Chapter XV: Book VI: 427 (2)

By the greatest good fortune, an almost imperceptible breeze sprang up; the vessel answered her helm a little and approached me; I was just able to catch hold of the rope, but my companions in rashness were clinging to it; when we were pulled to the ship's side, I was at the extremity of the line, and they bore upon me with all their weight. We were thus fished up one by one, which took long. The rolling continued; at each roll, we were either plunged six or seven feet into the water, or hung up as many feet in the air, like fish at the end of a line: at the last immersion, I felt ready to faint away; one roll more and it would have been over. I was hoisted on deck half dead: had I been drowned, what a good riddance for me and the rest!

Two days after this accident, we came in sight of land. My heart beat fast when the captain pointed it out to me: America! It was barely indicated by the crowns of a few maple-trees standing above the water. The palms at the mouth of the Nile have since indicated the coast of Egypt for me in the same manner. A pilot came on board; we entered Chesapeake Bay. In the evening a boat was sent on shore to fetch fresh provisions.

I joined the party, and soon trod American soil.

Turning my looks around me, I remained for some moments motionless. This continent, perhaps unknown during the whole course of antiquity and a large number of modern centuries; the first wild destinies of that continent and its second destinies after the arrival of Christopher Columbus; the sway of the European monarchies shaken in this new world; the old society ending in young America; a republic of a hitherto unknown character ushering in a change in the human mind; the part which my country had played in these events; those seas and shores owing their independence in part to French blood and the French flag; a great man issuing from the midst of discord and the desert; Washington inhabiting a flourishing city in the same spot where William Penn[464] had bought a patch of forestland; the United States handing on to France the revolution which France had supported with her arms; lastly, my own destinies, the virgin muse which I had come to abandon to the passion of a new revelation of nature; the discoveries which I desired to attempt in the deserts which still extended their broad kingdom behind the narrow empire of a foreign civilization: such were the thoughts that revolved through my mind.

[Sidenote: Chesapeake Bay.]

We walked towards a dwelling-house. Woods of balsam-trees and Virginian cedars, mocking-birds and cardinal-birds proclaimed by their aspect and shade, their song and colour, that we were in a new clime. The house, which we reached in half-an-hour, combined the characteristics of an English farm-house and a West-Indian cabin. Herds of European cattle grazed in pastures surrounded by glades, in which played striped squirrels. Blacks were sawing logs of wood, whites cultivating tobacco-plants. A negress of thirteen or fourteen years of age, nearly naked and of singular beauty, opened the gate of the enclosure to us, like a young figure of Night. We bought cakes of Indian corn, chickens, eggs, milk, and returned to the ship with our demi-johns and baskets. I gave my silk handkerchief to the little African: a slave welcomed me to the soil of liberty.

We weighed anchor in order to make the roads and port of Baltimore: as we approached, the waters grew narrow; they were smooth and motionless; we appeared to be ascending a lazy stream lined with avenues. Baltimore presented itself to us as though at the further end of a lake. Opposite the town rose a wooded hill, at the foot of which they were commencing to build. We moored alongside the quay. I slept on board and did not go on shore till the next day. I went to stay at the inn with my luggage; the seminarists retired to the establishment prepared for them, whence they have since dispersed over America.

What became of François Tulloch? The following letter was handed to me in London on the 12th of April 1822:

"Thirty years have elapsed, my dear viscount, since the
'epoch' of our journey to Baltimore, and it is very doubtful
whether you will remember as much as my name; but if I may
judge from the feelings of my heart, which has always been
loyal and true to you, this is not so, and I flatter myself
that you would not be displeased to see me again. Although
we are living almost opposite each other (as you will see by
the date of this letter), I am only too well aware how many
things separate us. But should you show the smallest wish
to see me, I shall be eager to prove to you, in so far as I
can, that I am ever, as I always have been, your faithful and
devoted,

"FRANCIS TULLOCH.

"P.S.--The distinguished rank which you have won and which
you have earned by so many claims has not escaped me; but
the memory of the Chevalier de Chateaubriand is so dear
to me that I cannot write to you (this time, at least) as
Ambassador, &c., &c. So pardon the style for the sake of our
old alliance.

"30 Portland Place,

_Friday_, 12 _April._"

And so Tulloch was in London; he did not become a priest; he is married; his romance ended as did mine. This letter testifies to the truthfulness of my Memoirs and the faithfulness of my recollections. Who would have given evidence of the "alliance" and "friendship" formed thirty years ago upon the sea, if the other contracting party had not appeared upon the scene? And what a sad and retrogressive perspective this letter unfolds before me! Tulloch, in 1822, was again living in the same city as myself, in the same street; the door of his house was opposite mine, as when we met on the same ship, upon the same deck, cabin facing cabin. How many of my other friends I shall never meet again! Every night, on retiring to rest, a man can count his losses: there is naught save his years that does not leave him, although these pass; when he reviews them and calls their numbers, they reply, "Here!" Not one but answers the roll-call.

