Great Ralegh

by Hugh De Sélincourt

He had lived the life of the courtier, he had fought against Spain, he had attended to the numberless duties in Devonshire, in Cornwall, in Ireland; everything was becoming wearisome to him, and while he was unconsciously losing interest in his life, he was also losing his power over others. He was in disfavour. He was prouder than the proud men amongst whom he lived, and in consequence he had many enemies, who longed to humble his pride. He grew tired of the life; his imagination moved ever in advance of the present, and kept him ever unsatisfied and alert. In himself rather than in the influence of others lay the primary reason for his loss of favour. It is almost invariably so with a great personality even when he is himself unconscious of the cause.

He put all his energy into making preparations for carrying out his project of founding a new kingdom in Guiana. If he were successful, fortune would be remade, and favour would be regained. The prospect was exciting, but more alluring than the excitement was the knowledge that the sea and the unknown would bring to his soul immediate peace; that new sights, new dangers, and new interests would soothe his mind, fretted by the immanent pettiness of passing days. Change is the law of life, and Ralegh was immensely alive. Such a nature as his must always find expression for itself, must find scope and occupation for its greatness, or the spirit preys upon itself and pines into uneasiness. Whatever the force be from which vitality comes, brain or blood or soul, that force is irresistible. Death alone can free a man from its tyranny.

So Ralegh turned towards that kingdom in Guiana, towards "that great and golden city which the Spaniards call El Dorado," and on Thursday, February 6, 1595, he left England. The previous year he had sent his servant, Jacob Whiddon, to get "knowledge of the passages," and he had "some light from Captain Parker," but yet his journey's end was vaguely known. Jacob Whiddon and Captain Parker only conjectured that the place existed somewhere southward of the great bay Charuas, or Guanipa; and their conjecture was incorrect by some six hundred miles. Information of the kind was apt then to be inaccurate. Spaniards, indeed, knew something of this vast empire of Guiana, but naturally they kept such knowledge to their own use. That this destination was six hundred miles farther inland than he had been led to believe, Ralegh did not discover until he arrived at Trinidad, which he reached with no mishap other than the usual one of separation.

One of the pieces of gossip which old Aubrey recounts, and which is pleasant to believe, is that Ralegh was in the habit of taking many books with him on a voyage, and of reading them assiduously in his cabin. He knew Spanish well, and was conversant with the travel-lore of Spain. Among his books would surely be the "large discourses" of Pedro de Cieza and Francisco Lopez, recounting the marvels of the land to which he was making and the adventures which the Spaniards endured in conquering it.

All the terrible hardships of these first explorers had often fired his imagination, but never as now, when every movement of the ship brought him nearer to the actual scene of his endeavour. He would succeed where they had failed. And his heart must have warmed to these brave adventurers in spite of the fact that they were his enemies. He remembered their hardships, and his own, when he wrote in his "History of the World," "I cannot forbeare to commend the patient virtue of the Spaniards. We seldome or never finde that any Nation hath endured so many misadventures and miseries as the Spaniards have done in their Indian discoveries.... Tempests and shipwrecks, famine, overthrowes, mutinies, heat and cold, pestilence, and all manner of diseases, both old and new, together with extreme povertie, and want of all things needefull, have beene the enemies wherewith every one of their most noble Discoverers, at one time or other hath encountered. Many yeeres have passed over some of their heads in the search of not so many leagues; yea, more than one or two have spent their labour, their wealth and their lives in search of a golden Kingdom without getting further notice of it than what they had at their first setting forth. All which, notwithstanding the third, fourth, and fifth under-takers, have not been disheartened. Surely they are worthily rewarded with those Treasuries and Paradises which they enjoy; and well they deserve to hold them quietly, if they hinder not the like virtue in others, which (perhaps) will not be found." Men who lived through the same elemental perils have something in common, and a man like Ralegh is able to realize and to express the fact; he is able to rise above the claims of nationality at a time when his nation struggled for its very life, and he with it, against the rival nation of Spain.

He arrived at the island of Trinidad, and punished, after the manner of the time, the treachery of the Spaniards against Jacob Whiddon; for the year before Berreo, Governor of Trinidad, had broken his word of truce to Whiddon, and having set an ambuscade for his men when they landed, slew some eight of them. "So as both to be revenged of this wrong, as also considering that to enter Guiana by small boats, to depart four or five hundred miles from my ships and to have a garrison in my back interested in the same enterprise, who also daily expected supplies out of Spain, I should have savoured very much of the ass; and therefore, taking a time of most advantage, I set upon the corp du gard in the evening, and having put them to the sword, sent Captain Galfield onward with sixty soldiers, and myself followed with forty more, and so took their new city, which they called S. Joseph, by break of day; they abode not any fight after a few shot, and all being dismissed but only Berreo and his companion. I brought them with me aboard, and at the instance of the Indians I set their new city of S. Joseph on fire."

And now Ralegh shows once more his extraordinary power over other men, and shows it even more vividly than in the case of the Irish chieftain whom he changed from a leader of rebels to a staunch servant of the Queen. He wanted all the information he could obtain, and from Berreo he obtained it, though he was bitterly opposed, as might be expected, to the English and to Ralegh. A Boswellian record of their conversations would be of value to all business men.

"Having Berreo my prisoner, I gathered 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." Berreo well knew the importance of such knowledge to Ralegh; for he had spread reports far and wide among the Indians that the English meant them the deadliest mischief, and he had announced that any native found to have had any intercourse with the English would be forthwith hanged. But Berreo, an old man, was constrained to give a full account of his journey; and Ralegh's narrative of his own expedition is punctuated by what Berreo saw and heard, and conjectured, and by repeated corroboration of Berreo's statements. Ralegh must have smiled to himself when the old man so far relented towards him as even to beg him not to venture his life and the lives of the company in attempting a task which had proved too much for his own capability. There must have been a singular mingling of affection and cunning in the petition. "Berreo," writes Ralegh, "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 he went on to explain the nature of the difficulties, how the mouths of the rivers were sandy and full of flats, which could only be entered in the smallest boats; how the current ran swift and strong; how the natives were hostile, and how the kings of the natives had decreed that none should trade with the English 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." To which Ralegh adds drily, "Many and the most of these I found to be true."

Naturally he did not let experience alone prove the truth of his valiant prisoner's statements. He called all the captains of the island together that were enemies to the Spaniards and conversed with them by means of an

Indian interpreter whom he had brought out of England. "I made them understand that I was the servant of a queen who was the great Cassiqui of the north, and a virgin, and had more Cassiqui under her than there were trees in their island; that she was an enemy to the Castellans in respect of their tyranny and oppression, and that she delivered all such nations about her as were by them oppressed; and having freed all the coast of the northern world from their servitude had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest. I showed them Her Majesty's picture, which they so admired and honoured as it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof.... They now call her Ezrabeta Cassipuna Aquerewana."