The Story of Isaac Brock Part 2

That the action had been a hot one can be best judged by the official returns. Out of 391 rank and file of the 49th in the field, there were 110 casualties--30 killed, 50 wounded and 30 missing. Savery Brock shared the honours with his brother. Oblivious to a hurricane of bullets, he rode from sand-hill to sand-hill, encouraging the men until his truancy was noticed and he was halted by Isaac. "By the Lord Harry, Master Savery," shouted the colonel, loud as he could pitch his powerful voice, as the big paymaster strode by, his horse having been shot under him, "did I not order you, unless you remained with the General, to stay with your iron chest? Go back, sir, immediately." To which Savery answered, playfully, "Mind your regiment, Master Isaac. You surely would not have me quit the field now." Of this intrepid brother Isaac wrote, "Nothing could surpa.s.s Savery's activity and gallantry." Another of the wounded at Egmont was Lord Aylmer, afterwards Governor-General of British North America. The loss of the enemy was estimated at 4,000. Two weeks later the British troops--while suffering intensely from severe weather--met with a reverse in the field, to which, through a misunderstanding of orders, their Russian allies contributed. The Duke of York was ordered to evacuate the country. The campaign had resulted in much experience and high honour for Brock. Quick to perceive and learn, his powers of observation on the field had enriched his mind with lessons in the tactics of war never to be forgotten.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF COLONEL JAMES FITZGIBBON]

In the ranks of the 49th was a young Irishman of superior talents. Brock was not slow to discover his abilities, and "with a discrimination that honoured both," he later appointed this combative private sergeant-major. Still later he procured him an ensigncy in the 49th, finally appointing him adjutant, promotion that the ability and gallantry of James FitzGibbon, a Canadian veteran of 1812, and the "hero of Beaver Dams" (Adjutant-General of Canada, 1837, and Military Knight of Windsor, 1851), amply justified.

If Brock was quick to appreciate merit, he was no less so in detecting defects. The Russian soldiers came in for scathing criticism. The type at Egmont impressed him most unfavourably. The clumsy Russian foot-soldier was his special aversion. The accuracy of his criticism has been confirmed by military writers, but this book is not for the purpose of weighing the quality of Russian valour in Holland. Six thousand of these Russian allies, the lateness of the season preventing their return home, were later quartered for six months in Guernsey.

While our hero was a severe military critic, he was never an unjust one, neither did he spare his own men. Though not a martinet, which was foreign to every fibre of his nature, he was a stickler for rigid discipline. When the expedition was recalled, he was first quartered in Norwich, and then at the old familiar barracks of St. Helier, in Jersey.

On his return to the latter place, in 1800, after leave of absence, he found that the junior lieutenant-colonel of the 49th--Colonel Sheaffe--had incurred the reasonable dislike of the men. The regiment was drawn up on the sands for morning parade, standing at ease. In company with this unpopular officer Brock appeared upon the scene. He was greeted with three hearty cheers. The personal honour, however, was lost sight of in the act of disobedience. Rebuking the men severely for "their most unmilitary conduct," they were marched to quarters and confined to barracks for a week. He would not, he explained, allow public exaltation of himself at the expense of another.

The next year found our hero in the Baltic Sea, aboard the _Ganges_, detailed for active duty as second in command of the land forces that under Lord Nelson were ordered to the attack on Copenhagen. It was intended that Brock, with the 49th, should lead in storming the Trekroner (Three Crown) battery, in conjunction with five hundred seamen; but the heroic defence by the Danes rendered the attempt impracticable, and Brock remained on the _Ganges_, an unwilling spectator of bloodshed in which he took no part. Towards the close of the engagement--the heaviest pounding match in history--he was on the _Elephant_, Nelson's flagship, and saw the hero of Trafalgar write his celebrated letter to the Crown Prince of Denmark.

