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- designs. By insidious arts he, from time to time, cajoles certain
sailors to desert their ships, and enlist beneath his banner. Soon as
missed, their captains crave permission to go and hunt them up.
Whereupon His Majesty first hides them very carefully away, and then
freely permits the search. In consequence, the delinquents are never
found, and the ships retire without them.
Thus, by a two-edged policy of this crafty monarch, foreign nations
were crippled in the number of their subjects, and his own were greatly
multiplied. He particularly petted these renegado strangers. But alas
for the deep-laid schemes of ambitious princes, and alas for the vanity
of glory. As the foreign-born Pretorians, unwisely introduced into the
Roman state, and still more unwisely made favorites of the Emperors, at
last insulted and overturned the throne, even so these lawless
mariners, with all the rest of the body-guard and all the populace,
broke out into a terrible mutiny, and defied their master. He marched
against them with all his dogs. A deadly battle ensued upon the beach.
It raged for three hours, the dogs fighting with determined valor, and
the sailors reckless of everything but victory. Three men and thirteen
dogs were left dead upon the field, many on both sides were wounded,
and the king was forced to fly with the remainder of his canine
regiment. The enemy pursued, stoning the dogs with their master into
the wilderness of the interior. Discontinuing the pursuit, the victors
returned to the village on the shore, stove the spirit casks, and
proclaimed a Republic. The dead men were interred with the honors of
war, and the dead dogs ignominiously thrown into the sea. At last,
forced by stress of suffering, the fugitive Creole came down from the
hills and offered to treat for peace. But the rebels refused it on any
other terms than his unconditional banishment. Accordingly, the next
ship that arrived carried away the ex-king to Peru.
The history of the king of Charles’s Island furnishes another
illustration of the difficulty of colonizing barren islands with
unprincipled pilgrims.
Doubtless for a long time the exiled monarch, pensively ruralizing in
Peru, which afforded him a safe asylum in his calamity, watched every
arrival from the Encantadas, to hear news of the failure of the
Republic, the consequent penitence of the rebels, and his own recall to
royalty. Doubtless he deemed the Republic but a miserable experiment
which would soon explode. But no, the insurgents had confederated
themselves into a democracy neither Grecian, Roman, nor American. Nay,
it was no democracy at all, but a permanent _Riotocracy_, which gloried
in having no law but lawlessness. Great inducements being offered to
deserters, their ranks were swelled by accessions of scamps from every
ship which touched their shores. Charles’s Island was proclaimed the
asylum of the oppressed of all navies. Each runaway tar was hailed as a
martyr in the cause of freedom, and became immediately installed a
ragged citizen of this universal nation. In vain the captains of
absconding seamen strove to regain them. Their new compatriots were
ready to give any number of ornamental eyes in their behalf. They had
few cannon, but their fists were not to be trifled with. So at last it
came to pass that no vessels acquainted with the character of that
country durst touch there, however sorely in want of refreshment. It
became Anathema—a sea Alsatia—the unassailed lurking-place of all sorts
of desperadoes, who in the name of liberty did just what they pleased.
They continually fluctuated in their numbers. Sailors, deserting ships
at other islands, or in boats at sea anywhere in that vicinity, steered
for Charles’s Isle, as to their sure home of refuge; while, sated with
the life of the isle, numbers from time to time crossed the water to
the neighboring ones, and there presenting themselves to strange
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