Days of the Discoverers Part 28

Once they knew Crecy, Hastings, Drogheda, Moscow, a.s.saye, Khartoum or Glencoe,-- Now the old hatreds are tinder for campfires.

England has only her world to show!

They are not dreamers, these men of the Empire, Guarding their land in the old-time way, And this is the style that prevails in the Legions,-- "The foe of the past is a friend to-day."

_"It's a long, long road to the Empire (From Beersheba even to Dan) And the time is rather late for a chronic Hymn of Hate,-- And we know the tailor doesn't make the man!"_

XIX

ADMIRAL OF NEW ENGLAND

Barefoot and touzle-headed, in the coa.r.s.e russet and blue homespun of an apprentice, a small boy sidled through the wood. Like a hunted hedgehog, he was ready to run or fight. Where a bright brook slid into the meadows, he stopped, and looked through new leaves at the infinite blue of the sky. Words his grandfather used to read to him came back to his mind.

"Let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountain."

The Bible which old Joseph Bradford had left to his grandson had been taken away, but no one could take away the memory of it. If he had dared, Will would have shouted aloud then and there. For all his hunger and weariness and dread of the future the strength of the land entered into his young soul. He drank of the clear brook, and let it wash away the soil of his pilgrimage. Then he curled himself in a hollow full of dry leaves, and went to sleep.

When he woke, it was in the edge of the evening. Long shadows pointed like lances among the trees. A horse was cropping the gra.s.s in a clearing, and some one beyond the thicket was reading aloud. For an instant he thought himself dreaming of the old cottage at Austerfield--but the voice was young and lightsome.

"Where a man can live at all, there can he live n.o.bly."

The reader stopped and laughed out. A lively snarling came from a burrow not far away, where two badgers were quarrelling conscientiously.

"Just like folks ye be, a-hectorin' and a-fussin'. What's the great question to settle now--predestination or infant baptism?--Why, where under the canopy did you come from, you pint o' cider?"

"I be a-travelin'," Will said stoutly.

"Runaway 'prentice, I should guess. I was one myself at fifteen."

"I'm 'leven, goin' on twelve," said the boy, standing as straight as he could.

"Any folks?"

"I lived with granddad until he died, four year back."

"And so you're wayfarin', be you? What can you do to get your bread?"

The urchin dug a bare toe into the sod. "I can work," he said half-defiantly. "Granddad always said I should be put to school some day, but my uncle won't have that. I can read."

"Latin?"

"No--English. Granddad weren't college-bred."

"Nor I--they gave me more lickings than Latin at the grammar school down to Alvord, 'cause I would go bird's-nesting and fishing sooner than study my _hic_, _haec_, _hoc_. And now I've built me a booth like a wild man o' Virginia and come out here to get my Latin that I should ha'

mastered at thirteen. All the travel-books are in Latin, and you have to know it to get on in foreign parts."

"Have you been in foreign parts?"

"Four year--France and Scotland and the Low Countries. But I got enough o' seeing Christians kill one another, and says I to myself, John Smith, you go see what they're about at home. And here I found our fen-sludgers all by the ears over Bishops and Papists and Brownists and such like. In Holland they let a man read's Bible in peace."

"Is that the Bible you got there?"

"Nay--Marcus Aurelius Antoninus--a mighty wise old chap, if he was an Emperor. And I've got Niccolo Macchiavelli's seven books o' the Art o'

War. When I'm weary of one I take to t' other, and between times I ride a tilt." He waved his hand toward a ring fastened on a tree, and a lance and horse-furniture leaning against the trunk.

"Our folks be Separatists," the boy said.

"Well, and what of it?" laughed the young man. "As I was a-reading here--a man is what his thoughts make him. Be he Catholic or Church Protestant or Baptist, he's what he's o' mind to be, good or bad. Other folk's say-so don't stop him--no more than them badgers' worryin' dams the brook."

This was a new idea to Will. His hunger for books was so keen that it had seemed to him that without them, he would be stupid as the swine.

John Smith seemed to understand it, for he added,

"You bide here with me awhile, lad. Maybe there's a way for you to get learning, yet."

Will shared the leafy booth and simple fare of his new friend for a fortnight, doing errands, rubbing down the black horse, Tamlane, and at odd times learning his conjugations. When John Smith left his hermitage and went to fight against the Turks in Transylvania, he placed a little sum of money with a Puritan scholar at Scrooby to pay for the boy's schooling for a year or two. The yeoman uncle had a family of his own to provide for, and was glad to have Will off his hands.

Transylvania in 1600 was on the very frontier of Christendom. John Smith needed all the philosophy he had learned from his favorite author when, after many adventures, he was taken prisoner and sent to the slave-market of Axopolis to be sold. Bogal, a Turkish pacha, bought the young Englishman to send as a gift to his future wife, Charatza Tragabigzanda, in Constantinople.

