Part 17

But, when the glaciers of the great ice age blocked the Ottawa Valley, the three seas had to find another outlet, so they made a channel through the Chicago River, down the Des Plaines, and the Illinois, into the Mississippi.

And when the glaciers made, across that channel, an embankment which is now the town site of Chicago, the three seas had to explore for a new outlet. So they filled the basin of Lake Erie, and poured over the edge of Queenstown Heights into Lake Ontario. The Iroquois called that fall the “Thunder of Waters,” which in their language is Niagara.

All the vast region which was flooded by the ice-field of the great ice age became a forest, and every river turned by the ice out of its ancient channel became a string of lakes and waterfalls. This beautiful wilderness was the scene of tremendous adventures, where the red Indians fought the white men, and the English fought the French, and the Americans fought the Canadians, until the continent was cut into equal halves, and there was peace.

Now let us see what manner of men were the Indians. At the summit of that age of glory--the sixteenth century--the world was ruled by the despot Akbar the Magnificent at Delhi, the despot Ivan the Terrible at Moscow, the despot Phillip II at Madrid, and a little lady despot, Elizabeth of the sea.

Yet at that time the people in the Saint Lawrence Valley, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, Cayugas and, in the middle, the Onondagas, were free republics with female suffrage and women as members of parliament. Moreover the president of the Onondagas, Hiawatha, formed these five nations into the federal republic of the Iroquois, and they admitted the Tuscaroras into that United States which was created to put an end to war. In the art of government we have not yet caught up with the Iroquois.

They were farmers, with rich fisheries, had comfortable houses, and fortified towns. In color they were like outdoor Spaniards, a tall, very handsome race, and every bit as able as the whites. Given horses, hard metals for their tools, and some channel or mountain range to keep off savage raiders, and they might well have become more civilized than the French, with fleets to attack old Europe, and missionaries to teach us their religion.

Their first visitor from Europe was Jacques Cartier and they gave him a hearty welcome at Quebec. When his men were dying of scurvy an Indian doctor cured them. But to show his gratitude Cartier kidnaped the five principal chiefs, and ever after that, with very brief intervals, the French had reason to fear the Iroquois. Like many another Indian nation, driven away from its farms and fisheries, the six nation republic lapsed to savagery, lived by hunting and robbery, ravaged the white men’s settlements and the neighbor tribes for food, outraged and scalped the dead, burned or even ate their prisoners.

The French colonies were rather over-governed. There was too much parson and a great deal too much squire to suit the average peasant, so all the best of the men took to the fur trade. They wore the Indian dress of long fringed deerskin, coon cap, embroidered moccasins, and a French sash like a rainbow. They lived like Indians, married among the tribes, fought in their wars; lawless, gay, gallant, fierce adventurers, the voyageurs of the rivers, the runners of the woods.

With them went monks into the wilderness, heroic, saintly Jesuits and Franciscans, and some of the quaintest rogues in holy orders. And there were gentlemen, reckless explorers, seeking a way to China. Of this breed came La Salle, whose folk were merchant-princes at Rouen, and himself pupil and enemy of the Jesuits. At the time of the plague and burning of London he founded a little settlement on the island of Mount Royal, just by the head of the Rapids. His dream was the opening of trade with China by way of the western rivers, so the colonists, chaffing him, gave the name La Chine to his settlement and the rapids. To-day the railway trains come swirling by, with loads of tea from China to ship from Montreal, but not to France.

During La Salle’s first five years in the wilderness he discovered the Ohio and the Illinois, two of the head waters of the Mississippi. The Indians told him of that big river, supposed to be the way to the Pacific. A year later the trader Joliet, and the Jesuit Saint Marquette descended the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas. So La Salle dreamed of a French empire in the west, shutting the English between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, with a base at the mouth of the Mississippi for raiding the Spanish Indies, and a trade route across the western sea to China. All this he told to Count Frontenac, the new governor general, a man of business who saw the worth of the adventure. Frontenac sent La Salle to talk peace with the Iroquois, while he himself founded Fort Frontenac at the outlet of Lake Ontario. From here he cut the trade routes of the west, so that no furs would ever reach the French traders of Montreal or the English of New York. The governor had not come to Canada for his health.

