Great Ralegh

by Hugh De Sélincourt

That was his policy always with the natives. The Spaniards desired immediate wealth, which they wrung from the Indians by all means in their power; Ralegh desired a new English kingdom, and knew that for his purpose the aid of the Indians was invaluable. And accordingly wherever he went he was always at the utmost pains to conciliate them with presents and carefully sought expressions of regard and good will. The Indian chieftains fell under the spell of his personality in the same way as the Irish rebel and his Spanish prisoner, or, indeed, any one over whom he sought from the first moment of acquaintance to exercise influence.

To estimate at its proper value the gigantic proportions of the task which Ralegh had sailed some thousand miles to achieve, it is necessary to remember something of the geography of the country which is now called Venezuela, and the innumerable rivers which there flow into the sea, forming a complicated network.

Having at length discovered from Berreo and the natives as much as he could about the lie of the land—that is to say, about a quarter of that which an intelligent Council School teacher could have told him in ten minutes at the present day—Ralegh started up the river to Guiana, "resolving," as he puts it, "to make trial of all, whatsoever happened." He sent ships to reconnoitre and take soundings. Captain Calfield in his bark and the vice-admiral George Gifford in the Lion's Whelp eastward to the mouth of the river called Capuri; King, master of the Lion's Whelp in his ship's boat to try another branch of the river in the bottom of the bay of Guanipa, and to see if there was water enough to admit the passage of a small ship. This branch was called the Amana; but it, like the other, presented the same difficulties. The rush of water was dangerous for a small boat, and the shallowness prevented the use of a ship. King could only make hurried investigations, because his Indian guide assured him that the natives of Guanipa, who were cannibals, might any moment attack them, and that the attack would be terrible, for they paddled swiftly in canoes and shot poisoned arrows with deadly effect.

Nothing could deter Ralegh from his enterprise. He gave instructions to his carpenters to cut down a gallego-boat, to draw five feet of water, and to fit her with banks to row on. John Douglas was sent in his barge to look after King, who had not returned, and to take careful soundings in the bottom of the bay. For old John Hampton of Plymouth, and others who had come from Trinidad, had told him dreadful stories of its danger. "It hath been held for infallible that whatsoever ship or boat shall fall therein can never disembogue again by reason of the violent current which setteth into the said bay, as also for that the breeze and easterly wind bloweth directly into the same."

John Douglas took with him an old cassique of Trinidad for a pilot, and was successful. Four goodly entrances were found, whereof the least was as big as the Thames at Woolwich, but only six feet deep. Ralegh accordingly gave up hope of finding passage for his ship, and decided to go on with the boats, and the gallego which he had prepared, and which held sixty men. In the boat of Lion's Whelp and in its wherry there was room for twenty men, in Captain Calfield's wherry for ten, and in Ralegh's barge for ten more. They carried victuals for a month. Among the gentlemen were Ralegh's cousins Butshead Gorges and John Grenville, his nephew John Gilbert, Captain Keymis and Captain Clarke. "We had as much sea to cross over in our wherries as between Dover and Calais, and in a great billow, the wind and current being both very strong, so as we were driven to go in those small boats directly before the wind into the bottom of the bay of Guanipa." Their pilot was an Arwacan, an Indian of Barema, which is a river to the south of the Orinoco. Ralegh had caught and pressed him into his service as he was paddling in his canoe to sell bread at Marquerita; but now the Arwacan confessed himself quite ignorant of the river up which they were rowing; he told them he had not been on it for twelve years, "at which time he was very young and of no judgment." The position of the adventurers was one of extreme danger; they might have rowed in that labyrinth of rivers for a year without finding a way either out or in, for they only discovered the Arwacan's ignorance after four days. Ralegh realized their plight to the full, and the extraordinary good fortune which drew them out of it. A small canoe was espied in which three Indians were paddling. Ralegh, in his eight-oared barge, immediately gave chase, and succeeded in overtaking the canoe before it crossed the river ("which because it had no name we called the river of the Red Cross, ourselves being the first Christians that ever came therein"). Natives on the thickly wooded bank watched the chase with eagerness, and the captain with anxiety, fearing what might happen to their fellows. But when they saw that Ralegh treated the three with deference, the people on the shore made friendly signs and showed no fear as the eight-oared barge drew in, but offered to traffic in such commodities as they possessed.

