by Robert Nye
‘Of course,’ I said. Then: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost—’ ‘Amen? Winwood bellowed.
I stood, coughing, and limped off down the aisle without a backward glance.
*
I trust Ralph Winwood as I trust few politicians. Nine years my junior, a Northamptonshire man, once Queen Elizabeth’s Ambassador to France, a lifelong enemy of all things Spanish, King James’s Secretary of State for 4 years now, a bulky, bluff, barrel-shaped fellow, not glowing, not shining, but decent English oak through and through. Without Ralph Winwood I would still be locked up in the Tower of London working on my unfinished (and unfinishable) History of the World. No doubt about it. I picture Ralph in Whitehall, reading my letter when it arrives, pacing up and down like a bear in a cage, seeking to find some honest way to present my case to the King. A task I do not envy him. But if Ralph Winwood cannot do it, then nobody can. And if Ralph Winwood will not do it, then I’m done for.
*
Back aboard the Destiny.
Tonight I feel, at last, that my ten days of crippled and crippling indecision are at an end.
I have crossed the narrow channel to St Kitts. (The first step in the final direction I must take.)
I have written a clear and truthful account of all our misfortunes and made provision for it to be delivered to my only real friend at the Court of King James. (My nephew George has this minute taken that letter from me, under my seal, and sworn on his life’s blood to see it safe into Ralph Winwood’s hands.)
I have (privately) made up my mind what I must do: I shall sail first for Newfoundland, and then home.
I have (publicly) resolved to send the sick on ahead of me.
And tomorrow I shall write to Bess, my wife.
12
22 March
I told her I was loath to write, because I knew no way to comfort her. I said, God knows, I never knew what sorrow meant till now. Comfort your heart (dearest Bess), I wrote, I shall sorrow for us both. And the Lord bless you and comfort you, that you may bear patiently the death of your valiant son.
For the facts about Keymis and the gold I referred her to Secretary Winwood’s letter, knowing that Ralph would give her a copy of it if she asked. My brains are broken, I told her, and it is a torment for me to write, and especially of misery. But I promised her that she should hear from me again, if I live, from Newfoundland.
It would not do.
The letter being sealed, I realised that it would not do.
Nothing would do. But this in particular would not do. Because I knew in my heart that I had to address Bess herself with the infernal facts of the story.
So I broke open the seals and added a postscript three times as long as the letter, telling her how they say that our poor Wat died, how Keymis had undone me in the matter of the gold and then tried to excuse it, how I rejected his reasons, how he shut himself up in his cabin, how Keymis killed himself. I told her also of the letters and lists discovered at San Thome. How King James himself betrayed me into the hands of my enemies. How Whitney and Wollaston turned pirate. And all the weary unendurable rest of it.
Both letters are gone with George Ralegh. The Page has sailed, loaded to the gunnels with rats who will lose no chance to malign me as soon as they get back to England. But my friends can have the true story as I have told it to Bess and to Ralph. And for the rest I care not.
The Thunder weighs her anchor as I write. Storm clouds gather over the island. Mount Misery is dark with sudden rain.
*
This evening I called my remaining captains together again to dine on the Destiny. Only four faces now across the good white linen of my table: Samuel King, Roger North, Charles Parker, Sir John Ferne.
I told them of my decision: To sail first for Newfoundland, and then home. I explained that I favoured this route for several reasons. First, as I knew from the letters found at San Thome, there must be a Spanish fleet somewhere in the offing, sent out to take me captive. If we sailed for Virginia, or even a straight course for England, we were likely to run into this, and we had neither the numbers nor the nerve for such an encounter. Second, a landfall at Newfoundland would enable us to clean our vessels thoroughly, and revictual. We had tobacco from Guiana to pay for it. Third, having rejected all idea of attacking the Plate Fleet, I was concerned to keep us well out of its route, so that no one could accuse us of trying. The Spanish treasure ships sail in spring from Havana through the channel between the Bahamas and Florida, then east to the Azores, and thence Cadiz. We would avoid them by making our way due north to Newfoundland, from which we could sail home to England across the narrower ocean.
