by Robert Nye
I must be mad. Or very very tired.
10
19 March
When I did at length acHicve some proper sleep last night it was only to suffer a nightmare in which I dreamt that I was a stag being chased by the royal hunt of King James.
The King himself, trussed into his saddle with ropes, led the field on an iron-grey horse. Villiers and Winwood came behind him, keeping their mounts hard-held to maintain a respectable distance. Count Gondomar, accompanied by two Spanish cardinals and five Spanish priests, trailed in the rear.
Down the steep I ran, along the valley, and into a river. And down the steep, along the valley, and into the river, scattering shingle with their horses’ hooves and throwing up the water in great glistening sheets, the royal hunt pursued me.
A bugle-note sounded from some distant forester, signalling that their game was ‘at soil’. ‘And indeed I was.
Another brief gallop round that elbow of the river, and the cavalcade came upon me. I was standing knee-deep in a pool which was rapidly turning amber with blood from my wounds. Being a stag, I had antlers of course. I swung my head from side to side in a desperate last attempt to keep the King’s hounds off. The dogs were struggling and swimming all around me, straining, with blood-shot eyes.
James turned to Villiers.
‘You see, Steenie?’ he said. ‘I promised you that I would have more sport of the man than I ever had of the stags.’
There was a moment then when I realised that I was a man, that I was the man, the King’s enemy, myself, and that I had no antlers. I was defenceless.
King James called out:
‘Up, Jewel! Up, Bran! Up, Ringwood! Up, Buscar!’
The leaders of the pack went for my throat. Their teeth sank in. Sharp. Deep. As usual, it was the great hound Jewel, the King’s favourite, which completed the kill. Blood and water gushed in all directions as I came crashing down.
In the dream, though dead, I retained a disgusting and pain-racked semblance of consciousness. So that I was aware of Villiers and Ralph Winwood dragging me from the river by my heels, and of Gondomar and his contingent of ecclesiastics ripping open my belly with daggers with crucifix handles.
Then the foresters unbonneted and wound the mort on their bugles, and King James was knee-deep in my slit-open corpse.
I must have screamed out in my sleep, for Robin my page came running to shake me awake.
*
We are, of course, at Nevis still. In fact, today it will have
been one whole wasted week since we first dropped our anchors here.
I have to put it on record that I never intended to make such a stay. Indeed, when I called my captains together that first night we spent at this island, I was reasonably quick and lucid in my own mind as to what we might do. The alternatives looked quite clear-cut then, and the captains’ lack of enthusiasm for any of them did not really daunt me. No doubt the same alternatives still obtain. And the near-mutinous silence of my captains does not matter. Yet something there is that prevents me from taking action. Something there is that makes for an agony of indecision.
What?
Wat Yes, perhaps it has something to do with you.
Something to do with the earth, red and virgin, beneath which you lie now, your young mouth stuffed full of it, with no prospect of whores or swords or wine, no jokes, no japes, no laughter, and no more chance of proving or measuring yourself against me, your prodigal father.
No, sir. Not so.
My son, forgive me.
It is of course not in you. It is not in the situation. It has little to do with the balance of probabilities. Nor is it in the too easily censurable stars.
It is wholly in me. It is my flaw which now appears, and hardly for the first time. Hullo, old unwelcome friend, old fault, old blot, old error.
Sir Walter Ralegh, that great adventurer, reluctant to venture forth. Sir Walter Ralegh, that prime mover of others, himself quite unable to move.
*
The Indian just came to me. I had discovered that the wine in our hold is no more than vinegar. So I was having the men wash the decks with it. The ship smells sharp as a consequence. HealtHicr.
The Indian watched the men scrubbing.
Then he said:
‘Guattaral understands now.’
It was not a question. I did not reply.
‘You prepare your ship,’ the Indian went on, ‘for the long voyage.’
His manner irritates me. It is so sententious.
‘I have no particular voyage in mind,’ I snapped. ‘I make ready for nothing. The wine went sour. I use it to clean the decks.’
He turned away, smiling.
