A Way in the World

6. A Parcel of Papers, a Roll of Tobacco, a Tortoise: An Unwritten Story

PERHAPS A PLAY or a screen play, or a mixture of both — that is how it came to me, an unrealizable impulse, a long time ago: the first set being a view in section of the upper decks of a Jacobean ship, the Destiny. The time, 1618. The setting, a South American river, grey when still, muddy when rippled. It is almost dawn. The sky is silver. The two-tiered set is in semi-gloom; but the tropical light is coming fast. The pre-dawn silence is broken by the sound of a heavy splash. A man has jumped overboard. After a while there are shouts from the decks of the ship, and the sound of running feet.

At the same time the light begins to show a thin and very old man in Jacobean undress in the captain’s quarters. This is Sir Walter Raleigh. He is sixty-four. He has been ill for many months; he has only eight months or so to live.

He has been a free man for just under two years. For thirteen years before that, he had been a prisoner in the Tower of London, because of some trouble with the king. He has been released in order to go and find the gold mines of El Dorado in Guiana in South America. He has always said that these mines exist somewhere on the banks of the Orinoco, and he has always said he knows exactly where the mines are. Twenty-two years before, he had raided the Spanish island of Trinidad, which guarded the entrance to the Orinoco and El Dorado, and he had captured the Spanish conquistador, Berrio, the so-called governor of the province of El Dorado. He claimed to have plundered all the old conquistador’s knowledge about the golden territories. And he also claimed to have won over all the Indians of the region to his side. He has been let out to prove his point now, and he has accepted conditions that are like those of a game. If he finds gold, everything will be forgiven. He will be executed if he doesn’t find gold, or if he disturbs the Spaniards. Guiana is Spanish territory.

And now — in this land which in his mind and writings existed as a kind of Arcadia where he could be king of the Indians, ruler of a golden empire — he is a man under siege. The Indians avoid him. He cannot get the food he once wrote about, the sweet fresh-water fish from the fresh-water pools in the Pitch Lake. The Spaniards on Trinidad, few, but the advantage is with them, watch him. They have their muskets. They don’t fire recklessly. They wait, they take careful aim at forty paces, no more. He regularly loses one man, two men, when little parties go ashore to get pitch, good for caulking ships, or oysters, or food, or water. Food is running short for him.

As the weeks pass, and no news comes from the south, from that tributary of the Orinoco up which he has sent half of his gold-mine expedition, he feels bereft. The skiff he sent afterwards up the river to get news — with a captured Indian as pilot — hasn’t returned. The conviction grows on him that knowledge of what has happened up river has spread around these Indian villages. The Indians all speak Spanish now. They have no reason to ignore the Spaniards for the sake of Raleigh. Raleigh has stayed away for twenty-two years, after all. And again it was to get news, as much as to get fresh food, the fish from the pools in the hard asphalt of the Pitch Lake, La Brea, and the delicate, “fat” flesh of the “pheasants” of the country, that he allowed the second of the three Indians he captured — secret Spanish-speakers, and possibly in league with the Spaniards in Trinidad and on the mainland — to go ashore, leaving his friend behind as a hostage.

A soldier knocks on his cabin door and comes in and says that Martin, the third Indian, has escaped.

“Well, well,” the old man says. “Who was on watch?”

“Piggott.”

“I feel I should put Piggott alone in a skiff and send him up to the Orinoco.”

“We can lower a boat and try to get him back. The Indian.”

“I don’t see what good that will do.”

“It won’t be easy, but we can try.”

“Of course it won’t be easy. By the time you lower your boat and put on your armour he will be in the woods. Once he’s got a tree between you and him, that’s that. You couldn’t keep him on the ship. You certainly won’t be able to catch him in the woods.”

“We were going to hang him today, because his friend didn’t come back from the village. The men didn’t like that. They feel now that everything they do will rebound on them. They’ve had too much bad luck already.”

“That reminds me. Go and tell the surgeon to come. I must have my draught. Why aren’t you wearing your breastplate? I gave those instructions. We should be ready at all times. Metal is hot, but a poisoned arrow will be much hotter.”

“I was putting it on when the Indian jumped overboard.”

“What scum.”

“I’ll go and call the surgeon.”

“These mariners and soldiers. Their friends and families sent them to sea on purpose. Wanting them only to drown or disappear. Sometimes I think the people they gave me were born only to eat rations. They stole my last apples. I was keeping a few in that sand barrel. They found out and stole them. I went to a lot of trouble to pack them in good clean white sand before we left England.”

The sky gets brighter. A hot day, already. The surgeon comes to the cabin, to give the old man his draught. They talk about Martin, the Indian who has escaped. They agree that it is better for the man not to have been hanged. The threat was made only to encourage the other Indian to come back, before they sent him — as they thought — to his village to trade English goods for food and perhaps news. Clearly, though, the man didn’t mind sacrificing the friend or fellow tribesman he’d left behind on the ship.

“Your draught,” the surgeon says.

“There is a balsam that can be collected in those woods,” the old man says. “In 1595 I got quite a bit from Wannawanare’s people. This time I had just got about a little nutful when I went ashore. The sweetest thing you ever smelled. Like angelica. For twenty years that smell has been with me. But then they opened up on us.”

“You have to forget about things like that now. We won’t be allowed to land.”

“And the oysters. Little ones growing on the roots of the mangrove below water. You could hack away a piece of mangrove root and bring away a dozen oysters, all alive. Sweet oysters, sweeter than anything you ever tasted. And the rain water in the hollows of the Pitch Lake. You can taste the tar in it, but that is part of the sweetness of the water.”

“You torment yourself, and other people, by talking of those things. Sweet things. How many of them you promised us when we were coming out! You talked a lot about a cassava liquor.”

“I remembered it from 1595. Right here. On this Guiana coast. The Indian women chewed the cassava and spat it out into a vessel. In England women are the brewers, and so they are here too. Or were. I don’t know what happens now. I haven’t gone to their villages. The chewing of the cassava was woman’s work, because long ago they found out that woman’s saliva caused cassava to ferment fast. You wouldn’t imagine it when you saw a group of them sitting flat on the ground and chewing and spitting into a hollowed-out piece of tree trunk, and giggling when they saw you looking at what they were doing. The first time I saw Moriquito’s women doing it, it looked so strange, I stopped and asked, and they all roared with laughter, and I thought they were joking. But when it was ready it made the clearest and the sweetest liquor you ever tasted. Sweeter than any nut, finer than any ale. On drinking occasions the chiefs took their leisure in their hammocks, swinging from side to side in the shade of trees in their villages. Because it’s cool there, in the woods, not as hot and sweaty as it is here on the ship in the Gulf. And the women served this nectar to their chiefs, filling tiny cupfuls at a time with little ladles. Such women. Plump, and as fine as any well-bred woman in England. White skins, regular features, black hair.”

“That was what you told us almost as soon as we left the Canaries, to give us courage for the crossing, after the trouble we had with the Spaniards there, and after that captain deserted with his ship.”

“What scum. All that fighting aboard the ships even before we had left England. What scum. When that man deserted, I was half with him, to tell you the truth. But there was no place for me to go. I had to stay with the expedition. I had begged for it for so long, and when it came it was like something with its own life, quite separate from me. Something to which I simply attached myself. And then the sickness — all those men sick and dying in our new ship. All those friends. I haven’t even begun to grieve for them. I am frightened to be left alone with grief now. I feel it will take me over. My own cook, Francis — he died. The gold expert I had, a man who was the best gold refiner in London, Fowler — he too died. They all died. The ship began to stink with sick people who couldn’t move and the corpses I had to bury.”

“And you kept everybody’s spirits up by talking to them about this paradise on this side of the ocean. Not only gold, but fresh water and fresh food, and the friendly beautiful people, waiting for you to be their king.”

“I was ill, too. Fever. Three shirts a day, three shirts a night. All wringing wet. And there were days of calm when we didn’t make above six leagues, and the sun hung above us in the sky and in the afternoon the sea seemed to blaze with the glitter. I wasn’t well. The expedition had its own life. I just surrendered to it and it dragged me through one day after another. I wasn’t willing anything. I was in no position to do anything like that.”

“Ten ships full of sick and dead people. And when we arrived we saw a Dutch ship, very calmly trading. Hatchets and knives and bits of metal, for tobacco and salt and hides. And we were full of sick and dead men looking for gold. Aren’t you amazed that the men who were still able-bodied didn’t mutiny, and ask where you had led them? You were supposed to have led them to a mysterious part of the world that none in England or Spain or the Indies knew about. And when we got to this place Captain Janson was trading, and you had yourself carried ashore in your shirt, to breathe clean air, to recover, and then to bury your dead. And all the while the little Indian canoes were going out to the Dutchman. The people who were going to be your subjects. They speak Spanish and Dutch. They don’t speak English. They haven’t come to you.

“Why did you tell so many people that you could be king of the Indies? You made them expect so much when they came here. They had suffered so much on the journey. We had suffered so much, all of us. I thought the chiefs would come out to meet you and honour you. The fresh, sweet water, the little cupfuls of liquor, those women, the fresh food. The deer and the fish and the oysters. Nothing happened. We lived on what we had. Your lieutenant Keymis sent an interpreter to the nearest village to ask for your two Indian servants. Servants. Not chiefs. But the people you took away to England in 1595, to show them off.”