*

Baltimore, like all the other capitals of the United States, had not the dimensions which it now possesses: it was a pretty little Catholic town, neat and lively, with customs and a society closely resembling the customs and society of Europe. I paid the captain my passage-money and gave him a farewell dinner. I booked my seat in the stage-coach which ran three times a week to Pennsylvania. I climbed up to it at four o'clock in the morning, and found myself rolling along the high-roads of the New World.

The road we followed was marked out rather than made, and crossed a somewhat flat tract of country: there were hardly any trees, some straggling farms, and thinly-scattered villages. The climate was French: swallows flew over the water as on the pond at Combourg.

[Sidenote: Philadelphia.]

As we drew nearer to Philadelphia, we met country-folk going to market, public carriages and private carriages. Philadelphia struck me as a fine town, with wide streets, some of which were planted with trees, intersecting each other at right angles in regular order from north to south and east to west. The Delaware runs parallel to the street which follows its west bank. This river would be considered a large one in Europe: it is not spoken of in America; its banks are low and unattractive.

At the period of my journey (1791), Philadelphia had not yet spread as far as the Schuylkill; the ground running towards that tributary was divided into lots, upon which houses were being built at intervals.

Philadelphia presents a monotonous aspect. In general, the Protestant cities of the United States fall short in great works of architecture: the Reformation, young in years, and sacrificing nothing to the imagination, has rarely erected those domes, those aerial naves, those twin towers with which the old Catholic religion has crowned Europe. No monument, in Philadelphia, in New York; at Boston, one pyramid rising above the mass of walls and roofs: the eye is saddened by this uniform level.

First alighting at an inn, I next took a room in a boarding-house in which were staying planters from San Domingo and Frenchmen who had emigrated with other ideas than mine. A land of liberty offered an asylum to those who were fleeing from liberty: nothing better proves the high value of generous institutions than this voluntary exile of the partisans of absolute power in a pure democracy.

A man who had landed in the United States as I had, filled with enthusiasm for the classic races, a colonist who sought on every side the rigidity of the early Roman manners, was necessarily much scandalized to find on every hand the luxury of private carriages, frivolity of conversation, inequality of fortunes, the immorality of banking and gaming-houses, the excitement of theatres and ball-rooms. In Philadelphia I might have thought myself in Liverpool or Bristol The appearance of the inhabitants was agreeable: the Quakeresses with their grey gowns, their uniform little bonnets and their pale features seemed attractive.

At that period of my life, I had a great admiration for republics, although I did not believe them possible at the stage of the world's history which we had reached: my idea of liberty was that conceived by the ancients, liberty the daughter of the manners of a new-born society; but I knew nothing of the liberty which is the daughter of enlightenment and of an old civilization, a form of liberty which the representative republic has proved to be real: God grant that it may be lasting! A man, to be free, is not obliged himself to plough his small field, to storm at arts and sciences, to wear hooked nails and a dirty beard.

General Washington was not in Philadelphia when I arrived there; I was obliged to wait a week. I saw him go past in a carriage drawn by four prancing horses, driven four-in-hand. Washington, according to my then ideas, was necessarily Cincinnatus; Cincinnatus in a chariot somewhat upset my republic of 296 B.C. Could Washington the Dictator be anything save a boor, driving his oxen with a goad and holding the tail of his plough? But when I went to carry my letter of recommendation to him, I found once more the simplicity of the ancient Roman.

A small house, resembling the neighbouring houses, was the palace of the President of the United States: no sentries, no footmen even. I knocked, and a young maid-servant opened the door. I asked if the general was at home; she replied that he was in. I said I had a letter for him. The servant asked my name, which is difficult to pronounce in English and which she could not remember. She then said softly, "Walk in, sir," and led the way down one of those narrow passages which serve as an entrance-hall to English houses: she showed me into a parlour where she asked me to wait until the general came.

I felt no agitation; greatness of mind or fortune in no way overawe me: I admire the first without being crushed by it; the second calls forth my pity rather than my respect: no man's countenance will ever disconcert me.

After a few minutes, the general entered the room: tall in stature, of a calm and cold rather than noble bearing, he resembled his engraved portraits. I handed him my letter in silence; he opened it and glanced at the signature which he read aloud, exclaiming:

"Colonel Armand!"

This was the name by which he knew the Marquis de La Rouërie and by which the latter had signed himself.

We sat down. I explained to him as best I could the object of my journey. He replied in monosyllables in English and French, and listened to me with a sort of astonishment. I remarked this and said to him, with some little animation:

"But it is less difficult to discover the North-West Passage than to create a people, as you have done."

"Well, well, young man!" he exclaimed, giving me his hand.

He invited me to dinner for the next day, and we parted.

[Sidenote: General Washington.]

I took care to keep the appointment. We were only five or six guests at table. The conversation turned upon the French Revolution. The general showed us a key from the Bastille. These keys, as I have already said, were rather silly toys which passed from hand to hand at that time. The consigners of locksmiths' wares might, three years later, have sent to the President of the United States the bolt of the prison of the monarch who bestowed liberty upon France and America. If Washington had seen the "victors of the Bastille" disporting themselves in the gutters of Paris, he would have felt less respect for his relic. The seriousness and strength of the Revolution did not spring from those blood-stained orgies. At the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, the same mob from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine demolished the Protestant temple at Charenton with as much ardour as when it laid waste the church of Saint-Denis in 1793.

