Just over two years later, Sir Walter Ralegh – the man who could not sleep on board a boat, who was by his own admission a poor ‘footman’ (walker) and a person of such an intellectual bent that he travelled with a chest full of books – found himself in a canoe up the Orinoco river in South America, thousands of miles from home.
The promise of £80,000 for Elizabeth had been enough to ensure his release from the Tower. Delivering the money, which duly found its way into the Crown’s coffers, ensured that Ralegh stayed out of prison. It was not enough, however, to ensure his political rehabilitation. Ralegh was now therefore on a quest for the ‘great and golden city of Manoa, which the Spaniards call El Dorado’, which, if found, would make that eighty thousand pounds appear small change. The journey to what he called the ‘large, rich, and beautiful empire of Guiana’ (now part of Venezuela) was dressed in the clothes of gaining an empire for his Queen. But it was also a naked grab for money and power, both essential if Sir Walter were to regain anything close to the glory of the 1580s.
Ralegh also had a new personal motivation: a second son, Wat. His attachment to Wat, conceived at Sherborne in the early months of 1593 just weeks after Bess’s release from the Tower of London, and christened there in November, is unquestionable. When, in the late summer of 1594, plague struck again, the new father was desperate: ‘I had a post this morning from Sherborne. The plague is in the town very hot. My Bess is one way sent, her son another way, and I am in great trouble therewith’. Presumably, the plan was to separate mother and baby to minimise the chances of both succumbing. They both survived, this time.
This brush with plague not only shows a father’s concern but also Ralegh the married man. This is the first letter in which Sir Walter acknowledges his marriage of three years before. Plague appears to have finally put an end to Ralegh’s public amnesia about his wife. Once he has mentioned Bess, he does not stop; she features in his very next letter to Robert Cecil. For a man as complex, as capable of deception both of himself and of others, as Ralegh, it is very hard to assess the nature of his feelings for his wife. In part he is driven by a desire, a need, to confirm his son’s legitimacy and secure his inheritance. Sir Walter may have lost vast tracts of political ground but he remained extremely wealthy and was determined his wealth should pass to Wat. Provision for his wife was simply not a priority. When he reviewed his finances in 1594 (and then later when he wrote his will in 1597) Ralegh allowed Bess a mere two hundred pounds a year after his death, which certainly would not have kept her in the manner to which she was accustomed. Everything else was to go to Wat.
While not particularly surprising, this is certainly not generous. Ralegh appears to take steps actively to exclude Bess from his financial dealings. He wrote in one letter that ‘all the interest [the equity] is in my son’, since the lease on the Sherborne estate has been assigned to young Wat ‘without power of revocation’. If or when Ralegh dies, Bess receives no property and no influence over the property, just her two hundred pounds a year. Even so, Sir Walter expresses anxiety about this and desires his correspondent to keep quiet about the details: ‘And besides by that means my wife will know that she can have no interest in my living, and so exclaim’. This statement is ambiguous: does Ralegh mean ‘interest’ in the sense of equity, in which case he is anxious that Bess will realise that she has absolutely no stake in his property and land (his ‘living’) and will thus complain of her unfair treatment? Or does it mean that Ralegh is worried that Bess would see the two hundred pounds as something valuable and that she would therefore have no interest in him living and more interest in a regular income after his death? Either way, his worry is that Bess will ‘exclaim’. This evocative word carries its modern sense of crying out vehemently but had two other possible meanings in Ralegh’s time, both characteristic of Lady Ralegh’s behaviour. One was to ‘accuse loudly’, the other to ‘expose an injustice’. As one of Christopher Marlowe’s characters says at a particularly bloody moment, ‘I curse thee, and exclaim thee, miscreant’.
Biographers – let alone film-makers – have not always done justice to Lady Ralegh’s undoubted feistiness, nor have they acknowledged the tensions between her and her husband. Bess has been described as ‘a devoted honourable wife’ with ‘blue eyes and blonde hair’ (think Abby Cornish in The Golden Age), the marriage as ‘without doubt, a happy one’ and Ralegh as ‘being obviously genuinely relaxed in his wife’s company’. The documents, in contrast, suggest Ralegh was rarely ‘relaxed’ about Bess and often feared her reaction. Was Bess ‘relaxed’ in the company of Ralegh, the husband who would not even acknowledge her existence for the first three years of their marriage and who actively sought to constrain her financially in the event of his death? For a woman who appeared to value honesty and straight-talking so highly, what did she make of Ralegh’s lies and evasions?
It has been suggested that deception on the scale Ralegh used reveals a man either devastatingly clear-sighted or completely self-hypnotised. Or perhaps both. He was a heady combination of these qualities, a man characterised by duality: intellectually brilliant but unable to control his passionate emotions, capable of extraordinary exertion (even Robert Cecil acknowledged that he could ‘toil terribly’) but also of periods of extreme passivity and depression. Bess Throckmorton had allied herself to one of the most visionary, mercurial men of her generation. It might be difficult to be relaxed in the company of a man who lived so intensely but it may well have been exciting.
When he was up, he was up, which explains why he was in a canoe on the Orinoco in the spring of 1595. Having seen off accusations of atheism and the threat of plague, by the end of 1594 the ‘very gallant’ Sir Walter was increasingly in London, a freewheeling adventurer again. In early December the Queen at last granted Ralegh permission to ‘offend’ the King of Spain and by Christmas he had organised the boats and men necessary for a voyage in search of the gold of El Dorado.
Bess attempted to stop him. She pleaded with Robert Cecil to use his power to ‘stay’ her husband. As Ralegh made his preparations to sail, his lady insisted that a bond should be drawn up between her and William Sanderson, the man who had been responsible for raising much of the money for the voyage. Bess demanded some protection against the possibility of a lawsuit from Sanderson to recover his investment from her if Ralegh did not return. If she herself was not going to gain from Ralegh’s death at sea, she did not want to be saddled with his debts. Bess believed there were other, safer, ways in which Sir Walter could achieve his political rehabilitation.
He chose to make the voyage. It is tempting to conclude that Ralegh risked the crossing of the Atlantic not merely because he was driven by a vision of El Dorado but because at sea he could escape both the political elite with which he had to work and the political fictions that he himself had helped to create and by which he had to live. At sea, the strange blend of qualities that characterised the man come fully into play: he could be practical, pragmatic and task-oriented but also visionary and imaginative; he could be full of curiosity and wonder but equally full of scepticism. He could be in sole command.
Ralegh seems more comfortable pitting himself against the ocean than struggling with human enemies on dry land. The Commission into his atheism the previous summer had been a reminder of the very real dangers he faced from those enemies, just as the arrival of plague in Sherborne the same summer had been a reminder that death could come at any time, in any place.
