If all this had passed through Walter Raleigh’s mind, what could we say of it, but that it was the natural and rational feeling of an honourable and right-hearted man, burning to rise to the level which he knew ought to be his, because he knew that he had fallen below it? And what right better way of testifying these feelings than to do what, as we shall see, Raleigh did? What right have we to impute to him lower motives than these, while we confess that these righteous and noble motives would have been natural and rational;—indeed, just what we flatter ourselves that we should have felt in his place? Of course, in his grand scheme, the thought came in, ‘And I shall win to myself honour, and glory, and wealth,’—of course. And pray, sir, does it not come in in your grand schemes; and yours; and yours? If you made a fortune to-morrow by some wisely and benevolently managed factory, would you forbid all speech of the said wisdom and benevolence, because you had intended that wisdom and benevolence should pay you a good percentage? Away with cant, and let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone.
So Raleigh hits upon a noble project; a desperate one, true: but he will do it or die. He will leave pleasant Sherborne, and the bosom of the beautiful bride, and the first-born son, and all which to most makes life worth having, and which Raleigh enjoys more intensely than most men; for he is a poet, and a man of strong nervous passions withal. But,—
‘I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.’
And he will go forth to endure heat, hunger, fever, danger of death in battle, danger of the Inquisition, rack, and stake, in search of El Dorado. What so strange in that? I have known half a dozen men who, in his case, and conscious of his powers, would have done the same from the same noble motive.
He begins prudently; and sends a Devonshire man, Captain Whiddon—probably one of The Whiddons of beautiful Chagford—to spy out the Orinoco. He finds that the Spaniards are there already; that Berreo, who has attempted El Dorado from the westward, starting from New Granada and going down the rivers, is trying to settle on the Orinoco mouth; that he is hanging the poor natives, encouraging the Caribs to hunt them and sell them for slaves, imprisoning the caciques to extort their gold, torturing, ravishing, kidnapping, and conducting himself as was usual among Spaniards of those days.
Raleigh’s spirit is stirred within him. If ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ fiction as it is, once excited us, how must a far worse reality have excited Raleigh, as he remembered that these Spaniards are as yet triumphant in iniquity, and as he remembered, too, that these same men are the sworn foes of England, her liberty, her Bible, and her Queen? What a deed, to be beforehand with them for once! To dispossess them of one corner of that western world, where they have left no trace but blood and flame! He will go himself: he will find El Dorado and its golden Emperor; and instead of conquering, plundering, and murdering him, as Cortez did Montezuma, and Pizarro Atahuallpa, he will show him English strength; espouse his quarrel against the Spaniards; make him glad to become Queen Elizabeth’s vassal tributary, perhaps leave him a bodyguard of English veterans, perhaps colonise his country, and so at once avenge and protect the oppressed Indians, and fill the Queen’s treasury with the riches of a land equal, if not superior, to Peru and Mexico.
Such is his dream; vague perhaps: but far less vague than those with which Cortez and Pizarro started, and succeeded. After a careful survey of the whole matter, I must give it as my deliberate opinion, that Raleigh was more reasonable in his attempt, and had more fair evidence of its feasibility, than either Cortez or Pizarro had for theirs. It is a bold assertion. If any reader doubts its truth, he cannot do better than to read the whole of the documents connected with the two successful, and the one unsuccessful, attempts at finding a golden kingdom. Let them read first Prescott’s ‘Conquests of Mexico and Peru,’ and then Schomburgk’s edition of Raleigh’s ‘Guiana.’ They will at least confess, when they have finished, that truth is stranger than fiction.