La Salle was penniless, but his mind went far beyond this petty trading; he charmed away the dangers from hostile tribes; his heroic record won him help from France. Within a year he began his adventure of the Mississippi by buying out Fort Frontenac as his base camp. Here he built a ship, and though she was wrecked he saved stores enough to cross the Niagara heights, and build a second vessel on Lake Erie. With the _Griffin_ he came to the meeting place of the three upper seas--Machilli-Mackinac--the Jesuit headquarters. Being a good-natured man bearing no malice, it was with a certain pomp of drums, flags and guns that he saluted the fort, quite forgetting that he came as a trespasser into the Jesuit mission. A Jesuit in those days was a person with a halo at one end and a tail at the other, a saint with modest black draperies to hide cloven hoofs, who would fast all the week, and poison a guest on Saturday, who sought the glory of martyrdom not always for the faith, but sometimes to serve a devilish wicked political secret society. Leaving the Jesuit mission an enemy in his rear, La Salle built a fort at the southern end of Lake Michigan, sent off his ship for supplies, and entered the unknown wilderness. As winter closed down he came with thirty-three men in eight birchbark canoes to the Illinois nation on the river Illinois.

Meanwhile the Jesuits sent Indian messengers to raise the Illinois tribes for war against La Salle, to kill him by poison, and to persuade his men to desert. La Salle put a rising of the Illinois to shame, ate three dishes of poison without impairing his very sound digestion, and made his men too busy for revolt; building Fort Brokenheart, and a third ship for the voyage down the Mississippi to the Spanish Indies.

Then came the second storm of trouble, news that his relief ship from France was cast away, his fort at Frontenac was seized for debt, and his supply vessel on the upper lakes was lost. He must go to Canada.

The third storm was still to come, the revenge of the English for the cutting of their fur trade at Fort Frontenac. They armed five hundred Iroquois to massacre the Illinois who had befriended him in the wilderness.

At Fort Brokenheart La Salle had a valiant priest named Hennepin, a disloyal rogue and a quite notable liar. With two voyageurs Pere Hennepin was sent to explore the river down to the Mississippi, and there the three Frenchmen were captured by the Sioux. Their captors took them by canoe up the Mississippi to the Falls of Saint Anthony, so named by Hennepin. Thence they were driven afoot to the winter villages of the tribe. The poor unholy father being slow afoot, they mended his pace by setting the prairie afire behind him. Likewise they anointed him with wildcat fat to give him the agility of that animal. Still he was never popular, and in the end the three wanderers were turned loose. Many were their vagabond adventures before they met the explorer Greysolon Du Luth, who took them back with him to Canada. They left La Salle to his fate.

Meanwhile La Salle set out from Fort Brokenheart in March, attended by a Mohegan hunter who loved him, and by four gallant Frenchmen. Their journey was a miracle of courage across the unexplored woods to Lake Erie, and on to Frontenac. There La Salle heard that the moment his back was turned his garrison had looted and burned Fort Brokenheart; but he caught these deserters as they attempted to pass Fort Frontenac, and left them there in irons.

Every man has power to make of his mind an empire or a desert. At this time Louis the Great was master of Europe, La Salle a broken adventurer, but it was the king’s mind which was a desert, compared with the imperial brain of this haughty, silent, manful pioneer. The creditors forgot that he owed them money, the governor caught fire from his enthusiasm, and La Salle went back equipped for his gigantic venture in the west.

The officer he had left in charge at Fort Brokenheart was an Italian gentleman by the name of Tonty, son of the man who invented the tontine life insurance. He was a veteran soldier whose left hand, blown off, had been replaced with an iron fist, which the Indians found to be strong medicine. One clout on the head sufficed for the fiercest warrior. When his garrison sacked the fort and bolted, he had two fighting men left, and a brace of priests. They all sought refuge in the camp of the Illinois.

