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CHAPTER 1

13 February 1618

When Alexander the Great came to the edge of the world of his time, and pitched his camp on the banks of the river Indus, he told his builders to build gigantic pavilions there and to fill each pavilion with a giant's furniture.

Then Alexander instructed his armourers to hammer out swords as long as lances, sHiclds as big and strong as mill wheels, axes like battering rams, and helmets the size of hives for monstrous bees.

When he withdrew and sailed for home, Alexander ordered this vast and ghostly camp to be left standing, with all its huge accoutrements intact.

He wanted to cast a long shadow. He wanted to make people believe that he had been a giant, and that his men had been only a little less, and that this had been a camp occupied by an army like gods.

My son, I am no giant and (God knows) no god.

Here you will find no big chairs.

* * *

I write these words aboard my flagship the Destiny, anchored now as she is in the bay of Punto Gallo, which the Indians call Curiapan, at the south-west point of the isle of Trinidad. Our position is 10° north wanting five minutes, in a longitude of 62° west. That is, some six miles east of the coast of Guiana. And a world of wild water west of you, Carew.

I kept a Journal for the greater part of this voyage, starting at the end of last August, sixty miles short of Cape Saint Vincent, twelve days after leaving Kinsale harbour in Ireland. That's five and half months. For five and a half months I have written of little else than storm and fever, high seas and low spirits, mishap, misfortune, mischance, of sails torn from their masts, masts snapped in two, men dying in as many ways they must, men deserting in as many ways they may.

Not long out of Kinsale and into the Atlantic we sprang a leak that drowned three sailors who were bailing in the hold, and we had to tread down every scrap of our raw meat between the planks to block the cracks that opened in our decks.

I should have known then that this voyage was doomed.

Damned, if you like.

Certainly wrong from the start.

So many ill omens and portents.

* * *

I should never have named my ship the Destiny. That was high-flown and grandiose and tempted fate. Ah, Elizabeth, how you would have shaken your head and flicked your fingers at such folly. You who disliked all solemn abstract names for the vessels of your fleet, and once made one of your captains change his Repentance to the Dainty.

'A vessel of five hundred tons,' I told Mr Pett. 'Built to these specifications which I have drawn up myself.'

'In the Tower, Sir Walter?'

'What better place for dreaming of tall ships, Mr Pett?'

Phineas Pett, the royal shipbuilder. I gave him £500 on account. There's £700 still owing. What did I care in those days? I was as confident of finding Guiana gold as I was of not missing my way from my dining-room to my bedchamber.

So my Destiny was built at Deptford and launched just nine days before Christmas 1616. A black swan of a ship. Swift, graceful, splendid. Solid English oak throughout, no plank less than five inches thick at any point from stem to stern. Fit to bear two hundred men. With her ports so laid that she could carry out and fire her thirty-six guns in all weathers.

'Why will you have her so heavily armed, Sir Walter?'

'Piracy, Mr Pett.'

'I beg your pardon, Sir Walter?' (Spectacles falling down his nose. Eyes as bright and hard as his bulbous bald head.)

'You ask an old fox a damned innocent question. Piracy is rife, Mr Pett. We live in evil days.'

Ropes, spars, hoists, cradles, stocks, capstans, ribs, hulls, saw-pits, hawsers, vats of pitch and barrels of oakum, davits, transoms, and long timbers all about us.

The great shire horses labouring in their harness, the stubby claws of the launching crab that jerked and stopped, jerked and stopped, the hempen cables singing with the strain, and slowly my Destiny inching forwards, rolling and rumbling down the well-greased slope and into the sombre waters of the Thames.

I remember there was snow blown like smoke in the east wind which snatched at our cloaks on the Deptford waterfront. Your mother was there, swathed in furs, my dear Bess, wearing her beaver cap with the ear-flaps. Wat, bare-headed, bright-cheeked, eating an apple in scorn of the cold. My friend Laurence Keymis, tall and thin and scholarly, with a cast in one eye. My cousinly keeper Sir Lewis Stukeley, suffering from a head cold but doing his duty, sipping now and again at a flask which contained an elixir I had prepared for him - powdered betony and balsam of sulphur, mixed with conserve of roses and wine. A brazier ablaze beside us on the quay. I warmed my hands at the hissing coals. And you, Carew, hopping from foot to foot, dancing, cheering, kept warm with your young innocent excitement.

The tarry smell of cordage. The clout of new wet sail-cloth. Pett's mechanicals trimming the yards and bearing down on the helm.

Pett himself with his coat-tails whipped out by the wind. 'A wholesome ship, Sir Walter. She rides well at anchor.'

So do coffins.

