Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley (book club reads txt) 📖

HOW THEY TOOK THE GREAT GALLEON

“When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt, Did march to the siege of the city of Gaunt, They muster’d their soldiers by two and by three, But the foremost in battle was Mary Ambree. When brave Sir John Major was slain in her sight, Who was her true lover, her joy and delight, Because he was murther’d most treacherouslie, Then vow’d to avenge him fair Mary Ambree.”

Old Ballad, A. D. 1584.

One more glance at the golden tropic sea, and the golden tropic evenings, by the shore of New Granada, in the golden Spanish Main.

The bay of Santa Marta is rippling before the land-breeze one sheet of living flame. The mighty forests are sparkling with myriad fireflies. The lazy mist which lounges round the inner hills shines golden in the sunset rays; and, nineteen thousand feet aloft, the mighty peak of Horqueta cleaves the abyss of air, rose-red against the dark-blue vault of heaven. The rosy cone fades to a dull leaden hue; but only for awhile. The stars flash out one by one, and Venus, like another moon, tinges the eastern snows with gold, and sheds across the bay a long yellow line of rippling light. Everywhere is glory and richness. What wonder if the earth in that enchanted land be as rich to her inmost depths as she is upon the surface? The heaven, the hills, the sea, are one sparkling garland of jewels—what wonder if the soil be jewelled also? if every watercourse and bank of earth be spangled with emeralds and rubies, with grains of gold and feathered wreaths of native silver?

So thought, in a poetic mood, the Bishop of Cartagena, as he sat in the state cabin of that great galleon, The City of the True Cross, and looked pensively out of the window towards the shore. The good man was in a state of holy calm. His stout figure rested on one easy-chair, his stout ankles on another, beside a table spread with oranges and limes, guavas and pine-apples, and all the fruits of Ind.

An Indian girl, bedizened with scarfs and gold chains, kept off the flies with a fan of feathers; and by him, in a pail of ice from the Horqueta (the gift of some pious Spanish lady, who had “spent” an Indian or two in bringing down the precious offering), stood more than one flask of virtuous wine of Alicant. But he was not so selfish, good man, as to enjoy either ice or wine alone; Don Pedro, colonel of the soldiers on board, Don Alverez, intendant of his Catholic majesty’s customs at Santa Marta, and Don Paul, captain of mariners in The City of the True Cross, had, by his especial request, come to his assistance that evening, and with two friars, who sat at the lower end of the table, were doing their best to prevent the good man from taking too bitterly to heart the present unsatisfactory state of his cathedral town, which had just been sacked and burnt by an old friend of ours, Sir Francis Drake.

“We have been great sufferers, senors,—ah, great sufferers,” snuffled the bishop, quoting Scripture, after the fashion of the day, glibly enough, but often much too irreverently for me to repeat, so boldly were his texts travestied, and so freely interlarded by grumblings at Tita and the mosquitoes. “Great sufferers, truly; but there shall be a remnant,—ah, a remnant like the shaking of the olive tree and the gleaning grapes when the vintage is done.—Ah! Gold? Yes, I trust Our Lady’s mercies are not shut up, nor her arms shortened.—Look, senors!”—and he pointed majestically out of the window. “It looks gold! it smells of gold, as I may say, by a poetical license. Yea, the very waves, as they ripple past us, sing of gold, gold, gold!”

“It is a great privilege,” said the intendant, “to have comfort so gracefully administered at once by a churchman and a scholar.”

“A poet, too,” said Don Pedro. “You have no notion what sweet sonnets—”

“Hush, Don Pedro—hush! If I, a mateless bird, have spent an idle hour in teaching lovers how to sing, why, what of that? I am a churchman, senors; but I am a man and I can feel, senors; I can sympathize; I can palliate; I can excuse. Who knows better than I how much human nature lurks in us fallen sons of Adam? Tita!”

“Um?” said the trembling girl, with a true Indian grunt.

“Fill his excellency the intendant’s glass. Does much more treasure come down, illustrious senor? May the poor of Mary hope for a few more crumbs from their Mistress’s table?”

“Not a pezo, I fear. The big white cow up there”—and he pointed to the Horqueta—“has been milked dry for this year.”

“Ah!” And he looked up at the magnificent snow peak. “Only good to cool wine with, eh? and as safe for the time being as Solomon’s birds.”

“Solomon’s birds? Explain your recondite allusion, my lord.”

“Enlighten us, your excellency, enlighten us.”

