Part 18 (1/2)
Now does the desert wake and croon of hidalgos coming-- Now for her children's sake she is whetting her sword to slay, And the armored squadrons break, and our iron-shod hoofs are drumming On the rocks of the mountain pa.s.s--we are free, we are off and away!
Hush--did a man's foot fall in the pasture where we go straying?
Listen--is that the call of a man aware of his right?
Hearken, my comrades all--once more the Game they are playing!
Masters, we come, we come, to be one with you in the fight!
XIII
THE WHITE MEDICINE MAN
”Cavalry without horses, in s.h.i.+ps without sailors, built by blacksmiths without forges and carpenters without tools. Now who in Spain will believe that?” commented Cabeca de Vaca.
It was the evening of the twenty-first of September, 1528. Five of the oddest looking boats ever launched on any sea were drawn up on the sh.o.r.e of La Baya de Cavallos, where not a horse was in sight, though there had been twoscore a fortnight ago. On the morrow the one-eyed commander of the Spaniards, Pamfilo de Narvaez, would marshal his ragam.u.f.fin expedition into those boats, in the hope of reaching Mexico by sea.
”We shall tell of it when we are grandfathers--if the sea does not take us within a week,” said Andres Dorantes with a sigh. ”I think that G.o.d does not waste miracles on New Spain.”
”Miracles? It is nothing less than a miracle that this fleet was built,”
said Cabeca de Vaca valiantly. And indeed he had some reason for saying so.
Narvaez, with a grant from the King which covered all the territory between the Atlantic and the Rio de los Palmas in Mexico, had staked his entire private fortune on this venture. He had landed in Baya de le Cruz--now Tampa Bay--on the day before Easter. The Indians had some gold which they said came ”from the north.” Cabeca, who was treasurer of the expedition, strongly advised against proceeding through a totally unknown country on this very sketchy information. But Narvaez consulted the pilot, who said he knew of a harbor some distance to the west, ordered the s.h.i.+ps to meet him there, and with forty hors.e.m.e.n and two hundred and sixty men on foot, struck boldly into the interior.
It was an amazing country. It had magnificent forests and almost impa.s.sable swamps, gorgeous tropical flowers and black bogs infested with snakes, alligators and hostile Indians, game of every kind and dense jungles into which it retreated. There seemed to be no towns, no grain-land and no gold-bearing mountains. The persevering explorers crossed half a dozen large rivers and many small ones, wading when they could, building rafts or swimming when the water was deep. After between three and four months of this, half-starved, shaken with swamp fever, weary and bedraggled, they reached the first harbor they had found upon the coast they followed, but no s.h.i.+ps were there. Whether the s.h.i.+ps had been wrecked, or put in somewhere only to meet with destruction at the hands of the Indians, they never knew.
Narvaez called his officers into consultation, one at a time, as to the best course to pursue in this desperate case. They had no provisions, a third of the men were sick and more were dropping from exhaustion every day, and all agreed that unless they could get away and reach Mexico while some of them could still work, there was very little chance that they would ever leave the place at all. But they had no tools, no workmen and no sailors, and nothing to eat while the s.h.i.+ps were a-building, even if they knew how to build them. They gave it up for that night and prayed for direction.
Next day one of the men proved to have been a carpenter, and another came to Cabeca de Vaca with a plan for making bellows of deerskin with a wooden frame and nozzle, so that a forge could be worked and whatever spare iron they had could be pounded into rude tools. The officers took heart. Cross-bows, stirrups, spurs, horse-furniture, reduced to sc.r.a.p-iron, furnished axes, hammers, saws and nails. There was plenty of timber in the forests. Those not able to do hard work stripped palmetto leaves to use in the place of tow for calking and rigging. Every third day one of the horses was killed, the meat served out to the sick and the working party, the manes and tails saved to twist into rope with palmetto fiber, and the skin of the legs taken off whole and tanned for water bottles. At four different times a selected body of soldiers went out to get corn from the Indians, peaceably if possible, by force if necessary, and on this, with the horse-meat and sometimes fish or sea-food caught in the bay, the camp lived and toiled for sixteen desperate days. A Greek named Don Theodoro knew how to make pitch for the calking, from pine resin. For sails the men pieced together their s.h.i.+rts. Not the least wearisome part of their labor was stone-hunting, for there were almost no stones in the country, and they must have anchors. But at last the boats were finished, of twenty-two cubits in length, with oars of savin (fir), and fifty of the men had died from fever, hards.h.i.+p or Indian arrows. Each boat must carry between forty-five and fifty of those who remained, and this crowded them so that it was impossible to move about, and weighted them until the gunwales were hardly a hand's breadth above the water. It would have been madness to venture out to sea, and they crept along the coast, though they well knew that in following all the inlets of that marshy sh.o.r.e the length of the voyage would be multiplied several times over.
When they had been out a week they captured five Indian canoes, and with the timbers of these added a few boards to the side of each galley. This made it possible to steer in something like a direct line toward Mexico.
On October 30, about the time of vespers, Cabeca de Vaca, who happened to be in the lead, discovered the mouth of what seemed to be an immense river. There they anch.o.r.ed among islands. They found that the volume of water brought down by this river was so great that it freshened the sea-water even three miles out. They went up the river a little way to try to get fuel to parch their corn, half a handful of raw corn being the entire ration for a day. The current and a strong north wind, however, drove them back. When they sounded, a mile and a half from sh.o.r.e, a line of thirty fathoms found no bottom. After this Narvaez with three of the boats kept on along the sh.o.r.e, but the boat commanded by Castillo and Dorantes, and that of Cabeca de Vaca, stood out to sea before a fair east wind, rowing and sailing, for four days. They never again saw or heard of the remainder of the fleet.