As with all the expeditions, voyages and battles in which Ralegh was involved, the quest for El Dorado – whether understood as the ‘golden one’, the King who ruled an empire of gold or the empire itself and its great and golden city of Manoa – was one element of a far bigger picture. Any attempt on ‘the empire of Guiana’ entailed a direct challenge to Spain, always a good thing in Ralegh’s mind. He understood, and for years had explained at length to anyone who would listen, the significance of what he called ‘Indian’ gold to England and Europe. Substitute the oil of our own time for the gold of his and the geopolitics become clear. Gold ‘disturbeth all the nations of Europe, it purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into Councels, and setteth bound loyalty at liberty, in the greatest Monarchies of Europe’. Put simply: ‘Those princes which abound in treasure have great advantages over the rest’.
Now, England could have its own Indian gold, from a land so rich in it that its King, El Dorado, the Golden One, bathed in it. It was a place of ‘great plenty of gold, pearl, and precious stones’. The report of El Dorado might seem strange but Spain had the wealth of the Incas, therefore, Ralegh urges us, if we consider ‘the many millions which are daily brought out of Peru into Spain, we may easily believe the same’. Ralegh even had a picture: ‘How the nobility of Guiana would cover themselves in gold when feasting’, inspired by his meeting with Toparimaca, cacique of Arowacai. Glittering marcasite, used as body paint, can look very like gold. It was an easy mistake to make but surely not a deliberate misrepresentation on Ralegh’s part.
Who would not seize the chance to find the Emperor of Guiana and his court, as described in a Spanish history of the Indies, helpfully translated by Ralegh for his English audience?
All the vessels of his house, table and kitchen were of gold and silver, and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and hardness of the metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which seemed giants, and the figures in proportion and bigness of all the beasts, birds, trees, and herbs that the earth bringeth forth: and of all the fishes that the sea of waters of his kingdom breedeth.
The Spanish had already been busy, with two great families competing for the title to the territory. Expedition after expedition of doradistas had headed into the interior but all was still there for the taking by England, if only it could be found. If it were not found, then the English would be quite happy to take some workable gold mines. That suited Ralegh; mining was part of his heritage, whether as a West Country boy and man, or as Lord Warden of the Stannaries, with direct responsibility for Cornwall, England’s most important mining region.
Mining had not been part of the nascent vision of the English empire in North America, for the obvious reason that there were no precious metals or mines in ‘Virginia’. Ralegh’s colonial ambitions had instead been centred on what Thomas Harriot called ‘vegetable gold’: planting not mining, settlement not plunder. (This was one of the reasons Ralegh became the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ poster boy for what was seen as a more decent form of imperialism. He was the true precursor of the British Empire because he attempted settlement in Virginia while others, such as Francis Drake and John Hawkins, were merely concerned with trade and plunder.) This privileging of ‘vegetable gold’ allowed England to demonise Spain for its mining activities. It was not hard to do. Opencast mining was, and is, horrific in terms of human labour and the destruction of the environment. The lives of mineworkers, then and now, are cheap. But ten years on from Virginia Ralegh wanted real gold, whether that of El Dorado’s well-hidden empire or the more realistic chances of workable mines beyond the Orinoco delta. Plantation, ‘vegetable gold’ of any kind, came a very poor third behind trade and plunder.
Virginia and Ireland had all too clearly shown Ralegh the challenges inherent in empire-building. Would ‘the large rich and beautiful empire of Guiana’ be third time lucky? Ralegh wanted Elizabeth to think so, asking her to ‘undertake the enterprise’ of annexing what he (and the Spanish) believed, or hoped, to be the last undiscovered Inca kingdom. Whether the empire of Guiana and its King would willingly agree to this was left hazy. The ideal was the willing acceptance of the legitimacy of English supremacy by the indigenous people. Conquest was, however, not off the agenda. Precisely because the voyage took place in the very earliest stages of the English imperial mission, anything was possible; the colonial rulebook had not yet been written.
It was, unfortunately, not the best moment for such a voyage. In the mid-1590s, England was reeling from famine and plague. The Crown’s military resources, such as they were, were spread across the Netherlands, France and Ireland and serious threats were reported (by Ralegh) from Spain. Having already paid for assaults, led by Drake and Hawkins, on the Spanish in Puerto Rico the cautious Queen was unlikely to support, financially or in any other way, the Guiana dream.
An empire in, or close to, the Indies; impoverishing Spain; the quest for El Dorado; a back route to the Incas. Gold. All these were enough to send Ralegh across the Atlantic, with or without the support of his Queen. But there may well have been a very raw, very personal ambition at work in the early months of 1595. This restless, driven man hungered for a land he could call his own: Raleghana.
To all these ends, Captain Jacob Whiddon was despatched to reconnoitre the region in 1594. He returned with more than a report; he brought the first South Americans to reach England since a Brazilian ‘king’ in 1531. Later in the year, to Ralegh’s horror, Robert Dudley, the illegitimate son of the Earl of Leicester, surveyed Trinidad and the lower Orinoco delta. Another rival expedition departed in January 1595. The good news was that Dudley’s report confirmed Ralegh’s belief in the potential for gold-working. The bad news was that his competitors were getting there ahead of him. Ralegh was rightly anxious that they would ‘attempt the chiefest places of my enterprise’. He ‘shall be undone’, while they, lacking his skills and experience, ‘will be beaten and do no good’. They would not, they must not, take the opportunity that Sir Walter was determined was his; to seize the empire that only he had the ability to seize.
Did he have it in him? He was not young (in his early forties) and for many years his life had been centred on the court and his developing estate at Sherborne. Even one of his admirers, the early twentieth-century imperialist historian V.T. Harlow, is doubtful of Ralegh’s ability as a sailor and explorer. He was not a ‘first-rate seaman’, ‘found wanting’ in stormy weather on various occasions. It was not that he was a ‘coward…he was simply not a sailor’, says Harlow, as is revealed by Ralegh’s deeply suspicious practice of taking a trunk full of books to sea: ‘an outward and visible sign of his character’. Harlow’s words, steeped in a very English anti-intellectualism, are variations on a theme that emerged in Ralegh’s time, as he well knew. People, acknowledged the man himself, think he is ‘too easeful and sensual to undertake a journey of so great travel [travail?]’. Undertake it he would. And undertake it he did.