Presently this pack of curs had news that La Salle was leading an army of Iroquois to their destruction, so instead of preparing for defense they proposed to murder Tonty and his Frenchmen, until the magic of his iron fist quite altered their point of view. Sure enough the Iroquois arrived in force, and the cur pack, three times as strong, went out to fight. Then through the midst of the battle Tonty walked into the enemy’s lines. He ordered the Iroquois to go home and behave themselves, and told such fairy tales about the strength of his curs that these ferocious warriors were frightened. Back walked Tonty to find his cur pack on their knees in tears of gratitude. Again he went to the Iroquois, this time with stiff terms if they wanted peace, but an Illinois envoy gave his game away, with such extravagant bribes and pleas for mercy that the Iroquois laughed at Tonty. They burned the Illinois town, dug up their graveyard, chased the flying nation, butchered the abandoned women and children, and hunted the cur pack across the Mississippi. Tonty and his Frenchmen made their way to their nearest friends, the Pottawattomies, to await La Salle’s return.

And La Salle returned. He found the Illinois town in ashes, littered with human bones. He found an island of the river where women and children by hundreds had been outraged, tortured and burned. His fort was a weed-grown ruin. In all the length of the valley there was no vestige of human life, or any clue as to the fate of Tonty and his men. For the third time La Salle made that immense journey to the settlements, wrung blood from stones to equip an expedition, and coming to Lake Michigan rallied the whole of the native tribes in one strong league, a red Indian colony with himself as chief, for defense from the Iroquois. The scattered Illinois returned to their abandoned homes, tribes came from far and wide to join the colony and in the midst, upon Starved Rock, La Salle built Fort Saint Louis as their stronghold. When Tonty joined him, for once this iron man showed he had a heart.

So, after all, La Salle led an expedition down the whole length of the Mississippi. He won the friendship of every tribe he met, bound them to French allegiance, and at the end erected the standard of France on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. “In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre,” on the nineteenth of April, 1682. La Salle annexed the valley of the Mississippi from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, from the lakes to the gulf, and named that empire Louisiana.

As to the fate of this great explorer, murdered in the wilderness by followers he disdained to treat as comrades, “his enemies were more in earnest than his friends.”

XXXVIII

A. D. 1741

THE EXPLORERS

From the time of Henry VII of England down to the present day, the nations of Europe have been busy with one enormous adventure, the search for the best trade route to India and the China seas. For four whole centuries this quest for a trade route has been the main current of the history of the world. Look what the nations have done in that long fight for trade.

Portugal found the sea route by Magellan’s Strait, and occupied Brazil; the Cape route, and colonized the coasts of Africa. She built an empire.

Spain mistook the West Indies for the real Indies, and the red men for the real Indians, found the Panama route, and occupied the new world from Cape Horn up to the southern edge of Alaska. She built an empire.

France, in the search of a route across North America, occupied Canada and the Mississippi Valley. She built an empire. That lost, she attempted under Napoleon to occupy Egypt, Palestine and the whole overland road to India. That failing, she has dug the Suez Canal and attempted the Panama, both sea routes to the Indies.

Holland, searching for a route across North America, found Hudson’s Bay and occupied Hudson River (New York). On the South Sea route she built her rich empire in the East Indian Islands.

Britain, searching eastward first, opened up Russia to civilization, then explored the sea passage north of Asia. Searching westward, she settled Newfoundland, founded the United States, built Canada, which created the Canadian Pacific route to the Indies, and traversed the sea passage north of America. On the Panama route, she built a West Indian empire; on the Mediterranean route, her fortress line of Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt, Adon. By holding all routes, she holds her Indian empire. Is not this the history of the world?

