“It was harder for Francis Sparrow. He never went looking for El Dorado and the city of Manoa. The Spaniards captured him a few days after you had set him down. The Indians must have informed on him. From the Spanish reports we know he spent seven years in Spanish jails, and you know the terrible things that happen to Protestant people in Spanish jails, even here in the Indies, where the Inquisition also exists.
“You had given up on El Dorado, and after all the hard deaths I think of these two boys left behind in the forest, four hundred miles up river, as special sacrifices of yours. All that we know of them are their names. You never paid too much attention to people like that, the labourers and rowers on the ships.
“And look where it’s brought you back. Look where it’s got us all, waiting in this muddy Gulf for news of your son, and news of your lieutenant Keymis. From time to time during the day the Spaniards in Trinidad will fire off a shot, to let us know they are watching. Just before the sun goes down the Indians will light fires on the shore. Their canoes will paddle by and no one will come to us.
“Yet the day after you arrived you wrote to your wife that you could still be king of the Indies. We will talk about that later. I will come later and give you a second draught, when it’s cool. I have to read and think some more, picking my way through your slippery words. Look how the sun shines through your green silk curtains. They’ve already begun to fade.”
WHEN THE sun went down—it never became really cool on the water, at the south of the Gulf, almost in the river estuary—the old man said to the surgeon, “You asked why I wrote as I did to my wife. She will get that letter in some months. By the time she reads it all this may be over. It didn’t matter what I wrote her. And at one time it was true: I could have been king of the Indians.”
“A long time ago. In 1595. Twenty-three years ago.”
“I rescued all the Trinidad Indian little kings or chiefs from the Spaniards. I was the first man here ever to punish the Spaniards for what they had done. I killed the Spaniards in Port of Spain and broke open the jail in their town inland and set the kings free, and their people burned the Spanish town. But when I wrote my book and gave the names of the kings there were people in England who said that I was making the names up. Wannawanare, Carroari, Maquarima, Tarroopanama, Aterima. I still know the names. And then—luckily, not for me so much as for the kings—a Spanish ship was captured taking duplicates of reports to Spain, and some of the names were there. The Spaniards founded Port of Spain on Wannawanare’s land. In the report they sent to Spain they said he agreed to handing over his land and his people. The man I saw was naked and tortured and half dead in that little jail room. I can still see their faces turned to one side against the wall, the five wasted kings, all on one chain, their bodies burnt in places with hot bacon fat. They would have just stayed there and died if we hadn’t freed them. And if duplicates of the Spanish reports from Trinidad hadn’t been captured, with the names of some of those kings, saying they had agreed to the Spaniards’ taking over their land and their people—if that hadn’t happened, nobody would have believed that those kings existed, and that they had gone through this torment in the closed cell.”
The surgeon said, “The Spaniards are like that. They record everything, and get it attested by notaries, and they send duplicates and triplicates by different ships to Spain. Very little gets lost. It’s a great help to us. We often have the two sides of a story.”
The old man said, “It’s terrible to think that people mightn’t have known about those men, or believed what I wrote about them.”
“Everything you write about the Trinidad side of the Gulf is true. It’s remarkable. Every tribe, every village, every river is as you say. And you did rescue Wannawanare and the others. But you went away, and, as you know, the Spaniards came back. They sent a very big expedition to the Gulf some months later. I don’t think anyone knows what happened to Wannawanare and his people, and all the others, after you left. The Spaniards had a lot of scores to settle: The Indians you had helped didn’t stand a chance. Those two boys you left on the river didn’t stand a chance. When you sent Keymis the following year to reconnoitre on his own, he had to move very carefully. He couldn’t even land on Trinidad. He heard later that the Spaniards were resettling the Indian tribes on both sides of the Gulf. You know what that means. Keymis didn’t mention Wannawanare. Strange—of Keymis, I mean.
“For a few weeks in 1595, when you had all those ships and men, I suppose it would have been possible for you to be the king of the Indians. But you were fooling those people. When Keymis went out the next year, an Indian chief came to the river mouth to meet him with twelve or twenty canoes provisioned for war. The chief asked Keymis where the rest of your fleet was. Keymis spoke the lie he had prepared. He said he hadn’t come to fight the Spaniards. You had killed all the Spaniards the previous year, and if you had sent a bigger force now the Indians would have thought that you wanted to invade their territory. After Keymis had said that twice, word spread among the tribes, and no one came to see Keymis. All the Indians on the river could think of was hiding from the Spaniards and trying to make peace with them.
“You stirred people up, here in this Gulf, and you went away. You stayed away for twenty-three years. You left a lot of people to face the consequences. The Spaniards had a lot of scores to settle. And you can’t blame them. Those Spaniards you killed at Port of Spain—some people would say you behaved dishonourably. Those men had been on the island for some years and were almost destitute. They came aboard your ships to try to buy linen from your men. You encouraged them, you talked to them about Virginia. You said that was where you were going. You gave them wine, which they hadn’t had for years. You entertained them for days. As soon as the rest of your fleet came into the Gulf, and you felt sure of your strength, you fell on those Spaniards and killed them.”
