Part 5
Fernão Mendes Pinto was a distant relative of Ananias. He sailed for India in 1537 “meanly accommodated.” At Diu he joined an expedition to watch the Turkish fleet in the Red Sea, and from Massawa was sent with letters to the king of Abyssinia. That was great luck, because the very black and more or less Christian kingdom was supposed to be the seat of the legendary, immortal, shadowy, Prester John. On his way back to Massawa the adventurer was wrecked, captured by Arabs, sold into slavery, bought by a Jew, and resold in the commercial city of Ormus where there were Christian buyers. He found his way to Goa, the capital of the Portuguese Indies, thence to Malacca, where he got a job as political agent in Sumatra. With this ended the dull period of his travels.
In those days there were ships manned by Portuguese rogues very good in port, but unpleasant to meet with at sea. They were armed with cannon, pots of wild fire, unslaked lime to be flung in the Chinese manner, stones, javelins, arrows, half-pikes, axes and grappling irons, all used to collect toll from Chinese, Malay, or even Arab merchants. Pinto found that this life suited him, and long afterward, writing as a penitent sinner, described the fun of torturing old men and children: “Made their brains fly out of their heads with a cord” or looked on while the victims died raving “like mad dogs.” It was great sport to surprise some junk at anchor, and fling pots of gunpowder among the sleeping crew, then watch them dive and drown. “The captain of one such junk was ‘a notorious Pyrat,’ and Pinto complacently draws the moral ‘Thus you see how it pleased God, out of His Divine justice to make the arrogant confidence of this cursed dog a means to chastise him for his cruelties.’”
So Christians set an example to the heathen.
Antonio de Faria, Pinto’s captain, had vowed to wipe out Kwaja Hussain, a Moslem corsair from Gujerat in Western India. In search of Hussain he had many adventures in the China seas, capturing pirate crews, dashing out their brains, and collecting amber, gold and pearls. Off Hainan he so frightened the local buccaneers that they proclaimed him their king and arranged to pay him tribute.
Luckily for them Faria’s ship was cast away upon a desert island. The crew found a deer which had been left by a tiger, half eaten; their shouts would scare the gulls as they flew overhead, so that the birds dropped such fish as they had captured; and then by good luck they discovered a Chinese junk whose people, going ashore, had left her in charge of an old man and a child. Amid the clamors of the Chinese owners Faria made off with this junk. He was soon at the head of a new expedition in quest of that wicked pirate, Kwaja Hussain. This ambition was fulfilled, and with holds full of plunder the virtuous Faria put into Liampo. Back among the Christians he had a royal welcome, but actually blushed when a sermon was preached in his honor. The preacher waxed too eloquent, “whereupon some of his friends plucked him three or four times by the surplice, for to make him give over.” It seems that even godly Christian pirates have some sense of humor.
Once in the Malay states, Pinto and a friend of his, a Moslem, were asked to dine with a bigwig, also a True Believer. At dinner they spoke evil about the local rajah, who got wind of the slander. Pinto watched both of these Moslem gentlemen having their feet sawn off, then their hands, and finally their heads. As for himself, he talked about his rich relations, claiming Dom Pedro de Faria, a very powerful noble, as his uncle. He said the factor had embezzled his uncle’s money and fully deserved his fate. “All this,” says Pinto, “was extemporized on the spur of the moment, not knowing well what I said.” The liar got off.
Pinto’s career as a pirate ended in shipwreck, capture, slavery and a journey in China where he was put to work on the repairing of the Great Wall. He was at a city called Quinsay in 1544 when Altan Khan, king of the Tumeds--a Mongolian horde--swept down out of the deserts.
