Chapter VII: Part 7

Once in the forest he found the skeleton of an ape of gigantic size. The natives explained that such apes were plentiful, although no white man has ever seen one. They have a bad habit of stealing negro women.

At the northern end of the Rift, where the country flattens out toward the Nile, Grogan and Sharp met with the officials of British Uganda, which was then in a shocking muddle of mutinous black troops, raids from the Congo, drought and famine. There Mr. Sharp left the expedition, making his way to Mombasa; the carriers were sent back home as a good riddance, and Mr. Grogan, with only five faithful attendants, pushed on down the Nile Valley. The river was blocked with a weed called the sudd, which a British expedition was trying to clear away, and Grogan was forced to the eastward through horrible marshlands. He had in all only fourteen men when he came to the Dinka country, and met that queer race of swamp folk. They are very tall, some even gigantic, beautifully built, but broad-footed, walking with feet picked up high and thrust far forward--the gait of a pelican. At rest they stand on one leg like a wading bird, the loose leg akimbo with its foot on the straight leg’s knee. They are fierce, too, and one tribe made an attack on Grogan’s party. His men threw down their loads, screaming that they were lost, and the best Congo soldier fell stabbed to the heart, while two others went down with cracked skulls.

“I took the chief,” says Grogan, “and his right-hand man with the double barrel, then, turning round, found that my boy had bolted with my revolver. At the same moment a Dinka hurled his spear at me; I dodged it, but he rushed in and dealt me a swinging blow with his club, which I fortunately warded with my arm, receiving no more damage than a wholesome bruise. I poked my empty gun at his stomach, and he turned, receiving a second afterwards a dum-dum in the small of his back. Then they broke and ran, my army with eight guns having succeeded in firing two shots. I climbed up an ant hill that was close by, and could see them watching at about three hundred yards for our next move, which was an unexpected one, for I planted a dum-dum apparently in the stomach of one of the most obtrusive ruffians, whom I recognized by his great height. They then hurried off and bunched at about seven hundred yards, and another shot, whether fatal or not I could not see, sent them off in all directions.”

The battle was finished, and Grogan toiled on with his wounded men, famished, desperate, almost hopeless. One day in desert country he came to the camp of Captain Dunn, a British officer.

“Captain Dunn: ‘How do you do?’

“I: ‘Oh, very fit, thanks; how are you? Had any sport?’

“Dunn: ‘Oh, pretty fair, but there is nothing here. Have a drink?’

“Then we washed, lunched, discussed the war, (South Africa), and eventually Dunn asked where the devil I had come from.”

The battle of Omdurman had destroyed the dervish power, and opened the Nile so that Grogan went on in ease and comfort by steamer to Khartoum, to Cairo, and home. Still he heard in his sleep the night melody of the lions--“The usual cry is a sort of vast sigh, taken up by the chorus with a deep sob, sob, sob, or a curious rumbling noise. But the pukka roar is indescribable ... it seems to permeate the whole universe, thundering, rumbling, majestic: there is no music in the world so sweet.”

It is hard to part with this Irish gentleman, whose fourteen months’ traverse of the Dark Continent is the finest deed in the history of African exploration.

XXVIII

A. D. 1900

THE COWBOY PRESIDENT

Let others appraise the merits of this great American gentleman as governor of New York, secretary of the United States Navy, colonel of the Rough Riders, historian of his pet hero, Oliver Cromwell, and, finally, president of the republic. He had spent half his life as an adventurer on the wild frontier breaking horses, punching cows, fighting grizzly bears, before he ever tackled the politicians, and he had much more fun by the camp-fire than he got in his marble palace. Here is his memory of a prairie fire:--“As I galloped by I saw that the fire had struck the trees a quarter of a mile below me, in the dried timber it instantly sprang aloft like a giant, and roared in a thunderous monotone as it swept up the coulée. I galloped to the hill ridge ahead, saw that the fire line had already reached the divide, and turned my horse sharp on his haunches. As I again passed under the trees the fire, running like a race horse in the bush, had reached the road; its breath was hot in my face; tongues of quivering flame leaped over my head, and kindled the grass on the hillside fifty yards away.”

Thus having prospected the ground he discovered means of saving himself, his companions, and his camp from the rushing flames. It is an old artifice of the frontier to start a fresh fire, burn a few acres, and take refuge on the charred ground while the storm of flame sweeps by on either hand. But this was not enough. The fire was burning the good pasture of his cattle and, unless stayed, might sweep away not only leagues of grass, but ricks and houses. “Before dark,” he continues, “we drove to camp and shot a stray steer, and then split its carcass in two length ways with an ax. After sundown the wind lulled--two of us on horseback dragging a half carcass bloody side down, by means of ropes leading from our saddle-horns to the fore and hind legs, the other two following on foot with slickers and wet blankets. There was a reddish glow in the night air, and the waving bending lines of flame showed in great bright curves against the hillside ahead of us. The flames stood upright two or three feet high. Lengthening the ropes, one of us spurred his horse across the fire line, and then wheeling, we dragged the carcass along it, one horseman being on the burnt ground, the other on the unburnt grass, while the body of the steer lay lengthwise across the line. The weight and the blood smothered the fire as we twitched the carcass over the burning grass, and the two men following behind with their blankets and slickers (oilskins) readily beat out any isolated tufts of flame. Sometimes there would be a slight puff of wind, and then the man on the grass side of the line ran the risk of a scorching.

