An Old Sailor's Yarns Part 22

THE PIRATE OF MASAFUERO.

CHAPTER I.

_Gonzalo._ Had I a plantation of this isle, my lord, And were the king of it, what would I do?

_Sebastian._ 'Scape getting drunk, for want of wine.

TEMPEST.

In the Pacific Ocean, and within two days' sail of the coast of Chili, lies the little island of Masafuero, or, as the word is generally divided by the Spaniards who discovered it, Mas-a-fuero--that is, the farthest--to distinguish it from Juan Fernandez, which lies nearer the main land, and in sight of Masafuero. Juan Fernandez is well known to all the reading community as having once been the temporary residence of Alexander Selkirk, the original, or, as grammarians would call it, the _root_, of De Foe's bewitching romance of Robinson Crusoe.

Masafuero is, on the contrary, remarkable for nothing more, that I know of, than being very difficult of access, and overrun with wild goats. It is situated in the lat.i.tude of thirty-three degrees and forty-five minutes, south, and eighty degrees and thirty-six minutes, west longitude; for I love to be particular in all such cases--not that I suppose my readers care a pin if I had told them it was in the south-west horn of the new moon; but all authors, when they put pen to paper, seem actuated by the kind and neighborly spirit of the sagacious Dogberry--namely, to "bestow all their tediousness" upon their readers; and I do not know that I have any prescriptive right--I am sure I have no intention--to depart from so well-worn a track, or to fly in the face of so many ill.u.s.trious precedents.

This island is covered, from the water's edge to the summit, with trees, and it is only for the sake of wood that it is ever visited by our whalemen, who fell the trees on the brink of steep cliffs, and tumble them down, by which process they are broken up into sufficiently short pieces to render their carriage convenient. There are evident traces of most tremendous earthquakes visible throughout the island; huge fissures and rents from the tops of the highest hills to unknown and unexplorable depths, vast scattered ma.s.ses of rock that have been shaken down from the cliffs, and many other similar appearances, announce that the most terrific convulsions of nature have rendered Masafuero a very unquiet residence, even to the poor goats, at different times. In its external appearance, and when seen at some distance, it bears considerable resemblance to the celebrated Isle of St. Helena, and is, like it, exceeding precipitous, and has but one approachable, and not always accessible, landing-place. Of this last trait in its character I can speak from experience and most feelingly, having visited the island in the year 1821, in a small brig, with the intention of getting off nine men, who had been left there some time previous for the purpose of collecting seal-skins, with which the island abounds, as well as with goats. Our attempt was rendered fruitless by the violence of the wind, which, for the time it lasted, exceeded any thing I had ever seen, except a _typhon_ in the China seas, and _one_ north-wester off Nantucket shoals.

Some of the men, whom I afterwards saw, informed me that they had, during their abode there, planted sundry garden seeds, such as beans, pumpkin, squash, and onion seeds; but this item of intelligence I look upon to be somewhat apocryphal; at any rate, I would not recommend to any one, who may chance to visit said island, to save his stomach for any pumpkin pies or baked beans he may obtain from it. There is undoubtedly fertile soil enough for a garden--but then the goats.

The island also enjoys the reputation of having once been the rendezvous of a gang of pirates, as a house, that has stood untenanted for any length of time, is sure to be peopled with ghosts. People seem to think it a pity that a tenement should remain unoccupied, so, out of sheer compa.s.sion for the proprietor, they stock it with unearthly tenants from roof to cellar, or like--for, now I am in the humor for comparisons, I might as well go on--it was like a man who keeps his business to himself and troubles n.o.body; his neighbors, knowing nothing about his occupations and habits, take it for granted that they are both bad and "contrary to the peace of the commonwealth."

Masafuero had, however, tolerably strong claims to the t.i.tle of a "den of thieves;" for there could be no doubt that, during the stormy times that took place when South America shook off the Spanish yoke and put on fifty worse ones--when there was a revolution once a week, and murder and rapine every hour--many of the human vultures that flocked to the prey, from Europe and this country, made this little island a place of deposit for their ill-gotten wealth, and a rendezvous and city of refuge from the vengeance of some of the short-lived authorities. The celebrated Benavidas, a sort of "free companion," was, as sailors say, "in vogue," when I first visited the Pacific in 1821; and as he carried on business both by land and water, there is no doubt that he occasionally visited both Masafuero and Juan Fernandez.

