This was a most fatiguing journey, for there was no regular path to be discovered, and we were in full marching order for the exercise; but even the greatest grumblers of the company confessed, when we gained the summit and had well eaten and drunk of what we brought with us, that the prospect was an ample compensation. A vast coloured sea of woods stretched out before us, through which whirled the huge stream of the St Lawrence. Far below us in the near distance we could descry the city of Montreal in the sunlight. It made a narrow oblong square, on a low ridge parallel with the river, sloping down evenly to the water-front and divided by regular well-formed streets. All the houses, almost, were whitewashed. A high plastered stone wall surrounded the city, consisting of curtains and bastions; and beyond, except on the waterside, were a dry ditch and a sort of glacis surmounted by a parapet loopholed for musketry. These defences were not strong and had been raised by the French long ago as a protection against Indians armed with bows and arrows, rather than a European enemy. The city was so situated, as we could see, that no works could be raised to enable it to stand a regular siege: for it was commanded by many eminences near by. There were numerous elegant houses in the suburbs, but these did not catch the sun so handsomely as those inside the city, which were covered with tin-plates, instead of shingles, for fear of fire. Fires, due to the inhabitants’ attachment to red-hot stoves kept burning all night, had so often destroyed the city that it was now built wholly of stone with sheet-iron shutters to the doors and windows; which gave it, as one walked down the street after dark, the appearance of an assemblage of prisons. We lifted our eyes from the city and looked south-east across the river to the distant hills of Chambly; and beyond them to the Green Mountains of Vermont, about sixty miles away, capped with snow – the residence of our enemies.
Our English-speaking guide bade us beware of serpents, which abounded in these woods, but he confessed that they were frightened off by the regular tramp of marching boots and would not bite unless surprised by the stealthy approach of a single person in moccasins. Only the copperhead snake, he said, was so torpid and sulky that he would not move out of the path though an elephant approached, but would infallibly strike at him as he passed. I may add, however, that no elephant had as yet visited the American continent; nor was one brought there for a show until some years after the Revolution.
This guide discoursed much upon snakes – the rattlesnake, whose skin, when the animal is enraged, exhibits a variety of beautiful tints, and who gains a new rattle to his tail for every year of his noxious life. Later, I saw two or three of them scuttling from me in the woods. This creature is greenish-yellow in colour, as thick as a man’s wrist and about four feet in length. The Indians esteem his flesh as whiter and more delicate than the best fish. His sloughed skin, charred, pulverized, and swallowed with brandy is the best-known specific against rheumatism.
The guide told us a very deplorable story of an American farmer of the Minisink who one day went to mowing with his negroes, but wore boots as a precaution against being stung. Inadvertently he trod on a snake, which immediately attacked his legs, but, as it drew back in order to renew its blow, one of his negroes cut it in two with his scythe. They prosecuted their work all day, and returned home when the sun set. After dinner, the farmer pulled off his boots and went to bed. He was soon after seized with a strange sickness at his stomach. He swelled up and died before a physician could be procured. A few days after his decease his son put on the same boots, and likewise went to the meadow to work. At night he pulled them off, went to bed, and experienced similar sufferings of sickness as took off his father. A little before he expired a doctor came, but, not being able to assign the cause of so singular a disorder, he pronounced both men to have died by witchcraft. Some weeks after, the widow sold all the movables for the benefit of the younger children, and the farm was leased. One of the neighbours who bought the boots, presently put them on, and fell sick, as had happened in the case of the other two. But this man’s wife, being alarmed by what befell the former family, dispatched one of her negroes for an eminent physician who, fortunately having heard of the dreadful affair, divined the cause, and applied medicines which recovered the man. The boots which had been so fatal were then carefully examined, and he found that the two fangs of the snake had been left in the leather, after being wrenched out of their sockets by the strength with which the snake had drawn back its head. The bladders which contained the poison, and several of the small nerves, were still fresh and adhered to the boot. The unfortunate father and son had both been poisoned by wearing these boots, in which action they imperceptibly scratched their legs with the points of the fangs – through the hollow of which some of the astonishing venom was conveyed.