Chained by the neck in gangs of twenties the slaves entered the great Moslem city. John Smith was left at the gate of a house exactly like all the others in the narrow noisy street. The beauty of an Oriental palace is inside the walls. Within the blank outer wall of stone and mud-brick, arched roofs, painted and gilded within, were upheld by slender round pillars of fine stone--marble, jasper, porphyry, onyx, red syenite, highly polished and sometimes brought from old palaces and temples in other lands. Intricate carving in marble or in fine hard wood adorned the doorways and lattices, and the balconies with their high lattice-work railings where the women could see into a room below without being seen. In the courtyards fountains plashed in marble basins, and from hidden gardens came the breath of innumerable roses. On floors of fine mosaic were silken many-hued rugs, brought in caravans from Bagdad, Moussoul or Ispahan, and the soft patter of bare feet, morocco shoes and light sandals came from the endless vistas of open arches. A silken rustling and once a gurgle of soft laughter might have told the Englishman that he was watched, but he knew no more what it meant than he understood the Arabic mottoes, interwoven with the decoration of the blue-and-gold walls.

Charatza's curiosity was aroused at the sight of a slave so tall, ruddy and handsome. She sent for him to come into an inner room where she and her ladies sat, closely veiled, upon a cushioned divan. Bogal's letter said that the slave was a rich Bohemian n.o.bleman whom he had captured in battle, and whose ransom would buy Charatza splendid jewels. But when spoken to in Bohemian the captive looked perfectly blank. He did not seem to understand one word.

Arabic and Turkish were no more successful. At last the young princess asked a question in Italian and found herself understood. It did not take long for her to find out that the story her lover had written had not a word of truth in it. She was as indignant as a spirited girl would naturally be.

In one way and another she made opportunities to talk with the Englishman and to inquire of others about his career. She presently discovered that he was the champion who had beheaded three Turkish warriors, one after another, before the walls of the besieged city Regall. She made up her mind that when she was old enough to control her own fortune, which would be in the not very distant future, she would set him free and marry him. Such things had been done in Constantinople, and doubtless could be done again.

But meantime Charatza's mother, learning that her daughter had been talking to a slave, was not at all pleased and threatened, since he was no n.o.bleman and would not be ransomed, to sell him in the market.

Charatza was used to having her way sooner or later, and managed to have him sent instead to her brother, a pacha or provincial governor in Tartary. She sent also a letter asking the pacha to be kind to the young English slave and give him a chance of learning Turkish and the principles of the Koran.

This was far from agreeable to a brother who had already heard of his sister's liking for the penniless stranger,--especially as he found that the Englishman had no intention of turning Moslem. The slave-master was told to treat him with the utmost severity, which meant that his life was made almost unbearable. A ring of iron, with a curved iron handle, was locked around his neck, his only garment was a tunic of hair-cloth belted with undressed hide, he was herded with other Christian slaves and a hundred or more Turks and Moors who were condemned criminals, and, as the last comer, had to take the kicks and cuffs of all the others.

The food was coa.r.s.e and unclean, and only extreme hunger made it possible to eat it.

John Smith was not the man to sit down hopelessly under misfortune, and he talked with the other Christians whenever chance offered, about possible plans of escape. None of them saw any hope of getting away, even by joining their efforts. It may be that some of this talk was overheard; at any rate Smith was sent after a while to thresh wheat by himself in a barn two or three miles from the stone castle where the governor lived. The pacha rode up while he was at work and began to abuse him, taunting him with being a Christian outcast who had tried to set himself above his betters by winning the favor of a Turkish lady.

The Englishman flew at him like a wildcat, dragged him off his horse and broke his skull with the club which was used instead of a flail for threshing. Then he dressed himself in the Turk's garments, hid the body under a heap of grain, filled a bag with wheat for all his provision, mounted the horse of his late master, and rode away northward. He knew that Muscovy was in this general direction, and coming to a road marked by a cross, rode that way for sixteen days, hiding whenever he heard any sound of travelers for fear the iron slave-ring should betray him. At last he came to a Russian garrison on the River Don, where he found good friends. In 1604, after some other adventures, he came again to England.

All London was talking of the doings of King James, who in one short year had managed to dissatisfy both Catholics and Protestants. Since the voyages of Gosnold, Pring and Weymouth there was much interest in Virginia. Ralegh was a prisoner in the Tower. There was talk of a trading a.s.sociation to be called the London Company, and it was said that this company planned a new plantation somewhere north of Roanoke.

Smith could see the great future which might await an English settlement in that rich land. He decided to join the adventurers going out in the fleet of Captain Christopher Newport. Before sailing, he went to Lincolnshire to bid farewell to his own people, and in the shadow of the Tower of Saint Botolph's he espied a tall lad whose look recalled something.

"Why," he cried with a hearty clasp of the hand. "'t is thyself grown a man, Will! And how goes the Latin?"

"I love it well," the youth answered shyly. "Master Brewster hath also instructed me in the Greek. If--if I had known where to send it I would have repaid the money you was so kind as to spare."

"Nay, think no more o't--or rather, hand it on to some other young book-worm," laughed the bearded and bronzed captain. "And how be all your folk?"

The lad's eyes rested wistfully upon the quaint old seaport streets.

"The Bishop rails upon our congregation," he said. "Holland is better than a prison, and we shall go there soon."