of shrimp, and school after school of fish. The colonists had feasted
on these as on a banquet without end. But they suddenly learned that
each had its season. When one day they wanted more none were to be had.
School was out as far as fish were concerned. Shrimp had run some place
else. In warm weather oysters made the colonists sick.
The woods were full of deer, the prairies of buffalo, the glades of
turkeys, the bayous of waterfowl, more meat than the French could eat
in a lifetime. They did not bother to jerk any of these. Why should
they work to dry flesh when there was so much that was fresh at
their very doors? The Indians prepared some, it is true, but Indians
themselves often take a chance on the future, and their not too
provident example went unnoticed by the colonists. The climate felt
much the same to the French as that of their own Languedoc; Languedoc
with a garden added like the Paradise where Adam and Eve gathered their
daily bread from bushes.
The deer followed the spring northward for croppings of new leaves, the
buffalo trotted away on paths which a lifetime of migration told them
led to cool green grass. Game left for Canada. Even alligators dropped
below reach into the mud. (Eating baked alligator tails is never a
treat; it means that one is very hungry indeed.)
Once whole fields were glutted with wild strawberries and blackberries.
Groves of mulberries and plums abounded. Luscious grapes clambered
every hill. Nobody dried or preserved them. It seemed absurd to do so
when there fell to the ground every day more than all France could have
eaten. So the time of these fruits came and went and nothing remained
to take their place.
Some of the finest foods can be made to grow in the sandy soil of the
country back of Biloxi beach if one knows how, but the colonists didn't
bother to inquire, and the only things that were now thriving under the
July sun were clouds of mosquitoes.
Anthony sipped his gruel and gazed over toward Deer Island. The rising
sun made the channel look so much like milk that poor du Gay was
tempted to walk down and take a taste of it. The pines were black
against the burning sky and a soldier coming out on the long narrow
point beyond them was silhouetted distinctly. As he went forward over
the low sand reef he had the effect of walking on the water. His
reflection in the white Gulf was as clear-cut as himself. Soldier and
shadow moved along grotesquely, and Anthony thought the whole thing
must be a mirage. But when the soldier staggered and fell with a very
real splashing of water, the Picard jumped into his canoe and rowed
across to see what was the matter.
The soldier was a Frenchman from the Mississippi stockade. Anthony knew
him, picked him up and supported him, gently bathing his drawn face and
questioning him.
"See all this pottery," cried the soldier, throwing out expressive
hands, "smashed to bits! Do you suppose these bowls had corn in them
when they were whole? I have followed a line of them out here to see if
anything to eat had been left in them."
"How are the other soldiers at the stockade?" asked Anthony, to
take his mind from this illusion of food caused by the sight of the
scattered dump of Indian bowls.
"Our stores are almost gone; we are on rations. We are drinking river
water." The soldier began to weep childishly. "I want a drink from our
hillside spring in France. I need my breakfast!"
With promises which he was by no means sure he could keep, Anthony put
the canoe in tow and helped the soldier into his own boat to take him
to the fort. He had been sent from the stockade to beg for stores at
Biloxi. Hunger-weary he had mistaken Deer Island for the beach and had
run his felucca ashore there. If Anthony had not happened to see him
he might have perished and the remaining soldiers at the stockade have
waited in vain for the return of their messenger.
It was with a grave face that Anthony sailed the soldier's boat into
Biloxi Bay and with a still heavier heart that he answered the hail
of another coastwise sailing-vessel which was coming to meet him from
the east. This second man was also a Frenchman, one of the colonists
at Mobile. A glance at his yellow skin, sunken cheeks, and burning
eyes told his whole story to Anthony. He, too, had been sent to beg
for stores. There were women and little children, some old priests and
helpless slaves in Mobile.
"We have eaten up our goats and our pigs; only the cows are left," was
the report of the Mobile colonist as he and the Mississippi soldier
were brought into the fort and presented to the Biloxi commandant by
Anthony. "The Sieur de Iberville sent some of our men to live among
the Indians who have a little but not much more than we ourselves. He
sailed some time ago for France to send provisions back to us with the
greatest possible haste. Until they come will you share with us?"
They had nothing to share. The few men still at Dauphin Island and
Ship Island were in equal straits. From these pitiful beggars before
the commandant Anthony turned and looked out of a loophole over the
waste where his own and the other settlers' gardens should have been in
toothsome bearing. Nothing was growing.
