The Voyage of the Destiny

by Robert Nye

  My birthday boy, I repeat myself. An old man’s privilege. And I am grown suddenly old just today, in the last few hours. Old enough to repeat that this voyage was wrong from the start. Ill-fated. Bad-starred. The sea at the bow of my Destiny like boiling copper when it wasn’t becalmed and like milk that’s gone sour in the churn. Forked lightning following us. Fire-flags of it wrapped round our masts. Tornadoes. Typhoons. Five days we sailed through sweltering tawny mist like a lion’s breath. Two days we had to steer by candlelight and the flickering of torches stuck at the stem and stern through fog so thick and black you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Some of the men swore then that we’d reached the world’s end. By God, it made them say their prayers with more attention. And they sang a psalm when we came out beyond the world’s end. Like choirboys they were then. Singing a psalm of thanksgiving as the watch was set. Jailbirds as good as gold.

  Ingots.

  At San Thome also, Keymis reports in his letter, he found this parcel of papers in the Spanish Governor’s house. Plans of our voyage, sent out by King James to the King of Spain via the spy Gondomar. Lists of my ships and my ships’ companies in my own handwriting. To be so betrayed by one’s own Sovereign Lord I have been a pawn in the King’s game with Spain. Very well then: a knight.

  Wag— The pen wrote it, the heart spoke it when my head intended Wat. And that’s right for I called him the wag in a poem once, and at other times too, for he was a wag, my son the elder, and a wild one.

  Wat, as I must make an end of saying, is dead.

  And as for Wat’s father?

  I shall not soon be dead. There is no call for me to kill myself. Sir Walter Ralegh is dead already. A man dead in law these 14 years, convicted of a treason he did not commit, never yet executed by him who most desires his death.

  A dead man writes this book.

  A dead man writing to his posthumous son.

  *

  Big music? Too loud and proud a mouth? Just what my enemies would expect of me?

  Carew, once upon a time there was a song they used to sing in the streets of London:

  Ralegh doth time bestride,

  He sits twixt wind and tide.

  Yet uphill he cannot ride—

  For all his bloody pride!

  Perhaps they sing it still? Or will again? All the same—

  Pride?

  The first and worst and deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins, of course. And I have been damnably proud in my day. But it’s not my day now.

  When my critics said pride what did they mean? They meant that I had come from next to nowhere, that my father was nobody, that I had no claim by birth on the world’s attention, and no grip on its slippery surface either. I made my own way in the world, and there are those who cannot forgive a man that.

  Sometimes I could hardly forgive myself. Yes, there have been moments when that was true too. I’ll have to try to come to them as best I can in this telling. But pride?

  I’d a nag called that once. And her riding was always uphill.

  I started life as a bare gentleman, you see. The fifth and youngest son of an English squire. No title. No great fortune. Plain and ordinary as cider. No advantages. Yet sprung from one of the oldest families in Devon.

  My father owned a small farm, a few green fields, some boats for fishing. A particular patch of England. He also owned himself. As Raleghs do.

  My father married three times. My mother married twice. Katherine Gilbert, widow of Otho Gilbert. She was bom Cham-pernown. Daughter of Philip Champernown of Plymouth.

  You never knew your grandparents, Carew. I have two stories to give you some hint or print or likeness of what they were. Two stories that say something of our blood. Of what I have inherited from them, and you (perhaps) have inherited from me along with many qualities which properly derive from your dear mother, my wife Bess.

  My father, first.

  One Sunday morning he was riding to Exeter from our farmhouse at Hayes Barton, near Budleigh Salterton, when he met an old woman with a rosary in her hands. This was in 1549, five years before I was born. The Roman rite was about to be abolished in England, Latin removed from our church services, and the Book of Common Prayer introduced. My father took an interest in these matters. No theologian, you understand, he was all the same a man who liked to think for himself, and who was therefore not displeased to see England get out from under the Pope’s slipper.

  ‘Madam,’ he says, ‘you’re in danger.’

  ‘What danger?’ demands the woman.

