University of Virginia Library

12. CHAPTER XII.
GLIMPSES OF THE CASSIQUE.

Calvert answered the politician only with a look of indifference
that might as well have been contempt. “Ay,” thought he,
as the other went, “such is, no doubt, the moral by which you
live. But, unless Edward Berkeley be wonderfully changed since
I last knew him, he is as much superior to you in wisdom as he
is in virtue. Alas! how I loved him! How great, I fancied,
was his love for me! Yet has he stepped between me and hope
— thrown his larger fortunes between me and happiness, and cut
me off from all that was precious in the heart's sunlight. Oh,
Edward Berkeley! there is but one thing that shall move me
truly to forgiveness. I must know that you have sinned against
me in ignorance; that you knew not, when you passed between
me and the object of my first fond affections, that she was so precious
in my sight. And I would fain believe it; and it may be
so! Jack Belcher is shrewd and sagacious — honest as well as
shrewd. He will have it that you were ignorant. You knew not
of the ties that bound her to me — to me only — that woman
whom you now proudly call your own! Be it so; and I can forgive
you! But for her? What plea, what excuse can she make
for her cruel abandonment of the younger for the elder son!

“Yes, it is he!” he murmured, as the voice of the visiter reached
him from the adjoining chamber — “the same clear, manly tones.
Surely there can not be meanness, or falsehood, or fraud, under
such a tongue.”

He stepped to the door which opened into the other chamber.
An irresistible curiosity to behold the visiter — to employ sight as

well as hearing — moved him to explore the crannies of the door,
in the hope to gratify this feeling; but the door had been made
fast by Quarry as he went out. Our captain could see nothing.
But every syllable spoken within came distinctly to his ears.
There was no reserve on the part of either speaker.

The governor was all civility. His rôle was evidently that of
conciliation. The cassique of Kiawah — a rich landed proprietor,
one of the newly-constituted Carolina nobility, under a system
which only made bald recognition of the crown rather as an abstraction
than an absolute power — and the nephew of one of the
landed proprietors, supposed not only to represent his will but to
be his favorite — such a person was to be conciliated. The governor
was very courtly, accordingly — quite solicitous; his smooth
accents, and polished speech, and adroit compliment, all being
judiciously employed — just saving sycophancy and servility — to
persuade his visiter into a pleasant frame of self-complacency,
which is the process when dealing with all effeminate minds.

This was Quarry's mistake. The cassique was by no means a
man of effeminate mind. He was no courtier, and disdained the
petty vanities of society; had no artifices himself; was a person
of direct, manly character, grasping at power and performance,
and nowise accessible to shams and shows, and the mere tricks
and trappings of convention. He endured the courtly preliminaries
of Governor Quarry, though with some unexpressed impatience.

“Yes, I am settled, after a fashion — hutting it, for the summer,
in log-cabins. These we have made tolerably comfortable. I
would have found them so, under the naked poles; but Lady
Berkeley and her mother have been used to a different life, and,
with all my pains-taking, the contrast must still be a prodigious
one, their present with their past. I had to combine the house
with the fortress, as you know, and the enclosures require to be a
sort of court of guard, rather than simple fences. They will give
us temporary refuge, and may be covered by musketry from the
block-houses which occupy the four corners of some fifteen acres.
The dwelling in the centre is itself a `block;' and, with the neighboring
offices, all at hand, the fences, the palisades all complete,
and the gates up, twenty men may keep them against five hundred
of the savages.”

“That reminds me, my dear cassique, to ask if the redskins

have been seen in your neighborhood lately. I have advices from
the frontier that they are moving down in our direction in rather
large divisions. The hunting-season is temporarily over, and the
fishing begun. This necessarily brings them to the watercourses
and the seaboard, out of the interior. And I know not that this
should occasion any anxiety. But they are reported to be more
numerous than usual. It is suspected that they bring with them
tribes which hitherto have lived wholly in the interior, and there
is also said to be some discontent among them — some complaints
about lands and trespassers — to say nothing of that common subject
of complaint, that the English do not make their presents
sufficiently frequent or sufficiently large for the wants of the children
of the wilderness. They are, by-the-way, as greedy in their
desires as a—”

“As a courtier,” replied the other, completing the sentence just
as Quarry halted for a proper comparison.

“Thank you, yes — exactly. A good hit, my dear colonel.
Ha! ha! ha! But we, who have sunned ourselves in royal favor,
must not quarrel with the world's sneer. But to return to our
red men?—”

“Thus far,” said the cassique, “I see nothing to apprehend. I
see very few of the tribes as yet. Some stragglers have shown
themselves at the barony, and been fed. They gave no trouble.
I am in treaty with one of the chiefs of the Stonos and Sewees
for his son, whom I propose to employ as a hunter to supply me
with venison. He is a mere boy of sixteen, upon whom I design
an experiment. I wish to see if I can not detach him gradually
from the life of the woods. My purpose is ultimately a more extensive
one — the gradual diversion of the tribes from barbarism
to the civilizing tasks of culture.”

“Ah, my dear cassique, you are nursing philanthropy in defiance
of all experience. You might as well warm the frozen snake
at your fireside, and hope that its gratitude will take the venom
out of its fangs. There is but one safe course with these savages.
It is that which the New-Englanders employed. Buy up the
scalps of the warriors, and sell the women and children to the
West Indies. This is our proper policy.”

“But this, you are aware, is positively forbidden by the lords-proprietors.”