I left my host at ten o'clock in the evening, and never saw him again; he went away the next day, and I continued my journey.

Such was my meeting with the citizen soldier, the liberator of a world. Washington descended to the grave before a vestige of fame had become attached to my footsteps; I passed before him as the most unknown of beings; he was in all his lustre, I in all my obscurity; my name perhaps did not linger one whole day in his memory: well for me, nevertheless, that his looks fell upon me! I have felt warmed by them for the rest of my life: there is virtue in a great man's looks.

*

Bonaparte is but lately dead[465]. As I have just knocked at Washington's door, it is natural that the parallel between the founder of the United States and the Emperor of the French should occur to my mind: the more so since, at the time when I am writing these lines, Washington himself is no more. Ercilla[466], singing and battling in Chile, stops in the middle of his journey to describe the death of Dido; why should not I stop at the commencement of my ramble through Pennsylvania to compare Washington with Bonaparte? I might have delayed my notice of them until I came to the time at which I met Napoleon; but should I happen to sink into the grave before reaching the year 1814 in my chronicle, the reader would never know what I had to say on the subject of the two mandataries of Providence. I remember the case of Castelnau[467]: he was Ambassador to England like myself, and like me wrote a part of his life in London. On the last page of Book VII., he says to his son, "I will treat of this fact in the Eighth Book," and the Eighth Book of Castelnau's Memoirs does not exist: that is a warning to me to take advantage of life while it lasts.

Washington does not, like Bonaparte, belong to the race that surpasses human stature. There is nothing astonishing attached to his person; he is not placed upon a vast stage; he is not engaged in a struggle with the ablest captains and the most powerful monarchs of the time; he does not rush from Memphis to Vienna, from Cadiz to Moscow: he defends himself with a handful of citizens in a land not yet famous, within the narrow circle of the domestic hearth. He delivers none of those battles in which the triumphs of Arbela and Pharsalia are renewed; he overturns no thrones to build up others from their ruins; he does not send word to the kings at his gate:

Qu'ils se font trop attendre, et qu'Attila s'ennuie[468].

A certain silence covers the actions of Washington; he acts slowly; it is as though he felt that he was entrusted with the liberty of the future and feared to compromise it. It is not his own destiny that a hero of this kind carries in his hand: it is that of his country; he does not suffer himself to stake that which does not belong to him; but from this profound humility see how great a light arises! Seek the woods in which flashed Washington's sword: what do you find? Tombstones? No: a world! Washington left the United States as a trophy on his battle-field.

*

[Sidenote: Washington and Bonaparte.]

Bonaparte has none of the features of this grave American: he fights noisily upon an old world; he seeks to create nothing but his fame; he entrusts himself with nothing but his own lot. He seems to know that his mission will be short, that the torrent which descends from so great a height will soon flow away; he hastens to enjoy and to misuse his glory, as though it were a fleeting season of youth. Like Homer's gods, he wishes to reach the end of the world in four steps. He appears on every shore; precipitously he inscribes his name upon the annals of every nation; he tosses crowns to his family and his soldiers; he makes haste with his monuments, his laws, his victories. Bending over the world, with one hand he fells the kings to the ground, while with the other he lays low the revolutionary giant; but in crushing anarchy, he stifles liberty, and ends by losing his own upon his last field of battle.

Each is rewarded according to his works: Washington raises a nation to independence; a peaceful magistrate, he falls asleep beneath his roof-tree amid the regrets of his fellow-countrymen and the veneration of the nations. Bonaparte robs a nation of its independence: a fallen emperor, he is hurled into exile, where the affrighted earth does not think him sufficiently closely imprisoned, even when guarded by the ocean. He dies: the news, posted on the gate of the palace before which the conqueror has caused so many funerals to be proclaimed, does not delay nor astonish the passer-by: what had the citizens to mourn for?

Washington's republic is in existence; Bonaparte's empire is destroyed. Washington and Bonaparte issued from the bosom of democracy: both were born of liberty; the first was faithful to her, the second betrayed her.

Washington was the representative of the needs, the ideas, the judgment, the opinions of his day; he seconded, rather than opposed, the changes in men's minds; he desired what he was bound to desire, the very thing for which he had been called: hence the coherent and perpetual character of his work. This man who strikes the imagination little, because he is in proportion, merged his existence in that of his country: his glory is civilization's inheritance; his fame towers like one of those public sanctuaries from which flows a fertile and inexhaustible spring.

Bonaparte had it equally in his power to enrich the commonwealth; he worked upon the most intelligent, the most gallant, the most brilliant nation on earth. How high would be the rank held by him today, if he had added magnanimity to the heroism which was his, if, Washington and Bonaparte in one, he had appointed liberty the universal legatee of his glory! But this giant did not link his destinies with those of his contemporaries; his genius belonged to modern times: his ambition was of a by-gone age; he did not perceive that the miracles of his life surpassed a diadem in value, and that that Gothic ornament would become him badly. Now he flung himself into the future, again he drew back towards the past; and according to whether he reascended or followed the course of time, thanks to his prodigious force, he drew with him or pushed back the waves. Men, in his eyes, were but a means of power; no sympathy was established between their happiness and his; he had promised to deliver them, and he enchained them; he isolated himself from them, and they withdrew from him. The Kings of Egypt placed their funeral pyramids, not among thriving pastures, but in the midst of barren deserts; those great tombs rise like eternity in the solitude: Bonaparte built the monument of his fame in their image,

*

I was impatient to continue my journey. I had not come to see the Americans, but something quite different from the men I knew, something more in harmony with the habitual order of my ideas; I burned to throw myself into an enterprise for which I had nothing prepared except my imagination and my courage.

