Part 23

At last the Dauphine came into a harbor or lake three leagues in circumference, where more than thirty canoes were assembled, filled with people. Suddenly Francois Parmentier leaped to his feet and waved his cap with a shout.

"Now what madness has taken you?" queried Verrazzano.

"I know where we are, that's all. This is Wampum Town,--L'Anorme Berge--the Grand Scarp. This is one of their great trading places, Captain. Father heard about it at Cape Breton from some south-country savages."

"And what may wampum be?" asked Verrazzano coolly.

"'T is the stuff they use for money--bits of shell made into beads and strung into a belt. There is an island in this bay where they make it out of their shell-fish middens--two kinds--purple and white. On my word, this big chief has on a wampum belt now!"

This was interesting information indeed, and the natives seemed prepared to traffic in all peace and friendliness. Verrazzano found upon investigation that on the north of this bay a very large river, deep at the mouth, came down between steep hills. Afterward, following the shore to the east, he discovered a fine harbor beyond a three-cornered island. Here he met two chiefs of that country, a man of about forty, and a young fellow of twenty-four, dressed in quaintly decorated deerskin mantles, with chains set with colored stones about their necks. He stayed two weeks, refitting the ship with provisions and other necessaries, and observing the place. The crew got by trading and as gifts the beans and corn cultivated by the people, wild fruits and nuts, and furs. Further north they found the tribes less friendly, and at last came so near the end of their provision that Verrazzano decided to return to France. He reached home July 8, 1524, after having sailed along seven hundred leagues of the Atlantic coast.

Francis I. was in the thick of a disastrous war with Spain, and had not time just then to consider further explorations. The war was not fairly over when a Cadiz warship, in 1527, caught Verrazzano and hanged him as a pirate.

NOTE

The not unnatural conclusion of Verrazzano that what he saw was an ocean or a great inland sea led to extraordinary misconceptions in the maps and charts of the time. It was not until the early part of the seventeenth century that the region was actually explored, by Newport and Smith, and found to be only Chesapeake Bay.

THE DRUM

I wake the gods with my sullen boom-- I am the Drum! They wait for the blood-red flowers that bloom In the heart of the sacrifice, there in the gloom With terror dumb-- I sound the call to his dreadful doom-- I am the Drum!

I was the Serpent, the Sacred Snake-- Wolf, bear and fox By the silent shores of river and lake Tread softly, listening lest they wake My voice that mocks The rattle that falling bones will make On barren rocks.

My banded skin is the voice of the Priest-- I am the Drum! I sound the call to the War-God's feast Till Tezcatlipoca's power hath ceased And the White Gods come Out of the fire of the burning East-- Hear me, the Drum!

THE GODS OF TAXMAR

If the Fathers of the Church had ever been on the other side of the world, they would have made new rules for it.

So thought Jeronimo Aguilar, on board a caravel plying between Darien and Hispaniola. It was a thought he would hardly have dared think in Spain.

He was a dark thin young friar from the mountains near Seville. In 1488 his mother, waiting, as women must, for news from the wars, vowed that if God and the Most Catholic Sovereigns drove out the Moors and sent her husband home to her, she would give her infant son to the Church. That was twenty-four years ago, and never had the power of the Church been so great as it now was. When the young Fray Jeronimo had been moved by fiery missionary preaching to give himself to the work among the Indians, his mother wept with astonishment and pride.

But the Indies he found were not the Indies he had heard of. Men who sailed from Cadiz valiant if rough and hard-bitted soldiers of the Cross, turned into cruel adventurers greedy for gold, hard masters abusing their power. The innocent wild people of Colon's island Eden were charged by the planters with treachery, theft, murderous conspiracy, and utter laziness. With a little bitter smile Aguilar remembered how the hidalgo, who would not dig to save his life, railed at the Indian who died of the work he had never learned to do. It was not for a priest to oppose the policy of the Church and the Crown, and very few priests attempted it, whatever cruelty they might see. Aguilar half imagined that the demon gods of the heathen were battling against the invading apostles of the Cross, poisoning their hearts and defeating their aims. It was all like an evil enchantment.

