the Indies, Spain sent out thirty battle-ships to the Azores. There
lay an English squadron of sixteen vessels, also in waiting for the
treasure fleet, whose policy was not to attack the escort, which
carried no plunder worth taking. Lord Howard’s vice-admiral was Sir
Richard Grenville, commanding Drake’s old flagship, the _Revenge_, of
seven hundred tons. This Grenville, says Linschoten, was a wealthy man,
a little eccentric also, for dining once with some Spanish officers
he must needs play the trick of crunching wine-glasses, and making
believe to swallow the glass while blood ran from his lips. He was
“very unquiet in his mind, and greatly affected to war,” dreaded by the
Spaniards, detested by his men. On sighting the Spanish squadron of
escort, Howard put to sea but Grenville had a hundred sick men to bring
on board the _Revenge_; his hale men were skylarking ashore. He stayed
behind, when he attempted to rejoin the squadron the Spanish fleet of
escort was in his way.
On board the _Revenge_ the master gave orders to alter course for
flight until Grenville threatened to hang him. It was Grenville’s
sole fault that he was presently beset by eight ships, each of them
double the size of the _Revenge_. So one small cruiser for the rest
of the day and all night fought a whole fleet, engaging from first
to last thirteen ships of the line. She sank two ships and well-nigh
wrecked five more, the Spaniards losing four hundred men in a fight
with seventy. Only when their admiral lay shot through the head, and
their last gun was silenced, their last boarding pike broken, the sixty
wounded men who were left alive, made terms with the Spaniards and laid
down their arms.
Grenville was carried on board the _Flagship_, where the officers of
the Spanish fleet assembled to do him honor, and in their own language
he spoke that night his last words: “Here die I, Richard Grenville,
with a joyful and quiet mind, for I have ended my life as a true
soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, queen, religion
and honor; whereby my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body;
and shall leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true
soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.”
[Illustration: SIR RICHARD GRENVILLE]
With that he died, and his body was committed to the sea. As to those
who survived of his ship’s company, the Spaniards treated them with
honor; sending them as free men home to England. But they believed that
the body of Grenville being in the sea raised that appalling cyclone
that presently destroyed the treasure fleet and its escort, in all one
hundred seven ships, including the _Revenge_.
So perished the fourth armada, making within five years a total loss
of four hundred eighty-nine capital ships, in all the greatest sea
calamity that ever befell a nation. Hear then the comment of Linschoten
the Dutchman. The Spaniards thought that “Fortune, or rather God, was
wholly against them. Which is a sufficient cause to make the Spaniards
out of heart; and on the contrary to give the Englishmen more courage,
and to make them bolder. For they are victorious, stout and valiant;
and all their enterprises do take so good an effect that they are,
hereby, become the lords and masters of the sea.”
* * * * *
The Portuguese were by no means the first seamen to round the Cape of
Good Hope. About six hundred years B. C. the Pharaoh of Egypt, Niko,
sent a Phœnician squadron from the Red Sea, to find their way round
Africa and through Gibraltar Strait, back to the Nile. “When autumn
came they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having
sown a tract of land with corn, waited till the grain was fit to eat.
Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that
two whole years went by, and it was not until the third year that they
doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On
their return, they declared--for my part, do not believe them, but
perhaps others may--that in sailing round Lybia (Africa), they had the
sun on their right hand” (i. e. in the northern sky). _Herodotus_.
XXXIII
A. D. 1583
SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT
“He is not worthy to live at all, that for any fear of danger of death,
shunneth his countrey’s service and his own honor.”
This message to all men of every English nation was written by a man
who once with his lone sword covered a retreat, defending a bridge
against twenty horsemen, of whom he killed one, dismounted two and
wounded six.
In all his wars and voyages Sir Humphrey Gilbert won the respect of
his enemies, and even of his friends, while in his writings one finds
the first idea of British colonies overseas. At the end of his life’s
endeavor he commanded a squadron that set out to found a first British
colony in Virginia, and on the way he called at the port of Saint
Johns in Newfoundland. Six years after the first voyage of Columbus,
John Cabot had rediscovered the American mainland, naming and claiming
this New-found Land, and its port for Henry VII of England. Since then
for nearly a hundred years the fishermen of Europe had come to this
coast for cod, but the Englishmen claimed and held the ports where the
fish were smoked. Now in 1583 Gilbert met the fishermen, English and
strangers alike, who delivered to him a stick of the timber and a turf
of the soil in token of his possession of the land, while he hoisted
the flag of England over her first colony, by this act founding the
British empire.
