Read Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys Online
Authors: Neil Oliver
Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (39 page)
Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, was talking to a Washington official in 1963 when he said:
If you want to, go ahead and fight in the jungles of Vietnam. The French fought there for seven years and still had to quit in the end. Perhaps the Americans will be able to stick it out for a little longer, but eventually they will have to quit too.
Many more men, the brave and the not-so-brave, were about to add themselves to the body count in the jungles of South-East Asia.
But nothing they would attempt or achieve would ever come close to the dash and the glamour of the valorous doomed of Dien Bien Phu.
By late January Scott and his men were hard at work sledding toward the Pole to drop piles of food and fuel that could be used for the real attempt, later in the year. Scott used ponies to begin with and once again was appalled at how badly they suffered in the snow and ice. By the middle of February they had pushed as far south as the 80th parallel, around 125 miles from Hut Point. It was at this location that they deposited the main dump of stores—the so-called “One Ton Depot”.
Content that they had gone far enough, Scott decided to turn back and make for the base at Cape Evans. En route they met up with other members of the team—and heard some alarming news. Under the command of Lieutenant Victor Campbell, the
Terra Nova
had been sailing along the Great Ice Barrier with the intention of landing at King Edward VII Land and perhaps identifying an alternative base closer to the Pole. Bad weather had forced them to abandon their plans and take shelter in the so-called Bay of Whales. Another ship was already anchored there—it was the
Fram
, and aboard her were Roald Amundsen and his team of explorers. Campbell, who spoke Norwegian, had paid a visit to the unwelcome arrivals and asked them what their intentions were. Amundsen said they were preparing to make camp for the winter and would set
out for the Pole during the Antarctic summer later in the year.
Among other things, the men aboard the
Terra Nova
had noticed and been deeply impressed by the Norwegian’s use of dogs. Rather than struggling with the animals, and fighting them every step of the way, Amundsen was in complete control. His pack pulled efficiently, easily and silently obeyed his every command. It was clear to all who watched that their rivals had a command over the environment that the British lacked.
When the news spread to the rest of the British team about the gatecrasher, every one of them was furious. As far as they were concerned it was Scott who had blazed the trail in the Antarctic—it was he who’d made the first journey and endured the first sufferings. It seemed only right, by the standards of English gentlemen, that Scott should be entitled to an uncontested attempt on the Pole.
Cherry-Garrard summed up the general mood when he wrote:
For an hour or so we were furiously angry, and were possessed with an insane sense that we must go straight to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen and his men.
But there would be no fighting on the ice–not that day nor any other. Scott and his men quietly swallowed down their rage and indignation and prepared to make the best of things, in the way that manly men do.
Although Campbell had been able to pass on the news of the cuckoos in the nest, he and his team were later caught off guard by the pack ice. Having taken their leave of the Norwegians, they headed northward around the coast of King Edward VII Land to continue with their explorations. Landing at Cape Adare, they planned to carry out some geological survey work before rejoining the ship later on. As they made their way back to the prearranged collection point, they found the
Terra Nova
had been driven off by sea ice and the six-man party had to spend the winter in a tiny cave,
surviving on a diet of seals and penguins. Had it not been for what was about to happen to Scott and his team, the endurance epic of Campbell’s party would have gone down as one of the great survival stories of the whole period.
Unaware of Campbell’s predicament, Scott and the rest of the men at Cape Evans settled down for the winter. There was plenty of work for the scientists to be getting on with and Scott would be able to concentrate his mind on the push for the Pole. He confided in his journal that while he would not have behaved as Amundsen had done, he could not allow it to upset him. Above all else, he would not allow the development to panic him or force him to change his plans. The departure date for the run to the South Pole was set for 1 November 1911.
Whether he liked it or not—whether he even admitted it to himself—Scott was about to go to war. Here on territory he considered his own by right he was about to be challenged by an enemy who seemed to have him outgunned. The skies over his kingdom were growing dark, and would remain so for many months to come. But if a fight was coming, then so be it. He would never surrender.
To the people of Texas and all Americans in the world. Fellow citizens and compatriots, I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna—I have sustained a continual bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man—The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if this fort is taken—I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, & our flag still waves proudly from the walls—I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism & everything dear to the American Character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch—The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due his own honor & that of his country—Victory or Death.
When the letter above was written—by William Barret Travis, officer commanding the Texas forces at the siege of the Alamo during the bitter winter of 1836—the future of the American West and indeed of the whole continent of North America was far from certain. All across that vast and infinitely varied terrain, peoples of every creed and color struggled to make their voices heard, to live their lives as they saw fit and proper, to win and secure their freedom, even to exist at all. The sun rose and fell in the empty, endless skies above them and there was everything to play for.
