 | CHAPTER XV.
THE FREED EAGLE—HOFES REVIVED AND BAFFLED. The damsel of Darien |  |
15. CHAPTER XV.
THE FREED EAGLE—HOFES REVIVED AND BAFFLED.
One of the predictions of Vasco Nunez was soon verified.
The colony soon found occasion for his services. In the
absence of his genius its fortunes sunk, its enterprises miscarried,
and a pestilence which fell upon the people during
the oppressive heats of summer, contributed to fill the measure
of its misfortunes to the brim. Pedrarias lacked
nearly all the necessary qualities for a great commander.
Though treating the conqueror with such severity, he yet
availed himself of many of the plans which his wily hypocrisy
had extracted at his first coming from the simple and
unsuspecting confidence of the other; but he adopted them
only to mar them; and many of them were left unattempted
through the pressure of calamities which contributed
among other apparent evils to humble in some little degree
the vain insolence and pride of heart, which made the governor
so utterly regardless of truth and justice. The malaria
of Darien prevailing in the heat of summer, carried off,
in the brief period of one month, no less than seven hundred
of the gay and youthful cavaliers that composed his
army—many of them fled to Cuba and Spain; and Pedrarias,—himself
sick, and thus deserted—was reduced to the
humbling necessity—after vainly attempting to lead his
troops in his own person in several expeditions which
proved fruitless—to release Vasco Nunez from his chains,
and yield those enterprises to his hands which had suffered
nothing but miscarriage in the hands of others. His generals
had traversed the country explored by Vasco Nunez,
and in the wantonness of their power had practised a thousand
excesses, which soon converted all the friendships
hate. Their wives and daughters were seized upon, and
subjected to the most brutal abuses, while their prisoners
of every sex and age were equally subjected to the most
cruel tortures in order that they might reveal the secret
places of their fancied or reported treasures. Among these
victims were many of those Indians whom the humane
policy of Vasco Nunez had altered from savage foes into
faithful allies; but who now, goaded to desperation, rose
in unanimous warfare on every hand, and baffled at every
point the ruthless invaders whom they did not always fail
to destroy. The old scarred soldiers of Darien now spoke
out with boldness on the subject of the wrongs of their
late commander. They pointed to the invariable defeat
of all those who had followed him over the ground on
which he had been as invariably successful. Their reproaches
and sarcasms had probably much more effect
upon the irritable Pedrarias than even the necessities of
his condition; and he resolved to employ the man who
was so much the idol of the people, in such a manner as
should do more to lessen his popularity than to ensure the
success of his services. A perilous expedition—one which,
tried before, had already more than once resulted in the
defeat of the Spanish arms,—was proposed to the discoverer,
who was only too happy to obtain his release
from a prison in which his soul sickened, to make any
serious objection to the terms. The rich mines of Dobayda—the
golden temple of that Indian province—had
long been a subject of fruitful anticipation among the Spanish
cavaliers, and the discovery had been once attempted
by Vasco Nunez himself without success. The enterprise
was invested in the imagination of the time with more than
ordinary dangers. The savages who held the country
were as adroit as valiant—well practised in the arts of
stratagem, and fought quite as well on water as on land.
Their country was particularly favourable to their ambuscades
and various modes of warfare. It was intersected
with bays and rivers, dreary fens and morasses, which
were also infested by every species of reptile. The vampire
bat lurked around the soldier while he slept—the cayman
plunged through the water, and assailed man and
horse with equal audacity; clouds of gnats and musquitoes
were ever on the wing, and every where; while, rendered
lurked in the same abodes with these natural enemies of
the European, forming ambuscades with his fleet canoes at
the mouths of lagunes and rivers, from whence he launched
the sudden death on the flinty tongue of his venomed arrow.
Nor, as if these terrors were not enough for the
discouragement of all ordinary adventure, did fable withhold
its marvels and monsters. The dragon and the harpy
were also the supposed tenants of Dobayda, and the guardians
of those golden treasures in search of which Spanish
cupidity and courage proved in the end more than equal to
all the perils involved in the adventure.
