Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (49 page)

That assertion came to him easily enough; Ralegh had been defending, embellishing, and finally believing his new 'truth' since the 1590s.
3
Certainty of this sort, however, flew in the face of other truths - the knowledge, for example, that Spain had failed to exploit any significant gold or silver deposits in the region. Nevertheless, the personal conviction behind his words matched the desire of many Englishmen and women to believe everything he had to say. Repeated assertions, made in such a way, whet appetites and attract speculators. The author of the Discoverie had been open in his belief that 'the desire of gold' trumped most objections to a brave adventure, and what had been true after his first Guiana voyage remained true twenty years later.
4

This conviction, so eloquently expressed, began to play on influential minds. A significant number of leading courtiers at last saw a reason to set Ralegh free. The Countess of Shrewsbury, who also spent years in the Tower after conspiring in the escape from confinement of her niece Arbella Stewart, is said to have lent her support to Ralegh's appeals and Bess of Hardwick's daughter was a persuasive woman, even in adversity.
5
At the Jacobean Court, however, money counted for more than fine words, and it seems very likely that substantial payments eased the prisoner out of the Tower. Looking back on the events of his childhood, Carew Ralegh recalled long afterwards that it had been necessary to bribe two well-connected courtiers, with (1,500 going to each. The fact that Carew, after so many years, put names to both men adds credibility to his tale. However, Carew's further recollection, that an additional £700 might have secured Ralegh full liberty, and quiet cancellation of the Guiana proposals, seems to have been wishful thinking. The prisoner's freedom was always conditional; while his ambitions had won over many principal courtiers, those powerful men and women would in due course expect some return for their support. Prominent among M. conditional friends was James's new favourite George Villiers. Ralegh wrote effusively to Villiers, acknowledging the help that had put him 'againe into the world', and assuring the favourite that, should his voyage succeed, credit would fall where it was due. Ralegh, however, knew that credit was not necessarily its own reward. 'If I doe not also make [the voyage] profitable unto you', he wrote, 'I shall shew my self exceeding ungratefull'.
6

As favourites rose, so favourites fell. Popular rumour connected Robert Carr's imprisonment after the Overbury scandal with Ralegh's release. Everyone knew, or assumed, that Ralegh bore Carr a grudge for having 'stolen' Sherborne, and some who liked to dwell on implausible conspiracy set these new alterations down to Sir Walter's 'wit and policie'. As so often, however, the later attribution of political change to the work of Machiavellian statesmen conceals far more than it reveals about these murky developments.
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Ralegh was in no position to plot or scheme. The royal commission eventually issued to him as commander of the Guiana expedition was paradoxical, and did not by any means amount to a pardon. The standard phrase 'trusty and well-beloved' was omitted in the preamble, and although Ralegh enjoyed powers of life and death over the volunteers in his fleet he was still himself, technically, a dead man in the eyes of the law. James and his ministers took a calculated decision that went far beyond bribes and venality. Ralegh's increasingly outspoken attacks on the regime set him apart as the most prominent political dissident in England. No one should underestimate the power of Ralegh's criticisms; as Steven May points out, his 1611 Dialogue between a Jesuit and a Recusant contains 'an astonishing rehearsal of the king's failures', his lavish generosity to Scots courtiers, his planned innovations in taxation, his disdain for English political traditions.
8
By freeing this man, and entrusting him with a hazardous mission that took him far from England, a critic was silenced, at least for a time. Given the resentment following the failure of the so-called Addled Parliament in 1614, and the tensions surrounding James's recourse to non-parliamentary taxation, it made sense to deflect opposition.
9
Seen this way, the decision was essentially politic, with perhaps just the smallest gesture of reconciliation. Early-modern government functioned through cooperation and consent, and as the pragmatic King and his equally pragmatic ministers knew all too well, it was ultimately counter-productive to dismiss or ignore the views of those who thought as Ralegh thought.

