Part 7
It was really on the shores of an insignificant Irish stream that William fought and won the battle of European liberty. But before he did this he had another battle to fight, as it were, in front of his newly-given throne.
His reign, unhappily, saw the commencement of that system of government which an intelligent Chinese Minister to the Court of St. James’ once described as “the election of one party to do the business of the nation, and of another to stop them doing it.” In other words, it was William’s fate, among all his other difficulties, to have to contend with the bitter and usually dishonest strife of Parliamentary parties, and so keen did this strife become after the foreign enemy had actually landed on British soil, that he was even then on the point of throwing up the whole business in disgust, and going back to Holland to fight his battles out there.
What would have happened if he had done so is anything but a pleasant subject for speculation. Happily, at the eleventh hour he refused to acknowledge himself beaten. Sick of the strife of words and longing for the reality of deeds, he announced his intention to place himself at the head of the English forces in Ireland, “and with the blessing of God Almighty endeavour to reduce that kingdom that it may no longer be a charge to this.”
In this we may see more than the expression of a pious hope. As statesman and soldier William had seen that Ireland was the back-door of Great Britain, and that so long as it remained open so long would the whole kingdom be vulnerable to foreign invasion, and so he went to close it.
It was a strange position for any man to be placed in. He was going to fight for everything that he held dear. He knew that if he lost in Ireland he must lose also in England and the Netherlands, but he was also going to fight against the father of the woman whom he had now come to love so dearly that her death, when it happened, came nearer to wrecking his imperial intellect than all the other trials and troubles of his laborious and almost joyless life. He had no feeling of personal enmity against James as he had against Louis, and it was duty, and duty alone, which took him to the Irish war. Almost the last words that he said to his wife concerning the enemy whom he was about to meet on the battlefield were:
“God send that no harm may come to him!”
Mr. Traill has thus tersely summed up the condition of affairs at this moment: “Ireland in the hands of a hostile army, the shores of England threatened by a hostile fleet, a dangerous conspiracy only detected on the eve of success, a formidable insurrection imminent in the country he was leaving behind him....”
And yet, gloomy as the outlook seemed, his spirits rose as they ever did when he saw the moment for doing instead of talking draw near, and Bishop Burnett tells us that he said to him on the eve of his departure: “As for me, but for one thing I should enjoy the prospect of being on horseback and under canvas again, for I am sure that I am fitter to direct a campaign than to manage your Houses of Lords and Commons.”
These words were well worthy of the man who, not many days later, quietly sat down to breakfast in the open air beside Boyne Water, within full sight of the enemy and within easy range of their guns. Breakfast over, he mounted his horse and was promptly fired at. The first shot from two field-pieces which had been trained on him and his staff killed a man and two horses. The second grazed his shoulder and made him reel in his saddle.
“There was no need for any bullet to come nearer than that!” was his remark on the occurrence. Certainly not many bullets have ever come nearer to changing the history of Britain, and therefore of the British Empire, than that one.
After the wound had been dressed, instead of taking the rest which a good many strong men would have taken, this consumptive and asthmatic invalid re-mounted his horse and remained until nightfall in the saddle, making his dispositions for the battle of the morrow, and attending to every detail himself. His prudent uncle and father-in-law, apparently bent on fulfilling William’s pious wish, was meanwhile taking very good care to keep himself out of harm’s way.
The battle itself, which, as every one knows, was fought on the 1st of July, brought out with startling clearness the contrast between the man who was king in his own right and the man who called himself king because his name was James Stuart.
“Men of Enniskillen, what will you do for me?” he cried at the critical moment of the fight, when Caillemot and Schomberg, his two best captains, had been killed, and he, drawing his sword and swinging it aloft with his wounded arm, led his trusty Dutch guards and Ulstermen against the Irish centre. James, meanwhile, having watched the first part of the fight on which all his fortunes depended from the safe eminence of the Hill of Donore, had already given up for lost the day which he had done nothing to win, and was making the best of his way to Dublin, whence, in due course, leaving the beaten and demoralised rabble that had once been his army to its fate, he fled to the congenial ignominy of his safe retreat at St. Germain, and the fostering care of his country’s worst enemy.
The Battle of the Boyne not only settled the fate of the Stuart dynasty for good; it decided the question whether this country was to be ruled by a feeble despotism under the patronage of France, or by that constitutional monarchy under which Great Britain has so worthily proved her title to be called the Mother of Free Nations, and in winning this battle and deciding this all-important question, William of Orange won the right to be counted among the wisest and strongest of our Empire-Makers. The disgusted Irishmen, too, had some reason on their side when they said to the victors after the battle: “Change leaders, and we’ll fight you again!”
