by Robert Nye
The Indian nodded slowly. His head is large and round, his dark eyes full of wit and intellection.
‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘I used to be the servant of Don Diego Palomeque de Acuna.’
‘And I used to be the servant of a very great Queen,’ I said. ‘I was the Captain of her Guard.’ ‘Yes,’ the Indian said. ‘I knew that.’
‘Did you? Who told you?’
The Indian said: ‘It is common knowledge. When I first came to San Thome in Palomeque’s service, I was told that you had journeyed up the Orinoco many years ago. I was told that you had gathered all the tribes together and told them that you had been sent by your Queen to set them free from the Spaniards. They spoke of you with awe. They said that you were the servant of a Queen who was the great Casique of the North, a virgin Queen who had more casiques under her than there are trees in the island of Trinidad.’
‘Casique,’ I said. ‘It is a long while since I heard that word.’
‘It is what the Spaniards call the cHicfs of our tribes.’
‘I know. What else did the people of the Orinoco say?’
‘That you would one day return,’ the Indian replied. ‘That you had given your word to do so.’
‘Which word I kept.’
‘Of course,’ said the Indian matter-of-factly. ‘Men do not give their word often. When they do, they keep it.’
I could detect no irony in his tone. Indeed, his every phrase was straightforward and considered and came with a power of truth behind it. There is a definite nobility about this Indian which strikes me forcibly. I was curious about his background, but held my tongue. For the moment, for my part, I saw my task as to win his confidence.
‘I am no longer the servant of that great Queen,’ I admitted. ‘Queen Elizabeth is dead.’
‘Death makes no difference,’ the Indian said. ‘You are still her man.’
This statement took me aback. There was such truth in it. I found I could say nothing for a while. I put one hand on top of the other on the knob of my cane. Both hands were trembling badly with the ague. I was racked by a spasm of coughing. My cane danced and chattered where it touched the deck.
The coughing fit passed.
‘I came back here as the servant of another Casique of the North,’ I said. ‘Kingjames.’
The Indian looked at me impassively. ‘Yet this same King
James kept you for many years in a tower, so I was told by Don Palomeque. You were his prisoner.’
‘Yes.’ I went on hurriedly, not wanting to waste time defending my position by having to explain that the charges of treason brought against me had been rigged by my enemies. ‘But you,’ I said. ‘What are you now?’
The Indian brought his big hands together as though their wrists were shackled.
‘Guattaral’s prisoner,’ he said.
I did not like this answer.
I said: ‘Keymis said you joined us of your own free will.’ ‘The man who looked sideways? He is dead.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Guattaral killed him,’ the Indian said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I saw his body go into the river in the sack this morning.’
I shivered in the sun, recalling the funeral service which could have meant nothing to this Indian. The Reverend Mr Samuel Jones had charitably ignored the fact that Keymis, as a suicide, should be denied the proper obsequies of the Church. Somehow, the reduction of that rite to the crude image of a corpse tossed overboard in a sack made Laurence Keymis very vivid in my remembrance. No doubt the sharks would be at him by now. These are pearls that were his eyes. …A pearl with a cast in it.
I said briskly: ‘This isn’t a river. This is a channel of the sea. A very great sea. An ocean. The Atlantic Ocean.’
The Indian looked puzzled. I realised that the concept of any expanse of water wider than a river or a lake was beyond his experience. Wherever he had been before he was captured by the Spaniards and compelled into the service of the Governor of San Thome, it had to have been somewhere inland. His build and stature certainly suggested that his tribe came of mountain stock. But I tried to get back to the point.
‘You are not my prisoner,’ I insisted. ‘You came back down the river because you wanted to. Why did you want to?’
The Indian leaned his broad shoulders against the spindle of the capstan. He did not answer my question. He said nothing for a while. When he spoke at last it was as if he had measured in his head what I had said to him and decided, on balance, that the conversation was worth continuing. All the same, he addressed himself not so much to me as to the spice-laden breeze which blew across the estuary from the mainland.
