Thirteen Chapters of American History Part 3

V.

MIDNIGHT Ma.s.s ON THE MISSISSIPPI OVER THE BODY OF FERDINAND DE SOTO, 1542.[H]

As simple, gloomy and severe as were the circ.u.mstances surrounding the departure of the expeditions of Lief Erickson and Columbus, and subsequently of Henry Hudson and the Pilgrim Fathers, so brilliant, hopeful and coveted was the journey of Fernando De Soto, when he set sail from Spain in April, 1538, to conquer Florida and in search of a new Eldorado. Having previously returned from the conquest of Peru, as the chief lieutenant of Francisco Pizarro, possessed of great wealth, and through his marriage with the beautiful Isabella Bobadilla affiliated with the highest n.o.bility, and having been appointed Governor of Cuba by Charles V.--the flower of the Spanish and Portuguese aristocracy flocked to his standard. The seven large and three small ships, including his flag-ship, the "San Christoval," in which the expedition set sail, were fitted out with great splendor. De Soto was then forty-two years of age, having been born at Xeres, Spain, in 1496, while his followers were mostly young men, and a more gorgeous or joyous company cannot be imagined. With them went the wife of De Soto and many other beautiful women, and the voyage was one round of pleasure and festivities. After landing and wintering in Cuba he started from there in May, 1539, with a following of one thousand men in nine ships, leaving the administration of Cuba in the hands of his wife and the Lieutenant-Governor. The original splendor was preserved, the leaders being clad in gorgeous armor and, followed by a host of servants and priests, they took with them all manner of live stock, cattle, horses, mules, etc., and were provided with all sorts of weapons and trappings, but also, significantly, with blood-hounds, handcuffs and iron neck-collars. Thus they landed in Florida, in the neighborhood of Tampa Bay, and began their march northward in the month of June, 1539, the cavaliers to the number of one hundred and thirteen on horseback, and the rest on foot. They pa.s.sed the winter near the present Georgia border, and in the spring of 1540 reached the location of the present city of Savannah. Instead of pacifying, they alienated the natives through many acts of hostility, in the exuberance of their youth and prowess, in consequence of which many members of the expedition were killed in battle and others died through sickness and deprivation.

Nevertheless, they pushed on still further westward towards the Rocky Mountains, and in May, 1541, discovered and crossed the Mississippi River near Lower Chickasaw Bluff, a little north of the thirty-fourth parallel of lat.i.tude, in Tunica County, in what is now the State of Mississippi. On again reaching the Mississippi on the return march, De Soto, in consequence of the exposure and hardships to which he had been subjected, sank down with a fever from which he died on May 21, 1542.

Owing to the awe which he had inspired in the minds of the natives it was deemed wise by the remnant of his followers to conceal the fact of his death. Accordingly at the dead of night he was wrapped in a flag, in which sand had been sown, and taken in a boat to the middle of the river, and amid the glare of torches, the chanting by the priests of the midnight ma.s.s, and his sorrowing and silent companions, solemnly consigned to the depths of the great river.

It is this solemn moment which the artist has caught in the painting bearing the above t.i.tle. As in all the other pictures he has, also in this, depicted all the important details of the occasion without descending to such minute particularity that the painting would lose its poetic character. The sad scene recalls vividly to the mind--in contrast with the high hope and magnificent display of the expedition at its start--the futility of human ambition.

The tone of the picture is heightened through the mingling of the pale moonlight with the lurid reflection from the torches, and the coloring altogether is such that it is in perfect harmony with the occasion.

It is unnecessary to dwell upon the subsequent fate of the remnant of the expedition, except, perhaps, to say that the picture itself gains in interest by contemplating that, after wandering through the pathless forests, wading swamps, swimming rivers and fighting Indians all the time, and deprived of their leader, and after four years of hardships from the time that the expedition set out, those who were left made their way to Mexico. In the meantime the beautiful wife of De Soto had died brokenhearted, and never was there, all in all, a more tragic ending to an expedition commenced amid so much pomp and glory and with such sanguine expectations. His longed-for Eldorado was not found, and yet De Soto, not unlike Columbus, gained immortality more surely than if his expectations had been realized; for the Father of Waters, the greatest river in the world, will always be a.s.sociated with his name, and the acquisition of the vast province of Louisiana by Spain led the way for its subsequent transfer to the United States. It was on April 30, 1803, that through the negotiations conducted by James Monroe and Robert Livingston the Province of Louisiana was purchased for the sum of about $15,000,000 from France, which nation had prior thereto acquired it from Spain.