When I had finished speaking there was silence.
Then Sam King said: ‘That makes good sense to me.’
And then there was another silence. A long one. I imagined that I could hear the moonlight on the roof of my cabin. It was, of course, only the gentle dissonant sound of the rain. I listened to that because my other three captains said nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
I sat there watching the candlelight on their faces. Parker smiled unpleasantly. North smoothed his moustache with his thumbnail. Ferne fiddled all the while with a piece of broken bread.
‘Well, gentlemen,’ I said at last, ‘what is your verdict?’
They would not look me in the eyes. Each one murmured a word or two of impeccable, curt and insincere approval. Then, one after another, they made their good nights and went out.
‘Now what do you make of that?’ I asked Sam. He shrugged. ‘Trouble,’ he said.
Trouble is too small a word, but then I like Sam’s taste for understatement.
I lit my pipe and we talked of other things.
*
I keep coming back to the night before the Destiny left London. I dreamt a dream that night and Bess dreamt another. We were together in bed at her house in Broad Street.
In my dream it was the first voyage to Guiana all over again and I remember I was running to the top of a hill and when I reached the top I could see how the river forked three ways, about a mile off, and there were the twelve waterfalls, and every one of the waterfalls rose as high above the one in front of it as a church tower over a church, so that the side of the second hill was one giant cathedral staircase of water, water falling with such force that I felt the sting of the spray on my face, and higher up the second hill it looked like a city all turrets, and the waterfalls like a smoke that was rising from a burning city of salt.
In my dream I turned to Keymis and said that I could not go on. I was cold and sweating. It was 1595 but I had my Cadiz wound of ‘96. The ague was on me. My bad leg was giving me hell. But the Indian guide pointed. ‘Beyond the cataracts the land is perfect.’ Keymis went on immediately. So there was no turning back. I followed, Keymis climbing, the Indian beckoning, until we passed through the thunder and lightning of the falls and came at last into the promised place.
I had never seen a more beautiful country, nor more lively prospects. Hills raised here and there over the valleys, the river winding into divers branches, the plains adjoining without bush or stubble, all fair green grass, the ground of hard sand easy to march on, either for horse or foot, the deer crossing every path, the birds towards evening singing on every tree a thousand different tunes, cranes and herons of white and crimson and carnation perching on the river’s side, the air fresh with a gentle easterly wind, and every stone that I stooped to pick up promised either gold or silver by its bright complexion.
But I had neither knife nor mattock to chip out the bits of the rock, and the rock was as hard as flint, and when I scrabbled at it with my fingers my nails cracked across and my hands came away bleeding. The men picked up bright stones and carried them, convinced that their glitter meant gold. And Whiddon and the surgeon brought me more stones like sapphires. But even in the dream I knew they were not sapphires.
The Indian guide, the son of Topiawari, pointed a
head to two mountain peaks. He said they were called Picatoa and Inatac. Each was about 7000 feet high. Beyond them, the Indian said, was the lake called Parima. And by the lake was the city. The city! Manoa! More rich and more beautiful, the Indian said, with more temples adorned with gold images and more sepulchres filled with treasure than either Cortez found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru.
Then Keymis cried out. The Spaniard was coming, he said. We had only one line of retreat. But that was all right, for our line of retreat would take us within sight of Mount Iconuri, and now in the dream I remembered that Mount Iconuri was the site of Putijma’s mine, and that there they said gold could be plucked up with the roots of the grass, gold lay all around on the ground, so that it didn’t matter that we had no shovels or other implements with us.