But there were other "land rats and water rats" than Benavidas, who, it may be interesting to know, died suddenly one day of strangulation, in consequence of his cravat being tied too tight. Numbers of English and American seamen, at the first breaking out of the revolution, who happened to be on the spot, realised large sums by privateering, and by striking certain sudden and bold strokes, _a la Buccanier_, upon the rich Spanish towns and richer churches; and as "their sound went out into all lands," others flocked to the Pacific for the same purpose. But by this time the first agony was over: the new government, short-lived and ephemeral as it was, enacted certain wholesome laws, which, as they did not materially interfere with the political views of the parties that successively kicked each other down stairs, were generally permitted to stand. A navy was organised and plunder was legalised; privateering was placed under restrictions; and, as none of these b.u.t.terfly republics were in existence long enough to take any further steps towards paying their seamen and soldiers than promising to, said seamen and soldiers very naturally betook themselves to their respective elements to look for prey. I have often wondered that the problem of our revolution was not followed by the same corollary. The two nations might be differently const.i.tuted--they were not differently situated.

Many stories are related of the daring exploits of these freebooters, both on the water and on the land; but there was generally a shade of difference in favor of the former, on the score of both courage and humanity; the "water rats" being almost exclusively English and Americans, and possessing both qualities by nature so strongly impressed, that they could never be entirely eradicated or smothered.

The land robbers, on the other hand, were as exclusively native Chilenos, a mixture generally of Indian and Spaniard--a more detestable amalgamation the earth does not produce--if the devil was to cross the breed, it would rather improve it than otherwise. One of the most formidable, most blood-thirsty, and most successful of these pirates wound up his affairs not a great while before I arrived in the Pacific, Jack Ketch being his administrator.

CHAPTER II.

Virtue? a fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus and thus.

OTh.e.l.lO.

James Longford was the eldest son of a merchant in the neighborhood of New York, who furnished in his own conduct one of those very rare instances of a mercantile man contented with what he has ama.s.sed, and willing to retire to private life to enjoy it. 'Tis true that merchants pretend to say, after having heaped up something like a million, that they continue in business for the sake of the employment of time and excitement of mind that it affords, and not for the lucre of gain; "sed non ego credulus illis," or, in plain English, "they may tell that to the marines, the sailors won't believe them." The thirst for gain increases with its gratification, as I could quote more Latin to prove; and not only does gratification increase the appet.i.te, but it seems to _pucker up_ the heart, and contract the muscles of the hand, for your very rich man is almost invariably a very close and avaricious one, except when making public donations to inst.i.tutions already bursting with wealth, when they know that their names and sums given will go the rounds of the public prints under the head of "munificent donations."

How delicious is flattery, even when thrown down one's throat with a shovel!

But they are stingy in another way, that brings with it its own punishment--they starve themselves. I know of several of your half million folks, not a thousand miles from where I now sit, whose table does not cost them fifty cents a day, and that too with tolerably numerous families. I was once ill-advised enough to dine with a gentleman of this description, in a sister city, in consequence of his repeated and pressing invitations. We had part of a fore-quarter of very small mutton boiled, with a small modic.u.m of potatoes; one man could have eaten the whole. To be sure, I had a gla.s.s of "London particular"

Madeira after dinner, if it deserves the name, but as soon as I had done I made my excuses--"indispensable business--obliged to go out of town, &c." and fled to an eating-house, where I satisfied what Dan Homer emphatically calls the "thumos edodes," the madness of appet.i.te, with something more to the purpose than lean mutton.

Mr. Longford was "none of them sort;"--he retired from business with only fifty thousand dollars, but with a clear conscience, adjusted books, and not a single cent of debt--he never refused his charity to deserving objects, and never signed a subscription paper for their relief,--he was never a member of a charitable society, and never contributed a cent to the Missionary funds, whether for the Valley of the Mississippi or the Island of Borneo, where there are nothing but monkeys, or Malays as incapable of being christianized as the monkeys.

Had he lived at the present time, and in this section of the country, he would have been prayed _for_ and prayed _at_, at least once a day, and been, besides, occasionally held up in the pulpit as a specimen of total depravity, and a child of perdition.

Yet, with all these defects, Mr. George Longford was a sincerely devout man, and a most firm believer in the Christian religion,--from a conviction of its truth, not merely because it was the fashion to believe it, or because his fathers believed it before him,--and a practical observer of its moral precepts. He read and studied the New Testament, because it contained a compendium of all his every-day duties as a rational and accountable being, and as a member of society, not because it was a magazine of polemical divinity and abstruse doctrines.

