Raleigh's Page

by Alan Armstrong

  “Just in case, though, my people will carry arms to assure a kind reception.”

  There was no need: the admiral’s gift of brightly dyed English wool—the finest in the world—for the merchant’s lady inspired the offer of a banquet.

  “Oh, no!” said the admiral, bowing and opening his arms. “I could only accept if my entire company were invited, and that would be too much, for in addition to my special guests”—he beckoned, waving his arm at Andrew, Tremayne, and Mr. Harriot—“my crews and the other explorers number more than a hundred and fifty.” He paused. “And we have two Indians in our party!”

  “Bring all!” the Señor answered bravely. “I would not have it any other way! Pray, bring all, even your savages.”

  The admiral raised his hand in mock surrender. “So, Andrew,” he laughed, “you see how it is with a Spanish gentleman!”

  The gentleman’s profits eased down gullets as crew, explorers, and Indians came ashore in shifts to eat roast ox and fresh greens and drink the famous wines of that place. The wine affected the Indians; they got giddy and fell asleep.

  After he got over feeling he was still on a rocking boat, Andrew wanted to explore the island and hunt for seashells like the ones the sailors had shown him.

  “No,” said Mr. Harriot. “You and Tremayne must stay with the Indians. We can leave behind an explorer or a sailor, but it won’t do to lose them! They’re our Virginia navigators!”

  The Señora had a small female dog she fanned as she held it to her bosom. When her dog spied Salt, it gave a bark of joy and leaped clear. The lady screamed, then hid her face behind her fan as the dogs tore off together, frisking, yipping, rolling, and rollicking. Only when Salt was tired and thirsty was Andrew able to catch him.

  The admiral’s people left in high spirits, with oranges and lemons and almost as many casks of their hosts’ wine as their water.

  Andrew went out in the last boat with Manteo and Wanchese. As they looked back, Manteo pointed. “Green, like home. Hot. Not like London.”

  The enemy’s ships of war saw them off from a distance. As a courtesy, Admiral Grenville dipped the flagship’s ensign. The Spaniards did the same. “Sailors don’t hate each other the way soldiers do,” the admiral said. “We have in common a more constant enemy: the sea.”

  Leaving the dark green Canaries behind, they sailed southwest along the coast of Africa until they picked up the equatorial current that flowed to the West Indies.

  “Watch now!” the admiral said as he pointed to the compass. “We turn to follow the directions Columbus gave his mariners a hundred years ago:

  “‘West.

  “West.

  “Nothing to the North.

  “Nothing to the South.

  “West.’”

  Andrew stood with the Indians and Tremayne. They felt the Tyger heel as she turned and left the Old World behind.

  “Now we’re really on our way,” Tremayne cried, his eyes bright as he stared at the line where the western sky met the sea. “There!” he exclaimed, pointing and poking Andrew as he laughed with excitement. “Do you remember my telling you ‘There sits America, waiting for you’? Well, there she is!”

  Andrew nodded and laughed as a shiver of anticipation swept over him. The Indians smiled. They understood.

  That night, the ship’s wake glowed like moonlight as she cut through a swarm of tiny jellyfish.

  The Tyger became the boy’s world as he studied the mechanics of raising the heavy sails with lines run through block and tackle to multiply the crewmen’s strength. He began to notice as sailors do slight shifts of wind and changes in the ship’s creaking. He learned how it is that some men choose to be sailors for life as he worked with the ship’s carpenters.

  One day a carpenter held up a long, tapering piece of oak.

  “Hi, boy! Do you know what this is?”

  “A builder’s peg, sir?”

  “To a landsman. To a sailor it’s a treenail: what fastens ship timbers one to another. We pare it to fit snug in a bored hole, bung it in, and then she goes to work on her own as the water swells her and she locks tighter and tighter. An iron spike would rust and work free. For building on your Virginia island, lad, treenails! From what I hear, it’s plenty wet there.”

  Andrew tried to imagine what he’d find at Roanoke, what he’d build. His mind raced over the tools they’d packed. Had they brought everything they’d need?

  28

  PRIZES!

