Part 18

On the coast of Madagascar, lying in a bay, two sloops were found, whose seamen supposed the _Duke_ to be a ship of war and being rogues, having stolen these vessels to go pirating, they fled with rueful faces into the woods. Of course they were frightfully pleased when they found out that they were not going to be hanged just yet, and delighted when Captain Avery asked them to sail in his company. They could fly at big game now, with this big ship for a consort.

Now, as it happened, the Great Mogul, emperor of Hindustan, was sending his daughter with a splendid retinue to make pilgrimage to Mecca and worship at the holy places of Mahomet. The lady sailed in a ship with chests of gold to pay the expenses of the journey, golden vessels for the table, gifts for the shrines, an escort of princes covered with jewels, troops, servants, slaves and a band to play tunes with no music, after the eastern manner. And it was their serious misfortune to meet with Captain Avery outside the mouth of the Indus. Avery’s sloops, being very swift, got the prize, and stripped her of everything worth taking, before they let her go.

It shocked Avery to think of all that treasure in the sloops where it might get lost; so presently, as they sailed in consort, he invited the captains of the sloops to use the big ship as their strong room. They put their treasure on board the _Duke_, and watched close, for fear of accidents. Then came a dark night when Captain Avery mislaid both sloops, and bolted with all the plunder, leaving two crews of simple mariners to wonder where he had gone.

Avery made off to the New England colonies, where he made a division of the plunder, handing the gold to the men, but privily keeping all the diamonds for himself. The sailors scattered out through the American settlements and the British Isles, modestly changing their names. Mr. Avery went home to Bristol, where he found some honest merchants to sell his diamonds, and lend him a small sum on account. When, however, he called on them for the rest of the money, he met with a most shocking repulse, because the merchants had never heard, they said, of him or his diamonds, but would give him to the justices as a pirate unless he shut his mouth. He went away and died of grief at Bideford in Devon, leaving no money even to pay for his coffin.

Meanwhile the Great Mogul at Delhi was making such dismal lamentations about the robbery of his daughter’s diamonds that the news of Avery’s riches spread to England. Rumor made him husband to the princess, a reigning sovereign, with a pirate fleet of his own--at the very time he was dying of want at Bideford.

We left two sloops full of pirates mourning over the total depravity of Captain Avery. Sorely repenting his sins, they resolved to amend their lives, and see what they could steal in Madagascar. Landing on that great island they dismantled their sloops, taking their plentiful supply of guns and powder ashore, where they camped, making their sails into tents. Here they met with another party of English pirates who were also penitent, having just plundered a large and richly-laden ship at the mouth of the Red Sea. Their dividend was three thousand pounds a man, and they were resolved to settle in Madagascar instead of going home to be hanged. The two parties, both in search of a peaceful and simple life, made friends with the various native princes, who were glad of white men to assist in the butchering of adjacent tribes. Two or three pirates at the head of an attacking force would put the boldest tribes to flight. Each pirate acquired his own harem of wives, his own horde of black slaves, his own plantations, fishery and hunting grounds, his kingdom wherein he reigned an absolute monarch. If a native said impudent words he was promptly shot, and any attack of the tribes on a white man was resented by the whole community of pirate kings. Once the negroes conspired for a general rising to wipe out their oppressors at one fell swoop, but the wife of a white man getting wind of the plot, ran twenty miles in three hours to alarm her lord. When the native forces arrived they were warmly received. After that each of their lordships built a fortress for his resting place with rampart and ditch set round with a labyrinth of thorny entanglements, so that the barefoot native coming as a stranger by night, trod on spikes, and sounded a loud alarm which roused the garrison.

Long years went by. Their majesties grew stout from high feeding and lack of exercise, hairy, dressed in skins of wild beasts, reigning each in his kingdom with a deal of dirty state and royalty.