* * *

My son, you know that I was thirteen years (unjustly) in the Tower, convicted of treason, under sentence of death. I shall have more to say about that in due course. You know also that it was only the prospect of gold which bought me my freedom (such as it is). He enjoys talking and thinking about gold - our King James the 6th of Scotland and the 1st of England. Not that I was cheating him when I wrote to Secretary Winwood and told of my plan if released. I have been here before. In '95. On behalf of a lady whom time has surprised. Queen Elizabeth. I can put my fingers on the map of the river Orinoco and point to the places where gold is to be found. Not El Dorado. Not Manoa. No mythical golden city. But potential gold mines. Real ones.

Your father was never quite without friends especially in Devon and Cornwall, in the West Country, his own country, which has always been loyal to him. There are people there, rich and poor, of high and low estate, who were not blinded by envy even in those (now distant) days when I rose high on fortune's wheel as spun by Queen Elizabeth's right hand and some foppish London fool - Sir Anthony Bagot, as I remember - called me 'the best-hated man in the world.' Well, Bagot, you maggot, the friends of that sometime best-hated man in the world invested £15,000 in backing this little adventure. And my wife Bess (God bless her, your dear mother, my Carew) sold her lands at Mitcham in Surrey to provide me with another £2500. And I called in myself the £8000 which had been on loan since I received it as compensation for my house at Sherborne being taken from me and given to the King's catamite of that time, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. And raised a further £5000 from this source and that. So that we had a bit more than £30,000 behind the wind in our sails when we slipped down the Thames in the last week of March 1617, anxious to be on our way before King James changed his mind. And had news of the death of the Indian princess Pocohontas in Gravesend just at the moment we sailed past it.

The sound of Indian drums beating for her funeral there, in England, in the very breath of our setting forth.

Death.

I am not by nature a superstitious man. I have even been called an atheist in my time. (I was never exactly that, though I was once a sceptic - neither affirming nor denying any religious position, but rather opposing it with my powers of reason.) Sceptic or not, perhaps I should have heeded those drums, should have listened to what they were saying.

Death.

For sure I should have known it when we lost one of our pinnaces off Plymouth, before we were halfway into the St George's Channel, the winds so foul and contrary, never such terrible seas since the year of the Armada.

The Devil's sly thumb-prints smudging my sea charts.

Death at the helm.

42 men dead in my flagship alone now, including John Pigott, our Lieutenant General for the land service, and Mr Nicholas Fowler, our cHicf refiner of metals, and the scholar Jack Talbot, who was my friend and who shared my imprisonment in the Tower for eleven years.

We set forth with 14 ships and 3 pinnaces.

The arithmetic of death.

We have 10 ships left, and only five of them were light enough to go upriver.

I had to watch them go without me. I am myself too weak to do more than write. When the hot wind blows from the shore I sweat so that I cannot see the words at the end of my pen. The rest of the time I am gripped by a clammy cold.

Even so. I go on. I continue. But you will have understood by now that I am avoiding the issue. That every sentence I have constructed so far has been a tacking this way and that way to keep going while I dodge what I must say. Has been a means - all that talk about money! - to hold my true thoughts and feelings at arm's length. Understand, then: I am not merely going on with my Journal, My Journal is over and done with. Ended. Not finished. What I must write now is what lies beyond its unfinishableness.

I wrote that Journal to and for myself. Now I write to you. For you, Carew, my son. And what I write will not be exactly a Journal. What will it be? I don't know. I am writing it partly to find out. It will have to be something like the truth. Both more than a Journal, and less. No giant or god stuff. But some kind of confession. The story of my days past and the story of my days present. What I was and what I am. What and who. For you, Carew, who do not really know me. My poor Carew, who will probably never read a single word of this. My sad little son, conceived and born in the Tower, christened in the chapel of St Peter in Chains inside the walls, and just 13 years old today. You didn't think I'd forgotten? That today is your birthday, Carew.

* * *

Wat is dead. Your brother. And my only other son. That is the first thing to be said. The thing which I have been avoiding saying. The reason, you will realise, for this present writing. Its spring. Its motive. Its deadly inspiration.

Wat was killed in a battle of some kind with the Spanish near their fort of San Thome. He was killed in the night of the 2nd of January. He was with Keymis and my young nephew George and the rest of them who set out upriver some ten weeks ago, with never a word until now. They went in our five ships of least draught, five craft light enough to negotiate the tricky shallow waters of the Orinoco delta. With 150 sailors and 250 soldiers. The five ships being commanded by my captains Whitney, King, Smith, Wollaston, and Hall. My nephew George being in charge of the land force. My lifelong friend Laurence Keymis entrusted with the search for the location of the mines, and then the supervising of all operations there.

I know, a few gentlemen excepted, what a scum of men George Ralegh and Laurence Keymis have to lead. When I stress that this voyage was doomed from the start, I am not being altogether melodramatic. The truth is that my position in law as an unpardoned 'traitor' merely let out of the Tower to get gold for King James did not attract to my service many men who were better than half-pirates or half-mercenaries. I know for a fact that a fair number of my crew are criminals who didn't so much join me as run away from the justice that still awaits them in England. Even the best of my captains don't trust each other. They refused point-blank to go up the Orinoco unless I remained here with the rest of the ships to guard the river mouth. I am the only one they could all trust not to run if a Spanish fleet comes up after us.