‘Your ship smells of ashes,’ he said.
I was weary of his company. I had no wish to continue another conversation compounded with riddles. But this evening, remembering my dream of last night, and turning over once more in my mind the courses of action which remain before me, it occurs to my fancy that his references to a long voyage and a smell of ashes must imply death.
In short, it becomes plain to me, after all, that I have only one choice to make:
Life or death.
It is that simple.
It would be life to sail back for gold from Guiana or even to attempt to take the Plate Fleet.
It is swift certain death to sail home to King James and the block.
Why, then, do I hesitate?
*
I had intended, today, to write down a few more brief particulars of my earliest existence in London. How I worshipped the Queen, as Gloriana, from afar. How my stepbrother Humphrey Gilbert, patronised by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, obtained a charter to explore the coast of North America and plant a colony if he could. How we sailed with seven ships in November, the winter of ‘78, and I had command of the Falcon, the Queen’s ship, 100 leaking tons, old and under-masted but a start. How the others all turned back, and I got as far only as the islands of Cape de Verde on the coast of Africa. How when I returned I was still spoiling for action, and fought a foolish duel with Sir Thomas Perrot by the tennis court at Whitehall, and was committed to prison in the Fleet for a week. How I then attracted Leicester’s patronage myself, and was commissioned to join Lord Grey of Wilton, in the long hot summer of 1580, and take a company of foot soldiers to help put down the rebellion in Ireland
Well, none of that seems so important any more. I will pick up the threads of my young life where this drops them - in monstrous Munster, in Ireland, during the Desmond rebellion - but not this evening. My mood of self-divided indecision makes me indifferent to the past as to the present.
The Indian came knocking at the door of my cabin a moment ago, as I put down my pen and sat looking at the ink dry on the paper, detesting the shape of my own crabbed handwriting.
He made no reference to our earlier conversation during the scrubbing of the decks, nor to the fantastic story which he told me last night. He would not come in. But he brought me a gift.
It is one of his precious green leaves.
‘Eat this,’ he said. ‘Chew it very slowly. Swallow the juice. Spit nothing out.’
I inspected the leaf which he had placed in the palm of my hand with a gesture approaching reverence. It looked innocent enough. Its only visual peculiarity, that I could see, was that it had in its centre the outline of another leaf just like itself. I sniffed at it It had no recognisable smell.
I asked him: ‘What do you call it?’
‘Khoka? he said. (I spell as he pronounced it.)
‘Where does it come from?’
‘The Valley of Sogamoso.’
‘It grows wild there?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your tribe, the Chibcha, do they all eat it?’
The Indian nodded.
‘They all eat it And they eat it all.’
I turned the leaf over in the palm of my hand, thinking of the doubts and indecisions that beset me. ‘Does it bring wisdom?’ I asked.
&nbs
p; The Indian shrugged his shoulders. He plainly found my question simple-minded.
‘Wisdom is here,’ he said, placing his hand on his heart, fingers splayed out wide.
‘Not here?’ I said, tapping my forehead.
The Indian said nothing. He kept his hand on his heart.
‘Eat the leaf,’ he said.
‘I shall,’ I promised. ‘But what does it do?’
‘That you must see for yourself. But eat it. It is good.’
‘Better than tobacco?’ I said.
‘There can be no comparison with anything,’ he said. ‘The leaf is the food of the gods.’
All this he said with the uttermost seriousness. I asked him again to enter my cabin. I suggested that we might share a meal of the leaves. He refused. It was the custom, he said, for a man to eat first of the leaf on his own.
Then he gave me also a little flask made from a gourd. He called this an iscupuru, saying that (like khoka itself) he knew no word in Spanish which might be its equivalent. In the flask, he told me, is a lime-like substance made from ashes. He called this llipta or llucta. He instructed me to intermix it with the leaf when chewing by applying it to my tongue with a short stick which I have to dip into the gourd from time to time.
‘But you do not do this,’ I pointed out.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I do not need to.’
‘So why do I?’
