trades, I have known in Western Canada two who are gold miners and two
who are cowboys. Mrs. Langdon, of California, drove a stage-coach for
years. Miss Calamity Jane was a noted Montana bull-whacker. Miss Minnie
Hill and Miss Collie French are licensed American pilots. Miss Evelyn
Smith, of Nova Scotia, was a jailer. Lady Clifford holds Board of Trade
certificates as an officer in our mercantile marine. A distinguished
French explorer, Madame Dieulafoy, is an officer of the Legion of
Honor, entitled to a military salute from all sentries, and has the
singular right by law of wearing the dress of a man. Several English
ladies have been explorers. Miss Bird explored Japan, conquered Long’s
Peak, and was once captured by Mountain Jim, the Colorado robber.
Lady Florence Dixie explored Patagonia, Miss Gordon-Cumming explored
a hundred of the South Sea Isles, put an end to a civil war in Samoa
and was one of the first travelers on the Pamirs. Mrs. Mulhall has
traced the sources of the Amazons. Lady Baker, Mrs. Jane Moir, and Miss
Kingsley rank among the great pioneers of Africa. Lady Hester Stanhope,
traveling in the _Levant_, the ship being loaded with treasure, her
own property, was cast away on a desert island near Rhodes. Escaping
thence she traversed the Arabian deserts, and by a gathering of forty
thousands of Arabs was proclaimed queen of Palmyra. This beautiful
and gifted woman reigned through the first decades of the nineteenth
century from her palace on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. Two other
British princesses in wild lands were Her Highness Florence, Maharanee
of Patiala, and the sherifa of Wazan, whose son is reverenced by the
Moslems in North Africa as a sacred personage.
Among women who have been warriors the greatest, perhaps, were the
British Queen Boadicea, and the saintly and heroic Joan of Arc, burned,
to our everlasting shame, at Rouen. Frances Scanagatti, a noble Italian
girl, fought with distinction as an officer in the Austrian army, once
led the storming of a redoubt, and after three years in the field
against Napoleon, went home, a young lady again, of sweet and mild
disposition.
Doctor James Barry, M. D., inspector-general of hospitals in the
British Army, a duelist, a martinet, and a hopelessly insubordinate
officer, died in 1865 at the age of seventy-one, and was found to be a
woman.
Apart from hosts of adventurous camp followers there have been
disguised women serving at different times in nearly every army. Loreta
Velasquez, of Cuba, married to an American army officer, dressed up in
her husband’s clothes, raised a corps of volunteers, took command, was
commissioned in the Confederate Army during the Civil War of 1861–5,
and fought as Lieutenant Harry Buford. She did extraordinary work as a
spy in the northern army. After the war, her husband having fallen in
battle, she turned gold miner in California.
Mrs. Christian Davies, born in 1667 in Dublin, was a happy and
respectable married woman with a large family, when her life was
wrecked by a sudden calamity, for her husband was seized by a press
gang and dragged away to serve in the fleet. Mrs. Davis, crazy with
grief, got her children adopted by the neighbors, and set off in
search of the man she loved. When she returned two years later as a
soldier, she found her children happy, the neighbors kind, and herself
utterly unknown. She went away contented. She served under the Duke of
Marlborough throughout his campaigns in Europe, first as an infantry
soldier, but later as a dragoon, for at the battles of Blenheim and
Fontenoy she was a squadron leader of the Scots Grays. The second
dragoon guards have many curious traditions of “Mother Ross.” When
after twelve years military service, she ultimately found her husband,
he was busy flirting with a waitress in a Dutch inn, and she passed by,
saying nothing. In her capacity as a soldier she was a flirt herself,
making love to every girl she met, a gallant, a duelist, and notably
brave. At last, after a severe wound, her sex was discovered and she
forgave her husband. She died in Chelsea Hospital at the age of one
hundred eight, and her monument may be seen in the graveyard.
Hannah Snell left her home because her husband had bolted with another
woman, and she wanted to find and kill him. In course of her search,
she enlisted, served as a soldier against the Scots rebellion of 1745,
and once received a punishment of five hundred lashes. A series of
wonderful adventures led her into service as a marine on board H. M. S.