Late 1594: Ralegh – as ever – is waiting on the weather. ‘I stay but for the wind to bring about the ship.’ He is looking for the arrival of his ships from the Thames, anxious because ‘the passage down the Channel’ is ‘often more hazardous than the crossing of the Atlantic’. Five days later: ‘this wind breaks my heart’. It should be carrying him away; instead it is keeping his ‘ships in the river of Temes’. He was still waiting on 1 January. The month came and went:
[His] body is wasted with toil, the purse with charge and all things worn. Only the mind is indifferent to good fortune or adversity. There is no news from hence worth the writing. If I were more fortunate I should be the more worth the commanding. As I am, you may dispose of me. And thus for the present I leave you to all good fortune, and my self quo me fortuna retrudet.
Ralegh had used some of these lines before, in the weeks leading up to the birth of Damerei. He never knowingly wasted a good phrase.
At last they sailed, reaching Trinidad on 22 March, where Ralegh coasted around the island ‘in my barge close aboard the shore and landed in every cove, the better to know the island’:
This island of Trinidad hath the form of a sheephook, and is but narrow; the north part is very mountainous; the soil is very excellent, and will bear sugar, ginger, or any other commodity that the Indies yield. It hath store of deer, wild porks, fruit, fish, and fowl; it hath also for bread sufficient maize, cassavi, and of those roots and fruits which are common everywhere in the West Indies. It hath divers beasts which the Indies have not; the Spaniards confessed that they found grains of gold in some of the rivers; but they having a purpose to enter Guiana, the magazine of all rich metals, cared not to spend time in the search thereof any further.
The message is that Trinidad may be wonderful but Guiana is even better. However, to seize ‘the magazine of all rich metals’ Ralegh had to control Trinidad, as Spain well knew. His cover story for circumnavigating the island was that his fleet was heading north to relieve the Virginian colonists but had been blown off course, and sheer curiosity led him to ask questions. In a sign of Spain’s weakness, rather than her strength, the Spanish Governor, Berrio, who had founded the town of San José de Oruña just before Ralegh’s arrival, let him.
Ralegh understood Spain’s vulnerabilities. The Spanish were not like the Portuguese, who could travel from Lisbon to north-eastern Brazil in about thirty days and return in forty to fifty. The Portuguese royal house could manage its colony at a distance, with no need to establish a separate colonial law code, printing press or university in the new world. The Spanish had a far harder task. The Caribbean ports were two months from Seville, and it took even longer to reach New Spain and Peru. The journey home was often five to six months. The distances made Spain vulnerable to European competitors, something not lost on Ralegh. They also made Spain see her American territories as remote, a world apart. A world over which viceroys ruled almost autonomously, using a separate legal code. A place where, far from Madrid, the great families of Spain competed for dominance.
In the Orinoco region, ‘Vides governor of Cumana, and Berreo were become mortal enemies’, Ralegh happily noted. Both men had attempted to ally with a significant indigenous leader, Morequito, with whom Governor Berrio had lived for seven months. In a typical counter-move, Vides’s men headed into the Orinoco delta and ‘carried off about three hundred stolen souls whom they sold like negroes’. Unsurprisingly, when Berrio returned to the region, Morequito was hostile. No wonder that the governor was alarmed by the arrival of the English (blown off course? Berrio was not so sure) and secretly sent for reinforcements. A local leader, a cacique, went straight to Ralegh with the information and he decided to act immediately, otherwise he might have ‘savoured much of an ass’:
Taking a time of most advantage, I set upon the Corps du garde in the evening, and having put them to the sword, sent Captain Caulfield onwards with sixty soldiers, and myself followed with forty more, and so took their new city, which they called St. Joseph, by break of day. They abode not any fight after a few shot, and all being dismissed, but only Berreo and his companion (the Portuguese captain Alvaro Jorge), I brought them with me aboard, and at the instance of the Indians I set their new city of St. Joseph on fire.
Spanish historians have described the attack as a ‘crime’ and compared Ralegh’s butchery of the inhabitants to his actions in Ireland. Sir Walter, at the time, legitimised the slaughter, praising the bravery of the ‘Indians’ who:
Come aboard to trade with me upon pain of hanging and quartering (having executed two of them for the same which I afterwards found) yet every night there came some with most lamentable complaints of his cruelty […] that he made the ancient Casique which were lords of the country to be their slaves, that he kept them in chains, and dropped their naked bodies with burning bacon, and such other torments, which I found afterwards to be true: for in the city after I entered the same, there were five of the lords or little kings (which they call casiqui in the West Indies) in one chain almost dead of famine, and wasted with torments.
In other words, it was Ralegh’s moral duty to attack, ‘at the instance of the Indians’, the Indians who have been so appallingly treated by the conquistador Spaniards. It is, of course, his social duty to spare Berrio and Jorge, men of his own rank. Indeed, he subsequently has a gentlemanly discussion with the governor, gathering:
From him as much of Guiana as he knew. This Berreo is a gentleman well descended, and had long served the Spanish King in Milan, Naples, the Low Countries, and elsewhere, very valiant and liberal, and a gentleman of great assuredness, and of a great heart. I used him according to his estate and worth in all things I could, according to the small means I had.
Ralegh listened, learned and finally told Berrio of his intention to become an English doradista:
Berreo was stricken into a great melancholy and sadness, and used all the arguments he could to dissuade me; and also assured the gentlemen of my company that it would be labour lost, and that they should suffer many miseries if they proceeded. And first he delivered that I could not enter any of the rivers with any bark or pinnace, or hardly with any ship’s boat, it was so low, sandy, and full of flats, and that his companies were daily grounded in their canoes, which drew but twelve inches water. He further said that none of the country would come to speak with us, but would all fly; and if we followed them to their dwellings, they would burn their own towns. And besides that, the way was long, the winter at hand, and that the rivers beginning once to swell, it was impossible to stem the current; and that we could not in those small boats by any means carry victuals for half the time, and that (which indeed most discouraged my company) the kings and lords of all the borders of Guiana had decreed that none of them should trade with any Christians for gold, because the same would be their own overthrow, and that for the love of gold the Christians meant to conquer and dispossess them of all together.
Berrio did his best to put Ralegh off but he remained undaunted, even though ‘many and the most of these I found to be true’. He was resolved to ‘make trial of whatsoever happened’. It was not going to be easy, but that just made the whole expedition more heroic, more exciting. The empire of El Dorado might be ‘environed with impassable mountains on every side as it is impossible to go over them with any company and more impossible to victual any company’ but still they would go. Somewhere, there were fierce Amazons, and a people living on ‘that branch which is called Caora’ whose ‘heads appear not above their shoulders…their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, and that a long train of hair groweth backwards between their shoulders’. And still they would go.
