NOTES

[1] Kanonghsionni was the name which the Iroquois gave themselves. It appears that at this time they occupied the country along the St. Lawrence held some centuries before by the Ojibways and later, in the time of Champlain, by the Hurons.

[2] Hiawatha is generally said to have founded the league of the Five Nations. Although these nations were united against any attack from outside they were not always free from interior enmities and dissensions, and the Mohawks in particular were objects of the fear and dislike of their neighbors, as the significance of their sobriquet clearly shows.

[3] Aneda is said to be the Iroquois word for spruce. When Champlain's men were attacked by scurvy in the same neighborhood half a century later, the Iroquois no longer lived there, and this remedy was not suggested.

[4] Rose quartz has this property.



THE MUSTANGS

Bred to the Game of the World as the Kings and the Emperors played it, Fate and our masters hurled us over the terrible sea. When the sails of the carracks were furled the Game was the Game that we made it,— We that were horses in Spain were gods in a realm to be!

Swift at the word we sped, we fought in the front of the battle,— Ah, but the wild men fled when they heard us neigh from afar! The field was littered with dead, cut down like slaughtered cattle —Ah, but the earth is red where the Conquistadores are!

Now does the desert wake and croon of hidalgos coming— Now for her children's sake she is whetting her sword to slay, And the armored squadrons break, and our iron-shod hoofs are drumming On the rocks of the mountain pass—we are free, we are off and away!

Hush—did a man's foot fall in the pasture where we go straying? Listen—is that the call of a man aware of his right? Hearken, my comrades all—once more the Game they are playing! Masters, we come, we come, to be one with you in the fight!



XIII

THE WHITE MEDICINE MAN

"Cavalry without horses, in ships without sailors, built by blacksmiths without forges and carpenters without tools. Now who in Spain will believe that?" commented Cabeca de Vaca.

It was the evening of the twenty-first of September, 1528. Five of the oddest looking boats ever launched on any sea were drawn up on the shore of La Baya de Cavallos, where not a horse was in sight, though there had been twoscore a fortnight ago. On the morrow the one-eyed commander of the Spaniards, Pamfilo de Narvaez, would marshal his ragamuffin expedition into those boats, in the hope of reaching Mexico by sea.

"We shall tell of it when we are grandfathers—if the sea does not take us within a week," said Andres Dorantes with a sigh. "I think that God does not waste miracles on New Spain."

"Miracles? It is nothing less than a miracle that this fleet was built," said Cabeca de Vaca valiantly. And indeed he had some reason for saying so.

Narvaez, with a grant from the King which covered all the territory between the Atlantic and the Rio de los Palmas in Mexico, had staked his entire private fortune on this venture. He had landed in Baya de le Cruz—now Tampa Bay—on the day before Easter. The Indians had some gold which they said came "from the north." Cabeca, who was treasurer of the expedition, strongly advised against proceeding through a totally unknown country on this very sketchy information. But Narvaez consulted the pilot, who said he knew of a harbor some distance to the west, ordered the ships to meet him there, and with forty horsemen and two hundred and sixty men on foot, struck boldly into the interior.

It was an amazing country. It had magnificent forests and almost impassable swamps, gorgeous tropical flowers and black bogs infested with snakes, alligators and hostile Indians, game of every kind and dense jungles into which it retreated. There seemed to be no towns, no grain-land and no gold-bearing mountains. The persevering explorers crossed half a dozen large rivers and many small ones, wading when they could, building rafts or swimming when the water was deep. After between three and four months of this, half-starved, shaken with swamp fever, weary and bedraggled, they reached the first harbor they had found upon the coast they followed, but no ships were there. Whether the ships had been wrecked, or put in somewhere only to meet with destruction at the hands of the Indians, they never knew.

Narvaez called his officers into consultation, one at a time, as to the best course to pursue in this desperate case. They had no provisions, a third of the men were sick and more were dropping from exhaustion every day, and all agreed that unless they could get away and reach Mexico while some of them could still work, there was very little chance that they would ever leave the place at all. But they had no tools, no workmen and no sailors, and nothing to eat while the ships were a-building, even if they knew how to build them. They gave it up for that night and prayed for direction.

Next day one of the men proved to have been a carpenter, and another came to Cabeca de Vaca with a plan for making bellows of deerskin with a wooden frame and nozzle, so that a forge could be worked and whatever spare iron they had could be pounded into rude tools. The officers took heart. Cross-bows, stirrups, spurs, horse-furniture, reduced to scrap-iron, furnished axes, hammers, saws and nails. There was plenty of timber in the forests. Those not able to do hard work stripped palmetto leaves to use in the place of tow for calking and rigging. Every third day one of the horses was killed, the meat served out to the sick and the working party, the manes and tails saved to twist into rope with palmetto fiber, and the skin of the legs taken off whole and tanned for water bottles. At four different times a selected body of soldiers went out to get corn from the Indians, peaceably if possible, by force if necessary, and on this, with the horse-meat and sometimes fish or sea-food caught in the bay, the camp lived and toiled for sixteen desperate days. A Greek named Don Theodoro knew how to make pitch for the calking, from pine resin. For sails the men pieced together their shirts. Not the least wearisome part of their labor was stone-hunting, for there were almost no stones in the country, and they must have anchors. But at last the boats were finished, of twenty-two cubits in length, with oars of savin (fir), and fifty of the men had died from fever, hardship or Indian arrows. Each boat must carry between forty-five and fifty of those who remained, and this crowded them so that it was impossible to move about, and weighted them until the gunwales were hardly a hand's breadth above the water. It would have been madness to venture out to sea, and they crept along the coast, though they well knew that in following all the inlets of that marshy shore the length of the voyage would be multiplied several times over. When they had been out a week they captured five Indian canoes, and with the timbers of these added a few boards to the side of each galley. This made it possible to steer in something like a direct line toward Mexico.

On October 30, about the time of vespers, Cabeca de Vaca, who happened to be in the lead, discovered the mouth of what seemed to be an immense river. There they anchored among islands. They found that the volume of water brought down by this river was so great that it freshened the sea-water even three miles out. They went up the river a little way to try to get fuel to parch their corn, half a handful of raw corn being the entire ration for a day. The current and a strong north wind, however, drove them back. When they sounded, a mile and a half from shore, a line of thirty fathoms found no bottom. After this Narvaez with three of the boats kept on along the shore, but the boat commanded by Castillo and Dorantes, and that of Cabeca de Vaca, stood out to sea before a fair east wind, rowing and sailing, for four days. They never again saw or heard of the remainder of the fleet.

On November 5 the wind became a gale. All night the boats drifted, the men exhausted with toil, hunger and cold. Cabeca de Vaca and the shipmaster were the only men capable of handling an oar in their boat. Near morning they heard the tumbling of waves on a beach, and soon after, a tremendous wave struck the boat with a force that hurled her up on the beach and roused the men who seemed dead, so that they crept on hands and knees toward shelter in a ravine. Here some rain-water was found, a fire was made and they parched their corn, and here they were found by some Indians who brought them food. They still had some of their trading stores, from which they produced colored beads and hawk-bells. After resting and collecting provisions the indomitable Spaniards dug their boat out of the sand and made ready to go on with the voyage.

They were but a little way from shore when a great wave struck the battered craft, and the cold having loosened their grip on the oars the boat was capsized and some of the crew drowned. The rest were driven ashore a second time and lost literally everything they had. Fortunately some live brands were left from their fire, and while they huddled about the blaze the Indians appeared and offered them hospitality. To some of the party this seemed suspicious. Were the Indians cannibals? Even when they were warmed and fed in a comfortable shelter nobody dared to sleep.

But the Indians had no treacherous intentions whatever, and continued to share with the shipwrecked unfortunates their own scanty provision. Fever, hunger and despair, reduced the eighty men who had come ashore, to less than twenty. All but Cabeca and two others who were helpless from fever at last departed on the desperate adventure of trying to find their way overland to Mexico. One of the two left behind died and the other ran away in delirium, leaving Cabeca de Vaca alone, as the slave of the Indians.

He discovered presently that he was of little use to them, for though he could have cut wood or carried water, this was squaws' work, and should a man be seen doing it every tradition of the tribe would be upset. He was of no use as a hunter, for he had not the hawk-like sight of an Indian or the Indian instinct for following a trail. He could dig out the wild roots they ate, which grew among canes and under water, but this was laborious and painful work, which made his hands bleed. With tools, or even metal with which to make them, he might have made himself the most useful member of the tribe, but as it was, he was even poorer than the wretched people among whom he lived, for they knew how to make the most of what was in the country, and he had no such training.

The lonely Spaniard studied their language and customs diligently. He found that they made knives and arrows of shell, and clothing of woven fibers of grass and leaves, and deerskin. They went from one part of the country to another according to the food supply. In prickly pear time they went into the cactus region to gather the fruit, on which they mainly lived during the season. When pinon nuts were ripe they went into the mountains and gathered these, threshing them out of the cones to be eaten fresh, roasted, or ground into flour for cakes baked on flat stones. They had no dishes except baskets and gourd-rinds, and their houses were tent-poles covered with hides. When a squaw wished to roast a piece of meat she thrust a sharp stick through it. When she wished to boil it she filled a large calabash-rind with water, put in it the materials of her stew, and threw stones into the fire to heat. When very hot these stones were raked out with a loop of twisted green reed or willow-shoots and put into the water. When enough had been put in to make the water boil, it was kept boiling by changing the cooled stones for hotter ones until the meat was cooked.

Many of the baskets made by the squaws were curiously decorated, and made of fine reed or fiber sewed in coils with very fine grass-thread, so that they were both light and strong. There were cone-shaped carrying-baskets borne on the back with a loop passed around the forehead; in these the squaws carried grain, fruit, nuts or occasionally babies. There were baskets for sifting grain and meal, and a sort of flask that would hold water. The materials were gathered from mountains, valleys and plains over a range of hundreds of miles—grasses here, bark fiber there, dyes in another place, maguey leaves in another, and for black figures in decoration the seed-pods called "cat's claws" or the stems of maiden-hair fern. A design was not copied exactly, but each worker made the pattern in the same general form and sometimes improved on it. There was a banded pattern in a diamond-shaped criss-cross almost exactly like the shaded markings on a rattlesnake-skin. The Indians believed in a goddess or Snake-Mother, who lived underground and knew about springs; and as water was the most important thing in that land of deserts, they showed respect to the Snake-Mother by baskets decorated in her honor. Another design showed a round center with four zigzag lines running to the border. This was intended for a lake with four streams flowing out of it, widening as they flowed; but it looked rather like a cross or a swastika. There was a design in zigzags to represent the lightning, and almost all the patterns had to do in some way with lakes, rivers, rain, or springs.

