Swashbucklers of Spain Duel for the Food of Pierre Le Moyne de Iberville—Hunger Seasons Sagimity
ANTHONY knelt before a jar which held perhaps two gallons. It was of red hand-made pottery open at the top and it had a bail of withes. Low on one side was a hole leading into the vessel between its flat bottom and another ventilated over-bottom to create a draught. The jar was filled with fat pine shavings and dry cones. He struck his flint and after several trials lighted some dry grass which fired the resin in the pine. Then the tiny clay stove began to roar cheerfully. Setting another crock upon it and mixing in that a very little corn with too much water the Picard du Gay tried to tell himself that he was getting breakfast.
Provisions had run short at this fort of Biloxi, and Anthony, one of the twenty men left here to guard the Great River's mouth, had missed more meals than he liked to count. Thestockade on the Mississippi itself was no better furnished with men or food than this one. The main body of the colony had been moved several times in hope of better picking and was now at a third fort on Mobile Bay. Like all new settlements from the beginning of time until to-morrow, this one had not been able to fit itself to the country about it without making mistakes. One error after another in handling foodstuffs had brought about the catastrophe of famine.
The sea was alive with delicious fare. There were beds of oysters, runs of shrimp, and school after school of fish. The colonists had feasted on these as on a banquet without end. But they suddenly learned that each had its season. When one day they wanted more none were to be had. School was out as far as fish were concerned. Shrimp had run some place else. In warm weather oysters made the colonists sick.
The woods were full of deer, the prairies of buffalo, the glades of turkeys, the bayous of waterfowl, more meat than the French could eat in a lifetime. They did not bother to jerk any of these. Why should they work to dry flesh when there was so much that was fresh at their very doors? The Indians prepared some, it is true, but Indians themselves often take a chance on the future, and their not too provident example went unnoticed by the colonists. The climate felt much the same to the French as thatof their own Languedoc; Languedoc with a garden added like the Paradise where Adam and Eve gathered their daily bread from bushes.
The deer followed the spring northward for croppings of new leaves, the buffalo trotted away on paths which a lifetime of migration told them led to cool green grass. Game left for Canada. Even alligators dropped below reach into the mud. (Eating baked alligator tails is never a treat; it means that one is very hungry indeed.)
Once whole fields were glutted with wild strawberries and blackberries. Groves of mulberries and plums abounded. Luscious grapes clambered every hill. Nobody dried or preserved them. It seemed absurd to do so when there fell to the ground every day more than all France could have eaten. So the time of these fruits came and went and nothing remained to take their place.
Some of the finest foods can be made to grow in the sandy soil of the country back of Biloxi beach if one knows how, but the colonists didn't bother to inquire, and the only things that were now thriving under the July sun were clouds of mosquitoes.
Anthony sipped his gruel and gazed over toward Deer Island. The rising sun made the channel look so much like milk that poor du Gay was tempted to walk down and take a tasteof it. The pines were black against the burning sky and a soldier coming out on the long narrow point beyond them was silhouetted distinctly. As he went forward over the low sand reef he had the effect of walking on the water. His reflection in the white Gulf was as clear-cut as himself. Soldier and shadow moved along grotesquely, and Anthony thought the whole thing must be a mirage. But when the soldier staggered and fell with a very real splashing of water, the Picard jumped into his canoe and rowed across to see what was the matter.
The soldier was a Frenchman from the Mississippi stockade. Anthony knew him, picked him up and supported him, gently bathing his drawn face and questioning him.
"See all this pottery," cried the soldier, throwing out expressive hands, "smashed to bits! Do you suppose these bowls had corn in them when they were whole? I have followed a line of them out here to see if anything to eat had been left in them."
"How are the other soldiers at the stockade?" asked Anthony, to take his mind from this illusion of food caused by the sight of the scattered dump of Indian bowls.
"Our stores are almost gone; we are on rations. We are drinking river water." The soldier began to weep childishly. "I want a drink from our hillside spring in France. I need my breakfast!"
With promises which he was by no means sure he could keep, Anthony put the canoe in tow and helped the soldier into his own boat to take him to the fort. He had been sent from the stockade to beg for stores at Biloxi. Hunger-weary he had mistaken Deer Island for the beach and had run his felucca ashore there. If Anthony had not happened to see him he might have perished and the remaining soldiers at the stockade have waited in vain for the return of their messenger.
It was with a grave face that Anthony sailed the soldier's boat into Biloxi Bay and with a still heavier heart that he answered the hail of another coastwise sailing-vessel which was coming to meet him from the east. This second man was also a Frenchman, one of the colonists at Mobile. A glance at his yellow skin, sunken cheeks, and burning eyes told his whole story to Anthony. He, too, had been sent to beg for stores. There were women and little children, some old priests and helpless slaves in Mobile.
