The Voyage of the Destiny

by Robert Nye

  When I came back from Antwerp the Court was at Greenwich.

  Ireland was talked about. I made several criticisms of current policy. Notably, I suggested that our soldiers there should not be kept waiting for their pay. English soldiers in Ireland without support were inclined to rob the native population. I spoke also of Grey’s shortcomings. Lord Burgh-ley made a note of all I said.

  Elizabeth found my criticisms cogent.

  I had gotten her ear in a trice. She began by being taken with my elocution. Soon she loved to hear my reasons to her demands. As Essex’s protégé Sir Robert Naunton once said spitefully: The Queen took me for a kind of oracle, which nettled them all.

  *

  Sir Christopher Hatton - Elizabeth’s ‘Sheep’, her ‘Mutton’, her ‘Ram’, her ‘Bell-Wether’, her ‘Pecora Campi’ - was nettled the most.

  The dances continued.

  But the door to the Privy Chamber was kicked shut by the Queen’s dancing feet more and more often.

  I think Hatton guessed even before I did that his days in the dance were numbered, and that I was destined to replace him as the Queen’s dear minion.

  All that spring of the year 1582 I rose in favour.

  It was Francis Bacon (who should have known) who said: ‘All rising to great place is by a winding stair.’ My feet were on that stair. And I was rising.

  If thy heart fail thee….

  It didn’t.

  But what did I see from the windows of that winding stair? (Apart from my own diamond writing on the pane.) I saw Elizabeth’s golden idolatrous Court. I saw the Hicrarchy of male merit. I liked the prospect from the windows. I liked it a lot.

  *

  Summer came. Hatton absented himself. In October he sent his friend Sir Thomas Heneage to the Queen at Windsor. I was with her. She was mounted, in a green habit laced with gold, at dawn, and about to go riding to the hunt. Heneage bore gifts from the Mutton. Jewels in the shape of a book, a bodkin, and a miniature silver bucket.

  ‘What does this mean?’ asked the Queen.

  I read the symbols for her.

  ‘Sir Christopher swears (by the book) that he will kill himself (with a bare bodkin) if your Majesty does not see less of me.’

  ‘Less of you? How so?’

  ‘Not much water to be got in a dwarf-size bucket, a thimblekin.’ Elizabeth laughed.

  ‘I shall send him back a bird,’ she said.

  ‘A bird?’

  ‘Like the one sent back to the Ark to announce the covenant that there should be no more Flood. That is - not too much water.’

  The meaning was perhaps obscure. And the bird was not a dove. And, besides, she could hardly send the poor fellow an explanatory rainbow to go with it.

  Which accounts, in part, for the Ram’s continuing sulks.

  Two months later he sent the Queen a tiny fish-tank. No doubt he meant that water creatures, fishy types, should be kept in confinement.

  ‘Ah,’ said Elizabeth. ‘A fish prison.’

  She turned to me.

  ‘What am I to make of this?’ ‘Are there fishes in it?’

  ‘See’

  She held up the little bright bowl. There were several small fry swimming round.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said carefully. ‘Unless we are meant to infer that mutton is preferable?’

  Elizabeth smiled.

  She sent Heneage back with the message that water and its various creatures contented her less than Sir Christopher evidently supposed. Her food, she said, had always been more of flesh than of fish. Her opinion, she said, was steadfast that flesh was more wholesome.

  Hatton was mollified.

  He came back to Court.

  And they danced again.

  But increasingly Elizabeth was watching me in the steps and turns and teasings of the dance. Her cool eyes watched, her long hands waved and fluttered. Her eyes pierced me. I longed to kiss that hand. I wrote a rather bad poem about this. It began: Those eyes that hold the hand of every heart. Those hands that hold the heart of every eye. A pretty confusion. And my senses were pretty confused.

  I waited.

  Horizon. Nothing but horizon.

  Dolphins and porpoises fool in the cut water, leaping here and darting there. It’s difficult to follow any particular one for more than a few yards.