As the adventurers stopped there for a while at the mouth of a little creek which came from the Indian village into the river, Ferdinando the pilot, who came with them originally, and his brother, must needs go to the village to drink the wine of the place, and upon him the chief men of the village fell, threatening to punish them with death for having thus brought white strangers into their midst. But Ferdinando, "being quick and of a disposed body," escaped to the woods, and his brother raced back to the barge, where he cried out panting that the Indians had slain Ferdinando. Ralegh immediately laid hands on a very old man, who was with him to serve as hostage, and if Ferdinando were indeed dead, to take his place as pilot. Meanwhile the Indians were pursuing Ferdinando with deer-dogs, and the woods sounded with their shouts; nor could the old man stay them, though he called out as loudly as he could the sad consequences in which they would involve him. At last Ferdinando reached a part of the shore and climbed a tall tree which hung over the river, and the barge happening to pass by, he plunged into the water and swam to it, half dead with fear. "But our good hap was that we kept the other old Indian, which we hand-fasted to redeem our pilot withal, for being natural of those rivers we assured ourselves he knew the way better than any stranger could; and, indeed, but for this chance, I think we had never found the way either to Guiana or back to our ships; for Ferdinando, after a few days, knew nothing at all nor which way to turn, yea and many times the old man himself was in great doubt which river to take."

They rowed on through the maze of rivers and islands, which were inhabited by the Ciawani and the Waraweete, goodly people, carpenters for the most part of canoes, who dwell in little houses in the summer, and, when the river rises (and it rises thirty feet, amazingly, as Ralegh discovered), in the tops of trees. He relates their customs; how some beat the bones of their chiefs into powder and the wives and friends drink it all, that the bones may have a kindly resting-place; how others take up the buried corpse of a dead chieftain, when the flesh has departed from the bones, and hang the skeleton in his own house, decking the skull with feathers and fitting his gold plates about the bones of his arms and thighs and legs.

On the third day the gallego "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."

Four days more they rowed on until they came into the river Amana, which ran more directly, without windings and twistings, than the other, and then a fresh difficulty met them. For the flood of the sea no longer gave any help and "we were enforced either by main strength to row against a violent current or to return as wise as we went out." The men complained that the work was too much for them; but they consented to pull on when Ralegh and the other captains and gentlemen offered to take each his turn at the oar. Each spell of rowing lasted one hour. Thus they proceeded slowly and with tremendous effort for three more days, when the men began to despair; the current became each day stronger and the river appeared interminable in length. "But we evermore commanded our pilots to promise an end by next day, and used it so long as we were driven to assure them from four reaches of the river to three, and so to two, and so to the next reach." The men, too, were hungry; food was giving out; the sun was scorching, and there was nothing to drink but the thick and troubled water of the river. Sometimes they found fruits on the trees that were good to eat; sometimes they shot birds. Birds there were of every brilliant colour, "carnation, crimson, orange-tawny, purple, green watchet, and of all sorts, both simple and mixt, as it was unto us a great good passing of the time to behold them." But the men were hungry and tired. Then a pilot, the very old man, whom they had hand-fasted, said that he would bring them soon to a town of the Arwacas, where they would find a store of bread, hens, fish, and the wine of the country, if they would turn with their barge and wherries down a branch of the river on the right hand. The men were cheered at the prospect. Ralegh and Gifford and Calfield determined to make their way to the town for food; so, leaving the majority of their men at the river's entrance, they set out. They rowed three hours without seeing a sign of human life, and they began to suspect that the pilot was playing them false. It grew towards night, but still he kept assuring them that the village lay only four reaches farther on. "When we had rowed four and four we saw no sign, and our poor watermen even, heartbroken and tired, were ready to give up the ghost; for we had now come from the galleye near forty miles."

Then they determined to hang the very old man, their pilot. But the river began to narrow. It became so narrow that the trees with which either bank was thickly covered touched branches across the water, and they were obliged to draw their swords and cut a passage through. "We were very desirous to find this town, hoping of a feast, because we made but a short breakfast aboard the galley in the morning, and it was now eight o'clock at night and our stomachs began to gnaw apace." At last they saw a light, heard the dogs of the village bark, and one hour after midnight they arrived. The old pilot had not deceived them in any way. They found good store of hens, bread, fish, and Indian drink.