As the exile of Spain began to know the country he sometimes ventured on journeys alone, without the tribe, to the north, away from the coast. In these wanderings he met with tribes whose language was not wholly strange, but whose customs and occupations were not exactly like those of his own Indians. Once he found a village of deerskin tents where the warriors were painting themselves with red clay, for a dance. He remembered that the squaws, when he came away some days before, were in great lamentation because they had no red paint for their baskets. He took out a handful of shells and found that these Indians were only too pleased to pay for them in red earth, deerskin, and tassels of deer hair dyed red. They would hardly let him go till he promised to come again and bring them more shells and shell beads. This suggested to him a way in which he might make himself of use and value.

Longer and longer journeys he took, trading shells for new dyes, flint arrow-heads, strong basket-reeds, and hides and furs of all sorts, learning more and more of the country as he trafficked. Once he found families living in a house built of stone and mud bricks, in the crevice of a cliff, getting water from a little brook at the base of it, and raising corn and vegetables along the waterside. Their houses had no real doors. They had trap-doors in the roof, reached by a notched tree-trunk inside and one outside. The corn that grew in the little farm at the foot of the cliff was of different colors, red, yellow, blue and white. Each kind was put in a separate basket. Each kind of meal was made separately into thin cakes cooked on a very hot flat stone. A handful of the batter was slapped on with the fingers so deftly that though the cake was thin, crisp and even, the cook never burned herself. The people were always on their guard against roving bands of Indians who lived in tipis, or wigwams, and were likely to attack the cliff-dwellers at any moment.

Cabeca de Vaca became interested in these wandering tribes, and moved north to see what they were like. He found them quite ready to trade with him and extremely curious about his wares. They had hides upon their tipis of a sort he had not seen before, not smooth, but covered with curly brown fur like a big dog's. It was some time before the Spanish trader made out what sort of animal wore such a skin, though he knew at first sight that it must be a very large one. Finally the old medicine man with whom he was talking began to make sketches on the inside of one of the great robes. The Spaniard in his turn made sketches, drawing a horse, a goat, a bear, a wolf, a bull. When he drew the bull the old Indian got excited. He declared that that was very like the animal they hunted, but that their bulls had great humped shoulders like this—he added a high curved line over the back. Cabeca came to the conclusion that it must be some sort of hunchbacked cow, but whatever it was, the curly furry hide was comforting on cold nights. The old Indian told him a few days after that some of the young men had just come in with news of a herd of these great animals moving along one of their trails, and if the white men cared to travel with them he could see them for himself.

It did not take the trader long to make up his mind. He went with the Indians at the slow trot which covers so many miles in a day, and sooner than they had expected, they saw from a little rise in the ground a vast herd of slowly moving animals which at first the white man took for black cattle. But they were not cattle.

There was the huge hump with the curly mane, and there were the short horns and slender, neat little legs which had seemed so out of proportion in the old Indian's sketch. From their point of view they could see the hunters cut out one animal and attack him with their arrows and lances without arousing the fears of the rest. The creatures moved quietly along, grazing and pawing now and then, darkening the plain almost as far as the eye could see. The trader spent several days with the tribe, and when he went south again he had a bundle of hides so large that he had to drag it on a kind of hurdle made of poles. He had helped the Indians decorate some of the hides they had, and whenever he did this he wrote his own name, the date, and a few words, somewhere on the skin.



"Why do you do this?" asked the medicine man, putting one long bronze finger on the strange marks.

"It is a message," said Cabeca de Vaca. "If any of my own people see it they will know who made the pictures."

The Indian looked at him thoughtfully.

"You are very clever," he said. "You ought to be a medicine-man."

This put another idea into the exile's head. He had seen much of the medicine-men in his wanderings, and had studied their ways. Like most men of his day who traveled much, he had a rough-and-ready knowledge of medicine and surgery. He had sometimes been able to be of service to sick and wounded Indians, and whether it was their faith in him, or in the virtues of his treatment, his patients usually got well. In comparing notes they found that he often prayed and sang in his own language while watching with them. In the end he gained a great reputation as a sort of combined priest and doctor. He was not too proud to adopt some of the methods of the medicine-men when he found them effective, especially as regards herbs and other healing medicaments, used either in poultices or drinks. From being a poor slave and a burden to his masters, he became their great man.

He had been for more than five years among the Indians when another tribe of Indians met with his tribe, perhaps drawn by the fame of the white medicine-man, and among their captives he recognized with joy three of his own comrades—Castillo, Dorantes, and a Barbary negro called Estevanico (Little Stephen). He told them of his experience, and found them glad to have him teach them whatever of the arts of the medicine-man he himself knew. After that, the four friends traveled more or less in company, and persuaded the Indians to go westward, where they thought that there might be a chance of meeting with some of their own people. They finally reached a point at which the Indians explained that they dared not go further, because the tribe which held the country further west was hostile.

"Send to them," suggested Cabeca, "and tell them we are coming."

After some argument the Indians sent two women, because women would not be harmed even in the enemy's country. Then the four comrades set out into the new land.

Among them they knew six Indian dialects, and could talk with the people after a fashion, wherever they went. Even when two tribes were at war, they made a truce, so that they might trade and talk with the strangers. At last Castillo saw on the neck of an Indian the buckle of a sword-belt, and fastened to it like a pendant the nail of a horse-shoe. His heart leaped. He asked the Indian where he got the things. The Indian answered,

"They came from heaven."

"Who brought them?" asked Cabeca.

"Men with beards like you," the Indian answered rather timidly, "seated on strange animals and carrying long lances. They killed two of our people with those lances, and the rest ran away."

Then Cabeca knew that his countrymen must have passed that way. His feelings were a strange mixture of joy and grief.

As they went on they came upon more traces of Spaniards, parties of slave-hunters from the south. Everywhere they themselves were well treated, even by people who were hiding in the mountains for fear of the Christians. When Cabeca told the Indians that he was himself a Christian they smiled and said nothing; but one night he heard them talking among themselves, not knowing that he could understand their talk.

"He is lying, or he is mistaken," they said. "He and his friends come from the sunrise, and the Christians from the sunset; they heal the sick, the Christians kill the well ones; they wear only a little clothing, as we do, the Christians come on horses, with shining garments and long lances; these good men take our gifts only to help others who need them; the Christians come to rob us and never give any one anything."

The next day Cabeca told the Indians that he wished to go back to his own people and tell them not to kill and enslave the natives. He explained to them that this wickedness was not in any way part of his religion, and that the founder of that religion never injured or despised the poor, but went about doing good. When he was sure that there were Spaniards not many miles away, he took Estevanico, leaving the other two Spaniards to rest their tired bones, and with an escort of eleven Indians went out to look for his countrymen.

When he found them, they were greatly astonished. Their astonishment did not lessen when he told them how he came to be where he was. He sent Estevanico back to tell the rest of the party to come, and himself remained to talk with Diego de Alcaraz, the leader of the Spanish adventurers, and his three followers. They were slave-hunters, like the other Spaniards. When, five days afterward Estevanico, Castillo and Dorantes came on with an escort of several hundred Indians, all Cabeca's determination and diplomacy were taxed to keep the slavers from making a raid on the confiding natives then and there. To buy Alcaraz off cost nearly all the bows, pouches, finely dressed skins, and other native treasures he had gained by trading or received as gifts. In this collection were five arrowheads of emerald or something very like that stone. It was not in Cabeca de Vaca to break his word to people who trusted him. He had suffered every sort of privation; he had traveled more than ten thousand miles on foot in his six years among the Indians of the Southwest; now he had lost most of his profit from that long exile; but he went back to Spain with faith unbroken and honor clear as a white diamond.

In May, 1536, he and his companions reached Culiacan in the territory of Spain. All the way to the City of Mexico they were feasted and welcomed as honored guests. The account which Cabeca de Vaca wrote of his travels was the first written description of the country now called Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.

NOTE

This story follows closely the "Relacion of Cabeca de Vaca." It illustrates the resourcefulness, bravery and ingenuity of Spanish cavaliers of the heroic age as hardly any other episode does.



LONE BAYOU

De Soto was a gentleman of Spain In those proud years when Spanish chivalry From fierce adventure never did refrain,— Ruler of argosies that ruled the sea, She looked on lesser nations in disdain, As born to trafficking or slavery.

In shining armor, and with shot and steel Abundantly purveyed for their delight, Banners before whose Cross the foe should kneel, His company embarked—how great a light Through men's perversity to stoop and reel Down through calamity to endless night!

Yet unsubmissive, obdurately bold, The savages refused to serve their need. They would not guide the conquerors to their gold, Nor though cast in the fire like a weed Or driven by stern compulsion to the fold, Would they abandon their unhallowed creed.

The forest folk in terror broke and fled Like fish before the fierce pursuing pike. The stubborn chiefs as hostages were led— And in the wilderness, a grisly dyke Of slaves and captives, lay the heathen dead, And the black bayou claims all dead alike.

Then southward through the haunted bearded trees The Spaniards fought their way—Mauila's fires Devoured their vestments and their chalices, Their sacramental wine and bread—the choirs No longer sang their requiems, and the seas Lay between them and all their sacred spires.

At last in a lone cabin, where the cane Hid the black mire before the lowly door, De Soto died—although they sought to feign By some pretended magic mirror's lore That still he lived, a gentleman of Spain,— And the dread flood rolled onward to the shore!



XIV

THE FACE OF THE TERROR

"Paris is no place in these times for a Huguenot lad from Navarre," said Dominic de Gourgues, of Mont-de-Marsan in Gascony. "His father, Francois Debre, did me good service in the Spanish Indies. One of these days, Philip and his bloodhounds will be pulled down by these young terriers they have orphaned."