I gave Keymis this assurance:

'You will find me at Punto Gallo, dead or alive. And if you don't find my ships there, you will find their ashes. I will set fire to the galleons, if it comes to the worst. Run will I never.'

So I'm here all right, fevered and sick, eating lemons. Lemons and oranges, quinces and pomegranates. Fruits given to me by the Governor's wife at Gomera, one of the smaller Canary Islands, on the voyage out. She was English, a daughter of the Stafford family. I couldn't have lived without these lemons and other fruits, preserved in big barrels of sand. My stomach is not good. I was unable to take solid food for more than a month. For 15 days, also, as I wrote to your mother when we reached the Cayenne River last November, I suffered the most violent calenture that ever man did, and lived. The calenture: that's a disease of these tropics, when a man falls into a delirium where he fancies the sea to be green fields and desires nothing more than to leap into it. That passed. The irony was, as I wrote to your mother in the letter borne home by the Dutch vessel, that in all this time of fever your brother Wat kept in perfect health, not even suffering distemper in that hell-fire of heat.

As for me, I am still too weak to walk without an arm to lean on. The arm is usually that of my new Lieutenant General, Sir Warham St Leger. He is sick too. He has dropsy. He remains here with me with the heavy vessels.

Wat died bravely, as one would expect. He died running forward against Spanish pikemen, and shouting Come on, my hearts! to his companions. So he died foolishly also, no doubt. And he shouldn't have been killed at all. There was no need. By the terms of my Commission from King James, we aren't supposed to cross swords with any Spaniard. Gondomar saw to that. The Spanish Ambassador. As soon as he heard that I had been released from the Tower (even unpardoned and accompanied everywhere in those early days by a keeper) he went straight to James and complained that the whole of Guiana belonged to Spain. In any case, Gondomar said, he was convinced that I had no intention of doing anything else than turn pirate and plunder the towns of the Spanish Main. As a result, the usual words 'trusty and well-beloved servant' were erased from my Commission, issued to me on the 26th of August 1616, and it was explicitly declared that I was still 'under the peril of the law.' James promised Gondomar that my life would be forfeit if I inflicted any injury whatsoever on the subjects of Spain.

A death trap? Not quite. My plan was to take French ships with me. The French could engage the Spaniards while we worked the mines. I sent two Frenchmen, Faige and Belle, to negotiate the matter with Montmorency, the Grand Admiral of France. I still have Montmorency's letter in which he promises me safe haven in any French port if I need it on my return. But what happened to the four French vessels already fitted out for the expedition at Havre and Dieppe? Faige and Belle took money from me, and letters for the French captains, before I sailed from Plymouth. They never came back. I hung around waiting at Kinsale, then in the Canaries, then at the Cayenne River after our torment of crossing the Atlantico No French showed up. And no French contingent ever yet arrived at the Orinoco.

Keymis counts it an acHicvement, apparently, that he has taken the Spanish fort at San Thome. Why he should think that, I don't know. It formed no part of my instructions to him or to my nephew George.

Keymis's letter concerning Wat's death came into my hands today, your birthday, Carew. It is dated the 8th of January. So it took the wretched man six days to write it, and it took the bearers - an Indian pilot and a sailor called Peter Andrews - five weeks to reach me. San Thome is more than 200 miles upriver, so there may be some small excuse for the latter. For the former, there can be no excuse I will ever accept. Keymis shall answer for his cowardly heart, by Christ.

And has he opened either of the mines? Got gold?

The miserable botcher says nothing.

Not one word of sense concerning that. Nothing at all.

As for Andrews, he is able only to tell me what I now already know and wish I didn't. That our forces hold San Thome. And Wat's dead.

* * *

Vultures over my ship. Her paint peeling. A tropic damp. The weather always hot and misty. The sun trailing a golden hand at noon in the swirling currents of that channel between Trinidad and the mainland which my maps call the Serpent's Mouth.

Ingots of golden water.

And I am as water. For it was Water she called me, the Queen. (Mocking my broad Devon accent, and perhaps a certain infirmity of purpose in my temper.)

An El Dorado undersea, Elizabeth.

Well, Carew, my only son now, I believe in the ingots. Not the city made of gold. Not that imaginary magnificence ruled by a king who was himself covered with gold dust, the legend as looked for by Diego de Ordaz, and Orellano, and Philip von Hutten, and Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada. That's just a story for children. I tell my child the truth. There is gold up the Orinoco there. I have played the world's game for 64 years. I'm no slug. I'm no fool. I would not have sailed half the globe over, and put my honour at stake thus, for a lie or a fantasy or a far-fetched hope. The tragedy is that I could not lead our actual expedition to fetch the damned stuff back.

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Excerpted from "The Voyage of the Destiny"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Robert Nye.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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