more than three hundred wolves that winter by a device so unique, yet
simple, that it is well worth recording. By the banks of the outlet of
the lakes they built a long pen twelve by sixteen feet at the base, and
sloping sharply inward and upward to a height of seven feet. The top
of the pyramid was an opening about two feet six inches wide by eight
feet in length. Whole deer, quarters of buffalo, any kind of meat handy
was thrown into the pen, and the wolves, scenting the flesh and blood,
seeing it plainly through the four to six inch spaces between the logs
would eventually climb to the top and jump down through the opening.
But they could not jump out, and there morning would find them uneasily
pacing around and around in utter bewilderment.
“You will remember that the old man was a Catholic, yet I know that
he had much faith in the Blackfoot religion, and believed in the
efficiency of the medicine-man’s prayers and mysteries. He used often
to speak of the terrible power possessed by a man named Old Sun. ‘There
was one,’ he would say, ‘who surely talked with the gods, and was
given some of their mysterious power. Sometimes of a dark night he
would invite a few of us to his lodge, when all was calm and still.
After all were seated his wives would bank the fire with ashes so that
it was as dark within as without, and he would begin to pray. First to
the Sun-chief, then to the wind maker, the thunder and the lightning.
As he prayed, entreating them to come and do his will, first the lodge
ears would begin to quiver with the first breath of a coming breeze,
which gradually grew stronger and stronger till the lodge bent to the
blasts, and the lodge poles strained and creaked. Then thunder began to
boom, faint and far away, and lightning dimly to blaze, and they came
nearer and nearer until they seemed to be just overhead; the crashes
deafened us, the flashes blinded us, and all were terror-stricken. Then
this wonderful man would pray them to go, and the wind would die down,
and the thunder and lightning go on rumbling and flashing into the far
distance until we heard and saw them no more.’”
LIII
A. D. 1819
SIMON BOLIVAR
Once at the stilted court of Spain young Ferdinand, Prince of the
Asturias, had the condescension to play at tennis with a mere colonial;
and the bounder won.
Long afterward, when Don Ferdinand was king, the colonial challenged
him to another ball game, one played with cannon-balls. This time the
stake was the Spanish American empire, but Ferdinand played Bolivar,
and again the bounder won.
“Now tell me,” a lady said once, “what animal reminds one most of the
Señor Bolivar?”
And Bolivar thought he heard some one say “monkey,” whereat he flew
into an awful passion, until the offender claimed that the word was
“sparrow.” He stood five feet six inches, with a bird-like quickness,
and a puckered face with an odd tang of monkey. Rich, lavish, gaudy,
talking mock heroics, vain as a peacock, always on the strut unless he
was on the run, there is no more pathetically funny figure in history
than tragical Bolivar; who heard liberty, as he thought, knocking at
the door of South America, and opened--to let in chaos.
“I don’t know,” drawled a Spaniard of that time, “to what class of
beasts these South Americans belong.”
They were dogs, these Spanish colonials, treated as dogs, behaving
as dogs. When they wanted a university Spain said they were only
provided by Providence to labor in the mines. If they had opinions
the Inquisition cured them of their errors. They were not allowed to
hold any office or learn the arts of war and government. Spain sent
officials to ease them of their surplus cash, and keep them out of
mischief. Thanks to Spain they were no more fit for public affairs than
a lot of Bengali baboos.
They were loyal as beaten dogs until Napoleon stole the Spanish crown
for brother Joseph, and French armies promenaded all over Spain closely
pursued by the British. There was no Spain left to love, but the
colonials were not Napoleon’s dogs. Napoleon’s envoys to Venezuela
were nearly torn to pieces before they escaped to sea, where a little
British frigate came and gobbled them up. The sea belonged to the
British, and so the colonials sent ambassadors, Bolivar and another
gentleman, to King George. Please would he help them to gain their
liberty? George had just chased Napoleon out of Spain, and said he
would do his best with his allies, the Spaniards.
In London Bolivar unearthed a countryman who loved liberty and had
fought for Napoleon, a real professional soldier. General Miranda was
able and willing to lead the armies of freedom, until he actually saw
the Venezuelan troops. Then he shied hard. He really must draw the line
somewhere. Yes, he would take command of the rabble on one condition,
that he got rid of Bolivar. To get away from Bolivar he would go
anywhere and do anything. So he led his rabble and found them stout
fighters, and drove the Spaniards out of the central provinces.
