but at least we can deal with one very odd phase of adventure in the Japan seas.

The daring seamen of old Japan used to think nothing of crossing the Pacific to raid the American coast for slaves. But two or three hundred years ago the reigning shogun made up his mind that slaving was immoral. So he pronounced an edict by which the builders of junks were forbidden to fill in their stern frame with the usual panels. The junks were still good enough for coastwise trade at home, but if they dared the swell of the outer ocean a following sea would poop them and send them to the bottom. That put a stop to the slave trade; but no king can prevent storms, and law or no law, disabled junks were sometimes swept by the big black current and the westerly gales right across the Pacific Ocean. The law made only one difference, that the crippled junks never got back to Japan; and if their castaway seamen reached America the native tribes enslaved them. I find that during the first half of the nineteenth century the average was one junk in forty-two months cast away on the coasts of America.

Now let us turn to another effect of this strange law that disabled Japanese shipping. Northward of Japan are the Kuril Islands in a region of almost perpetual fog, bad storms and bitter cold, ice pack, strong currents and tide rips, combed by the fanged reefs, with plenty of earthquakes and eruptions to allay any sense of monotony. The large and hairy natives are called the Ainu, who live by fishing, and used to catch sea otter and fur seal. These furs found their way via Japan to China, where sea-otter fur was part of the costly official winter dress of the Chinese mandarins. As to the seal, their whiskers are worth two shillings a set for cleaning opium pipes, and one part of the carcass sells at a shilling a time for medicine, apart from the worth of the fur.

Now the law that disabled the junks made it impossible for Japan to do much trade in the Kurils, so that the Russians actually got there first as colonists.

But no law disabled the Americans, and when the supply of sea otter failed on the Californian coast in 1872 a schooner called the _Cygnet_ crossed the Pacific to the Kuril Islands. There the sea-otters were plentiful in the kelp beds, tame as cats and eager to inspect the hunters’ boats. Their skins fetched from eighty to ninety dollars.

When news came to Japan of this new way of getting rich, a young Englishman, Mr. H. J. Snow, bought a schooner, a hog-backed relic called the _Swallow_ in which he set out for the hunting. Three days out, a gale dismasted her, and putting in for shelter she was cast away in the Kuriles. Mr. Snow’s second venture was likewise cast away on a desert isle, where the crew wintered. “My vessels,” he says, “were appropriately named. The _Swallow_ swallowed up part of my finances, and the _Snowdrop_ caused me to drop the rest.”

During the winter another crew of white men were in quarters on a distant headland of the same Island Yeturup, and were cooking their Christmas dinner when they met with an accident. A dispute had arisen between two rival cooks as to how to fry fritters, and during the argument a pan of boiling fat capsized into the stove and caught alight. The men escaped through the flames half dressed, their clothes on fire, into the snow-clad wilderness and a shrewd wind. Then they set up a shelter of driftwood with the burning ruin in front to keep them warm, while they gravely debated as to whether they ought to cremate the cooks upon the ashes of their home and of their Christmas dinner.

To understand the adventures of the sea hunters we must follow the story of the leased islands. The Alaska Commercial Company, of San Francisco, leased the best islands for seal and otter fishing. From the United States the company leased the Pribilof Islands in Bering Sea, a great fur-seal metropolis with a population of nearly four millions. They had armed native gamekeepers and the help of an American gunboat. From Russia the company leased Bering and Copper Islands off Kamchatka, and Cape Patience on Saghalian with its outlier Robber Island. There also they had native gamekeepers, a patrol ship, and the help of Russian troops and gunboats. The company had likewise tame newspapers to preach about the wickedness of the sea hunters and call them bad names. As a rule the sea hunters did their hunting far out at sea where it was perfectly lawful. At the worst they landed on the forbidden islands as poachers. The real difference between the two parties was that the sea hunters took all the risks, while the company had no risks and took all the profits.