  ‘The new laws,’ my father explains. ‘That rosary makes you look like an enemy of the reformed faith. I’m not criticising. I’m just warning. No beads. No holy water. I’ve heard from London. People are going to be punished for such things.’

  ‘Punished?’ the woman says. ‘How?’

  ‘By death, I believe,’ says my father.

  My father doffs his hat and he rides on.

  The old woman runs into the nearest church flapping her arms and she screams:

  ‘Mr Ralegh! Mr Ralegh! He’s going to throw mud on our altars and murder us all in our beds if we don’t give up God!’

  The people broke out of that church like some sort of wasps. They chased after my father where he rode innocently on his way to Exeter. He had to hide all night in a bell tower, thunder and lightning around him outside, to escape from their foolish fury.

  Alas, my poor father. But, Carew, do you understand me any better? And I wonder did I understand him?

  Then, when I was three years old or so, and Mary Tudor brought back all the hocus pocus of the Roman Church, another old woman was tried for heresy at Exeter. A very different old woman. Her name was Alice Prest. Alice Prest was not famous. She was no Cranmer, no female Latimer or Ridley. You’ll find her in no book of Protestant martyrs. But she refused to go wriggling or crawling back through the narrow Latin gate.

  My mother got to hear of the case. She thought that she might save this woman’s life. She went to visit Alice Prest in prison.

  ‘Just say your creed, my dear,’ my mother begged. ‘That’s enough. It will do to save you.’

  ‘The creed?’

  ‘Just the creed. There’s no harm in that, surely?’

  So Alice Prest nods and smiles and recites the creed to my mother and a priest outside listening. But when she comes to the article He ascended into heaven … she stops dead.

  ‘Why do you stop?’ asks my mother.

  ‘Because I believe it,’ says Alice Prest.

  ‘So you should,’ says my mother. ‘And so do I. So now go on.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ says Alice Prest. ‘I believe it. He ascended into heaven. Jesus did. I believe it. And so I believe that Our Lord’s blessed body is in heaven, not here on earth. He isn’t here in anything men can make with their hands. The bread of the mass can’t be His body, don’t you see? Our Lord is in heaven.’

  My mother came home to my father.

  ‘I couldn’t answer her reasoning,’ she told him. ‘And she cannot read, and I can.’ They burned Alice Prest. Two small stories. My father and my mother. Who made me, who made you….

  My only son, now that I have written those two stories down I cannot see the page for tears. They tell it all. My telling. What I have to tell, to define, to tease out from my own life. The infinite capacity we Raleghs have for being misunderstood, or for understanding too well for any useful action. When I was not being chased by ignorant crowds like wasps, I stood with my sensitive back to the burning of the Alice Prests of this world. On these twin poles I have been broken. On this rack I have stretched myself. Nor has it always been to my discomfort. That is my measure.

  I’ll write no more.

  Stop this.

  But what is Keymis doing up the river? Has he found a mine or not? And is he working it? Can gold bring Wat back? Of course not. But gold is what I need now to fill the ship and justify this voyage to King James. And what do I really care about that? About King Ja
mes and his satisfaction? Not a fig. Yet my good name is involved.

  Good name?

  My name is mud.

  The mud that fills Wat’s mouth.

  No more. I shall end my book. End it before it’s begun. I can’t go on.

  2

  3 March

  Keymis came back.

  Keymis came back yesterday at nightfall.

  The sun goes down suddenly in these latitudes. One moment it is there on the horizon, a great burning ball of fire, a huge guinea nailed into the sky with golden nails. The next moment it is gone. Dragged down. Blotted out. Removed as by some black hand. The sun goes and ail is darkness. No twilight. There is never twilight here.

  Keymis is dead. My friend. My lieutenant. My old companion.

  Keymis killed himself, and I drove him to it.

  My son, your father is a murderer. No hero now, as you begin to see. The noble Sir Walter Ralegh conducted himself like a Herod, like a Cain, like a bad actor in a third-rate play at the Globe. Worse. I blamed the whole failure of my life on Keymis.

