The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 4. Бенджамин Франклин

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СКАЧАТЬ have killed is my son. His body is now in my house. You ought to suffer; but you have eaten with me, and I have given you my faith, which must not be broken. Follow me.” He then led the astonished Spaniard to his stables, mounted him on one of his fleetest horses, and said: “Fly far while the night can cover you. You will be safe in the morning. You are indeed guilty of my son’s blood; but God is just and good, and I thank him that I am innocent of yours, and that my faith given is preserved.”

      The Spaniards caught from the Moors this punto of honor, the effects of which remain, in a degree, to this day. So that when there is fear of a war about to break out between England and Spain, an English merchant there, who apprehends the confiscation of his goods as the goods of an enemy, thinks them safe if he can get a Spaniard to take charge of them; for the Spaniard secures them as his own, and faithfully redelivers them, or pays the value, whenever the Englishman can safely demand it.

      Justice to that nation, though lately our enemies, and hardly yet our cordial friends, obliges me on this occasion not to omit mentioning an instance of Spanish honor which cannot but be still fresh in the memory of many yet living. In 1746, when we were in a hot war with Spain, the Elizabeth, of London, Captain William Edwards, coming through the Gulf from Jamaica richly laden, met with a most violent storm, in which the ship sprung a leak, that obliged them, for the saving of their lives, to run her into the Havana. The captain went on shore, directly waited on the governor, told the occasion of his putting in, and that he surrendered his ship as a prize, and himself and his men as prisoners of war, only requesting good quarter. “No, sir,” replied the Spanish governor; “if we had taken you in fair war at sea, or approaching our coast with hostile intentions, your ship would then have been a prize, and your people prisoners. But when distressed by a tempest you come into our ports for the safety of your lives, we, though enemies, being men, are bound as such by the laws of humanity to afford relief to distressed men who ask it of us. We cannot, even against our enemies, take advantage of an act of God. You have leave, therefore, to unload the ship, if that be necessary, to stop the leak; you may refit here, and traffic so far as shall be necessary to pay the charges. You may then depart, and I will give you a pass, to be in force till you are beyond Bermuda. If after that you are taken, you will then be a prize; but now you are only a stranger, and have a stranger’s right to safety and protection.” The ship accordingly departed, and arrived safe in London.

      Will it be permitted me to adduce, on this occasion, an instance of a like honor in a poor unenlightened African Negro? I find it in Captain Seagrave’s account of his Voyage of Guinea. He relates that a New England sloop, trading there in 1852, left their second mate, William Murray, sick on shore, and sailed without him. Murray was at the house of a black, named Cudjoe, with whom he had contracted an acquaintance during their trade. He recovered, and the sloop being gone, he continued with his black friend till some other opportunity should offer of his getting home. In the meanwhile, a Dutch ship came into the road, and some of the blacks going on board her, were treacherously seized, and carried off as slaves. Their relations and friends, transported with sudden rage, ran to the house of Cudjoe to take revenge by killing Murray. Cudjoe stopped them at the door, and demanded what they wanted. “The white men,” said they, “have carried away our brothers and sons, and we will kill all white men; give us the white man that you keep in your house, for we will kill him.” “Nay,” said Cudjoe, “the white men that carried away your brothers are bad men, kill them when you can catch them; but this white man is a good man, and you must not kill him.” “But he is a white man,” they cried; “the white men are all bad, and we will kill them all.” “Nay,” says he, “you must not kill a man, that has done no harm, only for being white. This man is my friend, my house is his fort, and I am his soldier. I must fight for him. You must kill me, before you can kill him. What good man will ever come again under my roof, if I let my floor be stained with a good man’s blood!” The Negroes, seeing his resolution, and being convinced by his discourse that they were wrong, went away ashamed. In a few days, Murray ventured abroad again with Cudjoe, when several of them took him by the hand, and told him they were glad they had not killed him; for, as he was a good (meaning an innocent) man, their God would have been angry, and would have spoiled their fishing. “I relate this,” says Captain Seagrave, “to show that some among these dark people have a strong sense of justice and honor, and that even the most brutal among them are capable of feeling the force of reason, and of being influenced by a fear of God (if the knowledge of the true God could be introduced among them), since even the fear of a false god, when their rage subsided, was not without its good effect.”

      Now I am about to mention something of Indians, I beg that I may not be understood as framing apologies for all Indians. I am far from desiring to lessen the laudable spirit of resentment in my countrymen against those now at war with us, so far as it is justified by their perfidy and inhumanity. I would only observe, that the Six Nations, as a body, have kept faith with the English ever since we knew them, now near a hundred years; and that the governing part of those people have had notions of honor, whatever may be the case with the rum-debauched, trader-corrupted vagabonds and thieves on the Susquehanna and Ohio, at present in arms against us. As a proof of that honor, I shall only mention one well-known recent fact. When six Catawba deputies, under the care of Colonel Bull, of Charlestown, went by permission into the Mohawk’s country, to sue for and treat of peace, for their nation, they soon found the Six Nations highly exasperated, and the peace at that time impracticable. They were therefore in fear of their own persons, and apprehended that they should be killed in their way back to New York; which being made known to the Mohawk chiefs by Colonel Bull, one of them, by order of the council, made this speech, to the Catawbas:

      “Strangers and Enemies:

      While you are in this country, blow away all fear out of your breasts; change the black streak of paint on your cheek for a red one, and let your faces shine with bear’s grease. You are safer here than if you were at home. The Six Nations will not defile their own land with the blood of men that come unarmed to ask for peace. We shall send a guard with you, to see you safe out of our territories. So far you shall have peace, but no farther. Get home to your own country, and take care of yourselves, for there we intend to come and kill you.”

      The Catawbas came away unhurt accordingly.

      It is also well known that just before the late war broke out, when our traders first went among the Piankeshaw Indians, a tribe of the Twigtwees, they found the principle of giving protection to strangers in full force; for, the French coming with their Indians to the Piankeshaw town, and demanding that those traders and their goods should be delivered up, the Piankeshaws replied the English were come there upon their invitation, and they could not do so base a thing. But the French insisting on it, the Piankeshaws took arms in defence of their guests, and a number of them, with their old chief, lost their lives in the cause, the French at last prevailing by superior force only.

      I will not dissemble that numberless stories have been raised and spread abroad, against not only the poor wretches that are murdered, but also against the hundred and forty Christianized Indians, still threatened to be murdered; all of which stories are well known, by those who know the Indians best, to be pure inventions, contrived by bad people, either to excite each other to join in the murder, or since it was committed, to justify it, and believed only by the weak and credulous. I call thus publicly on the makers and venders of these accusations to produce their evidence. Let them satisfy the public that even Will Soc, the most obnoxious of all that tribe, was really guilty of those offenses against us which they lay to his charge. But, if he was, ought he not to have been fairly tried? He lived under our laws, and was subject to them; he was in our hands, and might easily have been prosecuted; was it English justice to condemn and execute him unheard? Conscious of his own innocence, he did not endeavour to hide himself when the door of the workhouse, his sanctuary, was breaking open. “I will meet them.” says he, “for they are my brothers.” These brothers of his shot him down at the door, while the word “brothers” was between his teeth.

      But if Will Soc was a bad man, what had poor old Shehaes done? What could he or the other poor old men and СКАЧАТЬ