As at Egmont, the irrepressible conduct of Savery Brock on the _Ganges_ gave our hero much concern. Savery, as a former midshipman, was of course a gunner. While training a quarter-deck gun on the Trekroner battery his hat was blown from his head and he was knocked down by the rush of wind from a grapeshot. Seeing this, Brock exclaimed, "Ah, poor Savery! He is indeed dead." But, to use his own words, it was only "the hot air from the projectile that had 'floored' him." Previous to this he had driven Isaac almost demented by stating his intention of joining the storming party and sharing his brother's danger. "Is it not enough that one brother should be killed or drowned?" said Isaac. But Savery persisted until, at Isaac's request, the commander of the _Ganges_ kept the paymaster quiet by stratagem. "Master Savery," said he, "you simply _must_ remain with us. I appoint you captain of the gun. It will amuse you."

The loss of the Danes at Copenhagen was placed at 6,000, including prisoners. The British killed and wounded numbered 943, more than fell at the Battle of the Nile. Part of this loss is charged to a criminal misconception of military etiquette. To a line officer who asked where his men should be stationed, the captain of the battleship replied, that as soldiers were no good with big guns, and as the forts were out of musket range, he should "send them between decks." This, said the infantryman, "would be eternal disgrace." In deference to this brutal conception of military ethics, the men were drawn up on the gangway and, standing at attention, were allowed to be mowed down by Danish grapeshot. The 49th, on its return to England from Copenhagen, thoroughly initiated in the cruel cult of war, was ordered to Colchester.

Isaac Brock, with the bay-leaves of distinction on his brow, and his heart touched but not dismayed at the ferocity of war, had pa.s.sed the _second_ milestone of his life.

CHAPTER V.

BROCK IN CANADA.

Isaac Brock received with regret his orders to proceed with the 49th to Canada. Europe was still in the clutches of war. Great opportunities awaited the soldier of fortune in the struggle waging in the Peninsula.

The prospect for military advancement in Canada was not encouraging.

America was at peace. Canada was but slowly developing. While her exports of lumber and fish attracted the attention of the British merchant, her great resources were unknown except to the fur trader and the few United States speculators whose cupidity kept pace with their knowledge. Though the known sympathy of the United States for France was regarded as a possible excuse for hostility towards England, as yet this sympathy had found no official utterance, hence the outlook from a soldier's standpoint was far from desirable. Brock's life in the West Indies had created a distaste for garrison duty. While a past master in the details of barrack life, his career under arms had created an aversion for the grind of drill and parade.

Life in the high lat.i.tudes of Canada would present a clean-cut contrast to tropical Barbadoes, but it was out of harmony with his ambition, and, judging by his spirits, he might have been embarking for penal servitude at Botany Bay rather than for the land which was to bring him lasting fame. Even the attentions of the devoted Dobson, who had just filled his pipe, did not serve to arouse him. Brock's depression was short-lived. His optimism and faith banished gloomy thoughts. The ship had hardly dropped the last headland of the Irish coast when the winds bred in Labrador awoke the Viking strain in him and filled his soul with hope. The swinging seas of this northern ocean revived thoughts of the long-ago exploits of Sebastian Cabot, the discoverer of Newfoundland, and of his own sea-dog ancestors, those rough-riders of the sea who had defied the banks of Sable Island and returned to St. Peter's Port with their rich cargoes of contraband, looking innocent as kittens, while the ship was bursting with fur, fin and feather. So, pipe in mouth, with the frigate close-hauled, watching her bows splintering the sea into a million jewels, he left care behind, and thenceforward his busy brain was forming plans that would soften his exile in that land of chilling promise he was approaching.

He had been told to expect magnificent scenery, but was quite unprepared for the picture that the Gulf of St. Lawrence unfolded. The Straits of Belle Isle, the Magdalen Islands, the brazen bosom of the Bay of Chaleur that had allured Jacques Cartier 265 years before, the might of the n.o.ble river and the glorious vista of the citadel and frowning heights of Quebec, where Wolfe and Montcalm fell--the ancient Stadacona framed in the sunset--amazed him. A presage of coming conflict crowded his brain.

"Manfully tell me the truth."

