The Voyage of the Destiny

by Robert Nye

  He told me he pushed that wheelbarrow with its burden of potulent poetry down Milk Street, up Wood Street, along Hosier Lane. And (here is the curious thing) in his head, Wat told me, he stopped at every corner, cupped his hands to his mouth, and shouted the blasphemies he had shouted out loud in the streets of Paris. All that nonsense about Jonson being a better image of the Crucifixion than anything to be found in any Romish church.

  Wat might have been a wag. But he was not a fool. He shouted the words in imagination only. London was different. In London, his sacrilege would be understood.

  When they reached the churchyard of St Mary-le-Bow, Wat decided to rest. He trundled the wheelbarrow into the graveyard. Jonson had fallen asleep. The bottle had dropped out of his mouth. He was snoring, Wat said.

  So Wat sat down between the shafts, and yawned, and leaned his cheek against his knuckles. Then he took a silver pipe from his pocket, filled it with tobacco from a pouch, set tinder to the tobacco and lit it. He sat smoking ambitiously, trying to blow rings.

  (You catch the strangeness of this story, Carew? Here is Wat imitating me, his father, in dress and manner and habit, while having a sort of negative icon of me, drunk as I would never be, to hold up for mockery in a wheelbarrow. And the whole thing carried through on the one day of all days when you would have thought he might have met me honestly, and straightforwardly, with some kind of filial feeling. I catch the strangeness too. But I cannot claim to understand it.)

  Well, Wat had hardly settled to enjoy his pipe, he told me, when he heard this shrill voice piping at his elbow. He looked up and he saw a small boy in a black velvet suit. And this boy was chanting:

  ‘Tobacco is bad for you. Smoking is a noxious habit’

  Wat said that it now dawned on him that he had been vaguely conscious of this boy for some while - all the way from the scrivener’s shop at the sign of the Spread Eagle in Bread Street. The boy had shoulder-length blond hair. Wat had first noticed him peering out of a lower window of the scrivener’s shop, his nose pressed flat against the glass, his face like a white pastry. Ever since then the boy had been creeping along in their wake. And now he had dared to come right up to them. Wat judged him to be about eight or nine years old.

  ‘Smoking is evil,’ the boy said.

  ‘Who says so?’ Wat demanded.

  ‘My father,’ the boy said.

  The boy stood squarely, little legs apart, his tiny feet encased in coal-black shoes with modest silver buckles.

  He pointed. ‘Is that your father in the barrow?’

  ‘No,’ Wat said. ‘That’s not my father. That’s Ben Jonson. That’s the Poet Laureate.’

  ‘He can’t really be a poet,’ the boy said, dogmatically. ‘He’s intoxicated.’

  ‘Poets are often drunk,’ Wat said.

  The boy stamped his foot. ‘No, they’re not,’ he said. ‘Poets are temperate persons.’

  The boy had eyes like dried prunes, Wat told me.

  At this point the Poet Laureate woke up in his wheelbarrow and immediately spilled out of it to show the boy the thumb on his left hand. That thumb has a brand on it.

  Ben said: ‘You know where I got that brand, boy?’

  ‘In prison,’ the boy said, without blinking.

  ‘That’s right,’ Jonson roared. ‘I was in prison for killing a man. How about that? I killed a man once in a duel.’

  (Carew, this is true. The man he killed was one Gabriel Spenser, of Henslowe’s company at the Fortune theatre in Cripplegate. They fought to the death one night in Hogsden Fields.)

  ‘So what do you think of that?’ Ben demanded.

  ‘Duelling is unlawful,’ the boy said. ‘Why did you kill him?’

  ‘He was an actor,’Jonson shouted.

  ‘The stage is a breeding ground for many kinds of wickedness,’ the boy said. ‘But you still should not have killed him.’

  ‘He was a bad actor,’ Jonson explained. ‘He was a very bad actor. He was atrocious. He ruined a play of mine. He couldn’t remember his lines, and those he remembered he murdered. So I murdered him because he had already murdered me. Justifiable homicide for the sake of the nine Muses and in defence of their mother. You know who their mother was, lad?’

  ‘Mnemosyne,’ the boy said.

  ‘Meaning?’ Jonson demanded, a bit taken aback.

  ‘Memory,’ the boy said, shrugging, as if the question was too obvious to be bothered about.

