these straits of Anian which Juan de Fuca had found, and they marked
the place accordingly at forty-eight degrees of north latitude on the
west coast of America. But there were also rumors and legends in those
days of a great land beyond the uttermost coasts of Siberia, an island
that was called Aliaska, filling the North Pacific. All such legends
and rumors the astrologers marked faithfully upon their map until
the thing was of no more use than a dose of smallpox. Then Catherine
gave the precious chart to two of her naval officers, Vitus Bering,
the Dane--a mighty man in the late wars with Sweden and a Russian
lieutenant--Tschirikoff--and bade them go find the straits of Anian.
The expedition set out overland across the Russian and Siberian plains,
attended by hunters who kept the people alive on fish and game until
they reached the coasts of the North Pacific. There they built two
ships, the _Stv Petr_ and the _Stv Pavl_, and launched them, two years
from the time of their outsetting from Saint Petersburg. Thirteen years
they spent in exploring the Siberian coast, northward to the Arctic,
southward to the borders of China, then in 1741 set out into the
unknown to search for the Island of Aliaska, and the Straits of Anian
so plainly marked upon their chart.
Long months they cruised about in quest of that island, finding
nothing, while the crews sickened of scurvy, and man after man died in
misery, until only a few were left.
The world had not been laid out correctly, but Bering held with fervor
to his faith in that official chart for which his men were dying. At
last Tschirikoff, unable to bear it any longer, deserted Bering, and
sailing eastward many days, came at last to land at the mouth of Cross
Straits in Southern Alaska.
Beyond a rocky foreshore and white surf, forests of pine went up to
mountains lost in trailing clouds. Behind a little point rose a film of
smoke from some savage camp-fire. Tschirikoff landed a boat’s crew in
search of provisions and water, which vanished behind the point and was
seen no more. Heart-sick, he sent a second boat, which vanished behind
the point and was seen no more, but the fire of the savages blazed
high. Two days he waited, watching that pillar of smoke, and listened
to a far-off muttering of drums, then with the despairing remnant
of his crew, turned back to the lesser perils of the sea, and fled
to Siberia. Farther to the northward, some three hundred miles, was
Bering in the _Stv Petr_, driving his mutinous people in a last search
for land. It was the day after Tschirikoff’s discovery, and the ship,
flying winged out before the southwest wind, came to green shallows of
the sea, and fogs that lay in violet gloom ahead, like some mysterious
coast crowned with white cloud heights towering up the sky. At sunset,
when these clouds had changed to flame color, they parted, suddenly
revealing high above the mastheads the most tremendous mountain in the
world. The sailors were terrified, and Bering, called suddenly to the
tall after-castle of the ship, went down on his knees in awestruck
wonder. By the Russian calendar, the day was that of the dread Elijah,
who had been taken up from the earth drawn by winged horses of flame
in a chariot of fire, and to these lost mariners it seemed that this
was no mere mountain of ice walls glowing rose and azure through a rift
of the purple clouds, but a vision of the translation of the prophet.
Bering named the mountain Saint Elias.
There is no space here for the detail of Bering’s wanderings thereafter
through those bewildering labyrinths of islands which skirt the Alps
of Saint Elias westward, and reach out as the Aleutian Archipelago the
whole way across the Pacific Ocean. The region is an awful sub-arctic
wilderness of rock-set gaps between bleak arctic islands crowned by
flaming volcanoes, lost in eternal fog. It has been my fate to see the
wonders and the terrors of that coast, which Bering’s seamen mistook
for the vestibule of the infernal regions. Scurvy and hunger made
them more like ghosts of the condemned than living men, until their
nightmare voyage ended in wreck on the last of the islands, within two
hundred miles of the Siberian coast.
Stellar, the German naturalist, who survived the winter, has left
record of Bering laid between two rocks for shelter, where the sand
drift covered his legs and kept him warm through the last days, then
made him a grave afterward. The island was frequented by sea-cows,
creatures until then unknown, and since wholly extinct, Stellar’s being
the only account of them. There were thousands of sea otter, another
species that will soon become extinct, and the shipwrecked men had
plenty of wild meat to feed on while they passed the winter building
from the timbers of the wreck, a boat to carry them home. In the spring
they sailed with a load of sea-otter skins and gained the Chinese
coast, where their cargo fetched a fortune for all hands, the furs
being valued for the official robes of mandarins.
