Valley from Gaat-a-maksk to Gaet-wan-gak, which must be railway
stations now on the Grand Trunk Pacific. My packer was Willie-the-Bear,
so named because a grizzly had eaten off half his face, the side of
his face, in fact, which had to be covered with a black veil. We were
crossing some low hills when I asked him about the coming of the
white men. Promptly he told me of the first ship--a Spaniard; the
second--Vancouver’s; and the third--an American, all in correct order
after a hundred years. Who told him? His mother. And who told her? Her
mother, of course.
So, living as I was among the Indians, and seeing no white man’s face
for months on end, I gathered up the various memories of the people.
At Massett, on the north coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands, the
Haidas were amazed by a great bird which came to rest in front of the
village. When she had folded her wings a lot of little birds shot out
from under her, which came to the beach and turned out to be full of
men. They were as fair of color as the Haidas, some even more so, and
some red as the meat of salmon. The people went out in their dugouts to
board the bird, which was a vast canoe. All of them got presents, but
there was one, a person of no account, who got the finest gift, better
than anything received by the highest chiefs, an iron cooking-pot.
In those days the food was put with water into a wooden trough and
red-hot stones thrown in until it boiled. The people had copper, but
that was worth many times the present price of gold, not to be wasted
on mere cooking pots. So the man with the iron pot, in his joy, called
all the people to a feast, and gave away the whole of his property,
which of course was the right thing to do. The chiefs were in a rage
at his new importance, but they came, as did every one else. And at
the feast the man of no account climbed the tall pole in front of his
house, the totem pole carved with the arms of his ancestors, passing a
rope over the top by which he hauled up the iron pot so that it might
be seen by the whole tribe. “See,” he said, “what the great chief has
given me, the Big Spirit whose people have tails stiff as a beaver tail
behind their heads, whose canoe is loaded with thunder and lightning,
the mother of all canoes, with six young canoes growing up, whose
medicine is so strong that one dose makes you sick for three days,
whose warriors are so brave that one got two black eyes and did not run
away, who have a little dog which scratches and says meaou!
“This great chief has given us presents according to our rank, little
no-account presents to the common people; but when I came he knew I was
his brother, his equal, and to me, to me alone, he gave this pot which
sits upon the fire and does not burn, this pot which boils the water,
and will not break!”
But as the man bragged he kept twitching the rope, and down fell the
pot, smash on the ground, and broken all to pieces.
Now as to the first white man who came up Skeena River:
A very old man of Kitzelash remembered that when he was a boy he stood
on the banks of the cañon and there came a canoe with a white man, a
big chief called Manson, a Spaniard, and a black man, all searching for
gold. He remembered that first one man sang a queer song and then they
all took it up and sang, laughing together.
A middle-aged man of Gaet-wan-gak remembered that in his childhood a
canoe came up the river full of Indians, and with two white men. Nobody
had ever seen the like, and they took the strangers for ghosts, so
that the women ran away and hid. The ghosts gave them bread, but they
spat it out because it was ghost food and had no taste. They offered
tea, but the people spat it out, because it was like earth water out of
graves. Rice, too, they would not touch, for it was like--perhaps one
should not say what that was like.
XLVI
THE BEAVER
In the heart of the city of Victoria I once found an old log barn, the
last remnant of Fort Camosun, and climbing into the loft, kicked about
in a heap of rubbish from which emerged some damp rat-gnawed manuscript
books. From morning to evening, and far into the dusk, I sat reading
there the story of a great adventuress, a heroine of tonnage and
displacement, the first steamer which ever plied on the Pacific Ocean.
Her builders were Messrs. Boulton and Watt, and Watt was the father
of steam navigation. She was built at Blackwall on London River in
the days of George IV. She was launched by a duchess in a poke bonnet
and shawl, who broke a bottle of wine against the ship’s nose and
christened her the _Beaver_. Then the merchant adventurers of the
Hudson’s Bay Company, in bell toppers, Hessian boots and white chokers,
gave three hearty cheers.