The Mongols sacked Quinsay, and Pinto as a prisoner was brought before Altan Khan who was besieging Pekin. When the siege was raised he accompanied the Mongol army on its retreat into the heart of Asia. In time he found favor with his masters and was allowed to accompany an embassy to Cochin China. On this journey he saw some cannon with iron breeches and wooden muzzles made, he was told, by certain Almains (Germans) who came out of Muscovy (Russia), and had been banished by the king of Denmark. Then comes Pinto’s account of Tibet, of Lhasa, and the Grand Lama, and so to Cochin China, and the sea. If it is true, Pinto made a very great journey, and he claims to have been afterward with Xavier in Japan. In the end he returned to Lisbon after twenty-one years of adventure in which he was five times shipwrecked, and seventeen times sold as a slave.
It is disheartening to have so little space for the great world of Portuguese adventure in the Indies, where Camoens, one of the world’s great poets, wrote the immortal _Lusiads_.
However ferocious, these Portuguese adventurers were loyal, brave and strong. They opened the way of Europe to the East Indies, they Christianized and civilized Brazil. Once, at sea, a Portuguese lady spoke to me of England’s good-humored galling disdain toward her people. “Ah, you English!” she cried. “What you are, we were once! what we are, you will be!”
_Vasco da Gama and his Successors_, by K. G. Jayne. Methuen.
X
A. D. 1841
RAJAH BROOKE
Borneo is a hot forest about five hundred miles long, and as wide, inhabited by connoisseurs called Dyaks, keen collectors. They collect human heads and some of their pieces are said to be very valuable. They are a happy little folk with most amusing manners and customs. Here is their ritual for burial of the dead:
“When a man dies his friends and relations meet in the house and take their usual seats around the room. The deceased is then brought in attired in his best clothes, with a cigar fixed in his mouth; and, being placed on the mat in the same manner as when alive, his betel box is set by his side. The friends go through the form of conversing with him, and offer him the best advice concerning his future proceedings, and then, having feasted, the body is deposited in a large coffin and kept in the house for several months.”
The habits of the natives have been interfered with by the Malays, who conquered most of them and carved their island up into kingdoms more or less civilized, but not managed at all in the interests of the Dyaks. These kingdoms were decayed and tumbling to pieces when the Dutch came in to help, and helped themselves to the whole of Borneo except the northwestern part. They pressingly invited themselves there also, but the Malay rajah kept putting them off with all sorts of polite excuses.
While the rajah’s minister was running short of excuses to delay the Dutch an English yacht arrived in Sarawak. The owner was Mr. James Brooke, who had been an officer in the East India Company, but being hit with a slug in the lungs during the first Burma war, was retired with a pension of seventy pounds for wounds. Afterward he came into a fortune of thirty thousand pounds, took to yachting, traveled a great deal in search of adventure, and so in 1839 arrived in Sarawak on the lookout for trouble.
An Englishman of gentle birth is naturally expected to tell the truth, to be clean in all his dealings, to keep his temper, and not to show his fears. Not being a beastly cad, Brooke as a matter of course conformed to the ordinary standards and, having no worries, was able to do so cheerfully. One may meet men of this stock, size and pattern by thousands the world over, but in a decayed Malay state, at war with the Dyaks ashore and the pirates afloat, Brooke was a phenomenon just as astonishing as a first-class comet, an earthquake eruption, or a cyclone. His arrival was the only important event in the whole history of North Borneo. The rajah sought his advice in dealing with the Dutch, the Dyaks and the pirates. The Malays, Dyaks, pirates and everybody else consulted him as to their dealings with the rajah. On his second visit he took a boat’s crew from his yacht and went to the seat of war. There he tried to the verge of tears to persuade the hostile forces either to fight or make friends, and when nobody could be induced to do anything at all, he, with his boat’s crew and one native warrior, stormed the Dyak position, putting the enemy to total rout and flight. Luckily, nobody was hurt, for even a cut finger would have spoiled the perfect bloodlessness of Brooke’s victory. Then the Dyaks surrendered to Brooke. Afterward the pirate fleet appeared at the capital, not to attack the rajah, but to be inspected by Brooke, and when he had patted the pirates they went away to purr. Moreover the rajah offered to hand over his kingdom to Brooke as manager, and the Englishman expected him to keep his word. Brooke brought a shipload of stores in payment for a cargo of manganese, but the rajah was so contented with that windfall that he forgot to send to his mines for the ore.