The politicians were sitting down to draft the first of many
comic-opera constitutions when an awful sound, louder than any thunder,
swept out of the eastern Andes, the earth rolled like a sea in a storm,
and the five cities of the new republic crashed down in heaps of ruin.
The barracks buried the garrisons, the marching troops were totally
destroyed, the politicians were killed, and in all one hundred twenty
thousand people perished. The only thing left standing in one church
was a pillar bearing the arms of Spain; the only districts not wrecked
were those still loyal to the Spanish government. The clergy pointed
the moral, the ruined people repented their rebellion, and the Spanish
forces took heart and closed in from every side upon the lost republic.
Simon Bolivar generously surrendered General Miranda in chains to the
victorious Spaniards.
So far one sees only, as poor Miranda did, that this man was a
sickening cad. But he was something more. He stuck to the cause for
which he had given his life, joined the rebels in what is now Colombia,
was given a small garrison command and ordered to stay in his fort.
In defiance of orders, he swept the Spaniards out of the Magdalena
Valley, raised a large force, liberated the country, then marched into
Venezuela, defeated the Spanish forces in a score of brilliant actions,
and was proclaimed liberator with absolute power in both Colombia and
Venezuela. One begins to marvel at this heroic leader until the cad
looms out. “Spaniards and Canary islanders!” he wrote, “reckon on death
even if you are neutral, unless you will work actively for the liberty
of America. Americans! count on life even if you are culpable.”
Bolivar’s pet hobbies were three in number: Resigning his job as
liberator; writing proclamations; committing massacres. “I order you,”
he wrote to the governor of La Guayra, “to shoot all the prisoners in
those dungeons, and _in the hospital_, without any exception whatever.”
So the prisoners of war were set to work building a funeral pyre.
When this was ready eight hundred of them were brought up in batches,
butchered with axes, bayonets and knives, and their bodies thrown on
the flames. Meanwhile Bolivar, in his office, refreshed himself by
writing a proclamation to denounce the atrocities of the Spaniards.
Southward of the Orinoco River there are vast level prairies called
Llanos, a cattle country, handled by wild horsemen known as the
Llaneros. In Bolivar’s time their leader called himself Boves, and
he had as second in command Morales. Boves said that Morales was
“atrocious.” Morales said that “Boves was a man of merit, but too
blood-thirsty.” The Spaniards called their command “The Infernal
Division.” At first they fought for the Revolution, afterward for
Spain, but they were really quite impartial and spared neither age nor
sex. This was the “Spanish” army which swept away the second Venezuelan
republic, slaughtering the whole population save some few poor starving
camps of fugitives. Then Boves reported to the Spanish general, “I
have recovered the arms, ammunition, and the honor of the Spanish flag,
which your excellency lost at Carabobo.”
From this time onward the situation was rather like a dog fight, with
the republican dog somewhere underneath in the middle. At times Bolivar
ran like a rabbit, at times he was granted a triumph, but whenever he
had time to come up and breathe he fired off volleys of proclamations.
In sixteen years a painstaking Colombian counted six hundred ninety-six
battles, which makes an average of one every ninth day, not to mention
massacres; but for all his puny body and feeble health Bolivar was
always to be found in the very thick of the scrimmage.
Europe had entered on the peace of Waterloo, but the ghouls who
stripped the dead after Napoleon’s battles had uniforms to sell which
went to clothe the fantastic mobs, republican and royalist, who
drenched all Spanish America with blood. There were soldiers, too,
whose trade of war was at an end in Europe, who gladly listened to
Bolivar’s agents, who offered gorgeous uniforms and promised splendid
wages--never paid--and who came to join in the war for “liberty.”
Three hundred Germans and nearly six thousand British veterans joined
Bolivar’s colors to fight for the freedom of America, and nearly all
of them perished in battle or by disease. Bolivar was never without
British officers, preferred British troops to all others, and in his
later years really earned the loyal love they gave him, while they
taught the liberator how to behave like a white man.
