A soldier knocks on his cabin door and comes in and says that Martin, the third Indian, has escaped.
“Well, well,” the old man says. “Who was on watch?”
“Piggott.”
“I feel I should put Piggott alone in a skiff and send him up to the Orinoco.”
“We can lower a boat and try to get him back. The Indian.”
“I don’t see what good that will do.”
“It won’t be easy, but we can try.”
“Of course it won’t be easy. By the time you lower your boat and put on your armour he will be in the woods. Once he’s got a tree between you and him, that’s that. You couldn’t keep him on the ship. You certainly won’t be able to catch him in the woods.”
“We were going to hang him today, because his friend didn’t come back from the village. The men didn’t like that. They feel now that everything they do will rebound on them. They’ve had too much bad luck already.”
“That reminds me. Go and tell the surgeon to come. I must have my draught. Why aren’t you wearing your breastplate? I gave those instructions. We should be ready at all times. Metal is hot, but a poisoned arrow will be much hotter.”
“I was putting it on when the Indian jumped overboard.”
“What scum.”
“I’ll go and call the surgeon.”
“These mariners and soldiers. Their friends and families sent them to sea on purpose. Wanting them only to drown or disappear. Sometimes I think the people they gave me were born only to eat rations. They stole my last apples. I was keeping a few in that sand barrel. They found out and stole them. I went to a lot of trouble to pack them in good clean white sand before we left England.”
The sky gets brighter. A hot day, already. The surgeon comes to the cabin, to give the old man his draught. They talk about Martin, the Indian who has escaped. They agree that it is better for the man not to have been hanged. The threat was made only to encourage the other Indian to come back, before they sent him — as they thought — to his village to trade English goods for food and perhaps news. Clearly, though, the man didn’t mind sacrificing the friend or fellow tribesman he’d left behind on the ship.
“Your draught,” the surgeon says.
“There is a balsam that can be collected in those woods,” the old man says. “In 1595 I got quite a bit from Wannawanare’s people. This time I had just got about a little nutful when I went ashore. The sweetest thing you ever smelled. Like angelica. For twenty years that smell has been with me. But then they opened up on us.”
“You have to forget about things like that now. We won’t be allowed to land.”
“And the oysters. Little ones growing on the roots of the mangrove below water. You could hack away a piece of mangrove root and bring away a dozen oysters, all alive. Sweet oysters, sweeter than anything you ever tasted. And the rain water in the hollows of the Pitch Lake. You can taste the tar in it, but that is part of the sweetness of the water.”
“You torment yourself, and other people, by talking of those things. Sweet things. How many of them you promised us when we were coming out! You talked a lot about a cassava liquor.”
“I remembered it from 1595. Right here. On this Guiana coast. The Indian women chewed the cassava and spat it out into a vessel. In England women are the brewers, and so they are here too. Or were. I don’t know what happens now. I haven’t gone to their villages. The chewing of the cassava was woman’s work, because long ago they found out that woman’s saliva caused cassava to ferment fast. You wouldn’t imagine it when you saw a group of them sitting flat on the ground and chewing and spitting into a hollowed-out piece of tree trunk, and giggling when they saw you looking at what they were doing. The first time I saw Moriquito’s women doing it, it looked so strange, I stopped and asked, and they all roared with laughter, and I thought they were joking. But when it was ready it made the clearest and the sweetest liquor you ever tasted. Sweeter than any nut, finer than any ale. On drinking occasions the chiefs took their leisure in their hammocks, swinging from side to side in the shade of trees in their villages. Because it’s cool there, in the woods, not as hot and sweaty as it is here on the ship in the Gulf. And the women served this nectar to their chiefs, filling tiny cupfuls at a time with little ladles. Such women. Plump, and as fine as any well-bred woman in England. White skins, regular features, black hair.”
“That was what you told us almost as soon as we left the Canaries, to give us courage for the crossing, after the trouble we had with the Spaniards there, and after that captain deserted with his ship.”
“What scum. All that fighting aboard the ships even before we had left England. What scum. When that man deserted, I was half with him, to tell you the truth. But there was no place for me to go. I had to stay with the expedition. I had begged for it for so long, and when it came it was like something with its own life, quite separate from me. Something to which I simply attached myself. And then the sickness — all those men sick and dying in our new ship. All those friends. I haven’t even begun to grieve for them. I am frightened to be left alone with grief now. I feel it will take me over. My own cook, Francis — he died. The gold expert I had, a man who was the best gold refiner in London, Fowler — he too died. They all died. The ship began to stink with sick people who couldn’t move and the corpses I had to bury.”
“And you kept everybody’s spirits up by talking to them about this paradise on this side of the ocean. Not only gold, but fresh water and fresh food, and the friendly beautiful people, waiting for you to be their king.”
“I was ill, too. Fever. Three shirts a day, three shirts a night. All wringing wet. And there were days of calm when we didn’t make above six leagues, and the sun hung above us in the sky and in the afternoon the sea seemed to blaze with the glitter. I wasn’t well. The expedition had its own life. I just surrendered to it and it dragged me through one day after another. I wasn’t willing anything. I was in no position to do anything like that.”
“Ten ships full of sick and dead people. And when we arrived we saw a Dutch ship, very calmly trading. Hatchets and knives and bits of metal, for tobacco and salt and hides. And we were full of sick and dead men looking for gold. Aren’t you amazed that the men who were still able-bodied didn’t mutiny, and ask where you had led them? You were supposed to have led them to a mysterious part of the world that none in England or Spain or the Indies knew about. And when we got to this place Captain Janson was trading, and you had yourself carried ashore in your shirt, to breathe clean air, to recover, and then to bury your dead. And all the while the little Indian canoes were going out to the Dutchman. The people who were going to be your subjects. They speak Spanish and Dutch. They don’t speak English. They haven’t come to you.
“Why did you tell so many people that you could be king of the Indies? You made them expect so much when they came here. They had suffered so much on the journey. We had suffered so much, all of us. I thought the chiefs would come out to meet you and honour you. The fresh, sweet water, the little cupfuls of liquor, those women, the fresh food. The deer and the fish and the oysters. Nothing happened. We lived on what we had. Your lieutenant Keymis sent an interpreter to the nearest village to ask for your two Indian servants. Servants. Not chiefs. But the people you took away to England in 1595, to show them off.”