But there remains to be told the story of Russia’s search for routes to India and China. That story begins with Martha Rabe, the Swedish nursery governess, who married a dragoon, left him to be mistress of a Russian general, became servant to the Princess Menchikoff, next the lover, then the wife of Peter the Great, and finally succeeded him as empress of all the Russias. To the dazzling court of this Empress Catherine came learned men and travelers who talked about the search of all the nations for a route through North America to the Indies. Long ago, they said, an old Greek mariner, one Juan de Fuca, had bragged on the quays of Venice, of his voyages. He claimed to have rounded Cape Horn, and thence beat up the west coast of America, until he came far north to a strait which entered the land. Through this sea channel he had sailed for many weeks, until it brought him out again into the ocean. One glance at the map will show these straits of Juan de Fuca, and how the old Greek, sailing for many weeks, came out again into the ocean, having rounded the back of Vancouver’s Island. But the legend as told to Catherine the Great of Russia, made these mysterious straits of Anian lead from the Pacific right across North America to the Atlantic Ocean. Here was a sea route from Russia across the Atlantic, across North America, across the Pacific, direct to the gorgeous Indies. With such a possession as this channel Russia could dominate the world.

Catherine set her soothsayers and wiseacres to make a chart, displaying these straits of Anian which Juan de Fuca had found, and they marked the place accordingly at forty-eight degrees of north latitude on the west coast of America. But there were also rumors and legends in those days of a great land beyond the uttermost coasts of Siberia, an island that was called Aliaska, filling the North Pacific. All such legends and rumors the astrologers marked faithfully upon their map until the thing was of no more use than a dose of smallpox. Then Catherine gave the precious chart to two of her naval officers, Vitus Bering, the Dane--a mighty man in the late wars with Sweden and a Russian lieutenant--Tschirikoff--and bade them go find the straits of Anian.

The expedition set out overland across the Russian and Siberian plains, attended by hunters who kept the people alive on fish and game until they reached the coasts of the North Pacific. There they built two ships, the _Stv Petr_ and the _Stv Pavl_, and launched them, two years from the time of their outsetting from Saint Petersburg. Thirteen years they spent in exploring the Siberian coast, northward to the Arctic, southward to the borders of China, then in 1741 set out into the unknown to search for the Island of Aliaska, and the Straits of Anian so plainly marked upon their chart.

Long months they cruised about in quest of that island, finding nothing, while the crews sickened of scurvy, and man after man died in misery, until only a few were left.

The world had not been laid out correctly, but Bering held with fervor to his faith in that official chart for which his men were dying. At last Tschirikoff, unable to bear it any longer, deserted Bering, and sailing eastward many days, came at last to land at the mouth of Cross Straits in Southern Alaska.

Beyond a rocky foreshore and white surf, forests of pine went up to mountains lost in trailing clouds. Behind a little point rose a film of smoke from some savage camp-fire. Tschirikoff landed a boat’s crew in search of provisions and water, which vanished behind the point and was seen no more. Heart-sick, he sent a second boat, which vanished behind the point and was seen no more, but the fire of the savages blazed high. Two days he waited, watching that pillar of smoke, and listened to a far-off muttering of drums, then with the despairing remnant of his crew, turned back to the lesser perils of the sea, and fled to Siberia. Farther to the northward, some three hundred miles, was Bering in the _Stv Petr_, driving his mutinous people in a last search for land. It was the day after Tschirikoff’s discovery, and the ship, flying winged out before the southwest wind, came to green shallows of the sea, and fogs that lay in violet gloom ahead, like some mysterious coast crowned with white cloud heights towering up the sky. At sunset, when these clouds had changed to flame color, they parted, suddenly revealing high above the mastheads the most tremendous mountain in the world. The sailors were terrified, and Bering, called suddenly to the tall after-castle of the ship, went down on his knees in awestruck wonder. By the Russian calendar, the day was that of the dread Elijah, who had been taken up from the earth drawn by winged horses of flame in a chariot of fire, and to these lost mariners it seemed that this was no mere mountain of ice walls glowing rose and azure through a rift of the purple clouds, but a vision of the translation of the prophet. Bering named the mountain Saint Elias.