The adventure began. It makes a gripping yarn. The first challenge is to cross the Orinoco delta and find a way inland. Ralegh reconnoitres and finds numerous entrances all ‘at least as big as the Thames at Woolwich’ but none suitable, due to their shallow reach. They decide to make the sea crossing (a distance ‘as between Dover and Calais’; Europe is never far from Ralegh’s mind) in their smaller wherries and – reading between the lines – trust to luck. There were so many streams and branches to the river, ‘all so fair and large, and so like one to another’, that it was impossible to do anything else.
By chance – Ralegh as ever unwilling to see God’s hand at work – they find a way in. The river they are navigating has no name in the minds of the English, so it is promptly christened ‘the river of the Red Cross’. Ralegh may see his successes and failures as matters of chance, not providence, but he remained a man of his time.
Once into the Orinoco delta, the going got harder. Ralegh and his men were:
All driven to lie in the rain and weather, in the open air, in the burning sun, and upon the hard boards, and to dress our meat, and to carry all manner of furniture in them, wherewith they were so pestered and unsavoury, that what with victuals being most fish, with the wet clothes of so many men thrust together and the heat of the sun, I will undertake there was never any prison in England that could be found more unsavoury and loathsome, especially to my self, who had for many years before been dieted and cared for in a sort far differing.
Durham House, silk stockings and fine dinners are a long way away. After yet another gruelling episode, ‘nothing on earth could have been more welcome to us next unto gold, than the great store of very excellent bread which we found in these canoes, for now our men cried, let us go on, we care not how far’. Gold remains the goal but survival is becoming the priority: bread, and living with the maddening ‘overgrown mosquitos (a fly that biteth very grieviously)’.
Ralegh almost glories in the fact that on the expedition he was ‘dieted and cared for in a sort far differing’. It must surely be false modesty that makes him insist that he is unable to endure long marches in the tropics because, in the end, that is what he and his men do. Each day brings a new challenge and a new vista. Ralegh makes clear that the thrill of the expedition runs through everyone, not just him:
When we were come to the tops of the first hills of the plains adjoining to the river, we beheld that wonderful breach of waters which ran down Caroli [Ralegh’s version of Caroni]; and might from that mountain see the river how it ran in three parts, above twenty miles off, and there appeared some ten or twelve overfalls in sight, every one as high over the other as a church tower, which fell with that fury, that the rebound of water made it seem as if it had been all covered over with a great shower of rain; and in some places we took it at the first for a smoke that had risen over some great town. For mine own part I was well persuaded from thence to have returned, being a very ill footman; but the rest were all so desirous to go near the said strange thunder of waters, as they drew me on by little and little, till we came into the next valley, where we might better discern the same.
Ralegh’s men inspire him to continue but the way does not get easier:
The third day that we entered the river our galley came on ground, and stuck so fast, as we thought that even there our discovery had ended, and that we must have left sixty of our men to have inhabited like rooks upon trees with those nations: but the next morning, after we had cast out all her ballast, with tugging and hauling to and fro, we got her afloat, and went on.
A ‘goodly river’ follows, but then a ‘violent current’ meaning ‘every gentlemen and others taking their turns to row’. The company runs low on food (‘our bread even at the last, and no drink at all’) and the heat increases, ‘breeding great faintness’. Ralegh lies to his men that it was only one more day’s ‘work more to attain the land where we should be relieved of all we wanted, and if we returned that we were sure to starve by the way, and that the world would also laugh us to scorn’. It might have been a mixed message but it worked. They were saved by the fruits, flowers, fowl, fish and trees of the country and would not starve. Even at this moment, Ralegh has time for wonder:
We saw birds of all colours, some carnation, some crimson, orange tawny, purple, green, watched [blue or blueish], and of all other sorts both simple and mixed, as it was unto us a great good passing of the time to behold them.
If anything, however, things get even more challenging. It was:
Dark as pitch, and the river began so to narrow itself, and the trees to hang over from side to side, as we were driven with arming swords to cut a passage through those branches that covered the water.
Their stomachs ‘began to gnaw apace’. At last ‘about midnight we saw a light, and rowing towards it we saw the dogs of the village’. It is one of many moments when, with the entire expedition on the brink of disaster, everything comes right. The Indians bring them ‘good store of bread, fish, hens and Indian drink’. The men sleep well and in the morning, the landscape is one of beauty, a plain of ‘twenty miles in length, the grass short and green’.
The final moments of the expedition are no less demanding, no less exciting, no less human:
When we were arrived at the sea side then grew our greatest doubt, and the bitterest of all our journey forepassed, for I protest before God, that we were in a most desperate estate: […] there arose a mighty storm, and the river’s mouth was at least a league broad […] I confess I was very doubtful which way to take, either to go over in the pestered galley, there being but six foot water over the sands, for two leagues together, and that also in the channel, and she drew five: or to adventure in so great a billow, and in so doubtful weather, to cross the seas in my barge. […] about midnight we put our selves to God’s keeping, and thrust out into the sea, leaving the galley at anchor, who durst not adventure but by day light. And so being all very sober, and melancholy, one faintly cheering another to show courage, it pleased God that the next day about nine of the clock, we descried the island of Trinidad, and steering for the nearest part of it, we kept the shore till we came to Curiapan, where we found our ships at anchor, than which, there was never to us a more joyful sight.
As he journeyed, Ralegh saw his own country, and his own people, mirrored in Guiana. Some islands in the river were ‘as big as the Isle of Wight, and bigger’; the deer ‘came down feeding by the water’s side, as if they had been used to a keeper’s call’; there were ‘diverse copses scattered here and there by the river’s side, and all as full of deer, as any forest or park in England’; a mountain ‘appeared like a white church tower of exceeding height’; the waterfalls like church towers, the spray like smoke from a town. And the women? The women were beautiful, as beautiful as the women in England:
In all my life I have seldom seen a better favoured woman: she was of good stature, with black eyes, fat of body, of an excellent countenance, her hair almost as long as herself, tied up again in pretty knots, and it seemed she stood not in that awe of her husband, as the rest, for she spoke and discoursed, and drank among the gentlemen and captains, and was very pleasant, knowing her own comeliness, and taking great pride therein. I have seen a Lady in England so like her, as but for the difference of colour I would have sworn might have been the same.