At the time when I formed the project of discovering the North-West Passage, it was not known whether North America extended towards the Pole and joined Greenland, or whether it terminated in some sea adjoining Hudson's Bay and Behring's Straits. In 1772, Hearne had discovered the sea at the mouth of the Copper Mine River in latitude 71° 15' N. and longitude 119° 15' W. of Greenwich[469].

On the Pacific coast, the efforts of Captain Cook and subsequent travellers had left doubts. In 1787, a vessel was said to have entered an inland sea of North America; according to the story told by the captain of this ship, all that had been taken for uninterrupted coast to the north of California consisted merely of a closely-knit chain of islands. The British Admiralty sent Vancouver[470] to verify these reports, which proved to be false. Vancouver had not yet made his second voyage.

[Sidenote: Arctic exploration.]

In 1791, people in the United States were beginning to discuss the road taken by Mackenzie: starting from Fort Chippeway on Mountains Lake[471], 3 June 1789, he descended to the Arctic Ocean by the river to which he gave his name.

This discovery might have changed my direction and caused me to take my route due north; but I should have scrupled to alter the plans agreed upon between M. de Malesherbes and myself. I proposed, therefore, to travel westwards, so as to strike the north-west coast above the Gulf of California; from there, following the outline of the continent, and always keeping the sea in sight, I intended to explore Behring's Straits, double the northernmost cape of America, descend on the east along the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and return to the United States by way of Hudson's Bay, Labrador, and Canada.

What means had I to carry out this prodigious peregrination? None at all. Most of the French travellers have been isolated men, left entirely to their own resources; it is but rarely that the government or any company has employed or assisted them. Englishmen, Americans, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, thanks to the concurrence of the national volition, have accomplished the things which, with us, destitute individuals have begun in vain. Mackenzie and many others after him have, to the profit of the United States and Great Britain, made conquests upon the immensity of America, with which I had dreamed of aggrandizing my native land. In case of success, I should have had the honour of bestowing French names upon unknown regions, of endowing my country with a colony upon the Pacific Ocean, of taking away the rich fur-trade from a rival Power, and of preventing that Power from opening out a shorter road to the Indies, by placing France herself in possession of that road. I have stated these projects in the _Essai historique_, published in London in 1796, and these projects were taken from the manuscript of my Travels written in 1791. These dates prove that I was ahead, both in thought and work, of the latest explorers of the Arctic ice-fields.

I received no encouragement in Philadelphia. I foresaw from then that the object of this first journey would be missed, and that my expedition would be but the precursor of a second and longer journey. I wrote in this sense to M. de Malesherbes, and while looking forward to the future, I promised to poetry what should be lost to science. In fact, if I did not find in America what I had come to seek, the Arctic world, I did find there a new muse.

A stage-coach, similar to that which brought me from Baltimore, took me from Philadelphia to New York, a gay, populous, commercial town, which was nevertheless far from being what it is today, far from what it will be in a few years; for the United States grow faster than does this manuscript. I made a pilgrimage to Boston to salute the first battlefield of American liberty. I saw the plains of Lexington; I there sought, as I since sought at Sparta, the tomb of the warriors who died "in obedience to the sacred laws of their country[472]." A noteworthy instance of the concatenation of human affairs: a finance bill passed by the English Parliament in 1765 erects a new empire upon the earth in 1782, and causes one of the oldest kingdoms of Europe to disappear from the world in 1789!

*

I embarked at New York in the packet which sailed for Albany, situated on the upper reaches of the Hudson River. The company was numerous. On the evening of the first day we were served with a collation consisting of fruits and milk; the women sat on the benches on deck, the men on the deck at their feet. Conversation was not long maintained: at the sight of a beautiful natural picture, one involuntarily lapses into silence. Suddenly some one or other exclaimed:

"There is the place where Asgill[473] was arrested."

A Quakeress from Philadelphia was asked to sing the ballad known as _Asgill._ We were passing between mountains; the fair passenger's voice died away on the water, or rang out when we hugged the bank more closely. The fate of a young soldier, a lover, a poet and a hero, honoured by the interest of Washington and the generous intervention of an unfortunate queen, lent additional charm to the romance of the scene. The friend whom I have lost, M. de Fontanes, let fall some courageous words in memory of Asgill at the time when Bonaparte was preparing to ascend the throne upon which Marie Antoinette had sat. The American officers appeared touched by the song of the fair Pennsylvanian: the memory of the past troubles of their country made them appreciate more highly the calm of the present moment. They gazed with emotion upon those spots but lately filled with troops, resounding with the clash of arms, and now wrapped in profound peace; those spots gilded with the fading light of day, enlivened with the singing of the cardinal-birds, the cooing of the ring-doves, the song of the mocking-birds, while the inhabitants, leaning against their fences fringed with trumpet-flowers, watched our bark pass below them.

