A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  “There is a balsam that can be collected in those woods,” the old man says. “In 1595 I got quite a bit from Wannawanare’s people. This time I had just got about a little nutful when I went ashore. The sweetest thing you ever smelled. Like angelica. For twenty years that smell has been with me. But then they opened up on us.”

  “You have to forget about things like that now. We won’t be allowed to land.”

  “And the oysters. Little ones growing on the roots of the mangrove below water. You could hack away a piece of mangrove root and bring away a dozen oysters, all alive. Sweet oysters, sweeter than anything you ever tasted. And the rain water in the hollows of the Pitch Lake. You can taste the tar in it, but that is part of the sweetness of the water.”

  “You torment yourself, and other people, by talking of those things. Sweet things. How many of them you promised us when we were coming out! You talked a lot about a cassava liquor.”

  “I remembered it from 1595. Right here. On this Guiana coast. The Indian women chewed the cassava and spat it out into a vessel. In England women are the brewers, and so they are here too. Or were. I don’t know what happens now. I haven’t gone to their villages. The chewing of the cassava was woman’s work, because long ago they found out that woman’s saliva caused cassava to ferment fast. You wouldn’t imagine it when you saw a group of them sitting flat on the ground and chewing and spitting into a hollowed-out piece of tree trunk, and giggling when they saw you looking at what they were doing. The first time I saw Moriquito’s women doing it, it looked so strange, I stopped and asked, and they all roared with laughter, and I thought they were joking. But when it was ready it made the clearest and the sweetest liquor you ever tasted. Sweeter than any nut, finer than any ale. On drinking occasions the chiefs took their leisure in their hammocks, swinging from side to side in the shade of trees in their villages. Because it’s cool there, in the woods, not as hot and sweaty as it is here on the ship in the Gulf. And the women served this nectar to their chiefs, filling tiny cupfuls at a time with little ladles. Such women. Plump, and as fine as any well-bred woman in England. White skins, regular features, black hair.”

  “That was what you told us almost as soon as we left the Canaries, to give us courage for the crossing, after the trouble we had with the Spaniards there, and after that captain deserted with his ship.”

  “What scum. All that fighting aboard the ships even before we had left England. What scum. When that man deserted, I was half with him, to tell you the truth. But there was no place for me to go. I had to stay with the expedition. I had begged for it for so long, and when it came it was like something with its own life, quite separate from me. Something to which I simply attached myself. And then the sickness—all those men sick and dying in our new ship. All those friends. I haven’t even begun to grieve for them. I am frightened to be left alone with grief now. I feel it will take me over. My own cook, Francis—he died. The gold expert I had, a man who was the best gold refiner in London, Fowler—he too died. They all died. The ship began to stink with sick people who couldn’t move and the corpses I had to bury.”

  “And you kept everybody’s spirits up by talking to them about this paradise on this side of the ocean. Not only gold, but fresh water and fresh food, and the friendly beautiful people, waiting for you to be their king.”

  “I was ill, too. Fever. Three shirts a day, three shirts a night. All wringing wet. And there were days of calm when we didn’t make above six leagues, and the sun hung above us in the sky and in the afternoon the sea seemed to blaze with the glitter. I wasn’t well. The expedition had its own life. I just surrendered to it and it dragged me through one day after another. I wasn’t willing anything. I was in no position to do anything like that.”

  “Ten ships full of sick and dead people. And when we arrived we saw a Dutch ship, very calmly trading. Hatchets and knives and bits of metal, for tobacco and salt and hides. And we were full of sick and dead men looking for gold. Aren’t you amazed that the men who were still able-bodied didn’t mutiny, and ask where you had led them? You were supposed to have led them to a mysterious part of the world that none in England or Spain or the Indies knew about. And when we got to this place Captain Janson was trading, and you had yourself carried ashore in your shirt, to breathe clean air, to recover, and then to bury your dead. And all the while the little Indian canoes were going out to the Dutchman. The people who were going to be your subjects. They speak Spanish and Dutch. They don’t speak English. They haven’t come to you.

