Plotting in Pirate Seas Part 26

Two of the inhabitants, and two only, escaped; one a negro prisoner, who was not found until three days later, burned half to death in his prison cell; and one, a shoemaker, who, by some strange eddy in the all-killing gas, and who was on the very edge of the track of destruction, fled, though others fell dead on every side of him.

A second eruption, coupled with an earthquake, on May 20, completed the wreckage of the buildings. This outburst was even more violent than the first. There was no loss of life, for no one was left to slay.

Five years later, Sir Frederick Treves visited St. Pierre. "Along the whole stretch of the bay," he writes, "there is not one living figure to be seen, not one sign of human life, not even a poor hut, nor grazing cattle.... A generous growth of jungle has spread over the place in these five years. Rank bushes, and even small trees, make a thicket along some of the less traversed ways.... Over some of the houses luxuriant creepers have spread, while long gra.s.s, ferns and forest flowers have filled up many a court and modest lane."

Twelve years later, a visitor to St. Pierre found a small wooden pier erected. A tiny hotel had been built. Huts were cl.u.s.tering under the ruins. Several parties were at work clearing away the ruins, but slowly, for the government of the colony would not a.s.sist in the work, believing that the region was unsafe. At the time of this visit, Mont Pelee was still smoking.

This was the ruined city which Stuart was going to see. On board the steamer were the two or three books which tell the story of the great eruption, and the boy filled his brain full of the terrible story that he might better feel the great adventure that the next day should bring him.

The steamer reached Fort-de-France in the evening, and the boy found the town, though ill-lighted, gay. A band was playing in the Plaza, not far from the landing place and most of the shops were still open. Morning showed an even brighter Fort-de-France, for, though when St. Pierre was in its glory, Fort-de-France was the lesser town, the capital now is the center of the commercial prosperity of the island. For this, however, Stuart had little regard. Sunrise found him on the little steamer which leaves daily for St. Pierre.

The journey was not long, three hours along a coast of steep cliffs with verdant mountains above. Small fishing hamlets, half-hidden behind coco-nut palms, appeared in every cove. The steamer pa.s.sed Carbet, that town on the edge of the great eruptive flood, which had its own death-list, and they turned the point of land into the harbor of St.

Pierre.

Before the boy's eyes rose the Mountain of Destruction, sullen, twisted, wrinkled and still menacing, not all silent yet. The hills around were green, and verdure spread over the country once deep in volcanic ash.

But Mont Pelee was brown and bald still.

Nineteen years had pa.s.sed since the eruption, but St. Pierre had not recovered. At first sight, from the sea, the town gave a slight impression of being rebuilt. But this was only the strange combination of old ruins and modern fishing huts. The handsome stone wharves still stood, but no vessels lay beside them.

The little steamer slowed and tied up at a tiny wooden pier. A statue, symbolical of St. Pierre in her agony, had been erected on the end of the pier. The boy landed, and walked slowly along the frail wooden structure, to take in the scene as it presented itself to him.

Alas, for St. Pierre! As Lafcadio Hearn described it--"the quaint, whimsical, wonderfully colored little town, the sweetest, queerest, darlingest little city in the Antilles.... Walls are lemon color, quaint balconies and lattices are green. Palm trees rise from courts and gardens into the warm blue sky, indescribably blue, that appears almost to touch the feathery heads of them. And all things within and without the yellow vista are steeped in a sunshine electrically white, in a radiance so powerful that it lends even to the pavement of basalt the glitter of silver ore.

"Everywhere rushes mountain water--cool and crystal--clear, washing the streets; from time to time you come to some public fountain flinging a silvery column to the sun.... And often you will note, in the course of a walk, little drinking fountains contrived in the angle of a building, or in the thick walls bordering the bulwarks or enclosing public squares; glittering threads of water spurting through lion-lips of stone."

Alas for St. Pierre!

Above the pier but one street had been partly restored, and, at every gap, the boy's gaze encountered gray ruins. The ash, poured out by the mountain in its vast upheaval, has made a rich soil. To Stuart's eyes, the town was a town of dreams, of great stone staircases that led to nowhere, of high archways that gave upon a waste. The entrance hall of the great Cathedral, once one of the finest in the West Indies, still leads to the high altar, but that finds its home in a little wooden structure with a tin roof, shrinking in what was once a corner of the apse.

Built as a lean-to in the corner of what had once been a small, but strongly-built house was a store, a very small store, outside the door of which a crippled negro was sitting. Thinking that this might be one of the old-timers of St. Pierre, Stuart stopped and bought a small trinket, partly as a memento, partly as a means of getting into conversation.

