One of the immediate results of the voyage was the introduction into this country of the potato and the tobacco plant. Raleigh grew potatoes in his garden at Youghal, and thus gave Ireland the staple food of her peasantry. According to an old story, he was the first man to smoke tobacco in England. It is said that his servant, seeing volumes of smoke issuing from his mouth, concluded that he was on fire, and promptly poured a bucket of water over him, thus effectually putting out his pipe.
A second attempt to found a colony on Roanoke Island failed, and Raleigh was terribly disappointed. He could do no more; so in 1589, the year after he helped to repel the Armada, he disposed of his rights to a company of merchants, who made no attempt to found a new colony on the ruins of the old. Thus the sixteenth century came to an end, and England had no colony of any kind in America.
In the year 1592 Raleigh fell into disgrace with his royal mistress. She discovered that the man she had delighted to honour and enrich had actually dared to love one of her maids of honour. An excuse was speedily found by the jealous queen for sending Raleigh and his lady-love, Elizabeth Throgmorton, to the Tower. At length, however, the queen relented and restored Raleigh to liberty, but forbade him the court. The lovers were married and settled at Sherborne, where Raleigh busied himself in erecting a magnificent mansion and laying out its grounds with great taste.
About this time he made acquaintance with the Spanish legend of the fabulous wealth of El Dorado, the city of Manoa, in South America. The story fascinated his romantic nature, and he could not rest until he had attempted its discovery. Yielding to his wife’s entreaties, he refrained from going in search of it himself, and sent his tried and trusty servant, Jacob Whiddon, in his stead. Whiddon returned without having discovered anything, and Raleigh now essayed the adventure himself. With a fleet of five ships he sailed in February 1595, and in the next month arrived at the island of Trinidad. He seized the capital and captured the governor, who confirmed the stories of the richness and wonder of Manoa, and told him of its remarkable inhabitants, the dog-headed men “whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.”
Early in April Raleigh started on the quest with a little flotilla of five boats, a hundred men, and provisions for a month. He entered the Orinoco, but found the labour of rowing against the vast and powerful stream most exhausting. Sometimes his boats did not progress a stone’s-throw in an hour. After struggling onwards for nearly four hundred miles he was obliged to own himself beaten. He brought back with him some pieces of quartz showing grains of gold and the earliest specimens of mahogany ever seen in this country. Subsequently he attacked several Spanish settlements and then returned to England, where his enemies declared that the story of his river voyage was an invention. As a matter of fact, Guiana is rich in gold, and more than one famous mine has been worked in the country which Raleigh endeavoured to explore.
Raleigh lived peacefully at home for nearly two years, and then played a brilliant part in Drake’s daring attack on Cadiz. He commanded the Warspite, the leading ship, and though severely wounded, landed with his men for the storming of the town. His gallantry won him the queen’s forgiveness, and once more he was a familiar figure about the court. Under Essex he commanded a ship in the fleet which sailed for Flores, in the Azores, to lie in wait for Spanish treasure galleons. His disobedience of orders in his capture of Fayal earned for him the enmity of Essex, who now became one of his bitterest enemies. Essex, however, came to the block, but not before he had done Raleigh considerable mischief.
Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and James the Sixth of Scotland became James the First of England. There were plots to prevent his accession and to put Lady Arabella Stewart, an Englishwoman of the royal house, on the throne. The cowardly Lord Cobham was at the head of the Main Plot, and when arrested he made a lying confession implicating Raleigh, who was tried and found guilty of compassing the death of the king, of endeavouring to set Arabella Stewart on the throne, of receiving bribes from the court of Spain, and of seeking to deliver the country into the hands of its enemy. Raleigh’s execution was ordered, and he wrote a touching farewell to his wife; but on the eve of the fatal day he was reprieved and committed to the Tower with the death sentence hanging over his head. For about twelve years he remained a prisoner. He was treated leniently, and given apartments in the Bloody Tower, where he lived with his wife and son and his attendants. Frequently the young Prince Henry visited him, and the lad grew fond of his gallant and brilliant friend. “No man but my father,” he once said, “would keep such a bird in a cage.”
Raleigh now busied himself in a variety of occupations: he designed a model of a ship, he condensed fresh water from salt, he compounded drugs, he began his “History of the World,” and wrote verses and political pamphlets. About the year 1610 he revived his old project for discovering Manoa. Twenty years had now passed since he had returned from Guiana, but during his long solitude in the Tower his mind returned again and again to the fabulous riches of El Dorado, and he devised plan after plan for securing its wealth. He now made a proposition to certain lords of the Council, and they listened to it. “If I bring them not to a mountain covered with gold and silver ore,” he wrote, “let the commander have commission to cut off my head there.” All he stipulated for was that if half a ton of precious ore should be brought home he should have a free pardon. At length the king was persuaded to agree to the proposal, and in March 1617 the order for his release was signed.
Raleigh and his wife adventured all they had in fitting out the expedition. Ere it sailed the Spanish ambassador intervened. He protested loudly that Guiana belonged to Spain, and that Raleigh’s expedition proposed an invasion of Spanish territory, and was simply a cloak for piracy on a gigantic scale. The ambassador believed that Raleigh had his eye on the Mexican Plate fleet, and as after events proved, he was right. James warned Raleigh that he was not to fight the Spaniards, and on this understanding he was permitted to sail.
Misfortune dogged him from the outset. Foul winds and storms drove him back, and afterwards scattered his fleet and sank one of his vessels. He had difficulty in getting water at the Canaries, and a hurricane drove him from the Cape Verde Islands. For forty days he lay in the doldrums, while his men fell a prey to scurvy and fever and grew mutinous. At length, when the remnant of his ten ships arrived off the mouth of the Orinoco, Raleigh was prostrate with fever, and his men had lost all hope of success. But his courageous spirit was equal to the occasion. “We can make the adventure,” he cried; “and if we perish, it shall be no honour to England or gain to his Majesty to lose one hundred as valiant men as England hath in it.”