Part 8

The wildest dreams of the boy Francis Drake were now more than realized. All England buzzed with his astounding exploits. The city bells rang and there was a general holiday, with feasting and dancing. Queen Elizabeth came down from London and dined with the great captain on the _Golden Hind_. Before she left the deck, the captain knelt before her and she tapped him on the shoulder with his sword, thus knighting him Sir Francis Drake.

After this the greatest of the English knights of the high seas made many voyages, dealing out destruction to Spanish galleons and treasure stores. He attacked cities and burned fleets--reporting to the queen that he had just “singed the Spanish king’s beard.” Drake was one of the four chiefs in command of the English ships that destroyed the Spanish Armada. No one did more than he to take the sea power away from Spain and give it to England, and thus make it possible for the English to begin the settlement of our country.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH, THE FAVORITE OF GOOD QUEEN BESS

A gay company was waiting before the old palace at Greenwich, beside the River Thames below the City of London, on a summer afternoon in the days of Elizabeth. They were watching for the queen and her intimates to come down the broad steps in front of the palace.

There had been a shower, and the trees, grass, and bright flowers glistened in the sunshine.

“Here comes Her Majesty!” exclaimed some in the waiting throng as a woman in middle life descended the steps, attended by the Earl of Leicester and other nobles and knights whose names are well-known to history. The queen was slender, with her light auburn hair dressed up from her high, pale brow. Her chief mark of beauty was her small, delicate hands with long, taper fingers, of which she was rather vain. She was richly dressed in a heavy silk brocade, and a collar of costly lace stood up from her shoulders behind her slender neck like an open fan.

The court, after receiving her gracious greetings, followed the queen in a grand promenade through the park. Elizabeth soon came to a spot where the recent shower had left a shallow pool of water. A quaint writer describes this scene:

“Her Majesty meeting with a plashy place, made some scruples to go on, when Raleigh (dressed in the gay and genteel habit of those times) presently cast off and spread his new plush cloak on the ground, whereon the Queen trod gently over, rewarding him afterwards with many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair a foot-cloth.”

Walter Raleigh was a handsome young man, six feet tall, with curly brown hair and beard. He had been a soldier in France and an officer in Ireland, and had made several voyages of discovery with his gallant half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

It was the fashion--indeed it seemed necessary then--for men at court to flatter the middle-aged maiden queen, who was foolish enough to believe that she was as lovely as they told her she was. The Earl of Leicester once entertained her at Kenilworth Castle, where he had all the clocks stopped on the moment of her arrival to show that no notice should be taken of the passing of time during her visit there.

So Queen Bess could hardly help feeling flattered when such a gallant and good-looking courtier as Raleigh bowed before her and laid his cloak as a velvet carpet for her to walk upon. Riches, lands, castles, and even happiness go by favor in royal circles. Some time after this, the queen made her favorite a knight, with the title Sir before his name.

One day the queen saw Raleigh taking a diamond ring off his finger and scratching something on a window-pane.

“Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall.”

Then she took from her own slim hand a diamond and cut in the glass under what he had written, this rhyme:

“If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all.”

Of course, each reigning favorite of the queen became an object of envy to the rest of the court. Lord Leicester, who was now slighted by her Majesty for this new knight, did all he could to injure Raleigh. The young Earl of Essex did his utmost, later, to turn the queen against Sir Walter. But for a long time Raleigh remained high in favor.

Raleigh was the first Englishman to attempt to plant a colony in the New World. By way of compliment to the maiden queen, he named the whole region which he was trying to settle, Virginia. Returning from an early voyage, he introduced into Ireland the potato, first found in South America. He also discovered the pineapple (so named because it is shaped like a pine cone) and imported it to England. Another thing Raleigh is said to have introduced into England was tobacco, which the American Indians raised and “drank,” as they called smoking, in pipes of copper and clay. Raleigh had a silver pipe made for his own use. One day when he was smoking in his library, a manservant came in with a pot of ale, and, thinking his master was on fire, yelled with fright as he poured the ale over him! It is said that the queen asked Sir Walter to smoke in her presence; but when she tried to learn to use tobacco in that way, she stopped because it made her ill.

Sir Walter Raleigh was in active command of a number of English ships in the fleet which defeated the Invincible Armada, sent against England by King Philip the Second of Spain. For her favorite’s part in that great adventure, the queen made him an admiral. Later, he was wounded in a naval battle near Cadiz, Spain. When asked what had been done for him on account of his heroic services there, Admiral Raleigh sadly replied,

“What the generals have got I know least. For my own part, I have got a lame leg and deformed. I have not wanted good words, and exceeding kind and regardful usage; but I have possession of nought but poverty and pain.”