“Ah! thereby hangs a tale. You know the holy birds who run up and down on the Prado at Seville among the ladies’ pretty feet,—eh? with hooked noses and cinnamon crests? Of course. Hoopoes—Upupa, as the classics have it. Well, senors, once on a time, the story goes, these hoopoes all had golden crowns on their heads; and, senors, they took the consequences—eh? But it befell on a day that all the birds and beasts came to do homage at the court of his most Catholic majesty King Solomon, and among them came these same hoopoes; and they had a little request to make, the poor rogues. And what do you think it was? Why, that King Solomon would pray for them that they might wear any sort of crowns but these same golden ones; for—listen, Tita, and see the snare of riches— mankind so hunted, and shot, and trapped, and snared them, for the sake of these same golden crowns, that life was a burden to bear. So Solomon prayed, and instead of golden crowns, they all received crowns of feathers; and ever since, senors, they live as merrily as crickets in an oven, and also have the honor of bearing the name of his most Catholic majesty King Solomon. Tita! fill the senor commandant’s glass. Fray Gerundio, what are you whispering about down there, sir?”

Fray Gerundio had merely commented to his brother on the bishop’s story of Solomon’s birds with an—

“O si sic omnia!—would that all gold would turn to feathers in like wise!”

“Then, friend,” replied the other, a Dominican, like Gerundio, but of a darker and sterner complexion, “corrupt human nature would within a week discover some fresh bauble, for which to kill and be killed in vain.”

“What is that, Fray Gerundio?” asked the bishop again.

“I merely remarked, that it were well for the world if all mankind were to put up the same prayer as the hoopoes.”

“World, sir? What do you know about the world? Convert your Indians, sir, if you please, and leave affairs of state to your superiors. You will excuse him, senors” (turning to the Dons, and speaking in a lower tone). “A very worthy and pious man, but a poor peasant’s son; and beside—you understand. A little wrong here; too much fasting and watching, I fear, good man.” And the bishop touched his forehead knowingly, to signify that Fray Gerundio’s wits were in an unsatisfactory state.

The Fray heard and saw with a quiet smile. He was one of those excellent men whom the cruelties of his countrymen had stirred up (as the darkness, by mere contrast, makes the light more bright), as they did Las Casas, Gasca, and many another noble name which is written in the book of life, to deeds of love and pious daring worthy of any creed or age. True Protestants, they protested, even before kings, against the evil which lay nearest them, the sin which really beset them; true liberals, they did not disdain to call the dark-skinned heathen their brothers; and asserted in terms which astonish us, when we recollect the age in which they were spoken, the inherent freedom of every being who wore the flesh and blood which their Lord wore; true martyrs, they bore witness of Christ, and received too often the rewards of such, in slander and contempt. Such an one was Fray Gerundio; a poor, mean, clumsy-tongued peasant’s son, who never could put three sentences together, save when he waxed eloquent, crucifix in hand, amid some group of Indians or negroes. He was accustomed to such rebuffs as the bishop’s; he took them for what they were worth, and sipped his wine in silence; while the talk went on.

“They say,” observed the commandant, “that a very small Plate-fleet will go to Spain this year.”

“What else?” says the intendant. “What have we to send, in the name of all saints, since these accursed English Lutherans have swept us out clean?”

“And if we had anything to send,” says the sea-captain, “what have we to send it in? That fiend incarnate, Drake—”

“Ah!” said his holiness; “spare my ears! Don Pedro, you will oblige my weakness by not mentioning that man;—his name is Tartarean, unfit for polite lips. Draco—a dragon—serpent—the emblem of Diabolus himself—ah! And the guardian of the golden apples of the West, who would fain devour our new Hercules, his most Catholic majesty. Deceived Eve, too, with one of those same apples—a very evil name, senors—a Tartarean name,—Tita!”

“Um!”

“Fill my glass.”

“Nay,” cried the colonel, with a great oath, “this English fellow is of another breed of serpent from that, I warrant.”

“Your reason, senor; your reason?”

“Because this one would have seen Eve at the bottom of the sea, before he let her, or any one but himself, taste aught which looked like gold.”

“Ah, ah!—very good! But—we laugh, valiant senors, while the Church weeps. Alas for my sheep!”

“And alas for their sheepfold! It will be four years before we can get Cartagena rebuilt again. And as for the blockhouse, when we shall get that rebuilt, Heaven only knows, while his majesty goes on draining the Indies for his English Armada. The town is as naked now as an Indian’s back.”

“Baptista Antonio, the surveyor, has sent home by me a relation to the king, setting forth our defenceless state. But to read a relation and to act on it are two cocks of very different hackles, bishop, as all statesmen know. Heaven grant we may have orders by the next fleet to fortify, or we shall be at the mercy of every English pirate!”

“Ah, that blockhouse!” sighed the bishop. “That was indeed a villainous trick. A hundred and ten thousand ducats for the ransom of the town! After having burned and plundered the one-half—and having made me dine with them too, ah! and sit between the—the serpent, and his lieutenant-general—and drunk my health in my own private wine—wine that I had from Xeres nine years ago, senors and offered, the shameless heretics, to take me to England, if I would turn Lutheran, and find me a wife, and make an honest man of me— ah! and then to demand fresh ransom for the