In Amazonia (14 page)

Guiana was the focus of English ambition in South America at a time of much-fabled English ascendancy. Between 1550 and 1630, a London-based alliance of merchants, gentry, and scholars effectively reinvented the English nation, creating an emergent imperial power out of an island backwater on the cold periphery of a disdainful Europe—an island barely present in the centers of continental trade and whose own domestic commerce was largely controlled by outsiders.
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Yet, although the Elizabethan age is today recalled in national narratives as a triumphal era of maritime expansion, this was a period marked by political vacillation and by the reluctance of the queen and her successor, James I, to respond materially to the efforts of the imperialist lobby. As a result, English ventures in the New World were to suffer repeated failure and personal disaster.

Of all the failures, the most conclusive was Guiana. Of the personal disasters, the most compelling was that of Ralegh, which it contained. When the elderly courtier's flight to France was intercepted on the Thames and his captors rifled his pockets before removing him to the Tower, it was, symptomatically, mementos of Guiana that they discovered—maps, ingots, a spleenstone, an “idol of Gold”—the fetishes of obsession.
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Yet, to many contemporary and modern observers, Ralegh's two voyages to Guiana were of little moment. The first, wrote Vincent Harlow in 1928, “merely consisted in traversing the Orinoco from its estuary to the cataract on the Caroni, a journey with which every Spanish soldier at Trinidad was perfectly familiar.”
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The second, in 1617–18,
although involving a substantial force, was even less effectual, and Ralegh himself spent most of the time cabinbound off Trinidad, feverish and exhausted, anxiously awaiting word from the expeditionaries. No gold was recovered, no settlement founded, no enduring alliances established.

It is true that Ralegh returned from South America with insufficient material rewards to win his argument at Court. And it may well be that to imperial dreamers the eventual claiming of British Guiana was, as Pablo Ojer puts it, no more than a consolation prize.
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But there is much more here than such narrowly instrumental assessments would suggest. Ralegh's voyages and his vivid 1595 account,
The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana
, proved an enduring colonial inspiration. In the decades around the turn of the seventeenth century, they guaranteed that the mouths of the Orinoco and Amazon were thrown into violent and messy imperial competition, a definitive disaster for those already living in the region. Reinvoked in the nineteenth century, they stood for lyrical precedent, the lineage through which the English renewed their territorial claims within reconfigured geographies.
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At a moment when Europeans were still formulating a language through which the New World would enter the vernacular imagination, Ralegh issued an invitation to a region and a nature at once familiar and strange, an unsettling yet alluring vision of what would become tropical America.
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D
ESTINY AND
D
ESIRE

From the defeat of the Spanish Armada of 1588 to the accession of James I in 1603, English activity on the high seas was almost entirely dedicated to privateering. Ralegh's complementary roles as a principal sponsor of English maritime “picory” and chief architect of the Virginia and Guiana campaigns indicate the extent to which trade and plunder were entwined in these early imperial ventures.
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Northern South America and the Antilles were prime sites for opportunistic pillage, and in the
Discourse of Western Planting
(1584), a foundational appeal to the Crown to stand behind American exploration and settlement, Richard Hakluyt the younger drew particular attention to the Wild Coast:

All that parte of America eastwarde from Cumana vnto the River of S
ain
t Augustine in Bresill conteyneth in length alongest
to the sea side xxj C [2,100] miles, In whiche compasse and tracte there is neither Spaniarde, Portingale nor any Christian man but onely the Caribes, Indians, and saluages. In w
hi
ch places is greate plentie of golde, perle, and precious stones.
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Hakluyt wrote the
Discourse
“at the requeste and direction” of his patron, Ralegh. It was an important state paper, initially intended for the most restricted audience, and it represented the programmatic expression of the expansionist party at Court. It is here that Hakluyt introduces the two arguments repeatedly marshaled in support of the Guiana enterprise: absence of prior possession and presence of wealth beyond measure. In advancing these claims to the queen and Privy Council, the members of the influential circle gathered around Ralegh sought to formalize English maritime practice, and simultaneously to disrupt the aura of Spanish invincibility that underwrote national marginalization prior to the defeat of the Armada.
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They understood clearly that without significant state financing the prospects for New World colonization were slim. Yet, with a nervous eye to future Spanish wars, Elizabeth was diffident. She rewarded Ralegh with a knighthood and Hakluyt with a prebend. But that was all.

Ralegh would repeat these same claims, again and again, right up until his silencing in late 1618. Even after Elizabeth had died, as if refusing to admit the changed circumstances of the Jacobean era, he continued to press a policy that could lead only to confrontation with a Spain whose ambassador now had the run of the English Court and a king deep in negotiation to marry the Infanta. At the last, both the logic and substance of Guiana eluded him. Having failed for so long to deliver on their promise, the claims he promoted with such bluster became themselves the basis of the charges used to justify his execution. Hadn't he intended war with Spain from the beginning? Didn't he know all along that the gold of El Dorado was just for fools?

The second voyage to Guiana came at the end of a long period of imprisonment. Sentenced to death by James for conspiracy and consigned to the Tower, Ralegh wrote his monumental
History of the World
(1614) to demonstrate the vanity of kings. His return to the Wild Coast took the form of a parole, and it was James who set the terms. In concluding the Treaty of London with Spain in 1604, the king had withdrawn Crown protection from any English who trespassed into Spanish-held territory. English adventurers might sail to the Wild Coast—a region of ambiguous sovereignty—but were then subject to Spanish
attack and, should they retaliate, to charges of piracy on their return.
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Only a highly profitable outcome could revise this calculus. In Ralegh's case, rehabilitation was possible only should he both find the gold mine he promised and avoid confrontation with the Spanish soldiers billeted in its approach.

