a letter in the bottle, buried. A few days later Brahe returned with
the industrious Mr. Wright and his supply train. Here is the note in
Wright’s diary:--
“May eighth. This morning I reached the Cooper’s Creek depot and found
no sign of Mr. Burke’s having visited the creek, or the natives having
disturbed the stores.”
Only a few miles away the creek ran out into channels of dry sand
where Burke, Wills and King were starving, ragged beggars fed by the
charitable black fellows on fish and a seed called nardoo, of which
they made their bread. There were nice fat rats also, delicious baked
in their skins, and the natives brought them fire-wood for the camp.
Again they attempted to reach the Mounted Police outpost, but the
camels died, the water failed, and they starved. Burke sent Wills back
to Cooper’s Creek. “No trace,” wrote Wills in his journal, “of any one
except the blacks having been here since we left.” Brahe and Wright had
left no stores at the camp ground.
Had they only been bushmen the tracks would have told Wills of help
within his reach, the fish hooks would have won them food in plenty.
It is curious, too, that Burke died after a meal of crow and nardoo,
there being neither sugar nor fat in these foods, without which they
can not sustain a man’s life. Then King left Burke’s body, shot three
crows and brought them to Wills, who was lying dead in camp. Three
months afterward a relief party found King living among the natives
“wasted to a shadow, and hardly to be distinguished as a civilized
being but by the remnants of the clothes upon him.”
“They should not have gone,” said one pioneer of these lost explorers.
“They weren’t bushmen.” Afterward a Mr. Collis and his wife lived four
years in plenty upon the game and fish at the Innaminka water-hole
where poor Burke died of hunger.
Such were the first crossings from east to west, and from south to
north of the Australian continent.
XVIII
A. D. 1867
THE HERO-STATESMAN
There is no greater man now living in the world than Diaz the
hero-statesman, father of Mexico. What other soldier has scored
fourteen sieges and fifty victorious battles? What other statesman,
having fought his way to the throne, has built a civilized nation out
of chaos?
This Spanish-red Indian half-breed began work at the age of seven
as errand boy in a shop. At fourteen he was earning his living as a
private tutor while he worked through college for the priesthood. At
seventeen he was a soldier in the local militia and saw his country
overthrown by the United States, which seized three-fourths of all her
territories. At the age of twenty-one, Professor Diaz, in the chair of
Roman law at Oaxaca, was working double tides as a lawyer’s clerk.
In the Mexican “republic” it is a very serious offense to vote for the
Party-out-of-office, and the only way to support the opposition is to
get out with a rifle and fight. So when Professor Diaz voted at the
next general election he had to fly for his life. After several months
of hard fighting he emerged from his first revolution as mayor of a
village.
The villagers were naked Indians, and found their new mayor an
unexpected terror. He drilled them into soldiers, marched them to his
native city Oaxaca, captured the place by assault, drove out a local
usurper who was making things too hot for the citizens, and then amid
the wild rejoicings that followed, was promoted to a captaincy in the
national guards.
Captain Diaz explained to his national guards that they were fine men,
but needed a little tactical exercise. So he took them out for a gentle
course of maneuvers, to try their teeth on a rebellion which happened
to be camped conveniently in the neighborhood. When he had finished
exercising his men, there was no rebellion left, so he marched them
home. He had to come home because he was dangerously wounded.
It must be explained that there were two big political parties, the
clericals, and the liberals--both pledged to steal everything in sight.
Diaz was scarcely healed of his wound, when a clerical excursion came
down to steal the city. He thrashed them sick, he chased them until
they dropped, and thrashed them again until they scattered in helpless
panic.
The liberal president rewarded Colonel Diaz with a post of such eminent
danger, that he had to fight for his life through two whole years
before he could get a vacation. Then Oaxaca, to procure him a holiday,
sent up the young soldier as member of parliament to the capital.