At the news of this new trade in sea-otter skins, the hunters of
Siberia went wild with excitement, so that the survivors of Bering’s
crew led expeditions of their own to Alaska. By them a colony was
founded, and though the Straits of Anian were never discovered, because
they did not exist, the czars added to their dominions a new empire
called Russian America. This Alaska was sold in 1867 to the United
States for one million, five hundred thousand pounds, enough money to
build such a work as London Bridge, and the territory yields more than
that by far in annual profits from fisheries, timber and gold.
XXXIX
A. D. 1750
THE PIRATES
There are very few pirates left. The Riff Moors of Gibraltar Straits
will grab a wind-bound ship when they get the chance; the Arabs of
the Red Sea take stranded steamers; Chinese practitioners shipped as
passengers on a liner, will rise in the night, cut throats, and steal
the vessel; moreover some little retail business is done by the Malays
round Singapore, but trade as a whole is slack, and sea thieves are apt
to get themselves disliked by the British gunboats.
This is a respectable world, my masters, but it is getting dull.
It was very different in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
when the Sallee rovers, the Algerian corsairs, buccaneers of the West
Indies, the Malays and the Chinese put pirate fleets to sea to prey on
great commerce, when Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Bartholomew, Roberts,
Lafitte, Avery and a hundred other corsairs under the Jolly Roger could
seize tall ships and make their unwilling seamen walk the plank. They
and their merry men went mostly to the gallows, richly deserved the
same, and yet--well, nobody need complain that times were dull.
There were so many pirates one hardly knows which to deal with,
but Avery was such a mean rogue, and there is such a nice confused
story--well, here goes! He was mate of the ship _Duke_, forty-four
guns, a merchant cruiser chartered from Bristol for the Spanish
service. His skipper was mightily addicted to punch, and too drunk to
object when Avery, conspiring with the men, made bold to seize the
ship. Then he went down-stairs to wake the captain, who, in a sudden
fright, asked, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, nothing,” said Avery. The
skipper gobbled at him, “But something’s the matter,” he cried. “Does
she drive? What weather is it?” “No, no,” answered Avery, “we’re at
sea.” “At sea! How can that be?”
“Come,” says Avery, “don’t be in a fright, but put on your clothes,
and I’ll let you into the secret--and if you’ll turn sober and mind
your business perhaps, in time, I may make you one of my lieutenants,
if not, here’s a boat alongside, and you shall be set ashore.” The
skipper, still in a fright, was set ashore, together with such of the
men as were honest. Then Avery sailed away to seek his fortune.
On the coast of Madagascar, lying in a bay, two sloops were found,
whose seamen supposed the _Duke_ to be a ship of war and being rogues,
having stolen these vessels to go pirating, they fled with rueful faces
into the woods. Of course they were frightfully pleased when they found
out that they were not going to be hanged just yet, and delighted when
Captain Avery asked them to sail in his company. They could fly at big
game now, with this big ship for a consort.
Now, as it happened, the Great Mogul, emperor of Hindustan, was sending
his daughter with a splendid retinue to make pilgrimage to Mecca and
worship at the holy places of Mahomet. The lady sailed in a ship with
chests of gold to pay the expenses of the journey, golden vessels for
the table, gifts for the shrines, an escort of princes covered with
jewels, troops, servants, slaves and a band to play tunes with no
music, after the eastern manner. And it was their serious misfortune to
meet with Captain Avery outside the mouth of the Indus. Avery’s sloops,
being very swift, got the prize, and stripped her of everything worth
taking, before they let her go.
It shocked Avery to think of all that treasure in the sloops where it
might get lost; so presently, as they sailed in consort, he invited the
captains of the sloops to use the big ship as their strong room. They
put their treasure on board the _Duke_, and watched close, for fear
of accidents. Then came a dark night when Captain Avery mislaid both
sloops, and bolted with all the plunder, leaving two crews of simple
mariners to wonder where he had gone.
Avery made off to the New England colonies, where he made a division of
the plunder, handing the gold to the men, but privily keeping all the
diamonds for himself. The sailors scattered out through the American
settlements and the British Isles, modestly changing their names. Mr.