When Gilbert left Saint Johns, he had a secret that made him beam with
joy and hint at mysterious wealth. Perhaps his mining expert had found
pyrites and reported the stuff as gold, or glittering crystals that
looked like precious stones. Maybe it was the parcel of specimens for
which he sent his page boy on board the _Delight_, who, failing to
bring them, got a terrific thrashing.
When the _Delight_, his flagship, was cast away on Sable Island, with a
hundred men drowned and the sixteen survivors missing, Gilbert mourned,
it was thought, more for his secret than for ship or people. From
that time the wretchedness of his men aboard the ten-ton frigate, the
_Squirrel_, weighed upon him. They were in rags, hungry and frightened,
so to cheer them up he left his great ship and joined them. The
Virginia voyage was abandoned, they squared away for England, horrified
by a walrus passing between the ships, which the mariners took for a
demon jeering at their misfortunes.
They crossed the Atlantic in foul weather, with great seas running, so
that the people implored their admiral no longer to risk his life in
the half-swamped _Squirrel_.
“I will not forsake my little company,” was all his answer. The seas
became terrific and the weird corposants, Saint Elmo’s electric fires
“flamed amazement,” from masts and spars, sure harbinger of still more
dreadful weather.
A green sea filled the _Squirrel_ and she was near sinking, but as she
shook the water off, Sir Humphrey Gilbert waved his hand to the _Golden
Hind_. “Fear not, my masters!” he shouted, “we are as near to Heaven by
sea as by land.”
As the night fell, he was still seen sitting abaft with a book in his
hand.
Then at midnight all of a sudden the frigate’s lights were out, “for
in that moment she was devoured, and swallowed up by the sea,” and the
soul of Humphrey Gilbert passed out of the great unrest.
XXXIV
A. D. 1603
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
To its nether depths of shame and topmost heights of glory, the
sixteenth century is summed up in Sir Walter Raleigh. He was Gilbert’s
young half-brother, thirteen years his junior, and a kinsman of Drake,
Hawkins and Grenville, all men of Devon.
He played the dashing young gallant, butchering Irish prisoners of war;
he played the leader in the second sack of Cadiz; he played the knight
errant in the Azores, when all alone he stormed the breached walls of a
fort; he played the hero of romance in a wild quest up the Orinoco for
the dream king El Dorado, and the mythical golden city of Manoa. Always
he played to the gallery, and when he must dress the part of Queen
Elizabeth’s adoring lover, he let it be known that his jeweled shoes
had cost six thousand pieces of gold. He wrote some of the noblest
prose in our language besides most exquisite verse, invented distilling
of fresh water from the sea, and paid for the expeditions which founded
Virginia.
[Illustration: SIR WALTER RALEIGH]
So many and varied parts this mighty actor played supremely well,
holding the center of the stage as long as there was an audience
to hiss, or to applaud him. Only in private he shirked heights of
manliness that he saw but dared not climb and was by turns a sneak,
a toady, a whining hypocrite whose public life is one of England’s
greatest memories, and his death of almost superhuman grandeur.
When James the Cur sat on the throne of great Elizabeth, his courtiers
had Raleigh tried and condemned to death. The charge was treason in
taking Spanish bribes, not a likely act of Spain’s great enemy, one of
the few items omitted from Sir Walter’s menu of little peccadillos.
James as lick-spittle and flunkey-in-chief to the king of Spain, kept
Raleigh for fifteen years awaiting execution in the tower of London.
Then Raleigh appealed to the avarice of the court, talked of Manoa and
King El Dorado, offered to fetch gold from the Orinoco, and got leave,
a prisoner on parole, to sail once more for the Indies.
They say that the myth of El Dorado is based on the curious mirage of
a city which in some kinds of weather may still be seen across Lake
Maracaibo. Raleigh and his people found nothing but mosquitoes, fever
and hostile Spaniards; the voyage was a failure, and he came home, true
to his honor, to have his head chopped off.