"I did not come to the New World to raise cabbages," he thought,
resentfully. "I could have done that in Picardy without going out of my
own gate. I came to seek my fortune, to carry home a galleon of gold."
He smiled ruefully to think that if he could go back now to France he
could take little besides his own bones.
As he felt so did all the adventurers. They spent their days in
voyaging romantically up and down the Great River and through the
bayous and among the islands round its estuary hunting for the gold and
pearls which they expected to see shining in the sand or outcropping
from the banks. Their nights were taken up with dreams of how they
should spend this wealth when once it was found and shoveled into the
boats and taken to France.
To be sure, Anthony with the best intentions had said to his Indian
flunkies the same thing the other Frenchmen said to theirs: "Plant me
some of those juicy melons you know so well how to raise, and potatoes
and plenty of maize and beans for the sickquatash, and some of that
delightfully bad tobacco. Here are imported French seeds of cabbages
and turnips and Old World vegetables. Plant them also."
The docile Indians had sowed the plantations. In the virgin alluvial
soil under the warm spring rains the astonished seed from Picardy had
grown like Jack's beanstalk. The Indians watching these huge creations
were filled with superstitious fears. When an immense cabbage head
had burst they shrieked in chorus, "Bad Medicine!" and ran away.
Nothing could induce them to return. So the Frenchmen ordered the
negroes--there were only a handful of them--"_You_ tend the gardens."
The darkies promised. They really meant to do so that day or the next
or the next. If the masters had directed them and stood over them there
would have been provisions in plenty. But the masters went gold-hunting
and the darkies lay in the shade and waited for the weeds to stop
growing so they could pull them all at once. Now the gardens were in
ruins and the owners hungry.
"Remorse is a dreadful thing," thought Anthony; "I can feel it
gnawing at my belt and I am terribly ashamed." He turned back to
the commandant: "I suppose the question is, shall we ask alms of
our nearest neighbors, our worst enemies, those cruel Spaniards at
Pensacola?"
As it was quite impossible to send an armed force from the little group
of impoverished, sick, and famished colonists to enforce a request,
Anthony offered to go alone and beg.
The carelessness and short-sightedness of men in prosperity has never
ceased to be a marvel. It is equaled only by the endurance and courage
of the same men in trouble. Every one of the miserable colonists
offered to take the voyage in Anthony's place. So it was arranged
that if he should fail to return others were to follow on the same
mission, since Louisiana--which was the name of nearly half of North
America--had come to such a pass that she must say, "Give me food or I
may die in savagery."
"Let me take as attendant that Chickasaw boy the scouts brought in this
morning," was Anthony's only demand. "I can understand a little of his
speech and perhaps on the voyage I may coax from him some news of the
tribes north and learn why he is unfriendly toward us."
The captive spy was promised his freedom if he would serve Anthony as
far as Pensacola, and he went sullenly enough with the only man whose
words he knew. Anthony trusted to the intimacy of two days and a night
to learn from the Chickasaw all he knew that might serve the French in
their distress.
So Anthony, beautifully groomed and dressed and taking his Chickasaw
valet, rigged a sail to his canoe and started for Pensacola. In the
bow he set his clay stove, some precious pounded corn in a bowl, and a
porous jar which kept drinking-water cool by evaporation. Nobody then
and nobody now in the neighborhood of the Mississippi can get along
without a crock.
A vein of earth, a perfect potter's clay, outcrops on the lower reaches
of the Great River. The fingers of prehistoric Indian children itched
to mold splendid mud-pies just like the scarcely more skilful children
of our times do on those same shores. No one knows who turned the first
dish, dried it or baked it and painted it with stripes of color.
A primitive clay stove sails up and down the river and into the Gulf
in almost every fisherman's boat to-day, just as it did on Anthony's
trip. Big crocks in prosaic trucks now go merchandizing over the same
Mississippi regions where once they traveled by picturesque Indian
pick-a-back. On many southern window-sills the water-jars are still
cooling in a draught.
Bricks for building houses on the river, tiles for roofing them and
terra-cotta for ornamenting them, began to be manufactured early in the
history of the colony. In the city of New Orleans are potteries which
have raised the making of mud-pies into a beautiful art. Here and there
throughout the Mississippi system are talented dreamers who turn the
clay into inspiring groups of the sculptor's art.