  Jonson turned to Wat. ‘An excellent boy,’ he cried, ‘a most learned little lad. I could make a poet of him if he wasn’t so constipated.’

  The boy said: ‘You’re not a poet at all. You’re a criminal.’

  ‘I’m a poet and a criminal, of course,’ Jonson replied, wiping his nose with his branded thumb. ‘All real poets are criminals. Poetry itself is a crime.’

  ‘That’s not so,’ the boy said. ‘Poetry is a virtue. Poets have to know Greek and Latin and mathematics and music and cosmography. Poetry is truth. Poets are noble creatures.’

  Jonson looked up at the sky in despair.

  ‘My stepfather was a bricklayer,’ he said.

  He smiled.

  ‘My wife is a shrew, but honest,’ he said. Then he was sick and then he fell asleep again.

  Wat said the boy stood staring at Ben Jonson. ‘That man is damned,’ the boy said. ‘He will go to hell.’ Wat said lightly: ‘If he’s going to hell then I’ll go along with him.’

  Wat said the boy then turned and stared at him.

  ‘Yes,’ the boy said. ‘I fully expect that you will. Blasphemers do.’

  He walked off. Soon his neat black velvet suit was just a dot in the distance among the white gravestones.

  Dusk came. Wat stood and pissed behind a tomb. ‘Roll up!’ he called softly to an early owl. ‘Roll up and see the Prodigal Son about to go home! Roll up, roll up!’

  It wasn’t until that moment, Wat told me, that the full implications of what the boy had said sunk in. The boy had called him a blasphemer. But the actual spoken blasphemies had been long ago in Paris. Unless, of course, the boy had meant only that it was blasphemy for Wat to say that he would want to go to hell to keep Ben Jonson company. But Wat was sure the boy meant more than that.

  The other story I must tell more briefly. (My eyes are raw with sleeplessness, and the night air is hot and bitter in this cabin where I sit writing by a single candle.)

  It concerns the night before we dropped down the Thames on the ebb tide to rendezvous with the rest of our fleet at Plymouth. That would have been the 28th of March, last year. I had been invited, with Wat, and my other captains, to dine with Secretary Winwood at his house on Millbank. Winwood as you know had been a staunch supporter of my venture from the start. But I had been banned from Court since my release from the Tower, and Winwood for his part had needed to be discreet in his meetings with me. However, on this night before the voyage he dared to throw discretion to the winds, and kept open house for us.

  I wanted to go alone. I had this premonition that Wat would disgrace me.

  ‘You are a quarrelsome, affronting creature,’ I told him. ‘Sometimes I am ashamed to have such a bear in my company.’

  But Wat stood his ground.

  ‘I have been invited to Winwood’s for my own sake,’ he insisted. ‘I have a right to go, along with your other captains.’

  ‘You can be relieved of that duty,’ I said. ‘You can remain here in London while I sail without you.’

  Wat was furious. ‘You wouldn’t!’ he said.

  It was true. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. Whatever he said, whatever he did, he was always going to be my son, and I was always going to forgive him. Well, I had plenty to forgive him for that night.

  Winwood had gone to considerable trouble to make the meal memorable. In the middle of the round table in the great dining-room was a likeness of the Destiny, made of paste-board, bran, saffron, and egg yolks, all well baked, then gilded with bay leaves, and set floating in a dish of claret wine.

&nbs
p; The Secretary of State proposed the toast to our voyage, then we all sat down to dinner with our hats on. Wat sat next to me on my right, with Keymis next to me on the other side.

  All went well until about halfway through the meal. Wat had been quiet and polite, on his best behaviour. Now, for some reason, a devil of maliciousness spurted up in him. He took advantage of a lull in the conversation. I heard his drawling voice say loud and clear:

  ‘Gentlemen, I woke this morning without the fear of God before my eyes.’

  He had got what he wanted. Every face was turned towards him. He had the complete attention of the table.