Some one must have told the queen of this speech, for she called Raleigh back to the palace and appointed him once more her captain of the guard.

When Queen Elizabeth died, James Stuart, king of Scotland, became king. James’s mind had been poisoned against Raleigh, whose enemies told the new king that Raleigh plotted to place James’s cousin, Arabella Stuart, upon the throne of England. So Sir Walter was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was confined there for twelve years, though he proved that the things his enemies had said against him were untrue. One wicked creature who had accused him confessed that his story about Raleigh was made up out of spite.

During the long years of his imprisonment, Sir Walter wrote his “History of the World,” and experimented in a rude chemical laboratory which he had fixed up in his prison. He also wrote beautiful poems and many letters to his friends. For some time Lady Raleigh was allowed to visit him with their son, Carew. The older son, Walter, had been killed in an encounter while on a voyage with his father, seeking El Dorado, or the City of Gold, supposed to lie hidden in northern South America.

At last word came from King James that if Raleigh would go and find those fabled gold mines for his benefit, his high treason would be forgiven. So the white-haired knight, lame from a wound he had received in loyal service of England, started out on another voyage of adventure, to fight the Spaniard to the bitter end.

But Sir Walter was only hoping against hope, for there was no such mine there, and the expedition proved an utter failure. Instead of escaping to another country as he might well have done, he went back and bravely told King James that the “El Dorado” story was only a Spanish lie.

So the disappointed king ordered Raleigh back to prison, and a corrupt judge pronounced him guilty of high treason. For that crime, the Raleigh’s beautiful home estate might legally become the property of the crown, and Raleigh himself condemned to death.

Raleigh made the best even of this terrible experience. He cheered his wife by telling her he was ready and glad to go where she could come too--where they could be happy together always.

On his way to execution, Raleigh noticed a man with a bald head and no hat. Taking off his own cap he tossed it down to the old man with--

“You need this, my friend, more than I do.”

On the scaffold he made a patriotic speech to the assembled crowd. Then he asked to see the axe. He smiled as he tried the edge of it with his thumb, and remarked to the executioner who stood before him, dressed, as was the custom, in black velvet tights, with a black mask over his face,

“This gives me no fear. It is a sharp and fair medicine to cure me of all my troubles.”

HENRY HUDSON, THE MAN WHO PUT HIMSELF ON THE MAP

Just as Magellan set out to discover a way through America from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, so Henry Hudson determined to find a northwest passage from ocean to ocean. The reason for wishing to cross in the north from one ocean to the other was to save going “round the Horn,” as sailors call the long voyage around Cape Horn, the southern point of South America. We now know that there is no northwest passage; at least, if there is such a waterway it is so near the North Pole that it is always frozen up. But Henry Hudson, like all sailors in his time, thought that it would be a simple matter to sail through the open polar sea and pass from the Atlantic to the Pacific north of North America.

In 1607 this bold British navigator undertook a voyage in the employ, as he wrote in his journal, of “certain worshipful Merchants of London.” The object of this voyage was to explore the coast of Greenland and, as he explained, “for to discover a passage by the North Pole to Japan and China.” His crew numbered only twelve persons, including one boy, his own son John. After sailing about for five months, suffering great hardships, Hudson returned to London without discovering that northern passage. The next year he started out again, this time sailing north-east along the coast of Norway, and returned after four months without finding anything but hardships.

Hudson’s third voyage was made in the employ of the Dutch East India Company. He sailed from Amsterdam, Holland, with a crew of twenty men and his young son, on the _Half Moon_. He started out a second time for a north-east passage, but he found so many difficulties that he turned his prow westward again, determined to discover the way past North America. About the 4th of July, 1609, he came to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where he saw a fleet of Frenchmen fishing for cod. After catching over a hundred of these fish for themselves, the crew of the _Half Moon_ proceeded to the southwest, as Hudson had heard from his friend, Captain John Smith, that there was an open way to the Pacific south of Virginia.

After wandering down the coast and back, the _Half Moon_ entered a broad bay and anchored beside an island which the natives called Manhattan. Hudson took possession of this region in the name of his Dutch employers and named it New Netherland. Here he traded with the Indians and sailed a little way up the beautiful river which now bears his name. “Here,” one of his men wrote in the journal, “the land grew very high and mountainous.” Hudson and his crew were afraid of the Indians. They captured two red men and tried to hold them as prisoners. They thought that the other Indians would treat the white men well for fear that Hudson would kill these two prisoners. But they made their escape through a porthole and swam to the shore. As the _Half Moon_ got under way again, the two Indians and their friends stood on the bank, war-whooping, brandishing tomahawks, and calling for vengeance.

