Heralds of Empire Part 10

PART II

Now comes that part of a life which deals with what you will say no one man could do, yet the things were done; with wonders stranger than witchcraft, yet were true. But because you have never lived a sword-length from city pavement, nor seen one man holding his own against a thousand enemies, I pray you deny not these things.

Each life is a shut-in valley, says the jongliere; but Manitou, who strides from peak to peak, knows there is more than one valley, which had been a maxim among the jonglieres long before one Danish gentleman a.s.sured another there were more things in heaven and earth than philosophy dreamed.

CHAPTER VI

THE ROARING FORTIES

Keen as an arrow from tw.a.n.ging bowstring, Pierre Radisson set sail over the roaring seas for the northern bay.

'Twas midsummer before his busy flittings between Acadia and Quebec brought us to Isle Percee, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Here Chouart Groseillers (his brother-in-law) lay with two of the craziest craft that ever rocked anchor. I scarce had time to note the bulging hulls, stout at stem and stern with deep sinking of the waist, before M. Radisson had climbed the s.h.i.+p's ladder and scattered quick commands that sent sailors s.h.i.+nning up masts, for all the world like so many monkeys. The St. Pierre, our s.h.i.+p was called, in honour of Pierre Radisson; for admiral and captain and trader, all in one, was Sieur Radisson, himself. Indeed, he could reef a sail as handily as any old tar. I have seen him take the wheel and hurl Allemand head-foremost from the pilot-house when that sponge-soaked rascal had imbibed more gin than was safe for the weathering of rocky coasts.

Call him gamester, liar, cheat--what you will! He had his faults, which dogged him down to poverty and ruin; but deeds are proof of the inner man. And look you that judge Pierre Radisson whether your own deeds ring as mettle and true.

The ironwood capstan bars clanked to that seaman's music of running sailors. A clattering of the pawls--the anchor came away. The St.

Pierre shook out her bellying sails and the white sheets drew to a full beam wind. Long foam lines crisped away from the prow. Green sh.o.r.es slipped to haze of distance. With her larboard lipping low and that long break of swis.h.i.+ng waters against her ports which is as a croon to the seaman's ear, the St. Pierre dipped and rose and sank again to the swell of the billowing sea. Behind, crowding every st.i.tch of canvas and staggering not a little as she got under weigh, ploughed the Ste.

Anne. And all about, heaving and falling like the deep breathings of a slumbering monster, were the wide wastes of the sea.

And how I wish that I could take you back with me and show you the two miserable old gallipots which M. de Radisson rode into the roaring forties! 'Twas as if those G.o.ds of chance that had held riotous sway over all that watery desolation now first discovered one greater than themselves--a rebel 'mid their warring elements whose will they might harry but could not crush--Man, the king undaunted, coming to his own!

Children oft get closer to the essences of truth than older folk grown foolish with too much learning. As a child I used to think what a wonderful moment that was when Man, the master, first appeared on face of earth. How did the beasts and the seas and the winds feel about it, I asked. Did they laugh at this fellow, the most helpless of all things, setting out to conquer all things? Did the beasts pursue him till he made bow and arrow and the seas defy him till he rafted their waters and the winds blow his house down till he dovetailed his timbers? That was the child's way of asking a very old question--Was Man the sport of the elements, the plaything of all the cruel, blind G.o.ds of chance?

Now, the position was reversed.

Now, I learned how the Man must have felt when he set about conquering the elements, subduing land and sea and savagery. And in that lies the Homeric greatness of this vast, fresh, New World of ours. Your Old World victor takes up the unfinished work left by generations of men.

Your New World hero begins at the pristine task. I pray you, who are born to the n.o.bility of the New World, forget not the glory of your heritage; for the place which G.o.d hath given you in the history of the race is one which men must hold in envy when Roman patrician and Norman conqueror and robber baron are as forgotten as the kingly lines of old Egypt.

Fifty ton was our craft, with a crazy pitch to her prow like to take a man's stomach out and the groaning of infernal fiends in her timbers.