"If the Jesuits have their way all Huguenots will be exterminated, men, women and children," said Laudonniere, with a gleam of melancholy sarcasm in his dark pensive eyes. "Life to a Jesuit is quite simple."

"My faith," said Gascon, twisting his mustache, "they may find in that case, that other people can be simple too. But I must be off. I thank you for making a place for Pierre."

In consequence of this conversation, when Ribault's fleet anchored near the River of May, on June 25, 1564, Pierre Debre was hanging to the collars of two of Laudonniere's deerhounds and gazing in silent wonder at the strange and beautiful land.

"The fairest, fruitfullest and pleasantest land in all the world," Jean Ribault had said in his report two years before to Coligny the Great Admiral of France. Live-oaks and cedars untouched for a thousand years were draped in luxuriant grape-vines or wreathed with the mossy gray festoons of "old men's beard." Cypress and pine mingled with the shining foliage of magnolia and palm. From the marsh arose on sudden startled wings multitudes of water-fowl. The dogs tugged and whined eagerly as if they knew that in these vast hunting-forests there was an abundance of game. In this rich land, thus far neglected by the Spanish conquistadores because it yielded neither gold nor silver, surely the Huguenots might find prosperity and peace. Coligny was a Huguenot and a powerful friend, and if the French Protestants now hunted into the mountains or driven to take refuge in England, could be transplanted to America, France might be spared the horrors of religious civil war.

Pierre was thirteen and looked at least three years older. He could not remember when his people and their Huguenot neighbors had not lived in dread of prison, exile or death. When he was not more than ten years old he had guided their old pastor to safety in a mountain cave, and seen men die, singing, for their faith. After the death of his father and mother he had lived for awhile with his mother's people in Navarre, and since they were poor and bread was hard to come by he had run away the year before and found his way to Paris, where Dominic de Gourgues had found him. If the Huguenots had a safe home he might be able to repay the kindness of his cousins. Meanwhile the country, the wild creatures, the copper-colored people and the hard work of landing colonists and supplies were full of interest and excitement for Pierre.

Satouriona, the Indian chief, showed the French officers the pillar which Ribault's party had set up on their previous visit to mark their discovery. The faithful savages had kept it wreathed with evergreens and decked with offerings of maize and fruits as if it were an altar.

Unfortunately not all the colonists were of heroic mind. Most who had left France to seek their fortunes were merchants, craftsman and young Huguenot noblemen whose swords were uneasy in time of peace. French farm-laborers were mainly serfs on Catholic estates, and landowners did not wish to come to the New World. Thus the people of the settlement were city folk with little experience or inclination for cultivating the soil. The Indians grew tired of supplying the wants of so large a number of strangers. Quarrels arose among the French. A discontented group of adventurers mutinied and went off on a wild attempt at piracy. They plundered two ships in the Spanish Indies and were caught by the Spanish governor. The twenty-six who escaped his clutches fled back to the fort, which Laudonniere had built and named Carolina. His faithful lieutenant La Caille arrested them and dragged them to judgment. "Say what you will," said one of the culprits ruefully, "if Laudonniere does not hang us I will never call him an honest man." The four leaders were promptly sentenced to be hanged, but the sentence was commuted to shooting. After that order reigned, for a time.

Some of the tradesmen ranged the wilderness, bringing back feather mantles, arrows tipped with gold, curiously wrought quivers of beautiful fur, wedges of a green stone like beryl. There were reports of a gold mine somewhere in the northern mountains. Ribault did not return with the expected supplies, the Indians had mostly left the neighborhood, and misery and starvation followed, for the game, like the Indians fled the presence of the white men. The Governor began to think of crowding the survivors into the two little ships he had and returning to France.

Matters were in this unsatisfactory state when Captain John Hawkins in his great seven-hundred-ton ship the Jesus, with three smaller ones, the Solomon, the Tiger and the Swallow, put in at the River of May for a supply of fresh water. He gave them provisions, and offered readily to take them back to France on his way to England, but this offer Laudonniere declined.

"Monsieur Hawkins is a good fellow," he observed dryly to La Caille, "and I am grateful to him, but that is no reason why I should abandon this land to his Queen, and that is what he is hoping that I may do."

Others were not so long-sighted. The soldiers and hired workmen raised a howl of wrath and disappointment when they heard that they were not to sail with Hawkins, and openly threatened to desert and sail without leave. Laudonniere answered this threat by the cool statement that he had bought one of the English ships, the Tiger, with provisions for the voyage, and that if they would have a little patience they might soon sail for France in their own fleet. Somewhat taken aback they ceased their clamor and awaited a favoring wind. Before it came, Ribault came sailing back with seven ships, plenty of supplies, and three hundred new colonists.

The fleet approached as cautiously as if it were coming to attack the colony instead of relieving it, and Laudonniere, who saw many of his friends among the new arrivals, presently learned that his enemies among the colonists had written to Coligny describing him as arrogant and cruel and charging that he was about to set up an independent monarchy of his own. The Admiral, three thousand miles away, had decided to ask the Governor to resign. Ribault advised him to stay and fight it out, but Laudonniere was sick and disheartened. Life was certainly far from simple when to use authority was to be accused of treason, and not to use it was to foster piracy, and he had had enough of governing colonies in remote jungles of the New World. He was going home.

To most of the colonists, however, Ribault's arrival promised an end of all their troubles. Stores were landed, tents were pitched, and the women and children were bestowed in the most comfortable quarters which could be found for them just then. To his great satisfaction Pierre found among the arrivals his cousin Barbe and her husband, a carpenter, and her three children, Marie, Suzanne and little Rene. The two young girls regarded Cousin Pierre as a hero, especially when they learned that the bearskin on the floor of their palmetto hut had but a few months ago been the coat of a live black bear. It had been caught feasting in the maize-fields of the Indians, by their cousin and another youth, and shot with a crossbow bolt by Pierre. They thought the roast corn and stewed clams of their first meal ashore the most delicious food they had ever tasted, and the three-cornered enclosure in the forest with the wilderness all about it, the most wonderful place they had seen.

Little did these innocent folk imagine what was brewing in Spain. The raid of French pirates upon the Jamaican coast had promptly been reported by the Adelantado of that island. Spanish spies at the French court had carefully noted the movements of Coligny and Ribault. Pedro Menendez de Avila, raising money and men in his native province of Asturia in Spain for the conquest of all Florida, learned with horror and indignation that its virgin soil had already been polluted by heretic Frenchmen.

Menendez had in that very year gained permission from the King of Spain to conquer and convert this land at his own cost. In return he was to have free trade with the whole Spanish empire, and the title of Adelantado or governor of Florida for life—absolute power over all of America north of Mexico, for Spain had never recognized any right of France or England in the region discovered by Cabot, Cartier, Verrazzano or others. Menendez was allowed three years for his tremendous task. He was to take with him five hundred men and as many slaves, a suitable supply of horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, and provisions, and sixteen priests, four of whom were to be Jesuits. He had also to find ships to convey this great expedition.

But Menendez had been playing for big stakes all his life. He was only ten years old when he ran away and went to sea on a Barbary pirate ship. While yet a lad he was captain of a ship of his own, fighting pirates and French privateers. He had served in the West Indies and he had commanded fleets. King Philip had never really understood the enormous possibilities of Florida until Menendez explained them to him. The soil was fertile, the climate good, there might be valuable mines, and there were above all countless heathen whom it was the deepest desire of Menendez to convert to the true faith. In this last statement he was as sincere as he was in the others. He expected to do in Florida what Cortes had done in Mexico. Now heresy, the unpardonable sin, burned out and stamped out in Spain, had appeared in the province which he had bound himself at the cost of a million ducats to make Spanish and Catholic. With furious energy he pushed on the work of preparation.

He had assembled in June, 1565, a fleet of thirty-four ships and a force of twenty-six hundred men. Arciniega, another commander, was to join him with fifteen hundred. On June 29 he sailed from Cadiz in the San Pelayo, a galleon of nearly a thousand tons, a leviathan for those days. Ten other ships accompanied him; the rest of the fleet would follow later. It was the plan of Menendez to wipe out the garrison at Fort Caroline before Ribault could get there, plant a colony there and one on the Chesapeake, to control the northern fisheries for Spain alone. On the way a Caribbean tempest scattered the ships and only five met at Hispaniola, but Menendez did not wait for the rest. When he reached the Florida coast he sent a captain ashore with twenty men to find out exactly where on that long, lonely shore line the French colony had squatted.

About half past eleven on the night of September 4, the watchman on one of the French ships anchored off shore saw the huge San Pelayo, the Spanish banner lifting sluggishly in the slow wind, coming up from the south. Ribault was in the fort, so were most of the troops, and three of the ships were anchored inside the bar. The strange fleet came steadily nearer, the great flagship moved to windward of Ribault's flagship the Trinity, and dropped anchor. The others did likewise. Not a word was spoken by friend or foe. The Spanish chaplain Mendoza afterward wrote:

"Never since I came into the world did I know such a stillness."

A trumpet sounded on the San Pelayo. A trumpet sounded on the Trinity. Menendez spoke, politely.



"Gentlemen, whence does this fleet come?"

"From France."

"What is it doing here?"

"Bringing soldiers and supplies to a fort of the King of France in this country—where he soon will have many more," flung back the Breton captain defiantly.

"Are you Catholics or Lutherans?"

This time a score of clear voices reinforced the Captain's—"Lutherans—Huguenots—the Reformed Faith—The Religion!" And the Captain added, "Who are you yourself?"

"I am Pedro Menendez de Avila, General of the fleet of the King of Spain, Don Felipe the Second, who come hither to hang and behead all Lutherans whom I find by land or sea, according to instructions from his Majesty, which leave me no discretion. These commands I shall obey, as you will presently see. At daybreak I shall board your ships. If I find there any Catholic he shall be well treated. But every heretic shall die."

The reply to the rolling sonorous ultimatum was a shout of derision.

"Ah, if you are a brave man, don't put it off till daylight! Come on now and see what you will get!"