  Between my first entry in these pages, my first writing, and this dark page, many days have elasped. Hell-hot days, days of raging fever, days when I could not walk the decks of the Destiny and peer across the steamy waters of the estuary without Sir Warham St Ledger or the Reverend Mr Samuel Jones, our ship’s chaplain, there at my side to support me. On any one of those days, or better still in the star-confused nights which followed them, I could and perhaps should have killed myself. I lacked the guts to do it, Carew, and there’s some heroic truth for you.

  When Edward Hastings died on the long voyage out, our surgeon reported that his liver, spleen, and brains were rotten. By God, my liver must be lily-coloured. My spleen is a lump of hard poison. But, instead of blowing out my own brains, I waited for Keymis and the others to return down the river. And then when he came aboard I gave him the hell of my own anguish.

  ‘Where is the gold?’ I said. ‘Where is my son?’

  He stammered something, but I wouldn’t hear him.

  ‘Where is the gold?’ I kept saying. ‘Where is my son?’

  Keymis had a cast in his left eye. He always had that. I was used to it. But it seemed to me then that he was avoiding my looking at him, that he was searching the corners of my cabin for excuses, justifications, anything that would enable him to escape or resist what I saw as my righteous indignation.

  ‘You betrayed me,’ I said. ‘You did not obey orders.’

  He made some garbled noise of protest. I wouldn’t allow him to proceed.

  ‘My instructions were that you should bring back gold from one or the other of the sites known to both of us. I did not tell you to attack a Spanish garrison.’

  He said: ‘They fired first on us.’

  ‘Then you should have retreated. But why were you going for the Caroni mine anyway?’ He stared dumbly at the floor.

  ‘Were you scared to leave the river? Is that it? But damn you, man, even if that’s the case there must still have been some way you could have passed San Thome without a fight.’

  Keymis would not meet my gaze.

  ‘Your son,’ he said.

  There was a silence before Keymis went on.

  ‘Your son died very bravely,’ Keymis said. ‘He charged a line of Spaniards single-handed. He fell with a dozen pikes in him. After that, there was no turning back.’

  I caught him by the neck. I made him look at me.

  ‘Are you claiming it was Wat’s fault that you botched everything? A boy in his twenties? A boy who had never before seen military action?’

  ‘He was your son,’ Keymis said strangely.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Ask Captain Parker,’ Keymis said.

  ‘I will not ask Captain Parker. I am asking you.’

  ‘Your son died, as I wrote in my letter, with extraordinary valour.’

  ‘But he need not - he should not - have died at all,’ I said.

  Keymis said nothing. He was looking away again. His damned eye was like a crab that crawls for corners.

  ‘Is that what you’re driving at?’ I demanded. ‘Are you blaming the storming of the Spanish outpost on my son’s impetuosity?’

  Spittle flew from my mouth with the last word spoken. It ran down Keymis’s cheek. Then I saw that he was weeping. For some reason, his tears made things worse.

  ‘You fool!’ I shouted. ‘You went for the wrong mine! You disobeyed orders! You let my son be killed!’

  ‘Forward,’ Keymis mumbled. ‘He was all for going forward. It was the only word he wanted to hear. Without him, we would never have attempted the attack upon the fort. Ask Captain Parker. He tried to stop him. We all tried to stop him. “Unadvised daringness” - that’s what Parker said it was.’

  I removed my hands from Keymis’s neck. I wiped them on my doublet.

  ‘You are a coward, sir,’ I said quietly. ‘Strange to have known you so long and only now to have discovered the truth about you. A wilful and obstinate coward, sir. You failed to open either mine. You let my son be killed. And now you stand there blubbering and blabbing like a baby, and trying to use my dead boy as a scapegoat. Will you go, sir? Will you get out of my sight?’

  Keymis went.

  I sat and watched a candle burn to nothing.

  Then there was a soft knock at the door of my cabin, and it was the wretched Keymis back again, with a letter in his hand, the ink still wet on it.

  ‘I have written to Lord Arundel,’ he said.

  I said nothing.

