WHEN THE sun went down — it never became really cool on the water, at the south of the Gulf, almost in the river estuary — the old man said to the surgeon, “You asked why I wrote as I did to my wife. She will get that letter in some months. By the time she reads it all this may be over. It didn’t matter what I wrote her. And at one time it was true: I could have been king of the Indians.”
“A long time ago. In 1595. Twenty-three years ago.”
“I rescued all the Trinidad Indian little kings or chiefs from the Spaniards. I was the first man here ever to punish the Spaniards for what they had done. I killed the Spaniards in Port of Spain and broke open the jail in their town inland and set the kings free, and their people burned the Spanish town. But when I wrote my book and gave the names of the kings there were people in England who said that I was making the names up. Wannawanare, Carroari, Maquarima, Tarroopanama, Aterima. I still know the names. And then — luckily, not for me so much as for the kings — a Spanish ship was captured taking duplicates of reports to Spain, and some of the names were there. The Spaniards founded Port of Spain on Wannawanare’s land. In the report they sent to Spain they said he agreed to handing over his land and his people. The man I saw was naked and tortured and half dead in that little jail room. I can still see their faces turned to one side against the wall, the five wasted kings, all on one chain, their bodies burnt in places with hot bacon fat. They would have just stayed there and died if we hadn’t freed them. And if duplicates of the Spanish reports from Trinidad hadn’t been captured, with the names of some of those kings, saying they had agreed to the Spaniards’ taking over their land and their people — if that hadn’t happened, nobody would have believed that those kings existed, and that they had gone through this torment in the closed cell.”
The surgeon said, “The Spaniards are like that. They record everything, and get it attested by notaries, and they send duplicates and triplicates by different ships to Spain. Very little gets lost. It’s a great help to us. We often have the two sides of a story.”
The old man said, “It’s terrible to think that people mightn’t have known about those men, or believed what I wrote about them.”
“Everything you write about the Trinidad side of the Gulf is true. It’s remarkable. Every tribe, every village, every river is as you say. And you did rescue Wannawanare and the others. But you went away, and, as you know, the Spaniards came back. They sent a very big expedition to the Gulf some months later. I don’t think anyone knows what happened to Wannawanare and his people, and all the others, after you left. The Spaniards had a lot of scores to settle: The Indians you had helped didn’t stand a chance. Those two boys you left on the river didn’t stand a chance. When you sent Keymis the following year to reconnoitre on his own, he had to move very carefully. He couldn’t even land on Trinidad. He heard later that the Spaniards were resettling the Indian tribes on both sides of the Gulf. You know what that means. Keymis didn’t mention Wannawanare. Strange — of Keymis, I mean.
“For a few weeks in 1595, when you had all those ships and men, I suppose it would have been possible for you to be the king of the Indians. But you were fooling those people. When Keymis went out the next year, an Indian chief came to the river mouth to meet him with twelve or twenty canoes provisioned for war. The chief asked Keymis where the rest of your fleet was. Keymis spoke the lie he had prepared. He said he hadn’t come to fight the Spaniards. You had killed all the Spaniards the previous year, and if you had sent a bigger force now the Indians would have thought that you wanted to invade their territory. After Keymis had said that twice, word spread among the tribes, and no one came to see Keymis. All the Indians on the river could think of was hiding from the Spaniards and trying to make peace with them.
“You stirred people up, here in this Gulf, and you went away. You stayed away for twenty-three years. You left a lot of people to face the consequences. The Spaniards had a lot of scores to settle. And you can’t blame them. Those Spaniards you killed at Port of Spain — some people would say you behaved dishonourably. Those men had been on the island for some years and were almost destitute. They came aboard your ships to try to buy linen from your men. You encouraged them, you talked to them about Virginia. You said that was where you were going. You gave them wine, which they hadn’t had for years. You entertained them for days. As soon as the rest of your fleet came into the Gulf, and you felt sure of your strength, you fell on those Spaniards and killed them.”
The old man said, “It was what they had done to some of the people I had sent the year before. They invited them to leave the ships and go hunting in the woods. They had Indians and dogs. When our men were close to the shore they fired on them and killed them.”
“All right. You settled that score, but you left these others for the Spaniards to settle. And they didn’t forget. Spaniards are like that. Fourteen years after, a friend of yours, Hall, a London merchant, sent two ships to the Gulf to trade. To pick up tobacco, mainly. This foreign trading in a Spanish colony is illegal, but the Spanish governor didn’t mind breaking his country’s laws. He got the men on the London ships to talk. He found out that Hall, the owner of the ships, was a friend of yours. One day, when thirty-six men from the ships were ashore at Port of Spain, they were all seized and roped up. They were tied back to back, and the throats of all thirty-six were cut. Right away. On the black sand of that Port of Spain shore. The man who did that was the son of the old Spanish governor, the old conquistador you had captured and led about in 1595. It was bad luck on the thirty-six men, but the old conquistador’s son owed you that.
“This was part of what you left behind. The Gulf had always been a place of blood and revenge, of Indian dispossessions and resettlement. Even before the Spanish time. The man-eating Caribs were moving down. There were dreadful wars. You added to that. But you went away and wrote a book about an untouched paradise on the rivers, a place to which you alone had access, where the Indians lived in beautiful meadows and didn’t know the value of the gold and diamonds by which they were surrounded, and where you alone had the secret to Indian hearts.
“I am trying to find out how you arrived at that book, at that version of your adventure.
“You had heard, like the rest of the civilized world, about El Dorado. You knew about this old conquistador who had been made governor of the provinces of Trinidad and Guiana and El Dorado, and had spent his fortune looking for the golden city. You assembled a force. You came and captured the old governor. You had forty men dig sand — just in case — and load up the ships. You went exploring with the old governor. You thought him foolish. You found nothing. You’re an intelligent man. You lost much of your faith in El Dorado. You believed so little in El Dorado that you left only one man, a servant, to look for it. Just in case.
“You began to try to get a ransom for the old Spanish conquistador, the governor of Trinidad. That isn’t in your book, but it’s in the Spanish reports. None of the neighbouring Spanish officials would pay up. In fact, they all wanted the old man dead, so that they could claim his province and get whatever gold was going.
“So, at this stage, for all your trouble, and after all that killing, you had only sand. And this is where the Negro tells us something.”
The old man said, “I had no Negroes with me in 1595.”
“I know. You came straight from England with your force. I am thinking about the Negro who suddenly appears in your book when you are on the Guiana river, and see the meadows and fields and flowers near the falls. The river is full of crocodiles, thousands, you say. And the Negro — who would know about crocodiles — jumps in from the galley — for a swim, you say — and is immediately eaten alive. And that’s that. There’s nothing more about crocodiles or Negroes in your book. I have thought a lot about that vanishing Negro of yours, and I’m certain you borrowed him from John Hawkins’s account of his voyage to Guinea in West Africa and the West Indies in 1564. In Guinea Hawkins saw a Negro who was snatched by a crocodile and pulled under as he was filling water at the river’s edge. That’s a better story.