So Captain Woods found them when he went in the ship _Delicia_, to buy slaves. At the sight of his forty-gun ship they hid themselves in the woods, very suspicious, but presently learned his business, and came out of the woods, offering to sell their loyal negro subjects by hundreds in exchange for tobacco and suits of sailor clothes, tools, powder, and ball. They had now been twenty-five years in Madagascar, and, what with wars, accidents, sickness, there remained eleven sailor kings, all heartily bored with their royalty. Despite the attachments of their harems, children and swarms of grandchildren and dependents, they were sick for blue water, hungry for a cruise. Captain Woods observed that they got very friendly with his seamen, and learned that they were plotting to seize the ship, hoist the black flag, and betake themselves once more to piracy on the high seas.

After that he kept their majesties at a distance, sending officers ashore to trade with them until he had completed his cargo of slaves. So he sailed, leaving eleven disconsolate pirate kings in a mournful row on the tropic beach, and no more has ever transpired as to them or the fate of their kingdoms. Still, they had fared much better than Captain Avery with his treasure of royal diamonds.

XL

A. D. 1776

DANIEL BOONE

As a matter of unnatural history the British lion is really and truly a lioness with a large and respectable family. When only a cub she sharpened her teeth on Spain, in her youth crushed Holland, and in her prime fought France, wresting from each in turn the command of the sea.

She was nearing her full strength when France with a chain of forts along the Saint Lawrence and the Mississippi attempted to strangle the thirteen British cubs in America. By the storming of Quebec the lion smashed that chain; but the long and world-wide wars with France had bled her dry, and unless she could keep the sea her cubs were doomed, so bluntly she told them they must help.

The cubs had troubles of their own and could not help. Theirs was the legal, hers the moral right, but both sides fell in the wrong when they lost their tempers. Since then the mother of nations has reared her second litter with some of that gentleness which comes of sorrow.

So far the French in Canada were not settlers so much as gay adventurers for the Christ, or for beaver skins, living among the Indians, or in a holiday mood leading the tribes against the surly British.

So far the British overseas were not adventurers so much as dour fugitives from injustice at home, or from justice, or merely deported as a general nuisance, to join in one common claim to liberty, the fanatics of freedom.

Unlike the French and Spaniards, the northern folk--British or Dutch, German or Scandinavian--had no mission, except by smallpox to convert the heathen. Nothing cared they for glory or adventure, but only for homes and farms. Like a hive of bees they filled the Atlantic coast lands with tireless industry until they began to feel crowded; then like a hive they swarmed, over the Appalachian ranges, across the Mississippi, over the Rocky Mountains, and now in our own time to lands beyond the sea.

Among the hard fierce colonists a very few loved nature and in childhood took to the wilds. Such was the son of a tame Devon Quaker, young Daniel Boone, a natural marksman, axman, bushman, tracker and scout of the backwoods who grew to be a freckled ruddy man, gaunt as a wolf, and subtle as a snake from his hard training in the Indian wars.

When first he crossed the mountains on the old warrior trail into Kentucky, hunting and trapping paid well in that paradise of noble timber and white clover meadows. The country swarmed with game, a merry hunting ground and battle-field of rival Indian tribes.

There Boone and his wife’s brother Stuart were captured by Shawnees, who forced the prisoners to lead the way to their camp where the other four hunters were taken. The Indians took their horses, rifles, powder, traps and furs, all lawful plunder, but gave them food to carry them to the settlements with a warning for the whites that trespassers would be prosecuted. That was enough for four of the white hunters, but Boone and Stuart tracked the Indians and stole back some of their plunder, only to be trailed in their turn and recaptured. The Shawnees were annoyed, and would have taken these trespassers home to be burned alive, but for Boone’s queer charm of manner which won their liking, and his ghostlike vanishing with Stuart into the cane brakes. The white men got away with rifles, bullets and powder, and they were wise enough not to be caught again. Still it needed some courage to stay in Kentucky, and after Stuart got scalped Boone said he felt unutterably lonely. Yet he remained, dodging so many and such varied perils that his loneliness must really have been a comfort, for it is better to be dull in solitude than scalped in company. He owed money for his outfit, and would not return to the settlements until he had earned the skins that paid his debt.