The _Beaver_ was as ugly as it was safe to make her, but built of
honest oak, and copper bolted, her engines packed in the hold, and her
masts brigantine-rigged for the sailing voyage round Cape Horn. She
went under convoy of the barque _Columbia_, a slow and rather helpless
chaperon, who fouled and nearly wrecked her at Robinson Crusoe’s
Island. Her master, to judge by the ship’s books, was a peppery little
beast, who logged the mate for a liar: “Not correct D. Home;” drove his
officers until they went sick, quarreled with the _Columbia’s_ doctor,
found his chief engineer “in a beastly state of intoxication,” and
finally, at the Columbia River, hounded his crew into mutiny.
“Mr. Phillips and Mr. Wilson behaved,” says the mate, “in a most
mutinous manner.” So the captain had all hands aft to witness their
punishment with the cat-o’-nine-tails. Phillips called on the crew to
rescue him, and they went for the captain. Calling for his sword, the
skipper defended himself like a man, wounding one seaman in the head.
Then he “succeeded in tying up Phillips, and punishing him with two
dozen lashes with a rope’s end over his clothes,” whereupon William
Wilson demanded eleven strokes for himself, so sharing the fun, for
better or worse, with a shipmate.
Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, an old stockade of the
Nor’westers, was at this time the Hudson’s Bay Company’s capital on the
Pacific coast, where reigned the great Doctor McLauchlan, founder of
Oregon. Here the _Beaver_ shipped her paddles, started up her engines,
and gave an excursion trip for the ladies. So came her voyage under
steam out in the open Pacific of eight hundred miles to her station on
the British Columbian coast. She sailed on the last day of May in 1836,
two years before the Atlantic was crossed under steam. On the Vancouver
coast she discovered an outcrop of steam coal, still the best to be had
on the Pacific Ocean.
In her days of glory, the _Beaver_ was a smart little war-ship trading
with the savages, or bombarding their villages, all the way from Puget
Sound to Alaska. In her middle age she was a survey vessel exploring
Wonderland. In her old age the boiler leaked, so that the engineer had
to plug the holes with a rag on a pointed stick. She was a grimy tug
at the last, her story forgotten; and after fifty-two years of gallant
service, was allowed to lie a weed-grown wreck within a mile of the
new City of Vancouver, until a kindly storm gave her the honor of sea
burial.
It was in 1851 that the _Beaver_ brought to the factor at Fort Simpson
some nuggets of the newly discovered Californian gold. At first he
refused to take the stuff in trade, next bought it in at half its
value, and finally showed it to Edenshaw, head chief of the Haida
nation. As each little yellow pebble was worth a big pile of blankets,
the chief borrowed a specimen and showed it to his tribe in the Queen
Charlotte Islands.
There is a legend that in earlier days a trader found the Haidas using
golden bullets with their trade guns, which they gladly exchanged for
lead. Anyway an old woman told Edenshaw that she knew where to find the
stuff, so next day she took him in a small dugout canoe to the outer
coast. There she showed him a streak seven inches wide, and eighty feet
in length, of quartz and shining gold, which crossed the neck of a
headland. They filled a bushel basket with loose bits, and left them in
the canoe while they went back for more. But in the stern of the canoe
sat Edenshaw’s little son watching the dog fish at play down in the
deeps. When the elders came back Charlie had thrown their first load of
gold at the dog fish, and later on in life he well remembered the hands
of blessing laid on by way of reward.
Still, enough gold was saved to buy many bales of blankets. Edenshaw
claimed afterward that, had he only known the value of his find, he
would have gone to England and married the queen’s daughter.
News spread along the coast and soon a ship appeared, the H. B. C.
brigantine _Una_. Her people blasted the rocks, while the Indians,
naked and well oiled, grabbed the plunder. The sailors wrestled, but
could not hold those oily rogues. In time the _Una_ sailed with a load
of gold, but was cast away with her cargo in the Straits of Fuca.
Next year Gold Harbor was full of little ships, with a gunboat to
keep them in order while they reaped a total harvest of two hundred
eighty-nine thousand dollars. H. M. S. _Thetis_ had gone away when the
schooner _Susan Sturgis_ came back for a second load, the only vessel
to brave the winter storms. One day while all hands were in the cabin
at dinner the Indians stole on board, clapped on the hatches and made
them prisoners. They were marched ashore and stripped in the deep snow,
pleading for their drawers, but only Captain Rooney and the mate were
allowed that luxury. The seamen were sold to the H. B. Company at Fort
Simpson, but the two officers remained in slavery. By day they chopped
fire-wood under a guard, at night crouched in a dark corner of a big
Indian house, out of sight of the fire in the middle, fed on such
scraps of offal as their masters deigned to throw them.
