and Terror Bay, accompanied by the quartermaster of the North Star and three sailors, and bearing Admiralty despatches for Sir Edward Belcher : "It was supposed that Sir Edward was in Wellington Channel, in the neighbourhood of Cape Belcher. In that direction, therefore, the little troop set out, marching close along the eastern shore of the channel. After encamping the first day three miles from Cape Innis, the five men halted next day, on detached blocks of ice, about three miles from Cape Bowden. On the night of the 14th, on quitting that cape, they had to cross a cleft in the ice, four feet wide, which they effected prosperously enough. They were three miles off land when Bellot proposed to encamp, and he tried to reach it in the India - rubber canoe; but being twice driven back by a violent gale from the south-east, he determined to have an attempt made by two of his companions, Harvey, the quartermaster of the North Star, and Madden. The attempt succeeded, and once on shore, the two men fixed a pass-rope between the sledge and the coast, by means of which three objects could be transported. A fourth trip was about to be undertaken, when Madden, who was up to his middle in the water, perceived that the ice was setting itself in motion off shore and towards mid-channel. Bellot shouted to let go the rope-an effort was yet to be made, a hope remains; but the motion of the ice is so rapid, that, before any measure can be taken, it is already at an enormous distance from the shore. then went to the top of a hill to watch them,' says Madden, in his deposition, and saw them swept away from land towards midchannel. I watched from that spot for six hours, but lost sight of them in two. When they passed out of sight, the men were standing near the sledge, M. Bellot on the top of the hummock. They seemed to be on a very solid piece of ice. At that moment the wind was blowing strongly from the south-east, and it was snowing.' That moving mass of ice, thus driven northward by a furious gale, carried away the unfortunate Bellot, and two sailors with him, William Johnson and David Hook. After vainly endeavouring to shelter themselves under the tent with which their sledge was loaded, the three men began to cut a house for themselves in the ice with their knives. But let Johnson speak; his deposition is precise, and, nevertheless, very touching: : "M. Bellot,' he says,sat for half-anhour in conversation with us, talking on the danger of our position. I told him I was not afraid, and that the American expedition were drawn up and down this channel by the ice. He replied, "I know they were; and when the Lord protects us, not a hard our head shall be touched!' I then aske M. Bellot what time it was. He said, 'Abai a quarter past eight, A.M.' (Thursday, th 18th), and then lashed up his books, n said he would go and see how the i driving. He had only gone about four a nutes, when I went round the same humpka ! under which we were sheltered to book him, but could not see him; and on reta ing to our shelter saw his stick on the posite side of a creek, about five fact wide, and the ice all breaking up. It called out, Mr. Bellot!' but no answer this time blowing very heavy). After t I again searched round, but could see net of him. I believe that when he got im the shelter, the wind blew him into 2 creek, and his sou'-wester being tied dow could not rise.' "David Hook, Bellot's other compart deposed, that before the breach in the and the attempt to land, some one har said that it would be more prudent to the middle of the channel, Bellot, bet these words, replied, that Captain Pus orders were, to keep along the coast right, within about two miles of it. "This last trait, and the whole of scene, complete the moral portraiture of le lot, a slave to duty, sacrificing his own s to it, and incessantly disposed to deve life, confronting death like a man full d'u sublime confidence, that holy faith, keeps the soul always in readiness to a before its Creator and its Judge; that which inspired the navigator of the teenth century to utter the fine s Heaven is as near by water as by land ། So ended the short career of Le tenant Bellot; and seldom, peris has a human life been more rep with the elements of genuine happie than his. "Whom the gods la die young." Bellot lived long en to win, by honest means, the resp of two great nations, and, better s to earn and to secure the esteem love of many friends. He died beir the experience of manhood had its shadow over the brilliant colour in which the generous enthusiasm youth depicted the future. Being dead he yet speaketh, teaching, his own story, the uses, personal social, of legitimate and honoura ambition; and, by the manner of b death, uniting France and England a common desire to do honour to the memory of one of the truest and le alest of Frenchmen. : A MISSING CHAPTER OF IRISH HISTORY. THE capitulation of Limerick in 1691 is generally looked upon as the conclusion of Irish history, properly so called. Here it is that Leland stops, Moore has not gone even so far; and although Plowden has inflicted upon the world an historical memoir which winds muddily through the commencement of the eighteenth century, there are few persons resolute enough to undertake the task of wading into it, for the sake of # the little they may pick up. Lascelles, the most laborious of compilers, is of no account as an historian. Even in facts he is incorrect. Besides, his book is suppressed, only a few copies are to be met with. And the few writers of less note who have undertaken to carry on the national annals from ancient to modern times, have passed over this gulf, either in complete silence, or with words so listless and unintelligible as to resemble the yawn they provoke. Hence, from the Revolution to the middle of the reign of George III., is a blank which no one seems to have cared to fill up. What Ireland was doing for those eighty or ninety years, except for the instant that Molyneux started