[Sidenote: I arrive at Albany.]

On arriving at Albany I went in search of a Mr. Swift, for whom I had been given a letter. This Mr. Swift traded in furs with the Indian tribes enclosed in the territory ceded to the United States by England; for the civilized Powers in America, republican and monarchical alike, unceremoniously share among themselves land which does not belong to them. After listening to what I had to say, Mr. Swift made some very reasonable objections. He told me that I could not undertake a journey of this importance at first sight, alone, without assistance, without support, without letters of recommendation to the English, American, and Spanish stations by which I should be obliged to pass; that if I had the good fortune to cross so many solitary tracts of country, I should arrive at frozen regions where I should perish of hunger; he advised me to begin by acclimatizing myself, suggested that I should learn the Sioux, Iroquois, and Esquimaux languages, and live among the coureurs and the agents of the Hudson's Bay Company. Having gained this preliminary experience, I might then, in four or five years, with the assistance of the French Government, proceed on my hazardous mission.

This advice, whose justice, in my heart of hearts, I admitted, annoyed me. Had I trusted to my own judgment, I should have set out then and there to go to the Pole, as I might go from Paris to Pontoise. I concealed my vexation from Mr. Swift, and asked him to find me a guide and horses to take me to Niagara and Pittsburg: from Pittsburg I would go down the Ohio and gather ideas for my future plans. I still had my first project in my head. Mr. Swift engaged a Dutchman on my behalf, who spoke several Indian dialects. I bought two horses and left Albany.

The whole stretch of country between the territory surrounding that town and Niagara is now inhabited and cleared; the New York Canal crosses it; but at that time a great part of the district was unfrequented. When, after crossing the Mohawk, I entered woods which had never known the axe, I was seized with a sort of intoxication of independence; I went from tree to tree, left and right, saying to myself:

"Here are no more roads, no more cities, no more monarchies, no more republics, no more presidents, no more kings, no more men!"

And, in order to test whether I was really reinstated in my original rights, I indulged in acts of will which infuriated my guide, who in his heart believed me mad.

Alas, I imagined myself to be alone in that forest in which I was carrying my head so high! Suddenly I almost broke my nose against a shed. Under that shed, my amazed eyes beheld the first savages I had seen in my life. There were a score of them, men and women, all bedaubed like wizards, with half-naked bodies, slit ears, crows' feathers on their heads, and rings through their nostrils. A little Frenchman, all powdered and curled, in an apple-green coat, a drugget vest, and a muslin frill and ruffles, was scraping a pocket fiddle and making those Iroquois dance _Madelon Friquet._ M. Violet (that was his name) was the savages' dancing-master. They paid him for his lessons in beaver-skins and bear's hams. He had been a scullion in the service of General Rochambeau[474] during the American War. He remained in New York after the departure of our army, and resolved to instruct the Americans in the fine arts. His views widened with success, and the new Orpheus carried civilization to the savage hordes of the New World. In speaking to me of the Indians, he always said:

"Those savage ladies and gentlemen."

He took great pride in the nimbleness of his pupils; indeed I never saw such capers before or since. M. Violet, holding his little violin between his chest and his chin, tuned the fatal instrument; he cried to the Iroquois:

"Take your places!"

And the whole troop leaped about like a band of demons.

Was it not an overwhelming thing for a disciple of Rousseau, this introduction to savage life through a ball which General Rochambeau's late scullion was giving to the Iroquois? I had a great longing to laugh, but I felt cruelly humiliated.

*

I bought a complete outfit of the Indians: two bearskins, one to serve as a demi-toga, the other as a bed. I added to my new equipment the red ribbed-cloth cap, the cloak, the belt, the horn to call in the dogs, the bandoleer of the _coureurs des bois._ My hair hung over my bare neck; I wore a long beard: I had something of the savage, the hunter, and the missionary. I was invited to a hunt which was to take place the next day to track a wolverine.

[Sidenote: Life in Canada.]

This race of animals is almost entirely destroyed in Canada, as are the beavers. We took boat before daybreak to go up a river which issued from the wood in which the wolverine had been seen. There were some thirty of us, both Indians and American and Canadian _coureurs_: one part of the troop walked alongside of the flotilla with the dogs, and the women carried our provisions. We did not find the wolverine; but we killed lynxes and musk-rats. Formerly the Indians used to go into deep mourning when they had inadvertently killed any of the latter animals; for the female of the musk-rat is, as everybody knows, the mother of the human race. The Chinese, with their finer powers of observation, know to a certainty that the rat changes into a quail, the mole into a loriot.

Our table was abundantly furnished with river-side birds and fish. The dogs are trained to dive; when they are not hunting, they go fishing: they plunge into the streams and seize the fish down at the bottom of the water. The women prepared our meals at a large fire around which we took our places. We had to lie flat down, with our faces against the ground, to protect our eyes from the smoke, the clouds of which floated above our heads and indifferently preserved us from the stings of the mosquitoes.

