The Revenant Read online

  Glass opened his eyes. The sun stood directly above him, the only angle from which it could throw light onto the floor of the clearing. He rolled gingerly to his side to avoid the glare. Ten feet away, a six-foot rattlesnake lay fully extended. An hour before it had swallowed a cottontail kit. Now a large lump distorted the snake’s proportions as the rabbit worked its way slowly down the serpent’s digestive tract.

  Panicked, Glass looked down at his arm. There were no fang marks.

  Gingerly, he touched his neck, half expecting to find a serpent attached. Nothing. Relief flooded over him as he realized the snake—or at least the snake bites—were the imagined horror of a nightmare. He looked again at the snake, torpid, as its body worked to digest its prey.

  He moved his hand from his throat to his face. He felt the thick coat of salty wetness from heavy sweat, yet his skin was cool. The fever had broken. Water! His body screamed at him to drink. He dragged himself to the spring. His shredded throat still permitted only the smallest of sips. Even these caused pain, although the icy water felt like tonic, replenishing and cleansing him from within.

  Hugh Glass’s remarkable life began unremarkably as the firstborn son of Victoria and William Glass, an English bricklayer in Philadelphia. Philadelphia was growing rapidly at the turn of the century, and builders found no shortage of work. William Glass never became wealthy, but he comfortably supported five children. With a bricklayer’s eye, William viewed his responsibility to his children as the laying of a foundation. He considered his provision for their formal education as the crowning achievement of his life.

  When Hugh demonstrated considerable academic aptitude, William urged him to consider a career in the law. Hugh, though, had no interest in the white wigs and musty books of lawyers. He did have a passion—geography.

  The Rawsthorne & Sons Shipping Company kept an office on the same street as the Glass family. In the foyer of their building they displayed a large globe, one of the few in Philadelphia. On his way home from school each day, Hugh stopped in the office, spinning the globe on its axis, his fingers exploring the oceans and mountains of the world. Colorful maps adorned the office walls, sketching the major shipping routes of the day. The thin lines traversed broad oceans, connecting Philadelphia to the great ports of the world. Hugh liked to imagine the places and people at the ends of those thin lines: from Boston to Barcelona, from Constantinople to Cathay.

  Willing to allow his son some rein, William encouraged Hugh to consider a career in cartography. But to Hugh, the mere drawing of maps seemed too passive. The source of Hugh’s fascination lay not in the abstract representation of places, but rather in the places themselves, and above all the vast masses marked terra incognita. The cartographers of the day populated these unknown spaces with etchings of the most fanciful and terrifying monsters. Hugh wondered if such beasts could truly exist, or if they were mere fabrications of the mapmaker’s pen. He asked his father, who told him, “No one knows.” His father’s intent was to frighten Hugh toward more practical pursuits. The tactic failed. At the age of thirteen, Hugh announced his intention to become the captain of a ship.

  In 1802, Hugh turned sixteen, and William, afraid the boy might run off to sea, relented to the wishes of his son. William knew the Dutch captain of a Rawsthorne & Sons frigate, and asked that Hugh be taken aboard as a cabin boy. The captain, Jozias van Aartzen, had no children of his own. He took his responsibility for Hugh seriously, and for a decade worked to school him in the ways of the sea. By the time the captain died in 1812, Hugh had risen to the rank of first mate.

  The War of 1812 interrupted Rawsthorne & Sons’ traditional trade with Great Britain. The company quickly diversified into a dangerous but lucrative new business—blockade running. Hugh spent the war years dodging British warships as his speedy frigate transported rum and sugar between the Caribbean and embattled American ports. When the war ended in 1815, Rawsthorne & Sons maintained its Caribbean business, and Hugh became the captain of a small freighter.

  Hugh Glass had just turned thirty-one the summer he met Elizabeth van Aartzen, the nineteen-year-old niece of the captain who had mentored him. Rawsthorne & Sons sponsored a Fourth of July celebration, complete with line dancing and Cuban rum. The style of dance did not lend itself to conversation, but it did result in dozens of brief, twirling, thrilling exchanges. Glass sensed something unique about Elizabeth, something confident and challenging. He found himself taken completely.