Twelve men, our crew all told, half of them young gentlemen of fortune from Quebec, with t.i.tles as long as a tilting lance and the fighting blood of a Spanish don and the airs of a king's grand chamberlain.

Their seamans.h.i.+p you may guess. All of them spent the better part of the first weeks at sea full length below deck. Of a calm day they lolled disconsolate over the taffrail, with one eye alert for flight down the companionway when the s.h.i.+p began to heave.

"What are you doing back there, La Chesnaye?" asks M. de Radisson, with a quiet wink, not speaking loud enough for fo'castle hands to hear.

"Cursing myself for ever coming," growls that young gentleman, scarce turning his head.

"In that case," smiles Sieur Radisson, "you might be better occupied learning to take a hand at the helm."

"Sir," pleads La Chesnaye meekly, "'tis all I can do to ballast the s.h.i.+p below stairs."

"'Tis laziness, La Chesnaye," vows Radisson. "Men are thrown overboard for less!"

"A quick death were kindness, sir," groans La Chesnaye, scalloping in blind zigzags for the stair. "May I be shot from that cannon, sir, if I ever set foot on s.h.i.+p again!"

M. de Radisson laughs, and the place of the merchant prince is taken by the marquis with a face the gray shade of old Tibbie's linen a-bleaching on the green.

The Ste. Anne, under Groseillers--whom we called Mr. Gooseberry when he wore his airs too mightily--was better manned, having able-bodied seamen, who distinguished themselves by a mutiny.

Of which you shall hear anon.

But the spirits of our young gentlemen took a prodigious leap upward as their bodies became used to the crazy pace of our s.h.i.+p, whose gait I can compare only to the bouncings of loose timber in a heavy sea.

North of Newfoundland we were blanketed in a dirty fog. That gave our fine gentlemen a chance to right end up.

"Every man of them a good seaman in calm weather," Sieur Radisson observed; and he put them through marine drill all that week. La Chesnaye so far recovered that he sometimes kept me company at the bowsprit, where we watched the clumsy gambols of the porpoise, racing and leaping and turning somersets in mid-air about the s.h.i.+p. Once, I mind the St. Pierre gave a tremor as if her keel had grated a reef; and a monster silver-stripe heaved up on our lee. 'Twas a finback whale, M. Radisson explained; and he protested against the impudence of scratching its back on our keel. As we sailed farther north many a school of rolling finbacks glistened silver in the sun or rose higher than our masthead, when one took the death-leap to escape its leagued foes--swordfish and thrasher and shark. And to give you an idea of the fearful tide breaking through the narrow fiords of that rock-bound coast, I may tell you that La Chesnaye and I have often seen those leviathans of the deep swept tail foremost by the driving tide into some land-locked lagoon and there beached high on naked rock. That was the sea M. Radisson was navigating with c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l boats unstable of pace as a vagrant with rickets.

Even Foret, the marquis, forgot his dainty-fingered dignity and took a hand at the fis.h.i.+ng of a shark one day. The cook had put out a bait at the end of a chain fastened to the capstan, when comes a mighty tug; and the cook shouts out that he has caught a shark. All hands are hailed to the capstan, and every one of my fine gentlemen grasps an ironwood bar to hoist the monster home. I wish you had seen their faces when the shark's great head with six rows of teeth in its gaping upper jaw came abreast the deck! Half the fellows were for throwing down the bars and running, but the other half would not show white feather before the common sailors; and two or three clanking rounds brought the great shark las.h.i.+ng to deck in a way that sent us scuttling up the ratlines. But Foret would not be beaten. He thrust an ironwood bar across the gaping jaws. The shark tore the wood to splinters.

There was a rip that snapped the cable with the report of a pistol, and the great fish was over deck and away in the sea.

By this, you may know, we had all left our landsmen's fears far south of Belle Isle and were filled with the spirit of that wild, tempestuous world where the storm never sleeps and the cordage pipes on calmest day and the beam seas break in the long, low, growling wash that warns the coming hurricane.