The _Half Moon_ sailed on upstream, and towards night came to anchor near what is now Catskill Landing. “There,” as it is written in the journal of the voyage, “we found very loving people and very old men, where we were well used. Our boat went to fish and caught great store of very good fish.”

The next morning the fishing was not so good, “the

savages having been there in their canoes all night.” In the two days following the ship went only five miles farther up the river. Hudson was kindly received by an old chief who gave him the best cheer he could. The natives came flocking on board the ship, bringing grapes, pumpkins, and beaver and otter skins, which they traded with the sailors for hatchets, knives, beads, and trinkets.

The ship’s “log” states that they gave some of the savages brandy to drink. One of these men fell sound asleep, to the astonishment of the others, who feared he had been poisoned. They took to their canoes and paddled for shore. After a long powwow a few of the Indians returned with a quantity of beads. They wanted to pay the white men to lift the spell which they had put upon the sleeping Indian. The next day the intoxicated Indian was walking about, well and happy, after his first taste of “firewater.” This made his friends believe in the white men again, and the journal goes on to say:

“So, at three of the clock in the afternoon they came aboard, and brought tobacco and more beads, and gave them to our master; and made an oration, and showed him all the country round about. Then they sent one of their company on land, who presently returned, and brought a great platter full of venison dressed by themselves, and they caused him to eat with them. Then they made him reverence and departed, all save the old men that lay aboard.”

Hudson found that it would not be safe to take the ship beyond the site of the present city of Albany; so the _Half Moon’s_ prow was turned down stream. On the way back the sailors were met by the two escaped prisoners with quite a company of savages. More than a hundred braves surrounded the ship. One climbed up the rudder and others swarmed over the sides. The crew fired upon them with their muskets, and with the cannon, blew holes in their canoes. The “thunder and lightning” from the guns frightened the Indians so that they fled to the shore and took to the woods.

Hudson himself had had enough. The _Half Moon_ lifted its anchor and sailed away from the river whose name is Henry Hudson’s most glorious monument. Stopping in England on his way to Holland, he was engaged by the London Company to make another voyage in their behalf the following year. This time the ship he commanded was the _Discovery_. The course was past Iceland, around the southern part of Greenland, sighting Desolation Island, which he charted as in the northern part of Davis Strait. Through the strait which now bears his name he entered the sea known for all time as Hudson Bay.

This crew was a bad set of men. One young fellow whom Captain Hudson had picked up and befriended in London proved the worst of the gang. They did not face their hardships and sufferings with real courage. When starvation stared them in the face, every man looked out for himself. They hoarded food, and robbed and fought one another like wild beasts. At last they turned against Hudson, saying that he had brought them there to starve.

The young man to whom Hudson had been kindest of all bound his master. The rest tied up the six men who were most loyal to their chief, and Hudson’s son. These eight men were put bound into the ship’s boat. Then the crew hoisted the sail of the _Discovery_. They towed the little boat for a time, as if they were loath to do the dastardly deed that they had planned. But when they reached the open sea they cut the rope, and the little boat containing Henry Hudson and his son was never again seen by white men.

The ungrateful young man met a fate he richly deserved. In a fight with Arctic savages he was killed, and several of the rest were mortally wounded. Still others died of want before the few remaining deserters were picked up, starving, by a passing vessel. Their names are forgotten, and they are only remembered at all because of their wicked treachery. But the map of North America is a fitting monument to the heroic but ill-fated adventurer and discoverer, Henry Hudson.

LA SALLE AND THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI

Little is known now of the early life of Robert Cavelier de la Salle, until, at twenty-five or a little less, he came from Rouen, France, to Montreal. But of his life in America, in those days when the land was still a howling wilderness, there is much to tell. He was born a century and a half after Columbus thought he had found the coast of China; yet this young Frenchman still believed that China was only a little farther west than the land Columbus found, for he had but a narrow idea of the width of America.

The people who were living in Canada, the new country along the River St. Lawrence, were French. They traded with the Indians and trapped and skinned wild animals for their fur. Those were the days of Indian scouts and wigwams, and of war and scalp dances. Many of the French lived like Indians; they played Indian games--running, shooting, snowshoeing, lacrosse--and they learned to hunt and hide, and to travel stealthily through the forests, like real red men.