“Also to learn the language from them.”

“We waited for two weeks. The man you called Leonard never came.”

“He was never in good health. He must have died. I sent him back ten or twelve years ago. He wanted to die at home.”

“After two weeks a canoe came with a sick old man dressed up in old English clothes. A barefoot old Indian scarecrow in English rags. With the few teeth in his head blackened with the tobacco they use here to quell hunger when they go on a journey. Broken pieces of cassava bread lying about the canoe, and black tobacco rolls, and the rest of his food carefully wrapped up in a leaf. We thought we were going to witness the meeting of two chieftains. Fine clothes, feathers, an Indian standard. We witnessed the meeting of two old men. And you couldn’t talk to Harry, because he had forgotten his English.”

“I was surprised by that. He spent fourteen years with me. I was hoping he would have married someone in England. But he became homesick. He had an Indian bandeau, cotton, blue and white. When the homesickness really came on him, he would tie that around his forehead and he would sit facing the wall. He often did that in the Tower. He wouldn’t talk or move or close his eyes. He could do that for a whole day, until the homesickness left him. It was terrible to see. I sent him back here with William Harcourt. That was nine years ago. He wanted to take back a lot of English clothes. He liked clothes.”

“The men were close to mutiny that day. I don’t think you know how close. And that day or the next you sat in this cabin and wrote to your wife that your name lived among the Indians, and that you could be their king. That was one of the letters a ship went back with.”

“I didn’t know my letters were being read.”

“It would have been negligent for them not to be. This big expedition, all these deaths. All this potential for trouble when we want peace. We have to know what you intend. And you know that your letters are copied and passed around in England to your supporters.”

“I knew there was a spy with me. I wasn’t sure who he was. All the weeks before the sickness I tried to work it out. I didn’t think it was you. I thought it was John Talbot, my friend from the Tower. Then he died from the sickness, and I thought there wasn’t a spy any more. He was one of the men we had to bury here. A good man, I always thought. A scholar, too. Eleven years with me in the Tower. He wanted to get out. I couldn’t blame him for that. I didn’t mind him being the spy.”

“He’s been useful to us, in fact.”

“My examination has begun?”

“It was high time. We’ve been here two months. We’ve lost so many men. On all expeditions you lose people, but we’ve lost too many. Food is running short. You’ve sent five ships and four hundred men up the river. We have no means of knowing what has happened. That Indian you seized and sent up in the boat hasn’t returned, and I don’t think he will. All the other Indians we see keep well clear of us. On the Trinidad side of the Gulf the Spaniards are watching with their muskets to prevent us from landing. We have no means of knowing what has happened on the other side, on the river, at that settlement of San Thomé. We know that the Spanish governor went there from Trinidad, no doubt to fortify the place. This governor’s a new man. He was specially sent out from Spain. He is not one of the old colonial crew. He’s a nobleman, a relation of the Spanish ambassador in London. We have no means of knowing what’s happened to your lieutenant Keymis or your son. Or the five ships you sent, and the four hundred men. Clearly something has happened. You can tell it. You can feel it in the air. In a little while we are likely to find out, but then neither you nor I may be in a position to sit and talk.”

“Don’t you want pen, paper? Aren’t you going to write anything down?”

“Not at this stage. Though I always prefer to work with a written statement. Unless you write things down, you miss a lot. Certain things that people say can reveal their meaning only if you can read them again and again. The words physically have to be in front of your eyes. It’s the only way you can discover things. Simple things, to start with. Like: ‘But I don’t understand that sentence.’ Or: ‘How did we get from there to there?’ Especially with someone like you, very skilled with words. But in fact both you and Laurence Keymis have made quite detailed statements many years ago. You both wrote books about Guiana and El Dorado and your discoveries. Richard Hakluyt reprinted them in his own compilation. It was something that John Talbot, your Tower friend, put us on to. He said, ‘It’s all there. Study those books from twenty-two years ago. Dissect them.’

“I tried reading them in England before the journey, but I found it hard. I got lost with all the strange Indian and Spanish names, of people and places and tribes. You gave too many names: I must tell you that made me suspicious.

“There was no question of reading on the journey, especially after the sickness. I’ve begun to read only since we’ve been in the Gulf, and really only since Keymis and your son went off to look for the gold mine of El Dorado. We’ve had a lot of time since then, a lot of empty days. Sunlight from six to six. Even so I have to read your book again and again. It’s a slippery piece of work, if I can use that word. You slip about, you lose your footing. It’s nice and easy and clear and brilliant for a number of pages, and then suddenly you feel you’ve not been paying attention. You feel you’ve missed something. So you go back. You’ve missed nothing. It’s just that something’s gone wrong with the writing. This happens many times. So even if you’re a careful reader you lose the drift of the narrative. It’s not easy, noticing first of all that the writing has changed and then finding exactly where. But those are precisely the places you have to identify. Because those are the places where the writer decides to add things or to hide things.

“One of the more extraordinary things in your book occurs in the ‘Advertisement,’ a kind of preface which you print between the letter of dedication and the book itself. It’s very bold, very effective, to place something so important in that half-way-house place, where people don’t read all that carefully. You say you wrote the Advertisement in reply to people who all those years ago, when you went back to England, said you were lying about El Dorado, that you’d found nothing, that the so-called ‘ore’ you brought back was really sand and that the piece of Guiana gold you showed was something you had bought beforehand in North Africa. The tone of the Advertisement was manly and honest. You stated very clearly what your detractors said. And then in a very open way you appeared to give an explanation. You said that you’d sent forty of your men to look for gold ore. They brought back sand. Not all the same sand. Men chose different colours. You told them it was sand they’d brought back, but the men for various reasons insisted on keeping it and bringing it back to England, and you allowed them to do so.

“But there is no mention of this sand-collecting episode in the book itself. I am not able to say when your men were ordered to go and collect this ore. It seems from this that if your enemies or other people hadn’t said you were lying and had brought back sand from Trinidad and Guiana, we would never have known about the forty men who at your orders went and looked for golden sand and brought it back to the ships.

“So in London, when people began to ridicule and doubt, you produced the piece of North African gold and said it was from Guiana, from some mountain of gold and diamonds beside a turbulent river. You weren’t going to be proved a fool. A traitor, a pirate, someone in league with the king of Spain — better any of that than to be a fool, a clown. After Drake and Hawkins, to be a clown privateer and explorer — that would have been worse than death.

“We do things for all kinds of reasons. Some of these reasons can appear quite trivial. And it may be that one of the reasons — just one, perhaps — at the bottom of this venture — so chivalric now, at the limit of the world, so heroic, so doomed to failure, an old man’s nobility — bringing us all here, at the cost of so many lives — it may be that one of the original reasons for this might have been your wish all those years ago to prove that you weren’t a fool, that you hadn’t brought home a cargo of sand as a cargo of gold.

“When you showed the North African gold, people asked why you hadn’t brought back more from this fabled land of El Dorado. Of course you didn’t have the money to buy more. But you say in your Advertisement rather sharply that no one has the right to ask you for more. You go on to say that you didn’t have the time or the tools or the men when you were on the river of El Dorado. The gold had to be hacked away from very hard rock. And people accepted that, though you had prepared for the expedition for years, and had so many men and ships. You had captured the Spanish conquistador who had been on the El Dorado quest and you had picked his brains, and you had gone to look for the mines. It was strange then that, after all of this, you didn’t have the tools, you didn’t have the time. You say the river tide was running so fast you couldn’t stay too long on the banks, and you were far from your ships and you had left them unprotected.

“So all you took back to England was a lot of marcasite sand. I will tell you something else that made the sand business so shameful. Some Frenchmen had done the same thing and had been laughed at. And then, weeks before you, a young English nobleman had done the same thing too. Sir Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester’s son. He had gone to Trinidad. He had asked Indians on the Gulf beach about a gold mine. Just like that. As soon as he arrived. Not knowing the language or anything. And he thought the Indians had made signs to say yes, there was a gold mine just a short way up the beach. They went in full armour and saw the glittering marcasite in the sand. For three days Dudley’s men loaded up with sand. The Spaniards saw, but didn’t trouble them. And then young Dudley left, because you were coming, and he was nervous of being found by you in your El Dorado patch.

“This happened literally just a few weeks before you came to the Gulf, and killed all the Spaniards. While you were exploring the Guiana estuaries Dudley was taking his marcasite back to England. Captain Wyatt wrote up this adventure in very high romantic language. It has been circulated in manuscript. Hakluyt didn’t want to print it. When Dudley was told he had brought back sand, he pretended he had known all along, and had brought the sand back on a whim.

“That was more or less what you said when you went back with your own load of Trinidad sand. You didn’t know about young Dudley’s adventure. You’d found nothing else. Your book doesn’t say you found anything. You had talked to one or two chiefs, that was all. But you had found nothing. In spite of the title of your book, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana. A difficult book, not easy to read.

“I think a deliberately difficult book. It’s only here that I understand why the book is so difficult. It’s a deliberate mixture of old-fashioned fantasy and modern truth. Everything you write about this side of the Gulf, the eastern side, the Trinidad side, everything is correct and very clear, every name, every tribe, every little Indian port. Real knowledge, real enquiry. On the river side, it’s a different story. When you get down to the main Orinoco, you write about a strange land of diamond mountains and meadows and deer and birds. It’s beautiful, but only like a painting. The book’s like the work of two different men.