“We were blackened with smoke, and the taut ropes hurt our thighs, while at times the plunging horses tried to break or bolt. It was worse when we came to some deep gully or ravine--we could see nothing, and simply spurred our horses into it anywhere, taking our chances. Down we would go, stumbling, sliding and pitching, over cut banks and into holes and bushes, while the carcass bounded behind, now catching on a stump, and now fetching loose with a ‘pluck’ that brought it full on the horses’ haunches, driving them nearly crazy with fright. By midnight the half carcass was worn through, but we had stifled the fire in the comparatively level country to the eastwards. Back we went to camp, drank huge drafts of muddy water, devoured roast ox-ribs, and dragged out the other half carcass to fight the fire in the west. There was some little risk to us who were on horseback, dragging the carcass; we had to feel our way along knife-like ridges in the dark, one ahead and the other behind while the steer dangled over the precipice on one side, and in going down the buttes and into the cañons only by extreme care could we avoid getting tangled in the ropes and rolling down in a heap.” So at last the gallant fight was abandoned, and looking back upon the fire which they had failed to conquer: “In the darkness it looked like the rush of a mighty army.”

Short of cowboys and lunatics, nobody could have imagined such a feat of horsemanship. Of that pattern is frontier adventure--daring gone mad; and yet it is very rarely that the frontiersman finds the day’s work worth recording, or takes the trouble to set down on paper the stark naked facts of an incident more exciting than a shipwreck, more dangerous than a battle, and far transcending the common experience of men.

Traveling alone in the Rockies, Colonel Roosevelt came at sundown to a little ridge whence he could look into the hollow beyond--and there he saw a big grizzly walking thoughtfully home to bed. At the first shot, “he uttered a loud moaning grunt and plunged forward at a heavy gallop, while I raced obliquely down the hill to cut him off. After going a few hundred feet he reached a laurel thicket ... which he did not leave.... As I halted I heard a peculiar savage whine from the heart of the brush. Accordingly I began to skirt the edge standing on tiptoe, and gazing earnestly in to see if I could not get a glimpse of his hide. When I was at the narrowest part of the thicket he suddenly left it directly opposite, and then wheeled and stood broadside to me on the hillside a little above. He turned his head stiffly toward me, scarlet strings of froth hung from his lips, his eyes burned like embers in the gloom. I held true, aiming behind the shoulder, and my bullet shattered the point or lower end of his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and challenge, blowing the bloody foam from his mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white fangs; and then he charged straight at me, crashing and bounding through the laurel bushes so that it was hard to aim.

“I waited until he came to a fallen tree, raking him as he topped it with a ball which entered his chest and went through the cavity of his body, but he neither swerved nor flinched, and at the moment I did not know that I had struck him. He came unsteadily on, and in another moment was close upon me. I fired for his forehead, but my bullet went low, entering his open mouth, smashing his lower jaw, and going into the neck. I leaped to one side almost as I pulled trigger, and through the hanging smoke the first thing I saw was his paw as he made a vicious side blow at me. The rest of his charge carried him past. As he struck he lurched forward, leaving a pool of bright blood where his muzzle hit the ground; but he recovered himself and made two or three jumps onward, while I hurriedly jammed a couple of cartridges into the magazine, my rifle only holding four, all of which I had fired. Then he tried to pull up, but as he did so his muscles seemed to give way, his head drooped, and he rolled over--each of my first three bullets had inflicted a mortal wound.”

This man who had fought grizzly bears came rather as a surprise among the politicians in silk hats who run the United States. He had all the gentry at his back because he is the first man of unquestioned birth and breeding who has entered the political bear-pit since the country squires who followed George Washington. He had all the army at his back because he had charged the heights at Santiago de Cuba with conspicuous valor at the head of his own regiment of cowboys. He had the navy at his back because as secretary for the navy he had successfully governed the fleet. But he was no politician when he came forward to claim the presidency of the United States. Seeing that he could not be ignored the wire-puller set a trap for this innocent and gave him the place of vice-president. The vice-president has little to do, can only succeed to the throne in the event of the president’s death, and is, after a brief term, barred for life from any further progress. “Teddy” walked into the trap and sat down.

But when President McKinley was murdered the politicians found that they had made a most surprising and gigantic blunder. By their own act the cowboy bear fighter must succeed to the vacant seat as chief magistrate of the republic. President Roosevelt happened to be away at the time, hunting bears in the Adirondack wilderness, and there began a frantic search of mountain peaks and forest solitudes for the missing ruler of seventy million people. When he was found, and had paid the last honors to his dead friend, William McKinley, he was obliged to proceed to Washington, and there take the oaths. His women folk had a terrible time before they could persuade him to wear the silk hat and frock coat which there serve in lieu of coronation robes, but he consented even to that for the sake of the gorgeous time he was to have with the politicians afterward.

XXIX

A. D. 1905

THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

Once upon a time the Foul Fiend wanted a death-trap that would pick out all the bravest men and destroy them, so he invented the Northwest Passage.