It was just 33 years since Thomas Jefferson, third President of the Republic, had settled the deal for the “Louisiana Purchase”—paying Emperor Napoleon of France the sum of $11,250,000 for
the best part of 830,000 square miles of territory, something close to a quarter of the land mass occupied today by the United States of America. At that time, the land west of the Missouri River might as well have been on the moon as far as most US citizens were concerned. With the exception of the Lewis and Clark expedition and maybe enough hardy fur trappers and adventurers to fill a bus, it was terra incognita to white people.
The Louisiana territory that had been Napoleon’s to sell in 1803 had been held by Spain until 1800. But the Spanish grip on the Americas, once a stranglehold in places, was by then as weak as that of a dying man. Americans spilled into Florida, too. By 1821 Spain was moved to surrender that vast land as well. In return Andrew Jackson, seventh president, had formally renounced any and all claims to the territory the Spanish called Tejas. It was like a healthy, hungry child promising not to grow any bigger; those were the empty words of a promise his nation could not and would not keep.
Countless Americans had for years been viewing Tejas with envious eyes: rich fertile soil, endless forests of lumber, herds of wild horses and cattle beyond counting. In the nearby American territories of Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, too, many men felt hemmed in by neighbors, by personal circumstances, by brushes with the law, to stay put. Something had to give. There had, anyway, already been an attempt to annex the territory as early as 1819 when a Dr. James Long had rounded up 300 like-minded men and marched them across the border into the town of Nacogdoches. He just about had time to name it capital city of the “Republic of Texas” before his dream collapsed like a house of cards and Spanish troops reclaimed the place without a shot fired.
Then in 1820 it was the turn of a bankrupt Missouri lead miner named Moses Austin, who won from the Spanish permission to settle 300 American families in Tejas. He died before he had time
to fulfill his plans but his son Stephen assumed the mantle and crossed the border in 1821 with the first settlers. Even as they were making the journey, they heard Mexico had won its independence from Spain, but Governor Antonio Maria Martinez honored the deal he had made with Austin Senior and the immigration began.
They called themselves “Texians,” those first settlers. There had only ever been a relative handful of Spanish-speaking inhabitants and within a decade they were outnumbered two to one by the incomers. The Texians thought their neighbors little better than savages; the Mexicans were appalled by, among other things, the way the whites insisted on keeping slaves—a practice outlawed throughout the rest of Mexico.
But the newly independent nation of Mexico was itself hungry for people in its borderlands. Such was its need to see the territory defended from incursion by hostile Indians—as well as “illegal” white settlers—the government exempted the newcomers in Tejas from taxes (for the first four years) and positively encouraged settlement by law-abiding farmers and entrepreneurs. Among those who found their way to this land of opportunity were men who would become legends both before and after their own deaths—figures like Colonel Davy Crockett from Tennessee, frontiersman and failed politician (when his constituents chose not to return him to the US Senate he told them: “You can all go to hell! I’m going to Texas!”); Sam Houston, former governor of Tennessee and would-be fortune-hunter; Jim Bowie from Louisiana, slaver, Indian-fighter, knifeman. William Travis—the letter-writer who would one day lead the fight that burned itself into the American consciousness like no other—arrived in 1831. A young and ambitious lawyer, he’d left a pregnant wife and infant son behind in South Carolina. The story—unsubstantiated but often repeated—was that he’d grown convinced his wife was having an affair. Certain that the unborn
child—a daughter, later named Susan—was not his own, he shot the supposed lover dead and headed off for pastures new.
Gradually but inexorably, Mexican opinion began to harden against the self-styled Texians, who seemed likely at any moment to try to seek independent status for their new home. When President Jackson offered to buy Tejas for $5 million, it was the last straw. But by the time Mexico City got around to rejecting the offer and passing laws banning any further American immigration it was much too little and much too late. No mere paperwork was going to seal the border and the stage was set for armed conflict to settle the matter once and for all. In 1833, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was elected president of Mexico. As a soldier he had fought for independence from the Empire of Spain and in 1829 had taken the final surrender of the Spanish general Isidro Barradas.
At first, the new president promised to honor the established rights of the Texians, but within months his attitude had changed, hardening toward his increasingly unruly and apparently independence-minded American tenants. In 1835 he sent in an army headed by his own brother-in-law, Martin Perfecto de Cos, with orders to stamp on any hint of trouble and bring the whole place to heel. A company of Mexican cavalrymen was sent into the town of Gonzales during the first week in October to confiscate an ancient cannon used from time to time for frightening off Indians. When the horsemen arrived, they found the locals gathered around their antique, under a banner reading “Come and Take It.” As the Mexicans approached, the gun was fired and a mostly ineffectual load of scrap metal blasted forth in a cloud of white smoke. The casualties were few, but the repercussions immense. The Texians had gone to war. At first the majority aim was not independence, just opposition to the centralist government of Santa Anna. A provisional government of Texas was hastily sworn in
and Sam Houston was given the job of recruiting and leading a Texas defense force.