The Indian shrugged. ‘Perhaps you do not,’ he said. ‘But the leaf is strong. It is best not to eat it on its own until you have learned all its ways for yourself.’
He bade me goodnight then, with a curious abrupt lifting of his hands as if to bless or curse. I watched him walk away across the poop deck. At the door to Wat’s cabin, he turned.
‘Guattaral came for gold,’ he called back softly. ‘What I have given him now is more than gold. It is the food of the Golden Man himself.’
He was gone before I could think of a response.
*
So. I am chewing the khoka leaf as I write these words. It tastes pungent, bitter, faintly stale, but not so unpleasant when diluted with a smear of the llipta from the gourd. My mouth feels numb. My gums when I lick them are dry and give off a tang as if I had been eating salty meat or fish. Otherwise I cannot say that I notice anything special about it. If this is the food of the gods then it serves only to prove that I am very mortal. Which proof, I think, I did not really need.
*
One hour later.
I feel as though I shall not need to sleep tonight, that’s all. I just took a turn around deck. All things past, present, and to come seemed to my eyes to be concentrated in the channel of the sea between here and the neighbouring isle of St Kitts. They met there and were consumed in its salt. That channel burnt like a cold blue fire, then a hot white frost, in the light of the withering moon.
To cross that night sea water - only a matter of a mile or two - seems quite beyond the Destiny or her master.
11
21 March
And yet I have made that crossing. My Destiny is moored now at St Kitts.
Is this to be attributed to the leaf? I think not, though I ate it all, as the Indian had instructed me, and swallowed every last drop of its bitter juice.
There was some effect, but it is difficult to define it. Certainly I did not sleep for 24 hours. Certainly I experienced a sensation which I can only describe as like a gradual redeeming of the eyes - a feeling of the mind being clarified, the brain perhaps purified. And at the end of this I discovered in myself a power of action. But the leaf did not confer this. It was already there.
In short, the leaf inspired me to do nothing new. I would have done all the things which I have done in any event.
Also: I am unwilling to believe that the chemical powers of a mere plant could spur me on to action. On the other hand, it had no ill effects and I do not regret the ingestion of it.
I would be willing to experiment again with the eating of this khoka. But it has left me with no sense of urgency or need, and no excitement. I am content to wait until the Indian approaches me.
*
St Kitts. This island is in shape like a long loaf of bread. Mountains traverse the central part of it from north-west to south-east. The greatest height, my maps say, bears the name of Mount Misery!
Here are great trees that seem to touch the sky; pineapples with prickly tufted skins but sweet meat inside; iguanas which we roast between two pieces of wood for their good white flesh.
This island was discovered by Columbus on his second voyage, in 1493. Sad little Genoese, obsessed with sailing forever into the setting sun. You were once sent home in irons from these lands you found, kept sick and sweating below decks by order of the Spanish tyrants you served faithfully across 3000 miles of uncharted ocean. They say that you kept those irons by you to your dying day, as relics. Now they lie buried with you and your son in the cathedral of San Domingo in Hispaniola. No doubt they will prevail when your bones are clay.
*
This morning I wrote a long letter to the Secretary of State, my friend Ralph Winwood. Tomorrow I shall face the more difficult task of writing a letter to my wife. I intend to send these letters home to England by dispatching a flyboat, the Page, under command of Captain James Barker, with my nephew George on board to keep an eye on things. George is stupid (as I have before now remarked) but brave enough besides. He will need to be stupid to agree to go. He will need all his bravery to survive. The crew of the Page consists otherwise of a rabble of idle rascals, drunkards and blasphemers, the absolute dregs of those that remain of our never-exactly-glorious expedition. In the wake of the Page, I shall send home the Thunder. Her sick captain, Sir Warham St Leger, must carry and care for a cargo of others like himself. I have cleansed my fleet of the men worst affected by fever.
