Gentlemen rovers, by E. Alexander Powell

GENTLEMEN
ROVERS

E.ALEXANDER POWELL

GENTLEMEN ROVERS

Commodore Truxtun leaped into the shrouds.

GENTLEMEN
ROVERS

BY

E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S,

AUTHOR OF "THE LAST FRONTIER," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK::::::::::::::::::::::i9i3

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

Published September, 1913

THE FINEST GENTLEMAN I KNOW

MY FATHER

287955

"There's a Legion that never was 'listed,
That carries no colors or crest,
But, split in a thousand detachments,
Is breaking the road for the rest.

* * *

The ends o' the Earth were our portion,
The ocean at large was our share,
There was never a skirmish to windward
But the Leaderless Legion was there.

* * *

We preach in advance of the Army,
We skirmish ahead of the Church,
With never a gunboat to help us
When we're scuppered and left in the lurch.
But we know as the cartridges finish
And we're filed on our last little shelves,
That the Legion that never was 'listed
Will send us as good as ourselves.

* * *

Then a health (we must drink it in whispers)
To our wholly unauthorized horde-
To the line of our dusty foreloopers,
To the Gentlemen Rovers abroad!"

— The Lost Legion.

FOREWORD

THIS book is written as a tribute to some men
who have been overlooked by History and for
gotten by Fame. Though they won for us more
than half the territory comprised within our
present-day borders, not only have no monuments
been erected to perpetuate their exploits in bronze
and marble, but they lie for the most part in for
gotten and neglected graves, some of them un
der alien skies. Boyd, Truxtun, Eaton, Reed,
Lafitte, Smith, Ide, Ward, Walker — even their
names hold no significance for their country
men of the present generation, yet they played
great parts in our national drama. After two
decades of history-making in Hindustan, Boyd
came back to his own country and ably sec
onded William Henry Harrison in breaking the
power of the great Indian confederation which
threatened to check the white man's westward
march. When both France and England were
our enemies, and the gloom of despondency hung
like a cloud over the land, it was Truxtun and his

vii

Foreword

bluejackets who put new heart into the nation
by their victories. Eaton and his motley army
marched across six hundred miles of African des
ert, and by bringing the Barbary despots to their
knees accomplished that which had been unsuc
cessfully attempted by every naval power in
Europe. Captain Reed, of the General Armstrong,
after holding off a British force twenty times the
strength of his own, sunk his vessel rather than
surrender. To a pirate and smuggler named
Jean Lafitte, more than any other person save
Andrew Jackson, we owe our thanks for saving
New Orleans from capture and Louisiana from
invasion. Jedediah Smith blazed the route of the
Overland Trail and showed us the way to Cali
fornia, and a quarter of a century later Fremont,
Ide, Sloat, and Stockton made the land beyond
the Sierras ours. William Walker came within
an ace of changing the map of Middle America,
and made the name of American a synonym for
courage from the Rio Grande to Panama, while
on the other side of the world another American,
Frederick Townsend Ward, raised and led that
ever victorious army whose exploits were General
Gordon's chief claim to fame. There was not one
of these men of whom we have not reason to be
proud. But because they did their work unoffi-

viii

Foreword

cially, in what might aptly be described as "shirt
sleeve warfare," and because they went ahead
without waiting for the tardy sanction of those
who guided our ship of state, the deeds they per
formed have never received befitting recognition
from those who follow by the trails they made,
who grow rich from the mines that they discov
ered, who dwell upon the lands they won. And
that is why I am going to ask you, my friends, as
in the following pages I lead these forgotten heroes
before you in imaginary review, to raise your
hats in respect and admiration to this company
of brave soldiers and gallant gentlemen who so
stoutly upheld American prestige and American
traditions in many far corners of the world.

CONTENTS

PAGE

FOR RENT: AN ARMY ON ELEPHANTS ... i

WHEN WE FOUGHT NAPOLEON 19

WHEN WE CAPTURED AN AFRICAN KINGDOM . 45

THE LAST FIGHT OF THE "GENERAL ARMSTRONG" 73

THE PIRATE WHO TURNED PATRIOT .... 89

THE MAN WHO DARED TO CROSS THE RANGES 125

THE FLAG OF THE BEAR 153

THE KING OF THE FILIBUSTERS 179

CITIES CAPTURED BY CONTRACT 217

ILLUSTRATIONS

Commodore Truxtun leaped into the shrouds . Frontispiece

FACING
PAGE

The death of Tippo-Sahib at the storming of Seringa-

patam 12

The battle of Tippecanoe 16

The frigate Philadelphia ran aground in the harbor of
Tripoli, the Tripolitans capturing Captain Bain-
bridge and his entire crew 54

But even in those days the fame of American gunners

was as wide as the seas 86

The battle of New Orleans 120

Westward pressed the little troop of pioneers, across the

sun-baked lava beds of southwestern Utah . . . 136

The Sacramento Valley in 1845 164

General William Walker and his men, after a long and
stormy voyage, landing at Virgin Bay, en route to
Costa Rica 196

General Walker reviewing troops on the Grand Plaza,

Granada 200

xiii

Illustrations

PAGE

The programme was always the same: the sudden rush
of the filibusters with their high, shrill yell; the
taking of the barracks and the cathedral in the
Plaza 206

"Come on, boys!" shouted Ward. "We're going in!"
and plunged through the narrow opening, a revol
ver in each hand 230

FOR RENT: AN ARMY ON ELEPHANTS

FOR RENT: AN ARMY ON ELEPHANTS

THE pitiless Indian sun had poured down
upon the Hyderabad maidan until its sandy
surface glowed like a stove at white heat. Drawn
up in motionless ranks, which stretched from end
to end of the great parade-ground, was a division
of cavalry: squadron after squadron of scarlet-
coated troopers on sleek and shining horses; row
after row of brown and bearded faces peering
stolidly from under the white turbans. The rays
of the sun danced and sparkled upon ten thou
sand lance-points; the feeble breeze picked up
ten thousand pennons and fluttered them into a
white-and-scarlet cloud. Now and then the silence
would be broken by a clash of steel as a horse
tossed its head or a sowar stirred uneasily in his
saddle. Sitting a white Arab, a score of paces
in advance of the foremost rank, very stiff and
soldierly in his gorgeous uniform, was a tall young
man whose ruddy cheeks and pleasant eyes looked
strangely out of place in so Oriental a setting.

Gentlemen Rovers

From somewhere within the city walls a bugle
spoke shrilly and was answered by another and
then another, each nearer than the one preceding.
The young man in the splendid uniform barked
an order, and men and horses stiffened into rigid
ity as sharply as though an electric current had
gone through them. Through the twin-towered
gateway of the city advanced a procession, color
ful as a circus, dazzling as a durbar. The two
figures who rode at the head of the glittering cor
tege formed an almost startling contrast. One of
them answered in every detail the popular con
ception of an Asiatic potentate: haughty of man
ner, portly of person, with a clear, dark skin and
wonderfully piercing eyes and a great black beard,
spreading fan-wise upon his breast. An aigret of
diamonds flashed and scintillated in his flame-col
ored turban; rubies, large as robin's eggs, gleamed
in his ears, and hanging from his neck over his
pale blue surtout was a rope of pearls which would
have roused the envy of an empress. His com
panion, to whom he paid marked attention, was
equally noticeable, though in quite a different
fashion: a lean, smooth-shaven, lantern-jawed
man, still in the middle thirties, very cold and
reserved of manner, with a great beak of a nose
and a jaw like a granite crag. It did not need

For Rent: An Army on Elephants

the cocked hat and gold epaulets of a British
general to mark him as a soldier.

As the cortege cantered onto the maidan the
massed bands of the cavalry burst into a wild,
barbaric march, brass and kettle-drums crashing
together in stirring discord. The strains ceased
as abruptly as they began, and the youthful com
mander, rising in his stirrups, shot his blade into
the air and called in a voice like a trumpet:

"Cheers for his Highness!"

And back came a guttural roar from ten thou
sand throats:

"Long live the Nizam!"

Obviously gratified at the warmth of his greet
ing, the ruler of the Deccan wheeled his horse and
came cantering up to the cavalryman, whose
sword flashed in salute.

"Boyd Sahib," he said, "you are a veritable
magician. You turn ryots into soldiers as read
ily as a fakir turns a stone into bread. Your men
are admirable. I congratulate you on their ap
pearance."

Then, turning to his taciturn companion:

"Sir Arthur Wellesley, permit me to present to
you Boyd Sahib, commander of my cavalry and
my trusted friend. General Boyd," he added,
glancing at the Englishman with a malicious

5

Gentlemen Rovers

smile, "is a very brilliant soldier — and an Amer

ican."

Thus met, when the nineteenth century was
still in its swaddling-clothes, two extraordinary
men: Sir Arthur Wellesley, who in later years,
as the Duke of Wellington, was to gain undying
fame by conquering Napoleon; and General John
Parker Boyd, an American soldier of fortune, who
rendered most gallant service to his own people,
but whose very name has been forgotten by them.

Jack Boyd, as his boyhood companions in New-
buryport used to call him, was born with the
spirit of adventure strong within him. Almost
before he had graduated from dresses to knee-
trousers he would linger about the wharfs of
the quaint old town, drinking in the stories of
strange places and stranger doings told him by
the seafarers who were wont to congregate along
the water-front, or staring wistfully at the big,
black merchantmen about to sail for foreign parts.
He was wont to say that it was a perverse and
unkind fate which caused him to be born in so
inauspicious a year as 1764, for, though there
was no more ardent youngster in all New Eng
land, his youth caused the recruiting sergeants of
the Continental Army to whom he applied for

6

For Rent: An Army on Elephants

enlistment to pat him on the shoulder and re
mark encouragingly: "Come again, son, when
you're a few years older/'

Thus it was that he saw unroll before him that
marvellous moving-picture of the birth of a na
tion, which began on the greensward at Lexing
ton and ended before the British lines at York-
town, without being able to play any greater part
in those stirring events than does a spectator in
the thrilling scenes which he pays his five cents
to see depicted on a screen. Indeed, a twelve
month passed after the last British soldier left
our shores before young Boyd achieved the am
bition of his life by obtaining an ensign's com
mission in the 2d Regiment of Foot and donned
the blue coat and buff breeches of an officer in
the American army. Although within a year he
had been promoted to lieutenant, his was not the
temperament which could long endure the mo
notony of garrison life, with its unending round
of guard-mounting and small-arms practice and
company drill. It is scarcely to be wondered at,
therefore, that before the gold braid on his lieu
tenant's uniform had time to tarnish he had
handed in his papers and had booked passage on
an East Indiaman sailing out of Boston for Ma
dras. The year 1788, then, saw this youngster of

7

Gentlemen Rovers

four-and-twenty landed on the coast of Coroman-
del, poor in acquaintances and pocket but rich
in adventurousness and pluck.

He could have taken his military talents to
no better market, for at this period of India's
troubled history a brilliant career awaited a man
whose wits were as sharp as his sword. The last
quarter of the eighteenth century found all In
dia ablaze with racial and religious hatred. Wars
were as frequent as strikes are in the United
States. Though the French were still supreme
in the south of the peninsula, the English power
was steadily rising in Bombay, Calcutta, and
Madras. There were really two distinct strug
gles in progress: the English were fighting the
French and the Hindus were fighting the Moham
medans. The most powerful of the native princes
at this time were the Nizam of Hyderabad, and
the Peishwa, as the ruler of the Mahratta tribes
was called — both of whom had, for reasons of pol
icy, espoused the English cause — and Tippoo Sa
hib, the son of a Mohammedan military adven
turer who had made himself Sultan of Mysore,
who was an ally of the French. Ranged on the
one side, then, were the British, with their allies,
the Nizam and the Peishwa, while opposed to
them were the French and Tippoo of Mysore.

8

For Rent: An Army on Elephants

All of the reigning princes of India maintained
extensive military establishments, and soldiers of
fortune found at their courts rapid promotion
and lavish pay. When Boyd landed in India he
was confronted with the problem which of the
rival causes he should make his own, and it speaks
well for his sagacity and foresight that he promptly
decided to offer his services to the allies of the
English, for at that time most students of politics,
in India and out of it, believed that the future of
the peninsula was to be Gallic rather than Anglo-
Saxon.

From Madras Boyd made his way on horseback
to the Mahratta country, where his attractive per
sonality and soldierly appearance so impressed the
Peishwa that he gave the young American the
command of a cavalry brigade of fifteen hundred
men. Boyd was now in possession of the raw
material for which he had hankered, and he forth
with proceeded to show his extraordinary skill in
welding, tempering, and sharpening it. From
daybreak until dark his camp resounded to the
call of bugles, the words of command, and the
clatter of galloping hoofs. He hammered his men
into shape as a blacksmith hammers a bar of
iron, until they combined the inflexible discipline
of Prussian foot-guards with the mobility and

Gentlemen Rovers

endurance of Texas rangers. His chance to test
the quality of his handiwork came in 1790, when
Tippoo Sultan, failing in his attempt to bring on
a renewal of the war between England and France,
turned loose his hordes and overran the land. In
the three years' war which followed, the British,
under Lord Cornwallis, who was striving to re
gain in India the reputation he had lost at York-
town, were aided by the Mahrattas and the Nizam,
who were induced by fear and jealousy to join
in the struggle against their powerful neighbor.
Thus Opportunity knocked sharply on Boyd's
door. Commanding a body of as fine horsemen
as ever threw leg across saddle, his name quickly
became a synonym for audacity and daring. Ri
ding, wholly without support, into the very heart
of Tippoo's dominions, he would strike a series
of paralyzing blows, burn a dozen towns, capture
or destroy immense stores of ammunition, exact
a huge indemnity, and be back in his own terri
tory again before any troops could be brought
up to oppose him. Boyd's flying columns played
no small part, indeed, in the campaign which
ended in 1792 with the defeat of Tippoo — a de
feat for which the Sultan had to pay by ceding
half his dominions, paying an indemnity of three
thousand lacs of rupees (one hundred million dol-

10

For Rent: An Army on Elephants

lars), and giving his two sons as hostages for his
future good behavior.

Boyd, meanwhile, had never let slip an oppor
tunity for improving his knowledge of Hindu
stani and its kindred dialects or familiarizing him
self with the complex conditions, racial, religious,
and political, which prevailed in Hindustan.
Realizing that the Mahratta power was on the
wane, he resigned from the service of the Peishwa,
and, bearing letters of the highest commendation
from that ruler to the British envoy at the court
of the Nizam, he turned his horse's head toward
Hyderabad. In a letter to his father, written at
this time, he says: "On my arrival I was pre
sented to his Highness in form by the English
consul. My reception was as favorable as my
most sanguine wishes had anticipated. After
the usual ceremony was over he presented me
with the command of two kansolars of infantry,
each of which consists of five hundred men."
Continuing, he described in detail the army of
the Nizam, which at that time consisted of one
hundred and fifty thousand infantry, sixty thou
sand cavalry, and five hundred elephants, each
of which bore a "castle" containing a nabob and
his attendants. Can't you picture the scene when
that letter, with its strange foreign postmarks,

Gentlemen Rovers

reached the old brick house in the quaint New
England town; how the parents read and re-read
that message from the son who was adventuring
in foreign parts, and how the neighbors dropped in
of evenings to hear the latest news of the boy they
all knew, who was carving out a career with his
sword half the world away? Success is, after all,
a rather tasteless thing if there are no home folks
to rejoice in it.

Fortuna, that capricious beauty whose favor so
many brave men have sought in vain, seemed to
have lost her heart to the stalwart American, for
in 1799, when Tippoo and his savage soldiery once
more broke loose and swept across the peninsula,
leaving a trail of corpses and burning villages be
hind them, the Nizam, recalling the tales he had
heard of Boyd's exploits as a cavalry leader, gave
him the command of a division of ten thousand
turbaned troopers. Nor did the fair goddess de
sert him even when he was captured by a body
of Mysore horsemen, taken before Tippoo Sahib
himself, and, upon his stoutly refusing to turn
traitor to the Nizam, condemned to death by
torture. And the torturers of the tyrant of My
sore bore a most evil reputation. Overpower
ing the sentries who were set to guard him, he
succeeded in making his way, thanks to his flu-

12

The death of Tippo-Sahib at the storming of Seringapatam.

From a painting by R. de Moraine.

For Rent: An Army on Elephants

ency in Hindustani, through the enemy's lines,
rejoining the Nizam's forces in time to take part
in the storming of the Sultan's capital of Serin-
gapatam, Tippoo being killed in a hand-to-hand
struggle after a last stand at the city gates. Thus
died, as he would have wished — with his boots
on — the most dangerous adversary with whom
Britain had to contend in the winning of her
Eastern empire.

Early in the nineteenth century Boyd, who, as
the result of the generous rewards he had received
from his royal employers, had by this time become
possessed of considerable means, left the service
of the Nizam, much against the wishes of that
monarch, and organized an army of his own.
Numerically, it wasn't much of an army, as armies
go, having at no time exceeded two thousand
men, but it was as businesslike a force as ever
responded to a bugle. Boyd, whose reputation
as a cavalry leader extended from Bengal to Mala
bar, had the horsemen of all India to draw from,
and he recruited nothing but the best, the men
with whom he filled his ranks being as hard as
nails and as keen as razors. His second in com
mand was an Irish soldier of fortune named Wil
liam Tone, a brother of Wolf Tone, the famous
rebel patriot.

Gentlemen Rovers

, As Boyd reckoned on counterbalancing the
smallness of his force by its extreme mobility, he
adopted the novel expedient of transporting his
artillery on the backs of elephants, thus making
it possible for the guns to keep pace with the
cavalry even on his whirlwind raids, for an ele
phant, though burdened with a field-piece and
half a dozen soldiers, can put mile after mile be
hind it at a swinging, ungainly gait which it will
tax any horse to maintain. Military history pre
sents no more fantastic picture than that of this
sun-tanned Yankee adventurer spurring across an
Indian countryside with a brigade of beturbaned
lancers and a score or so of lumbering elephants,
the muzzles of brass field-guns frowning from
their howdahs, tearing along behind him. What
a pity that the folk in Newburyport could not
have seen him!

The entire outfit — elephants, horses, cannon,
and weapons — was Boyd's personal property, and
he rented it to those princes who had need of
and were able to pay for its service precisely as
a garage rents an automobile. The prices he ob
tained for it were enormous, and ere long he
became a wealthy man. From one end of the
country to the other he led his scarlet-coated
mercenaries, selling their services in turn to his

14

For Rent; An Army on Elephants

former employers, the Nizam and the Peishwa,
and to the rulers of Gwalior and Indore.
When a force was needed for a particularly des
perate service or for a hopeless hope they sent
for Boyd. And he always delivered the goods.
Fighting was going on everywhere, and he never
lacked employment. But he was far too discern
ing not to recognize the fact that the power of
England was steadily, if slowly, increasing, and
that her complete domination of India, which
could not much longer be delayed, must inevi
tably put an end to independent soldiering as a
profitable profession. In 1808, therefore, he sold
his army, elephants and all, to Colonel Felose,
a Neapolitan who had seen service under many
flags, and with misted eyes and a choking throat
for the last time rode along the lines of his faith
ful troopers. A few days later he set sail for
Paris, for, with the Corsican's star high in the
heavens, there seemed no better place for such a
man to seek adventure and advancement. Dis
appointed in his hope of obtaining a commission
under the Napoleonic eagles, he turned his face
toward home, and in 1810, after an absence of
more than twenty years, he felt the cobblestones
of his native Newburyport beneath his feet once
more.

Boyd's adventurous career under his own flag

15

Gentlemen Rovers

and in the service of his own people forms quite
another though a scarcely less thrilling story.
Trained and experienced officers being in those
days few and far between, the government of
fered him the colonelcy of the 4th Regiment of
Infantry, which he promptly accepted, displaying
such energy in drilling his men that when his
regiment marched through the streets of Boston
on its way to Pittsburg the local papers com
mented editorially on the smartness of its appear
ance. When William Henry Harrison, then gov
ernor of the Territory of Indiana (which included
the present States of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan,
and Wisconsin), realizing the imperative necessity
of smashing the great Indian confederation which
Tecumseh, the Shawnee warrior-statesman, was
so painstakingly building to oppose the white
man's further progress westward, called for troops
to do the business, Boyd put his men on flat-
boats, floated them down to the falls of the Ohio,
and marched them overland to Vincennes, his
dusty, footsore column tramping into Harrison's
stockaded headquarters almost before that vet
eran frontiersman had realized that they had
started. Boyd was in direct command, under
Harrison, of the little expeditionary force of nine
hundred men throughout the whirlwind cam
paign which culminated on a drizzling November

16

o ?

rs 3

CJ 3

<U (X

.11

For Rent: An Army on Elephants

morning in 1811 on the banks of the Tippecanoe
River. Tippecanoe was, I suppose, the only bat
tle which our army ever fought in high hats, for
the absurd uniform of the American infantry, dis
carded a few months later, consisted of blue,
brass-buttoned tail-coats, skin-tight pantaloons,
and "stovepipe" hats with red, white, and blue
cockades. Though taken by surprise and out
numbered six to one, Boyd's soldiery showed the
result of their training by standing like a stone
wall against the onset of the whooping redskins,
pouring in a volley of buckshot at close range
which left the hordes of warriors wavering, un
decided whether to come on or to retreat. At
this psychological moment Boyd ordered up the
squadron of dragoons which he had been holding
in reserve for just such an opportunity. "Right
into line!" he roared in the voice which had re
sounded over so many fields in far-off Hindustan.
"Trot! Gallop! Charge! Hip, hip, here we
go!" It was the charge of the cavalry, delivered
with all the smashing suddenness with which a
boxer delivers a solar-plexus blow, which did the
businesSo The Indians, panic-stricken at the sight
of the oncoming troopers in their brass helmets
and streaming plumes of horsehair, broke and ran.
Tippecanoe was won; Harrison was started on the
road which was to end in the White House; the

Gentlemen Rovers

peril of Tecumseh's Indian confederation was
ended forever, and the civilization of the West
was advanced a quarter of a century.

In the following year, upon the outbreak of our
second war with England, Boyd, who had been
commissioned a brigadier-general, commanded a
division of Wilkinson's army in the abortive
American invasion of Upper Canada, and, on
November n, 1813, fought the drawn battle of
Chrysler's Field. "Taps" were sounded to his
picturesque career on October 4, 1830. He died,
not as he would have wished, sword in hand at
the head of charging squadrons, but quite peace
fully in his bed, holding the prosaic position of
port officer of Boston, to which post he had been
appointed by that other gallant fighter, President
Andrew Jackson. As the end approached I doubt
not that in mind he was far away from the brick
and plaster of the New England city, and that
his thoughts harked back to those mad, glad days
when he and his lancers rode across the plains of
Hindustan and his elephants rocked and rolled
behind him.

18

WHEN WE FOUGHT NAPOLEON

WHEN WE FOUGHT NAPOLEON

THIS is the story of some forgotten fights and
fighters in a forgotten war. The govern
ments of the two nations which did the fighting —
France and the United States — refused, indeed,
to admit that there was any war at all, and, in a
sense, they were right, for there was never any
declaration of hostilities, and there was never
signed a treaty of peace. But it was a very real
war, nevertheless, with some of the fiercest battles
ever fought on deep water, and when it was over
we had laid the foundations of a navy, we had
won the respect of the European powers, and we
had humbled the pride of Napoleon as it had
been humbled only once before, when Nelson
annihilated the French fleet in the battle of the
Nile.

At the time that this narrative opens Bona
parte had just finished his wonderful campaign
in northern Italy, and the French nation, flushed
with confidence by his remarkable series of vic
tories, was swaggering about with a chip on its

21

Gentlemen Rovers

shoulder, and defying the nations of the world to
knock it off. In fact, the leaders of the Reign of
Terror, drunk with unaccustomed power, had lost
their heads as completely as the victims whom
they had guillotined on the Place de la Revolution.
Thoroughly typical of this insolent and arrogant
attitude was the French Directory's peremptory
demand that we instantly abrogate the treaty
which John Jay, our minister to England, had
just concluded with that country, basing its un
warrantable interference with our affairs on the
ground that the terms of the treaty were injurious
to the commercial interests of France. Upon our
curt refusal to accede to this preposterous de
mand, Charles C. Pinckney, our minister at Paris,
was notified by the French Government that it
would hold no further intercourse with him, and
the very next mail-packet brought the news that
he had been expelled from France. Not content
with this extraordinary and uncalled-for affront to
a friendly nation, French cruisers began seizing
our ships under a decree of their government au
thorizing the capture of neutral vessels having on
board any of the products of Great Britain or her
colonies, for at this time, remember, France and
England were at war, as they were, indeed,
throughout nearly the whole of Napoleon's reign.
As the bulk of our trade at this period was with

22

When We Fought Napoleon

the British colonies in the West Indies, it was evi
dent that this decree was aimed directly at us.
Every packet that came from West Indian waters
brought news of American ships overhauled and
plundered, of sailors beaten and kidnapped, and
of cargoes seized and confiscated by the French,
the authenticated despatches to the State Depart
ment naming nearly a thousand vessels which had
been captured. So bold did the French become
that one of their privateers actually had the
audacity to sail into Charleston Roads and, al
most under the guns of the batteries, to burn to
the water's edge a British vessel which was lying
in the harbor.

Though it was evident that nothing short of a
miracle could avert war, President Adams, appre
ciating the ill-preparedness of the United States,
which had only recently emerged from the Revo
lution in a weakened and impoverished condition,
determined to make one more try for peace by
despatching to France a special mission composed
of Minister Pinckney, Elbridge Gerry, and John
Marshall, the last-named later Chief Justice of
the United States. Though in all our diplomatic
history we have sent abroad no more able or dis
tinguished embassy, the reception its members
received at the hands of the French Government
was as disgraceful as it was ludicrous. The French

23

Gentlemen Rovers

Directory at this time was composed of low and
irresponsible politicians of the ward-heeler type
who had climbed to power during the French
Revolution, so that, incredible as such a state of
affairs may seem in these days, the negotiations
soon degenerated into an attempt to fleece the
American envoys, who were informed quite frankly
that their success depended entirely upon their
agreeing to bribe — or, as the French politely put
it, to give a douceur to — certain avaricious mem
bers of the Directory. Not only this, but the
American diplomatists were told that, if the bribes
demanded were not forthcoming, orders would be
given to the war-ships on the French West Indian
station to ravage the coasts of the United States.
The chronicles of our foreign relations contain
nothing which, for sheer impudence and insult,
even approaches this attempt to levy blackmail
on the nation. Even the astute Talleyrand, at
that time French Foreign Minister, so far mis
judged the characters of the men with whom he
was dealing as to insinuate that a gift of money to
members of the government was a necessary pre
liminary to the negotiations, and that a refusal
would bring on war. Then all the pent-up rage
and indignation of Pinckney burst forth. "War
be it, then!" he exclaimed. "Millions for defence,
sir, but not one cent for tribute!" ,

24

When We Fought Napoleon

Upon learning of this crowning insult to his
representatives, President Adams, on March 19,
1798, informed Congress that the mission on
which he had built his hopes of peace had proved
a failure. Then the war-fever, which had tem
porarily been held in abeyance, swept over the
country like fire in dry grass. Talleyrand's at
tempt to whip America into a revocation of Jay's
treaty had ignominiously failed. He had made
the inexcusable mistake of underestimating the
spirit and resources of his opponents. Congress
promptly abrogated all our treaties with France,
prohibited American vessels from entering French
ports, and French vessels from coming into Ameri
can waters, and voted a large sum for national
defence. The land forces were increased, the
coastwise fortifications strengthened, ships of
war were hurriedly laid down, volunteers from
every walk of life besieged the recruiting stations,
Washington reassumed command of the army.
At Portland, Portsmouth, Salem, Chatham, Nor
wich, Philadelphia, and Baltimore the shipyards
resounded to the clatter of tools, for those were
before the days of big guns and armor-plate, and
a man-of-war could, if necessary, be built and
equipped in ninety days.

Out from behind this war-cloud rose the thrill
ing strains of "Hail, Columbia." When the war-

25

Gentlemen Rovers

fever was at its height, a young actor and singer
named Fox — a vaudeville artist, we should call him
nowadays — who was appearing at a Philadelphia
theatre, called one morning on his friend Joseph
Hopkinson, a young and clever lawyer, and a son
of that Francis H. Hopkinson whose signature
may be seen at the bottom of the Declaration of
Independence.

"Look here, Joe," said Fox, dropping into a
chair, "I need some help and you're the only man
I know who can give it to me. No, no, old man,
it's not money I'm after. To-morrow night I'm
to have a benefit at the theatre, but not a single
box has been sold; so, unless something can be
done to attract public attention, I'm afraid I shall
have a mighty thin house. Now it strikes me
that, with all this war-fever in the air, if I could
get some patriotic verses, something really fiery
and inspiriting, written to the tune of 'The Presi
dent's March,' I might draw a crowd. Several
of the people around the theatre have tried it,
but they have all given it up as a bad job, and say
that it can't be done. So you're my last hope,
Joe, and I think you could do it."

Shutting himself up in his study, within an hour
Hopkinson had completed the first verse and
chorus of what was to prove one of the greatest
of our national songs, and had submitted them to

26

When We Fought Napoleon

his wife, who sang them to a harpsichord accom
paniment. The tune and the words harmonized.
A few hours later the song was completed and
was being memorized by Fox. The next morning
Philadelphia was placarded with announcements
that that evening Mr. Fox would sing, for the
first time on any stage, a new patriotic song.
The house was packed to the doors. As the or
chestra broke into the familiar opening bars of
"The President's March," and Fox, slender and
debonair, bowed from behind the footlights, the
audience grew hushed with expectancy. When
the now familiar words,

"Immortal patriots, rise once more!
Defend your rights, defend your shore!"

went rolling through the theatre from pit to gal
lery, the audience went wild. Eight times they
made him sing it through, and the ninth time they
rose and joined in the rousing chorus:

"Firm, united let us be,
Rallying round our Liberty.
Like a band of brothers joined,
Peace and safety we shall find."

Night after night the singing of "Hail, Columbia,"
in the theatres was applauded by audiences de-

27

Gentlemen Rovers

lirious with enthusiasm, and within a few days it
was being sung by boys in the streets of every
city from Portland to Savannah. Never since
the days of Bunker Hill had the nation been so
stirred as it was in that summer of 1798.