The story of his wars in those countries which have been aptly termed the cockpit of Europe is the story of the continuation of that work which he came to England to do; not, as has already been pointed out, for England as a country, but for the establishment of those principles for which the British Constitution, of which he was one of the makers, stands. Ignorant or prejudiced critics have accused him of sacrificing English blood and treasure to the furtherance of his own ambition. The fact is that he employed them upon the best and most necessary work that there was for them to do just then.
“Look at my brave English!” he said to the Elector of Bavaria one day during the siege of Namur, while a British regiment was carrying the outworks on one side of the city. But they were doing more than carrying earthworks. They were fighting for the principles which their descendants crowned with everlasting glory at Trafalgar and Waterloo. They were showing the soldiers and generals of France, then held to be the best in the world, the sort of stuff that they were made of, and giving promise of future prowess that was soon to be splendidly redeemed at Blenheim and Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet.
It was a singular war, and by all the rules of warfare the issue should have been the reverse of what it was. But again and again William’s wonderful genius and indomitable persistence snatched victory out of defeat, and turned disaster into advantage, until at last the Grand Monarch himself had to confess the power of the enemy whom he had once thought so insignificant, and the signing of the Treaty of Ryswick left William triumphant if somewhat dissatisfied.
The results would no doubt have been much greater if William could have had his own way, and if the strife of parties in the British Parliament had not so sorely crippled him. But at least he had the satisfaction of knowing before he died that, whereas a few months before the French men-of-war had with impunity insulted and threatened the English coasts, and landed a small army on Irish soil, a few months afterwards every invader had been driven from British ground, and the French fleet almost destroyed, while the Mediterranean, on which British ships had sailed only by sufferance, was now well on the way to becoming a British lake.
And yet, in spite of all the triumphs that he had won over so many difficulties and so many dangers, and in spite of the consciousness of work well and nobly, if quietly and unostentatiously, done, William’s last days, like those of many another man who has deserved well of the world, were full of sorrow and suffering.
The death of his now adored queen had so shaken his mighty nature that for some days his reason was despaired of, and there can be no doubt but that it hastened his own end. And yet, weak and far advanced in disease as he was when he went out for that fatal ride from Kensington to Hampton Court, he was even then going a-hunting. The brutal Jacobite toast: “To the little gentleman in black velvet who works underground!” still serves to remind us of the mole-hill over which his horse stumbled and fell, breaking his rider’s collar-bone, and inflicting the death-wound which he had escaped on a score of battle-fields.
His death was worthy of his life, for it was the death of a brave, patient man and a Christian gentleman. No doubt he himself would have preferred to have died at the head of a charge, or in the thick of an assault on a French fortress, but his destiny ordered it otherwise, and the man who had a hundred times faced death in the most reckless fashion for the purpose of inspiring his followers with his own courage and enthusiasm, died quietly in his bed, leaving behind him the greatest work ever done by an individual British sovereign, and a fame which, but for the one dark and inexplicable blot of Glencoe, is as fairly entitled to be called spotless as that of any man who ever sat upon a throne and accomplished great things with such means as came to his hand.
VI
_JAMES COOK_,
_CIRCUMNAVIGATOR_
VI
JAMES COOK
Once more I am going to ask you to take your seat with me on the ideal equivalent of the Magic Carpet and skim across another time-gulf some half-century wide. This time we alight on the morning of Monday, July 5, 1742, before the door of a double-fronted shop, one side of which is devoted to the sale of groceries and the other to the drapery business. This shop is situated in a little village on the Yorkshire coast a few miles from Whitby, Staithes, or more exactly The Staithes, so called from the local name for a pier or sea-wall of wood jutting out a few feet into the German Ocean, and built partly to protect the little bay from the North Sea rollers and partly to afford accommodation for the fishing-boats and colliers.
The shop belongs to a substantial citizen of Staithes named Saunderson, and this morning Mr. Saunderson is a very angry man. In fact, if we go into the shop, which is not yet open, we shall find him with a cane or some similar weapon in his hand, leaning behind the counter and hitting blindly at a bed there is beneath it, shouting the while sundry excellent maxims on the virtue of early rising, especially modified for the benefit of apprentices.
But no response comes from the bed, and Mr. Saunderson stoops down to make closer investigation. The bed is empty, and the fact dawns on him that his last apprentice has followed the example of all the others and run away to sea. It was a very common event on the Yorkshire coast in those days, but this particular running away was destined to be a very memorable one for the world, for the lad who, instead of being in the bed under the counter, was just then striding rapidly away over the fields to Whitby with one extra shirt and a jack-knife for his sole possessions, was James Cook, a name as dear to the lovers of the romance of travel and adventure as Robinson Crusoe, and one of infinitely more importance in the annals of mankind.