“I have,” he said on the scaffold, “a long journey to take, and must
bid the company farewell.”
The headsman knelt to receive his pardon. Testing with his finger the
edge of the ax, Raleigh lifted and kissed the blade. “It is a sharp and
fair medicine,” he said smiling, “to cure me of all my diseases.”
Then the executioner lost his nerve altogether, “What dost thou fear?”
asked Raleigh. “Strike, man, strike!”
“Oh eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast
persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world
hath flattered, thou hast cast out of the world and despised:
“Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the
pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these
two narrow words, _Hic jacet_.”
[Illustration: JAMES I]
XXXV
A. D. 1608
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH
The sentence just quoted, the most beautiful perhaps in English prose,
is copied from the _History of the World_, which Raleigh wrote when a
prisoner in the tower, while wee James sat on the throne. It was then
that a gentleman and adventurer, Captain John Smith, came home from
foreign parts.
At the age of seventeen Mr. Smith was a trooper serving with the Dutch
in their war with Spain. As a mariner and gunner he fought in a little
Breton ship which captured one of the great galleons of Venice. As an
engineer, his inventions of “flying dragons” saved a Hungarian town
besieged by the Turks, then captured from the infidel the impregnable
city of Stuhlweissenburg. So he became a captain, serving Prince
Sigismund at the siege of Reigall. Here the attack was difficult and
the assault so long delayed “that the Turks complained they were
getting quite fat for want of exercise.” So the Lord Turbishaw, their
commander, sent word that the ladies of Reigall longed to see some
courtly feat of arms, and asked if any Christian officer would fight
him for his head, in single combat. The lot fell to Captain Smith.
In presence of the ladies and both armies, Lord Turbishaw entered the
lists on a prancing Arab, in shining armor, and from his shoulders
rose great wings of eagle feathers spangled with gold and gems. Perhaps
these fine ornaments marred the Turk’s steering, for at the first onset
Smith’s lance entered the eye-slit of his visor, piercing between the
eyes and through the skull. Smith took the head to his general and kept
the charger.
Next morning a challenge came to Smith from the dead man’s greatest
friend, by name Grualgo. This time the weapons were lances, and these
being shattered, pistols, the fighting being prolonged, and both men
wounded, but Smith took Grualgo’s head, his horse and armor.
As soon as his wound was healed, at the request of his officer
commanding, Smith sent a letter to the ladies of Reigall, saying he
did not wish to keep the heads of their two servants. Would they
please send another champion to take the heads and his own? They sent
an officer of high rank named Bonni Mulgro. This third fight began
with pistols, followed by a prolonged and well-matched duel with
battle-axes. Each man in turn reeled senseless in the saddle, but the
fight was renewed without gain to either, until the Englishman, letting
his weapon slip, made a dive to catch it, and was dragged from his
horse by the Turk. Then Smith’s horse, grabbed by the bridle, reared,
compelling the Turk to let go, and giving the Christian time to regain
his saddle. As Mulgro charged, Smith’s falchion caught him between the
plates of his armor, and with a howl of anguish the third champion
fell. So it was that Smith won for his coat of arms the three Turks’
heads erased.
After the taking and massacre of Reigall, Smith with his nine English
comrades, and his fine squadron of cavalry, joined an army, which was
presently caught in the pass of Rothenthurm between a Turkish force
and a big Tartar horde. By Smith’s advice, the Christian cavalry got
branches of trees soaked in pitch and ablaze, with which they made a
night charge, stampeding the Turkish army. Next day the eleven thousand
Christians were enclosed by the Tartars, the pass was heaped with
thirty thousand dead and wounded men, and with the remnant only two
Englishmen escaped. The pillagers found Smith wounded but still alive,
and by his jeweled armor, supposed him to be some very wealthy noble,
worth holding for ransom. So he was sold into slavery, and sent as a
gift by a Turkish chief to his lady in Constantinople. This lady fell
in love with her slave, and sent him to her brother, a pasha in the
lands north of the Caucasus, begging for kindness to the prisoner until
he should be converted to the Moslem faith. But the pasha, furious
at his sister’s kindness to a dog of a Christian, had him stripped,
flogged, and with a spiked collar of iron riveted on his neck, made
servant to wait upon four hundred slaves.
