Part 6
“Startled by the noise of the assault Yar Mahomed (the vizier) had risen up, left his quarters, and ridden down to the works. Pottinger went forth at the same time and on the same errand. Giving instructions to his dependents to be carried out in the event of his falling in the defense, he hastened to join the vizier.... As they neared the point of the attack the garrison were seen retreating by twos and threes; others were quitting the works on the pretext of carrying off the wounded.... Pottinger was eager to push on to the breach; Yar Mahomed sat himself down. The vizier had lost heart; his wonted high courage and collectedness had deserted him. Astonished and indignant ... the English officer called upon the vizier again and again to rouse himself. The Afghan chief rose up and advanced further into the works, and neared the breach where the conflict was raging.... Yar Mahomed called upon his men in God’s name to fight; but they wavered and stood still. Then his heart failed him again. He turned back, said he would go for aid.... Alarmed by the backwardness of their chief the men were now retreating in every direction.” Pottinger swore.
Yar roused himself, again advanced, but again wavered, and a third time Pottinger by word and deed put him to shame. “He reviled, he threatened, he seized him by the arm and dragged him forward to the breach.” Now comes the fun, and we can forsake the tedious language of the official version. Yar, hounded to desperation by Pottinger, seized a staff, rushed like a wildcat on the retreating soldiers, and so horrified them that they bolted back over the breach down the outside into the face of the Persians. And the Persians fled! Herat was saved.
An envoy came from the Persian army to explain that it was infamous of the Shah Kamran to have an infidel in charge of the defense. “Give him up,” said the Persians, “and we’ll raise the siege.” But the shah was not in a position to surrender Pottinger. That gentleman might take it into his head to surrender the shah of Herat.
Another six months of siege, with famine, mutiny and all the usual worries of beleaguered towns finished Pottinger’s work, the saving of Herat.
II
Now we take up the life of another spy, also an army officer, old Alexander Burnes. At eighteen he had been adjutant of his regiment and rose very steadily from rank to rank until he was sent as an envoy to Runjeet Singh, the ruler of Punjab, and to the ameers of Scinde. In those days Northwestern India was an unknown region and Burnes was pioneer of the British power.
In 1832 he set out on his second mission through Afghanistan, Bokhara and Persia. See how he wrote from Cabul: “I do not despair of reaching Istamboul (Constantinople) in safety. They may seize me and sell me for a slave, but no one will attack me for my riches.... I have no tent, no chair or table, no bed, and my clothes altogether amount to the value of one pound sterling. You would disown your son if you saw him. My dress is purely Asiatic, and since I came into Cabul has been changed to that of the lowest orders of the people. My head is shaved of its brown locks, and my beard dyed black grieves ... for the departed beauty of youth. I now eat my meals with my hands, and greasy digits they are, though I must say in justification, that I wash before and after meals.... I frequently sleep under a tree, but if a villager will take compassion on me I enter his house. I never conceal that I am a European, and I have as yet found the character advantageous to my comfort. The people know me by the name of Sekunder, which is the Persian for Alexander.... With all my assumed poverty I have a bag of ducats round my waist, and bills for as much money as I choose to draw.... When I go into company I put my hand on my heart, and say with all humility to the master of the house, ‘Peace be unto thee,’ according to custom, and then I squat myself down on the ground. This familiarity has given me an insight into the character of the people ... kind-hearted and hospitable, they have no prejudices against a Christian and none against our nation. When they ask me if I eat pork, I of course shudder, and say that it is only outcasts that commit such outrages. God forgive me! for I am very fond of bacon.... I am well mounted on a good horse in case I should find it necessary to take to my heels. My whole baggage on earth goes on one mule, which my servant sits supercargo.... I never was in better spirits.”
After his wonderful journey Burnes was sent to England to make his report to the government, and King William IV must needs hear the whole of the story at Brighton pavilion.
The third journey of this great spy was called the commercial mission to Cabul. There he learned that the Persian siege of Herat was being more or less conducted by Russian officers. Russians swarmed at the court of Dost Mahomed, and an ambassador from the czar was there trying to make a treaty.