So when Europe needed a short route to China round the north end of the Americas our seamen set out to find a channel, and even when they knew that any route must lie through the high Arctic, still they were not going to be beaten. Our white men rule the world because we refuse to be beaten.

The seamen died of scurvy, and it was two hundred years before they found out how to stay alive on salted food, by drinking lime juice. Safe from scurvy, they reached the gate of the passage at Lancaster Sound, but there the winter caught them, so that their ships were squashed in driving ice, and the men died of cold and hunger. Then the explorers got ships too strong to be crushed; they copied the dress of the Eskimo to keep them warm; and they carried food enough to last for years. Deeper and deeper they forced their way into the Arctic, but now they neared the magnetic pole where the compass is useless, in belts of drifting fog darker than midnight. Still they dared to go on, but the inner channels of the Arctic were found to be frozen until the autumn gales broke up the ice-fields, leaving barely six weeks for navigation before the winter frosts. At that rate the three-thousand-mile passage would take three years. Besides, the ship must carry a deck load of sledge dogs with their food, so that the men might escape overland in case they were cast away. Only a big ship could carry the supplies, but once again the seamen dared to try. And now came the last test to break men’s hearts--the sea lane proved to be so foul with shoals and rocks that no large vessel could possibly squeeze through. At last, after three hundred years, the British seamen had to own defeat. Our explorers had mapped the entire route, but no ship could make the passage because it was impossible to raise money for the venture.

Why should we want to get through this useless channel? Because it was the test for perfect manhood free from all care for money, utterly unselfish, of the highest intellect, patience, endurance and the last possible extremity of valor.

And where the English failed a Norseman, Nordenskjöld made the Northeast passage round the coast of Asia. Still nobody dared to broach the Northwest passage round America, until a young Norse seaman solved the riddle. Where no ship could cross the shoals it might be possible with a fishing boat drawing only six feet of water. But she could not carry five years’ supplies for men and dogs. Science came to the rescue with foods that would pack into a tenth part of their proper bulk, and as to the dog food, one might risk a deck load big as a haystack, to be thrown off if the weather got too heavy. Still, how could a fishing boat carry twenty men for the different expert jobs? Seven men might be discovered each an expert in three or four different trades; the captain serving as the astronomer and doctor, the cook as a naturalist and seaman. So Roald Amundsen got Doctor Nansen’s help, and that great explorer was backed by the king. Help came from all parts of Scandinavia, and a little from Great Britain.

The _Gjöa_ was a forty-seven ton herring boat with a thirteen horse-power motor for ship’s pet, loaded with five years’ stores for a crew of seven men, who off duty were comrades as in a yachting cruise. In 1903 she sailed from Christiania and spent July climbing the north current in full view of the Greenland coast, the Arctic wonderland. At Godhaven she picked up stores, bidding farewell to civilization, passed Upernivik the last village, and Tassinssak, the last house on earth, then entered Melville Bay with its three-hundred-mile frontage of glacier, the most dangerous place in the Arctic. Beyond, near Cape York, she found a deck load of stores left for her by one of the Dundee whalers. There the people met the last white men, three Danish explorers whose leader, Mylius Erichsen, was making his way to death on the north coast of Greenland. So, like a barge with a hayrick, the overload _Joy_ crossed from the Greenland coast to Lancaster Sound, the gate of the Northwest passage, whose gatepost is Beechey Island, sacred to the memory of Sir John Franklin, and the dead of the Franklin search. The _Joy_ found some sole leather better than her own, a heap of useful coal and an anvil, among the litter of old expeditions; made the graves tidy; left a message at Franklin’s monument, and went on. For three hundred years the channels ahead were known to have been blocked; only by a miracle of good fortune could they be free from ice; and this miracle happened, for the way was clear.

* * * * *

“I was sitting,” writes Amundsen on August thirty-first, “entering the day’s events in my journal, when I heard a shriek--a terrific shriek, which thrilled me to the very marrow. It takes something to make a Norseman shriek, but a mighty flame with thick suffocating smoke was leaping up from the engine room skylight. There the tanks held two thousand two hundred gallons of petroleum, and close beside them a pile of soaked cotton waste had burst with a loud explosion. If the tanks got heated the ship would be blown into chips, but after a hard fight the fire was got under. All hands owed their lives to their fine discipline.”

A few days later the _Joy_ grounded in a labyrinth of shoals, and was caught aground by a storm which lifted and bumped her until the false keel was torn off. The whole of the deck load had to be thrown overboard. The only hope was to sail over the rocks, and with all her canvas set she charged, smashing from rock to rock until she reached the farther edge of the reef which was nearly dry. “The spray and sleet were washing over the vessel, the mast trembled, and the _Gjöa_ seemed to pull herself together for a last final leap. She was lifted up and flung bodily on the bare rocks, bump, bump, with terrific force.... In my distress I sent up (I honestly confess it) an ardent prayer to the Almighty. Yet another bump worse than ever, then one more, and we slid off.”

The shock had lifted the rudder so that it rested with the pintles on the mountings, and she would not steer; then somehow the pins dropped back into their sockets, the steersmen regained control and the _Joy_ was saved, after a journey across dry rocks which ought to have smashed any ship afloat. She did not even leak.

