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Explorers and Travellers. Greely Adolphus Washington
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Автор произведения Greely Adolphus Washington
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With Mobile commenced, the royal storehouses erected, and the alliance of the Choctaws and Chickasaws secured, Iberville felt that the colony of Louisiana was on a secure foundation, and on March 31st he sailed from Dauphine Island, then the headquarters of that colony for which he had done so much, and which he was destined never again to see.
The domain of Louisiana, obtained by so much heroic endeavor and individual suffering on the part of Joliet, Marquette, La Salle, Tonti, Iberville, and their associates, passed at once, by an edict of Louis XIV., into a monopoly and under the control of a courtier, Anton Crozat, for trading purposes, by the decree of September 14, 1712. In this decree the limits of Louisiana were for the first time defined, including “all the territories by us (France) possessed, and bounded by New Mexico and by those of the English in Carolina… The river St. Louis, formerly called the Mississippi, from the sea-shore to the Illinois, together with the rivers St. Phillipe, formerly called the Missouries, and the St. Jerome, formerly called the Wabash (the Ohio), with all the countries, territories, lakes in the land, and the rivers emptying directly or indirectly into that part of the river St. Louis. All the said territories, countries, rivers, streams, and islands we will to be and remain comprised under the name of the government of Louisiana.”
There was another and blacker page to the decree, whereby Crozat was further authorized to introduce African slavery: “If the aforesaid Sieur Crozat considers it advisable to have negroes in the said country of Louisiana, for agriculture or other use on plantations, he can send a ship each year to trade directly with the Guinea coast, … and is further authorized to sell negroes to the settlers of Louisiana.”
But prior to this condition of affairs the great Canadian naval commander had passed to his final reward, having died of yellow fever at Havana, July 9, 1706. The last leaf in his history was, however, an effort, through his personal bravery and skill, to secure French domination in America by driving out of the Antilles the determined English seamen whose successful raids so often militated against the interests of France. Despite his health, undermined by fevers, Iberville left France with a fleet with which he hoped to carry out this great plan. Intending to make a descent upon Barbadoes, he learned that the English, warned of his plans, were prepared for him. He therefore seized on the islands of Nevis and St. Christopher, where his fleet captured an enormous amount of booty of all kinds. He decided next to ravage the English colonies in the Carolinas, but stopping at Havana for reinforcements he lost his own life by the epidemic which destroyed eight hundred others of his fleet.
Among the qualities of this great Canadian all must admire his intrepidity in war, his skill as a navigator, and his capacity as an explorer; but beyond these were the astonishing administrative ability and political sagacity which he displayed in such an eminent degree in the planning, founding, and fostering of the great province of Louisiana.
III
JONATHAN CARVER,
Throughout the bloody series of French and Indian wars which ravaged the frontier settlements of America during the first half of the eighteenth century, France maintained secure possession of the regions of the great lakes and the basin of the upper Mississippi. The successful campaign of the gallant Wolfe against the no less gallant Montcalm ultimately resulted in the termination of French supremacy in these sections, and under the treaty of Paris, in 1763, Canada with all other dominions of France east of the Mississippi passed under the control of Great Britain.
To this time the English colonists had confined their operations almost entirely to the region of the Atlantic Coast, so when Great Britain acquired her immense war-inheritance the country to the west of the Appalachian Mountain range was practically an unknown region to its new masters. The extension of English settlements toward the interior of the continent was determined on by the English Government, and the more accessible of the French trading-posts in the northwest were immediately occupied. Maps were few and inaccurate, information as to the Indians vague and exaggerated, while nothing was known as to the resources of the country except that furs were obtainable in large numbers.
Scarcely were the terms of the treaty promulgated than the enterprising pioneers moved westward and gradually pressed back the Indians nearest the English settlements. A few other men, however, undertook to penetrate the valley of the Mississippi to the very frontier of Louisiana, which remained a French possession.
Among these hardy and adventurous Americans the most enterprising was Captain Jonathan Carver, who was born in Stillwater, N. Y., in 1732. He was the grandson of William Joseph Carver, one of the earliest of the royal appointments in Connecticut, and his first public service was at the age of eighteen, when he secured an ensigncy in a Connecticut regiment. In 1757, when Colonel Oliver Partridge raised a battalion of infantry in Massachusetts to serve against Canada, Carver was made a lieutenant therein. Later he served as captain under Colonel Whitcomb, in 1760, and under Colonel Saltonstall, in 1762, and participated in the taking of Crown Point and other operations in northern New York.
Doubtless his association with scouts and camp-followers, largely consisting of fur-traders and frontiersmen, induced a lively interest in their accounts of the western country held by their enemies, the Indian and the Frenchman. Certain it is that Carver acquired such ideas of the extent, fertility, natural wealth, and possibilities of the great and unknown West as fired his adventurous spirit with a firm determination to solve the important geographical problems connected therewith.
His objects, he states, were to gain knowledge concerning the Indian tribes to the west of the Mississippi, to ascertain the natural resources of the country, and to cross the American continent between the forty-third and forty-sixth degrees of north latitude. Ultimately he contemplated the establishment of a trading-post at some suitable point on the Pacific Coast.
Carver was not ignorant of the great danger involved in such an undertaking, where he was obliged to intrust his life to the mercy of unknown Indians for a prolonged time. Indeed, considering his experiences at the massacre of Englishmen and provincials at Fort Henry, it seems surprising that he would ever trust a savage or a Frenchman. In the campaign of 1757, Carver volunteered to accompany the detachment of fifteen hundred men which General Webb sent forward to reinforce the garrison at Fort Henry, then anticipating an attack from Montcalm. The garrison, commanded by the gallant Monro, who resisted until his guns burst and his ammunition was nearly exhausted, surrendered to the combined force of Indians and French under Montcalm, who promised safe conduct and private property. As the English force moved out the next morning the Indians, inflamed by liquor, song, and dance, butchered the sick and wounded and then fell upon the helpless captives, of whom there were, according to French accounts, about sixty killed and four hundred robbed and maltreated. Montcalm and Levi, to their credit, though too late, made heroic personal efforts which mitigated the horrors of the situation.
Among the unfortunates was Carver, who, robbed and stripped by the savages, appealed to a French sentry for protection only to be repelled with abuse. Realizing finally that to remain quiet was to meet certain death, Carver and a few others attempted to escape by breaking unarmed through the surrounding lines of Indian fiends. In this desperate effort for life Carver was twice wounded, badly beaten, seized by two Indians, and led away to death, which he escaped by the appearance of a British officer in full uniform, who was such a prize that his captors left Carver to secure a more valuable victim. Profiting by the respite Carver fled to the nearest woods, where, exhausted and nearly naked, he concealed himself in a thicket until night. For three days he wandered through the densest part of the forest, suffering tortures from travel under such conditions, often in danger of recapture, and without food until he reached, in a nearly exhausted condition, the English settlements.
An attempt at transcontinental exploration was then looked on as foolhardy and visionary in the extreme, even to those friends of Carver who never deserted him. One of these, Dr. Lettsom, wrote in the third edition of Carver’s travels, fifteen years after the journey, as