Menendez in black fury snapped out a command. Cables were slipped, and the towering black hulk of the San Pelayo bore down toward the Trinity. But the Breton captain was already leading the little fleet out of danger, and with all sail set, went out to sea, answering the Spanish fire with tart promptness. In the morning Menendez gave up the chase and came back to find armed men drawn up on the beach, and all the guns of the ships inside the bar pointed in his direction. He steered southward and found three ships already unloading in a harbor which he named San Augustin and proceeded to fortify.

In Fort Caroline, Pierre Debre, awakened by the sound of firing, ran down to the beach, where a crowd was gathering. No one could see anything but the flashes of the guns; who or what was attacking the ships there was no way of knowing. The first light of dawn showed the two fleets far out at sea, and Ribault at once ordered the drums to beat "To arms!" They saw the great galleon approach, hover about awhile, and bear away south. When the French fleet came back later, one of the captains, Cosette, reported that trusting in the speed of his ship he had followed the Spaniards to the harbor where they were now landing and entrenching themselves.

The terror which haunted the future of every Huguenot in France now menaced the New World.

Ribault gave his counsel for an immediate attack by sea, before Menendez completed his defense or received reinforcements. Laudonniere was ill in bed. The fleet sailed as soon as it could be made ready, and with it nearly every able fighting man in the settlement. Pierre, nearly crying with wrath and disappointment, was left among the non-combatants at the fort. In vain did old Challeux the carpenter try to console him. It might be, as Challeux said, that there would be plenty of chances to fight after his beard was grown, but now he was missing everything.

That night a terrible storm arose and continued for days. The marshes became a boundless sea; the forests were whipped like weeds in the wind. Where had the fleet found refuge? or had it been hurled to destruction by the rage of wind and sea? Laudonniere, in the driving rain, came from his sick-bed to direct the work on the defenses, which were broken down in three or four places. Besides the four dog-boys, the cook, the brewer, an old cross-bow maker, and the old carpenter, there were two shoemakers, a musician, four valets, fourscore camp-followers who did not know the use of arms, and the crowd of women and children. The sole consolation that could be found in their plight was that in such a storm no enemy would be likely to attack them by sea or land. Nevertheless Laudonniere divided his force into two watches with an officer for each, gave them lanterns and an hour glass for going the rounds, and himself, weak with fever, spent each night in the guard-room.

On the night of the nineteenth the tempest became a deluge. The officer of the night took pity on the drenched and gasping sentries and dismissed them. But on that night five hundred Spaniards were coming from San Augustin through almost impassable swamps, their provisions spoiled and their powder soaked, under the leadership of the pitiless Menendez. The storm had caught Ribault's fleet just as it was about to attack on the eleventh, and Menendez had determined to take a force of Spaniards overland and attack the fort while its defenders were away. With twenty Vizcayan axemen to clear the way and two Indians and a renegade Frenchman, Francois Jean, for a guide, he had bullied, threatened and exhorted them through eight days of wading through mud waist-deep, creeping around quagmires and pushing by main force through palmetto jungles, until two hours before daylight the panting, shivering, sullen men stood cursing the country and their commander, under their breath, in a pine wood less than a mile from Fort Caroline. It was all that Menendez could do to get them to go a rod further. All night, he said, he had prayed for help; their provisions and ammunition were gone; there was nothing to do but to go on and take the fort. They went on.

In the faint light of early morning a trumpeter saw them racing down the slope toward the fort and blew the alarm. "Santiago! Santiago!" sounded in the ears of the half-awakened French as the Spaniards came through the gaps in the defenses and over the ramparts. Fierce faces and stabbing pikes were everywhere. Laudonniere snatched sword and buckler, rallied his men to the point of greatest danger, fought desperately until there was no more hope, and with a single soldier of his guard escaped into the woods. Challeux, chisel in hand, on his way to his work, swung himself over the palisade and ran like a boy. In the edge of the forest he and a few other fugitives paused and looked down upon the enclosure of the fort. It was a butchery. Some of the Huguenots in the woods decided to return and surrender rather than risk the terrors of the wilderness. The Spaniards, they said, were at least men. Six of them did return, and were cut down as they came. Pierre Debre side by side with a few desperate men who had one of the two light cannon the fort possessed, was fighting like a tiger in defense of a corner where a group of women and children were crouching.

When Menendez could secure the attention of his maddened men he gave an order that women, children and boys under fifteen should be spared. This order and the instant's pause it gave came just as the last of the men in Pierre's corner went down before the halberds of the Spaniards. Pierre leaped the palisade and ran for the forest. Looking back, he saw the trembling women and children herded into shelter, but not killed. Fifteen of the captured Huguenots were presently hanged; a hundred and forty-two had been cut down and lay heaped together on the river bank. Pierre plunged into the forest and after days of wandering reached a friendly Indian village. The carpenter and the other fugitives who escaped were taken to France in the two small ships of Ribault's fleet which had not gone to attack the Spanish settlement. Menendez returned at leisure to San Augustin, where he knelt and thanked the Lord.

The fate of the men of Ribault's fleet became known through the letters which the Spaniards themselves wrote in course of time to their friends at home, but chiefly through Menendez's own report to the King. Dominic de Gourgues heard of it from Coligny, and his eyes burned with the still anger of a naturally impetuous man who has learned in stern schools how to keep his temper.

"As I understand it," he said grimly and quietly, "Menendez, in the disguise of a sailor, found Ribault and his men shipwrecked and starving, some in one place, some in another. He promised them food and safety on condition that they should surrender and give up their arms and armor. He separated them into lots of ten, each guarded by twenty Spaniards. When each lot had been led out of sight of the rest he explained that on account of their great numbers and the fewness of his own followers he should be compelled to tie their hands before taking them into camp, for fear they might capture the camp. At the end of the day, when all had reached a certain line which Menendez marked out with his cane in the sand, he gave the word to his murderers to butcher them."

Coligny bowed his noble gray head.

"And he offered them life if they would renounce their religion, whereupon Ribault repeating in French the psalm, 'Lord, remember thou me,' they died without other supplication to God or man. On this account did Menendez write above the heads of those whom he hanged, 'I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to Lutherans.' And no demand for redress has as yet been made?"

"One," said the Admiral coolly. "A demand was made by Philip of Spain. He has required his brother of France to punish one Gaspe Coligny, sometimes known as Admiral, for sending out a Huguenot colony to settle in Florida."

The Gascon sprang to his feet muttering something between his teeth. "I crave your pardon, my lord," he added with a courteous bow. "I am but a plain rough soldier unused to the ways of courts, but it seems to me that things being as they are, my duty is quite simple." He bowed himself out and left Coligny wondering.

During the following months it was noted that in choosing the men for his coming expedition Gourgues appeared to be unusually select. He sold his inheritance, borrowed some money of his brother, and fitted out three small ships carrying both sails and oars. He enlisted, one by one, about a hundred arquebusiers and eighty sailors who could fight either by land or sea if necessary. He secured a commission from the King to go slave-raiding in Benin, on the coast of Africa. On August 22, 1567, he set sail from the mouth of the Charente.

"I should like to know," said one of the trumpeters, Lucas Moreau, "whether we are really going slave-catching, or not."

"Why do you think we are not?" asked the pilot, to whom he spoke.

"Because I have seen nothing on board that looks like it. Moreover, he was very particular to ask me if I had been in the Spanish Indies, and when he heard that I had been in Florida he took me on at once. I was out there, you know, when you were, two years ago."

"And you would like to go back?" asked the other, gruffly.

"If there were a chance of killing Menendez, yes," answered Moreau with a fierce flash of white teeth.

The trumpeter's guess was a shrewd one. When the tiny fleet reached the West Indies, the commander took his men into his confidence and revealed the true object of his voyage—to avenge the massacre at Fort Caroline. The result proved that he had not misjudged them. Fired by his spirit they became so eager that they wanted to push on at once instead of waiting for moonlight to pass the dangerous Bahama Channel. They came through it without mishap, and at daybreak were anchored at the mouth of a river about fifteen leagues north of Fort Caroline. In the growing light an Indian army in war paint and feathers, bristling with weapons, could be seen waiting on the shore.

"They may think we are Spaniards," said Dominic de Gourgues. "Moreau, if you think they will understand you, it might be well for you to speak to them."

No sooner had the trumpeter come near enough in a small boat for the Indians to recognize him, than yells of joy were heard, for the war party was headed by Satouriona himself, who well remembered him. When Moreau explained that the French had returned with presents for their good friends there was great rejoicing. A council was appointed for the next day.

In the morning Satouriona's runners had scoured the country, and the woods were full of Indians. The white men landed in military order, and in token of friendliness laid aside their arquebuses, and the Indians came in without their bows and arrows. Satouriona met Gourgues with every sign of friendliness, and seated him at his side upon a wooden stool covered with the gray "Spanish moss" that curtained all the trees. In the clearing the chiefs and warriors stood or sat around them, ring within ring of plumed crests fierce faces and watchful eyes. Satouriona described the cruelty of the Spaniards, their abuse of the Indians and the miseries of their rule, saying finally,

"A French boy fled to us after the fort was taken, and we adopted him. The Spaniards wished to get him to kill him, but we would not give him up, for we love the French." He waved his hand, and from the woods at one side came, in full Indian costume, bronzed and athletic, Pierre Debre.

Greatly as he was surprised and delighted, Gourgues dared not show it too plainly, and Pierre had grown almost as self-contained as a veteran of twice his years. When the French commander suggested fighting the Spaniards Satouriona leaped for joy. He and his warriors asked only to be allowed to join in that foray.

"How soon?" asked Gourgues. Satouriona could have his people ready in three days.

"Be secret," the Gascon cautioned, "for the enemy must not feel the wind of the blow." Satouriona assured him that there was no need of that warning, for the Indians hated the Spaniards worse than the French did.

"Pierre," said Gourgues, when he had the lad safe on board ship, "they said you were killed."

"I stayed alive to fight Spaniards," said the boy with a flash of the eye. "'Sieur Dominic, there are four hundred of them behind their walls, where they rebuilt our fort. I have hidden in the trees and counted. But you can trust Satouriona. The Spaniards have stolen women, enslaved and tortured men, and killed children, and the tribe is mad with hate."