In the event, the expedition, a large-scale affair involving at least a thousand men, was even more of a disaster than anticipated. No mine was found, the Spanish garrison of San Thomé was unprofitably sacked in the inglorious episode that claimed Ralegh's eldest surviving son, and as the
Destiny
limped home, in a clumsy and pathetic coda, Lawrence Keymis, his closest aide, first shot, then stabbed himself to death, adrift in love, loyalty, and humiliation.

Persuaded by a mutinous crew that flight for France, Newfoundland, or other potential safe harbor was out of the question, Ralegh returned to London and, with hair disheveled and clothes unkempt, climbed the awaiting scaffold. The decapitation scene, as a number of biographers have pointed out, was among the finest that he played, even if, by its nature, it simultaneously denied him the opportunity to savor the laudatory reviews.
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No matter, it seems the death of the sustaining dream had killed him even before he faced the executioner's axe.

The failure of the second voyage to Guiana casts the trials of the first into tragic relief. But we should resist any sense of gathering futility. There was nothing to tell Ralegh and his associates that the fatal vision of unlimited wealth in Guiana was a chimera. Indeed, the lesson of the still recent sackings of the Aztec and Inca empires was that treasures inconceivable in their vastness awaited men bold enough in spirit.
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As Ralegh himself reasons: “although these reportes [of El Dorado] may seem straunge, yet if wee consider the many millions which are daily brought out of
Peru
into Spaine, wee may easely beleeve the same.”
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Interest in the Americas reflected a late realization that the bulldog strategy of intercepting and harrying the Spanish treasure fleet as it passed through the Caribbean was a poor substitute for the possession of equivalent sources of specie.
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Despite the decline in New World gold and silver exports in this period, the inflationary instability of the Spanish economy, and the rapidity with which American bullion flowed from Castile to the finance houses of northwest Europe (and thence, in Fernand Braudel's chilling phrase, to the “necropolis” of Asia), the ambitious and patriotic Ralegh circle remained dazzled by the glint of precious metal and dedicated to usurping the Spanish monopoly.
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It was Hakluyt who provided this project's most public expression. His massive
Principal Navigations
(1589) was a striking embodiment of global ambition, conjuring imperial precedent from the English failure to capitalize on the fifteenth-century fishing voyages to the Brazilian coast from Bristol and on Cabot's trips to Newfoundland. His work was the earliest English institutional welding of science, commerce, and empire, part of the effort to pressure a Crown happy to benefit from private initiative but unwilling to venture its own diplomatic or financial resources. More decisively, Hakluyt brought together merchants and adventurers in a textual juxtaposition that materialized concretely in the innovative joint-stock companies of the period.
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As a propagandist for expansion, he integrated the rhetorics of economy and travel with such skill that he was to begin the nineteenth century lionized as a prophet of free trade and to end it as the equally vaunted giant of imperial ambition.
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In an important sense, this malleability of Hakluyt's reputation merely demonstrated the capacity of the Elizabethan “golden age” to function as a shifting signifier of nostalgic glory in later British politics. But it also accurately reflected the ties between commerce and militarism in Hakluyt and Ralegh's aggressively imperial mercantilism.

In March 1584, soon after the disappearance of his half brother Humphrey Gilbert off Newfoundland in the first concerted English attempt at American colonization, Ralegh received royal charter to find and settle what would ultimately become Virginia. It was the year before war broke out with Spain, and the queen's letters patent urged him

at all times for euer hereafter to discouer, search, find out and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands, countreis and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people, as to him, his heires and assignes, and to euery or any of them as shall seeme good … to have holde, occupy & enjoy to him, his heires and assignes for euer with all prerogatiues, commodities, jurisdictions, royalties, priviledges, franchises and pre-eminences, thereto or thereabouts by land or sea, whatsoeuer we by our letters patent may grant.
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It was a lucrative prospect and Ralegh was prepared. Within two weeks a small expeditionary force set sail from the West Country, bound for a coastal reconnaissance of what are now Florida and North Carolina.

This was a moment of striking ascendancy for Ralegh. It was to reach a climax with the destruction of the Spanish Armada of 1588, which followed the fateful settlement of Roanoke and left him awash in royal sinecures and with title to vast estates in Munster. We should set this achievement in gaining the queen's ear—and, as the schoolbooks tell us, her heart—in the context of an unlikely pedigree. Because he was the son of impoverished Devon gentry, Ralegh's background ensured his subjection to the encircling snobbery of the English elite,
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and it is perhaps to explain his remarkable ascent that, with rare exception, biographers emphasize his charm, his energy, and his extravagant and strategic dandyism. Equally important, though, was the ceiling English society imposed on a man of his social origins, however seductive. As he undoubtedly knew and ultimately discovered, Crown indulgence, easily bestowed, could be withdrawn with even greater facility. Irrespective of
the level of patronage he achieved, Ralegh's inheritance left him without clear manorial title and bereft of both dependable income and the possibility of establishing a landed dynasty. In this respect, England was stifling to his ambition—as was Spain to Cortés and Pizarro—and the best hope for a radical transcendence lay in the promise of perpetuity made by the letters patent and the prospect of vast lands and treasures overseas.