Part 10
Perhaps that is why he ran away to sea; but anyway a sailing ship landed him in New Orleans, where a rich merchant adopted him as a son. Of course a workhouse boy has nothing to be patriotic about, so it was quite natural that this Welsh youth should become a good American, also that he should give up the name his mother bore, taking that of his benefactor, Henry M. Stanley. The old man died, leaving him nothing, and for two years there is no record until the American Civil War gave him a chance of proving his patriotism to his adopted country. He was so tremendously patriotic that he served on both sides, first in the confederate army, then in the federal navy. He proved a very brave man, and after the war, distinguished himself as a special correspondent during an Indian campaign in the West. Then he joined the staff of the New York _Herald_ serving in the Abyssinian War, and the civil war in Spain. He allowed the _Herald_ to contradict a rumor that he was a Welshman. “Mr. Stanley,” said the paper, “is neither an Ap-Jones, nor an Ap-Thomas. Missouri and not Wales is his birthplace.”
Privately he spent his holidays with his mother and family in Wales, speaking Welsh no doubt with a strong American accent. The whitewashed American has always a piercing twang, even if he has adopted as his “native” land, soft-voiced Missouri, or polished Louisiana.
In those days Doctor Livingstone was missing. The gentle daring explorer had found Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika, and to the westward of them, a mile wide river, the Lualaba, which he supposed to be headwaters of the Nile. He was slowly dying of fever, almost penniless, and always when he reached the verge of some new discovery, his cowardly negro carriers revolted, or ran away, leaving him to his fate. No word of him had reached the world for years. England was anxious as to the fate of one of her greatest men, so there were various attempts to send relief, delayed by the expense, and not perhaps handled by really first-rate men. To find Livingstone would be a most tremendous world-wide advertisement, say for a patent-pill man, a soap manufacturer, or a newspaper. All that was needed was unlimited cash, and the services of a first-rate practical traveler, vulgar enough to use the lost hero as so much “copy” for his newspaper. The New York _Herald_ had the money, and in Stanley, the very man for the job.
Not that the _Herald_, or Stanley cared twopence about the fate of Livingstone. The journal sent the man to make a big journey through Asia Minor and Persia on his way to Zanzibar. The more Livingstone’s rescue was delayed the better the “ad” for Stanley and the _Herald_.
As to the journey, Stanley’s story has been amply advertised, and we have no other version because his white followers died. He found Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, and had the grace to reverence, comfort and succor a dying man.
As to Stanley’s magnificent feat of exploring the great lakes, and descending Livingstone’s river to the mouth of the Congo, again his story is well exploited while the version of his white followers is missing, because they gave their lives.
In Stanley’s expedition which founded the Congo State, and in his relief of Emin Pasha, the white men were more fortunate, and some lived. It is rumored that they did not like Mr. Stanley, but his negro followers most certainly adored him, serving in one journey after another. There can be no doubt too, that with the unlimited funds that financed and his own fine merits as a traveler, Stanley did more than any other explorer to open up the dark continent, and to solve its age-long mysteries. It was not his fault that Livingstone stayed on in the wilderness to die, that the Congo Free State became the biggest scandal of modern times, or that Emin Pasha flatly refused to be rescued from governing the Soudan.
Stanley lived to reap the rewards of his great deeds, to forget that he was a native of Missouri and a freeborn American citizen, to accept the honor of knighthood and to sit in the British parliament. Whether as a Welshman, or an American, a confederate, or a federal, a Belgian subject or a Britisher, he always knew on which side his bread was buttered.