‘Guattaral did not kill the man who looked sideways?’ ‘That is correct,’ I said. ‘Keymis killed himself.’ ‘Why?’ the Indian asked softly.
I said: ‘Keymis killed himself because he no longer wished to live. Because he had lost his honour. Do you understand that? Honour?’
The Indian looked me straight in the eyes.
‘I understand honour,’ he said. ‘I know honour. My people are a proud people. We had our lands before the Incas came.’
‘Where are they?’ I said. ‘The lands of your tribe?’
The Indian hesitated for a moment. Yet his silence seemed inspired by deliberation rather than any uncertainty. His eyes became incalculable. He said: ‘Around Lake Guatavita.’
The word for some reason sent a shiver down my spine. It was not the ague, I swear it.
‘Guatavita?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘I have never heard of this Lake Guatavita. It must be far away?’
‘Yes.’
‘Over the mountains? To the west?’
‘Yes.’
It was in my mind, of course, to ask him if there was gold in that region. But the moment was wrong. I sensed that by the way his eyes had darkened, the wit drained out of them, as though they now looked inward, dwelling upon some image in his head rather than upon me, his interlocutor. I saw that I would have to win his confidence before I could put any questions to him about the possibility of gold in the lands that he came from. I admit that it occurred to me also that it would be useless to try to torture such information out of him. The Spaniards had crucified Indians in their quest for El Dorado. They had not obtained a single jot of worthwhile information by such methods.
I contented my curiosity by saying: ‘Then how is it that you came to San Thomé?’
The Indian said nothing. But he hung his head and for the
first time in my brief experience of him there was something like shame in the way he held himself.
‘Don Palomeque,’ I pursued, ‘what was he like?’
The Indian spat.
But he still remained silent.
I said: ‘I take it that Palomeque was a bad master. So you are better off now? You were glad that my soldiers killed him? Is that why you came back with Keymis?’
The Indian wears a curious pointed cap on his head. It looks as if it were woven from the grey fibres of some plant - the cabuya perhaps. He removed this cap from his head and smoothed his hair with his hand. His hair is as black as a raven’s wing, and as glossy, worn long, reaching down to his shoulders.
‘Guattaral is mistaken,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘His soldiers did not kill Palomeque.’
This statement astonished me. I was speechless.
‘Palomeque was killed by his own,’ the Indian went on. ‘There were those in the Spanish fort who wanted Guattaral to take it without bloodshed. There were those who hated Don Diego. Who would have opened the gates for Guattaral’s men without fighting. But Guattaral’s son ran forward shouting in the moonlight—’
I turned on my heel. I did not want to hear any more. At the top of the stairs leading to my cabin something made me stop and look back at the Indian. He had put his cone-shaped cap back on his head. He was gazing up at the sun with wide open eyes. I never saw anyone do that before without going blind.
*
This evening I could stand it no longer. I dined in my cabin with my nephew George. He had charge of our land forces that went up the Orinoco. To be brief, he held that command because he was older than Wat, and possesses courage and initiative. But, truth to tell, nephew George has precious little else to commend him. He is a boisterous beef-witted creature, with the manner of an overgrown schoolboy. If he keeps a stiff upper lip it is only to hold up his weak flabby chin.
When I put it plainly to George that Keymis had said that my son was responsible for the fighting at San Thomé, he denied it at first. Then I asked him if it was true that the Governor of the fort had been killed by his own men. He blustered, thumping the table with his clenched fists. I persisted in pursuit of the truth. He grew dangerously quiet, then broke down and wept like a child and admitted all.
It appears that in the first place he and Keymis were dominated by Wat from the moment our party passed out of my sight. It was Wat who insisted on pushing so far up the river.