  ‘He was a cHicf promoter of your expedition,’ Keymis went on. ‘This letter sets forth my case. Will you read what I have written?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You had better write to the Devil, sir,’ I said. ‘He is more likely to understand your explanations.’ ‘Please,’ Keymis said.

  ‘I will not even look at it,’ I said. Then Keymis turned his face away.

  ‘I will wait on you presently,’ he said in a level voice. ‘And I will give you better satisfaction.’

  He left me. I heard the tread of his feet along the companionway. Then the sound of his cabin door shutting behind him. Then the crack of a pistol shot.

  ‘Keymis!’ I shouted.

  His cabin was next to mine on the poop deck. You could hear through the timbers quite clearly.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he called back. ‘I merely fired off my pistol to clean it.’

  He had not. He had shut himself up in his cabin, and shot himself with a pocket pistol, but the pistol ball only served to break one of his ribs and finding that it had not done the trick Keymis thrust a long knife into his heart up to the handle and died.

  *

  How to make sense of all this? My captains speak of Keymis with implacable contempt. It seems he was never seen to be prospecting for gold. He made himself subservient to my son.

  Was Wat truly to blame for the fiasco at San Thome? It is not important, I think. The taking of the fort was a gross tactical blunder, an irrelevance, but even then - San Thome once taken - there is no excuse for Keymis. He could easily have left a garrison there, if he wanted, and proceeded to the Caroni mine, which is a matter of just a few miles beyond it. No doubt the Spaniards retreated in that direction, to defend their interests, and he was scared of another confrontation. But then why did he venture so far upriver in the first place? Can it really be true that he feared to leave the Orinoco and march inland to Mount Iconuri, to Pu tij ma’s mine?

  There, for the first time I have written down the location of it. Why not? I am not as weak as I was, and I propose to lead a second expedition in person, to journey myself up the Orinoco and bring back gold. If I succeed, if I can go home with only a hatful of gold-bearing ore, then at least I shall have some reputation left. And if I fail? Then I ask for no fitter fate than to lay my bones to rest beside Wat’s in front of the altar of the church at San Thome.

  Two ingots.

  Keymis did bring back with h
im two gold ingots that he found within the fort. Also a number of documents which seem to refer to the existence of the Caroni mine. Also an Indian, sometime personal servant of Palomèque who was the Governor of the fort. This Indian interests me. He speaks good Spanish. His name is Christoval Guayacunda.

  But I do not believe my bones really belong here. I believe I shall lay my bones elsewhere to rest. And my restless flesh and blood and spirit I shall lay out for you, Carew, in these words, these pages, this true book of my life.

  As for its style…. Who lists like trade to try? I wrote that once, long ago, in one of my first poems, penned in commendation of a book called The Steel Glass. The idea of that glass of Gascoigne’s was that it showed truth, not mere reflections. The inward man, the hidden face, not just the usual surface semblance. And that is certainly my ambition here. But the style? My style? Is there indeed a style of the individual voice? Or a more general style of truth to which individual voices aspire?

  I write each sentence as if it were my last. A man might do worse than to write always like that. That’s style. That’s my style. It is also of course the plain fact of the matter, given the conditions I write in. Besides, I always wrote best under sentence of death. The shadow of the axe gave sharp edge to my sentences.

  If I could get just two handfuls of gold—

  Wat is dead.

  Wat lies lapped and shrouded in unnecessary gold. Damn gold. Damn all thought of gold. Without gold, I would still have my son.

  What am I saying? That this voyage was not just ‘wrong’, but mad? That I should never have left the Tower? This obsession with gold, gold, gold. Where did it start? It has something to do with the Queen. Yes, you, Elizabeth, your finger beckoning me. It’s almost as if ’you are upriver there, a glittering golden ghost, Gloriana come back again. And you had my son instead of me. You always liked them young, you glorious bitch. Love likes not the falling fruit from the withered tree. My son, my best piece of poetry, my sacrifice. Water, you called me. You who had nicknames for all your victim lovers.

  Water and gold and blood; my story. Well, your Water is nearly all spilled now, dead Majesty.

  I always needed an end to make a beginning.