Vikings of the Pacific Part 6

{116} But a spy might ask the same question. The Russian evaded answer, and a few hours later showed the Pole books of travel, among which were maps of the Philippines, where twenty or thirty exiles might go _if they had a leader_.

Leader? Benyowsky leaped to his feet with hands on pistol and cutla.s.s with which he had been armed that morning when Governor Nilow liberated them to hunt on parole. Leader? Were they men? Was this settlement, too, ready to rise if they had a leader?

No time to lose! Within a month, cautious as a man living over a volcano, the Polish n.o.bleman had enlisted twenty recruits from the exile settlement, bound to secrecy by oath, and a score more from a crew of sailor exiles back from America, mutinous over brutal treatment by their captain. In addition to secrecy, each conspirator bound himself to implicit and instant obedience to Benyowsky, their chief, and to slay each with his own hand any member of the band found guilty of betrayal. But what gave the Pole his greatest power was his relation to the governor. The coming of the young n.o.bleman had caused a flutter in the social life of the dull little fort. He had been appointed secretary to Governor Nilow, and tutor to his children. The governor's lady was the widow of a Swedish exile; and it took the Pole but a few interviews to discover that wife and family favored the exiles rather than their Russian lord. In fact, the good woman suggested to the Pole that he {117} should prevent her sixteen-year-old daughter becoming wife to a Cossack by marrying her himself.

The Pole's first move was to ask the governor's permission to establish a colony of exile farmers in the south of the peninsula. The request was granted. This created a good excuse for the gathering of the provisions that would be needed for the voyage on the Pacific; but when the exiles further requested a fur-trading vessel to transport the provisions to the new colony, their design was balked by the unsuspecting governor granting them half a hundred row boats, too frail to go a mile from the coast. There seemed no other course but to seize a vessel by force and escape, but Benyowsky again played for time. The governor's daughter discovered his plot through her servant planning to follow one of the exiles to sea; but instead of betraying him to her Russian father, she promised to send him red clippings of thread as danger signals if the governor or his chancellor got wind of the treason.

Their one aim was to get away from Asia before fresh orders could come overland from Yakutsk. Ice still blocked the harbor in April, but the _St. Peter and Paul_, the armed vessel that had brought the exiles across the sea from the mainland, lay in port and was already enlisting a crew for the summer voyage to America. The Pole sent twelve of his men to enlist among the crew, and nightly store provisions in the hold.

The rest of the band were set to manufacturing cartridges, and buying or borrowing all the firearms {118} they could obtain on the pretence of hunting. Word was secretly carried from man to man that, when a light was hoisted on the end of a flagstaff above the Benyowsky hut, all were to rally for the settlement across the ravine from the fort.

The crisis came before the harbor had opened. Benyowsky was on a sled journey inland with the governor, when an exile came to him by night with word that one of the conspirators had lost his nerve and determined to save his own neck by confessing all to the governor.

The traitor was even now hard on the trail to overtake the governor.

Without a moment's wavering, Benyowsky sent the messenger with a flask of poisoned brandy back to meet the man.

The Pole had scarcely returned to his hut in the exile village, when the governor's daughter came to him in tears. Ismyloff, a young Russian trader, who had all winter tried to join the conspirators as a spy, had been on the trail when the traitor was poisoned and was even now closeted with Governor Nilow.

It was the night of April 23. No sooner had the daughter gone than the light was run up on the flagstaff, the bridge across the ravine broken down, arms dragged from hiding in the cellars, windows and doors barricaded, sentinels placed in hiding along the ditch between village and fort. For a whole day, no word came. Governor and chancellor were still busy examining witnesses. In the morning came a maid {119} from the governor's daughter with a red thread of warning, and none too soon, for at ten o'clock, a Cossack sergeant brought a polite invitation from the governor for the pleasure of M. Benyowsky's company at breakfast.

M. Benyowsky returns polite regrets that he is slightly indisposed, but hopes to give himself the pleasure later.

The sergeant winked his eyes and opined it was wiser to go by fair means than to be dragged by main force.

The Pole advised the sergeant to make his will before repeating that threat.

Noon saw two Cossacks and an officer thundering at the Pole's door.

The door opened wide. In marched the soldiers, armed to the teeth; but before their clicking heels had ceased to mark time, the door was shut again. Benyowsky had whistled. A dozen exiles rose out of the floor.

Cossacks and captors rolled in a heap. The soldiers were bound head to feet, and bundled into the cellar. Meanwhile the sentinels hidden in the ravine had captured Ismyloff, the nephew of the chancellor, and two other Russians, who were added to the captives in the cellar; and the governor changed his tactics. A letter was received from the governor's daughter pleading with her lover to come and be reconciled with her father, who had now no prejudice against the exiles; but in the letter were two or three tiny red threads such as might have {120} been pulled out of a dress sleeve. The letter had been written under force.