There was a strong adverse current. They proceeded slowly. Captains Wollaston and Whitney ran their ships aground (George thinks deliberately) on a sandbank. They did not rejoin the expedition until after the fall of San Thome. Keymis was volubly uneasy but ineffectual. George was brow-beaten by Wat, who taunted him for being a coward when he expressed doubts concerning their venture. As for the men - they were cockscombs and couldn’t care less whose orders they half-obeyed just as long as they had a prospect of getting some loot out of it.
As they drew nearer San Thome, Keymis pulled himself together and conferred secretly with George behind Wat’s back. They sent spies on ahead. The spies came back with news that there was widespread and profound hatred of Palomeque, who ruled the fort like a tyrant. There was a faction in San Thome willing to betray him and arrange a peaceful surrender - especially since the fort contained only about forty soldiers fit for active service, and our forces (even without the contingents aground on the sandbank) numbered over two hundred. The leader of the Spanish conspirators was one Geronimo de Grados. We were to advance and pretend to attack, but the siege would be a game - under cover of which Palomeque could be killed by his own men.
Late in the afternoon of the 2nd of January our squadron anchored at the creek called Aruco some three miles this side of the town. Troops were disembarked. Then the three remaining ships sailed on upstream until they came exactly opposite San Thome, where they dropped anchor. The ships were promptly fired on by two mortars, no doubt on Palomeque’s orders, but the mortars missed, perhaps because Grados had supervision of their firing. Meantime our soldiers marched in battle order straight at San Thome until they were within half a mile of it. George then ordered a halt. He and Keymis were confident that the faction within the town would open the gates for them.
Darkness fell. Tensions mounted. George found it hard to keep our soldiers in check. It was even harder, he says, to stop Wat from precipitate action. He claims that at this point he told Wat of the plot he and Keymis had hatched with Geronimo de Grados. Wat scoffed at it. But he consented to wait in hope that the dissident Spaniards would either fling open the gates, or give our English some signal for the mock-siege to begin.
Nothing happened.
My nephew claims that Wat then started drinking. It is not impossible. His usual habit, like my own, was not to drink, but I can believe that at this moment, alone with himself in the heart of the dark continent, and about to be put to the test, Wat might have reached for the wine bottle. Impatience would be burning him up, and how was he to know whether Keymis and his cousin had not been misled by the Spanish conspirators? At such a time, in such a situation, had I been his age I can imagine that I could have sought solace in alcohol. None knows better than I, it is terror that holds a man sober. Terror of what is within. When equal terrors threaten from without, then drink can seem a suitable way of meeting them. I can say this because I have been damnably drunk in my day, and lived to regret it. For many years now I have drunk water where others drank wine, and held myself sober when others fell down. Yet, as I say, I can sympathise too much with my poor son to condemn him if indeed it is true that as my nephew says he reached for the bottle.
Drunk or sober, just before one o’clock in the morning of Saturday the 3rd of January it all got too much for Wat. He went wild. He charged forward on his own, sword in hand, straight at the Spanish quietly sitting watching the English line in the starlight. As he ran he shouted, George reports, and the exact words he shouted were: Come on, my hearts! Here is the mine that you must expect! They that look for any other mine are fools!
According to my nephew, Wat did not die (as Keymis said) with a dozen Spanish pikes in him. He was cut down by a Spanish captain, one Arias Nieto. Our trash of soldiers then lost their heads and flung themselves into attack. Keymis and my nephew did their best to honour the pact with the rebel Grados and his party. Finding that they could not contain their own troops, they shouted out for Grados to identify himself before it was too late. This he did, pointing out (George claims) places and persons not to be fired at. But the men fought and fired indiscriminately, storming the gates, gaining entrance and burning several buildings to the ground. Grados and his followers ran away. We lost their trust, my nephew claims, first because of Wat’s wild individual action, and then because our soldiery were plainly out of control.
In any event, our forces outnumbered the Spaniards many times over, and the fort was easily taken. The fighting was over in a matter of minutes.