  ‘So I went to this whore,’ Wat continued, his voice sounding clear as a bell. ‘She was the hottest whore in London, so I’d heard. I was eager, I can tell you. I kissed her. I embraced her. I put her down upon the bed. I was just about to mount her when she suddenly surprised me by asking me my name. She’d been looking at me strangely all the while, as if she thought she knew me. Well, I was burning for her, and considered this information little enough to give in view of what her naked body promised. So I told her who I was. Next thing, God damn it, what does she do but push me away and start reaching for her petticoats. “What’s the matter?” I say. “I can’t do it,” says she, “it’s not right, it’s not natural.” “What’s not right and natural?” I say. She won’t answer. She shakes her head. Every time I come at her she pushes me away. Every time I ask her why, she refuses me an explanation. At last, I’ve got her pinned down on the bed. She won’t open her legs. I show her what she’s missing. “No, no,” says she, “I can’t, you mustn’t, it’s not right, it’s not natural.” “Why?” I demanded, “why? why? why?” She covers her face with her hands. She’s laughing. Then she’s weeping. Then she whispers: “Because your father had me just an hour ago!”’

  Stunned silence.

  Then a gust of filthy laughter from Dick Wollaston. And others join the laughing, nervously, and Wollaston’s banging the table with his fists.

  I turned to Wat and hit him in the face. I hit him hard. His hat went flying off.

  They all stopped laughing. They all looked at Wat. They wanted to see him hit me back, of course.

  Carew, he didn’t.

  You know what he did? He threw back his head, tossing his auburn hair. Then he laughed on his own. A brief laugh, a clever laugh. Then he turned to the man sitting next to him on his other side (it was Wollaston, that incipient pirate, I’m pleased to report) and he fetched him a blow just as hard as the one I’d fetched him.

  Tass it on round the table!’ Wat cries. It will come back to my father in time!’

  Wollaston didn’t, of course. He just went to retrieve his crumpled hat.

  I laughed then. They all laughed.

  I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks.

  6

  13 March

  But Wat did not believe in my gold mine. Winwood’s indifference and Bacon’s scepticism do not matter. But the fact that Wat’s dying words declared his disbelief in the gold - that rankles, that puzzles, that disturbs me. It might be taken to explain, of course, why he bullied poor Keymis and George Ralegh into travelling so far upriver. There was a something suicidal in him. He saw himself as my rival. He flung himself into death like a man making love for the first time.

  Was Wat, in fact, a virgin? I should not be much surprised if he was, all his loud and vulgar boasting to the contrary. He wanted to be thought a man. But he bragged like a boy.

  I say that he saw himself as my rival. It is all very strange. I can understand that he found it difficult to grow to manhood in the shadow of a father who had won some glory in the world’s eyes. But Wat’s sense of rivalry went deeper and darker than any mere wish to emulate my acHicvements as a soldier. It was much more personal; it made him match himself against my essence. That night on the way to Winwood’s, for instance, he persisted in asking me a number of indelicate questions concerning my relations with the Queen. The subject appeared to obsess him. I had to parry one lewd suggestion after another, as if fighting a duel. At last he came right out with it. Ben Jonson had told him, he said, that Queen Elizabeth had this vaginal deformity, a membrane which made her private parts impenetrable, although Ben being Ben he had added that she tried many men for her delight.

  Wat wanted to know: Was I one of them?

  I told him I was not.

  Which is true. And yet also a lie.

  *

  I have offered Keymis’s cabin to the Indian. He has to sleep somewhere and I consider this a better solution than having him sling a hammock over the guns down below with the rest of the men. Truth to tell, most of my crew are more savage than this Chris to val Guayacunda.

  Yet it is doubtful if he appreciates the favour I have granted him. He says little even when directly addressed in the Spanish he can speak very well. His mood is withdrawn though not sullen or uneasy. He conducts himself with a degree of self-possession which both intrigues and repels me. I had anticipated that the further we sailed from his own land the more dependent on my authority he would become. This has not proved so. The more to my displeasure because I still entertain some hope of drawing him out on the matter of the gold.

  But this evening, for instance, when I took a turn below decks in pursuit of him, with this end in mind, I found him crouched to examine the trunnions and axletrees of our guns, and before he would enter into any conversation to my liking I had to list for him the names of all our great ordnance and their appurtenances, because he kept silent, pointing to one piece after another, as it were demanding their names without uttering a word.

  So I ran through them, for his useless instruction: the cannon royal, or double cannon; the cannon serpentine; the cannon petro; the bastard cannon; the demy cannon; the culverin and the basilisco; the saker, the minion, and the falcon; and so forth, and so forth. I should have left the task to our master gunner, William Gurden; but I was anxious to gain the Indian’s confidence.

