University of Virginia Library

22. CHAPTER XXII.
SOMETHING FURTHER OF ETHAN ALLEN; WITH ISRAEL'S
FLIGHT TOWARDS THE WILDERNESS.

AMONG the episodes of the Revolutionary War, none
is stranger than that of Ethan Allen in England; the
event and the man being equally uncommon.

Allen seems to have been a curious combination of a
Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a Tom Hyer; had
a person like the Belgian giants; mountain music in him
like a Swiss; a heart plump as Cœur de Lion's. Though
born in New England, he exhibited no trace of her character.
He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan,
convivial, a Roman, hearty as a harvest. His spirit was
essentially Western; and herein is his peculiar Americanism;
for the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no
other is, or can be), the true American one.

For the most part, Allen's manner while in England
was scornful and ferocious in the last degree; however,
qualified by that wild, heroic sort of levity, which in the
hour of oppression or peril seems inseparable from a
nature like his; the mode whereby such a temper best
evinces its barbaric disdain of adversity, and how cheaply

and waggishly it holds the malice, even though triumphant,
of its foes! Aside from that inevitable egotism relatively
pertaining to pine trees, spires, and giants, there were,
perhaps, two special incidental reasons for the Titanic
Vermonter's singular demeanor abroad. Taken captive
while heading a forlorn hope before Montreal, he was
treated with inexcusable cruelty and indignity; something
as if he had fallen into the hands of the Dyaks. Immediately
upon his capture he would have been deliberately
suffered to have been butchered by the Indian alies in
cold blood on the spot, had he not, with desperate intrepidity,
availed himself of his enormous physical strength,
by twitching a British officer to him, and using him for a
living target, whirling him round and round against the
murderous tomahawks of the savages. Shortly afterwards,
led into the town, fenced about by bayonets of the guard,
the commander of the enemy, one Colonel McCloud,
flourished his cane over the captive's head, with brutal
insults promising him a rebel's halter at Tyburn. During
his passage to England in the same ship wherein went
passanger Colonel Guy Johnson, the implacable tory, he
was kept heavily ironed in the hold, and in all ways
treated as a common mutineer; or, it may be, rather as
a lion of Asia; which, though caged, was still too dreadful
to behold without fear and trembling, and consequent
cruelty. And no wonder, at least for the fear; for on
one occasion, when chained hand and foot, he was insulted
on shipboard by an officer; with his teeth he twisted off
the nail that went through the mortise of his handcuffs,
and so, having his arms at liberty, challenged his insulter
to combat. Often, as at Pendennis Castle, when no other
avengement was at hand, he would hurl on his foes such
howling tempests of anathema as fairly to shock them
into retreat. Prompted by somewhat similar motives,
both on shipboard and in England, he would often make
the most vociferous allusions to Ticonderoga, and the part
he played in its capture, well knowing, that of all
American names, Ticonderoga was, at that period, by far
the most famous and galling to Englishmen.

Parlor-men, dancing-masters, the graduates of the Albe
Bellgarde, may shrug their laced shoulders at the boisterousness
of Allen in England. True, he stood upon no
punctilios with his jailers; for where modest gentlemanhood
is all on one side, it is a losing affair; as if my
Lord Chesterfield should take off his hat, and smile, and
bow, to a mad bull, in hopes of a reciprocation of politeness.
When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be
a wild beast. Neither is it unlikely that this was the
view taken by Allen. For, besides the exasperating tendency
to self-assertion which such treatment as his must
have bred on a man like him, his experience must have
taught him, that by assuming the part of a jocular, reckless,
and even braggard barbarian, he would better sustain
himself against bullying turnkeys than by submissive
quietude. Nor should it be forgotten, that besides the
petty details of personal malice, the enemy violated every
international usage of right and decency, in treating a distinguished
prisoner of war as if he had been a Botany-Bay
convict. If, at the present day, in any similar case
between the same States, the repetition of such outrages

would be more than unlikely, it is only because it is
among nations as among individuals: imputed indigence
provokes oppression and scorn; but that same indigence
being risen to opulence, receives a politic consideration
even from its former insulters.

As the event proved, in the course Allen pursued, he
was right. Because, though at first nothing was talked
of by his captors, and nothing anticipated by himself, but
his ignominious execution, or at the least, prolonged and
squalid incarceration, nevertheless, these threats and prospects
evaporated, and by his facetious scorn for scorn,
under the extremest sufferings, he finally wrung repentant
usage from his foes; and in the end, being liberated from
his irons, and walking the quarter-deck where before he
had been thrust into the hold, was carried back to America,
and in due time, at New York, honorably included in a
regular exchange of prisoners.

