“Just as you were taking back Topiawari’s son to England to show people that you had really been to Guiana, so, as you were writing about foreign adventures, you wanted to let people know that you had seen what other famous adventurers had seen. There is a little more, connected with that Negro. Hawkins was a slaver and privateer, a sacker of Spanish cities. I feel that when you left the Gulf, with only the sand to show for your pains, your thoughts were turning to sacking a city. Hawkins was in your head. You thought you would do what he had done.
“Outside the Gulf, not far to the west, just below the salt-pans of the Araya Peninsula, is the town of Cumaná. It is the oldest Spanish town in this part of the world. You thought you would capture that, as you had captured Port of Spain. But the Spanish governor there had heard about you, and he was waiting, with his musketeers and his Indian archers with their poisoned arrows. The land sloped up from the sea to the town. It was sandy, open, full of low, prickly cactus. Your men were massacred as they came off the boats. There is nothing of this in your book, but the Spanish reports say that forty of your men died there. They were important men. The Spanish reports give the names. They couldn’t have made them up. The men who died from musket or sabre wounds on the Cumaná shore were the lucky ones.
“Terrible things happened to the people who were hit by the poisoned arrows of the Indians. They went mad with thirst. Their bowels burst, their bodies blackened. The smell was awful in the ships. You asked the old Spanish conquistador you were dragging around with you about an antidote. He said he didn’t know. So he had his revenge at last. It didn’t matter how much you abused him for being unlearned and incurious: he said he didn’t know.
“In your book you don’t talk about the attack on Cumaná, of course. But you talk in a very concrete and passionate way about the effects of the poisoned arrows; you slip it in as a necessary digression — to use your words — in the Guiana section. You mention the antidote you heard about from someone you said was a Guianian; but what this person said suggests he was a Spaniard, a renegade you mention in another context, someone lower down the coast from Cumaná, always ready to trade with foreigners. Some Spaniards, this man said, had been cured with garlic juice; the golden rule was to take no liquids before the wound was dressed. Twenty-seven men died in the ships from the arrows: this was the figure given by the old conquistador to the Spanish enquiry. He was let off the ship at this stage, the old conquistador, perhaps exchanged for two English prisoners.
“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.