Avery went home to Bristol, where he found some honest merchants to
sell his diamonds, and lend him a small sum on account. When, however,
he called on them for the rest of the money, he met with a most
shocking repulse, because the merchants had never heard, they said, of
him or his diamonds, but would give him to the justices as a pirate
unless he shut his mouth. He went away and died of grief at Bideford
in Devon, leaving no money even to pay for his coffin.
Meanwhile the Great Mogul at Delhi was making such dismal lamentations
about the robbery of his daughter’s diamonds that the news of Avery’s
riches spread to England. Rumor made him husband to the princess, a
reigning sovereign, with a pirate fleet of his own--at the very time he
was dying of want at Bideford.
We left two sloops full of pirates mourning over the total depravity
of Captain Avery. Sorely repenting his sins, they resolved to amend
their lives, and see what they could steal in Madagascar. Landing on
that great island they dismantled their sloops, taking their plentiful
supply of guns and powder ashore, where they camped, making their sails
into tents. Here they met with another party of English pirates who
were also penitent, having just plundered a large and richly-laden ship
at the mouth of the Red Sea. Their dividend was three thousand pounds
a man, and they were resolved to settle in Madagascar instead of going
home to be hanged. The two parties, both in search of a peaceful and
simple life, made friends with the various native princes, who were
glad of white men to assist in the butchering of adjacent tribes.
Two or three pirates at the head of an attacking force would put the
boldest tribes to flight. Each pirate acquired his own harem of wives,
his own horde of black slaves, his own plantations, fishery and hunting
grounds, his kingdom wherein he reigned an absolute monarch. If a
native said impudent words he was promptly shot, and any attack of the
tribes on a white man was resented by the whole community of pirate
kings. Once the negroes conspired for a general rising to wipe out
their oppressors at one fell swoop, but the wife of a white man getting
wind of the plot, ran twenty miles in three hours to alarm her lord.
When the native forces arrived they were warmly received. After that
each of their lordships built a fortress for his resting place with
rampart and ditch set round with a labyrinth of thorny entanglements,
so that the barefoot native coming as a stranger by night, trod on
spikes, and sounded a loud alarm which roused the garrison.
Long years went by. Their majesties grew stout from high feeding and
lack of exercise, hairy, dressed in skins of wild beasts, reigning each
in his kingdom with a deal of dirty state and royalty.
So Captain Woods found them when he went in the ship _Delicia_, to
buy slaves. At the sight of his forty-gun ship they hid themselves in
the woods, very suspicious, but presently learned his business, and
came out of the woods, offering to sell their loyal negro subjects by
hundreds in exchange for tobacco and suits of sailor clothes, tools,
powder, and ball. They had now been twenty-five years in Madagascar,
and, what with wars, accidents, sickness, there remained eleven sailor
kings, all heartily bored with their royalty. Despite the attachments
of their harems, children and swarms of grandchildren and dependents,
they were sick for blue water, hungry for a cruise. Captain Woods
observed that they got very friendly with his seamen, and learned that
they were plotting to seize the ship, hoist the black flag, and betake
themselves once more to piracy on the high seas.
After that he kept their majesties at a distance, sending officers
ashore to trade with them until he had completed his cargo of slaves.
So he sailed, leaving eleven disconsolate pirate kings in a mournful
row on the tropic beach, and no more has ever transpired as to them
or the fate of their kingdoms. Still, they had fared much better than
Captain Avery with his treasure of royal diamonds.
XL
A. D. 1776
DANIEL BOONE
As a matter of unnatural history the British lion is really and truly
a lioness with a large and respectable family. When only a cub she
sharpened her teeth on Spain, in her youth crushed Holland, and in her
prime fought France, wresting from each in turn the command of the sea.
She was nearing her full strength when France with a chain of forts
along the Saint Lawrence and the Mississippi attempted to strangle the
thirteen British cubs in America. By the storming of Quebec the lion
smashed that chain; but the long and world-wide wars with France had
bled her dry, and unless she could keep the sea her cubs were doomed,
so bluntly she told them they must help.
The cubs had troubles of their own and could not help. Theirs was the
legal, hers the moral right, but both sides fell in the wrong when they
lost their tempers. Since then the mother of nations has reared her
second litter with some of that gentleness which comes of sorrow.