Of Raleigh’s credulity in believing in El Dorado, much has been said. I am sorry to find even so wise a man as Sir Robert Schomburgk, after bearing good testimony to Raleigh’s wonderful accuracy about all matters which he had an opportunity of observing, using this term of credulity. I must dare to differ on that point even with Sir Robert, and ask by what right the word is used? First, Raleigh says nothing about El Dorado (as every one is forced to confess) but what Spaniard on Spaniard had been saying for fifty years. Therefore the blame of credulity ought to rest with the Spaniards, from Philip von Huten, Orellano, and George of Spires, upward to Berreo. But it rests really with no one. For nothing, if we will examine the documents, is told of the riches of El Dorado which had not been found to be true, and seen by the eyes of men still living, in Peru and Mexico. Not one-fifth of America had been explored, and already two El Dorados had been found and conquered. What more rational than to suppose that there was a third, a fourth, a fifth, in the remaining four-fifths? The reports of El Dorado among the savages were just of the same kind as those by which Cortez and Pizarro hunted out Mexico and Peru, saving that they were far more widely spread, and confirmed by a succession of adventurers. I entreat readers to examine this matter in Raleigh, Schomburgk, Humboldt, and Condamine, and judge for themselves. As for Hume’s accusations, I pass them by as equally silly and shameless, only saying, for the benefit of readers, that they have been refuted completely by every one who has written since Hume’s days; and to those who are inclined to laugh at Raleigh for believing in Amazons and ‘men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders’ I can only answer thus—
About the Amazons, Raleigh told what he was told; what the Spaniards who went before him, and Condamine who came after him, were told. Humboldt thinks the story possibly founded on fact; and I must say that, after reviewing all that has been said thereon, it does seem to me the simplest solution of the matter just to believe it true; to believe that there was, about his time, or a little before, somewhere about the Upper Orinoco, a warlike community of women. Humboldt shows how likely such would be to spring up where women flee from their male tyrants into the forests. As for the fable which connected them with the Lake Manoa and the city of El Dorado, we can only answer, ‘If not true there and then, it is true elsewhere now’; for the Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey at this moment, as all know, surpass in strangeness and in ferocity all that has been reported of the Orinocquan viragos, and thus prove once more that truth is stranger than fiction. [138]
Beside—and here I stand stubborn, regardless of gibes and sneers—it is not yet proven that there was not, in the sixteenth century, some rich and civilised kingdom like Peru or Mexico in the interior of South America. Sir Robert Schomburgk has disproved the existence of Lake Parima; but it will take a long time, and more explorers than one, to prove that there are no ruins of ancient cities, such as Stephens stumbled on in Yucatan, still buried in the depths of the forest. Fifty years of ruin would suffice to wrap them in a leafy veil which would hide them from every one who did not literally run against them. Tribes would die out, or change place, as the Atures and other great nations have done in those parts, and every traditional record of them perish gradually; for it is only gradually and lately that it has perished: while if it be asked, What has become of the people themselves? the answer is, that when any race (like most of the American races in the sixteenth century) is in a dying state, it hardly needs war to thin it down, and reduce the remnant to savagery. Greater nations than El Dorado was even supposed to be have vanished ere now, and left not a trace behind: and so may they. But enough of this. I leave the quarrel to that honest and patient warder of tourneys, Old Time, who will surely do right at last, and go on to the dogheaded worthies, without necks, and long hair hanging down behind, who, as a cacique told Raleigh, that ‘they had of late years slain many hundreds of his father’s people,’ and in whom even Humboldt was not always allowed, he says, to disbelieve (so much for Hume’s scoff at Raleigh as a liar), one old cacique boasting to him that he had seen them with his own eyes. Humboldt’s explanation is, that the Caribs, being the cleverest and strongest Indians, are also the most imaginative; and therefore, being fallen children of Adam, the greatest liars; and that they invented both El Dorado and the dog-heads out of pure wickedness. Be it so. But all lies crystallise round some nucleus of truth; and it really seems to me nothing very wonderful if the story should be on the whole true, and these worthies were in the habit of dressing themselves up, like foolish savages as they were, in the skins of the Aguara dog, with what not of stuffing, and tails, and so forth, in order to astonish the weak minds of the Caribs, just as the Red Indians dress up in their feasts as bears, wolves, and deer, with foxtails, false bustles of bison skin, and so forth. There are plenty of traces of such foolish attempts at playing ‘bogy’ in the history of savages, even of our own Teutonic forefathers; and this I suspect to be the simple explanation of the whole mare’s nest. As for Raleigh being a fool for believing it; the reasons he gives for believing it are very rational; the reasons Hume gives for calling him a fool rest merely on the story’s being strange: on which grounds one might disbelieve most matters in heaven and earth, from one’s own existence to what one sees in every drop of water under the microscope, yea, to the growth of every seed. The only sound proof that dog-headed men are impossible is to be found in comparative anatomy, a science of which Hume knew no more than Raleigh, and which for one marvel it has destroyed has revealed a hundred. I do not doubt that if Raleigh had seen and described a kangaroo, especially its all but miraculous process of gestation, Hume would have called that a lie also; but I will waste no more time in proving that no man is so credulous as the unbeliever—the man who has such mighty and world-embracing faith in himself that he makes his own little brain the measure of the universe. Let the dead bury their dead.