service, and became a politician, he schemed, with unheard-of daring,
for even greater ends. At his suggestion, the Northwest Mounted Police
was formed and sent out to take possession of the Great Plains. That
added a wheat field to Canada which will very soon be able to feed the
British empire. Next he speculated with every dollar he could raise,
on a rusty railway track, which some American builders had abandoned
because they were bankrupt. He got the rail head into Winnipeg, and
a large trade opened with the United States. So began the boom that
turned Manitoba into a populous country, where the buffalo had ranged
before his coming. Now he was able to startle the Canadian government
with the warning that unless they hurried up with a railway, binding
the whole Dominion from ocean to ocean, all this rich western country
would drift into the United States. When the government had failed in
an attempt to build the impossible railway, Sir Donald got Montreal
financiers together, cousins and friends of his own, staked every
dollar he had, made them gamble as heavily, and set to work on the
biggest road ever constructed. The country to be traversed was almost
unexplored, almost uninhabited except by savages, fourteen hundred
miles of rock and forest, a thousand miles of plains, six hundred miles
of high alps.
The syndicate building the road consisted of merchants in a provincial
town not bigger then than Bristol, and when they met for business it
was to wonder vaguely where the month’s pay was to come from for their
men. They would part for the night to think, and by morning, Donald
Smith would say, “Well, here’s another million--that ought to do for
a bit.” On November seven, 1885, he drove the last spike, the golden
spike, that completed the Canadian Pacific railway, and welded Canada
into a living nation.
Since then Lord Strathcona has endowed a university and given a big
hospital to Montreal. At a cost of three hundred thousand pounds he
presented the famous regiment known as Strathcona’s Horse, to the
service of his country, and to-day, in his ninety-third year is working
hard as Canadian high commissioner in London.
XXI
A. D. 1872
THE SEA HUNTERS
The Japanese have heroes and adventurers just as fine as our own, most
valiant and worthy knights. Unhappily I am too stupid to remember their
honorable names, to understand their motives, or to make out exactly
what they were playing at. It is rather a pity they have to be left
out, but at least we can deal with one very odd phase of adventure in
the Japan seas.
The daring seamen of old Japan used to think nothing of crossing
the Pacific to raid the American coast for slaves. But two or three
hundred years ago the reigning shogun made up his mind that slaving was
immoral. So he pronounced an edict by which the builders of junks were
forbidden to fill in their stern frame with the usual panels. The junks
were still good enough for coastwise trade at home, but if they dared
the swell of the outer ocean a following sea would poop them and send
them to the bottom. That put a stop to the slave trade; but no king
can prevent storms, and law or no law, disabled junks were sometimes
swept by the big black current and the westerly gales right across the
Pacific Ocean. The law made only one difference, that the crippled
junks never got back to Japan; and if their castaway seamen reached
America the native tribes enslaved them. I find that during the first
half of the nineteenth century the average was one junk in forty-two
months cast away on the coasts of America.
Now let us turn to another effect of this strange law that disabled
Japanese shipping. Northward of Japan are the Kuril Islands in a region
of almost perpetual fog, bad storms and bitter cold, ice pack, strong
currents and tide rips, combed by the fanged reefs, with plenty of
earthquakes and eruptions to allay any sense of monotony. The large and
hairy natives are called the Ainu, who live by fishing, and used to
catch sea otter and fur seal. These furs found their way via Japan to
China, where sea-otter fur was part of the costly official winter dress
of the Chinese mandarins. As to the seal, their whiskers are worth two
shillings a set for cleaning opium pipes, and one part of the carcass
sells at a shilling a time for medicine, apart from the worth of the
fur.
Now the law that disabled the junks made it impossible for Japan to do
much trade in the Kurils, so that the Russians actually got there first
as colonists.
But no law disabled the Americans, and when the supply of sea otter
failed on the Californian coast in 1872 a schooner called the _Cygnet_
crossed the Pacific to the Kuril Islands. There the sea-otters were
plentiful in the kelp beds, tame as cats and eager to inspect the
hunters’ boats. Their skins fetched from eighty to ninety dollars.
When news came to Japan of this new way of getting rich, a young
Englishman, Mr. H. J. Snow, bought a schooner, a hog-backed relic
called the _Swallow_ in which he set out for the hunting. Three days
out, a gale dismasted her, and putting in for shelter she was cast away
in the Kuriles. Mr. Snow’s second venture was likewise cast away on
a desert isle, where the crew wintered. “My vessels,” he says, “were
appropriately named. The _Swallow_ swallowed up part of my finances,
and the _Snowdrop_ caused me to drop the rest.”