Great was the indignation and alarm in British India, and for fear of a Russian invasion in panic haste the government made a big famous blunder, for without waiting to know how Dost was fooling the Russians, an army was sent through the terrible Bolan Pass. That sixty-mile abyss with hanging walls belongs to the Pathans, the fiercest and wildest of all the tribes of men. The army climbed through the death trap, marched, starving, on from Quetta to Candahar and then advanced on Cabul. But Dost’s son Akbar held the great fortress of Ghuznee, a quite impregnable place that had to be taken.
One night while a sham attack was made on the other side of the fortress, Captain Thomson placed nine hundred pounds of gunpowder at the foot of a walled-up gate, and then touched off the charge. The twenty-first light infantry climbed over the smoking ruins and at the head of his storming column Colonel Dennie, in three hours’ fighting, took the citadel. Dost Mahomed fled, and the British entered Cabul to put a puppet sovereign on the throne.
Cabul was a live volcano where English women gave dances. There were cricket matches, theatricals, sports. The governor-general in camp gave a state dinner in honor of Major Pottinger, who had come in from the siege of Herat. During the reception of the guests a shabby Afghan watched, leaning against a door-post, and the court officials were about to remove this intruder when the governor-general approached leading his sister. “Let me present you,” said Lord Auckland, “to Eldred Pottinger, the hero of Herat.” This shabby Afghan was the guest of honor, but nobody would listen to his warnings, or to the warnings of Sir Alexander Burnes, assistant resident. Only the two spies knew what was to come. Then the volcano blew up.
Burnes had a brother staying with him in Cabul, also his military secretary; and when the mob, savage, excited, bent on massacre, swarmed round his house he spoke to them from the balcony. While he talked Lieutenant Broadfoot fell at his side, struck by a ball in the chest. The stables were on fire, the mob filled his garden. He offered to pay then in cash for his brother’s life and his own, so a Cashmiri volunteered to save them in disguise. They put on native clothes, they slipped into the garden, and then their guide shouted, “This is Sekunder Burnes!” The two brothers were cut to pieces.
Pottinger was political agent at Kohistan to the northward, and when the whole Afghan nation rose in revolt his fort was so sorely beset that he and his retinue stole away in the dark, joining a Ghoorka regiment. But the regiment was also beset, and its water supply cut off. Pottinger fought the guns; the men repelled attacks by night and day until worn out; dying of thirst in an intolerable agony the regiment broke, scattering into the hills. Only a few men rallied round Pottinger to fight through to Cabul, and he was fearfully wounded, unable to command. Of his staff and the Ghoorka regiment only five men were alive when they entered Cabul.
Our officer commanding at Cabul was not in good health, but his death was unfortunately delayed while the Afghans murdered men, women and children, and the British troops, for lack of a leader, funked. Envoys waited on Akbar Khan, and were murdered. The few officers who kept their heads were without authority, blocked at every turn by cowards, by incompetents. Then the council of war made treaty with Akbar, giving him all the guns except six, all the treasure, three officers as hostages, bills drawn on India for forty thousand rupees, the honor of their country, everything for safe conduct in their disgrace. Dying of cold and hunger, the force marched into the Khoord-Cabul Pass, and at the end of three days the married officers were surrendered with their wives and children. Of the sixteen thousand men three-fourths were dead when the officer commanding and the gallant Brigadier Skelton were given up as hostages to Akbar. The survivors pushed on through the Jugduluk Pass, which the Afghans had barricaded, and there was the final massacre. Of the whole army, one man, Doctor Brydon, on a starved pony, sinking with exhaustion, rode in through the gates of Fort Jellalabad.