“I think that when you began to travel in Guiana up that river, when you saw what a foolish old man the old Spanish conquistador was, when you saw the poverty of the tribes, you knew that there was no El Dorado. And you hated travelling on the river. I can understand from your writing how hard that kind of travel is. The sun, the airlessness, the constant running aground, the excrement and the food and the cooking all mixed up on the galley, people getting wet and dry and then wet again, the smell of many sweaty men in a small space.

“You were differently dieted, you said. However much you wanted to be like Hawkins or Drake, you couldn’t do the kind of thing they had done. You never wanted to get too far from your ships and your cabin. But you had killed too many people, you had talked too long about El Dorado, and when you went back to England you didn’t want to appear foolish, with the sand. So you had to stick to the El Dorado story.

“Unless you had given up on El Dorado when you were on the river, it doesn’t make sense what you did. You left one man with the Indians to go to the city of gold. One man, in the middle of the forest. The Indian chief asked you to leave fifty men, to protect them against the Spaniards. You said no. You left one man. After all that journey and preparation, all those years of reconnoitring. The man you left was a servant, Captain Gifford’s servant, Francis Sparrow. Francis Sparrow, one of the meaner sort you always rail about, was the man who was going to discover El Dorado for you.

“And to show to people in England where you had been you took the son of the chief Topiawari. You left a boy in exchange. A sixteen-year-old boy, Hugh Goodwin. I don’t know how you could do that. If people had read your book more carefully they would have taxed you with that. Keymis found out the following year what happened to that poor boy. Keymis wrote about it, and we found out from the Spanish reports as well. Before you had even got back into the Gulf that boy had been killed. The Indians told the Spaniards that the boy went out walking in the forest in his English clothes, and a tiger was so maddened by the sight of the clothes that it fell on him and killed him. Sometimes I think it sounds good, sometimes it sounds a mocking Spanish story, sometimes I think it sounds a foolish story. Who knows? Perhaps the Spaniards killed him, perhaps the Indians did. Think of this boy close to tears walking in the forest, in his best clothes, with such goods as he had taken off the ship. Walking in solitude away from the village, after the ships had begun to drift downstream, a hundred miles a day.

“It was harder for Francis Sparrow. He never went looking for El Dorado and the city of Manoa. The Spaniards captured him a few days after you had set him down. The Indians must have informed on him. From the Spanish reports we know he spent seven years in Spanish jails, and you know the terrible things that happen to Protestant people in Spanish jails, even here in the Indies, where the Inquisition also exists.

“You had given up on El Dorado, and after all the hard deaths I think of these two boys left behind in the forest, four hundred miles up river, as special sacrifices of yours. All that we know of them are their names. You never paid too much attention to people like that, the labourers and rowers on the ships.

“And look where it’s brought you back. Look where it’s got us all, waiting in this muddy Gulf for news of your son, and news of your lieutenant Keymis. From time to time during the day the Spaniards in Trinidad will fire off a shot, to let us know they are watching. Just before the sun goes down the Indians will light fires on the shore. Their canoes will paddle by and no one will come to us.

“Yet the day after you arrived you wrote to your wife that you could still be king of the Indies. We will talk about that later. I will come later and give you a second draught, when it’s cool. I have to read and think some more, picking my way through your slippery words. Look how the sun shines through your green silk curtains. They’ve already begun to fade.”

WHEN THE sun went down — it never became really cool on the water, at the south of the Gulf, almost in the river estuary — the old man said to the surgeon, “You asked why I wrote as I did to my wife. She will get that letter in some months. By the time she reads it all this may be over. It didn’t matter what I wrote her. And at one time it was true: I could have been king of the Indians.”

“A long time ago. In 1595. Twenty-three years ago.”

“I rescued all the Trinidad Indian little kings or chiefs from the Spaniards. I was the first man here ever to punish the Spaniards for what they had done. I killed the Spaniards in Port of Spain and broke open the jail in their town inland and set the kings free, and their people burned the Spanish town. But when I wrote my book and gave the names of the kings there were people in England who said that I was making the names up. Wannawanare, Carroari, Maquarima, Tarroopanama, Aterima. I still know the names. And then — luckily, not for me so much as for the kings — a Spanish ship was captured taking duplicates of reports to Spain, and some of the names were there. The Spaniards founded Port of Spain on Wannawanare’s land. In the report they sent to Spain they said he agreed to handing over his land and his people. The man I saw was naked and tortured and half dead in that little jail room. I can still see their faces turned to one side against the wall, the five wasted kings, all on one chain, their bodies burnt in places with hot bacon fat. They would have just stayed there and died if we hadn’t freed them. And if duplicates of the Spanish reports from Trinidad hadn’t been captured, with the names of some of those kings, saying they had agreed to the Spaniards’ taking over their land and their people — if that hadn’t happened, nobody would have believed that those kings existed, and that they had gone through this torment in the closed cell.”

The surgeon said, “The Spaniards are like that. They record everything, and get it attested by notaries, and they send duplicates and triplicates by different ships to Spain. Very little gets lost. It’s a great help to us. We often have the two sides of a story.”

The old man said, “It’s terrible to think that people mightn’t have known about those men, or believed what I wrote about them.”

“Everything you write about the Trinidad side of the Gulf is true. It’s remarkable. Every tribe, every village, every river is as you say. And you did rescue Wannawanare and the others. But you went away, and, as you know, the Spaniards came back. They sent a very big expedition to the Gulf some months later. I don’t think anyone knows what happened to Wannawanare and his people, and all the others, after you left. The Spaniards had a lot of scores to settle: The Indians you had helped didn’t stand a chance. Those two boys you left on the river didn’t stand a chance. When you sent Keymis the following year to reconnoitre on his own, he had to move very carefully. He couldn’t even land on Trinidad. He heard later that the Spaniards were resettling the Indian tribes on both sides of the Gulf. You know what that means. Keymis didn’t mention Wannawanare. Strange — of Keymis, I mean.

“For a few weeks in 1595, when you had all those ships and men, I suppose it would have been possible for you to be the king of the Indians. But you were fooling those people. When Keymis went out the next year, an Indian chief came to the river mouth to meet him with twelve or twenty canoes provisioned for war. The chief asked Keymis where the rest of your fleet was. Keymis spoke the lie he had prepared. He said he hadn’t come to fight the Spaniards. You had killed all the Spaniards the previous year, and if you had sent a bigger force now the Indians would have thought that you wanted to invade their territory. After Keymis had said that twice, word spread among the tribes, and no one came to see Keymis. All the Indians on the river could think of was hiding from the Spaniards and trying to make peace with them.

“You stirred people up, here in this Gulf, and you went away. You stayed away for twenty-three years. You left a lot of people to face the consequences. The Spaniards had a lot of scores to settle. And you can’t blame them. Those Spaniards you killed at Port of Spain — some people would say you behaved dishonourably. Those men had been on the island for some years and were almost destitute. They came aboard your ships to try to buy linen from your men. You encouraged them, you talked to them about Virginia. You said that was where you were going. You gave them wine, which they hadn’t had for years. You entertained them for days. As soon as the rest of your fleet came into the Gulf, and you felt sure of your strength, you fell on those Spaniards and killed them.”

The old man said, “It was what they had done to some of the people I had sent the year before. They invited them to leave the ships and go hunting in the woods. They had Indians and dogs. When our men were close to the shore they fired on them and killed them.”

“All right. You settled that score, but you left these others for the Spaniards to settle. And they didn’t forget. Spaniards are like that. Fourteen years after, a friend of yours, Hall, a London merchant, sent two ships to the Gulf to trade. To pick up tobacco, mainly. This foreign trading in a Spanish colony is illegal, but the Spanish governor didn’t mind breaking his country’s laws. He got the men on the London ships to talk. He found out that Hall, the owner of the ships, was a friend of yours. One day, when thirty-six men from the ships were ashore at Port of Spain, they were all seized and roped up. They were tied back to back, and the throats of all thirty-six were cut. Right away. On the black sand of that Port of Spain shore. The man who did that was the son of the old Spanish governor, the old conquistador you had captured and led about in 1595. It was bad luck on the thirty-six men, but the old conquistador’s son owed you that.

“This was part of what you left behind. The Gulf had always been a place of blood and revenge, of Indian dispossessions and resettlement. Even before the Spanish time. The man-eating Caribs were moving down. There were dreadful wars. You added to that. But you went away and wrote a book about an untouched paradise on the rivers, a place to which you alone had access, where the Indians lived in beautiful meadows and didn’t know the value of the gold and diamonds by which they were surrounded, and where you alone had the secret to Indian hearts.

“I am trying to find out how you arrived at that book, at that version of your adventure.

“You had heard, like the rest of the civilized world, about El Dorado. You knew about this old conquistador who had been made governor of the provinces of Trinidad and Guiana and El Dorado, and had spent his fortune looking for the golden city. You assembled a force. You came and captured the old governor. You had forty men dig sand — just in case — and load up the ships. You went exploring with the old governor. You thought him foolish. You found nothing. You’re an intelligent man. You lost much of your faith in El Dorado. You believed so little in El Dorado that you left only one man, a servant, to look for it. Just in case.