On November 5 the wind became a gale. All night the boats drifted, the men exhausted with toil, hunger and cold. Cabeca de Vaca and the s.h.i.+pmaster were the only men capable of handling an oar in their boat.
Near morning they heard the tumbling of waves on a beach, and soon after, a tremendous wave struck the boat with a force that hurled her up on the beach and roused the men who seemed dead, so that they crept on hands and knees toward shelter in a ravine. Here some rain-water was found, a fire was made and they parched their corn, and here they were found by some Indians who brought them food. They still had some of their trading stores, from which they produced colored beads and hawk-bells. After resting and collecting provisions the indomitable Spaniards dug their boat out of the sand and made ready to go on with the voyage.
They were but a little way from sh.o.r.e when a great wave struck the battered craft, and the cold having loosened their grip on the oars the boat was capsized and some of the crew drowned. The rest were driven ash.o.r.e a second time and lost literally everything they had. Fortunately some live brands were left from their fire, and while they huddled about the blaze the Indians appeared and offered them hospitality. To some of the party this seemed suspicious. Were the Indians cannibals? Even when they were warmed and fed in a comfortable shelter n.o.body dared to sleep.
But the Indians had no treacherous intentions whatever, and continued to share with the s.h.i.+pwrecked unfortunates their own scanty provision.
Fever, hunger and despair, reduced the eighty men who had come ash.o.r.e, to less than twenty. All but Cabeca and two others who were helpless from fever at last departed on the desperate adventure of trying to find their way overland to Mexico. One of the two left behind died and the other ran away in delirium, leaving Cabeca de Vaca alone, as the slave of the Indians.
He discovered presently that he was of little use to them, for though he could have cut wood or carried water, this was squaws' work, and should a man be seen doing it every tradition of the tribe would be upset. He was of no use as a hunter, for he had not the hawk-like sight of an Indian or the Indian instinct for following a trail. He could dig out the wild roots they ate, which grew among canes and under water, but this was laborious and painful work, which made his hands bleed. With tools, or even metal with which to make them, he might have made himself the most useful member of the tribe, but as it was, he was even poorer than the wretched people among whom he lived, for they knew how to make the most of what was in the country, and he had no such training.
The lonely Spaniard studied their language and customs diligently. He found that they made knives and arrows of sh.e.l.l, and clothing of woven fibers of gra.s.s and leaves, and deerskin. They went from one part of the country to another according to the food supply. In p.r.i.c.kly pear time they went into the cactus region to gather the fruit, on which they mainly lived during the season. When pinon nuts were ripe they went into the mountains and gathered these, thres.h.i.+ng them out of the cones to be eaten fresh, roasted, or ground into flour for cakes baked on flat stones. They had no dishes except baskets and gourd-rinds, and their houses were tent-poles covered with hides. When a squaw wished to roast a piece of meat she thrust a sharp stick through it. When she wished to boil it she filled a large calabash-rind with water, put in it the materials of her stew, and threw stones into the fire to heat. When very hot these stones were raked out with a loop of twisted green reed or willow-shoots and put into the water. When enough had been put in to make the water boil, it was kept boiling by changing the cooled stones for hotter ones until the meat was cooked.
Many of the baskets made by the squaws were curiously decorated, and made of fine reed or fiber sewed in coils with very fine gra.s.s-thread, so that they were both light and strong. There were cone-shaped carrying-baskets borne on the back with a loop pa.s.sed around the forehead; in these the squaws carried grain, fruit, nuts or occasionally babies. There were baskets for sifting grain and meal, and a sort of flask that would hold water. The materials were gathered from mountains, valleys and plains over a range of hundreds of miles--gra.s.ses here, bark fiber there, dyes in another place, maguey leaves in another, and for black figures in decoration the seed-pods called ”cat's claws” or the stems of maiden-hair fern. A design was not copied exactly, but each worker made the pattern in the same general form and sometimes improved on it. There was a banded pattern in a diamond-shaped criss-cross almost exactly like the shaded markings on a rattlesnake-skin. The Indians believed in a G.o.ddess or Snake-Mother, who lived underground and knew about springs; and as water was the most important thing in that land of deserts, they showed respect to the Snake-Mother by baskets decorated in her honor. Another design showed a round center with four zigzag lines running to the border. This was intended for a lake with four streams flowing out of it, widening as they flowed; but it looked rather like a cross or a swastika. There was a design in zigzags to represent the lightning, and almost all the patterns had to do in some way with lakes, rivers, rain, or springs.
As the exile of Spain began to know the country he sometimes ventured on journeys alone, without the tribe, to the north, away from the coast. In these wanderings he met with tribes whose language was not wholly strange, but whose customs and occupations were not exactly like those of his own Indians. Once he found a village of deerskin tents where the warriors were painting themselves with red clay, for a dance. He remembered that the squaws, when he came away some days before, were in great lamentation because they had no red paint for their baskets. He took out a handful of sh.e.l.ls and found that these Indians were only too pleased to pay for them in red earth, deerskin, and ta.s.sels of deer hair dyed red. They would hardly let him go till he promised to come again and bring them more sh.e.l.ls and sh.e.l.l beads. This suggested to him a way in which he might make himself of use and value.