"We have eaten up our goats and our pigs; only the cows are left," was the report of the Mobile colonist as he and the Mississippi soldier were brought into the fort and presented to the Biloxi commandant by Anthony. "The Sieur de Iberville sent some of our men to live among the Indians who have a little but not much more than we ourselves. He sailed sometime ago for France to send provisions back to us with the greatest possible haste. Until they come will you share with us?"
They had nothing to share. The few men still at Dauphin Island and Ship's Island were in equal straits. From these pitiful beggars before the commandant Anthony turned and looked out of a loophole over the waste where his own and the other settlers' gardens should have been in toothsome bearing. Nothing was growing.
"I did not come to the New World to raise cabbages," he thought, resentfully. "I could have done that in Picardy without going out of my own gate. I came to seek my fortune, to carry home a galleon of gold." He smiled ruefully to think that if he could go back now to France he could take little besides his own bones.
As he felt so did all the adventurers. They spent their days in voyaging romantically up and down the Great River and through the bayous and among the islands round its estuary hunting for the gold and pearls which they expected to see shining in the sand or outcropping from the banks. Their nights were taken up with dreams of how they should spend this wealth when once it was found and shoveled into the boats and taken to France.
To be sure, Anthony with the best intentions had said to his Indian flunkies the same thingthe other Frenchmen said to theirs: "Plant me some of those juicy melons you know so well how to raise, and potatoes and plenty of maize and beans for the sickquatash, and some of that delightfully bad tobacco. Here are imported French seeds of cabbages and turnips and Old World vegetables. Plant them also."
The docile Indians had sowed the plantations. In the virgin alluvial soil under the warm spring rains the astonished seed from Picardy had grown like Jack's beanstalk. The Indians watching these huge creations were filled with superstitious fears. When an immense cabbage head had burst they shrieked in chorus, "Bad Medicine!" and ran away. Nothing could induce them to return. So the Frenchmen ordered the negroes—there were only a handful of them—"Youtend the gardens."
The darkies promised. They really meant to do so that day or the next or the next. If the masters had directed them and stood over them there would have been provisions in plenty. But the masters went gold-hunting and the darkies lay in the shade and waited for the weeds to stop growing so they could pull them all at once. Now the gardens were in ruins and the owners hungry.
"Remorse is a dreadful thing," thought Anthony; "I can feel it gnawing at my belt and I am terribly ashamed." He turned back to thecommandant: "I suppose the question is, shall we ask alms of our nearest neighbors, our worst enemies, those cruel Spaniards at Pensacola?"
As it was quite impossible to send an armed force from the little group of impoverished, sick, and famished colonists to enforce a request, Anthony offered to go alone and beg.
The carelessness and short-sightedness of men in prosperity has never ceased to be a marvel. It is equaled only by the endurance and courage of the same men in trouble. Every one of the miserable colonists offered to take the voyage in Anthony's place. So it was arranged that if he should fail to return others were to follow on the same mission, since Louisiana—which was the name of nearly half of North America—had come to such a pass that she must say, "Give me food or I may die in savagery."
"Let me take as attendant that Chickasaw boy the scouts brought in this morning," was Anthony's only demand. "I can understand a little of his speech and perhaps on the voyage I may coax from him some news of the tribes north and learn why he is unfriendly toward us."
The captive spy was promised his freedom if he would serve Anthony as far as Pensacola, and he went sullenly enough with the only man whose words he knew. Anthony trusted to the intimacy of two days and a night to learn fromthe Chickasaw all he knew that might serve the French in their distress.
So Anthony, beautifully groomed and dressed and taking his Chickasaw valet, rigged a sail to his canoe and started for Pensacola. In the bow he set his clay stove, some precious pounded corn in a bowl, and a porous jar which kept drinking-water cool by evaporation. Nobody then and nobody now in the neighborhood of the Mississippi can get along without a crock.
A vein of earth, a perfect potter's clay, outcrops on the lower reaches of the Great River. The fingers of prehistoric Indian children itched to mold splendid mud-pies just like the scarcely more skilful children of our times do on those same shores. No one knows who turned the first dish, dried it or baked it and painted it with stripes of color.
A primitive clay stove sails up and down the river and into the Gulf in almost every fisherman's boat to-day, just as it did on Anthony's trip. Big crocks in prosaic trucks now go merchandizing over the same Mississippi regions where once they traveled by picturesque Indian pick-a-back. On many southern window-sills the water-jars are still cooling in a draught.
Bricks for building houses on the river, tiles for roofing them and terra-cotta for ornamenting them, began to be manufactured early in the history of the colony. In the city of New Orleansare potteries which have raised the making of mud-pies into a beautiful art. Here and there throughout the Mississippi system are talented dreamers who turn the clay into inspiring groups of the sculptor's art.