These meditations were ended by a mighty buffet of wind that smote the caravel and sent it flying northwest. Ourakan was abroad, the Carib god of the hurricane, and no one could think of anything thereafter but the heaving, tumbling wilderness of black waves and howling tempest and hissing spray. Valdivia, regidor of Darien, had been sent to Hispaniola by Balboa, the governor, with important letters and a rich tribute of gold, to get supplies and reinforcements for the colony. Shipwreck would be disastrous to Balboa and his people as well as to the voyagers.

Headlong the staggering ship was driven upon Los Viboros, (The Vipers) that infamous group of hidden rocks off Jamaica. She was pounded to pieces almost before Valdivia could get his one boat into the water, with its crew of twenty men. Without food or drink, sails or proper oars, the survivors tossed for thirteen dreadful days on the uncharted cross-currents of unknown seas. Seven died of hunger, thirst and exposure before the tide that drifted northwest along the coast of the mainland caught them and swept them ashore.

None of them had ever seen this coast. Valdivia cherished a faint hope that it might be a part of the kingdom of walled cities and golden temples, of which they had all heard. There were traces of human presence, and they could see a cone-shaped low hill with a stone temple or building of some kind on the top. Natives presently appeared, but they broke the boat in pieces and dragged the castaways inland through the forest to the house of their cacique.

That chief, a villainous looking savage in a thatched hut, looked at them as if they had been cattle--or slaves--or condemned heretics. What they thought, felt or hoped was nothing to him. He ordered them taken to a kind of pen, where they were fed. So great is the power of the body over the mind that for a few days they hardly thought of anything but the unspeakable joy of having enough to eat and drink, and nothing to do but sleep. The cacique visited the enclosure now and then, and looked them over with a calculating eye. Aguilar was haunted by the idea that this inspection meant something unpleasant.

All too soon the meaning was made known to them. Valdivia and four other men who were now less gaunt and famine-stricken than when captured, were seized and taken away, to be sacrificed to the gods.

It was the custom of the Mayas of Yucatan to sacrifice human beings, captives or slaves for choice, to the gods in whose honor the stone pyramids were raised. When the victim had been led up the winding stairway to the top, the central figure in a procession of priests and attendants, he was laid upon a stone altar and his heart was cut out and offered to the idol, after which the body was eaten at a ceremonial feast. The eight captives who remained now understood that the food they had had was meant merely to fatten them for future sacrifice. Half mad with horror, they crouched in the hot moist darkness, and listened to the uproar of the savages.

A strong young sailor by the name of Gonzalo Guerrero, who had done good service during the hurricane, pulled Jeronimo by the sleeve, "What in the name of all the saints can we do, Padre?" he muttered. "Jose and the rest will be raving maniacs."

Aguilar straightened himself and rose to his feet where the rays of the moon, white and calm, shone into the enclosure. Lifting his hands to heaven he began to pray.

All he had learned from books and from the disputations and sermons of the Fathers fell away from him and left only the bare scaffolding, the faith of his childhood. At the familiar syllables of the Ave Maria the shuddering sailors hushed their cries and oaths and listened, on their knees.

This was a handful of castaways in the clutch of a race of man-eaters who worshiped demons. But above them bent the tender and pitiful Mother of Christ who had seen her Son crucified, and Christ Himself stood surrounded by innumerable witnesses. Among the saints were some who had died at the hands of the heathen, many who had died by torture. The poor and ignorant men who listened were caught up for the moment into the vision of Fray Jeronimo and regained their self-control. When the prayer was ended Gonzalo Guerrero sprang up, and rallied them to furious labor. Under his direction and Aguilar's they dug and wrenched at their cage like desperate rats, until they broke away enough of it just to let a man's body through. Aguilar was the last to go. He closed the hole and heaped rubbish outside it, as rubbish and branches had been piled where they were used to sleep, to delay as long as possible the discovery of their escape. They got clear away into the depths of the forest.