Part 23

They were loyal as beaten dogs until Napoleon stole the Spanish crown for brother Joseph, and French armies promenaded all over Spain closely pursued by the British. There was no Spain left to love, but the colonials were not Napoleon’s dogs. Napoleon’s envoys to Venezuela were nearly torn to pieces before they escaped to sea, where a little British frigate came and gobbled them up. The sea belonged to the British, and so the colonials sent ambassadors, Bolivar and another gentleman, to King George. Please would he help them to gain their liberty? George had just chased Napoleon out of Spain, and said he would do his best with his allies, the Spaniards.

In London Bolivar unearthed a countryman who loved liberty and had fought for Napoleon, a real professional soldier. General Miranda was able and willing to lead the armies of freedom, until he actually saw the Venezuelan troops. Then he shied hard. He really must draw the line somewhere. Yes, he would take command of the rabble on one condition, that he got rid of Bolivar. To get away from Bolivar he would go anywhere and do anything. So he led his rabble and found them stout fighters, and drove the Spaniards out of the central provinces.

The politicians were sitting down to draft the first of many comic-opera constitutions when an awful sound, louder than any thunder, swept out of the eastern Andes, the earth rolled like a sea in a storm, and the five cities of the new republic crashed down in heaps of ruin. The barracks buried the garrisons, the marching troops were totally destroyed, the politicians were killed, and in all one hundred twenty thousand people perished. The only thing left standing in one church was a pillar bearing the arms of Spain; the only districts not wrecked were those still loyal to the Spanish government. The clergy pointed the moral, the ruined people repented their rebellion, and the Spanish forces took heart and closed in from every side upon the lost republic. Simon Bolivar generously surrendered General Miranda in chains to the victorious Spaniards.

So far one sees only, as poor Miranda did, that this man was a sickening cad. But he was something more. He stuck to the cause for which he had given his life, joined the rebels in what is now Colombia, was given a small garrison command and ordered to stay in his fort. In defiance of orders, he swept the Spaniards out of the Magdalena Valley, raised a large force, liberated the country, then marched into Venezuela, defeated the Spanish forces in a score of brilliant actions, and was proclaimed liberator with absolute power in both Colombia and Venezuela. One begins to marvel at this heroic leader until the cad looms out. “Spaniards and Canary islanders!” he wrote, “reckon on death even if you are neutral, unless you will work actively for the liberty of America. Americans! count on life even if you are culpable.”

Bolivar’s pet hobbies were three in number: Resigning his job as liberator; writing proclamations; committing massacres. “I order you,” he wrote to the governor of La Guayra, “to shoot all the prisoners in those dungeons, and _in the hospital_, without any exception whatever.”

So the prisoners of war were set to work building a funeral pyre. When this was ready eight hundred of them were brought up in batches, butchered with axes, bayonets and knives, and their bodies thrown on the flames. Meanwhile Bolivar, in his office, refreshed himself by writing a proclamation to denounce the atrocities of the Spaniards.

Southward of the Orinoco River there are vast level prairies called Llanos, a cattle country, handled by wild horsemen known as the Llaneros. In Bolivar’s time their leader called himself Boves, and he had as second in command Morales. Boves said that Morales was “atrocious.” Morales said that “Boves was a man of merit, but too blood-thirsty.” The Spaniards called their command “The Infernal Division.” At first they fought for the Revolution, afterward for Spain, but they were really quite impartial and spared neither age nor sex. This was the “Spanish” army which swept away the second Venezuelan republic, slaughtering the whole population save some few poor starving camps of fugitives. Then Boves reported to the Spanish general, “I have recovered the arms, ammunition, and the honor of the Spanish flag, which your excellency lost at Carabobo.”

From this time onward the situation was rather like a dog fight, with the republican dog somewhere underneath in the middle. At times Bolivar ran like a rabbit, at times he was granted a triumph, but whenever he had time to come up and breathe he fired off volleys of proclamations. In sixteen years a painstaking Colombian counted six hundred ninety-six battles, which makes an average of one every ninth day, not to mention massacres; but for all his puny body and feeble health Bolivar was always to be found in the very thick of the scrimmage.