Sailing along the banks of pottery clay, Anthony measured out his bowl of corn and wondered if he could make it do for the Chickasaw and himself. As he sped under drive of wind and push of oar he glimpsed at intervals those great heaps of empty oyster-shells, the kitchen-middens, which proved that somebody in far-away days had feasted long and well on these now starving shores. It was not so very far by way of the coast to Pensacola Bay, and in good time he put into the harbor and asked for the governor of the post, one Don Francisco Martin. He was taken to an officer of the fort, and this is what was said:
"I am Anthony Auguelle, the Picard du Gay, representing the French of Louisiana in a message to your governor."
"You are a companion of the buccaneer pilot Lawrence de Graaf. I saw you both on theBadine. You are assigned to a dungeon on bread and water."
"In the name of France I demand an audience."
"In the name of Spain I will recommend youto the Don Martin when he has nothing else to notice."
A prison is a dreadful thing; a Spanish dungeon the worst of all forms of confinement. The cruelties of the Inquisition which made such underground holes possible still sicken the thoughts of a civilized world. But Anthony was so spent with weariness that he ate his plain bread greedily—it was the first wheat bread he had tasted for months—and gulped the water gratefully. The darkness was a relief to his sand-dazzled eyes and the cold stones felt good to a sun-blistered back. He slept around the clock and clambered the ladder from his cell on the point of a bayonet at the bidding of the officer. He was in good spirits. The only really bad thing about a dungeon is to have to stay in it.
The Don Francisco Martin thought it a good plan, whenever possible, to give his rivals of France and England a taste of his dungeon. But life was so dull at the outpost of Pensacola and his curiosity about a French message was so great that he granted an audience in the courtyard on this second day.
"You are lately come from Paris," said the don, noting the cut of Anthony's fine coat. "Before we proceed to business we will entertain ourselves like gentlemen. I'm sure it will give you pleasure to show us the newest feints in fencing. Luckily I have three swordsmen athand to prove your skill," and he nodded to his gaoler, who picked up one of those immense brass keys which the Spaniards used with such gruesome effect, and went rattling down a shell-paved corridor.
Anthony looked at the smiling, whiskered don and he felt like a mouse under a tom-cat's claws. He viewed the garrison of rowdies crowding up to see a fight, and at the hot, empty sky, with narrowed eyes, as one who expects his only help from heaven.
Imagine his astonishment when the gaoler came clanking back with de Graaf a very shadow of himself, a toothless buccaneer much the worse for imprisonment, and a big Spaniard all gone to nerves.
Anthony covertly scanned the sky more than once as he listened to the don's mocking words: "All these soldiers of fortune have arms with them; you shall cross swords. Who survives the duel gets his freedom and his request." And the sarcasm, "A gentleman's game for gentlemen!"
Now Anthony Auguelle did not belong to the blood royal. The don was sure of that. The Picard du Gay had become a gentleman in heart and appearance through association with the best explorers of his time. But under the lash of the Spaniard's tongue he thought it best to affect that haughty bearing supposed to beone of the marks of a title. And he thought this the right time to use the bits of news he had gained from the Chickasaw.
"I will not kill de Graaf," he declared, "for you, Don Martin, need him to read a message in the air," and he waved his hand dramatically toward puffs of smoke which he had at last discovered floating in the northern sky.
The don stood up. The sentries ran for their neglected posts. The soldiers sprang to arms. Every neck was craned. As a hint to de Graaf, Anthony gave a meaning gesture toward the Chickasaw at his heels, and de Graaf, who lived by his wits, was ready to answer with confidence when the surprise abated: "That, Don Martin, is the signal of the Chickasaws who are coming toward your fort to besiege it. I heard their war-drums along the coast before I was taken by your men."
The don turned to Anthony, who touched the Chickasaw, who in turn spoke a gruff word to a Spanish interpreter. It meant that his tribe were in arms. De Graaf was thus confirmed in his statement.
The don's brows were drawn; his eyes grew keen.
"I will not kill the buccaneer," cried Anthony again. "I throw him a purse of gold instead," suiting his action to his boast, "and so will you, Don Martin, when he tells you whatheknows."
While the don stared at Anthony, that gambler with fate, smiling at the buccaneer, began to chuckle and then to laugh. The sea-robber responded like a child with a tickled rib. "Tell the don, my bully boy"—here Anthony spoke slowly to be sure he had the Anglo-Saxon words—"what the Carolina English will do to Pensacola and to Biloxi."
"Ho-ho-ho!" roared the buccaneer. "It's a secret. I must not tell."
"When I and the Chickasaw and de Graaf know it, it is a secret no longer. Tell the don and save your neck."
Like the unthinking dog he was, the buccaneer obeyed Anthony as his master and declared, "English ships are ready to come down the Atlantic in double force to surprise you."
