day’s events in my journal, when I heard a shriek--a terrific shriek,
which thrilled me to the very marrow. It takes something to make a
Norseman shriek, but a mighty flame with thick suffocating smoke was
leaping up from the engine room skylight. There the tanks held two
thousand two hundred gallons of petroleum, and close beside them a
pile of soaked cotton waste had burst with a loud explosion. If the
tanks got heated the ship would be blown into chips, but after a hard
fight the fire was got under. All hands owed their lives to their fine
discipline.”
A few days later the _Joy_ grounded in a labyrinth of shoals, and
was caught aground by a storm which lifted and bumped her until the
false keel was torn off. The whole of the deck load had to be thrown
overboard. The only hope was to sail over the rocks, and with all her
canvas set she charged, smashing from rock to rock until she reached
the farther edge of the reef which was nearly dry. “The spray and sleet
were washing over the vessel, the mast trembled, and the _Gjöa_ seemed
to pull herself together for a last final leap. She was lifted up and
flung bodily on the bare rocks, bump, bump, with terrific force.... In
my distress I sent up (I honestly confess it) an ardent prayer to the
Almighty. Yet another bump worse than ever, then one more, and we slid
off.”
The shock had lifted the rudder so that it rested with the pintles on
the mountings, and she would not steer; then somehow the pins dropped
back into their sockets, the steersmen regained control and the _Joy_
was saved, after a journey across dry rocks which ought to have smashed
any ship afloat. She did not even leak.
Near the south end of King William’s Land a pocket harbor was found,
and named Joy Haven. There the stores were landed, cabins were built,
the ship turned into a winter house, and the crew became men of
science. For two years they were hard at work studying the magnetism
of the earth beside the Magnetic Pole. They collected fossils and
natural history specimens, surveyed the district, studied the heavens
and the weather, hunted reindeer for their meat and clothing, fished,
and made friends with the scented, brave and merry Eskimos. During the
first winter the thermometer dropped to seventy-nine degrees below
zero, which is pretty near the world record for cold, but as long as
one is well fed, with bowels in working order, and has Eskimo clothes
to wear, the temperature feels much the same after forty below zero.
Below that point the wind fails to a breathless calm, the keen dry air
is refreshing as champagne, and one can keep up a dog-trot for miles
without being winded. It is not the winter night that people dread,
but the summer day with its horrible torment of mosquitoes. Then there
is in spring and autumn, a hot misty glare upon the snow-fields which
causes blindness with a deal of pain. The Arctic has its drawbacks, but
one remembers afterward the fields of flowers, the unearthly beauty of
the northern lights, the teeming game, and those long summer nights
when the sun is low, filling the whole sky with sunset colors.
The greatest event of the first year was the finding of an Eskimo
hunter to carry letters, who came back in the second summer, having
found in Hudson’s Bay an exploring vessel of the Royal Northwest
Mounted Police of Canada. Major Moody, also the captain of the Arctic,
and the Master of an American whaler, sent their greetings, news of the
outer world, some useful charts, and a present of husky dogs.
The second summer was over. The weather had begun to turn cold before
a northerly gale smashed the ice, and sea lanes opened along the
Northwest passage. On August thirteenth the _Joy_ left her anchorage,
under sail and steam, to pick her way without compass through blinding
fog, charging and butting through fields of ice, dodging zigzag
through shoals, or squeezing between ice-fields and the shore. There
was no sleep for anybody during the first three nights, but racking
anxiety and tearing overstrain until they reached known waters, a
channel charted by the old explorers. They met an American whaler, and
afterward had clear open water as far as the mouths of the Mackenzie
River. A few miles beyond that the ice closed in from the north and
piled up-shore so that the passage was blocked and once more the _Joy_
went into winter quarters. But not alone. Ladies must have corsets
ribbed with whalebone from the bowhead whale. Each whale head is
worth two thousand pounds, so a fleet of American whalers goes hunting
in the Arctic. Their only port of refuge is Herschel Island off the
Canadian coast, so there is an outpost of the Northwest Mounted Police,
a mission station and a village of Eskimos.
The _Joy_ came to anchor thirty-six miles to the east of Herschel
Island, beside a stranded ship in charge of her Norse mate, and daily
came passengers to and fro on the Fort Macpherson trail. From that post
runs a dog-train service of mails connecting the forts of the Hudson’s
Bay Company all the way up the Mackenzie Valley to Edmonton on the
railway within two thousand miles. The crew of the _Joy_ had company
news, letters from home, and Captain Amundsen went by dog-train to the
mining camps on the Yukon where at Eagle City he sent telegrams.