On July 6, with the red-white-and-blue ensign
streaming proudly from her main truck, the sloop
of war Delaware, twenty guns, of Baltimore, un
der Stephen Decatur, Sr., put to sea to an ac
companiment of booming cannon. Cape Henry
had scarcely sunk below the horizon before she
was hailed by a merchantman which had been
boarded and plundered by a French privateer only
the day before. Upon hearing this news Decatur
set off in a pursuit as eager as that with which a
bloodhound follows the trail of a fugitive criminal.
A few hours later his lookouts reported four ves
sels dead ahead. Being unable to determine
which was the privateer, he ran in his guns, closed
his ports, and keeping on his course until he was
sure that he had been seen, stood hurriedly off,
as though afraid of being captured. Just as he
had anticipated, the Frenchman fell into the trap,
and piling on his canvas, bore down upon him.
It was not until the privateersman drew close
enough to make out the gun-ports and the un
usual number of men on the American's decks,
that he discovered Decatur's ruse and attempted

28

When We Fought Napoleon

to escape. But it was too late. The Delaware's
superior speed enabled her easily to overhaul the
Frenchman, which proved to be La Incroyable,
fourteen guns and seventy men. So accurate and
deadly was the fire poured into her by the Dela
ware9 s gunners (forerunners, remember, of those
bluejackets who handle the twelve-inch guns on
the dreadnaught Delaware to-day) that within
ten minutes after the action had commenced the
French tricolor came fluttering down. We had
struck our first blow against the power of France.

The captured vessel was sent into port under a
prize crew, was refitted, added to the American
Navy as the Retaliation — fitting name! — went to
sea under command of William Bainbridge (the
same who a few years later was to lose the war
ship Philadelphia to the Barbary pirates in the
harbor of Tripoli), and shortly afterward was re
captured by the French frigate FInsurgtnle, being
the only vessel of our little navy taken by the
French.

By the beginning of 1799 the West Indian waters
were as effectually patrolled by American war
ships as a great city is patrolled by policemen.
The newly built American frigates were objects
of great amusement and derision to the French
and British officers stationed in the West Indian

29

Gentlemen Rovers

colonies, for they were far too heavily armed, ac
cording to European ideas, carrying almost double
the number of guns usual to vessels of their class.
It is interesting to recall the fact, however, that
sixty-odd years later European officers were
equally derisive and sceptical of another Ameri
can innovation in war-ships which was destined
to revolutionize naval warfare — the monitor. But
before long the sceptics were compelled to revise
their opinions of the fighting qualities of our in
fant navy. Our fleet was at this time divided
into two squadrons, both of which made their
headquarters at St. Christopher, or, as it was
more commonly called, St. Kitts, on the island
of Antigua; one, under Commodore Barry, run
ning as far south as the Guianas, while the other,
under Commodore Truxtun, cruised northward
to Santo Domingo, thus effectually cutting off
from commercial intercourse with the mother
country the rich French colonies in the Caribbean.
Truxtun was a most picturesque and romantic
figure. Short and stout, red-faced, gray-eyed,
loud-voiced, gallant with women and short-tem
pered with men, he was as typical a sea fighter
as ever trod a quarter-deck with a brass telescope
tucked under his arm. From the time when,
as a boy of twelve, he ran away to sea, until,

30

When We Fought Napoleon

a national hero, he was laid to rest in Christ
Church graveyard in Philadelphia, his life was as
full of hair-breadth escapes and hair-raising ad
ventures as that of one of Mr. George A. Henty's
heroes. A sailor before the mast when scarcely
in his teens, he was impressed into the British
Navy, where his ability attracted such attention
that he was offered a midshipman's warrant,
which he refused. When only twenty years of
age he commanded his own ship, in which he suc
ceeded, though at great personal hazard, in smug
gling large quantities of much-needed powder into
the rebellious colonies. Eventually his ship was
captured and he was made a prisoner. Escaping
from the British prison in the West Indies where
he was confined, he made his way to the United
States, obtained letters of marque from the first
Continental Congress, and was the first to get to
sea of that long line of privateersmen who, first
in the Revolution, and afterward in the War of
1812, practically drove British commerce from
the Atlantic. At the close of the Revolution
Truxtun returned to the merchant service, in
which he rose to wealth and position. When the
American Navy was organized under the stimulus
of French aggression, he was offered and accepted
the command of the thirty-eight-gun frigate Con-

Gentlemen Rovers

stellation, a new and very beautiful vessel, splen
didly officered and manned, and with heels as
fast as her gun-fire was heavy.

While cruising off Antigua, on February 9, 1799,
the Constellation s lookout reported a French
war-ship, which, upon being overhauled, proved
to be r Insurgent* , forty guns, which had the repu
tation of being one of the fastest ships in the
world, and was commanded by Captain Bar-
reault, an officer celebrated in the French Navy as
a desperate fighter and a resourceful sailor. As
the Constellation, with her crew at quarters and
her decks cleared for action, came booming down
upon him, Captain Barreault broke out the
French tricolor at his masthead and fired a gun
to windward, which signified, in the language of
the seas, that he was ready for a yard-arm to
yard-arm combat. Truxtun's reply was to range
alongside his adversary, a flag of stripes and stars
at every masthead, and pour in a broadside
which raked I'lnsurgente's decks from stem to
stern. The first great naval action in which the
American Navy ever bore a part had begun.

Waiting until the Constellation was well abreast
of her, at a distance of perhaps thirty feet (modern
war-ships seldom fight at a range of less than
three miles), Vlnsurgente replied, firing high in an

32

When We Fought Napoleon

attempt to disable the American by bringing down
her rigging. Midshipman David Porter, a young
ster barely in his teens, was stationed in the fore-
top. Seeing that the top-mast, which had been
seriously damaged by the French fire, was totter
ing and about to fall, but being unable to make
himself heard on deck above the din of battle,
he himself assumed the responsibility of lowering
the foretopsail yard, thus relieving the strain on
the mast and preventing a mishap which would
probably have changed the result of the battle.
That midshipman rose, in after years, to be an
admiral and the commander-in-chief of the
American Navy.

Barreault, who had a much larger crew than his
adversary, soon saw that his vessel was in danger
of being pounded to pieces by the American gun
ners who were making every shot tell, and that his
only hope of victory lay in getting alongside and
boarding, depending upon his superior numbers to
take the American vessel with the cutlass. With
this in view, he ordered the boarding parties to
their stations, sent men into the rigging with grap
pling-irons with which to hold the ships together
when they touched, directed the guns to be loaded
with small shot that they might cause greater exe
cution at close quarters, and then, putting his helm

33

Gentlemen Rovers

hard down, attempted to run alongside the Con
stellation. But Truxtun had anticipated this very
manoeuvre, and was prepared for it. Seizing his op
portunity — and in sea-battles opportunities do not
last long or come often — he whirled his ship about
as a polo player whirls his pony, and ran squarely
across the enemy's bows, pouring in a rain of lead
as he passed, which all but annihilated the board
ing parties drawn up on the deck of FInsurgente.

Foiled in his attempt to get to hand-grips with
his enemy, the Frenchman sheered off and the
duel at short range continued, the Constellation,
magnificently handled, sailing first along I'lnsur-
gentes port side, firing as she went, and then,
crossing her bows, repeating the manoeuvre on
her starboard quarter. Nothing is more typical
of the iron discipline enforced by the American
naval commanders in those early days than an
incident that occurred when this duel between the
two frigates was at its height. As a storm of
shot from the Frenchman's batteries came crash
ing and smashing into the Constellation, a gunner,
seeing his mate decapitated by a solid shot,
became so demoralized that he retreated from
his gun, whereupon an officer drew his pistol and
shot the man dead.

Time after time Truxtun repeated his evolution
34

When We Fought Napoleon

of literally sailing around I* Insurgents, until every
gun in her main batteries had been dismounted,
her crew being left only the small guns with which
to continue the action. It speaks volumes for
Barreault's bravery that, with half his crew dead
or wounded, and with a terribly battered and
almost defenceless ship, he did continue the action,
his weary, blood-stained, powder-blackened men
loading and firing their few remaining guns daunt-
lessly. Seeing the weakened condition of his en
emy, Truxtun now prepared to end the battle.
Before the French had time to grasp the full sig
nificance of his manoeuvre, he had put his helm
hard down, and the Constellation, suddenly loom
ing out of the battle smoke, bore down upon Fln-
surgente with the evident intention of crossing her
stern and raking her with a broadside to which
she would be unable to reply. Though no braver
man than Barreault ever fought a ship, he in
stantly appreciated that this would mean an un
necessary slaughter of his men; so, with the tears
streaming down his cheeks, he ordered his colors
to be struck, and in token of surrender the flag of
France slipped slowly and mournfully down. The
young republic of the West had avenged the in
sult of Talleyrand.

It is a remarkable fact that, notwithstanding

35

Gentlemen Rovers

the desperate fighting which characterized this
battle, the Constellation had only two of her crew
killed and three wounded, while the French loss
was nearly twenty times that number. Lieu
tenant Rodgers and Midshipman Porter were im
mediately sent aboard the captured vessel with a
prize crew of only eleven men. After the dead
had been buried at sea, the wounded cared for
by the American surgeons, and about half of the
prisoners transferred to the Constellation, Rodgers
set such sails on I'lnsurgente as the wrecked rig
ging would permit, and laid his course for St.
Christopher, it being understood that Truxtun
would keep within hail in case his assistance was
needed. During the night a heavy gale set in,
however, and when day broke upon the heaving
ocean the Constellation was nowhere to be seen.
It was a ticklish situation in which the thirteen
Americans found themselves, for they had their
work cut out for them to navigate a leaking, shat
tered, and dismasted ship, while below decks,
awaiting the first opportunity which offered to
rise and overpower their captors, were nearly
two hundred desperate and determined prisoners.
There were neither shackles nor handcuffs on
board, and the hatchcovers had been destroyed
in the action, so that the prisoners were perfectly

36

When We Fought Napoleon

aware that, could they once force their way on
deck by a sudden rush, the ship would again be
theirs. But they reckoned without Rodgers, for
the first men who put their heads above the hatch
way found themselves looking into the muzzles of
a pair of pistols held by the American lieutenant,
whose fingers were twitching on the triggers.
During the three days and two nights which the
voyage to St. Christopher lasted, a guard of Ameri
can bluejackets stood constantly around the open
hatchway, a pile of loaded small arms close at
hand, and a cannon loaded with grape-shot trained
menacingly into the prisoner-filled hold. On the
evening of the third day, after Truxtun had given
her up for lost, I' Insurgents limped into port with
the flag of the United States flaunting victoriously
above that of France.

The 1st of February of the following year found
the Constellation, still under the command of
Commodore Truxtun, cruising off Guadaloupe in
the hope of picking up some of the French priva
teers which were using that colony as a base from
which to prey on our West Indian commerce.
While loitering off the port of Basse Terre, and
praying that something would turn up to pay him
for his patience, Truxtun sighted a vessel coming
up from the southeast, which from her size and

37

Gentlemen Rovers

build was evidently a French frigate of the first
class. As she approached, the keen-eyed Ameri
can naval officers, scanning her through their
glasses, recognized her as the fifty-two-gun frigate
La Vengeance, one of the most formidable vessels
in the French Navy. It was evident from the
first, however, that she would much rather run
than fight, this anxiety to avoid an encounter
being due to the fact that she had on board a
large number of officials, high in the colonial
service, whom she was bringing out to the colonies
from the mother country. No sooner did she per
ceive the character of the Constellation, therefore,
than she piled on every yard of canvas and headed
for Basse Terre and the protecting guns of its
forts. Never had the Constellation a better op
portunity to display her remarkable sailing quali
ties, and never did she display them to better
advantage. It was well after nightfall, however,
before she was able to overhaul the flying French
man, so that it was by the light of a full moon,
which illumined the scene almost as well as though
it were day, that the preparations were completed
for the combat. The sea, which was glasslike in
its smoothness, as is so often the case in Carib
bean waters, seemed to be covered with a veil of
shimmering silver, while the battle-lanterns which

38

When We Fought Napoleon

had been lighted on both vessels swung like giant
fireflies across the purple sky.

Seeing that escape was hopeless, the French
commander hove to and prepared for a desperate
resistance. Now, Truxtun had made up his mind
that this was to be no long-range duel, in which
the Frenchman's heavier metal could not fail to
give him an advantage, but a fight at close quar
ters, in which the smashing broadsides which the
Constellation was specially designed to deliver
could not fail to tell. Just before the beginning
of the battle the stout commodore, red-faced,
white-wigged, cock-hatted, clad in the blue tail
coat and buff breeches of the American Navy,
descended to the gun-deck and walked slowly
through the batteries, acknowledging the cheers
of the gunners, but emphatically warning them
against firing a shot until he gave the word. No
one knew better than Truxtun the demoralizing
effect of a smashing broadside suddenly delivered
at close quarters, and it was this demoralization
which he intended to create aboard the enemy.
"Load with solid shot," he ordered, and added,
speaking to his officers so that the men could
hear: "If a man fires a gun before I give the
order, shoot him on the spot." Then with board
ing-nettings triced up, decks sanded, magazines

39

Gentlemen Rovers

opened, and the tops filled with marines whose
duty it was to pick off the French gunners, the
Constellation, stripped to her fighting canvas,
swept grandly into action. As she came within
range the French commander opened with his
stern-chasers, and in an instant the ordered decks
of the American were turned into a shambles.
The wounded were carried groaning to the cock
pit, where the white-aproned surgeons, their arms
bared to the elbow, awaited their grim work, while
the dead were hastily ranged along the unengaged
side — rows of stark and staring figures beneath
the placid moon. Again and again the guns of
La Vengeance belched smoke and flame, and red
der and redder grew the sand with which the
Constellation s decks were spread, but she still
kept coming on. Not until she was squarely
abreast of the Frenchman did Truxtun, leaping
into the shrouds, bellow through his speaking-
trumpet: "Now, boys, give 'em hell!" The
American gunners answered with a broadside
which made La Vengeance reel. The effect was
terrible. On the decks of the Frenchman the
dead and dying lay in quivering, bleeding heaps.
But not for an instant did the French sailors flinch
from their guns. Broadside answered broadside,
cheer answered cheer, while the men, French and

40

When We Fought Napoleon

American alike, toiled and sweated at their work
of carnage. So rapidly were the American guns
fired that the men actually had to crawl out of the
ports, in the face of a withering fire, for buckets
of water with which to cool them off.

The different tactics adopted by the two com
manders soon began to show results, for, whereas
Truxtun had given orders that his men were to
disregard the upper works and to concentrate
their fire on the main-deck batteries and the hull,
the French commander had from the first directed
his fire upon the American's rigging in the hope
of crippling her. Shortly after midnight the
French fire, which had grown weaker and weaker
under the terrible punishment of the Constella
tion s successive broadsides, ceased altogether,
and an officer was seen waving a white flag in
token of surrender. Twice before, in fact, La
Vengeance had struck her colors, but owing to the
smoke and darkness the Americans had not per
ceived it. And there was good reason for her
surrender, for she had lost one hundred and
sixty men out of her crew of three hundred and
thirty, while the Constellation had but thirty-
nine casualties out of a crew of three hundred and
ten. Though the French fire had done small dam
age to the Constellation s hull, and had killed a

Gentlemen Rovers

comparatively small number of her crew, it had
worked terrible havoc in her rigging, it being dis
covered, just as she was preparing to run along
side her capture and take possession, that every
shroud and stay supporting her mainmast had
been shot away, and that the mast was tottering
and about to fall. The men in the top were un
der the command of a little midshipman named
James Jarvis, who was only thirteen years old.
He had been warned by one of his men that the
mast was likely to fall at any moment, and
had been implored to leave the top while there
was still time, which he would have been entirely
justified in doing, particularly as the battle was
over. But that thirteen-year-old midshipman
had in him the stuff of which heroes are made,
and resolutely refused to leave his post without
orders. The orders never came, for before the
crew had time to secure it the great mast crashed
over the side, carrying with it to instant death
little Jarvis and all of his men save one. Though
his name and deed have long since been forgotten
by the nation for which he died, he was no whit
less a hero than that other boy-sailor, Casabianca,
whose self-sacrifice at the battle of the Nile has
been made familiar by song and story.

The falling of the Constellation's mast reversed
42

When We Fought Napoleon

conditions in an instant, for the surrendered
frigate, taking prompt advantage of the victor's
temporary helplessness, crowded on all sail and
slowly disappeared into the night. By the time
the wreck had been chopped away any pursuit of
her was hopeless. A few days later she put into
the Dutch port of Cura£ao in a sinking condition.

Thus continued until February, 1801, an un
broken series of American successes, French war
ships, French privateers, and French merchant
men alike being sunk, captured, or driven from
the seas. France's trade with her West Indian
colonies was paralyzed, and the prestige of her
navy was enormously diminished. Napoleon, as
First Consul, had abolished the Directory, and
was now the virtual ruler of France, having entire
command of all administrative affairs, both civil
and military. Forced to admit that from first to
last his ships had been out-sailed, out-fought, and
out-manoeuvred by the despised Americans, and
that a continuance of the war could only result
in further disaster and loss of prestige, he began
negotiations which led, about the time that the
nineteenth century passed its first birthday, to a
suspension of hostilities.

During the two and a half years of this unofficial
war with the most powerful military nation in the

43

Gentlemen Rovers

world our infant navy had captured eighty-four
armed French vessels, mounting over five hun
dred guns — a success all the more remarkable
when it is remembered that our entire naval estab
lishment at the outbreak of hostilities comprised
but twenty-two vessels, with four hundred and
fifty-six guns. In other words, we had captured
almost four times as many ships as we possessed.
Not only had we practically destroyed French
commerce on this side of the Atlantic, but our
own commerce had risen, under the protection of
our guns, from fifty-seven million dollars in 1797
to more than seventy-eight million dollars in 1799.
Most important of all, however, we had shown to
France and to Europe that, when occasion de
manded, we both would and could, in the words
of our national song, defend our rights and defend
our shore.

44

WHEN WE CAPTURED AN AFRICAN
KINGDOM

WHEN WE CAPTURED AN AFRICAN
KINGDOM

DID you ever, by any chance, leave the
Boston State House by the back door?
If so, you found yourself in a quiet and rather
shabby thoroughfare, cobble-paved and lined on
the farther side by old-fashioned red-brick houses,
with white, brass-knockered doors, and iron bal
conies, and green blinds. That is Derne Street.
Though a man standing on Boston Common
could break one of its violet-glass windows with
a well thrown ball, it is, as it were, a placid back
water of the busy streams of commerce which
flow so noisily a few rods away. I wonder how
many of the smug frock-coated politicians who
hurry through it as a short cut daily have any
idea how it got its name; I wonder if any of the
people who live upon it know. Though the ex
ploit which this Boston byway was named to
commemorate has been overlooked by nearly all
our historians, perhaps because its scene was laid
in a remote and barbarous country, yet it was a

47

Gentlemen Rovers

feat which, for picturesqueness, daring, and in
domitable courage, is deserving of a more generous
share of the calcium light of public appreciation.
Though I am perfectly aware that history only
too often makes dull reading, this chronicle, I
promise you, is as bristling with romance and
adventure as a hedgehog is with quills.

You must understand, in the first place, that
the declining years of the eighteenth century found
a perfectly astounding state of affairs prevailing
in the Mediterranean, where the four Barbary
states — Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli —
which stretched along its African shore, collected
tribute from every nation whose vessels sailed that
sea as methodically as a street-car conductor col
lects fares. Asserting that they were no common,
vulgar buccaneers who plundered vessels indis
criminately, the Barbary corsairs, claiming for
themselves the virtual ownership of the Mediter
ranean, turned it into a sort of maritime toll-road,
and professed themselves at war with all who re
fused to pay roundly for using it. Nor was their
boast that they were the masters of the Middle
Sea a vain one, scores of captured merchantmen
and thousands of European slaves laboring under
the African sun proving indubitably that they
were amply capable of enforcing their demands.

48

Capturing An African Kingdom

As far as the question of economy was concerned,
it was about as cheap for a nation to be at war
with these bandits of the sea as at peace, for so
heavy was the tribute they demanded that their
friendship came almost as high as their enmity.
It cost Spain, at that time a rich and powerful
empire, upward of three million dollars to obtain
peace with the Dey of Algiers in 1786. Though
England boasted herself mistress of the seas, and
in token thereof English admirals carried brooms
at their mastheads, she nevertheless spent four
hundred thousand dollars annually in propitiating
these African despots. Previous to the Revolu
tion there were close on a hundred American
vessels, manned by more than twelve hundred
seamen, in the Mediterranean, but with the with
drawal of British protection this commerce was
entirely abandoned. The ink was scarcely dry
on the treaty of peace, however, before we had
despatched diplomatic agents to the Barbary
coast to purchase the friendship of its rulers, and
had taken our place in the line of regular contrib
utors. We were in good company, too, for Eng
land, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Den
mark, and the Italian states had been paying
tribute so long that they had acquired the habit.
Think of it, my friends! Every great seafaring

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nation in the world meekly paying tribute to a
few thousand Arab cutthroats for the privilege
of using one of the seven seas, and humbly apolo
gizing if the payment happened to become over
due!

Our friendly relations with the Dey of Algiers
were of short duration, however, and by 1793 his
swift-sailing, heavily armed cruisers had captured
thirteen American vessels, and sixscore American
slaves were at work on the fortifications of his
capital. In his prison-yard, indeed, one could
hear every American inflection, from the nasal
twang of Maine to the drawl of Carolina. After
two years of procrastination, Congress, spurred to
action by public indignation, purchased the liberty
of the captives and peace with Algiers for eight
hundred thousand dollars, though the Dey re
marked gloomily, as he scrawled his Arabic flour
ish at the foot of the treaty: "If I keep on making
peace at this rate, there will soon be no one left
to fight. Then how shall I occupy my corsairs?
What shall I do with my fighting men? If they
have no one else to rob and slaughter, they will
rob and slaughter me!"

The Bashaw of Tripoli at this time was a pecul
iarly insolent and tyrannical Arab named Yussuf
Karamanli, who had gained the throne by the

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Capturing An African Kingdom

effective method of winning over the body-guard,
quietly surrounding the palace one night, and de
posing his elder brother, Ahmet, whom he promptly
exiled. Despite the annual tribute of twenty-two
thousand dollars which we were paying to the
Bashaw, not to mention the seventeen thousand
dollars' worth of presents which we presented bi
ennially to the officers and officials of his court, he
complained most bitterly to the American consul
at Tripoli that he was not getting as much as his
neighboring rulers, and that unless the matter was
remedied immediately, he would have to get some
American slaves to teach him English. Now,
Yussuf was a bad man to have for an enemy, for
his cruisers were numerous and loaded to the gun
wales with pirates who would rather fight than
eat, and he had, in addition, the reputation of
being most inconsiderate to those sailors who fell
into his hands, sometimes going so far as to wall
a few of them up in the fortifications which he
was constantly building. To put it bluntly, he
was not popular outside of his own circle. As
Mr. Cathcart, the American consul, did not take
his demands for a larger tribute very seriously,
the Bashaw wrote to President Jefferson direct,
mincing no words in saying that the American
government had better grant his request, and be

Gentlemen Rovers

quick about it, or American seamen would find the
Mediterranean exceedingly unhealthy for them.

Incredible as it may seem in this day and age,
the authorities at Washington ordered a vessel to
be loaded with the arms, ammunition, and naval
stores demanded by the Bashaw, their total value
being thirty-four thousand dollars, and hurriedly
despatched it to Tripoli, with profuse apologies
for the delay. A few months later the Bashaw,
who evidently knew a good thing when he saw it,
suggested that a token of our esteem for him in
the form of jewels would be highly acceptable,
whereupon the American minister in London was
instructed to purchase jewelry to the value of ten
thousand dollars and have it hurried to Tripoli
by special messenger. Emboldened by his un
dreamed-of success in shaking the republican tree,
the Bashaw reached the very height of audacity
by again sending a peremptory note to President
Jefferson, demanding that the United States im
mediately present him with a thirty-six-gun war
ship! As no attention was paid to this modest
request (and in view of the other outrageous con
cessions made by our government, it is somewhat
surprising that this demand was not granted also),
the Bashaw ordered the flagstaff of the American
consulate to be chopped down as a sign of war,

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Capturing An African Kingdom

and turned his corsairs loose on American com
merce in the Mediterranean. The war opened
most disastrously for the United States, for a few
months later the frigate Philadelphia ran aground
in the harbor of Tripoli, the Tripolitans capturing
Captain Bainbridge and his entire crew. No
wonder the Bashaw went to the mosque that day
to give thanks to Allah, for had he not received
an even larger war-ship than he had demanded,
and did he not have two hundred American slaves
to instruct him in the English tongue? "God is
great!" exclaimed the Bashaw devoutly, as he
knelt on his silken prayer-rug, and "God is
great!" echoed the rows of corsairs who knelt
behind him.

It was shortly after this American misfortune
that William Eaton, soldier, diplomat, and Indian-
fighter, swaggered upon the scene, and things be
gan to happen with a rapidity that made the
Bashaw's turbaned head whirl. By birth and up
bringing Eaton was a Connecticut Yankee, and
he possessed all the shrewdness, hardihood, and
perseverance so characteristic of that race. The
son of a schoolmaster farmer, before he was six
teen he had run away from home to join the Con
tinental Army, which he left at the close of the
Revolution with the chevrons of a sergeant on his

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Gentlemen Rovers

coat-sleeve. Far-sighted enough to see the value
of a college education, he went from the camp
straight to the college classroom. Graduating
from Dartmouth in 1790, he re-entered the army
as a captain, served against the Indians in Georgia
and Ohio, and in 1798 received an appointment
as American consul at Tunis. Resolute, energetic,
and daring, impatient with any one who did not
agree with his views, no better man could have
been selected for the place. Thoroughly under
standing the Arab character, from the very outset
he took a high hand in his dealings with the Tu
nisian ruler. He alternately quarrelled with and
patronized the Bey, bullyragged his ministers, and
actually horsewhipped an insolent official of the
court in the palace courtyard, for five years
keeping up an uninterrupted series of altercations,
provocations, and procrastinations over the pay
ment of tribute-money. He acted with such en
ergy and boldness, however, that he secured to
the commerce of his country complete immunity
from the attacks of Tunisian cruisers, and made
the name American respected on that part of the
Barbary coast at least. In 1801, as I have al
ready remarked, the American flagstaff in the
adjoining kingdom of Tripoli came crashing down
at the Bashaw's order, and war promptly began

54

The frigate Philadelphia ran aground in the harbor of Tripoli,

the Tripolitans capturing Captain Bainbridge

and his entire crew.

Capturing An African Kingdom

between that country and the United States. Two
years later the Bey of Tunis, harried beyond
endurance by the half-insolent, half-patronizing
fashion in which Eaton treated him, ordered that
gentleman to leave the country.

Returning to the United States, Eaton went
immediately to Washington and laid before Presi
dent Jefferson and his Cabinet a scheme for bring
ing the war with Tripoli to a successful conclusion,
and exchanging our humiliating position as a con
tributor to a gang of pirates for one more consistent
with American ideals. The plan which he pro
posed was, briefly, that the United States should
assist in restoring to the Tripolitan throne the
exiled Bashaw, Ahmet Karamanli, on the under
standing that, upon his restoration, the exaction
of tribute from the American government and
the depredations on American commerce should
cease. Eaton was outspoken in urging the de
sirability of carrying out this plan, arguing that
the dethronement of one of the Barbary despots
would impress the people of all that region as
nothing else could do. I can see him standing
there beside the long table in the Cabinet room of
the White House, his lean Yankee face aglow with
enthusiasm, his every motion bespeaking con
fidence in himself and his plan, while Jefferson and

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Gentlemen Rovers

his sedate, conservative advisers lean far back in
their chairs and regard this visionary half curi
ously, half amusedly, as he outlines his schemes
for overturning thrones and reapportioning king
doms. From the President and his Cabinet he
received the sort of treatment which timid gov
ernments are apt to bestow on men of spirit and
action. He was given to understand that he was
at liberty to carry out his plans, but that, if he
was successful, the government would take all the
credit, and that, if he failed, he would have to
take all the blame. The only way to explain the
astounding apathy of the American government
to events in the Mediterranean is that a bitter
political struggle was then in progress in the United
States, and that the very remoteness of the theatre
of war probably lessened its importance in the
eyes of the administration. At any rate, Presi
dent Jefferson signed the appointment of Eaton
as American naval agent in the Mediterranean,
and, happy as a schoolboy at the beginning of the
long vacation, at the wide latitude of action con
ferred upon him by this purposely vague commis
sion, he sailed a few days later with the American
fleet for Egypt. His great adventure had begun.
Aware that the dethroned Bashaw had fled to
Cairo, Eaton landed at Alexandria, and, hastening

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Capturing An African Kingdom

to the Egyptian capital by camel, succeeded in
locating the exiled Ahmet, whom he found in
the depths of poverty and despair. Seated cross-
legged beside him in a native coffee-house, Eaton
outlined his plan and proposition. He told Ahmet
that the United States would undertake to restore
him to the Tripolitan throne upon his agreeing to
repay the expenses of the expedition immediately
upon his restoration, and upon the condition that
Eaton should be commander-in-chief of the land
forces throughout the campaign, Ahmet and his
followers to promise him implicit obedience. Ah
met snapped at the chance, slim though it was,
to regain his kingdom, as a starving dog snaps at
a proffered bone. Eaton's plan of campaign was
as simple as it was reckless. He proposed to
recruit a force of Greek and Arab mercenaries,
officered by Americans, in Alexandria, and, follow
ing the North African coast-line westward across
the Libyan Desert, to surprise and capture Derna
(or, as it was spelled in those days, Derne), the
capital of the easternmost and richest province of
Tripoli. With Derna as a base of operations, and
with the co-operation of the American fleet, he
held that it would be a comparatively simple
matter to push on along the coast, taking in turn
Benghazi, Tobruk, and the city of Tripoli itself.