Twenty sailors were left to guard the ships, Gourgues with a hundred and sixty Frenchmen took up their march along the seashore; their Indian allies slipped around through the forest. With the French went Olotoraca, the nephew of the chief, a young brave of distinguished reputation, a French pike in his hand. The French met their allies not far from the fort, and pounced upon the garrison just as it finished dinner, Olotoraca being the first man up the glacis and over the unfinished moat. The fort across the river began to cannonade the attacking party, who turned four captured guns upon them, and then crossed, the French in a large boat which had been brought up the river, the Indians swimming. Not one Spaniard escaped. Fifteen were kept alive, to be hanged on the very trees from which Menendez had hanged his French captives, and over them was set an inscription burned with a hot poker on a pine board:

"Not as to Spaniards, but as to Traitors, Robbers, and Murderers."

When not one stone was left upon another in either fort, Dominic de Gourgues bade farewell to his Indian allies, and taking with him the lad so strangely saved from death and exile, went back to France.

NOTE

The full history of this dramatic episode is to be found in Parkman's "The Pioneers of France in the New World."



THE DESTROYERS

The moon herself doth sail the air As we do sail the sea, Where by Saint Michael's Mount we fare Free as the winds are free. Our keels are bright with elfin gold That mocks the tyrant's gaze, That slips from out his greedy hold And leaves him in amaze.

White water creaming past her prow The little Golden Hynde Bears westward with her treasure now— We'd ship and follow blind, But that he never did require— Our Captain hath us bound Only by force of his desire— The quarry hunts the hound!

The hunt is up, the hunt is up To the gray Atlantic's bound,— The health of the Queen in a golden cup!— The quarry is hunting the hound! Like steel the stars gleam through the night On armored waves beneath,— As England's honor cold and bright We bear her sword in sheath!

When that great Empire dies away And none recall her place, Men shall remember our work to-day And tell of our Captain's grace,— How never a woman or child was the worse Wherever our foe we found, Nor their own priests had cause to curse The quarry that hunted the hound!



XV

THE FLEECE OF GOLD

White fog, the thick mist of windless marshes, masked the Kentish coast. The Medway at flood-tide from Sheerness to Gillingham Reach was one maze of creeks and bends and inlets and tiny bays. Nothing was visible an oar's length overside but shifting cloudy shapes that bulked obscurely in the fog. But although this was Francis Drake's first voyage as master of his own ship, he knew these waters as he knew the palm of his hand. His old captain, dying a bachelor, had left him the weather-beaten cargo-ship as reward for his "diligence and fidelity", and at sixteen he was captain where six years before he had been ship's-boy.

Scores of daring projects went Catherine-wheeling through his mind as he steered seaward through the white enchanted world. In 1561 Spain was the bogy of English seaports, most of whose folk were Protestants. There was no knowing how long the coast-wise trade would be allowed to go on.

Out of the white mist flashed a whiter face, etched with black brows and lashes and a pointed silky beard—the face of a man all in black, whose body rose and dipped with the waves among the marsh grass of an eyot. So lightly was it held that it might have slipped off in the wake of the boat had not Tom Moone the carpenter caught it with a boat-hook. But when they had the man on board they found that he was not dead.

Ten minutes before, the young captain would have said that every dead Spaniard was so much to the good, but he had the life-saving instinct of a Newfoundland dog. He set about reviving the rescued man without thinking twice on the subject.

"'T is unlucky," grumbled Will Harvest under his breath. "Take a drownded man from the sea and she get one of us—some time."

"Like enough," agreed his master blithely. "But this one's not drownded—knocked on the head and robbed, I guess. D'you think we might take him to Granny Toothacre's, Tom?"

"I reckon so," returned Tom with a wide grin, "seein' 't is you. If I was the one to ask her I'd as lief do it with a brass kittle on my head. She don't like furriners."

Drake laughed and brought his craft alongside an old wharf near which an ancient farm-house stood, half-hidden by a huge pollard willow. Here, when he had seen his guest bestowed in a chamber whose one window looked out over the marshes, he stayed to watch with him that night, sending the ship on to Chatham in charge of the mate.

"Now what's the lad up to?" queried Will as they caught the ebbing tide. "D'ye think he'll find out anything, tending that there Spanisher?"

"Not him. He don't worm secrets out o' nobody. But he's got his reasons, I make no doubt. You go teach a duck to swim—and leave Frankie alone," said Moone.

The youth did not analyze the impulse that kept him at the bedside of the injured man, but he felt that he desired to know more of him. The stranger was gaunt, gray and without jewel, gold chain or signet ring to show who he was, but it was the same man who had spoken to him at Gravesend five years ago.

A barge-load of London folk had come down to see the launching of the Serchthrift, the new pinnace of the Muscovy Company, and among them was the venerable Sebastian Cabot. Alms were freely distributed that the spectators might pray for a fortunate voyage, but Frankie Drake was gazing with all his eyes at the veteran navigator. A hand was laid on his shoulder, and a friendly voice inquired,

"Did you get your share of the plunder, my son?"

The lad shook his head a trifle impatiently. "I be no beggar," he answered. "I be a ship's boy."

"Ay," said the man, "and you seek not the Golden Fleece?"

His eyes laughed, and his long fingers played with a strange jewel that glowed like Mars in the midnight of his breast. It was of gold enamel, with a splendid ruby in the center, and hanging from it a tiny golden ram. Could he mean that? But the crowd surged between them and left the boy wondering. He had never spoken to a Spaniard before.

As the fluttering pulse grew stronger and the man roused from his stupor, disjointed phrases of sinister meaning fell from his lips. No names were used, and much of his talk was in Spanish, but it suggested a foul undercurrent of bribery, falsehood and conspiracy hidden by the bright magnificence of the young Queen's court. The queer fact seemed to be that the speaker appeared himself to be the victim of some Spanish plot. Now why should that be, and he a Spaniard?

The young captain turned from the window, into which through the clearing air the moon was shining, to find the stranger looking at him with sane though troubled eyes.

"The Golden Fleece?" he asked in English. Drake shook his head.

"You've had a bad hurt, sir," he said, and briefly explained the circumstances.

"Ah," said the man frowning, and was silent.

"If you would wish to send any word to your friends,—" Drake began, and hesitated.

"I have no friends here, save my servant Sancho. The Golden Fleece will sail on Saint James's Eve for Coruna, and he was to meet me at Dover and return with me to our own country. In Alcala they know what to expect of a Saavedra."

The last words were spoken with a proud assurance that gave the listener a tingling sense of something high and indomitable. Saavedra's dark eyes were searching his face.

"I fear I trespass on your kindness," he added courteously, "and that I have talked some nonsense before I came to myself."

"Nothing of any account, sir," answered the lad quickly. "Mostly it was Spanish—and I don't know much o' that. You'll miss your ship if she sails so soon, but you're welcome here so long as you like to stay."

"I thank you," said the Spaniard in a relieved tone, adding half to himself, "No friends—but one cannot break faith—even with an enemy."

He dropped asleep almost at once after swallowing the cordial which Drake held to his lips. The moon came up over the flooded meadows that were all silvery lights and black shadow like a fairy realm. The lad had never spent a night like this, even when he had seen his master die.

When the pearl and rose of a July morning overspread the sky he descended, to splash and spatter and souse his rough brown head in a bucket of fresh-drawn water, and wheedle the old dame into a good humor.

"What ye hate and fear's bound to come to ye, sooner or later," Granny Toothacre grumbled as she stirred her savory broth, "My old man said so and I never beleft it—here be I at my time o' life harborin' a Spanisher."

"Ah, now, mother,"—Drake laid a brown hand coaxingly on her old withered one,—"you'll take good care of him for me, and we'll share the ransom."

"Ransom," the old woman muttered, looking after the straight, sturdy young figure as it strode down to the wharf, "not much hope o' that. Not but what he's a grand gentleman," she admitted, turning the contents of her saucepan into her best porringer. "He don't give me a rough word no more than if I was a lady."

Drake spent all his leisure during the next fortnight with the Spaniard, whose recovery was slow but steady. It was tacitly understood that the less said of the incident which had left him stunned and half-drowned the better. If those who had sought to kill him knew him to be alive, they might try again.

The young seaman had never known a man like this before. In his guest's casual talk of his young days one could see as in a mirror the Spain of a half-century since, with its audacious daring, its extravagant chivalry and its bulldog ferocity.

"They have outgrown us altogether, these young fellows," he said once with his quaint half-melancholy smile. "When the King and Queen rode in armor at the head of their troops in Granada, our cavaliers dreamed of conquering the world—now it has all been conquered."

"Not England," Drake put in quickly.

"Not England—I beg your pardon, my friend. But we have grown heavy with gold in these days—and gold makes cowards."

"It never made a coward o' me," laughed the lad. "Belike it'll never have the chance."

Through the shadows the old ship's-lantern cast in the rude half-timbered room seemed to move the wild figures of that marvellous pageant of conquest which began in 1492. Saavedra spoke little of himself but much of others—Ojeda, Nicuesa, Balboa, Cortes, Alvarado, Pizarro. In his soft slow speech they lived again, while by the stars outside, unknown uncharted realms revealed themselves. This man used words as a master mariner would use compass and astrolabe.

"Those days when we followed Balboa in his quest for the South Sea," he ended, "were worth it all. Gold is nothing if it blinds a man to the heavens. You too, my son, may seek the Golden Fleece in good time. May the high planets fortify you!"

What room was left for a knight-errant in the Spain of to-day, ruling by steel and shot and flame and gold? It must be rather awful, the listener reflected, to see your own country go rotten like that in a generation. Yet there was no bitterness in the old hidalgo's tranquil eyes. "I have been a fool," he said smiling, "but somehow I do not regret it. The wound from a poisoned arrow can be seared with red-hot iron, but for the creeping poison of the soul—the loss of honor—there is no cure."

