Part 14
Let others appraise the merits of this great American gentleman as governor of New York, secretary of the United States Navy, colonel of the Rough Riders, historian of his pet hero, Oliver Cromwell, and, finally, president of the republic. He had spent half his life as an adventurer on the wild frontier breaking horses, punching cows, fighting grizzly bears, before he ever tackled the politicians, and he had much more fun by the camp-fire than he got in his marble palace. Here is his memory of a prairie fire:--“As I galloped by I saw that the fire had struck the trees a quarter of a mile below me, in the dried timber it instantly sprang aloft like a giant, and roared in a thunderous monotone as it swept up the coulée. I galloped to the hill ridge ahead, saw that the fire line had already reached the divide, and turned my horse sharp on his haunches. As I again passed under the trees the fire, running like a race horse in the bush, had reached the road; its breath was hot in my face; tongues of quivering flame leaped over my head, and kindled the grass on the hillside fifty yards away.”
Thus having prospected the ground he discovered means of saving himself, his companions, and his camp from the rushing flames. It is an old artifice of the frontier to start a fresh fire, burn a few acres, and take refuge on the charred ground while the storm of flame sweeps by on either hand. But this was not enough. The fire was burning the good pasture of his cattle and, unless stayed, might sweep away not only leagues of grass, but ricks and houses. “Before dark,” he continues, “we drove to camp and shot a stray steer, and then split its carcass in two length ways with an ax. After sundown the wind lulled--two of us on horseback dragging a half carcass bloody side down, by means of ropes leading from our saddle-horns to the fore and hind legs, the other two following on foot with slickers and wet blankets. There was a reddish glow in the night air, and the waving bending lines of flame showed in great bright curves against the hillside ahead of us. The flames stood upright two or three feet high. Lengthening the ropes, one of us spurred his horse across the fire line, and then wheeling, we dragged the carcass along it, one horseman being on the burnt ground, the other on the unburnt grass, while the body of the steer lay lengthwise across the line. The weight and the blood smothered the fire as we twitched the carcass over the burning grass, and the two men following behind with their blankets and slickers (oilskins) readily beat out any isolated tufts of flame. Sometimes there would be a slight puff of wind, and then the man on the grass side of the line ran the risk of a scorching.
“We were blackened with smoke, and the taut ropes hurt our thighs, while at times the plunging horses tried to break or bolt. It was worse when we came to some deep gully or ravine--we could see nothing, and simply spurred our horses into it anywhere, taking our chances. Down we would go, stumbling, sliding and pitching, over cut banks and into holes and bushes, while the carcass bounded behind, now catching on a stump, and now fetching loose with a ‘pluck’ that brought it full on the horses’ haunches, driving them nearly crazy with fright. By midnight the half carcass was worn through, but we had stifled the fire in the comparatively level country to the eastwards. Back we went to camp, drank huge drafts of muddy water, devoured roast ox-ribs, and dragged out the other half carcass to fight the fire in the west. There was some little risk to us who were on horseback, dragging the carcass; we had to feel our way along knife-like ridges in the dark, one ahead and the other behind while the steer dangled over the precipice on one side, and in going down the buttes and into the cañons only by extreme care could we avoid getting tangled in the ropes and rolling down in a heap.” So at last the gallant fight was abandoned, and looking back upon the fire which they had failed to conquer: “In the darkness it looked like the rush of a mighty army.”
Short of cowboys and lunatics, nobody could have imagined such a feat of horsemanship. Of that pattern is frontier adventure--daring gone mad; and yet it is very rarely that the frontiersman finds the day’s work worth recording, or takes the trouble to set down on paper the stark naked facts of an incident more exciting than a shipwreck, more dangerous than a battle, and far transcending the common experience of men.
Traveling alone in the Rockies, Colonel Roosevelt came at sundown to a little ridge whence he could look into the hollow beyond--and there he saw a big grizzly walking thoughtfully home to bed. At the first shot, “he uttered a loud moaning grunt and plunged forward at a heavy gallop, while I raced obliquely down the hill to cut him off. After going a few hundred feet he reached a laurel thicket ... which he did not leave.... As I halted I heard a peculiar savage whine from the heart of the brush. Accordingly I began to skirt the edge standing on tiptoe, and gazing earnestly in to see if I could not get a glimpse of his hide. When I was at the narrowest part of the thicket he suddenly left it directly opposite, and then wheeled and stood broadside to me on the hillside a little above. He turned his head stiffly toward me, scarlet strings of froth hung from his lips, his eyes burned like embers in the gloom. I held true, aiming behind the shoulder, and my bullet shattered the point or lower end of his heart, taking out a big nick. Instantly the great bear turned with a harsh roar of fury and challenge, blowing the bloody foam from his mouth, so that I saw the gleam of his white fangs; and then he charged straight at me, crashing and bounding through the laurel bushes so that it was hard to aim.