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Gentlemen Rovers

The chief merit of the scheme lay in its sheer
audacity, for of all the leaders who have invaded
Africa, this unknown American was the only one
who had the courage to face the perils of a march
across a waterless, trackless, sun-scorched, and
uninhabited desert. But there was in Eaton the
stuff of which great conquerors are made, and
instead of letting his mind dwell on the dangers
which the desert had to offer, he dreamed of the
triumphs which awaited him beyond it.

To raise the men for so hazardous an expedi
tion, Eaton had need of all the energy and mag
netism at his command, alternately employing the
specious promises of a recruiting sergeant and the
persuasive arguments of a campaign orator. On
March 3, 1805, Eaton and the man to whom he had
promised a kingdom reviewed their forlorn hope
— and it was very forlorn indeed — at a spot called
the Arab's Tower, some forty miles southwest of
Alexandria. I doubt if so strangely assorted a
force ever marched and fought under the shadow
of our flag. The army, if army it could be called,
consisted of eight Americans besides Eaton: Lieu
tenant O'Barron, Sergeant Peck, and six marines
borrowed from the American fleet; thirty-four
Greeks, who went along professedly because they
wanted to fight the Moslem, but really because

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Capturing An African Kingdom

they needed the money; twenty-five Egyptian
Copts, Christians at least in name, who claimed
to be trained artillerymen, and to lend color to
their assertion brought with them a small brass
field-gun; those of Ahmet's personal adherents who
had fled with him into exile, numbering about
ninety men; and a squadron of Arab mercenaries,
whose services had been obtained by the promise
of unlimited opportunities for loot — these with the
drivers of the baggage-camels bringing the total
strength of the "Army of North Africa" to less
than four hundred men. With this motley and ill-
disciplined force behind him, and six hundred miles
of yellow sand in front, Eaton turned his horse's
nose Tripoliward, so that at about the time Presi
dent Jefferson was delivering his second inaugural
address the adventurous American was leading his
little army across the desert, with the courage of
an Alexander the Great, to conquer an African
kingdom.

The task which lay before him was one which
great military leaders, all down the ages, had de
clared impossible. For a distance equal to that
from Philadelphia to Chicago stretched an unbro
ken expanse of pitiless, sun-scorched desert, boast
ing no single living thing save ah occasional
band of nomad Arabs or a herd of gazelles. Mid-
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Gentlemen Rovers

way between Alexandria and Derna was the in
significant port of Bomb a, where, according to a
prearranged plan, the Argus, under Captain Isaac
Hull — the same who became famous a few years
later for his victories over the British in the War
of 1812 — was to meet the expedition with supplies.
Unless you have seen the desert it will be difficult
for you to appreciate how hazardous this ad
venture really was. Imagine a sea of yellow sand
with billow after billow stretching in every direc
tion as far as the eye can see; without a tree, a
shrub, a plant, a blade of grass; without a river,
a brook, a drop of water except, at long intervals,
a stagnant, green-scummed pool; the air like a
blast from an open furnace-door and overhead a
sky pitiless as molten brass! During the seven
weeks of the march the thermometer never dropped
during the day below 120 degrees.

The arrangements for the transport had been
left to Ahmet Pasha, and it was not until the
expedition was two hundred miles into the desert,
and the camel-drivers abruptly halted and an
nounced that they were going back to Egypt, that
Eaton learned that they had been engaged only to
that point. As the desertion of the camel-drivers
and the consequent inability to transport the tents,
ammunition, and supplies would wreck the expe-

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Capturing An African Kingdom

dition, Eaton pleaded with the men to stick by
him two or three days longer, until he could reach
an encampment of Arabs with whom he could
make another contract. This they consented to
do on condition that they were paid in advance.
By borrowing every piaster which his Americans
and Greeks had to lend, Eaton succeeded in rais
ing six hundred and seventy-three dollars, and
with this the camel-drivers were apparently con
tent. Nothing shows more strikingly the shoe
string on which the enterprise was being run than
the fact that this unexpected disbursement re
duced Eaton's war-chest to three Venetian sequins
— equivalent to six dollars and fifty-four cents!
Despite this payment, all but four of the camel-
drivers deserted the very next night, and the four
that remained sullenly refused to go any far
ther. In the darkness of the following night they,
too, quietly untethered their camels and slipped
silently away. Here, then, were three hundred
and fifty men, with a rapidly diminishing supply
of food and water and absolutely no means of
transport, as completely marooned as though they
were on a desert island.

To make matters worse, if such a thing were
possible, Eaton learned that Ahmet had induced
his Tripolitans and the Arabs to refuse to advance

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Gentlemen Rovers

until they had news of the arrival of the Argus at
Bomba. Eaton, striding across to Ahmet's tent,
shook his fist menacingly in the face of the crin
ging Tripolitan. "I know you're a coward," said
he, "and I suspect that you're a traitor and I've
a damned good mind to have you shot." The
Pasha, now thoroughly frightened, replied that
his men were too tired to march any farther.
"You can take your choice between marching and
starving," Eaton retorted, turning on his heel,
and placing a guard of American marines around
the tent containing the provisions, he ordered
them to shoot the first Arab who approached it.
This resolute action had an immediate effect,
for the Pasha and his men lost their tired feeling
with amazing quickness, fifty of the camel-drivers
returned, and the desperate march was resumed.
It was but a day or two, however, before the
Arabs became as turbulent and unruly as ever.
Then another mutiny broke out, Ahmet and
his people announcing that they preferred to be
well-fed cowards rather than starved heroes, and
that they were going back to the flesh-pots of
Egypt forthwith. Just as they were on the point
of departure, however, a messenger who had been
despatched to Bomba reached camp with the
news that the Argus was awaiting them in the

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Capturing An African Kingdom

harbor. These unexpected delays had wholly ex
hausted the supplies, which were slim enough,
goodness knows, in the beginning, so that during
the remainder of the march to Bomba they were
compelled to kill some of the camels for food,
living upon them and upon such roots as they
could gather on the way.

It was a half-starved and utterly exhausted
expedition that plodded up the sand dunes which
overlook the little port of Bomba, so what must
their despair have been when they found no vessel
awaiting them in the harbor, and that the town
itself had been deserted. Captain Hull, appar
ently having given them up as lost, had departed.
This time a more serious mutiny occurred, the
Arabs, desperate with hunger and furious from
disappointment, preparing to attack Eaton and
his handful of Europeans. Appreciating the peril
of his position, Eaton hastily formed his men
into a hollow square. Just as the Arabs were pre
paring to charge down upon them the musket of
one of the marines was prematurely discharged,
the bullet whistling in uncomfortable proximity
to the Pasha's ear. So terror-stricken was that
worthy that he called off his men and attempted
to parley with Eaton, who, standing alone well in
front of his command, relieved his mind by telling

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Gentlemen Rovers

Ahmet his opinion of him in what, according to
the accounts of those who heard it, must have
been an epic in objurgation. While the two fac
tions were growling at each other like angry bull
dogs one of the Americans, happening to glance
seaward, suddenly broke the dangerous tension
by shouting: "A sail! A sail!" Hull, true to
his promise, was returning, and the expedition
was saved. Supplies were quickly landed from
the Argus for the starving men; with full stomachs
the courage of the Arabs returned, and Eaton and
his little band once more turned their faces toward
the setting sun.

On the evening of April 25 the vanguard sighted
the walls of Derna. A feat that veteran soldiers
had jeered at as impossible had been accomplished,
and Eaton, without the loss of a man, had brought
his army across six hundred miles of desert, in the
heat of an African spring, and in the remarkable
time, when the scantiness of the rations and the
many delays are considered, of fifty-two days.
With their goal actually in sight, still another
mutiny took place, the craven Arabs claiming
that they were too few in number to attempt the
capture of a walled and heavily garrisoned city,
and it was not until Eaton promised them a bonus
of two thousand dollars if they succeeded in taking

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it that they could be induced to advance. The
more one learns of this man the more one must
admire his unfailing resource, his tenacity of pur
pose, and his bull-dog courage; for, in addition to
the appalling natural obstacles which he overcame,
he was constantly harried by intrigue, treachery,
and cowardice.

On the morning of the 26th a message was
sent to the governor of Derna, under a flag of
truce, offering him full amnesty if he would sur
render and declare his allegiance to his rightful
sovereign, Ahmet. The answer that came back
was as curt as it was conclusive: "My head or
yours," it read. Just as the sun was rising above
the sand-dunes the following morning the Argus,
the Nautilus, and the Hornet swept grandly into
the harbor, their crews at quarters, their decks
cleared for action, and the red-white-and-blue
ensign of the oversea republic floating defiantly
from their main trucks. Under cover of a terrific
bombardment by the war-ships, Eaton's force
advanced upon the city, planning, with their
single field-piece, to effect a breach in the walls
and carry the place by storm. So murderous was
the fire that the Tripolitan riflemen poured into
them from the walls and housetops, however,
that they were thrown into confusion, their single

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Gentlemen Rovers

piece of artillery was put out of action by a well-
directed cannon-shot, and Eaton himself was
severely wounded. Seeing that his raw troops
were on the verge of panic, and knowing that his
only chance of holding them together lay in a
charge, Eaton ordered his buglers to sound the
advance, and with a cheer like the roar of a storm
his whole line — Americans, Greeks, and Arabs —
swept forward on a run. "Come on, boys!"
shouted Eaton, as he raced ahead, sword in one
hand, pistol in the other. "At the double! Fol
low me! Follow me!" And follow him they did.
Cheering like madmen they crossed a field swept
by a withering rifle-fire. They clambered over the
ramparts, and by the very fury of their assault
drove back the defenders, who .outnumbered them
twenty to one. They fought with them hand
to hand, sabre against cimiter, bayonet against
clubbed matchlock. Swarming into the batteries,
they cut down the gunners and turned their guns
upon the town. The defences of the city once in
his possession, Eaton directed an assault upon the
palace, where the governor had taken refuge,
utilizing his Arab cavalry meanwhile to cut off
the retreat of the flying garrison. Before the sun
had disappeared into the Mediterranean, Eaton, at
a cost of only fourteen killed and wounded (all of

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whom, by the way, were Americans and Greeks),
had made himself master of Derna. His moment
of triumph came when, still begrimed with dirt
and powder, his arm in a blood-stained sling, he
stood with drawn sword before the line formed by
his ragged soldiers and the trim bluejackets from
the fleet, and, watching a ball of bunting creep up
that palace flagstaff from which so recently had
flaunted the banner of Tripoli, saw it suddenly
break out into the Stars and Stripes. Our flag,
for the first and only time, flew above a fortifica
tion on that side of the Atlantic.

Reinforced by a party of bluejackets from the
fleet, Eaton wasted not a moment in preparing
the city for defence. He was none too soon, either,
for the Bashaw, learning of the loss of his richest
province, despatched an overwhelming force for
its recapture. This army arrived before the walls
of Derna on May 13, and immediately made an
assault, which Eaton repulsed, as he did a second
one a few weeks later. By this time the news of
Eaton's victory had spread across North Africa
as fire spreads in dry grass, and thousands of na
tives, many of them deserters from the Bashaw's
forces, hastened to assert their undying loyalty
and to offer their services to Ahmet, for your
Arab is far-seeing and takes good care to be

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found on the side which he believes to be the
winning one. With his army thus largely aug
mented, with ample supplies, with Derna as a
base of operations, and with his own prestige
equivalent to an additional regiment, Eaton had
completed the preparations for continuing his
victorious advance along the African coast-line.
There is little doubt, indeed, that with the co
operation of the fleet he could have marched on
to Benghazi, taken that city as easily as he did
Derna, and in due time planted the American
flag on the castle of Tripoli itself.

So it was with undisguised amazement and in
dignation that on June 12 he received orders from
Commodore Rodgers to evacuate Derna and to
withdraw his forces from Tripoli, Colonel Tobias
Lear, the American consul at Algiers, having, in
the face of Eaton's successes, signed an inglorious
treaty of peace with the Bashaw of Tripoli. No
more degrading terms were ever assented to by a
civilized power. The Bashaw at first demanded
two hundred thousand dollars for the release of
Bainbridge and the Philadelphia 's crew, but as
Eaton had captured a large number of Tripolitans
in the storming of Derna, an exchange was eventu
ally arranged, the United States agreeing to pay
the pirate ruler sixty thousand dollars to boot.

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The city of Derna and the great province of which
it was the capital were surrendered without so
much as the mention of an equivalent, not even
the relinquishment of the ransom of the American
prisoners. The unfortunate Ahmet Pasha, who
had been decoyed from his refuge in Egypt on the
promise of American assistance in effecting his
restoration, was deserted at a moment when suc
cess was actually ours, and had to fly for his life
to Sicily, his wife and children being held as hos
tages by his brother and the heads of his adherents
being exposed on the walls of the Tripolitan cap
ital. Thus shamefully ended one of the most
gallant and romantic exploits in the history of
American arms; thus terminated an episode which,
more than any other agency, compelled the rulers
of the Barbary coast to respect the citizens and
fear the wrath of the United States. Though an
expedition of scarcely four hundred men may
sound insignificant, the humbling of a Barbary
power was an achievement which every European
nation had attempted and which none of them
had accomplished.

Disappointed and disgusted, Eaton returned to
the United States in November, 1805, to find
himself a national hero. From the moment he
set his foot on American soil he was greeted with

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cheers wherever he appeared; it was "roses, roses
all the way." The cities of Washington and
Richmond honored him with public dinners;
Massachusetts, "desirous to perpetuate the re
membrance of an heroic enterprise," granted him
ten thousand acres of land in Maine; Boston
named a street after the city which he had cap
tured against such fearful odds; President Jeffer
son lauded him in his annual message; and in
recognition of his services in effecting the release
of some Danish captives in Tripoli, he was pre
sented by the King of Denmark with a jewelled
snuff-box. He was complimented everywhere ex
cept at the seat of government, and received every
honor except that which he most deserved — a vote
of thanks from Congress. Though his expedition
had involved an expense of twenty-three thou
sand dollars, for which he had given his personal
notes and the repayment of which exhausted all
his means, Congress never reimbursed him. Not
withstanding the astounding indifference and in
gratitude of the nation on whose flag he had shed
such lustre, he indignantly rejected the advances
of Aaron Burr, who tried ineffectually to enlist
him in his conspiracy to establish an empire be
yond the Mississippi, and died, poverty-stricken
and broken-hearted, on June i, 1811. Though

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the most modest of monuments marks his resting-
place in Brimfield churchyard, and though not
one in a hundred thousand of his countrymen
have so much as heard his name, his fame still
lives in that wild and far-off region where it took
an Italian army of forty thousand men to repeat
the exploit which he accomplished with four
hundred.

THE LAST FIGHT OF THE "GENERAL
ARMSTRONG"

THE LAST FIGHT OF THE "GENERAL
ARMSTRONG"

WE leaned over the rail of the Hamburg,
Colonel Roosevelt and I, and watched the
olive hills of Fayal rise from the turquoise sea.
Houses white as chalk began to peep from among
the orange groves; what looked at first sight to
be a yellow snake turned into a winding road;
then we rounded a headland, and the U-shaped
harbor, edged by a sleepy town and com
manded by a crumbling fortress, lay before us.
"In there," said the ex-President, pointing eagerly
as our anchor rumbled down, "was waged one of
the most desperate sea-fights ever fought, and one
of the least known; in there lies the wreck of the
General Armstrong, the privateer that stood off
twenty times her strength in British men and guns,
and thereby saved Louisiana from invasion. It is
a story that should make the thrills of patriotism
run up and down the back of every right-thinking
American."

Everything about her, from the carved and
gilded figure-head, past the rakish, slanting masts

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to the slender stern, indicated the privateer. As
she stood into the roadstead of Fayal late in
the afternoon of September 26, 1814, black-hulled
and white-sparred, carrying an amazing spread of
snowy canvas, she made a picture that brought a
grunt of approval even from the surly Azorian
pilot. Hardly had the red-white-and-blue ensign
showing her nationality fluttered to her peak be
fore a harbor skiff bearing the American consul,
Dabney, shot out from shore; for these were
troublous times on the Atlantic, and letters from
the States were few and far between. Rounding
her stern, he read, with a thrill of pride, "General
Armstrong, New York"

The very name stood for romance, valor, hair
breadth escape. For of all the two-hundred-odd
privateers that put out from American ports at
the outbreak of the War of 1812 to prey on Brit
ish commerce, none had won so high a place in
the popular imagination as this trim-built, black-
hulled schooner. Built for speed, and carrying a
spread of canvas at which most skippers would
have stood aghast, she was the fastest and best-
handled privateer afloat, and had always been able
to show her heels to the enemy on the rare occa
sions when the superior range of her seven guns
had failed to pound him into submission. Her

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The "General Armstrong"

list of captures had made rich men of her owners,
and had caused Lloyd's to raise the insurance on
a vessel merely crossing the English Channel to
thirteen guineas in the hundred.

The story of her desperate encounter off the
mouth of the Surinam River with the British sloop
of war Coquette, with four times her weight in guns,
had fired the popular imagination as had few other
events of the war. Although her commander,
Samuel Chester Reid, was not long past his thir
tieth birthday, no more skilful navigator or daring
fighter ever trod a quarter-deck, and his crew of
ninety men — Down-East fishermen, old man-o'-
war's men, Creole privateersmen who had fought
under Lafitte, reckless adventurers of every sort
and kind — would have warmed the heart of bluff
old John Paul Jones himself.

Just as dusk was falling the officer on watch
reported a sail in the offing, and Reid and the con
sul, hurrying on deck, made out the British brig
Carnation, of eighteen guns, with two other war-
vessels in her wake: the thirty-eight-gun frigate
Rota, and the Plantagenet, of seventy-four. Now,
as the privateer lay in the innermost harbor,
where a dead calm prevailed, while the three
British ships were fast approaching before the
brisk breeze which was blowing outside, Reid,
who knew the line which marks foolhardiness from

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Gentlemen Rovers

courage, appreciating that the chances of his being
able to hoist anchor, make sail, and get out of
the harbor before the British squadron arrived to
block the entrance were almost infinitesimal, de
cided to stay where he was and trust to the
neutrality of the port, a decision that was con
firmed by the assurances of Consul Dabney that
the British would not dare to attack a vessel lying
in a friendly harbor. But therein the consul was
mistaken, for throughout the entire duration of
the war the British as cynically disregarded the
observance of international law and the rights of
neutrals as though they did not exist.

The Carnation, learning the identity of the
American vessel from the pilot, hauled close into
the harbor, not letting go her anchor until she was
within pistol-shot of the General Armstrong. In
stantly a string of signal-flags fluttered from her
mast, and the message was promptly acknowledged
by her approaching consorts, which thereupon
proceeded to stand ofF and on across the mouth
of the harbor, thus barring any chance of the
privateer making her escape. So great was the
commotion which ensued on the Carnation s deck
that Reid, becoming suspicious of the English
man's good faith, warped his ship under the very
guns of the Portuguese fort.

About eight o'clock, just as dark had fallen,

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The " General Armstrong "

Captain Reid saw four boats slip silently from the
shadow of the Carnation and pull toward him
with muffled oars. If anything more were needed
to convince him of their hostile intentions, the
moon at that moment appeared from behind a
cloud and was reflected by the scores of cutlasses
and musket-barrels in all four of the approaching
boats. As they came within hailing distance
Reid swung himself into the shrouds.

"Boats there!" he shouted, making a trumpet
of his hands. "Come no nearer! For your own
safety I warn you!"

At his hail the boats halted, as though in inde
cision, and their commanders held a whispered
consultation. Then, apparently deciding to take
the risk, and hoping, no doubt, to catch the priva
teer unprepared, they gave the order: "Give way
all ! " The oars caught the water together, and the
four boats, loaded to the gunwales with sailors
and marines, came racing on.

"Let 'em have it, boys!" roared Reid, and at
the word a stream of flame leaped from the dark
side of the privateer and a torrent of grape swept
the crowded boats, almost annihilating one of the
crews and sending the others, crippled and bleed
ing, back to the shelter of their ship.

By this time the moon had fully risen, and
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Gentlemen Rovers

showed the heights overlooking the harbor to be
black with spectators, among whom were the
Portuguese governor and his staff; but the castle,
either from weakness or fear, showed no signs of
resenting the outrageous breach of neutrality to
which the port had been subjected. Angered and
chagrined at their repulse, the British now threw
all caution aside. The long-boats and gigs of all
three ships were lowered, and into them were
crowded nearly four hundred men, armed with
muskets, pistols, and cutlasses. Reid, seeing that
an attack was to be made in force, proceeded to
warp his vessel still closer inshore, mooring her
stem and stern within a few rods of the castle.
Moving two of the nine-pounders across the deck,
and cutting ports for them in the bulwarks, he
brought five guns, in addition to his famous
"long torn," to bear on the enemy. With cannon
double-shotted, boarding-nets triced up, and decks
cleared for action, the crew of the General Arm
strong lay down beside their guns to await the
British attack.

It was not long in coming. Just as the bells of
the old Portuguese cathedral boomed twelve a
dozen boats, loaded to the water's edge with
sailors and marines, whose burnished weapons
were like so many mirrors under the rays of the

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The "General Armstrong"

moon, swung around a promontory behind which
they had been forming and, with measured stroke
of oars, came sweeping down upon the lone priva
teer. The decks of the General Armstrong were
black and silent, but round each gun clustered its
crew of half-naked gunners, and behind the bul
warks knelt a line of cool, grim riflemen, eyes
sighting down their barrels, cheeks pressed close
against the butts. Up and down behind his men
paced Reid, the skipper, cool as a winter's morning.

"Hold your fire until I give the word, boys," he
cautioned quietly. "Wait till they get within
range, and then teach 'em better manners."

Nearer and nearer came the shadowy line of
boats, the oars rising and falling with the faultless
rhythm which marks the veteran man-o'-war's
man. On they came, and now the waiting Ameri
cans could make out the gilt-lettered hat-bands
of the bluejackets and the white cross-belts and
the brass buttons on the tunics of the marines.
A moment more and those on the Armstrong s
deck could see, beneath the shadow of the leather
shakoes, the tense, white faces of the British
boarders.

"Now, boys!" roared Captain Reid; "let 'em
have it for the honor of the flag!" and from the
side of the privateer leaped a blast of flame and

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Gentlemen Rovers

lead, cannon and musketry crashing in chorus.
Never were men taken more completely by sur
prise than were those British sailors, for they had
expected that Reid, relying on the neutrality of
the port, would be quite unprepared to resist them.
But, though the American fire had caused terrible
havoc in the crowded boats, with the bull-dog
courage for which the British sailors were justly
famous, they kept indomitably on. "Give way!
Give way all!" screamed the boy-coxswains, and
in the face of a withering rifle-fire the sailors, re
covering from their momentary panic, bent grimly
to their oars. Through a perfect hail-storm of lead,
right up to the side of the privateer, they swept.
Six boats made fast to her quarter and six more
to her bow. " Boarders up and away!" bellowed
the officers, hacking desperately at the nettings
with their swords, and firing their pistols point-
blank into the faces they saw above them. The
Armstrong's gunners, unable to depress the muz
zles of their guns enough so that they could
be brought to bear, lifted the solid shot and
dropped them from the rail into the British
boats, mangling their crews and crashing through
their bottoms. From the shelter of the bulwarks
the American riflemen fired and loaded and fired
again, while the negro cook and his assistant

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The "General Armstrong"

played their part in the defence by pouring kettles
of boiling water over the British who were attempt
ing to scramble up the sides, sending them back
into their boats again scalded and groaning with
pain.

There has been no fiercer struggle in all the an
nals of the sea. The Yankee gunners, some of
them gray-haired men who had seen service with
John Paul Jones in the Bon Homme Richard,
changed from cannon-balls to grape, and from
grape to bags of bullets, so that by the time the
British boats drew alongside they were little more
than floating shambles. The dark waters of the
harbor were lighted up by spurts of flame from
muskets and cannon; the high, shrill yell of
the Yankee privateersmen rose above the deep-
throated hurrahs of the English sailors; the air
was filled with the shouts and oaths of the com
batants, the shrieks and groans of the wounded,
the incessant trampling of struggling men upon the
decks, the splash of dead and injured falling over
board, the clash and clang of steel on steel, and
all the savage, overwhelming turmoil of a struggle
to the death. Urged on by their officers' cries of
"No quarter! Give the Yankees no quarter!"
the British division which had attacked the bow
hacked its way through the nettings, and succeeded

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Gentlemen Rovers

by sheer weight of numbers in getting a footing
on the deck, all three of the American lieutenants
being killed or disabled in the terrific hand-to-hand
struggle that ensued.

At this critical juncture, when the Americans
on the forecastle, their officers fallen and their
guns dismounted, were being pressed slowly back
by overwhelming numbers, Captain Reid, having
repulsed the attack on the Armstrongs quarter,
led the after division forward at a run, the priva-
teersmen, though outnumbered five to one, dri
ving the English overboard with the resistless fury
of their onset. As the British boats, now laden
with dead and dying, attempted to withdraw into
safety, they were raked again and again with
showers of lead; two of them sank, two of them
were captured by the Americans. Finally, with
nearly three hundred of their men — three-quarters
of the cutting-out force — dead or wounded, the
British, now cowed and discouraged, pulled slowly
and painfully out of range. Some of the most
brilliant victories the British navy has ever gained
were far less dearly purchased.

At three in the morning Reid received a note
from Consul Dabney asking him to come ashore.
He then learned that the governor had sent a
letter to the British commander asking him to

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The " General Armstrong"

desist from further hostilities, as several buildings
in the town had been injured by the British fire
and a number of the inhabitants wounded. To
this request Captain Lloyd had rudely replied that
he would have the Yankee privateer if he had to
knock the town into a heap of ruins. Returning
on board, Reid ordered the dead and wounded
taken ashore, and told the crew to save their per
sonal belongings.

At daybreak the Carnation, being of lighter
draught than the other vessels, stood close in for
a third attack, opening on the privateer with every
gun she could bring to bear. But even in those
days the fame of American gunners was as wide
as the seas, and so well did the crew of the General
Armstrong uphold their reputation that the Car
nation was compelled to beat a demoralized re
treat, with her rigging cut away, her foremast
about to fall, and with several gaping holes be
tween wind and water. But Reid, appreciating
that there was absolutely no chance of escape,
and recognizing that further resistance would en
tail an unnecessary sacrifice of his men's lives, by
which nothing could be gained, ordered the crew
to throw the nine-pounders which had rendered
such valiant service overboard and to leave the
ship. The veteran gunners, who were as much at-

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Gentlemen Rovers

tached to their great black guns as a cavalryman
is to his horse, obeyed the order with tears plough
ing furrows down their powder-begrimed cheeks.
Then Reid with his own hand trained the long-
torn down his vessel's hatchway, and pulling the
lanyard sent a charge of grape crashing through
her bottom, from which she at once began to sink.
Ten minutes later, before a British crew could
reach her side, the General Armstrong went to the
bottom with her flag still defiantly flying.

Few battles have been fought in which the odds
were so unequal, and in few battles have the rela
tive losses been so astounding. The three British
war-ships carried two thousand men and one
hundred and thirty guns, and of the four hundred
men who composed the boarding party they lost,
according to their own accounts, nearly three hun
dred killed and wounded. Of the American crew
of ninety men, two were killed and seven wounded.
This little crew of privateersmen had, in other
words, put out of action more than three times
their own number of British, and had added one
more laurel to our chaplet of triumphs on the sea.

The Americans had scarcely gained the shore
before Captain Lloyd — who, by the way, had been
so severely wounded in the leg that amputation
was necessary — sent a peremptory message to the

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The " General Armstrong "

governor demanding their surrender. But the
men who could not be taken at sea were not the
men to be captured on land, and the Americans,
retreating to the mountainous centre of the island,
took possession of a thick-walled convent, over
which they hoisted the stars and stripes, and from
which they defied British and Portuguese alike to
come and take them. No one tried.

All of the following day was spent by the British
in burying their one hundred and twenty dead —
you can see the white gravestones to-day if you
will take the trouble to climb the hill behind the
little town — but it took them a week to repair the
damage caused by the battle. And so deep was
their chagrin and mortification that when two
British ships put into Fayal a few days later, and
were ordered to take home the wounded, they
were forbidden to carry any news of the disaster
back to England.

To Captain Reid and his little band of fighters
is due in no small measure the credit of saving
New Orleans from capture and Louisiana from
invasion. Lloyd's squadron was a part of the
expedition then gathering at Pensacola for the in
vasion of the South, but it was so badly crippled
in its encounter with the privateer that it did not
reach the Gulf of Mexico until ten days later than

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Gentlemen Rovers

the expedition had planned to sail. The expedi
tion waited for Lloyd and his reinforcements, so
that when it finally approached New Orleans,
Jackson and his frontiersmen, who had hastened
down by forced marches from the North, had made
preparations to give the English a warm recep
tion. Had the expedition arrived ten days earlier
it would have found the Americans unprepared,
and New Orleans would have fallen.

Captain Reid and his men, landing on their na
tive soil at Savannah, found their journey north
ward turned into a triumphal progress. The whole
country went wild with enthusiasm. There was
not a town or village on the way but did them
honor. The city of Richmond gave Captain Reid
a great banquet, and the State of New York pre
sented him with a sword of honor. But of all the
tributes which were paid to the little band of
heroes, none had the flavor of the concluding line
of a letter written by one of the British officers en
gaged in the action to a relative in England. "If
this is the way the Americans fight," he wrote,
"we may well say, 'God deliver us from our

enemies/

88

THE PIRATE WHO TURNED PATRIOT

THE PIRATE WHO TURNED PATRIOT

HOW many well-informed people are aware,
I wonder, that the fact that the American
flag, and not the British, flies to-day over the
Mississippi valley is largely due to the eleventh-
hour patriotism of a pirate ? Of the many kinds
of men of many nationalities who have played
parts of greater or less importance in the making
of our national history, none is more completely
cloaked in mystery, romance, and adventure than
Jean Lafitte. The last of that long line of buc
caneers who for more than two centuries terror
ized the waters and ravaged the coasts of the
Gulf of Mexico, his exploits make the wildest
fiction appear commonplace and tame. Although
he was as thorough-going a pirate as ever plun
dered an honest merchant-man, I do not mean to
imply that he was a leering, low-browed scoundrel,
with a red bandanna twisted about his head and
an armory of assorted weapons at his waist, for
he was nothing of the sort. On the contrary, from
all I can learn about him, he appears to have been

Gentlemen Rovers

a very gentlemanly sort of person indeed, tall
and graceful and soft- voiced, and having the most
charming manners. Though he regarded the law
with unconcealed contempt, there came a crisis
in our national history when he placed patriotism
above all other considerations, and rendered an
inestimable service to the country whose laws he
had flouted and to the State which had set a
price on his head. Indeed, we are indebted to
Jean Lafitte in scarcely less measure than we are
to Andrew Jackson for frustrating the British in
vasion and conquest of Louisiana.