Seen through the microscope, the various carnivorous insects are formidable animals; they were once perhaps those winged dragons whose skeletons are sometimes found: decreasing in size in proportion as their matter decreased in energy, these hydras, griffins and others would today be reduced to the condition of insects. The antediluvian giants are the little men of our time.

*

M. Violet offered me his credentials for the Onondagas, the remnant of one of the six Iroquois nations. I first came to the Lake of the Onondagas. The Dutchman selected a suitable spot at which to pitch our camp: a river issued from the lake; our gear was set up in the curve of the river. We drove two forked stakes into the ground, at a distance of six feet one from the other; in the forks of these stakes we hung, horizontally, a long pole. Strips of birch bark, one end resting on the ground, the other on the transversal pole, formed the sloping roof of our mansion. Our saddles served as pillows, our cloaks as blankets. We fastened bells to our horses' necks and turned them loose in the woods near our camp: they did not wander far.

Fifteen years later, when I was bivouacking in the sand of the Saba Desert, at a few steps from the Jordan on the banks of the Dead Sea, our horses, those swift sons of Araby, looked as though they were listening to the tales of the sheik and taking part in the story of Antar and of the horse in Job[475].

It was hardly four o'clock in the afternoon when we were hutted. I took my gun and went for a stroll round about There were few birds. A solitary, pair alone fluttered before my eyes, like the birds which I had followed in my paternal woods; by the colour of the male, I recognised the white sparrow, the _passer nivalis_ of the ornithologists. I also heard the osprey, very clearly characterized by its note. The flight of the "screamer" had led me to a dale hemmed in by tall and rocky heights; on a mountain-side stood a poor hut; a lean cow roamed in a field below.

I like small shelters: "_A chico pajarillo chico nidillo_: a little bird, a little nest." I sat down on the slope facing the hut planted on the hillside opposite. In a few minutes, I heard voices in the valley: three men were driving five or six fat cows; they put them to graze and drove away the lean cow with blows of a switch. An Indian woman came out of the hut, went towards the frightened beast, and called it. The cow ran to her, stretching out its neck with a little low. The planters shook their fists at the Indian woman, who returned to her hut The cow followed her.

[Sidenote: The Indian woman.]

I got up, climbed down the declivity of the hillside, crossed the glen, and climbing the opposite hill, reached the hut. I uttered the greeting I had been taught:

"_Siegoh!_ I have come!"

The Indian woman, instead of returning my greeting by the customary repetition, "You have come," made no reply. Then I petted the cow: the Indian woman's yellow and saddened face showed signs of softening. I was touched by these mysterious relations of misfortune: there is sweetness in lamenting ills that none have lamented beside.

My hostess looked at me a little longer, with a remnant of doubt lingering in her eyes, and then came forward and passed her hand over the forehead of her companion in misery and solitude. Encouraged by this mark of confidence, I said in English, for I had exhausted my Indian:

"She is very lean."

The Indian woman replied, in broken English:

"She eats very little."

"They drove her away roughly," I added.

And the woman replied:

"We are both accustomed to that."

I asked:

"Does not this meadow belong to you then?"

She answered:

"This meadow belonged to my husband, who is dead. I have no children, and the pale-faces drive their cows into my meadow."

I had nothing to offer this creature of God. We parted. My hostess said a number of things to me which I did not understand; they were doubtless wishes for prosperity; if they have not been heard by Heaven, it is not the fault of her who prayed, but the infirmity of him for whom the prayer was offered. All souls have not an equal aptitude for happiness, just as all lands do not bear equal harvests.

I returned to my wigwam, where a collation consisting of potatoes and Indian corn awaited my arrival. The evening was splendid: the lake, smooth as a flawless mirror, showed not a ripple; the murmuring river bathed our peninsula, which the calycanthuses perfumed with the scent of apple-blossom. The whip-poor-will uttered its song: we heard it, now nearer, now farther away, according as the bird changed the spot of its amorous calls. No one called me. Weep, poor Will!

The next day I went to pay a visit to the sachem of the Onondagas; I reached his village at ten o'clock in the morning. I was at once surrounded by young savages, who spoke to me in their language, mixed with English phrases and a few words of French; they were very noisy and wore an air of light-heartedness, like the first Turks whom I saw, later, at Koroni, when landing on the soil of Greece. These Indian tribes, enclosed in the clearings made by the whites, own horses and cattle; their huts are filled with utensils purchased at Quebec, Montreal, Niagara, and Detroit on the one side, and in the markets of the United States on the other.

The explorers of the interior of North America found in a state of nature, among the different savage tribes, the several forms of government known to the peoples of civilization. The Iroquois belonged to a race which seemed destined to conquer the Indian races, if strangers had not come to exhaust his veins and stop the progress of his genius. That fearless man was not astonished at fire-arms when these were first used against him; he stood fast amid the hiss of the bullets and the roar of the cannon, as though he had heard them all his life; he seemed to pay no more heed to them than to the storm. So soon as he was able to procure a musket, he made better use of it than the European. He did not abandon for it the tomahawk, the scalping-knife, the bow and arrow; but to these he added the carbine, the pistol, the dagger, and the axe: he seemed never to have enough arms to satisfy his valour. Doubly equipped with the murderous instruments of Europe and America, his head decked with plumes, his ears slit, his face streaked with various colours, his arms tattooed and smeared with blood, this champion of the New World became as redoubtable in appearance as in battle, on the shores which he defended foot by foot against the invaders.

