The Voyage of the Destiny

by Robert Nye

  Wat was buried with all military honours in the church at San Thome. Captain Cosmor and Mr Harrington were also given decent burial.

  As for Palomeque and his two dead companions, Keymis instructed some Indian women to bury them. But the ground proved too hard. The three corpses were roped together and left in the town square as a warning to those inhabitants of the fort who remained. One night, my nephew says, someone cut the head off Palomeque. Our soldiers were amused. They used it as a football until it fell to bits.

  Keymis spent much of his time cross-questioning the Indians and the blacks. He was obsessed with the idea of getting gold from some deposit already known to the Spaniards. One of the papers in the chest discovered in the Governor’s residence spoke of a barranca further up the Orinoco where there might be gold. Some of the Indians (but not, apparently, the Governor’s servant, Christoval Guaya-cunda, who would say nothing on the subject) told Keymis that this barranca was some six or seven miles upriver past the point where the Caroni flows into it. Two small boats were sent by Keymis to investigate - with gentlemen, soldiers, and sailors aboard. My nephew had command of them. He reports that they got no further than a narrow channel between one side of the riverbank and an island which the Indians called Seiba. There they were fired on. Two of our men were killed, six wounded, and the party retreated to San Thome in confusion. George gives it as his opinion that this was a deliberate ambush, arranged between Grados and his refugees and the Indians who had stayed in the fort.

  Keymis now sank into a state of utter nervelessness and despair. My nephew counts it as some kind of acHicvement that at this point he decided himself to take action, although the action had nothing to do with the search for gold. He took three launches back up the river. The trip was well-managed, from a military point of view, with one boat kept midstream and the other two keeping to the left and right banks respectively. They passed by Seiba island without incident. They took careful soundings of the river as they went, and urged the various Indian tribes which they encountered to rise against their Spanish overlords and prepare for the coming of a great English army. They got as far as the Guarico - covering, George says, a distance of 300 miles in three weeks going up and returning.

  When he got back to San Thome, he found Keymis openly admitting that all had failed in his quest for gold. He says it was Keymis who ordered the fort to be burned down when it became clear that the whole mission had come to nothing. (The crippled Spanish priest perished in this conflagration.) Wollaston and Whitney had turned up from their convenient sandbank. They jeered at Keymis. There was no morale amongst the men at all. The Spaniards were foraging and sniping quite successfully with a consequence that our people were finding it increasingly difficult to get food. More than anything, George says, Keymis seems to have been terrified by the notion that Spanish reinforcements might cut off his only means of retreat - down the Orinoco. Consequently, as soon as the town had been fired, our ships were loaded with what little plunder there was - cHicfly, tobacco, and the contents of the chest found in the Governor’s house - and they hoisted sail under white flags of truce, at Keymis’s insistence, and began the return journey to the sea.

  I asked my nephew why he thought it was that the Indian Christoval chose to join us. He said he had no idea.

  As they came back downriver, Keymis sat huddled in his cloak, his hat pulled down over his forehead, barely saying a word. He broke his silence just once, when he stood up suddenly and started ‘babbling something about Mount Iconuri’ (my nephew’s own phrase).

  Now Mount Iconuri is about 15 miles inland from a point some 25 miles this side of San Thome. In 1595, on my first voyage here with Keymis, an Indian casique called Putijma told me that this mountain is rich in gold. On that same expedition I picked quartz out of the rock with my dagger from a spot on the north bank of the Caroni River, within sight of the Falls. This particular sample was tried by a refiner in London and found to contain a high proportion of pure gold.

  In ‘96 I sent Keymis back to the Orinoco. He reported that the Spanish seemed very interested in the Caroni region, for they had now built a fort (San Thome) within miles of it, which fort commanded the approach by the river. At the same time, he told me that he had been advised by friendly Indians that any gold near the Caroni Falls would be difficult to mine, not only because of the Spanish presence but because the terrain there was not propitious, consisting of hard white spar.