_Swallow_. After a narrow escape from foundering, this vessel joined
Admiral Boscawen’s fleet in the East Indies. She showed such extreme
gallantry in the attack on Mauritius and in the siege of Areacopong,
that she was chosen for special work in a forlorn hope. In this fight
she avenged the death of a comrade by killing the author of it with her
own hands. At the siege of Pondicherry she received eleven wounds in
the legs, and a ball in the body which she extracted herself for fear
of revealing the secret of her sex. On her return voyage to England she
heard that she need not bother about killing her husband, because he
had been decently hanged for murder. So on landing at Portsmouth she
revealed herself to her messmates as a woman, and one of them promptly
proposed to her. She declined and went on the stage, but ultimately
received a pension of thirty pounds a year, and set up as a publican at
the sign of the Women in Masquerade.
Anna Mills, able seaman on board the _Maidstone_ frigate in 1740, made
herself famous for desperate valor.
Mary Ann, youngest of Lord Talbot’s sixteen natural children, was the
victim of a wicked guardian who took her to the wars as his foot-boy.
As a drummer boy she served through the campaigns in Flanders, dressing
two severe wounds herself. Her subsequent masquerade as a sailor led
to countless adventures. She was a seaman on a French lugger, powder
monkey on a British ship of the line, fought in Lord Howe’s great
victory and was crippled for life. Later she was a merchant seaman,
after that a jeweler in London, pensioned for military service, and was
last heard of as a bookseller’s housemaid in 1807.
Mary Dixon did sixteen years’ service, and fought at Waterloo. She was
still living fifty years afterward, “a strong, powerful, old woman.”
Phœbe Hessel fought in the fifth regiment of foot, and was wounded in
the arm at Fontenoy. After many years of soldiering she retired from
service and was pensioned by the prince regent, George IV. A tombstone
is inscribed to her memory in the old churchyard at Brighton.
In this bald record there is no room for the adventures of such
military and naval heroines as prisoners of war, as leaders in
battle, as victims of shipwreck, or as partakers in some of the most
extraordinary love-affairs ever heard of.
Hundreds of stories might be told of women conspicuous for valor,
meeting hazards as great as ever have fallen to the lot of men. In
one case, the casting away of the French frigate _Medusa_, the men,
almost without exception, performed prodigies of cowardice, while
two or three of the women made a wonderful journey across the Sahara
Desert to Senegambia, which is the one bright episode in the most
disgraceful disaster on record. In the defenses of Leyden and Haarlem,
besieged by Spanish armies, the Dutch women manned the ramparts with
the men, inspired them throughout the hopeless months, and shared the
general fate when all the survivors were butchered. And the valor of
Englishwomen during the sieges of our strongholds in India, China and
South Africa, has made some of the brightest pages of our history.
XLIX
THE CONQUERORS OF INDIA
Only the other day, the king of England was proclaimed emperor of
India, and all the princes and governors of that empire presented
their swords in homage. This homage was rendered at Delhi, the ancient
capital of Hindustan; and it is only one hundred and ten years since
Delhi fell, and Hindustan surrendered to the British arms. We have to
deal with the events that led up to the conquest of India.
The Moslem sultans, sons of the Great Mogul, had long reigned over
Hindustan, but in 1784 Shah Alam, last of these emperors, was driven
from Delhi. In his ruin he appealed for help to Madhoji Scindhia, a
Hindu prince from the South, who kindly restored the emperor to his
palace, then gave him into the keeping of a jailer, who gouged out the
old man’s eyes. Still Shah Alam, the blind, helpless, and at times very
hungry prisoner, was emperor of Northern India, and in his august name
Scindhia led the armies to collect the taxes of Hindustan. No tax was
collected without a battle.
Scindhia himself was one of many turbulent Mahratta princes subject to
the peshwa of Poona, near Bombay. He had to sit on the peshwa’s head
at Poona, and the emperor’s head at Delhi, while he fought the whole
nobility and gentry of India, and kept one eye cocked for British
invasions from the seaboard. The British held the ocean, surrounded
India, and were advancing inland. Madhoji Scindhia was a very busy man.
He had never heard of tourists, and when De Boigne, an Italian
gentleman, came up-country to see the sights, his highness, scenting
a spy, stole the poor man’s luggage. De Boigne, veteran of the French
and Russian armies, and lately retired from the British service, was
annoyed at the loss of his luggage, and having nothing left but his
sword, offered the use of that to Scindhia’s nearest enemy. In those
days scores of Europeans, mostly French, and scandalous rogues as a
rule, were serving in native armies. Though they liked a fight, they
so loved money that they would sell their masters to the highest
bidder. Scindhia observed that De Boigne was a pretty good man, and the
Savoyard adventurer was asked to enter his service.