“You began to try to get a ransom for the old Spanish conquistador, the governor of Trinidad. That isn’t in your book, but it’s in the Spanish reports. None of the neighbouring Spanish officials would pay up. In fact, they all wanted the old man dead, so that they could claim his province and get whatever gold was going.

“So, at this stage, for all your trouble, and after all that killing, you had only sand. And this is where the Negro tells us something.”

The old man said, “I had no Negroes with me in 1595.”

“I know. You came straight from England with your force. I am thinking about the Negro who suddenly appears in your book when you are on the Guiana river, and see the meadows and fields and flowers near the falls. The river is full of crocodiles, thousands, you say. And the Negro — who would know about crocodiles — jumps in from the galley — for a swim, you say — and is immediately eaten alive. And that’s that. There’s nothing more about crocodiles or Negroes in your book. I have thought a lot about that vanishing Negro of yours, and I’m certain you borrowed him from John Hawkins’s account of his voyage to Guinea in West Africa and the West Indies in 1564. In Guinea Hawkins saw a Negro who was snatched by a crocodile and pulled under as he was filling water at the river’s edge. That’s a better story.

“Just as you were taking back Topiawari’s son to England to show people that you had really been to Guiana, so, as you were writing about foreign adventures, you wanted to let people know that you had seen what other famous adventurers had seen. There is a little more, connected with that Negro. Hawkins was a slaver and privateer, a sacker of Spanish cities. I feel that when you left the Gulf, with only the sand to show for your pains, your thoughts were turning to sacking a city. Hawkins was in your head. You thought you would do what he had done.

“Outside the Gulf, not far to the west, just below the salt-pans of the Araya Peninsula, is the town of Cumaná. It is the oldest Spanish town in this part of the world. You thought you would capture that, as you had captured Port of Spain. But the Spanish governor there had heard about you, and he was waiting, with his musketeers and his Indian archers with their poisoned arrows. The land sloped up from the sea to the town. It was sandy, open, full of low, prickly cactus. Your men were massacred as they came off the boats. There is nothing of this in your book, but the Spanish reports say that forty of your men died there. They were important men. The Spanish reports give the names. They couldn’t have made them up. The men who died from musket or sabre wounds on the Cumaná shore were the lucky ones.

“Terrible things happened to the people who were hit by the poisoned arrows of the Indians. They went mad with thirst. Their bowels burst, their bodies blackened. The smell was awful in the ships. You asked the old Spanish conquistador you were dragging around with you about an antidote. He said he didn’t know. So he had his revenge at last. It didn’t matter how much you abused him for being unlearned and incurious: he said he didn’t know.

“In your book you don’t talk about the attack on Cumaná, of course. But you talk in a very concrete and passionate way about the effects of the poisoned arrows; you slip it in as a necessary digression — to use your words — in the Guiana section. You mention the antidote you heard about from someone you said was a Guianian; but what this person said suggests he was a Spaniard, a renegade you mention in another context, someone lower down the coast from Cumaná, always ready to trade with foreigners. Some Spaniards, this man said, had been cured with garlic juice; the golden rule was to take no liquids before the wound was dressed. Twenty-seven men died in the ships from the arrows: this was the figure given by the old conquistador to the Spanish enquiry. He was let off the ship at this stage, the old conquistador, perhaps exchanged for two English prisoners.

“Twenty-seven people died on the ships, but you did what you could to spare yourself the smell and the suffering. There were two Dutch ships at anchor off the Araya Peninsula, no doubt loading up with contraband salt, with the connivance of that man who told you about the antidote. You spent the hours of daylight and heat with them, when the smell of the dying men in your own ship would have been very high. At night you came back to your cabin, with the green hangings. Just like this one. Later you buried your dead — just as you did this time, when you reached the Gulf.

“That journey of 1595 had begun with murder; it had ended with a massacre of your people and the stench of death in the ships. And all you had to show for it was sand. As for all the deaths, you didn’t have to explain — people always die on expeditions.

“Perhaps if you hadn’t taken back the sand and been mocked for it, you might have written nothing. Or you might have written a little account of your exploration of the Gulf and the river. But you had to prove that you were not a fool, that you had found something more important than gold or booty. You had found a new empire for England, an empire of willing Indian subjects. So you wrote your difficult book, mixing up fantasy and history with your own real explorations. Everything on this side of the Gulf was real, everything on that side was fantasy. That made it easy for you to write, but by this means you also created a book that no one could ever disentangle and very few would read. The story was in the title; that was as far as most people would get. The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) and Other Countries, with their Rivers adjoining. Performed in the year 1595 by Sir Walter Raleigh Knight.

“The book was offered as proof, if anyone chose to go through it. But the more important proof was your own behaviour. You insisted that El Dorado existed. You had your Indian servants. You sent Keymis the next year to Guiana. You sent people to keep in touch. The only thing that gives you away is that you yourself never wanted to go back. You sent Keymis. You sent other people later. But you never went back yourself. And even now, at the end of your life, you haven’t wanted to go up the river. You arrived this time as you left twenty-three years ago, with the stench of death in your ship. You have buried your dead. But you have preferred to stay out here in the Gulf. You don’t really want to know. You are hoping for luck. Or perhaps you are hoping for nothing at all. There was never any El Dorado in Guiana. The Spaniards stopped looking many years ago. The French have stopped looking. The Dutch never looked. They always came only to trade, to get tobacco and salt. Neither you nor Keymis saw anything on the river. You both thought only that where so many had looked for El Dorado, El Dorado existed. Keymis in his book said El Dorado had to exist, if only as a sign of God’s providence: to give England an empire as Spain had been given one. And now we wait for news of Keymis and your son and the others.”

THE SHIPS and canoes that went down to the main river from the Gulf went down one branch; the ones that came up from the river to the Gulf used another, some way to the east, where the current was not so strong. Up to fifty years before only the Indians were masters of these waters; now that trick of the estuary was known to all. Normally now the canoes ignored the Destiny and its sentinel ship. But one day there came a canoe or launch.

Imagine the wide southern Gulf at sunrise: the flat many-channelled estuary to the west and south, the long barrier arm of the low, sandy peninsula of south-western Trinidad to the east: the morning sky high, the water reasonably calm, river water from the continent mingling with the Atlantic in froth-edged bands of colour: mud, various shades of olive, grey. Almost mid-way between the estuary and the peninsula is a high, broken rock formation which now has a Spanish name, Soldado, The Soldier. Only pelicans and the birds now called frigate birds live there; they have done that for centuries, perhaps tens of centuries. They nest there, and when the time comes they settle down to die, not far away from where they have nested, with the same kind of deliberation, folding their legs neatly below them. Guano and bones fill every crevice and cushion every ledge of the broken grey rock, and create a kind of earth where vegetation grows.

At night the water is more turbulent than at sunrise, and the weak lights of the rocking Destiny, lying within the Gulf, and its sentinel ship, lying south of The Soldier, can be seen from far.

In the middle of the day the sky is blue, the birds circle above The Soldier, mere glitter replaces the colours of the choppy water and blurs far-off objects.

So the small vessel, coming up one afternoon from the eastern channel, bobbing up and down, appears and disappears in the glitter. A canoe? Indian canoes steer clear of the Destiny now. This vessel comes steadily on. The sentinel ship signals. The vessel coming up is one of the expedition’s launches. The captain of the Destiny fixes his glass on the approaching shape, its outlines dissolving and re-forming in the white glitter. The deck of the ship is hot below the thin leather soles of the soldiers, watchful now, sweating in their hot breast armour.

In the captain’s glass a launch defines itself at last. Not an Indian canoe. An English launch: its sails can be seen: the oars of the rowers are at rest. Some armed soldiers are with them. And a gentleman, a man in splendid clothes, sitting on one of the benches. Not English clothes. Spanish clothes.

It can only be the Spanish governor. Is he a captive? Has some act of war therefore occurred? Or is he coming to parley, to offer a deal, nobleman to nobleman?

In the general’s cabin, hot in the afternoon, with the smell of the sea and the estuary mingling with the smell of sickness, and the small bleached curtains glowing in the light, the old man bestirs himself and begins to dress, to receive the governor. The surgeon helps him. A clean shirt for the general: it smells of the brackish water in which it has been washed. Then the two men go out together to the light on the deck.

The launch gets nearer.

“Is it Palomeque?” the old man asks.

“It’s an Indian,” the surgeon says. “They’ve dressed him up in Spanish clothes. The governor’s, or some other nobleman’s. The clothes are far too big for him.”

The old man falls silent. The sails slacken, the launch pulls alongside. The Indian looks up, all face in the too-big clothes. A soldier from the launch climbs half-way up the ship’s ladder. A second soldier passes him things from the launch.

The man on the ladder says, “For the admiral. Captain Keymis’s compliments. A basket of oranges and lemons.” He passes the fruit, already shrivelling, to a musketeer on the deck. “A roll of tobacco. A parcel of papers.”

The surgeon takes the papers and glances at them. He says, “Spanish papers.”

“A tortoise,” the man on the ladder says, as that creature, its shell warm from the sun, its lower part cool from the bilge water where it’s been resting, is passed up. “And Don José himself.”

This is the Indian. He is pushed up the ladder. The clothes are the clothes of a man a foot taller, and they are not as fine as they appeared from a distance. They are flecked with mud and stained in places with old blood and bilge water; sweat stains under the arms show purple on the blue silk. The Indian is uncertain. He fixes frightened eyes on the old man with the white beard.