  My effort was wasted. At the end of this inventory or anthology of guns, together with some tedious observations on my part concerning their shooting and other management, when I had by several stratagems steered the subject round to Guiana being like a magazine of all rich metals, the Indian merely grunted, squatting on his hunkers, and remarked:

  ‘Guattaral has it wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean? How have I got it wrong?’ The Indian flicked at the disc-shaped pendant which dangles from the septum of his nose. ‘About the gold,’ he said. ‘But there is gold?’ ‘Perhaps. It is not important.’ I was angered by his indifference.

  ‘It is very important,’ I said. ‘I staked my honour on there being gold in Guiana. I lost my son looking for it.’

  He said nothing. He crouched, stroking the bastard cannon.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Where is the mine?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘You must know!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Listen,’ I told him. ‘Did Palomeque not look for gold high in the mountain they call Iconuri?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘To hell with perhaps! What do you mean: perhaps?’ ‘I mean he may have looked. I don’t know. He didn’t find any.’

  ‘Didn’t find gold there? But he did somewhere else then?’ The Indian went on stroking the cannon. He offered no reply.

  I lost my temper with him.

  ‘Christ’s blood, man!’ I cried. ‘I could have you hung overboard by the heels till you shout what you know or your brains are dashed out against the hull!’

  The Indian smiled and shrugged. His eyes were unfathomable. ‘Life is perfected by death,’ he said levelly.

  This answer shamed me.

  I said: ‘I have no intention of killing you, nor of torturing you either. But, in God’s name, why did you come down the river with Keymis if not to lead me back to the bloody gold?’

  The Indian took his time answering. At last he said:

  ‘Because it wa
s necessary.’

  ‘Necessary to whom?’

  ‘Necessary to me.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘To keep Guattaral company,’ the Indian said. ‘To go with him where he goes. To see him live and die.’

  I hit the bastard cannon with my cane. ‘You talk like a fooi!’ I cried. ‘I am not going to die!’

  The Indian looked at me, his face a mask of wonder or astonished disbelief. (It was hard to tell which.)

  ‘Then you will be the first man not to do so, won’t you?’ he said.

  *

  Captain Samuel King. Let me tell you a little about him. There is little enough, in all honesty, for me to tell. He is my one true friend, I think. He has served me well for nearly 50 years. A stubborn, scarred, and candid fellow, Carew. It is a relief to turn to Captain Sam King after talking about the Indian and his conundrums.

  I first met King when I went to the Wars of Religion in France. My mother’s cousin Henry Champernown got leave of Queen Elizabeth to take a troop of one hundred gentlemen volunteers to fight on the side of the Huguenots. The year was ‘69. And I must have been just a month or so short of my 16th birthday.

  Our private company could expect no quarter from the Papists. England was not at war with France, of course, and those of us unfortunate enough to be captured during the Huguenot defeats at Jarnac and Montcontour were hanged on gallows with scrolls pinned to the corpses saying that we had died not as Englishmen but as damned Protestants opposing God’s will in the destiny of France.

  I suppose I suffered from the usual youthful fever for adventure. I thought it a splendid thing to ride armoured into battle, and to fight with sword and lance, a good horse under me.

  Samuel King rode at my side, just one year older, but with a moustache that already compassed his mouth. At 17, Sam had already found his element. A born soldier, and he looked it. He even rode his horse with a kind of swagger, wide-footed in the stirrups, the tops of his boots turned down to meet his jingling spurs. No fool, no coward, he was my brother at arms, and we learned our lessons together in the art of war. Fearless himself, he taught me that the facing of fear can be less than the dread of it. Sam despised death. He said the dead looked ugly. He said he was ugly enough without adding worms to the picture. Yet he had his philosophy. A man can only die once, so let him die well. And at night, by the camp-fire, we talked, and I found there was more to him. We had different backgrounds, but many opinions in common. The callow opinions of youth, no doubt, and shallow, but some sense in them still, I believe. Sam reasoned that no man is born a hero, but if history gives him a chance then heroic times can raise a man up to their level. As to our present circumstances - Sam was no bigot, but he counted any man his friend who saw the need to fight for the right to worship God according to his own conscience. He was not one of those fanatics who equate the Pope with the Devil as the enemies, in this world and the next, of their immortal souls. But (like me) he had been brought up to detest the peculiar interpretation of the Roman Catholic faith which has led Spain to believe that she enjoys God’s own permission to impose an iron yoke on the rest of the world.