  However, although the casique Putijma was no longer to be found, Keymis told me that other Indians had led him inland towards Mount Iconuri and assured him that there was indeed gold there, so much gold in fact that specimens could be brought back without digging. He showed me grains of gold they had gathered out of the sand of a tiny shallow river, the Macawini, which springs and falls on that mountain.

  When Keymis set out up the Orinoco some three months ago he had clear instructions from me to try Mount Iconuri first, and only to attempt an approach to the other site if all else failed.

  Am I really to believe that he disobeyed those orders just because Wat insisted on pushing upriver direct to San

  Thomé, and only started ‘babbling’ about Iconuri on the way back when everyone had lost faith in him?

  Why did my son not believe in any mine at all?

  Keymis alone could answer the first question.

  Wat the second.

  *

  It is the night watch. A sea of ultramarine darkness. Stars like eyes. I must write calmly and coolly in this tropic lunacy. I must use the past to make sense of the present. My boy, my boyhood.

  Do you imagine, do you fancy, Carew, that your father always thirsted for the sea? Do you picture him in childhood as some avid listening lad, wide-eyed and eager to hear sailors’ tales of their voyages, of the great green deep, of mermaids and Tritons, of galleons and argosies?

  Nothing could be further from the truth,

  I do not care for the sea. I never have.

  To be blunt about it: Your father is a poor seaman. As far back as I can remember, I suffered always from the most disgusting and gut-stretching sea-sickness as soon as I passed out of sight of land. Sir Walter Raleigh, that great captain, would rather go round and about and walk over London Bridge than take a wherry from Southwark to Westminster. It was often remarked on.

  Make what you will of it. I say that only fools love the sea for the sea’s sake. The sea is negligible when it is not cruel. It is nothing, a nothingness the more to be avoided and despised for its always being hungry to appease and satisfy its own deficiencies by stuffing drowning men into its maw. An element without anatomy or lineaments. A salt indefinite-ness.

  Drake and the others? Frobisher? Hawkins? Fine fellows. And fools. Let them and their like love the sea. I leave it to them.

  For myself, I invariably welcomed the prospect of advancing land with a leap of the heart and a widening of the wits if not the stomach. Besides, the sea is boring. I was always too quickly bored.

  Elizabeth was crowned Queen when I was four years old. Strange thought. But there are stranger.

  4

  6 March

  The dockyard rats! They would not return upriver. I tried everything. I commanded. I cajoled. I even offered bribes to the bolder captains. Result: Perfect failure. Not a man there was who was willing to accompany me back up the Orinoco, even when I told them that there was gold to be got without our venturing again as far as the fort as San Thome.

  The plain truth is that they are all afraid. They refused to return up the Orinoco for fear that a Spanish fleet is already under sail across the Atlantic in pursuit of us. They reminded me of the warnings we had from our old Indian friends when we made our first landfall at the Cayenne River last November. It was apparent that early that word had been sent out from Madrid to all the commanders of Spanish settlements in the American continent. The papers which Keymis found in the Governor’s chest at San Thome have served to confirm the worst suspicions of every whey-faced coward that sailed with
me.

  They had one thought and one thought only - to be gone from Punto Gallo before this threatened Spanish armada descended upon us. I held a council of war. Captain after captain stood up and declared that we must fly away before the Spaniards came. My arguments concerning the location of the gold on Mount Iconuri - demonstrated first with a diagram, then on the actual map - cut no ice with them. Some of them drove me to fury by openly doubting the existence of any mine anywhere. They said that I was fevered. So I was. And am. (Though no longer, thank Christ, do I have to change my shirt three times a day as I did when the sweating sickness was at its worst.) In vain I argued that the fever would pass while the gold remained there for the taking. That while man is transitory, gold is eternal. Even Samuel King, the toughest and most loyal of my captains, gave it as his opinion that we should withdraw for a while from Trinidad and review our prospects from the Leeward Islands. So the gold remains virgin. Intact Like you, Elizabeth.

