private soldiers, all in bright armor. Over the shining helmets were
waving plumes, and many a mailed fist held aloft a rich and beautiful
banner. There were hundreds of horsemen and many more men marching on
foot. No more richly dressed men and horses ever started out on a
Crusade to regain possession of the Holy City. But the object of this
Spanish quest was gold. Spanish serving men drove along with this rich
and gay procession four hundred fat hogs. De Soto had decided not to
risk being starved to death as so many explorers had been. And
gamekeepers held in leash, not falcons to catch and kill birds or
beasts, but bloodhounds for hunting Indians.
Instead of mountains of rocks from which gold could be mined, De Soto’s
men found swamps. The weather was sultry and moist. Insects got inside
their knightly armor and stung them to madness, and venomous serpents
coiled around their armored legs. Indians shot poisoned arrows at them
from the bushes. Their coats of mail were so heavy that stout knights
sank deep in the bogs. They advanced very slowly; they wallowed rather
than marched, and their days and nights were spent in weariness and
torture.
The fame of the white men went on ahead of them. As De Soto advanced he
found the savages on the warpath ready to drive back the invaders. All
along their line of march they could hear savage threats in the
distance. Juan Ortiz told the Spaniards that the Indians were shouting:
“Keep on, robbers and murderers! In Apalachee you will get what you
deserve. No mercy will be shown to captives, who will be hung on the
highest trees along the trail.”
After the Spaniards had marched through the lands of five different
chiefs, they found a great chieftain who seemed to wish to make friends
with the white men. De Soto gladly accepted, but Juan Ortiz warned him
to look out for treachery. So the white men were secretly prepared; and
when the traitor chief gave the signal to his men to attack, the
Spaniards raised their battle cry, “_Santiago!_” and thousands of the
savages were killed by a few hundred Spaniards. Hundreds of Indians
took refuge in a lake. There five good swimmers would lie side by side,
on the surface like logs, forming a human raft on which the best archer
would stand and shoot back at the white men. The fight lasted all day
and nearly all night. Before morning all the Indians were killed or
captured, put in chains, and divided among the Spaniards as slaves.
The Indians, who at first thought the white men were gods, were now sure
they were devils. The boasted village of Apalachee was only a few straw
huts on a knoll in the center of a great swamp. And the savages who
defended it with bows and arrows were no match for armed Spaniards; the
white men killed nearly all of them.
Cold weather came on, and the Spaniards went into winter quarters. A
beautiful Indian girl-chief in that region came bringing pearls and gems
to the Spanish chieftain. But he demanded gold. When she understood this
she sent men to a far country for the yellow metal he desired so
eagerly. De Soto and his men now rejoiced, for they thought they had
found the object of their long and painful search. When the red
messengers returned the stuff proved not to be gold. It must have been
copper ore or “fool’s gold.”
During the second year of their long march, the Spaniards were led
southward to Mabila, which is believed to have stood on the shore of
Mobile Bay. This was a huge fortress, the greatest native town the white
men had yet seen. Within an immense stockade or wall of tree trunks on
end stood a number of houses each of which would hold hundreds of
Indians.
Tuscaloosa, the Mabile chief, set a trap for the Spaniards. The battle
which took place here was the worst of all. The
[Illustration: DE SOTO ON THE BANK OF THE MISSISSIPPI
_From the drawing by H. L. Stephens_]
Spaniards lost seventy men and forty horses. Then they set fire to the
Indians’ houses, and the savages perished in the flames.
De Soto’s men were heartily sick of fighting. They also despaired of
finding gold in southern swamps. The governor heard here that they were
plotting to desert him at Mabila and return by boat to Havana. So,
instead of waiting for a ship to come from Cuba, he ordered them to
march farther into the wilderness. As the prospect of finding gold
became more desperate, De Soto seemed to grow more cruel. Indians were
beheaded for small offenses; friendly scouts were tortured and sent back
with insulting messages to their chiefs.
The farther west the Spaniards went the more bitterly the natives fought
and the more successful they were in battle. In one place the Indians
burned nearly all the Spaniards’ hogs, and feasted on roast pork for
many days. After terrible wanderings, the few remaining Spaniards came
to a wide stream at Chickasaw Bluff, a few miles above the present city
of Vicksburg.