The evening of such a man's life is calm and tranquil; his death is indeed the death of the righteous.

James was this man's eldest son;--I cannot say, as novel writers generally do, that "in him were centred the hopes and wishes of his fond parents,"--for they were not--they looked for support and comfort in their old age to their other children. James was a refractory and disobedient child from the very cradle. It is ridiculous to say that all men are born alike in dispositions and capacities; the great poet of nature, from whom I have, as usual, taken my text, says no; and I would sooner have a single line from him than folios of ingenious theories and metaphysical arguments from the profoundest philosophers. I have not much faith in innate ideas, but I confess that I have in innate dispositions, both good and bad.

James Longford's disposition was most decidedly bad by nature--he was constantly, even when a mere schoolboy, in mischief, and that, too, of a kind that marked a malicious and cruel temper. His father in vain exhausted kindness and severity, in the hope of subduing this most unhappy temper; but neither the infliction of punishment, that he deserved twenty times a day, nor the caresses of the tenderest parental affection, appeared to have the least influence in mollifying his stubborn and morose disposition--he seemed to be one of those whom St.

Paul characterizes, in that tremendous first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, as being "without natural affection." Notwithstanding all these faults, he had naturally a strong mind and good talents; so that by the time he had attained his eighteenth year he was, at one and the same time, one of the most ungovernable and ill-tempered boys and best scholars in Parson Crabtree's seminary of some fifty in number.

At this period his father placed him in the counting-room of a wealthy mercantile house in the city of New-York. Here his good education and natural quickness soon procured him the favorable notice of his employers, while his constant and active duties seemed to have smothered, at least for a time, his malicious temper. Before the expiration of a year he had acquired the good will and confidence of the merchants whom he served; but by this time the pleasures and temptations of the "Commercial Emporium" had begun to attract his inexperienced eyes, and his disposition seemed to have taken a new turn.

With all the stubborn wilfulness and unfeeling carelessness of consequences that characterized his temper, he plunged into all manner of vicious indulgences; but what seemed to attract him the most irresistibly, and fix him the most firmly, was a fondness for gambling.

The "time-honored" black-legs of the billiard and roulette tables were, however, an overmatch for an inexperienced lad of nineteen, and, as might have been expected, he was soon stripped, thoroughly "cleaned out." It was then that the idea of replenishing his pockets from the counting-room trunk first presented itself to his mind, and, without much hesitation or compunction of conscience, he took small sums from time to time.

It is needless to trace his progress more minutely--he finished by forging a check for a thousand dollars, which forgery was subsequently detected.

Precisely the same "dull round" of vice is trodden, at least once a week, by the same cla.s.s of young men. The merchants' clerks are certainly creatures of no imagination, or they would have struck out some new way of going to the devil; they evidently have not a spark of what an eminent Irish lawyer called "the poetry of wickedness;" they uniformly begin with plundering the money drawer, and end with forging checks.

Mr. Longford was advised of his son's guilt, and the affair was compromised by his paying the amount purloined. In utter despair the afflicted father placed his degenerate son on board an outward-bound Indiaman, a mode of proceeding often resorted to prematurely, for it generally does a boy's business if he is viciously inclined--a merchantman's forecastle is not a school of morality. Sending a refractory child to sea may be an excellent way of getting rid of him, but it is at the same time the most expeditious mode of sending him to the devil.

There is a great deal of talk about "G.o.dly captains;" but I never knew one that was not an infernal tyrant, and a most accomplished scoundrel.

If you wish to cure a boy of a fondness for the sea, send him a good long voyage with a G.o.dly captain, and I'll be bail that he comes home as lean as a weazel, and most thoroughly disgusted at the very thoughts of a ship. If you merely wish to get rid of him, send him to the coast of Guinea on a trading voyage, or to that Golgotha, New Orleans; a G.o.dly captain, by working him one half to death, and starving him the other, will put it out of his power to trouble you any more in this world. The Carmelites and other religious orders were once of opinion that the devil could be flogged out of the flesh, and for that purpose wore a couple of fathoms of two-inch rope about their loins: G.o.dly captains think he can be worked out, and so, perhaps, he can; but generally, in the two places that I have mentioned, he and the vital spark go out together.