WE STAY with those Indian eyes. When we next consider them they are calmer, even self-possessed. Let us stand back a step or two. We see then that the possessor of those eyes is now wearing English Jacobean clothes that fit. He is sitting at a heavy dark table in a high, bare room. It is cool in the room, though it is sunny outside. The solid walls are unevenly plastered and the sloping projections catch the dust here and there.

A year has passed. In spite of Don José’s English clothes, we are in New Granada, back in the New World and South America, and Don José is giving evidence to a priest, Fray Simón, who is writing a history of the Spanish New World.

Fray Simón is reading back from his notes.

“ ‘And witness says that after these gifts were handed over, the surgeon asked for news. A letter was handed over to the general. And when the letter was half read, the general, whose name at that time witness thought to be Milor Guaterai, looked at the deck and the sea and the sky, and then at the birds flying above the rock known as The Soldier, and then he looked at the deck again and began to cry silently, in the presence of all, for the death of his son.’ And so?”

Don José says, “The surgeon came forward to support the old man, and the old man allowed himself to be held.”

EYES ALONE now, we will go down the fast-flowing channel from the Gulf to the main river. The water and the banks are all that we will see. We are travelling at the speed of the ships, and we are seeing (without interference, with the help of this camera’s eye) the once aboriginal waters down which Captain Keymis’s four ships passed a full year before, with four hundred heavily armed men, among them a section of pike commanded by the old man’s son. Big forest birds fly ahead. The white sky yellows, then glows red; the muddy water turns violet in the fading light. Night falls on the river and the banks; the bush begins to sing. We slow down. The expedition has drawn near to the Spanish settlement.

Here we begin to fit pictures to the words of Don José. The narrative is now his.

“When the people of San Thomé heard that the English were coming they were frightened. When they heard that all those ships had anchored outside the river they began to take away their goods from their rancherías to the island in the middle of the river.”

“Rancherías?” Fray Simón said. “Shacks, huts? Do you mean that? Were they living in huts?”

“Only the governor lived in a house, and everything was in that house. The jail, the Royal Treasury, everything. The Treasury was full of people’s goods. The governor, Don Palmita, was a very hard man.”

“Palomeque. Pa-lo-me-que.”

“The governor took people’s goods when they broke the law. The people didn’t have money to pay the fines. Don Palomeque didn’t like people trading with the foreigners.”

“Don Diego. Don Diego Palomeque.”

“Don Diego said this kind of trading was against the king’s laws, and he was determined to put an end to it. So he took people’s goods. He was no respecter of persons. In the Treasury in his house in San Thomé there was a lot of silver plate belonging to the wife of the previous governor. I mention this because I used to work for the family. In fact, the previous governor was my father. Don Fernando Berrio. You can look at my face and see that I am Spanish.”

Fray Simón said, “Not especially.”

“I am just telling you what people say. My mother was an Indian woman, of course. People didn’t like this new gov ernor, Don Diego, and if he didn’t have those soldiers from Puerto Rico with him, they would have killed him in Trinidad or San Thomé. He was coming and going between the two places and, even with the soldiers, there were many places on the river where he could have had an accident. I am not giving away any secrets if I say that some people were happy to hear that the English were coming. One Indian servant actually said so in Don Diego’s hearing. The governor had the foolish man whipped in the open ground we called the plaza and then had him chained up in the jail in the governor’s house. This happened about four days before the English came.

“The next day news was brought of the size of the English force. People said four hundred men, five hundred, seven hundred men were coming. At nightfall all the vecinos or people of the little town left their rancherías and took all the food they had and went to the island in the river. My people did that too. They left me behind just in case something happened when the English came and I was in a position to recover the silver plate from the governor’s house. The next evening, or the evening after that, the soldiers from Puerto Rico deserted. There were about fifty of them. More than enough to frighten the vecinos of San Thomé, but not enough to face the English. They went to the island where the townspeople had gone.

“There were only twelve people in the town the next morning. I counted them. There was the chained Indian in the governor’s house. There was myself. There were three Indian servant women. Two Negroes, left by their owners to fend for themselves. A crippled priest, and a Portuguese boy. There was the governor, and there were two captains with him, Captain Monje and Captain Erenetta.”

Fray Simón said, “Arias Nieto. That was the name that came out at the official enquiry.”

“The governor, Don Diego, behaved like a man. I have to say it. There were only the three of them who were soldiers, and he behaved as though they were three hundred. He was a big, stout man, the biggest Spaniard I had seen. I had never seen him do any manual work. Now he showed how much he could do. He and the two captains worked from first light to fortify the redoubt the soldiers from Puerto Rico had begun to create around some rocks just outside the plaza. He and the captains dug. They got the two Negroes to dig with them, and they made me dig with them as well. So there were six of us digging. Six men can dig a lot in a day. They had about a dozen muskets and they were preparing three lines of defence. We cut down branches and created barricades in front of each musket position. In the outer line the musket positions were far apart, about forty yards. In the second line they were closer, and in the last line they were very close, just inside the plaza. They set up rests for their muskets, and in some rests they placed primed muskets.

“They didn’t have a chance, but they were going to do all that they could. And they were working with such a will that it was only in the afternoon, when it was very hot and quiet, that I began to think that they were really dead men, that this was the last day of their life. I must tell you I admired them then, and I began to work with a will like theirs. The Indian women prepared food for us and brought us water, and the governor didn’t forget the crippled priest. We worked right through the day. A silent day, a deserted plaza, and we were all so active. The Portuguese boy acted as scout and watched the river.

“When there were two hours of daylight left, the governor said they had done as much as they could do. For an hour or so he and the two others practised running from musket position to musket position, and withdrawing from one line to another. Then they ate their last meal, and the fires were put out. The sun went down, and after the silence of the day the forest began to roar. We waited. I don’t know how long. I don’t think it would have been possible for the whistles or signals of the Portuguese boy to be heard with all that forest noise. And then we heard four musket shots. Just four, very close together. There was nothing more after that. Just the forest. In the morning, when it was silent again, the English soldiers came into the square. They carried very big lances.

“I was in the Berrios’ house. The soldiers had no trouble finding me. They found the three Indian women, too, hiding in one of the rancherías. And the Portuguese boy, and the two Negroes. They began to drive us very roughly to the governor’s house, shouting at us in English and what they thought was Spanish.

“ ‘You,’ they said to me. ‘Castellano’? I wanted to tell them that my father was the previous governor, but I didn’t know how to say that. So I just made signs to say yes. This made them very angry. One of the soldiers unhooked a coil of rope from his belt, and I think they would have hanged me there and then if the Negroes hadn’t said, ‘No castellano, no castellano. Indio, indio. Indian, Indian.’

“There were many soldiers in the governor’s house. In one room, the office, we saw a man with bandages and blood on his torn clothes. He had been wounded by a musket shot. In another room, the one with the Royal Chest, we saw two dead men laid out. We were taken to the main bedroom. There we found the English commander. He was an old man, very tall, as tall as the Spanish governor, but very thin. He had a bad eye. As commander he carried a polished stick about a yard long. He said through an interpreter to the women, ‘Some Spanish men died during the night. We want you to tell us who they are.’

“They took us to the redoubt, where we had done so much digging in the red earth the day before. The ground had been scuffed by the English soldiers’ feet, but you could still see the branches we had cut and where we had dragged them on the ground. Don Palmita, Erenetta, and Captain Monje had died at musket positions in the outer line. All that work, and the fight had lasted only a minute. Four musket shots. One man had fired twice. With those four shots they had killed two English soldiers and wounded one. Only one shot had missed. And then all three of them had died. You could see where the big English lances had thrown aside the branches. I don’t think they were expecting the English to come so far up the river with those lances. Erenetta and Captain Monje still had their clothes, but they had already stripped the clothes off Don Palmita. He was naked and dirty and the blood was black on him and there was a gash from the top of his head down to his teeth.

“I told the commander who the dead men were. He changed colour when he heard that the naked man was the governor. The women were crying at the sight of the dead men, and when the English commander asked them to bury the dead men they said they didn’t know how to bury people. I don’t know what rule the commander was following. I don’t know why he wanted the women to bury the dead men. He didn’t ask me. He didn’t ask the Negroes. When the women said they didn’t know how to bury dead men, he looked as though he didn’t know what to do. Then he said to the women through the interpreter, ‘All right, all right. Cook for us. If you cook for us, nothing will happen to you. What can you cook for us?’ The women said they had only maize, and there wasn’t much of that because the vecinos had stripped the fields and taken most of the maize to the island.

“They cooked the maize, boiling it with some herbs, and the commander asked me and the other Indian, the one chained up in the house, to eat with them in the governor’s house. They treated us with a lot of honour. I wasn’t expecting that. The man who had been chained they called Señor Don Pedro. It wasn’t his name. It was like a joke with them.

“All the time there were those two dead bodies in the Treasury room. One of them was the son of the English general. And outside were those three other bodies. When people die they should disappear. A dead body is like a weight on the earth, a weight on the soul. Later that day, when everyone was less tired, some of the English soldiers went out to the dead men, tried to compose their limbs, tied the bodies together and buried them in one of the holes we had dug the day before. That felt better. The crippled priest said some prayers in his house.