For all his thoughts of home, Virginia and Ireland had taught Ralegh that he and his men were reliant on the indigenous population, so he made the crucial contacts, recruited interpreters, collected intelligence, made use of the ‘two Indians’ who had been brought to England the previous year and who were ‘familiar with the English language’ (as the Spanish noted, enviously) and – in contrast to the Spanish – insisted that his men did not involve themselves with the local women:
[When] the poor men and women had seen us and that we gave them meat, and to every one some thing or other, which was rare and strange to them, they began to conceive the deceit and purpose of the Spaniards, who indeed (as they confessed) took from them both their wives and daughters daily, and used them for the satisfying of their own lusts, especially such as they took in this manner by strength. But I protest before the majesty of the living God, that I neither know nor believe, that any of our company one or other, by violence or otherwise, ever knew any of their women, and yet we saw many hundreds, and had many in our power, and of those very young, and excellently favoured which came among us without deceit, stark naked.
For Ralegh, there is a sense that this is not simply strategic, although it was certainly that. He is fascinated by the politics and society of the lower Orinoco and listens eagerly when the old chief Topiawari provides detail after detail of his people’s lives. His account of the expedition has been judged a profoundly valuable ethnological text, ‘a fundamental source for the historical anthropology of the Americas’, precisely because Ralegh is so engaged with this land far from home. His interest in the landscapes and peoples that he encountered (however brutal and incomplete that encounter might be) allows us, four hundred years on, a glimpse of a vanished world. It is a world that he, his men and his ideology helped to destroy but it is also a world that Ralegh explored with wonder, providing a rare glimpse of the peoples of the Orinoco delta during a period of almost first contact.
Others simply see a man asserting his cultural and political supremacy. For many, there is nothing to admire in Ralegh’s treatment of the indigenous people. Their ‘very acceptance of Ralegh’s dissembled gifts betokens their uncomprehending entry into the circulations of England’s nascent imperial economy – an economy to be fueled, in the future, by their own gold’, argues Louis Montrose. ‘Uncomprehending’ does not quite do justice to the communities in the Orinoco delta or their history; they had had a century of dealing with, and resisting, Spanish and Portuguese intrusions on to their territories. Indeed, his allies were not quite as loyal as Ralegh hoped or believed. When Ralegh made his parting attack on the Spanish, in Cumaná, he suffered heavy losses because (according to Spanish sources) the Englishmen’s native guide, Juan Caraca, ‘knew what he had to do’ and ‘led them by a devilish road overlooked by two forts’.
The Lieutenant Governor of Cumaná, Lucas Fajardo, entertained Ralegh, Berrio and Jorge at around the same time, as the four gentlemen deliberated the terms of release of Berrio and Jorge. Such is war. Such is the military elite.
As Michael Oberg writes, the native peoples made use of Ralegh, ‘whom they saw as a potentially valuable ally in their struggles against European and Native American foes’. Indigenous politics were far more complex than local tribes seeking to replace the Spanish with new English overlords. There were power struggles between the tribes and regular attempts to play the Europeans off against each other:
That Ralegh traded with them, established the reciprocal basis for an alliance, exchanged emissaries, and pledged through his interpreters to protect them from their enemies offered evidence that here was a foreigner whose friendship was worth cultivating.
A friendship worth cultivating? Others have been more scathing about the disjunction between the apparent consideration and courtesy (friendship) demonstrated towards indigenous cultures on the one hand and the quest for gold and the need for conquest on the other. This disjunction is built into the period’s colonialist discourse, to paraphrase Stephen Greenblatt, one of the great scholars of early-modern culture and a man who cut his academic teeth on Sir Walter Ralegh’s life and works. Ralegh is perpetrating ‘a most massive deception of the Indians’, ‘simultaneously covetous and generous, cynical and patriotic’.
At the time, one of the propagandist poets Ralegh drew to his cause insisted that the goal was ‘conquest without blood’. Guiana was a place where Sir Walter Ralegh could be ‘King of the Indians’, a place where the captain of the Destiny could fulfil his own destiny. In 1595, in Guiana, the fifth son of a Devonian gentleman could be a king. It would not be treason, for he remained, ever and always, a loyal servant to his own Amazonian Queen, the cacique of the guard of the great Ezrabeta Cassipuna Aquerewana, as he took care to translate ‘Elizabeth the great princess or greatest commander’.
Ralegh’s fascination with the Amazons may either be strategic, in that to write of their power was to flatter Elizabeth, or might be born of his long years of service to a queen. Either way, it is powerful. Amazonian tribes are found all over the world, he lectures his reader, channelling his not-so-hidden social anthropologist but:
They which are not far from Guiana do accompany with men but once in a year, and for the time of one month, which I gather by their relation to be in April. At that time all the kings of the borders assemble, and the queens of the Amazons, and after the queens have chosen, the rest cast lots for their Valentines. This one month, they feast, dance, and drink of their wines in abundance, and the moon being done, they all depart to their own provinces. If they conceive, and be delivered of a son, they return him to the father, if of a daughter they nourish it, and retain it, and as many as have daughters send unto the begetters a present, all being desirous to increase their own sex and kind, but that they cut off the right dug of the breast I do not find to be true.
Returning to the hard sell and his royal audience, Ralegh imagines the Amazons hearing the ‘name of a virgin, which is not only able to defend her own territories and her neighbours, but also to invade and conquer so great empires and so far removed’. How could Ezrabeta Casspina Aquerewana resist?
She could resist because, in the end, plain Sir Walter Ralegh, no king of the Indians he, returned from the ‘large, rich and beautiful empire of Guiana’ with nothing. Whether Ralegh failed because there was, in fact, no gold to be found has long perplexed historians and commentators. The foremost modern Spanish historian of the region and the time, Pablo Ojer, argues that ‘the Caroni mine’ was revealed as a measure of the indigenous peoples’ trust in Ralegh. The anthropologist Neil Whitehead spells it out: ‘We now know that it did exist, that it was known to the Spanish in 1595, and that it was still known and considered for exploitation at the end of the eighteenth century’. But it is hard to work out exactly where it was. Perhaps Mount ‘Iconuri’, a day’s march inland from the river? Maybe on the river Caroni? It doesn’t help that sixty-two of the seventy references to gold made by Ralegh when writing about his expedition are general. Joyce Lorimer, a Ralegh scholar who trusts her subject as far as she can throw him, points out that ‘actual gold mines’ are hardly mentioned and even the more sympathetic Whitehead argues that Ralegh ‘badly serves himself’ by inflating the indications of gold working to conform more closely to the El Dorado legend of a ‘Golden King’. Ralegh’s words bring the gold close, but the reality was that, although he was ‘safely landed’ on English shores by the end of September 1595, he landed empty-handed.