Benyowsky's answer was to marshal his fifty-seven men in three divisions round the village; one round the house, the largest hidden in the dark on the fort side of the ravine, a decoy group stationed in the ditch to draw an attack.

By midnight, the sentinels sent word that the main guard of Cossacks had reached the ravine. The decoy had made a feint of resistance. The Cossacks sent back to the fort for reinforcements. The Pole waited only till nearly all the Cossacks were on the ditch bank, then instructing the little band of decoys to keep up a sham fight, poured his main forces through the dark, across the plain at a run, for the fort. Palisades were scaled, gates broken down, guards stabbed where they stood! Benyowsky's men had the fort and the gates barricaded again before the governor could collect his senses. As Benyowsky entered the main rooms, the enraged commander seized a pistol, which missed fire, and sprang at the Pole's throat, roaring out he would see the exiles dead before he would surrender. The Pole, being lame, had swayed back under the onslaught, when the circular slash of a cutla.s.s in the hand of an exile officer severed the governor's head from his body.

Twenty-eight Cossacks were put to the sword inside the fort; but the exiles were not yet out of their troubles. Though they had seized the armed vessel at once and {121} transferred to the hold the entire loot of the fort,--furs, silks, supplies, gold,--it would be two weeks before the ice would leave the port. Meanwhile the two hundred defeated Cossacks had retreated to a hill, and sent coureurs scurrying for help to the other forts of Kamchatka. Within two weeks seven hundred Cossacks would be on the hills; and the exiles, whose supplies were on board the vessel, would be cut off in the fort and starved into surrender.

No time to waste, Benyowsky! Not a woman or child was harmed, but every family in the fort was quickly rounded up in the chapel. Round this, outside, were piled chairs, furniture, pitch, tar, powder, whale-oil. Promptly at nine in the morning, three women and twelve young girls--wives and daughters of the Cossack officers--were despatched to the Cossack besiegers on the hill with word that unless the Cossacks surrendered their arms to the exiles and sent down fifty soldiers as hostages of safety for the exiles till the s.h.i.+p could sail--precisely at ten o'clock the church would be set on fire.

The women were seen to ascend the hill. No signal came from the Cossacks. At a quarter past nine Benyowsky kindled fires at each of the four angles of the church. As the flames began to mount a forest of handkerchiefs and white sheets waved above the hill, and a host of men came spurring to the fort with all the Cossacks' arms and fifty-two hostages.

{122} The exiles now togged themselves out in all the gay regimentals of the Russian officers. Salutes of triumph were fired from the cannon. A _Te Deum_ was sung. Feast and mad wa.s.sail filled both day and night till the harbor cleared. Even the Cossacks caught the madcap spirit of the escapade, and helped to load ammunition on the _St. Peter and Paul_. Nor were old wrongs forgiven. Ismyloff was bundled on the vessel in irons. The chancellor's secretary was seized and compelled to act as cook. Men, who had played the spy and tyrant, now felt the merciless knout. Witnesses, who had tried to pry into the exiles'

plot, were hanged at the yard-arm. Nine women, relatives of exiles, who had been compelled to become the wives of Cossacks, now threw off the yoke of slavery, donned the costly Chinese silks, and joined the pirates. Among these was the governor's daughter, who was to have married a Cossack.

On May 11, 1771, the Polish flag was run up on the _St. Peter and Paul_. The fort fired a G.o.d-speed--a heartily sincere one, no doubt--of twenty-one guns. Again the _Te Deum_ was chanted; again, the oath of obedience taken by kissing Benyowsky's sword; and at five o'clock in the evening the s.h.i.+p dropped down the river for the sea, with ninety-six exiles on board, of whom nine were women; one, an archdeacon; half a dozen, officers of the imperial army; one, a gentleman in waiting to the Empress; at least a dozen, convicts of the blackest dye.

{123} The rest of Benyowsky's adventures read more like a page from some pirate romance than sober record of events on the west coast of America. Barely had the vessel rounded the southern cape of the peninsula into the Pacific, when Ismyloff, the young Russian trader, who had been carried on board in irons, rallied round Benyowsky such a clamor of mutineers, duels were fought on the quarter-deck, the malcontents clapped in handcuffs again, and the ringleaders tied to the masts, where knouting enough was laid on to make them sue for peace.