In 1883 Snow made his first raid on Bering Island. Night fell while his crew were busy clubbing seals, and they had killed about six hundred when the garrison rushed them. Of course the hunters made haste to the boats, but Captain Snow missed his men who should have followed him, and as hundreds of seals were taking to the water he joined them until an outlying rock gave shelter behind which he squatted down, waist-deep. When the landscape became more peaceful he set off along the shore of boulders, stumbling, falling and molested by yapping foxes. He had to throw rocks to keep them off. When he found the going too bad he took to the hills, but sea boots reaching to the hips are not comfy for long walks, and when he pulled them off he found how surprisingly sharp are the stones in an Arctic tundra. He pulled them on again, and after a long time came abreast of his schooner, where he found one of the seamen. They hailed and a boat took them on board, where the shipkeeper was found to be drunk, and the Japanese bos’n much in need of a thrashing. Captain Snow supplied what was needed to the bos’n and had a big supper, but could not sail as the second mate was still missing. He turned in for a night’s rest.

Next morning bright and early came a company’s steamer with a Russian officer and two soldiers who searched the schooner. There was not a trace of evidence on board, but on general principles the vessel was seized and condemned, all her people suffering some months of imprisonment at Vladivostok.

In 1888, somewhat prejudiced against the virtuous company, Captain Snow came with the famous schooner _Nemo_, back to the scene of his misadventure. One morning with three boats he went prospecting for otter close along shore, shot four, and his hunters one, then gave the signal of return to the schooner. At that moment two shots rang out from behind the boulders ashore, and a third, which peeled some skin from his hand, followed by a fusillade like a hail storm. Of the Japanese seamen in Snow’s boat the boat steerer was shot through the backbone. A second man was hit first in one leg, then in the other, but went on pulling. The stroke oar, shot in the calf, fell and lay, seemingly dead, but really cautious. Then the other two men bent down and Snow was shot in the leg.

So rapid was the firing that the guns ashore must have heated partly melting the leaden bullets, for on board the boat there was a distinct perfume of molten lead. Three of the bullets which struck the captain seem to have been deflected by his woolen jersey, and one which got through happened to strike a fold. It had been noted in the Franco-Prussian War that woolen underclothes will sometimes turn leaden bullets.

“I remember,” says Captain Snow, “weighing the chances ... of swimming beside the boat, but decided that we should be just as liable to be drowned as shot, as no one could stand the cold water for long. For the greater part of the time I was vigorously plying my paddle ... and only presenting the edge of my body, the left side, to the enemy. This is how it was that the bullets which struck me all entered my clothing on the left side. I expected every moment to be shot through the body, and I could not help wondering how it would feel.”

With three dying men, and three wounded, he got the sinking boat under sail and brought her alongside the schooner.

Of course it was very good of the Alaska Commercial Company to preserve the wild game of the islands, but even gamekeepers may show excess of zeal when it comes to wholesale murder. To all of us who were in that trade it is a matter of keen regret that the officers ashore took such good cover. Their guards, and the Cossacks, were kindly souls enough, ready and willing--in the absence of the officers to sell skins to the raiders or even, after some refreshments, to help in clubbing a few hundred seals. It was rather awkward, though, for one of the schooners at Cape Patience when in the midst of these festivities a gunboat came round the corner.

The American and the Japanese schooners were not always quite good friends, and there is a queer story of a triangular duel between three vessels, fought in a fog. Mr. Kipling had the _Rhyme of the Three Sealers_, he told me, from Captain Lake in Yokohama. I had it from the mate of one of the three schooners, _The Stella_. She changed her name to _Adele_, and the mate became master, a little, round, fox-faced Norseman, Hans Hansen, of Christiania. In 1884 the _Adele_ was captured by an American gunboat and taken to San Francisco. Hansen said that he and his men were marched through the streets shackled, and great was the howl about pirates, but when the case came up for trial the court had no jurisdiction, and the ship was released. From that event dates the name “Yokohama Pirates,” and Hansen’s nickname as the Flying Dutchman. Because at the time of capture he had for once been a perfectly innocent deep sea sealer, he swore everlasting war against the United States, transferred his ship to the port of Victoria, British Columbia, and would hoist by turns the British, Japanese, German, Norwegian or even American flag, as suited his convenience.