The don considered his four sources of information. He did not for one moment doubt Anthony's honesty; nobody ever did. It was plain that the news was true.
"By Chickasaws on land and English on sea French and Spaniards are to be cracked like bugs between two boards. What is your advice, du Gay?"
The answer was prompt: "Release my Chickasaw and your buccaneer to tell their different peoples the plot is discovered. It will not be carried out this time. It is much easier to discourage than it is to defeat the English. Sendde Graaf to warn the fort at Mobile and let the Indian and the buccaneer see him get away so they may report that too."
Then the don grinned: "It shall be done. I would I had you for a friend, du Gay. You release your admirers in trios, throw pardons with a king's hand. What for yourself?"
"When I rid us of this swordsman I shall ask a boon," and he turned to the Spanish prisoner. It would not help Anthony's cause to disappoint the garrison who pined to see a fight. Thus Anthony took the ring with the swagger of a matador and the spirit of a game-cock.
Luck had followed him so far. A whole loaf of bread had filled his worst need and he drew his blade with confidence. The big Spanish jailbird was both strong and skilful, but two weeks in a black dungeon with rats, lice, and the fear of hanging had given him a wild eye and a shaking hand. He thrust strongly but not well. He was desperate and erratic. In normal health he could have split Anthony like a rabbit, but not to-day.
During the first few minutes it was more a game of tag than fencing. The two jumped about as though they were grasshoppers. Anthony's one idea was to save himself from the half-insane Spaniard. In a little while the big one began to weaken. Then Anthony thought it proper to amuse the spectators by airing thefancy thrusts and feints and all the fads that he had practised in Paris. Cheer followed cheer. This was what they wanted to see. The don himself was longing for just such a show. So Anthony continued it as long as he thought the Spaniard could stand up; on guard for bursts of passion on his opponent's part.
It was a sorry game.
Anthony, bent on winning his own ends, cared nothing for the ethics of a duel. When he saw his man ready to drop he thrust forward and pinned him against a post. But he did not drive his sword through the Spaniard, as was his right, as the don nodded permission, and as the whole colony now assembled whooped and howled and begged for him to do. Instead, he signaled the crowd to silence and, withdrawing his blade, wiped it airily on a bit of lace kerchief and announced: "I present his life to the fort. He is expert. Such will do good work against the Chickasaw."
The crowd, who a minute before would have been glad to see his blood spurt, now greeted the Spaniard with hurrahs, dragged him to the kitchen, and feasted him. Pensacola, a much older place than Biloxi, had learned to conserve its products. There was no food shortage among these Spaniards.
Don Francisco Martin seemed to be regretting that irony about gentlemen. He gave Anthonya friendly hand and said, sincerely, "I will be glad to grant you any request I can."
And the Picard du Gay said, simply, as one man to another, "My people are starving; unless you feed us we must perish."
So a ship was loaded with stores. Lest the hunger-wild Frenchmen should eat food without proper cooking and thus add an epidemic to their woes, the don ordered the half-deck covered with great bowls. Each was filled with the savory stew of venison and com or rice and dried fish which the Indians dub sagimity.
And who shall say how that ship came in? The starving French, lost to all feeling but the primitive call of hunger, thronged the bay to watch her drop anchor. They wept aloud and gurgled with laughter. They danced and hugged one another. They rushed into the water, stretching bony fingers; got beyond their depth, and had to be rescued with scoldings and ridicule in the midst of the utmost confusion. When the boat began to unload, the grateful French kissed the hands of their enemies, the Spaniards, and knelt to bathe their feet with happy tears.
As the sagimity came to shore they fell upon it and guzzled like kittens in the cream, quite unashamed. They stood upon the beach to sup and to feed one another. From one bowl to another they hurried, abandoning this, shoving it aside for that, running to another, steppingon it, heedlessly crushing it down into fragments. They had endured slow starvation with pathetic dignity, but the smell and sight of savory stew was too much for decorum, and half the emptied jars were thrown aside with a crash in the mad rush for full ones.
Many settlements have perished for lack of food. Starvation is an ill as old as the human race. It shows its skeleton head at some place on our globe almost every year of the world. The Great River itself has had many hungry times, but none quite so strange as this one when lifelong foes became friends and the beach was strewn with fragments of the crockery brought by the rescuers.
The Indians, who, while waiting their turn at the feast, looked on at the uncontrollable appetites of the succored French, pointed with stolid significance to the long pile of ruined dishes on the beach of Deer Island.
When Anthony, offering food to them, asked what they meant, they answered: "What has happened once can happen again and yet again. In the time of our fathers we, too, were fed by enemies as you are saved to-day, and there we got our name, for the guardian Indians of the Mississippi are called Biloxi, and the word Biloxi means the Broken Pots."