XX
A. D. 1871
LORD STRATHCONA
It is nearly a century now since Lord Strathcona was born in a Highland cottage. His father, Alexander Smith, kept a little shop at Forres, in Elgin; his mother, Barbara Stewart, knew while she reared the lad that the world would hear of him. His school, founded by a returned adventurer, was one which sent out settlers for the colonies, soldiers for the army, miners for the gold-fields, bankers for England, men to every corner of the world. As the lad grew, he saw the soldiers, the sailors, the adventurers, who from time to time came tired home to Forres, and among these was his uncle, John Stewart, famous in the annals of the Canadian frontier, rich, distinguished, commending all youngsters to do as he had done. When Donald Smith was in his eighteenth year, this uncle procured him a clerkship in the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Canada was in revolt when in 1837 the youngster reached Montreal, for Robert Nelson had proclaimed a Canadian republic and the British troops were busy driving the republicans into the United States. So there was bloodshed, the burning of houses, the filling of the jails with rebels to be convicted presently and hanged. Out of all this noise and confusion, Donald Smith was sent into the silence of Labrador, the unknown wilderness of the Northeast Territory, where the first explorer, McLean, was searching for tribes of Eskimos that might be induced to trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company. “In September (1838),” wrote McLean, “I was gratified by the arrival of despatches from Canada by a young clerk appointed to the district. By him we received the first intelligence of the stirring events which had taken place in the colonies during the preceding year.” So Smith had taken a year to carry the news of the Canadian revolt to that remote camp of the explorers.
Henceforward, for many years there exists no public record of Donald Smith’s career, and he has flatly refused to tell the story lest he should appear to be advertising. His work consisted of trading with the savages for skins, of commanding small outposts, healing the sick, administering justice, bookkeeping, and of immense journeys by canoe in summer, or cariole drawn by a team of dogs in winter. The winter is arctic in that Northeast Territory, and a very pleasant season between blizzards, but the summer is cursed with a plague of insects, black flies by day, mosquitoes by night almost beyond endurance. Like other men in the service of the company, Mr. Smith had the usual adventures by flood and field, the peril of the snow-storms, the wrecking of canoes. There is but one story extant. His eyesight seemed to be failing, and after much pain he ventured on a journey of many months to seek the help of a doctor in Montreal. Sir George Simpson, governor of the company, met him in the outskirts of the city.
“Well, young man,” he said, “why are you not at your post?”
“My eyes, sir; they got so bad, I’ve come to see a doctor.”
“And who gave you permission to leave your post?”
“No one, sir.” It would have taken a year to get permission, and his need was urgent.
“Then, sir,” answered the governor, “if it’s a question between your eyes, and your service in the Hudson’s Bay Company, you’ll take my advice, and return this instant to your post.”
Without another word, without a glance toward the city this man turned on his tracks, and set off to tramp a thousand miles back to his duty.
The man who has learned to obey has learned to command, and wherever Smith was stationed, the books were accurate, the trade was profitable. He was not heard of save in the return of profits, while step by step he rose to higher and higher command, until at the age of forty-eight he was appointed governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, sovereign from the Atlantic to the Pacific, reigning over a country nearly as large as Europe. To his predecessors this had been the crowning of an ambitious life; to him, it was only the beginning of his great career.
The Canadian colonies were then being welded into a nation and the first act of the new Dominion government was to buy from the Hudson’s Bay Company the whole of its enormous empire, two thousand miles wide and nearly five thousand miles long. Never was there such a sale of land, at such a price, for the cash payment worked out at about two shillings per square mile. Two-thirds of the money went to the sleeping partners of the company in England; one-third--thanks to Mr. Smith’s persuasion--was granted to the working officers in Rupert’s Land. Mr. Smith’s own share seems to have been the little nest egg from which his fortune has hatched.
When the news of the great land sale reached the Red River of the north, the people there broke out in revolt, set up a republic, and installed Louis Riel as president at Fort Garry.