Only one poor old woman pitied the slaves, hiding many a dried clam
under the matting within their reach. Also they made a friend of Chief
Bearskin’s son; and Bearskin himself was a good-hearted man, though
Edenshaw proved a brute. Rooney was an able-bodied Irishman, Lang
a tall broad-shouldered Scot, though this business turned his hair
gray. For after the schooner was plundered and broken up, a dispute
arose between Bearskin and Edenshaw as to their share of the captives.
Edenshaw would kill Lang rather than surrender him to Bearskin, and
twice the Scotchman had his head on the block to be chopped off before
Bearskin gave in to save his life. At last both slaves were sold to
Captain McNeill, who gave them each a striped shirt, corduroy trousers
and shoes, then shipped them aboard the _Beaver_. Now it so happened
that on the passage southward the _Beaver_ met with the only accident
in her long life, for during a storm the steering gear was carried
away. Lang was a ship’s carpenter, and his craftsmanship saved the
little heroine from being lost with all hands that night. This rescued
slave became the pioneer ship-builder of Western Canada.
XLVII
A. D. 1911
THE CONQUEST OF THE POLES
The North Pole is only a point on the earth’s surface, a point which
in itself has no length, breadth or height, neither has it weight nor
any substance, being invisible, impalpable, immovable and entirely
useless. The continents of men swing at a thousand miles an hour round
that point, which has no motion. Beneath it an eternal ice-field slowly
drifts across the unfathomed depths of a sea that knows no light.
Above, for a night of six months, the pole star marks the zenith round
which the constellations swing their endless race; then for six months
the low sun rolls along the sky-line on his level rounds; and each day
and night are one year.
The attempt to reach that point began in the reign of Henry VIII of
England, when Master John Davis sailed up the Greenland coast to a big
cliff which he named after his becker, Sanderson’s Hope. The cliff is
sheer from the sea three thousand four hundred feet high, with one
sharp streak of ice from base to summit. It towers above Upernivik, the
most northerly village in the world, and is one thousand one hundred
twenty-eight miles from the Pole.
In 1594 Barentz carried the Dutch flag a little farther north but
soon Hudson gave the lead back to Great Britain, and after that, for
two hundred seventy-six years the British flag unchallenged went on
from victory to victory in the conquest of the North. At last in 1882
Lieutenant Greely of the United States Army beat us by four miles at
a cost of nearly his whole expedition, which was destroyed by famine.
Soon Doctor Nansen broke the American record for Norway, to be beaten
in turn by an Italian prince, the Duke d’Abruzzi. But meanwhile Peary,
an American naval officer, had commenced his wonderful course of
twenty-three years’ special training; and in 1906 he broke the Italian
record. His way was afoot with dog-trains across the ice of the Polar
sea, and he would have reached the North Pole, but for wide lanes of
open sea, completely barring the way. At two hundred twenty-seven miles
from the Pole he was forced to retreat, and camp very near to death
before he won back to his base camp.
Peary’s ship was American to the last detail of needles and thread,
but the vessel was his own invention, built for ramming ice-pack. The
ship’s officers and crew were all Newfoundlanders, trained from boyhood
in the seal fishery of the Labrador ice-pack. They were, alas! British,
but that could not be helped. To make amends the exploring officers
were Americans, but they were specially trained by Peary to live and
travel as Eskimos, using the native dress, the dog-trains and the snow
houses.
Other explorers had done the same, but Peary went further, for he hired
the most northerly of the Eskimo tribes, and from year to year educated
the pick of the boys, who grew up to regard him as a father, to obey
his orders exactly, and to adopt his improvements on their native
methods. So he had hunting parties to store up vast supplies of meat,
and skins of musk-ox, ice-bear, reindeer, fox, seal and walrus, each
for some special need in the way of clothing. He had women to make the
clothes. He had two hundred fifty huskie dogs, sleds of his own device,
and Eskimo working parties under his white officers. In twenty-three
years he found out how to boil tea in ten minutes, and that one detail
saved ninety minutes a day for actual marching--a margin in case
of accident. Add to all that Peary’s own enormous strength of mind
and body, in perfect training, just at the prime of life. He was so
hardened by disaster that he had become almost a maniac, with one idea,
one motive in life, one hope--that of reaching the Pole. Long hours
before anything went wrong an instinct would awaken him out of the
soundest sleep to look out for trouble and avert calamity.