“The Lord send them a better wisdom! Here are these tribes
about us, pretending peace, yet your laborers have to carry the
shovel or axe in one hand and the musket in the other.”

“Ay, because they have been much more free with musket than
with axe or shovel. Had they been content to clear and cultivate
we should have had little trouble with the red man. I, at
least, shall try the pacific and humane policy, and see what will
come of it.”

“May you live to see! But take my counsel: in taking up the
spade, do not put down the musket.”

“Oh, I shall adopt all proper precautions. My fortress shall
be well garrisoned. I am now looking out for laborers, who shall
be gunmen also. Should you hear of any, who will answer in
this twofold capacity, pray secure them for me. What advices
lately from England?”

“None: we may look for the `Swallow' packet daily.”

“Is it not strange neglect of us, that there are no war-ships on
our station? Here we have the most stringent orders for putting
down piracy, yet not a vessel-of-war sent us. They seem, all of
them, to crowd about New York and Boston, where they are
quite out of the track of the pirates of the gulf. This should be
the station of one or more, if we are to do anything efficiently.
We have no land-force here for resistance to a single cruiser,
which, if insolent, or defied, might boldly enter our harbor, and
batter the town about our ears, and we scarce able to bring a
gun to bear upon her, or to marshal the smallest battalion in our
defence.”

“Ah! luckily, most of these pirates are of good English breed.
They devour the dons only, and this is so much good service done
to the colony.”

“We must not say that, Governor Quarry, regarding the existing
treaty with Spain, and our orders from the proprietors.
This last affair of the rover Calvert — the destruction of the
`Maria del Occidente,' a royal vessel — has made the matter a
very serious one, and compels us to adopt a much more strict and
national policy. By-the-way, should you not make proclamation
of the tenor of your last instructions against piracy, and offer a
reward for the apprehension of this rover Calvert?”

“There were no policy in that. With neither ships-of-war nor

troops in hand, we could only hope to effect his apprehension by
stratagem, in the event of his putting into our port again, as he
has boldly done before. To make public proclamation of what
he may expect, if he returns, will be most effectually to defeat
our own object, and keep him off. Our true policy is to lie low,
keep dark, and close upon him when he least expects it.”

“You are right. That, in our present condition of weakness,
is the only course we can adopt. We must have one or more
men-of-war cruising on this station. And yet this rover will be
more than a match, I fear, for any of our ships single-handed.
He is a good seaman and a fearless scoundrel. The circumstances
of that savage fight, were it in a good cause, would suffice to make
him a hero. I confess that I share in all our British antipathy
to the Spaniard, and in all our admiration of the hardy valor of
our Norman breed; and when I heard the particulars of that
affair, though out of the sanction of law, I rejoiced that the ancient
spirit of the Drakes, the Raleighs, the Sandwiches, and Cavendishes,
was not extinct among our seamen. Had we in our
king's ships such brave fellows to command as this rover Calvert,
Britain would never be made ashamed before Spaniard, or Frenchman,
or Hollander. But it is your courtiers, sir, who play the
devil with our marine. Here are they, men of the land altogether,
too frequently taken from the command of cavalry, sent
on board to manage ships and fleets — men of silk and filagree,
who do not know a ship's stern from her taffrail, and are just
as likely to go into action stern foremost as head. I scarce know
one of them now in command in America whom I should not
dread to see, yard-arm to yard-arm, in a sea-fight with this
`Happy-go-Lucky.' Our brave sea-dogs have given place to
court-monkeys and the powdered popinjays whose only merit
seems to be in their ready adoption of all the frills and furbelows
of France.”

“My dear cassique, you are quite too severe upon our macaronies.
These powdered monkeys will fight.”

“So they will. But we need conduct as well as valor, and we
can have no conduct without the capacity, and this depends upon
the hard school, the apprenticeship of seven years, which trains
them to the use of every faculty and every art, so that they shall
in action work rather by will and intuition than by thought. It is

the lack of these that has made us succumb to Dutch, French,
and Spaniard, in turn; and but for these unlicensed rovers, who
assert the manhood of the nation in spite of its laws, the honor of
Britain would too frequently lie upon a puppy's sleeve, for every
daw to pluck at. I would it were that the British crown were
honestly at war with France and Spain, so that we could legitimate
the valor of these cruisers, and appropriate their gallantry
to the country's honor. As it is, I should grieve to see this fellow
Calvert strung up to the gallows, when, as a mere deed of valor,
his crime would rather merit star and garter. But we must
beware how we mock at law. Law is the most sacred thing
known to society. The moment we hold it in irreverence, that
moment we open all the floodgates of license, and Anarchy pours
in her conflicting torrents to the breaking down of all the securities
that keep the race from ruin.”

“Ah! true, and very eloquently spoken, my dear cassique,”
answered the governor languidly, with difficulty suppressing a
yawn. “Law is a very important matter in society. We, who
hold offices of such high function, ought never to forget the laws
— no! Of course, we must bring these pirates to the gallows —
this fellow Calvert especially; though, I confess with you I should
much rather see him commissioned in a king's cruiser, and doing
a still larger business among the Spanish galleons.”

Enough. There was more said; there was some business done
between the parties. Papers were exchanged and signed. Money
was confided to his excellency by the cassique. There were notes
taken touching the Westo and other tribes of red men in the immediate
precinct, who had already given the colony some trouble.
But we do not care to state more than absolutely concerns our
narrative.

The cassique of Kiawah took his departure, and the governor
suffered Calvert to emerge from his retreat.