up as her solitary champion, and for that period into which the genius of Swift has thrown a partial gleam, is as little known to the world as is the origin of her towers; and yet she must have been about something. Any hiatus in history is an evil. No period can be understood in a state of isolation. Events explain each other. They are evolved, by a natural and intelligible process, out of other events; they grow, like leaves, by the operation of an inherent principle of development, and are always natural as they arise. This it is, as well as something in the period in question not destitute of interest for its own sake, that has decided us upon attempting a short excursion into this unreclaimed domain, and gathering thence some specimens, if not of dimensions equal to those brought from the valley of Eshcol, at least of a class and character not altogether unworthy of a place in a national periodical. We must confine ourselves for the present to the history of a very few years at the commencement of the era of obscurity. There is one difficulty which unfortunately besets the best-intentioned inquirer into this period. He is constantly at a loss how to keep his course in the mid-stream of impartiality. Dur ing the first half-century after the Reformation, the rival parties within the kingdom continued to be distinguished, in the main, by the boundaries of the two races. But once the unchristian policy of those who professed the Reformed religion had struck the ploughshare of persecution into the land, the political demarcations thenceforth fell into the religious ones, and Ireland became Protestant and Roman Catholic. As long as the ethnical distinctions keep their prominence, we who live in a later and more enlightened era have a comparatively easy task; for we have established and admitted principles to guide us, affording a clue to our worst entanglements if we only possess the power and will to take it in hand; but when religious strife supersedes political antagonism, and the spirit of bigotry gets abroad, a new ingredient has entered into the investiga tion, of which the essential properties are not so easily ascertained; or rather, concerning the properties of which the minds of the ablest and most conscientious men are known to disagree. The embarrassment arising out of this state of things pervades the whole aspect of political affairs from thenceforward. It enters into every page, and is felt at every step. And whereas the inquirer, as he descends nearer and nearer our own times, might reasonably expect that history should at length cast itself clear of fable, and atone by its faithworthiness for the fading of romance and chivalry from the page; even in this hope, strange to say, he must, when he turns to Ireland, make up his mind to be disappointed. Not only does he find the most opposite inferences drawn from the facts; but, astonishing as it may appear, he discovers, as he pursues his research, a continuous discrepancy in the narrative of successive events pervading the records of the British and the Irish chroniclers, constituting, in fact, two concurrent and discordant histories; so that, up to a very recent period, he is obliged to grope his way through evidences as contradictory, and at the same time as circumstantial, as that supporting a provincial identification and alibi. To reconcile these discrepancies is no easy task; to attempt it is no light undertaking. The conviction that there is something translucent in truth, which causes it to shine through the thickest veil that can be thrown over it, is our only encouragement. This, and the belief that in the events of this period we of to-day are practically concerned, have sufficed to overcome many scruples. From the surrender of Limerick, the struggles of Ireland, so long carried on with fire and sword, have been almost exclusively civil struggles,-for the disturbances of public tranquillity in 1798 can scarcely be called a war;-but they have been not the less real for all that. During the greater part of the eighteenth century that tyrannical code was built up, which was intended by a rampart of law to supply the place of that pale of an earlier era, within which the interest of England and the AngloIrish had uniformly entrenched itself. Before that century had run its course its demolition had begun. The legisla lative act with which it closed, rendered its obliteration a matter of safety; and paved the way for that final incorporation of the creeds into one equally enfranchised whole, which might perhaps with a better grace have earlier followed the union of the two countries. sway of those who had hitherto been unable, from the first invasion of Henry II., to substantiate a title to their territorial acquisitions, either on the ground of conquest or surrender. De Ginckle's army, ill paid and loosely disciplined, wanted little provocation to urge it to acts of unjustifiable severity and wanton cruelty, perpetrated in spite of the incessant exertions of the civil and military authorities;* and that provocation had been abundantly supplied by the vast bands of houseless and wandering natives, partly composed of the scattered fragments of James's forces, partly of those who, having obtained protection from William's generals, had been subsequently maltreated by the soldiery, and consequently bore with them into the wilds the superadded rancour of personal which wrong; and partly of those gangs had long infested the northern districts of the kingdom the last remnant of the mountain militia that had followed the banner of Owen Roe. These predatory hordes resembled, in some respect, the fierce troops of assassins which, during the period of the Crusades, poured down from their homes within the fastnesses of Lebanon, upon the armies of the Chris tians and the Saracens indiscriminately. Amidst the exaggerated statements of the English writers of the day, and the sweeping refutations of their opponents, enough is elicited of