But if you think we were a Noah's ark of solemn faces 'mid all that warring desolation, you are much mistaken. I doubt if lamentations ever did as much to lift mankind to victory as the naughty glee of the shrieking fife. And of glee, we had a-plenty on all that voyage north.

La Chesnaye, son of the merchant prince who owned our s.h.i.+ps, played c.o.c.k-o'-the-walk, took rank next to M. Radisson, and called himself deputy-governor. Foret, whose father had a stretch of barren s.h.i.+ngle on The Labrador, and who had himself received letters patent from His Most Christian Majesty for a marquisate, swore he would be cursed if he gave the _pas_ to La Chesnaye, or any other commoner. And M. de Radisson was as great a stickler for fine points as any of the new-fledged colonials. When he called a conference, he must needs muster to the quarter-deck by beat of drum, with a tipstaff, having a silver bauble of a stick, leading the way. This office fell to G.o.defroy, the trader, a fellow with the figure of a slat and a scalp tonsured bare as a billiard-ball by Indian hunting-knife. Spite of many a thwack from the flat of M. de Radisson's sword, G.o.defroy would carry the silver mace to the chant of a "diddle-dee-dee," which he was always humming in a sand-papered voice wherever he went. At beat of drum for conference we all came scrambling down the ratlines like tumbling acrobats of a country fair, G.o.defroy grasps his silver stick.

"Fall in line, there, deputy-governor, diddle-dee-dee!"

La Chesnaye cuffs the fellow's ears.

"Diddle-dee-dee! Come on, marquis. Does Your High Mightiness give place to a merchant's son? Heaven help you, gentlemen! Come on! Come on! Diddle-dee-dee!"

And we all march to M. de Radisson's cabin and sit down gravely at a long table.

"Pot o' beer, tipstaff," orders Radisson; and G.o.defroy goes off slapping his buckskins with glee.

M. Radisson no more takes off his hat than a king's amba.s.sador, but he waits for La Chesnaye and Foret to uncover. The merchant strums on the table and glares at the marquis, and the marquis looks at the skylight, waiting for the merchant; and the end of it is M. Radisson must give G.o.defroy the wink, who knocks both their hats off at once, explaining that a landsman can ill keep his legs on the sea, and the sea is no respecter of persons. Once, at the end of his byplay between the two young fire-eaters, the sea lurched in earnest, a mighty pitch that threw tipstaff sprawling across the table. And the beer went full in the face of the marquis.

"There's a health to you, Foret!" roared the merchant in whirlwinds of laughter.

But the marquis had gone heels over head. He gained his feet as the s.h.i.+p righted, whipped out his rapier, vowed he would dust somebody's jacket, and caught up G.o.defroy on the tip of his sword by the rascal's belt.

"Foret, I protest," cried M. Radisson, scarce speaking for laughter, "I protest there's nothing spilt but the beer and the dignity! The beer can be mopped. There's plenty o' dignity in the same barrel. Save G.o.defroy! We can ill spare a man!"

With a quick rip of his own rapier, Radisson had cut G.o.defroy's belt and the wretch scuttled up-stairs out of reach. Sailors wiped up the beer, and all hands braced chairs 'twixt table and wall to await M.

Radisson's pleasure.

He had dressed with unusual care. Gold braid edged his black doublet, and fine old Mechlin came back over his sleeves in deep ruffs. And in his eyes the glancing light of steel striking fire.

Bidding the sailors take themselves off, M. Radisson drew his blade from the scabbard and called attention by a sharp rap.

Quick silence fell, and he laid the naked sword across the table. His right hand played with the jewelled hilt. Across his breast were medals and stars of honour given him by many monarchs. I think as we looked at our leader every man of us would have esteemed it honour to sail the seas in a tub if Pierre Radisson captained the craft.

But his left hand was twitching uneasily at his chin, and in his eyes were the restless lights.