I do not know whether I ought to regard it as a fortunate or unfortunate circ.u.mstance, that the first captain that I sailed with was a "ripper"

for swearing and drinking. He was a professed infidel, a first-rate seaman, an excellent scholar, and took more care of the morals of his crew than many of those who have prayers twice a day; and ten thousand times more of their health, for he would not permit a man to expose himself for two minutes to the sun or rain in Batavia, and in consequence did not lose a man. He watched over my moral and physical health with a degree of zeal and tenderness that I have never, for an instant, experienced since, at the hands of those who call themselves my "friends." Indeed, the severest scolding he ever gave me, and I expected every moment he would knock me down in the street, was for walking, one deliciously cool morning, from Weltwreden to Batavia, a distance of four miles, when I had a carriage and two horses at my disposal.

Peace to his ashes! I have lived to see the grave close in succession over many of the few friends that I ever had. When I wandered about London streets, barefoot and half-naked, in the dead of a hard winter, just discharged from a hospital, and scarcely able to drag one foot after the other, my situation was comparatively enviable. I had no self-styled "friends" at my elbow, to mock me by talking about my "talents!" I knew that if I did not "bear a hand," and ship myself off _somewhere_, I should be taken up on the vagrant act, and sent to Bridewell. Burns says,

"The fear o' death's a hangman's whip, That hauds the wretch in order."

I should be loth to admit that the fear of Bridewell operated as a stimulus upon my mind, for it did not often occur to me; but I longed to enjoy once more

"the glorious privilege Of being independent;"

and he, who is earning an honest livelihood by his own exertions, and can shave with cold water, is, in my estimation, more truly independent than he, whose father has bequeathed him half a million. Reader! you may as well pardon this digression first as last, for it is ten chances to one that you fall in with a whole fleet of them before you have sailed through these pages. If I do not moralize as I go along, I shall not have a chance to do it any where else.

As the afflicted father returned, with melancholy steps and slow, towards his quiet home, he could not forbear feeling an emotion of regret at the thought of having parted with his son in such a manner.

"Had I but placed him," he said to himself, "under the charge of the commander of one of our men-of-war, he would necessarily have been under such strict guardianship and discipline that his unfortunate habits might be entirely broken up; but now I fear that the liberty he will be allowed, or will take, in a merchant's ship, will be his ruin."

His home was more gloomy and sad that evening than it had ever been before; for though satisfied in the main with his own conduct, and hoping that the voyage would have most beneficial effects upon his son's behavior and disposition, he regretted most bitterly the necessity of the measure, and felt the keenest anxiety as to its results. That son was destined never to return.

The ship in which he was embarked was driven much farther to the westward than is usually the case with outward-bound Indiamen, and encountered one of those tremendous gales of wind, known to seamen by the local name of _pamperos_, from their blowing off the immense _pampas_, or plains, that const.i.tute a large portion of the province of Buenos Ayres, or, as it is now called, the Argentine Republic. The ship was dismasted, and with difficulty succeeded in reaching the harbor of Buenos Ayres to refit.

The city of Buenos Ayres was at that time, and I believe it is not much better now, a nest and rendezvous of pirates, that, under the cover of the republican flag, and the a.s.sumed character of men-of-war or privateers, with forged commissions, committed the most barefaced and abominable acts of piracy. The British cruisers, by capturing and hanging a good number of them, struck a most wholesome terror into the rest; but our government, with a fraternal affection for every mean and insignificant patch of barren sand-beach that called itself a republic, more worthy the _sans-culotterie_ of the French revolution, than becoming a great and polished nation, permitted them to sell their prizes and refit in our ports. Buenos Ayres was then a point towards which all the scoundrels, and thieves, and murderers, of Europe and the United States, were radiating as to a common centre.

Here, as might have been expected, Longford found plenty of congenial companions to "whet his almost blunted purpose" of vicious propensity and indulgence. In a drunken quarrel at the gaming-table, knives were drawn, and Longford stabbed his antagonist-to the heart. Murders are so exceedingly common in all the Spanish possessions and settlements in America, that but seldom or never is any inquiry set on foot with regard to them. The only _judicial_ formality consists in laying the dead bodies on their backs, with a plate upon the breast of each to receive the contributions of those who are disposed to a.s.sist in defraying the expenses of burial. But the murdered person, in this case, was a man of considerable consequence in the Buenos Ayrean government, having the charge and management of certain public moneys, and in consequence, the "authorities" thought it worth their while to ask a few questions about his "taking off." Longford was well aware of these facts, and with considerable difficulty and danger made his escape to the other side of the river.