Naturally this did not meet the views of the Canadian government, which had bought the country, or of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which owned the stolen fort. Mr. Smith, governor of the company, was sent at once as commissioner for the Canadian government to restore the settlement to order. On his arrival the rebel president promptly put him in jail, and openly threatened his life. In this awkward situation, Mr. Smith contrived not only to stay alive, but to conduct a public meeting, with President Riel acting as his interpreter to the French half-breed rebels. The temperature at this outdoor meeting was twenty degrees below zero, with a keen wind, but in course of five hours’ debating, Mr. Smith so undermined the rebel authority that from that time it began to collapse. Afterward, although the rebels murdered one prisoner, and times were more than exciting, Mr. Smith’s policy gradually sapped the rebellion, until, when the present Lord Wolseley arrived with British troops, Riel and his deluded half-breeds bolted. So, thanks to Mr. Smith, Fort Garry is now Winnipeg, the central city of Canada, capital of her central province, Manitoba.
But when Sir Donald Smith had resigned from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s service, and became a politician, he schemed, with unheard-of daring, for even greater ends. At his suggestion, the Northwest Mounted Police was formed and sent out to take possession of the Great Plains. That added a wheat field to Canada which will very soon be able to feed the British empire. Next he speculated with every dollar he could raise, on a rusty railway track, which some American builders had abandoned because they were bankrupt. He got the rail head into Winnipeg, and a large trade opened with the United States. So began the boom that turned Manitoba into a populous country, where the buffalo had ranged before his coming. Now he was able to startle the Canadian government with the warning that unless they hurried up with a railway, binding the whole Dominion from ocean to ocean, all this rich western country would drift into the United States. When the government had failed in an attempt to build the impossible railway, Sir Donald got Montreal financiers together, cousins and friends of his own, staked every dollar he had, made them gamble as heavily, and set to work on the biggest road ever constructed. The country to be traversed was almost unexplored, almost uninhabited except by savages, fourteen hundred miles of rock and forest, a thousand miles of plains, six hundred miles of high alps.
The syndicate building the road consisted of merchants in a provincial town not bigger then than Bristol, and when they met for business it was to wonder vaguely where the month’s pay was to come from for their men. They would part for the night to think, and by morning, Donald Smith would say, “Well, here’s another million--that ought to do for a bit.” On November seven, 1885, he drove the last spike, the golden spike, that completed the Canadian Pacific railway, and welded Canada into a living nation.
Since then Lord Strathcona has endowed a university and given a big hospital to Montreal. At a cost of three hundred thousand pounds he presented the famous regiment known as Strathcona’s Horse, to the service of his country, and to-day, in his ninety-third year is working hard as Canadian high commissioner in London.
XXI
A. D. 1872
THE SEA HUNTERS
The Japanese have heroes and adventurers just as fine as our own, most valiant and worthy knights. Unhappily I am too stupid to remember their honorable names, to understand their motives, or to make out exactly what they were playing at. It is rather a pity they have to be left out, but at least we can deal with one very odd phase of adventure in the Japan seas.
The daring seamen of old Japan used to think nothing of crossing the Pacific to raid the American coast for slaves. But two or three hundred years ago the reigning shogun made up his mind that slaving was immoral. So he pronounced an edict by which the builders of junks were forbidden to fill in their stern frame with the usual panels. The junks were still good enough for coastwise trade at home, but if they dared the swell of the outer ocean a following sea would poop them and send them to the bottom. That put a stop to the slave trade; but no king can prevent storms, and law or no law, disabled junks were sometimes swept by the big black current and the westerly gales right across the Pacific Ocean. The law made only one difference, that the crippled junks never got back to Japan; and if their castaway seamen reached America the native tribes enslaved them. I find that during the first half of the nineteenth century the average was one junk in forty-two months cast away on the coasts of America.
Now let us turn to another effect of this strange law that disabled Japanese shipping. Northward of Japan are the Kuril Islands in a region of almost perpetual fog, bad storms and bitter cold, ice pack, strong currents and tide rips, combed by the fanged reefs, with plenty of earthquakes and eruptions to allay any sense of monotony. The large and hairy natives are called the Ainu, who live by fishing, and used to catch sea otter and fur seal. These furs found their way via Japan to China, where sea-otter fur was part of the costly official winter dress of the Chinese mandarins. As to the seal, their whiskers are worth two shillings a set for cleaning opium pipes, and one part of the carcass sells at a shilling a time for medicine, apart from the worth of the fur.