But the rains came down, and the shirts were washed on our backs ten times in a day, and the river raged and overflowed. I was back with Topiawari himself, and Topiawari gave me another of his sons to take to England and I left Francis Sparrow, the servant of one of my captains, with Topiawari in return, and also Hugh Godwin, who was fifteen years old, to learn the language. We came back down the river in thunder and lightning and torrential rain, our hearts cold, stopping only to gaze at the faraway mountain like crystal. ‘Putijma’s mine,’ Topiawari said, pointing. I was unable to walk all the way with Keymis and the others. I called on a cHicf who had promised to help me. I found the cHicf drunk, and his village all drunk, with the pots going from one to another without rest, and the rain lashing down, and all the drunkards lying in each other’s arms in the mud in the rain. Then I feasted on armadillo meat, and went back to my ship, where—
I was woken by Bess screaming beside me. I got up and lit a candle and came back to bed. She was holding her hands to her lips.
I took her in my arms and she said: ‘I wish you would not go.’
I said nothing. I caressed her hair. I could feel her tears on my neck. ‘All our life has consisted of parting and meeting,’ she said. ‘All our life you’ve been going away, coming back. This time is the last time. I know. This time you will never come back.’
‘Bess, Bess,’ I said. ‘Of course I shall come back. What’s more I shall come back with gold. You will have pure gold to buckle your shoes and gold combs to wear in your hair.’
Bess turned away violently. ‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘I detest it. Gold is like a maggot in your brain. Sometimes I think you went mad with it long long ago.’
I pulled the sheet down from her neck and started to fondle her breasts. ‘You will feel differently in the morning,’ I suggested.
Bess said: ‘No, I won’t. I shall see things just the same. To get gold for that sow of a king. Where’s the honour in that? Where’s the glory?’
I said: ‘Would you rather I had rotted in the Tower?’
‘Of course not,’ she said quickly. ‘But you’re free now. You have your fine ship. Oh Wat, we could sail away.’
‘And where would we go, Bess?’ I asked.
‘Anywhere. Everywhere. Where doesn’t matter.’
‘Guiana?’ I said. ‘Would you sail with me there then?’
Bess shivered. She brushed my fingers away from her nipples.
‘Never,’ she said. ‘I abhor the very name. It’s a hell. It’s a false paradise waiting to sap and swamp what little is left of your wits.’ She sat up in bed, her breasts heaving with a sudden sharp intake of breath. ‘I remember the dream now.’
I said: ‘It was nightmare that woke you?’
‘I was at this lake in the mountains,’ Bess said, ‘and there was a person - some sort of emperor - who was rolling in gold dust, all covered with it, sticky. Then he was carried by his people on a litter and cast into the lake. Only then I saw that I’d been mistaken and it wasn’t a man at all. It was Queen Elizabeth. She lay naked on her back in the lake and there was gold running out of her private parts, like blood, just as if she’d been ravished. And you were there, Wat. You were swimming towards her, and then you were licking the blood like a snake, you were drinking it where it stained the salt water. And I cried out: “Don’t drink it! It’s poison!” I woke up then, screaming….
I was roused by Bess’s dream, and we made love.
Afterwards, when I had huffed out the candle, and had lain for a long while searching the darkness with raw unsleeping eyes, I whispered: ‘Bess, I will tell you something few ever knew. It’s about the Queen. I never shared the secret with anyone before. But I know now that I must tell you.’
I stretched out my hand to her cheek. Bess snuggled against it. She kissed it, but she was kissing my fingers in her sleep. She was snoring softly. She had not heard a word that I had said.
I lay sleepless there beside her until dawn, when I heard the street door opening, and then Wat’s tiptoed tread upon the stair.
*
It is a different kind of darkness here. The rain stopped round about midnight. The Garib night is vast and velvet. Lying in bed in London beside Bess was like lying in a brass-bound coffin box. The night about St Kitts is soft and tropical and malicious. The sea laps at the Destiny, dark and warm, teeming with silver sharks, a track of moonlight scratched across it as if by God’s fingernail. If I opened one box in my mind that last night in London then there was a second smaller box inside it, and inside the second box a third, and so on, and so on. But sleep was not to be reached, there was never an infinitely small and perfectly empty box. Here, tonight, I have been equally sleepless, but that is to be attributed to an immensity of pitch-black space and shadow. I just took a turn around the deck. The night sky is enormous. Its stars are like explosions far away. The moon’s full and needs a shave.
