Part 20
Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, an old stockade of the Nor’westers, was at this time the Hudson’s Bay Company’s capital on the Pacific coast, where reigned the great Doctor McLauchlan, founder of Oregon. Here the _Beaver_ shipped her paddles, started up her engines, and gave an excursion trip for the ladies. So came her voyage under steam out in the open Pacific of eight hundred miles to her station on the British Columbian coast. She sailed on the last day of May in 1836, two years before the Atlantic was crossed under steam. On the Vancouver coast she discovered an outcrop of steam coal, still the best to be had on the Pacific Ocean.
In her days of glory, the _Beaver_ was a smart little war-ship trading with the savages, or bombarding their villages, all the way from Puget Sound to Alaska. In her middle age she was a survey vessel exploring Wonderland. In her old age the boiler leaked, so that the engineer had to plug the holes with a rag on a pointed stick. She was a grimy tug at the last, her story forgotten; and after fifty-two years of gallant service, was allowed to lie a weed-grown wreck within a mile of the new City of Vancouver, until a kindly storm gave her the honor of sea burial.
It was in 1851 that the _Beaver_ brought to the factor at Fort Simpson some nuggets of the newly discovered Californian gold. At first he refused to take the stuff in trade, next bought it in at half its value, and finally showed it to Edenshaw, head chief of the Haida nation. As each little yellow pebble was worth a big pile of blankets, the chief borrowed a specimen and showed it to his tribe in the Queen Charlotte Islands.
There is a legend that in earlier days a trader found the Haidas using golden bullets with their trade guns, which they gladly exchanged for lead. Anyway an old woman told Edenshaw that she knew where to find the stuff, so next day she took him in a small dugout canoe to the outer coast. There she showed him a streak seven inches wide, and eighty feet in length, of quartz and shining gold, which crossed the neck of a headland. They filled a bushel basket with loose bits, and left them in the canoe while they went back for more. But in the stern of the canoe sat Edenshaw’s little son watching the dog fish at play down in the deeps. When the elders came back Charlie had thrown their first load of gold at the dog fish, and later on in life he well remembered the hands of blessing laid on by way of reward.
Still, enough gold was saved to buy many bales of blankets. Edenshaw claimed afterward that, had he only known the value of his find, he would have gone to England and married the queen’s daughter.
News spread along the coast and soon a ship appeared, the H. B. C. brigantine _Una_. Her people blasted the rocks, while the Indians, naked and well oiled, grabbed the plunder. The sailors wrestled, but could not hold those oily rogues. In time the _Una_ sailed with a load of gold, but was cast away with her cargo in the Straits of Fuca.
Next year Gold Harbor was full of little ships, with a gunboat to keep them in order while they reaped a total harvest of two hundred eighty-nine thousand dollars. H. M. S. _Thetis_ had gone away when the schooner _Susan Sturgis_ came back for a second load, the only vessel to brave the winter storms. One day while all hands were in the cabin at dinner the Indians stole on board, clapped on the hatches and made them prisoners. They were marched ashore and stripped in the deep snow, pleading for their drawers, but only Captain Rooney and the mate were allowed that luxury. The seamen were sold to the H. B. Company at Fort Simpson, but the two officers remained in slavery. By day they chopped fire-wood under a guard, at night crouched in a dark corner of a big Indian house, out of sight of the fire in the middle, fed on such scraps of offal as their masters deigned to throw them.
Only one poor old woman pitied the slaves, hiding many a dried clam under the matting within their reach. Also they made a friend of Chief Bearskin’s son; and Bearskin himself was a good-hearted man, though Edenshaw proved a brute. Rooney was an able-bodied Irishman, Lang a tall broad-shouldered Scot, though this business turned his hair gray. For after the schooner was plundered and broken up, a dispute arose between Bearskin and Edenshaw as to their share of the captives. Edenshaw would kill Lang rather than surrender him to Bearskin, and twice the Scotchman had his head on the block to be chopped off before Bearskin gave in to save his life. At last both slaves were sold to Captain McNeill, who gave them each a striped shirt, corduroy trousers and shoes, then shipped them aboard the _Beaver_. Now it so happened that on the passage southward the _Beaver_ met with the only accident in her long life, for during a storm the steering gear was carried away. Lang was a ship’s carpenter, and his craftsmanship saved the little heroine from being lost with all hands that night. This rescued slave became the pioneer ship-builder of Western Canada.
