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.27
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,28 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 As he undoubtedly knew and ultimately discovered, Crown indulgence, easily bestowed, could be withdrawn with even greater facility.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.
The queen’s favorite, c. 1585
His ready participation in massacres of Irish and Spanish prisoners shows Ralegh to be ruthless, cold-blooded, and deceitful where national and self-interest coincide. Moreover, his business and personal dealings reveal a man frequently vain, amoral, and duplicitous. But it is also hard to resist the conclusion that, at critical moments, he found himself beyond his depth in the treacherous waters of the Tudor and Jacobean Courts. In 1592, just four years after the triumph of the Armada, he was to suffer a drastic reversal with Elizabeth’s discovery of his secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton and the birth of their daughter. Ralegh’s bride was not only a maid-of-honor at Court, she was a member of a prominent Catholic family that had been held responsible for the 1584 plot to replace Elizabeth with her cousin, Mary, queen of Scots. His fall was as stunning as his rise. Temporarily banished to the Tower with his wife, he was reduced to pleading for petty favor through intermediaries. The discovery of Guiana held out the promise of redemption.
ARRIVAL
Ralegh was out-of-shape by the time he got to Guiana. He was forty-three years old, already past the flirtatious prime of the Elizabethan courtier, and we find him struggling, bitterly. No matter the flights of Arcadian lyricism he might achieve at times, the daily experience of travel in Guiana seems to have been overwhelmingly grueling.
Realistically and intimately, physical and spiritual ordeal is a recurring feature of the Guiana narratives. Indeed, in Ralegh’s El Dorado quest, in the tribulations undergone in its pursuit, and in his characterization of the voyage as a “paineful pilgrimage,”29 there is a reaching back to the legend cycles of King Arthur and Lord Owen Madoc, early Britons claimed by Hakluyt and John Dee as prior conquerors of America, legitimation for the still notional British Empire.30 Travel on the Orinoco was grim:
We carried 100 persons and their victuals for a moneth in the [open boat], being al driven to lie in the raine and wether, in the open aire, in the burning sunne, & pon the hard bords, and to dresse our meat, and to carry al manner of furniture in them, wherewith they were so pestred and unsavery, that what with victuals being most fish, with the weete clothes of so many men thrust together and the heate of the sunne, I will undertake there was never any prison in England, that coulde be founde more unsavory and loathsome, especially to my selfe, who had for many yeares before beene dieted and cared for in a sort farre differing.31
The double irony of this analogy would have been lost on neither Ralegh nor his readers at Court. As they knew, he had recently been in prison, but the Tower was less brutal than this voluntary hardship, a suffering that by any measure proved his loyalty to a queen and nation indivisible. But as well as conveying endurance, the physicality of the language—the hard boards, the burning sun, the winds and rains that punish the cramped sailors—is calculated to mark the materiality of Guiana and its nature.
As the men cross the mouth of the Orinoco and travel farther into the estuary, they without warning enter a region of undecidability. It is a physical and narrative passage into the unknown and, as if to demonstrate their transgressing of an unseen border, the Indian pilot they kidnapped as they crossed the bay is suddenly as bewildered as the Englishmen:
[T]his Arawacan promised to bring me into the great riuer of Orenoque, but indeed of that which we entred he was utterly ignorant, for he had not seene it in twelve yeeres before, at which time he was very yoong, and of no judgement, and if God had not sent us another helpe, we might have wandred a whole yeere in that laborinth of rivers, ere we had found any way, either out or in, especiallie after we were past the ebbing and flowing, which was in fower daies: for I know all the earth doth not yeeld the like confluence of streames and branches, the one crossing the other so many times, and all so faire and large, and so like one to another, as no man can tell which to take: and if we went by the Sun or compasse hoping thereby to go directly one way or another, yet that waie we were also caried in a circle amongst multitudes of Ilands, and every Iland so bordered with high trees, as no man could see any further than the bredth of the river, or length of the breach.32
This is one of several memorable passages in The Discoverie in which Ralegh captures his disorientation in the face of the unprecedented, a loss of psychic balance both terrifying and elating. This is a landscape of “broken Ilands and drowned lands,” “of many great stormes and gusts, thunder, and lightnings,” and of forests “thicke and spiny, and so full of prickles, thorns, and briers, as it is impossible to creepe thorow them.”33 Ralegh’s panic rises. His strategies for mastering space collapse around him. He has no reliable maps of the estuary. Instead, he plans to use this exploration and the abducted pilot’s expertise to make a map. But his forcible appropriation of local knowledge backfires: not only is this man unable to help them, his confusion only adds to the English disarray. Even worse, the new science on which the imperial project is based dissolves within this indecipherable landscape. Their navigational calculations and