“I waited until he came to a fallen tree, raking him as he topped it with a ball which entered his chest and went through the cavity of his body, but he neither swerved nor flinched, and at the moment I did not know that I had struck him. He came unsteadily on, and in another moment was close upon me. I fired for his forehead, but my bullet went low, entering his open mouth, smashing his lower jaw, and going into the neck. I leaped to one side almost as I pulled trigger, and through the hanging smoke the first thing I saw was his paw as he made a vicious side blow at me. The rest of his charge carried him past. As he struck he lurched forward, leaving a pool of bright blood where his muzzle hit the ground; but he recovered himself and made two or three jumps onward, while I hurriedly jammed a couple of cartridges into the magazine, my rifle only holding four, all of which I had fired. Then he tried to pull up, but as he did so his muscles seemed to give way, his head drooped, and he rolled over--each of my first three bullets had inflicted a mortal wound.”
This man who had fought grizzly bears came rather as a surprise among the politicians in silk hats who run the United States. He had all the gentry at his back because he is the first man of unquestioned birth and breeding who has entered the political bear-pit since the country squires who followed George Washington. He had all the army at his back because he had charged the heights at Santiago de Cuba with conspicuous valor at the head of his own regiment of cowboys. He had the navy at his back because as secretary for the navy he had successfully governed the fleet. But he was no politician when he came forward to claim the presidency of the United States. Seeing that he could not be ignored the wire-puller set a trap for this innocent and gave him the place of vice-president. The vice-president has little to do, can only succeed to the throne in the event of the president’s death, and is, after a brief term, barred for life from any further progress. “Teddy” walked into the trap and sat down.
But when President McKinley was murdered the politicians found that they had made a most surprising and gigantic blunder. By their own act the cowboy bear fighter must succeed to the vacant seat as chief magistrate of the republic. President Roosevelt happened to be away at the time, hunting bears in the Adirondack wilderness, and there began a frantic search of mountain peaks and forest solitudes for the missing ruler of seventy million people. When he was found, and had paid the last honors to his dead friend, William McKinley, he was obliged to proceed to Washington, and there take the oaths. His women folk had a terrible time before they could persuade him to wear the silk hat and frock coat which there serve in lieu of coronation robes, but he consented even to that for the sake of the gorgeous time he was to have with the politicians afterward.
XXIX
A. D. 1905
THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE
Once upon a time the Foul Fiend wanted a death-trap that would pick out all the bravest men and destroy them, so he invented the Northwest Passage.
So when Europe needed a short route to China round the north end of the Americas our seamen set out to find a channel, and even when they knew that any route must lie through the high Arctic, still they were not going to be beaten. Our white men rule the world because we refuse to be beaten.
The seamen died of scurvy, and it was two hundred years before they found out how to stay alive on salted food, by drinking lime juice. Safe from scurvy, they reached the gate of the passage at Lancaster Sound, but there the winter caught them, so that their ships were squashed in driving ice, and the men died of cold and hunger. Then the explorers got ships too strong to be crushed; they copied the dress of the Eskimo to keep them warm; and they carried food enough to last for years. Deeper and deeper they forced their way into the Arctic, but now they neared the magnetic pole where the compass is useless, in belts of drifting fog darker than midnight. Still they dared to go on, but the inner channels of the Arctic were found to be frozen until the autumn gales broke up the ice-fields, leaving barely six weeks for navigation before the winter frosts. At that rate the three-thousand-mile passage would take three years. Besides, the ship must carry a deck load of sledge dogs with their food, so that the men might escape overland in case they were cast away. Only a big ship could carry the supplies, but once again the seamen dared to try. And now came the last test to break men’s hearts--the sea lane proved to be so foul with shoals and rocks that no large vessel could possibly squeeze through. At last, after three hundred years, the British seamen had to own defeat. Our explorers had mapped the entire route, but no ship could make the passage because it was impossible to raise money for the venture.
Why should we want to get through this useless channel? Because it was the test for perfect manhood free from all care for money, utterly unselfish, of the highest intellect, patience, endurance and the last possible extremity of valor.
And where the English failed a Norseman, Nordenskjöld made the Northeast passage round the coast of Asia. Still nobody dared to broach the Northwest passage round America, until a young Norse seaman solved the riddle. Where no ship could cross the shoals it might be possible with a fishing boat drawing only six feet of water. But she could not carry five years’ supplies for men and dogs. Science came to the rescue with foods that would pack into a tenth part of their proper bulk, and as to the dog food, one might risk a deck load big as a haystack, to be thrown off if the weather got too heavy. Still, how could a fishing boat carry twenty men for the different expert jobs? Seven men might be discovered each an expert in three or four different trades; the captain serving as the astronomer and doctor, the cook as a naturalist and seaman. So Roald Amundsen got Doctor Nansen’s help, and that great explorer was backed by the king. Help came from all parts of Scandinavia, and a little from Great Britain.