Though the palmy days of piracy in the Gulf
of Mexico really ended with the seventeenth cen
tury, by which time the rich cities of Middle
America had been impoverished by repeated sack
ings and the gold-freighted caravels had taken to
travelling under convoy, even at the beginning of
the nineteenth century these storied waters still
offered many opportunities to lawless and enter
prising sea-folk. But the pirates of the nineteenth
century, unlike their forerunners of the seven
teenth, preyed on slave-ships rather than on
treasure-galleons. Consider the facts. On Jan
uary i, 1808, Congress passed an act prohibiting
the further importation of slaves into the United
States. By this act the recently acquired terri-

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The Pirate Who Turned Patriot

tory of Louisiana, over which prosperity was ad
vancing in three-league boots, was deprived of
its supply of labor. With crops rotting in the
fields for lack of laborers, the price of slaves rose
until a negro fresh from the coast of Africa would
readily bring a thousand dollars at auction in
New Orleans. At the same time, remember, ship
loads of slaves were being brought to Cuba, where
no such restrictions existed, and sold for three
hundred dollars a head. Under such conditions
smuggling was inevitable. At first the smugglers
bought their slaves in the Cuban market, and run
ning them across the Gulf of Mexico, landed them
at obscure harbors on the Louisiana coast, whence
they were marched overland to New Orleans and
Baton Rouge. The smugglers soon saw, however,
that the slavers carried small crews, poorly armed,
and quickly made up their minds that it was a
shameful waste of money to buy slaves when they
could get them for nothing by the menace of their
guns. In short, the smugglers became buccaneers,
and as such drove a thriving business in captured
cargoes of "black ivory," as the slaves were
euphemistically called.

As the demand was greatest on the rich new
lands along the Mississippi, it was at New Orleans
that the buccaneers found the most profitable

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Gentlemen Rovers

market for their human wares, for they could
easily sail up the river to the city, dispose of their
cargoes, and be off again with the quick despatch
of regular liners to resume their depredations.
But the buccaneers did not confine their atten
tion to slave-ships, so that in a short time, de
spite the efforts of British, French, and American
war-ships, the waters of the Gulf became as un
safe for all kinds of merchant-vessels as they were
in the days of Morgan and Kidd.

As a base for their piratical and smuggling oper
ations, as well as for supplies and repairs, the buc
caneers chose Barataria Bay, a place which met
their requirements as though made to order.
The name is applied to all of the Gulf coast of
Louisiana between the mouth of the Mississippi
and the mouth of another considerable stream
known as the Bayou La Fourche, the latter a
waterway to a rich and populous region. The
Bay of Barataria is screened from the Gulf, with
which it is connected by a deep-water pass, by
the island of Grande Terre, the trees on which
were high enough to effectually hide the masts of
the buccaneers' vessels from the view of inqui
sitive war-ships cruising outside. Between the
Mississippi and the La Fourche there is a perfect
network of small but navigable waterways which

94

The Pirate Who Turned Patriot

extend almost to New Orleans, so that the buc
caneers thus had a back-stairs route, as it were, to
the city, which brought their rendezvous at
Grande Terre within safe and easy reach of the
great mart of the Mississippi valley.

Such supplies as the buccaneers did not get
from the ships they captured, they obtained by
purchase in New Orleans. For the chains which
were used in making up the caufles of slaves for
transportation into the interior, they were accus
tomed to patronize the blacksmith-shop of the
Brothers Lafitte, which stood — and still stands
— on the northeast corner of Bourbon and St.
Philippe Streets. Of the history of these broth
ers prior to their arrival in New Orleans nothing
is definitely known. From their names, and be
cause they spoke with the accent peculiar to the
Garonne, they are credited with having been
natives of the south of France, though whence
they came and where they went are questions
which have never been satisfactorily answered.
They were quite evidently men of means, and
might have been described as gentlemen black
smiths, for they owned the slaves who pounded
the iron. Being men of exceptional business
shrewdness, it is not to be wondered at that from
doing the buccaneers' blacksmithing they grad-

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Gentlemen Rovers

ually became their agents and bankers, the smithy
in St. Philippe Street coming in time to be a sort of
clearing-house for many questionable transactions.
Now Jean Lafitte was an extremely able man, com
bining a remarkable executive ability with a genius
for organization, and had he lived a century later
these traits, together with his predatory instincts
and his utter contempt for the law, would un
doubtedly have made him the president of a
trust. Through success in managing their affairs,
he gradually increased his usefulness to the buc
caneers until he obtained complete control over
them, and ruled them as despotically as a tribal
chieftain. This was when his genius for organ
ization had succeeded in uniting their different,
and often rival, efforts and interests into a sort of
pirates' corporation, composed of all the bucca
neers, privateers, and freebooters doing business in
the Gulf, this combination of outlaws, incredible as
it may seem, as effectually controlling the price
of slaves and many other things in the Mississippi
valley as the Standard Oil Company controls the
price of petroleum to-day.

The influence of this new element in the buc
caneer business soon made itself felt. At that
time New Orleans was a sort of cross between an
American frontier town and a West Indian port,

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The Pirate Who Turned Patriot

its streets and barrooms being filled with swagger
ing adventurers, gamblers, and soldiers of fortune
from every corner of the three Americas, the pres
ence of most of whom was due to the activity of
the sheriffs in their former homes. It was from
these men, cool, reckless, resourceful, that Lafitte
recruited his forces. Leaving his brother Pierre
in charge of the New Orleans branch of the enter
prise, Jean Lafitte took up his residence on Grande
Terre, where, under his directions, a fort was
built, around which there soon sprang up a verita
ble city of thatched huts for the shelter of the
buccaneers, and for the accommodation of the
merchants who came to supply their wants or to
purchase their captured cargoes. Within a year
upward of a dozen armed vessels rendezvoused
in Barataria Bay, and their crews addressed Jean
Lafitte as "bosse." One of the Baratarians, a
buccaneer of the walk-the-plank-and-scuttle-the-
ship school named Grambo, who boldly called
himself a pirate, and jeered at Lafitte's polite
euphemism of privateer, was one day unwise
enough to dispute the new authority. Without
an instant's hesitation Lafitte drew a pistol and
shot him through the heart in the presence of the
whole band. After that episode there was no
more insubordination.

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Gentlemen Rovers

By 1813 the Baratarians, who had long since
extended their operations to include all kinds of
merchandise, were driving such a roaring trade
that the commerce and shipping of New Orleans
was seriously diminished (for why go to New
Orleans for their supplies, the sea-captains and
the plantation-owners argued, when they could
get what they wanted at Barataria for a fraction
of the price), the business of the banks decreased
alarmingly under the continual lessening of their
deposits, while even the National Government
began to feel its loss of revenue. The waters of
Barataria, on the contrary, were alive with the
sails of incoming and outgoing vessels; the wharfs
which had been constructed at Grande Terre re
sounded to the creak of winches and the shouts of
stevedores unloading contraband cargoes, and the
long, low warehouses were filled with merchandise
and the log stockades with slaves waiting to be
sold and transported to the up-country planta
tions. So defiant of the law did Lafitte become
that the streets of New Orleans were placarded
with handbills announcing the auction sales at
Barataria of captured cargoes, and to them flocked
bargain-hunters from all that part of the South.
An idea of the business done by the buccaneers at
this time may be gained from an official statement

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The Pirate Who Turned Patriot

that four hundred slaves were sold by auction in
the Grande Terre market in a single day.

Of course the authorities took action in the
matter, but their efforts to enforce the law proved
both dangerous and ineffective. In October, 1811,
a customs-inspector succeeded in surprising a band
of Baratarians and seizing some merchandise they
had with them, but before he could convey the
prisoners and the captured contraband to New
Orleans Lafitte and a party of his men overtook
him, rescued the prisoners, recovered the property,
and in the fight which ensued wounded several of
the posse. Some months later Lafitte killed an
inspector named Stout, who attempted to inter
fere with him, and wounded two of his deputies.
Then Governor Claiborne issued a proclamation
offering a reward for the capture of Lafitte dead
or alive, at the same time appealing to the legis
lature for permission to raise an armed force to
break up the buccaneering business for good and
all. The cautious legislators declined to take any
action, however, because they were unwilling to
interfere with an enterprise that, however illegal
it might be, was unquestionably developing the
resources of lower Louisiana, and incidentally add
ing immensely to the fortunes of their constitu
ents. As for the Baratarians, they paid as scant

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Gentlemen Rovers

attention to the governor's proclamation as though
it had never been written. Surrounded by groups
of admiring friends, Lafitte and his lieutenants
continued to swagger through the streets of New
Orleans; his men openly boasted of their exploits
in every barroom of the city, and in places of
public resort announcements of auctions at Bara-
taria continued to be displayed.

Then Governor Claiborne played his last card,
and secured indictments of the Lafittes on the
charge of piracy. Pierre Lafitte was arrested in
his blacksmith-shop and confined without bail
in the calaboose. Jean Lafitte promptly trumped
the governor's card by retaining the services of
Edward Livingston and John R. Grymes, the two
most distinguished members of the Louisiana bar,
at the enormous fee of twenty thousand dollars
apiece. Grymes was then the district attorney,
but he resigned his office for the fee. When his
successor accused him in open court of having
bartered his honor for pirate gold Grymes chal
lenged him to a duel, and crippled him for life
with a pistol bullet through the hip. When the
two eminent lawyers had cleared their poor, inno
cent, persecuted clients of the unfounded and out
rageous charges brought against them, and had
taught them certain legal tricks whereby they

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The Pirate Who Turned Patriot

could continue doing business at the old stand
and still keep on the right side of the bars, Pierre
Lafitte sent them an invitation to visit Barataria
and collect their fees in person. Livingston, a
cautious gentleman who had no desire to risk him
self among the pirates whose virtues he had just
extolled so highly to a jury, declined the invitation
with thanks, offering his colleague a commission of
ten per cent to collect his fee for him. Grymes,
who was a hard-drinking, high-living Virginian,
and afraid of nothing on two feet or four, accepted
the invitation with alacrity, and until the end of
his life was wont to convulse his friends with lurid
descriptions of the magnificent entertainment
which Lafitte provided for him. After a carouse
which lasted for a week, and which, from Grymes's
accounts, was a combination of the feasts of Lu-
cullus with the orgies of Nero, Lafitte sent his legal
adviser back to New Orleans in a sailing vessel,
together with several huge chests containing his
fee in Spanish gold pieces. It is an interesting
commentary on the customs which prevailed in
those days that by the time Grymes reached New
Orleans, after having visited the various planta
tions along the lower Mississippi and tried his
luck at their card-tables, not a dollar of his fee
remained.

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Gentlemen Rovers

Now, it should be understood that the feeble
ness which characterized all the attempts of the
Federal Government to break the power of the
buccaneers was not due to any reluctance to
prosecute them, but to the fact that it already
had its attention taken up with far more pressing
matters, for we were then in the midst of our
second war with Great Britain. The long series
of injuries which England had inflicted on the
United States, such as the plundering and con
fiscation of our ships, the impressment into the
British Navy of our seamen, and the interruption
of our commerce with other nations, had culmi
nated on June 18, 1812, by Congress declaring war.
So unexpected was this action that it found the
country totally unprepared. Our military estab
lishment was barely large enough to provide gar
risons for the most exposed points on our far-flung
borders; the numerous ports on our seaboard
were left unprotected and unfortified; and our
navy consisted of but a handful of war-ships.
The history of the first two years of the struggle,
which was marked by brilliant American victories
at sea, but by a disastrous attempt to invade
Canada, has no place in this narrative. Early in
the summer of 1814, however, the British Gov
ernment, exasperated by its failure to inflict any

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vital damage in the northern States, determined
to bring the war to a quick conclusion by the in
vasion and conquest of Louisiana. The prepara
tions made for this expedition were in themselves
startling. Indeed, few Americans have even a
faint conception of the strength of the blow which
England prepared to deal us, for with Napoleon's
abdication and exile to Elba, and the ending
of the war with France, she was enabled to bring
her whole military and naval power against us.
The British armada consisted of fifty war-ships,
mounting more than a thousand guns. It was
commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Coch-
rane, under whom was Sir Thomas Hardy, the
friend of Nelson, Rear-Admiral Malcolm, and
Rear-Admiral Codrington, and was manned by
the same sailors who had fought so valorously at
the Nile and at Trafalgar. This great fleet acted
as convoy for an almost equal number of trans
ports, having on board eight thousand soldiers,
which were the very flower of the British Army,
nearly all of them being veterans of the Napoleonic
campaigns. Such importance did the British Gov
ernment attach to the success of this expedition
that it seriously considered giving the command
of it to no less a personage than the Duke of Well
ington. So certain were the British that the ven-

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ture would be successful that they brought with
them a complete set of civil officials to conduct
the government of this new country which was
about to be annexed to his Majesty's dominions,
judges, customs-inspectors, revenue-collectors,
court-criers, printers, and clerks, together with
printing-presses and office paraphernalia, being
embarked on board the transports. A large num
ber of ladies, wives and relatives of the officers,
also accompanied the expedition, to take part in
the festivities which were planned to celebrate the
capture of New Orleans. And, as though to ca'p
this exhibition of audacity, a number of ships were
chartered by British speculators to bring home the
booty, the value of which was estimated before
hand at fourteen millions of dollars. Whether the
British Government expected to be able to per
manently hold Louisiana is extremely doubtful,
for it must have been fully aware that the Western
States were capable of pouring down a hundred
thousand men, if necessary, to repel an invasion.
It is probable, therefore, that they counted only
on a temporary occupation, which they expected
to prolong sufficiently, however, to give them time
to pillage and lay waste the country, a course
which they felt confident would quickly bring the
govenment at Washington to terms.

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This formidable armada set sail from England
early in the summer of 1814 and, reaching the
Gulf of Mexico, established its base of operations,
regardless of all the laws of neutrality, at the
Spanish port of Pensacola. One morning in the
following September a British brig hove to off
Grande Terre, and called attention to her presence
by firing a cannon. Lafitte, darting through the
pass in his four-oared barge to reconnoitre, met
the ship's gig with three scarlet-coated officers in
the stern, who introduced themselves as bearers
of important despatches for Mr. Lafitte. The
pirate chief, introducing himself in turn, invited
his unexpected guests ashore, and led the way
to his quarters with that extraordinary charm
of manner for which he was noted even among
the punctilious Creoles of New Orleans. After a
dinner of Southern delicacies, which elicited ex
clamations even from the blase British officers,
Lafitte opened the despatches. They were ad
dressed to Jean Lafitte, Esquire, commandant at
Barataria, from the commander-in-chief of the
British forces at Pensacola, and bluntly offered
him thirty thousand dollars, payable in Pensacola
or New Orleans, a commission as captain in the
British Navy, and the enlistment of his men in
the naval or military forces of Great Britain if

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Gentlemen Rovers

he would assist the British in their impending in
vasion of Louisiana. Though it was a generous
offer, no one knew better than the British com
mander that Lafitte's co-operation was well worth
the price, for, familiar with the network of
streams and navigable swamps lying between
Barataria Bay and New Orleans, he was capable
of guiding a British expedition through these se
cret waterways to the very gates of the city be
fore the Americans would have a hint of its ap
proach. It is not too much to assert that at this
juncture the future of New Orleans, and indeed
of the whole Mississippi Valley, hung upon the
decision of Jean Lafitte, a pirate and a fugitive
from justice with a price upon his head.

Whether Lafitte seriously considered accepting
the offer there is, of course, no way of knowing.
That it must have sorely tempted him it seems
but reasonable to suppose, for he was not an
American, either by birth or naturalization, and
the prospect of exchanging his hazardous outlaw's
life, with a vision of the gallows ever looming be
fore him for a captain's commission in the royal
navy, with all that that implied, could hardly
have failed to appeal to him strongly. That he
promptly decided to reject the offer speaks vol
umes for the man's strength of character and for

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his faith in American institutions. Appreciating
that at such a crisis every hour gained was of
value to the Americans, he asked time to consider
the proposal, requesting the British officers to
await him while he consulted an old friend and
associate whose vessel, he said, was then lying in
the bay. Scarcely was he out of sight, however,
before a band of buccaneers, acting, of course,
under his orders, seized the officers and hustled
them into the interior of the island, where they
were politely but forcibly detained. Here they
were found some days later by Lafitte, who pre
tended to be highly indignant at such unwarrant
able treatment of his guests. Releasing them with
profuse apologies, he saw them safely aboard their
brig, and assured them that he would shortly com
municate his decision to the British commander.
But that officer's letter was already in the hands
of a friend of Lafitte's in New Orleans, who was
a member of the legislature, and accompanying
it was a communication from the pirate chief
himself, couched in those altruistic and patriotic
phrases for which the rascal was famous. In it he
asserted that, though he admitted being guilty
of having evaded the payment of certain customs
duties, he had never lost his loyalty and affection
for the United States, and that, notwithstanding

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the fact that there was a price on his head, he
would never miss an opportunity of serving his
adopted country. A few days later Lafitte for
warded through the same channels much valu
able information which his agents had gathered
as to the strength, resources, and plans of the
British expedition, enclosing with it a letter
addressed to Governor Claiborne in which he
offered the services of himself and his men in
defence of the State and city on condition that
they were granted a pardon for past offences.

Receiving no reply to this communication,
Lafitte sailed up the river to New Orleans in his
lugger and made his way to the residence of the
governor. Governor Claiborne was seated at his
desk, immersed in the business of his office, when
the door was softly opened, and Lafitte, stepping
inside, closed it behind him. Clad in the full-
skirted, bottle-green coat, the skin-tight breeches
of white leather, and the polished Hessian boots
which he affected, he presented a most graceful
and gallant figure. As he entered he drew two
pistols from his pockets, cocked them, and covered
the startled governor, after which ominous pre
liminaries he bowed with the grace for which he
was noted.

"Sir," he remarked pleasantly, "you may pos-
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The Pirate Who Turned Patriot

sibly have heard of me. My name is Jean La-
fitte."

"What the devil do you mean, sir," exploded
the governor, "by showing yourself here? Don't
you know that I shall call the sentry and have
you arrested?"

"Pardon me, your Excellency," interrupted
Lafitte, moving his weapons significantly, "but
you will do nothing of the sort. If you move
your hand any nearer that bell I shall be com
pelled to shoot you through the shoulder, a
necessity, believe me, which I should deeply
regret. I have called on you because I have
something important to say to you, and I intend
that you shall hear it. To begin with, you have
seen fit to put a price upon my head?"

"Upon the head of a pirate, yes," thundered
the governor, now almost apoplectic with rage.

"In spite of that fact," continued Lafitte, "I
have rejected a most flattering offer from the
British government, and have come here, at some
small peril to myself, to renew in person the offer
of my services in repelling the coming invasion.
I have at my command a body of brave, well-
armed, and highly disciplined men who have
been trained to fight. Does the State care to
accept their services or does it not?"

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The governor, folding his arms, looked long at
Lafitte before he answered. Then he held out
his hand. "It is a generous offer that you make,
sir. I accept it with pleasure."

"At daybreak to-morrow, then," said Lafitte,
replacing his pistols, "my men will be awaiting
your Excellency's orders across the river." Then,
with another sweeping bow, he left the room as
silently as he had entered it.

Governor Claiborne immediately communicated
Lafitte's offer to General Andrew Jackson, then
at Mobile, who had been designated by the War
Department to conduct the defence of Louisiana.
Jackson, who had already issued a proclamation
denouncing the British for their overtures to "rob
bers, pirates, and hellish bandits," as he termed
the Baratarians, promptly replied that the only
thing he would have to do with Lafitte was to
hang him. Nevertheless, when the general ar
rived in New Orleans a few days later, Lafitte
called at his headquarters and requested an inter
view. By this time Jackson was conscious of the
feebleness of the resources at his disposal for the
defence of the city and of the strength of the arma
ment directed against it, which accounts, perhaps,
for his consenting to receive the "hellish bandit."
Lafitte, looking the grim old soldier squarely in

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The Pirate Who Turned Patriot

the eye, repeated his offer, and so impressed was
Jackson with the pirate's cool and fearless bearing
that he accepted his services.

On the loth of December, 1814, ten days after
Jackson's arrival in New Orleans, the British
armada reached the mouth of the Mississippi.
Small wonder that the news almost created a
panic in the city, for the very names of the ships
and regiments composing the expedition had be
come famous through their exploits in the Na
poleonic wars. It was a nondescript and motley
force which Jackson had hastily gathered to repel
this imposing army of invasion. Every man
capable of bearing arms in New Orleans and its
vicinity — planters, merchants, bankers, lawyers —
had volunteered for service. To the local com
pany of colored freedmen was added another one
composed of colored refugees from Santo Domingo,
men who had sided with the whites in the revo
lution there and had had to leave the island in
consequence. Even the prisoners in the cala
boose had been released and provided with arms.
From the parishes round about came Creole
volunteers by the hundred, clad in all manner
of clothing and bearing all kinds of weapons.
From Mississippi came a troop of cavalry under
Hinds, which was followed a few hours later by

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Coffee's famous brigade of "Dirty Shirts," com
posed of frontiersmen from the forests of Ken
tucky and Tennessee, who after a journey of eight
hundred miles through the wilderness answered
Jackson's message to hurry by covering the one
hundred and fifty miles between Baton Rouge
and New Orleans in two days. Added to these
were a thousand raw militiamen, who had been
brought down on barges and flat-boats from the
towns along the upper river, four companies of
regulars, Beale's brigade of riflemen, a hundred
Choctaw Indians in war-paint and feathers, and
last, but in many respects the most efficient of
all, the corps of buccaneers from Barataria, under
the command of the Lafittes. The men, dragging
with them cannon taken from their vessels, were
divided into two companies, one under Captain
Beluche (who rose in after years to be admiral-
in-chief of Venezuela) and the other under a
veteran privateersman named Dominique You.
These men were fighters by profession, hardy,
seasoned, and cool-headed, and as they swung
through the streets of New Orleans to take up the
position which Jackson had assigned them, even
that taciturn old soldier gave a grunt of appro
bation.

Jackson had chosen as his line of defence an
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artificial waterway known as the Rodriguez Ca
nal, which lay some five miles to the east of the
city, and along its embankments, which in them
selves formed pretty good fortifications, he dis
tributed his men. On the night of December 23
a force of two thousand British succeeded, by
means of boats, in making their way, through
the chain of bayous which surrounds the city, to
within a mile or two of Jackson's lines, where
they camped for the night. Being informed of
their approach (for the British, remember, had
the whole countryside against them), Jackson,
knowing the demoralizing effect of a night attack,
directed Coffee and his Tennesseans to throw
themselves upon the British right, while at the
same moment Beale's Kentuckians attacked on
the left. Trained in all the wiles of Indian war
fare, the frontiersmen succeeded in reaching the
outskirts of the British camp before they were
challenged by the sentries. Their reply was a
volley at close quarters and a charge with the
tomahawk — for they had no bayonets — which
drove the British force back in something closely
akin to a rout.

Meanwhile Jackson had set his other troops at
work strengthening their line of fortifications, so
that when the sun rose on the morning of the day

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before Christmas it found them strongly intrenched
behind earthworks, helped out with timber, sand
bags, fence-rails, and cotton-bales — whence arose
the myth that the Americans fought behind bales
of cotton. The British troops were far from be
ing in Christmas spirits, for the truth had already
begun to dawn upon them that men can fight as
well in buckskin shirts as in scarlet tunics, and
that these raw-boned wilderness hunters, with
their powder-horns and abnormally long rifles,
were likely to prove more formidable enemies than
the imposing grenadiers of Napoleon's Old Guard,
whom they had been fighting in Spain and France.
On that same day before Christmas, strangely
enough, a treaty of peace was being signed by the
envoys of the two nations in a little Belgian town,
four thousand miles away.

On Christmas Day, however, the wonted con
fidence of the British soldiery was somewhat re
stored by the arrival of Sir Edward Pakenham,
the new commander-in-chief, for even in that hard-
fighting day there were few European soldiers who
bore more brilliant reputations. A brother-in-
law of the Duke of Wellington, he had fought side
by side with him through the Peninsular War;
he had headed the storming party at Badajoz;
and at Salamanca had led the charge which won

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the day for England and a knighthood for him
self. An earldom and the governorship of Loui
siana, it was said, had been promised him as his
reward for the American expedition.

Pakenham's practised eye quickly appreciated
the strength of the American position, which,
after a council of war, it was decided to carry
by storm. During the night of the 26th the
storming columns, eight thousand strong, took up
their positions within half a mile of the American
lines. As the sun rose next morning over fields
sparkling with frost, the bugles sounded the ad
vance, and the British army, ablaze with color,
and in as perfect alignement as though on parade,
moved forward to the attack. As they came
within range of the American guns, a group
of plantation buildings which masked Jackson's
front were blown up, and the British were startled
to find themselves confronted by a row of ship's
cannon, manned as guns are seldom manned on
land. Around each gun was clustered a crew of
lean, fierce-faced, red-shirted ruffians, caked with
sweat and mud: they were Lafitte's buccaneers,
who had responded to Jackson's orders by run
ning in all the way from their station on the Bayou
St. John that morning. Not until he could make
out the brass buttons on the tunics of the advan-

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Gentlemen Rovers

cing British did Lafitte give the command to fire.
Then the great guns of the pirate-patriots flashed
and thundered. Before that deadly fire the scarlet
columns crumbled as plaster crumbles beneath a
hammer, the men dropping, first by twos and
threes, then by dozens and scores. In five min
utes the attacking columns, composed of regi
ments which were the boast of the British army,
had been compelled to sullenly retreat.

The British commander, appreciating that the
repulse of his forces was largely due to the fire of
the Baratarian artillery, gave orders that guns be
brought from the fleet and mounted in a position
where they could silence the fire of the buccaneers.
Three days were consumed in the herculean task
of moving the heavy pieces of ordnance into posi
tion, but when the sun rose on New Year's morn
ing it showed a skilfully constructed line of in-
trenchments, running parallel to the American
front and armed with thirty heavy guns. While
the British were thus occupied, the Americans had
not been idle, for Jackson had likewise busied
himself in constructing additional batteries, while
Commodore Patterson, the American naval com
mander, had gone through the sailors' boarding-
houses of New Orleans with a fine-tooth comb, im
pressing every nautical-looking character on which

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he could lay his hands, regardless of nation
ality, color, or excuses, to serve the guns. With
their storming columns sheltered behind the
breastworks, awaiting the moment when they
would burst through the breach which they con
fidently expected would shortly be made in the
American defences, the British batteries opened
fire with a crash which seemed to split the heavens.
Throughout the artillery duel which ensued splen
did service was rendered by the men under Lafitte,
who trained their guns as carefully and served
them as coolly as though they were back again
on the decks of their privateers. The storming
parties, which were waiting for a breach to be
made, waited in vain, for within an hour and
thirty minutes after the action opened the Brit
ish batteries were silenced, their guns dismounted,
and their parapets levelled with the plain. The
veterans of Wellington and Nelson had been out
fought from first to last by a band of buccaneers,
reinforced by a few-score American bluejackets
and a handful of nondescript seamen.

Pakenham had one more plan for the capture
of the city. This was a general assault by his
entire army on the American lines. His plan of
attack was simple, and would very probably have
proved successful against troops less accustomed

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to frontier warfare than the Americans. Colonel
Thornton, with fourteen hundred men, was directed
to cross the river during the night of January 7,
and, creeping up to the American lines under cover
of the darkness, to carry them by assault. His
attack was to be the signal for a column under
General Gibbs to storm Jackson's right, and for
another, under General Keane, to throw itself
against the American left, General Lambert, who
had just arrived with two fresh regiments, being
held in reserve. So carefully had the British
commanders perfected their plans that the battle
was already won — in theory.

No one knew better than Jackson that this was
to be the deciding round of the contest, and he
accordingly made his preparations to win it with
a solar-plexus blow. He also had received a rein
forcement, for the long-expected militia from Ken
tucky, two thousand two hundred strong, had just
arrived, after a forced march of fifteen hundred
miles, though in a half-naked and starving con
dition. Our history contains nothing finer, to my
way of thinking, than the story of how these moun
taineers of the Blue Ridge, foot-sore, ragged, and
hungry, came pouring down from the north to
repel the threatened invasion. The Americans,
who numbered, all told, barely four thousand men,

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were scattered along a front of nearly three miles,
one end of the line extending so far into a swamp
that the soldiers stood in water to their waists
during the day, and at night slept on floating logs
made fast to trees.

Long before daybreak on the morning of the
8th of January the divisions of Gibbs and Keane
were in position, and waiting impatiently for the
outburst of musketry which would be the signal
that Thornton had begun his attack. Thornton
had troubles of his own, however, for the swift
current of the Mississippi, as though wishing to
do its share in the nation's defence, had carried
his boats a mile and a half down-stream, so that
it was daylight before he was able to effect a
landing, when a surprise was, of course, out of
the question. But Pakenham, naturally obstinate
and now made wholly reckless by the miscarriage
of his plans, refused to recall his orders; so, as the
gray mists of the early morning slowly lifted, his
columns were seen advancing across the fields.

"Steady now, boys! Steady!" called Jack
son, as he rode up and down behind his lines.
"Don't waste your ammunition, for we've none
to spare. Pick your man, wait until he gets
within range, and then let him have it! Let's get
this business over with to-day!" His orders were

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Gentlemen Rovers

obeyed to the letter, for not a shot was fired un
til the scarlet columns were within certain range.
Then the order "Commence firing" was repeated
down the line. Neither hurriedly, nor excitedly,
nor confusedly was it obeyed, but with the ut
most calmness and deliberation, the frontiersmen,
trained to use the rifle from boyhood, choosing
their targets, and calculating their ranges as un
concernedly as though they were hunting in their
native forests. Still the British columns pressed
indomitably on, and still the lean and lantern-
jawed Jackson rode up and down his lines, cheer
ing, cautioning, exhorting, directing. Suddenly he
reined up his horse at the Baratarian battery
commanded by Dominique You.