The middle of May saw the vessel anchoring on the west coast of Bering Island, where a sharp lookout was kept for Russian fur traders, and armed men must go ash.o.r.e to reconnoitre before Benyowsky dared venture from the s.h.i.+p. The Pole's position was chancy enough to satisfy even his melodramatic soul. Apart from four or five Swedes, the entire crew of ninety-six was Russian. Benyowsky was for sailing south at once to take up quarters on some South Sea island, or to claim the protection of some European power. The Russian exiles, of whom half were criminals, were for coasting the Pacific on pirate venture, and compelled the Pole to steer his vessel for the fur hunters' islands of Alaska.

The men sent to reconnoitre Bering Island came back with word that while they were gathering driftwood on the south sh.o.r.e, they had heard shots and met five Russians belonging to a Saxon exile, who had {124} turned fur hunter, deposed the master of his s.h.i.+ps, gathered one hundred exiles around him, and become a trader on his own account. The Saxon requested an interview with Benyowsky. What was the Pole to do?

Was this a decoy to test his strength? Was the Saxon planning to scuttle the Pole's vessel, too? Benyowsky's answer was that he would be pleased to meet his Saxon comrade in arms on the south sh.o.r.e, each side to approach with four men only, laying down arms instantly on sight of each other. The two exile pirates met. Each side laid down arms as agreed. Ochotyn, the Saxon, was a man of thirty-six years, who had come an exile on fur trading vessels, gathered a crew of one hundred and thirty-four around him, and, like the Pole, become a pirate. His plan in meeting Benyowsky was to propose vengeance on Russia: let the two s.h.i.+ps unite, go back to Siberia, and sack the Russian ports on the Pacific. But the Pole had had enough of Russia.

He contented himself with presenting his brother pirate with one hundred pounds of ammunition; and the two exiles sat round a campfire of driftwood far into the night, spinning yarns of blasted hopes back in Europe, and desperate venture here on the Pacific. The Saxon's headquarters were on Kadiak, where he had formed alliance with the Indians. Hither he advised the Pole to sail for a cargo of furs.

Ismyloff, the mutineer, was marooned on Bering Island. Ice-drift had seemed to bar the way {125} northward through Bering Straits. June saw Benyowsky far eastward at Kadiak on the south sh.o.r.e of Alaska, gathering in a cargo of furs; and from the sea-otter fields of Kadiak and Oonalaska, Benyowsky sailed southwest, past the smoking volcanoes of the Aleutians, vaguely heading for some of those South Sea islands of which he used to read in the exile village of Kamchatka.

Not a man of the crew knew as much about navigation as a schoolboy.

They had no idea where they were going, or where the s.h.i.+p was. As day after day slipped past with no sight but the heaving sea, the Russian landsmen became restive. Provisions had dwindled to one fish a day; and scarcely a pint of water for each man was left in the hold. In flying from Siberian exile, were they courting a worse fate?

Stephanow, the criminal convict, who had crossed Siberia with the Pole, dashed on deck demanding a better allowance of water as the s.h.i.+p entered warmer and warmer zones. The next thing the Pole knew, Stephanow had burst open the barrel hoops of the water kegs to quench his thirst. By the time the guard had gone down the main hatch to intercept him, Stephanow and a band of Russian mutineers had trundled the brandy casks to the deck and were in a wild debauch. The main hatch was clapped down, leaving the mutineers in possession of the deck, till all fell in drunken torpor, when Benyowsky rushed his soldiers up the fore scuttle, snapped handcuffs on {126} the rebels, and tied them to the masts. In the midst of this disorder, such a hurricane broke over the ocean that the tossing yard-arms alternately touched water.

To be sure, Benyowsky had escaped exile; but his s.h.i.+p was a hornets'

nest. After the storm all hands were busy sewing new sails. The old sails were distributed as trousers for the ragam.u.f.fin crew. For ten days no food was tasted but soup made from sea-otter skins. Then birds were seen, and seaweed drifted past the vessel; and a wild hope mounted every heart of reaching some part of j.a.pan.

On sunset of July 15, the Pole's watch-dog was noticed standing at the bow, sniffing and barking. Two or three of the s.h.i.+p's hands dashed up to the masthead, vowing they would not come down till they saw land.

Suddenly the lookout shouted, Land! The exiles forgot their woes.

Even the mutineers tied to the masts cheered. Darker and darker grew the cloud on the horizon. By daybreak the cloud had resolved itself to a sh.o.r.e before the eager eyes of the watching crew. The s.h.i.+p had scarcely anch.o.r.ed before every man was overboard in a wild rush for the fresh water to be found on land. Tents were pitched on the island; and the wanderers of the sea rested.

It is no part of this narrative to tell of Benyowsky's adventures on Luzon of the Philippines, or the Ladrones,--whichever it was,--how he scuttled {127} j.a.panese sampans of gold and pearls, fought a campaign in Formosa, and wound up at Macao, China, where all the rich cargo of sea-otter brought from America was found to be water rotted; and Stephanow, the criminal convict, left the Pole dest.i.tute by stealing and selling all the j.a.panese loot.