Of course the clerical army objected strongly to the debates of a
liberal congress sitting in parliament at the capital. They came and
spoiled the session by laying siege to the City of Mexico. Then the
member for Oaxaca was deputed to arrange with these clericals.
He left his seat in the house, gathered his forces, and chased that
clerical army for two months. At last, dead weary, the clericals had
camped for supper, when Diaz romped in and thrashed them. He got that
supper.
So disgusted were the clerical leaders that they now invited Napoleon
III to send an army of invasion. Undismayed, the unfortunate liberals
fought a joint army of French and clericals, checked them under the
snows of Mount Orizaba, and so routed them before the walls of Puebla
that it was nine months before they felt well enough to renew the
attack. The day of that victory is celebrated by the Mexicans as their
great national festival.
In time, the French, forty thousand strong, not to mention their
clerical allies, returned to the assault of Puebla, and in front of
the city found Diaz commanding an outpost. The place was only a large
rest-house for pack-trains, and when the outer gate was carried,
the French charged in with a rush. One man remained to defend the
courtyard, Colonel Diaz, with a field-piece, firing shrapnel, mowing
away the French in swathes until his people rallied from their panic,
charged across the square, and recovered the lost gates.
The city held out for sixty days, but succumbed to famine, and the
French could not persuade such a man as Diaz to give them any parole.
They locked him up in a tower, and his dungeon had but a little
iron-barred window far up in the walls. Diaz got through those bars,
escaped, rallied a handful of Mexicans, armed them by capturing a
French convoy camp, raised the southern states of Mexico, and for two
years held his own against the armies of France.
President Juarez had been driven away into the northern desert, a
fugitive, the Emperor Maximilian reigned in the capital, and Marshal
Bazaine commanded the French forces that tried to conquer Diaz in the
south. The Mexican hero had three thousand men and a chain of forts.
Behind that chain of forts he was busy reorganizing the government of
the southern states, and among other details, founding a school for
girls in his native city.
Marshal Bazaine, the traitor, who afterward sold France to the Germans,
attempted to bribe Diaz, but, failing in that, brought nearly fifty
thousand men to attack three thousand. Slowly he drove the unfortunate
nationalists to Oaxaca and there Diaz made one of the most glorious
defenses in the annals of war. He melted the cathedral bells for
cannon-balls, he mounted a gun in the empty belfry, where he and his
starving followers fought their last great fight, until he stood alone
among the dead, firing charge after charge into the siege lines.
Once more he was cast into prison, only to make such frantic attempts
at escape that in the end he succeeded in scaling an impossible wall.
He was an outlaw now, living by robbery, hunted like a wolf, and yet on
the second day after that escape, he commanded a gang of bandits and
captured a French garrison. He ambuscaded an expedition sent against
him, raised an army, and reconquered Southern Mexico.
[Illustration: PORFIRIO DIAZ]
It was then (1867) that the United States compelled the French to
retire. President Juarez marched from the northern deserts, gathering
the people as he came, besieged Querétaro, captured and shot the
Emperor Maximilian. Diaz marched from the south, entered the City of
Mexico, handed over the capital to his triumphant president, resigned
his commission as commander-in-chief, and retired in deep contentment
to manufacture sugar in Oaxaca.
For nine years the hero made sugar. Over an area in the north as large
as France, the Apache Indians butchered every man, woman and child
with fiendish tortures. The whole distracted nation cried in its agony
for a leader, but every respectable man who tried to help was promptly
denounced by the government, stripped of his possessions and driven
into exile. At last General Diaz could bear it no longer, made a few
remarks and was prosecuted. He fled, and there began a period of the
wildest adventures conceivable, while the government attempted to hunt
him down. He raised an insurrection in the north, but after a series
of extraordinary victories, found the southward march impossible. When
next he entered the republic of Mexico, he came disguised as a laborer
by sea to the port of Tampico.
At Vera Cruz he landed, and after a series of almost miraculous escapes
from capture, succeeded in walking to Oaxaca. There he raised his last
rebellion, and with four thousand followers ambuscaded a government
army, taking three thousand prisoners, the guns and all the transport.