  “Why did you tell so many people that you could be king of the Indies? You made them expect so much when they came here. They had suffered so much on the journey. We had suffered so much, all of us. I thought the chiefs would come out to meet you and honour you. The fresh, sweet water, the little cupfuls of liquor, those women, the fresh food. The deer and the fish and the oysters. Nothing happened. We lived on what we had. Your lieutenant Keymis sent an interpreter to the nearest village to ask for your two Indian servants. Servants. Not chiefs. But the people you took away to England in 1595, to show them off.”

  “Also to learn the language from them.”

  “We waited for two weeks. The man you called Leonard never came.”

  “He was never in good health. He must have died. I sent him back ten or twelve years ago. He wanted to die at home.”

  “After two weeks a canoe came with a sick old man dressed up in old English clothes. A barefoot old Indian scarecrow in English rags. With the few teeth in his head blackened with the tobacco they use here to quell hunger when they go on a journey. Broken pieces of cassava bread lying about the canoe, and black tobacco rolls, and the rest of his food carefully wrapped up in a leaf. We thought we were going to witness the meeting of two chieftains. Fine clothes, feathers, an Indian standard. We witnessed the meeting of two old men. And you couldn’t talk to Harry, because he had forgotten his English.”

  “I was surprised by that. He spent fourteen years with me. I was hoping he would have married someone in England. But he became homesick. He had an Indian bandeau, cotton, blue and white. When the homesickness really came on him, he would tie that around his forehead and he would sit facing the wall. He often did that in the Tower. He wouldn’t talk or move or close his eyes. He could do that for a whole day, until the homesickness left him. It was terrible to see. I sent him back here with William Harcourt. That was nine years ago. He wanted to take back a lot of English clothes. He liked clothes.”

  “The men were close to mutiny that day. I don’t think you know how close. And that day or the next you sat in this cabin and wrote to your wife that your name lived among the Indians, and that you could be their king. That was one of the letters a ship went back with.”

  “I didn’t know my letters were being read.”

  “It would have been negligent for them not to be. This big expedition, all these deaths. All this potential for trouble when we want peace. We have to know what you intend. And you know that your letters are copied and passed around in England to your supporters.”

  “I knew there was a spy with me. I wasn’t sure who he was. All the weeks before the sickness I tried to work it out. I didn’t think it was you. I thought it was John Talbot, my friend from the Tower. Then he died from the sickness, and I thought there wasn’t a spy any more. He was one of the men we had to bury here. A good man, I always thought. A scholar, too. Eleven years with me in the Tower. He wanted to get out. I couldn’t blame him for that. I didn’t mind him being the spy.”

  “He’s been useful to us, in fact.”

  “My examination has begun?”

  “It was high time. We’ve been here two months. We’ve lost so many men. On all expeditions you lose people, but we’ve lost too many. Food is running short. You’ve sent five ships and four hundred men up the river. We have no means of knowing what has happened. That Indian you seized and sent up in the boat hasn’t returned, and I don’t think he will. All the other Indians we see keep well clear of us
. On the Trinidad side of the Gulf the Spaniards are watching with their muskets to prevent us from landing. We have no means of knowing what has happened on the other side, on the river, at that settlement of San Thomé. We know that the Spanish governor went there from Trinidad, no doubt to fortify the place. This governor’s a new man. He was specially sent out from Spain. He is not one of the old colonial crew. He’s a nobleman, a relation of the Spanish ambassador in London. We have no means of knowing what’s happened to your lieutenant Keymis or your son. Or the five ships you sent, and the four hundred men. Clearly something has happened. You can tell it. You can feel it in the air. In a little while we are likely to find out, but then neither you nor I may be in a position to sit and talk.”

  “Don’t you want pen, paper? Aren’t you going to write anything down?”

  “Not at this stage. Though I always prefer to work with a written statement. Unless you write things down, you miss a lot. Certain things that people say can reveal their meaning only if you can read them again and again. The words physically have to be in front of your eyes. It’s the only way you can discover things. Simple things, to start with. Like: ‘But I don’t understand that sentence.’ Or: ‘How did we get from there to there?’ Especially with someone like you, very skilled with words. But in fact both you and Laurence Keymis have made quite detailed statements many years ago. You both wrote books about Guiana and El Dorado and your discoveries. Richard Hakluyt reprinted them in his own compilation. It was something that John Talbot, your Tower friend, put us on to. He said, ‘It’s all there. Study those books from twenty-two years ago. Dissect them.’