Europe had entered on the peace of Waterloo, but the ghouls who stripped the dead after Napoleon’s battles had uniforms to sell which went to clothe the fantastic mobs, republican and royalist, who drenched all Spanish America with blood. There were soldiers, too, whose trade of war was at an end in Europe, who gladly listened to Bolivar’s agents, who offered gorgeous uniforms and promised splendid wages--never paid--and who came to join in the war for “liberty.” Three hundred Germans and nearly six thousand British veterans joined Bolivar’s colors to fight for the freedom of America, and nearly all of them perished in battle or by disease. Bolivar was never without British officers, preferred British troops to all others, and in his later years really earned the loyal love they gave him, while they taught the liberator how to behave like a white man.

It was in 1819 that Bolivar led a force of two thousand five hundred men across a flooded prairie. For a week they were up to their knees, at times to their necks in water under a tropic deluge of rain, swimming a dozen rivers beset by alligators. The climate and starvation bore very heavily upon the British troops. Beyond the flood they climbed the eastern Andes and crossed the Paramo at a height of thirteen thousand feet, swept by an icy wind in blinding fog--hard going for Venezuelans.

An Irishman, Colonel Rook, commanded the British contingent. “All,” he reported, “was quite well with his corps, which had had quite a pleasant march” through the awful gorges and over the freezing Paramo. A Venezuelan officer remarked here that one-fourth of the men had perished.

“It was true,” said Rook, “but it really was a very good thing, for the men who had dropped out were all the wastrels and weaklings of the force.”

Great was the astonishment of the royalists when Bolivar dropped on them out of the clouds, and in the battle of Boyacá they were put to rout. Next day Colonel Rook had his arm cut off by the surgeons, chaffing them about the beautiful limb he was losing. He died of the operation, but the British legion went on from victory to victory, melting away like snow until at the end negroes and Indians filled its illustrious companies. Colombia, Venezuela and Equador, Peru and Bolivia were freed from the Spanish yoke and, in the main, released by Bolivar’s tireless, unfailing and undaunted courage. But they could not stand his braggart proclamations, would not have him or any man for master, began a series of squabbles and revolutions that have lasted ever since, and proved themselves unfit for the freedom Bolivar gave. He knew at the end that he had given his life for a myth. On the eighth December, 1830, he dictated his final proclamation and on the tenth received the last rites of the church, being still his old braggart self. “Colombians! my last wishes are for the welfare of the fatherland. If my death contributes to the cessation of party strife, and to the consolidation of the Union, I shall descend in peace to the grave.” On the seventeenth his troubled spirit passed.

LIV

A. D. 1812

THE ALMIRANTE COCHRANE

When Lieutenant Lord Thomas Cochrane commanded the brig of war _Speedy_, he used to carry about a whole broadside of her cannon-balls in his pocket. He had fifty-four men when he laid his toy boat alongside a Spanish frigate with thirty-two heavy guns and three hundred nineteen men, but the Spaniard could not fire down into his decks, whereas he blasted her with his treble-shotted pop-guns. Leaving only the doctor on board he boarded that Spaniard, got more than he bargained for, and would have been wiped out, but that a detachment of his sailors dressed to resemble black demons, charged down from the forecastle head. The Spaniards were so shocked that they surrendered.

For thirteen months the _Speedy_ romped about, capturing in all fifty ships, one hundred and twenty-two guns, five hundred prisoners. Then she gave chase to three French battle-ships by mistake, and met with a dreadful end.

In 1809, Cochrane, being a bit of a chemist, and a first-rate mechanic, was allowed to make fireworks hulks loaded with explosives--with which he attacked a French fleet in the anchorage at Aix. The fleet got into a panic and destroyed itself.

And all his battles read like fairy tales, for this long-legged, red-haired Scot, rivaled Lord Nelson himself in genius and daring. At war he was the hero and idol of the fleet, but in peace a demon, restless, fractious, fiendish in humor, deadly in rage, playing schoolboy jokes on the admiralty and the parliament. He could not be happy without making swarms of powerful enemies, and those enemies waited their chance.