"What's this? What's this?" he exclaimed.
"You have stopped firing? What the devil does
this mean, sir?"

"Of course we've stopped firing, general," said
the buccaneer, touching his forelock man-o'-war
fashion. "The powder's good for nothing. It
might do to shoot blackbirds with, but not red

coats."

Jackson beckoned to one of his aides-de-camp.

"Tell the ordnance officer that I will have him
shot in five minutes as a traitor if Dominique
complains again of his powder," and he galloped

120

1 1

T: u

° *

<u Q

•s I

^ .S

The Pirate Who Turned Patriot

off. When he passed that way a few minutes later
the rattle of the musketry was being punctuated
at half-minute intervals with the crash of the
Baratarian guns. "Ha, friend Dominique," called
Jackson, "I'm glad to see you're at work again."
"Pretty good work, too, general," responded the
buccaneer. "It looks to me as if the British have
discovered that there has been a change of powder
in this battery." He was right. Before the com
bined rifle and artillery fire of the Americans the
British columns were melting like snow under a
spring rain. Still their officers led them on, cheer
ing, pleading, threatening, imploring. Pakenham's
arm was pierced by a bullet; at the same instant
another killed his horse, but, mounting the pony
of his aide-de-camp, he continued to encourage
his disheartened and wavering men. Keane was
borne bleeding from the field, and a moment
later Gibbs, mortally wounded, was carried after
him. The panic which was just beginning to seize
the British soldiery was completed at this critical
instant by a shot from one of the Baratarians'
big guns which burst squarely in the middle of
the advancing column, causing terrible destruc
tion in the solid ranks. Pakenham's horse fell
dead, and the general reeled into the arms of an
officer who sprang forward to catch him. Terri-

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bly wounded, he was carried to the shelter of a
spreading oak, beneath which, five minutes later,
he breathed his last. Then the ebb-tide began.
The shattered regiments, demoralized by the
death of their commander, and themselves fear
fully depleted by the American fire, broke and ran.
Ten minutes later, save for the crawling, agonized
wounded, not a living foe was to be seen. But
the field, which had been green with grass half an
hour before, was carpeted with scarlet now, and
the carpet was made of British dead. Of the six
thousand men who took part in the attack, it is
estimated that two thousand six hundred were
killed or wounded. Of the Ninety-third Regi
ment, which had gone into action nine hundred
strong, only one hundred and thirty-nine men
answered to the roll-call. The Americans had
eight men killed and thirteen wounded. The
battle had lasted exactly twenty-five minutes.
At eight o'clock the American bugles sounded
"Cease firing," and Jackson — whom this victory
was to make President of the United States —
followed by his stafF, rode slowly down the lines,
stopping at each command to make a short ad
dress. As he passed, the regimental fifes and
drums burst into "Hail, Columbia," and the rows
of weary, powder-grimed men, putting their caps

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on the ends of their long rifles, swung them in the
air and cheered madly the victor of New Orleans.
There is little more to tell. On March 17 the
British expedition, accompanied by the judges and
customs-inspectors and revenue-collectors, and by
the officers' wives who had come out to take part
in the festivities which were to mark the conquest,
set sail from the mouth of the Mississippi, reach
ing Europe just in time to participate in the Water
loo campaign. In the general orders issued by
Jackson after the battle the highest praise was
given to the Lafittes and their followers from Bara-
taria, while the official despatches to Washington
strongly urged that some recognition be made of
the extraordinary services rendered by the erst
while pirates. A few weeks later the President
granted a full pardon to the inhabitants of Bara-
taria, his message concluding: "Offenders who
have refused to become the associates of the enemy
in war upon the most seducing terms of invitation,
and who have aided to repel his hostile invasion
of the territory of the United States, can no longer
be considered as objects of punishment, but as
objects of generous forgiveness." Taking advan
tage of this amnesty, the ex-pirates settled down
to the peaceable lives of fishermen and market-
gardeners, and their descendants dwell upon the

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shores of Barataria Bay to this day. As to the
future movements of the brothers Lafitte, beyond
the fact that they established themselves for a
time at Galveston, whence they harassed Spanish
commerce in the Gulf of Mexico, nothing definite
is known. Leaving New Orleans soon after the
battle, they sailed out of the Mississippi, and out
of this story.

124

THE MAN WHO DARED TO CROSS
THE RANGES

THE MAN WHO DARED TO CROSS
THE RANGES

ABOUT the word frontiersman there is a
pretty air of romance. The very mention
of it conjures up a vision of lean, sinewy, brown-
faced men, in fur caps and moccasins and
fringed buckskin, slipping through virgin forests
or pushing across sun-scorched prairies — advance-
guards of civilization. Hardy, resolute, taciturn
figures, they have passed silently across the pages
of our history and we shall see their like no more.
To them we owe a debt that we can never repay—
nor, indeed, have we even publicly acknowledged
it. We followed by the trails which they had
blazed for us; we built our towns in those rich
valleys and pastured our herds on those fertile
hillsides which theirs were the first white men's
eyes to see. The American frontiersman was
never a self-seeker. His discoveries he left as a
heritage to those who followed him. In almost
every case he died poor and, more often than not,
with his boots on. David Livingstone and Henry

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M. Stanley, the two Englishmen who did more
than any other men for the opening up of Africa,
lie in Westminster Abbey, and thousands of their
countrymen each year stand reverently beside
their tombs. To Cecil Rhodes, another Anglo-
African pioneer, a great national memorial has
been erected on the slopes of Table Mountain.
Far, far greater parts in the conquest of a wilder
ness, the winning of a continent, were played by
Daniel Boone, William Bowie, Kit Carson, Davy
Crockett; yet how many of? those who to-day
enjoy the fruits of the perils they faced, the hard
ships they endured, know much more of them than
as characters in dime novels, can tell where they
are buried, can point to any statues or monuments
which have been erected to their memories?

There are two million four hundred thousand
people in the State of California, and most of them
boast of it as "God's own country." They have
more State pride than any people that I know,
yet I would be willing to wager almost anything
you please that you can pick a hundred native
sons of California, and put to each of them the
question, "Who was Jedediah Smith?" and not
one of them would be able to answer it correctly.
The public parks of San Francisco and Los
Angeles and San Diego and Sacramento have in-

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The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

numerable statues of one kind and another, but
you will find none of this man with the stern old
Puritan name; they are starting a hall of fame
in California, but no one has proposed Jedediah
Smith as deserving a place in it. Yet to him, per
haps more than to any other man, is due the fact
that California is American: he was the greatest
of the pathfinders; he was the real founder of the
Overland Trail; he was the man who led the way
across the ranges. Had it not been for the trail
he blazed and the thousands who followed in his
footsteps the Sierra Nevadas, instead of the Rio
Grande, might still mark the line of our frontier.
The westward advance of population which took
place during the first quarter of the nineteenth
century far exceeded the limits of any of the great
migrations of mankind upon the older continents.
The story of the American onset to the beckoning
West is one of the wonder-tales of history. Over
the natural waterway of the great northern lakes,
down the road to Pittsburg, along the trail which
skirted the Potomac, and then down the Ohio,
over the passes of the Cumberland into Tennessee,
round the end of the Alleghanies into the Gulf
States, up the Missouri, and so across the Rockies
to the head waters of the Columbia, or south-
westward from St. Louis to the Spanish settle-

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ments of Santa Fe, the hardy pioneers poured in
an ever-increasing stream, carrying with them
little but axe, spade, and rifle, some scanty house
hold effects, a small store of provisions, a liberal
supply of ammunition, and unlimited faith, cour
age, and enterprise.

During that brief period the people of the United
States extended their occupation over the whole
of that vast region lying between the Alleghanies
and the Rockies — a territory larger than all of
Europe, without Russia — annexed it from the
wilderness, conquered, subdued, improved, cul
tivated, civilized it, and all without one jot of
governmental assistance. Throughout these years,
as the frontiersmen pressed into the West, they
continued to fret and strain against the Spanish
boundaries. The Spanish authorities, and after
them the Mexican, soon became seriously alarmed
at this silent but resistless American advance, and
from the City of Mexico orders went out to the
provincial governors that Americans venturing
within their jurisdiction should be treated, when
ever an excuse offered, with the utmost severity.
But, notwithstanding the menace of Mexican
prisons, of Indian tortures, of savage animals, of
thirst and starvation in the wilderness, the pioneers
pushed westward and ever westward, until at last

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The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

their further progress was abruptly halted by the
great range of the Sierra Nevada, snow-crested,
and presumably impassable, which rose like a
titanic wall before them, barring their further
march.

It was at about the time of this halt in our
westward progress that Captain Jedediah Smith
came riding onto the scene. You must picture
him as a gaunt-faced, lean-flanked, wiry man,
with nerves of iron, sinews of rawhide, a skin
like oak-tanned leather, and quick on his feet as
a catamount. He was bearded to the ears, of
course, for razors formed no part of the scanty
equipment of the frontiersman, and above the
beard shone a pair of very keen, bright eyes, with
the concentrated wrinkles about their corners that
come of staring across the prairies under a blazing
sun. He was sparing of his words, as are most
men who dwell in the great solitudes, and, like
them, he was, in an unorthodox way, devout, his
stern and rugged features as well as his uncom
promising scriptural name betraying the grim
old Puritan stock from which he sprang. His hair
was long and black, and would have covered his
shoulders had it not been tied at the back
of the neck by a leather thong. His dress was
that of the Indian adapted to meet the require-

Gentlemen Rovers

ments of the adventuring white man : a hunting-
shirt and trousers of fringed buckskin, embroidered
moccasins of elkhide, and a cap made from the
glossy skin of a beaver, with the tail hanging down
behind. On hot desert marches, and in camp, he
took off the beaver-skin cap and twisted about his
head a bright bandanna, which, when taken with
his gaunt, unshaven face, made him look uncom
monly like a pirate. These garments were by no
means fresh and gaudy, like those affected by the
near-frontiersmen who take part in the produc
tion of Wild West shows; instead they were very
soiled and much worn and greasy, and gave evi
dence of having done twenty-four hours* duty a
day for many months at a stretch. Hanging on
his chest was a capacious powder-horn, and in his
belt was a long, straight knife, very broad and
heavy in the blade — a first cousin of that deadly
weapon to which William Bowie was in after years
to give his name; in addition he carried a rifle,
with an altogether extraordinary length of barrel,
which brought death to any living thing within a
thousand yards on which its foresight rested. His
mount was a plains-bred pony, as wiry and unkempt
and enduring as himself. Everything considered,
Smith could have been no gentle-looking figure,
and I rather imagine that, if he were alive and ven-

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tured into a Western town to-day, he would prob
ably be arrested by the local constable as an unde
sirable character. I have now sketched for you,
in brief, bold outline, as good a likeness of Smith
as I am able with the somewhat scanty materials
at hand, for he lived and did his pioneering in the
days when frontiersmen were as common as traffic
policemen are now, added to which the men who
were familiar with his exploits were of a sort more
ready with their pistols than with their pens.

The dates of Smith's birth and death are not
vital to this story, and perhaps it is just as well
that they are not, for I can find no record of when
he came into the world, and only the Indian war
rior who wore his scalp-lock at his waist could have
told the exact date on which he went out of it.
It is enough to know that, just as the nineteenth
century was passing the quarter mark, Smith was
the head of a firm of fur-traders, Smith, Jackson
& Soublette, which had obtained from President
John Quincy Adams permission to hunt and trade
to their hearts' content in the region lying beyond
the Rocky Mountains. It would have been much
more to the point to have obtained the permission
of the Mexican governor-general of the Californias,
or of the great chief of the Comanches, for they
held practically all of the territory in question

Gentlemen Rovers

between them. Those were the days whose like we
shall never know again, when the streams were
alive with beaver, when there were more elk and
antelope on the prairies than there are cattle now,
and when the noise made by the moving buffalo
herds sounded like the roll of distant thunder.
They were the days when a fortune, as fortunes
were then reckoned, awaited the man with un
limited ammunition, a sure eye, and a body inured
to hardships. What the founder of the Astor
fortune was doing in the Puget Sound country,
Smith and his companions purposed to do in the
Rockies; and, with this end in view, established
their base camp on the eastern shores of the
Great Salt Lake, not far from where Ogden now
stands. This little band of pioneers formed the
westernmost outpost of American civilization, for
between them 'and the nearest settlement, at the
junction of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers,
stretched thirteen hundred miles of savage wilder
ness. Livingstone, on his greatest journey, did
not penetrate half as far into unknown Africa
as Smith did into unknown America, and while
the English explorer was at the head of a large
and well-equipped expedition, the American was
accompanied by a mere handful of men.

In August, 1826, Smith and a small party of his

The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

hunters found themselves in the terrible Painted
Desert, that God-forsaken expanse of sand and
lava where the present States of Arizona, Utah,
and Nevada meet. Water there was none, for
the streams had run dry, and the horses and pack-
mules were dying of thirst and exhaustion; the
game had entirely disappeared; the supplies were
all but finished— and five hundred miles of the
most inhospitable country in the world lay be
tween them and their camp on Great Salt Lake.
The situation was perilous, indeed, and a decision
had to be made quickly if any of them were to get
out alive.

"What few supplies we have left will be used
up before we get a quarter way back to the camp,"
said Smith. "Our only chance — and I might as
well tell you it's a mighty slim one, boys — is in
pushing on to California."

"But California's a good four hundred miles
away," expostulated his companions, "and the
Sierras lie between, and no one has ever crossed
them."

"Then I'll be the first man to do it," said Smith.
"Besides, I've always had a hankering to learn
what lies on the other side of those ranges. Now's
my chance to find out."

"I reckon there ain't much chance of our ever

Gentlemen Rovers

seeing Salt Lake or California either/' grumbled
one of the hunters, "and even if we do reach the
coast the Mexicans '11 clap us into prison."

"Well, so fur's I'm concerned," said Smith de
cisively, "I'd rather be alive and in a Greaser
prison than to be dead in the desert. I'm going
to California or die on the way."

History chronicles few such marches. West
ward pressed the little troop of pioneers, across
the sun-baked lava beds of southwestern Utah,
over the arid deserts and the barren ranges of
southern Nevada, and so to the foot-hills of that
great Sierran range which rears itself ten thousand
feet skyward, forming a barrier which had there
tofore separated the fertile lands of the Pacific
slope from the rest of the continent more effectu
ally than an ocean. The lava beds gave way to
sand wastes dotted with clumps of sage-brush and
cactus, and the cactus changed to stunted pines,
and the pines ran out in rocks, and the rocks be
came covered with snow, and still Smith and his
hunters struggled on, emaciated, tattered, almost
barefooted, lamed by the cactus spines on the
desert, and the stones on the mountain slopes, until
at last they stood upon the very summit of the
range and, like that other band of pioneers in an
earlier age, looked down on the promised land after

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$

The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

their wanderings in the wilderness. No explorer
in the history of the world, not Columbus, nor
Pizarro, nor Champlain, nor De Soto, ever gazed
upon a land so fertile and so full of beauty. The
mysterious, the jealously guarded, the storied land
of California lay spread before them like a map
in bas-relief. Then the descent of the western
slope began, the transition from snow-clad moun
tain peaks to hillsides clothed with subtropical
vegetation amazing the Americans by its sudden
ness. Imagine how like a dream come true it
must have been to these men, whose lives had been
spent in the less kindly climate and amid the
comparatively scanty vegetation of the Middle
West, to suddenly find themselves in this fairy
land of fruit and flowers !

"It is, indeed, a white man's country," said
Smith prophetically, as, leaning on his long rifle,
he gazed upon the wonderful panorama which un
rolled itself before him. "Though it is Mexican
just now, sooner or later it must and shall be ours."

Heartened by the sight of this wonderful new
country, and by the knowledge that they must
be approaching some of the Mexican settlements,
but with bodies sadly weakened from exposure,
hunger, and exhaustion, the Americans slowly
made their way down the slope, crossed those fer-

Gentlemen Rovers

tile lowlands which are now covered with groves
of orange and lemon, and so, guided by some
friendly Indians whom they met, came at last to
the mission station of San Gabriel, one of that re
markable chain of outposts of the church founded
by the indefatigable Franciscan, Father Junipero
Serra. The little company of worn and weary men
sighted the red-tiled roof of the mission just at
sunset, and though Smith and his followers came
from stern New England stock which prided it
self on having no truck with Papists, I rather
imagine that as the sweet, clear mission bells
chimed out the angelus they lifted their hats and
stood with bowed heads in silent thanksgiving for
their preservation.

I doubt if there was a more astonished com
munity between the oceans than was the monastic
one of San Gabriel when this band of ragged
strangers suddenly appeared from nowhere and
asked for food and shelter.

"You come from the South — from Mexico?"
queried the father superior, staring, half-awed, at
these gaunt, fierce-faced, bearded men who spoke
in a strange tongue.

"No, padre," answered Smith, calling to his aid
the broken Spanish he had picked up in his trading
expeditions to Santa Fe, "we come from the East,

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The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

from the country beyond the great mountains,
from the United States. We are Americans," he
added a little proudly.

"They say they come from the East," the
brown-robed monks whispered to each other.
"It is impossible. No one has ever come from
that direction. Have not the Indians told us
many times that there is no food, no water in that
direction, and that, moreover, there is no way to
cross the mountains ? It is, indeed, a strange and
incredible tale that these men tell. But we will
offer them our hospitality in the name of the
blessed St. Francis, for that we withhold from
no man; but it is the part of wisdom to despatch
a messenger to San Diego to acquaint the governor
of their coming, for it may well be that they mean
no good to the people of this land."

Had the good monks been able to look forward
a few-score years, perhaps they would not have
been so ready to offer Smith and his companions
the shelter of the mission roof. But how were
they to know that these ragged strangers, begging
for food at their mission door, were the skirmishers
for a mighty host which would one day pour over
those mountain ranges to the eastward as the
water pours over the falls at Niagara; that within
rifle-shot of where their mission stood a city of

Gentlemen Rovers

half a million souls would spread itself across
the hills; that down the dusty Camino Real,
which the founder of their mission had trudged
so often in his sandals and woollen robe, would
whirl strange horseless, panting vehicles, putting
a mile a minute behind their flying wheels; that
twin lines of steel would bring their southernmost
station at San Diego within twenty hours, instead
of twenty days, of their northernmost outpost at
Sonoma; and that over this new land would fly,
not the red-white-and-green standard of Mexico,
but an alien banner of stripes and stars ?

The four years which intervened between the
collapse of Spanish rule in Mexico and the arrival
of Jedediah Smith at San Gabriel were marked by
political chaos in the Californias. When a gov
ernor of Alta California rose in the morning he
did not know whether he was the representative
of an emperor, a king, a president, or a dictator.
As a result of these perennial disorders, the Mex
ican officials ascribed sinister motives to the most
innocent episodes. No sooner, therefore, did Gov
ernor Echeandia learn of the arrival in his prov
ince of a mysterious party of Americans than
he ordered them brought under escort to San
Diego for examination. Though those present
probably did not appreciate it, the meeting of

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The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

Smith and Echeandia in the palace at San Diego
was a peculiarly significant one. There sat at his
ease in his great chair of state the saturnine Mex
ican governor, arrogant and haughty, beruffled
and gold-laced, his high-crowned sombrero and
his velvet jacket heavy with bullion, while in front
of him stood the American frontiersman, gaunt,
unshaven, and ragged, but as cool and self-pos
sessed as though he was at the head of a conquer
ing army instead of a forlorn hope. The one was
as truly the representative of a passing as the other
was of a coming race. Small wonder that Eche
andia, as he observed the hardy figures and deter
mined faces of the Americans, thought to himself
how small would be Mexico's chance of holding
California if others of their countrymen began to
follow in their footsteps. He and his officials
cross-examined Smith as closely as though the
frontiersman was a prisoner on trial for his life,
as, in a sense, he was, for almost any fate might
befall him and his companions in that remote
corner of the continent without any one being
called to account for it. Smith described the
series of misfortunes which had led him to cross
the ranges; he asserted that he desired nothing so
much as to get back into American territory again,
and he earnestly begged the governor to provide

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Gentlemen Rovers

him with the necessary provisions and permit him
to depart. His story was so frank and plausible
that Echeandia, with characteristic Spanish sus
picion, promptly disbelieved every word of it, for
why, he argued, should any sane man make so
hazardous a journey unless he were a spy and well
paid to risk his life? For even in those early days,
remember, the Mexicans had begun to fear the
ambitions of the young republic to the eastward.
So, despite their protests, he ordered the Americans
to be imprisoned — and no one knew better than
they did that, once within the walls of a Mexi
can prison, there was small chance of their seeing
the outside world again. Fortunately for the ex
plorers, however, it so happened that there were
three American trading-schooners lying in San
Diego harbor at the time, and their captains, de
termined to see the rights of their fellow country
men respected, joined in a vigorous and energetic
protest to the governor against this high-handed
and unjustified action. This seems to have fright
ened Echeandia, for he reluctantly gave orders for
the release of Smith and his companions, but or
dered them to leave the country at once, and by
the same route by which they had come.

When the year 1827 was but a few days old,
therefore, the Americans turned their faces north-

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The Man Who Crossed, the Ranges

ward, but instead of retracing their steps in ac
cordance with Echeandia's orders, they crossed
the coast range, probably through the Tejon Pass,
and kept on through the fertile region now known
as the San Joaquin Valley, in the hope that by
crossing the Sierra farther to the northward they
would escape the terrible rigors of the Colorado
desert. When some three hundred miles north of
San Gabriel they attempted to recross the ranges,
but a feat that had been hazardous in midsum
mer was impossible in midwinter, and the entire
expedition nearly perished in the attempt. Several
of the men and all the horses died of cold and
hunger, and it was only by incredible exertions that
Smith and his few remaining companions, terribly
frozen and totally exhausted, managed to reach the
Santa Clara Valley and Mission San Jose. So
slow was their progress that the news of their
approach preceded them and caused considerable
disquietude to the monks. Learning from the
Indians that he and his tatterdemalion followers
were objects of suspicion, Smith sent a letter to
the father superior, in which he gave an account
of his arrival at San Gabriel, of his interview with
the governor, of his disaster in the Sierras, and
of his present pitiable condition. "I am a long
way from home," this pathetic missive concludes,

Gentlemen Rovers

" and am anxious to get there as soon as the nature
of the case will permit. Our situation is quite un
pleasant, being destitute of clothing and most of
the necessaries of life, wild meat being our prin
cipal subsistence. I am, reverend father, your
strange but real friend and Christian brother,
Jedediah Smith." As a result of this appeal, the
hospitality of the mission was somewhat grudg
ingly extended to the Americans, who were by
this time in the most desperate condition.

Hardships that would kill ordinary men were but
unpleasant incidents in the lives of the pioneers,
however, and in a few weeks they were as fit as
ever to resume their journey. But, upon think
ing the matter over, Smith decided that he would
never be content if he went back without having
found out what lay still farther to the northward,
for in him was the insatiable curiosity and the in
domitable spirit of the born explorer. But as his
force, as well as his resources, had become sadly
depleted, he felt it imperative that he should first
return to Salt Lake and bring on the men, horses,
and provisions he had left there. Accordingly,
leaving most of his party in camp at San Jose, he
set out with only two companions, recrossed the
Sierra at one of its highest points (the place he
crossed is where the railway comes through to-day)

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The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

and after several uncomfortably narrow escapes
from landslides and from Indians, eventually
reached the camp on Great Salt Lake, where he
found that his people had long since given him
and his companions up for dead.

Breaking camp on a July morning, in 1827,
Smith, with eighteen men and two women, turned
his face once more toward California. To avoid
the snows of the high Sierras, he chose the route
he had taken on his first journey, reaching the
desert country to the north of the Colorado River
in early August. It was not until the party had
penetrated too far into the desert to retreat that
they found that the whole country was burnt
up. For several days they pushed on in the hope
of finding water. Across the yellow sand wastes
they would sight the sparkle of a crystal lake, and
would hasten toward it as fast as their jaded
animals could carry them, only to find that it was
a mirage. Then the horrors preliminary to death
by thirst began: the animals, their blackened
tongues protruding from their mouths, staggered
and fell, and rose no more; the women grew de
lirious and babbled incoherent nothings; even the
hardiest of the men stumbled as they marched, or
tried to frighten away by shouts and gestures the
fantastic shapes which danced before them. At

Gentlemen Rovers

last there came a morning when they could go no
farther. Such of them as still retained their facul
ties felt that it was the end — that is, all but Jede-
diah Smith. He was of the breed which does not
know the meaning of defeat, because they are
never defeated until they are dead. Loading him
self with the empty water-bottles, he set out alone
into the desert, determined to follow one of the
numerous buffalo trails, for he knew that sooner
or later it must lead him to water of some sort,
even if to nothing more than a buffalo-wallow.
Racked with the fever of thirst, his legs shaking
from exhaustion, he plodded on, under the pitiless
sun, mile after mile, hour after hour, until, strug
gling to the summit of a low divide, he saw the
channel of a stream in the valley beneath him.
The expedition was saved. Stumbling and sli
ding down the slope in his haste to quench his
intolerable thirst, he came to a sudden halt on
the river-bank. It was nothing but an empty
watercourse into which he was staring — the
river had run dry! The shock of such a dis
appointment would have driven most men stark,
staring mad. Only for a moment, however,
was the veteran frontiersman staggered; he knew
the character of many streams in the West
—that often their waters run underground a

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The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

few feet below the surface, and in a moment he
was on his knees digging frantically in the soft
sand. Soon the sand began to grow moist, and
then the coveted water slowly began to filter up
ward into the little excavation he had hollowed.
Throwing himself flat on the ground, he buried
his burning face in the muddy water — and as he
did so a shower of arrows whistled about him. A
war-party of Comanches, unobserved, had followed
and surrounded him. He had but exchanged the
danger of death by thirst for the far more dread
ful fate of death by torture. Though struck
by several of the arrows, he held the Indians
off until he had filled his water-bottles; then,
retreating slowly, taking advantage of every par
ticle of cover, as only a veteran plainsman can,
blazing away with his unerring rifle whenever
an Indian was incautious enough to show a por
tion of his figure, Smith succeeded in getting back
to his companions with the precious water. With
their dead animals for breastworks, the pioneers
succeeded in holding the Indians at bay for six-
and-thirty hours, but on the second night the
redskins, heavily reinforced, rushed them in the
night, ten of the men and the two women being
killed in the hand-to-hand fight which ensued,
and the few horses which remained alive being

Gentlemen Rovers

stampeded. I rather imagine that the women
were shot by their own husbands, for the women
of the frontier always preferred death to capture
by these fiends in paint and feathers.

How Smith, calling all his craft and experience
as a plainsman to his assistance, managed to lead
his eight surviving companions through the en
circling Indians by night, and how, wounded,
horseless, and provisionless as they were, he suc
ceeded in guiding them across the ranges to San
Bernardino, is but another example of this for
gotten hero's courage and resource. Having lost
everything that he possessed, for the whole of his
scanty savings had been invested in the ill-fated
expedition, Smith, with such of his men as were
strong enough to accompany him, set out to rejoin
the party he had left some months previously at
Mission San Jose. Scarcely had he set foot within
that settlement, however, before he was arrested
and taken under escort to Monterey, where he was
taken before the governor, who, he found to his
surprise and dismay, was no other than his old en
emy of San Diego, Don Jose Echeandia. This time
nothing would convince Echeandia that Smith
was not the leader of an expedition which had
territorial designs on California, and he promptly
ordered him to be taken to prison and kept in

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The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

solitary confinement as a dangerous conspirator.
Thereupon Smith resorted to the same expedient
he had used so successfully, and begged the cap
tains of the American vessels in the harbor of
Monterey for protection. So forcible were their
representations that Echeandia finally agreed to
release Smith on his swearing to leave Califor
nia for good and all. To this proposal Smith
willingly agreed and took the oath required
of him, but, upon being released from prison,
was astounded to learn that the governor had
given orders that he must set out alone — that his
hunters would not be permitted to accompany him.
His and their protestations were disregarded.
Smith must start at once and unaccompanied.
He was given a horse and saddle, provisions,
blankets, a rifle — and nothing more. It was a
sentence of death which Echeandia had had pro
nounced on this American frontiersman, and both
he and Smith knew it. Without having com
mitted any crime — unless it was a crime to be an
American — Jedediah Smith was driven out of the
territory of a supposedly friendly nation, and told
that he was at perfect liberty to make his way
across two thousand miles of wilderness to the
nearest American outpost — if he could.

Striking back into that range of the Sierras
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which lies southeast of Fresno, Smith suc
ceeded in crossing them for a fourth time, evi
dently intending to make his way back to his old
stamping-ground on the Great Salt Lake. Our
knowledge of what occurred after he had crossed
the ranges for the last time is confined to tales
told to the settlers in later years by the Indians.
While emerging from the terrible Death Valley,
where hundreds of emigrants were to lose their
lives during the rush to the gold-fields a quarter
of a century later, he was attacked at a water-
hole by a band of Indians. For many years
afterward the Comanches were wont to tell with
admiration how this lone pale-face, coming from
out of the setting sun, had knelt behind his dead
horse and held them off with his deadly rifle all
through one scorching summer's day. But when
nightfall came they crept up very silently under
cover of the darkness and rushed him. His scalp
was very highly valued, for it had cost the lives
of twelve Comanche braves.

But Jedediah Smith did not die in vain. Tales
of the rich and virgin country which he had found
beyond the ranges flew as though with wings
across the land; soon other pioneers made their
way over the mountains by the trails which he
had blazed; long wagon- trains crawled westward

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The Man Who Crossed the Ranges

by the routes which he had taken; strange bands
of horsemen pitched their tents in the valleys
where he had camped. The mission bells grew
silent; the monk in his woollen robe and the
caballero in his gold-laced jacket passed away;
settlements of hardy, energetic, nasal-voiced folk
from beyond the Sierras sprang up everywhere.
Then one day a new flag floated over the presidio
in Monterey — a flag that was not to be pulled
down. The American republic had reached the
western ocean, and thus was fulfilled the dream
of Jedediah Smith, the man who showed the way.