  He called on her the next day, then whenever he docked in Philadelphia. She was traveled and educated, talking easily of far-off peoples and places. They could speak an abbreviated language, each able to complete the other’s thoughts. They laughed easily at each other’s stories. Time away from Philadelphia became torture, as Glass remembered her eyes in the sparkle of the morning sun, her pale skin in the light of the moon on a sail.

  On a bright May day in 1818, Glass returned to Philadelphia with a tiny velvet bag in the breast pocket of his uniform. Inside was a gleaming pearl on a delicate, golden chain. He gave it to Elizabeth and asked her to marry. They planned a wedding for the summer.

  Glass left a week later for Cuba. He found himself stuck in the port of Havana, awaiting the resolution of a local dispute over the tardy delivery of a hundred barrels of rum. After a month in Havana, another Rawsthorne & Sons ship arrived. It carried a letter from his mother with the news that his father had died. She implored him to return to Philadelphia immediately.

  Hugh knew that the dispute over the rum might well take months to resolve. In that time he could travel to Philadelphia, settle his father’s estate, and return to Cuba. If the legal proceedings in Havana proceeded more quickly, his first mate could pilot the ship back to Philadelphia. Glass booked passage on Bonita Morena, a Spanish merchant bound that week for Baltimore.

  As it turned out, the Spanish merchant would never sail past the ramparts of Fort McHenry. And Glass would never again see Philadelphia. A day’s sail from Havana there appeared on the horizon a ship with no flag. Bonita Morena’s captain attempted to flee, but his sluggish boat was no match for the speedy pirate cutter. The cutter came abreast of the merchant and fired five cannons loaded with grape. With five of his sailors dead on the decks, the captain took down his sails.

  The captain expected his surrender to result in quarter. It did not.

  Twenty pirates boarded Bonita Morena. The leader, a mulatto with a golden tooth and a golden chain, approached the captain who was standing formally on the quarterdeck.

  The mulatto pulled a pistol from his belt and shot the captain point-blank in the head. The crew and passengers stood shocked, awaiting their fates. Hugh Glass stood among them, looking at the buccaneers and their ship. They spoke a jumbled mix of Creole, French, and English. Glass suspected, correctly, that they were Baratarians—foot soldiers in the growing syndicate of the pirate Jean Lafitte.

  Jean Lafitte had plagued the Caribbean for years before the War of 1812. The Americans paid little attention, since his targets were primarily British. In 1814, Lafitte discovered a sanctioned avenue for his hatred of England. Major-General Sir Edward Pakenham and six thousand veterans of Waterloo laid siege to New Orleans. In command of the American army, General Andrew Jackson found himself outnumbered five to one. When Lafitte offered the services of his Baratarians, Jackson did not ask for references. Lafitte and his men fought valiantly in the Battle of New Orleans. In the heady wake of the American victory, Jackson recommended a full pardon of Lafitte’s earlier crimes, which President Madison quickly granted.

  Lafitte had no intention of abandoning his chosen profession, but he had learned the value of sovereign sponsorship. Mexico was at war with Spain. Lafitte established a settlement he called Campeche on the island of Galveston and offered his services to Mexico City. The Mexicans commissioned Lafitte and his small navy, authorizing the attack of any Spanish ship. Lafitte, in turn, won a license to plunder.

  The brutal reality of this arrangement now played out before Hugh G
lass’s eyes. When two crew members stepped forward to aid the mortally wounded captain, they too were shot. The three women onboard, including an ancient widow, were carried to the cutter, where a leering crew welcomed them aboard. While one band of pirates went belowdecks to inspect the cargo, another group began a more systematic appraisal of the crew and passengers. Two elderly men and one obese banker were stripped of their possessions and pushed into the sea.