When the seamen came to get orders from their young captain, Saavedra observed with surprise the lad's clear knowledge of his own trade. Francis Drake's old master had seen King Henry's shipwrights discarding time-honored models to build for speed, speed and more speed. He had seen Fletcher of Rye, in 1539, prove to all the Channel that a ship could sail against the wind. All that he knew he had taught his young apprentice, and now the boy was free to use it for his own work—whatever that should be. Unlike the gilded and perfumed courtiers, these men of the sea showed little respect toward the tall ships of Spain. Saavedra, pleased that they spoke without reserve in his presence, watched the rugged straightforward faces, and wondered.

The time came when they took him and his stocky, silent old servant to board a Vizcayan boat. As they caught his last quick smile and farewell gesture Will Harvest heaved a rueful sigh. "I never thought to be sorrowful at parting with a Don," he said reflectively, "but I be."

"God made men afore the Devil made Dons," growled Tom Moone. "Yon's a man."

Drake had gone down the wharf with John Hawkins of Plymouth, a town that was warmly defiant of Spain's armed monopoly of sea-trade. Privateers were dodging about the trade-routes where Spanish and Portuguese galleons, laden with ingots of gold and silver, dyewoods, pearls, spices, silks and priceless merchandise, moved as menacing sea-castles. Huger and huger galleasses were built, masted and timbered with mighty trunks from the virgin forests of the Old World, four and five feet thick. The military discipline of the Continent made a warship a floating barrack; the decks of a Spanish man-of-war were packed with drilled troops like marching engines of destruction, dealing leaden death from arquebus and musquetoun. The little ships of Cabot, Willoughby and William Hawkins had not exceeded fifty, sixty, at most a hundred tons; Philip's leviathans outweighed them more than ten to one. What could England do against the landing of such an army? An English Admiral would be Jack the Giant-Killer with no magic at his command. Yet in the face of all this, under the very noses of the Spanish patrol, Protestant craftsmen were escaping from the Inquisition in the Netherlands to England, where Elizabeth had contrived to let it be known that they were quite welcome.

To a perfectly innocent and lawful coasting trade Drake and his crew now added this hazardous passenger service. They were braving imprisonment, torture and the stake, for in 1562 no less than twenty-six Englishmen were burned alive in Spain, and ten times as many lay in prison. Before Drake was twenty all Spanish ports were closed to English trade. He sold his ship and joined Hawkins in his more or less contraband trade with the West Indies.

With every year of adventure upon the high seas his hatred of the tyranny of Spain deepened and strengthened. Yet though Spanish ferocity might soak the world in blood, he would not have his men tainted with the evil inheritance of the idolaters. It came to be known that El Draque did not kill prisoners. His crews fought like demons, but they slew no unarmed man, they molested no woman or child. On these terms only would he accept allies. Tons of plunder he took, but never a helpless life. He landed the shivering crews of his prizes on some Spanish island or with a laugh returned to them their empty ships. "A dead man's no mortal use to anybody," he would say cheerily, and go on using his cock-boats to sink or capture galleys. At twenty-seven, beholding for the first time the shining Pacific, he vowed that with God's help he would sail an English ship on that sea. Alone upon the platform built in a great tree with steps cut in its trunk, to which his negro allies the Maroons had guided him, he conceived the sublimely audacious plan which he was one day to unfold to Walsingham and the Queen.

The air was thick with rumors of war with Spain when Drake arrived in London years later, in the company of a new friend, Thomas Doughty,—courtier, soldier, scholar, familiar with every shifting undercurrent of European court life. Never at a loss for a phrase, ready of wit and quick of understanding, Doughty could put into words what the frank-hearted young sea-captain had thought and felt and dreamed. Both knew the peace with Philip to be only deceptive. Walsingham and Leicester were for war; Burleigh for peace; between the two the subtle Queen played fast and loose with her powerful enemy.

Drake avowed to Doughty his belief that to strike effectively at the gigantic power of Spain, England must raid the colonies—not the West Indies alone, but the rich western provinces of Peru and Chili. No one had been south of Patagonia since its discovery, sixty years before. Geographers still held that beyond the Straits of Magellan a huge Antarctic continent existed. From that unknown region of darkness and tempest came the great heaving ground-swell, the tidal wave and the hurricane. Even Spanish pilots never used the perilous southern route. Treasure went overland across the Isthmus. Every year an elephantine treasure-ship sailed from Panama westward through the South Sea; and there was a rich trade between the American mines and the Orient and the Spanish peninsula, by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Doughty's imagination was fired by the gorgeous possibilities of the idea, and when he became the secretary of Christopher Hatton, the Queen's handsome Captain of the Guard, he laid the plan before him with all the eloquence of his persuasive tongue. Hatton finally obtained from Elizabeth a promise to contribute a thousand crowns to the cost of an expedition to penetrate the South Seas. This, however, was only on condition that the affair should be kept secret, above all from Burleigh, who was certain to use every effort to stop it. She had already, in a private audience with Drake, been informed of the main features and even the details of the scheme, and had assured him that when the time was ripe he should be chosen to avenge the long series of injuries which Philip had inflicted upon England's honor and her own.

When in mid-November, 1577, Drake ran out of Plymouth with his tiny fleet, he had with him all told one hundred and fifty seamen and fourteen boys, enlisted for a voyage to Alexandria, although it was pretty well known that this was a blind. His flagship, the Pelican, afterward re-christened the Golden Hynde for Hatton's coat-of-arms, was a hundred-ton ship carrying eighteen guns. The Marygold, a barque of thirty tons and fifteen guns, and the Swan, a provision ship of fifty tons, were commanded by two of the gentlemen volunteers, Mr. John Thomas and Mr. John Chester. Captain John Wynter commanded the Elizabeth, a new eighty-ton ship, and a fifteen-ton pinnace called the Christopher in honor of Hatton, was commanded by Tom Moore. Thomas Doughty was commander of the land-soldiers, and his brother John was enlisted among the gentlemen adventurers.

All of Drake's experience and sagacity had gone to the fitting out of the ships. There were less than fifty men on board besides the regular crews, and among them were special artisans, two trained surveyors, skilled musicians furnished with excellent instruments, and the adventurous sons of some of the best families in England. As page the Admiral had his own nephew, Jack Drake. There were stores of wild-fire, chain-shot, arquebuses, pistols, bows, and other weapons. The Queen herself had sent packets of perfume breathing of rich gardens, and Drake's table furniture was of silver gilt, engraved with his arms; even some of the cooking utensils were of silver. Nothing was spared which became the dignity of England, her Admiral and her Queen. On calm nights the sea was alive with music. And on board the little flagship Doughty and Drake talked together as those do whose minds answer one another like voices in a roundelay.

Men who have time and again run their heads into the jaws of death are often inclined to fatalism. Drake had never expressed it in words, but he had a feeling that whatever he was meant to do, God would see that he did, so long as he gave himself wholly to the work. One evening when the Southern Cross was lifting above the darkling sea, and the violins were crooning something with a weird burden to it, Doughty mused aloud.

"'T is the strangest thing in life, that whatever we are most averse to, that we are fated to do."

"Eh?" said Drake with a laugh, looking up from Eden's translation of Pigafetts. "Accordin' to that you can't even trust yourself. D'you look to see me set up an image to be worshiped?" Then he added in a lower tone, "That's foolish, Tom. God don't shape us to be puppets."

"That sounds like old Saavedra," was Doughty's idle comment. "He had great store of antiquated sentiments—like those in the chronicles of the paladins. I knew his nephew well—a witty fellow, but visionary. He laughed at the old cavalero, but he was fond of him, and our affections rule us and ruin us. A man should have no loves nor hates if he would get on at court."

Sheer surprise kept the other silent for the moment, and Doughty went on,—

"The old man had been in Mexico with Cortes, and might have risen to Adelantado in some South American province if he had not been too scrupulous to join Pizarro. He was in London, ten or fifteen years before I knew him, and I believe he was the destruction of a well-considered Spanish plot for the assassination of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth—the assassins nearly killed him. He was left for dead and was picked up by some sailors."

"He was in luck." Drake's eyes twinkled.

"They would have been luckier—if they had let the Spanish agents in London know they had him. He paid them well of course, but he gave them credit for the most exalted motives. All his geese were swans."

"Maybe they acted out o' pure decency," Drake said dryly.

"My Admiral, this is not Utopia." Doughty stroked his beard with a light complacent hand. "Seriously, it is not a kindness to expect of men without traditions more than they are capable of doing. 'E meglio cade dalle fenestre che del tetto.'" (It is better to fall from the window than from the roof.)

Drake was silent, fingering the slender Milanese poniard with the blade inlaid with gold and the great ruby in the top of the hilt, which lay on the table between them. The shipmaster came in just then with some question, and the conversation dropped.



It was not often that Francis Drake attempted to analyze the character and behavior of those about him. Mostly he judged men by a shrewd instinct; but that night he lay long awake, watching the witch-lights upon the waves from the dancing lanterns. He was acute enough to see that Doughty had hit slyly at him over Saavedra's shoulders. Doughty had not liked it that Moone should be raised to the rank of captain; he had already shown that he regarded himself as second only to Drake in command, and the champion of the gentlemen as distinct from the mariners. The second officer of every English ship was a practical shipmaster whose authority held in all matters concerning navigation. The soldiers and their officers were passengers. This was unavoidable in view of the new method of English sea-fighting, which depended quite as much on the skill of the seamen as on the armed and trained soldier. English gunners could give the foe a broadside and slip away before their huge adversary could turn. Drake now had two factions to deal with, and he bent his brows and set his jaw as he pondered the situation. If discord arose, the gentlemen would have to come to order. There was no room here for old ideas of caste. Any man too good to haul on a rope might go to—Spain.

Doughty had a way of taking it for granted that Drake and he, as gentlemen, shared thoughts and feelings not to be comprehended by common men. On land this had not seemed offensive, but on blue water, with the old sea-chanteys in his ears, in the intimate association of a long voyage, Drake found himself resenting it. What was there about the man that made his arguments so plausible when one heard them, so false when his engaging presence was withdrawn? And yet how devoted, how sympathetic, how witty and companionable he could be! Drake found himself excusing his friend as if he were a woman,—laughed, sighed, and went to sleep.