  They sped west as Admiral Grenville crowded on sail. The storms they met came up from behind and pushed them on. They were not so violent as the one that broke the pinnace.

  Andrew made friends with the three ships’ boys on board. They taught him to chew the ends of hemp rope to get dizzy and tried to get him to climb the masts like they did, but his stomach wouldn’t take it. They showed him how to roll dice and play a game with bright-colored cards they’d got from one of the sailors. The boys couldn’t read, but they were masters at playing cards.

  Andrew was glad to have friends his own age, though they seemed more like men than boys. They talked about girls they knew and doing things he had no idea of. What he missed, home and family, counted for nothing with them; the Tyger was as much home as they knew.

  They got Andrew to bet. He won a few times, then he began to lose.

  “Pay up!” the biggest one demanded.

  Andrew didn’t have any money.

  “Go double-or-nothing, then.”

  He lost again.

  Now he owed twopence. He was employed by Mr. Harriot and earning a wage, but he was too ashamed to approach him. He went to Tremayne.

  “I need twopence,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “To pay the ships’ boys.”

  Slowly, Tremayne got the story.

  “They took you!” he said with a grim smile as he handed Andrew the coins. “The old trick—they let you win just enough to make you think you knew what you were doing, then they rigged the game. You got cheated!”

  Andrew said nothing. He felt sick. It wasn’t the money; it was feeling alone and different. He’d felt close to those boys—the way he’d felt about his friends at school and William. To the ships’ boys, though, he was nothing more than a pocket to empty.

  They were thirty-two days out from the Canaries when Salt announced New World land, the island of Puerto Rico. He and the Indians smelled it at the same time. The Indians sang a long single-note chant as the dog barked. The breeze was sweet, full of flowers.

  The ship’s water was stale, the barrels green and slimy, teeming with worms. Everyone was hungry for fresh fruit and greens, anything but ship biscuit and salt pork.

  Following the map Tremayne and Andrew had stolen from the Frenchman, the admiral found an uninhabited harbor safe from Spanish eyes. The land had been freshly worked, though; there were Spaniards around.

  The men were organized into teams, the largest to throw up a wall of pointed logs in case Spaniards attacked, another to scour the green mold from the water barrels and refill them, the third to go after cassava root to make bread. They found plenty in the worked fields. The bread was sweet and good. Mr. Harriot helped Tremayne and Andrew gather sugar and banana roots to try at Roanoke.

  The explorers suffered from sunburn and biting flies until Manteo and Wanchese showed them a root to pulp and rub on their bodies.

  Once the palisade was up, Andrew joined the carpenters building a pinnace to replace the one lost in the storm. This was the work he liked best: the tools and smells of fresh-shaved wood reminded him of helping his father do carpentry work back at Stillwell.

  He was proud to show he knew how to manage the drills and planes and measure angles. “If you don’t like Virginia, lad, we’ll take you on as apprentice,” the Tyger’s master carpenter announced. That warmed Andrew; it made up for the hurt he’d felt at being cheated by the ships’ boys.

  In less than a week they’d fashioned a keel and laid the ribs out like fish bones.
A week later they launched her. She was green and leaky, but the admiral ordered the fleet to sail.

  Andrew stood with Tremayne and Mr. Harriot, watching as the island grew small behind them. “How soon do we make Virginia?” he asked, sure that was where they were headed at last.

  “Ah,” said Mr. Harriot, his mouth tightening. “The admiral has orders from the investors to take prizes, and even if he didn’t, he would.”

  Sure enough, down came the English flags and up went the Spanish. The admiral turned pirate and went hunting along the sea-lanes. Neither Mr. Harriot nor Tremayne seemed surprised, so Andrew kept his mouth shut. All hours the admiral kept the ships’ boys, slight and quick as cats, watching from the mast tops. It made Andrew queasy to look up at them swaying like birds in a storm.

  It was early morning. Andrew was wetting the apple shoots with his share of fresh water when he heard the yell—

  “Sail! Sail!” One of the gamblers had spotted a merchantman.