During the winter another crew of white men were in quarters on a
distant headland of the same Island Yeturup, and were cooking their
Christmas dinner when they met with an accident. A dispute had arisen
between two rival cooks as to how to fry fritters, and during the
argument a pan of boiling fat capsized into the stove and caught
alight. The men escaped through the flames half dressed, their clothes
on fire, into the snow-clad wilderness and a shrewd wind. Then they set
up a shelter of driftwood with the burning ruin in front to keep them
warm, while they gravely debated as to whether they ought to cremate
the cooks upon the ashes of their home and of their Christmas dinner.
To understand the adventures of the sea hunters we must follow the
story of the leased islands. The Alaska Commercial Company, of San
Francisco, leased the best islands for seal and otter fishing. From
the United States the company leased the Pribilof Islands in Bering
Sea, a great fur-seal metropolis with a population of nearly four
millions. They had armed native gamekeepers and the help of an American
gunboat. From Russia the company leased Bering and Copper Islands off
Kamchatka, and Cape Patience on Saghalian with its outlier Robber
Island. There also they had native gamekeepers, a patrol ship, and the
help of Russian troops and gunboats. The company had likewise tame
newspapers to preach about the wickedness of the sea hunters and call
them bad names. As a rule the sea hunters did their hunting far out
at sea where it was perfectly lawful. At the worst they landed on the
forbidden islands as poachers. The real difference between the two
parties was that the sea hunters took all the risks, while the company
had no risks and took all the profits.
In 1883 Snow made his first raid on Bering Island. Night fell while his
crew were busy clubbing seals, and they had killed about six hundred
when the garrison rushed them. Of course the hunters made haste to
the boats, but Captain Snow missed his men who should have followed
him, and as hundreds of seals were taking to the water he joined them
until an outlying rock gave shelter behind which he squatted down,
waist-deep. When the landscape became more peaceful he set off along
the shore of boulders, stumbling, falling and molested by yapping
foxes. He had to throw rocks to keep them off. When he found the going
too bad he took to the hills, but sea boots reaching to the hips are
not comfy for long walks, and when he pulled them off he found how
surprisingly sharp are the stones in an Arctic tundra. He pulled them
on again, and after a long time came abreast of his schooner, where he
found one of the seamen. They hailed and a boat took them on board,
where the shipkeeper was found to be drunk, and the Japanese bos’n much
in need of a thrashing. Captain Snow supplied what was needed to the
bos’n and had a big supper, but could not sail as the second mate was
still missing. He turned in for a night’s rest.
Next morning bright and early came a company’s steamer with a Russian
officer and two soldiers who searched the schooner. There was not
a trace of evidence on board, but on general principles the vessel
was seized and condemned, all her people suffering some months of
imprisonment at Vladivostok.
In 1888, somewhat prejudiced against the virtuous company, Captain
Snow came with the famous schooner _Nemo_, back to the scene of his
misadventure. One morning with three boats he went prospecting for
otter close along shore, shot four, and his hunters one, then gave
the signal of return to the schooner. At that moment two shots rang
out from behind the boulders ashore, and a third, which peeled some
skin from his hand, followed by a fusillade like a hail storm. Of the
Japanese seamen in Snow’s boat the boat steerer was shot through the
backbone. A second man was hit first in one leg, then in the other,
but went on pulling. The stroke oar, shot in the calf, fell and lay,
seemingly dead, but really cautious. Then the other two men bent down
and Snow was shot in the leg.
So rapid was the firing that the guns ashore must have heated partly
melting the leaden bullets, for on board the boat there was a distinct
perfume of molten lead. Three of the bullets which struck the captain
seem to have been deflected by his woolen jersey, and one which
got through happened to strike a fold. It had been noted in the
Franco-Prussian War that woolen underclothes will sometimes turn
leaden bullets.
“I remember,” says Captain Snow, “weighing the chances ... of swimming
beside the boat, but decided that we should be just as liable to be
drowned as shot, as no one could stand the cold water for long. For the
greater part of the time I was vigorously plying my paddle ... and only
presenting the edge of my body, the left side, to the enemy. This is
how it was that the bullets which struck me all entered my clothing on
the left side. I expected every moment to be shot through the body, and
I could not help wondering how it would feel.”