  Wind whips the wave-crests into a fine mist, which catches and reflects the sun’s rays in a barrage of rainbows. The sea is pure blue, with patches of gold and salmon reflected from the sky.

  When I am at the wheel I have the whole ship before me. I hold her as I might hold an apple in my hand. My flag as Admiral. It flows with the wind. 5 silver lozenges on a field of blue.

  My coat of arms emblazoned up there, streaming from the top-mast. Its motto:

  AMORE ET VIRTUTE. By love and by courage.

  I feel like a part of this ship now. I feel the strain upon the masts, within the sails, as if it were a strain on my own heart.

  At the same time, in the same breath, I despise myself for these too simple feelings. Be sure, the sea is a pasture for fools. Myself among them.

  18

  6 April

  The wind whirls us northwards. The wind is master of my Destiny now. The wind whirls us faster and faster.

  In the week that is past we have sailed another 800 miles. Our position is on a parallel with Cape Hatteras and Roanoke Island. That is, in 33° of north latitutde.

  We stand about a thousand miles off Newfoundland.

  And the seas for two days now have been stained with that swift-flowing weed which betokens the Gulf Stream. The weather is more mixed and the air has an edge to it presently.

  Roanoke Island. I sent seven ships there in ‘85, under command of my cousin Sir Richard Grenville. He planted a colony and came home. This was the start of my disillusion with the New World. In no time at all those colonists succeeded in turning friendly Indians into enemies. They were fortunate to be picked up by Francis Drake at the end of one of his privateering voyages to the Caribbean, and ferried back to England for a fee.

  I lost money but not all heart. No doubt it would have been better the other way round. Two years after that abortive attempt at a first colony in the land I named Virginia (in honour of the Queen), I dispatched 150 pioneers to the same place. There were seventeen women among them. A new fort was set up on the star-shaped ruin of the abandoned old one. John White was appointed governor.

  Briefly, for a cruel moment of kindness, it seemed as if this colony might survive and prosper. In the summer of ‘87 the first English child was born on the American continent, a daughter to Eleanor and Ananias Dare. They called her Virginia, of course. But then nerves began to falter. The settlers sent John White back to England for more spades, more seeds, more axes - all those small necessities of civilisation which might serve to save them from extinction.

  White took his time. He was not really a man of action, being more adept at painting water colour pictures of plants and animals. Bess still possesses some of his pictorial records of Indian life. You will have seen them on the walls of the house in Broad Street.

  Anyway, when John White finally returned to Roanoke he found the tiny settlement deserted.

  No one there.

  Nothing.

  There had been a prearranged signal in case of danger. A Maltese cross was to be cut in the wood of the stockade and a sign carved to indicate what had happened. No cross was ever discovered. All White could find was a tree with three letters cut into its bark.

  The letters spelt:

  CRO.

  What happened to that Roanoke colony? Had the settlers gone to live with the Croatoan Indians? Were they massacred by them? Or did something else happen?

  White never found out. And I cannot presume to guess.

  For years, though, I liked to believe that Virginia Dare was not dead. I dreamt that one day (maybe centuries hence) there would come reports of a breed of white-faced, blue-eyed Indians somewhere in the interior.

>   But this is romance.

  The lesson to be learned is not romantic. The lesson is that all that may finally survive of us is a few enigmatic letters carved on a tree, letters without sure meaning to those who find and read them.

  Like these words I write now? Here’s something definite, beyond ambiguity. All day yesterday I was seasick. Put it down to the force of these winds that pursue us. The ship rears and bucks and plunges in the water. My gut was racked. I could keep nothing down.

  I remember Sam King’s old joke on the subject.

  ‘You know the best cure for it, Admiral?’

  ‘Is there one?’

  Only one. But infallible.’

  ‘A cure for seasickness? Quick! Tell me, man, tell me….’ ‘Sit under an elm tree,’ Sam said.

  ‘Keel haul that damned comedian!’ I shouted. But the burst of laughter stopped my vomiting for a moment.

  That was many long years ago, on the voyage to Cadiz.