Near the south end of King William’s Land a pocket harbor was found, and named Joy Haven. There the stores were landed, cabins were built, the ship turned into a winter house, and the crew became men of science. For two years they were hard at work studying the magnetism of the earth beside the Magnetic Pole. They collected fossils and natural history specimens, surveyed the district, studied the heavens and the weather, hunted reindeer for their meat and clothing, fished, and made friends with the scented, brave and merry Eskimos. During the first winter the thermometer dropped to seventy-nine degrees below zero, which is pretty near the world record for cold, but as long as one is well fed, with bowels in working order, and has Eskimo clothes to wear, the temperature feels much the same after forty below zero. Below that point the wind fails to a breathless calm, the keen dry air is refreshing as champagne, and one can keep up a dog-trot for miles without being winded. It is not the winter night that people dread, but the summer day with its horrible torment of mosquitoes. Then there is in spring and autumn, a hot misty glare upon the snow-fields which causes blindness with a deal of pain. The Arctic has its drawbacks, but one remembers afterward the fields of flowers, the unearthly beauty of the northern lights, the teeming game, and those long summer nights when the sun is low, filling the whole sky with sunset colors.

The greatest event of the first year was the finding of an Eskimo hunter to carry letters, who came back in the second summer, having found in Hudson’s Bay an exploring vessel of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada. Major Moody, also the captain of the Arctic, and the Master of an American whaler, sent their greetings, news of the outer world, some useful charts, and a present of husky dogs.

The second summer was over. The weather had begun to turn cold before a northerly gale smashed the ice, and sea lanes opened along the Northwest passage. On August thirteenth the _Joy_ left her anchorage, under sail and steam, to pick her way without compass through blinding fog, charging and butting through fields of ice, dodging zigzag through shoals, or squeezing between ice-fields and the shore. There was no sleep for anybody during the first three nights, but racking anxiety and tearing overstrain until they reached known waters, a channel charted by the old explorers. They met an American whaler, and afterward had clear open water as far as the mouths of the Mackenzie River. A few miles beyond that the ice closed in from the north and piled up-shore so that the passage was blocked and once more the _Joy_ went into winter quarters. But not alone. Ladies must have corsets ribbed with whalebone from the bowhead whale. Each whale head is worth two thousand pounds, so a fleet of American whalers goes hunting in the Arctic. Their only port of refuge is Herschel Island off the Canadian coast, so there is an outpost of the Northwest Mounted Police, a mission station and a village of Eskimos.

The _Joy_ came to anchor thirty-six miles to the east of Herschel Island, beside a stranded ship in charge of her Norse mate, and daily came passengers to and fro on the Fort Macpherson trail. From that post runs a dog-train service of mails connecting the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company all the way up the Mackenzie Valley to Edmonton on the railway within two thousand miles. The crew of the _Joy_ had company news, letters from home, and Captain Amundsen went by dog-train to the mining camps on the Yukon where at Eagle City he sent telegrams.

At last in the summer of 1906 the _Joy_ sailed on the final run of her great voyage, but her crew of seven was now reduced to six, and at parting she dipped her colors to the cross on a lone grave. The ice barred her passage, but she charged, smashing her engines, and charged again, losing her peak which left the mainsail useless. So she won past Cape Prince of Wales, completing the Northwest passage, and entering Bering Sea called at Cape Nome for repairs. There a thousand American gold miners welcomed the sons of the vikings with an uproarious triumph, and greeted Captain Amundsen with the Norse national anthem.

XXX

A. D. 1588

JOHN HAWKINS

Master John Hawkins, mariner, was a trader’s son, familiar from childhood with the Guinea coast of Africa. Worshipful merchants of London trusted him with three ridiculously small ships, the size of our fishing smacks, but manned by a hundred men. With these, in 1562--the “spacious times” of great Elizabeth--he swooped down on the West African coast, and horribly scared were his people when they saw the crocodiles. The nature of this animal “is ever when he would have his prey, to sob and cry like a Christian bodie, to provoke them to come to him, and then he snatcheth at them.” In spite of the reptiles, Master Hawkins “got into his possession, partly by the sword, and partly by other means,” three hundred wretched negroes.

The king of Spain had a law that no Protestant heretic might trade with his Spanish colonies of the West Indies, so Master Hawkins, by way of spitting in his majesty’s eye, went straight to Hispaniola, where he exchanged his slaves with the settlers for a shipload of hides, ginger, sugar and pearls.

On his second voyage Master Hawkins attempted to enslave a whole city, hard by Sierra Leone, but the Almighty, “who worketh all things for the best, would not have it so, and by Him we escaped without danger, His name be praised for it.” Hawkins had nearly been captured by the negroes, and was compelled to make his pious raids elsewhere. Moreover, when he came with a fleet loaded with slaves to Venezuela, the Spanish merchants were scared to trade with him. Of course, for the sake of his negroes, he had to get them landed somehow, so he went ashore, “having in his greate boate two falcons of brasse, and in the other boates double bases in their noses.” Such artillery backed by a hundred men in plate armor, convinced the Spaniards that it would be wise to trade.

