France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West
Spanish buccaneers. She was laden with provisions, tools, and other
necessaries for the colony; and the loss was irreparable. Beaujeu was
answerable for it; for had he anchored at Port de Paix, it would not
have occurred. The lieutenant-general, with Bégon and Cussy, who
presently arrived, plainly spoke their minds to him.[279]
[Sidenote: ILLNESS OF LA SALLE.]
La Salle's illness increased. "I was walking with him one day," writes
Joutel, "when he was seized of a sudden with such a weakness that he
could not stand, and was obliged to lie down on the ground. When he was
a little better, I led him to a chamber of a house that the brothers
Duhaut had hired. Here we put him to bed, and in the morning he was
attacked by a violent fever."[280] "It was so violent that," says
another of his shipmates, "his imagination pictured to him things
equally terrible and amazing."[281] He lay delirious in the wretched
garret, attended by his brother, and one or two others who stood
faithful to him. A goldsmith of the neighborhood, moved at his
deplorable condition, offered the use of his house; and Abbé Cavelier
had him removed thither. But there was a tavern hard by, and the patient
was tormented with daily and nightly riot. At the height of the fever, a
party of Beaujeu's sailors spent a night in singing and dancing before
the house; and, says Cavelier, "The more we begged them to be quiet, the
more noise they made." La Salle lost reason and well-nigh life; but at
length his mind resumed its balance, and the violence of the disease
abated. A friendly Capucin friar offered him the shelter of his roof;
and two of his men supported him thither on foot, giddy with exhaustion
and hot with fever. Here he found repose, and was slowly recovering,
when some of his attendants rashly told him the loss of the ketch "St.
François;" and the consequence was a critical return of the
disease.[282]
There was no one to fill his place. Beaujeu would not; Cavelier could
not. Joutel, the gardener's son, was apparently the most trusty man of
the company; but the expedition was virtually without a head. The men
roamed on shore, and plunged into every excess of debauchery,
contracting diseases which eventually killed them.
[Sidenote: COMPLAINTS OF BEAUJEU.]
Beaujeu, in the extremity of ill-humor, resumed his correspondence with
Seignelay. "But for the illness of the Sieur de la Salle," he writes, "I
could not venture to report to you the progress of our voyage, as I am
charged only with the navigation, and he with the secrets; but as his
malady has deprived him of the use of his faculties, both of body and
mind, I have thought myself obliged to acquaint you with what is
passing, and of the condition in which we are."
He then declares that the ships freighted by La Salle were so slow that
the "Joly" had continually been forced to wait for them, thus doubling
the length of the voyage; that he had not had water enough for the
passengers, as La Salle had not told him that there were to be any such
till the day they came on board; that great numbers were sick, and that
he had told La Salle there would be trouble if he filled all the space
between decks with his goods, and forced the soldiers and sailors to
sleep on deck; that he had told him he would get no provisions at St.
Domingo, but that he insisted on stopping; that it had always been
so,--that whatever he proposed La Salle would refuse, alleging orders
from the King; "and now," pursues the ruffled commander, "everybody is
ill; and he himself has a violent fever, as dangerous, the surgeon tells
me, to the mind as to the body."
The rest of the letter is in the same strain. He says that a day or two
after La Salle's illness began, his brother Cavelier came to ask him to
take charge of his affairs; but that he did not wish to meddle with
them, especially as nobody knows anything about them, and as La Salle
has sold some of the ammunition and provisions; that Cavelier tells him
that he thinks his brother keeps no accounts, wishing to hide his
affairs from everybody; that he learns from buccaneers that the entrance
of the Mississippi is very shallow and difficult, and that this is the
worst season for navigating the Gulf; that the Spaniards have in these
seas six vessels of from thirty to sixty guns each, besides row-galleys;
but that he is not afraid, and will perish, or bring back an account of
the Mississippi. "Nevertheless," he adds, "if the Sieur de la Salle
dies, I shall pursue a course different from that which he has marked
out; for I do not approve his plans."
"If," he continues, "you permit me to speak my mind, M. de la Salle
ought to have been satisfied with discovering his river, without
undertaking to conduct three vessels with troops two thousand leagues
through so many different climates, and across seas entirely unknown to
him. I grant that he is a man of knowledge, that he has reading, and
even some tincture of navigation; but there is so much difference
between theory and practice, that a man who has only the former will
always be at fault. There is also a great difference between conducting
canoes on lakes and along a river, and navigating ships with troops on
distant oceans."[283]
While Beaujeu was complaining of La Salle, his followers were deserting
him. It was necessary to send them on board ship, and keep them there;
for there were French buccaneers at Petit Goave, who painted the
promised land in such dismal colors that many of the adventurers
completely lost heart. Some, too, were dying. "The air of this place is
bad," says Joutel; "so are the fruits; and there are plenty of women
worse than either."[284]
It was near the end of November before La Salle could resume the voyage.