THE FLAG OF THE BEAR

THE FLAG OF THE BEAR

BECAUSE the battles which marked its es
tablishment were really only skirmishes, in
which but an insignificant number of lives were
lost, and because it boasted less than a thousand
citizens all told, certain of our historians have
been so undiscerning as to assert that the Bear
Flag Republic was nothing but a travesty and a
farce. Therein they are wrong. Though it is
doubtless true that the handful of frontiersmen
who raised their home-made flag, with its emblem
of a grizzly bear, over the Californian presidio of
Sonoma on that July morning in 1846 took them
selves much more seriously than the circumstances
warranted, it is equally true that their action
averted the seizure of California by England, and
by forcing the hand of the administration at
Washington was primarily responsible for adding
what is now California, Nevada, Arizona, New
Mexico, Utah, and more than half of Wyoming
and Colorado to the Union. The series of in
trigues and affrays and insurrections which re-

Gentlemen Rovers

suited in the Pacific coast becoming American
instead of European form a picturesque, exciting,
and virtually unwritten chapter in our national
history, a chapter in which furtive secret agents
and haughty caballeros, pioneers in fringed buck
skin, and naval officers in gold-laced uniforms ail
played their greater or their lesser parts.

To fully understand the conditions which led
up to the "Bear Flag War," as it has been called,
it is necessary to go back for a moment to the first
quarter of the last century, when the territory of
the United States ended at the Rocky Mountains
and the red-white-and-green flag of Mexico floated
over the whole of that vast, rich region which lay
beyond. Under the Mexican regime the territory
lying west of the Sierra Nevadas was divided into
the provinces of Alta (or Upper) and Baja (or
Lower) California, the population of the two
provinces about 1845 totalling not more than
fifteen thousand souls, nine-tenths of whom were
Mexicans, Spaniards, and Indians, the rest Ameri
can and European settlers. The foreigners, among
whom Americans greatly predominated, soon be
came influential out of all proportion to their
numbers. This was particularly true of the
Americans, who, solidified by common interests,
common dangers, and common ambitions, ob-

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The Flag of the Bear

tained large grants of land, built houses which in
certain cases were little short of forts, frequently
married into the most aristocratic of the Cali-
fornian families, and before long practically con
trolled the commerce of the entire territory.

It was only to be expected, therefore, that the
Mexicans should become more and more appre
hensive of American ambitions. Nor did Presi
dent Jackson's offer, in 1835, to buy Southern
California — an offer which was promptly refused-
serve to do other than strengthen these apprehen
sions. And to make matters worse, if such a
thing were possible, Commodore T. ApCatesby
Jones, having heard a rumor that war had broken
out between the United States and Mexico, and
having reason to believe that a British force was
preparing to seize California, landed a force of
bluejackets and marines, and on October 21, 1842,
raised the American flag over the presidio at Mon
terey. Although Commodore Jones, finding he
had acted upon misinformation, lowered the flag
next day and tendered an apology to the provin
cial officials, the incident did not tend to relieve
the tension which existed between the Mexicans
and the Americans, for it emphasized the ease
with which the country could be seized, and hinted
with unmistakable plainness at the ultimate in-

Gentlemen Rovers

tentions of the United States. That our govern
ment intended to annex the Californias at the first
opportunity that offered the Mexicans were per
fectly aware, for, aroused by the descriptions of
the unbelievable beauty and fertility of the coun
try as sent back by those daring souls who had
made their way across the ranges, the hearts of
our people were set upon its acquisition. The
great Bay of San Francisco, large enough to shel
ter the navies of the world and the gateway to
the Orient, the fruitful, sun-kissed land beyond
the Sierras, the political domination of America,
and the commercial domination of the Pacific —
such were the visions which inspired our people
and the motives which animated our leaders, and
which were intensified by the fear of England's
designs upon this western land.

As the numbers of the American settlers gradu
ally increased, the jealousy and suspicion of the
Mexican officials became more pronounced. As
early as 1826 they had driven Captain Jedediah
Smith, the first American to make his way to
California by the overland route, back into the
mountains, in the midst of winter, without com
panions and without provisions, to be killed by
the Indians. In 1840 more than one hundred
American settlers were suddenly arrested by the

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The Flag of the Bear

Mexican authorities on a trumped-up charge of
having plotted against the government, marched
under military guard to Monterey, and confined
in the prison there under circumstances of the
most barbarous cruelty, some fifty of them being
eventually deported to Mexico in chains. Thomas
O. Larkin, the American consul at Monterey, upon
visiting the prisoners in the local jail where they
were confined, found that the cells had no floors,
and that the poor fellows stood in mud and water
to their ankles. Sixty of the prisoners he found
crowded into a single room, twenty feet long and
eighteen wide, in which they were so tightly packed
that they could not all sit at the same time, much
less lie down. The room being without windows
or other means of ventilation, the air quickly be
came so fetid that they were able to live only by
dividing themselves into platoons which took turns
in standing at the door and getting a few breaths
of air through the bars. These men, whose only
crime was that they were Americans, were con
fined in this hell-hole, without food except such
as their friends were able to smuggle in to them
by bribing the sentries, for eight days. And this
treatment was accorded them, remember, not be
cause they were conspirators — for no one knew
better than the Mexican authorities that they were

Gentlemen Rovers

not — but because it seemed the easiest means of
driving them out of the country. Throughout the
half-dozen years that ensued American settlers
were subjected to a systematic campaign of an
noyance, persecution, and imprisonment on in
numerable frivolous pretexts, being released only
on their promise to leave California immediately.
By 1845, therefore, the harassed Americans, in
sheer desperation, were ready to grasp the first
opportunity which presented itself to end this
intolerable tyranny for good and all.

It was not only the outrageous treatment to
which they were subjected, however, nor the weak
ness and instability of the government under
which they were living, nor even the insecurity of
their lives and property and the discouragements
to industry, which led the American settlers to
decide to end Mexican rule in the Californias.
Texas had recently been annexed by the United
States against the protests of Mexico, an American
army of invasion was massed along the Rio Grande,
and war was certain. It required no extraor
dinary degree of intelligence, then, to foresee that
the coming hostilities would almost inevitably re
sult in Mexico losing her Californian provinces.
Now it was a matter of common knowledge that
the Mexican Government was seriously consider-

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The Flag of the Bear

ing the advisability of ceding the Californias to
Great Britain, and thus accomplishing the three
fold purpose of wiping out the large Mexican debt
due to British bankers, of winning the friendship
and possibly the active assistance of England in
the approaching war with the United States, and
of preventing the Californias from falling into
American hands. The danger was, therefore, that
England would step in before us. Nor was the
danger any imaginary one. Her ships were
watching our ships on the Mexican coast, and her
secret agents who infested the country were keep
ing their fingers constantly on the pulse of public
opinion. Though it remains to this day a matter
of conjecture as to just how far England was pre
pared to go to obtain this territory, there is little
doubt that she had laid her plans for its acquisi
tion in one way or another. If California was to
be added to the Union, therefore, it must be by a
sudden and daring stroke.

Meanwhile the authorities at Washington had
not been idle. Though Larkin was ostensibly the
American consul at Monterey and nothing more,
in reality he was clothed with far greater powers,
having been hurried from Washington to California
for the express purpose of secretly encouraging an
insurrectionary movement among the American

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Gentlemen Rovers

settlers, and of keeping our government informed
of the plans of the Mexicans and British. Re
ceiving information that a powerful British fleet
— the largest, in fact, which had ever been seen
in Pacific waters — was about to sail for the coast
of California, the administration promptly issued
orders for a squadron of war-ships under Commo
dore John Drake Sloat to proceed at full speed to
the Pacific coast, the commander being given
secret instructions to back up Consul Larkin in
any action which he might take, and upon receiv
ing word that the United States had declared war
against Mexico to immediately occupy the Cali-
fornian ports. Then ensued one of the most
momentous races in history, over a course ex
tending half-way round the world, the contestants
being the war-fleets of the two most powerful
maritime nations, and the prize seven hundred
thousand square miles of immensely rich territory
and the mastery of the Pacific. Commodore Sloat
laid his course around the Horn, while the Eng
lish commander, Admiral Trowbridge, chose the
route through the Indian Ocean. The first thing
he saw as he entered the Bay of Monterey was the
American squadron lying at anchor in the harbor.
Never was there a better example of that form
of territorial expansion which has come to be

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The Flag of the Bear

known as "pacific penetration" than the American
conquest of California; never were the real de
signs of a nation and the schemes of its secret
agents more successfully hidden. Consul Larkin,
as I have already said, was quietly working, under
confidential instructions from the State Depart
ment, to bring about a revolution in California
without overt aid from the United States; the
Californian coast towns lay under the guns of
American war-ships, whose commanders likewise
had secret instructions to land marines and take
possession of the country at the first opportunity
that presented itself; and, as though to complete
the chain of American emissaries, early in 1846
there came riding down from the Sierran passes,
at the head of what pretended to be an exploring
and scientific expedition, the man who was to set
the machinery of conquest actually in motion.

The commander of the expedition was a young
captain of engineers, named John Charles Fre
mont, who, as the result of two former journeys
of exploration into the wilderness beyond the
Rockies, had already won the sobriquet of "The
Pathfinder." Born in Savannah, of a French
father and a Virginian mother, he was a strange
combination of aristocrat and frontiersman. Dash
ing, debonair, fearless, reckless, a magnificent
horseman, a dead-shot, a hardy and intrepid ex-

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Gentlemen Rovers

plorer, equally at home at a White House ball
or at an Indian powwow, he was probably the
most picturesque and romantic figure in the
United States. These characteristics, combined
with extreme good looks, a gallant manner, and
the great public reputation he had won by the
vivid and interesting accounts he had published
of his two earlier journeys, had completely cap
tured the popular imagination, so that the young
explorer had become a national idol. In the spring
of 1845 he was despatched by the National Gov
ernment on a third expedition, which had as its os
tensible object the discovery of a practicable route
from the Rocky Mountains to the mouth of the
Columbia River, but which was really to lend
encouragement to the American settlers in Cali
fornia in any secession movement which they
might be planning and to afford them active as
sistance should war be declared. Just how far
the government had instructed Fremont to go in
fomenting a revolution will probably never be
known, but there is every reason to believe that
his father-in-law, United States Senator Benton,
had advised him to seize California if an oppor
tunity presented itself, and to trust to luck (and
the senator's influence) that the government would
approve rather than repudiate his action.

All told, Fremont's expedition numbered barely
164

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~ o

K^ M

> .5

0 «

C c

1 -5

The Flag of the Bear

threescore men — no great force, surely, with
which to overthrow a government and win an
empire. In advance of the little column rode the
four Delaware braves whom Fremont had brought
with him from the East to act as scouts and
trackers, and whose cunning and woodcraft he was
willing to match against that of the Indians of
the plains. Close on their heels rode the Path
finder himself, clad from neck to heel in fringed
buckskin, at his belt a heavy army revolver and
one of those vicious, double-bladed knives to
which Colonel Bowie, of Texas, had already given
his name, and on his head a jaunty, broad-brimmed
hat, from beneath which his long, yellow hair fell
down upon his shoulders. At his bridle arm rode
Kit Carson, the most famous of the plainsmen,
whose exploits against the Indians were even then
familiar stories in every American household.
Behind these two stretched out the rank and file
of the expedition — bronze-faced, bearded, reso
lute men, well mounted, heavily armed, and all
wearing the serviceable dress of the frontier.

Fremont found the American settlers scattered
through the interior in a state of considerable
alarm, for rumors had reached them that the Mex
ican Government had decided to drive them out
of the country, and that orders had been issued

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Gentlemen Rovers

to the provincial authorities to incite the Indians
against them. As they dwelt for the most part
in small, isolated communities, scattered over a
great extent of country, it was obvious that, if
these rumors were true, their lives were in immi
nent peril. They had every reason to expect,
moreover, that the news of war between Mexico
and the United States would bring down on them
those forms of punishment and retaliation for
which the Mexicans were notorious. They were
confronted, therefore, with the alternative of aban
doning the homes they had built and the fields
they had tilled and seeking refuge in flight across
the mountains, or of remaining to face those perils
inseparable from border warfare. Nor did it take
them long to decide upon resistance, for they were
not of the breed which runs away.

Leaving most of his men encamped in the foot
hills, Fremont pushed on to Monterey, then the
most important settlement in Upper California,
and the seat of the provincial government, where
he called upon Don Jose Castro, the Mexican com
mandant, explained the purposes of his expedition,
and requested permission for his party to proceed
northward to the Columbia through the San Joa-
quin valley. This permission Castro grudgingly
gave, but scarcely had Fremont broken camp be-

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The Flag of the Bear

fore the Mexican, who had hastily gathered an
overwhelming force of soldiers and vaqueros, set
out upon the trail of the Americans with the
avowed purpose of surprising and exterminating
them. Fortunately for the Americans, Consul
Larkin, getting wind of Castro's intended treach
ery, succeeded in warning Fremont, who instead
of taking his chances in a battle on the plains
against a greatly superior force, suddenly oc
cupied the precipitous hill lying back of and
commanding Monterey, known as the Hawk's
Peak, intrenched himself there, and then sent
word to Castro to come and take him. Although
the Mexican commander made a military dem
onstration before the American intrenchments, he
was wise enough to refrain from attempting to
carry a position of such great natural strength
and defended by such unerring shots as were
Fremont's frontiersmen. Four days later Fre
mont, feeling that there was nothing to be gained
by holding the position longer, and confident
that the Mexicans would be only too glad to see
his back, quietly broke camp one night and re
sumed his march toward Oregon.

Scarcely had he crossed the Oregon line, how
ever, before he was overtaken by a messenger on
a reeking horse, who had been despatched by

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Gentlemen Rovers

Consul Larkin to inform him that an officer with
urgent despatches from Washington had arrived
at Monterey and was hastening northward to
overtake him. Fremont immediately turned back,
and on the shores of the Greater Klamath Lake
met Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie, who had
travelled from New York to Vera Cruz by steamer,
had crossed Mexico to Mazatlan on horseback,
and had been brought up the Pacific coast to
Monterey in an American war-ship. The exact
contents of the despatches with which Gillespie
had been intrusted will probably never be known,
for having reason to believe that his mission was
suspected by the Mexicans, and being fearful of
arrest, he had destroyed the despatches after
committing their contents to memory. These
contents he communicated to Fremont, and the
fact that the latter immediately turned his horse's
head Californiawards is the best proof that they
contained definite instructions for him to stir up
the American settlers to revolt and so gain Cali
fornia for the Union by what some one has aptly
described as "neutral conquest."

The news of Fremont's return spread among the
scattered settlers as though by wireless, and from
all parts of the country hardy, determined men
came pouring into camp to offer him their serv-

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The Flag of the Bear

ices. But his hands were tied. His instruc
tions from Washington, while ordering him to
lend his encouragement to an insurrectionary
movement, expressly forbade him to take the in
itiative in any hostilities until he received word
that war with Mexico had been declared — and
that word had not yet come. These facts he
communicated to the settlers. Fremont's assur
ance that the American Government sympathized
with their aspirations for independence, and could
be counted upon to back up any action they might
take to secure it, was all that the settlers needed.
On the evening of June 13, 1846, some fifty Ameri
cans living along the Sacramento River met at
the ranch of an old Indian-fighter and bear-hunter
named Captain Meredith, and under his leader
ship rode across the country in a northwesterly
direction through the night. Dawn found them
close to the presidio of Sonoma, which was the
residence of the Mexican general Vallejo and the
most important military post north of San Fran
cisco. Leaving their horses in the shelter of the
forest, the Americans stole silently forward in the
dimness cf the early morning, overpowered the
sentries, burst in the gates, and had taken posses
sion of the town and surrounded the barracks be
fore the garrison was fairly awake. General Va
llejo and his officers were captured in their beds,

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Gentlemen Rovers

and were sent under guard to a fortified ranch
known as Sutter's fort, which was situated some
distance in the interior. In addition to the pris
oners, nine field-guns, several hundred stands of
arms, and a considerable supply of ammunition
fell into the hands of the Americans. The first
blow had been struck in the conquest of California.

The question now arose as to what they should
do with the town they had captured, for Fremont
had no authority to take it over for the United
States, or to muster the men who took it into the
American service. The embattled settlers found
themselves, in fact, to be in the embarrassing posi
tion of being men without a country. After a
council of war they decided to organize a pro-tern.
government of their own to administer the terri
tory until such time as it should be formally an
nexed to the United States. I doubt if a govern
ment was ever established so quickly and under
such rough-and-ready circumstances. After an
informal ballot it was announced that William B.
Ide, a leading spirit among the settlers, had been
unanimously elected governor and commander-in-
chief "of the independent forces"; John H. Nash,
who had been a justice of the peace in the East
before he had emigrated to California, being named
chief justice of the new republic.

For a full-fledged nation not to have a flag of
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The Flag of the Bear

its own was, of course, unthinkable; so, as most of
its citizens were hunters and adventurers, when
some one suggested that the grizzly bear, because
of its indomitable courage and tenacity and its
ferocity when aroused, would make a peculiarly
appropriate emblem for the new banner, the
suggestion was adopted with enthusiasm, and a
committee of two was appointed to put it into
immediate execution. A young settler named
William Ford, who had been imprisoned by the
Mexicans in the jail at Sonoma, and who had
been released when his countrymen captured the
place, and William Todd, an emigrant from Illi
nois, were the makers of the flag. On a piece of
unbleached cotton cloth, a yard wide and a yard
and a half long, they painted the rude figure of a
grizzly bear ready to give battle. This strange
banner they raised, at noon on June 14, amid a
storm of cheers and a salute from the captured
cannon, on the staff where so recently had floated
the flag of Mexico, and from it the Bear Flag
Republic took its name.

Scarcely had Fremont received the news of the
capture of Sonoma and the proclamation of the
Bear Flag Republic than word reached him that
a large force of Mexicans was on its way to re
take the town. Disregarding his instructions
from Washington, and throwing all caution to

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Gentlemen Rovers

the winds, Fremont instantly decided to stake
everything on giving his support to his imperilled
countrymen. His own men reinforced by a num
ber of volunteers, he arrived at Sonoma, after a
forced march of thirty-six hours, only to find the
Bear Flag men still in possession. The number
of the enerriy, as well as their intentions, had, it
seems, been greatly exaggerated, the force in ques
tion being but a small party of troopers which
Castro had despatched to the Mission of San
Rafael, on the north shore of San Francisco Bay,
to prevent several hundred cavalry remounts
which were stabled there from falling into the
hands of the Americans. Realizing the value of
these horses to the settlers in the guerilla campaign
which seemed likely to ensue, Fremont succeeded
in capturing them after a sharp skirmish with the
Mexicans. Hurrying back to Sonoma, he learned
that during his absence Ide and his men had re
pulsed an attack by a body of Mexican regulars,
under General de la Torre, reinforced by a band
of ruffians and desperadoes led by an outlaw
named Padilla, inflicting so sharp a defeat that
the only enemies left in that part of the country
were the scattered fugitives from this force, these
being hunted down and summarily dealt with by
the frontiersmen. Having now irrevocably com
mitted himself to the insurgent cause, and feeling

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The Flag of the Bear

that, if he were to be hanged, it might as well be
for a sheep as for a lamb, Fremont decided on the
capture of San Francisco. The San Francisco of
1846 had little in common with the San Francisco
of to-day, remember, for on the site where the
great Western metropolis now stands there was
nothing but a village consisting of a few-score
adobe houses and the Mexican presidio, or fort,
the latter containing a considerable supply of arms
and ammunition. Accompanied by Kit Carson,
Lieutenant Gillespie, and a small detachment of
his men, Fremont crossed the Bay of San Fran
cisco in a sailing-boat by night, and took the Mex
ican garrison so completely by surprise that they
surrendered without firing a shot. The gateway
to the Orient was ours.

Fremont now prepared to take the offensive
against Castro, who was retreating on Los Angeles,
but just as he was about to start on his march
southward a messenger brought the great news
that Admiral Sloat, having received word that
hostilities had commenced along the Rio Grande,
had landed his marines at Monterey, and on July 7,
to the thunder of saluting war-ships, had raised
the American flag over the presidio, and had
proclaimed the annexation of California to the
Union. When the Bear Flag men learned the
great news they went into a frenzy of enthusiasm;

Gentlemen Rovers

whooping, shouting, singing snatches of patriotic
songs, and firing their pistols in the air. Quickly
the standard of the fighting grizzly was lowered
and the flag of stripes and stars hoisted in its
place, while the rough-clad, bearded settlers, who
had waited so long and risked so much that this
very thing might come to pass, sang the Doxology
with tears running down their faces. As the folds
of the familiar banner caught the breeze and
floated out over the flat-roofed houses of the little
town, Ide, the late chief of the three-weeks re
public, jumping on a powder barrel, swung his
sombrero in the air and shouted: "Now, boys, all
together, three cheers for the Union ! " The moist
eyes and the lumps in the throats brought by the
sight of the old flag did not prevent the little
band of frontiersmen from responding with a roar
which made the windows of Sonoma rattle.

Now, as a matter of fact, Admiral Sloat had
placed himself in a very embarrassing position,
for he had based his somewhat precipitate action
in seizing California on what he had every reason
to believe was authentic news that war between
the United States and Mexico had actually begun,
but which proved next day to be merely an un
confirmed rumor. If a state of war really did
exist, then both Sloat and Fremont were justified
in their aggressions; but if it did not, then they

i74

The Flag of the Bear

might have considerable difficulty in explaining
their action in commencing hostilities against a
nation with which we were at peace. So Sloat be
gan "to get cold feet,57 asserting that he was forced
to act as he had because he had received reliable
information that the British, whose fleet was lying
oft Monterey, were on the point of seizing Cali
fornia themselves. Fremont, on his part, claimed
to have acted in defence of the American settlers
in the interior, who without his assistance would
have been massacred by the Mexicans. At this
juncture Commodore Stockton arrived at Mon
terey in the frigate Congress, and as Sloat was now
thoroughly frightened and only too glad to trans
fer the responsibility he had assumed to other
shoulders, Stockton, who was the junior officer,
asked for and readily obtained permission to as
sume command of the operations. Fremont,
who had reached Monterey with several hundred
riflemen, was appointed commander-in-chief of
the land forces by Stockton, and was ordered to
embark his men on one of the war-ships and pro
ceed at once to capture San Diego, at that time
by far the most important place in California.
Stockton himself, after raising the American flag
over San Francisco and Santa Barbara, sailed
down the coast to San Pedro, the port of Los
Angeles, where he disembarked a force of blue-

Gentlemen Rovers

jackets and marines for the taking of the latter
city, within which the Mexican commander, Gen
eral Castro, had shut himself up with a consider
able number of troops, and where he promised to
make a desperate resistance.

As Stockton came marching up from San Pedro
at the head of his column he was met by a Mexican
carrying a flag of truce and bearing a message
from Castro warning the American commander in
the most solemn terms that if his forces dared to
set foot within Los Angeles they would be going
to their own funerals. "Present my compliments
to General Castro," Stockton told the messenger,
"and ask him to have the kindness to have the
church bells tolled for our funerals at eight o'clock
to-morrow morning, for at that hour I shall enter
the city." Upon receipt of this disconcerting
message Castro slipped out of Los Angeles that
night, without firing a shot in its defence, and at
eight o'clock on the following morning, Stockton,
just as he had promised, came riding in at the
head of his men.

After garrisoning the surrounding towns and
ridding the countryside of prowling bands of
Mexican guerillas, Stockton officially proclaimed
California a Territory of the United States, insti
tuted a civil government along American lines,
and appointed Fremont as the first Territorial

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The Flag of the Bear

governor. Before the year 1846 had drawn to a
close these two Americans, the one a rough-and-
ready sailor, the other a youthful and impetuous
soldier, assisted by a few hundred marines and
frontiersmen, had completed the conquest and
pacification of a territory having a greater area
and greater natural resources than those of all
the countries conquered by Napoleon put together.
Thus ended the happy, lazy, luxury-loving society
of Spanish California. Another society, less lux
urious, less light-hearted, less contented, but more
energetic, more progressive, and better fitted for
the upbuilding of a nation, took its place. There
are still to be found in California a few men,
white-haired and stoop-shouldered now, who
were themselves actors in this drama I have de
scribed, and who delight to tell of those stirring
days when Fremont and his frontiersmen came
riding down from the passes, and the embattled
settlers of Sonoma founded their short-lived
Republic of the Bear.

177

THE KING OF THE FILIBUSTERS

THE KING OF THE FILIBUSTERS

IN one of the public squares of San Jose, which
is the capital of Costa Rica, there is a marble
statue of a stern-faced young woman, with her
foot planted firmly on a gentleman's neck. The
young woman is symbolic of the Republic of Costa
Rica, and the gentleman ground beneath her heel
is supposed to represent the American filibuster
and soldier of fortune, William Walker. Now,
before going any farther, justice requires me to
explain that Walker's downfall was not due to
Costa Rica, as the citizens of that little republic
would like the world to believe, and as the bom
bastic statue in the plaza of its capital would lead
one to suppose, but to a far greater and richer
power, whose victories were won with dollars in
stead of bayonets, whose capital was New York
City, and whose name was Cornelius Vanderbilt.
To the younger generation the name of William
Walker carries no significance, but to the gray-
heads whose recollections antedate the Civil War
the mention of it brings back a flood of thrilling

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Gentlemen Rovers

memories, while throughout the length and breadth
of that wild region lying between the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec and the Isthmus of Panama it is
still a synonym for unfaltering courage. His
weakness was ambition; his fault was failure.
Had he succeeded in realizing his ambitions — and
he failed only by the narrowest of margins — he
would have been lauded as another Cortez, and
would have received stars and crosses instead of
bullets. Had his life not been cut short by a
Honduran firing-party, it is possible, indeed
probable, that, instead of there being six states in
Central America there would be but one, and in
that one the institution of slavery might still
exist. Though I have scant sympathy with the
motives which animated Walker, and though I
believe that his death was for the best good of the
Central American peoples, he was the very antith
esis of the cutthroat and blackguard and outlaw
which he has been painted, being, on the contrary,
a very brave and honest gentleman, of whom
his countrymen have no reason to feel ashamed,
and that is why I am going to tell his story.

The eldest son of a Scotch banker, Walker was
born in 1824 in Nashville, Tennessee. His father,
a stiff-necked Presbyterian who held morning and
evening prayers, asked an interminable grace be-

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fore every meal, and took his family to church
three times on Sunday, had set his heart on his
son entering the ministry, and it was with a pulpit
and parish in view that young Walker was edu
cated. By the time that he was ready to enter the
theological school, however, he decided that he
preferred M.D. instead of D.D. after his name,
whereupon, much to his father's disappointment,
he insisted on taking the medical course at the
University of Tennessee, following it up by two
years at the University of Edinburgh. Thor
oughly equipped to practise his chosen profession,
he opened an office in Philadelphia, but in a few
months the routine of a doctor's life palled upon
him, so, taking down his brass door-plate, he went
to New Orleans, where, after two years of study, he
was admitted to the bar. But he soon found that
briefs and summonses were scarcely more to his
liking than prescriptions and pills, so, with the
prompt decision which was one of his most marked
characteristics, he closed his law-office and ob
tained a position as editorial writer on a New
Orleans newspaper. Within a year the restless
ness which had led him to abandon the church,
medicine, and the bar caused him to give up
journalism in its turn. At this time, 1852, the
Californian gold fever was at its mad height, and

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to the Pacific coast were pouring streams of for
tune-seekers and adventure-lovers from every
quarter of the globe. One of the latter was
Walker, and it was while editor of the San Fran
cisco Herald, when only twenty-eight years old,
that his amazing career really began.

Walker was not of the sort who could content
himself for any length of time within the stuffy
walls of an editorial sanctum. His fingers were
made to grasp something more virile than the
pen. Nor did he make any attempt to win a for
tune with pick and shovel in the gold fields. His
ambitions were neither intellectual nor mercenary,
but political, for from his boyhood days in Nash
ville he had dreamed, as all boys worth their salt
do dream, of some day founding a state, with
himself as its ruler, in that wild and savage region
below the Rio Grande. Enlisting half a hundred
kindred souls from the hordes of the reckless, the
adventurous, and the needy which were pouring
into California by boat and wagon-train, Walker
chartered a small vessel and set sail from San
Francisco for the coast of Mexico. His avowed
object was a purely humanitarian one: to protect
the women and children living along the Mexican
frontier from massacre by the Indians, the state
of Sonora being at that time more under the

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dominion of the Apaches than it was under that
of Mexico. But it was not the protection of the
women and children — though they needed pro
tection badly enough, goodness knows — which led
Walker to embark on this hare-brained expedition.
He was lured southward by a dream of empire,
an empire of which he should be the ruler, and
which should be founded on slavery. By this
time, remember, the slavery question in the
United States had become exceedingly acute, the
future of the institution on this continent largely
depending upon whether the next States admitted
to the Union should be slave or free. Walker was
a sincere, even fanatical, believer in slavery.
Born and reared in an atmosphere of slavery, to
Walker it was as sacred, as God-given an institu
tion as the Fast of Ramadan is to the Moslem or
the Feast of the Passover to the Jew. Convinced
that friction over this question would sooner or
later force the slave-holding States to secede from
the Union, he determined to extend the area of
slavery by conquering that portion of northern
Mexico immediately adjacent to the United States,
to establish an independent government there, and
eventually to annex his country to the South, thus
counteracting the growing movement for aboli
tion, which, with the admission of new Northern

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territories, already hinted at the overthrow of
slavery.