The _Gjöa_ was a forty-seven ton herring boat with a thirteen horse-power motor for ship’s pet, loaded with five years’ stores for a crew of seven men, who off duty were comrades as in a yachting cruise. In 1903 she sailed from Christiania and spent July climbing the north current in full view of the Greenland coast, the Arctic wonderland. At Godhaven she picked up stores, bidding farewell to civilization, passed Upernivik the last village, and Tassinssak, the last house on earth, then entered Melville Bay with its three-hundred-mile frontage of glacier, the most dangerous place in the Arctic. Beyond, near Cape York, she found a deck load of stores left for her by one of the Dundee whalers. There the people met the last white men, three Danish explorers whose leader, Mylius Erichsen, was making his way to death on the north coast of Greenland. So, like a barge with a hayrick, the overload _Joy_ crossed from the Greenland coast to Lancaster Sound, the gate of the Northwest passage, whose gatepost is Beechey Island, sacred to the memory of Sir John Franklin, and the dead of the Franklin search. The _Joy_ found some sole leather better than her own, a heap of useful coal and an anvil, among the litter of old expeditions; made the graves tidy; left a message at Franklin’s monument, and went on. For three hundred years the channels ahead were known to have been blocked; only by a miracle of good fortune could they be free from ice; and this miracle happened, for the way was clear.
* * * * *
“I was sitting,” writes Amundsen on August thirty-first, “entering the day’s events in my journal, when I heard a shriek--a terrific shriek, which thrilled me to the very marrow. It takes something to make a Norseman shriek, but a mighty flame with thick suffocating smoke was leaping up from the engine room skylight. There the tanks held two thousand two hundred gallons of petroleum, and close beside them a pile of soaked cotton waste had burst with a loud explosion. If the tanks got heated the ship would be blown into chips, but after a hard fight the fire was got under. All hands owed their lives to their fine discipline.”
A few days later the _Joy_ grounded in a labyrinth of shoals, and was caught aground by a storm which lifted and bumped her until the false keel was torn off. The whole of the deck load had to be thrown overboard. The only hope was to sail over the rocks, and with all her canvas set she charged, smashing from rock to rock until she reached the farther edge of the reef which was nearly dry. “The spray and sleet were washing over the vessel, the mast trembled, and the _Gjöa_ seemed to pull herself together for a last final leap. She was lifted up and flung bodily on the bare rocks, bump, bump, with terrific force.... In my distress I sent up (I honestly confess it) an ardent prayer to the Almighty. Yet another bump worse than ever, then one more, and we slid off.”
The shock had lifted the rudder so that it rested with the pintles on the mountings, and she would not steer; then somehow the pins dropped back into their sockets, the steersmen regained control and the _Joy_ was saved, after a journey across dry rocks which ought to have smashed any ship afloat. She did not even leak.
Near the south end of King William’s Land a pocket harbor was found, and named Joy Haven. There the stores were landed, cabins were built, the ship turned into a winter house, and the crew became men of science. For two years they were hard at work studying the magnetism of the earth beside the Magnetic Pole. They collected fossils and natural history specimens, surveyed the district, studied the heavens and the weather, hunted reindeer for their meat and clothing, fished, and made friends with the scented, brave and merry Eskimos. During the first winter the thermometer dropped to seventy-nine degrees below zero, which is pretty near the world record for cold, but as long as one is well fed, with bowels in working order, and has Eskimo clothes to wear, the temperature feels much the same after forty below zero. Below that point the wind fails to a breathless calm, the keen dry air is refreshing as champagne, and one can keep up a dog-trot for miles without being winded. It is not the winter night that people dread, but the summer day with its horrible torment of mosquitoes. Then there is in spring and autumn, a hot misty glare upon the snow-fields which causes blindness with a deal of pain. The Arctic has its drawbacks, but one remembers afterward the fields of flowers, the unearthly beauty of the northern lights, the teeming game, and those long summer nights when the sun is low, filling the whole sky with sunset colors.
The greatest event of the first year was the finding of an Eskimo hunter to carry letters, who came back in the second summer, having found in Hudson’s Bay an exploring vessel of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada. Major Moody, also the captain of the Arctic, and the Master of an American whaler, sent their greetings, news of the outer world, some useful charts, and a present of husky dogs.