indisputable truth to show how dismal and dark the social horizon must have been over which such tempests could have swept. High among the trackless hills the Rapparees for so were they called-used to gather in masses, after The condition of Ireland, once the having, at a preconcerted signal, col contest between James and William was brought to a close, and the authority of the latter definitively established, was miserable enough. The passions of nations, as of individuals, seldom cool down in a moment when the strife is over. On the one side was a haughty and triumphant party, actuated by the usual motives of mingled animosity and rapacity, in carrying out its own mode of quieting the country, and enriching its adherents. On the other, was the mass of the popu lation, now consigned over, by the solemn act of their own leaders, to the * Harris's "William III." p. 294. At lected their arms from their places of + Ib. p. 312. discovered of the formidable array of a few minutes before, and the trooper might weary himself in search of the Rapparee, who was, perhaps, crouched like a hare in the nearest tuft of rushy grass, or lying all along in the watercourse close by, with his mouth and nostrils alone above the surface.* With a characteristic versatility, too, these very same individuals, as soon as the winter compelled them to close their barbarous campaign, would appear at the quarters of the troops, or in the thoroughfares of towns, in the squalid garb and with the abject mien of beggary, under which no sagacity could recognise the sinewy and ferocious banditti that had spread terror through the land. Their habits and manners were as peculiar as their system of warfare. They had no settled abodes, and subsisted, partly on plunder, partly upon the cattle which they conducted with them in droves, and which, belonging to the small and active breed of the country, formed little impediment to them in their rapid marches and retreats. That lawless bands should infest a country circumstanced as was Ireland at the time, is but natural; that the general outlawry of the race should drive a half-civilised peasantry to desperation, is likewise too probable an inference; we are not called upon, therefore, to reject the statements made by contemporary writers regarding this singular fraternity, on the score of improbability.† Some final facts remain undisputed at all events, forming a more significant commentary upon the horrors of these wars than all Curry's vindications. Dean Story's list gives us, of Rapparees killed by the army or militia, 1,928; of the same put to death by the soldiers, without form of trial, 122. By an injudicious, as well as cruel, proclamation of Government, a certain sum a-piece was offered for Rapparees' heads; and they were constantly told over before the officers as so much merchandise, for the stipulated reward. There is a tradition of a tragical occurrence occasioned in a family of rank, by a sackful of these ghastly trophies being rolled out suddenly, and without pre * Dr. Curry's "Civil Wars of Ireland," vol. ii. chap. 8. Dr. Curry, the author who has shown the greatest zeal as well as ability in the attempt to impugn the testimony of eyewitnesses, has succeeded no farther than to designate the outrages of the Rapparees as acts of retaliation, without denying that they were perpetrated; while the passage he cites from Lesley's answer to King only asserts, that the greater number of those who were executed as Rapparees did not in reality belong to that com munity, but were inoffensive country-people, who were every day seized and shot without ceremony, by an army who hardly thought them "human kind." That there may be some exaggeration in the accounts of Williamite writers in speaking of the atrocities alleged to have been committed by the Rapparees, is not difficult to believe. But the admission of excess and cruelty on the part of the army goes far to confirm them, in the natural course of wild vindictiveness; and the Act passed in the 7th year of William III., a few years later, for the suppression of these very gangs directs its penalties expressly against outrages to person and property, appearing to be common, amongst which are enumerated murder, maiming, robbery, arson, destroying cattle, &c. It is however indisputable, evincing the working of the same spirit which unfortunately still exists, that the Rapparees were encouraged and abetted by the "protected" Irish, as they were called-that is, by those individuals of James's party who had been granted protections by the generals of William's army, on the condition of their behaving peaceably and quietly. These treacherous friends were in the habit, by certain signals, of giving notice of the approach of any detached bodies of troops which were to pass across lonely districts, or through difficult defiles. While Lord George Hamilton's regiment lay at Mount Mellick, a small party of his soldiers, with a few of the English townspeople, were thus entrapped, within a mile of the town, and all murdered. Some persons were proved to have harboured the offenders; but though they were seized and held prisoners, the Government in Dublin dealt so leniently with them, that not one of them suffered; and Harris, who tells the story, assures us that he himself conversed, many years after the settlement of Ireland, with two of these individuals, who used to boast of their various methods of screening delinquents, and their other "policies at the time" (See Harris's "William III." p. 295). But however this may be, in the curious details of which an outline is given above, it is not easy to conceive a motive for misstatement. Nor is the indignation of their champion, Dr. Curry, easily intelligible, where it is excited to such a degree by the insinuation that his unfortunate countrymen, when hunted to their lairs, hid their musket-barrels in cavities, and their bodies in bog-holes (See "Dalrymple's Memoir of Britain and Ireland," part i. p. 176). |