  The mulatto spoke Spanish as well as French. He stood before the captured crew, explaining their options. Any man willing to renounce Spain could join the service of Jean Lafitte. Any man unwilling could join their captain. The dozen remaining sailors chose Lafitte. Half were taken to the cutter, half left to join a pirate crew on the Bonita Morena.

  Though Glass spoke barely a word of Spanish, he understood the gist of the mulatto’s ultimatum. When the mulatto approached him, pistol in hand, Glass pointed to himself and said one word in French: “Marin.” Sailor.

  The mulatto stared at him in silent appraisal. An amused smirk appeared at the corner of his mouth, and he said, “Ah bon? Okay, monsieur le marin, hissez le foc.” Hoist the jib.

  Glass desperately rummaged the corners of his rudimentary French.

  He had no idea of the meaning of hissez le foc. In context though, he understood quite clearly the high stakes connected with passing the mulatto’s test. Assuming that the challenge involved his bona fides as a sailor, he strode confidently to the fore of the ship, reaching for the jib line that would set the ship into the wind.

  “Bien fait, monsieur le marin,” said the mulatto. It was August of 1819.

  Hugh Glass had become a pirate.

  Glass looked again at the gap in the woods where Fitzgerald and Bridger had fled. His jaw set as he thought about what they had done, and he felt again the visceral desire to strike out in pursuit. This time though, he also felt the weakness of his body. For the first time since the bear attack, his mind was clear. With clarity came an alarming assessment of his situation.

  It was with considerable trepidation that Glass began an examination of his wounds. He used his left hand to trace the edges of his scalp. He’d caught a blurry glimpse of his face in the pooled waters of the spring, and he could see that the bear had nearly scalped him. Never a vain man, his appearance struck him as particularly irrelevant in his current state of affairs. If he survived, he supposed that his scars might even afford him a certain measure of respect among his peers.

  What did concern him was his throat. Unable to see the throat wound except in the watery reflection of the spring, he could only probe gingerly with his fingers. Bridger’s poultice had fallen off in his short crawl the day before. Glass touched the sutures and appreciated Captain Henry’s rudimentary surgical skills. He had a vague memory of the captain working over him in the moments after the attack, although the details and chronology remained murky.

  By craning his neck downward he could see the claw marks that extended from his shoulder to his throat. The bear had raked deeply through the muscles of his chest and upper arm. Bridger’s pine tar had sealed the wounds. They looked relatively healthy, though a sharp muscular pain kept him from lifting his right arm. The pine tar made him think of Bridger. He remembered that the boy had tended his wounds. Still, it wasn’t the image of Bridger nursing him that stuck in his mind. Instead, he saw Bridger looking back from the edge of the clearing, the stolen knife in his hand.

  He looked at the snake and thought, God, what I’d give for my knife. The rattler had yet to move. He suppressed further thoughts about Fitzgerald and Bridger. Not now.

  Glass looked down at his right leg. Bridger’s tar smeared the puncture wounds in his upper thigh. Those wounds also looked relatively healthy. Cautiously, he straightened the leg. It was stiff as a corpse. He tested the leg by rolling slightly to shift his weight, then pushing down. Excruciating pain radiated outward from the wounds. Clearly, the leg would bear no weight.

  Last of all, Glass used his left arm to explore the deep slashes on his back. His probing fingers counted the five parallel cuts. He touched the sticky mess of pine tar, suture, and scab. When he looked at his hand, there was fresh blood too. The cuts began on his butt and got deeper as they rose up his back. The deepest part of the wounds lay between his shoulder blades, where his hand could not reach.

  Having completed his self-examination, Glass arrived at several dispassionate conclusions: He was defenseless. If Indians or animals discovered him, he could muster no resistance. He could not stay in the clearing. He wasn’t sure how many days he had been in the camp, but he knew that the sheltered spring must be well known to any Indians in the area. Glass had no idea why he had not been discovered the day before, but he knew his luck could not last much longer.