  There wasn’t much wind, and the loaded Tyger was heavy and slow. The Spaniard tried to escape. Admiral Grenville ordered up every sail he could hang and formed teams to wet them so they’d hold what wind there was. Andrew was perched ten feet above deck, cheering and yelling in time with the others as he passed up the heavy buckets and lowered the empties.

  Admiral Grenville was the better sailor. By midafternoon the Tyger had drawn close, firing shots from her one small swivel cannon and shooting flaming arrows to set the Spaniards’ rigging afire.

  The Spaniards shot back as good as they got and more. Andrew dodged fire arrows as he raced with buckets of seawater to douse flames. Slowly they pulled alongside, splinters flying as the Tyger’s sailors threw anchors and grappling irons to haul in the enemy. The boy leapt to join the haulers on the thick rope just as the sailor next to him went down with a scream, blood jetting from his neck; another held his arm, half off at the shoulder. Andrew pulled with everything he had; he pulled for three.

  As the two ships bumped together, scraping and grinding, the Tyger’s sailors, explorers, and Indians jumped across to the Spaniard, yelling like madmen and screaming an eerie high-pitched Indian war whoop. Andrew screamed too, as loud as he could, as he held on to his haul line.

  He’d grown up on stories that the English are the bloodthirstiest soldiers in the world, thinking first about honor and last about safety as each goes after his own prize. That afternoon, he learned it was the same with the Indians. As for the Spanish, he discovered they could be fierce fighters too, but they were practical. When the Spanish captain realized what he faced, he allowed capture and got good treatment. Andrew couldn’t imagine Admiral Grenville giving up like that.

  The boy watched as Manteo and Wanchese draped themselves in plundered calico and paraded, singing and chanting their high strange music, on the Tyger’s deck. Others piled up what they could use of the Spaniards’ cargo—barrels of wine, crates of cloth, coops of chickens.

  Mr. Harriot and Tremayne came and stood beside him while folks on deck figured their gains. “The ship is new,” Mr. Harriot said. “She’ll bring plenty back home in England! And those fancy prisoners—they’ll bring good ransoms! The Queen and Sir Walter will do well, the investors too. And us, we’ll get shares!”

  “Me?” asked Andrew. “I’ll get a share too?”

  “Indeed you will, same prize money as Tremayne and me,” Mr. Harriot said with a big smile. A shiver of pride went over the boy. His father could use the money.

  They sailed along the Florida channel and up the Virginia coast, stitching past its line of sheltering islands. The pilot said the one they sought lay inside the outer ones. Suddenly Andrew felt the ship turn.

  The heavily laden Tyger rode deep. She needed fifteen feet depth of water for clear sailing.

  Roanoke Island was mostly flat and low, twenty miles long, six across at the widest. On the map it was shaped like one of Pena’s Spanish roots, the plant he called potato. As they approached it, Andrew and one of the ships’ boys were sent to perch far forward on the bowsprit to measure the depth of water. Their weighted lines were marked every half foot. They took turns calling out their soundings to the admiral. It was as they’d been warned: shallows all around.

  It was late afternoon. The admiral was wary. Although they were well off from the island, the ship was already in shallows. The sounders were calling, “Twenty-one!” “Twenty!” then “Eighteen!” when Admiral Grenville ordered, “Drop sail! Drop anchor!”

  As the anchors rumbled out on their chains, a cloud of white cranes rose from the marsh with a cry like an army of men shouting all together. To Andrew, it was a greeting. It thrilled him like hearing that deep organ chord at St. Paul’s Cathedral a year before.

  Tremayne came and stood beside him. The long line of sunset was bright gold shading up to crimson. The breeze carried a sweet scent of tidewater and sun-warmed marsh. The man who had been his teacher smiled and shook his head. “Do you remember when I saw you off to London, I asked you to bring me news? You did better! You brought me to the news!”

  29

  SHIPWRECK!

  At dusk, from the Tyger’s deck, they saw Indians onshore. Admiral Grenville made signs of greeting, but the Indians ran away. That night, on board, they heard a harsh, wavering conch horn signal that carried for miles. “They send news of us,” Manteo explained.

  The gentlemen unpacked their finery to dress for the landing.

