Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (305 page)

“Aye,” Edward Colman said, “you are always princely. You would rather run into great danger for all our necks and your own, and so shine out like the King at a play, than go quietly and soberly to work, however safe it was.”

“Why so I would,” Hudson said, “for that is the way to gain men’s hearts and win renown.”

“I had rather die a prince than live puritanically,” he said again seriously. “But thou — thou hast somewhat of a puritan in thee. It comes from wedding a Knipperdollinck.”

“Well, let us drink to our wives,” Edward Colman said. “I thought last night when I lay on the deck that never should I see mine again, which caused me great woe, for I love her. For when I asked the dwarf Hieronymus for two pistols — not knowing for certain but that the captain too was drugged and asleep — I thought to myself, ‘Two pistols will slay two of these men. Then shall the other two slay me. Hudson may make a shift to bar himself in against them and so live, but I shall never see Magdalena again!’ Yet I was fain to see her and my child, if she shall have a child.”

“These are the rules of the game,” Hudson answered him, “for the world is builded by men that never again see wife nor child. It may come to thee or me. I wonder how many good men sleep beneath the waters or little mounds in far countries; or how many true men’s bones bleach beneath the sun on sands or grow brittle on frozen ground, leaving widows and the children they have never seen? I trow there are many thousands of them, and thus the world is builded up and spins around. But it was a good thought of thine to kill two men and die for me.”

CHAPTER III
.

IT was on a day in July towards ten o’clock in the morning that first they sighted the shores of the New World, being then well to the north of the island called Newfoundland and farther in, too, to the west. It was a very hot day too, and the wind fell when they came in with the land and found soundings, and there was much of haze in the air. But, from where they let the anchor drop into the steel-like water, they could descry the little mouth of a river or creek, red rocks, many green pine-trees and, farther in, several mountains much more lofty than are to be seen in England or Holland, but more such as they had observed passing Scotland on their northern voyage. So they debated how it would be to call this land New Scotland if it had no other name, and they filled their two boats, called the pinnace and the little-boat, with their water-casks to be filled at the river, and taking their stand-guns and some bows and arrows, all of them but two rowed into the little creek, which, sure enough, they found to be of fresh water.

And as they rowed up this little creek, between rocks and boulders and old grey dead trees, and many trees like pine-trees that were quite still in the unwindy weather, laughing and talking all together, they heard wild cries, resounding and full, like the notes of owls and hawks, and soon they saw great hawks and, soon after, men, leaping along over the fallen trees, all brown, with blankets of brown upon them and with hatchets in their hands and their long hair, all black, floating behind them. In the pinnace where Hudson was he made them sit quietly and observe these indigenes; but the little boat was behind, and they saw old Jan in it stand up and plant his gun on a rest and set his eye along it, and the sound of his shot echoed many times among the deep hills and the white smoke hung in the still air. They could not, in the pinnace, see that he had killed any man, only the Indians, who had been coming close along the right bank, made off into the trees and up the hillsides, calling out mournfully and awakening mournful echoes.

Hudson scowled heavily at this deed, and bade them lay on their oars till the little-boat came up with them. For, he said, and he called it out to the old man, not only are these people a simple and a friendly folk, but here when they came first many vessels would follow them. And if any were shipwrecked how would it fare with the poor crews upon this land if they, the first comers, mishandled thus, without any provocation?

But the old Jan was in no way dismayed or cast down. He answered that these peoples and all peoples with black or brown skins were devils, that was why they had that mark of brownness set upon them by God. And it was his duty and his pleasure to slay some of them that came within reach of pellets or bolts.

“Well,” said Hudson, “I have in this no command over you. But I hold it for a very wicked thing to do, and I would fain have spoken with these people as to whether near here a strait crosses this land.”

“Why, you cannot speak with them,” old Jan called back, “for if you have no Dutch assuredly you have not the tongue of devils such as these be. And they would misguide you and lead you astray and murder us all, and they have ways of sending men to hell after having slain them. My grandfather, who was a sailor, heard that of his confessor in the Indies.”

Hudson answered that it was not true, or, if it were, so much the more reason not to slay these poor peoples in their sin, but to bring them to see God.

“I am never for killing,” he said.

But in that mind he had only Edward Colman with him. For the Dutchmen, when they did not incline to believe the teachings of old Jan, said that these brown-skinned peoples were no more than beasts, and you slay a beast when you see it.

“That do I not,” Hudson said, and the boat’s crew laughed at him.

For they said that he was a very great man in all else; but in this he was a little simple and foolish. For did he not play with white mice, which, in Holland, was held to be the deed of a natural, since mice were not eatable, neither did they give forth agreeable songs like birds, or make gross antics for men to laugh at like apes?

But, because each man was eager to set forth upon this New World, they gave over this talking and set about to find a convenient landing-place. And, with a few strokes of the oars, they came to a place where a canoe painted with ochre lay upon a pebbly flat. Behind it were three tents of deerskins with the poles crossed above them, and before the openings were fires smouldered down, and the tents were painted in ochre with the figures of monstrous horned beasts where they stood beneath the trunks of great pine-trees in the shadows. So the Dutchmen fired three gun-shots, one into each tent, and a score or so of arrows through the sides to make sure that no savages lurked within. And there came out of them no more than a yellow-furred dog, that howled at them till one shot it with an arrow.

Then they said it was proof of the devilish nature of these brown men that, without message carried to them, they knew that the boats were arrived. So they went ashore and gave thanks to God that had so safely brought them to this land after such many and fearful storms and escapes. For, but four days before, on a dark night they had come very close to an iceberg and had come away only with great peril.