In February, 1814, a French officer landed at Dover with tidings that the Emperor Napoleon had been slain by Cossacks. The messenger’s progress became a triumphal procession, and amid public rejoicings he entered London to deliver his papers at the admiralty. Bells pealed, cannon thundered, the stock exchange went mad with the rise of prices, while the messenger--a Mr. Berenger--sneaked to the lodgings of an acquaintance, Lord Cochrane, and borrowed civilian clothes.

His news was false, his despatch a forgery, he had been hired by Cochrane’s uncle, a stock-exchange speculator, to contrive the whole blackguardly hoax. Cochrane knew nothing of the plot, but for the mere lending of that suit of clothes, he was sentenced to the pillory, a year’s imprisonment, and a fine of a thousand pounds. He was struck from the rolls of the navy, expelled from the house of commons, his banner as a Knight of the Bath torn down and thrown from the doors of Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster. In the end he was driven to disgraceful exile and hopeless ruin.

Four years later Cochrane, commanding the Chilian navy, sailed from Valparaiso to fight the Spanish fleet. Running away from his mother, a son of his--Tom Cochrane, junior--aged five, contrived to sail with the admiral, and in his first engagement, was spattered with the blood and brains of a marine.

“I’m not hurt, papa,” said the imp, “the shot didn’t touch me. Jack says that the ball is not made that will hurt mama’s boy.” Jack proved to be right, but it was in that engagement that Cochrane earned his Spanish title, “The Devil.” Three times he attempted to take Callao from the Spaniards, then in disgusted failure dispersed his useless squadron, and went off with his flag ship to Valdivia. For lack of officers, he kept the deck himself until he dropped. When he went below for a nap, the lieutenant left a middy in command, but the middy went to sleep and the ship was cast away.

Cochrane got her afloat; then, with all his gunpowder wet, went off with his sinking wreck to attack Valdivia. The place was a Spanish stronghold with fifteen forts and one hundred and fifteen guns. Cochrane, preferring to depend on cold steel, left the muskets behind, wrecked his boats in the surf, let his men swim, led them straight at the Spaniards, stormed the batteries, and seized the city. So he found some nice new ships, and an arsenal to equip them, for his next attack on Callao.

He had a fancy for the frigate, _Esmeralda_, which lay in Callao--thought she would suit him for a cruiser. She happened to be protected by a Spanish fleet, and batteries mounting three hundred guns, but Cochrane did not mind. El Diablo first eased the minds of the Spaniards by sending away two out of his three small vessels, but kept the bulk of their men, and all their boats, a detail not observed by the weary enemy. His boarding party, two hundred and forty strong, stole into the anchorage at midnight, and sorely surprised the _Esmeralda_. Cochrane, first on board, was felled with the butt end of a musket, and thrown back into his boat grievously hurt, in addition to which he had a bullet through his thigh before he took possession of the frigate. The fleet and batteries had opened fire, but El Diablo noticed that two neutral ships protected themselves with a display of lanterns arranged as a signal, “Please don’t hit me.” “That’s good enough for me,” said Cochrane and copied those lights which protected the neutrals. When the bewildered Spaniards saw his lanterns also, they promptly attacked the neutrals. So Cochrane stole away with his prize.

Although the great sailor delivered Chili and Peru from the Spaniards, the patriots ungratefully despoiled him of all his pay and rewards. Cochrane has been described as “a destroying angel with a limited income and a turn for politics.” Anyway he was misunderstood, and left Chili disgusted, to attend to the liberation of Brazil from the Portuguese. But if the Chilians were thieves, the Brazilians proved to be both thieves and cowards. Reporting to the Brazilian government that all their cartridges, fuses, guns, powder, spars and sails, were alike rotten, and all their men an encumbrance, he dismantled a squadron to find equipment for a single ship, the _Pedro Primeiro_. This he manned with British and Yankee adventurers. He had two other small but fairly effective ships when he commenced to threaten Bahia. There lay thirteen Portuguese war-ships, mounting four hundred and eighteen guns, seventy merchant ships, and a garrison of several thousand men. El Diablo’s blockade reduced the whole to starvation, the threat of his fireworks sent them into convulsions, and their leaders resolved on flight to Portugal. So the troops were embarked, the rich people took ship with their treasure, and the squadron escorted them to sea, where Cochrane grinned in the offing. For fifteen days he hung in the rear of that fleet, cutting off ships as they straggled. He had not a man to spare for charge of his prizes, but when he caught a ship he staved her water casks, disabled her rigging so that she could only run before the wind back to Bahia, and threw every weapon overboard. He captured seventy odd ships, half the troops, all the treasure, fought and out-maneuvered the war fleet so that he could not be caught, and only let thirteen wretched vessels escape to Lisbon. Such a deed of war has never been matched in the world’s annals, and Cochrane followed it by forcing the whole of Northern Brazil to an abject surrender.