At last in the summer of 1906 the _Joy_ sailed on the final run of her
great voyage, but her crew of seven was now reduced to six, and at
parting she dipped her colors to the cross on a lone grave. The ice
barred her passage, but she charged, smashing her engines, and charged
again, losing her peak which left the mainsail useless. So she won past
Cape Prince of Wales, completing the Northwest passage, and entering
Bering Sea called at Cape Nome for repairs. There a thousand American
gold miners welcomed the sons of the vikings with an uproarious
triumph, and greeted Captain Amundsen with the Norse national anthem.
XXX
A. D. 1588
JOHN HAWKINS
Master John Hawkins, mariner, was a trader’s son, familiar from
childhood with the Guinea coast of Africa. Worshipful merchants of
London trusted him with three ridiculously small ships, the size of our
fishing smacks, but manned by a hundred men. With these, in 1562--the
“spacious times” of great Elizabeth--he swooped down on the West
African coast, and horribly scared were his people when they saw the
crocodiles. The nature of this animal “is ever when he would have his
prey, to sob and cry like a Christian bodie, to provoke them to come to
him, and then he snatcheth at them.” In spite of the reptiles, Master
Hawkins “got into his possession, partly by the sword, and partly by
other means,” three hundred wretched negroes.
The king of Spain had a law that no Protestant heretic might trade with
his Spanish colonies of the West Indies, so Master Hawkins, by way of
spitting in his majesty’s eye, went straight to Hispaniola, where he
exchanged his slaves with the settlers for a shipload of hides, ginger,
sugar and pearls.
On his second voyage Master Hawkins attempted to enslave a whole city,
hard by Sierra Leone, but the Almighty, “who worketh all things for
the best, would not have it so, and by Him we escaped without danger,
His name be praised for it.” Hawkins had nearly been captured by the
negroes, and was compelled to make his pious raids elsewhere. Moreover,
when he came with a fleet loaded with slaves to Venezuela, the Spanish
merchants were scared to trade with him. Of course, for the sake of his
negroes, he had to get them landed somehow, so he went ashore, “having
in his greate boate two falcons of brasse, and in the other boates
double bases in their noses.” Such artillery backed by a hundred men in
plate armor, convinced the Spaniards that it would be wise to trade.
On his third voyage, Master Hawkins found the Spaniards his friends
along the Spanish main, but the weather, a deadly enemy, drove him for
refuge and repair to San Juan d’Ullua, the port of Mexico. Here was an
islet, the only shelter on that coast from the northerly gales. He sent
a letter to the capital for leave to hold that islet with man and guns
while he bought provisions and repaired his ships. But as it happened,
a new viceroy came with a fleet of thirteen great ships to claim that
narrow anchorage, and Hawkins must let them in or fight. “On the faith
of a viceroy” Don Martin de Henriquez pledged his honor before Hawkins
let him in, then set his ships close aboard those of England, trained
guns to bear upon them, secretly filled them with troops hid below
hatches, and when his treason was found out, sounded a trumpet, the
signal for attack. The Englishmen on the isle were massacred except
three, the queen’s ship _Jesus_, of Lubeck, was so sorely hurt that
she had to be abandoned, and only two small barks, the _Minion_ and
the _Judith_, escaped to sea. The Spaniards lost four galleons in that
battle.
[Illustration: SIR JOHN HAWKINS]
As to the English, they were in great peril, and parted by a storm. The
Judith fared best, commanded by a man from before the mast, one Francis
Drake, who brought the news to England that Hawkins had more than two
hundred people crowded upon the _Minion_ without food or water. “With
many sorrowful hearts,” says Hawkins, “we wandered in an unknown sea by
the span of fourteen dayes, till hunger forced us to seeke the lande,
for birdes were thought very goode meate, rattes, cattes, mise and
dogges.”
It was then that one hundred fourteen men volunteered to go ashore and
the ship continued a very painful voyage.