technologies fail them. They cannot see far enough, or, if they can, they are unable to differentiate one from another these labyrinthine channels in their maze-like routes between indistinguishable islands. Techniques painstakingly developed in Renaissance libraries to plot longitudes and distance are as worthless for finding their position as are their clothes for protecting their persons. And, like their clothes, their science turns out to be a hindrance, trapping them into thinking they were prepared, that they could conquer uncertainty through method. It is the first defeat for empiricism, and, in its symbolic leveling, it is also the first sign that Ralegh will encounter native people in the spirit of Montaigne as well as that of Cortés; that he will see these new worlds with both the relativizing eye of the libertins erudits and with the “cold gaze of the soldier.”34
THE WILD COAST
Ralegh’s engagement with Guiana may have begun as early as 1587. Historian Joyce Lorimer has uncovered documents suggesting his involvement in a murky affair aimed at est
ablishing an outpost on the Orinoco under the flag of the Portuguese pretender, Dom Antonio, prior of Crato.35 Though tentative, this venture already showed the strategic interests at play. The Wild Coast was unprotected, “open to all and sundry,” and it lay to windward of the Spanish main, relatively safe haven for ransack, encampment, and trade.36 A base here could render vulnerable both the pearl fisheries of La Margarita to the north and the Atlantic treasure fleet itself. Moreover, Spain and its enemies shared a belief that descent of the Amazon could be reversed and that usurpers might travel upstream, exposing the Andean mines to attack from the east.37
But the project was also driven by the prospect of more dazzling reward. Just a few months earlier, two of Ralegh’s privateering ships had returned from the Azores with Spanish prisoners. Among them was Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, famous through Europe as the colonist of the Straits of Magellan and a scholar of Incan history. Ralegh entertained him lavishly, and, in return, found himself enchanted into the ranks of the doradistas.38
In El Dorado, Europe found its second center of South American civilization and an incitement to exploration. Somewhere between the Amazon and the Orinoco lay the golden kingdom of Manco Capac, built by the defiant Inca after his repulsion from Cuzco in 1533.39 It was a potent imaginative topography that drew Orellana down the Amazon in 1540 following his separation from Gonzalo Pizarro’s starving band of conquistadores.40 It also impelled the calamitous venture of Pedro de Ursúa, a project of conventional brutality until it surrendered to Lope de Aguirre’s transcontinental terror, that stripped-down metaphor of colonial extremity captured in Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972). Amazon exploration was a repeated debacle, attaining symbolic exhaustion in Aguirre’s hallucinatory letter to Madrid:
I advise thee not to send any Spanish fleet up this ill-omened river; for, on the faith of a Christian, I swear to thee, O king and lord, that if a hundred thousand men should go up, not one would escape, and there is nothing else to expect.41
As Amazon gold failed to materialize in the desired quantity, El Dorado migrated, and its elusiveness provoked a progressive inflation. From the early tales of a native king ritually anointed with gold dust, in Ralegh’s Discoverie it became a Guianan kingdom of golden warriors “al shining from the foote to the head.”42
Renewed Spanish attempts were led by Antonio de Berrio. In 1579, already fifty-three years old, Berrio inherited the governorship of a huge territory east of the Andes from Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, his uncle and the conqueror of New Granada. Quesada’s brother, Hernán Perez de Quesada, assuming command in Bogotá, led a brutal campaign into the lowland forests of modern Colombia in search of the golden kingdom, returning with appetite unsatisfied and dying soon after—struck down by a lightning bolt in a widely appreciated signal of divine displeasure.43 In 1583, following the trail downslope, Berrio marched eighty men as far the upper Orinoco, and by 1591 he was certain he had located El Dorado on Lake Manoa, at the headwaters of the Rio Caroní, close to the Orinoco estuary.44
Rumor of this activity filtered back to Europe in quayside conversations, seized documents, and chance meetings like that between Ralegh and the scholar-conquistador Sarmiento. And it is clear that the voyage of 1587 took place in the midst of increasing Europe-wide interest in the region’s possibilities. The English contribution to the expedition was small. But it included four anonymous young men, two of whom were set ashore in Trinidad and two on an island in the Orinoco delta. They were the first of several to be planted in this way, and their task was to learn native languages and establish informal alliance, opening the way to a more substantial presence. Their fate is unknown. But their assignment is the first indication of the dialogic form of the Guiana enterprise, its simultaneously strategic and open character as a series of calculated yet affective negotiations and exchanges.
As the promise of his North American enterprise fades, we see Ralegh’s attention turning increasingly to Guiana.45 In 1594, released from the Tower but out of favor, he outfitted two ships under Jacob Whiddon, the captor of Sarmiento. Whiddon returned from Trinidad with the news that Berrio had built a fort on the island, securing the critical supply route to the Wild Coast, and that he was preparing a further expedition to the land of gold.