On his third voyage, Master Hawkins found the Spaniards his friends along the Spanish main, but the weather, a deadly enemy, drove him for refuge and repair to San Juan d’Ullua, the port of Mexico. Here was an islet, the only shelter on that coast from the northerly gales. He sent a letter to the capital for leave to hold that islet with man and guns while he bought provisions and repaired his ships. But as it happened, a new viceroy came with a fleet of thirteen great ships to claim that narrow anchorage, and Hawkins must let them in or fight. “On the faith of a viceroy” Don Martin de Henriquez pledged his honor before Hawkins let him in, then set his ships close aboard those of England, trained guns to bear upon them, secretly filled them with troops hid below hatches, and when his treason was found out, sounded a trumpet, the signal for attack. The Englishmen on the isle were massacred except three, the queen’s ship _Jesus_, of Lubeck, was so sorely hurt that she had to be abandoned, and only two small barks, the _Minion_ and the _Judith_, escaped to sea. The Spaniards lost four galleons in that battle.

As to the English, they were in great peril, and parted by a storm. The Judith fared best, commanded by a man from before the mast, one Francis Drake, who brought the news to England that Hawkins had more than two hundred people crowded upon the _Minion_ without food or water. “With many sorrowful hearts,” says Hawkins, “we wandered in an unknown sea by the span of fourteen dayes, till hunger forced us to seeke the lande, for birdes were thought very goode meate, rattes, cattes, mise and dogges.”

It was then that one hundred fourteen men volunteered to go ashore and the ship continued a very painful voyage.

These men were landed on the coast of Mexico, unarmed, to be stripped naked presently by red Indians, and by the Spaniards marched as slaves to the city of Mexico, where after long imprisonment those left alive were sold. The Spanish gentlemen, the clergy and the monks were kind to these servants, who earned positions of trust on mines and ranches, some of them becoming in time very wealthy men though still rated as slaves. Then came the “Holy Hellish Inquisition” to inquire into the safety of their souls. All were imprisoned, nearly all were tortured on the rack, and flogged in public with five hundred lashes. Even the ten gentlemen landed by Hawkins as hostages for his good faith shared the fate of the shipwrecked mariners who, some in Mexico and some in Spain, were in the end condemned to the galleys. And those who kept the faith were burned alive. From that time onward, whatever treaties there might be in Europe, there was never a moment’s peace for the Spanish Indies. All honest Englishmen were at war with Spain until the Inquisition was stamped out, and the British liberators had helped to drive the Spaniards from the last acre of their American empire.

When Hawkins returned to England, Mary, Queen of Scots, was there a prisoner. The sailor went to Elizabeth’s minister, Lord Burleigh, and proposed a plot. By this plot he entered into a treaty with the queen of Scots to set her on the throne. He was to join the Duke of Alva for the invasion and overthrow of England. So pleased was the Spanish king that he paid compensation to Hawkins for his losses at San Juan d’Ullua and restored to freedom such of the English prisoners as could be discovered. Then Hawkins turned loyal again, and Queen Elizabeth knighted him for fooling her enemies.

XXXI

A. D. 1573

FRANCIS DRAKE

The _Judith_ had escaped from San Juan d’Ullua and her master, Francis Drake, of Devon, was now a bitter vengeful adversary, from that time onward living to be the scourge of Spain. Four years he raided, plundered, burned along the Spanish main, until the name Drake was changed to Dragon in the language of the dons.

Then in 1573 he sailed from Plymouth with five little ships to carry fire and sword into the South Seas, where the flag of England had never been before. When he had captured some ships near the Cape de Verde Islands, he was fifty-four days in unknown waters before he sighted the Brazils, then after a long time came to Magellan’s Straits, where he put in to refresh his men. One of the captains had been unfaithful and was now tried by a court-martial, which found him guilty of mutiny and treason against the admiral. Drake offered him a ship to return to England and throw himself on the queen’s mercy, or he might land and take his chance among the savages, or he could have his death, and carry his case to the Almighty. The prisoner would not rob the expedition of a ship, nor would he consort with the degraded tribes of that wild Land of Fire, but asked that he might die at the hands of his countrymen because of the wrong he had done them. So the date was set for his execution, when all the officers received the holy communion, the prisoner kneeling beside the admiral. After that they dined together for the last time, and when they had risen from table, shook hands at parting, the one to his death, the others to their voyage. May England ever breed such gentlemen!

The squadron had barely got clear of the straits and gained the Pacific Ocean, when bad weather scattered all the ships. Drake went on alone, and on the coast of Chili, met with an Indian in a canoe, who had news of a galleon at Santiago, laden with gold from Peru. The Spaniards were not at all prepared for birds of Drake’s feather on the South Seas, so that when he dropped in at Santiago they were equally surprised and annoyed.

The galleon’s crew were ashore save for six Spaniards and three negroes, so bored with themselves that they welcomed the visitors by beating a drum and setting out Chilian wine. But when Master Moon arrived on board with a boat’s crew, he laid about him outrageously with a large sword, saying, “Down, dog!” to each discomfited Spaniard, until they fled for the hold. Only one leaped overboard, who warned the town, whereat the people escaped to the bush, leaving the visitors to enjoy themselves. The cargo of gold and wine must have been worth about fifty thousand pounds, while Santiago yielded a deal of good cheer besides, Master Fletcher, the parson, getting for his “spoyle” a silver chalice, two cruets and an altar cloth.