It was in 1819 that Bolivar led a force of two thousand five hundred
men across a flooded prairie. For a week they were up to their
knees, at times to their necks in water under a tropic deluge of
rain, swimming a dozen rivers beset by alligators. The climate and
starvation bore very heavily upon the British troops. Beyond the flood
they climbed the eastern Andes and crossed the Paramo at a height of
thirteen thousand feet, swept by an icy wind in blinding fog--hard
going for Venezuelans.
An Irishman, Colonel Rook, commanded the British contingent. “All,”
he reported, “was quite well with his corps, which had had quite a
pleasant march” through the awful gorges and over the freezing Paramo.
A Venezuelan officer remarked here that one-fourth of the men had
perished.
“It was true,” said Rook, “but it really was a very good thing, for
the men who had dropped out were all the wastrels and weaklings of the
force.”
Great was the astonishment of the royalists when Bolivar dropped on
them out of the clouds, and in the battle of Boyacá they were put
to rout. Next day Colonel Rook had his arm cut off by the surgeons,
chaffing them about the beautiful limb he was losing. He died of the
operation, but the British legion went on from victory to victory,
melting away like snow until at the end negroes and Indians filled
its illustrious companies. Colombia, Venezuela and Equador, Peru and
Bolivia were freed from the Spanish yoke and, in the main, released by
Bolivar’s tireless, unfailing and undaunted courage. But they could
not stand his braggart proclamations, would not have him or any man
for master, began a series of squabbles and revolutions that have
lasted ever since, and proved themselves unfit for the freedom Bolivar
gave. He knew at the end that he had given his life for a myth. On
the eighth December, 1830, he dictated his final proclamation and on
the tenth received the last rites of the church, being still his old
braggart self. “Colombians! my last wishes are for the welfare of the
fatherland. If my death contributes to the cessation of party strife,
and to the consolidation of the Union, I shall descend in peace to the
grave.” On the seventeenth his troubled spirit passed.
LIV
A. D. 1812
THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE
When Lieutenant Lord Thomas Cochrane commanded the brig of war
_Speedy_, he used to carry about a whole broadside of her cannon-balls
in his pocket. He had fifty-four men when he laid his toy boat
alongside a Spanish frigate with thirty-two heavy guns and three
hundred nineteen men, but the Spaniard could not fire down into his
decks, whereas he blasted her with his treble-shotted pop-guns. Leaving
only the doctor on board he boarded that Spaniard, got more than he
bargained for, and would have been wiped out, but that a detachment of
his sailors dressed to resemble black demons, charged down from the
forecastle head. The Spaniards were so shocked that they surrendered.
For thirteen months the _Speedy_ romped about, capturing in all fifty
ships, one hundred and twenty-two guns, five hundred prisoners. Then
she gave chase to three French battle-ships by mistake, and met with a
dreadful end.
In 1809, Cochrane, being a bit of a chemist, and a first-rate mechanic,
was allowed to make fireworks hulks loaded with explosives--with which
he attacked a French fleet in the anchorage at Aix. The fleet got into
a panic and destroyed itself.
And all his battles read like fairy tales, for this long-legged,
red-haired Scot, rivaled Lord Nelson himself in genius and daring.
At war he was the hero and idol of the fleet, but in peace a demon,
restless, fractious, fiendish in humor, deadly in rage, playing
schoolboy jokes on the admiralty and the parliament. He could not be
happy without making swarms of powerful enemies, and those enemies
waited their chance.
In February, 1814, a French officer landed at Dover with tidings that
the Emperor Napoleon had been slain by Cossacks. The messenger’s
progress became a triumphal procession, and amid public rejoicings he
entered London to deliver his papers at the admiralty. Bells pealed,
cannon thundered, the stock exchange went mad with the rise of prices,
while the messenger--a Mr. Berenger--sneaked to the lodgings of an
acquaintance, Lord Cochrane, and borrowed civilian clothes.
His news was false, his despatch a forgery, he had been hired by
Cochrane’s uncle, a stock-exchange speculator, to contrive the whole
blackguardly hoax. Cochrane knew nothing of the plot, but for the mere
lending of that suit of clothes, he was sentenced to the pillory, a
year’s imprisonment, and a fine of a thousand pounds. He was struck
from the rolls of the navy, expelled from the house of commons, his
banner as a Knight of the Bath torn down and thrown from the doors
of Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster. In the end he was driven to
disgraceful exile and hopeless ruin.