XLVII
A. D. 1911
THE CONQUEST OF THE POLES
The North Pole is only a point on the earth’s surface, a point which in itself has no length, breadth or height, neither has it weight nor any substance, being invisible, impalpable, immovable and entirely useless. The continents of men swing at a thousand miles an hour round that point, which has no motion. Beneath it an eternal ice-field slowly drifts across the unfathomed depths of a sea that knows no light.
Above, for a night of six months, the pole star marks the zenith round which the constellations swing their endless race; then for six months the low sun rolls along the sky-line on his level rounds; and each day and night are one year.
The attempt to reach that point began in the reign of Henry VIII of England, when Master John Davis sailed up the Greenland coast to a big cliff which he named after his becker, Sanderson’s Hope. The cliff is sheer from the sea three thousand four hundred feet high, with one sharp streak of ice from base to summit. It towers above Upernivik, the most northerly village in the world, and is one thousand one hundred twenty-eight miles from the Pole.
In 1594 Barentz carried the Dutch flag a little farther north but soon Hudson gave the lead back to Great Britain, and after that, for two hundred seventy-six years the British flag unchallenged went on from victory to victory in the conquest of the North. At last in 1882 Lieutenant Greely of the United States Army beat us by four miles at a cost of nearly his whole expedition, which was destroyed by famine. Soon Doctor Nansen broke the American record for Norway, to be beaten in turn by an Italian prince, the Duke d’Abruzzi. But meanwhile Peary, an American naval officer, had commenced his wonderful course of twenty-three years’ special training; and in 1906 he broke the Italian record. His way was afoot with dog-trains across the ice of the Polar sea, and he would have reached the North Pole, but for wide lanes of open sea, completely barring the way. At two hundred twenty-seven miles from the Pole he was forced to retreat, and camp very near to death before he won back to his base camp.
Peary’s ship was American to the last detail of needles and thread, but the vessel was his own invention, built for ramming ice-pack. The ship’s officers and crew were all Newfoundlanders, trained from boyhood in the seal fishery of the Labrador ice-pack. They were, alas! British, but that could not be helped. To make amends the exploring officers were Americans, but they were specially trained by Peary to live and travel as Eskimos, using the native dress, the dog-trains and the snow houses.
Other explorers had done the same, but Peary went further, for he hired the most northerly of the Eskimo tribes, and from year to year educated the pick of the boys, who grew up to regard him as a father, to obey his orders exactly, and to adopt his improvements on their native methods. So he had hunting parties to store up vast supplies of meat, and skins of musk-ox, ice-bear, reindeer, fox, seal and walrus, each for some special need in the way of clothing. He had women to make the clothes. He had two hundred fifty huskie dogs, sleds of his own device, and Eskimo working parties under his white officers. In twenty-three years he found out how to boil tea in ten minutes, and that one detail saved ninety minutes a day for actual marching--a margin in case of accident. Add to all that Peary’s own enormous strength of mind and body, in perfect training, just at the prime of life. He was so hardened by disaster that he had become almost a maniac, with one idea, one motive in life, one hope--that of reaching the Pole. Long hours before anything went wrong an instinct would awaken him out of the soundest sleep to look out for trouble and avert calamity.
A glance at the map will show how Greenland, and the islands north of Canada, reach to within four hundred miles of the Pole. Between is a channel leading from Baffin’s Bay into the Arctic Ocean. The _Roosevelt_, Peary’s ship, forced a passage through that channel, then turned to the left, creeping and dodging between the ice-field and the coast of Grant Land. Captain Bartlett was in the crow’s-nest, piloting, and Peary, close below him, clung to the standing rigging while the ship butted and charged and hammered through the floes. Bartlett would coax and wheedle, or shout at the ship to encourage her, “Rip ’em, Teddy! Bite ’em in two! Go it! That’s fine, my beauty! Now again! Once more!”