The captured general had sent orders for the retreat of the Jellalabad garrison through the awful defiles of the Khyber Pass in face of a hostile army, and in the dead of winter; but General Sale, commanding, was not such a fool. For three months he had worked his men to desperation rebuilding the fortress, and now when he saw the white tents of Akbar’s camp he was prepared for a siege. That day an earthquake razed the whole fortress into a heap of ruins, but the garrison rebuilt the walls. Then they sallied and, led by Henry Havelock, assaulted Akbar’s camp, smashed his army to flying fragments, captured his guns, baggage, standards, ammunition and food. Nine days later the bands of the garrison marched out to meet a relieving army from India. They were playing an old tune, _Oh, but ye’ve been lang o’ comin’_.
Meanwhile the British prisoners, well treated, were hurried from fort to fort, with some idea of holding them for sale at so much a slave, until they managed to bribe an Afghan chief. The bribed man led a revolt against Akbar, and one chief after another joined him, swearing on the Koran allegiance to Eldred Pottinger. When Akbar fell, Pottinger marched as leader of the revolted chiefs on the way to Cabul. One day, as the ladies and children were resting in an old fort for shelter during the great heat of the afternoon, they heard the tramp of horsemen, and in the dead silence of a joy and gratitude too great for utterance, received the relieving force.
XII
A. D. 1842
A YEAR’S ADVENTURES
A thousand adventures are taking place every day, all at once in the several continents and the many seas. A few are reported, many are noted in the private journals of adventurers, most of them are just taken as a matter of course in the day’s work, but nobody has ever attempted to make a picture of all the world’s adventures for a day or a year.
Let us make magic. Any date will do, or any year. Here for instance is a date--the twelfth of September, 1842--that will serve our purpose as well as any other.
In Afghanistan a British force of twenty-six thousand people had perished, an army of vengeance had marched to the rescue of Major Pottinger, Lady Sale, Lady McNaughton and other captives held by the Afghan chiefs. On September twelfth they were rescued.
In China the people had refused to buy our Indian opium, so we carefully and methodically bombarded all Chinese seaports until she consented to open them to foreign trade. Then Major Pottinger’s uncle, Sir Henry, made a treaty which the Chinese emperor signed on September eighth.
In the Malacca Straits Captain Henry Keppel of H. M. S. _Dido_ was busy smashing up pirates.
In Tahiti poor little Queen Pomaré, being in childbed, was so bullied by the French admiral that she surrendered her kingdom to France on September ninth. Next morning her child was born, but her kingdom was gone forever.
In South Africa Captain Smith made a disgraceful attack upon the Boers at Port Natal, and on June twenty-sixth they got a tremendous thrashing which put an end to the republic of Natalia. In September they began to settle down as British subjects, not at all content.
Norfolk Island is a scrap of paradise, about six miles by four, lying nine hundred miles from Sydney, in Australia. In 1842 it was a convict settlement, and on June twenty-first the brig _Governor Philip_ was to sail for Sydney, having landed her stores at the island. During the night she stood off and on, and two prisoners coming on deck at dawn for a breath of air noticed that discipline seemed slack, although a couple of drowsy sentries guarded their hatchway. Within a few minutes the prisoners were all on deck. One sentry was disarmed, the other thrown overboard. Two soldiers off duty had a scuffle with the mutineers, but one took refuge in the main chains, while the other was drowned trying to swim ashore. The sergeant in charge ran on deck and shot a mutineer before he was knocked over, stunned. As to the seamen, they ran into the forecastle.
The prisoners had now control of the ship, but none of them knew how to handle their prize, so they loosed a couple of sailors and made them help. Woolfe, one of the convicts, then rescued a soldier who was swimming alongside. The officers and soldiers aft were firing through the grated hatches and wounded several convicts, until they were allayed with a kettle of boiling water. So far the mutiny had gone off very nicely, but now the captain, perched on the cabin table, fired through the woodwork at a point where he thought a man was standing. By luck the bullet went through the ringleader’s mouth and blew out the back of his head, whereon a panic seized the mutineers, who fled below hatches. The sailor at the wheel released the captain, and the afterguard recaptured the ship. One mutineer had his head blown off, and the rest surrendered. The whole deck was littered with the wounded and the dying and the dead, and there were not many convicts left. In the trial at Sydney, Wheelan, who proved innocent, was spared, also Woolfe for saving a soldier’s life, but four were hanged, meeting their fate like men.