Now the law that disabled the junks made it impossible for Japan to do much trade in the Kurils, so that the Russians actually got there first as colonists.
But no law disabled the Americans, and when the supply of sea otter failed on the Californian coast in 1872 a schooner called the _Cygnet_ crossed the Pacific to the Kuril Islands. There the sea-otters were plentiful in the kelp beds, tame as cats and eager to inspect the hunters’ boats. Their skins fetched from eighty to ninety dollars.
When news came to Japan of this new way of getting rich, a young Englishman, Mr. H. J. Snow, bought a schooner, a hog-backed relic called the _Swallow_ in which he set out for the hunting. Three days out, a gale dismasted her, and putting in for shelter she was cast away in the Kuriles. Mr. Snow’s second venture was likewise cast away on a desert isle, where the crew wintered. “My vessels,” he says, “were appropriately named. The _Swallow_ swallowed up part of my finances, and the _Snowdrop_ caused me to drop the rest.”
During the winter another crew of white men were in quarters on a distant headland of the same Island Yeturup, and were cooking their Christmas dinner when they met with an accident. A dispute had arisen between two rival cooks as to how to fry fritters, and during the argument a pan of boiling fat capsized into the stove and caught alight. The men escaped through the flames half dressed, their clothes on fire, into the snow-clad wilderness and a shrewd wind. Then they set up a shelter of driftwood with the burning ruin in front to keep them warm, while they gravely debated as to whether they ought to cremate the cooks upon the ashes of their home and of their Christmas dinner.
To understand the adventures of the sea hunters we must follow the story of the leased islands. The Alaska Commercial Company, of San Francisco, leased the best islands for seal and otter fishing. From the United States the company leased the Pribilof Islands in Bering Sea, a great fur-seal metropolis with a population of nearly four millions. They had armed native gamekeepers and the help of an American gunboat. From Russia the company leased Bering and Copper Islands off Kamchatka, and Cape Patience on Saghalian with its outlier Robber Island. There also they had native gamekeepers, a patrol ship, and the help of Russian troops and gunboats. The company had likewise tame newspapers to preach about the wickedness of the sea hunters and call them bad names. As a rule the sea hunters did their hunting far out at sea where it was perfectly lawful. At the worst they landed on the forbidden islands as poachers. The real difference between the two parties was that the sea hunters took all the risks, while the company had no risks and took all the profits.
In 1883 Snow made his first raid on Bering Island. Night fell while his crew were busy clubbing seals, and they had killed about six hundred when the garrison rushed them. Of course the hunters made haste to the boats, but Captain Snow missed his men who should have followed him, and as hundreds of seals were taking to the water he joined them until an outlying rock gave shelter behind which he squatted down, waist-deep. When the landscape became more peaceful he set off along the shore of boulders, stumbling, falling and molested by yapping foxes. He had to throw rocks to keep them off. When he found the going too bad he took to the hills, but sea boots reaching to the hips are not comfy for long walks, and when he pulled them off he found how surprisingly sharp are the stones in an Arctic tundra. He pulled them on again, and after a long time came abreast of his schooner, where he found one of the seamen. They hailed and a boat took them on board, where the shipkeeper was found to be drunk, and the Japanese bos’n much in need of a thrashing. Captain Snow supplied what was needed to the bos’n and had a big supper, but could not sail as the second mate was still missing. He turned in for a night’s rest.
Next morning bright and early came a company’s steamer with a Russian officer and two soldiers who searched the schooner. There was not a trace of evidence on board, but on general principles the vessel was seized and condemned, all her people suffering some months of imprisonment at Vladivostok.