A glance at the map will show how Greenland, and the islands north
of Canada, reach to within four hundred miles of the Pole. Between
is a channel leading from Baffin’s Bay into the Arctic Ocean. The
_Roosevelt_, Peary’s ship, forced a passage through that channel, then
turned to the left, creeping and dodging between the ice-field and the
coast of Grant Land. Captain Bartlett was in the crow’s-nest, piloting,
and Peary, close below him, clung to the standing rigging while the
ship butted and charged and hammered through the floes. Bartlett would
coax and wheedle, or shout at the ship to encourage her, “Rip ’em,
Teddy! Bite ’em in two! Go it! That’s fine, my beauty! Now again! Once
more!”
Who knows? In the hands of a great seaman like Bartlett a ship seems to
be a living creature, and no matter what slued the _Roosevelt_ she had
a furious habit of her own, coming to rest with her nose to the north
for all the world like a compass. Her way was finally blocked just
seventy-five miles short of the most northerly headland, Cape Columbia,
and the stores had to be carried there for the advanced base. The
winter was spent in preparation, and on March first began the dash for
the Pole.
No party with dog-trains could possibly carry provisions for a return
journey of eight hundred miles. If there had been islands on the route
it would have been the right thing to use them as advanced bases for a
final rush to the Pole. But there were no islands, and it would be too
risky to leave stores upon the shifting ice-pack. There was, therefore,
but one scheme possible. Doctor Goodsell marched from the coast to
Camp A, unloaded his stores and returned. Using the stores at Camp A,
Mr. Borup was able to march to Camp B, where he unloaded and turned
back. With the stores at Camp B, Professor Marvin marched to Camp C and
turned back. With the stores at Camp C, Captain Bartlett marched to
Camp D and turned back. With the stores at Camp D, Peary had his sleds
fully loaded, with a selection, besides, of the fittest men and dogs
for the last lap of the journey, and above all not too many mouths to
feed.
It was a clever scheme, and in theory the officers, turned back with
their Eskimo parties, were needed to pilot them to the coast. All the
natives got back safely, but Professor Marvin was drowned. If Peary had
not sent all his officers back, would he have been playing the game in
leaving his Eskimo parties without navigating officers to guide them in
the event of a storm? There is no doubt that his conduct was that of a
wise and honorable man. But the feeling remains--was it sportsman-like
to send Captain Bartlett back--the one man who had done most for his
success, denied any share in the great final triumph? Bartlett made
no complaint, and in his cheery acceptance of the facts cut a better
figure than even Commander Peary.
With his negro servant and four Eskimos, the leader set forth on the
last one hundred thirty-three miles across the ice. It was not plain
level ice like that of a pond, but heaved into sharp hills caused by
the pressure, with broken cliffs and labyrinthine reefs. The whole pack
was drifting southward before the wind, here breaking into mile-wide
lanes of black and foggy sea, there newly frozen and utterly unsafe.
Although the sun did not set, the frost was sharp, at times twenty and
thirty degrees below zero, while for the most part a cloudy sky made
it impossible to take observations. Here great good fortune awaited
Peary, for as he neared the Pole, the sky cleared, giving him brilliant
sunlight. By observing the sun at frequent intervals he was able to
reckon with his instruments until at last he found himself within five
miles of ninety degrees north--the Pole. A ten-mile tramp proved he had
passed the apex of the earth, and five miles back he made the final
tests. Somewhere within a mile of where he stood was the exact point,
the north end of the axis on which the earth revolves. As nearly as
he could reckon, the very point was marked for that moment upon the
drifting ice-field by a berg-like hill of ice, and on this summit he
hoisted the flag, a gift from his wife which he had carried for fifteen
years, a tattered silken remnant of Old Glory.