The best specific against rattlesnake bite is the juice of a sort of plan-tain-leaf: it was accidentally discovered by a Virginian negro who desperately rubbed it upon his leg to soothe the agonies of a bite, as he lay by the wayside. The negro not only recovered from the poison, but was emancipated by his master as a reward for this service to humanity.
The same guide told us also of a small, speckled, hissing snake with spots which glow with a variety of colours when he is enraged; at the same time he blows from his mouth a subtile and nauseous wind that if drawn into the mouth of an unwary traveller will infallibly bring on a mortal decline; for there is no remedy against it. He tried our credulity further with an account of the whip-snake which, he said, pursues cattle through wood and meadow, lashing them with his tail, until overcome with the fatigue of the chase they drop exhausted to the ground, where the whip-snake preys upon their flesh. This was perhaps true, but we could not accept his account of the hoop-snake which thrusts the extremity of his tail into a cavity of his mouth, where it catches fast with an arrangement like a pawl and ratchet, and then rolls forward like a boy’s hoop with such extreme velocity that neither man nor beast can hope to escape from his devouring jaws.
There was a silence of a few moments after this tale, which Mad Johnny Maguire took the privilege of breaking, as he was the oldest soldier among us. ‘Oh, what a darling monster that must be, from which nobody has ever escaped alive to give so sensible an account of his habits! But he’s nothing at all compared with the serpents of Killaloo that Saint Patrick drove out of my country when he first came. They banged all: they could wrap their necks about a rifle-gun and squint along the barrel, and both load and fire it with their tails! But the Saint prayed at them, and waved his staff at them, and told them to quit before the Sunday following, and off they went, howling. The proof that I’m not codding you is that not a single specimen of the breed is still to be found on the shores of Ireland. Let us hope, by Jesus God, that they did not take ship to Canada.’
Chapter XVI
MAJOR BOLTON was taken from us to command the Eighth Regiment; they were stationed partly at Magara, by the world-renowned waterfalls which lie between the Great Lakes of Ontario and Erie, and partly at Detroit on the waterway joining Lakes Erie and Huron. We were sorry to lose so considerate an officer, but my private feelings were the more affected by the news of his removal when I learned that Private Harlowe, who was now his orderly, was going along with him. I did not care twopence whether or not I ever beheld Harlowe himself again in the whole future course of ‘my versal life’, but his wife would naturally accompany him; and let me here confess that for months past I had been tormented by longing thoughts of her. Struggle as I might against the spell that she had cast upon me, her face invaded my dreams and constantly stood before my imagination at all hours of the day, especially when I was in a relaxed condition of body after some heavy duty. I had not set eyes on her since we sailed from Ireland, for the women and children had remained behind with the baggage-guard during our advance to St John’s and had been removed to Montreal when we proceeded up the lake. Now, at the first consideration, I was deeply grieved that I should not see her about the camp in the Isle of Jesus, as I had imagined that I would; but, at the second, there came a feeling of rel
ief. For the sick temptation to run on evil courses, as well as the innocent pleasure of looking upon a face that I heartily loved, would be removed by her residence at Niagara. I busied myself in my military duties and began to look forward with keen expectation to the winter, which was the social season in Canada and always passed with great good cheer and merriment – especially in the neighbourhood of Montreal, where there were numerous sports performed in the ice and snow every day, and dances near every night in the better sort of houses. But first came the time called the Indian Summer, marked by a reddish, hazy, quiet atmosphere; the woods were close and warm with the exhalations of fallen and rotting leaves, which bred melancholy thoughts.
However, I was to be absent for some time from my comrades. We had not been in our new quarters above three weeks, during the last few days of which it snowed almost incessantly, so that the ground was covered to a depth of about four feet, when Captain Sweetenham, as he now was, sent for me. ‘Sergeant Lamb,’ he said, ‘Colonel Guy Johnson is inquiring after you, and Corporal Reeves and yourself are to wait upon him this afternoon at his residence near the Place des Armes in Montreal.’