It was in August that the sultan of Borneo confirmed Mr. James Brooke as rajah of Sarawak, and the new king was extremely busy executing robbers, rescuing shipwrecked mariners from slavery, reopening old mines for diamonds, gold and manganese. “I breathe peace and comfort to all who obey,” so he wrote to his mother, “and wrath and fury to the evil-doer.”
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Captain Ross was in the Antarctic, coasting the great ice barrier. Last year he had given to two tall volcanoes the names of his ships, the _Erebus_ and _Terror_. This year on March twelfth in a terrific gale with blinding snow at midnight the two ships tried to get shelter under the lee of an iceberg, but the _Terror_ rammed the _Erebus_ so that her bow-sprit, fore topmast and a lot of smaller spars were carried away, and she was jammed against the wall of the berg totally disabled. She could not make sail and had no room to wear round, so she sailed out backward, one of the grandest feats of seamanship on record; then, clear of the danger, steered between two bergs, her yard-arms almost scraping both of them, until she gained the smoother water to leeward, where she found her consort.
* * * * *
In Canada the British governor set up a friendship between the French Canadians and our government which has lasted ever since. That was on the eighth of September, but on the fifth another British dignitary sailed for home, having generously given a large slice of Canada to the United States.
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In Hayti there was an earthquake, in Brazil a revolution; in Jamaica a storm on the tenth which wrecked H. M. S. _Spitfire_, and in the western states Mount Saint Helen’s gave a fine volcanic eruption.
Northern Mexico was invaded by two filibustering expeditions from the republic of Texas, and both were captured by the Mexicans. There were eight hundred fifty prisoners, some murdered for fun, the rest marched through Mexico exposed to all sorts of cruelty and insult before they were lodged in pestilence-ridden jails. Captain Edwin Cameron and his people on the way to prison overpowered the escort and fled to the mountains, whence some of them escaped to Texas. But the leader and most of his men being captured, President Santa Ana arranged that they should draw from a bag of beans, those who got black beans to be shot. Cameron drew a white bean, but was shot all the same. One youth, G. B. Crittenden, drew a white bean, but gave it to a comrade saying, “You have a wife and children; I haven’t, and I can afford to risk another chance.” Again he drew white and lived to be a general in the great Civil War.
General Green’s party escaped by tunneling their way out of the castle of Perot, but most of the prisoners perished in prison of hunger and disease. The British and American ministers at the City of Mexico won the release of the few who were left alive.
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In 1842 Sir James Simpson, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with his bell-topper hat and his band, came by canoe across the northern wilds to the Pacific Coast. From San Francisco he sailed for Honolulu in the Sandwich Islands, where the company had a large establishment under Sir John Petty. On April sixteenth he arrived in the H. B. ship _Cowlitz_ at the capital of Russian America. “Of all the drunken as well as the dirty places,” says he, “that I had ever visited, New Archangel was the worst. On the holidays in particular, of which, Sundays included, there are one hundred sixty-five in the year, men, women and even children were to be seen staggering about in all directions drunk.” Simpson thought all the world, though, of the Russian bishop.
The Hudson’s Bay Company had a lease from the Russians of all the fur-trading forts of Southeastern Alaska, and one of these was the Redoubt Saint Diogenes. There Simpson found a flag of distress, gates barred, sentries on the bastions and two thousand Indians besieging the fort. Five days ago the officer commanding, Mr. McLoughlin, had made all hands drunk and ran about saying he was going to be killed. So one of the voyagers leveled a rifle and shot him dead. On the whole the place was not well managed.