Once when I asked him why not the Black Flag, he grinned, remarking that them old-fashioned pirates had no business sense. Year after year he raided the forbidden islands to subvert the garrisons, rob warehouses, or plunder the rookeries, while gunboats of four nations failed to effect his capture. In port he was a pattern of innocent virtue, at sea his superb seamanship made him as hard to catch as a ghost, and his adventures beat the _Arabian Nights_. I was with him as an ordinary seaman in the voyage of 1889, a winter raid upon the Pribilof Islands. At the first attempt we clawed off a lee shore in a hurricane, the second resulted in a mutiny, and the third landing was not very successful, because the boats were swamped, and the garrison a little too prevalent ashore. On the voyage of 1890 the _Adele_ took four hundred skins, but in 1891 was cast away on the North Island of the Queen Charlotte group, without any loss of life. The Flying Dutchman took to mining on the outer coast of Vancouver, where he rescued a shipwrecked crew, but afterward perished in the attempt to save a drowning Indian.

Quite apart from the so-called Yokohama pirates, a large fleet of law-abiding Canadian schooners hunted the fur seal at sea, a matter which led to some slight unpleasantness between the American and the British governments. There was hunting also in the seas about Cape Horn; but the Yokohama schooners have left behind them by far the finest memories. Captain Snow says that from first to last some fifty white men’s schooners sailed out of Yokohama. Of five there is no record, two took to sealing when the sea otter no longer paid, and four were sold out of the business. The Russians sank one, captured and lost two, captured and condemned three, all six being a dead loss to their owners. For the rest, twenty-two were cast away, and twelve foundered with all hands at sea, so that the total loss was forty ships out of fifty. For daring seamanship and gallant adventure sea hunting made a school of manhood hard to match in this tame modern world, and war is a very tame affair to those who shared the fun.

XXII

A. D. 1879

THE BUSHRANGERS

It is a merit to love dumb animals, but to steal them is an excess of virtue that is sure to cause trouble with the police. All Australians have a passion for horses, but thirty years ago, the Australian bushmen developed such a mania for horse-stealing, that the mounted police were fairly run off their legs. The feeling between bushmen and police became so exceedingly bitter that in 1878 a constable, attempting to make arrests, was beset and wounded. The fight took place in the house of a Mrs. Kelly, who got penal servitude, whereas her sons, Ned and Dan, who did the actual shooting, escaped to the hills. A hundred pounds were offered for their arrest.

Both of Mrs. Kelly’s sons were tainted, born and raised thieves. At the age of sixteen Ned had served an apprenticeship in robbery under arms with Power the bushranger, who described him as a cowardly young brute. Now, in his twenty-fifth year he was far from brave. Dan, aged seventeen, was a ferocious young wolf, but manly. As the brothers lurked in hiding they were joined by Joe Byrne, aged twenty-one, a gallant and sweet-tempered lad gone wrong, and by Steve Hart, a despicable little cur. All four were superb as riders, scouts and bushmen, fairly good shots, intimate with every inch of the country, supported by hundreds of kinsmen and the sympathy of the people generally in the war they had declared against the police.

In October, Sergeant Kennedy and three constables patroling in search of the gang, were surprised by the outlaws in camp, and, as they showed fight, Ned and Dan Kelly attacked them. Only one trooper escaped. At this outrage, Byrne was horrified, Hart scared, but the Kellys forced them to fire into Sergeant Kennedy’s corpse that they might share the guilt. Then Ned Kelly, touched by the gallantry with which the sergeant had fought, brought a cloak and reverently covered his body.

In December, the outlaws stuck up a sheep station, and robbed the bank at Euroa.

In February, 1879, they surprised the police station at Jerilderie, locked two policemen in the cells, disguised themselves as constables, captured the town, imprisoning a crowd of people in the hotel, then sacked the bank, and rode away shouting and singing with their plunder.