I gave Ralph Winwood a clear account of our passage and proceedings. I pointed out first that while the usual time spent in sailing from Cape de Verde to America is about 15 or 20 days at the most, it was our misfortune to find winds so contrary, with violent storms and rains, when we found winds at all, that it took us six weeks. I told him of the great heat in which we had no water (our water-casks lost in a hurricane); how so many of our ablest men died on that long voyage out; how when we reached the Orinoco at last I was still myself in the hands of Death, unable to walk, and then carried about in a chair. I told him what seems to have happened upriver. How the Spanish were waiting for us, expecting our arrival. How they had lists in my own handwriting of the number of my men and the burden of my ships, together with details of what ordnance every ship carried. Which lists I had given to King James at his Majesty’s express command. Who was pleased to value me so little that he passed them on to the Spanish Ambassador, who in turn dispatched them to the King of Spain. I enclosed for Winwood’s instruction the letter which the King of Spain then sent to Don Diego de Palomeque, along with all my lists, which letter was dated the 19th of March of last year, i.e. before my departure out of the Thames even. I invited Ralph to draw his own conclusions, and to extend to me whatever help he could. I told him of Wat’s death and Keymis’s suicide. I apologised for the fact that I am coming home without the promised gold.
Coming home.
Home does not necessarily mean death. Even if it does, that’s where I’m going, and that’s what I’m going to do.
*
And now - sitting in the shade of a palm tree, with my lame leg plunged in a cool running brook of fresh water -I drink from a coconut with one hand while with the other I write here to call back with pleasure and affection our meetings in the early days, Ralph Winwood and I, in the first weeks after my release (unpardoned, with a keeper) from the Tower.
Ralph was always my friend, but he had to be circumspect. I remember one meeting in particular. I was late. Stukeley dogged me. I found Winwood kneeling in the Henry VII chapel of Westminster Abbey. How dank, how English, how far away! No bright birds screaming there.
He was in front of the tomb where Queen Elizabeth now lies side by side with her elder half-sister Queen Mary. The only bed they ever shared, for sure. The one, a Protestant, remained a virgin all her life and had Catholics stretched on the rack. The other, a Catholic, married a Spanish prince and had Protestants burnt at the stake.
Ralph was peeping through his big blunt fingers at that inscription which announces that Sharers of kingdom and tomb sleep here, Elizabeth and Mary, sisters, in hope of the Resurrection.
I said: ‘No doubt they will be one dust before that day.’
Winwood hid his face in his hands, as if he was deep in prayer. I knelt with difficulty beside him. To kneel hurts my leg.
I said: ‘Our Father which art in heaven…. All goes well with Pett. But I shall need more ships.’
He said: ‘Naturally. How many?’
‘A dozen,’ I said.
‘That will prove expensive,’ he murmured. ‘Give us this day our daily bread? I said.
Always pray in a good round voice in public, my son. There’s nothing like it for boring or embarrassing any eavesdroppers, and ensuring that only God and your best friends hear the things you say quietly.
Winwood whispered into his hands. ‘Can you raise the money in the City?’
I said: ‘The City prefers whales and spices.’
‘Explain,’ he said irritably. ‘We have no time for riddles.’
I explained: ‘The City prefers the Muscovy Company and the East India Company to an old ghost from the Court of the Faerie Queen. Anything that smacks of privateering is abhorrent to them. For thine is the kingdom ‘
‘Privateering is out of date,’ Winwood commented. ‘So what will you do?’
‘I have old-fashioned friends,’ I said. ‘Amen? I added.
‘Amen? Ralph said loudly. Then, very softly: ‘How much will your friends be willing to invest?’
‘The best I can hope for is £15,000,’ I told him.
‘And your Sherborne money?’
‘That - plus money from Bess selling land - brings us up to about £25,000.’ ‘Not enough?’ ‘Not enough.’
Winwood bent further forwards and took a swift peep under his shoulder. I did likewise. We both saw the familiar shadow of Sir Lewis Stukeley stooping to read an inscription on the wall. Ralph must have judged that my cousinly keeper was just out of earshot. He said quickly: ‘I’ll do what I can. You understand that as Secretary I mustn’t be seen to assist you.’