The Onondaga chief was an old Iroquois in the fullest sense of the word; he kept up in his person the ancient traditions of the desert. The English narratives never fail to speak of the Indian sachem as "the old gentleman." Now, the old gentleman is perfectly naked; he wears a feather or a fish-bone in his pierced nostrils, and sometimes covers his head, which is smooth and round as a cheese, with a laced three-cornered hat, as an European sign of honour. Has not Velly[476] depicted history with the same veracity? The Frankish chieftain Khilpérick[477] rubbed his hair in sour butter, _infundens acido comam butyro_, stained his cheeks with woad, and wore a party-coloured jerkin or a greatcoat made of the skin of some beast; he is represented by Velly as a prince magnificent to the point of ostentation in his furniture and equipage, voluptuous to the point of debauchery, and scarcely believing in God, whose ministers formed the subject of his raillery.

[Sidenote: With the Onondagas.]

The sachem of the Onondagas received me well and made me sit down on a mat. He spoke English and understood French; my guide knew Iroquois: conversation was easy. Among other things, the old man told me that, although his nation had always been at war with mine, he had always respected it. He complained of the Americans; he thought them greedy and unjust, and regretted that, in the division of the Indian territories his tribe had not gone to swell the lot of the English. The women served us with a meal. Hospitality is the last virtue left to the savages in the midst of European civilization; their hospitality is well known of old; the hearth had all the power of the altar. When a tribe was driven from its woods, or when a man came to demand hospitality, the stranger began what was called the dance of the supplicant. The child touched the door-sill and said:

"Here is the stranger."

And the chief replied:

"Child, bring the man into the hut."

The stranger entered, under the protection of the child, and sat down by the ashes on the hearth. The women sang the song of consolation:

The stranger has found a mother and a wife; the sun will rise
and set for him as of old.

These customs seem borrowed from the Greeks: Themistocles, visiting Admetus, kisses the Penates and his host's young son (I have possibly at Megara trod upon the poor wife's hearthstone beneath which Phocion's cinerary urn lay concealed[478]); and Ulysses, visiting Alcinous, implores Arete:

"Noble Arete, daughter of Rhexenor, after suffering cruel ills, I throw myself at your feet[479]."

Having spoken these words, the hero goes towards the hearth and seats himself by the ashes.

I took leave of the old chief. He had been present at the capture of Quebec. In the shameful years of the reign of Louis XV., the episode of the Canadian War comes to our consolation as though it were a page from our ancient history discovered in the Tower of London.

Montcalm[480], left to defend Canada unaided against forces often relieved and four times his own in number, fights successfully for two whole years; he defeats Lord Loudon[481] and General Abercromby[482]. At last fortune forsakes him; he falls wounded beneath the walls of Quebec, and two days later breathes his last: his Grenadiers bury him in a hole dug by a shell, a grave worthy of the honour of our arms! His noble enemy Wolfe[483] dies facing him; he pays with his own life for Montcalm's life and for the glory of expiring upon a few French flags.

Once more my guide and I mounted our horses. Our road became more difficult and was marked only by some felled trees. The trunks of these trees served as bridges over the streams or as hurdles in the bogs. The American population was at that time moving towards the Genesee grants. These grants were sold at prices more or less high according to the goodness of the soil, the quality of the trees, the current and abundance of the water.

It has been observed that colonists are often preceded in the woods by bees: these are the van-guard of the tillers of the soil, and the symbols of the industry and civilization whose coming they proclaim. Foreign to America, these peaceful conquerors came in the wake of Columbus' sails, and have robbed a new world of flowers of those treasures only of whose use the natives were ignorant; nor have they employed those treasures other than to enrich the soil whence they derived them.

The clearings along both sides of the road which I travelled displayed a curious mixture of the state of nature and the state of civilization. In one comer of a wood which had never known any sound save the yells of the savage and the belling of the stag, one came across a ploughed field; one saw from the same point of view the wigwam of an Indian and the dwelling of a planter. Some of these dwellings, when completed, reminded one of the neatness of the Dutch farm-houses; others were only half finished, and had nothing but the sky for a roof.

[Sidenote: Indians and settlers.]

I was welcomed in these dwellings, the results of a morning's work; often I would find a family displaying European elegancies, mahogany furniture, a piano, carpets, mirrors, at a few steps from the hut of an Iroquois. In the evening, when the farm-servants returned from working in the woods or fields with the axe or the hoe, the windows were opened. My host's daughters, with their beautiful fair hair dressed in ringlets, would sing, to the accompaniment of the piano, the duet from Paisiello's[484] _Pandolfetto_ or some _cantabile_ by Cimarosa[485], all in full view of the wilderness, and sometimes to the murmuring sound of a waterfall.

Small market-towns rose in the better districts. The spire of a new steeple shot up from the midst of an old forest. The English are accompanied by English customs wherever they go: after crossing districts containing no trace of habitation, I came upon the sign of an inn swinging from the bough of a tree. Hunters, planters, and Indians mingled at these caravansaries: the first time I rested there, I swore that it should be the last.