Vasco Nunez only smiled when his friends strove to dissuade
him from the command, which, it was well understood,
had been proposed to him by Pedrarias rather in hate
than affection. He was too anxious to escape from the
pining solitude of his prison, and the cankering cares of inactivity,
to regard the presence of dangers to which he had
been long familiar; and with the natural confidence of true
genius, he was too well assured of his own powers to apprehend
other than the most favourable results to an enterprise
of which he had the entire conduct. But, it was his
misfortune not to have the entire conduct of the adventure.
The jealous Pedrarias, when he discovered the readiness
of Vasco Nunez to undertake the enterprise, associated
with him in the command one Louis Carillo, a creature of
his own, who, in addition to his utter want of character,
laboured under an equal deficiency of ability, and served
only, as doubtless Pedrarias calculated, to embarrass the
purposes, and finally defeat the exterprise of his associate.
When this after-resolve of the governor was made known
to Vasco Nunez, his ardour was chilled, and but that he
had passed his word, he would freely have withdrawn
from the command. His honour, however, was now concerned
in the successful prosecution of the enterprise, and
he resolved to go through it with his accustomed cheerfulness
and spirit. But before departing he had a conference
with the youth Pedro of whom he had seen but little while
in his dungeon.
“Thou hast almost fled me, Pedro—thou lovest not the
air of a prison. Thou art wise, but thou shouldst not
desert thy friends.”
“I do not, señor—it may be that I have served thee without
better than if I had sought thee within.”
“Perhaps so—it is not unlikely. It had been of little
help to thee or me in the eye of Pedrarias, to have made
thyself familiar in my prison. I doubt not thy friendship,
Pedro, and would try it farther. Wilt thou be faithful?”
“If it be with me, señor, thou wilt find me in the moment
of death the nearest to thy side.”
“Enough—hear me. I have but little hope from this
expedition now. This Carillo is a fool—and no less vain
than foolish. His presumption already moves him to confound
my commands, and this presumption, natural enough
to the man, is strengthened and increased by a knowledge
which he has of the treasured hostility of Pedrarias to my
fame and fortunes. He will probably defeat the enterprise.
Against this I would be prepared. I would be free from
Pedrarias. Here then is gold—it is the small remains of
my spoil on the Southern Sea. Thou shalt take this to
Cuba and procure for me a brigantine, well armed, and
with seventy resolute men. With these I will leave
Darien for the South Sea, and explore the country beyond
it without fear of this petty tyrant.”
“I will do it, Señor Vasco,” replied the youth.
“It was surely unwise,” said the astrologer, after the
other had departed, “to give so great a trust to one so
young.”
“Alas! Micer Codro,” replied the conqueror, “thou
speakest as if Vasco Nunez had his choice of warriors
among a thousand. The youth is young indeed, but he is
thoughtful—he is feeble but he is bold; and far better is it
to trust the thoughtful boy than the thoughtless graybeard,
and more sure is the strength of the heart than the strength
of the body. The small dog pulls down to the earth the
heavy bull, and the little bird with a fearless heart speeds
with an arrow's swiftness upon the big but trembling fowl
that wanders near the dwelling of his young. This boy
hath a generous spirit and a good mind. Even were it
otherwise, as I have told thee, there had been none but
thou—”
“I had gone for thee, son Vasco.”
“No, no, Micer Codro—it is not fitting at thy years
that thou shouldst toil for youth, in such labours as should
only fall to the lot of youth. I had thought of Francisco
in command under Pedrarias, and his eye looks not into
mine when we speak together. He hath ever been true to
me I think, yet I like not this. He too hath, I fear, but
little love for friends in a dungeon.”
“He is a brave, bad man,” said the astrologer, “who
hath no such nature as thine, and will only be thy friend
when it helps his fortune to be so. Still, he had done
better than the boy.”
“Nay, I know not that,” replied the other as if willing
to dismiss the subject. “I have faith in that youth, and it
needs not valour nor strength to buy brigantine and hire
soldiers. He will do well I doubt not.”
The enterprise of Vasco Nunez failed; he reached the
province and river of Dobayda, but was not destined to
win the golden temple. His small fleet of canoes was
surrounded by thousands of savages in vessels of the same
description, which they were taught to manage with more
skill than the Spaniards. The fight was long and bloody.