De Boigne proved honest, faithful to his prince, a tireless worker, a
glorious leader, the very pattern of manliness. The battalions which he
raised for Scindhia were taught the art of war as known in Europe, they
were well armed, fed, disciplined, and paid their wages; they were led
by capable white men, and always victorious in the field. At Scindhia’s
death, De Boigne handed over to the young prince Daulat Rao, his heir,
an army of forty thousand men, which had never known defeat, together
with the sovereignty of India.
The new Scindhia was rotten, and now the Italian, broken down with
twenty years of service, longed for his home among the Italian
vineyards. Before parting with his highness, he warned him rather to
disband the whole army than ever be tempted into conflict with the
English. So De Boigne laid down the burden of the Indian empire, and
retired to his vineyards in Savoy. There for thirty years he befriended
the poor, lived simply, entertained royally, and so died full of years
and honors.
While De Boigne was still fighting for Scindhia, a runaway Irish sailor
had drifted up-country, and taken service in one of the native states
as a private soldier. George Thomas was as chivalrous as De Boigne,
with a great big heart, a clear head, a terrific sword, and a reckless
delight in war. Through years of rough and tumble adventure he fought
his way upward, until with his own army of five thousand men he invaded
and conquered the Hariana. This district, just to the westward of
Delhi, was a desert, peopled by tribes so fierce that they had never
been subdued, but their Irish king won all their hearts, and they
settled down quite peacefully under his government. His revenue was
eighteen hundred thousand pounds a year. At Hansi, his capital town,
he coined his own money, cast his own cannon, made muskets and powder,
and set up a pension fund for widows and orphans of his soldiers. All
round him were hostile states, and whenever he felt dull he conquered
a kingdom or so, and levied tribute. If his men went hungry, he
starved with them; if they were weary, he marched afoot; the army
worshiped him, and the very terror of his name brought strong cities
to surrender, put legions of Sikh cavalry to flight. All things seemed
possible to such a man, even the conquest of great Hindustan.
De Boigne had been succeeded as commander-in-chief under Scindhia by
Perron, a runaway sailor, a Frenchman, able and strong. De Boigne’s
power had been a little thing compared with the might and splendor of
Perron, who actually reigned over Hindustan, stole the revenues, and
treated Scindhia’s orders with contempt. Perron feared only one man on
earth, this rival adventurer, this Irish rajah of the Hariana, and sent
an expedition to destroy him.
The new master of Hindustan detested the English, and degrading the
capable British officers who had served De Boigne, procured Frenchmen
to take their place, hairdressers, waiters, scalawags, all utterly
useless. Major Bourguien, the worst of the lot, was sent against Thomas
and got a thrashing.
But Thomas, poor soul, had a deadlier enemy than this coward, and
now lay drunk in camp for a week celebrating his victory instead of
attending to business. He awakened to find his force of five thousand
men besieged by thirty thousand veterans. There was no water, spies
burned his stacks of forage, his battalions were bribed to desert, or
lost all hope. Finally with three English officers and two hundred
cavalry, Thomas cut his way through the investing army and fled to his
capital.
The coward Bourguien had charge of the pursuing force that now invested
Hanei. Bourguien’s officers breached the walls and took the town by
storm, but Thomas fell back upon the citadel. Then Bourguien sent spies
to bribe the garrison that Thomas might be murdered, but his officers
went straight to warn the fallen king. To them he surrendered.
That night Thomas dined with the officers, and all were merry when
Bourguien proposed a toast insulting his prisoner. The officers turned
their glasses down refusing to drink. Thomas burst into tears; but
then he drew upon Bourguien, and waving the glittering blade, “One
Irish sword,” he cried, “is still sufficient for a hundred Frenchmen!”
Bourguien bolted.
Loyal in the days of his greatness, the fallen king was received with
honors at the British outposts upon the Ganges. There he was giving
valuable advice to the governor-general when a map of India was laid
before him, the British possessions marked red. He swept his hand
across India: “All this ought to be red.”
It is all red now, and the British conquest of India arose out of the
defense made by this great wild hero against General Perron, ruler of
Hindustan. Scindhia, who had lifted Perron from the dust, and made him
commander-in-chief of his army, was now in grave peril on the Deccan,
beset by the league of Mahratta princes. In his bitter need he sent to
Perron for succor. Perron, busy against his enemy in the Hariana, left
Scindhia to his fate.