Ralegh was released on 19 March 1616, and at once set about planning his expedition.
10
A surviving 'estimate of the chardge of 4 Ships and 2 Barques with their victualls and other necessaries for a voyage to Guiana in the West Indies' must date from around this time. Ralegh reckoned the costs of his voyage at just under £10,000 - an underassessment, like so many back of the envelope summaries - with around £4,000 allowed for victualling. Other projected costs in the document, for spare shirts, fishing nets, flyboats, surgeons' chests, great barges for river work, canary wine and aqua vita for medicinal purposes, and copper desalination furnaces, among other necessaries, are also given in rough, rounded totals.
11
In the exuberance of liberty, Ralegh was calculating in broad sweeps. As with Elizabethan voyages in the previous century, the Crown's partnership was keenly solicited. James was invited to pay in what he wished, and to take a proportionate share of the anticipated profit. However, little he said or did comforted those at Court determined on preserving peace with Spain, and Ralegh, to his disgust, was obliged to give a full account of his intentions to Gondomar. Complying with the letter of this order, he did not quite tell all. It is said that Ralegh discussed with the new Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Francis Bacon, in the course of a long meeting in Gray's Inn Walks, the possibility of seizing the silver fleet, brushing aside Bacon's comment that this would amount to an act of piracy. 'Tush, my Lord', he asked rhetorically, 'did you ever hear of any that was counted a pirate for taking millions? They are poor nychars [i.e. mitchers, or petty thieves] that are called in question for piracy, that are not able to make their peace with that they get.'At this point in the conversation he moved into his familiar, optimistic stride.'If I can catch the fleet, I can give this man ten thousand and that man ten thousand, and six hundred thousand to the King, and yet keep enough for myself and all my company.' That was the old boast of the Elizabethan privateer, but the 'if' was emphatic, and the words perhaps best left unsaid.
12

Bacon was playing devil's advocate. King James's decision to free Ralegh implicitly accepted his argument. Behind all the calculations lay an understanding that, were gold to be discovered in Guiana, England would maintain its rights to exploit the mines, even to the point of war with Spain. James, who despite appearances had the measure of Gondomar, was quite prepared to defy Madrid, so long as the rewards were sufficient.
13
Both the Spanish minister and his monarch knew this, and the knowledge added to the vigour of their protests. Afterwards, the English government blamed the seductive power inherent in Ralegh's glorious vision of Guiana, but admitted he had only asserted 'that which every man was willing to believe'. How could any King deny his subjects the chance of treasure and glory, after all Ralegh's enchanting tales?
14

Passed on by gossip, reports of these 'private' conversations with leading statesmen convinced many people that the voyage was, first and foremost, a pursuit of plunder. John Chamberlain, as ever, spoke for the worldly wise: 'I feare', he wrote to Carleton on 29 March 1617, as Ralegh sailed round the coast from London to Plymouth, 'he doth but go (as children are wont to tell theyre tales) to seeke his fortune.
15
Ralegh too seems to have been thinking more pragmatically about the future. Now he was free, one notes a certain sobriety; the prisoner's gold-fever is gone. Perhaps, as in 1595, he had expected that court or international politics would frustrate the voyage, leaving him both safe and at liberty. Now, as then, he found himself committed against his own better instincts, obliged to make the best of things. As we have seen, he scrambled about, imagining ways in which his fleet might work some service for England, but as his thoughts progressed England was not the only beneficiary. Could he perhaps be of use to the Savoyards in their war against Spain, to the French protestants, or even to the French monarch? Ralegh spoke to the French ambassador Des Marets in the spring of 1617, and if the envoy is to be believed he declared that, since he had been 'so evilly and tyrannically treated by his own king, he had made up his mind, if God sent him good success, to leave his country, and to make the King of France the first offer of whatever might fall under his power'. These overtures may simply have sought to draw French adventurers and their money into his Guiana project, but there was perhaps another agenda too.
16
If accurately reported - and it is unlikely that Des Marets was lying - the conversation can be seen as preparing the way to a refuge after failure, as well as allocating the possible rewards of success.

