Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life & Legend (50 page)

The expedition did not arrive in harbour, at the mouth of the Cayenne River, until 14 November, and for some weeks, despite assistance from the local Indians, it was in no condition to take the next step. The men were weak and the ships were in a poor state after so many weeks at sea. Ralegh took the occasion to write via a messenger invalided home from his fleet: PeterAlley was carried back to Europe by a Dutch merchant, Captain Jansen of Flushing, and Bess eventually received the letter in February 1618. Amid news of death and sickness, Ralegh reassured her that Wat was well,'havinge no distemper in all the heate under the line'. He paid his respects, pointedly, to Queen Anne, bragging by way of conclusion that the Indians roundabout 'all offer to obey me'.
31
Of course, Alley brought home one or two other reflections on the venture, and while some, like the optimistic paper by 'R. M: titled Newes of Sir Walter Rauleigh', painted a rosy picture of the voyage and its prospects, others told a very different tale. Alley himself was hardly sanguine or complimentary.
32

That pessimism was justified. Ralegh, his years catching up with him, found it hard to shake off the privations of the voyage, and the land commander, Sir Warham St Leger, was also in poor health. In their places, Lawrence Keymis and George Ralegh took command of the five boats that set out on 10 December, carrying 'a moneth vittles or somewhat more'.
33
These vessels were of shallow draft; they alone could hope to negotiate the sandbanks of the Orinoco delta. By Ralegh's own tally, four hundred soldiers and sailors were embarked. In his instructions to his lieutenant, he confessed that this 'skume of men' might not sustain such a mission, but, he observed, they would have to do. He still expected Keymis to recognize landmarks last glimpsed more than two decades earlier, and to exploit mines that no Englishman had ever seen. A glimmer of common sense creeps in when he permits the expedition to bring back just a 'baskett or two' of ore, if the mine proved less productive than expected. The King would, after all, still require proof that his story was more than just a fable.
34

The little flotilla did what it could. Three vessels survived the dangerous shoals at the mouth of the Orinoco, battled against strong river currents, and arrived at the small Spanish fortified settlement of San Thorne on 2 January, while Ralegh and his ships lay to off the coast of Trinidad, scuffling with the hostile Spanish settlers and awaiting developments. The English then took San Thorne by storm, in a poorly planned night assault. Some accounts, which perhaps carry a touch of self-justification, suggest that this aggression was a spontaneous response to provocation, that it followed a bungled Spanish ambush, sprung on an English camp pitched, just as provocatively, close to the settlement.
35
The evidence available suggests that Keymis, broadly in accordance with Ralegh's orders, and perhaps surprised by the strength of the foursquare defences when compared with the squalid little settlement of the 1590s, hoped to use a show of force to mask excavations at the putative mine. The sudden Spanish response had then precipitated a fight in which an assault on the town had developed of its own accord. Fatalities in the brief, bitter struggle included the Spanish Governor, Diego Palomeque de Acufia, and Ralegh's son. Wat's turbulent life ended in an act of 'unadvised daringnes'; he was shot as he led his men forward. But his last words, characteristically mixing exuberance with barbed bravado, were eventually to tell against his father. 'Conte on, my hearts', he is supposed to have said, 'here is the mine that you must expect; they that look for any other mine are fools.'
36
That was a rallying cry, of course, but the hostile English government argued later that Ralegh's own secret scepticism had been articulated in the dying breath of this impetuous young man.