Further up the coast a British ship was destroyed by lightning, and her crew got ashore where they were held as captives pending a large ransom. Even when the captain’s wife had a baby the local bigwig thereabouts saw a new chance of plunder, and stole the baby-clothes. Then the shipwrecked mariners sent a letter to Brooke appealing for his help; but nothing on earth could induce the spineless boneless rajah to send the relief he had promised. Then Brooke wrote to Singapore whence the East India Company despatched a war-ship which rescued the forty castaways.
The rajah’s next performance was to arrange for a percentage with two thousand, five hundred robbers who proposed to plunder and massacre his own subjects. Brooke from his yacht stampeded the raiders with a few rounds from the big guns--blank of course. Brooke was getting rather hard up, and could not spare ball ammunition on weekdays.
So King Muda Hassim lied, cheated, stole, betrayed, and occasionally murdered--a mean rogue, abject, cringing to Brooke, weeping at the Englishman’s threats to depart, holding his throne so long as the white yacht gave him prestige; but all this with pomp and circumstance, display of gems and gold, a gorgeous retinue, plenty of music, and royal salutes on the very slightest pretext. But all the population was given over to rapine and slaughter, and the forest was closing in on ruined farms. The last and only hope of the nation was in Brooke.
Behind every evil in the state was Makota, the prime minister, a polite and gentlemanly rascal, and at the end of two years he annoyed Brooke quite seriously by putting arsenic in the interpreter’s rice. Brooke cleared his ship for action, and with a landing party under arms marched to the palace gates. In a few well-chosen words he explained Makota’s villainy, showed that neither the rajah’s life nor his own was safe, and that the only course was to proclaim Brooke as governor.
No shot was fired, no blow was struck, but Makota’s party vanished, the villain fled, the rajah began to behave, the government of the country was handed over to the Englishman amid great popular rejoicings. “My darling mother,” he wrote, “I am very poor, but I want some things from home very much; so I must trust to your being rich enough to afford them to me. Imprimis, a circle for taking the latitude; secondly, an electrifying machine of good power; thirdly, a large magic lantern; fourthly, a rifle which carries fifty balls; and last, a peep-show. The circle and rifle I want very much; and the others are all for political purposes.” Did ever king begin his reign with such an act as that letter?
But then, look at the government he replaced: “The sultan and his chiefs rob all classes of Malays to the utmost of their power; the Malays rob the Dyaks, and the Dyaks hide their goods as much as they dare, consistent with the safety of their wives and children.” Brooke found his private income a very slender fund when he had to pay the whole expense of governing a kingdom until the people recovered from their ruin.
February the first, 1842, a pirate chief called to make treaty with the new king. “He inquired, if a tribe pirated on my territory what I intended to do. My answer was ‘to enter their country and lay it waste.’ ‘But,’ he asked me again, ‘you will give me--your friend--leave to steal a few heads occasionally?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I shall have a hundred Sakarran heads for every one you take here!’ He recurred to this request several times--‘just to steal one or two’-as a schoolboy asks for apples.”
Brooke used to give the pirates his laughing permission to go to Singapore and attack the English.
“The Santah River,” he wrote, “is famous for its diamonds. The workers seem jealous and superstitious, disliking noise, particularly laughter, as it is highly offensive to the spirit who presides over the diamonds.... A Chinese Mohammedan with the most solemn face requested me to give him an old letter; and he engraved some Chinese characters, which, being translated signify ‘Rajah Muda Hassim, James Brooke, and Hadju Ibrahim present their compliments to the spirit and request his permission to work at the mine.’”