Four years later Cochrane, commanding the Chilian navy, sailed from
Valparaiso to fight the Spanish fleet. Running away from his mother, a
son of his--Tom Cochrane, junior--aged five, contrived to sail with the
admiral, and in his first engagement, was spattered with the blood and
brains of a marine.
“I’m not hurt, papa,” said the imp, “the shot didn’t touch me. Jack
says that the ball is not made that will hurt mama’s boy.” Jack proved
to be right, but it was in that engagement that Cochrane earned his
Spanish title, “The Devil.” Three times he attempted to take Callao
from the Spaniards, then in disgusted failure dispersed his useless
squadron, and went off with his flag ship to Valdivia. For lack of
officers, he kept the deck himself until he dropped. When he went below
for a nap, the lieutenant left a middy in command, but the middy went
to sleep and the ship was cast away.
Cochrane got her afloat; then, with all his gunpowder wet, went off
with his sinking wreck to attack Valdivia. The place was a Spanish
stronghold with fifteen forts and one hundred and fifteen guns.
Cochrane, preferring to depend on cold steel, left the muskets behind,
wrecked his boats in the surf, let his men swim, led them straight at
the Spaniards, stormed the batteries, and seized the city. So he found
some nice new ships, and an arsenal to equip them, for his next attack
on Callao.
He had a fancy for the frigate, _Esmeralda_, which lay in
Callao--thought she would suit him for a cruiser. She happened to be
protected by a Spanish fleet, and batteries mounting three hundred
guns, but Cochrane did not mind. El Diablo first eased the minds of
the Spaniards by sending away two out of his three small vessels,
but kept the bulk of their men, and all their boats, a detail not
observed by the weary enemy. His boarding party, two hundred and forty
strong, stole into the anchorage at midnight, and sorely surprised the
_Esmeralda_. Cochrane, first on board, was felled with the butt end of
a musket, and thrown back into his boat grievously hurt, in addition
to which he had a bullet through his thigh before he took possession
of the frigate. The fleet and batteries had opened fire, but El Diablo
noticed that two neutral ships protected themselves with a display of
lanterns arranged as a signal, “Please don’t hit me.” “That’s good
enough for me,” said Cochrane and copied those lights which protected
the neutrals. When the bewildered Spaniards saw his lanterns also, they
promptly attacked the neutrals. So Cochrane stole away with his prize.
Although the great sailor delivered Chili and Peru from the Spaniards,
the patriots ungratefully despoiled him of all his pay and rewards.
Cochrane has been described as “a destroying angel with a limited
income and a turn for politics.” Anyway he was misunderstood, and
left Chili disgusted, to attend to the liberation of Brazil from the
Portuguese. But if the Chilians were thieves, the Brazilians proved to
be both thieves and cowards. Reporting to the Brazilian government that
all their cartridges, fuses, guns, powder, spars and sails, were alike
rotten, and all their men an encumbrance, he dismantled a squadron to
find equipment for a single ship, the _Pedro Primeiro_. This he manned
with British and Yankee adventurers. He had two other small but fairly
effective ships when he commenced to threaten Bahia. There lay thirteen
Portuguese war-ships, mounting four hundred and eighteen guns, seventy
merchant ships, and a garrison of several thousand men. El Diablo’s
blockade reduced the whole to starvation, the threat of his fireworks
sent them into convulsions, and their leaders resolved on flight to
Portugal. So the troops were embarked, the rich people took ship with
their treasure, and the squadron escorted them to sea, where Cochrane
grinned in the offing. For fifteen days he hung in the rear of that
fleet, cutting off ships as they straggled. He had not a man to spare
for charge of his prizes, but when he caught a ship he staved her water
casks, disabled her rigging so that she could only run before the wind
back to Bahia, and threw every weapon overboard. He captured seventy
odd ships, half the troops, all the treasure, fought and out-maneuvered
the war fleet so that he could not be caught, and only let thirteen
wretched vessels escape to Lisbon. Such a deed of war has never been
matched in the world’s annals, and Cochrane followed it by forcing the
whole of Northern Brazil to an abject surrender.