And most of them were filled with a great emotion of wonder and contentment thus, for the first time, to tread upon these shores where each man, after his disposition, imagined that his heart’s content was to be found. For some aspired to perfect republics, and some to find places where the True Doctrine, as they took it to be, should flourish in tranquillity, and some desired gold, and some strange sweetmeats and spices and fruits. And each had heard that all these things were to be found in this New World.

So they stretched their legs and rifled the tents, where they found only skins and a few fish, and some hatchets and tools, whose use they did not know, made of stone tied with thongs to sticks, and two carcases of deer hung to a tree, and some baskets of rush-work and a little money, and some strips of leather that had beads of a substance they knew not and sharks’ teeth stitched into them, and other strips of leather with coronals of feathers and strips of great eagles’ feathers sewn to them. And all these things they carried to their boats, and they filled their casks with water, and four or five of them ran a race along the level ground, and they cut many green boughs of a sort of tree that bore nuts and looked like a hazel. And one man with his bow shot a hawk that was high overhead in the sky. And some stretched themselves on the little pebbles in the hot sunlight and debated of this New World and of all they had heard told of it by other travellers, and they drank wine they had brought with them. —

But, to Edward Colman, this did not seem a very good place to found a colony, for the rocks were very dry and had no lichens, and the soil was sand and there was neither grass nor flowers, and the hills were high and precipitous all around that little stream, and there was no level ground, only there was timber enough to build all the navies and fleets of the world.

And Hudson bade him be patient, for farther south he would find him meadows and champaigns and flat places level with river mouths; aye, and timber too, and fruit trees and streams bearing gold in their sands and a great fertility and many sweet flowers.

“This is no good place,” he said, “or only good in midsummer time, for here we are above the sixtieth parallel, and I know that in winter it is very cold. And you may plainly tell by the poverty of gear in these tents that this is a very poor place.”

Towards sundown there came a great swarm of midges and of flies, and the sun set toward the top of the mountains to a fire and red gold such as they had never seen. And when they had slit the tents to ribands with their swords and set fire to the canoe, that was as thin as paper, they got into their boat, and with their oars tore the satin of the water into foam and made the hills once more echo, this time with psalms in Dutch and some few gunshots.

The next morning they decorated the ship all over the rigging with the boughs of trees that they had cut, and they set a little fir-tree on the high-mast and another on the little mast at the stem, and they declared it a Sabbath day and did nothing but lie at anchor.

Hudson made them also another long speech, telling them what his plans were and how they should sail. They were to search, he said, for a great strait of water that ran right across this continent. Now, north of where they were, the country had been well explored by the French, who, sixty years before, had sent there a great expedition under the Lord of Riverolles. And, since then, every year they had sent there expeditions to the land that they had called Canada; and they brought away furs and skins, and had made friends with and converted the natives to the Papist form of religion, and the French Protestants, called Huguenots, had there attempted to found settlements and colonies, and had set up posts bearing the arms of the Kings of France, and had made excellent good charts. So that, although there was there a very great gulf called the Gulf of St. Lawrence, after the day on which it had been found by the Papist French, they were well assured that, to the north of them, there was no strait extending through America.

To the south and west of them the land bowed out to the island called Newfoundland. Here the French fishermen came every year from French Britaigne and fished; and here there were said to be settlements on the shores, and they might have meats and fish and replenish their stores. And from the southern port of America up to the fortieth parallel they were main certain that there was no passage, the French and the Spaniards having searched the coasts so high on the east, and Sir Francis Drake having searched so high on the western or Pacific shore. For this idea of the passage through America was a very old idea that had been pursued by many men.

But the shores in between the southern end of Newfoundland and the fortieth parallel were less well known and charted than any. Only it was known that here were many inlets and sounds such as, if any there were, might well be the western end of such a passage. Therefore he was minded, if they would suffer him, to take them right away from the shore of Newfoundland, not very near to the land, but observing it, down to the fortieth parallel and from there northwards again to nearly Newfoundland, searching all the creeks and inlets till they were well satisfied.

And he made them, at the end, another great speech of the glory and renown to be had in such an enterprise and in setting their names to headlands, saying that their ship and their voyage should live as long in the minds of men as the ship called
Argos
that bore of old Jason and the Argonauts in search of the golden fleece. For were they not in search of a fleece, allegorically, as precious — the gold of a land where men might dwell in peace and unity and concord and affluence and plenty, such as were not in their own lands where too much sorrow was?

But for himself, he confessed to Edward Colman after this speech, whilst he wiped his great forehead with a towel, for it was very hot, he cared much less for the glory of opening new horizons of land. He wished much more to penetrate into new seas. And he was very contented.

For with this voyage he had searched well the northern seas, and was assured that there was no outlet over the Pole, for it was the third time that he had made that essay. And, for himself, he was assured that they would find no strait across this continent; but he was well content to make the essay, since it would set his mind at rest, and, being then well assured that there were no other corners of the world to leave unprobed, he could, in subsequent voyages, set to discovering the secrets of the seas and the northward of the Gulf of St. Lawrence — more northerly than ever the Frenchmen had sailed.

On this glory he dilated much. And he laid himself upon his couch to sleep through the afternoon. But Edward Colman went with a boat to the shore lower down than where they had landed the day before, for his mind was set upon the land and not upon the inconstant seas, and he dreamed of sending settlements to these shores, and he observed the rocks and the trees and how there was little fresh water there and many flies and little grass and herbage.