Like the patriots of Chili and Peru, the Brazilians gratefully rewarded their liberator by cheating him out of his pay; so next he turned to deliver Greece from the Turks. Very soon he found that even the Brazilians were perfect gentlemen compared with the Greek patriots, and the heart-sick man went home.

England was sorry for the way she had treated her hero, gave back his naval rank and made him admiral with command-in-chief of a British fleet at sea, restored his banner as a Knight of the Bath in Henry VII’s chapel, granted a pension, and at the end, found him a resting-place in the Abbey. On his father’s death, he succeeded to the earldom of Dundonald, and down to 1860, when the old man went to his rest, his life was devoted to untiring service. He was among the first inventors to apply coal gas to light English streets and homes; he designed the boilers long in use by the English navy; made a bitumen concrete for paving; and offered plans for the reduction of Sebastopol which would have averted all the horrors of the siege. Yet even to his eightieth year he was apt to shock and terrify all official persons, and when he was buried in the nave of the Abbey, Lord Brougham pronounced his strange obituary. “What,” he exclaimed at the grave side, “no cabinet minister, no officer of state to grace this great man’s funeral!” Perhaps they were still scared of the poor old hero.

LV

A.D. 1823

THE SOUTH SEA CANNIBALS

Far back in the long ago time New Zealand was a crowded happy land. Big Maori fortress villages crowned the hilltops, broad farms covered the hillsides; the chiefs kept a good table, cooking was excellent, and especially when prisoners were in season, the people feasted between sleeps, or, should provisions fail, sacked the next parish for a supply of meat. So many parishes were sacked and eaten, that in the course of time the chiefs led their tribes to quite a distance before they could find a nice fat edible village, but still the individual citizen felt crowded after meals, and all was well.

Then came the Pakehas, the white men, trading, with muskets for sale, and the tribe that failed to get a trader to deal with was very soon wiped out. A musket cost a ton of flax, and to pile up enough to buy one a whole tribe must leave its hill fortress to camp in unwholesome flax swamps. The people worked themselves thin to buy guns, powder and iron tools for farming, but they cherished their Pakeha as a priceless treasure in special charge of the chief, and if a white man was eaten, it was clear proof that he was entirely useless alive, or a quite detestable character. The good Pakehas became Maori warriors, a little particular as to their meat being really pig, but otherwise well mannered and popular.

Now of these Pakeha Maoris, one has left a book. He omitted his name from the book of _Old New Zealand_, and never mentioned dates, but tradition says he was Mr. F. C. Maning, and that he lived as a Maori and trader for forty years, from 1823 to 1863 when the work was published.

In the days when Mr. Maning reached the North Island a trader was valued at twenty times his weight in muskets, equivalent say, to the sum total of the British National Debt. Runaway sailors however, were quite cheap. “Two men of this description were hospitably entertained one night by a chief, a very particular friend of mine, who, to pay himself for his trouble and outlay, ate one of them next morning.”

Maning came ashore on the back of a warrior by the name of Melons, who capsized in an ebb tide running like a sluice, at which the white man, displeased, held the native’s head under water by way of punishment. When they got ashore Melons wanted to get even, so challenged the Pakeha to a wrestling match. Both were in the pink of condition, the Maori, twenty-five years of age, and a heavy-weight, the other a boy full of animal spirits and tough as leather. After the battle Melons sat up rather dazed, offered his hand, and venting his entire stock of English, said “How do you do?”