President Lerdo heard the news, and bolted with all the cash. General
Diaz took the City of Mexico and declared himself president of the
republic.
Whether as bandit or king, Diaz has always been the handsomest man
in Mexico, the most courteous, the most charming, and terrific as
lightning when in action. The country suffered from a very plague of
politicians until one day he dropped in as a visitor, quite unexpected,
at Vera Cruz, selected the eleven leading politicians without the
slightest bias as to their views, put them up against the city wall and
shot them. Politics was abated.
The leading industry of the country was highway robbery, until the
president, exquisitely sympathetic, invited all the principal robbers
to consult with him as to details of government. He formed them into
a body of mounted police, which swept like a whirlwind through the
republic and put a sudden end to brigandage. Capital punishment not
being permitted by the humane government, the robbers were all shot for
“attempting to escape.”
Next in importance was the mining of silver, and the recent decline in
its value threatened to ruin Mexico. By the magic of his finance, Diaz
used that crushing reverse to lace the country with railroads, equip
the cities with electric lights and traction power far in advance of
any appliances we have in England, open great seaports, and litter all
the states of Mexico with prosperous factories. Meanwhile he paid off
the national debt, and made his coinage sound.
He never managed himself to speak any other language than his own
majestic, slow Castilian, but he knew that English is to be the tongue
of mankind. Every child in Mexico had to go to school to learn English.
And this greatest of modern sovereigns went about among his people the
simplest, most accessible of men. “They may kill me if they want to,”
he said once, “but they don’t want to. They rather like me.” So one
might see him taking his morning ride, wearing the beautiful leather
dress of the Mexican horsemen, or later in the day, in a tweed suit
going down to the office by tram car, or on his holidays hunting the
nine-foot cats which we call cougar, or of a Sunday going to church
with his wife and children. On duty he was an absolute monarch, off
duty a kindly citizen, and it seemed to all of us who knew the country
that he would die as he had lived, still in harness. One did not expect
too much--the so-called elections were a pleasant farce, but the
country was a deal better governed than the western half of the United
States. Any fellow entitled to a linen collar in Europe wore a revolver
in Mexico, as part of the dress of a gentleman, but in the wildest
districts I never carried a cartridge. Diaz had made his country a land
of peace and order, strong, respected, prosperous, with every outward
sign of coming greatness. Excepting only Napoleon and the late Japanese
emperor, he was both in war and peace the greatest leader our world has
ever known. But the people proved unworthy of their chief; to-day he is
a broken exile, and Mexico has lapsed back into anarchy.
XIX
A. D. 1870
THE SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
A lady who remembers John Rowlands at the workhouse school in Denbigh
tells me that he was a lazy disagreeable boy. He is also described as a
“full-faced, stubborn, self-willed, round-headed, uncompromising, deep
fellow. He was particularly strong in the trunk, but not very smart
or elegant about the legs, which were disproportionately short. His
temperament was unusually secretive; he could stand no chaff nor the
least bit of humor.”
Perhaps that is why he ran away to sea; but anyway a sailing ship
landed him in New Orleans, where a rich merchant adopted him as a son.
Of course a workhouse boy has nothing to be patriotic about, so it was
quite natural that this Welsh youth should become a good American, also
that he should give up the name his mother bore, taking that of his
benefactor, Henry M. Stanley. The old man died, leaving him nothing,
and for two years there is no record until the American Civil War gave
him a chance of proving his patriotism to his adopted country. He was
so tremendously patriotic that he served on both sides, first in the
confederate army, then in the federal navy. He proved a very brave man,
and after the war, distinguished himself as a special correspondent
during an Indian campaign in the West. Then he joined the staff of the
New York _Herald_ serving in the Abyssinian War, and the civil war in
Spain. He allowed the _Herald_ to contradict a rumor that he was a
Welshman. “Mr. Stanley,” said the paper, “is neither an Ap-Jones, nor
an Ap-Thomas. Missouri and not Wales is his birthplace.”