This part of the story does not concern America; and the Pole's whole life has been told by Jokai, the Hungarian novelist, and Kotzebue, the Russian dramatist.

Benyowsky got pa.s.sage to Europe from China on one of the East India Company s.h.i.+ps, whose captain was uneasy enough at having so many pirates on board. In France he obtained an appointment to look after French forts in Madagascar; but this was too tame an undertaking for the adventure-loving Pole. He threw up his appointment, returned to Europe, interested English merchants in a new venture, sailed to Baltimore in the _Robert Anne_ of twenty cannon and four hundred and fifty tons, interested merchants there in his schemes, and departed from Baltimore October 25, 1784, to conquer Madagascar and set up an independent commercial government. Here he was slain by the French troops on the 23d of May, 1786--to the ruin of those Baltimore and London merchants who had advanced him capital. His own account of his adventures is full of gross exaggerations; but even the Russians were so impressed with the prowess of his valor that a few years later, when Cook sailed to Alaska, Ismyloff could not be brought to mention his name; {128} and when the English s.h.i.+ps went on to Kamchatka, they found the inhabitants hidden in the cellars, for fear the Polish pirate had returned. But like many heroes of misfortune, Benyowsky could not stand success. It turned his head. He entered Macao with the airs of an emperor, that at once discredited him with the solid people. If he had returned to the west coast of America, as a fur trader, he might have wrested more honors from Russia; but his scheme to capture an island of which he was to be king, ended in ruin for himself and his friends.[1]

[1] It may as well be acknowledged that Mauritius Augustus, Count Benyowsky (p.r.o.nounced by himself Be-nyov-sky), is a liar without a peer among the adventurers of early American history. If it were not that his life was known to the famous men of his time, his entire memoirs from 1741 to 1771 might be rejected as fiction of the yellow order; but the comical thing is, the mendacious fellow cut a tremendous swath in his day. The garrisons of Kamchatka trembled at his name twenty-five years after his escapades. Ismyloff, who became a famous trader in the Russian Fur Company, could not be induced to open his mouth about the Pole to Cook, and actually made use of the universal fear of Benyowsky among Russians, to keep Cook from learning Russian fur trade secrets, when the Englishman went to Kamchatka, by representing that Cook was a pirate, too. The _Gentleman's Magazine_ for June, 1772, contained a letter from Canton, dated November 19, 1771, giving a full account of the pirate's arrival there with his mutineers and women refugees. The Bishop Le Bon of Macao writes, September 24, 1771: "Out of his equipage, there remain no more than eight men in health. All the rest are confined to their beds. For two months they suffered hunger and thirst." Captain King of Cook's staff writes of Kamchatka: "We were informed that an exiled Polish officer named Beniowski had seized upon a galliott, lying at the entrance of the harbor, and had forced on board a number of Russian sailors, sufficient to navigate her; that he had put on sh.o.r.e a part of the crew . . . among the rest, Ismyloff."

In Paris he met and interested Benjamin Franklin. Hyacinth de Magellan, a descendant of the great discoverer, advanced Benyowsky money for the Madagascar filibustering expedition. So did certain merchants of Baltimore in 1785. On leaving England, Benyowsky gave his memoirs to Magellan, who pa.s.sed their editing over to William Nicholson of the Royal Society, by {129} whom they were given to the world in 1790. German, French, and Russian translations followed. This called forth Russia's account of the matter, written by Ivan Ryumin, edited by Berg, St. Petersburg, 1822. These accounts, with the facts as cited from contemporaries, enable one to check the preposterous exaggerations of the Pole. Of late years, between drama and novels, quite a Benyowsky literature has sprung up about this Cagliostro of the sea.

His record in the continental armies preceding his exile would fill a book by itself; and throughout all, Benyowsky appears in the same light, an unscrupulous braggart lying gloriously, but withal as courageous as he was mendacious.

[Transcriber's note: the "e" and "o" in the above "Be-nyov-sky" are actually e-macron (Unicode U+0113) and o-macron (Unicode U+014D).]

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PART II

AMERICAN AND ENGLISH ADVENTURERS ON THE WEST COAST OF AMERICA--FRANCIS DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA--COOK, FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA TO ALASKA--LEDYARD, THE FORERUNNER OF LEWIS AND CLARK--GRAY, THE DISCOVERER OF THE COLUMBIA--VANCOUVER, THE LAST OF THE WEST COAST NAVIGATORS

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CHAPTER VI

1562-1595

FRANCIS DRAKE IN CALIFORNIA