“The next day they buried the two men stretched out in the governor’s house. They brought shrouds from the ships and wrapped the bodies in them. They placed the bodies on planks and some men carried the planks round the open bare ground of the plaza, in front of the shacks and the thatched adobe church. The commander walked alone just behind the planks. It looked strange, but again I didn’t know what rule they were following. Some of the soldiers marched in formation with their flags pointing down. Others held their big lances in their right hands, the points sloping up, the wooden hafts dragging on the ground behind them. Twice they walked round the plaza. Then the bodies were buried in another hole we had dug the day before, not far from the other.

“After this, the commander began to look for gold. He dug up the ground in every ranchería. Once for a whole morning he had the Portuguese boy whipped back and forth through the settlement. He thought the Portuguese boy knew where the gold was. It might have been because of the boy’s accent. Then he left the poor boy alone. Day after day he had the soldiers dig. One night he went out of the settlement. In the morning he came back with some sand. He showed it to me. ‘Is this gold, Don José?’ He became demented. His bad eye flickered out of control more and more. He went up and down the river. Once he went too near the island and the soldiers from Puerto Rico opened up and killed six of his soldiers.

“Every day now, in little incidents like this, he began to lose men. Every day there were burials, and not always with their rules. Once for many days he went up the river in a launch. He travelled in this way for two hundred miles. He took me with him. He had said before we started that he knew this stretch of the river well, but it soon was clear that the river here was quite new to him. He was terrified that the people on the banks might shoot poisoned arrows. Every time he saw a rock or coloured earth or sand he wanted to know whether it contained gold. But he never wanted to stay too long on the banks because of his fear of the arrows. When we came back to the settlement we found that one of the ships had gone away.

“It was strange. I had hated Don Diego, the governor. Then I grieved for him. Now I began to grieve for the man who had killed Don Diego. He was frightened and unhappy. He held on to his polished stick but he no longer knew what to do. The soldiers were sick and dying. We had no food. His men had no regard for him. He was frightened that more ships might desert. That was when he decided to send me in the launch to the river mouth to meet the general.

“He sat in the bedroom of the governor’s house and wrote a letter. He said I was not to tell the general about the death of his son. The general should read it first in his letter. Then he began to put things in the launch. A lot of papers from the Treasury, where the general’s dead son had lain for two nights and a day. The oranges and lemons. The only gold things in San Thomé. There were some trees in the settlement. The roll of tobacco. There was tobacco everywhere. That was what people grew to trade with the foreign ships. If only it was food no one would have gone hungry. Then he thought of the tortoise. He would have liked to send the general an armadillo, he said. On the river one day in 1595 he and the general and everybody else had feasted on armadillo. The tortoise wasn’t food, but the general was interested in these strange animals. I was to keep the tortoise cool.

“And then, just before I left, the idea came to him to dress me up in the clothes they had stripped off the dead governor. They were pretty clothes, but they were too big for me. That made him laugh. I thought it was a strange time for a joke like that. But he was probably following some rules of his own. It was like the time he and his officers unchained the Indian in the governor’s house, dressed him up, and called him Señor Don Pedro, and then wanted him and me to sit and eat boiled maize with them in the governor’s house, while the three dead men were unburied outside, and the two dead men were lying in the other room.”

EYES ALONE again, we move down river. But now we are looking at what the launch is leaving behind. We are never far from the northern bank, and we are moving fast, at about four or five miles an hour. At a certain stage we leave the main river and turn into a channel that flows north. We slow down. The current no longer drives us. We depend on wind and tack from side to side, until the banks vanish. We are out in the wide Gulf again, and soon we see the heavy brown pelicans and the slender frigate birds flying over The Soldier.

Half-way through these pictures, as we consider water and flat land, green and brown and yellow, we hear the voice of Fray Simón, the historian.

“You are now a well-travelled man. Better travelled than most people in the world. You’ve been to England. You’ve seen some of its great cities and great buildings. You’ve seen things I haven’t seen. The spire of Salisbury, the great cathedrals of Winchester and Southwark, the Tower of London that they say Julius Caesar built. You’ve met important men. You’ve been to Spain, too. You’ve been to Toledo and Salamanca. You’ve been to Seville. You’ve seen the galleons from the Americas on the river there. And now you’re back here, in New Granada, where you were born. Don José in name and deed.”

“It was the doing of Sir Guateral, the English general. He could have condemned me with a word.”

“Why did he like you?”

“He never said.”

“Did he see in you some resemblance to the son he had lost? Was it because you were among the last people to see his son?”

“We never talked about it. He never asked me about his son.”

“Did you know the general was going to die in a few months?”

“I didn’t know, and I’m glad I didn’t know. It would have been too much for me after all that had happened. And I was full of my own grief.”

“Because of all the dead men? Or grief because you were being taken away?”

“It had been with me for some weeks. But it was only on the launch that I began to understand what I was feeling. I wasn’t a Guiana man. I was from New Granada, and had made that long journey down the river with the Berrios. I always had the hope that I would be able to pick my way back home from Guiana. When the settlement was abandoned, and the vecinos took refuge on the island in the river, I felt the world had changed for me. I felt I had lost touch with things. On the launch this grief grew and grew. Sometimes a child playing in a puddle after rain gets suddenly frightened by the reflected sky. I was like that. I felt I was falling into the sky, falling into the sea. I hardened my heart. And then, from being frightened by that idea of falling into the sky, I began to hold on to it. It was the only comfort I had. The thought of my doom lifted me above people. I thought I would acknowledge no one. Even if people laughed at me, or smiled at me, because of the clothes I was wearing, I wasn’t going to smile back.”

“Was this the face you showed to the general when you went aboard his ship?”

“Yes.”

“You were a lucky man. He had fallen out of love with the Indians. He thought they’d let him down.”

“As I said, he could have condemned me with a word.”

“It may be your demeanour impressed him. Perhaps he saw his fate in yours.”

“He didn’t look at me at first. And I was thinking about the birds above the rock they called The Soldier. Then he began to read the letter, and he cried for his son, and the surgeon held him. It was only after this that I felt his eyes fall on me.”

“Of course, you were the only thing from Guiana he was taking back to England.”

“That was what people said later. At the time I just felt his old man’s eyes falling on my face, and I felt at ease with him.”

“I was hoping to get something else from you, I must confess. My feeling now is that as an historian I should deal as simply as possible with the moment of news. I should present only the facts.”

We consider again the frigate birds floating high over The Soldier, and, lower down, flying in well-spaced lines above the sea glitter, the awkwardly shaped pelicans (like miniature airborne caravels), heavy-bodied, heavy-beaked, with no balancing length of tail.

Over this comes the voice of Fray Simón, reading aloud as he writes his history.

“So their joy at the death in battle of the valiant Don Diego Palomeque de Acuña was well watered by the weeping that began in their ships for the death of their own general’s son.”

WE FOCUS again on Don José: his confident face, his fine Jacobean tunic. He takes up his narrative again.

“When the general was a little restored, he gave orders that I was to be taken to his cabin and given some of his own clothes. So at once my position on the ship changed. People who had looked at me with irony stopped doing so. Even my name they pronounced in a different way. The general’s cabin was small, but the hangings were richer than anything I had seen. The attendant who took me to the cabin opened a chest that was battened down to the floor, took out some clothes, and asked me to choose. The general was closer to my size. It was a relief to get out of the Spanish governor’s clothes. They were the fine clothes he had put on for the battle. The blood had turned black on them, and the red San Thomé mud, from that night of the battle, had dried to powder. They gave off the smell of death and the forest, river water and wet old leaves, and, faintly, as if from a long time before, the smell of the sweet root the governor had kept in his own clothes chest to perfume his clothes and keep out insects. I folded the clothes as neatly as I could and placed them on the lid of the chest.

“I dressed in my new clothes, with the help of the attendant, and was wondering about going outside when the general and the surgeon came in. They made me understand that I was to sleep in the cabin. A hammock would be set up for me. I was to be the general’s personal servant. The general asked whether I knew about waiting on people, and I told him that I had been in the household of the previous governor of Trinidad and Guiana. I didn’t tell him that the governor was my father.

“My first duty was to serve him his dinner. His cook had died on the voyage out, and he ate what the ship’s galley provided. It was a maize gruel that day. He hardly touched it. Later he and the surgeon walked, and he played with the tortoise. In the cabin in the evening we didn’t talk. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted my company, but he wanted me to stay a stranger. At some time in the night he got out of his cotton hammock. He wanted to eat something. He ate a stewed prune, from a barrel he had brought out from England. I didn’t like the way the prune or the barrel looked, after he had taken out the cover, and I thought the smell very unpleasant. He said it was the only thing he could eat easily, after his sickness on the voyage, and he had very few left. He said the last few apples he had brought out from England had been stolen by the men. He looked very thin in his shirt. It was pitiful to see him.

“He was old and sick and thin, but he could be very rough with people, especially with people who served him. He wanted them to know that he didn’t think much of them; he could be a shouter. For some reason he wasn’t like that with me, and this gave me some standing among the English on the ship. I have to say that I had never in my life been shown anything like that regard, not in New Granada, not in San Thomé when I was with the Berrios. At the same time I saw that this good fortune of mine wasn’t going to last, that the position of the general here in the Gulf was almost like the position of his commander on the river.