In view of the chapters of history which a contemplation of this picture recalls, it is of particular interest during this year (1904), when through the magnificent Louisiana Purchase Exposition we are celebrating the centennial anniversary of the acquisition by the United States of the vast territory, which before De Soto and his followers the foot of white man had never trod.

HENRY HUDSON ENTERING NEW YORK BAY

(_September 11, 1609_)

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.]

VI.

HENRY HUDSON ENTERING NEW YORK BAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1609.[I]

Previous to his discovery of the Hudson River, Henry Hudson, an Englishman, sometimes erroneously called Hendrick Hudson because the ship in which he sailed was fitted out under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company and the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce, had made three voyages to find a northwest pa.s.sage to China and India. To reach those sh.o.r.es _via_ the Atlantic seems to have been the goal of all the early discoverers, including Columbus and also De Soto, who, before his Florida expedition, had explored the coast of Central America, on the Pacific Ocean, in search of a pa.s.sage through the American continent; and even Hudson sailed up the Hudson River in the expectation that it would lead on to the Pacific Ocean and thus to Asia. Hudson was not the only Englishman who had received encouragement and a.s.sistance from Holland when his own land had failed him, the same as did the Pilgrims soon thereafter, when they sought refuge in that enlightened and enterprising country.

He sailed from Amsterdam on April 6, 1609, in a clumsy, two-masted craft with square sails called the "Half Moon," a Dutch galiot of only ninety tons, with a crew of twenty men, in an extreme northwesterly direction, but being driven back by the ice, skirted along the Atlantic coast, pa.s.sing through Cas...o...b..y, Maine, as far south as Chesapeake Bay, and thence again northward, and entered Raritan Bay, south of Staten Island, on September 11, 1609, into the present harbor of New York, and, on September 14th, sailed up the Hudson River almost as far as Albany.

The return voyage down the Hudson to its mouth, owing to adverse winds, occupied eleven days, and on November 7, 1609, he landed at Dartmouth, England, where, owing to the jealousy of the English Government, the crew was detained and his ship seized, although she had borne the Dutch flag and Hudson had claimed the sovereignty of the soil for that country over that portion of the American continent which he had discovered. It was to all intents and purposes a discovery, as the first definite historic account of the existence of this part of the new world dated from this voyage, of which he kept a careful journal, however probable it may be that, before him, other Europeans had looked upon Manhattan Island and the Hudson River, in view of the many expeditions to America during the long period from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries.

The discovery of Hudson led almost immediately to numerous trading voyages, and thereafter to temporary, and then to regular and permanent colonization, and finally to the foundation of the great City of New York. Also with Hudson, the same as with Columbus and De Soto, is thus linked a discovery far greater in its consequences than if he had succeeded in reaching the goal which he originally set out to find. Like theirs, also his ending was sad and tragic, for on a subsequent northwestern voyage, his mutinous crew cast him, together with his son and seven of his faithful men, adrift amid the ice of Hudson Bay, which bears his name, thus like De Soto perishing in the very waters which he had discovered.

His life is wrapt in mystery; nothing is known of it except during the four years occupied with his voyages (1607 to 1611), and that he was probably the son of Christopher Hudson, one of the factors of the Muscovy Company. There is not even an authentic portrait of him in existence.

The interest of this painting centers in the scene, which it vividly depicts, of the effect upon the natives of this first sight of a ship.

Nothing could be more intense than the expression of mingled fear and defiant surprise portrayed in the face and att.i.tude of the young Indian warrior, that so strange an object should dare to approach his. .h.i.therto undisputed domain of the sh.o.r.e. This interest is heightened through the grouping of the squaw and Indian dog, with the Indian hut or tepee in the background on the edge of the forest, and the rocky sh.o.r.e in the foreground. The ship itself is subordinated to the representation of this idea, being only dimly seen in the distance.