"But yes, Monsieur," answered the storekeeper, "it was my wife and I--we escaped. My wife, she had been sent into Morne Rouge, that very morning, with a message from her mistress. Me, I was working on the road, not more than a mile away. I saw nothing of it, Monsieur. About half-past seven that morning (twenty-two minutes, therefore, before the final eruption) a shower of stones fell where I was working. One fell on my back, and left me crippled, as you see. But my four children, ah!

Monsieur, they sleep here, somewhere!"

He waved his hand toward the riot of ruin and foliage which now marks the city which once prided itself on being called "the gayest little city in the West Indies."

"Yet you have come back!" exclaimed Stuart.

"But yes, Monsieur, what would you? It pleased G.o.d that I should be born here, that my children should be taken away from me here; and, maybe, that I should die here, too."

"You are not afraid that Mont Pelee will begin again?"

The negro shrugged his shoulders.

"It is my home, Monsieur," he said simply. "Better a home which is sad than the place of a stranger which is gay. But we hope, Monsieur, that some day the government of Martinique will accept a parole of good conduct from the Great Eater of Lives"--he pointed to Mont Pelee--"and give us back our town again."

Next morning, studying the life of the little town, Stuart found that many others shared the view of the crippled negro. The little market-place on the Place Bertin, though lacking any shelter from pouring rain or blazing sun, was crowded with three or four hundred market women. Daily the little steamer takes a cargo from St. Pierre, for the ash from the volcano has enriched the soil, and the planters are growing wealthy. There are many more little houses and thatched huts tucked into corners of the ruins than appear at first sight, and a hotel has been built for the tourists who visit the strange spot.

The crater in Mont Pelee is silent now; the great vent which hurled white-hot rocks, incandescent dust and mephitic gases, is now covered with a thick green shrubbery, only here and there do small smoke-holes emit a light sulphurous vapor; but the great mountain, treeless, wrinkled, implacable, seemed to Stuart to throw a solemn shadow of threat upon the town. The secret of St. Pierre, as Stuart wrote to his paper, "lies in the hope of its inhabitants, but its real future lies in the parole of good conduct from the Great Eater of Human Lives, Mont Pelee."

CHAPTER XII

A CORSAIR'S DEATH

There is not a corner of the world which is more full of historic memories than is the West Indies. Dominica, the next island which Stuart pa.s.sed after he had left Martinique, besides being one of the scenic glories of the world, described as "a tabernacle for the sun, a shrine of a thousand spires, rising tier above tier, in one exquisite fabric of green, purple and grey," has many claims to fame. Here, the cannibal Caribs were so fierce that for 255 years they defied the successive fleets of Spaniards, French and English who tried to take possession of the island. Some three hundred Caribs still dwell upon the island upon a reservation provided by the government. The warriors no longer make war, and fish has taken the place of the flesh of their enemies as a staple diet.

Under the cliffs of Dominica is a memory of the Civil War, for there the Confederate vessel _Alabama_ finally escaped the Federal man-of-war _Iroquois_. A few miles further north, between Dominica and Guadeloupe, in The Saints Pa.s.sage, was fought, in 1782, the great sea-battle between Rodney and De Gra.s.se, which ended in the decisive victory of the English over the French and gave Britain the mastery of the Caribbean Sea. It ranks as one of the great historic sea-fights of the world.

The next island on the direct line to the north, St. Kitts, is not dest.i.tute of fame. As Cecil had told Stuart, St. Kitts or St.

Christopher was first a home for buccaneers, and later one of the keys to the military occupation of the West Indies. Its neighbor, St. Nevis, together with other claims to romance, has a special interest to the United States in that Alexander Hamilton--perhaps one of the greatest of American statesmen--was born there.

Near St. Kitts lies Antigua, where the _Most Blessed Trinity_--despite her name, one of the most famous pirate craft afloat--settled after her b.l.o.o.d.y cruises. Its captain was Bartholomew Sharp, described as "an acrid-looking villain whose scarred face had been tanned to the color of old brandy, whose s.h.a.ggy brows were black with gunpowder, and whose long hair, half singed off in a recent fight, was tied up in a nun's wimple.

He was dressed in the long embroidered coat of a Spanish grandee, and, as there was a bullet hole in the back of the garment, it may be surmised that the previous owner had come to a violent end. His hose of white silk were as dirty as the deck, his shoe buckles were of dull silver."

Sharp, with 330 buccaneers, had left the West Indies in April, 1760.

They landed on the mainland, and, crossing the isthmus, made for Panama. Having secured canoes, they attacked the Spanish fleet lying at Perico, an island off Panama City, and, after one of the most desperate fights recorded in the annals of piracy, they took all the ships, including the _Most Blessed Trinity_. Then followed a long record of successful piracy, of battle, murder and sudden death, of mutiny and slaughter grim and great. Sharp, who, with all his crimes, was as good a navigator as he was reckless a fighter, sailed the _Most Blessed Trinity_ with his crew of desperadoes the whole length of South America, rounded the Horn and, after eighteen months of adventure, peril and hardship, reached the West Indies again.