Who knows? In the hands of a great seaman like Bartlett a ship seems to be a living creature, and no matter what slued the _Roosevelt_ she had a furious habit of her own, coming to rest with her nose to the north for all the world like a compass. Her way was finally blocked just seventy-five miles short of the most northerly headland, Cape Columbia, and the stores had to be carried there for the advanced base. The winter was spent in preparation, and on March first began the dash for the Pole.
No party with dog-trains could possibly carry provisions for a return journey of eight hundred miles. If there had been islands on the route it would have been the right thing to use them as advanced bases for a final rush to the Pole. But there were no islands, and it would be too risky to leave stores upon the shifting ice-pack. There was, therefore, but one scheme possible. Doctor Goodsell marched from the coast to Camp A, unloaded his stores and returned. Using the stores at Camp A, Mr. Borup was able to march to Camp B, where he unloaded and turned back. With the stores at Camp B, Professor Marvin marched to Camp C and turned back. With the stores at Camp C, Captain Bartlett marched to Camp D and turned back. With the stores at Camp D, Peary had his sleds fully loaded, with a selection, besides, of the fittest men and dogs for the last lap of the journey, and above all not too many mouths to feed.
It was a clever scheme, and in theory the officers, turned back with their Eskimo parties, were needed to pilot them to the coast. All the natives got back safely, but Professor Marvin was drowned. If Peary had not sent all his officers back, would he have been playing the game in leaving his Eskimo parties without navigating officers to guide them in the event of a storm? There is no doubt that his conduct was that of a wise and honorable man. But the feeling remains--was it sportsman-like to send Captain Bartlett back--the one man who had done most for his success, denied any share in the great final triumph? Bartlett made no complaint, and in his cheery acceptance of the facts cut a better figure than even Commander Peary.
With his negro servant and four Eskimos, the leader set forth on the last one hundred thirty-three miles across the ice. It was not plain level ice like that of a pond, but heaved into sharp hills caused by the pressure, with broken cliffs and labyrinthine reefs. The whole pack was drifting southward before the wind, here breaking into mile-wide lanes of black and foggy sea, there newly frozen and utterly unsafe. Although the sun did not set, the frost was sharp, at times twenty and thirty degrees below zero, while for the most part a cloudy sky made it impossible to take observations. Here great good fortune awaited Peary, for as he neared the Pole, the sky cleared, giving him brilliant sunlight. By observing the sun at frequent intervals he was able to reckon with his instruments until at last he found himself within five miles of ninety degrees north--the Pole. A ten-mile tramp proved he had passed the apex of the earth, and five miles back he made the final tests. Somewhere within a mile of where he stood was the exact point, the north end of the axis on which the earth revolves. As nearly as he could reckon, the very point was marked for that moment upon the drifting ice-field by a berg-like hill of ice, and on this summit he hoisted the flag, a gift from his wife which he had carried for fifteen years, a tattered silken remnant of Old Glory.
“Perhaps,” he writes, “it ought not to have been so, but when I knew for a certainty that I had reached the goal, there was not a thing in the world I wanted but sleep. But after I had a few hours of it, there succeeded a condition of mental exaltation which made further rest impossible. For more than a score of years that point on the earth’s surface had been the object of my every effort. To obtain it my whole being, physical, mental and moral, had been dedicated. The determination to reach the Pole had become so much a part of my being that, strange as it may seem, I long ago ceased to think of myself save as an instrument for the attainment of that end.... But now I had at last succeeded in planting the flag of my country at the goal of the world’s desire. It is not easy to write about such a thing, but I knew that we were going back to civilization with the last of the great adventure stories--a story the world had been waiting to hear for nearly four hundred years, a story which was to be told at last under the folds of the Stars and Stripes, the flag that during a lonely and isolated life had come to be for me the symbol of home and everything I loved--and might never see again.”
Here is the record left at the North Pole:--
“90 N. Lat., North Pole, “April 6th, 1909.
