A Way in the World (24 page)

“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.