Carr, an educated soldier of the 49th, was hesitating. Desertions had been frequent at Quebec, and discipline _must_ be restored. Stepping up, with hand clenched, the officer continued, "Don't lie! Tell the truth like a man. You know I have ever treated you kindly." The confession of intended desertion followed. "Go, then," said Colonel Brock,--"go and tell your deluded comrades everything that has pa.s.sed here, and also that I will still treat every man of you with kindness, and then you may desert me if you please."

During the three years of his command at Montreal, York, Fort George and Quebec, though mutiny was epidemic in both Europe and America, Brock had lost but one man by desertion. He had won the loyalty of the rank and file. FitzGibbon said of him that "he created by his judicious praise the never-failing interest of the men in the ranks." His accurate knowledge of human nature served him in the graver experiences of life which followed. His stay in Quebec was short. A study of the ancient citadel and its incomplete fortifications occupied his time. In the summer of 1803 he was stationed at York, a hamlet carved out of the backwoods, sustaining a handful of people, but famous as the gathering-place of many wise men. He found that desertions in Upper Canada had become too frequent. The temptations offered by a long line of frontier easy of access, and the desperate discipline in the army, had led to much brutality in the way of punishments.

Such were the conditions in Upper Canada when Brock reached York.

Shortly after his arrival six men, influenced by an artificer, stole a military batteau and started across the lake to Niagara. By midnight Brock, with his trusty sergeant-major and the ever-watchful Dobson, in another batteau with twelve men, pa.s.sed out of the western gap in hot pursuit of the defaulters. Though the night was calm the trip was perilous. Before them stretched a waste of water, but our hero was in his element. He was living over again his daring visits to the Casquets through the furious seas that raced between St. Sampson and the Isle of Herm.

The crew was divided into "watches," six taking an hour's "breather"

while the other six rowed, hour and hour about, alternately rowing and resting. When the wind served they hoisted their big square sail, our hero at the tiller. On this occasion there was little wind, and "Master Isaac," for example's sake, and "to keep my biceps and fore-arm in good condition"--as he told the sergeant-major--took his regular spells at the oar. On arriving at Fort George, Colonel Hunter, Governor and Commandant, rebuked him for rashly venturing across the lake in an open boat, "a risk," he said, "never before undertaken."[1] The expedition, however, was successful, for the deserters were surprised on the American sh.o.r.e and made prisoners.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Lake Ontario was crossed from Toronto to the wharf at the mouth of the Niagara River in an ordinary double-scull, lap-strake pleasure-skiff, by the writer and another Argonaut--Herbert Bartlett--one unruly morning in the summer of 1872. Though a risky row, and not previously attempted, it was not regarded as a remarkable feat by the performers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VIEW OF QUEENSTON ROAD, ABOUT 1824]

CHAPTER VI.

BRIDLE-ROAD, BATTEAU AND CANOE.

The means for transit through Canada at this time was most primitive, and not the least of the questions which occupied Brock's thoughts was the important one of transportation. The lack of facilities for moving large bodies of men and supplies, in event of war, was as apparent as was the lack of vessels of force on lake and river.

Between Quebec and Montreal, a distance of sixty leagues, the overland journey was divided into twenty-four stages, requiring four relays of horse-caleches in summer and horse-carioles in winter. The time occupied was three days, and the rate for travellers twenty-five cents a league.

This rough road--which entailed numerous ferries in summer at the Ottawa and at Lake St. Francis, except for a break of fifty miles--led by Cornwall and Prescott to Kingston, along which route United Empire Loyalists twenty years before had established themselves.