“I have to-day hoisted the national ensign of the United States of America at this place, which my observations indicate to be the North Polar axis of the earth, and have formally taken possession of the entire region, and adjacent, for and in the name of the president of the United States of America.
“I leave this record and United States flag in possession.
“ROBERT E. PEARY, “United States Navy.”
Before the hero of this very grand adventure returned to the world, there also arrived from the Arctic a certain Doctor Cook, an American traveler who claimed to have reached the Pole. The Danish Colony in Greenland received him with joy, the Danish Geographical Society welcomed him with a banquet of honor, and the world rang with his triumph. Then came Commander Peary out of the North, proclaiming that this rival was a liar. So Doctor Cook was able to strike an attitude of injured innocence, hinting that poor old Peary was a fraud; and the world rocked with laughter.
In England we may have envied the glory that Peary had so bravely won for his flag and country, but knew his record too well to doubt his honor, and welcomed his triumph with no ungenerous thoughts. The other claimant had a record of impudent and amusing frauds, but still he was entitled to a hearing, and fair judgment of his claim from men of science. Among sportsmen we do not expect the runners, after a race, to call one another liars, and were sorry that Peary should for a moment lapse from the dignity expected of brave men.
It is perhaps ungenerous to mention such trifling points of conduct, and yet we worship heroes only when we are quite sure that our homage is not a folly. And so we measure Peary with the standard set by his one rival, Roald Amundsen, who conquered the Northwest passage, then added to that immortal triumph the conquest of the South Pole. In that Antarctic adventure Amundsen challenged a fine British explorer, Captain Scott. The British expedition was equipped with every costly appliance wealth could furnish, and local knowledge of the actual route. The Norseman ventured into an unknown route, scantily equipped, facing the handicap of poverty. He won by sheer merit, by his greatness as a man, and by the loyal devotion he earned at the hands of his comrades. Then he returned to Norway, they say, disguised under an assumed name to escape a public triumph, and his one message to the world was a generous tribute to his defeated rival. The modern world has no greater hero, no more perfect gentleman, no finer adventurer than Roald Amundsen.
XLVIII
WOMEN
Two centuries ago Miss Mary Read, aged thirteen, entered the Royal Navy as a boy. A little later she deserted, and still disguised as a boy, went soldiering, first in a line regiment, afterward as a trooper. She was very brave. On the peace of Ryswick, seeing that there was to be no more fighting, she went into the merchant service for a change, and was bound for the West Indies when the ship was gathered in by pirates. Rather than walk the plank, she became a pirate herself and rose from rank to rank until she hoisted the black flag with the grade of captain. So she fell in with Mrs. Bonny, widow of a pirate captain. The two amiable ladies, commanding each her own vessel, went into a business partnership, scuttling ships and cutting throats for years with marked success.
In the seventeenth century an escaped nun did well as a seafaring man under the Spanish colors, ruffled as a gallant in Chili, and led a gang of brigands in the Andes. On her return to Spain as a lady, she was very much petted at the court of Madrid. The last of many female bandits was Miss Pearl Hart, who, in 1890, robbed a stage-coach in Arizona.
Mr. Murray Hall, a well-known Tammany politician and a successful business man, died in New York, and was found to be a woman.