It so happened that, on entering one of these hostelries, I stood dumfoundered at the sight of a huge bed set up in a circle around a post: each traveller took a place in this bed, with his feet against the post in the centre and his head on the circumference of the circle, so that the sleepers were arranged symmetrically, like the spokes of a wheel or the sticks of a fan. After a momentary hesitation, I got into this affair because I saw no one there. I was just falling asleep, when I felt something sliding against me: it was the leg of my big Dutchman; I never in my life experienced a greater fright. I sprang out of the hospitable work-basket, cordially cursing the customs of our good ancestors. I went and slept in my cloak by the moonlight: this companion of the traveller's bed had at least nothing but was agreeable, and fresh, and sweet.

On the bank of the Genesee we found a ferry-boat. A troop of colonials and Indians crossed the river with us. We camped in meadows bright with butterflies and flowers. With our varied costumes, grouped around our several fires, and our horses tethered or grazing, we looked like a caravan. I there first met the rattlesnake, which allows itself to be bewitched by the sound of a flute. The Greeks would have turned my Canadian into Orpheus; the flute into a lyre; the snake into Cerberus, or, possibly, Eurydice.

*

We rode towards Niagara. When we had come within a distance of eight or nine leagues of our destination, we perceived, in an oak grove, the camp-fire of some savages, who had settled down on the bank of a stream where we ourselves were thinking of bivouacking. We took advantage of their preparations: after grooming our horses and dressing ourselves for the night, we accosted the band. With legs crossed tailor-wise, we sat down among the Indians around the blazing pile, and began to roast our maize cakes.

The family consisted of two women, two infants at the breast, and three braves. The conversation became general, that is to say, interspersed with a few words on my side and many gestures; after that, each fell asleep in the place where he sat I alone remained awake, and went to sit by myself on a root trailing by the bank of the stream.

[Sidenote: The Falls of Niagara.]

The moon showed above the tops of the trees; a balmy breeze, which the Queen of the Night brought with her from the East, seemed to go before her through the forests, as though it were her cool breath. The solitary luminary climbed higher and higher in the sky, now pursuing her even way, again surmounting clusters of clouds, which resembled the summits of a snow-clad mountain-chain. All would have been silence and repose, but for the fall of a few leaves, the passing of a sudden gust of wind, the hooting of the wood-owl; in the distance was heard the dull roar of the Falls of Niagara, which, in the calm of night, extended from waste to waste and expired in the lonely forests. It was during those nights that an unknown muse appeared to me; I gathered some of her accents; I marked them on my tables, by the light of the stars, as a vulgar musician might write down the notes dictated to him by some great master of harmony.

The next day, the Indians armed themselves, the women collected the baggage. I distributed a little gunpowder and vermilion among my hosts. We parted, touching our foreheads and breasts; the braves shouted the order to march and walked in front; the women went behind, carrying the children, who, slung in furs on their mothers' backs, turned their heads to look at us. I followed this progress with my eyes until the whole band had disappeared among the trees of the forest.

The savages of the Falls of Niagara in the English dominion were entrusted with the police service of the frontier on that side. This outlandish constabulary, armed with bows and arrows, prevented our passage. I was obliged to send the Dutchman to the fort of Niagara for a permit in order to enter the territory of the British government. This saddened my heart a little, for I remembered that formerly France had ruled in both Upper and Lower Canada. My guide returned with the permit: I still have it; it is signed, "Captain Gordon." Is it not strange that I should have found the same English name on the door of my cell in Jerusalem? "Thirteen pilgrims had inscribed their names on the door and walls of the chamber: the first was called Charles Lombard, who visited Jerusalem in 1669; the last was John Gordon, and the date of his passage is 1804[486]."

*

I stayed two days in the Indian village, whence I wrote another letter to M. de Malesherbes. The Indian women busied themselves with different occupations; their nurslings were slung in nets from the branches of a tall purple beech. The grass was covered with dew, the wind issued all perfumed from the woods, and the cotton-plants of the country, throwing back their capsules, looked like white rose-trees. The breeze rocked the cradles in mid-air with an almost imperceptible movement; the mothers stood up from time to time to see if their children were asleep and had not been awakened by the birds.

From the Indian village to the cataract was some three or four leagues: it took my guide and me as many hours to reach it. Already at six miles' distance, a column of vapour indicated the situation of the weir to my eyes. My heart beat with joy mingled with terror, as I entered the wood that concealed from my view one of the grandest spectacles which nature has offered to mankind.

We dismounted. Leading our horses by the bridle, we passed through heaths and thickets until we came to the bank of the Niagara River, seven or eight hundred paces above the falls. As I never ceased going forward, the guide caught me by the arm; he stopped me on the very edge of the water, which passed with the swiftness of an arrow. It did not seethe, but glided in one sole mass to the slope of the rock; its silence before its fall contrasted with the uproar of the fall itself. The Scriptures often compare a people to the mighty waters: here it was a dying people which, deprived of its voice by the agony of death, went to hurl itself into the abyss of eternity.