‘I do not know the gentleman, your Honour,’ said I.
‘He is an Irishman, the Superintendent of the Indian Department of our Government and a person of great consequence among the tribes. Colonel Johnson has asked for three months’ leave of absence to be given you for a special mission, in case you wish to accept it.’
‘I shall be glad to go on any mission,’ I answered, ‘and the more adventurous the better it will please me. In Corporal Reeves’s company I would dare go anywhere.’
‘You will hand over your duties to Sergeant Buchanan,’ the Captain said. ‘Inform him so.’
I touched my tall cap and departed, with a pleasurable sense that my friend Thayendanegea was at the bottom of this business; and, upon my arrival at Montreal with Terry Reeves, I found that it was so. Terry and I made the journey in a hired cariole, a sort of carriage upon runners which the horses of the country could draw with ease, through ice or snow, at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. The people of Montreal were very curious in the way that they fashioned their carioles in every possible variety of design, such as the representation of some beast or fowl, a Venetian gondola, a Quaker shoe, a whale, or a monster goldfish. This one simulated a black swan, and was well provided with blankets. The cold was so severe that the St Lawrence itself was now nearly all frozen over, though there is a ten-knot current at Montreal; but Terry and I were surprised that we felt so little inconvenience from it. The reason was the superior dryness of the air. Perhaps this dryness excused a habit of the Canadian which seemed barbarous to us, namely of allowing his horses, sweating after a journey of perhaps twenty or thirty miles, to stand for hours on end, without any covering at all, outside the door where he had gone visiting.
The journey into Montreal was doubled in length by our driver constantly stopping, whenever he came to a wayside shrine or crucifix, to climb down and say a prayer. He was not to be deterred from this practice even by Terry’s threats to cut off his treasured queue with a jack-knife, did he not shorten his orisons. It then occurred to me that the word of command, ‘Marche-donc’, spoken to the horse in tones simulating those of his master, would likely enough set our chariot in motion. The plan succeeded, and the driver, hearing our loud farewells, leapt up, cursing, from his knees and rushed after us. It was fortunate that the horses recognized his voice and presently pulled up, for neither Terry nor I knew the word for ‘Whoa!’, and might well have been arrested for the theft of a cariole. The fur-clad driver was quite breathless from his long run when he climbed up into his seat, which enabled me to anticipate the French sentence which I knew was choking in his throat. ‘Je vais le dire au Général Carleton,’ said I, very severely.
Then I offered him a drink of spirits and presently we were good friends again. He only descended for a short prayer at one more shrine, where was represented the sponge, vinegar-bottle, spear, and various other instruments mentioned in the Gospel chapters concerning the crucifixion of Jesus Christ; the whole assemblage surmounted by St Peter’s cock.
Montreal presented a very animated appearance, for this was the season when the Indian fur-trappers assembled with their peltry to sell to the resident merchants. The city then took on the appearance of a great fair, with booths adorned with fir-branches set up in all public places for the sale of every conceivable object of utility or luxury. We saw numerous painted, pipe-smoking Indians, with capes over their head and shoulders wadded with feathers, and the squaws dressed in their finest clothes with jewellery, ribbons, and dyed plumes; British officers on horseback in full regimentals of flashing gold, silver, blue and scarlet; merchants whose Parisian extravagance of dress was intended to impress the Indians with an idea of their consequence; priests, friars, lay-sisters; armed parties of British soldiers in travel-worn greatcoats, marching to fife and drum; groups of animated French Habitants of both sexes’ the women in long scarlet cloaks, the men in their sleekest furs, and swarms of warmly muffled, exuberant children; fantastic carioles jingling and whirling up and down the narrow streets; and, in the squares, frequent statues of men, monsters, beasts, and birds fashioned of heaped snow and glazed to perfection by pails of coloured water dashed over them.