Financed by Southern friends whose motives
were probably considerably less altruistic than his
own, Walker landed at Cape San Lucas, the ex
treme southern point of the Mexican territory of
Southern California, in October, 1852, with an
"army of invasion" of forty-five men. Instead
of hastening to protect the women and children
of whom he had talked so feelingly, he sailed
up the coast to the territorial capital of La Paz,
which he seized, where he issued a proclama
tion announcing the annexation of the neighbor
ing state of Sonora, in which he had not yet set
foot, giving to the two states the name of the
"Republic of Sonora," and proclaiming himself
its first president. As soon as the news of this
initial success reached San Francisco, Walker's
sympathizers there busied themselves in recruiting
reinforcements, three hundred desperadoes who
boasted that they were afraid of nothing "on two
feet or four" being shipped to him at La Paz a
few weeks later. These men were looked upon
as hard cases even in the San Francisco of the
early fifties, and, if they had not consented to
leave the country to assist Walker, many of them
would probably have left it sooner or later at the

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end of a rope in the hands of the local vigilance
committee. When this force of scoundrels ar
rived at La Paz and found themselves under the
command of a quiet, mild-mannered, beardless
youth of twenty-eight, instead of the brawny,
foul-mouthed, swashbuckling leader whom they
had expected, they promptly hatched a scheme to
blow up the magazine, seize the ship and the stores
of the expedition in the ensuing confusion, and
make their way back to the United States, leav
ing Walker to shift for himself. Warning of the con
spiracy reaching him, however, Walker displayed
for the first time those traits which were later to
make his name a word of terror in the ears of men
who bragged that they feared neither God nor
man. Arresting the ringleaders, he had two of
them tried by court-martial and shot within an
hour; two of the others he ordered flogged and
drummed out of camp, to take their chances among
the hostile Mexicans and Indians. But, though
this act gained Walker the fear and respect of his
followers, the newcomers among them had no
stomach for a leader who could punish, so when
he called for volunteers to accompany him in the
conquest of Sonora less than a hundred men
offered to follow him.

From the very first the shadow of failure hung
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over the enterprise. To begin with, there is no
more savage and desolate region on the American
continent than the peninsula of Lower California,
it being so barren and destitute that even the liz
ards have to scramble for an existence. Mexicans
and Indians hung upon the flanks of the little col
umn night and day, as buzzards follow a dying
steer. There was neither medicine nor medical
instruments with the expedition, and the wounded
died from lack of the most elementary care.
Their shoes gave out and the men marched bare
foot over sun-scorched rocks and needle cactus,
leaving a trail of crimson behind them in the sand.
Their provisions were soon exhausted, and their
only food was beef which they killed on the march.
For years afterward the route of that ill-fated
expedition could be traced from La Paz to the
Colorado River by the bleaching skeletons of the
men who fell by the way. By the time the head
of the Gulf of California was reached the expedi
tion had dwindled to barely twoscore men. It
was no longer a question of conquering Sonora;
it was a question of getting back to the States
alive.

With sinking heart, but imperturbable face,
Walker led his little band of starving, fever-
racked, exhausted men toward the Californian

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line. Three miles of road led through a moun
tain pass into the United States and safety. But
the pass was held by a force of Mexican sol
diery under Colonel Melendrez, and his Indian
allies were scattered over the plain below. And,
as though to give a final touch of irony to the
situation in which Walker and his men found
themselves, from their position on the Mexican
hillside they could look across into American ter
ritory, could see the American flag, their flag,
fluttering over the military post south of San
Diego, could even see the sun glinting upon the
bits and sabres of the troop of American cavalry
drawn up along the border. Four Indians bearing
a flag of truce approached. They bore a message
from the Mexican commander to the filibusters.
If they would surrender their leader and give up
their arms, Melendrez sent word, they would be
permitted to leave the country unmolested. But
after you have fought and bled and marched and
starved with a man for a year, you are not likely
to abandon him, particularly when the end is in
sight, so they sent back word to Melendrez that
if he wanted their arms he would have to come
and take them. Meanwhile the American com
mander, Major McKinstry, had drawn up his
troopers along the boundary-line and awaited the

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result of the unequal struggle like an umpire at a
foot-ball game. Walker, who knew perfectly well
that he deserved no aid from the United States,
and that he would get none, appreciated that if
he was to get out of this predicament alive it
must be by his own wits. Concealing a dozen of
his men among the rocks and sage-brush which
lined the road on either side, with the remainder
of his force he pretended to beat a panic-stricken
retreat. Melendrez, confident that it was now
all over but the shouting, swept down the road in
pursuit. But as the Mexicans rode into the am
bush which Walker had prepared for them the
hidden filibusters emptied a dozen saddles at a
single volley, and the soldiers, terrified and de
moralized, wheeled and fled for their lives. Thirty
minutes later the President, the Cabinet, and all
that remained of the standing army of the late
Republic of Sonora stumbled across the American
boundary and surrendered to Major McKinstry.
It was May 8, 1854, and in such fashion Walker
celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

Sent to San Francisco as a political prisoner,
Walker was tried for violating the neutrality laws
of the United States, was acquitted — for the mem
bers of a Californian jury could not but sympathize
with such a man — and once again found himself

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writing editorials for the San Francisco Herald.
His narrow escape from death in Mexico had only
served to whet his appetite for adventure, however,
so when he was not doing his newspaper work he
was poring over an atlas in search of some other
land where a determined man might carve out a
career for himself with his sword. Staring at the
map of Middle America, his finger again and again
paused, as though by instinct, on Nicaragua.
Here was indeed a fertile field for the filibuster.
Not only was the country enormously rich in
every form of natural resources, but it had a
kindly and moderately healthy climate, and, what
was the most important of all, owing to its peculiar
geographical position, it commanded what was at
that time one of the great trade-routes of the
world. At this time there were three routes to
the Californian gold-fields : one, the long and weary
voyage around the Horn; another, by the danger
ous and costly Overland Trail; and the third,
which was the shortest, cheapest, and most pop
ular, across Nicaragua. If you will glance at the
map, you will see that, barring the Isthmus of
Panama, which is several hundred miles farther
south, Nicaragua is the narrowest neck of land
between the two great oceans, and that in the
middle of this neck is the great Lake Nicaragua,

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which is upward of fifty miles in width. An Amer
ican corporation known as the Accessory Transit
Company, of which the first Cornelius Vander-
bilt was president, had obtained a concession from
the Nicaraguan Government to transport pas
sengers across Central America by this route. Pas
sengers en route from New York or New Orleans
to the gold-fields were landed by the company's
steamers at Greytown, on the Atlantic coast
of Nicaragua, and transported thence by light-
draught steamers up the San Juan River to Lake
Nicaragua. Here they were transferred to larger
steamers and taken across the lake to Virgin Bay,
the twelve-mile journey from there to the port of
San Juan del Sur, on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua,
being performed in carriages or on the backs of
mules. During a single year twenty-five thou
sand passengers crossed Nicaragua by this route.
It did not take Walker long to appreciate, there
fore, that the man who succeeded in making him
self master of this, the shortest route to California,
would be in a position of considerable strength.
Not only this, but Nicaragua was torn by internal
dissensions; the army was divided into a dozen
factions; the peasantry were down-trodden and
poverty-stricken; the government was inconceiv
ably corrupt; and the usual revolution was, of
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The King of the Filibusters

course, in progress, in which the sister republics
of Honduras and Costa Rica were preparing to
take a hand. Everything considered, Nicaragua's
only hope of salvation from anarchy lay in find
ing for a ruler a man with an inflexible sense of
justice and an iron hand. Walker determined to
be that man.

In view of what I have already told of his ex
ploits, you have doubtless pictured Walker as a
tall, broad-shouldered man of commanding pres
ence. As a matter of fact, he was nothing of the
sort. In height he was but five feet five inches,
and correspondingly slender. A remarkably square
jaw and a long chin lent strength and determina
tion to features which were plain almost to the
point of coarseness. His eyes, which were of a
singularly light gray, are universally spoken of as
having been his most noticeable feature, for they
were so large and fixed that the eyelids scarcely
showed, and so penetrating that they seemed to
bore holes into the person at whom they were
looking. He was extremely taciturn, and when he
did speak it was briefly and to the point. He had
an unusual command of English, however, and
his words were always carefully chosen. A
stranger to fear, men who followed him on his
campaigns assert that even under the most trying

Gentlemen Rovers

and perilous circumstances they had never seen
him change countenance or betray emotion by so
much as the contraction of a muscle. He was
wholly lacking in personal vanity, and when in
the field wore his trousers tucked into his boots, a
flannel shirt open at the neck, and a faded black
campaign hat. In a land where all three habits
were universal, he neither drank, smoked, nor
swore; he never looked at women; his word, once
given, was never broken; the justice he meted
out to disobedient followers, though stern to the
point of brutality, was absolutely impartial.
Highly ambitious, it is paying but the barest jus
tice to his memory to say that his aspirations,
however little we may sympathize with them,
were wholly political and never mercenary, his
whole career showing him to be utterly careless
of wealth. Taking everything into consideration,
we have good reason to be proud that William
Walker was an American.

In 1854, as I have already remarked, Nicaragua
was split asunder by civil war. The opposing
parties were the Legitimists and the Democrats.
What they were fighting about is of no conse
quence; perhaps they did not know themselves.
In any event, in August of that year an American
named Byron Cole, acting as an agent for Walker,

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arrived at the headquarters of the Democratic
forces with a novel offer. Briefly, he agreed to
contract to supply the Democratic party with
three hundred American "colonists liable to mil
itary duty," these settlers to receive a grant of
fifty-two thousand acres of land, and to have the
privilege of becoming citizens of Nicaragua. This
contract was approved and signed by General
Castillon, the Democratic leader, and with it in
his pocket Cole hastened to San Francisco and
Walker. After taking the precaution of submit
ting the contract to the civil and military authori
ties in San Francisco, and receiving their assur
ances that it did not violate the neutrality laws of
the United States, Walker immediately set about
recruiting his "colonists," and in May, 1855, just
a year after his escape from Mexico, he was ready
to sail. Although, as I have said, the Federal
authorities had passed upon the legality of the
contract, it was a noticeable fact that the peace
able settlers took with them Winchester rifles in
stead of spades, and Colt's revolvers instead of
hoes, and that the hold of the brig Festa, on which
they sailed from San Francisco, was filled with
ammunition and machine guns instead of agricul
tural implements and machinery.

After a long and stormy voyage down the

Gentlemen Rovers

Pacific coast Walker and his men landed, on
June 16, at the port of Realejo, in Nicaragua,
where he was met by Castillon. Walker was at
once commissioned a colonel; Achilles Kewen, who
had just come from Cuba, where he had been
fighting under the patriot Lopez, a lieutenant-
colonel; and Timothy Crocker, a fighting Irish
man, who was a veteran of Walker's Sonora expe
dition, a major; the corps being organized as an
independent command under the name of La
Falange Americana — the American Phalanx. At
this time the Transit route from the Atlantic to
the Pacific was held by the Legitimist forces, and
these Walker was ordered to dislodge, it be
ing essential to the success of the Democrats that
they gain possession of this interoceanic highway.
Accordingly, a week after setting foot in Nica
ragua, Walker, at the head of fifty-seven of his
Americans and one hundred and fifty native sol
diers, set out for Rivas, a town on the western
shore of Lake Nicaragua held by twelve hundred
of the enemy. The first battle of his Nicaraguan
campaign ended in the most complete disaster.
At the first volley his native allies bolted, leaving
the Americans surrounded by ten times their
number of Legitimists. The enemy instantly
perceived this defection, and pressed the Phalanx

196

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The King of the Filibusters

so hard that its members were driven to take
shelter behind a row of adobe huts. No one knew
better than Walker that if the enemy charged he
and his men were done for, so he decided to do the
charging himself. Out from behind the huts
dashed the red-shirted filibusters, firing as they
came, and so ferocious was their onslaught that
they succeeded in cutting their way through the
encircling army and escaping into the jungle.
Though six of the Americans were killed, inclu
ding Walker's two lieutenants, Kewen and Crocker,
and twice as many wounded, the battle of Rivas
established the reputation of Americans in Cen
tral America for years to come, for a hundred and
fifty of the enemy fell before their deadly fire.

Bleeding and exhausted from battle and travel,
Walker and his men, after an all-night march
through the jungle, limped into the port of San
Juan del Sur, and, finding a Costa Rican vessel in
the harbor, they seized it for their own use. Still
bearing in mind the necessity of getting control
of the Transit route, Walker gave his men only a
few days in which to recover from their wounds
and weariness, and then was off again, this time
for Virgin Bay, the halting-place for passengers
going east or west. Though in the fight which
ensued Walker was outnumbered five to one, his

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losses were only three natives killed and a few
Americans wounded, while one hundred and fifty
of the enemy fell before the rifles of the filibusters.
This disparity of losses emphasizes, as does noth
ing else, the deadliness of the American fire.

After the fight at Virgin Bay Walker received
from California fifty recruits, thus bringing the
force under his command up to some four hun
dred men, about a third of whom were Americans.
The Legitimists, learning that he was planning to
again attack Rivas, hastened to reinforce the gar
rison of that town by hurrying troops there from
their headquarters at Granada, which was farther
up the lake, planning to give Walker a warm and
unexpected reception. But it was Walker who did
the surprising, for, having his own channels of
secret information, he no sooner learned of the
weakened condition of Granada than he deter
mined to direct his efforts against that place,
instead of Rivas, and by capturing it to give the
Legitimist cause a solar-plexus blow. Embarking
his men on a small steamer with the announced
intention of attacking Rivas, as soon as night
fell he turned in the opposite direction and, with
lights out and fires banked, steamed silently up the
lake. Dawn found him off Granada, the garrison
and inhabitants of which were sleeping off a

The King of the Filibusters

drunken debauch with which they had celebrated
a recent victory. Even the sentries drowsed at
their posts. Unobserved, the Americans landed
in the semi-darkness of the early dawn, and it
was not until they had reached the very outskirts
of the town that a sentry suddenly awakened to
their presence and gave the alarm by letting off
his rifle, the shot being instantly answered by a
crackle of musketry as the Americans opened fire.
''Charge!" shouted Walker, "Get at 'em! Get at
em! "and dashed forward at a run, a revolver in
each hand, with his followers, cheering like madmen,
close at his heels. "Los Filibusteros! Los Filibus-
teros!" screamed the terror-stricken inhabitants,
catching sight of the red shirts and scarlet hat-bands
of the Americans. " Run for your lives ! " The de
moralized garrison made a brief and ineffective
stand in the Plaza, and then threw down their arms.
Walker was master of Granada. He at once in
stituted a military government, released over a
hundred political prisoners confined in the local
jail, policed the town as effectually as though it
were a New England village, and when he caught
one of his native soldiers in the act of looting, ran
him through with his sword.

Walker was now in a position to dictate his own
terms of peace, and, four months after he and his

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fifty-seven followers landed in Nicaragua, an
armistice was arranged and the side to which the
Americans had lent their aid was in power. A
native named Rivas was made provisional presi
dent, and Walker was appointed commander-in-
chief of the army, which at that time numbered
about twelve hundred men. Though insignificant
in numbers when judged by European standards,
this was really a remarkable force, and perhaps
the most effective for its size known to military
history. The officers had all seen service under
many flags and in many lands — in Cuba, Mexico,
Brazil, Spain, Algeria, Italy, Egypt, Russia, India,
China — and the men, nearly all of whom had been
recruited in San Francisco, boasted that "Cali
fornia was the pick of the world, and they were
the pick of California." There was scarcely a
man among them who could not flick the ashes
from a cigar with his revolver at a hundred feet,
or with his rifle hit a dollar held between a man's
thumb and forefinger at a hundred yards. All
the strange, wild natures for whom even the mi
ning-camps of California had grown too tame
were drawn to Walker's flag as iron filings are
drawn to a magnet. Frederick Townsend Ward,
the New England youth who raised, trained, and
led the Ever- Victorious Army, who rose to be an

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admiral-general of China, and who performed the
astounding exploits for which General Charles
Gordon received the credit, gained much of his
military training under Walker; Joaquin Miller,
"the poet of the Sierras," was another of his de
voted followers, while scores of the other men who
fought under the blue-and-white banner with the
scarlet star in later years achieved name and fame
in many different lands.

Says General Charles Frederic Henningsen,
the famous English soldier of fortune who was
Walker's second in command: "I have heard two
greasy privates disputing over the correct reading
and comparative merits of ^Eschylus and Euripides.
I have seen a soldier on guard incessantly scrib
bling strips of paper, which turned out to be a
finely versified translation of his dog's-eared copy
of the Divina Commedia" The same officer, who
had fought with distinction under Don Carlos in
Spain, under Schamyl in the Caucasus, and
under Kossuth in Hungary, who had introduced
the Minie rifle into the American service, and
was a recognized authority on the use of artil
lery, and therefore knew whereof he spoke, also
testifies to the heroism and astounding fortitude
of Walker's men. " I have often seen them march
ing with a broken or a compound-fractured arm in

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splints, and using the other to fire the rifle or re
volver. Those with a fractured thigh, or with
wounds which rendered them incapable of re
moval, often (or rather, in early times, always)
shot themselves, sooner than fall into the hands
of the enemy. Such men do not turn up in the
average of every-day life, nor do I ever expect to
see their like again. I was on the Confederate
side in many of the bloodiest battles of the late
war, but I aver that if, at the end of that war I
had been allowed to pick five thousand of the
bravest Confederate or Federal soldiers I ever saw,
and could resurrect and pit against them one thou
sand of such men as lie beneath the orange-trees
of Nicaragua, I feel certain that the thousand
would have scattered and utterly routed the five
thousand within an hour. All military science
failed, on a suddenly given field, before assailants
who came on at a run, to close with their revolvers,
and who thought little of charging a battery,
pistol in hand." As a matter of fact, at the first
battle of Rivas, ten Americans, all officers of the
Phalanx, armed only with bowie-knives and re
volvers, actually did charge and capture a battery
manned by more than a hundred Costa Ricans,
half of the little band being killed in that astound
ing exploit. Some estimate of the deeds of these

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unsung heroes, so many of whom lie in unmarked
graves beneath an alien sky, may be gathered
from the surgical reports, which showed that the
proportion of wounds treated was one hundred and
thirty-seven to every hundred men.

For several months after the taking of Granada
and the establishment of a provisional govern
ment, the dove of peace hovered over Nicaragua
as though desirous of alighting, but in February,
1856, it was driven away, at least for a time, by
a fresh splutter of musketry along the southern
frontier, where Costa Rica, alarmed by Walker's
reputed ambition to make himself master of all
Middle America, had begun an invasion with the
expressed purpose of driving the gringos from
Central American soil. After a few months of
desperate fighting, in which the Americans fully
maintained their reputation for reckless bravery,
the Costa Ricans were driven across the border,
and for a brief time the harassed Nicaraguans
were able to exchange their rifles for their hoes.
The country now being for the moment at peace,
Rivas called a presidential election, announcing
himself as the candidate of the Democrats. The
Legitimists, recognizing in Walker the one strong
man of the country, had the political shrewdness
to choose him, their former enemy, to head their

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ticket. Two other candidates, Ferrer and Salazar,
were also in the field. The election was regular
in every respect, the voting being entirely free
from the usual disturbances. According to the
Nicaraguan constitution, every male inhabitant
over eighteen years of age, criminals excepted, is
entitled to the suffrage. When the votes were
counted it was found that Rivas had received 867
votes; Salazar, 2,087; Ferrer, 4,447; and Walker,
15,835. By such an overwhelming majority, and
in an absolutely fair election, was William Walker
made President of Nicaragua — the first and only
time an American has ever been chosen ruler of a
foreign and independent state.

In all its troubled history Nicaragua has never
been governed so justly and so wisely as it was by
the American soldier of fortune. Had he been
free from foreign interference there is little doubt
that he would have made Nicaragua a progressive,
prosperous, and contented country, and that he
would in time have brought under one govern
ment and one flag all the states lying between
Yucatan and Panama. But that was precisely
what the peoples of those states were fearful of,
so that, a few weeks after Walker was inaugu
rated, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, and San
Salvador declared war. This time Walker took

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the field with three thousand trained and seasoned
veterans, while opposed to him were twenty-one
thousand of the allies. To describe the campaign
that ensued would be as profitless as it would be
tedious. The programme was always the same:
the march by night through the silent, steaming
jungle, and the stealthy surrounding of the threat
ened town in the early dawn; the warning crack
of a startled sentry's rifle; the sudden rush of the
filibusters with their high, shrill yell; the taking
of the barracks and the cathedral in the Plaza,
nearly always at the pistol's point; and the panic-
stricken retreat of the little brown men in their
uniforms of soiled white linen. Everywhere the
arms of Walker were triumphant, and had he not
at this time deliberately crossed the path of a
soldier of fortune of quite another kind, in a few
months more he would have realized his life-dream
and have made himself the ruler of a Central
American empire.

Upon investigating national affairs after his
election, Walker found that the Accessory Transit
Company had not lived up to the terms of its con
cession from the government of Nicaragua. By
the terms of its charter it had agreed to pay to the
Nicaraguan Government ten thousand dollars an
nually, and ten per cent of its net profits. The

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company claimed, and the government as stoutly
denied, that the ten thousand dollars had been
regularly paid, though the concessionaires ad
mitted that the ten per cent on the profits had
not been paid, giving as their excuse that there
had been no profits. Upon an examination of the
books it was quickly discovered that the company
had so juggled with the accounts as to make it ap
pear that there were no profits, when, as a matter
of fact, the enterprise was an enormously profitable
one. Upon discovering the fraud which had been
perpetrated upon the government and people of
Nicaragua, Walker demanded back payments to
the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars, and upon the company insolently refusing
to pay them, he promptly revoked its charter,
and seized its steamboats, wharves, and ware
houses as security for the debt. Though this
action was perfectly justifiable under the circum
stances, it was, in view of the instability of Walk
er's position, an unwise move, for it made an
implacable enemy of one of the most powerful
and perhaps the most unscrupulous of the finan
ciers of the time.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was not a person who
could be bluffed or frightened. Infuriated at the
action of the filibuster President, he immediately

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The King of the Filibusters

withdrew from service the ships of the Transit
Company in both oceans, thus cutting off commu
nication between Nicaragua and the United States,
and thereby Walker's source of supplies. But the
grim old financier was not content with that. Re
cruiting a force of foreign adventurers on his own
account, he despatched them to Central America
with orders to assist the Costa Ricans, whom he
liberally supplied with money, arms, and ammuni
tion, in their war against Walker. Turning then
to Washington, he had little difficulty in inducing
Secretary of State Marcy, who was known to be
one of his creatures, to use the government forces
in driving Walker out of Nicaragua. To Com
modore Mervin, who was his personal friend,
Secretary Marcy communicated his wishes, or
rather Vanderbilt's wishes, and these Mervin in
turn transmitted to Captain Davis, commanding
the man-of-war St. Mary V, who was ordered to
proceed at full speed to San Juan del Sur, on the
Pacific coast of Nicaragua, and to force Walker
out of that country. Never has the government
of the United States lent itself to the designs of
predatory wealth so disgracefully and so flagrantly
as it did when, at the dictation of Cornelius Van-
derbilt, and without a shadow of right or excuse,
it used the American navy to oust William Walker

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from the presidency to which he had been legally
elected by a sovereign people. Its unjustified
persecution of Walker to serve the spite of a
money-lord forms one of the darkest stains on
our national history.

When Davis arrived in Nicaragua he found
Walker, his forces terribly reduced by death, fever,
and desertion (for his means of supply had, as I
have said, been stopped), besieged by the allies in
the town of Rivas. Food was running short, the
hospital was filled with wounded, and many of
his men were helpless from fever. Captain Davis
demanded that Walker surrender to him upon the
ground of humanity, but the indomitable filibuster
replied that when he did not have enough men
left to man the guns he intended to take refuge
on board his little schooner, the Granaday which
lay in the harbor, and seek his fortune elsewhere.
"You will not do that," answered Davis, "for
I am going to seize your vessel." With his
only hope of escape thus cut off, there was
nothing for Walker to do but capitulate. There
fore, on May I, 1857, William Walker, President
of Nicaragua, whose title was as legally sound as
that of any ruler in the world, surrendered to the
forces his own country had sent against him, and
one more argument was given to those who claimed

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The King of the Filibusters

that it was not liberty which we upheld and wor
shipped, but the almighty dollar. When Walker
arrived in New York a few weeks later he found
the city bedecked with flags and bunting in his
honor. On but two other occasions has the
American metropolis given such a reception to a
visitor: once when Kossuth, the Hungarian pa
triot, rode up Broadway, and years later, when
Dewey returned, fresh from his victory at Manila.
Walker's drive from the Battery to Madison Square
was like a triumphal progress, for his gallantry in
action and his successes against overwhelming
odds had aroused the admiration of his country
men, just as his outrageous treatment by the gov
ernment had excited their indignation. Though
legally he had serious grounds for complaint, he
received scant consideration when he placed his
demands for reparation before the Department
of State at Washington. But the cold shoulder
turned toward him by official Washington was
more than made up for by the welcome he re
ceived in the South, where he was acclaimed as a
hero and a martyr. He was banqueted in every
town and city from Baltimore to New Orleans,
and when he entered a box in the opera-house of
the latter place, the audience, forgetting the play,
rose as one man to cheer him.

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Gentlemen Rovers

Within a month Walker had raised enough
money and recruits in the South to enable him to
try his fortunes once more in Nicaragua. Sailing
from New Orleans with one hundred and fifty
men, he landed at San Juan del Norte, on the Car
ibbean side, marched upon and captured the
town of Castillo Viejo together with four of the
Transit Company's steamers, and was, indeed, in
a fair way to again make himself master of Nica
ragua when the United States once more inter
fered, the frigate Wabash, under command of
Commodore Hiram Pawlding, dropping anchor in
a position where her guns commanded the fili
busters' camp, her commander demanding Walk
er's immediate surrender. The flag-officer who
presented Walker with Pawlding's demand tact
lessly remarked: "General, I'm sorry to see you
here. A man like you deserves to command bet
ter men." "If I had even a third of the force you
have brought against me," Walker responded
grimly, "I'd soon show you who commands the
better men." For the third time in his career
Walker was forced to surrender to his own coun
trymen, and was sent north under parole as a
prisoner of war. But, although Pawlding had
acted precisely as Davis had done, President
Buchanan, instead of thanking him, not only pub-

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The King of the Filibusters

licly reprimanded him, but retired him from
active service, and when Walker presented him
self at the White House as a prisoner, refused to
receive his surrender, or to recognize him as being
in the custody of the United States. All of which,
however, was scant consolation for Walker.

To regain the presidency of which he had been
unjustly deprived had now become an obsession
with Walker. In spite of a proclamation issued
by President Buchanan forbidding him to take
further part in Central American affairs, he
sailed from Mobile, on December i, 1858, with a
hundred and fifty of his veterans. His voyage
was brought to a sudden and wholly unlooked-for
termination, however, for he was wrecked in a
gale off the coast of Honduras, whence he was
rescued by a British war-ship which happened to
be in the vicinity and brought back to the United
States. By this time Walker had become almost
as much of a nightmare to the governments of the
United States and Great Britain (for the latter,
both because of the proximity of her colony of
British Honduras and of her large financial inter
ests in the other Central American countries, had
no desire to see that region again plunged into
war) as Napoleon was to the Holy Alliance, and
as a result both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts

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of Nicaragua were patrolled by the war-ships of
the two nations to prevent Walker's return. Ap
preciating that, under the circumstances, it was
about as easy for him to land on Nicaraguan soil
as it was to land on the moon, Walker, with
a hundred of his devoted followers, slipped silently
out of Mobile harbor on an August night in 1860,
and landed, a few days later, on a little island off
the coast of Honduras known as Ruatan.

And so we come to the last chapter in this ex
traordinary man's extraordinary career. Within
a day after his landing at Ruatan, Walker had
crossed to the mainland and captured the im
portant seaport of Trujillo. But the ill-fortune
which from the beginning had dogged him like
a shadow was not to desert him now, for scarcely
had the flag of Honduras which fluttered above the
barracks been replaced by the blue-and-white
banner of the filibusters when a British frigate
dropped anchor off the town. Twenty minutes
later a boat's crew of British bluejackets tossed
their oars as they ran alongside Trujillo wharf,
and a naval officer immaculate in white and
gold, stepping ashore, inquired for General Walk
er, and presented him with a message. It was
from Captain Salmon, commanding the British
man-of-war Icarus, which lay outside, and de-

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manded the immediate evacuation of the city by
the filibusters, as the British Government held a
mortgage on the revenues of the port and intended
to protect them, by force if necessary. Walker
answered that as he had made Trujillo a free port,
the British claims were no longer valid. "Cap
tain Salmon instructs me to inform you, sir,"
replied the British officer, as he prepared to re-
enter his gig, "that he will give you until to
morrow morning to make your decision. If you
do not then surrender he will be compelled to
bombard the town." As a strong force of Hondu-
rans had in the mean time appeared on the land
side of the city and were preparing to attack,
Walker realized that his position had become un
tenable, so that night he and his men slipped
silently out of the sleeping city and started down
the coast with the intention of making their way
overland to Nicaragua. When the British landed
the next morning they were only just in time to
prevent the sick and wounded whom Walker had
been forced to leave behind him in his retreat from
falling into the hands of the ferocious Hondu-
rans. Learning of Walker's flight, Salmon imme
diately started down the coast on the Icarus in
pursuit.

They overtook Walker at a little fishing village
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Gentlemen Rovers

near the mouth of the Rio Negro, several boat
loads of sailors and marines being sent up the
river to take him. But the coast of Honduras is
a good second to the Gold Coast in the deadliness
of its climate, so that when the landing party
reached the little cluster of wretched hovels where
Walker and his men had taken refuge, they found
the filibusters too far gone with fever to oppose
them. To Captain Salmon's demand for an uncon
ditional surrender, Walker, who was so weak that
he could scarcely stand, inquired if he was sur
rendering to the English or to the Hondurans.
Captain Salmon twice assured him distinctly that
it was to the English, whereupon the filibusters,
at Walker's orders, laid down their arms and were
taken aboard the Icarus. No sooner had he ar
rived back at Trujillo, however, than Captain
Salmon, breaking the word he had given as an
officer and a gentleman, and in defiance of every
law of humanity, turned his prisoners over to the
Honduran authorities. Salmon, who was young
and pompous and had a life-size opinion of him
self and his position, interceded for all of the
prisoners except Walker, and obtained their re
lease, but he informed the filibuster chieftain that
he would plead for him only on condition that
he would ask his intercession as an American

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The King of the Filibusters

citizen. But Walker, imbittered by the treat
ment he had received at the hands of his own
government and disdaining to turn to it for as
sistance in his adversity, answered proudly: "The
President of Nicaragua is a citizen of Nicaragua/'
and turned his back upon the Englishman who
had betrayed him.