* * * * *
Sailing along the banks of pottery clay, Anthony measured out his
bowl of corn and wondered if he could make it do for the Chickasaw
and himself. As he sped under drive of wind and push of oar he
glimpsed at intervals those great heaps of empty oyster-shells, the
kitchen-middens, which proved that somebody in far-away days had
feasted long and well on these now starving shores. It was not so very
far by way of the coast to Pensacola Bay, and in good time he put into
the harbor and asked for the governor of the post, one Don Francisco
Martin. He was taken to an officer of the fort, and this is what was
said:
"I am Anthony Auguelle, the Picard du Gay, representing the French of
Louisiana in a message to your governor."
"You are a companion of the buccaneer pilot Lawrence de Graaf. I saw
you both on the _Badine_. You are assigned to a dungeon on bread and
water."
"In the name of France I demand an audience."
"In the name of Spain I will recommend you to the Don Martin when he
has nothing else to notice."
A prison is a dreadful thing; a Spanish dungeon the worst of all forms
of confinement. The cruelties of the Inquisition which made such
underground holes possible still sicken the thoughts of a civilized
world. But Anthony was so spent with weariness that he ate his plain
bread greedily--it was the first wheat bread he had tasted for
months--and gulped the water gratefully. The darkness was a relief to
his sand-dazzled eyes and the cold stones felt good to a sun-blistered
back. He slept around the clock and clambered the ladder from his cell
on the point of a bayonet at the bidding of the officer. He was in good
spirits. The only really bad thing about a dungeon is to have to stay
in it.
The Don Francisco Martin thought it a good plan, whenever possible,
to give his rivals of France and England a taste of his dungeon. But
life was so dull at the outpost of Pensacola and his curiosity about
a French message was so great that he granted an audience in the
courtyard on this second day.
"You are lately come from Paris," said the don, noting the cut of
Anthony's fine coat. "Before we proceed to business we will entertain
ourselves like gentlemen. I'm sure it will give you pleasure to show us
the newest feints in fencing. Luckily I have three swordsmen at hand
to prove your skill," and he nodded to his gaoler, who picked up one of
those immense brass keys which the Spaniards used with such gruesome
effect, and went rattling down a shell-paved corridor.
Anthony looked at the smiling, whiskered don and he felt like a mouse
under a tom-cat's claws. He viewed the garrison of rowdies crowding up
to see a fight, and at the hot, empty sky, with narrowed eyes, as one
who expects his only help from heaven.
Imagine his astonishment when the gaoler came clanking back with de
Graaf a very shadow of himself, a toothless buccaneer much the worse
for imprisonment, and a big Spaniard all gone to nerves.
Anthony covertly scanned the sky more than once as he listened to the
don's mocking words: "All these soldiers of fortune have arms with
them; you shall cross swords. Who survives the duel gets his freedom
and his request." And the sarcasm, "A gentleman's game for gentlemen!"
Now Anthony Auguelle did not belong to the blood royal. The don was
sure of that. The Picard du Gay had become a gentleman in heart and
appearance through association with the best explorers of his time. But
under the lash of the Spaniard's tongue he thought it best to affect
that haughty bearing supposed to be one of the marks of a title. And
he thought this the right time to use the bits of news he had gained
from the Chickasaw.
"I will not kill de Graaf," he declared, "for you, Don Martin, need
him to read a message in the air," and he waved his hand dramatically
toward puffs of smoke which he had at last discovered floating in the
northern sky.
The don stood up. The sentries ran for their neglected posts. The
soldiers sprang to arms. Every neck was craned. As a hint to de Graaf,
Anthony gave a meaning gesture toward the Chickasaw at his heels, and
de Graaf, who lived by his wits, was ready to answer with confidence
when the surprise abated: "That, Don Martin, is the signal of the
Chickasaws who are coming toward your fort to besiege it. I heard their
war-drums along the coast before I was taken by your men."
The don turned to Anthony, who touched the Chickasaw, who in turn spoke
a gruff word to a Spanish interpreter. It meant that his tribe were in
arms. De Graaf was thus confirmed in his statement.