But of women who, without disguise, have excelled in adventurous trades, I have known in Western Canada two who are gold miners and two who are cowboys. Mrs. Langdon, of California, drove a stage-coach for years. Miss Calamity Jane was a noted Montana bull-whacker. Miss Minnie Hill and Miss Collie French are licensed American pilots. Miss Evelyn Smith, of Nova Scotia, was a jailer. Lady Clifford holds Board of Trade certificates as an officer in our mercantile marine. A distinguished French explorer, Madame Dieulafoy, is an officer of the Legion of Honor, entitled to a military salute from all sentries, and has the singular right by law of wearing the dress of a man. Several English ladies have been explorers. Miss Bird explored Japan, conquered Long’s Peak, and was once captured by Mountain Jim, the Colorado robber. Lady Florence Dixie explored Patagonia, Miss Gordon-Cumming explored a hundred of the South Sea Isles, put an end to a civil war in Samoa and was one of the first travelers on the Pamirs. Mrs. Mulhall has traced the sources of the Amazons. Lady Baker, Mrs. Jane Moir, and Miss Kingsley rank among the great pioneers of Africa. Lady Hester Stanhope, traveling in the _Levant_, the ship being loaded with treasure, her own property, was cast away on a desert island near Rhodes. Escaping thence she traversed the Arabian deserts, and by a gathering of forty thousands of Arabs was proclaimed queen of Palmyra. This beautiful and gifted woman reigned through the first decades of the nineteenth century from her palace on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. Two other British princesses in wild lands were Her Highness Florence, Maharanee of Patiala, and the sherifa of Wazan, whose son is reverenced by the Moslems in North Africa as a sacred personage.
Among women who have been warriors the greatest, perhaps, were the British Queen Boadicea, and the saintly and heroic Joan of Arc, burned, to our everlasting shame, at Rouen. Frances Scanagatti, a noble Italian girl, fought with distinction as an officer in the Austrian army, once led the storming of a redoubt, and after three years in the field against Napoleon, went home, a young lady again, of sweet and mild disposition.
Doctor James Barry, M. D., inspector-general of hospitals in the British Army, a duelist, a martinet, and a hopelessly insubordinate officer, died in 1865 at the age of seventy-one, and was found to be a woman.
Apart from hosts of adventurous camp followers there have been disguised women serving at different times in nearly every army. Loreta Velasquez, of Cuba, married to an American army officer, dressed up in her husband’s clothes, raised a corps of volunteers, took command, was commissioned in the Confederate Army during the Civil War of 1861–5, and fought as Lieutenant Harry Buford. She did extraordinary work as a spy in the northern army. After the war, her husband having fallen in battle, she turned gold miner in California.
Mrs. Christian Davies, born in 1667 in Dublin, was a happy and respectable married woman with a large family, when her life was wrecked by a sudden calamity, for her husband was seized by a press gang and dragged away to serve in the fleet. Mrs. Davis, crazy with grief, got her children adopted by the neighbors, and set off in search of the man she loved. When she returned two years later as a soldier, she found her children happy, the neighbors kind, and herself utterly unknown. She went away contented. She served under the Duke of Marlborough throughout his campaigns in Europe, first as an infantry soldier, but later as a dragoon, for at the battles of Blenheim and Fontenoy she was a squadron leader of the Scots Grays. The second dragoon guards have many curious traditions of “Mother Ross.” When after twelve years military service, she ultimately found her husband, he was busy flirting with a waitress in a Dutch inn, and she passed by, saying nothing. In her capacity as a soldier she was a flirt herself, making love to every girl she met, a gallant, a duelist, and notably brave. At last, after a severe wound, her sex was discovered and she forgave her husband. She died in Chelsea Hospital at the age of one hundred eight, and her monument may be seen in the graveyard.
Hannah Snell left her home because her husband had bolted with another woman, and she wanted to find and kill him. In course of her search, she enlisted, served as a soldier against the Scots rebellion of 1745, and once received a punishment of five hundred lashes. A series of wonderful adventures led her into service as a marine on board H. M. S. _Swallow_. After a narrow escape from foundering, this vessel joined Admiral Boscawen’s fleet in the East Indies. She showed such extreme gallantry in the attack on Mauritius and in the siege of Areacopong, that she was chosen for special work in a forlorn hope. In this fight she avenged the death of a comrade by killing the author of it with her own hands. At the siege of Pondicherry she received eleven wounds in the legs, and a ball in the body which she extracted herself for fear of revealing the secret of her sex. On her return voyage to England she heard that she need not bother about killing her husband, because he had been decently hanged for murder. So on landing at Portsmouth she revealed herself to her messmates as a woman, and one of them promptly proposed to her. She declined and went on the stage, but ultimately received a pension of thirty pounds a year, and set up as a publican at the sign of the Women in Masquerade.