"The log of the voyage," writes Treves, "affords lurid reading. It records how they landed and took towns, how they filled the little market squares with corpses, how they pillaged the churches, ransacked the houses and then committed the trembling places to the flames.

"It tells how they tortured frenzied men until, in their agony, they told of hiding places where gold was buried; how they spent an unholy Christmas at Juan Fernandez; how, in a little island cove, they fished with a greasy lead for golden pieces which Drake is believed to have thrown overboard for want of carrying room. It gives account of a cargo of sugar and wine, of tallow and hides, of bars of silver and pieces of eight, of altar chalices and ladies' trinkets, of scented laces, and of rings torn from the clenched and still warm fingers of the dead.

"The 'valiant commander' had lost many of his company on the dangerous voyage. Some had died in battle; others had mumbled out their lives in the delirium of fever, sunstroke or drink; certain poor souls, with racked joints and bleeding backs, were crouching in Spanish prisons; one had been marooned on a desert island in the Southern Pacific Ocean." At the last, Sharp turned over the ship to the remainder of his crew and set sail, rich and respected (!) for England.

On the way from St. Kitts to St. Thomas, Stuart pa.s.sed the two strange islands of St. Eustatius and Saba, remnants of the once great Dutch power in the West Indies. Statia, as the first island is generally called, is a decadent spot, its commerce fallen to nothing, the warehouses along the sea-front of its only town, in ruins. Yet once, strange as it may seem, for a few brief months, Statia became the scene of a wild commercial orgy, and the place where once was held "the most stupendous auction in the history of the universe."

It happened thus: When the American Revolulutionary War broke out, England being already at war with France, commercial affairs in the West Indies became complicated by the fact that the Spanish, the French and the English, all enacted trading restrictions so stringent that practically every port in the West Indies was closed. The Dutch, seizing the opportunity, made Statia a free port. Immediately, the whole of French, English, Spanish, Dutch and American trade was thrown upon the tiny beach of Fort Oranje.

More than that, Statia became the center for contraband of war. All the other islands took advantage of this. Statia became a huge a.r.s.enal.

American privateers and blockade-runners were convoyed by Dutch men-of-war, which, of course, could not be attacked. Smugglers were amply provided with Dutch papers. Goods poured in from Europe every day in the week. Rich owners of neighboring islands, not knowing how the French-English strife might turn out, sent their valuables to Statia for safe keeping. The little island became a treasure-house.

At times more than a hundred merchant vessels could be seen swinging to their anchors in the roadstead. A mushroom town appeared as by magic.

Warehouses rose by scores. The beach was hidden by piles of boxes, bags and bales for which no storeroom could be found. Merchants came from all ports, especially the Jews and Levantines, who, since the beginning of time, have been the trade-rovers of the sea. Neither by day nor by night did the Babel of commerce cease. Unlike other West Indian towns, where such a condition led to gaiety and pleasure, Fort Oranje retained its Dutch character. It was a hysteria, but a hysteria of buying and selling alone.

Then, one fine day, February 3, 1781, Rodney came down with a British fleet and captured Fort Oranje and all that it contained. There were political complications involved, but Rodney bothered little about that.

Fort Oranje was a menace to British power. Rodney took it without remorse, appropriated the more than $20,000,000 worth of goods lying on the beach and the warehouses, and the 150 merchantmen, which, on that day, were lying in the bay. Jews and Levantines were stripped to the skin and sent packing. The Dutch surrendered and took their medicine phlegmatically. The French, as open enemies, were allowed to depart with courtesy.

Then came the great auction. Without reserve, without remorse, over $20,000,000 worth of goods were put up for what they would fetch. Boxes, crates, bales and bags melted away like snow before the sun. Warehouses bursting with goods became but empty sh.e.l.ls. Traders' booths were abandoned, one by one. Just for a few months the commercial debauch lasted, then Rodney sailed away. Since then, the selling on the beach of Statia has been confined to a little sugar and a few yams.

For the United States, the little fort above Fort Oranje has a historic memory. From the old cannon, still in position on that fort, was fired the first foreign salute to the Stars and Stripes, the first salute which recognized the United States as a sovereign nation.

It was on the 16th of November, 1776, that the brig _Andrea Doria_, fourteen guns, third of the infant American navy of five vessels, under the command of Josiah Robinson, sailed into the open roadstead of St.

Eustatius, and dropped anchor almost under the guns of Fort Oranje.

"She could have chosen no more fitting name," writes Fenger, "than that of the famous townsman of Columbus.... The _Andrea Doria_ may have attracted but little attention as she appeared in the offing ... but, with the quick eyes of seafarers, the guests of Howard's Tavern had probably left their rum for a moment to have their first glimpse of a strange flag which they all knew must be that of the new republic.