Lord of Darkness

Afterword

Andrew Battell and many of the other characters of this novel actually existed. But all we know of Battell is that he went to sea with one Abraham Cocke in 1589, was captured in Brazil and shipped to Angola, and had twenty years of adventures there; and that when he returned to England in 1610 he dictated a memoir to the geographer Samuel Purchas. An abridged and apparently garbled version of that memoir was published in Purchas’ vast compendium, Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), and a modern edition of it appeared in 1901: The Strange Adventure of Andrew Battell, edited by E. G. Ravenstein (London, The Hakluyt Society.)

I have used that brief narrative of Battells as the foundation for Lord of Darkness; but I think it is best to regard this book not as a volume of history, but rather as a historical fantasy. For I have taken the liberty of reinventing Andrew Battell, since he left only the scantiest of information about himself, and no one has been able to learn even the dates of his birth and death, or what the outlines of his life were like before and after Africa. I have imagined a family background for him, and some wives, and several lovers, and a philosophy, and a great deal more, much of which he might find scandalous or even libelous if he were to read this book. I have followed the broad outlines of his tale of adventure, making only minor changes in the order of events for the sake of dramatic force; but I have filled in those broad (and often vague) outlines with a world of imagined detail. For that, I hope the real Andrew Battell will forgive me. The man in the book is my own creature, whose life story overlaps in some aspects that of the other Andrew Battell who sailed the seas in the reign of Elizabeth. My purpose was to show what it might have been like for an English seaman to have spent twenty years in the jungles of West Africa in the late sixteenth century; Andrew Battell’s true but sketchy story was useful for illustrating my theme; and since Purchas did not deign to give us more than the outline of what Battell told him, I have invented the rest.

—Robert Silverberg

Oakland, California