From New Archangel (Sitka) the Russian Lieutenant Zagoskin sailed in June for the Redoubt Saint Michael on the coast of Behring Sea. Smallpox had wiped out all the local Eskimos, so the Russian could get no guide for the first attempt to explore the river Yukon. A day’s march south he was entertained at an Eskimo camp where there was a feast, and the throwing of little bladders into the bay in honor of Ug-iak, spirit of the sea. On December ninth Zagoskin started inland--“A driving snow-storm set in blinding my eyes ... a blade of grass seventy feet distant had the appearance of a shrub, and sloping valleys looked like lakes with high banks, the illusion vanishing upon nearer approach. At midnight a terrible snow-storm began, and in the short space of ten minutes covered men, dogs and sledges, making a perfect hill above them. We sat at the foot of a hill with the wind from the opposite side and our feet drawn under us to prevent them from freezing, and covered with our parkas. When we were covered up by the snow we made holes with sticks through to the open air. In a short time the warmth of the breath and perspiration melted the snow, so that a man-like cave was formed about each individual.” So they continued for five hours, calling to one another to keep awake, for in that intense cold to sleep was death. There we may as well leave them, before we catch cold from the draft.
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Fremont was exploring from the Mississippi Valley a route for emigrants to Oregon, and in that journey climbed the Rocky Mountains to plant Old Glory on one of the highest peaks. He was a very fine explorer, and not long afterward conquered the Mexican state of California, completing the outline of the modern United States. But Fremont’s guide will be remembered long after Fremont is forgotten, for he was the greatest of American frontiersmen, the ideal of modern chivalry, Kit Carson. Of course he must have a chapter to himself.
XIII
A.D. 1843
KIT CARSON
Once Colonel Inman, an old frontiersman, bought a newspaper which had a full page picture of Kit Carson. The hero stood in a forest, a gigantic figure in a buckskin suit, heavily armed, embracing a rescued heroine, while at his feet sprawled six slain Indian braves, his latest victims.
“What do you think of this?” said the colonel handing the picture to a delicate little man, who wiped his spectacles, studied the work of art, and replied in a gentle drawl, “That may be true, but I hain’t got no recollection of it.” And so Kit Carson handed the picture back.
He stood five feet six, and looked frail, but his countrymen, and all the boys of all the world think of this mighty frontiersman as a giant.
At seventeen he was a remarkably green and innocent boy for his years, his home a log cabin on the Missouri frontier. Past the door ran the trail to the west where trappers went by in buckskin, traders among the Indians, and soldiers for the savage wars of the plains.
One day came Colonel S. Vrain, agent of a big fur-trading company, with his long train of wagons hitting the Santa Fe trail. Kit got a job with that train, to herd spare stock, hunt bison, mount guard and fight Indians. They were three weeks out in camp when half a dozen Pawnee Indians charged, yelling and waving robes to stampede the herd, but a brisk fusillade from the white men sent them scampering back over the sky-line. Next day, after a sixteen mile march the outfit corraled their wagons for defense at the foot of Pawnee Rock beside the Arkansas River. “I had not slept any of the night before,” says Kit, “for I stayed awake watching to get a shot at the Pawnees that tried to stampede our animals, expecting they would return; and I hadn’t caught a wink all day, as I was out buffalo hunting, so I was awfully tired and sleepy when we arrived at Pawnee Rock that evening, and when I was posted at my place at night, I must have gone to sleep leaning against the rocks; at any rate, I was wide enough awake when the cry of Indians was given by one of the guard. I had picketed my mule about twenty paces from where I stood, and I presume he had been lying down; all I remember is, that the first thing I saw after the alarm was something rising up out of the grass, which I thought was an Indian. I pulled the trigger; it was a center shot, and I don’t believe the mule ever kicked after he was hit!”
At daylight the Pawnees attacked in earnest and the fight lasted nearly three days, the mule teams being shut in the corral without food or water. At midnight of the second day they hitched up, fighting their way for thirteen miles, then got into bad trouble fording Pawnee Fork while the Indians poured lead and arrows into the teams until the colonel and Kit Carson led a terrific charge which dispersed the enemy. That fight cost the train four killed and seven wounded.
It was during this first trip that Carson saved the life of a wounded teamster by cutting off his arm. With a razor he cut the flesh, with a saw got through the bone, and with a white-hot king-bolt seared the wound, stopping the flow of blood.