The savages fought with a degree of desperation as singular
as it was successful. They assailed the invaders with lances
and arrows, which were sent with a force which impelled
them through buckler, escaupil and body, and only failed
against such Spaniards as had the good fortune to wear
mail coats. While one swarm of warriors carried on the
combat with these weapons, others plunged boldly into
the river, grappling the canoes of the enemy with their
hands, and dragging them beneath the water; stabbing with
their short spears the struggling Spaniards who vainly
strove at the same moment against their implacable opponents
and their own weighty armour. One half of the
Spaniards were slain; among them Carillo, to whose rashness
the surprise was wholly due. Vasco Nunez, himself
wounded, succeeded in beating off the enemy and retreated
safely to Darien, amidst horrors and privations, which fully
confirmed the worst features of the dreadful tales which
they had heard of this fearful region. Pedrarias and his
partisans exulted in a result which they had alike desired,
and taunted the friends of the hero with his defeat. But
they had their sufficient answer, when they mentioned the
name of Carillo, to whose blind insolence, the surviving
soldiers of the expedition ascribed its unfortunate termination.
Vasco Nunez himself was silent amid all these discussions.
consciousness of evil fortune, and, with hourly increasing
reverence, he nightly looked with Micer Codro at the
aspect of that evil planet which still hung with threatening
augury within the horizon of his own. The expectation
of the vessel from Cuba, and the hope of better tidings from
Spain, alone cheered him up against the oppressions of his
tyrant on earth, and those predictions of evil which seemed
written against his fortune on the dim curtains of heaven.
There was a time when, the summit of his greatness being
won, it seemed to him that death would have been a small
evil; and such was his conviction when he stood upon the
peak of Darien and watched the living waters flowing at
his feet below. His thought now, like that of all great
minds, was, not of what he had done, but of what yet remained
for him to do. The height was gained, it is true,
but the illusive glory lay beyond it still. Other heights
were to be reached—other seas crossed—other nations
overcome—and then, the employments of ambition are yet
to be begun. Weary with watching, sad with many and
conflicting thoughts, he turned from the astrologer—he
turned from the few soldiers, the scarred veterans whose
eyes declared the sympathy which it had been unwise to
speak in more emphatic language—he turned from all
men, and from all the schemes of men, as fruitful only in
affliction, and yielding no other increase than strife; and
sought his only consolation in the unobtrusive but watchful
devotion of the Indian damsel. The care which wasted
him was also busy at her heart; and his departure from
her presence, and his return, brought her equal anxiety.
She knew enough of his position in the colony, to be now
aware of his dangers, and when her knowledge failed her,
her apprehension underwent due increase. To the ignorant,
the unknown is always full of dangers, and the ignorance
that loves is always the most timid of creatures.
“Oh, my lord,” she was always ready to exclaim when
she saw him return—and while her fingers played with his
long, brown hair, which intense thought and many cares
were prematurely sprinkling with gray—“shall we not go
to Coyba, and hide among the hills? There is danger to
my lord in Darien—there is death here. Will not my lord
fly with the poor Careta, where safety sits in the bushes
among the hills—where the cruel Spaniard cannot come?”
“Ay, Careta, there is danger here and death—but where
are they not? Coyba is not more secure than Darien—
thou hast heard my thunder among its hills, and the Spaniard
will dwell in Coyba as in Darien. There will be no
part of this wild land which can be secure against his warriors.
But I would send thee to Coyba, to thy father, my
poor Careta, if this were in my power. If harm comes to
Vasco Nunez—if death—”
“No, no, no! no death for my lord.”
“Bethink thee, my girl,—if death comes to me, what
will become of thee? Where wilt thou hide thee? What
wilt thou do? Thou wilt be at the mercy of this tyrant,
who hath but too well shown to me what are the mercies
of the wicked.”
A smile faintly overspread the lips of the damsel, as she
gradually comprehended the speech of the conqueror—but
she made no other answer. None other was necessary to
show at that moment the feeling in her soul. The subject
was one which she did not care to examine. It was enough
for her to know that in his death, her own cares of life
would all be extinguished.
| CHAPTER XV.
THE FREED EAGLE—HOFES REVIVED AND BAFFLED. The damsel of Darien | |