Like the patriots of Chili and Peru, the Brazilians gratefully rewarded
their liberator by cheating him out of his pay; so next he turned
to deliver Greece from the Turks. Very soon he found that even the
Brazilians were perfect gentlemen compared with the Greek patriots, and
the heart-sick man went home.
England was sorry for the way she had treated her hero, gave back
his naval rank and made him admiral with command-in-chief of a
British fleet at sea, restored his banner as a Knight of the Bath in
Henry VII’s chapel, granted a pension, and at the end, found him a
resting-place in the Abbey. On his father’s death, he succeeded to
the earldom of Dundonald, and down to 1860, when the old man went
to his rest, his life was devoted to untiring service. He was among
the first inventors to apply coal gas to light English streets and
homes; he designed the boilers long in use by the English navy; made
a bitumen concrete for paving; and offered plans for the reduction of
Sebastopol which would have averted all the horrors of the siege. Yet
even to his eightieth year he was apt to shock and terrify all official
persons, and when he was buried in the nave of the Abbey, Lord Brougham
pronounced his strange obituary. “What,” he exclaimed at the grave
side, “no cabinet minister, no officer of state to grace this great
man’s funeral!” Perhaps they were still scared of the poor old hero.
LV
A.D. 1823
THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS
Far back in the long ago time New Zealand was a crowded happy land. Big
Maori fortress villages crowned the hilltops, broad farms covered the
hillsides; the chiefs kept a good table, cooking was excellent, and
especially when prisoners were in season, the people feasted between
sleeps, or, should provisions fail, sacked the next parish for a supply
of meat. So many parishes were sacked and eaten, that in the course of
time the chiefs led their tribes to quite a distance before they could
find a nice fat edible village, but still the individual citizen felt
crowded after meals, and all was well.
Then came the Pakehas, the white men, trading, with muskets for sale,
and the tribe that failed to get a trader to deal with was very soon
wiped out. A musket cost a ton of flax, and to pile up enough to buy
one a whole tribe must leave its hill fortress to camp in unwholesome
flax swamps. The people worked themselves thin to buy guns, powder
and iron tools for farming, but they cherished their Pakeha as a
priceless treasure in special charge of the chief, and if a white man
was eaten, it was clear proof that he was entirely useless alive, or a
quite detestable character. The good Pakehas became Maori warriors, a
little particular as to their meat being really pig, but otherwise well
mannered and popular.
Now of these Pakeha Maoris, one has left a book. He omitted his name
from the book of _Old New Zealand_, and never mentioned dates, but
tradition says he was Mr. F. C. Maning, and that he lived as a Maori
and trader for forty years, from 1823 to 1863 when the work was
published.
In the days when Mr. Maning reached the North Island a trader was
valued at twenty times his weight in muskets, equivalent say, to the
sum total of the British National Debt. Runaway sailors however, were
quite cheap. “Two men of this description were hospitably entertained
one night by a chief, a very particular friend of mine, who, to pay
himself for his trouble and outlay, ate one of them next morning.”
Maning came ashore on the back of a warrior by the name of Melons, who
capsized in an ebb tide running like a sluice, at which the white man,
displeased, held the native’s head under water by way of punishment.
When they got ashore Melons wanted to get even, so challenged the
Pakeha to a wrestling match. Both were in the pink of condition, the
Maori, twenty-five years of age, and a heavy-weight, the other a boy
full of animal spirits and tough as leather. After the battle Melons
sat up rather dazed, offered his hand, and venting his entire stock of
English, said “How do you do?”
But then came a powerful chief, by name Relation-eater. “Pretty work
this,” he began, “_good_ work. I won’t stand this not at all! not at
all! not at all!” (The last sentence took three jumps, a step and a
turn round, to keep correct time.) “Who killed the Pakeha? It was
Melons. You are a nice man, killing _my_ Pakeha ... we shall be called
the ‘Pakeha killkillers’; I shall be sick with shame; the Pakeha will
run away; what if you had killed him dead, or broken his bones”....
(Here poor Melones burst out crying like an infant). “Where is the hat?
Where the shoes? The Pakeha is robbed! he is murdered!” Here a wild
howl from Melons.