At the moment when the big colonial hive began to swarm Boone led a party of thirty frontiersmen to cut a pack-trail over the mountains into the plains of Kentucky. This wilderness trail--some two hundred miles of mud-holes, rocks and stumps--opened the way for settlement in Kentucky, a dark and bloody ground, for white invaders. At a cost of two or three scalps Boone’s outfit reached this land, to build a stockaded village named for the leader, Boonesborough, and afterward he was very proud that his wife and daughters were the first women to brave the perils of that new settlement.

Under a giant elm the settlers, being British, had church and parliament, but only on one Sunday did the parson pray for King George before the news came that congress needed prayers for the new republic at war with the motherland.

Far to the northwest of Kentucky the forts of Illinois were held by a British officer named Hamilton. He had with him a handful of American Tories loyal to the king, some newly conquered French Canadians not much in love with British government, and savage Indian tribes. All these he sent to strike the revolting colonies in their rear, but the whole brunt of the horror fell upon poor Kentucky. The settlements were wrecked, the log cabins burned, and the Indians got out of hand, committing crimes; but the settlers held four forts and cursed King George through seven years of war.

It was in a lull of this long storm that Boone led a force of thirty men to get salt from the salt-licks frequented by the buffalo and deer, on the banks of Licking River. One day while he was scouting ten miles from camp, and had just loaded his horse with meat to feed his men, he was caught, in a snow-storm, by four Shawnees. They led him to their camp where some of the hundred warriors had helped to capture Boone eight years before. These, with much ceremony and mock politeness, introduced him to two American Tories, a brace of French Canadians, and their Shawnee chiefs. Then Boone found out that this war party was marching on Fort Boonesborough where lived his own wife and children and many women, but scarcely any men. But knowing the ways of the redskins Boone saw that if he let them capture his own men in camp at the salt-licks they would go home without attacking Boonesborough. He must risk the fighting men to save the fort; he must guide the enemy to his own camp and order his men to surrender; and if they laid down all their lives for the sake of their women and children--well, they must take their chance. Boone’s men laid down their arms.

A council followed at which fifty-nine Indians voted to burn these Americans at the stake against sixty-one who preferred to sell them to Hamilton as prisoners of war. Saved by two votes, they marched on a winter journey dreadful to the Indians as well as to the prisoners; but all shared alike when dogs and horses had to be killed for food. Moreover the savages became so fond of Boone that they resolved to make an Indian of him. Not wanting to be an Indian he pleaded with Hamilton the Hair Buyer, promising to turn loyalist and fight the rebels, but when the British officer offered a hundred pounds for this one captive it was not enough for these loving savages. They took Boone home, pulled out his hair, leaving only a fine scalp-lock adorned with feathers, bathed him in the river to wash all his white blood out, painted him, and named him Big Turtle. As the adopted son of the chief, Black Fish, Boone pretended to be happy, and in four months had become a popular chief, rather closely watched, but allowed to go out hunting. Then a large Indian force assembled to march against Fort Boonesborough.

Boone easily got leave to go out hunting, and a whole day passed before his flight was known. Doubling on his course, setting blind trails, wading along the streams to hide his tracks, sleeping in thickets or in hollow logs, starving because he dared not fire a gun to get food, his clothes in rags, his feet bloody, he made his way across country, and on the fifth day staggered into Fort Boonesborough.

The enemy were long on the way. There was time to send riders for succor and scouts to watch, to repair the fort, even to raid the Shawnee country before the invaders arrived--one hundred Canadians and four hundred Indians, while Boone’s garrison numbered fifty men and boys, with twenty-five brave women.

By Hamilton’s orders there must be no bloodshed, and he sent forty horses for the old folks, the women and children to ride on their way northward as prisoners of war.