At the Place des Armes, a sort of square which was used before the Conquest as a parade-ground for French soldiers, we were directed to the house of Colonel Guy Johnson, who had succeeded his recently deceased father-in-law, Sir William Johnson, in his Superintendency. We were given rum in an ante-room, where stood glass cases full of curiosities of Indian domestic manufacture – such as embroidered wampum-belts, pouches and tobacco-pipes of intricate manufacture, weapons of various sorts, and ceremonious head-dresses. The corporal on duty gave us an account of them, and told us among other surprising things that the ‘wampum’ or shell-beads, strung on leather, which are of universal currency as money among the Indian tribes, are coined in Old England: wampum was formerly made by the Indians themselves in the form of crude beads of baked white clay, but then of sea-shell, which we could cut by machinery much more expeditiously and regularly then they by hand, to the shape and size of the glass bugles worn on ladies’ dresses. The shell used was that of the clam, a large sort of scallop found on the coasts of New England and Virginia, and the purple sort was more esteemed by the Indians than the white: they would pay an equal weight in silver for it.
This corporal was one of the armourers employed by the Indian Department for mending the firelocks of friendly Indians; but he had the week before been wounded in the hand by a drunken Indian and withdrawn from his employment until it healed.
Colonel Johnson presently sent for us, and was most affable. He said, ‘My friend Thayendanegea has an invitation to offer you.’
Thayendanegea was at table with him, in a company of several other war-chiefs of the Six Nations – Senecas, Oneidas, Onondagoes, Cayugas, Tuskaroras, and Mohawks – among them the Chief Sachem of the Mohawks himself, by name Little Abraham. This venerable person, it seems, secretly favoured an alliance of the Confederacy with the revolted colonists, and was now doing what he could to incline his inferior chiefs to that course. But Thayendanegea and his very active wife Miss Molly, with whom he lived in monogamous union on account of his Christian faith, were leaders of the opposition to Little Abraham; and their influence seemed to be preponderant at the table. The cloth was spread with beefsteaks, salted bear’s-legs, dressed capons, and a number of fricassees and complicated confections in the French style which the Indians universally preferred to our English style of cooking. They were all to some degree intoxicated and had, as was their wont before sitting down to drink, given their weapons into the safe keeping of one of their number, who was pledged for the occasion to keg himself. However, on so ceremonious an occasion it was not to be expected that they would risk their dignity by any recourse to violence. For Indians of rank deemed it highly becoming to accommodate their
manners to those of a distinguished stranger, especially a host, and they were wonderfully observant; so that you would seldom find a well-born Indian behaving other than with ease and gentility in the most select company, if a hint were but supplied him, before his entry, of the forms expected. Yet the Colonel was visibly restraining his impatience with the unusual and unexpected ill manners which one or two of his guests were showing. I was told later that the offenders on this occasion had recently been the guests of a Brunswick officers’ mess at Three Rivers, and the greater licence for horse-play and raillery there permitted to the intoxicated had given them an incorrect notion of what would be fashionable in Montreal at the residence of a British officer of rank.
Just as we entered, Thayendanegea was addressing in English a Seneca chief named Gyantwaia, or ‘Cornplanter’, who was gravely balancing a bottle of Madeira upon his nose (distinguished for a gold nose-ring with a little gold bell-pendant dropping to his upper lip). Thayendanegea said very civilly to him: ‘My courageous ally and brother, it impresses me vastly to observe your feats of leger de nez; but perhaps the hilarity of the occasion has blinded your eye to the fact that a lady is present!’ – indicating Miss Molly, who modestly turned away. Then improving upon the occasion, for Cornplanter (whose father, by the way, was a Dutch settler from Albany in New York) seemed somewhat abashed, Thayendanegea added: ‘And if our generous host will permit it, we will now cease our potations of his very fine liquors, which have somewhat disequilibriated our judgment. Instead, we will keep my wife, Miss Molly, company in a dish of tea, which as the rebellious colonists regard as noxious to all disloyal persons, so we may well drink with pride and gratification in honour of our ally and father, King George.’