“He was a doomed man. Everyone knew it. The surgeon, the mariners, the soldiers, the men who cooked his meals in the galley. He had lost many men, many friends, many noblemen. He had lost his son. And he had Spanish blood on his hands. He shouldn’t have allowed that to happen. He had promised the English king there would be no fighting with the Spaniards. That battle at San Thomé shouldn’t have taken place. I understood about that later. What I understood at the time was that he had not found gold, and that as soon as he went back to England he would be arrested by orders of the English king, and after that he would be executed.

“That was his future, yet in the meantime he was the general. He had ships and men at his disposal. He could order men to do what he wanted. He could shout at the mariners and the serving people. And of course it was still possible that if he found gold everything would be reversed. He would live and be honoured. If he could find the gold that he had made people believe only he knew how to find. But the gold didn’t exist. To the people of San Thomé it was a joke when we heard that the English were coming to seize our gold mines.

“I don’t think anyone on the Destiny or the other ships believed in the gold either. And yet they were all there in the Gulf, under the orders of the general whose life was more or less over. They were waiting, doing nothing. Like the general. Some of them found it hard. A few days after I arrived, a couple of the general’s ships slipped away, heading north up the Gulf to the Dragon’s Mouth and the Caribbean Sea. The general appeared not to notice.

“The surgeon came to the cabin three or four times a day. The general talked a lot to him. In fact, he was the only one the general talked to. He talked about attacking Trinidad and holding Port of Spain to ransom. He had done it twenty-three years before, he said, and he could do it again. This time he would ask the Spaniards for twenty thousand pounds, and he would burn the city, a street a day, until the Spaniards paid. He talked about attacking Cumaná and Puerto Cabello, and then establishing a base in Florida.

“At first I took what he said seriously, and then I saw that he stood no chance at all, had nowhere in the world to hide, that whatever luck he might have the first time or the second time in those ventures he was outlining, the ships from England would come after him again and again. The way the Spanish ships had come again and again to our part of the world. Then I understood that he was talking just to impress the surgeon and even a little to impress me. He would tell me in Spanish what he had been telling the surgeon, and then he would say, almost as though it was a joke, ‘What do you think, Don José?’

“When the surgeon left and we were alone in the cabin, the old man would go silent. In daylight and in darkness I could feel him grieving for his son and thinking of his own death. Once or twice he took out a book and sat down to write in it. But he didn’t write anything. They told me later it was the journal he had kept since he had left England with his ships and men. Even when he had been very ill he had written in that book. But he had written nothing in it since the launch had come from San Thomé with the news.

“He was waiting for his commander from San Thomé. It was really all we were doing there in the Gulf, waiting for that defeated man with the bad eye. He talked about it many times a day, as though it was the one thing that was still clear to him.

“At last one day, about thirteen or fourteen days after I had arrived, the commander’s ship appeared in the south, coming up the channel to our left. The sentinel ship signalled, the mariners and soldiers shouted the news, and people ran to the deck to wait. Not the general, though. I had been helping him to get ready to go out for a walk on deck, but when he heard the news he said he didn’t think he was well enough. He wasn’t making it up. His face changed. It seemed to shrink. It became older, full of creases. He said he would stay in his cabin. But he wanted me to go out and see what was happening.

“I went outside. It was just before noon, and the decks felt hot below the soles of my new shoes. The sky was full of big moving clouds, and the choppy sea was all glitter. The ship came up slowly, the light from sea and sky dancing about it, the shape and colours of its masts and sails coming and going. The birds from The Soldier floated high above. When the ship came nearer I saw that it was flying two white flags. I don’t know what that meant.

“The ship anchored a little distance away. A boat was lowered. Rowers climbed down the rope ladder into the boat. The commander appeared on the deck of his ship, tall, dressed in the same clothes I had last seen him in, holding his polished stick of office. With that stick always in his right hand, he climbed down the ladder. He was rowed over to us. He was still the commander of the river force at that moment, but as soon as he held on to the ship’s ladder and began to come up to the deck that authority left him. And I thought how strange it was, that just a few weeks ago the English pikemen at San Thomé were within two or three minutes of hanging me. The Negroes saved me then, and after that for many weeks my life depended on this man. Now I was on the general’s ship, and with everyone else was studying every movement of this condemned man coming up the ladder with his now useless commander’s stick.

“He had grown very thin. We didn’t have much to eat on the ship. He would have had less on the river. His clothes were dirty. So were his hands. They were discoloured with old dirt, and full of scratches, some fresh, some healing. I suppose a campaigning soldier’s hands are very rough, but I had never thought about it until that moment. One eye was very quiet, almost dead; the other eye, the bad one, was jumping about madly. He didn’t look at me. There was nothing in his face to show that he even recognized me as the man he had dressed in the Spanish governor’s clothes and sent as a prisoner to the general.

“He went up to the general’s cabin. He knew the way. Everyone looked at him. The surgeon followed him, and I followed the surgeon. The general’s door was open. There was no reply when the commander knocked, but he went in, still holding his stick, and bending — a very tall man, a small doorway — in order not to strike his head. The general was in his hammock. Since I had left him he had become very ill. His shirt was wet with sweat. His face was white above the hollows of his eyes and cheeks. He didn’t talk. And yet, as I had learned, these two old men were very old friends.

“The commander began to talk. The old man didn’t reply. The commander talked on. I felt his words didn’t matter. I felt after a time that even the commander wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. I think that all of us in that cabin were waiting for an explosion from the sick man in the hammock. And that explosion did come, and it went on for a long time. It was as though the waiting and the disappointments and the grief of many weeks now, and many years before that, had been gathered up into this moment, as though this was the moment that the general had been waiting for, the one clear thing he had felt he had to do, after he had understood his doom.

“The old commander, already bending below the low ceiling, bent lower before the general’s words. The commander had ruined everything, the general said. The commander had come out at the general’s expense many years before to look for the gold mines, and he had said he had found the gold mines. There were three people in San Thomé who operated gold mines, the general said. He even knew their names. Don José knew their names. Francisco Fashardo owned a mine. Hermano Fruntino owned a mine. Pedro Rodrigo Paraná owned a mine.

“When I heard my name mentioned, I looked up and caught the surgeon’s eye. He translated what the general had said into Spanish. I wanted to say that it wasn’t true, that there were no gold mines in San Thomé, that none of those names the general had spoken were real, that Paraná was the name of a river, and that hermano meant brother. But the surgeon looked hard at me and made a slight gesture with his head, and I knew that I was to say nothing, that we had to bear with the general in his madness, that this madness was all that remained of his life now, that this rage had given the sick man who had lost his son a kind of life.

“The old man raged and raged at the commander that afternoon. The sun shone through the green curtains. The heat was too much for me, and the anger of the old man, and the grief of the tall half-starved man with the bad eye and the very dirty clothes and hands. I went outside, and found everyone quiet and hushed and unhappy. Nothing that had happened was hidden from anyone on the Destiny or in the other ships.

“At length the commander left, without his stick, and went to his cabin. It was above the general’s. The general called for me, and I found him trembling in his hammock, his face thin and white, his shirt very wet, and he was complaining of feeling cold. He said, ‘I am sick, Don José, very sick.’ The commander’s polished stick was on the lid of the general’s clothes chest. We could hear the commander moving about in his cabin overhead, and the general behaved as though every noise, every sign of life from his commander, was an insult.

“Later, just before sunset, the general summoned the commander and went at him again.

“The commander had taken off some of his clothes. His shirt was undone. This time he didn’t listen for very long. He said something which I didn’t understand, and after that he didn’t try to talk. Not long after, he left and went up to his cabin.

“The general was like a man possessed. He got out of his hammock, got out his book, took some sheets of paper from it, and began to write by the light of a candle. It was the first time I had seen him use a candle since I had got on to the ship. There was a sound of a shot from above. The general made a face. It was dark, even with the candle. If it wasn’t dark, I would have said that the general smiled when he heard. After the shot the general wrote and wrote, this man who had not written in his journal since I had come to be with him.

“The surgeon came, and he and the general talked. We all three then went to the cabin above, the cabin of the commander. There he was, in the clothes he had arrived in, fully dressed again, on the floor. They were the clothes I had seen on him when he had put me on the launch at San Thomé and sent me to the general, with the gifts of the tortoise and the papers and the roll of tobacco. The commander’s face was turned towards the floor. The general turned him over, like a man anxious to see what other men would have preferred not to see. We could see where the shot had torn the shirt and damaged his ribs over his very thin chest. But there was also a knife, a long, thin knife. It had been thrust in between the ribs. What had come first? The knife or the shot? I think the shot.

“The cabin was soon full of people. The general wanted everyone to see, and no one liked what he had seen. I was told later that they didn’t like the idea of a man putting an end to his own life. It was like a judgement the dead man had made on himself. Though among us who are Indians or partly Indian it is better to do away with oneself than to live with dishonour.

“For hours that night, like a man inspired, like a man drawing energy from some unknown source or soul, the general wrote. The next day the commander was buried, without ceremony, his body tied in a shroud, for the sake of decency, rather than for religion, and thrown out into the Gulf, he who had walked according to the rules behind the shrouded corpses of the general’s son and the other dead English nobleman at San Thomé.