These men were landed on the coast of Mexico, unarmed, to be stripped
naked presently by red Indians, and by the Spaniards marched as slaves
to the city of Mexico, where after long imprisonment those left alive
were sold. The Spanish gentlemen, the clergy and the monks were kind
to these servants, who earned positions of trust on mines and ranches,
some of them becoming in time very wealthy men though still rated as
slaves. Then came the “Holy Hellish Inquisition” to inquire into the
safety of their souls. All were imprisoned, nearly all were tortured
on the rack, and flogged in public with five hundred lashes. Even the
ten gentlemen landed by Hawkins as hostages for his good faith shared
the fate of the shipwrecked mariners who, some in Mexico and some in
Spain, were in the end condemned to the galleys. And those who kept
the faith were burned alive. From that time onward, whatever treaties
there might be in Europe, there was never a moment’s peace for the
Spanish Indies. All honest Englishmen were at war with Spain until the
Inquisition was stamped out, and the British liberators had helped to
drive the Spaniards from the last acre of their American empire.
When Hawkins returned to England, Mary, Queen of Scots, was there a
prisoner. The sailor went to Elizabeth’s minister, Lord Burleigh, and
proposed a plot. By this plot he entered into a treaty with the queen
of Scots to set her on the throne. He was to join the Duke of Alva
for the invasion and overthrow of England. So pleased was the Spanish
king that he paid compensation to Hawkins for his losses at San Juan
d’Ullua and restored to freedom such of the English prisoners as could
be discovered. Then Hawkins turned loyal again, and Queen Elizabeth
knighted him for fooling her enemies.
XXXI
A. D. 1573
FRANCIS DRAKE
The _Judith_ had escaped from San Juan d’Ullua and her master, Francis
Drake, of Devon, was now a bitter vengeful adversary, from that time
onward living to be the scourge of Spain. Four years he raided,
plundered, burned along the Spanish main, until the name Drake was
changed to Dragon in the language of the dons.
Then in 1573 he sailed from Plymouth with five little ships to carry
fire and sword into the South Seas, where the flag of England had never
been before. When he had captured some ships near the Cape de Verde
Islands, he was fifty-four days in unknown waters before he sighted
the Brazils, then after a long time came to Magellan’s Straits, where
he put in to refresh his men. One of the captains had been unfaithful
and was now tried by a court-martial, which found him guilty of mutiny
and treason against the admiral. Drake offered him a ship to return
to England and throw himself on the queen’s mercy, or he might land
and take his chance among the savages, or he could have his death,
and carry his case to the Almighty. The prisoner would not rob the
expedition of a ship, nor would he consort with the degraded tribes of
that wild Land of Fire, but asked that he might die at the hands of his
countrymen because of the wrong he had done them. So the date was set
for his execution, when all the officers received the holy communion,
the prisoner kneeling beside the admiral. After that they dined
together for the last time, and when they had risen from table, shook
hands at parting, the one to his death, the others to their voyage. May
England ever breed such gentlemen!
The squadron had barely got clear of the straits and gained the Pacific
Ocean, when bad weather scattered all the ships. Drake went on alone,
and on the coast of Chili, met with an Indian in a canoe, who had news
of a galleon at Santiago, laden with gold from Peru. The Spaniards were
not at all prepared for birds of Drake’s feather on the South Seas, so
that when he dropped in at Santiago they were equally surprised and
annoyed.
The galleon’s crew were ashore save for six Spaniards and three
negroes, so bored with themselves that they welcomed the visitors by
beating a drum and setting out Chilian wine. But when Master Moon
arrived on board with a boat’s crew, he laid about him outrageously
with a large sword, saying, “Down, dog!” to each discomfited Spaniard,
until they fled for the hold. Only one leaped overboard, who warned the
town, whereat the people escaped to the bush, leaving the visitors to
enjoy themselves. The cargo of gold and wine must have been worth about
fifty thousand pounds, while Santiago yielded a deal of good cheer
besides, Master Fletcher, the parson, getting for his “spoyle” a silver
chalice, two cruets and an altar cloth.
[Illustration: SIR FRANCIS DRAKE]
Greatly refreshed, the English went on northward, carefully inspecting
the coast. At one place a sleeping Spaniard was found on the beach
with thirteen bars of silver. “We took the silver and left the man.”
Another place yielded a pack-train of llamas, the local beast of
burden, with leather wallets containing eight hundred pounds’ weight of
silver. Three small barks were searched next, one of them being laden
with silver; then twelve ships at anchor, which were cut adrift; and a
bark with eighty pounds’ weight of gold, and a golden crucifix set with
emeralds. But best of all was the galleon _Cacafuego_, overtaken at
sea, and disabled at the third shot, which brought down her mizzenmast.