In 1888, somewhat prejudiced against the virtuous company, Captain Snow came with the famous schooner _Nemo_, back to the scene of his misadventure. One morning with three boats he went prospecting for otter close along shore, shot four, and his hunters one, then gave the signal of return to the schooner. At that moment two shots rang out from behind the boulders ashore, and a third, which peeled some skin from his hand, followed by a fusillade like a hail storm. Of the Japanese seamen in Snow’s boat the boat steerer was shot through the backbone. A second man was hit first in one leg, then in the other, but went on pulling. The stroke oar, shot in the calf, fell and lay, seemingly dead, but really cautious. Then the other two men bent down and Snow was shot in the leg.
So rapid was the firing that the guns ashore must have heated partly melting the leaden bullets, for on board the boat there was a distinct perfume of molten lead. Three of the bullets which struck the captain seem to have been deflected by his woolen jersey, and one which got through happened to strike a fold. It had been noted in the Franco-Prussian War that woolen underclothes will sometimes turn leaden bullets.
“I remember,” says Captain Snow, “weighing the chances ... of swimming beside the boat, but decided that we should be just as liable to be drowned as shot, as no one could stand the cold water for long. For the greater part of the time I was vigorously plying my paddle ... and only presenting the edge of my body, the left side, to the enemy. This is how it was that the bullets which struck me all entered my clothing on the left side. I expected every moment to be shot through the body, and I could not help wondering how it would feel.”
With three dying men, and three wounded, he got the sinking boat under sail and brought her alongside the schooner.
Of course it was very good of the Alaska Commercial Company to preserve the wild game of the islands, but even gamekeepers may show excess of zeal when it comes to wholesale murder. To all of us who were in that trade it is a matter of keen regret that the officers ashore took such good cover. Their guards, and the Cossacks, were kindly souls enough, ready and willing--in the absence of the officers to sell skins to the raiders or even, after some refreshments, to help in clubbing a few hundred seals. It was rather awkward, though, for one of the schooners at Cape Patience when in the midst of these festivities a gunboat came round the corner.
The American and the Japanese schooners were not always quite good friends, and there is a queer story of a triangular duel between three vessels, fought in a fog. Mr. Kipling had the _Rhyme of the Three Sealers_, he told me, from Captain Lake in Yokohama. I had it from the mate of one of the three schooners, _The Stella_. She changed her name to _Adele_, and the mate became master, a little, round, fox-faced Norseman, Hans Hansen, of Christiania. In 1884 the _Adele_ was captured by an American gunboat and taken to San Francisco. Hansen said that he and his men were marched through the streets shackled, and great was the howl about pirates, but when the case came up for trial the court had no jurisdiction, and the ship was released. From that event dates the name “Yokohama Pirates,” and Hansen’s nickname as the Flying Dutchman. Because at the time of capture he had for once been a perfectly innocent deep sea sealer, he swore everlasting war against the United States, transferred his ship to the port of Victoria, British Columbia, and would hoist by turns the British, Japanese, German, Norwegian or even American flag, as suited his convenience.
Once when I asked him why not the Black Flag, he grinned, remarking that them old-fashioned pirates had no business sense. Year after year he raided the forbidden islands to subvert the garrisons, rob warehouses, or plunder the rookeries, while gunboats of four nations failed to effect his capture. In port he was a pattern of innocent virtue, at sea his superb seamanship made him as hard to catch as a ghost, and his adventures beat the _Arabian Nights_. I was with him as an ordinary seaman in the voyage of 1889, a winter raid upon the Pribilof Islands. At the first attempt we clawed off a lee shore in a hurricane, the second resulted in a mutiny, and the third landing was not very successful, because the boats were swamped, and the garrison a little too prevalent ashore. On the voyage of 1890 the _Adele_ took four hundred skins, but in 1891 was cast away on the North Island of the Queen Charlotte group, without any loss of life. The Flying Dutchman took to mining on the outer coast of Vancouver, where he rescued a shipwrecked crew, but afterward perished in the attempt to save a drowning Indian.