  “I tried reading them in England before the journey, but I found it hard. I got lost with all the strange Indian and Spanish names, of people and places and tribes. You gave too many names: I must tell you that made me suspicious.

  “There was no question of reading on the journey, especially after the sickness. I’ve begun to read only since we’ve been in the Gulf, and really only since Keymis and your son went off to look for the gold mine of El Dorado. We’ve had a lot of time since then, a lot of empty days. Sunlight from six to six. Even so I have to read your book again and again. It’s a slippery piece of work, if I can use that word. You slip about, you lose your footing. It’s nice and easy and clear and brilliant for a number of pages, and then suddenly you feel you’ve not been paying attention. You feel you’ve missed something. So you go back. You’ve missed nothing. It’s just that something’s gone wrong with the writing. This happens many times. So even if you’re a careful reader you lose the drift of the narrative. It’s not easy, noticing first of all that the writing has changed and then finding exactly where. But those are precisely the places you have to identify. Because those are the places where the writer decides to add things or to hide things.

  “One of the more extraordinary things in your book occurs in the ‘Advertisement,’ a kind of preface which you print between the letter of dedication and the book itself. It’s very bold, very effective, to place something so important in that half-way-house place, where people don’t read all that carefully. You say you wrote the Advertisement in reply to people who all those years ago, when you went back to England, said you were lying about El Dorado, that you’d found nothing, that the so-called ‘ore’ you brought back was really sand and that the piece of Guiana gold you showed was something you had bought beforehand in North Africa. The tone of the Advertisement was manly and honest. You stated very clearly what your detractors said. And then in a very open way you appeared to give an explanation. You said that you’d sent forty of your men to look for gold ore. They brought back sand. Not all the same sand. Men chose different colours. You told them it was sand they’d brought back, but the men for various reasons insisted on keeping it and bringing it back to England, and you allowed them to do so.

  “But there is no mention of this sand-collecting episode in the book itself. I am not able to say when your men were ordered to go and collect this ore. It seems from this that if your enemies or other people hadn’t said you were lying and had brought back sand from Trinidad and Guiana, we would never have known about the forty men who at your orders went and looked for golden sand and brought it back to the ships.

  “So in London, when people began to ridicule and doubt, you produced the piece of North African gold and said it was from Guiana, from some mountain of gold and diamonds beside a turbulent river. You weren’t going to be proved a fool. A traitor, a pirate, someone in league with the king of Spain—better any of that than to be a fool, a clown. After Drake and Hawkins, to be a clown privateer and explorer—that would have been worse than death.

  “We do things for all kinds of reasons. Some of these reasons can appear quite trivial. And it may be that one of the reasons—just one, perhaps—at the bottom of this venture—so chivalric now, at the limit of the world, so heroic, so doomed to failure, an old man’s nobility—bringing us all here, at the cost of so many lives—it may be that one of the original reasons for this might have been your wish all those years ago to prove that you weren’t a fool, that you hadn’t brought home a cargo of sand as a cargo of gold.

  “When you showed the North African gold, people asked why you hadn’t brought back more from this fabled land of El Dorado. Of course you didn’t have the money to buy more. But you say in your Advertisement rather sharply that no one has the right to ask you for more. You go on to say that you didn’t have the time or the tools or the men when you were on the river of El Dorado. The gold had to be hacked away from very hard rock. And people accepted that, though you had prepared for the expedition for years, and had so many men and ships. You had captured the Spanish conquistador who had been on the El Dorado quest and you had picked his brains, and you had gone to look for the mines. It was strange then that, after all of this, you didn’t have the tools, you didn’t have the time. You say the river tide was running so fast you couldn’t stay too long on the banks, and you were far from your ships and you had left them unprotected.