In following his fortunes, so far as the brief limits of such a sketch as this will permit, we shall bid a perhaps welcome adieu for a while to the roar of guns and the shock of battle, to the blaze of burning towns and the fierce cries ringing along the decks of captured treasure-ships, to watch the contest of a clear head and a strong will against those foes which may be overcome without bloodshed, although not always without loss of life--the hidden dangers of unknown oceans strewn with uncharted reefs and shoals lying in wait for unwary keels, the sudden hurricanes of the Tropics, and the storms and fogs and the floating ice-navies of the far North and South. It was these that Captain Cook went out to fight and overcome, and in doing so to prove eloquently that:
“Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war.”
Nevertheless there are certain points of likeness between James Cook, Geographer and Circumnavigator, and that other Circumnavigator, Francis Drake, Pirate and Scourge of Spain. Both began life as ship-boys, and both rose, by sheer ability and strength of purpose, far above their original station in life to positions of command in the service of their country. Both were men of iron will, far-reaching design, unshakeable self-reliance, and passionate temper, and, lastly, both were possessed by that irresistible spirit of roving and adventure which, when it once seizes a man, but seldom lets him rest in peace. In short, though the vocation of one was piracy and war, and that of the other the peaceful, but none the less adventurous service of science, both were stamped with the supreme and essential characteristics of the Empire-Maker.
Naturally, the world had changed a good deal by the time James Cook started out to add so enormously to men’s knowledge of it. Spain had fallen from her high estate and was living in slothful ease on the dregs and lees of that strong wine which she had drunk to intoxication in the golden days of Cortez and Pizarro. But Britain, no longer only England, had become Great Britain, and was fast expanding into Greater Britain. Cowley, Dampier, Clapperton and Anson had circumnavigated the globe more than once, and people were beginning to have something like a definite notion of how very big a place was this world which now seems so small to us. The Imperial Idea was beginning to take hold of men’s minds. They wanted to know, not so much how big the world was, but what other unknown lands might be lying waiting for the discoverer, hidden away among the vast expanses which were still an utter blank upon the map.
The maritime nations of the world, too, and Britain, now foremost among them, had unconsciously taken a very great stride along the pathway of real progress, and they were beginning to grasp the higher ideal of colonisation as distinguished from mere conquest, and to James Cook belongs the high honour, if not of discovering, at least of first definitely locating and in part mapping out the greatest of all the British colonies.
Indeed, it may be said that, in sober fact, he added a whole continent to the British Empire, and that without the striking of a single blow or the loss of a single life in battle.
The first few years of James Cook’s seafaring life were eventless, just as Francis Drake’s were, but for all that he, like Gloriana’s Little Pirate, was doing that minor but no less essential part of his life-work which was the necessary preparation for the greater. He was doing his work first as ship’s boy, then as sailor before the mast, then as second mate, first mate, and so on up the laborious ladder which was to lead him in the end to an unequalled eminence among mariners.
Thus for thirteen years he served what may be called his apprenticeship to his life’s work; learning in the most practical of all schools, a North Sea collier of the eighteenth century, not only the science of seamanship in all its details, but also what was hardly less important--that science of taking things as they came, of looking upon hardship, privation and danger as the commonplaces of a seaman’s life, incidents in his day’s work, as it were, and as such scarcely worth even the mention, and hence much less worth troubling about.
A curiously instructive fact strikes one in contrasting Captain Cook’s own account of his voyages with those of others, such as Anderson and Gilbert, who sailed with him. They expatiate largely on the miseries of heat and cold, ice and mist, the almost uneatable character of the sea-fare of those days, disease among the crew, and so on; but Captain Cook hardly ever mentions them, saving only the scurvy, of which more hereafter.
But there was something else that James Cook had already learnt long ago while he was yet a boy. When he was a lad of six or seven he had been set to work on a farm belonging to a man named William Walker, and this William had a wife named Mary who, taking a fancy to the lad, taught him his letters and encouraged him to read, and so, without knowing it, put into his hands the talisman which was to win his way to future greatness. She not only aroused in him that passion for reading which distinguished him among the sailors of his time, but she gave him what might have been the only means of gratifying it, for not every farm-lad and ship’s-boy of the middle of the eighteenth century had learnt, or ever did learn, to read and write.