There is no space here for the detail of Bering’s wanderings thereafter through those bewildering labyrinths of islands which skirt the Alps of Saint Elias westward, and reach out as the Aleutian Archipelago the whole way across the Pacific Ocean. The region is an awful sub-arctic wilderness of rock-set gaps between bleak arctic islands crowned by flaming volcanoes, lost in eternal fog. It has been my fate to see the wonders and the terrors of that coast, which Bering’s seamen mistook for the vestibule of the infernal regions. Scurvy and hunger made them more like ghosts of the condemned than living men, until their nightmare voyage ended in wreck on the last of the islands, within two hundred miles of the Siberian coast.

Stellar, the German naturalist, who survived the winter, has left record of Bering laid between two rocks for shelter, where the sand drift covered his legs and kept him warm through the last days, then made him a grave afterward. The island was frequented by sea-cows, creatures until then unknown, and since wholly extinct, Stellar’s being the only account of them. There were thousands of sea otter, another species that will soon become extinct, and the shipwrecked men had plenty of wild meat to feed on while they passed the winter building from the timbers of the wreck, a boat to carry them home. In the spring they sailed with a load of sea-otter skins and gained the Chinese coast, where their cargo fetched a fortune for all hands, the furs being valued for the official robes of mandarins.

At the news of this new trade in sea-otter skins, the hunters of Siberia went wild with excitement, so that the survivors of Bering’s crew led expeditions of their own to Alaska. By them a colony was founded, and though the Straits of Anian were never discovered, because they did not exist, the czars added to their dominions a new empire called Russian America. This Alaska was sold in 1867 to the United States for one million, five hundred thousand pounds, enough money to build such a work as London Bridge, and the territory yields more than that by far in annual profits from fisheries, timber and gold.

XXXIX

A. D. 1750

THE PIRATES

There are very few pirates left. The Riff Moors of Gibraltar Straits will grab a wind-bound ship when they get the chance; the Arabs of the Red Sea take stranded steamers; Chinese practitioners shipped as passengers on a liner, will rise in the night, cut throats, and steal the vessel; moreover some little retail business is done by the Malays round Singapore, but trade as a whole is slack, and sea thieves are apt to get themselves disliked by the British gunboats.

This is a respectable world, my masters, but it is getting dull.

It was very different in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Sallee rovers, the Algerian corsairs, buccaneers of the West Indies, the Malays and the Chinese put pirate fleets to sea to prey on great commerce, when Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Bartholomew, Roberts, Lafitte, Avery and a hundred other corsairs under the Jolly Roger could seize tall ships and make their unwilling seamen walk the plank. They and their merry men went mostly to the gallows, richly deserved the same, and yet--well, nobody need complain that times were dull.

There were so many pirates one hardly knows which to deal with, but Avery was such a mean rogue, and there is such a nice confused story--well, here goes! He was mate of the ship _Duke_, forty-four guns, a merchant cruiser chartered from Bristol for the Spanish service. His skipper was mightily addicted to punch, and too drunk to object when Avery, conspiring with the men, made bold to seize the ship. Then he went down-stairs to wake the captain, who, in a sudden fright, asked, “What’s the matter?” “Oh, nothing,” said Avery. The skipper gobbled at him, “But something’s the matter,” he cried. “Does she drive? What weather is it?” “No, no,” answered Avery, “we’re at sea.” “At sea! How can that be?”

“Come,” says Avery, “don’t be in a fright, but put on your clothes, and I’ll let you into the secret--and if you’ll turn sober and mind your business perhaps, in time, I may make you one of my lieutenants, if not, here’s a boat alongside, and you shall be set ashore.” The skipper, still in a fright, was set ashore, together with such of the men as were honest. Then Avery sailed away to seek his fortune.