So far the French in Canada were not settlers so much as gay
adventurers for the Christ, or for beaver skins, living among the
Indians, or in a holiday mood leading the tribes against the surly
British.
So far the British overseas were not adventurers so much as dour
fugitives from injustice at home, or from justice, or merely deported
as a general nuisance, to join in one common claim to liberty, the
fanatics of freedom.
Unlike the French and Spaniards, the northern folk--British or Dutch,
German or Scandinavian--had no mission, except by smallpox to convert
the heathen. Nothing cared they for glory or adventure, but only for
homes and farms. Like a hive of bees they filled the Atlantic coast
lands with tireless industry until they began to feel crowded; then
like a hive they swarmed, over the Appalachian ranges, across the
Mississippi, over the Rocky Mountains, and now in our own time to lands
beyond the sea.
Among the hard fierce colonists a very few loved nature and in
childhood took to the wilds. Such was the son of a tame Devon Quaker,
young Daniel Boone, a natural marksman, axman, bushman, tracker and
scout of the backwoods who grew to be a freckled ruddy man, gaunt as a
wolf, and subtle as a snake from his hard training in the Indian wars.
When first he crossed the mountains on the old warrior trail into
Kentucky, hunting and trapping paid well in that paradise of noble
timber and white clover meadows. The country swarmed with game, a merry
hunting ground and battle-field of rival Indian tribes.
There Boone and his wife’s brother Stuart were captured by Shawnees,
who forced the prisoners to lead the way to their camp where the other
four hunters were taken. The Indians took their horses, rifles, powder,
traps and furs, all lawful plunder, but gave them food to carry them
to the settlements with a warning for the whites that trespassers
would be prosecuted. That was enough for four of the white hunters,
but Boone and Stuart tracked the Indians and stole back some of their
plunder, only to be trailed in their turn and recaptured. The Shawnees
were annoyed, and would have taken these trespassers home to be burned
alive, but for Boone’s queer charm of manner which won their liking,
and his ghostlike vanishing with Stuart into the cane brakes. The
white men got away with rifles, bullets and powder, and they were wise
enough not to be caught again. Still it needed some courage to stay in
Kentucky, and after Stuart got scalped Boone said he felt unutterably
lonely. Yet he remained, dodging so many and such varied perils that
his loneliness must really have been a comfort, for it is better to be
dull in solitude than scalped in company. He owed money for his outfit,
and would not return to the settlements until he had earned the skins
that paid his debt.
At the moment when the big colonial hive began to swarm Boone led a
party of thirty frontiersmen to cut a pack-trail over the mountains
into the plains of Kentucky. This wilderness trail--some two hundred
miles of mud-holes, rocks and stumps--opened the way for settlement
in Kentucky, a dark and bloody ground, for white invaders. At a cost
of two or three scalps Boone’s outfit reached this land, to build a
stockaded village named for the leader, Boonesborough, and afterward
he was very proud that his wife and daughters were the first women to
brave the perils of that new settlement.
Under a giant elm the settlers, being British, had church and
parliament, but only on one Sunday did the parson pray for King George
before the news came that congress needed prayers for the new republic
at war with the motherland.
Far to the northwest of Kentucky the forts of Illinois were held by a
British officer named Hamilton. He had with him a handful of American
Tories loyal to the king, some newly conquered French Canadians not
much in love with British government, and savage Indian tribes. All
these he sent to strike the revolting colonies in their rear, but the
whole brunt of the horror fell upon poor Kentucky. The settlements
were wrecked, the log cabins burned, and the Indians got out of hand,
committing crimes; but the settlers held four forts and cursed King
George through seven years of war.
It was in a lull of this long storm that Boone led a force of thirty
men to get salt from the salt-licks frequented by the buffalo and deer,
on the banks of Licking River. One day while he was scouting ten miles
from camp, and had just loaded his horse with meat to feed his men, he
was caught, in a snow-storm, by four Shawnees. They led him to their
camp where some of the hundred warriors had helped to capture Boone
eight years before. These, with much ceremony and mock politeness,
introduced him to two American Tories, a brace of French Canadians,
and their Shawnee chiefs. Then Boone found out that this war party was
marching on Fort Boonesborough where lived his own wife and children
and many women, but scarcely any men. But knowing the ways of the
redskins Boone saw that if he let them capture his own men in camp at
the salt-licks they would go home without attacking Boonesborough. He
must risk the fighting men to save the fort; he must guide the enemy to
his own camp and order his men to surrender; and if they laid down all
their lives for the sake of their women and children--well, they must
take their chance. Boone’s men laid down their arms.
