Israel Potter: Chapter 22

Chapter 22

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 Coeur 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 allies 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 passenger 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 braggart 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 throng 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 crest-fallen 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 swimming 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.

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