Whether or not the attack on San Thome was pre-planned, it directly violated the commission under which the Guiana fleet sailed. Ralegh subsequently tried to excuse this aggression by claiming in his 'Apologie' that San Thome had been moved twenty miles from its original site, and that the English, after beating off the ambush, found themselves attacking the new settlement before they quite realized the significance of the action. But the evasion, based apparently on a statement from Keymis, smacks of desperation. According to reports from Diego Palomeque, filed in support of a subsequent claim for redress submitted by his kinsman Francisco de Avila of Seville, San Thome had been weakened and exposed by internecine conflict, and did indeed stand on a new site. However, this was no more than a mile from the original settlement, seen by Keymis twenty years before.
37

The English buried Wat and their other casualties within the church,Wat himself before the high altar. They plundered what they could; as late as 1621 Francisco de Avila was still rather optimistically seeking compensation for the loss of 500 quintals of tobacco and other goods to a total value of 30,000ducats.
38
Then they tried to work out what to do next. At this point Keymis began to lose his nerve, and, indeed, any hold that he might have had over his men. The principal problem, of course, lay in the fact that no one knew for certain where the mine, or mines, might be found. Following his orders, he made some show of attempting to locate them, but the attempt was half-hearted, and unproductive. 'One night', as the clergyman Samuel Jones later told the Privy Council, Keymis 'accompanied only with his men, went out privately and brought in some mineral ore which he cheerfully shewed Captain Thornhurst: but being tried by a refiner, it proved worth nothing, and was no more spoken of.'

Jones was quite certain that the mine, as Ralegh had described it, lay close to San Thom.
39
If Ralegh had indeed seen alluvial gold in 1595, perhaps in surface deposits of limonite, then the possibility of relocating such deposits after twenty rainy seasons was remote. Discredited and afraid, Keymis found himself in a very difficult situation. The Spanish had melted away into the hinterland, but they remained a military threat, executing further ambushes and killing several English adventurers. Launches were eventually sent further up the Orinoco. The English travelled another 180 miles upstream, but they discovered neither gold nor silver.
40
At this point, the gamble was seen to have failed; belatedly, Keymis realized that any discovery of a silver mine would benefit only the Spanish. He and his men were no longer strong enough to guard it, work it and carry away its contents. Terrified of what Ralegh would say, he secured the signatures of those who travelled upstream, men prepared to swear that they had done their honest best in impossible circumstances.
41
After an occupation of twenty-nine days, San Thome, the target of increasingly frequent and effective guerrilla raids by the Spaniards and their Indian allies, was burnt to the ground and the expedition returned to the river mouth.

News proceeded ahead of the main party; rumours carried by Indians were circulating in the fleet, early in February. These told of a great fight at San Thome in which the Spanish governor and two English officers had been killed. It seems likely that the first notice of casualties came to Ralegh at this point, for he writes in his journal of details 'which I forbeare to sett downe till I know the trewth'.
42
Things fall apart a little in his mind, as other reports travel down river: February inadvertently becomes January in the diary, his thoughts are elsewhere.
43
The journal of his voyage ends abruptly on 13 February; on that day or on the next, Ralegh was told of his son's death.

He met Keymis, at first with reserve, then with increasingly furious accusations, refusing to accept any apology, and declaring that his lieutenant's obstinacy had undone him. Keymis's desperate arguments, that his advance upriver was expected, that the Spanish were weakened by the attack on San Thorne, that no mine could ever be exploited by the English given the strength of Spanish settlements in the Orinoco basin, were all rejected.
44
Greenblatt is quick to see in Ralegh's reaction his 'fanatical self-absorption, the lack of a sense of the other', but in the circumstances his hostility is surely a normal response, easy to understand.
45
understand.45This is the frustrated anger of bereavement. Keymis was the first to admit that 'the disgrace of not bringing our men to this Mine will, I know, whilst I live rest heavy upon me in the judgment and opinions of most men', and his actions had cost Ralegh a son.
46
In so many words, and by his own admission, Ralegh told Keymis that he must leave him to himself to answere it to the King and the State'.
47
Keymis replied 'I knowe then, Sir, what course to take.'
48
He retired to his cabin. First he tried to put a bullet through his breast, but the shot from a 'pockett pistoll' was deflected by a rib. He then 'thrust a long knife under his short ribbs up to the handle and died', as Ralegh relates in a crisp passage to Bess, writing to her as if to a man. He may simply not have been thinking, the tone itself an indication of true distraction. His letter seems to lack calculation of any kind.
49
Ralegh received news of the suicide with contempt. By putting an end to his life, Keymis had merely been conceding his absolute responsibility for failure. Thereafter, Ralegh pragmatically blamed a dead subordinate for every misfortune: the mine, he insisted, could have been found, 'notwithstanding [Keymis's] obstinacy'.
50
'That...my Instructions were not followed, it was not my falt.'
51
Viewed objectively, the obstinacy was Ralegh's. Those instructions had been overly optimistic, and based on a dismissal of political and geographical realities. He was not in the mood to hear explanations, because he knew that it really was his fault after all.