  They attempted it early the next morning. Waves and eddies roiled the channel as the Tyger poked its way. The chart the first exploring captains had made was useless. Storms and drifting sand had changed the inlets.

  Andrew clung to the bowsprit like a spider, legs around, one hand holding as he sounded the channel depths with the other. The vessel pitched and heaved with the rolls of water and the pushing wind.

  “Sixteen!” the boy behind him yelled, calling the number from his marked rope.

  Andrew’s showed less than twelve.

  “Eleven!” he hollered as a huge roller hurled the ship forward.

  The cord in his hand went slack as the Tyger ran aground with a crash like falling timber. It was all Andrew could do to hang on to the narrow spar as he spun like a toy on a stick. Then another wave sent the ship rolling far to port and he was pitched into the churning water along with crates and chunks of broken wood. As he fell in, one of the heavy crates tore his ear and banged his shoulder.

  Roller after roller smacked the Tyger, each one breaking more of her bones. There were yells and screams as rigging snapped like kindling. Gagging on seawater, the boy splashed frantically and fought for breath. His left arm hurt. His boots were pulling him down. Then Pena’s voice came to him: “On your back. Rest. Then make like the frog.”

  He rolled over on his back. It was hard to kick with his boots on. Slowly, he worked them off. Then he rested, panting and vomiting. At last he made like a frog for land.

  Salt! Where was Salt?

  The wind shifted and the ship broke free. The admiral brought her, half sunk, to anchor some distance from the island.

  Two deckhands and the ships’ boy who’d spotted the prize a few days before were missing.

  That afternoon, the sailors began ferrying the explorers to shore in the small boats. Andrew heard there were many injured. He went out to the Tyger to help Tremayne and Mr. Harriot as they worked with the ship’s surgeon.

  They were sent to a sailor whose leg bone was sticking out like a piece of snapped wood. Andrew had watched his mother set such breaks. Tremayne gave the sailor a drink of spirits, then tied him down. The sailor’s groans became howls as the boy used all his strength to force the ends of bone together and then probed the wound to fish out splinters.

  That done, he rinsed the swollen purple mess with strong wine and braced it with splints tied tight around with cords.

  Next was a man with his scalp torn open. Blood gushed when they lifted his bandage. Andrew sewed him up the way you’d stitch shut a sack, loop over and
thread under.

  Tremayne then stitched Andrew’s torn ear. He’d had no practice at this work; his stitching hurt more than the crate’s tearing. He fixed the tear, but he didn’t line it up properly.

  The sailors, meanwhile, ferried to shore what could be saved of the expedition’s food. There wasn’t much. The Tyger’s hold was deep in brine. The barrels of flour were soaked, the dried meat and stockfish all spoiled.

  A gentleman fussed about damage to his yellow silk suit.

  They were one hundred four explorers. With what they’d saved and counting the supplies not needed on the other ships, they had food for twenty days. The Tyger had carried most of their stores because the admiral feared the crews’ stealing. The best of what they had left was cheese. Andrew had never liked cheese.

  Right then he didn’t think about their difficulties. The place was beautiful, unlike any he’d ever seen, flat and noisy in constant sea wind, slap of water, rustling reed meadows along the shore, thick green brush a little ways inland, then immense oaks bearded with silver moss. Cypress grew tall out of the water; there were groves of great spiked cedar trees. The soil was black and sandy. He scooped up a handful and made a ball. It held. He sniffed it and tasted it. I can grow anything in this, he thought. Near the fort, there were trees blooming white blossoms large as saucers. A gray and white bird mocked his whistle; when it flew, it looked like a wheel turning.

  Exhausted and half sick from salt water as he was, Andrew had never felt happier in his life. A glow of pride and relief warmed him. “I made it,” he said to himself. “I made it to America!”

  Manteo and Wanchese showed the explorers how to cut fragrant cedar boughs for their beds. As Andrew and Tremayne worked, the wind and swamp smells filled their heads. There were whitecaps on the gray-brown water. The water glinted like silver from the silt in it. Strange birds sang. Some were red, some blue with touches of black. In the warm sunlight, the air was heavy with green and growing.