Greatly refreshed, the English went on northward, carefully inspecting the coast. At one place a sleeping Spaniard was found on the beach with thirteen bars of silver. “We took the silver and left the man.” Another place yielded a pack-train of llamas, the local beast of burden, with leather wallets containing eight hundred pounds’ weight of silver. Three small barks were searched next, one of them being laden with silver; then twelve ships at anchor, which were cut adrift; and a bark with eighty pounds’ weight of gold, and a golden crucifix set with emeralds. But best of all was the galleon _Cacafuego_, overtaken at sea, and disabled at the third shot, which brought down her mizzenmast. Her cargo consisted of “great riches, as jewels and precious stones, thirteen chests full of royals of plate, four score pounds weight of golde, and six and twentie tunne of silver.” The pilot being the possessor of two nice silver cups, had to give one to Master Drake, and the other to the steward, “because hee could not otherwise chuse.”

Every town, every ship was rifled along that coast. There was neither fighting nor killing, but much politeness, until at last the ship had a full cargo of silver, gold and gems, with which she reached England, having made a voyage round the world. When Queen Elizabeth dined in state on board Drake’s ship at Greenwich, she struck him with a sword and dubbed him knight. Of course he must have armorial bearings now, but when he adopted the three wiverns--black fowl of sorts--of the Drake family, there were angry protests against his insolence. So the queen made him a coat-of-arms, a terrestrial globe, and a ship thereon led with a string by a hand that reached out of a cloud, and in the rigging of the said ship, a wivern hanged by the neck.

It was Parson Fletcher who wrote the story of that illustrious voyage, but he does not say how he himself fell afterward from grace, being solemnly consigned by Drake to the “devil and all his angells,” threatened with a hanging at the yard-arm, and made to bear a posy on his breast with these frank words, “Francis Fletcher, ye falsest knave that liveth.”

Drake always kept his chaplain, and dined “alone with musick,” did all his public actions with large piety and gallant courtesy, while he led English fleets on insolent piracies against the Spaniards.

From his next voyage he returned leaving the Indies in flames, loaded with plunder, and smoking the new herb tobacco to the amazement of his countrymen.

Philip II was preparing a vast armada against England, when Drake appeared with thirty sail on the Spanish coast, destroyed a hundred ships, swept like a hurricane from port to port, took a galleon laden with treasure off the western islands, and returned to Plymouth with his enormous plunder.

Next year Drake was vice-admiral to Lord Howard in the destruction of the Spanish armada.

In 1589 he led a fleet to deliver Portugal from the Spaniards, wherein he failed.

Then came his last voyage in company with his first commander, Sir John Hawkins. Once more the West Indies felt the awful weight of his arm, but now there were varying fortunes of defeat, of reprisals, and at the end, pestilence, which struck the fleet at Nombre de Dios, and felled this mighty seaman. His body was committed to the sea, his memory to the hearts of all brave men.

XXXII

A. D. 1587

THE FOUR ARMADAS

Here let us call a halt. We have come to the climax of the great century, the age of the Renaissance, when Europe was born again; of the Reformation, when the Protestants of the Baltic fought the Catholics of the Mediterranean for the right to worship in freedom; and of the sea kings who laid the foundations of our modern world.

Islam had reached her fullest flood of glory with the fleets of Barbarossa, the armies of the Sultan Suleiman, and all the splendors of Akbar the Magnificent, before her ebb set downward into ruin.

Portugal and Spain, under one crown, shared the plunder of the Indies and the mastery of the sea.

Then, as the century waned, a third-class power, the island state of England, claimed the command of the sea, and planted the seeds of an empire destined to overshadow the ruins of Spain, as well as the wreck of Islam.

Here opened broad fields of adventure. There were German and English envoys at the court of Russia; English merchants seeking trade in India, Dutch gunners in the service of eastern princes, French fishermen finding the way into Canada, seamen of all these nations as slaves in Turkish galleys or in Spanish mines; everywhere sea fights, shipwrecks, trails of lost men wandering in unknown lands, matters of desert islands, and wrecked treasures with all the usual routine of plague, pestilence and famine, of battle, of murder and of sudden death.

In all this tangle we must take one thread, with most to learn, I think, from a Hollander, Mynheer, J. H. van Linschoten, who was clerk to the Portuguese archbishop of the Indies and afterward in business at Terceira in the Azores, where he wrote a famous book on pilotage. He tells us about the seamanship of Portuguese and Spaniards in terms of withering contempt as a mixture of incompetence and cowardice, enough to explain the downfall and ruin of their empires.

The worst ships, he says, which cleared from Cochin were worth, with their cargo, one million, eight hundred thousand pounds of our modern money. Not content with that, the swindlers in charge removed the ballast to make room for more cinnamon, whereby the _Arreliquias_ capsized and sank.

The _San Iago_, having her bottom ripped out by a coral reef, her admiral, pilot, master and a dozen others entered into a boat, keeping it with naked rapiers until they got clear, and deserted. Left without any officers, the people on the wreck were addressed by an Italian seaman who cried, “Why are we thus abashed?” So ninety valiant mariners took the longboat and cleared, hacking off the fingers, hands and arms of the drowning women who held on to her gunwale.

As to the pilot who caused this little accident, he afterward had charge of the _San Thomas_ “full of people, and most of the gentility of India,” and lost with all hands.