The old man said, “It was what they had done to some of the people I had sent the year before. They invited them to leave the ships and go hunting in the woods. They had Indians and dogs. When our men were close to the shore they fired on them and killed them.”
“All right. You settled that score, but you left these others for the Spaniards to settle. And they didn’t forget. Spaniards are like that. Fourteen years after, a friend of yours, Hall, a London merchant, sent two ships to the Gulf to trade. To pick up tobacco, mainly. This foreign trading in a Spanish colony is illegal, but the Spanish governor didn’t mind breaking his country’s laws. He got the men on the London ships to talk. He found out that Hall, the owner of the ships, was a friend of yours. One day, when thirty-six men from the ships were ashore at Port of Spain, they were all seized and roped up. They were tied back to back, and the throats of all thirty-six were cut. Right away. On the black sand of that Port of Spain shore. The man who did that was the son of the old Spanish governor, the old conquistador you had captured and led about in 1595. It was bad luck on the thirty-six men, but the old conquistador’s son owed you that.
“This was part of what you left behind. The Gulf had always been a place of blood and revenge, of Indian dispossessions and resettlement. Even before the Spanish time. The man-eating Caribs were moving down. There were dreadful wars. You added to that. But you went away and wrote a book about an untouched paradise on the rivers, a place to which you alone had access, where the Indians lived in beautiful meadows and didn’t know the value of the gold and diamonds by which they were surrounded, and where you alone had the secret to Indian hearts.
“I am trying to find out how you arrived at that book, at that version of your adventure.
“You had heard, like the rest of the civilized world, about El Dorado. You knew about this old conquistador who had been made governor of the provinces of Trinidad and Guiana and El Dorado, and had spent his fortune looking for the golden city. You assembled a force. You came and captured the old governor. You had forty men dig sand—just in case—and load up the ships. You went exploring with the old governor. You thought hi
m foolish. You found nothing. You’re an intelligent man. You lost much of your faith in El Dorado. You believed so little in El Dorado that you left only one man, a servant, to look for it. Just in case.
“You began to try to get a ransom for the old Spanish conquistador, the governor of Trinidad. That isn’t in your book, but it’s in the Spanish reports. None of the neighbouring Spanish officials would pay up. In fact, they all wanted the old man dead, so that they could claim his province and get whatever gold was going.
“So, at this stage, for all your trouble, and after all that killing, you had only sand. And this is where the Negro tells us something.”
The old man said, “I had no Negroes with me in 1595.”
“I know. You came straight from England with your force. I am thinking about the Negro who suddenly appears in your book when you are on the Guiana river, and see the meadows and fields and flowers near the falls. The river is full of crocodiles, thousands, you say. And the Negro—who would know about crocodiles—jumps in from the galley—for a swim, you say—and is immediately eaten alive. And that’s that. There’s nothing more about crocodiles or Negroes in your book. I have thought a lot about that vanishing Negro of yours, and I’m certain you borrowed him from John Hawkins’s account of his voyage to Guinea in West Africa and the West Indies in 1564. In Guinea Hawkins saw a Negro who was snatched by a crocodile and pulled under as he was filling water at the river’s edge. That’s a better story.
“Just as you were taking back Topiawari’s son to England to show people that you had really been to Guiana, so, as you were writing about foreign adventures, you wanted to let people know that you had seen what other famous adventurers had seen. There is a little more, connected with that Negro. Hawkins was a slaver and privateer, a sacker of Spanish cities. I feel that when you left the Gulf, with only the sand to show for your pains, your thoughts were turning to sacking a city. Hawkins was in your head. You thought you would do what he had done.
“Outside the Gulf, not far to the west, just below the salt-pans of the Araya Peninsula, is the town of Cumaná. It is the oldest Spanish town in this part of the world. You thought you would capture that, as you had captured Port of Spain. But the Spanish governor there had heard about you, and he was waiting, with his musketeers and his Indian archers with their poisoned arrows. The land sloped up from the sea to the town. It was sandy, open, full of low, prickly cactus. Your men were massacred as they came off the boats. There is nothing of this in your book, but the Spanish reports say that forty of your men died there. They were important men. The Spanish reports give the names. They couldn’t have made them up. The men who died from musket or sabre wounds on the Cumaná shore were the lucky ones.
“Terrible things happened to the people who were hit by the poisoned arrows of the Indians. They went mad with thirst. Their bowels burst, their bodies blackened. The smell was awful in the ships. You asked the old Spanish conquistador you were dragging around with you about an antidote. He said he didn’t know. So he had his revenge at last. It didn’t matter how much you abused him for being unlearned and incurious: he said he didn’t know.