What was I going to say about Elizabeth?
Nothing. Not now.
I wish my bones could dream without my flesh.
13
23 March
I have been studying my charts and tables.
From St Kitts to Newfoundland is about 2500 miles. With reasonable winds, and allowing for good days and bad, it is clear that we need to average some 80 miles a day to complete the voyage north in 31 days.
Not impossible.
On a good day, before a fair wind, we might well sail 150 miles or more. A bad day would see us sailing anything less than 50 miles. 80 miles a day is an average quite comfortably acHicved in these latitudes and at this time of the year. If we maintain it then we should drop anchor in the harbour of St John in Newfoundland in about one month, give or take a day or two.
Besides, this direction I intend to pursue lies under the beneficent eye of the Pole Star. My sea quadrant is fitted with a mirror to permit star observations, and I have here on board the Destiny a nocturnal which gives the correction to be applied to the altitude of the Pole Star to obtain true latitude. Thus, when the need arises and the weather allows, we may sail at night as swift as we sail by day.
Newfoundland. The name begins to haunt me. The word gives new edge to old wits. I look forward to Newfoundland becoming actual. Cathedrals of ice and seas like diamonds. Their cold will cure my fevers finally.
*
Ireland in 1580 in the summer. I was 26 years old, I was a captain, and my pay was four shillings a day. I had a lieutenant, Michael Butler, and four junior officers under me. I had command of a company of one hundred men. Five of these men were dead. That was in accord with the usual practice. A captain could have a few dead men on his roll and pocket their pay without anyone complaining. No more than half a dozen, that was the only rule. My five dead men brought in a further 3 shillings and fourpence. Making a grand total of 7 shillings and fourpence a day. After my years of borrowing and burrowing in the Inns of Court this was a princely wage I assure you, Carew. I didn’t sniff at it.
Cork I did sniff at. Cork in that long hot summer of my first year in Ireland stank to high heaven. It consisted of one long street and a great number of middens. The Irish wore yellow shirts and were usually drunk. Irish horses were small in stature and the natives used to
tie a plough to the tails of half a dozen of them to plough the fields.
In September word came into Cork that the Spaniard had landed on the west coast of Munster, and that there was a great fleet from Spain just offshore. We marched to meet the invader, found that he numbered about 600, and fought with him, capturing the Papal Nuncio’s altar cloth. The enemy fell back and took possession of a fort at Smerwick. Lacking artillery, we withdrew to Rathkeale.
The invading army was small, but the whole country now rose to support the pugs of the Pope.
Grey himself, the Lord Deputy, arrived from Dublin with more troops. We heard that the Irish rampaged and burned their own villages behind his back as he came south. He took command of our English army and marched on the fort at Smerwick.
I tarried and stayed behind.
The Irish do most of their fighting in the manner of bandits. They like to sulk and skulk behind walls of stones, shooting the enemy in the back or waiting in ambush to fire darts at him. They have few soldiers as such. Most of the time in Ireland we found ourselves fighting an army of shadows, men who wore no uniform to declare their bloody trade, cowards who were peasants by day and cut-throats by night. The Irish have a special name or title for these secret killers. Kerns -that’s what they call them.
Now I had noted that it was a custom among these Irish kerns to come creeping along out of the ditches whenever any English camp was struck. They would wait until our soldiers had departed. Then they came picking and plundering, taking whatever they found to be left behind.
So, when my Lord Grey hurried off with our main forces against Smerwick fort, I elected to play the Irish at their own low game. I had my men conceal themselves about the remains of the camp at Rathkeale. We lay close in the darkness and we waited.