The Guiana fleet eventually set out from Plymouth on 12 June 1617, fourteen ships carrying about one thousand men, an altogether larger affair than 1595. Ralegh sailed in his brand-new flagship, the 440-ton Destiny, built by Phineas Pett and launched only six months earlier. Lawrence Keymis joined him, of course, as did George Ralegh, his nephew Gentlemen volunteers, some able, some ambitious novices, contributed their £30, £40 or £50 to the expedition funds, younger sons and brothers of the Earl of Huntingdon, the Earl of Pembroke and Lord North among them. The voyage also attracted its fair share of enterprising opportunists - and scoundrels - including the playwright turned pirate Lording Barry.
17
Somehow, the costs were met, or at least pledged, with the Raleghs ostensibly throwing in all that they had in the world, including the £8,000 compensation for Sherborne. The last significant family assets were sold, along with Bess's house at Mitcham, as Ralegh admitted afterwards in his Apologie for the voyage.
18
Many others also invested heavily in the venture, among them Sir Arthur Ingram, who later assigned any profit that he might make on the expedition to Richard Calthorp of London, and Ralegh's vice-admiral, John Penington, who emerges from obscurity at this point to begin a prominent naval career under the early Stuarts.
19
The mayor of Plymouth laid on a splendid dinner, at a cost of £9 paid by the town authorities, and a drummer called 'Sir Walter Rauleighs company aboord' ship on departure, but even amid the bravado of these farewells there was plenty of pessimism.
20
'God speed him', wrote Chamberlain, 'and send him a better viage then I can hope for.'
21

The early stages were far from auspicious. Storms and adverse winds detained the fleet off the southern coast of Ireland for nearly two months, Ralegh enjoying the hospitality of Richard Boyle, later Earl of Cork, the man who had taken his unprofitable Munster lands off his hands, fifteen years earlier. Finally, at six o'clock on the morning of 19 August, a fair wind allowed the ships - 'xii salle small and gret', as he told Bess in a letter sent back on an English bark early in the voyage - to make their way south from Cork.
22
The Atlantic crossing was laborious, via Lanzarote and La Gomera in the Canaries, and the Cape Verde Islands, where a landing proved impossible in heavy seas. Illness took its usual, arbitrary toll. Forty-two men died on Ralegh's ship alone, including his personal servants, his cook, and the scholarly John Talbot, Ralegh's servant and friend through the Tower years.
23
On board another ship, however,Thomas Thornehurst rejoiced that not one man had been lost from the company during the crossing.
24
The officers did what they could. Ralegh knew the value of lemons to 'comfort' his sick men, and the consequent importance of maintaining good relations with islanders who provided these essentials. He admitted in his journal of the voyage that the baskets of fresh fruit sent by the wife of the Governor on La Gomera 'were better welcome unto me than a 1,000 crownes could have bine'.
25
Treading all the while on eggshells, he sought and received from the Governor a letter to Gondomar, 'witnesing how nobly we had behaved ourselves'.
26
Yet sensible gestures of this sort could never hope to counter hostile rumour back home. Early deserters returned to London, eagerly spreading reports that their captain had 'turnd pirat' by way of excusing their own cowardice.
27

These were problems stored up for the future; out on the ocean, Ralegh had to contend with a number of more pressing difficulties. The incompetence and inexperience of his crew manifested itself in various ways. One September night a pinnace, 'having all her men asleap and not any one att the wach drove (?) under our bowspreet and sunck, but the men were saved, though better worthy to have bine hanged then saved'.
28
The open Atlantic brought violent winds and driving rain: 'I was my self so wete as the water ran in att my neck and out att my knees as if it had bine powred on me with pailes';'we were all drownd in our cabins'.
29
Flat calms and persistently adverse westerly winds were just as infuriating, as were the pitch-dark days when captains unable to take their latitude were forced to steer their ships by candlelight. Never comfortable at sea, Ralegh himself fell heavily, succumbed at the beginning of November to 'a burning fever then which never man indured any more violent', and was unable to face solid food for nearly a month. Even so, the sheer joy of liberty is never entirely absent from his journal. He rejoiced to see 'Magelanns cloude...which riseth and setteth with the stares', noted the great number of sea-birds on an island off the coast of Guiana (so many that 'they kild them with staves') and did his best to interpret empirically the weather phenomena encountered. 'I observed this day', he wrote in his entry for 14 October, 'and so I did before, that the morning rainebow doth not give a faire day as in Ingland.' Rainbows proved so reliable an indicator of bad weather that he began to think, on seeing another one, that 'the raine would never end'. Off Trinidad, yet another rainbow made a 'perfait cirkell' in the sky, 'which I never saw before'.
30