Читать книгу The Book of Gallant Vagabonds - Henry Beston - Страница 8

Now came difficulties and explanations, and John cut the knot by going to sea. Four years later, at the end of a voyage, a young American seaman walks the narrow streets of London’s “Sailortown.” John Ledyard is now twenty-five years old, life has done little with him, and he has done little with life; his friends at home are beginning to regard him as something of a ne’er-do-well, and the pockets of his sailor breeches are emptier than ever.

In “Sailortown” an April sun is shining, the dank smell of the Thames mingles with wood smoke from the hearths, and there is a sound of men’s voices and a clink of glasses at the doors of mariner’s inns. John steps into a tavern, and hears news which fires his imagination, and sets his blood to racing. Captain James Cook, the great navigator and explorer, is about to make a third voyage to the South Seas, and ships are being prepared and loaded for the expedition. With characteristic audacity, John hurries directly to the Captain at his lodgings in Chelsea Hospital, and boldly requests to be allowed to go. His colonial directness pleases, and John Ledyard walks back to London, no longer an obscure American seaman, but a corporal of His Majesty’s Marines attached to Cook’s own vessel, the Discovery.

The two ships of the expedition, the old Resolution and the new Discovery, sailed from England on July 12th, 1776, bound for the South Pacific by the Cape of Good Hope.

He was a marine, now, on a British naval vessel; a roving Yankee caught up in the old navy’s conventionalised routine. A bugle or a drum tattoo woke him at early dawn as he slept in the low ’tween deck caves where the timbers groaned when the wind freshened in the night, and the lanterns and the hammocks swung to the listing of the ship; he escaped from the darkness below, the warm, human smell, and the sight of sleepy men and nakedness to the humid deck, the lilac morning, and the vast splendour of the awakening sea; the drill drum beat for him, he heard the shuffle and the tramp of feet, the peremptory order, and, in the silences, the wind in the rigging and the endless, dissolving whisper of alongside foam.

This Discovery was the more interesting of the ships. Captain Cook himself was aboard, a man over six feet in height, with brown eyes, a pleasant countenance, and brown hair tied behind. Ledyard often saw the tall figure in great cloak and three-cornered hat standing at the other end of the deck. Perhaps of even greater interest to the ship’s company was the Noah’s ark farmyard aboard of cattle, sheep, goats, ducks, dogs, horses, cats, pigs, and rabbits, all intended as gifts to estimable savages who had no such allies, for the eighteenth century was nothing if not benevolent. When in port for any length of time, the sea-going bull and the other grazing animals were put ashore for pasturage; at the Cape of Good Hope, a rascally Hottentot delayed the expedition by stealing a salty and intrepid cow. During a stay in the east, this animal world was strengthened by a vast contingent of cockroaches who fell in showers to the deck when the sails were unfurled before getting under way; not a romantic picture, this, but one with a genuine flavor of old sailing ship days. And when all other things wearied, there was a battle to watch, that battle with never a truce which is the sailing of a sailing ship in open sea.

After a pause by the barren rocks of Kerguelen Land in the Antarctic, and after revisiting Tasmania and New Zealand, the expedition sounded its way through the archipelagos of the South Pacific, and anchored in the bay of Tongataboo in the Friendly Islands. The ships remained there twenty-six days gathering stores.

Tongataboo—the name has a ring of the Bab Ballads; but it hides the memory of a Paradise. John found himself among a people who were beautiful, courteous, and friendly, for no whites had yet poisoned them either with their maladies or their civilization, and there was no tiresome angel with a flaming sword. First of a line of roaring Yankee whalemen and sailors, Corporal John walks the island night under the giant moon, watching the smooth, incoming seas burst and scatter into a churning wash that might be a liquid and greener moonlight; first of American adventurers in the South Seas, John Ledyard hears the endless clatter and dry rustling of the island palms. He lives in a tent ashore, refers to the natives as “the Indians,” eats fish baked in plantain leaves, and drinks water from a coconut shell. Late in the golden night, he hears over the faint monotone of the breaking sea, “a number of flutes, beginning almost at the same time, burst from every quarter of the surrounding grove.” Not to be outdone in the matter of entertainment, Cook delights the innocent natives with a display of fireworks, a form of entertainment then regarded as the height of the ingenious and the civilized. Surely it was pleasant to be alive when Paradise was young. From the Friendly Islands, the Discovery carried John to Hawaii, and thence to the coast whose memory was to shape the greater adventures of his life.

By the last half of the eighteenth century, the one accessible coast of North America which lingered unvisited and unexplored, was the coast of the Pacific North Northwest,—or to be more definite, the shores of northern British Columbia and the great peninsula of Alaska. The geographers of the day were aware that Bering had sighted such a coast, and that the Russians had crossed to it from northeastern Siberia and claimed it for their empire, but with these two facts their knowledge came to an end. The character and the conformation of the land remained unknown. Cook was to be the first to make a scientific survey of the region, for the Admiralty had instructed him to explore any rivers or inlets that might lead eastward to Hudson’s or Baffin’s bay through the “Northwest Passage” of romance. The ships turned north in December, 1777, and arrived off the coast of what is now the state of Oregon on March 7th, 1778. The weather was cold and stormy, but summer came upon them as they worked their way to the north, the splendid summer of the cool, northwestern land.

John Ledyard was once more on American soil, and what an America it was, this great unknown land of bold, indented coasts, evergreens and alders, snow-capped inland mountains, and great rivers moving unsullied to the sea! The beauty and living quality of the new country conquered the Connecticut explorer even as it conquered those who followed him. Carefully charting the way, Cook’s expedition sailed along the coast to Alaska, past the towering cliffs of vast glaciers rising pale-green from the darker surges washing at their base; into this great fjord and into that went the ships, waking the deep arctic silence with the plunge of their anchors and the hurrying rattle of chain. At the Island of Unalaska, John offered to go with native guides in search of some “white strangers,” and thus had a unique opportunity to spy out the land.