One day the pasha found Smith threshing corn, in a barn some three
miles distant from his castle. For some time he amused himself flogging
this starved and naked wretch who had once been the champion of a
Christian army; but Smith presently caught him a clip behind the ear
with his threshing bat, beat his brains out, put on his clothes,
mounted his Arab horse, and fled across the steppes into Christian
Russia. Through Russia and Poland he made his way to the court of
Prince Sigismund, who gave him a purse of fifteen thousand ducats. As
a rich man he traveled in Germany, Spain and Morocco, and there made
friends with Captain Merstham, whose ship lay at Saffee. He was dining
on board one day when a gale drove the ship to sea, and there fell in
with two Spanish battle-ships. From noon to dusk they fought, and in
the morning Captain Merstham said, “The dons mean to chase us again
to-day. They shall have some good sport for their pains.”
“Oh, thou old fox!” cried Smith, slapping him on the shoulders. So
after prayers and breakfast the battle began again, Smith in command
of the guns, and Merstham pledging the Spaniards in a silver cup of
wine, then giving a dram to the men. Once the enemy managed to board
the little merchantman, but Merstham and Smith touched off a few bags
of powder, blowing away the forecastle with thirty or forty Spaniards.
That set the ship on fire, but the English put out the flames and
still refused to parley. So afternoon wore into evening and evening
into night, when the riddled battle-ships sheered off at last, their
scuppers running with blood.
When Captain Smith reached England he was twenty-five years old, of
singular strength and beauty, a learned and most rarely accomplished
soldier, a man of saintly life with a boy’s heart. I doubt if in the
long annals of our people, there is one hero who left so sweet a memory.
Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement in Virginia had been wiped out by
the red Indians, so the second expedition to that country had an
adventurous flavor that appealed to Captain Smith. He gave all that he
had to the venture, but being somewhat masterful, was put in irons
during the voyage to America, and landed in deep disgrace, when every
man was needed to work in the founding of the colony. Had all the
officers of the expedition been drowned, and most of the members left
behind, the enterprise would have had some chance of success, for it
was mainly an expedition of wasters led by idiots. The few real workers
followed Captain Smith in the digging and the building, the hunting
and trading; while the idlers gave advice, and the leaders obstructed
the proceedings. The summer was one of varied interest, attacks by the
Indians, pestilence, famine and squabbles, so that the colony would
have come to a miserable end but that Captain Smith contrived to make
friends with the tribes, and induced them to sell him a supply of
maize. He was up-country in December when the savages managed to scalp
his followers and to take him prisoner. When they tried to kill him he
seemed only amused, whereas they were terrified by feats of magic that
made him seem a god. He was taken to the king--Powhatan--who received
the prisoner in state, gave him a dinner, then ordered his head to be
laid on a block and his brains dashed out. But before the first club
crashed down a little Indian maid ran forward, pushed the executioners
aside, taking his head in her arms, and holding on so tightly that she
could not be pulled away. So Pocahontas, the king’s daughter, pleaded
for the Englishman and saved him.
King Powhatan, with an eye to business, would now give the prisoner his
liberty, provided that he might send two messengers with Smith for a
brace of the demi-culverins with which the white men had defended the
bastions of their fort. So the captain returned in triumph to his own
people, and gladly presented the demi-culverins. At this the king’s
messengers were embarrassed, because the pair of guns weighed four and
a half tons. Moreover, when the weapons were fired to show their good
condition, the Indians were quite cured of any wish for culverins, and
departed with glass toys for the king and his family. In return came
Pocahontas with her attendants laden with provisions for the starving
garrison.
The English leaders were so grateful for succor that they charged
Captain Smith with the first thing that entered their heads, condemned
him on general principles, and would have hanged him, but that he
asked what they would do for food when he was gone, then cheered the
whole community by putting the prominent men in irons and taking sole
command. Every five days came the Indian princess and her followers
with a load of provisions for Captain Smith. The people called her the
Blessed Pocahontas, for she saved them all from dying of starvation.