  And I write these words at sea to the north of Grenada, southernmost of the Windward Islands, 140 miles or so south-west of Barbados, having sailed some 85 miles north by west of Trinidad, from Punto Gallo out of the Gulf of Paria and through the Dragon’s Mouth. Our position being 13° north by 61° west.

  Grenada: discovered in 1498 by Columbus who named it Conception.

  Virgin gold.

  Conception island.

  But the worst is still to tell For today, 6 March, while

  we were running with fair fat sails past this isle of Grenada, Captain Whitney and Captain Wollaston broke away with their ships. Deserted. Left my fleet. It is plain that they planned all along to turn pirate. I should have realised this from the moment I learned of their running their vessels aground on that sandbank.

  It galls. It leaves a taste of wormwood in the mouth. Especially Whitney’s defection. For when we were about to set forth in the first place from Plymouth he came to me saying that he lacked funds to man and victual his ship properly, and I valued him so much that I sold my silver plate for him, to meet his bills, and thus ensure his presence in our company.

  I trusted Thomas Whitney.

  I trusted Richard Wollaston.

  And Whitney and Wollaston have spat in my trusting face by turning pirate.

  The arithmetic of treachery. I have only 8 ships left.

  *

  When I was a boy I liked lists. My first piece of writing, at the age of six or so, was a list drawn up for my father, concerning the lease of tithes of fish and larks at Sidmouth. Later, I was fascinated by the lists of ships and cities that you find in Homer. By the lists of knights in Malory. By the lists of who begat who in the Old Testament of the Bible.

  Here, then, I will set down the list of my remaining ships and their captains.

  (1) The Destiny, 500 tons, captained by myself now Wat is dead.

  (2) The Thunder, 150 tons, Captain Sir Warham St Leger.

  (3) The Jason, 240 tons, Captain Charles Parker.

  (4) The Flying Joan, 120 tons, Captain John Chudleigh.

  (5) The Encounter, 160 tons, Captain Samuel King.

  (6) The Southampton, 80 tons, Captain Roger North.

  (7) The Star, 240 tons, Captain Sir John Ferne.

  (8) The Page, a pinnace, 25 tons, Captain James Barker.

  As for the crews of these vessels I have not the heart to bother counting or listing them. They are gallows-birds almost to a man. Those that sailed away with Whitney and Wollaston will no doubt end their days on the gibbet at Cartagena. Those that remain - both soldiers and sailors - are villains just waiting for the right moment to cut their captains’ throats, unless their captains have made known to them their intention to turn corsair at the earliest opportun- ity.

  I have command of a flotilla of turds.

  *

  Carew, I began this book by mocking Alexander. It is time to withdraw that mockery. It is time to attempt to express my own self-doubt.

  If I do not leave giant chairs behind me wherever I go it is because in my most secret heart I have never been sure that I deserved any chair at all.

  As a young man I wore silver armour. Why? Because I could never be certain that my spirit was not some base metal. I needed that silver, that splendour, that show. I used to have pearls loosely sewn on my cloak, so that when I strode through the crowd at Court some of the pearls would scatter. Then I could look over my shoulder with contempt for the small fry who stooped to collect them. But the best pearls were always double-stitched.

  I am trying to say something of my own insecurity, my son. Never believe those who would speak of me only in laudatory terms, as some species of hero. If on occasion I have acted heroically - and I have - then it is because I was always afraid of my own capacity for fear. I have resolved my self-doubt in action. It has looked decisive. It was not. My spring was always the spur of the fear of confusion. The fact of confusion made me determined to resolve my doubt in action.

  One anecdote will give you the picture.

  Very early in my acquaintance with the Queen I remember taking a diamond and scratching on a windowpane the words:

  Fain would I rise, yet fear I to fall….

  It was winter. Through the window was a great garden full of snow and frozen fountains. And Elizabeth read the words, as I had intended that she would, and she took up the diamond from the velvet-covered windowseat where I had chucked it as casually as if it had been a stick of chalk, and she wrote underneath, capping my line:

  If thy heart fail thee, rise not at all.