He was told that Beaujeu had said that he would not wait longer for the
store-ship "Aimable," and that she might follow as she could.[285]
Moreover, La Salle was on ill terms with Aigron, her captain, who had
declared that he would have nothing more to do with him.[286] Fearing,
therefore, that some mishap might befall her, he resolved to embark in
her himself, with his brother Cavelier, Membré, Douay, and others, the
trustiest of his followers. On the twenty-fifth they set sail; the
"Joly" and the little frigate "Belle" following. They coasted the shore
of Cuba, and landed at the Isle of Pines, where La Salle shot an
alligator, which the soldiers ate; and the hunter brought in a wild pig,
half of which he sent to Beaujeu. Then they advanced to Cape St.
Antoine, where bad weather and contrary winds long detained them. A load
of cares oppressed the mind of La Salle, pale and haggard with recent
illness, wrapped within his own thoughts, and seeking sympathy from
none.
[Sidenote: A VAIN SEARCH.]
At length they entered the Gulf of Mexico, that forbidden sea whence by
a Spanish decree, dating from the reign of Philip II., all foreigners
were excluded on pain of extermination.[287] Not a man on board knew the
secrets of its perilous navigation. Cautiously feeling their way, they
held a north-westerly course, till on the twenty-eighth of December a
sailor at the mast-head of the "Aimable" saw land. La Salle and all the
pilots had been led to form an exaggerated idea of the force of the
easterly currents; and they therefore supposed themselves near the Bay
of Appalache, when, in fact, they were much farther westward.
On New Year's Day they anchored three leagues from the shore. La Salle,
with the engineer Minet, went to explore it, and found nothing but a
vast marshy plain, studded with clumps of rushes. Two days after there
was a thick fog, and when at length it cleared, the "Joly" was nowhere
to be seen. La Salle in the "Aimable," followed closely by the little
frigate "Belle," stood westward along the coast. When at the mouth of
the Mississippi in 1682, he had taken its latitude, but unhappily could
not determine its longitude; and now every eye on board was strained to
detect in the monotonous lines of the low shore some tokens of the
great river. In fact, they had already passed it. On the sixth of
January, a wide opening was descried between two low points of land; and
the adjacent sea was discolored with mud. "La Salle," writes his brother
Cavelier, "has always thought that this was the Mississippi." To all
appearance, it was the entrance of Galveston Bay.[288] But why did he
not examine it? Joutel says that his attempts to do so were frustrated
by the objections of the pilot of the "Aimable," to which, with a
facility very unusual with him, he suffered himself to yield. Cavelier
declares, on the other hand, that he would not enter the opening because
he was afraid of missing the "Joly." But he might have entered with one
of his two vessels, while the other watched outside for the absent ship.
From whatever cause, he lay here five or six days, waiting in vain for
Beaujeu;[289] till, at last, thinking that he must have passed westward,
he resolved to follow. The "Aimable" and the "Belle" again spread their
sails, and coasted the shores of Texas. Joutel, with a boat's crew,
tried to land; but the sand-bars and breakers repelled him. A party of
Indians swam out through the surf, and were taken on board; but La Salle
could learn nothing from them, as their language was unknown to him.
Again Joutel tried to land, and again the breakers repelled him. He
approached as near as he dared, and saw vast plains and a dim expanse of
forest, buffalo running with their heavy gallop along the shore, and
deer grazing on the marshy meadows.
[Sidenote: THE SHORES OF TEXAS.]
Soon after, he succeeded in landing at a point somewhere between
Matagorda Island and Corpus Christi Bay. The aspect of the country was
not cheering, with its barren plains, its reedy marshes, its
interminable oyster-beds, and broad flats of mud bare at low tide.
Joutel and his men sought in vain for fresh water, and after shooting
some geese and ducks returned to the "Aimable." Nothing had been seen of
Beaujeu and the "Joly;" the coast was trending southward; and La Salle,
convinced that he must have passed the missing ship, turned to retrace
his course. He had sailed but a few miles when the wind failed, a fog
covered the sea, and he was forced to anchor opposite one of the
openings into the lagoons north of Mustang Island. At length, on the
nineteenth, there came a faint breeze; the mists rolled away before it,
and to his great joy he saw the "Joly" approaching.
"His joy," says Joutel, "was short." Beaujeu's lieutenant, Aire, came on
board to charge him with having caused the separation, and La Salle
retorted by throwing the blame on Beaujeu. Then came a debate as to
their position. The priest Esmanville was present, and reports that La
Salle seemed greatly perplexed. He had more cause for perplexity than
he knew; for in his ignorance of the longitude of the Mississippi, he
had sailed more than four hundred miles beyond it.
Of this he had not the faintest suspicion. In full sight from his ship
lay a reach of those vast lagoons which, separated from the sea by
narrow strips of land, line this coast with little interruption from
Galveston Bay to the Rio Grande. The idea took possession of him that
the Mississippi discharged itself into these lagoons, and thence made
its way to the sea through the various openings he had seen along the
coast, chief among which was that he had discovered on the sixth, about
fifty leagues from the place where he now was.[290]
[Sidenote: PERPLEXITY OF LA SALLE.]
Yet he was full of doubt as to what he should do. Four days after
rejoining Beaujeu, he wrote him the strange request to land the troops,
that he "might fulfil his commission;" that is, that he might set out
against the Spaniards.[291] More than a week passed, a gale had set in,