The don's brows were drawn; his eyes grew keen.
"I will not kill the buccaneer," cried Anthony again. "I throw him a
purse of gold instead," suiting his action to his boast, "and so will
you, Don Martin, when he tells you what _he_ knows."
While the don stared at Anthony, that gambler with fate, smiling at
the buccaneer, began to chuckle and then to laugh. The sea-robber
responded like a child with a tickled rib. "Tell the don, my bully
boy"--here Anthony spoke slowly to be sure he had the Anglo-Saxon
words--"what the Carolina English will do to Pensacola and to Biloxi."
"Ho-ho-ho!" roared the buccaneer. "It's a secret. I must not tell."
"When I and the Chickasaw and de Graaf know it, it is a secret no
longer. Tell the don and save your neck."
Like the unthinking dog he was, the buccaneer obeyed Anthony as his
master and declared, "English ships are ready to come down the Atlantic
in double force to surprise you."
The don considered his four sources of information. He did not for one
moment doubt Anthony's honesty; nobody ever did. It was plain that the
news was true.
"By Chickasaws on land and English on sea French and Spaniards are to
be cracked like bugs between two boards. What is your advice, du Gay?"
The answer was prompt: "Release my Chickasaw and your buccaneer to tell
their different peoples the plot is discovered. It will not be carried
out this time. It is much easier to discourage than it is to defeat the
English. Send de Graaf to warn the fort at Mobile and let the Indian
and the buccaneer see him get away so they may report that too."
Then the don grinned: "It shall be done. I would I had you for a
friend, du Gay. You release your admirers in trios, throw pardons with
a king's hand. What for yourself?"
"When I rid us of this swordsman I shall ask a boon," and he turned to
the Spanish prisoner. It would not help Anthony's cause to disappoint
the garrison who pined to see a fight. Thus Anthony took the ring with
the swagger of a matador and the spirit of a game-cock.
Luck had followed him so far. A whole loaf of bread had filled his
worst need and he drew his blade with confidence. The big Spanish
jailbird was both strong and skilful, but two weeks in a black dungeon
with rats, lice, and the fear of hanging had given him a wild eye and
a shaking hand. He thrust strongly but not well. He was desperate and
erratic. In normal health he could have split Anthony like a rabbit,
but not to-day.
During the first few minutes it was more a game of tag than fencing.
The two jumped about as though they were grasshoppers. Anthony's one
idea was to save himself from the half-insane Spaniard. In a little
while the big one began to weaken. Then Anthony thought it proper to
amuse the spectators by airing the fancy thrusts and feints and all
the fads that he had practised in Paris. Cheer followed cheer. This was
what they wanted to see. The don himself was longing for just such a
show. So Anthony continued it as long as he thought the Spaniard could
stand up; on guard for bursts of passion on his opponent's part.
It was a sorry game.
Anthony, bent on winning his own ends, cared nothing for the ethics
of a duel. When he saw his man ready to drop he thrust forward and
pinned him against a post. But he did not drive his sword through the
Spaniard, as was his right, as the don nodded permission, and as the
whole colony now assembled whooped and howled and begged for him to do.
Instead, he signaled the crowd to silence and, withdrawing his blade,
wiped it airily on a bit of lace kerchief and announced: "I present
his life to the fort. He is expert. Such will do good work against the
Chickasaw."
The crowd, who a minute before would have been glad to see his blood
spurt, now greeted the Spaniard with hurrahs, dragged him to the
kitchen, and feasted him. Pensacola, a much older place than Biloxi,
had learned to conserve its products. There was no food shortage among
these Spaniards.
Don Francisco Martin seemed to be regretting that irony about
gentlemen. He gave Anthony a friendly hand and said, sincerely, "I
will be glad to grant you any request I can."
And the Picard du Gay said, simply, as one man to another, "My people
are starving; unless you feed us we must perish."
So a ship was loaded with stores. Lest the hunger-wild Frenchmen should
eat food without proper cooking and thus add an epidemic to their woes,
the don ordered the half-deck covered with great bowls. Each was filled
with the savory stew of venison and com or rice and dried fish which
the Indians dub sagimity.