The second summer was over. The weather had begun to turn cold before a northerly gale smashed the ice, and sea lanes opened along the Northwest passage. On August thirteenth the _Joy_ left her anchorage, under sail and steam, to pick her way without compass through blinding fog, charging and butting through fields of ice, dodging zigzag through shoals, or squeezing between ice-fields and the shore. There was no sleep for anybody during the first three nights, but racking anxiety and tearing overstrain until they reached known waters, a channel charted by the old explorers. They met an American whaler, and afterward had clear open water as far as the mouths of the Mackenzie River. A few miles beyond that the ice closed in from the north and piled up-shore so that the passage was blocked and once more the _Joy_ went into winter quarters. But not alone. Ladies must have corsets ribbed with whalebone from the bowhead whale. Each whale head is worth two thousand pounds, so a fleet of American whalers goes hunting in the Arctic. Their only port of refuge is Herschel Island off the Canadian coast, so there is an outpost of the Northwest Mounted Police, a mission station and a village of Eskimos.
The _Joy_ came to anchor thirty-six miles to the east of Herschel Island, beside a stranded ship in charge of her Norse mate, and daily came passengers to and fro on the Fort Macpherson trail. From that post runs a dog-train service of mails connecting the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company all the way up the Mackenzie Valley to Edmonton on the railway within two thousand miles. The crew of the _Joy_ had company news, letters from home, and Captain Amundsen went by dog-train to the mining camps on the Yukon where at Eagle City he sent telegrams.
At last in the summer of 1906 the _Joy_ sailed on the final run of her great voyage, but her crew of seven was now reduced to six, and at parting she dipped her colors to the cross on a lone grave. The ice barred her passage, but she charged, smashing her engines, and charged again, losing her peak which left the mainsail useless. So she won past Cape Prince of Wales, completing the Northwest passage, and entering Bering Sea called at Cape Nome for repairs. There a thousand American gold miners welcomed the sons of the vikings with an uproarious triumph, and greeted Captain Amundsen with the Norse national anthem.
XXX
A. D. 1588
JOHN HAWKINS
Master John Hawkins, mariner, was a trader’s son, familiar from childhood with the Guinea coast of Africa. Worshipful merchants of London trusted him with three ridiculously small ships, the size of our fishing smacks, but manned by a hundred men. With these, in 1562--the “spacious times” of great Elizabeth--he swooped down on the West African coast, and horribly scared were his people when they saw the crocodiles. The nature of this animal “is ever when he would have his prey, to sob and cry like a Christian bodie, to provoke them to come to him, and then he snatcheth at them.” In spite of the reptiles, Master Hawkins “got into his possession, partly by the sword, and partly by other means,” three hundred wretched negroes.
The king of Spain had a law that no Protestant heretic might trade with his Spanish colonies of the West Indies, so Master Hawkins, by way of spitting in his majesty’s eye, went straight to Hispaniola, where he exchanged his slaves with the settlers for a shipload of hides, ginger, sugar and pearls.
On his second voyage Master Hawkins attempted to enslave a whole city, hard by Sierra Leone, but the Almighty, “who worketh all things for the best, would not have it so, and by Him we escaped without danger, His name be praised for it.” Hawkins had nearly been captured by the negroes, and was compelled to make his pious raids elsewhere. Moreover, when he came with a fleet loaded with slaves to Venezuela, the Spanish merchants were scared to trade with him. Of course, for the sake of his negroes, he had to get them landed somehow, so he went ashore, “having in his greate boate two falcons of brasse, and in the other boates double bases in their noses.” Such artillery backed by a hundred men in plate armor, convinced the Spaniards that it would be wise to trade.
On his third voyage, Master Hawkins found the Spaniards his friends along the Spanish main, but the weather, a deadly enemy, drove him for refuge and repair to San Juan d’Ullua, the port of Mexico. Here was an islet, the only shelter on that coast from the northerly gales. He sent a letter to the capital for leave to hold that islet with man and guns while he bought provisions and repaired his ships. But as it happened, a new viceroy came with a fleet of thirteen great ships to claim that narrow anchorage, and Hawkins must let them in or fight. “On the faith of a viceroy” Don Martin de Henriquez pledged his honor before Hawkins let him in, then set his ships close aboard those of England, trained guns to bear upon them, secretly filled them with troops hid below hatches, and when his treason was found out, sounded a trumpet, the signal for attack. The Englishmen on the isle were massacred except three, the queen’s ship _Jesus_, of Lubeck, was so sorely hurt that she had to be abandoned, and only two small barks, the _Minion_ and the _Judith_, escaped to sea. The Spaniards lost four galleons in that battle.
As to the English, they were in great peril, and parted by a storm. The Judith fared best, commanded by a man from before the mast, one Francis Drake, who brought the news to England that Hawkins had more than two hundred people crowded upon the _Minion_ without food or water. “With many sorrowful hearts,” says Hawkins, “we wandered in an unknown sea by the span of fourteen dayes, till hunger forced us to seeke the lande, for birdes were thought very goode meate, rattes, cattes, mise and dogges.”
It was then that one hundred fourteen men volunteered to go ashore and the ship continued a very painful voyage.