There were great doings when the sultan of Borneo had Mr. Brooke proclaimed king in Sarawak. Then he went off to the Straits Settlements, where he made friends with Henry Keppel, captain of H. M. S. _Dido_, a sportsman who delighted in hunting pirates, and accepted Brooke’s invitation to a few days’ shooting. Keppel describes the scene of Brooke’s return to his kingdom, received by all the chiefs with undisguised delight, mingled with gratitude and respect for their newly-elected ruler. “The scene was both novel and exciting, presenting to us--just anchored in a large fresh water river, and surrounded by a densely wooded jungle--the whole surface of the water covered with canoes and boats dressed with colored silken flags, filled with natives beating their tom-toms, and playing on wind instruments, with the occasional discharge of firearms. To them it must have been equally striking to witness the _Dido_ anchored almost in the center of their town, her mastheads towering above the highest trees of that jungle, the loud report of her heavy thirty-two-pounder guns, the manning aloft to furl sails of one hundred fifty seamen in their clean white dresses, and with the band playing. I was anxious that Mr. Brooke should land with all the honors due to so important a personage, which he accordingly did, under a salute.”
It was a little awkward that the _Dido_ struck a rock and sank, but she chose a convenient spot just opposite Mr. Brooke’s house, so that Brooke’s officers and those of the ship formed one mess there, a band of brothers, while the damage was being repaired. Then came the promised sport, a joint boat expedition up all sorts of queer back channels and rivers fouled by the pirates with stakes and booms under fire of the artillery in their hill fortresses. The sportsmen burst the booms, charged the hills, stormed the forts, burned out the pirates and obtained their complete submission. Brooke invited them all to a pirate conference at his house and, just as with the land rogues, charmed them out of their skins. He fought like a man, but his greatest victories were scored by perfect manners.
The next adventure was a visit from the Arctic explorer, Sir Edward Belcher, sent by the British government to inspect Brooke’s kingdom, now a peaceful and happy country.
Later came Admiral Sir Thomas Cochrane with a squadron to smash up a few more pirates, and the smashing of pirates continued for many years a popular sport for the navy. The pirate states to the northward became in time the British colonies of Labuan, and North Borneo, but Sarawak is still a protected Malay state, the hereditary kingdom of Sir James Brooke and his descendants. May that dynasty reign so long as the sun shines.
XI
A. D. 1842
THE SPIES
I
From earliest childhood Eldred Pottinger was out of place in crowded England. Gunpowder is good exciting stuff to play with, and there could be no objection to his blowing up himself and his little brother, because that was all in the family; but when he mined the garden wall and it fell on a couple of neighbors, they highly took offense; and when his finely invented bomb went off at Addiscombe College he rose to the level of a public nuisance. On the whole it must have been a relief to his friends when he went to India. There he had an uncle, the president in Scinde, a shrewd man who shipped young Pottinger to the greatest possible distance in the hinder parts of Afghanistan.
The political situation in Afghanistan was the usual howling chaos of oriental kingdoms, and the full particulars would bore the reader just as they bored me. It was Pottinger’s business to find out and report the exact state of affairs at a time when any white man visiting the country was guaranteed, if and when found, to have his throat cut. Being clever at native languages, with a very foxy shrewdness, the young spy set off, disguised as a native horse dealer, and reached Cabul, the Afghan capital.
The reigning ameer was Dost Mahomet, who was not on speaking terms with Kamran, king of Herat, and Pottinger’s job was to get through to Herat without being caught by Dost. The horse-copper disguise was useless now, so Pottinger became a Mahomedan _syed_, or professional holy man. He sent his attendants and horses ahead, slipped out of the capital on foot by night and made his way to his camp. So he reached the country of the Hazareh tribes where his whole expedition was captured by the principal robber Jakoob Beg, who did a fairly good business in selling travelers, as slaves, except when they paid blackmail. “The chief,” says Pottinger, “was the finest Hazareh I had seen, and appeared a well-meaning, sensible person. He, however, was quite in the hands of his cousin--an ill-favored, sullen and treacherous-looking rascal. I, by way of covering my silence, and to avoid much questioning, took to my beads and kept telling them with great perseverance, much to the increase of my reputation as a holy personage.”