Presently he began to hear of John Doughty's amusing himself by reading palms and playing on the superstitions of the sailors with strange prophecies, in which his brother sometimes joined. Drake summoned the two to a brief interview in which Thomas Doughty learned that his friend on land, frank, boyish and unassuming, was a different person from the Admiral of the Fleet. Yet as this impression faded, the brothers perversely went on encouraging discord between the gentlemen adventurers and the sailors, and foretelling events with sinister aptness.

It grew colder and colder. It should be summer,—but as they crept southward they encountered cold and wind beyond that of the North Sea in January. The nights grew long; the battering of the gales never ceased; the ships lost sight of one another. It was whispered that not only had the uncanny brothers foretold the evil weather, but Thomas Doughty had boasted of having brought it about. "We'll ha' no luck till we get rid of our prophet," said blunt Tom Moone, "and the Lord don't provide no whales for the likes o' he."

Drake warned his comrade with an ominous quiet. "Doughty," he said, "if you value your neck you keep your reading and writing to what a common man can understand—you and your brother. A man can't always prophesy for himself, let alone other folk."

"You heard what he said," commented Wynter grimly when the Admiral was in his cabin behind closed doors. "Better not raise the devil unless you know for sure what he'll do. There's been one gallows planted on this coast."

"Sneck up!" laughed Doughty, "he would not dare hang a gentleman!" but he felt a creeping chill at the back of his neck.

On the desolate island where the stump of Magellan's gallows stood black against a crimson dawn, they landed and the tragedy of estrangement and suspicion ended. Thomas Doughty was tried for mutiny and treason before a jury of his peers. Every man there held him a traitor, yet he was acquitted for lack of evidence. Thus encouraged, Doughty boldly declared that they should all smart for this when Burleigh heard of it. What he had done to hinder the voyage, he averred, was by Burleigh's orders, for before they sailed he had gone to that wily statesman and told him the entire scheme.

In a flash of merciless revelation Drake saw the truth. He left Doughty to await the verdict, called the companies down to the shore, and there told them the story of the expedition from first to last, not overlooking the secret orders of the Queen.

"This man was my friend," he said with a break in his voice such as they had not heard save at the suffering of a child. "I would not take his life,—but if he be worthy of death, I pray you hold up your hands."

There was a breathless instant when none stirred; then every hand was raised.

On the next day but one they all sat down to a last feast on that bleak and lonely shore; the two comrades drank to each other for the last time, shared the sacrament, and embracing, said their farewells. Doughty proved that if he could not live a true man he could die like a gentleman; the headsman did his work, and Drake pronounced the solemn sentence, "Lo! this is the death of traitors!"

In that black hour the boyish laughter went forever from the eyes of the Admiral, and the careless mirth from his voice. When after a while young Jack Drake, unable to bear the silence that fell between them, began some phrase of blundering boyish affection, the sentence trailed off into a stammer.

"He's dead and at peace, Jack," the master said, the words dropping wearily, like spent bullets. "He couldn't help being as he was,—I reckon. If I'd known he was like that I could ha' stopped him, but I never knew—till too late."

Discord among the crews continued, until Drake, rousing from his fitful melancholy, called them all together on a Sunday, and mounted to the place of the chaplain.

"I am going to preach to-day," he said shortly. Then he unfolded a paper and began to read it aloud.

"My masters, I am a very bad orator, for my bringing up hath not been in learning; but what I shall speak here let every man take good notice of and let him write it down. For I will speak nothing but what I will answer it in England, yea, and before Her Majesty." He reminded them of the great adventure before them and went on.

"Now by the life of God this mutiny and dissension must cease. Here is such controversy between the gentlemen and the sailors that it doth make me mad to hear it. I must have the gentleman to haul with the mariner and the mariner with the gentleman. I would know him that would refuse to set his hand to a rope—but I know there is not any such here.

"Any who desire to go home may go in the Marygold, but let them take care that they do go home, for if I find them in my way I will sink them."

Then beginning with Wynter he reduced every officer to the ranks forthwith, reprimanded known offenders, and wound up with this appeal:

"We have set by the ears three mighty sovereigns, and if this voyage have not success we shall be a scorning unto our enemies and a blot on our country forever. What triumph would it not be for Spain and Portugal! The like of this would never more be tried!" Then he gave every man his former rank and dismissed them. Moone, meeting Will Harvest that night by the light of a bonfire, was the only man who dared venture a comment. "We was spoilin' for a lickin'," he said, "and we got it. I do hope and trust we'll keep out o' mischief till Frankie gets us home to Plymouth, Hol'." Will grinned back cheerfully, and there was a subdued laugh from the group about the fire. The fleet was itself again.

Adventure after adventure succeeded, wilder than minstrel ever sang. The Marygold went down with all hands; Wynter in the Elizabeth, believing the Admiral lost, turned homeward; the Christopher and the Swan had already been broken up. All alone the little Golden Hynde, blown southward, sailed around Cape Horn and proved the Antarctic continent a myth. Then Drake steered northward after more than two month's tossing on the uncharted seas, to revictual his ship in Spanish ports, fill his hold with the rich cargoes of one prize ship after another, and capture at last the great annual treasure-ship Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, nicknamed the Spitfire because she was better armed than most of the ships plying on that coast. As they ballasted the Golden Hynde with silver from her huge hulk the jesting seamen dubbed her the Spit-silver. The little flagship was literally brimful of silver bars, ingots of gold, pieces of eight, and jewels whose value has never been accurately known. The Spanish Adelantados, accustomed to trust in their remoteness for defense, frantically looked for Drake everywhere except where he was. Warships hung about the Patagonian coast to catch him on his way home—surely he could not stay at sea forever!

But Drake had other plans. Navigators were still searching for the northern passage, the Straits of Anian, and he coasted northward until his men were half paralyzed with cold and the creeping chill of the fog. From the latitude of Vancouver he turned south again, and put into a natural harbor not far from the present San Francisco, which he named New Albion because of the white cliffs like the chalk downs of England. Here he landed and made camp to refit and repair his flagship. He had captured on one prize, two China pilots in whose possession were all the secret charts of the Pacific trade.

Indians ventured down from the mountains to the little fort and dockyard, wondering and admiring. Parson Fletcher presently came to the Admiral with the extraordinary news that they were worshiping the English as gods. Horror and laughter contended among the Puritans when they found themselves set up as idols of the heathen, and the chaplain endeavored by signs to teach the simple savages that the God whom all men should worship was invisible in the heavens.

"'T only shows," remarked Moone, with a nail in one corner of his mouth, after vehemently dissuading a persistent adorer, "that a man never knows what he'll come to. Granny Toothacre used to say that if there's a thing you fight against all your life it'll come to you sooner or later."

"So she did," said Drake with a grim smile as he passed. "Takes a woman to tell a fortune, after all."

"D'you ever hear what become of the old Don we picked up that time?" Moone asked in a lowered voice.

"Not since he sent Frankie the dagger with the gold work and the jewel. Why?"

"'Cause the pilot o' the Spit-silver he knowed un. He say the plague broke out in the Low Countries, and the old Don took and tended that Gallego servant o' his and then he died—not o' the pestilence—just wore out like. I reckon maybe he told Mus' Drake. I didn't."

Silence fell. Then Will said thoughtfully, "He won't be Mus' Drake much longer—by rights—but you never know what a woman'll do. She keep her presents and her favors for them that ha'n't earned 'em—as a rule."

Moone presently hummed half aloud,

"When I served my master I got my Sunday pudden, When I served the Company I got my bread and cheese. When I served the Queen I got hanged for a pirate, All along o'sailin' on the Carib Seas!"

It was a reckless jest, for every one knew that if Elizabeth were dead or married to a Catholic or at peace with Spain when they saw England again, it was extremely likely that the gallows would be their reward. But here, at any rate, was one spot not yet haunted by the Spanish spectre.

The Indians, persuaded at last that the white chief was not a god, insisted on making him their King. They crowned him with a headdress of brilliant feathers, in all due ceremony, hung a chain of beads about his neck, and looked on with the utmost reverence while Drake fixed to a large upright post a tablet claiming the land for the Queen of England, and a silver sixpence with the portrait of Elizabeth and the Tudor rose. Securely hidden under the tablet in a hollow of the wood were memoranda concerning the direction in which, according to the Indians, gold was to be found in the streams,—plenty of gold. When she was ready to the last rope's end the little ship spread her wings and sailed straight across the Pacific, round the Cape of Good Hope, home to England.

Battered and scarred but still seaworthy the Golden Hynde crept into Plymouth Sound, where Drake heard that the plague was in the seaport. Using this for excuse not to land until he knew his footing, he anchored behind Saint Nicholas Island and sent letters to Court.

The sea-dogs who patrolled the Narrow Seas in Elizabeth's time understood her better than her courtiers did. To Drake she was still the keen-minded woman who, like the jeweled silent birds he had seen in tropical jungles, sat in her palace, with enemies all about her alert and observant, and ready to seize her if she came within their grasp. He knew her waywardness to be half assumed, since to let an enemy know what he can count on is fatal. He had not much doubt of her action, but he must wait for her to give him his cue.

Within a week came her answer. She demurely suggested that she should be pleased to see any curiosities which her good Captain had brought home. Drake went up to London, and with him a pack train laden with the cream of his spoil. The Spanish Ambassador Mendoza came with furious letters from Philip demanding the pirate's head. A Spanish force landed that very week in Ireland. Burleigh and the peace party were desperate. All that Mendoza could get out of Elizabeth was an order to Edmund Tremayne at Plymouth to register the cargo of the Golden Hynde and send it up to London that she might see how much the pirate had really taken. At the same time Drake himself went down with her private letter to Tremayne telling him to look another way while her captain got his share of the bullion. Meanwhile she suggested that Philip call his Spaniards out of Ireland. Philip snarled that they were private volunteers. Elizabeth replied, so was Drake. An inquiry was held, and not a single act of cruelty or destruction of property could be proved against any of Drake's crews. The men were richly rewarded by their Admiral; the Golden Hynde came up to Deptford; a list of the plunder was returned to Mendoza; and London waited, excited and curious.