Though it is often stated that De Soto discovered the Mississippi, he
was not the first Spaniard to see that wide and muddy stream. The Great
River meant nothing to him. As he wandered up and down its banks he
contracted malarial fever and died miserably. Faithful friends placed
the body in his heavy armor and wrapped that in blankets weighted with
sand. Then, on a dark night, they paddled out into the middle of the
stream and sank it in a hundred feet of water, where the Indians could
not find it and wreak their revenge upon De Soto’s remains. His
followers attempted to go farther west but became discouraged and
descended the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE, ENGLAND’S FIRST GREAT SAILOR
Among little Francis Drake’s earliest memories was his home in the hulk
of an old ship near a navy yard in the south of England. His father was
a sort of chaplain to the fleets which kept coming and going there.
Francis heard the wild tales of seafaring men about pirates and
Spaniards, and seafights, and the wonderful wealth in distant lands.
Young Drake’s soul was fired with a fervent longing for life and
adventure on the high seas or the Spanish Main, as the region along the
northern coast of South America was called, where wedges of gold and
silver from Peru and pearls and precious stones were stored in treasure
towns, waiting to be shipped to Spain. But Francis was the eldest of
twelve children and his father was poor. So the lad was bound out till
he was twenty-one to work for a skipper, or owner of a small trading
vessel called a barque. In his work there was plenty of lifting and
lugging to do--moving baskets and bales on and off his master’s boat. He
had to work long hours--often at night. His food was scarce and coarse
and his pay was very small indeed, for his work was thought not worth
much more than his learning the sailor trade.
Sometimes they sailed the barque across the Channel to France or Holland
and brought back a cargo to England; but that was as far as such a small
craft could be trusted to go. Francis often saw great ships riding high
on their majestic way to foreign lands, and he felt sure that those
lucky sailors would have thrilling times with pirates and Spaniards, and
come home loaded down with gold and silver, spices, precious gems, and
thrilling stories. Much as he yearned to go on a long voyage, the
faithful fellow stayed by his master, worked hard, and learned all the
ins and outs of sailing a ship, whether large or small.
Just before Francis was old enough to be his own man the good skipper
died. As he had never married and had no near relatives, he left his
barque to his faithful apprentice. Young Drake continued the business,
running from port to port and market to market for about a year, when he
saw a chance to sail on a longer voyage and engage in a larger
enterprise. He had a cousin, John Hawkins, who was captain of a vessel.
This cousin now had a little fleet of five ships and was about to engage
in the slave trade. As Francis had learned to manage a ship, Captain
Hawkins offered to put the smallest vessel in his fleet under his young
cousin’s command. So Francis sold his barque and became captain of his
cousin’s ship _Judith_.
Now, at the age of twenty-two, Francis Drake was embarking on the voyage
of life with the prospect of great adventures, as he had always dreamed
of doing. Slave trading was not considered wrong four hundred years ago.
The ships would go to Africa and buy or carry off negroes and take them
to some foreign country to work in fields and mines. There the blacks
would be sold for gold, silver, pearls and other things of great value.
Sometimes the owner of a fleet would make a fortune in a single
adventure. Of course, there was a great risk to run. Although England
and Spain were not then at war, the English and Spanish treated each
other as enemies when they met on the high seas.
For this voyage, Captain Hawkins got leave of Queen Elizabeth “to load
negroes in Guinea and sell them in the West Indies.” As a sign that the
hundred and seventy men on Hawkins’s fleet saw nothing wrong in stealing
black men from their homes and selling them to be slaves, here is a
motto which that captain had written to govern his soldiers and sailors:
“Serve God daily, love one another, preserve your victuals, beware of
fire, and keep good company.”
Hawkins and Drake seem to have had no trouble in seizing negroes on the
coast of Africa, or in selling their human cargo in the Spanish ports of
America. But as these slavers were starting back to England they were
caught in a storm and had to go into a harbor in Mexico for safety and
to repair damages. While they were there a Spanish fleet five times as
large as theirs, loaded with gold and pearls, came in also for repairs.