The trouble was that Pottinger and his devout followers were of the Sounee faith, whereas the robber castle was of the Sheeah persuasion. The difference was something like that between our Catholics and Protestants, and Pottinger was like a Methodist minister trying to pass himself off for a cardinal without knowing the little points of etiquette. The prisoners prompted one another into all sorts of ridiculous blunders, so that the ill-favored cousin suspected Pottinger of being a fraud. “Why he may be a Feringhee himself,” said the cousin. “I have always heard that the Hindustanees are black, and this man is fairer than we are.” But then the Feringhees--the British--were supposed to be monsters, and Pottinger was in no way monstrous to look at, so that he managed to talk round the corner, and at the end of a week ransomed his party with the gift of a fine gun to the chief. They set off very blithely into the mountains, but had not gone far when the chief’s riders came romping in pursuit, and herded them back, presumably to have their throats cut according to local manners and customs. The chief, it turned out, had been unable to make the gun go off, but finding it worked all right if handled properly dismissed the spy with his blessing. Eighteen days’ journey brought him to Herat, where he felt perfectly safe, strolling unarmed in the country outside the walls, until a gang of slave catchers made him an easy prey. His follower, Synd Ahmed, scared them off by shouting to an imaginary escort.
Shah Kamran with his vizier Yar Mahomed had been out of town, but on their return to Herat, Pottinger introduced himself to the king as a British officer, and his gift of a brace of pistols was graciously accepted.
Not long afterward a Persian army came up against Herat, and with that force there were Russian officers. For once the Heratis could look for no help from Afghanistan; and for once this mighty fortress, the key to the gates of India, was guarded by a cur. If Herat fell the way was open for Russia, the ancient road to India of all the conquerors. There is the reason why the British had sent a spy to Herat.
The Heratis were quick to seek the advice of the British officer who organized the defense and in the end took charge, the one competent man in the garrison. Shah Kamran sent him with a flag of truce to the Persian army. The Persian soldiers hailed him with rapture, thinking they would soon get home to their wives and families; they patted his legs, they caressed his horse, they shouted “Bravo! Bravo! Welcome! The English were always friends of the king of kings!”
So Pottinger was brought before the shah of Persia, who would accept no terms except surrender, which the Englishman ridiculed. He went back to the city, and the siege went on for months.
A shell burst the house next door to his quarters, but he took no harm. One day he leaned against a loophole in the ramparts, watching a Persian attempt to spring a mine, and as he moved away his place was taken by a eunuch who at once got a ball in the lungs. He had narrow escapes without end.
At the end of six months, June twenty-fourth, 1838, the Persians tried to carry the place by assault. “At four points the assault was repulsed, but at the fifth point the storming column threw itself into the trench of the lower fausse-braye. The struggle was brief but bloody. The defenders fell at their posts to a man, and the work was carried by the besiegers. Encouraged by this first success, the storming party pushed on up the slope, but a galling fire from the garrison met them as they advanced. The officers and men of the column were mown down; there was a second brief and bloody struggle, and the upper fausse-braye was carried, while a few of the most daring of the assailants, pushing on in advance of their comrades, gained the head of the breach. But now Deen Mahomed came down with the Afghan reserve, and thus recruited the defenders gathered new heart, so that the Persians in the breach were driven back. Again and again with desperate courage they struggled to effect a lodgment, only to be repulsed and thrown back in confusion upon their comrades, who were pressing on behind. The conflict was fierce, the issue doubtful. Now the breach was well-nigh carried; and now the stormers, recoiling from the shock of the defense, fell back upon the exterior slope of the fausse-braye.