  I kept thinking of it yesterday, even as I lay retching into a bowl on my bed in this great cabin. Lord God, how I longed for a level English meadow beneath me and a sweet spiring elm tree above! I’d have traded all the gold of Guiana to be out of that agony, and safe and calm in one good green acre of Devon, with or without the tree, just so long as the spot was landlocked and my stomach still.

  However, I have also to report that the Indian has proved not unhelpful.

  Evidently he heard me being sick, or Robin my page may have told him. This morning at dawn he came to my cabin with a fresh supply of khoka leaves.

  ‘Eat,’ he said.

  I was reluctant, but he persuaded me.

  And now I must say that the drug has worked. I no longer vomit. My belly and bowels are calmed and my head feels as though a tight steel band has just been removed from round about my temples.

  The leaf is remarkable.

  I have always been fascinated by true medicines and elixirs. When Prince Henry’s doctors despaired of his life - after they had tried letting his blood in the nose, and everything else they could think of - they consented to give him the quintessence of quinine which I had prepared for him, at Queen Anne’s behest. (She sent her own messenger to me in the Tower to beg for it.) That quinine did not save Prince Henry’s life. But it brought him to some show of sense and opening of his eyes. Too late, its administration.

  And yet I know that it should certainly have cured him or any other of a fever. Except in case of poison.

  Was Prince Henry poisoned? And if he was - who would have killed him, and how? He was my hope, and the hope of all England, the noble son of an ignoble father, as unlike our miserable King James as it is possible to imagine. If he had lived, I should have been delivered out of the Tower before Christmas 1612. If he had lived, I would have completed my History of the World, which I undertook in the first place for his instruction.

  But I speak out of turn.

  I shall come in due course to the manner of Prince Henry’s living - and his dying.

  Meanwhile, suffice it to say that my History of the World must stand for generations to come as yet another monument to despair and disillusion. It gets only as far as the Romans in Macedonia.

  *

  Khoka. I have been questioning the Indian about it. This is indeed the one subject on which he can unfailingly be drawn to speak, even if what he then says is not always coherent or comprehensible.

  ‘How did you know that this would cure my seasickness?’ I asked, mindful that he claimed originally that he had never been to sea.

  He shrugged.

  ‘The leaf cures many sicknesses,’ he said.

  ‘You spoke of it once as the food of the Golden Man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does that mean? Who is this Golden Man?’

  He answered me in Spanish, of course, which is always the language of our discourse, although native to neither of us. ‘El Dorado,’ he said.

  ‘You babble of fables,’ I told him. ‘El Dorado. It means only the gilded one. It was a story which some of your people told the Spaniards, no doubt to beguile or bewilder them, or to satisfy fools looking for more riches like those found in Peru. This El Dorado was supposed to be an Indian cHicf who rolled once a year in turpentine, was covered with gold dust and then dived into a lake. Isn’t that it?’

  The Indian shrugged. (How his perpetual shrugging an- noys me! As if his shoulders can dismiss my every word)

  ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘The leaf is good.’

  I found I could agree with this simple statement. ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘But the goodness or badness of the leaf has nothing to do with any El Dorado nonsense.’

  ‘The leaf is good,’ the Indian repeated. ‘The leaf makes the head understand what the heart knows.’

  ‘Khoka? I pressed him. ‘The word khoka. What does that mean?’

  ‘The tree,’ he said.

  There was an unmistakably reverential inflection in the way he said this.

  ‘Tree of what?’ I demanded. ‘Tree of Knowledge? Tree of

  Life?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Tree of the Golden Man?’ I insisted. ‘El Dorado tree, perhaps?’

  The Indian shook his head. ‘The tree,’ he said.

  So. The khoka leaves appear to constitute both the basis of the Indian’s philosophy or faith and its means of expression. In a word, you might say that they fulfil for him a sacramental function.

  Khoka is the divine plant of the Chibchas, he told me. It was also regarded as divine by the Incas.