“In your book you don’t talk about the attack on Cumaná, of course. But you talk in a very concrete and passionate way about the effects of the poisoned arrows; you slip it in as a necessary digression—to use your words—in the Guiana section. You mention the antidote you heard about from someone you said was a Guianian; but what this person said suggests he was a Spaniard, a renegade you mention in another context, someone lower down the coast from Cumaná, always ready to trade with foreigners. Some Spaniards, this man said, had been cured with garlic juice; the golden rule was to take no liquids before the wound was dressed. Twenty-seven men died in the ships from the arrows: this was the figure given by the old conquistador to the Spanish enquiry. He was let off the ship at this stage, the old conquistador, perhaps exchanged for two English prisoners.
“Twenty-seven people died on the ships, but you did what you could to spare yourself the smell and the suffering. There were two Dutch ships at anchor off the Araya Peninsula, no doubt loading up with contraband salt, with the connivance of that man who told you about the antidote. You spent the hours of daylight and heat with them, when the smell of the dying men in your own ship would have been very high. At night you came back to your cabin, with the green hangings. Just like this one. Later you buried your dead—just as you did this time, when you reached the Gulf.
“That journey of 1595 had begun with murder; it had ended with a massacre of your people and the stench of death in the ships. And all you had to show for it was sand. As for all the deaths, you didn’t have to explain—people always die on expeditions.
“Perhaps if you hadn’t taken back the sand and been mocked for it, you might have written nothing. Or you might have written a little account of your exploration of the Gulf and the river. But you had to prove that you were not a fool, that you had found something more important than gold or booty. You had found a new empire for England, an empire of willing Indian subjects. So you wrote your difficult book, mixing up fantasy and history with your own real explorations. Everything on this side of the Gulf was real, everything on that side was fantasy. That made it easy for you to write, but by this means you also created a book that no one could ever disentangle and very few would read. The story was in the title; that was as far as most people would get. The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) and Other Countries, with their Rivers adjoining. Performed in the year 1595 by Sir Walter Raleigh Knight.
“The book was offered as proof, if anyone chose to go through it. But the more important proof was your own behaviour. You insisted that El Dorado existed. You had your Indian servants. You sent Keymis the next year to Guiana. You sent people to keep in touch. The only thing that gives you away is that you yourself never wanted to go back. You sent Keymis. You sent other people later. But you never went back yourself. And even now, at the end of your life, you haven’t wanted to go up the river. You arrived this time as you left twenty-three years ago, with the stench of death in your ship. You have buried your dead. But you have preferred to stay out here in the Gulf. You don’t really want to know. You are hoping for luck. Or perhaps you are hoping for nothing at all. There was never any El Dorado in Guiana. The Spaniards stopped looking many years ago. The French have stopped looking. The Dutch never looked. They always came only to trade, to get tobacco and salt. Neither you nor Keymis saw anything on the river. You both thought only that where so many had looked for El Dorado, El Dorado existed. Keymis in his book said El Dorado had to exist, if only as a sign of God’s providence: to give England an empire as Spain had been given one. And now we wait for news of Keymis and your son and the others.”
THE SHIPS and canoes that went down to the main river from the Gulf went down one branch; the ones that came up from the river to the Gulf used another, some way to the east, where the current was not so strong. Up to fifty years before only the Indians were masters of these waters; now that trick of the estuary was known to all. Normally now the canoes ignored the Destiny and its sentinel ship. But one day there came a canoe or launch.
Imagine the wide southern Gulf at sunrise: the flat many-channelled estuary to the west and south, the long barrier arm of the low, sandy peninsula of south-western Trinidad to the east: the morning sky high, the water reasonably calm, river water from the continent mingling with the Atlantic in froth-edged bands of colour: mud, various shades of olive, grey. Almost mid-way between the estuary and the peninsula is a high, broken rock formation which now has a Spanish name, Soldado, The Soldier. Only pelicans and the birds now called frigate birds live there; they have done that for centuries, perhaps tens of centuries. They nest there, and when the time comes they settle down to die, not far away from where they have nested, with the same kind of deliberation, folding their legs neatly below them. Guano and bones
fill every crevice and cushion every ledge of the broken grey rock, and create a kind of earth where vegetation grows.
At night the water is more turbulent than at sunrise, and the weak lights of the rocking Destiny, lying within the Gulf, and its sentinel ship, lying south of The Soldier, can be seen from far.
In the middle of the day the sky is blue, the birds circle above The Soldier, mere glitter replaces the colours of the choppy water and blurs far-off objects.
So the small vessel, coming up one afternoon from the eastern channel, bobbing up and down, appears and disappears in the glitter. A canoe? Indian canoes steer clear of the Destiny now. This vessel comes steadily on. The sentinel ship signals. The vessel coming up is one of the expedition’s launches. The captain of the Destiny fixes his glass on the approaching shape, its outlines dissolving and re-forming in the white glitter. The deck of the ship is hot below the thin leather soles of the soldiers, watchful now, sweating in their hot breast armour.
In the captain’s glass a launch defines itself at last. Not an Indian canoe. An English launch: its sails can be seen: the oars of the rowers are at rest. Some armed soldiers are with them. And a gentleman, a man in splendid clothes, sitting on one of the benches. Not English clothes. Spanish clothes.