“That was the end. There was nothing more to do there. The captains of the other ships came to the general and asked what they were to do. He said that he was a doomed man, very sick and very old, a man who had lost his son, a man who had been betrayed by everyone, even his oldest friend, and that they should leave him, because he brought misfortune to all who followed him. When the captains did as he said, and left us, and there was nothing in the Gulf where we had been used to seeing their ships, the general complained about their ingratitude. He complained to me and the surgeon and to other people. But not with any great passion. He didn’t believe what he said. He was a tired-out man, drained of feelings, trying to play with feelings.

“It was the end. And in spite of all that the general said he could do, he decided quite simply, when the time came, to head for home, and his doom at the hands of his king.

“When the poor commander — a very frightened man, as I now understood — had dressed me for a joke in Don Palmita’s very big clothes at San Thomé, and had sent me down river in the launch, I had found a picture, in my head, for my own doom. I had felt I was falling into the sea, falling into the sky. I had focussed on that picture and found a comfort in it, because the doom it contained was so complete that it took away meaning from grief and the life of men and the world itself.

“Now, a few days after leaving the Gulf, leaving emptiness where our own ship had been, I found that the world had become like that picture in my head. Just a few days after leaving so many things that were familiar to me, familiar not only from the journeys I had made with the Berrios, but also from what I had heard from so many people: the rock called The Soldier, where the strong-winged pelicans settled down to die; the lake of pitch on the island of lere, which the Spaniards had called Trinidad; the high solitary hill of Anaparima, a marker for all who travelled in the Gulf; Guanaganare’s territory of Conquerabo or Cumucurapo, where my father’s father had founded the City of the Spaniards; the high island of Chacachacare and the other islands and islets in the Dragon’s Mouth. Familiar places, with clouds and sky and wind and sea as they had always been, but all now in a world changed forever, for me and for everybody else.

“A few days out of that, I was in the world of my old dream, an infinity of water and sky. But there was no terror for me. The ship was its own little world. The shipboard days had their rhythm. The old man was calm in his cabin. He did a certain amount of writing; he talked to the surgeon; he spent a fair amount of time teaching me English. As for emotion: he grieved a lot for the tortoise, which had died: it was too hot on the ship, and there was no fresh green for the creature. With that kind of activity and emotion — teaching me English, worrying about the tortoise — the old man could trust himself. But for the most part he was like a man who had ceased to feel, separated from the rest of us, as I thought, putting myself in his place, by his idea of his own doom.

“His regard for me never faded. More than once the surgeon told me what other people were to tell me. I was an Indian from Guiana and his servant: ordinary enough on the other side of the ocean, but now every day more precious as a human being. When we got to England people would look at me and think better of the old man. I would be like a remnant or proof of the kingdom of gold in his head. So I was part of the vanity that remained to him, part of his idea of the world going on beyond the emptiness of the sea.

“The day came at last when we landed and put that emptiness behind us. Everyone was relieved. Everyone wanted to walk on firm land and drink clean water and eat fresh food. But the old man’s authority as general ended as soon as we touched land. As soon as we touched land he was the prisoner of his king. No chains were put on him. No one was waiting to take him away. We went to stay at his house, and there, with all the sorrow, he was still master. But everyone knew that his life was forfeit. Everyone was waiting for the king to act, and the king was in no hurry.

“For days after we landed I felt the ground move below me, as though we were still on the ship. And it was strange that though I was on land again and had that safety, for which I had longed, though the sky pressed low on me and I was once again with small views and small distances, there had come to me something of the mood with which I had travelled down the river from San Thomé to the Destiny. It had begun to come on me for a few days before we had arrived at land. It had come to me when I had heard people talking about arriving. I didn’t like that idea of arriving. I was nervous about it.

“When we came to the land and travelled to the general’s house I was seized by a great melancholy. It overpowered me. It ran through me like a cold fluid. It broke into my sleep. It was at the back of everything I did. It was like a spirit on my shoulder. Just as, on the launch coming down river, the dream of falling into the sea and the sky had lifted me above men, so this grief now cut me off from everything and everyone. I wanted to die. In the room the general’s people had given me in his house I tied a cloth around my forehead to feel that tension above my eyes, as though I was a child again, and I turned my face to the wall. I wanted to turn away from all that was around me. I looked at the wall and never closed my eyes. It was like looking at the sky I had seen as a child. I looked hard at that and longed to cease to feel and think.

“Sometimes from far away, as it seemed, I would hear the general and the surgeon calling me, ‘Don José, Don José.’ If I heard that clearly enough, it would make me think of the general and his own doom, and sometimes after a while the emptiness would leave me. When that happened I would feel my tongue getting furred and my breath getting very bad. It was as though the unhappiness in my head and heart and stomach had turned to that smell inside me.

“At last the messengers from the king came. We left the house and got into a big heavy coach. The surgeon and I travelled with the old man. There was another coach in front, and soldiers on horseback behind. It was warm. The sun came up much earlier than I had known and set much later. In all the villages we passed people were waiting to look at the general. They wanted to look at me too. The soldiers on horseback didn’t let them get too close. The surgeon and the general talked a lot sometimes.

“All the time we were getting nearer to the capital and his doom. We came one afternoon to a town where the houses were arranged as in a big square or plaza. The whole of one side of the square was occupied by a very big church with a very tall tower. The old man was in a very playful mood. ‘Look, Don José. You will never see anything so tall again. Would you like to go up there?’ I thought he was joking, but he said there was a way right to the top, inside the tower. The thought of climbing up so high made me feel giddy, roused me from my own grief a little. This pleased the old man, made him light-headed, I thought.

“We were to stop here for dinner. But when we got out of the coach the old man complained of having a headache. He walked into a post as the soldiers were taking him up to the room where we were to dine. He began to howl with pain, and he had to be supported into the room. He lay down in all his clothes. When food was brought up for him he sent it away. He said his headache was very bad and he felt he was going blind. The soldiers and officials were worried. The surgeon prepared something for him to drink, and immediately after that mixed an ointment for his bruises. All the time the general was groaning. At last he said he wanted to sleep. They took him to another room. They posted a soldier at the door.

“I was helping the old man to undress when he began to vomit. I went outside to get a bowl. That took some time. When I came back I found him half naked, crawling about the floor, chewing at the dried reeds spread there. The ointment the surgeon had applied had caused the bruises to come out in a rash that made me think of the effects of poisoned arrows. I called out to the soldier at the door, and when he saw he began to shout for people to come and help.

“The surgeon looked very serious. He said that the old man would become quite unbalanced if he didn’t rest. So the king’s officers decided to spend the night where we were. They had the old man’s chest brought up to the room. When we were alone I began to unpack what was needed for the night. The old man said, Taper, Don José, paper.’ He was standing, in his shirt, and smiling at me. I gave him the paper he asked for, and he sat at the table and began to write at great speed, as he had written that day in the cabin on the Destiny, after the death of the commander in the room above us. From time to time as he wrote he looked at me and smiled. I asked him what he was writing about. He said, ‘About the gold mines of San Thomé. What else?’

“He wrote until it was dark. He filled many pages. He said, ‘My wrist is hurting, Don José. I must stop.’ When it was dark the surgeon came. He was in his travelling cloak. The two men smiled at each other. From below his cloak the surgeon brought out, wrapped in cloth, pieces of the dinner the old man had refused earlier. The old man gave the surgeon the letter or the document he had been writing. The surgeon folded the sheets and put them in a pocket.

“The old man said, ‘Don José must eat with us.’ He lit a rushlight, and we ate off the wooden platters that were in the room. The old man was in a good mood. I had never seen him in such a good mood. It was like the time in San Thomé when the commander had insisted that the imprisoned Indian in the dead governor’s house and I should sit and eat boiled maize with them, with the two dead men lying in the next room, and the three dead men lying outside in the sun in the trenches they had dug the day before.

“The old man’s mood lifted my spirits. But I felt at the same time that death was close to all of us.

“His own death came quite soon, when we got to the capital. The prison was on the river. He wanted me to put on my best clothes to witness what they did to him. And I did. I could hardly bear to go back to the room afterwards. I turned my face to the wall and looked at the sky in it.

“There was an English nobleman who wanted me to join his household. The old man had known of this and had liked the idea. But my grief was too great. After getting to feel for the Berrios, and then that afternoon for Don Palmita, and afterwards for the English commander, and then for the old man, moving on in a chain of death from one man to his enemy; after the journey in the great ocean; I felt I would die if I couldn’t get back to the beginning, to the first world I knew.

“The English behaved well. They could have kept me and made me wear feathers. But they told the Spanish ambassador. He was a relation of Don Palmita. The ambassador made arrangements to send me to Spain. Before I left they gave me English clothes, including some of the old man’s that I had already worn. In Spain I went to the great city of Seville, where the galleons filled the river, and from there I travelled in one of the galleons to Cartagena. And now I am here.”

FRAY SIMÓN said, “You’ve crossed the ocean twice. You are back here in New Granada, in the very town where you were born. You didn’t get lost. The ships always knew where they were going. When you consider the great fear you used to have of the oceans, what do you think now?”

“I’ve thought a lot about that. And I think, Father, that the difference between us, who are Indians, or half Indians, and people like the Spaniards and the English and the Dutch and the French, people who know how to go where they are going, I think that for them the world is a safer place.”