Out of this diplomatic tangle Elizabeth took her own way, as she usually did. On April 4, 1581, she suggested to Drake that she would be his guest at a banquet on board the little, worm-eaten ship. All the court was there, and a multitude of on-lookers besides, for those were the days when royalty sometimes dined in public. After the banquet, the like of which, as Mendoza wrote his master, had not been seen in England since the time of her father, Elizabeth requested Drake to hand her the sword she had given him before he left England. "The King of Spain demands the head of Captain Drake," she said with a little laugh, "and here am I to strike it off." As Drake knelt at her command she handed the sword to Marchaumont, the envoy of her French suitor, asking that since she was a woman and not trained to the use of weapons, he should give the accolade. This open defiance of Philip thus involved in her action the second Catholic power of Europe before all the world. Then, as Marchaumont gave the three strokes appointed the Queen spoke out clearly, while men thrilled with sudden presage of great days to come,—

"Rise up,—Sir Francis Drake!"



A WATCH-DOG OF ENGLAND

Where the Russian Bear stirs blindly in the leash of a mailed hand, Bright in the frozen sunshine, the domes of Moscow stand,

Scarlet and blue and crimson, blazing across the snow As they did in the Days of Terror, three hundred years ago.

Courtiers bending before him, envoys from near and far, Sat in his Hall of Audience Ivan the Terrible Tsar,

(He of the knout and torture, poison and sword and flame) Yet unafraid before him the English envoy came.

And he was Sir Jeremy Bowes, born of that golden time When in the soil of Conquest blossomed the flower of Rhyme.

Dauntless he fronted the Presence,—and the courtiers whispered low, "Doth Elizabeth send us madmen, to tempt the torture so?"

"Have you heard of that foolhardy Frenchman?" Ivan the Terrible said,— "He came before me covered,—I nailed his hat to his head."

Then spoke Sir Jeremy Bowes, "I serve the Virgin Queen,— Little is she accustomed to vail her face, I ween.

"She is Elizabeth Tudor, mighty to bless or to ban, Nor doth her envoy give over at the bidding of any man!

"Call to your Cossacks and hangmen,—do with me what ye please, But ye shall answer to England when the news flies over seas."

Ivan smiled on the envoy,—the courtiers saw that smile, Glancing one at the other, holding their breath the while.

Then spoke the terrible Ivan, "His Queen sits over sea, Yet he hath bid me defiance,—would ye do as much for me?"



XVI

LORDS OF ROANOKE

Primrose garlands in Coombe Wood shone with the pale gold of winter sunshine. Violets among dry leaves peered sedately at the pageant of spring. In the royal hunting forest of Richmond, venerable trees unfolded from their tiny buds canopies like the fairy pavilion of Paribanou.

Philip Armadas and Arthur Barlowe, coming up from Kingston, beheld all this April beauty with the wistful pleasure of those who bid farewell to a dearly beloved land. Within a fortnight Sir Walter Ralegh's two ships, which they commanded, would be out upon the gray Atlantic. The Queen would lie at Richmond this night, and the two young captains had been bidden to court that she might see what manner of men they were.[1]

Armadas, though born in Hull, was the son of a Huguenot refugee. Barlowe was English to the back-bone. Both knew more of the ways of ships than the ways of courts. Yet for all her magnificence and her tempers Elizabeth had a way with her in dealing with practical men. She welcomed merchants, builders, captains and soldiers as frankly as she did Italian scholars or French gallants. Her attention was as keen when she was framing a letter to the Grand Turk securing trade privileges to London or Bristol, as when she listened to the graceful flatteries of Spenser or Lyly. In this year 1584 she had granted a patent to Ralegh for further explorations of the lands north of Florida discovered half a century since by Sebastian Cabot. She heaped upon it rights and privileges which made Hatton and her other court gallants grind their teeth. Ralegh knew well that this was no time for him to be wandering about strange coasts. He was therefore fitting out an expedition to make a preliminary voyage and report to him what was found.

"'T is like this," Armadas was saying with the buoyant confidence which endeared him alike to his patron and his comrade. "North you get the scurvy and south the fever, but midway is the climate for a new empire. There Englishmen may have timber for their shipyards, and pasture for their sheep and cattle, and meadows for their corn. There Flemings and Huguenots may live and work in peace. Our sons may be lords and princes of a new world, Arthur lad."

"Aye; but there's the Inquisition in the Indies to reckon with," answered Barlowe with his grim half-smile. "And if what we hear of the barbarians be true, the men who make the first plantation may be forced to plant and build with their left hand and keep their right for fighting."

"Oh, the barbarians,—" Armadas began, and paused, for the chatter of young voices broke forth in a copse.

"I tell thee salvages be hairy men with tails like monkeys. My uncle he has seen them on the Guinea coast."

"Dick, if thou keep not off my heels in the passamezzo—"

"Be not so cholerical, Tom Poope, or the Master'll give thee a tuning. Thou'rt not Lord of the Indies yet."

"Faith," chuckled Barlowe, "here be some little eyasses practising a fantasy for the Queen's pleasure. Hey, lads, what's all the pother about?"[2]

The company emerged half-shamefacedly from the shrubbery, a group of youngsters between ten and fourteen, in fanciful costumes of silk and brocade, or mimic armor and puffed doublets. The central figure of the group was a handsome little lad in a sort of tunic of hairy undressed goatskin, a feather head-dress and gilded ornaments. His dark face had a sullen look, and he grasped his lance as if about to use it. Another urchin, whose great arched eyebrows, rolling eyes and impish mouth marked him as the clown of the company, made answer boldly,

"'T is Tom Poope, your lordships, who mislikes the dress he must wear, and says if we have but a king and queen of the monkeys to welcome the discoverers, the Queen will only laugh at us, and 'a will not stay to be laughed at. 'T is a masque of the ventures of Captain Cabot, look you, and Tom's the King of the salvages and makes all the long speeches."

"Upon my word, coz," laughed Armadas, "I think we have stumbled upon a pretty conceit intended to do honor to our master. Methinks His Royal Highness here has the right on't—the man who made that costume never saw true Indians."

"Have you seen them, then, sir? Are you a voyager?" asked Tom Poope eagerly, his face brightening. "And will you look on and tell us if we do it right?"

Barlowe grinned good-humoredly, and Armadas waved a laughing assent. They seated themselves upon a grassy bank and the play began.

Before half a dozen speeches had been said it was quite clear that the dark-eyed child who played the Indian King was the heart and fire of the piece. They were all clever children and well trained, but he alone lived his part. His small figure moved with a grace and dignity that even his grotesque apparel could not spoil. The costumer had evidently built his design for the costume of an Indian chief upon legends of wild men drawn from the history of Hanno and his gorillas, adding whatever absurdities he had gathered from sailors of the Gold Coast and the Caribbean Sea. Armadas, who had made a voyage to Newfoundland and seen the stately figure of a sachem outlined against a sunset sky, thought that the boy's instinct was truer than the costumer's tradition.

"Let me arrange thy habit, lad," he said when the first scene ended and the clown began his dance. With a few deft touches, ripping down one side of the tunic and wreathing a girdle of ivy and bracken, he changed the whole outline of the figure. With the hairy tunic draped as a cloak, and the ungainly plumed head-dress arranged as a warrior's crest, the character which had been almost ridiculous became heroic, as the author of the masque evidently had intended. The little King's beautiful voice changed like the singing of a Cremona violin as he spoke his lines to the white stranger:

"To this our wild domain we welcome thee In honorable hospitality. If Thou dost come as the great Lord of Life, The Lord of bear and wolf, and stag and fox, Leopard and ape, and rabbits of the rocks, We are thy children, as our brothers are,— The furry folk of forest fastnesses, The bright-winged birds that wanton with the breeze, The seal that sport amid the sapphire seas. We worship gods of lightning and of thunder, Of winds and hissing waves, the rainbow's wonder, The fruits and grains, borne by the kindly earth, And all the mysteries of death and birth. Say who you are, and from what realm you hail, White spirits that in winged peraguas sail? If ye be angels, tell us of your heaven. If ye be men, tell us who is your King."

It was not a long play, and had been written by a court poet especially for the children, of whose acting the Queen was fond. There were dances and songs—a sailor's contra-dance to the music of a horn pipe, a stately passamezzo by the Indian court, a madrigal and an ode in compliment to the Queen.[3] Finally the leader of the white men planted the banner of England on the little knoll, and in the name of his sovereign received the homage of the Indians. The last notes of the final chorus had just died away when trumpets called from the Thames, and the scene melted into chaos. Off ran the players, cramming costumes and properties into their wallets as they went, to see the Queen land at the water-gate. Amadas and Barlowe took the same direction less hurriedly.

"I wonder now," said Armadas thoughtfully, "how much of prophecy there may have been in that mascarado? Do you know, old lad, we may be taken for gods ourselves in two months' time? God grant they think us not devils before we are done!"

"We need have no fear if no Spaniards have landed on that coast before us," said Barlowe stolidly. "If they have—no poetical speeches will help our cause."

The Queen's great gilded barge with its crimson hangings came sweeping up the river just as they joined the company drawn up to receive her. The tall graceful figure of Ralegh was nearest her, and when she set her small neat foot upon the stone step it was his hand which she accepted to steady her in landing. She was a sovereign every inch even in her traveling cloak, but when dinner was over, and she took her seat in the throne-room, she dazzled the eye with the splendor of gold and pearl network over brilliant velvets, the glitter of diamonds among the frost-work of Flanders lace. Elizabeth knew how to stage the great Court drama as well as any Master of the Revels.

Moreover, what the Queen did, set the fashion for all the courtiers, to the profit and prosperity of merchants and craftsmen. Earls might secretly writhe at the prospect of entertaining their sovereign with suitable magnificence, but the tradesmen and purveyors rubbed their hands. When a company of Flemings was employed for four years on the carving of the beams and panels of the Middle Temple Hall, or noblemen to be in the fashion built new banquet-rooms in the Italian style, with long windows and galleries, English, Flemish and Huguenot builders flocked to the kingdom. If she took with one hand she gave with the other, and it was not without reason that the common folk of England long after she was dead called their daughters after "good Queen Bess."