“Perhaps,” he writes, “it ought not to have been so, but when I knew
for a certainty that I had reached the goal, there was not a thing
in the world I wanted but sleep. But after I had a few hours of it,
there succeeded a condition of mental exaltation which made further
rest impossible. For more than a score of years that point on the
earth’s surface had been the object of my every effort. To obtain it
my whole being, physical, mental and moral, had been dedicated. The
determination to reach the Pole had become so much a part of my being
that, strange as it may seem, I long ago ceased to think of myself
save as an instrument for the attainment of that end.... But now I had
at last succeeded in planting the flag of my country at the goal of
the world’s desire. It is not easy to write about such a thing, but
I knew that we were going back to civilization with the last of the
great adventure stories--a story the world had been waiting to hear for
nearly four hundred years, a story which was to be told at last under
the folds of the Stars and Stripes, the flag that during a lonely and
isolated life had come to be for me the symbol of home and everything I
loved--and might never see again.”
Here is the record left at the North Pole:--
“90 N. Lat., North Pole,
“April 6th, 1909.
“I have to-day hoisted the national ensign of the United States of
America at this place, which my observations indicate to be the
North Polar axis of the earth, and have formally taken possession
of the entire region, and adjacent, for and in the name of the
president of the United States of America.
“I leave this record and United States flag in possession.
“ROBERT E. PEARY,
“United States Navy.”
Before the hero of this very grand adventure returned to the world,
there also arrived from the Arctic a certain Doctor Cook, an American
traveler who claimed to have reached the Pole. The Danish Colony in
Greenland received him with joy, the Danish Geographical Society
welcomed him with a banquet of honor, and the world rang with his
triumph. Then came Commander Peary out of the North, proclaiming that
this rival was a liar. So Doctor Cook was able to strike an attitude
of injured innocence, hinting that poor old Peary was a fraud; and the
world rocked with laughter.
In England we may have envied the glory that Peary had so bravely won
for his flag and country, but knew his record too well to doubt his
honor, and welcomed his triumph with no ungenerous thoughts. The other
claimant had a record of impudent and amusing frauds, but still he
was entitled to a hearing, and fair judgment of his claim from men of
science. Among sportsmen we do not expect the runners, after a race,
to call one another liars, and were sorry that Peary should for a
moment lapse from the dignity expected of brave men.
It is perhaps ungenerous to mention such trifling points of conduct,
and yet we worship heroes only when we are quite sure that our homage
is not a folly. And so we measure Peary with the standard set by his
one rival, Roald Amundsen, who conquered the Northwest passage, then
added to that immortal triumph the conquest of the South Pole. In
that Antarctic adventure Amundsen challenged a fine British explorer,
Captain Scott. The British expedition was equipped with every costly
appliance wealth could furnish, and local knowledge of the actual
route. The Norseman ventured into an unknown route, scantily equipped,
facing the handicap of poverty. He won by sheer merit, by his greatness
as a man, and by the loyal devotion he earned at the hands of his
comrades. Then he returned to Norway, they say, disguised under an
assumed name to escape a public triumph, and his one message to the
world was a generous tribute to his defeated rival. The modern world
has no greater hero, no more perfect gentleman, no finer adventurer
than Roald Amundsen.
XLVIII
WOMEN
Two centuries ago Miss Mary Read, aged thirteen, entered the Royal Navy
as a boy. A little later she deserted, and still disguised as a boy,
went soldiering, first in a line regiment, afterward as a trooper.
She was very brave. On the peace of Ryswick, seeing that there was to
be no more fighting, she went into the merchant service for a change,
and was bound for the West Indies when the ship was gathered in by
pirates. Rather than walk the plank, she became a pirate herself and
rose from rank to rank until she hoisted the black flag with the grade
of captain. So she fell in with Mrs. Bonny, widow of a pirate captain.
The two amiable ladies, commanding each her own vessel, went into a
business partnership, scuttling ships and cutting throats for years
with marked success.
In the seventeenth century an escaped nun did well as a seafaring man
under the Spanish colors, ruffled as a gallant in Chili, and led a
gang of brigands in the Andes. On her return to Spain as a lady, she
was very much petted at the court of Madrid. The last of many female
bandits was Miss Pearl Hart, who, in 1890, robbed a stage-coach in
Arizona.
Mr. Murray Hall, a well-known Tammany politician and a successful
business man, died in New York, and was found to be a woman.