A few days later, Sir Walter was back in London. People were excited that he had brought a ‘supposed prince’ from Guiana. On 9 October, he dined with John Dee at Durham House. Dee, mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, supporter of colonialism, was Ralegh’s kind of man: sceptical, enquiring, expert. People noticed a change in Sir Walter. He ‘is here and goes daily to hear sermons, because he hath seen the wonders of the Lord in the deep: ‘tis much commended and spoken of’. It was all quite fascinating, but what of the much-anticipated gold?
Ralegh does his best: every stone promised ‘either gold or silver by its complexion’ but the rocks are too hard to mine: ‘like flint, and in all as hard or harder’. He has a barrel full of the ‘rocks like unto gold ore’. Writing to Charles, Lord Howard and to Robert Cecil, he claims that there is hardly a piece of ‘rich’ rock that doesn’t contain ‘some metal, either, gold, silver, copper, steel of all which we have brought some quantity to make trial’. Unfortunately, he admits that he had had:
Neither Pioneers, bars, sledges, nor wedges of iron to break the ground without which there is no working in mines, but we saw all the hills with stones of golden colour, and some of the colour of silver and we tried them to be no marquisite, and therefore I hope, they will prove of the right stamp, and if any of many which we saw by chance without search prove rich, I will undertake to load 1,000 ships with the ore of any one of a dozen, which we passed over as we went to view the country.
It is a huge claim (a thousand ships? Really?) but the lack of appropriate men and equipment is a shocking admission. Ralegh had hired a ‘refiner and trier of metals’ in London but he ‘came not to me at all, which hath fallen out I know now to what loss, for we had neither man nor means to try which mine was good, or which was bad’. This embarrassing omission in their company was revealed in a manuscript account of the voyage, written by 15 October. It marked Ralegh’s first attempt to paper over the cracks, the most obvious crack being that he had not brought even one ship laden with gold back to England, let alone a thousand.
Nevertheless, he was the talk of London. Lord Burghley wanted to see the manuscript account and so did others. (Just one copy, that addressed to George Carew, survives in the Lambeth Palace Library, but there were obviously more in circulation.) One courtier writes to another that he has been promised a copy of Ralegh’s ‘discourse to the queen of his journey’, suggesting that the work’s most important reader might be Elizabeth. Ralegh certainly hoped so.
His courtly readers remain unconvinced. A month later, Ralegh is becoming desperate at the lack of a follow-up expedition. He piles on the rhetoric, writing from ‘this desolate place’ (he is at Sherborne), with ‘no hope’ and, for good measure, channelling recent Shakespearean play titles: ‘We that have much ado to get bread to eat have the less to care for, unless much lost labour and love awake us’. He challenges Robert Cecil, his correspondent, directly:
What becomes of Guiana I much desire to hear, whether it pass for a history or a fable. I hear Master Dudley and others are sending thither. If it be so, farewell all good from thence, for although myself like a coxcomb did rather prefer the future in respect of others, and rather sought to win the kings to Her Majesty’s service then to sack them, I know what others will do when those kings shall come simply [innocently] into their hands. […]
For conclusion I will only say this much, take good heed lest you be not too slow; expedition in a little is better than much too late. But your ministers of despatch are not plentiful, neither is it every man’s occupation.—From Sherborne, the 10th of November.
A couple of days later, he’s repeating the same message: ‘You may perceive by this relation that it is no dream which I have reported of Guiana’. He knows:
the like was never offered to any Christian Prince. I know it will be presently followed both by the Spanish and French, and if it be foreslowed by us I conclude that we are curst of God. In the meantime I humbly beseech you to move her Majesty that none be suffered to foil the enterprise, and that those kings of the borders which are by my labour, peril, and charge won to her Majesty’s love and obedience be not by other pilferers lost again. I hope I shall be thought worthy to direct those actions that I have at mine own charge laboured in, and to govern that country which I have discovered and hope to conquer for the Queen without her cost. I am sending away a bark to the country to comfort and assure the people that they despair not nor yield to any composition with other nations.
There’s more, of course, because this is Ralegh. There are maps (produced by Harriot) that he can send; there are promises of ‘both diamond and pearl’ (he can send two stones to Cecil and is sending one ‘which I think is amethyst, and hath a strange blush of carnation’); there is a further assurance that everything he writes is backed up by ‘Spanish letters’ (a package of extracts from Spanish manuscripts, seized in 1593 by George Popham and handed to the Privy Council in early November). There is a characteristically ironic comment about the success of Ralegh’s old enemies: ‘if the Spaniards had been so blockish and slothful we had not feared now their power, who by their gold from thence vex and endanger all the estates of Europe’.
He’s writing quickly: from ‘Sherborne, this Wednesday morning, an hour after the receipt of your letter, the 13 November’. This note, crammed into the left-hand margin, is a sign of his haste: if it was Wednesday, it was 12 November. Two weeks later, he is still writing quickly (‘haste post haste W Ralegh’); his letter making its way from Shaftesbury at ‘one of the clock; Received this letter at v of the clock in the afternoon, the 26 day of November, ’95, Sarum. Received at Andover at eight of the clock afternoon, and at Basingstoke at xi of clock at night. Hurtford Bridge, the 27th day of November at i of the night. Staines, 8 a clock in the morning’. This was good going, but not as good as another correspondent wished when he wrote: ‘Haste, for thy life, post, haste; for thy life, post, haste, haste; for thy life, haste, haste, haste, haste, for thy life, post, haste’ and presumably not as good as Ralegh desired. He is begging for clarity from the Crown:
I beseech you let us know whether we shall be travellers or tinkers, conquerors or crounes [novices?], for if the winter pass without making provision, there can be no victualling in the summer, and if it be now foreslowed, farewell Guiana for ever! Then must I determine to beg or run away; honour and gold, and all good, for ever hopeless. I do not hear how you like the white stone; I have sent for more of each; as soon as they come you shall have them.
Ralegh attempts to keep the letter short. He turns to a brief summary of the defences of Devon and Cornwall (and indeed Dorset), but Guiana is always on his mind. He is trying to make the point that even though the news was all of the Spanish preparations for another attack, this should not prevent a renewed attempt on the empire of Guiana because, crucially, ‘your lordship [Charles Howard] doth find that it is the surest way to divert all attempts from home’. Ralegh’s global perspective, seeing Dorset on the same map as Guiana, is characteristic of the man. But by the second week of December, even Ralegh was starting to accept that those with the power to support him – Cecil, Howard, the Queen – were not going to. On 13 December, he is a ‘banished man from court’ and thinking about going to the Netherlands. There would be no follow-up expedition.