A council followed at which fifty-nine Indians voted to burn these
Americans at the stake against sixty-one who preferred to sell them
to Hamilton as prisoners of war. Saved by two votes, they marched on
a winter journey dreadful to the Indians as well as to the prisoners;
but all shared alike when dogs and horses had to be killed for food.
Moreover the savages became so fond of Boone that they resolved to
make an Indian of him. Not wanting to be an Indian he pleaded with
Hamilton the Hair Buyer, promising to turn loyalist and fight the
rebels, but when the British officer offered a hundred pounds for this
one captive it was not enough for these loving savages. They took Boone
home, pulled out his hair, leaving only a fine scalp-lock adorned with
feathers, bathed him in the river to wash all his white blood out,
painted him, and named him Big Turtle. As the adopted son of the chief,
Black Fish, Boone pretended to be happy, and in four months had become
a popular chief, rather closely watched, but allowed to go out hunting.
Then a large Indian force assembled to march against Fort Boonesborough.
[Illustration: DANIEL BOONE]
Boone easily got leave to go out hunting, and a whole day passed before
his flight was known. Doubling on his course, setting blind trails,
wading along the streams to hide his tracks, sleeping in thickets or
in hollow logs, starving because he dared not fire a gun to get food,
his clothes in rags, his feet bloody, he made his way across country,
and on the fifth day staggered into Fort Boonesborough.
The enemy were long on the way. There was time to send riders for
succor and scouts to watch, to repair the fort, even to raid the
Shawnee country before the invaders arrived--one hundred Canadians and
four hundred Indians, while Boone’s garrison numbered fifty men and
boys, with twenty-five brave women.
By Hamilton’s orders there must be no bloodshed, and he sent forty
horses for the old folks, the women and children to ride on their way
northward as prisoners of war.
Very solemn was Boone, full of negotiations for surrender, gaining day
after day with talk, waiting in a fever for expected succor from the
colonies. Nine commissioners on either side were to sign the treaty,
but the Indians--for good measure--sent eighteen envoys to clasp the
hands of their nine white brothers, and drag them into the bush for
execution. The white commissioners broke loose, gained the fort,
slammed the gates and fired from the ramparts.
Long, bitter and vindictive was the siege. A pretended retreat failed
to lure Boone’s men into ambush. The Indians dug a mine under the
walls, but threw the dirt from the tunnel into the river where a streak
of muddy water gave their game away. Torches were thrown on the roofs,
but women put out the flames. When at last the siege was raised and
the Indians retreated, twenty-four hours lapsed before the famished
garrison dared to throw open their gates.
In these days a Kentucky force, led by the hero George Rogers Clark,
captured the French forts on the Illinois, won over their garrisons,
and marched on the fortress of Vincennes through flooded lands, up to
their necks in water, starving, half drowned. They captured the wicked
Hamilton and led him away in chains.
Toward the end of the war once more a British force of Frenchmen and
Indians raided Kentucky, besieging Logan’s fort, and but for the valor
of the women, that sorely stricken garrison would have perished. For
when the tanks were empty the women took their buckets and marched out
of the gates, laughing and singing, right among the ambushed Indians,
got their supply of water from the spring, and returned unhurt because
they showed no fear.
With the reliefs to the rescue rode Daniel Boone and his son Israel,
then aged twenty-three. At sight of reinforcements the enemy bolted,
hotly pursued to the banks of Licking River. Boone implored his people
not to cross into the certainty of an ambush, but the Kentuckians took
no notice, charging through the river and up a ridge between two bushed
ravines.
From both flanks the Wyandots charged with tomahawks, while the
Shawnees raked the horsemen with a galling fire, and there was pitiless
hewing down of the broken flying settlers. Last in that flight came
Boone, bearing in his arms his mortally wounded son, overtaken, cut
off, almost surrounded before he struck off from the path, leaping from
rock to rock. As he swam the river Israel died, but the father carried
his body on into the shelter of the forest.