A few years prior to Brock's arrival, Governor Simcoe, with the men of the Queen's Rangers, had cut a roadway through the dense forest between Prescott and Burlington, at the head of Lake Ontario. From Ancaster, the then western limit of the U.E. Loyalists' settlement, this road traversed the picturesque region that surrounded the Mohawk village on the Grand River, where Joseph Brant, the famous warrior, was encamped with his Six Nation Indians. From this point it penetrated the rolling lands of the western peninsula, to the La Trenche (the Thames River), from whence Lake St. Clair and the Detroit outlet to the great lakes was reached by water. Another military road, also built by Simcoe, followed the old Indian trail through thirty-three miles of forest from York to Lake Simcoe. This shorter route to Lake Superior enabled the North-West Fur Company--established by Frobisher and McTavish, of Montreal, in 1776--to avoid canoeing up the Ottawa and its tortuous tributaries. The batteaux were brought up the St. Lawrence, breaking bulk at certain "carrying places," then under sail up Lake Ontario to York. From here the cargoes were hauled by horses over Yonge's military road to Lake Simcoe, thence by river and stormy Lake Huron to Fort Michilimackinac, Great Turtle Island--the Mackinaw of to-day--at the head of Lake Michigan. By this route fifty dollars was saved on every ton of freight from Ottawa to the middle north. At Mackinaw the goods were reshipped by bark canoe to the still remoter regions in the further West, where Spanish pedlars on the southern tributaries of the lower Mississippi traded with the Akamsea Indians in British goods distributed from Mackinaw.

The records of these trips through a wilderness of forest and stream, with their exhilarating hardships, had a singular fascination for Isaac Brock. It was not long before he had won, with his conquering ways and robust manhood, the allegiance of the big-hearted fur-traders in Montreal. Their wild legends of the great fur country rang in his ears, and his receptive mind was soon stored with the exploits of Radisson and Groseillers, Joliette, Marquette, and other famous pathfinders, with whose exploits a century and a half before, aided by his fluency in French, he became wonderfully familiar.

He found the evolution of the Canadian highway a subject of absorbing interest. From his Caughnawaga guides he learned how the tracks made by lynx and beaver, rabbit and wolverine, wolf and red deer--invariably the safest and firmest ways--were in turn naturally followed by Indian voyageur and fur-trader, until the blazed trail became the bridle-road for the pack-horse of the pioneer. This, as the white settler drifted in, became the winter-road; then, as civilization stifled the call of the wild, there uprose from swamp and muskeg the crude corduroy, expanding by degrees into the half-graded highway, until the turnpike and toll-bar, with its despotic keeper, exacted its tribute from progress. This was the prelude to a still more amazing transformation, for the day soon came, though not in our hero's time, when the drumming of the partridge was silenced by the choo-choo of the locomotive as it shrieked through forest and beaver-meadow on its way to vaster tracks, further and further west, disclosing and leaving in its trail an empire of undreamed-of fertility. Then the redman, disturbed in his solitudes, was confronted with civilization, and had to accept the terms of conquest or seek another sanctuary in the greater wilderness beyond.

The navigation of the lakes and rivers at this time was limited to three types of vessel, the "snow," a three-master with a try-sail abaft the mainmast, the schooner, the batteau and the birch canoe, and, in closely land-locked waters, the horse ferry. The Durham boat, a batteau on a larger scale with false keel, had yet to be introduced. The bark canoe, which for certain purposes has never been improved upon--not even excepting the cedar-built canoe--varied in size from nine to thirty feet, or, in the language of the voyageur, from one and a half to five fathoms. These canoes had capacity for a crew of from one to thirty men, or a cargo of seventy "pieces" of ninety pounds each, equal to three tons, exclusive of provisions for nine paddlers. In these arks of safety, manned by Indians or _metis_ (half-breeds), the fur-trader would leave Lachine, on the St. Lawrence, ascend the Ottawa, descend the French, cross Lake Huron--the Lake Orleans of Nicollet and Hennepin--and find no rest from drench or riffle until he reached Mackinaw, or more distant Fort Dearborn (now Chicago), on the Skunk River, at the head of Lake Michigan, 1,450 miles by water from Quebec.

The batteaux--great, open, flat-bottomed boats, forty feet long and eight feet beam, pointed at stem and stern--were not unlike the York boats used in Lord Wolseley's Red River expedition in 1870, and would carry five tons of cargo. Rigged with a movable mast stepped almost amid-ships, and a big lug-sail, these greyhounds of the lakes were, for pa.s.sengers in our hero's time, often the only means of water transport between Quebec and Little York. As important factors in the transport of soldiers and munitions in the war of 1812, they deserve description.