But then came a powerful chief, by name Relation-eater. “Pretty work this,” he began, “_good_ work. I won’t stand this not at all! not at all! not at all!” (The last sentence took three jumps, a step and a turn round, to keep correct time.) “Who killed the Pakeha? It was Melons. You are a nice man, killing _my_ Pakeha ... we shall be called the ‘Pakeha killkillers’; I shall be sick with shame; the Pakeha will run away; what if you had killed him dead, or broken his bones”.... (Here poor Melones burst out crying like an infant). “Where is the hat? Where the shoes? The Pakeha is robbed! he is murdered!” Here a wild howl from Melons.

The local trader took Mr. Maning to live with him, but it was known to the tribes that the newcomer really and truly belonged to Relation-eater. Not long had he been settled when there occurred a meeting between his tribe and another, a game of bluff, when the warriors of both sides danced the splendid Haka, most blood-curdling, hair-lifting of all ceremonials. Afterward old Relation-eater singled out the horrible savage who had begun the war-dance, and these two tender-hearted individuals for a full half-hour, seated on the ground hanging on each other’s necks, gave vent to a chorus of skilfully modulated howling. “So there was peace,” and during the ceremonies Maning came upon a circle of what seemed to be Maori chiefs, until drawing near he found that their nodding heads had nobody underneath. Raw heads had been stuck on slender rods, with cross sticks to carry the robes, “Looking at the ’eds, sir?” asked an English sailor. “’Eds was _werry_ scarce--they had to tattoo a slave a bit ago, and the villain ran away, tattooin’ and all!”

“What!”

“Bolted before he was fit to kill,” said the sailor, mournful to think how dishonest people could be.

Once the head chief, having need to punish a rebellious vassal, sent Relation-eater, who plundered and burned the offending village. The vassal decamped with his tribe.

“Well, about three months after this, about daylight I was aroused by a great uproar.... Out I ran at once and perceived that M--’s premises were being sacked by the rebellious vassal who ... was taking this means of revenging himself for the rough handling he had received from our chief. Men were rushing in mad haste through the smashed windows and doors, loaded with everything they could lay hands upon.... A large canoe was floating near to the house, and was being rapidly filled with plunder. I saw a fat old Maori woman who was washerwoman, being dragged along the ground by a huge fellow who was trying to tear from her grasp one of my shirts, to which she clung with perfect desperation. I perceived at a glance that the faithful old creature would probably save a sleeve.

“An old man-of-war’s man defending _his_ washing, called out, ‘Hit out, sir! ... our mob will be here in five minutes!’

“The odds were terrible, but ... I at once floored a native who was rushing by me.... I then perceived that he was one of our own people ... so to balance things I knocked down another! and then felt myself seized round the waist from behind.

“The old sailor was down now but fighting three men at once, while his striped shirt and canvas trousers still hung proudly on the fence.

“Then came our mob to the rescue and the assailants fled.

“Some time after this a little incident worth noting happened at my friend M--’s place. Our chief had for some time back a sort of dispute with another magnate.... The question was at last brought to a fair hearing at my friend’s house. The arguments on both sides were very forcible; so much so that in the course of the arbitration our chief and thirty of his principal witnesses were shot dead in a heap before my friend’s door, and sixty others badly wounded, and my friend’s house and store blown up and burnt to ashes.

“My friend was, however, consoled by hundreds of friends who came in large parties to condole with him, and who, as was quite correct in such cases, shot and ate all his stock, sheep, pigs, ducks, geese, fowls, etc., all in high compliment to himself; he felt proud.... He did not, however, survive these honors long.”

Mr. Maning took this poor gentleman’s place as trader, and earnestly studied native etiquette, on which his comments are always deliciously funny. Two young Australians were his guests when there arrived one day a Maori desperado who wanted blankets; and “to explain his views more clearly knocked both my friends down, threatened to kill them both with his tomahawk, then rushed into the bedroom, dragged out all the bedclothes, and burnt them on the kitchen fire.”

A few weeks later, Mr. Maning being alone, and reading a year-old Sydney paper, the desperado called. “‘Friend,’ said I; ‘my advice to you is to be off.’