It may have been that James Cook’s latent ambition had never looked beyond the possibility of becoming master of one of the vessels of which he had been mate, and it is also possible that he might never in reality have been anything more, but it so happened that his ship, the _Friendship_, was lying in London river in May, 1756, and that at the same time the war with France, which had been brewing for a year, broke out.
As usual the Press Gang set instantly to work, and now came Cook’s chance. He was mate of a ship, albeit only a collier brig; still he was a thorough seaman, an excellent navigator, and, more than that, he seems to have known something of the theory as well as the practice of his science. These accomplishments, however, did not put him beyond the reach of the Press Gang.
Now, in those days there were two ranks of seamen before the mast in the King’s navy--the pressed man, who might be anything from a raw land-lubber to an escaped convict, and the volunteer, who was probably and usually a good sailor, if not something better, as Cook was, and he, guided either by inspiration or deliberate resolve, eluded the Press Gang by offering himself as a volunteer, and so in due course took his rating as able-seaman before the mast on board his Majesty’s frigate _Eagle_, of sixty guns, of which shortly afterwards the good genius of his life, Sir Hugh Palliser, was appointed captain.
During the next four years there was fighting, but we have no record of any share that Cook took in it. What we do know is that by the time he was thirty he had risen to the rank of master of the _Mercury_, a King’s ship which went with the fleet to the St. Lawrence at a very critical juncture in British colonial history.
So far it would appear that he had worked himself up by sheer ability and industry, but now his chance was to come. The river St. Lawrence at that time had never been surveyed, and it was absolutely necessary that soundings should be taken and the river correctly charted before the fleet could go in and with its guns cover Wolfe’s attack on Quebec. The all-important work was entrusted to the master of the _Mercury_, and although the river was swarming with the canoes of hostile Indians in the service of the French, and though he had to do his work at night, he did it so thoroughly that not only did the fleet go in and out again with perfect safety, but the work has needed but little re-doing from that day to this.
Thus did James Cook, not as sailor or fighting-man, but as good mariner and skilful workman play his first part as Empire-Maker, and in an unostentatious fashion contribute his share towards the capture of Quebec and the acquisition of one of the widest and fairest portions of Greater Britain.
He was at this time, as has been said, only thirty. As regards the outer aspect of the man he stood something over six feet, spare, hard, and active. His face was a good one and suited to the man, broad forehead, bright, brown, well-set eyes, yet rather small, a long, well-shaped nose with good nostrils, a firm mouth, and full, strong chin.
In short, his best portraits show you just the kind of man you would expect Captain Cook to be. For the rest he was a man of iron frame, tireless at work, resting only when it was a physical necessity, with few friends and fewer confidants, cool of judgment save during his rare and deplorable fits of passion, self-contained and self-reliant--just such a sea-king, in short, as we may imagine Heaven to have commissioned to carry the British flag three times round the world and to the uttermost parts of the known earth, and to plant it on lands which until then no white man’s eye had seen or foot had trodden.
In the same year Cook was promoted from the _Mercury_ to the _Northumberland_, the Admiral’s flag-ship, and in her he came back to England, and at St. Margaret’s Church, Barking, married Elizabeth Batts, a young lady of great beauty and of social standing far above that of the grocer’s apprentice and collier’s knockabout boy, but not above that of the Master of a King’s ship. His married life lasted some seventeen years, and of these he spent a little over four in the enjoyment of the delights of home.
For the next four years or so he was regularly employed in surveying and exploring work off the Atlantic coast of America, and this of itself shows that he had already made his mark in his chosen profession. But much greater things were now to be in store for him. It will be remembered how Drake, when he first saw the smooth waters of the Pacific, prayed God that He would give him life and leave to sail an English ship on its waters. That prayer had been granted, and his and many another English ship had crossed the great Sea of the South.
Meanwhile the realised dream of El Dorado had been replaced in men’s minds by another, even more vast, shadowy, and splendid. This was the dream of the Great Southern Continent, and in this imagination revelled and ran riot. Grave scientists, too, demonstrated beyond all doubt that there must be such a land far away to the south since how, without it as a counterpoise to the continents of the north, was the rolling world to be kept in equilibrium?
So they took it for granted, laid it down upon the maps, and wrote glowing descriptions of the varieties of climate, the splendour of scenery, the wealth of treasures and the strange peoples and animals that it must of necessity contain. Above all, it would be a new El Dorado which would not be under the control of Spain.
What more could men want, unless indeed it was the actual discovery of the Terra Incognita Australis? This was the new world of which Cook was to be the Columbus. Others had seen parts of it just as others had seen parts of America before the great Genoese reached the West Indies, but he was the man who was to do the work of putting its existence beyond all doubt.