The English agreed to leave the Spaniards without touching their ships
if the Spaniards would let them alone. But the Spanish captain did not
keep his word and there was a fierce battle. Hawkins and Drake did great
damage to the Spanish fleet. They reached England safely with two of
their ships, though they had lost nearly all the treasure they had
received as pay for the slaves.
Captain Drake complained to the queen of the way in which the Spaniards
had deceived them, but she was afraid to go to war with a country which
had such a powerful navy as Spain’s was then. So the bold English
captain took matters into his own hands. He made one voyage after
another, attacking Spanish settlements where gold and silver were
stored, boarding Spanish vessels, killing the men or taking them
prisoners, and bringing their rich cargoes to England. Within a few
years the Spaniards lived in terror of their lives when they heard that
Francis Drake was near, and the king of Spain appealed to Queen
Elizabeth to stop those attacks, calling Drake “the master thief of the
western world.”
On one of these expeditions, Drake landed on the Isthmus of Panama, or
Darien, as it was then called. Some of the natives showed him the way
across to the South Sea, or the Pacific Ocean, as Magellan had named it,
and when they had ascended a mountain about half-way across, Drake
climbed a tall tree from which he gazed upon the broad, unexplored
ocean.
“May God give me leave and life to sail that sea but once!” murmured
Captain Drake to his companions.
But Queen Elizabeth had heard of the terror of the Spaniards and ordered
him to stop, lest he plunge her kingdom into a Spanish war before
England was ready. So for a while Francis Drake stayed at home and
suffered because he was not allowed to fight with the Spaniards.
About five years after his first sight of the Pacific, Captain Drake
sailed away from England in command of a fleet of five vessels of which
the flagship was the _Golden Hind_. The object of the voyage was a
secret. This was about sixty years after Magellan, the Portuguese
master-sailor, had discovered and passed through the straits named for
him.
It took five months for the fleet to reach the eastern coast of South
America. In due time they found and passed through the Straits of
Magellan; but the ocean beyond was more terrific than Pacific, for a
fierce storm drove the _Golden Hind_ even farther south than Tierra del
Fuego, so that Drake was first to land at Cape Horn, the southern-most
point of South America. At the place where the waters of the Atlantic
meet those of the Pacific, Drake lay down and embraced the sharp point
of rock and exclaimed: “I am the only man in the world who has ever been
so far south!”
All the ships in Drake’s fleet but the _Golden Hind_ had either been
sunk, broken, or scattered. Now at last he had “leave and life to sail
that sea but once”--with one ship alone. The undaunted hero sailed up
the western coast of South America to capture treasure from the gold
mines of Peru. When he came near Valparaiso, some Spaniards in a ship
saw the _Golden Hind_ approach. Never dreaming that an English ship
could be in that ocean, they were astonished to see a gun presented
through a porthole and to hear an English voice calling on them roughly
to surrender. So they stared and cursed under their breath while “the
master thief of the western world” took charge of their ship with sixty
thousand gold pesos, jewels, merchandise, and a stock of wine.
When the people of Valparaiso heard that the dreadful Drake was in their
harbor, they fled from the city. The little English crew entered the
town, and stocked up with bread, bacon, and wine, which they enjoyed to
the full after many months of famishing. In a day or two the _Golden
Hind_ sailed away northward toward Peru.
At another port they waylaid three unguarded barques and captured
fifty-seven bricks of silver, each weighing about twenty pounds. When
they came to the port of Lima, there were seventeen vessels anchored in
the harbor. Not daunted by numbers, Drake sailed right into the harbor,
captured them all with his one ship, and made their men prisoners while
he plundered the whole Spanish fleet. By this time the alarm had been
spread along the coast that Drake was capturing everything in sight, and
the
[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH KNIGHTING DRAKE ON BOARD THE “GOLDEN
HIND”
_From the drawing by Sir John Gilbert, R.A._]
governor of Peru with two thousand men was waiting for him at Callao.
Drake’s good luck seemed now to desert him. In the presence of that
waiting army the wind died down and the _Golden Hind_ was becalmed,
helpless, and unable to move a yard. The Spanish governor grinned as he
went out in boats from the shore with four hundred soldiers, to take
back all the precious cargo Drake had lately captured. But before the
armed men reached the English ship a gale blew up and Drake sailed away,
laughing and waving farewells to his pursuers.