It was not without strange interest that Israel had been
an eye-witness of the scenes on the Castle Green. Neither
was this interest abated by the painful necessity of concealing,
for the present, from his brave countryman and
fellow-mountaineer, the fact of a friend being nigh. When
at last the through was dismissed, walking towards the
town with the rest, he heard that there were some forty
or more Americans, privates, confined on the cliff. Upon
this, inventing a pretence, he turned back, loitering around
the walls for any chance glimpse of the captives. Presently,
while looking up at a grated embrasure in the tower, he
started at a voice from it familiarly hailing him:

“Potter, is that you? In God's name how came you here?”

At these words, a sentry below had his eye on our
astonished adventurer. Bringing his piece to bear, he
bade him stand. Next moment Israel was under arrest.
Being brought into the presence of the forty prisoners,
where they lay in litters of mouldy straw, strewn with
gnawed bones, as in a kennel, he recognized among them
one Singles, now Sergeant Singles, the man who, upon
our hero's return home from his last Cape Horn voyage,
he had found wedded to his mountain Jenny. Instantly
a rush of emotions filled him. Not as when Damon found
Pythias. But far stranger, because very different. For
not only had this Singles been an alien to Israel (so far
as actual intercourse went), but impelled to it by instinct,
Israel had all but detested him, as a successful, and perhaps
insidious rival. Nor was it altogether unlikely that
Singles had reciprocated the feeling. But now, as if the
Atlantic rolled, not between two continents, but two worlds
—this, and the next—these alien souls, oblivious to hate,
melted down into one.

At such a juncture, it was hard to maintain a disguise,
especially when it involved the seeming rejection of advances
like the Sergeant's. Still, converting his real amazement
into affected surprise, Israel, in presence of the sentries,
declared to Singles that he (Singles) must labor under
some unaccountable delusion; for he (Potter) was no
Yankee rebel, thank Heaven, but a true man to his king; in
short, an honest Englishman, born in Kent, and now serving
his country, and doing what damage he might to her
foes, by being first captain of a carronade on board a
letter of marque, that moment in the harbor.

For a moment the captive stood astounded, but observing
Israel more narrowly, detecting his latent look, and
bethinking him of the useless peril he had thoughtlessly
caused to a countryman, no doubt unfortunate as himself,
Singles took his cue, and pretending sullenly to apologize
for his error, put on a disappointed and crestfallen air.
Nevertheless, it was not without much difficulty, and after
many supplemental scrutinies and inquisitions from a
board of officers before whom he was subsequently
brought, that our wanderer was finally permitted to quit
the cliff.

This luckless adventure not only nipped in the bud a
little scheme he had been revolving, for materially befriending
Ethan Allen and his comrades, but resulted in
making his further stay at Falmouth perilous in the extreme.
And as if this were not enough, next day, while
hanging over the side, painting the hull, in trepidation of
a visit from the castle soldiers, rumor came to the ship
that the man-of-war in the haven purposed impressing one-third
of the letter of marque's crew; though, indeed,
the latter vessel was preparing for a second cruise. Being
on board a private armed ship, Israel had little dreamed
of its liability to the same governmental hardships with
the meanest merchantman. But the system of impressment
is no respecter either of pity or person.

His mind was soon determined. Unlike his shipmates,
braving immediate and lonely hazard, rather than wait
for a collective and ultimate one, he cunningly dropped
himself overboard the same night, and after the narrowest
risk from the muskets of the man-of-war's sentries (whose

gangways he had to pass), succeeded in swimmiing to
shore, where he fell exhausted, but recovering, fled inland,
doubly hunted by the thought, that whether as an Englishman,
or whether as an American, he would, if caught,
be now equally subject to enslavement.

Shortly after the break of day, having gained many
miles, he succeeded in ridding himself of his seaman's
clothing, having found some mouldy old rags on the
banks of a stagnant pond, nigh a rickety building, which
looked like a poorhouse—clothing not improbably, as he
surmised, left there on the bank by some pauper suicide.
Marvel not that he should with avidity seize these rags;
what the suicides abandon, the living hug.

Once more in beggar's garb, the fugitive sped towards
London, prompted by the same instinct which impels
the hunted fox to the wilderness; for solitudes befriend
the endangered wild beast, but crowds are the security,
because the true desert, of persecuted man. Among the
things of the capital, Israel for more than forty years
was yet to disappear, as one entering at dusk into a
thick wood. Nor did ever the German forest, nor Tasso's
enchanted one, contain in its depths more things of horror
than eventually were revealed in the secret clefts, gulfs,
caves and dens of London.

But here we anticipate a page.