With three dying men, and three wounded, he got the sinking boat under
sail and brought her alongside the schooner.
Of course it was very good of the Alaska Commercial Company to preserve
the wild game of the islands, but even gamekeepers may show excess of
zeal when it comes to wholesale murder. To all of us who were in that
trade it is a matter of keen regret that the officers ashore took such
good cover. Their guards, and the Cossacks, were kindly souls enough,
ready and willing--in the absence of the officers to sell skins to the
raiders or even, after some refreshments, to help in clubbing a few
hundred seals. It was rather awkward, though, for one of the schooners
at Cape Patience when in the midst of these festivities a gunboat came
round the corner.
The American and the Japanese schooners were not always quite good
friends, and there is a queer story of a triangular duel between three
vessels, fought in a fog. Mr. Kipling had the _Rhyme of the Three
Sealers_, he told me, from Captain Lake in Yokohama. I had it from
the mate of one of the three schooners, _The Stella_. She changed
her name to _Adele_, and the mate became master, a little, round,
fox-faced Norseman, Hans Hansen, of Christiania. In 1884 the _Adele_
was captured by an American gunboat and taken to San Francisco. Hansen
said that he and his men were marched through the streets shackled, and
great was the howl about pirates, but when the case came up for trial
the court had no jurisdiction, and the ship was released. From that
event dates the name “Yokohama Pirates,” and Hansen’s nickname as the
Flying Dutchman. Because at the time of capture he had for once been a
perfectly innocent deep sea sealer, he swore everlasting war against
the United States, transferred his ship to the port of Victoria,
British Columbia, and would hoist by turns the British, Japanese,
German, Norwegian or even American flag, as suited his convenience.
Once when I asked him why not the Black Flag, he grinned, remarking
that them old-fashioned pirates had no business sense. Year after
year he raided the forbidden islands to subvert the garrisons, rob
warehouses, or plunder the rookeries, while gunboats of four nations
failed to effect his capture. In port he was a pattern of innocent
virtue, at sea his superb seamanship made him as hard to catch as a
ghost, and his adventures beat the _Arabian Nights_. I was with him
as an ordinary seaman in the voyage of 1889, a winter raid upon the
Pribilof Islands. At the first attempt we clawed off a lee shore in a
hurricane, the second resulted in a mutiny, and the third landing was
not very successful, because the boats were swamped, and the garrison
a little too prevalent ashore. On the voyage of 1890 the _Adele_ took
four hundred skins, but in 1891 was cast away on the North Island
of the Queen Charlotte group, without any loss of life. The Flying
Dutchman took to mining on the outer coast of Vancouver, where he
rescued a shipwrecked crew, but afterward perished in the attempt to
save a drowning Indian.
Quite apart from the so-called Yokohama pirates, a large fleet of
law-abiding Canadian schooners hunted the fur seal at sea, a matter
which led to some slight unpleasantness between the American and the
British governments. There was hunting also in the seas about Cape
Horn; but the Yokohama schooners have left behind them by far the
finest memories. Captain Snow says that from first to last some fifty
white men’s schooners sailed out of Yokohama. Of five there is no
record, two took to sealing when the sea otter no longer paid, and four
were sold out of the business. The Russians sank one, captured and lost
two, captured and condemned three, all six being a dead loss to their
owners. For the rest, twenty-two were cast away, and twelve foundered
with all hands at sea, so that the total loss was forty ships out of
fifty. For daring seamanship and gallant adventure sea hunting made a
school of manhood hard to match in this tame modern world, and war is a
very tame affair to those who shared the fun.
XXII
A. D. 1879
THE BUSHRANGERS
It is a merit to love dumb animals, but to steal them is an excess of
virtue that is sure to cause trouble with the police. All Australians
have a passion for horses, but thirty years ago, the Australian bushmen
developed such a mania for horse-stealing, that the mounted police
were fairly run off their legs. The feeling between bushmen and police
became so exceedingly bitter that in 1878 a constable, attempting
to make arrests, was beset and wounded. The fight took place in the
house of a Mrs. Kelly, who got penal servitude, whereas her sons, Ned
and Dan, who did the actual shooting, escaped to the hills. A hundred
pounds were offered for their arrest.