By this time the rewards offered for their capture amounted to eight thousand pounds, and the whole strength of the Victoria police was engaged, with native trackers, in hunting them. Had these wicked robbers ever showed rudeness to a woman, or plundered a poor man, or behaved meanly with their stolen wealth, they would have been betrayed at once to the police, but the Australians are sportsmen, and there is a gallantry in robbery under arms that appeals to misguided hearts.

The four bad men were so polite to all women, so kindly to unarmed citizens, so humorous in their methods, so generous with their gold, so daring in making war against a powerful British state, that they were esteemed as heroes. Even bad heroes are better than none at all, and they were not betrayed even by poor folk to whom the rewards would have been a fortune. For two years they outwitted the whole force of police, scouts and trackers at a cost to the state of one hundred fifteen thousand pounds.

But with all this the best of Australian manhood was engaged in the hunt, and the real heroes of this adventure were the police, who made no moan through months of outrageous labor and suffering in the mountains.

Superintendent Hare, in charge of the hunt, made friends with a kinsman of the outlaws, a young horse-thief, named Aaron Sherritt. This lad knew all the secrets of the outlaws, was like a brother to them, and yet, so worshiped Mr. Hare that he served with the police as a spy. In treachery to his kinsmen, he was at least faithful to his master, knowing that he went to his own death.

He expected the outlaws to come by night to the house of Joe Byrne’s mother, and led Mr. Hare’s patrol, which lay for the next month in hiding upon a hill overlooking the homestead. Aaron was engaged to Byrne’s sister, was daily at the house and slowly a dim suspicion dawned on the outlaw’s mother. Then the old woman, uneasily searching the hills, stumbled into the police bivouac, and saw Aaron Sherritt, the spy, asleep in that company. His dress betrayed him to her, a white shirt, breeches and long boots, impossible to mistake. And when he knew what had happened, the lad turned white. “Now,” he muttered, “I am a dead man.”

Mrs. Byrne sent the news of Aaron’s treachery to her outlawed son in the hills. On June twenty-sixth, the spy was called out of his mother’s cabin by some one who cried that he had lost his way. Aaron opened the door, and Joe Byrne shot him through the heart.

So the outlaws had broken cover after months of hiding, and at once Superintendent Hare brought police and trackers by a special train that they might take up the trail of their retreat back to the mountains. The outlaws, foreseeing this movement, tore up the railway track, so that the train, with its load of police, might be thrown into a gully, and all who survived the wreck were to be shot down without mercy.

This snare which they set for their enemies was badly planned. Instead of tearing up the tracks themselves, they brought men for the job from Glenrowan station close by; and then, to prevent their presence from being reported, they had to hold the village instead of mounting guard upon the trap. They cut the wires, secured the station and herded all the villagers into the Glenrowan hotel some two hundred yards from the railway. Then they had to wait for the train from three o’clock on Monday morning all through the long day, and the dreary night, guarding sixty prisoners and watching for the police. They amused the prisoners, men, women and children with an impromptu dance in which they shared by turns, then with raids upon outlying houses, and with athletic feats, but always on the alert lest any man escape to give the alarm, or the police arrive unobserved. The strain was beyond human endurance. So Byrne, fresh from the murder of his chum Aaron Sherritt, relieved his mind by getting drunk, Ned Kelly kept up his courage by bragging of the death prepared for his enemies, and, worst of all, the local schoolmaster was allowed to take his sick wife home.

The schoolmaster had been most sympathetic all day long, helping the outlaws until he won their confidence; but now, escaped to his house, he made haste to prepare a lantern covered with a red shawl with which to signal the train. He stood upon the track waving the red light, when in the pitchy darkness before dawn, the train-load of police came blindly straight for the death-trap. The train slowed, stopped and was saved.