So the Indians liked the French people better than they liked other white settlers. The French called their scouts wood-runners. These brave, shrewd messengers went out among the Indian tribes and learned their languages and customs. Many of them ran from tribe to tribe, thousands of miles into the wilderness, and came back to the French settlement with skins of the mink, beaver, otter, and other animals. They also had strange stories to tell of meadows, which they called prairies, as level as a floor and hundreds of miles wide, where there were no trees except along the rivers. Down through this thousand-mile prairie region they said there were rivers which flowed together into a wide stream which the Indians called the Mississippi, or Father of Waters, which kept on in a mighty flood to the unknown south country.

These stories fired the fervent soul of Robert La Salle. He believed that mighty river should be used as a water highway to the South Sea--as the Pacific Ocean was still called; and that if they could sail down to its mouth they would find an outlet to China like the outlet which the St. Lawrence gave toward Europe. He was always talking about China and trying in every way he could to raise money for canoes and food and Indian guides to find the way to China through the western wilderness. The French people laughed at his enthusiasm and called some land which he owned beside the rapids above Montreal _La Chine_--French for China. That suburb of Montreal is still called Lachine, and the rapids are the Lachine Rapids.

Not having wealth enough of his own, La Salle went to France to ask the king to approve his plan, and to provide money for the planting of the lilies of France on the banks of the Mississippi. La Salle’s practical way of planting French lilies was to build and maintain forts at different points through all that great western country. Already Fort Frontenac had been built near the outlet of Lake Ontario, and Father Marquette, a heroic French missionary, accompanied by a trader named Joliet had found the Mississippi and explored that great river for hundreds of miles. On his return to a French settlement Joliet wrote to Count Frontenac, governor of Canada, telling of the dangers of his voyage:

“I had escaped every peril of the Indians. I had passed forty-two rapids; and was at the point of debarking, full of joy at the success of so long and difficult an enterprise, when my canoe capsized, after all the danger seemed over. I lost two men and my box of papers within sight of the first French settlements, which I had left almost two years before. Nothing remains to me but life, and the ardent desire to employ it on any service which you may please to direct.”

When Robert La Salle had permission from the king and his treasurer, and had borrowed money of his rich relatives in France, he returned to Canada and made up a party of brave French and Indian guides, scouts, and interpreters, who were to fight, if need be, to plant the lilies and forts of France in the great western valley of the Father of Waters.

After they had paddled through Lake Ontario and carried their canoes past Niagara Falls and the rapids above the Falls, they built their sailboat, the _Griffin_. On this ship they sailed through the lakes to the lower end of Lake Michigan. They paddled their canoes down along the shore of that lake to the St. Joseph River, where they built Fort St. Joseph. Canoeing up this river, which flows into Lake Michigan, they carried their barks across to a little stream which led away from the lake toward the greater rivers of the south country. On their way they saw Indians of the Illinois tribes, and smoked the calumet, or peace pipe, with most of these red men. Some tribes were so savage and unfriendly that the white travelers were afraid to shoot game for food, or even to build a fire lest a band of Indians on the warpath should see it and come to kill and scalp them all. But it seems to have been the fate of most discoverers to find their bitterest foes among those who should be their friends. One of La Salle’s own party was caught just in time to keep him from shooting their leader in the back.

Floating down a small stream the travelers came to the Illinois River. On their way, among friendly tribes, they shot plenty of game. Once they captured a huge bison, or buffalo, stuck in a swamp and left behind by the rest of the herd, and feasted on buffalo meat for many days.

At last they came to a place, now called Lake Peoria, where the Illinois is several miles wide. They decided that this would be a good place to build a fort. Seeing smoke, they guessed that it proceeded from the campfire of an Illinois tribe which was said to be hostile to the French. Seeing wigwams in the distance La Salle arranged the canoes in rows, and pulled up to the Indian camp. There was a stir in the Illinois village. The Indian braves came out and received the white men as friends, and there were feasts and games and dances in honor of their French guests.

The Indians said that La Salle and his friends might build a fort there. Built without delay, the fort was named Fort Breakheart, for Robert La Salle had been going through some heartrending experiences. One of these was the loss of the lake boat, the _Griffin_, with all the supplies and equipments.

When La Salle explained to the Illinois tribe what he was seeking, the chief gave him and his men a solemn warning of perilous falls and precipices, of cannibal tribes and man-eating monsters. He said that if they should get by those awful dangers, the mouth of the river was an awful whirlpool which would engulf them, for no man who had ever gone down into the mouth of the Father of Waters had returned alive. These stories so frightened the men of the party--both red and white--that they deserted their leader. They preferred to endure the ills they had and risk their lives among savages known to be cruel, rather than fly to ills they knew not of.

So La Salle had to go hundreds of miles back to Canada for more men, funds, and supplies, before he could venture to make the rest of the trip. After many months’ delay he started out again from Montreal.