But if the seamanship of the Portuguese made it a miracle if they escaped destruction, that of the Spaniards was on a much larger scale. Where Portugal lost a ship Spain bungled away a fleet, and never was incompetence more frightfully punished than in the doom of the four armadas.

Philip II was busy converting Protestant Holland, and in 1587 he resolved to send a Catholic mission to England also, but while he was preparing the first armada Drake came and burned his hundred ships under the guns of Cadiz.

A year later the second, the great armada, was ready, one hundred thirty ships in line of battle, which was to embark the army in Holland, and invade England with a field force of fifty-three thousand men, the finest troops in Europe.

Were the British fleet of to-day to attack the Dutch the situation would be much the same. It was a comfort to the English that they had given most ample provocation and to spare, but still they felt it was very awkward. They had five million people, only the ninth part of their present strength; no battle-ships, and only thirty cruisers. The merchant service rallied a hundred vessels, the size of the fishing smacks, the Flemings lent forty, and nobody in England dared to hope.

To do Spain justice she made plenty of noise, giving ample warning. Her fleet was made invincible by the pope’s blessing, the sacred banners and the holy relics, while for England’s spiritual comfort there was a vicar of the inquisition with his racks and thumbscrews. Only the minor details were overlooked: that the cordage was rotten, the powder damp, the wine sour, the water putrid, the biscuits and the beef a mass of maggots, while the ship’s drainage into the ballast turned every galleon into a floating pest-house. The admiral was a fool, the captains were landlubbers, the ships would not steer, and the guns could not be fought. The soldiers, navigators, boatswains and quartermasters were alike too proud to help the short-handed, overworked seamen, while two thousand of the people were galley slaves waiting to turn on their masters. Worst of all, this sacred, fantastic, doomed armada was to attack from Holland, without pilotage to turn our terrific fortifications of shoals and quicksands.

Small were our ships and woefully short of powder, but they served the wicked valiant queen who pawned her soul for England. Her admiral was Lord Howard the Catholic, whose squadron leaders were Drake, Hawkins and Frobisher. The leaders were practical seamen who led, not drove, the English. The Spanish line of battle was seven miles across, but when the armada was sighted, Drake on Plymouth Hoe had time to finish his game of bowls before he put to sea.

From hill to hill through England the beacon fires roused the men, the church bells called them to prayer, and all along the southern coast fort echoed fort while guns and trumpets announced the armada’s coming. The English fleet, too weak to attack, but fearfully swift to eat up stragglers, snapped like a wolf-pack at the heels of Spain. Four days and nights on end the armada was goaded and torn in sleepless misery, no longer in line of battle, but huddled and flying. At the Straits they turned at bay with thirty-five hundred guns, but eight ships bore down on fire, stampeding the broken fleet to be slaughtered, foundered, burned or cast away, strewing the coast with wreckage from Dover to Cape Wrath and down the Western Isles. Fifty-three ruined ships got back to Spain with a tale of storms and the English which Europe has never forgotten, insuring the peace of English homes for three whole centuries.

A year passed, and the largest of all the armadas ventured to sea, this time from the West Indies, a treasure fleet for Spain. Of two hundred twenty ships clearing not more than fifteen arrived, the rest being “drowned, burst, or taken.” Storms and the English destroyed that third armada.

The fourth year passed, marked by a hurricane in the Western Isles, and a great increase of England’s reckoning, but the climax of Spain’s undoing was still to come in 1591, the year of the fourth armada.

To meet and convoy her treasure fleet of one hundred ten sail from the Indies, Spain sent out thirty battle-ships to the Azores. There lay an English squadron of sixteen vessels, also in waiting for the treasure fleet, whose policy was not to attack the escort, which carried no plunder worth taking. Lord Howard’s vice-admiral was Sir Richard Grenville, commanding Drake’s old flagship, the _Revenge_, of seven hundred tons. This Grenville, says Linschoten, was a wealthy man, a little eccentric also, for dining once with some Spanish officers he must needs play the trick of crunching wine-glasses, and making believe to swallow the glass while blood ran from his lips. He was “very unquiet in his mind, and greatly affected to war,” dreaded by the Spaniards, detested by his men. On sighting the Spanish squadron of escort, Howard put to sea but Grenville had a hundred sick men to bring on board the _Revenge_; his hale men were skylarking ashore. He stayed behind, when he attempted to rejoin the squadron the Spanish fleet of escort was in his way.

On board the _Revenge_ the master gave orders to alter course for flight until Grenville threatened to hang him. It was Grenville’s sole fault that he was presently beset by eight ships, each of them double the size of the _Revenge_. So one small cruiser for the rest of the day and all night fought a whole fleet, engaging from first to last thirteen ships of the line. She sank two ships and well-nigh wrecked five more, the Spaniards losing four hundred men in a fight with seventy. Only when their admiral lay shot through the head, and their last gun was silenced, their last boarding pike broken, the sixty wounded men who were left alive, made terms with the Spaniards and laid down their arms.

Grenville was carried on board the _Flagship_, where the officers of the Spanish fleet assembled to do him honor, and in their own language he spoke that night his last words: “Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, queen, religion and honor; whereby my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body; and shall leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.”