Out of plowshares and scrap iron, a blacksmith had forged for each of the outlaws a cuirass and helmet of plate armor, and now at the sound of the approaching train they dressed in this bullet-proof harness. Ned Kelly’s suit weighed ninety-seven pounds, and the others were similar, so clumsy that the wearer could neither run to attack nor mount a horse to escape. Moreover, with a rifle at the shoulder, it was impossible to see for taking aim. So armed, the robbers had got no farther than the hotel veranda when the police charged, and a fierce engagement began. The prisoners huddled within the house had no shelter from its frail board walls, and two of the children were wounded.

Byrne was drinking at the bar when a bullet struck him dead. Ned Kelly, attempting to desert his comrades, made for the yard, but finding that all the horses had been shot, strolled back laughing amid a storm of lead. Every bullet striking his armor made him reel, and he had been five times wounded, but now he began to walk about the yard emptying his revolvers into the police. Then a sergeant fired at his legs and the outlaw dropped, appealing abjectly for his life.

The escape of the panic-stricken prisoners had been arranged, but for hours the fight went on until toward noon the house stood a riddled and ghastly shell, with no sign of life. A bundle of straw was lighted against the gable end, and the building was soon ablaze. Rumors now spread that an old man lay wounded in the house, and a priest gallantly led in a rush of police to the rescue. The old man was saved, and under the thick smoke, Dan Kelly and Hart were seen lying dead upon the floor in their armor.

Ned Kelly died as he had lived, a coward, being almost carried to the gallows, and that evening his sister Kate exhibited herself as a show in a music-hall at Melbourne. So ended this bloody tragedy in hideous farce, and with the destruction of the outlaws closed a long period of disorder. Except in remote regions of the frontier, robbery under arms has ceased forever in the Australasian states.

XXIII

A. D. 1883

THE PASSING OF THE BISON

May I recommend a better book than this? If anybody wants to feel the veritable spirit of adventure, let him read _My Life as an Indian_, by F. W. Schultz. His life is an example in manliness, his record the best we have of a red Indian tribe, his book the most spacious and lovely in frontier literature.

The Blackfeet got their name from the oil-dressed, arrow-proof leather of their moccasins (skin shoes) which were dark in color. They were profoundly religious, scrupulously clean--bathing daily, even through thick ice, fastidiously moral, a gay light-hearted people of a temper like the French, and even among Indians, the most generous race in the world, they were famed for their hospitality. The savage is to the white man, what the child is to the grown-up, of lesser intellect, but much nearer to God.

When the white men reached the plains, the Blackfeet mustered about forty thousand mounted men, hunters. The national sport was stealing horses and scalps, but there was no organized war until the pressure of the whites drove the tribes westward, crowding them together, so that they had to fight for the good hunting grounds. Then there were wars in which the Blackfeet more than held their own. Next came the smallpox, and afterward the West was not so crowded. Whole nations were swept away, and those that lived were sorely reduced in numbers. After that came white frontiersmen to trade, to hunt, or as missionaries. The Indians called them Hat-wearers, but the Blackfeet had another name--the Stone-hearts. The whites were nearly always welcomed, but presently they came in larger numbers, claiming the land for mining camps and ranching, which drove away the game. The Indians fought the whites, fought for their land and their food, their liberty; but a savage with bow and arrows has no chance against a soldier with a rifle. For every white man killed a hundred would come to the funeral, so the Blackfeet saw that it was no use fighting.

In 1853 they made a treaty that secured them their hunting ground, forever free. The Great Father at Washington pledged his honor, and they were quite content. It was the same with every western tribe that the United States was pledged by solemn treaty which the Indians kept, and the white men always broke. Troops drove the settlers off, but went away and the settlers came back. So young warriors broke loose from the chiefs to scalp those settlers and burn their homes; and the army would break vengeance. Such were the conditions when Schultz, a green New England boy of nineteen, came by steamer up the Missouri to Fort Benton.

The truly respectable reader will be shocked to learn that this misguided youth went into partnership with a half-breed trader, selling water with a flavoring of whisky at very high prices to the Indians. In other words, he earned his living at a very risky trade. He married a Blackfoot girl, becoming a squaw-man, which, as everybody knows, is beneath contempt. In other words, he was honest enough to marry a most charming woman instead of betraying her to ruin. He went on guilty expeditions to snatch scalps and steal horses. He shared the national sports and so learned the inmost heart of a brave people.