He was tried by court martial on September u,
1860, and after the barest formalities was sen
tenced to be shot at daybreak the next morning.
The place selected for his execution was a strip
of sandy beach, and to it the condemned man
walked as coolly as though taking a morning
stroll. Before him tramped a detachment of
slovenly Honduran infantry, who, with their
brown, wizened faces, their ill-fitting uniforms,
and their jaunty caps, looked more like monkeys
than men; behind him marched the firing-party,
with weapons at the charge; beside him was a
priest bearing a crucifix and murmuring the prayers
for the dying. As the little procession came to a
halt within the hollow square of soldiery, Walker
waved away the handkerchief with which they
would have blindfolded him, and, cool and straight
and soldierly as though in command of his
Phalanx, took his stand before the firing-party.

"I die a Roman Catholic," he said in Spanish

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Gentlemen Rovers

in a voice clear and unafraid. "The war which I
made upon you was wrong and I take this opportu
nity of asking your pardon. I die with resigna
tion, though it would be a consolation for me to feel
that my death is for the good of society." As he
ceased speaking, the officer in command of the
troops dropped the point of his sword, the levelled
rifles of the firing-party spoke as one, and Walker
fell. But, though every bullet entered his body,
he still lived. So a sergeant stepped forward with
a cocked revolver and blew out his brains. With
that shot there passed the soul of a very brave
and gallant gentleman who deserved from his
country better treatment than he received.

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CITIES CAPTURED BY CONTRACT

CITIES CAPTURED BY CONTRACT

I HAVE known men who, from need of money
or from love of adventure, have contracted to
do all sorts of seemingly impossible things. Some
conquered apparently unconquerable chasms by
means of daring bridges; others built railways
across waterless, yellow deserts, where experts had
asserted that no railway could go; one contracted
to find and raise a treasure galleon sunk three
hundred years ago; another agreed to compose
an opera in a week; while still another engaged
to find a man who for two years had been lost in
equatorial Africa. It took a New Englander,
however, to sign a contract to capture walled and
hostile cities, at a stipulated price per city, just
as a Chicago meat-packer would contract to supply
a government with beef at so much a pound.

The man who entered into this amazing agree
ment was baptized Frederick Townsend Ward,
but bore at his death the adopted name of
Hwa. Though born within biscuit-throw of Salem
wharves he was by residence a citizen of the world,

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and by profession a soldier of fortune. Now the
trouble with most soldiers of fortune is that they
don't make good in the end. They are generally en
tertaining fellows, with vast stores of information
on an amazing variety of subjects, wide acquaint
anceships with personages whose names you see
in the daily papers, and an intimate knowledge
of the little-known places, but they rarely save
any money, they seldom rise to high positions,
and they usually end their checkered careers by
being ingloriously arrested for breaking the neu
trality laws, or by dying, picturesquely but quite
uselessly, between a stone wall and a firing-party.
That Frederick Ward was a striking exception
merely proves the soundness of my remarks.
Though he was a soldier of fortune (he fought
under at least six flags) he did make money, for
he capitalized his remarkable military genius by
signing a contract to capture rebellious cities, at
seventy-five thousand dollars a city, and took a
dozen of them, one after another; he rose to be
an admiral-general of China, and a Mandarin of
the Red Button, which was equivalent to being a
Dewey, a Kitchener, and a Cromer rolled into
one; and though he died when scarcely thirty, it
was on the walls of a captured city, directing a
victorious charge. Though the Manchu dynasty

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Cities Captured by Contract

of China, to which he gave an additional half-
century of existence, has fallen, the soldiers of the
new republic continue to invoke his spirit as that
of a god of battles, and the priests of Confucius
still burn incense before his tomb.

The story of how this adventurous American
youth recognized the splendid fighting material
into which the Chinese were capable of being
transformed; how he took that material and
heated and hammered and tempered it into a
serviceable weapon, and gave that weapon a keen
cutting edge; how, with a force which never num
bered more than six thousand men, he broke the
backbone of a rebellion which turned China into
a shambles; and how his battalions came to be
known, in the annals of time, as the "Ever-Vic
torious Army," forms a chronicle of courage and
thrilling incident the like of which can not be
found in history. If the almost incredible ex
ploits of Ward have escaped the notice of our his
torians, it is because, at the time they took place,
Americans were too intent on the business of their
own great slaughter-house to be interested in a
similar performance going on, in much less work
manlike fashion, half the world away. Though
British writers slightingly allude to Ward as "an
obscure Yankee adventurer," the officer who suc-

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Gentlemen Rovers

ceeded him, General Charles George Gordon,
merely completed the work which his predecessor
had begun, and built his military reputation on
the foundations which the American had laid.
Though the name of Frederick Townsend Ward
holds but little meaning for the vast majority of
his countrymen, it is still a name to conjure with
in that country which he saved from anarchy.

Though a youth in appearance and in years,
Ward was a seasoned veteran long before he set
out on his last campaign. Before he was five-and-
twenty he had had enough experiences to satisfy
a dozen ordinary men. Coming from New Eng
land seafaring stock, it was only to be expected
that a passion for adventure should course through
his veins. From the time he donned short trousers
he dreamed of a cadetship at West Point, and a
commission under his own flag. But it was des
tined that his military genius should profit another
country than his own, and that he should fight
and die under an alien banner. His father, a stern
old merchant captain, held that there was no
training for a boy like that to be had in the school
of the sea, and so, when young Ward was scarce
half-way through his teens, he was packed off
aboard a sailing-vessel bound for the China seas.
By the time he was twenty he held a first mate's

222

Cities Captured by Contract

warrant, and had paid for it with three long voy
ages. Joining Garibaldi's famous Foreign Legion,
he saw service under that great soldier in the war
between the Republic of the Rio Grande and
Brazil. Afterward he helped the young Republic
of Uruguay to defeat Manuel Rosas, the Argen
tine dictator. At the outbreak of the Crimean
War he obtained a lieutenant's commission in a
regiment of French zouaves, and followed the tri
color until the Treaty of Paris brought that bloody
campaign to an end. Turning his steps toward
Latin America again, he joined William Walker
in his ill-fated Nicaraguan adventure, and after
that leader's execution in Honduras he offered
his sword and services to Juarez, and helped to
win for him the presidency of Mexico. With the
triumph of Juarez, peace settled for a time upon
the western hemisphere, and Ward, finding no
market for his military talents, was driven by
financial necessities to take up the occupation of
a ship-broker in New York City. But the shackles
of trade soon proved intolerable to this man of
action. He was like a race-horse harnessed to a
milk-wagon. Though his talk was of cargoes and
bottomry and tonnage, his thoughts were far
away, on those distant seaboards of the world
where history was in the making. At the begin-

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Gentlemen Rovers

ning of 1859, the only country in the world where
righting on a large scale was going on was China,
which was being devastated by the great Taiping
Rebellion. In the spring of that year Ward, un
able to longer resist the call to action which was
forever sounding in his ears, turned the key in
the door of his New York office, saddled his horse,
and, unaccompanied, rode across the continent to
San Francisco, where he booked a passage for
Shanghai. It was no random adventure which he
had undertaken. He had laid his plans carefully
and knew exactly what he intended doing. Nor
did the magnitude of his project dishearten him.
He had set out to save an empire, and he intended
to win fame and fortune in doing it.

The conditions which prevailed in China be
tween 1850 and 1863 can be compared only to the
French Reign of Terror, or to the rule of the Mahdi
in the Sudan. About the time that the nineteenth
century was approaching the half-way mark, a
Chinese schoolmaster named Hung-siu-Tseuen,
inflamed by the partially comprehended teachings
of Christian missionaries, had inaugurated a prop
aganda to overthrow the Confucian religion, and
incidentally the reigning dynasty. There speedily
rallied to his banners all the floating scoundrelism
of China. In 1852 the rebel hordes had moved

224

Cities Captured by Contract

into the province of Hunan, murdering, pillaging,
and burning as they went; advanced down the Kiang
River to the Yang-tse, down which they sailed,
capturing and sacking the cities on its banks.
Making Nanking his capital, the rebel leader as
sumed the title of Tien Wang, or "Heavenly King,"
and proclaimed the rule of the Ping Chao, or "Peace
Dynasty," which, with the prefix Tai ("great")
gave the rebellion its name, Taiping. Wang's
great hordes of tatterdemalions, flushed with their
unbroken series of successes, gradually overran
the silk and tea districts, the richest in the empire,
threatened Peking, and advanced almost to the
gates of Shanghai, carrying death and destruction
over fifteen of the eighteen provinces of China.
Perhaps it will give a better idea of the magnitude
of this rebellion when I add that reliable authori
ties estimate that it cost China two billion five hun
dred million dollar sy and twenty million human lives.
By the autumn of 1859 such of the imperial forces
as remained loyal had been whipped to a stand
still, and the European powers having interests
in China had their work cut out to defend the
treaty ports; the rebels were undisputed masters
of all Central China; the rivers were literally
choked with corpses, and the smoke of burning
cities overhung the land. The atrocities com-

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Gentlemen Rovers

mitted by order of the Taiping leader shocked
even the dulled sensibilities of China. On one
occasion, six thousand people, suspected of an
intention to desert, were gathered in the pub
lic square of Nanking. A hundred executioners
stood among the prisoners with bared swords, and,
at a signal from the Wang, slashed off heads until
their arms were weary, and blood stood inches
deep in the gutters. Ward had indeed chosen a
good market in which to sell his services.

Through an English friend in the Chinese serv
ice, Ward obtained an introduction to Wu, the
Taotoi of Shanghai, and to a millionaire merchant
and mandarin named Tah Kee. The plan he
proposed was as simple as it was daring. He
offered to recruit a foreign legion, with which he
would defend Shanghai, and at the same time
attack such of the Taiping strongholds as were
within striking distance, stipulating that for every
city captured he was to receive seventy-five thou
sand dollars in gold, that his men were to have
the first day's looting, and that each place taken
should immediately be garrisoned by imperial
troops, leaving his own force free for further opera
tions. Wu on behalf of the government, and Tah
Kee as the representative of the Shanghai mer
chants, promptly agreed to this proposal, and

226

Cities Captured by Contract

signed the contract. They had, indeed, every
thing to gain and nothing to lose. It was also
arranged that Tah Kee should at the outset fur
nish the arms, ammunition, clothing, and commis
sary supplies necessary to equip the legion.
These preliminaries once settled, Ward wasted no
time in recruiting his force, for every day was
bringing the Taipings nearer. A number of brave
and experienced officers, for the most part soldiers
of fortune like himself, hastened to offer him their
services, General Edward Forester, an American,
being appointed second in command. The rank
and file of the legion was recruited from the scum
and offscourings of the East, Malay pirates, Bur
mese dacoits, Tartar brigands, and desperadoes,
adventurers, and fugitives from justice from every
corner of the farther East being attracted by the
high rate of pay, which in view of the hazardous
nature of the service, was fixed at one hundred
dollars a month for enlisted men, and proportion
ately more for officers. The non-commissioned
officers, who were counted upon to stiffen the ranks
of the Orientals, were for the most part veterans
of continental armies, and could be relied upon to
fight as long as stock and barrel held together.
The officers carried swords and Colt's revolvers,
the latter proving terribly effective in the hand-to-

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Gentlemen Rovers

hand fighting which Ward made the rule; while
the men were armed with Sharp's repeating car
bines and the vicious Malay kris. Everything con
sidered, I doubt if a more formidable aggregation
of ruffians ever took the field. Ward placed his
men under a discipline which made that of the
German army appear like a kindergarten; taught
them the tactics he had learned under Garibaldi,
Walker, and Juarez; and finally, when they were
as keen as razors and as tough as rawhide, he en
tered them in battle on a most astonished foe.

The first city Ward selected for capture was
Sunkiang, on the banks of the Wusung River,
some twenty-five miles above Shanghai. In
choosing this particular place as his first point of
attack, Ward showed himself a diplomatist as
well as a soldier, for it was one of the seven sacred
cities of China, and to it had been wont to come
thousands of pilgrims from the most distant prov
inces, to prostrate themselves in the temple of
Confucius, the oldest and most revered shrine in
the empire. Its capture by the Taipings and their
desecration of its altars had sent a thrill of horror
through the imperialists, such as was not even
caused by the loss of the great metropolis of
Nanking.

Ward, who appreciated the necessity of winning
228

Cities Captured by Contract

the recognition and confidence of the higher au
thorities, well knew that the regaining of this
sacred city would endear him to the religious heart
of China as nothing else could do. But Sunkiang,
with its walls twenty feet high and five miles in
circumference, and with a garrison of five thousand
fanatics to defend those walls, was no easy nut
to crack even for a powerful force well supplied
with artillery. The idea of its being taken by
Ward and his five hundred desperadoes was pre
posterous, unthinkable, absurd. He first tried the
weapon he had so painstakingly forged on a July
morning, in 1860. Just as his European critics in
Shanghai had prophesied, the attack on Sunkiang
proved the most dismal of failures. His stealthy
approach being discovered by the Taipings, he
was greeted with such a withering fire upon reach
ing the walls that, being without supports, and
perceiving the hopelessness of the situation, he
ordered his buglers to sound the retreat.

But Ward was one of those rare men to whom
discouragements and disasters are but incidents,
annoying but not disheartening, in the day's
work. He spent a fortnight in strengthening the
weakened morale of his force, and then he tried
again, making his onset with the suddenness and
fury of a tiger's spring just at break of day.

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Gentlemen Rovers

Slipping like ghosts through the grayness of the
dawn, Ward and his men stole across the surround
ing rice-fields, and were almost under the city
walls before the Taiping sentries discovered their
approach. As the first rifle cracked, Ward and
one of his lieutenants raced ahead with bags of
powder, placed them beneath the main gate of
the city, and lighted the fuse. Like an echo of
the ensuing explosion rose the shrill yell of the
legionaries, who dashed forward like sprinters in
a race. Instead of the gates being blown to pieces
as they had expected, they found that they had
been forced apart only enough for one man to
pass at a time — and on the other side of that door
of death five thousand rebels waited eagerly for
the first of the attackers to appear. ' "Come on,
boys!" roared Ward, his voice rising above the
crash of the musketry, "We're going in!" and
plunged through the narrow opening, a revolver
in each hand. Hard on his heels crowded his
legionaries. Though they were going to what was
almost certain death, such was the magnetism of
their leader that not a man hung back, not a man
faltered. Before half a dozen men were through
they were attacked by hundreds, but, so deadly
was the fire they poured in with their repeaters,
they were able to hold off the defenders until the

230

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Cities Captured by Contract

whole attacking force was within the gate. Then
began one of the most desperate and unequal fights
in history. The key to the city was the howitzer
battery, which was stationed on the top of the
massive main gate, forty feet above. Up the
narrow ramps the legionaries fought their way,
five hundred against five thousand, hacking, stab
bing, firing, at such close range that their rifles
set fire to their opponents' clothing, driving their
bayonets into the human wall before them as a
field-hand pitchforks hay. Wherever there was
space for a man to plant his feet or swing
his sword, there a Taiping was to be found.
The passageway was choked with them, but
they sullenly gave way before the frenzy of
Ward's attack as a hillside slowly disintegrates
before the stream from a hydraulic nozzle. Ward
was wounded, and his men were falling about him
by dozens, but those that were left, mad with the
lust of battle, fought on, until with a final surge
and cheer they reached the top, and the position
which commanded the city was in their hands.
Then the Taipings broke and fled, some to be
overtaken and slaughtered by the legionaries,
others throwing themselves into the streets be
low. Bayoneting the rebel gunners, the howitzers
were turned upon the city, raking the streets,

231

Gentlemen Rovers

sweeping the crowded walls and house-tops, and
leaving heaps of dead and dying where Taiping
regiments had stood before. .

For four-and-twenty hours Ward and the ex
hausted survivors of his legion, without food and
without water, held the gate in the face of the
most desperate efforts to retake it. Then the
Chinese reinforcements for which he had asked
tardily arrived, and Sunkiang was an Imperial
city again. The American had taken the first
trick in the great game he was playing. It was at
fearful cost, however, for of the five hundred men
who followed him into action, but one hundred
and twenty-eight remained alive, and of these
only twenty-seven were without wounds. In
other words, the casualties amounted to more than
ninety-four per cent of the entire force. Ward had
ridden out of Shanghai a despised adventurer to
whom the foreign officers refused to speak. He
returned to that city a hero and a power in China.
The priesthood acclaimed him as the saviour of the
sacred city; the emperor made him a Mandarin of
the Red Button; the merchants of Shanghai voiced
their relief by adding a splendid estate to the
promised reward of seventy-five thousand dollars.
His reputation would have been secure if he had
never fought another battle.

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Cities Captured by Contract

Leaving Sunkiang heavily garrisoned by im
perial troops, Ward withdrew to Shanghai for the
purpose of recruiting his shattered forces. Such
a glamour of romance now surrounded the legion
that Ward was fairly besieged by European as
well as Oriental volunteers. Shortly after the
capture of Sunkiang, Ward had occasion to visit
Shanghai with reference to the care of his wounded.
While riding through the streets of the city he
was arrested by a British patrol, and despite his
protestations that he was an officer in the imperial
service, was hustled aboard the flag-ship of Admiral
Sir James Hope, which lay in the harbor, and was
placed in close confinement. In reply to his in
quiries he was told that he was to be tried for
recruiting British man-o'-war's-men for service in
his legion. Though the arrest was high-handed
and unjustified, there seemed no immediate pros
pect of release, for the American consul-general
refused to interfere on the ground that Ward, by
taking service under the Chinese government,
had forfeited his right to American protection;
the imperial authorities were powerless to take
any action; while the British were notoriously
fearful of the dangerous ascendancy which this
American might gain if his successful career was
permitted to continue. The only hope for Ward

233

Gentlemen Rovers

— and for China — lay in his escape. A friend
perfected a plan of flight. While visiting Ward,
who was confined in an outside cabin of the flag
ship, with a marine constantly on guard at the
door, he synchronized his watch with that of the
cabin clock, and whispered to the prisoner that he
would be in a sampan under his cabin window at
precisely two o'clock in the morning. Taking off
his coat and shoes that he might be unhampered
in the water, Ward sat on the edge of his berth
with his eyes on the face of the clock. Just as
the minute-hand touched the figure II, Ward
made a dash for the window and sprang head
foremost through the sash, for the windows of the
old fashioned men-of-war were much larger than
the ports of modern battle-ships. He had hardly
touched the water before he was pulled aboard a
sampan, which disappeared in the darkness long
before the flag-ship's boats could be manned and
lowered. This daring exploit enormously in
creased Ward's prestige among both Chinese and
Europeans, with whom the British, as a result of
their insolent and overbearing attitude, were in
tensely unpopular. Some days later Admiral
Hope sent a m'essage to Ward requesting an inter
view, and, upon Ward assuring him that he would
no longer recruit his ranks from the British navy,

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Cities Captured by Contract

the old sea fighter became his strong partisan and
friend.

With his ranks once more repleted, Ward made
preparations for a second venture. This time it
was the city of Sing-po toward which he turned;
but the Taipings, getting wind of his intentions,
secretly threw an overwhelming force into the
place under a renegade Englishman named Savage.
Ward was without artillery with which to breach
the walls, and, after several desperate assaults, in
leading which he was severely wounded, he was
forced to retire. Ten days later, regardless of his
wounds, he tried again, but this time he was taken
in the rear by a Taiping army of twenty thousand
men, his little force being completely surrounded.
So certain was the rebel leader that the famous
general was within his grasp, that he consulted
with his officers as to what methods of torture
they should use upon him. But he was a trifle
premature, for Ward struck the Taiping cordon
at its weakest point, fought his way through, and
reached Shanghai with a loss of only one hundred
men. His secret agents bringing him word that
the powerful force from which he had just escaped
was to be used in the recapture of Sunkiang,
Ward, by making night marches, slipped unper-
ceived into that city. When the Taipings at-

235

Gentlemen Rovers

tempted to carry it by storm a few days later,
instead of meeting with the half-hearted resist
ance which they had grown to expect from Chinese
garrisons, they were astounded to see the hel-
meted figure of the dreaded American upon the
walls, and were greeted with a blast of rifle fire
which swept away their leading columns and
crumpled up their army as effectually as though it
had encountered an earthquake.

Dangerously weakened by half a dozen wounds,
Ward was reluctantly compelled to go to Paris in
the fall of 1860 for surgical attention. Back at
Shanghai again at the beginning of the following
summer, he found that the Taipings, emboldened
by his absence, were flaunting their banner within
sight of the city walls. From end to end of the
empire there existed an unparalleled reign of
terror, the rebels now having grown so strong
that they demanded the recognition of the Euro
pean powers. Ward, meanwhile, had become
convinced that the true solution of the problem
lay in raising an army of natives, rather than for
eigners, for not only was the supply of Chinese
unlimited, but his experience had shown him that
there was splendid fighting material in them if
they were properly drilled and led. When he
asked permission of the imperial government to

236

Cities Captured by Contract

raise and drill a Chinese force, therefore, it was
gladly granted.

An opportunity to put his theories regarding the
fighting capabilities of the Chinese to a test soon
came. Learning that a force of rebels, ten thou
sand strong, was advancing in the direction of
Shanghai, Ward sallied forth from his head
quarters at Sunkiang with two thousand five hun
dred men, struck the Taiping army, curled it up
like a withered leaf, and drove it a dozen miles
into the interior. Pressing on, he captured the
city of Quan-fu-ling, which the rebels had gar
risoned and fortified, and with it several hundred
junks loaded with supplies. Throughout these
actions his Chinese displayed all the steadiness
and courage of European veterans. That he
showed sound judgment in pinning his faith to
natives is best proved by the fact that from that
time on he never met with a reverse. His motto
was "Cold steel," and his tactics would have de
lighted the old-time sea fighters, for, appreciating
the fact that few Oriental troops are capable of
remaining steady under a galling long-range fire,
he invpriably threw his men against the enemy in
an overwhelming charge, and finished the business
at close quarters with the bayonet.

Moving up from Sunkiang with a thousand of

237

Gentlemen Rovers

his men, Ward joined a combined force of French
and British bluejackets, who had with them a
light howitzer battery, in an attack on Kaschiaou,
just opposite Shanghai, which was the city's main
source of supplies, and which the rebels had seized
and fortified. Using the contingent from the war
ships as a reserve, Ward and his Chinamen did the
work alone, carrying the stockades by storm and
capturing two thousand rebels, as a result of which
the enemy fell back from the neighborhood of
Shanghai. So strongly impressed were the British
officers with the behavior of Ward's soldiery that
Sir James Mitchel, the commander-in-chief on the
China station, strongly urged that the task of sup
pressing the rebellion be placed in the American's
hands, and that he be empowered to raise his force
to ten thousand men. A few weeks later Ward
received an imperial rescript acknowledging his
great services to China, and appointing him an
admiral-general of the empire, the highest rank
that the emperor could bestow. With this came
the authority to recruit his force to six thousand
men, and its baptism, by imperial order, with the
sonorous and thrilling title of Chun Chen Chun,
or the Ever-Victorious Army.

As the barometer of Ward's fortunes steadily
rose, that of his native country began to fall,

238

Cities Captured by Contract

the dark cloud of secession hanging threateningly
over the land. It has been said of Ward that he
denationalized himself by marrying a Chinese
wife and adopting a Chinese name, but there is
no doubt that it was only his stern sense of duty
which kept him at the task he had undertaken in
China when the guns of Sumter boomed out the
beginning of the Civil War. He immediately
sent a contribution of ten thousand dollars to the
Union war fund, however, with a message that his
services were at the disposal of the North whenever
they were required. At the time of the Trent
affair, when war between England and the United
States was momentarily expected, and the British
in China had laid plans to seize American shipping
and other property in the treaty ports, Ward
effected a secret organization of American sym
pathizers and prepared to surprise and capture
every British war-ship and merchant vessel in
Chinese waters. In view of his success in equally
daring exploits, there is good reason to believe
that he would have accomplished even so startling
a coup as this.

While recruiting his army to its newly author
ized strength, Ward did not give the Taipings a
moment's rest. He kept several flying columns
constantly in the field, attacking the rebels at

239

Gentlemen Rovers

every opportunity, cutting up their outposts, har
rying their pickets, breaking their lines of com
munication, and demoralizing them generally.
One day Ward would be reported as operating in
the south, and the Wang would draw a momentary
breath of relief, but the next night, without the
slightest warning, he would suddenly fall upon a
city a hundred miles to the northward and carry
it by storm. By such aggressive tactics as these
Ward struck fear to the heart of the Taiping
leader, who saw the despotism he had built up
crumbling about him before the American's
smashing blows. It was said, indeed, that the
mere sight of Ward's white helmet in the van of
a storming party was more effective than a brigade
of infantry. With a thousand men of his own
corps and six hundred royal marines he attacked
and captured Tsee-dong, a walled city of consider
able strength, and cleared the rebels from the sur
rounding region as though with a fine-tooth comb.
The town of Wong-kadza was in the possession
of the Taipings, and Ward decided to capture it.
General Staveley, who had succeeded Sir James
Mitchel in command of the British forces, offered
to co-operate with him. It was agreed that they
should rendezvous outside the town. Ward
reached there first with six hundred of his men.

240

, Cities Captured by Contract

Without waiting for the British to come up, he
ordered his bugles to sound the charge, and after
a quarter of an hour of desperate fighting he car
ried the stockade, and the rebels broke and ran,
Ward's men killing more of them in the pursuit
than they themselves numbered. When General
Staveley arrived a few hours later he was chagrined
to see the imperial standard flying over the city
and to find that the impetuous American had
done the work and reaped the glory. The allied
forces now pressed on to the Taiping stronghold
of Tai-poo, which was held by a strong and well-
armed garrison. While the British engaged the
attention of the rebels in front with a fierce artil
lery fire, Ward and his Chinamen made a detour
to the rear of the city, and were at and over the
walls almost before the garrison realized what had
happened.

The Ever-Victorious Army now numbered
nearly six thousand men. It was well drilled and
under an iron discipline; it was fairly well armed;
it was magnificently officered; it was emboldened
with repeated successes. The man who was the
maker and master of such a force might well go a
long way. That Ward dreamed of eventually
making himself dictator of China there can be
but little doubt. Louis Napoleon, remember,

241

Gentlemen Rovers

climbed to a throne on the bayonets of his soldiers.
By this time the American soldier of fortune had
become by long odds the most popular figure in
the empire; the army was with him to a man;
he possessed the confidence of the great man
darins and merchant princes; and he had to his
credit an almost unparalleled succession of vic
tories. Dictator of the East! What American
ever had a more ambitious dream and was within
such measurable distance of realizing it? It is
no exaggeration to say that, had Ward lived, the
whole history of the Orient would have been
changed, and China, rather than Japan, would
doubtless have held the balance of power in the
Farther East.

In April, 1862, Ward, the Viceroy Lieh, and the
French and British commanders held a council of
war in Shanghai. Ward suggested a plan of cam
paign designed to break the Taiping power in
that part of China for good and all. Briefly put,
his scheme was to capture a semicircle of cities
within a radius of fifty miles of Shanghai and the
coast. This would result in the rebels being held
within their own lines by a cordon of bayonets,
and, as they had utterly devastated the regions
they had overrun, would mean starvation for
them. Thus cut off from the seaboard, Ward

242

Cities Captured by Contract

argued, they would be unable to obtain ammu
nition and supplies, and the rebellion would soon
wither. The series of operations was carried out
as planned, Ward's corps being reinforced by
three thousand French and British. It ended in
the capture, in rapid succession, of the cities of
Kah-ding, Sing-po, Najaor, and Tsaolin. In every
case Ward insisted on being given the post of
honor; he and his Chinamen, who fought with an
appalling disregard for life, carrying the defences
at the bayonet's point, while his European allies
covered his advance with artillery fire and sup
ported his whirlwind attacks. Leaving garrisons
barely large enough to hold the captured cities,
he pushed on by forced marches to Ning-po, which
was a large and strongly fortified city. Twice his
storming parties were driven back. The third
time the men, exhausted by the continuous fight
ing in which they had been engaged and the long
marches they had been called upon to perform,
momentarily faltered in the face of the terrible
fire which greeted them. Instantly Ward ordered
the recall sounded, formed them into line within
easy rifle-range of the city walls, and calmly put
them through the manual of arms with as much
precision as though they were on parade, while a
storm of bullets whistled round them, and men

243

Gentlemen Rovers

were momentarily dropping in the ranks. Then,
his men once more in hand, the bugles screamed
the charge and the yellow line roared on to victory.

Ward gave his last order to advance — he had
forgotten how to give any other — on September
21, 1862. With a regiment of his men he was
about to attack Tse-Ki, a small fortified coast
town a few miles from Ning-po. With his habitual
contempt for danger he was standing with General
Forester, his chief of staff, well in advance of his
men, inspecting the position through his field-
glasses. Suddenly he clapped his hand to his
breast. "I've been hit, Ed!" he exclaimed, and
fell forward into the arms of his friend. Very
tenderly his devoted yellow men carried him
aboard the British war-ship Hardy, which was
lying in the harbor, but the naval surgeons shook
their heads when an examination showed that the
bullet had passed through his lungs. "Don't
mind me," whispered Ward. "Take the city."
So Forester, heavy at heart, ordered forward the
storming parties. That night the great captain
died. The last sound he heard was his Chinamen's
shrill yell of triumph.

With extraordinary solemnity the dead soldier
was laid to rest in the temple of Confucius in Sun-
kiang, the most sacred shrine in China and the

244

Cities Captured by Contract

very spot where he had established his head
quarters after his first great victory. His body,
which was followed to the grave by imperial vice
roys, European admirals, generals, and consuls,
and Chinese mandarins, was borne between the
silent lines of his Ever-Victorious Army. By
order of the emperor his name was placed in the
pantheon of the gods. Temples to commemorate
his victories were built at Sing-po and Ning-po,
and a magnificent mausoleum was erected in his
honor in Sunkiang. In it the yellow priests of
Confucius still burn incense before his tomb. In
all his history there can be found no hint of dis
honor, no trace of shame. He was a great soldier
and a very gallant gentleman, but he has been
forgotten by his own people. To paraphrase the
lines of Matthew Arnold :

"Far hence he lies,
Near some lone Chinese town,
And on his grave, with shining eyes,
The Eastern stars look down."

245

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