Her cargo consisted of “great riches, as jewels and precious stones,
thirteen chests full of royals of plate, four score pounds weight
of golde, and six and twentie tunne of silver.” The pilot being the
possessor of two nice silver cups, had to give one to Master Drake, and
the other to the steward, “because hee could not otherwise chuse.”
Every town, every ship was rifled along that coast. There was neither
fighting nor killing, but much politeness, until at last the ship had
a full cargo of silver, gold and gems, with which she reached England,
having made a voyage round the world. When Queen Elizabeth dined in
state on board Drake’s ship at Greenwich, she struck him with a sword
and dubbed him knight. Of course he must have armorial bearings now,
but when he adopted the three wiverns--black fowl of sorts--of the
Drake family, there were angry protests against his insolence. So the
queen made him a coat-of-arms, a terrestrial globe, and a ship thereon
led with a string by a hand that reached out of a cloud, and in the
rigging of the said ship, a wivern hanged by the neck.
It was Parson Fletcher who wrote the story of that illustrious voyage,
but he does not say how he himself fell afterward from grace, being
solemnly consigned by Drake to the “devil and all his angells,”
threatened with a hanging at the yard-arm, and made to bear a posy on
his breast with these frank words, “Francis Fletcher, ye falsest knave
that liveth.”
Drake always kept his chaplain, and dined “alone with musick,” did all
his public actions with large piety and gallant courtesy, while he led
English fleets on insolent piracies against the Spaniards.
From his next voyage he returned leaving the Indies in flames, loaded
with plunder, and smoking the new herb tobacco to the amazement of his
countrymen.
Philip II was preparing a vast armada against England, when Drake
appeared with thirty sail on the Spanish coast, destroyed a hundred
ships, swept like a hurricane from port to port, took a galleon laden
with treasure off the western islands, and returned to Plymouth with
his enormous plunder.
Next year Drake was vice-admiral to Lord Howard in the destruction of
the Spanish armada.
In 1589 he led a fleet to deliver Portugal from the Spaniards, wherein
he failed.
Then came his last voyage in company with his first commander, Sir John
Hawkins. Once more the West Indies felt the awful weight of his arm,
but now there were varying fortunes of defeat, of reprisals, and at the
end, pestilence, which struck the fleet at Nombre de Dios, and felled
this mighty seaman. His body was committed to the sea, his memory to
the hearts of all brave men.
[Illustration: QUEEN ELIZABETH]
XXXII
A. D. 1587
THE FOUR ARMADAS
Here let us call a halt. We have come to the climax of the great
century, the age of the Renaissance, when Europe was born again; of the
Reformation, when the Protestants of the Baltic fought the Catholics of
the Mediterranean for the right to worship in freedom; and of the sea
kings who laid the foundations of our modern world.
Islam had reached her fullest flood of glory with the fleets of
Barbarossa, the armies of the Sultan Suleiman, and all the splendors of
Akbar the Magnificent, before her ebb set downward into ruin.
Portugal and Spain, under one crown, shared the plunder of the Indies
and the mastery of the sea.
Then, as the century waned, a third-class power, the island state of
England, claimed the command of the sea, and planted the seeds of an
empire destined to overshadow the ruins of Spain, as well as the wreck
of Islam.
Here opened broad fields of adventure. There were German and English
envoys at the court of Russia; English merchants seeking trade in
India, Dutch gunners in the service of eastern princes, French
fishermen finding the way into Canada, seamen of all these nations as
slaves in Turkish galleys or in Spanish mines; everywhere sea fights,
shipwrecks, trails of lost men wandering in unknown lands, matters of
desert islands, and wrecked treasures with all the usual routine of
plague, pestilence and famine, of battle, of murder and of sudden death.
In all this tangle we must take one thread, with most to learn, I
think, from a Hollander, Mynheer, J. H. van Linschoten, who was clerk
to the Portuguese archbishop of the Indies and afterward in business at
Terceira in the Azores, where he wrote a famous book on pilotage. He
tells us about the seamanship of Portuguese and Spaniards in terms of
withering contempt as a mixture of incompetence and cowardice, enough
to explain the downfall and ruin of their empires.