When our own countrymen get too self-righteous, bigoted, priggish, smug and generally beyond bearing, what a blessing it would be if we had a few wild Indians to collect their scalps!

Schultz had a chum, a Blackfoot warrior called Wolverine, who taught him the sign language and a deal of bush craft. At times this Wolverine was unhappy, and once the white man asked him what was wrong. “There is nothing troubling me,” answered the Indian, then after a long pause: “I lied. I am in great trouble. I love Piks-ah’-ki, and she loves me, but I can not have her; her father will not give her to me.”

The father, Bull’s Head, was a Gros Ventre, and hated Wolverine for being a Blackfoot.

“I am going,” said Wolverine, “to steal the girl. Will you go with me?”

So one evening the pair stole away from the Blackfoot camp, rode eastward across the plains, marching by night, hiding by day. Once, at a river crossing they discovered the trails of a large war party of Crees on the way to the Gros Ventre camp. “I knew,” said Wolverine, laughing happily, “that my medicine would not desert me, and see, the way is clear before us. We will ride boldly into camp, to the lodge of the great chief, Three Bears. I will say that our chief sent me to warn him of a war party working this way. I will say that we ourselves have seen their tracks along the bars of the river. Then the Gros Ventres will guard their horses; they will ambush the enemy; there will be a big fight, big excitement. All the men will rush to the fight, and that will be my time. I will call Piks-ah’-ki, we will mount our horses and fly.” So riding hard, they came in sight of the Gros Ventre camp. “Ah!” said Wolverine, “there is the camp. Now for the big lie.” Then more seriously, “Pity me, great Sun! Pity me, you under water creatures of my dream! Help me to obtain that which I seek here.”

So they came to the lodge of Three Bears, presented tobacco as a present from the chief Big Lake and were welcomed with a special feast of boiled dog, which had to be eaten, no matter how sick they felt. Gros Ventres believed the enemy were coming and kept close watch on their herd, but Bull’s Head sat in the chief’s lodge, sneering at the visitors, “To-night,” he said, “I shall sit in my lodge and watch for women stealers, and my gun will be loaded.”

So he got up, and flounced out of the lodge.

That night all happened as Wolverine had said, for the Cree war party attempted to stampede the herd, and all the Gros Ventres, including Bull’s Head, ran out of camp for the battle. Wolverine and Schultz found Bull’s Head’s daughter ready but crying in her mother’s arms at parting. They mounted, they rode, they thought they were clear of the battle-field, when suddenly a gun exploded in front of Wolverine, and down he went with his horse. Then the girl screamed, “They have killed him! Help, white man, they have killed him!”

But Wolverine fired his gun at something that moved in the sage brush, and a deep groan followed. Wolverine clubbed something three of four times with his rifle. Then stooping, he picked up the gun which had been fired at him. “I count a coup,” he laughed, and handed the enemy’s weapon to Schultz.

At that moment Bull’s Head appeared, and in a frightful passion seized his daughter’s horse by the head attempting to drag her from the saddle. She shrieked, while Wolverine sprang at her father, threw him, disarmed him and flung away his gun. Then the young lover leaped lightly behind the girl upon her pony, and the father raged astern while they fled.

Four days’ ride brought them home to the Blackfoot camp, but Bull’s Head got there first, and whined about his poverty until Wolverine gave him ten ponies, also the captured gun. It was not much to pay for a beautiful woman who became a faithful and loving wife.

One day news reached the three main camps of the Blackfoot nation that a white buffalo had been sighted in the herds. Midwinter as it was, the hunters turned out, for the man who killed a white buffalo was held to have the especial favor of the Sun, and not only he, but his tribe. The head chief of a nation has been known to use the robe for a seat, but it could never be sold, and at the next building of a temple to the Sun it was offered up as a national sacrifice.