In this crisis, Ralegh planned a second expedition to San Thome. The mine, he reasoned, must have been overlooked, it might still be exploited. No one else on the expedition paid much attention. Faced with the challenging journey upriver, and the ever-present threat of Spanish reinforcements - they had all along feared a stronger military challenge based on the information passed to Madrid at King James's command - his men refused to countenance the idea, and soon afterwards the fleet sailed north, two captains deserting him 'at the Granadas'. Even then, having 'clensed' his ship of sick men, Ralegh conjured visions of revictualling in Newfoundland and of plundering the Spanish treasure fleet.
52
In the desperate letter to Bess from St Kitts on 22 March he tried and failed to formulate plans, his words flowing with grief. He is coherent only when expressing pride in the dead Wat, who had killed one of the Spanish 'captaines', and in asking that his news might be reported truthfully to the truest friends that remained -'my Lord of Northumberland and Sil[vanus] Skory and...Sir John Leigh'. Ralegh had, he was sure,'tabacco enough to pay' for the refit; the modest plunder from San Thome could be put to good use, and thereafter, maybe, God might send him 'somewhat' to restore his fortune.
53
There was never much chance of that; his demoralized followers only wanted to go home. In the last week of March the rest of his fleet deserted, leaving Ralegh in the Destiny, alone off Nevis. With an openly discontented crew - the grumblers included 'some of...the best men...some of them being gentlemen' - he sailed north towards Newfoundland, where by his own account he faced down a mutiny, then across the Atlantic to Kinsale, where many in the company quite understandably melted away, fearing the King's displeasure.
54
Ralegh, with the remnant of his force, sailed on to Plymouth. There he began a fight to justify his actions, and eventually to fight for his life.

Ralegh could have been under no illusions as to his reception, but he pretended that the King's 'grave displeasure' came as a surprise. The arguments were familiar: Guiana could not be Spanish territory, when he himself had taken possession of the country in 1595 'by virtue of a cession by all the native chiefs of the country'.
55
The French and the Dutch had also claimed the territory, he added, but in point of law 'His Majesty has a better right and title than anyone'.
56
The argument, in his own eyes quite robust, did not alter much in the months ahead. Again and again he glossed it with reflections on his own sincerity: at no point, he argued, had he seriously considered turning buccaneer, though opportunity and temptation had always been there. While many had broken their word to him, through desertion and treachery, he would not now disgrace and inconvenience the people who had pledged sureties for his return. 'It should not be sayd to your Majestie that your Majestic had given libertie and trust to a man whose end was but the recoverie of his libertie and who had betrayed your Majesties trust.'
57
His actions in returning home, he insisted, spoke for themselves. Indeed they did, though his intentions during those frantic, dangerous and stressful weeks at sea remain very difficult to pin down. Ralegh is never slow to exaggerate the strains under which he laboured, but the concluding remarks in a contemporary letter credibly reflect the terror arising from close confinement at sea with a hostile crew. 'Want of sleep', he writes, 'for fear of being surprised in my cabin at night has almost deprived me of my sight and some return of the palsy which I had in the Tower has so weakened my hand that I cannot hold the pen.'
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