Through this conception, the artist was enabled to present a picture which adds to the variety of the series, and at the same time demonstrates his surpa.s.sing mastery of figure and landscape painting as well.

EMBARKATION OF THE PILGRIMS From Southampton

(_August 5, 1620_)

[Ill.u.s.tration: Copyright, 1898, by Edward Moran.]

VII.

EMBARKATION OF THE PILGRIMS FROM SOUTHAMPTON, AUGUST 5, 1620.[J]

A sadder journey than that of the Pilgrims, both in its inception in leaving home and kindred and fleeing from persecution, and in its ending in the inconceivable hardships which they had to endure in the new world, was probably never undertaken than when, on August 5, 1620, the "Mayflower" sailed out of the harbor of Southampton.

It must have been with heavy hearts and the gloomiest forebodings, and yet buoyed up with the hope of finding a permanent refuge beyond the ocean, for the exercise of that freedom of conscience for which they had previously found only a temporary abode at Leyden, Holland, that the hundred brave men and women, representing twenty-three different families, consigned their lives and fortunes into the hands of the crew of the little one hundred and sixty ton vessel that for almost five long months was to battle with storm and winds across the dreaded Atlantic, until on December 21, 1620, they anch.o.r.ed on the sh.o.r.es of Ma.s.sachusetts, and, with that spirit of loyalty, still, to the land from which they had fled, named the spot where they first landed, Plymouth Rock, to which they had been driven in the stress and storm, instead of reaching the Virginia colony, for which they had set sail.

What that departure of the Pilgrims from England meant to those left behind on the sh.o.r.e at Southampton can hardly be conceived by those who, in our day, at some magnificent steamship pier, amid the strains of music and a shower of flowers, now and anon wave a farewell to their friends, perhaps bound on a pleasure tour in some leviathan of the ocean, of twenty thousand or more tons burden, and fitted up in more regal splendor than the most gorgeous palaces of the age of the Pilgrims.

It is to the sadness of this departure that the artist, in this canvas, has undertaken to give expression in the mournful group of friends on the sh.o.r.e, waving a final farewell and wistfully gazing at the "Mayflower," lying in mid-water and evidently waiting for the last pa.s.sengers to arrive before setting sail on its perilous voyage into the mysterious darkness of the approaching night. There is a mellow gray light of evening diffused throughout this painting which is almost indescribable, with the moon casting its rays across the water, so perfectly is it in harmony with the thread of the whole story which is suggested by this inimitable picture.

I can think of no more fitting words to accompany this canvas than those of Edward Everett, in his oration at Plymouth, on December 22, 1824, on "The Emigration of the Pilgrim Fathers":

"Methinks I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the 'Mayflower' of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future State, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pa.s.s, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for sh.o.r.e. I see them now scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route; and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy waves. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight against the staggered vessel.

I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after five months'

pa.s.sage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth,--weak and weary from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their shipmaster for a draft of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on sh.o.r.e, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes."

What an extraordinary coincidence it is that a Dutch slaver, laden with slaves for Virginia, should be on the ocean at the same time with the "Mayflower," in whose cabin was written the first charter of independence, the first American const.i.tution, in the words following:

"In the name of G.o.d, Amen. We whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord, King James, by the grace of G.o.d, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, etc., having undertaken, for the glory of G.o.d, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually in the presence of G.o.d, and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, const.i.tute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, const.i.tutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."

What but a reflection of these words is the memorable preamble to the Const.i.tution of the United States, framed by the convention of 1787:

"We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain this Const.i.tution for the United States of America."

What a debt of grat.i.tude we owe to the leaders of that expedition, Carver, Winslow, Bradford and Standish, who thus planted this colony in the United States, practically the first after that in Virginia--but also to the great artist who fortunately came from the sh.o.r.es of the same England to immortalize, through this beautiful picture, the first scene in the drama whose culmination is the establishment of the greatest republic that the world has ever seen!

"There were men with h.o.a.ry hair Amidst that pilgrim-band: Why had they come to wither there, Away from their childhood's land?

"There was woman's fearless eye, Lit by her deep love's truth; There was manhood's brow serenely high, And the fiery heart of youth.

"What sought they thus afar?

Bright jewels of the mine?

The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?-- They sought a faith's pure shrine!