With that he died, and his body was committed to the sea. As to those who survived of his ship’s company, the Spaniards treated them with honor; sending them as free men home to England. But they believed that the body of Grenville being in the sea raised that appalling cyclone that presently destroyed the treasure fleet and its escort, in all one hundred seven ships, including the _Revenge_.

So perished the fourth armada, making within five years a total loss of four hundred eighty-nine capital ships, in all the greatest sea calamity that ever befell a nation. Hear then the comment of Linschoten the Dutchman. The Spaniards thought that “Fortune, or rather God, was wholly against them. Which is a sufficient cause to make the Spaniards out of heart; and on the contrary to give the Englishmen more courage, and to make them bolder. For they are victorious, stout and valiant; and all their enterprises do take so good an effect that they are, hereby, become the lords and masters of the sea.”

* * * * *

The Portuguese were by no means the first seamen to round the Cape of Good Hope. About six hundred years B. C. the Pharaoh of Egypt, Niko, sent a Phœnician squadron from the Red Sea, to find their way round Africa and through Gibraltar Strait, back to the Nile. “When autumn came they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited till the grain was fit to eat. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not until the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On their return, they declared--for my part, do not believe them, but perhaps others may--that in sailing round Lybia (Africa), they had the sun on their right hand” (i. e. in the northern sky). _Herodotus_.

XXXIII

A. D. 1583

SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT

“He is not worthy to live at all, that for any fear of danger of death, shunneth his countrey’s service and his own honor.”

This message to all men of every English nation was written by a man who once with his lone sword covered a retreat, defending a bridge against twenty horsemen, of whom he killed one, dismounted two and wounded six.

In all his wars and voyages Sir Humphrey Gilbert won the respect of his enemies, and even of his friends, while in his writings one finds the first idea of British colonies overseas. At the end of his life’s endeavor he commanded a squadron that set out to found a first British colony in Virginia, and on the way he called at the port of Saint Johns in Newfoundland. Six years after the first voyage of Columbus, John Cabot had rediscovered the American mainland, naming and claiming this New-found Land, and its port for Henry VII of England. Since then for nearly a hundred years the fishermen of Europe had come to this coast for cod, but the Englishmen claimed and held the ports where the fish were smoked. Now in 1583 Gilbert met the fishermen, English and strangers alike, who delivered to him a stick of the timber and a turf of the soil in token of his possession of the land, while he hoisted the flag of England over her first colony, by this act founding the British empire.

When Gilbert left Saint Johns, he had a secret that made him beam with joy and hint at mysterious wealth. Perhaps his mining expert had found pyrites and reported the stuff as gold, or glittering crystals that looked like precious stones. Maybe it was the parcel of specimens for which he sent his page boy on board the _Delight_, who, failing to bring them, got a terrific thrashing.

When the _Delight_, his flagship, was cast away on Sable Island, with a hundred men drowned and the sixteen survivors missing, Gilbert mourned, it was thought, more for his secret than for ship or people. From that time the wretchedness of his men aboard the ten-ton frigate, the _Squirrel_, weighed upon him. They were in rags, hungry and frightened, so to cheer them up he left his great ship and joined them. The Virginia voyage was abandoned, they squared away for England, horrified by a walrus passing between the ships, which the mariners took for a demon jeering at their misfortunes.

They crossed the Atlantic in foul weather, with great seas running, so that the people implored their admiral no longer to risk his life in the half-swamped _Squirrel_.

“I will not forsake my little company,” was all his answer. The seas became terrific and the weird corposants, Saint Elmo’s electric fires “flamed amazement,” from masts and spars, sure harbinger of still more dreadful weather.

A green sea filled the _Squirrel_ and she was near sinking, but as she shook the water off, Sir Humphrey Gilbert waved his hand to the _Golden Hind_. “Fear not, my masters!” he shouted, “we are as near to Heaven by sea as by land.”

As the night fell, he was still seen sitting abaft with a book in his hand.

Then at midnight all of a sudden the frigate’s lights were out, “for in that moment she was devoured, and swallowed up by the sea,” and the soul of Humphrey Gilbert passed out of the great unrest.

XXXIV

A. D. 1603

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

To its nether depths of shame and topmost heights of glory, the sixteenth century is summed up in Sir Walter Raleigh. He was Gilbert’s young half-brother, thirteen years his junior, and a kinsman of Drake, Hawkins and Grenville, all men of Devon.

He played the dashing young gallant, butchering Irish prisoners of war; he played the leader in the second sack of Cadiz; he played the knight errant in the Azores, when all alone he stormed the breached walls of a fort; he played the hero of romance in a wild quest up the Orinoco for the dream king El Dorado, and the mythical golden city of Manoa. Always he played to the gallery, and when he must dress the part of Queen Elizabeth’s adoring lover, he let it be known that his jeweled shoes had cost six thousand pieces of gold. He wrote some of the noblest prose in our language besides most exquisite verse, invented distilling of fresh water from the sea, and paid for the expeditions which founded Virginia.

So many and varied parts this mighty actor played supremely well, holding the center of the stage as long as there was an audience to hiss, or to applaud him. Only in private he shirked heights of manliness that he saw but dared not climb and was by turns a sneak, a toady, a whining hypocrite whose public life is one of England’s greatest memories, and his death of almost superhuman grandeur.