During the five weeks of his captivity, Smith had told the Indians
fairy tales about Captain Newport, whose ship was expected soon with
supplies for the colony. Newport was the great Merowames, king of the
sea.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH]
When Newport arrived he was fearfully pleased at being the great
Merowames, but shared the disgust of the officials at Captain Smith’s
importance. When he went to trade with the tribes he traveled in state,
with Smith for interpreter, and began by presenting to Powhatan a red
suit, a hat, and a white dog--gifts from the king of England. Then to
show his own importance he heaped up all his trading goods, and
offered them for such maize as Powhatan cared to sell, expecting tons
and getting exactly four bushels. Smith, seeing that the colony would
starve, produced some bright blue beads, “very precious jewels,” he
told Powhatan, “composed of a most rare substance, and of the color of
the skies, of a sort, indeed, only to be worn by the greatest kings of
the world.”
After hard bargaining Powhatan managed to get a very few beads for a
hundred bushels of grain.
The Virginia Company sent out more idlers from England, and some
industrious Dutchmen who stole most of their weapons from the English
to arm the Indian tribes; James I had Powhatan treated as a brother
sovereign, and crowned with all solemnity, so that he got a swollen
head and tried to starve the settlement. The colonists swaggered,
squabbled and loafed, instead of storing granaries; but all parties
were united in one ambition--planning unpleasant surprises for Captain
Smith.
Once his trading party was trapped for slaughter in a house at
Powhatan’s camp, but Pocahontas, at the risk of her life, warned her
hero, so that all escaped. Another tribe caught Smith in a house where
he had called to buy grain of their chief. Smith led the chief outside,
with a pistol at his ear-hole, paraded his fifteen musketeers, and
frightened seven hundred warriors into laying down their arms. And then
he made them load his ship with corn. This food he served out in daily
rations to working colonists only. After the next Indian attempt on his
life, Smith laid the whole country waste until the tribes were reduced
to submission. So his loafers reported him to the company for being
cruel to the Indians, and seven shiploads of officials and wasters
were sent out from England to suppress the captain.
This was in September of the third year of the colony, and Smith, as
it happened, was returning to Jamestown from work up-country. He lay
asleep in the boat against a bag of powder, on which one of the sailors
was pleased to knock out the ashes of his pipe. The explosion failed
to kill, but almost mortally wounded Captain Smith, who was obliged to
return to England in search of a doctor’s aid. After his departure, the
colony fell into its customary ways, helpless for lack of leadership,
butchered by the Indians, starved, until, when relief ships arrived,
there were only sixty survivors living on the bodies of the dead. The
relieving ships brought Lord Delaware to command, and with him, the
beginnings of prosperity.
When the great captain was recovered, his next expedition explored the
coast farther north, which he named New England. His third voyage was
to have planted a colony, but for Smith’s capture, charged with piracy,
by a French squadron. His escape in a dingey seems almost miraculous,
for it was on that night that the flagship which had been his prison
foundered in a storm, and the squadron was cast away on the coast of
France.
Meanwhile, the Princess Pocahontas, had been treacherously captured as
a hostage by the Virginian colonists, which led to a sweet love story,
and her marriage with Master John Rolfe. With him she presently came on
a visit to England, and everywhere the Lady Rebecca Rolfe was received
with royal honors as a king’s daughter, winning all hearts by her
beauty, her gentleness and dignity. In England she again met Captain
Smith, whom she had ever reverenced as a god. But then the bitter
English winter struck her down, and she died before a ship could take
her home, being buried in the churchyard in Gravesend.
The captain never again was able to adventure his life overseas, but
for sixteen years, broken with his wounds and disappointment, wrote
books commending America to his countrymen. To the New England which
he explored and named, went the Pilgrim Fathers, inspired by his works
to sail with the _Mayflower_, that they might found the colony which
he projected. Virginia and New England were called his children, those
English colonies which since have grown into the giant republic. So the
old captain finished such a task as “God, after His manner, assigns to
His Englishmen.”
XXXVI
A. D. 1670
THE BUCCANEERS
It is only a couple of centuries since Spain was the greatest nation
on earth, with the Atlantic for her duck pond, the American continents
for her back yard, and a notice up to warn away the English, “No dogs
admitted.”