Both of Mrs. Kelly’s sons were tainted, born and raised thieves. At
the age of sixteen Ned had served an apprenticeship in robbery under
arms with Power the bushranger, who described him as a cowardly young
brute. Now, in his twenty-fifth year he was far from brave. Dan, aged
seventeen, was a ferocious young wolf, but manly. As the brothers
lurked in hiding they were joined by Joe Byrne, aged twenty-one,
a gallant and sweet-tempered lad gone wrong, and by Steve Hart, a
despicable little cur. All four were superb as riders, scouts and
bushmen, fairly good shots, intimate with every inch of the country,
supported by hundreds of kinsmen and the sympathy of the people
generally in the war they had declared against the police.
In October, Sergeant Kennedy and three constables patroling in search
of the gang, were surprised by the outlaws in camp, and, as they showed
fight, Ned and Dan Kelly attacked them. Only one trooper escaped. At
this outrage, Byrne was horrified, Hart scared, but the Kellys forced
them to fire into Sergeant Kennedy’s corpse that they might share the
guilt. Then Ned Kelly, touched by the gallantry with which the sergeant
had fought, brought a cloak and reverently covered his body.
In December, the outlaws stuck up a sheep station, and robbed the bank
at Euroa.
In February, 1879, they surprised the police station at Jerilderie,
locked two policemen in the cells, disguised themselves as constables,
captured the town, imprisoning a crowd of people in the hotel, then
sacked the bank, and rode away shouting and singing with their plunder.
By this time the rewards offered for their capture amounted to eight
thousand pounds, and the whole strength of the Victoria police was
engaged, with native trackers, in hunting them. Had these wicked
robbers ever showed rudeness to a woman, or plundered a poor man, or
behaved meanly with their stolen wealth, they would have been betrayed
at once to the police, but the Australians are sportsmen, and there is
a gallantry in robbery under arms that appeals to misguided hearts.
The four bad men were so polite to all women, so kindly to unarmed
citizens, so humorous in their methods, so generous with their gold, so
daring in making war against a powerful British state, that they were
esteemed as heroes. Even bad heroes are better than none at all, and
they were not betrayed even by poor folk to whom the rewards would have
been a fortune. For two years they outwitted the whole force of police,
scouts and trackers at a cost to the state of one hundred fifteen
thousand pounds.
But with all this the best of Australian manhood was engaged in the
hunt, and the real heroes of this adventure were the police, who
made no moan through months of outrageous labor and suffering in the
mountains.
Superintendent Hare, in charge of the hunt, made friends with a kinsman
of the outlaws, a young horse-thief, named Aaron Sherritt. This lad
knew all the secrets of the outlaws, was like a brother to them, and
yet, so worshiped Mr. Hare that he served with the police as a spy.
In treachery to his kinsmen, he was at least faithful to his master,
knowing that he went to his own death.
He expected the outlaws to come by night to the house of Joe Byrne’s
mother, and led Mr. Hare’s patrol, which lay for the next month in
hiding upon a hill overlooking the homestead. Aaron was engaged to
Byrne’s sister, was daily at the house and slowly a dim suspicion
dawned on the outlaw’s mother. Then the old woman, uneasily searching
the hills, stumbled into the police bivouac, and saw Aaron Sherritt,
the spy, asleep in that company. His dress betrayed him to her, a
white shirt, breeches and long boots, impossible to mistake. And when
he knew what had happened, the lad turned white. “Now,” he muttered, “I
am a dead man.”
Mrs. Byrne sent the news of Aaron’s treachery to her outlawed son in
the hills. On June twenty-sixth, the spy was called out of his mother’s
cabin by some one who cried that he had lost his way. Aaron opened the
door, and Joe Byrne shot him through the heart.
So the outlaws had broken cover after months of hiding, and at once
Superintendent Hare brought police and trackers by a special train that
they might take up the trail of their retreat back to the mountains.
The outlaws, foreseeing this movement, tore up the railway track, so
that the train, with its load of police, might be thrown into a gully,
and all who survived the wreck were to be shot down without mercy.
This snare which they set for their enemies was badly planned. Instead
of tearing up the tracks themselves, they brought men for the job from
Glenrowan station close by; and then, to prevent their presence from
being reported, they had to hold the village instead of mounting guard
upon the trap. They cut the wires, secured the station and herded all
the villagers into the Glenrowan hotel some two hundred yards from the
railway. Then they had to wait for the train from three o’clock on
Monday morning all through the long day, and the dreary night, guarding
sixty prisoners and watching for the police. They amused the prisoners,
men, women and children with an impromptu dance in which they shared
by turns, then with raids upon outlying houses, and with athletic
feats, but always on the alert lest any man escape to give the alarm,
or the police arrive unobserved. The strain was beyond human endurance.