Keymis found Palomeque dead in the square. He had a hatchet between his shoulder-blades, and the left side of his head had been split open down to the teeth. His body (curiously) had been stripped naked, and his uniform was nowhere to be discovered. An Indian woman identified him at dawn. Also a Spanish priest named Francisco de Leuro, who was a cripple and so unable to run away with the others. There is apparently no doubt that it was Palomeque. He was a great gross man, much larger in girth and stature than anyone else in the fort. George reports that neither the priest nor the remaining Indians and black slaves made any display of grief over his corpse. It seems that the Governor was hated and feared by just about every inhabitant of San Thome. There had even been an attempt to murder him some weeks before our coming, on the part of a Captain Francisco de Salas. Unfortunately, neither Salas nor Grados nor any other Spaniard was prepared to trust us now. Keymis and my nephew took possession of a fort that was deserted save for the priest, the Indian servants, and the blacks.
Some of our scum were already trying to rape the Indian girls. George claims that he put a stop to this only at pistol point.
It was Keymis who found the Indian Christoval in a room in the Governor’s house, where he had been left to guard a chest containing the documents relating to Spanish attempts to mine gold in the region, plus the letters from Madrid sent out to warn the outpost of our coming, which bundle included the lists of ships and men written in my own hand and given to King James who had promptly passed them on to Gondomar, the Spanish Ambassador in London. The chest also contained the two small ingots of gold which were all that Keymis fetched back of that commodity.
My nephew tried to belittle the whole thing. ‘A mere skirmish,’ he called it, reminding me that on our side there were only two men killed besides Wat - Captain Cosmor and Mr Harrington. (Captain Thornhurst was badly wounded, but has made a gradual recovery.) As for the Spanish, George insists that apart from Palomeque there were only two other casualties: the Captain Arias Nieto already mentioned as the slayer of my son, and a captain identified by the Indians as one Juan Ruiz Monge. These seem to have been the only Spaniards who remained sufficiently loyal to the Governor to lay down their lives in defence of the fort.
(So: The dead amounted merely to six persons. But I can take no comfort from such arithmetic. Even if the odious Palomeque was murdered by his own men, that leaves two Spaniards killed by us. Which is two Spaniards too many. And one of our English dead was of course Wat)
I asked George what he thought had happened to Grados and the others who deserted. He replied that he had good reason to suppose that they retreated in the direction of the Caroni Falls. If that is true it would account for Keymis’s failure to open up the mine there. Grados was not pro-English, my nephew surmises, he was simply pro-Grados. He was probably using us to help him get rid of Palomeque. George suggests that it might then have loomed in the mind of this Grados that it was important, when any Spanish reinforcements came up the Orinoco, that such reinforcements would not suspect that he (Grados) was in any way responsible for the killing of the Governor. Therefore he could hardly have returned to parley with us, even if he had wanted to. Such mental abilities as my nephew possesses are predominantly military, and this reasoning convinces me as likely.
There were a few more ‘skirmishes’ during the 29 days our troops occupied San Thome. The history of those days, as recounted by George, is altogether miserable. Keymis went around trying to tease information out of those remaining Indians and blacks who spoke Spanish. He learned nothing of the slightest use from this exercise. He vacillated terribly, knowing that he must write to me but unable to summon up the spirit to tell me the appalling news. On more than one occasion he confided in George, announcing that he contemplated suicide, that he was in the position of one who feels he dare not even shut his eyes to sleep, and so forth. My nephew was not sympathetic. All the captains, he says, himself included, were waiting for Keymis to do something. In particular, they expected him to lead them to the mine. But Keymis protested that it was no easy matter to go out into the jungle and locate it. He also remarked to George that if he marched the men out at the head of a column and then confessed that he had lost his bearings, the oafs would go beserk. It appears that he decided to obviate that risk by venturing out one night with a hand-picked squadron of his own, probably up the Caroni River in the direction of the Falls. He brought back a little mineral ore which he showed to George and to the wounded Captain Thornhurst. The ore was tried by a refiner. It proved worthless, and was no more spoken of.