Very solemn was Boone, full of negotiations for surrender, gaining day after day with talk, waiting in a fever for expected succor from the colonies. Nine commissioners on either side were to sign the treaty, but the Indians--for good measure--sent eighteen envoys to clasp the hands of their nine white brothers, and drag them into the bush for execution. The white commissioners broke loose, gained the fort, slammed the gates and fired from the ramparts.

Long, bitter and vindictive was the siege. A pretended retreat failed to lure Boone’s men into ambush. The Indians dug a mine under the walls, but threw the dirt from the tunnel into the river where a streak of muddy water gave their game away. Torches were thrown on the roofs, but women put out the flames. When at last the siege was raised and the Indians retreated, twenty-four hours lapsed before the famished garrison dared to throw open their gates.

In these days a Kentucky force, led by the hero George Rogers Clark, captured the French forts on the Illinois, won over their garrisons, and marched on the fortress of Vincennes through flooded lands, up to their necks in water, starving, half drowned. They captured the wicked Hamilton and led him away in chains.

Toward the end of the war once more a British force of Frenchmen and Indians raided Kentucky, besieging Logan’s fort, and but for the valor of the women, that sorely stricken garrison would have perished. For when the tanks were empty the women took their buckets and marched out of the gates, laughing and singing, right among the ambushed Indians, got their supply of water from the spring, and returned unhurt because they showed no fear.

With the reliefs to the rescue rode Daniel Boone and his son Israel, then aged twenty-three. At sight of reinforcements the enemy bolted, hotly pursued to the banks of Licking River. Boone implored his people not to cross into the certainty of an ambush, but the Kentuckians took no notice, charging through the river and up a ridge between two bushed ravines.

From both flanks the Wyandots charged with tomahawks, while the Shawnees raked the horsemen with a galling fire, and there was pitiless hewing down of the broken flying settlers. Last in that flight came Boone, bearing in his arms his mortally wounded son, overtaken, cut off, almost surrounded before he struck off from the path, leaping from rock to rock. As he swam the river Israel died, but the father carried his body on into the shelter of the forest.

With the ending of the war of the Revolution, the United States spread gradually westward, and to the close of his long life old Daniel Boone was ever at the front of their advance, taking his rest at last beyond the Mississippi. To-day his patient and heroic spirit inspires all boys, leads every frontiersman, commands the pioneers upon the warrior trails, the ax-hewn paths, the wilderness roads of marching empire.

XLI

A. D. 1813

ANDREW JACKSON

The Nations were playing a ball game: “Catch!” said France, throwing the ball to Spain, who muffed it. “Quick!” cried Napoleon, “or England will get it--catch!” “Caught!” said the first American republic, and her prize was the valley of the Mississippi.

Soon afterward the United States in the name of freedom joined Napoleon the Despot at war with Great Britain; and the old lion had a wild beast fight against a world-at-arms. In our search for great adventure let us turn to the warmest corner of that world-wide struggle, poor Spanish Florida.

Here a large Indian nation, once civilized, but now reduced to savagery, had taken refuge from the Americans; and these people, the Creeks and Seminoles, fighting for freedom themselves, gave shelter to runaway slaves from the United States. A few pirates are said to have lurked there, and some Scottish gentlemen lived with the tribes as traders. Thanks perhaps to them, Great Britain armed the Creeks, who ravaged American settlements to the north, and at Fort Minns butchered four hundred men.

Northward in Tennessee the militia were commanded by Andrew Jackson, born a frontiersman, but by trade a lawyer, a very valiant man of high renown, truculent as a bantam.

Without orders he led two thousand, five hundred frontiersmen to avenge Fort Minns by chasing the Spanish governor (in time of peace) out of Pensacola, and a British garrison from Fort Barrancas, and then (after peace was signed) expelled the British from New Orleans, while his detachment in Florida blew up a fort with two hundred seventy-five refugees, including the women and children. Such was the auspicious prelude to Jackson’s war with the Creeks, who were crushed forever at the battle of Horseshoe Bend.