Perron had no need of Scindhia now, but was leagued with Napoleon to
hand over the Indian empire to France. He betrayed his master.
Now Scindhia, had the Frenchmen been loyal, could have checked the
Mahratta princes, but these got out of hand, and one of them, Holkar,
drove the Mahratta emperor, the peshwa of Poona, from his throne. The
peshwa fled to Bombay, and returned with a British army under Sir
Arthur Wellesley. So came the battle of Assaye, wherein the British
force of four thousand five hundred men overthrew the Mahratta army
of fifty thousand men, captured a hundred guns, and won Poona, the
capital of the South. Meanwhile for fear of Napoleon’s coming, Perron,
his servant, had to be overthrown. A British army under General Lake
swept Perron’s army out of existence and captured Delhi, the capital
of the North. Both the capital cities of India fell to English arms,
both emperors came under British protection, and that vast empire was
founded wherein King George now reigns. As to Perron, his fall was
pitiful, a freak of cowardice. He betrayed everybody, and sneaked away
to France with a large fortune.
And Arthur Wellesley, victor in that stupendous triumph of Assaye,
became the Iron Duke of Wellington, destined to liberate Europe at
Waterloo.
L
A. D. 1805
THE MAN WHO SHOT LORD NELSON
This story is from the memoirs of Robert Guillemard, a conscript in
the Grand Army of France, and to his horror drafted for a marine on
board the battle-ship _Redoubtable_. The Franco-Spanish fleet of
thirty-three battle-ships lay in Cadiz, and Villeneuve, the nice old
gentleman in command, was still breathless after being chased by Lord
Nelson across the Atlantic and back again. Now, having given Nelson the
slip, he had fierce orders from the Emperor Napoleon to join the French
channel fleet, for the invasion of England. The nice old gentleman knew
that his fleet was manned largely with helpless recruits, ill-paid,
ill-found, most scandalously fed, sick with a righteous terror lest
Nelson come and burn them in their harbor.
Then Nelson came, with twenty-seven battle-ships, raging for a fight,
and Villeneuve had to oblige for fear of Napoleon’s anger.
The fleets met off the sand-dunes of Cape Trafalgar, drawn up in
opposing lines for battle, and when they closed, young Guillemard’s
ship, the _Redoubtable_, engaged Lord Nelson’s _Victory_, losing thirty
men to her first discharge.
Guillemard had never been in action, and as the thunders broke from
the gun tiers below, he watched with mingled fear and rage the rush of
seamen at their work on deck, and his brothers of the marines at their
musketry, until everything was hidden in trailing wreaths of smoke,
from which came the screams of the wounded, the groans of the dying.
Some seventy feet overhead, at the caps of the lower masts, were
widespread platforms, the fighting tops on which the best marksmen were
always posted. “All our topmen,” says Guillemard, “had been killed,
when two sailors and four soldiers, of whom I was one, were ordered to
occupy their post in the tops. While we were going aloft, the balls
and grapeshot showered around us, struck the masts and yards, knocked
large splinters from them, and cut the rigging to pieces. One of my
companions was wounded beside me, and fell from a height of thirty feet
to the deck, where he broke his neck. When I reached the top my first
movement was to take a view of the prospect presented by the hostile
fleets. For more than a league extended a thick cloud of smoke, above
which were discernible a forest of masts and rigging, and the flags,
the pendants and the fire of the three nations. Thousands of flashes,
more or less near, continually penetrated this cloud, and a rolling
noise pretty similar to the sound of thunder, but much stronger, arose
from its bosom.”
Guillemard goes on to describe a duel between the topmen of the
_Redoubtable_ and those of the _Victory_ only a few yards distant,
and when it was finished he lay alone among the dead who crowded the
swaying platform.
“On the poop of the English vessel was an officer covered with orders
and with only one arm. From what I had heard of Nelson I had no
doubt that it was he. He was surrounded by several officers, to whom
he seemed to be giving orders. At the moment I first perceived him
several of his sailors were wounded beside him by the fire of the
_Redoubtable_. As I had received no orders to go down, and saw myself
forgotten in the tops, I thought it my duty to fire on the poop of the
English vessel, which I saw quite clearly exposed, and close to me.