So Byrne, fresh from the murder of his chum Aaron Sherritt, relieved
his mind by getting drunk, Ned Kelly kept up his courage by bragging
of the death prepared for his enemies, and, worst of all, the local
schoolmaster was allowed to take his sick wife home.
The schoolmaster had been most sympathetic all day long, helping the
outlaws until he won their confidence; but now, escaped to his house,
he made haste to prepare a lantern covered with a red shawl with which
to signal the train. He stood upon the track waving the red light,
when in the pitchy darkness before dawn, the train-load of police came
blindly straight for the death-trap. The train slowed, stopped and was
saved.
Out of plowshares and scrap iron, a blacksmith had forged for each of
the outlaws a cuirass and helmet of plate armor, and now at the sound
of the approaching train they dressed in this bullet-proof harness. Ned
Kelly’s suit weighed ninety-seven pounds, and the others were similar,
so clumsy that the wearer could neither run to attack nor mount a horse
to escape. Moreover, with a rifle at the shoulder, it was impossible to
see for taking aim. So armed, the robbers had got no farther than the
hotel veranda when the police charged, and a fierce engagement began.
The prisoners huddled within the house had no shelter from its frail
board walls, and two of the children were wounded.
Byrne was drinking at the bar when a bullet struck him dead. Ned Kelly,
attempting to desert his comrades, made for the yard, but finding that
all the horses had been shot, strolled back laughing amid a storm of
lead. Every bullet striking his armor made him reel, and he had been
five times wounded, but now he began to walk about the yard emptying
his revolvers into the police. Then a sergeant fired at his legs and
the outlaw dropped, appealing abjectly for his life.
The escape of the panic-stricken prisoners had been arranged, but for
hours the fight went on until toward noon the house stood a riddled
and ghastly shell, with no sign of life. A bundle of straw was lighted
against the gable end, and the building was soon ablaze. Rumors now
spread that an old man lay wounded in the house, and a priest gallantly
led in a rush of police to the rescue. The old man was saved, and under
the thick smoke, Dan Kelly and Hart were seen lying dead upon the floor
in their armor.
Ned Kelly died as he had lived, a coward, being almost carried to the
gallows, and that evening his sister Kate exhibited herself as a show
in a music-hall at Melbourne. So ended this bloody tragedy in hideous
farce, and with the destruction of the outlaws closed a long period of
disorder. Except in remote regions of the frontier, robbery under arms
has ceased forever in the Australasian states.
XXIII
A. D. 1883
THE PASSING OF THE BISON
May I recommend a better book than this? If anybody wants to feel the
veritable spirit of adventure, let him read _My Life as an Indian_, by
F. W. Schultz. His life is an example in manliness, his record the best
we have of a red Indian tribe, his book the most spacious and lovely in
frontier literature.
The Blackfeet got their name from the oil-dressed, arrow-proof leather
of their moccasins (skin shoes) which were dark in color. They were
profoundly religious, scrupulously clean--bathing daily, even through
thick ice, fastidiously moral, a gay light-hearted people of a temper
like the French, and even among Indians, the most generous race in the
world, they were famed for their hospitality. The savage is to the
white man, what the child is to the grown-up, of lesser intellect, but
much nearer to God.
When the white men reached the plains, the Blackfeet mustered about
forty thousand mounted men, hunters. The national sport was stealing
horses and scalps, but there was no organized war until the pressure
of the whites drove the tribes westward, crowding them together, so
that they had to fight for the good hunting grounds. Then there were
wars in which the Blackfeet more than held their own. Next came the
smallpox, and afterward the West was not so crowded. Whole nations were
swept away, and those that lived were sorely reduced in numbers. After
that came white frontiersmen to trade, to hunt, or as missionaries.
The Indians called them Hat-wearers, but the Blackfeet had another
name--the Stone-hearts. The whites were nearly always welcomed, but
presently they came in larger numbers, claiming the land for mining
camps and ranching, which drove away the game. The Indians fought
the whites, fought for their land and their food, their liberty; but
a savage with bow and arrows has no chance against a soldier with a
rifle. For every white man killed a hundred would come to the funeral,
so the Blackfeet saw that it was no use fighting.