Privately he spent his holidays with his mother and family in Wales,
speaking Welsh no doubt with a strong American accent. The whitewashed
American has always a piercing twang, even if he has adopted as his
“native” land, soft-voiced Missouri, or polished Louisiana.
In those days Doctor Livingstone was missing. The gentle daring
explorer had found Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika, and to the westward
of them, a mile wide river, the Lualaba, which he supposed to be
headwaters of the Nile. He was slowly dying of fever, almost penniless,
and always when he reached the verge of some new discovery, his
cowardly negro carriers revolted, or ran away, leaving him to his fate.
No word of him had reached the world for years. England was anxious
as to the fate of one of her greatest men, so there were various
attempts to send relief, delayed by the expense, and not perhaps
handled by really first-rate men. To find Livingstone would be a most
tremendous world-wide advertisement, say for a patent-pill man, a soap
manufacturer, or a newspaper. All that was needed was unlimited cash,
and the services of a first-rate practical traveler, vulgar enough to
use the lost hero as so much “copy” for his newspaper. The New York
_Herald_ had the money, and in Stanley, the very man for the job.
Not that the _Herald_, or Stanley cared twopence about the fate of
Livingstone. The journal sent the man to make a big journey through
Asia Minor and Persia on his way to Zanzibar. The more Livingstone’s
rescue was delayed the better the “ad” for Stanley and the _Herald_.
As to the journey, Stanley’s story has been amply advertised, and
we have no other version because his white followers died. He found
Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, and had the grace to
reverence, comfort and succor a dying man.
As to Stanley’s magnificent feat of exploring the great lakes, and
descending Livingstone’s river to the mouth of the Congo, again his
story is well exploited while the version of his white followers is
missing, because they gave their lives.
In Stanley’s expedition which founded the Congo State, and in his
relief of Emin Pasha, the white men were more fortunate, and some
lived. It is rumored that they did not like Mr. Stanley, but his negro
followers most certainly adored him, serving in one journey after
another. There can be no doubt too, that with the unlimited funds that
financed and his own fine merits as a traveler, Stanley did more than
any other explorer to open up the dark continent, and to solve its
age-long mysteries. It was not his fault that Livingstone stayed on in
the wilderness to die, that the Congo Free State became the biggest
scandal of modern times, or that Emin Pasha flatly refused to be
rescued from governing the Soudan.
[Illustration: HENRY M. STANLEY]
Stanley lived to reap the rewards of his great deeds, to forget that
he was a native of Missouri and a freeborn American citizen, to accept
the honor of knighthood and to sit in the British parliament. Whether
as a Welshman, or an American, a confederate, or a federal, a Belgian
subject or a Britisher, he always knew on which side his bread was
buttered.
XX
A. D. 1871
LORD STRATHCONA
It is nearly a century now since Lord Strathcona was born in a Highland
cottage. His father, Alexander Smith, kept a little shop at Forres,
in Elgin; his mother, Barbara Stewart, knew while she reared the lad
that the world would hear of him. His school, founded by a returned
adventurer, was one which sent out settlers for the colonies, soldiers
for the army, miners for the gold-fields, bankers for England, men
to every corner of the world. As the lad grew, he saw the soldiers,
the sailors, the adventurers, who from time to time came tired home
to Forres, and among these was his uncle, John Stewart, famous in
the annals of the Canadian frontier, rich, distinguished, commending
all youngsters to do as he had done. When Donald Smith was in his
eighteenth year, this uncle procured him a clerkship in the Hudson’s
Bay Company.