I could even have taken aim at the men I saw, but I fired at hazard
among the groups of sailors and officers. All at once I saw great
confusion on board the _Victory_; the men crowded round the officer
whom I had taken for Nelson. He had just fallen, and was taken below
covered with a cloak. The agitation shown at this moment left me no
doubt that I had judged rightly, and that it really was the English
admiral. An instant afterward the _Victory_ ceased from firing, the
deck was abandoned.... I hurried below to inform the captain.... He
believed me the more readily as the slackening of the fire indicated
that an event of the highest importance occupied the attention of the
English ship’s crew.... He gave immediate orders for boarding, and
everything was prepared for it in a moment. It is even said that young
Fontaine, a midshipman ... passed by the ports into the lower deck of
the English vessel, found it abandoned, and returned to notify that
the ship had surrendered.... However, as a part of our crew, commanded
by two officers, were ready to spring upon the enemy’s deck, the fire
recommenced with a fury it had never had from the beginning of the
action.... In less than half an hour our vessel, without having hauled
down her colors, had in fact, surrendered. Her fire had gradually
slackened and then had ceased altogether.... Not more than one hundred
fifty men survived out of a crew of about eight hundred, and almost all
those were more or less severely wounded.”
When these were taken on board the _Victory_, Guillemard learned
how the bullet which struck down through Lord Nelson’s shoulder and
shattered the spine below, had come from the fighting tops of the
_Redoubtable_, where he had been the only living soul. He speaks of his
grief as a man, his triumph as a soldier of France, who had delivered
his country from her great enemy. What it meant for England judge now
after nearly one hundred years, when one meets a bluejacket in the
street with the three white lines of braid upon his collar in memory of
Nelson’s victories at Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar, and the black
neckcloth worn in mourning for his death.
It seemed at the time that the very winds sang Nelson’s requiem, for
with the night came a storm putting the English shattered fleet in
mortal peril, while of the nineteen captured battle-ships not one was
fit to brave the elements. For, save some few vessels that basely ran
away before the action, both French and Spaniards had fought with
sublime desperation, and when the English prize-crews took possession,
they and their prisoners were together drowned. The _Aigle_ was cast
away, and not one man escaped; the _Santissima Trinidad_, the largest
ship in the world, foundered; the _Indomitable_ sank with fifteen
hundred wounded; the _Achille_, with her officers shooting themselves,
her sailors drunk, went blazing through the storm until the fire
caught her magazine. And so with the rest of eighteen blood-soaked
wrecks, burned, foundered, or cast away, while only one outlived that
night of horror.
[Illustration: LORD NELSON]
When the day broke Admiral Villeneuve was brought on board the
_Victory_, where Nelson lay in state, for the voyage to England.
Villeneuve, wounded in the hand, was unable to write, and sent
among the French prisoners for a clerk. For this service Guillemard
volunteered as the only uninjured soldier who could write. So
Guillemard attended the admiral all through the months of their
residence at Arlesford, in Devon, where they were at large on parole.
The old man was treated with respect and sympathy.
Prisoners of war are generally released by exchange between fighting
powers, rank for rank, man for man; but after five months Villeneuve
was allowed to return to France. He pledged his honor that unless duly
exchanged he would surrender again on the English coast at the end of
ninety days. So, attended by Guillemard and his servant, he crossed the
channel, and from the town of Rennes--the place where Dreyfus had his
trial not long ago--he wrote despatches to the government in Paris.
He was coming, he said in a private letter, to arraign most of his
surviving captains on the charge of cowardice at Trafalgar.
Of this it seems the captains got some warning, and decided that for
the sake of their own health Villeneuve should not reach Paris alive.
Anyway, Guillemard says that while the admiral lay in the Hotel de
Bresil, at Rennes, five strangers appeared--men in civilian dress, who
asked him many questions about Villeneuve. The secretary was proud of
his master, glad to talk about so distinguished a man, and thought no
evil when he gave his answers. The leader of the five was a southern
Frenchman, the others foreigners, deeply tanned, who wore mustaches--in
those days an unusual ornament.
That night the admiral had gone to bed in his room on the first floor
of the inn, and the secretary was asleep on the floor above. A cry
disturbed him, and taking his sword and candle, he ran down-stairs
in time to see the five strangers sneak by him hurriedly. Guillemard
rushed to the admiral’s room “and saw the unfortunate man, whom the
balls of Trafalgar had respected, stretched pale and bloody on his bed.
He ... breathed hard, and struggled with the agonies of death.... Five
deep wounds pierced his breast.”
So it was the fate of the slayer of Nelson to be alone with Villeneuve
at his death.