And who shall say how that ship came in? The starving French, lost to
all feeling but the primitive call of hunger, thronged the bay to watch
her drop anchor. They wept aloud and gurgled with laughter. They danced
and hugged one another. They rushed into the water, stretching bony
fingers; got beyond their depth, and had to be rescued with scoldings
and ridicule in the midst of the utmost confusion. When the boat began
to unload, the grateful French kissed the hands of their enemies, the
Spaniards, and knelt to bathe their feet with happy tears.
As the sagimity came to shore they fell upon it and guzzled like
kittens in the cream, quite unashamed. They stood upon the beach to
sup and to feed one another. From one bowl to another they hurried,
abandoning this, shoving it aside for that, running to another,
stepping on it, heedlessly crushing it down into fragments. They had
endured slow starvation with pathetic dignity, but the smell and sight
of savory stew was too much for decorum, and half the emptied jars were
thrown aside with a crash in the mad rush for full ones.
Many settlements have perished for lack of food. Starvation is an ill
as old as the human race. It shows its skeleton head at some place
on our globe almost every year of the world. The Great River itself
has had many hungry times, but none quite so strange as this one when
lifelong foes became friends and the beach was strewn with fragments of
the crockery brought by the rescuers.
The Indians, who, while waiting their turn at the feast, looked on
at the uncontrollable appetites of the succored French, pointed with
stolid significance to the long pile of ruined dishes on the beach of
Deer Island.
When Anthony, offering food to them, asked what they meant, they
answered: "What has happened once can happen again and yet again. In
the time of our fathers we, too, were fed by enemies as you are saved
to-day, and there we got our name, for the guardian Indians of the
Mississippi are called Biloxi, and the word Biloxi means the Broken
Pots."
IX
THE SLAVE SHIP
A Hurricane Brings Odd Guests to His Colony for the Governor,
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville--Voodoo in Rag-time
SHOUTING of white men, screaming of black ones, startled Anthony as he
came down the main street of the port town called New Orleans in honor
of the regent duke of France.
"That must be a brawl in the slave-mart," was his first thought as he
began to run. He wanted to be at hand if the Sieur de Bienville needed
him to help quell it.
Several bad colonists, with worse slaves, had joined the Mississippi
French by crossing over from the West Indies in small boats at amazing
risk. They navigated from point to point in fair weather through
the Gulf of Mexico. The heavy seas were avoided when possible. The
waterways in the protected channels between the coast-line islands
had made the voyage possible. Vessels now entered the Mississippi by
way of the east through Lake Pontchartrain, a much safer path than
through the Delta.
They had brought with them blackamoors and several kegs of rum.
New Orleans had not been glad to see them. But the Sieur de Bienville
had given each slave-owner a parcel of land on which to build shelters
and lay out gardens. He hoped to keep the masters busy and the negroes
so separated that they would work quietly. He tried to make both
classes add to the usefulness of the port. The very good plan did not
prove a success. In less than a week here were the new-comers back in
the heart of the town, turning the orderly market-place into a scene of
riot. Drunken owners were beating drunken servants.
The scandalized settlers had already called out their French soldiers
against the renegades from the West Indies. The uniformed ranks passed
Anthony at double-quick as he hurried along. By the time he had gained
the open square where the auction-block stood the unpopular white
immigrants, doubly guarded, were on their way to the only prison the
settlement could boast.
The slaves still lay about in disgraceful sodden heaps. The Sieur de
Bienville, self-possessed and active, was already giving commands to
have them carried to the different plantations where they belonged. By
the marks on their ears they were sorted out like cattle at a fair.
Young de Bienville, passionately ashamed at such a scene and full of
pity for the ill-treated blacks, was going among them and examining
their injuries.
"To make these poor creatures suffer so lessens their usefulness for
days. Ten thousand livres' worth of damage has been done to valuable
human chattels in the last half-hour," he cried, indignantly. "When I
shall have power to dictate a black code, and strength to enforce it,
no slave shall be abused nor given rum to drink."
He looked to Anthony for sympathy. He did not get it, for that witness
of the reformer's vow was leaning over a prostrate bleeding slave.
Anthony's face was not sorrowful, but full of the liveliest interest.
This slave was old and wizened and, what was a rare thing to see, his
wool was as white as a dandelion puff. Anthony gazed at him as though
he had found a gem.
"What now?" demanded the Sieur de Bienville, shocked at Anthony's
callous pose.