While sailing well when before the wind, they yet, with their defective rig and keelless bottoms, carrying no weather helm, made little headway with the wind close abeam. On one occasion Isaac Brock left Lachine with a brigade of five batteaux, so that all hands could unite in making the portages. At the Cascades, the Milles Roches and the Cedars, three-quarters of the cargo had to be portaged by the packmen. At times these lightened boats were poled or tracked through the broken water, towed by the men, from such foothold as the rocky banks afforded, by means of a long lariat tied to the boat's bow, with loops over each trackman's shoulder, one man steering with a long sweep. When this treadmill work was impossible, owing to too steep banks, and where no batteau locks existed, the crew hauled the boats across the portage on a skidway of small rolling logs, and, so journeying, Prescott was reached.

Here, the wind being favourable, lug-sails were hoisted and Brock's strange fleet started for Kingston, reaching it after twelve days' toil from Lachine, then coasting further along Lake Ontario to Little York (Toronto). When wind failed, the long oars were used, the men rising from the thwarts to pull, standing. Thus, alternately sitting and rising, pulling in unison, the light-hearted voyageurs would break into one of their wild French chants, quaint with catching refrain, in which our hero soon learned to join.

At Prescott Brock sometimes took the Government schooner, paying two guineas for a trip, which might last a week, or caught one of the small "two-stickers" that carried freight between Kingston and Queenston. If much pressed for time, the batteau would be exchanged for a caleche--the stage-coach was as yet only a dream--and he would resign himself to a rude jolting over the colonization road through the forest that flanked the rugged northern sh.o.r.e of Lake Ontario.

These trips were a never-failing source of surprise and profit. The skill of the canoemen, the strength and endurance of the packmen, excited his admiration. What wonderful raw material! Given drill and discipline, what might not be achieved on the frontier with such craftsmen! The muscles, all whipcord, of these rugged Canadians, part _coureur de bois_, part scout, amazed him. One thing was not so evident as he could have wished. Their love seemed to be more for race and language, home and wilderness, than for King and country. Perhaps, as he said, if the safety of their homes were threatened, they would develop patriotism of the highest type.

But, after all, as to kings, "Who," they naively asked him, "was their king? Surely they must be under two flags and two kings. Napoleon or George? _Que voulez vous?_"

As their hearts seemed to be as stout as their limbs, they would, he reflected, be unconquerable, these careless children of waste places.

While Brock thus communed, he watched. There was little to choose between them--Narcisse, Baptiste, Louis, Jacques, Pierre--all strong as buffalo, all agile as catamounts.

They would lift the "pieces" from the dripping canoe and land them on the slippery rock. A minute later and Narcisse perhaps would appear, a bit bent, to keep balanced a bag of flour, a chest of tea, a caddy of tobacco and sundry packages of sugar or shot that made up the load resting on his shoulders where body and nape of neck joined. This load was supported and held together by a broad moose-hide band--a tump-line--strapped across his forehead, his upraised hands grasping the narrowing moose-hide stretched on either side of his lowered head, between ear and shoulder. Brock would watch these packmen as, thus handicapped with a load weighing from two to five hundred pounds, they set out across the rough portage, singing, and at a dog trot, following each other in quick succession. There was rivalry, of course, duly encouraged by Brock with a promise of tobacco to the first man in, but it was all good-natured compet.i.tion, the last man chanting his laughing canzonet as loudly as the first.

Our hero, with his grand physique and cleverness, was not long in mastering the tricks of the carriers. He soon learned to build up a load and adjust a tump-line, after which practice made the carrying of a pack almost twice his own weight a not extraordinary performance.

These trips afforded Brock an opportunity to study Indian character. He learned much from the packman and voyageur that was destined to be of great value to him in his career on the western frontier, among the outposts of civilization.

Little escaped his notice. His faculties were sharpened by contact with these children of the wilds, whose only cla.s.s-room was the forest, their only teacher, nature. As the crushed blade or broken twig were of deepest import to the Indian scout, so no incident of his life was now too trivial for Brock to dismiss as of no importance.