SPEECH ACTS
Ralegh’s fleet of five ships left Plymouth with one hundred men in February 1595. Unlike many of the overseas ventures of the time, his expedition was underwritten almost entirely by investors from the landed gentry, the absence of merchant interest an indication that its material prospects were viewed as less promising than its patriotic ones.46 As if to refute such judgments, Ralegh stopped off en route to raid Trinidad. The unexpected booty he netted turned out to be Antonio de Berrio. It was what A. L. Rowse has aptly called “a fatal stroke of luck.”47 In spite of the conquistador’s dark admonitions, the long shipboard interviews only intensified Ralegh’s commitment to the El Dorado quest, kindling the fire set by Sarmiento and inspiring the extraordinary tales of native kingdoms and thwarted knights that fill the early pages of The Discoverie. The closure of the region to competitors assumed ever greater urgency.
As we have seen, the Tudor letters patent granted property rights to the New World in a context of geopolitical maneuver. The legalistic phrasing carefully avoided acknowledging competing claims. All lands “not actually possessed of any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people” were open to broad categories of exploitation. Yet, although dominion was extended to landscapes formally figured as empty terrain, the imagination of such territory as “heathen and barbarous lands” showed the elision of native people to be far from complete.48 Despite the explicit absence of non-Christians in these grants, it was self-evident to Crown and colonizer that the meaningful production of colonial space required effective sovereignty over regional populations. By the late sixteenth century, Europeans knew that indigenous politics could not be taken for granted. Unsettling instances of local resistance and rebellion made it clear that the outcome of colonial encounter could be bloody and uncertain, and that the allegiance of native elites was often a decisive prize.49
Despite disavowal, then, relations with indigenous Americans were the cause of tremendous anxiety. For Ralegh, they demanded the politics of embodied restraint, a moral and strategic continence that was also the measure of his leadership:
I suffred not anie man to take from anie of the nations so much as a Pina, or a Potato roote, without giving them contentment, nor any man so much as to offer to touch any of their wives or daughters: which course, so contrarie to the Spaniards (who tyrannize over them in all things) drew them to admire hir Majestie, whose commandement I told them it was, and also woonderfully to honour our nation. But I confess it was a very impatient worke to keepe the meaner sort from spoile and stealing, when we came to their houses, which bicause in all I could not prevent I caused my Indian interpreter at every place when we departed, to know of the losse or wrong done, and if ought were stolen or taken by violence, either the same was restored, and the party punished in their sight, or els it was paid for to their utmost demand.50
This remarkable behavior had two self-conscious reference points, both immediately recognizable to Ralegh’s readers. The first was personal: Ralegh’s ragged reputation as a sexual adventurer, his estrangement from the queen following his marriage, and his attempt to recover his favored status—a complex cluster to which I return below. The second association was with the leyenda negra, the Black Legend of Spanish barbarity in the Americas. Humanist Catholic texts such as Las Casas’ Breuissima relacion de la destruycion de las Indias (1552) had demonstrated to the English that the divine right to empire could be forfeited on moral grounds—reasoning that Hakluyt appropriated in support of the manifest destiny of Protestant colonization.51 This was a serviceable but highly contingent ethics, absent, for example, from the Irish campaigns and selectively applied where it might create tactical advantage. Temperance was part of a larger strategic practice: Spanish
conduct provided an opening to the more self-controlled outsider; successful alliance with disaffected but still dependent elites required the sustained work of diplomacy.
The key relationship Ralegh establishes in Guiana is with the aged “king” Topiawari, an ally he presents as the most reliable client of the Crown. Topiawari’s territory offered access to the borders of El Dorado, and treaty with him was a central goal of the expedition. It was also Ralegh’s only clear accomplishment and, accordingly, is described in careful and sympathetic detail. It is this sympathy that has led Mary Campbell to praise Ralegh for the “widening of consciousness” he achieves in his representation of native Guianans, people who most often enter his account as individualized interlocutors, emerging through reported speech as multidimensional subjects.52 Campbell explains this in terms of the structural position of such people as Topiawari in Ralegh’s campaign and narrative. They are his informants, providers of the vital data he needs to accomplish his mission. Ralegh introduces them through events in which they themselves are central actors. It is a rhetoric designed to convey the credibility of his sources, as well as the authenticity of his own presence. The Discoverie, above all, is an argument for intervention: an argument based not only on the existence of El Dorado, but on the military vulnerability of Guiana and on the authority of the narrator himself.
But there is a certain delicacy here. For his project to succeed on either side of the Atlantic, Ralegh’s informants should themselves be convincingly authoritative and substantial. As allies, they must be capable of delivering arms and resources. They must also be moral beings, appreciative of the superior English virtues. Yet, at the same time, neither his field practice nor its reporting can leave any doubt as to Ralegh’s own mastery of encounter. Thus, at the outset of their first meeting, Ralegh explicitly subverts Topiawari’s local authority, managing the idiom of courtliness to claim for himself the rights of host. In a show of condescending deference to the “king of Arromaia,” Ralegh establishes the ground for their interview by raising a tent and allowing Topiawari, now the visitor in his own domain, to rest in its shade. Eventually, with the aid of Ralegh’s interpreter, they talk:
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