The worst ships, he says, which cleared from Cochin were worth, with
their cargo, one million, eight hundred thousand pounds of our modern
money. Not content with that, the swindlers in charge removed the
ballast to make room for more cinnamon, whereby the _Arreliquias_
capsized and sank.
The _San Iago_, having her bottom ripped out by a coral reef, her
admiral, pilot, master and a dozen others entered into a boat, keeping
it with naked rapiers until they got clear, and deserted. Left without
any officers, the people on the wreck were addressed by an Italian
seaman who cried, “Why are we thus abashed?” So ninety valiant mariners
took the longboat and cleared, hacking off the fingers, hands and arms
of the drowning women who held on to her gunwale.
As to the pilot who caused this little accident, he afterward had
charge of the _San Thomas_ “full of people, and most of the gentility
of India,” and lost with all hands.
But if the seamanship of the Portuguese made it a miracle if they
escaped destruction, that of the Spaniards was on a much larger scale.
Where Portugal lost a ship Spain bungled away a fleet, and never was
incompetence more frightfully punished than in the doom of the four
armadas.
Philip II was busy converting Protestant Holland, and in 1587 he
resolved to send a Catholic mission to England also, but while he was
preparing the first armada Drake came and burned his hundred ships
under the guns of Cadiz.
A year later the second, the great armada, was ready, one hundred
thirty ships in line of battle, which was to embark the army in
Holland, and invade England with a field force of fifty-three thousand
men, the finest troops in Europe.
Were the British fleet of to-day to attack the Dutch the situation
would be much the same. It was a comfort to the English that they had
given most ample provocation and to spare, but still they felt it was
very awkward. They had five million people, only the ninth part of
their present strength; no battle-ships, and only thirty cruisers. The
merchant service rallied a hundred vessels, the size of the fishing
smacks, the Flemings lent forty, and nobody in England dared to hope.
To do Spain justice she made plenty of noise, giving ample warning.
Her fleet was made invincible by the pope’s blessing, the sacred
banners and the holy relics, while for England’s spiritual comfort
there was a vicar of the inquisition with his racks and thumbscrews.
Only the minor details were overlooked: that the cordage was rotten,
the powder damp, the wine sour, the water putrid, the biscuits and the
beef a mass of maggots, while the ship’s drainage into the ballast
turned every galleon into a floating pest-house. The admiral was a
fool, the captains were landlubbers, the ships would not steer, and
the guns could not be fought. The soldiers, navigators, boatswains
and quartermasters were alike too proud to help the short-handed,
overworked seamen, while two thousand of the people were galley slaves
waiting to turn on their masters. Worst of all, this sacred, fantastic,
doomed armada was to attack from Holland, without pilotage to turn our
terrific fortifications of shoals and quicksands.
Small were our ships and woefully short of powder, but they served the
wicked valiant queen who pawned her soul for England. Her admiral was
Lord Howard the Catholic, whose squadron leaders were Drake, Hawkins
and Frobisher. The leaders were practical seamen who led, not drove,
the English. The Spanish line of battle was seven miles across, but
when the armada was sighted, Drake on Plymouth Hoe had time to finish
his game of bowls before he put to sea.
From hill to hill through England the beacon fires roused the men, the
church bells called them to prayer, and all along the southern coast
fort echoed fort while guns and trumpets announced the armada’s coming.
The English fleet, too weak to attack, but fearfully swift to eat up
stragglers, snapped like a wolf-pack at the heels of Spain. Four days
and nights on end the armada was goaded and torn in sleepless misery,
no longer in line of battle, but huddled and flying. At the Straits
they turned at bay with thirty-five hundred guns, but eight ships bore
down on fire, stampeding the broken fleet to be slaughtered, foundered,
burned or cast away, strewing the coast with wreckage from Dover to
Cape Wrath and down the Western Isles. Fifty-three ruined ships got
back to Spain with a tale of storms and the English which Europe has
never forgotten, insuring the peace of English homes for three whole
centuries.
A year passed, and the largest of all the armadas ventured to sea, this
time from the West Indies, a treasure fleet for Spain. Of two hundred
twenty ships clearing not more than fifteen arrived, the rest being
“drowned, burst, or taken.” Storms and the English destroyed that third
armada.
The fourth year passed, marked by a hurricane in the Western Isles,
and a great increase of England’s reckoning, but the climax of Spain’s
undoing was still to come in 1591, the year of the fourth armada.