Canada was in revolt when in 1837 the youngster reached Montreal, for
Robert Nelson had proclaimed a Canadian republic and the British troops
were busy driving the republicans into the United States. So there
was bloodshed, the burning of houses, the filling of the jails with
rebels to be convicted presently and hanged. Out of all this noise
and confusion, Donald Smith was sent into the silence of Labrador,
the unknown wilderness of the Northeast Territory, where the first
explorer, McLean, was searching for tribes of Eskimos that might be
induced to trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company. “In September (1838),”
wrote McLean, “I was gratified by the arrival of despatches from Canada
by a young clerk appointed to the district. By him we received the
first intelligence of the stirring events which had taken place in the
colonies during the preceding year.” So Smith had taken a year to carry
the news of the Canadian revolt to that remote camp of the explorers.
Henceforward, for many years there exists no public record of Donald
Smith’s career, and he has flatly refused to tell the story lest he
should appear to be advertising. His work consisted of trading with
the savages for skins, of commanding small outposts, healing the sick,
administering justice, bookkeeping, and of immense journeys by canoe
in summer, or cariole drawn by a team of dogs in winter. The winter is
arctic in that Northeast Territory, and a very pleasant season between
blizzards, but the summer is cursed with a plague of insects, black
flies by day, mosquitoes by night almost beyond endurance. Like other
men in the service of the company, Mr. Smith had the usual adventures
by flood and field, the peril of the snow-storms, the wrecking of
canoes. There is but one story extant. His eyesight seemed to be
failing, and after much pain he ventured on a journey of many months to
seek the help of a doctor in Montreal. Sir George Simpson, governor of
the company, met him in the outskirts of the city.
“Well, young man,” he said, “why are you not at your post?”
“My eyes, sir; they got so bad, I’ve come to see a doctor.”
“And who gave you permission to leave your post?”
“No one, sir.” It would have taken a year to get permission, and his
need was urgent.
“Then, sir,” answered the governor, “if it’s a question between your
eyes, and your service in the Hudson’s Bay Company, you’ll take my
advice, and return this instant to your post.”
Without another word, without a glance toward the city this man turned
on his tracks, and set off to tramp a thousand miles back to his duty.
The man who has learned to obey has learned to command, and wherever
Smith was stationed, the books were accurate, the trade was profitable.
He was not heard of save in the return of profits, while step by step
he rose to higher and higher command, until at the age of forty-eight
he was appointed governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, sovereign from
the Atlantic to the Pacific, reigning over a country nearly as large as
Europe. To his predecessors this had been the crowning of an ambitious
life; to him, it was only the beginning of his great career.
The Canadian colonies were then being welded into a nation and the
first act of the new Dominion government was to buy from the Hudson’s
Bay Company the whole of its enormous empire, two thousand miles wide
and nearly five thousand miles long. Never was there such a sale of
land, at such a price, for the cash payment worked out at about two
shillings per square mile. Two-thirds of the money went to the sleeping
partners of the company in England; one-third--thanks to Mr. Smith’s
persuasion--was granted to the working officers in Rupert’s Land. Mr.
Smith’s own share seems to have been the little nest egg from which his
fortune has hatched.
When the news of the great land sale reached the Red River of the
north, the people there broke out in revolt, set up a republic, and
installed Louis Riel as president at Fort Garry.
Naturally this did not meet the views of the Canadian government,
which had bought the country, or of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which
owned the stolen fort. Mr. Smith, governor of the company, was sent
at once as commissioner for the Canadian government to restore the
settlement to order. On his arrival the rebel president promptly put
him in jail, and openly threatened his life. In this awkward situation,
Mr. Smith contrived not only to stay alive, but to conduct a public
meeting, with President Riel acting as his interpreter to the French
half-breed rebels. The temperature at this outdoor meeting was twenty
degrees below zero, with a keen wind, but in course of five hours’
debating, Mr. Smith so undermined the rebel authority that from that
time it began to collapse. Afterward, although the rebels murdered
one prisoner, and times were more than exciting, Mr. Smith’s policy
gradually sapped the rebellion, until, when the present Lord Wolseley
arrived with British troops, Riel and his deluded half-breeds bolted.
So, thanks to Mr. Smith, Fort Garry is now Winnipeg, the central city
of Canada, capital of her central province, Manitoba.