  So I rose, you will say. Yes, I rose and fell, and rose and fell again. But I rose in the first place because I feared heights.

  How many ‘heroes’ have there been like that?

  More than you think, my son.

  How I detest and despise and mistrust that crude concept ‘hero’ in any case!

  Alexander was a fool. His big chairs.

  And I am a bigger fool with nothing to sit on but a rotting ship on a stinking sea and no gold and my brains broken and my life in ruins.

  5

  12 March

  We have dropped anchor in the Bay of Nevis, in the Leeward Islands, out of the prevailing north easterly trade winds. Nevis is separated from the slightly larger island of St Kitts by a shallow channel only two miles wide at its narrowest point. In form the island is almost round, and from the sea has the appearance of a perfect cone. It reminds me, in fact, of that curious hat which the Indian Ghristoval Guayacunda always wears on his head.

  I have found a medicinal spring which I bathe in regularly. It must come from deep down, a long dark way down, the water, from under the rock. It must start hot down there, sown hot and sulphurous down there under the black, but by the time it comes out in the bank here, in this place I have scooped clean and keep filled with white pebbles like pearls, it is cold and good. My leg likes it.

  My son, I cannot begin to tell you of the beauty of these islands. This new world. New sky. New light like honey and new air like wine.

  My old eyes can delight in it despite their tears.

  These hellish tears that scald the page I write on.

  What do I see but a vision of delight?

  *

  A Vision of Delight Such power in words! And how strange are the twists and turns of memory! For the phrase written down has destroyed the earthly paradise I see. Instead of parrots and parrakeets I hear church bells. The blue sky above me becomes that midnight black over London when the firmament flared alive and was hung with sudden light. There were rockets and Catherine wheels, incandescent squibs and illuminations by the sackful, whizzers and bangers, jumping jacks and little demons, spinning flowers and sparkling towers and sprinkling showers of green and gold stars by the thousand. The fireworks had been set off from long barges, a fleet of them, moored south across the Thames from the Palace of Whitehall where Ben Jonson’s Twelfth Night masque had just finished to polite applause no doubt. A Vision of Delight, that’s what he called it. But I’d lay all Lombard Street to a
china orange that most of the audience found delight as usual only in Inigo Jones’s glittering stage-effects and Nicholas Lanier’s pounding music, both designed to display the talents of George Villiers as dancer.

  Villiers, the King’s catamite, stealing the show with his lovely ridiculous legs.

  Unless it had been already stolen by Pocohontas, ill-fated princess of the Powhatan Indians, newly come to England from Virginia in company with her husband John Rolfe, and sitting as guest of honour on one side of King James on the royal dais.

  Twelfth Night of a year ago, 1617. Now so far away and foreign to me that I could imagine I have been to the moon and back in the meantime.

  Wat was there, that night. Wat always danced attendance on Ben Jonson. It was Wat who told me that King James was all eyes for the splendour of poor Pocohontas’s medicine man, Uttamatamakin, bronzed and rancid with bear-oil in a scanty leather breech-clout. Wat who told me that Queen Anne danced drunkenly with Villiers, then recently created first Duke of Buckingham, down the gold and silver leaf interior of the Banqueting House, and who swore that he heard the Queen cry:

  ‘My dear dog, you know that to be amused is all I ask of life.’ To which Villiers said nothing, just dancing. But Queen Anne went on:

  ‘You must promise me that you’ll do something about it. Why, in just a month that wretched ship of his has become the most fashionable lounge in London. More crowded than Paul’s Walk. And I’ve begged on my bended knees, my dear, but the old sow positively refuses to let me visit. He won’t even name him, or hear his name. He calls him the man all the time.’

  The old sow being her husband James, by the grace of God the first King of England to bear that name, but the sixth of Scotland.

  And the man being me.

  Perhaps Wat invented the story? But it somehow rings true. Villiers said nothing, Wat said, by way of direct reply. He just spun away from the Queen, his heavy gold cape swinging out like a wing, then bowed and came back to her, his right hand brushing the lace pompon roses that adorned his outstretched slipper.