Queen Elizabeth had no reason to support a second voyage at a time when her kingdom was threatened. In Ireland, even as the Spanish continued their preparations for a new Armada (it would be destroyed in a storm in October 1596, but in 1595 Elizabeth could not know that), the Earl of Tyrone was in open rebellion. And on 23 July, while Ralegh was in Guiana, the Spanish landed in Cornwall, making a series of what have been described as commando raids on ports in the far west, including Penzance and Mousehole. The Spanish ships came from Brittany (the same Brittany, with its superb harbours, that Ralegh had been keen to raid earlier in the decade), where their fleet had a footing and was supporting the Catholic side in the continuing French civil wars. It was yet another manifestation of the stop-start nature of the ongoing war between England and Spain, far more characteristic of the conflict than the Great Armada of 1588 and revealing of the fact that Spain still viewed English maritime exploits as a threat to its power.
As 1595 closed, Ralegh was among those advocating an attack on the Spanish mainland. Attack looked like being England’s best form of defence but would also be rather helpful to Ralegh’s dreams of empire in Guiana, since it would ensure the Spanish were unable to send reinforcements to the Orinoco region. Meanwhile, Ralegh attempted to find more evidence of the ‘empire of Guiana’, sending Lawrence Keymis – a friend since university, a member of Sir Walter’s household since the early 1590s and his trusted lieutenant for the Guiana voyage of 1595 – in a tiny expedition across the Atlantic in January 1596. It was the best he could do.
His next step became one of his trademark moves. Having reluctantly recognised that the Queen was unwilling to take over the search for El Dorado and his empire – Ralegh should have known by now that Elizabeth used her subjects to fight her wars whenever she could – Sir Walter shifted his focus to private individuals. It was a shift that led to the publication of what, for many readers, is Ralegh’s most iconic work:
The Discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful EMPIRE Of GUIANA; with a Relation of the great and golden CITY of MANOA, which the Spaniards call EL DORADO, and the PROVINCES of EMERIA, AROMAIA, AMAPAIA, and other Countries, with their rivers, adjoining. Performed in the year 1595 by Sir WALTER RALEIGH, KNIGHT, CAPTAIN of her Majesty’s GUARD, Lord Warden of the STANNARIES, and her Highness’ LIEUTENANT-GENERAL of the COUNTY of CORNWALL.
It was a publishing sensation; three editions were rushed out in 1596 alone.
Ralegh subtly changes his manuscript for public consumption, another mark of the man: he always thought about his audience. His main aim appears to be to make the English look good. For the print version, he removes the moment when, to ensure his loyalty, they took their Indian guide’s wife hostage and he keeps quiet about the demands made by the same guide in recompense for his ill-treatment: ‘a shirt, a hatchet and a knife’. While sanitising his own and his men’s behaviour (bread, not wine, is offered to the Indians in the print version), Ralegh also removes some of the Spaniards’ more problematic statements that he had reported previously. He didn’t wish to publicise the idea, promulgated by the Spanish, that the ‘English nation sought for Indians, and to take their children to sell in England for bardasos’ (young boys who were prostituted to older men). Nor does he care to mention that one particular indigenous leader thoroughly supported the Spanish.
While some changes make Ralegh himself look better – there is no more talk of the refiner who didn’t turn up – others were designed not to give too much away; there is no mention of a barrel of rocks taken from a ‘round mountain’. Some of the most interesting moments end up on the cutting-room floor: an account of the beast Jawari, a joking allusion to the tendency of men to get distracted by women, a passage concerning the ways in which Guiana is a wonderful destination for drunkards, womanisers and smokers, the attack by two jaguars while Ralegh’s men were feasting on roasted armadillo (the armadillo stays in, the jaguars are cut) and Ralegh’s love of pineapples and hammocks:
in mine opinion there is nothing more necessary for soldiers, for they are light to carry, and easy to lodge in, and will keep them from the cold and wet ground, the lying whereon breedeth so many fluxes and agues in every camp, and they are bought there for the value of a 2 penny knife, or less.
Joyce Lorimer, who has edited the two versions, believes that in the interim between manuscript and print, Ralegh’s friends, household or political colleagues ‘took the humiliated author in hand’, disciplined his prose and eliminated soaring hyperbole. But whoever encouraged, or told, Ralegh to edit the manuscript version did not always get their own way. Sir Walter was asked to change ‘know’ to ‘think’. He kept ‘know’:
For I know all the earth doth not yield the like confluence of streams and branches, the one crossing the other so many times, and all so fair and large, and so like one to another, as no man can tell which to take: and if we went by the sun or compass, hoping thereby to go directly one way or other, yet that way we were also carried in a circle amongst multitudes of islands, and every island so bordered with high trees as no man could see any further than the breadth of the river, or length of the breach. But this it chanced, that entering into a river (which because it had no name, we called the River of the Red Cross, ourselves being the first Christians that ever came therein), the 22. of May, as we were rowing up the same, we espied a small canoa with three Indians, which by the swiftness of my barge, rowing with eight oars, I overtook ere they could cross the river. The rest of the people on the banks, shadowed under the thick wood, gazed on with a doubtful conceit what might befall those three which we had taken. But when they perceived that we offered them no violence, neither entered their canoa with any of ours, nor took out of the canoa any of theirs, they then began to show themselves on the bank’s side, and offered to traffic with us for such things as they had. And as we drew near, they all stayed; and we came with our barge to the mouth of a little creek which came from their town into the great river.
There is hyperbole here but the reader also hears, loud and clear, that Ralegh had been there, had navigated the ‘great river’, had seen the ‘high trees’ and the ‘multitude of islands’; had eaten armadillo, manatee and the eggs of the tortuga. Perhaps there were not millions of oysters growing on the branches of mangroves; perhaps the Spaniards had not martyred and tortured hundreds of the Indians, but hammock-loving Ralegh’s voice loses something between manuscript and print. Though not much.
Sir Walter promised his readers a discovery, in the older sense of uncovering or revealing something. He delivers it, describing Guiana as a beautiful virgin just longing to be taken by the right man:
To conclude, Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought; the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance. The graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their images pulled down out of their temples. It hath never been entered by any army of strength, and never conquered or possessed by any Christian prince.
These have become (in)famous lines, offering a ‘prospect of virgin penetration, gratefully invited’, in the words of one critic. Or as Ralegh puts it: ‘There is a way found to answer every man’s longing’. It is no surprise that feminist and post-colonial analyses condemn outright Ralegh’s ‘literary acts of colonial appropriation’; the way in which his masterful rhetoric is harnessed to the service of the rapist imperialist. The Discovery is an example of (to quote Michel Certeau) ‘writing which conquers’.