  “So all you took back to England was a lot of marcasite sand. I will tell you something else that made the sand business so shameful. Some Frenchmen had done the same thing and had been laughed at. And then, weeks before you, a young English nobleman had done the same thing too. Sir Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester’s son. He had gone to Trinidad. He had asked Indians on the Gulf beach about a gold mine. Just like that. As soon as he arrived. Not knowing the language or anything. And he thought the Indians had made signs to say yes, there was a gold mine just a short way up the beach. They went in full armour and saw the glittering marcasite in the sand. For three days Dudley’s men loaded up with sand. The Spaniards saw, but didn’t trouble them. And then young Dudley left, because you were coming, and he was nervous of being found by you in your El Dorado patch.

  “This happened literally just a few weeks before you came to the Gulf, and killed all the Spaniards. While you were exploring the Guiana estuaries Dudley was taking his marcasite back to England. Captain Wyatt wrote up this adventure in very high romantic language. It has been circulated in manuscript. Hakluyt didn’t want to print it. When Dudley was told he had brought back sand, he pretended he had known all along, and had brought the sand back on a whim.

  “That was more or less what you said when you went back with your own load of Trinidad sand. You didn’t know about young Dudley’s adventure. You’d found nothing else. Your book doesn’t say you found anything. You had talked to one or two chiefs, that was all. But you had found nothing. In spite of the title of your book, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana. A difficult book, not easy to read.

  “I think a deliberately difficult book. It’s only here that I understand why the book is so difficult. It’s a deliberate mixture of old-fashioned fantasy and modern truth. Everything you write about this side of the Gulf, the eastern side, the Trinidad side, everything is correct and very clear, every name, every tribe, every little Indian port. Real knowledg
e, real enquiry. On the river side, it’s a different story. When you get down to the main Orinoco, you write about a strange land of diamond mountains and meadows and deer and birds. It’s beautiful, but only like a painting. The book’s like the work of two different men.

  “I think that when you began to travel in Guiana up that river, when you saw what a foolish old man the old Spanish conquistador was, when you saw the poverty of the tribes, you knew that there was no El Dorado. And you hated travelling on the river. I can understand from your writing how hard that kind of travel is. The sun, the airlessness, the constant running aground, the excrement and the food and the cooking all mixed up on the galley, people getting wet and dry and then wet again, the smell of many sweaty men in a small space.

  “You were differently dieted, you said. However much you wanted to be like Hawkins or Drake, you couldn’t do the kind of thing they had done. You never wanted to get too far from your ships and your cabin. But you had killed too many people, you had talked too long about El Dorado, and when you went back to England you didn’t want to appear foolish, with the sand. So you had to stick to the El Dorado story.

  “Unless you had given up on El Dorado when you were on the river, it doesn’t make sense what you did. You left one man with the Indians to go to the city of gold. One man, in the middle of the forest. The Indian chief asked you to leave fifty men, to protect them against the Spaniards. You said no. You left one man. After all that journey and preparation, all those years of reconnoitring. The man you left was a servant, Captain Gifford’s servant, Francis Sparrow. Francis Sparrow, one of the meaner sort you always rail about, was the man who was going to discover El Dorado for you.

  “And to show to people in England where you had been you took the son of the chief Topiawari. You left a boy in exchange. A sixteen-year-old boy, Hugh Goodwin. I don’t know how you could do that. If people had read your book more carefully they would have taxed you with that. Keymis found out the following year what happened to that poor boy. Keymis wrote about it, and we found out from the Spanish reports as well. Before you had even got back into the Gulf that boy had been killed. The Indians told the Spaniards that the boy went out walking in the forest in his English clothes, and a tiger was so maddened by the sight of the clothes that it fell on him and killed him. Sometimes I think it sounds good, sometimes it sounds a mocking Spanish story, sometimes I think it sounds a foolish story. Who knows? Perhaps the Spaniards killed him, perhaps the Indians did. Think of this boy close to tears walking in the forest, in his best clothes, with such goods as he had taken off the ship. Walking in solitude away from the village, after the ships had begun to drift downstream, a hundred miles a day.