  I asked him several times what exactly he meant by this remark, but he seemed unable or unwilling to explain. I have the impression that here I am up against the edge of a mystery, something inexplicable except in terms of itself, a point where his world and mine are mutually exclusive, irreconcilable. However, I gather that one clear distinction is to be made: While his people reverence the khoka herb or tree, they do not worship it. It is employed as an offering to the sun, it is burnt in honour of idols, and it is used to produce smoke at his tribe’s sacrifices. The priests of the tribe, he says, must chew it during the performance of their religious ceremonies, otherwise I gather they fear that their gods will not be propitiated. The places where the herb grows wild are considered holy places, sanctuaries.

  In answer to further questions I learned that the plant is of very great antiquity, that the Chibchas believe that its ingestion before death assures them of entry into Paradise, that they apply it also to sores and broken bones and against malaria and other fevers, but that its cHicf use is as a spiritual stimulant. They regard it as incomparably potent in fortifying the user against despair, and sovereign against all manner of misery. It purifies the blood and cleanses the soul. Yet it is, he says, essentially a food, and when it is eaten regularly then a man has no hunger for other (lesser) foods. He claims indeed that it is possible, under its influence, to go for many days without other forms of nourishment. It enhances the mental power of its users to a marked degree, and their physical power is also materially increased. He spoke again of running behind Palomeque’s horse. It was the leaf that gave him the strength, he says.

  For my own part, I concede that the drug cured my wretched seasickness. Also, on reflection, it may have acted as some kind of spur in enabling me at last to overcome the torment of indecision that beset me all the time we lay at anchor in the Bay of Nevis. That is sufficient to suggest that it is an elixir of a sort I can respect - not magical but conferring a power of human endurance. It confirms a man in what he is already.

  At this moment, then, far from suffering from seasickness, my mouth is full of the aromatic taste of the khoka leaf, giving an increased flow of saliva, a feeling of comfort in the stomach, and a general sense as though a rich but frugal meal has just been eaten with good appetite. I notice also that my pulse is beating faster, and that my brain participates in the exaltation produced. I experience from time to time a peculiar ease as though isolated from the external
world, accompanied by an irresistible inclination to exertion not readily satisfied by mere pacing about on deck. A while ago I felt moved to climb into the rigging - and did so, to the astonishment of Mr Burwick and some of the other ship’s officers. Now, however, there follows a state of quietness accompanied by a sensation of intense content, consciousness being all the time perfectly clear, indeed refined.

  *

  In this mood I resume the wandering story of my days.

  During the period leading up to my being afflicted with seasickness I found within myself no impulse to do so. To sit and stare at my pen and my papers appeared to me then of more importance than to employ them in scribbling. Rather, writing and not-writing seemed equally unimportant. I was in some deep sense quite paralysed. It occurs to me that this state has been one to which I have been prone all my life. There is a sense in which the Tower suited me, being a perfect emblem of my self-imprisonment. No doubt that is why I hated it so much.

  This evening, at any rate, I think I begin to see what the Indian means when he calls his leaf divine. It brings with its ingestion a peace and confidence and a heightened awareness of the present moment in which one is peaceful and confident, at the same time quickening memory and the desire to reach back into the past for its truth, cancelling also all idle or ambitious cares and fears concerning the unknowable future.

  In such a temper a man is at one with whatever he understands by the word God.

  In such a temper I turn again to examine my own mortality by autobiography.

  *

  Elizabeth was not mean or miserly. But she didn’t spend much money on her favourites. She couldn’t. Her income was perhaps a quarter of a million pounds a year, rarely more. This sum might seem large but it had to cover the expenses of government as well as her own personal expenses. I remember her delight when she made £250,000 from little Captain Drake’s otherwise rather stupid voyage around the world.

  However, if the Queen could not give money, she gave opportunity.

  I always preferred opportunity.

  Within that year following my quick thinking in the matter of the cloak I was rewarded first with the gift of many suits. It amused her Majesty to see me well dressed. Each set of clothes came with some remark concerning the cloak incident. For instance, I recall one suit of spotless white which was accompanied by her handwritten message referring to ‘so fine and seasonable a tender of so fair a footcloth.’