  Despite the risk of Indians, Glass had no intention of veering from the Grand. It was a known source for water, food, and orientation. There was, however, one critical question: Upstream or down? As much as Glass might want to embark in immediate pursuit of his betrayers, he knew that to do so would be folly. He was alone with no weapons in hostile country. He was weak from fever and hunger. He couldn’t walk.

  It pained him to consider retreat, even temporary retreat, but Glass knew there was no real option. The trading post of Fort Brazeau lay 350 miles downstream at the confluence of the White River and the Missouri. If he could make it there, he could reprovision himself, then begin his pursuit in earnest.

  Three hundred and fifty miles. A healthy man in good weather could cover that ground in two weeks. How far can I crawl in a day? He had no idea, but he did not intend to sit in one place. His arm and leg did not appear inflamed, and Glass assumed they would mend with time. He would crawl until his body could support a crutch. If he only made three miles a day, so be it. Better to have those three miles behind him than ahead. Besides, moving would increase his odds of finding food.

  The mulatto and his captured Spanish ship sailed west for Galveston Bay and Lafitte’s pirate colony at Campeche. They attacked another Spanish merchantman a hundred miles south of New Orleans, luring their prey into cannon range under the guise of the Bonita Morena’s Spanish flag. Once aboard this newest victim, the Castellana, the buccaneers again conducted their brutal triage. This time the urgency was greater, since the cannon barrage had ripped open the Castellana below the waterline. She was sinking.

  The pirates’ luck ran flush. The Castellana was bound from Seville to New Orleans with a cargo of small arms. If they could remove the guns from the ship before it sank, they would turn an enormous profit. Lafitte would be pleased.

  The settlement of Texas had begun in earnest by 1819, and Jean Lafitte’s pirate enclave on Galveston Island worked diligently to supply it. Towns sprouted from the Rio Grande to the Sabine, and all of them needed provisions. Lafitte’s particular method of obtaining his wares cut out the middleman. In fact, it cut up the middleman. With this competitive advantage over more conventional traders, Campeche thrived, becoming a magnet for all manner of smugglers, slavers, picaroons, and anyone else seeking a tolerant environment for illicit trade. The ambiguous status of Texas helped to shelter the Campeche pirates from intervention by outside powers. Mexico benefited from the attacks on Spanish ships, and Spain was too weak to challenge them. For a while, the United States was willing to look the other way. After all, Lafitte left American ships alone, and he was a hero of the Battle of New Orleans to boot.

  Though not physically shackled, Hugh Glass found himself thoroughly imprisoned by Jean Lafitte’s criminal enterprise. Onboard ship, any form of mutiny would result in his death. His participation in various attacks on Spanish merchantmen left no doubt about the pirates’ perspective on dissent. Glass managed to avoid spilling blood by his own hand; his other actions he justified by the doctrine of necessity.

  Nor did Glass’s time ashore in Campeche offer any reasonable opportunity for escape. Lafitte reigned supreme on the island. Across the bay on the Texas mainland, the dominant inhabitants were the Karanka
wa Indians, notorious for cannibalism. Beyond the territory of the Karankawa lay the Tonkawas, the Comanches, the Kiowas, and the Osage. None were hospitable to whites, though they were less inclined to eat them. The scattered pockets of civilization still included a large number of Spaniards, likely to hang as a pirate anyone who walked up from the coast. Mexican banditos and vigilante Texicans added final spice to the mainland mix.

  Ultimately, there were limits on the civilized world’s willingness to tolerate a thriving pirate state. Most significantly, the United States decided to improve its relations with Spain. This diplomatic endeavor was made more difficult by the constant harassment of Spanish ships, often in U.S. territorial waters. In November 1820, President Madison sent Lieutenant Larry Kearney, the USS Enterprise, and a fleet of American warships to Campeche. Lieutenant Kearney presented Lafitte with a succinct choice: Leave the island or be blown to pieces.

  Jean Lafitte may have been a swashbuckler, but he was also a pragmatist. He loaded his ships with as much plunder as could be carried, set Campeche ablaze, and sailed away with his buccaneer fleet, never again to be glimpsed by history.