The cargo from the last ship they captured overloaded the _Golden Hind_
with tons of gold, silver and precious gems. It was useless to overhaul
any more galleons, for they now had all their ship could carry. Their
only thought was to get their treasure home safe and sound. Sailing
across the Pacific, they were sixty-eight days without sighting land.
The _Golden Hind_ began to show the strain of her long voyage; so they
set up a forge on an island in the South Pacific and spent weeks in
making repairs, so that the ship might complete her voyage around the
world. After they had sailed more than a month longer, the ship ran on a
ledge of rocks. Seeing that they could not get her off, they threw six
cannon overboard, then the sugar and spices, then great fortunes in
silver. At last they managed to work her off the ledge into deep water.
Still it was nearly a year before they reached the harbor of Plymouth,
England.
The wildest dreams of the boy Francis Drake were now more than realized.
All England buzzed with his astounding exploits. The city bells rang and
there was a general holiday, with feasting and dancing. Queen Elizabeth
came down from London and dined with the great captain on the _Golden
Hind_. Before she left the deck, the captain knelt before her and she
tapped him on the shoulder with his sword, thus knighting him Sir
Francis Drake.
After this the greatest of the English knights of the high seas made
many voyages, dealing out destruction to Spanish galleons and treasure
stores. He attacked cities and burned fleets--reporting to the queen
that he had just “singed the Spanish king’s beard.” Drake was one of the
four chiefs in command of the English ships that destroyed the Spanish
Armada. No one did more than he to take the sea power away from Spain
and give it to England, and thus make it possible for the English to
begin the settlement of our country.
SIR WALTER RALEIGH, THE FAVORITE OF GOOD QUEEN BESS
A gay company was waiting before the old palace at Greenwich, beside the
River Thames below the City of London, on a summer afternoon in the days
of Elizabeth. They were watching for the queen and her intimates to come
down the broad steps in front of the palace.
There had been a shower, and the trees, grass, and bright flowers
glistened in the sunshine.
“Here comes Her Majesty!” exclaimed some in the waiting throng as a
woman in middle life descended the steps, attended by the Earl of
Leicester and other nobles and knights whose names are well-known to
history. The queen was slender, with her light auburn hair dressed up
from her high, pale brow. Her chief mark of beauty was her small,
delicate hands with long, taper fingers, of which she was rather vain.
She was richly dressed in a heavy silk brocade, and a collar of costly
lace stood up from her shoulders behind her slender neck like an open
fan.
[Illustration: THE BOYHOOD OF RALEIGH. AS HE LISTENS TO THE SAILOR’S
TALE OF THE LAND BEYOND THE SEA, RALEIGH RESOLVES TO WIN IT FOR ENGLAND
WHEN HE IS A MAN.
_From the painting by J. E. Millais_]
The court, after receiving her gracious greetings, followed the queen in
a grand promenade through the park. Elizabeth soon came to a spot where
the recent shower had left a shallow pool of water. A quaint writer
describes this scene:
“Her Majesty meeting with a plashy place, made some scruples to go
on, when Raleigh (dressed in the gay and genteel habit of those
times) presently cast off and spread his new plush cloak on the
ground, whereon the Queen trod gently over, rewarding him
afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of
so fair a foot-cloth.”
Walter Raleigh was a handsome young man, six feet tall, with curly brown
hair and beard. He had been a soldier in France and an officer in
Ireland, and had made several voyages of discovery with his gallant
half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert.
It was the fashion--indeed it seemed necessary then--for men at court to
flatter the middle-aged maiden queen, who was foolish enough to believe
that she was as lovely as they told her she was. The Earl of Leicester
once entertained her at Kenilworth Castle, where he had all the clocks
stopped on the moment of her arrival to show that no notice should be
taken of the passing of time during her visit there.
So Queen Bess could hardly help feeling flattered when such a gallant
and good-looking courtier as Raleigh bowed before her and laid his cloak
as a velvet carpet for her to walk upon. Riches, lands, castles, and
even happiness go by favor in royal circles. Some time after this, the
queen made her favorite a knight, with the title Sir before his name.
One day the queen saw Raleigh taking a diamond ring off his finger and
scratching something on a window-pane.
“Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.”
