“Also to learn the language from them.”
“We waited for two weeks. The man you called Leonard never came.”
“He was never in good health. He must have died. I sent him back ten or twelve years ago. He wanted to die at home.”
“After two weeks a canoe came with a sick old man dressed up in old English clothes. A barefoot old Indian scarecrow in English rags. With the few teeth in his head blackened with the tobacco they use here to quell hunger when they go on a journey. Broken pieces of cassava bread lying about the canoe, and black tobacco rolls, and the rest of his food carefully wrapped up in a leaf. We thought we were going to witness the meeting of two chieftains. Fine clothes, feathers, an Indian standard. We witnessed the meeting of two old men. And you couldn’t talk to Harry, because he had forgotten his English.”
“I was surprised by that. He spent fourteen years with me. I was hoping he would have married someone in England. But he became homesick. He had an Indian bandeau, cotton, blue and white. When the homesickness really came on him, he would tie that around his forehead and he would sit facing the wall. He often did that in the Tower. He wouldn’t talk or move or close his eyes. He could do that for a whole day, until the homesickness left him. It was terrible to see. I sent him back here with William Harcourt. That was nine years ago. He wanted to take back a lot of English clothes. He liked clothes.”
“The men were close to mutiny that day. I don’t think you know how close. And that day or the next you sat in this cabin and wrote to your wife that your name lived among the Indians, and that you could be their king. That was one of the letters a ship went back with.”
“I didn’t know my letters were being read.”
“It would have been negligent for them not to be. This big expedition, all these deaths. All this potential for trouble when we want peace. We have to know what you intend. And you know that your letters are copied and passed around in England to your supporters.”
“I knew there was a spy with me. I wasn’t sure who he was. All the weeks before the sickness I tried to work it out. I didn’t think it was you. I thought it was John Talbot, my friend from the Tower. Then he died from the sickness, and I thought there wasn’t a spy any more. He was one of the men we had to bury here. A good man, I always thought. A scholar, too. Eleven years with me in the Tower. He wanted to get out. I couldn’t blame him for that. I didn’t mind him being the spy.”
“He’s been useful to us, in fact.”
“My examination has begun?”
“It was high time. We’ve been here two months. We’ve lost so many men. On all expeditions you lose people, but we’ve lost too many. Food is running short. You’ve sent five ships and four hundred men up the river. We have no means of knowing what has happened. That Indian you seized and sent up in the boat hasn’t returned, and I don’t think he will. All the other Indians we see keep well clear of us. On the Trinidad side of the Gulf the Spaniards are watching with their muskets to prevent us from landing. We have no means of knowing what has happened on the other side, on the river, at that settlement of San Thomé. We know that the Spanish governor went there from Trinidad, no doubt to fortify the place. This governor’s a new man. He was specially sent out from Spain. He is not one of the old colonial crew. He’s a nobleman, a relation of the Spanish ambassador in London. We have no means of knowing what’s happened to your lieutenant Keymis or your son. Or the five ships you sent, and the four hundred men. Clearly something has happened. You can tell it. You can feel it in the air. In a little while we are likely to find out, but then neither you nor I may be in a position to sit and talk.”
“Don’t you want pen, paper? Aren’t you going to write anything down?”
“Not at this stage. Though I always prefer to work with a written statement. Unless you write things down, you miss a lot. Certain things that people say can reveal their meaning only if you can read them again and again. The words physically have to be in front of your eyes. It’s the only way you can discover things. Simple things, to start with. Like: ‘But I don’t understand that sentence.’ Or: ‘How did we get from there to there?’ Especially with someone like you, very skilled with words. But in fact both you and Laurence Keymis have made quite detailed statements many years ago. You both wrote books about Guiana and El Dorado and your discoveries. Richard Hakluyt reprinted them in his own compilation. It was something that John Talbot, your Tower friend, put us on to. He said, ‘It’s all there. Study those books from twenty-two years ago. Dissect them.’
“I tried reading them in England before the journey, but I found it hard. I got lost with all the strange Indian and Spanish names, of people and places and tribes. You gave too many names: I must tell you that made me suspicious.
“There was no question of reading on the journey, especially after the sickness. I’ve begun to read only since we’ve been in the Gulf, and really only since Keymis and your son went off to look for the gold mine of El Dorado. We’ve had a lot of time since then, a lot of empty days. Sunlight from six to six. Even so I have to read your book again and again. It’s a slippery piece of work, if I can use that word. You slip about, you lose your footing. It’s nice and easy and clear and brilliant for a number of pages, and then suddenly you feel you’ve not been paying attention. You feel you’ve missed something. So you go back. You’ve missed nothing. It’s just that something’s gone wrong with the writing. This happens many times. So even if you’re a careful reader you lose the drift of the narrative. It’s not easy, noticing first of all that the writing has changed and then finding exactly where. But those are precisely the places you have to identify. Because those are the places where the writer decides to add things or to hide things.
“One of the more extraordinary things in your book occurs in the ‘Advertisement,’ a kind of preface which you print between the letter of dedication and the book itself. It’s very bold, very effective, to place something so important in that half-way-house place, where people don’t read all that carefully. You say you wrote the Advertisement in reply to people who all those years ago, when you went back to England, said you were lying about El Dorado, that you’d found nothing, that the so-called ‘ore’ you brought back was really sand and that the piece of Guiana gold you showed was something you had bought beforehand in North Africa. The tone of the Advertisement was manly and honest. You stated very clearly what your detractors said. And then in a very open way you appeared to give an explanation. You said that you’d sent forty of your men to look for gold ore. They brought back sand. Not all the same sand. Men chose different colours. You told them it was sand they’d brought back, but the men for various reasons insisted on keeping it and bringing it back to England, and you allowed them to do so.
“But there is no mention of this sand-collecting episode in the book itself. I am not able to say when your men were ordered to go and collect this ore. It seems from this that if your enemies or other people hadn’t said you were lying and had brought back sand from Trinidad and Guiana, we would never have known about the forty men who at your orders went and looked for golden sand and brought it back to the ships.
“So in London, when people began to ridicule and doubt, you produced the piece of North African gold and said it was from Guiana, from some mountain of gold and diamonds beside a turbulent river. You weren’t going to be proved a fool. A traitor, a pirate, someone in league with the king of Spain — better any of that than to be a fool, a clown. After Drake and Hawkins, to be a clown privateer and explorer — that would have been worse than death.