There’s absolutely no doubt that Ralegh could produce ‘writing which conquers’. Conquering the actual territory of Guiana was another matter. Ralegh had been right to feel a desperate urgency, since the Spanish re-established themselves swiftly. By the time Keymis’s small expedition arrived in the region, he was too late. Berrio, as soon as he was released from Cumaná, rushed back to the Orinoco and established a small garrison close to the delta. His son sent a further cohort of soldiers from New Granada, which allowed the rebuilding of the settlement on Trinidad. The ‘principal Indians of that coast’ were instructed by Spain that ‘in future they must not admit nor receive in their country any foreigners except Spaniards who should come in the name of your Majesty’.
Ralegh had instructed his surrogate Keymis ‘to comfort and assure the people, that they despair not, nor yield to any composition with other nations’ but, due to the Spanish reclamation of the Caroni river (predicted by Ralegh), Keymis swiftly moved to a previously-agreed alternative. He worked on finding other routes in to the delta, making landfall on 14 March 1596 at the mouth of the river Arrowari, far to the south of the Caroni. Further north, the Indians were waiting for Ralegh ‘during the whole moon of the month of March’. Keymis attempted to reach Topiawari’s port but found to his ‘grief’ that the Spaniards were lying in ambush ‘to defend the passage to those mines, from whence your ore and white stones were taken the last year’. Keymis headed back to search for the other friendly leader, Putijma, ‘in the mountains’, the plan being that ‘if the Indians should think themselves too weak, with our help to displant the Spaniards: to set some of these to work, for hatchets and knives to return us gold grains, and white stones from such places, as they should be directed unto’. Putijma could not be found, so the native guide:
offered to bring us either to the mine of white stones near Winicapora, or else to a gold mine, which Putijma had showed him, being but one day’s journey overland, from the place where we now stayed at an anchor. I saw far off the mountain adjoining to the gold mine, and having measured their paths near the same place this last year, could not judge it to be fifteen miles from us. I do well remember how coming that way with Putijma the year before, he pointed to this same mountain, making signs to have me go with him thither. I understood his signs, and marked the place, but mistook his meaning, imagining that he would have showed me the overfall of the River Curwara from the mountains. My Indian showed me in what sort without digging they gather the gold in the sand of a small river, named Macawini, that springeth and falleth from the rocks where this mine is.
So near and yet so far. In 1595, there might just have been an opportunity to steal Guiana for the English. Just a year later, Spain was closing the door. Keymis came back empty-handed, even though, for anthropologist Neil Whitehead, Keymis’s account is ‘direct confirmation of the location of many of the gold deposits mentioned by Ralegh and his contemporaries’. Whitehead identifies one of historians’ problems with Ralegh, a man who so often “sexed up his dossier”: the misrepresentations (if we are being harsh, the lies) don’t actually ‘undermine or make invalid the representations of native social practice, or indeed the presence of gold. It’s just that it’s hard to tell where truth ends and fiction begins’. Indeed.
This is also true of Ralegh’s proud claim that none of his men died on the expedition into the interior:
Moreover the country is so healthful, as of an hundred persons and more, which lay without shift most sluttishly, and were every day almost melted with heat in rowing and marching, and suddenly wet again with great showers, and did eat of all sorts of corrupt fruits, and made meals of fresh fish without seasoning, of tortugas, of lagartos or crocodiles, and of all sorts good and bad, without either order or measure, and besides lodged in the open air every night, we lost not any one, nor had one ill-disposed to my knowledge; nor found any calentura [fever] or other of those pestilent diseases which dwell in all hot regions, and so near the equinoctial line.
This may well be true but Ralegh keeps quiet about the botched raid on Cumaná, focusing on the threat of diseases rather than Indian arrows and Spanish muskets.
In late June 1596, it was the straight-talking Lady Ralegh who spelt out the truth of the collapse of Ralegh’s dream of Guiana. There has been nothing done of ‘much worth: for that the Spaniards are already possessed in Guiana’. Or, as she makes clear, deploying her idiosyncratic spelling: ‘I mean along the shorre, so as they durst not land: and also Topeaware the king, that was heer Magisti’s subgect, is ded, and his sun returned’. Thomas Harriot did his best to give a more positive gloss to the voyage. Writing on 11 July, he admitted that ‘although Captain Keymis be not come home rich, yet he hath done the special thing which he was enjoined to do, as the discovery of the coast betwixt the river of the Amazon and Orinoco, where are many goodly harbours for the greatest ships her Majesty hath and any number’.
Ralegh, and his supporters, made several more efforts to sell Guiana. Keymis produced a Relation of the second voyage to Guiana or as he now calls it – tellingly, wistfully, as with each passing month the dream of King Walter further receded – Raleana. Keymis adds a new religious gloss to the initiative, something singularly lacking from Ralegh’s Discovery, with Biblical authorities aplenty and a prayer that ‘God grant that we possess this promised land’. The core message remains the same: the Guiana empire would be ‘profitable’, it was ‘necessary’ to counter the Spanish and it would be easy, oh so easy, to achieve. The Spanish are hated by the Indians, the sea journey is straightforward and the country easily defended. In the Relation, gold is less important than farming and trade: ‘Brazil wood, honey, cotton, balsam and drugs’ are all available for the taking. A third text, recounting the voyage of Captain Leonard Berry on the Watte, appeared. It is even less rhetorically sophisticated than Keymis’s Relation, being primarily concerned with navigation. It showed that little further was achieved, except to continue a tentative dialogue with the local people, who still came to the Englishmen, still used ‘us kindly, and brought us victuals and other things’. Ralegh’s epic journey in search of gold for his Queen has been supplanted by a more mundane, but more realistic, analysis of the economics of colonialism and the mathematics of navigation, relevant to the predominantly non-courtly adventurers who invested in these early initiatives.
The Discovery was, and remains, glorious travel writing. Ralegh’s fascination with and admiration for the people he encountered, and for their lives, shines through.
These Tivitivas are a very goodly people and very valiant, and have the most manly speech and most deliberate that ever I heard of what nation soever. In the summer they have houses on the ground, as in other places; in the winter they dwell upon the trees, where they build very artificial towns and villages.
This is one of the reasons that, literally and metaphorically, his name lived on for so long in the region. During the late 1590s and beyond, Ralegh’s readers enjoyed his words but were unwilling to support future expeditions: they ‘only to entertain idle time, sit listening for Guiana news, and instantly forget it, as if it were nought else, but a pleasing dream of golden fancy’. El Dorado, let alone Raleana, remained a ‘pleasing dream of golden fancy’. Ralegh’s personal, rich and beautiful empire was not to be.
The Warao People, descendants of the Tivitivas, still inhabit the Orinoco delta.