Then she took from her own slim hand a diamond and cut in the glass
under what he had written, this rhyme:
“If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all.”
Of course, each reigning favorite of the queen became an object of envy
to the rest of the court. Lord Leicester, who was now slighted by her
Majesty for this new knight, did all he could to injure Raleigh. The
young Earl of Essex did his utmost, later, to turn the queen against Sir
Walter. But for a long time Raleigh remained high in favor.
Raleigh was the first Englishman to attempt to plant a colony in the New
World. By way of compliment to the maiden queen, he named the whole
region which he was trying to settle, Virginia. Returning from an early
voyage, he introduced into Ireland the potato, first found in South
America. He also discovered the pineapple (so named because it is shaped
like a pine cone) and imported it to England. Another thing Raleigh is
said to have introduced into England was tobacco, which the American
Indians raised and “drank,” as they called smoking, in pipes of copper
and clay. Raleigh had a silver pipe made for his own use. One day when
he was smoking in his library, a manservant came in with a pot of ale,
and, thinking his master was on fire, yelled with fright as he poured
the ale over him! It is said that the queen asked Sir Walter to smoke in
her presence; but when she tried to learn to use tobacco in that way,
she stopped because it made her ill.
Sir Walter Raleigh was in active command of a number of English ships in
the fleet which defeated the Invincible Armada, sent against England by
King Philip the Second of Spain. For her favorite’s part in that great
adventure, the queen made him an admiral. Later, he was wounded in a
naval battle near Cadiz, Spain. When asked what had been done for him on
account of his heroic services there, Admiral Raleigh sadly replied,
“What the generals have got I know least. For my own part, I have got a
lame leg and deformed. I have not wanted good words, and exceeding kind
and regardful usage; but I have possession of nought but poverty and
pain.”
Some one must have told the queen of this speech, for she called Raleigh
back to the palace and appointed him once more her captain of the guard.
When Queen Elizabeth died, James Stuart, king of Scotland, became king.
James’s mind had been poisoned against Raleigh, whose enemies told the
new king that Raleigh plotted to place James’s cousin, Arabella Stuart,
upon the throne of England. So Sir Walter was imprisoned in the Tower of
London. He was confined there for twelve years, though he proved that
the things his enemies had said against him were untrue. One wicked
creature who had accused him confessed that his story about Raleigh was
made up out of spite.
During the long years of his imprisonment, Sir Walter wrote his “History
of the World,” and experimented in a rude chemical laboratory which he
had fixed up in his prison. He also wrote beautiful poems and many
letters to his friends. For some time Lady Raleigh was allowed to visit
him with their son, Carew. The older son, Walter, had been killed in an
encounter while on a voyage with his father, seeking El Dorado, or the
City of Gold, supposed to lie hidden in northern South America.
At last word came from King James that if Raleigh would go and find
those fabled gold mines for his benefit, his high treason would be
forgiven. So the white-haired knight, lame from a wound he had received
in loyal service of England, started out on another voyage of adventure,
to fight the Spaniard to the bitter end.
But Sir Walter was only hoping against hope, for there was no such mine
there, and the expedition proved an utter failure. Instead of escaping
to another country as he might well have done, he went back and bravely
told King James that the “El Dorado” story was only a Spanish lie.
So the disappointed king ordered Raleigh back to prison, and a corrupt
judge pronounced him guilty of high treason. For that crime, the
Raleigh’s beautiful home estate might legally become the property of the
crown, and Raleigh himself condemned to death.
Raleigh made the best even of this terrible experience. He cheered his
wife by telling her he was ready and glad to go where she could come
too--where they could be happy together always.
On his way to execution, Raleigh noticed a man with a bald head and no
hat. Taking off his own cap he tossed it down to the old man with--
“You need this, my friend, more than I do.”
On the scaffold he made a patriotic speech to the assembled crowd. Then
he asked to see the axe. He smiled as he tried the edge of it with his
thumb, and remarked to the executioner who stood before him, dressed, as
was the custom, in black velvet tights, with a black mask over his face,
“This gives me no fear. It is a sharp and fair medicine to cure me of
all my troubles.”
HENRY HUDSON, THE MAN WHO PUT HIMSELF ON THE MAP