XLII

A. D. 1836

SAM HOUSTON

Serving in Jackson’s force was young Sam Houston, a hunter and a pioneer from childhood. Rather than be apprenticed to a trade he ran away and joined the Cherokees, and as the adopted son of the head chief became an Indian, except of course during the holidays, when he went to see his very respectable mother. On one of these visits home he met a recruiting sergeant, and enlisted for the year of 1812. At the age of twenty-one he had fought his way up to the rank of ensign, serving with General Andrew Jackson at the battle of Horseshoe Bend.

The Creeks held a line of breastworks, and the Americans were charging these works when an arrow struck deep into young Houston’s thigh. He tried to wrench it out but the barb held, and twice his lieutenant failed. “Try again,” said Houston, “and if you fail I’ll knock you down.” The lieutenant pulled out the arrow, and streaming with blood, the youngster went to a surgeon who dressed his wound. General Jackson told him not to return to the front, but the lad must needs be at the head of his men, no matter what the orders.

Hundreds of Creeks had fallen, multitudes were shot or drowned attempting to swim the river, but still a large party of them held a part of the breastwork, a sort of roof spanning a gully, from which, through narrow port-holes, they kept up a murderous fire. Guns could not be placed to bear on this position, the warriors flatly refused all terms of surrender, and when Jackson called for a forlorn hope Houston alone responded. Calling his platoon to follow him he scrambled down the steep side of the gully, but his men hesitated, and from one of them he seized a musket with which he led the way. Within five yards of the Creeks he had turned to rally his platoon for a direct charge through the port-holes, when two bullets struck his right shoulder. For the last time he implored his men to charge, then in despair walked out of range. Many months went by before the three wounds were healed, but from that time, through very stormy years he had the constant friendship of his old leader, Andrew Jackson, president of the United States.

Houston went back to the West and ten years after the battle was elected general of the Tennessee militia. Indeed there seemed no limit to his future, and at thirty-five he was governor of the state, when his wife deserted him, and ugly rumors touched his private life. Throwing his whole career to the winds he turned Indian, not as a chief, but as Drunken Sam, the butt of the Cherokees.

It is quite natural for a man to have two characters, the one commanding while the other rests. Within a few months the eyes of Houston the American statesman looked out from the painted face of Drunken Sam, the savage Cherokee. From Arkansas he looked southward and saw the American frontiersmen, the Texas pioneers, trying to earn a living under the comic opera government of the Mexicans. They would soon sweep away that anarchy if only they found a leader, and perhaps Drunken Sam in his dreams saw Samuel Houston leading the Texas cowboys. Still dressed as a Cherokee warrior he went to Washington, called on his old friend President Jackson, begged for a job, talked of the liberation of Texas--as if the yankees of the North would ever allow another slave state of the South to enter the Union!

Houston went back to the West and preached the revolt against Mexico. There we will leave him for a while, to take up the story of old Davy Crockett.

XLIII

A. D. 1836

DAVY CROCKETT

Far off on his farm in Tennessee, old Davy Crockett heard of the war for freedom. Fifty years of hunting, trapping and Indian warfare had not quenched his thirst for adventure, or dulled his love of fun; but the man had been sent to Washington as a member of congress, and came home horrified by the corruption of political life. He was angry and in his wrath took his gun from over the fireplace. He must kill something, so he went for those Mexicans in the West.

His journey to the seat of war began by steamer down the Mississippi River, and he took a sudden fancy to a sharper who was cheating the passengers. He converted Thimblerig to manhood, and the poor fellow, like a lost dog, followed Davy. So the pair were riding through Texas when they met a bee hunter, riding in search of wild honey--a gallant lad in a splendid deerskin dress, who led them to his home. The bee hunter must join Davy too, but his heart was torn at parting with Kate, the girl he loved, and he turned in the saddle to cheer her with a scrap of song for farewell:

“Saddled and bridled, and booted rode he, A plume in his helmet, a sword at his knee.”

But the girl took up the verse, her song broken with sobbing:

“But toom’ cam’ the saddle, all bluidy to see, And hame cam’ the steed, but hame never cam’ he.”