“I took with me some presents adapted to the taste of the Indians, brandy in bottles, and bread, but no other provisions. I went entirely unarmed by the advice of Captain Cook.... The country was rough and hilly; and the weather wet and cold. At about three hours before dark we came to a large bay, ... and saw a canoe approaching us from the opposite side of the bay, in which were two Indians. It was beginning to be dark when the canoe came to us. It was a skin canoe after the Esquimaux plan (a kayak) with two holes to accommodate two sitters. The Indians that came in the canoe talked a little with my two guides and desired I would get into the canoe. This I did not very readily agree to, however, as there was no other place for me but to be thrust into the space between the holes, extended at length upon my back, and wholly excluded from seeing the way I went, or the power of extricating myself on any emergency. But as there was no alternative I submitted thus to be stowed away in bulk, and went head foremost very swift through the water about an hour, when I felt the canoe strike a beach, and afterwards lifted up and carried some distance, and then sat down again, after which I was drawn up by the shoulders by three or four men, for it was now so dark that I could not tell who they were, though I was conscious that I heard a language that was new.

“I was conducted by two of these persons, who appeared to be strangers, about forty rods, when I saw lights and a number of huts.... As we approached one of them, a door opened, and discovered a lamp by which, to my joy and surprise, I discovered that the two men who held me by each arm were Europeans, fair and comely, and concluded from their appearance that they were Russians, which I soon after found to be true.... We had supper which consisted of boiled whale, halibut fried in oil, and broiled salmon.... I had a very comfortable bed composed of different fur skins, both under and over me.... After I had lain down, the Russians assembled the Indians in a very silent manner, and said prayers after the manner of the Greek church which is much like the Roman.”

The meeting of the New England marine and certain Russian fur traders visiting Alaska to buy skins for the Chinese trade, is not without significance to the philosophic reader of history, for it is the first contact of a white civilisation advancing across America from the east with another and a belated white civilisation approaching the continent from the west. Had Columbus failed, what strange results might not have sprung from this Russian enterprise! But Yankee John rises to end the reverie. A notion of advancing his fortune by joining in the Alaskan fur trade is getting into his head, and he enters in his journal that skins which were purchased in Alaska for six pence were sold later in China for a hundred dollars.

Save for the tragic death of Captain Cook, who was attacked by natives at Hawaii, and “fell into the water and spoke no more,” there is little in the further history of the ships to halt the chronicle of Corporal John. The ships revisited the Bering Sea and the Russian Asiatic coast, cruised to China, and returned to England round the same Cape of Good Hope. The expedition had been at sea exactly four years and three months.

For two troubled years, John Ledyard walks the flagstones of a British barrack yard, for the war of the Revolution is being fought in America, and he can neither escape nor bring himself to take naval service against his countrymen. Barrack life, however, ends by exhausting his patience, he seeks a transfer to the American station, and the December of 1782 finds him aboard a British man of war lying in Huntington Bay, Long Island. As the island was then in the hands of the British, John obtains seven days’ leave, but patriotically forgets to report aboard. From a stay with friends at Huntington, he hastens to Southold, where his mother keeps a boarding house, then frequented chiefly by British officers.

He rode up to the door, alighted, went in, and asked if he could be accommodated in her house as a lodger. She replied that he could, and showed him a room into which his baggage was conveyed. After having adjusted his dress, he came out, and took a seat by the fire in company with several other officers, without making himself known to his mother, or entering into conversation with any person. She frequently passed and repassed through the room, and her eye was observed to be attracted to him with more than usual attention. At last after looking at him steadily for some minutes, she deliberately put on her spectacles, approached nearer to him, begging his pardon for her rudeness, and telling him that he so much resembled a son of hers, who had been absent eight years, that she could not resist her inclination to view him more closely. “The scene that followed,” adds the old chronicler, “may be imagined, but not described.”

Travelling by night down the Long Island shore, John found a way to reach Hartford, and took refuge there at the house of his Uncle Seymour. He remained with him four months, writing an account of his voyage with Cook. The book was published, and is now exceedingly rare. “I am now at Mr. Seymour’s,” wrote John, “and as happy as need be. I have a little cash, two coats, three waistcoats, six pair stockings, and half a dozen ruffled shirts.... I eat and drink when I am asked, and visit when invited, in short, I generally do as I am bid. All I want of my friends is friendship, possessed of that, I am happy.”

The long and cruel struggle of the American Revolution was drawing to an end. Peace was at hand. John Ledyard, now thirty-two years of age, found himself a personage in his own country. He was John Ledyard, “the American traveller.” And he had lost his corporal’s chevrons—popular imagination had seen to that; John was now Captain Ledyard; Major Ledyard, and even Colonel Ledyard to the eloquent. The American traveller! The great, fair-haired, “rangy” lad had grown into a tall energetic man whose countenance told of hardship and adventure; there were lines, such as sailors have, about his eyes, his nose was thinner and more than ever eagle-like, and the grey eyes had a look in them the world but rarely sees. The man stands at the window of the house in Hartford, looking down the still, New England street, but the inner eye sees only the northwest coast, the waterfalls on the sides of the sea ravines, the dark trees, and the crests of snow. He alone, of all the American world, has seen the unknown land; he alone can guide his fellow-adventurers of the young republic to the wealth that waits the gathering of the bold.