“Of Andrew Battell’s history,” said E.G. Ravenstein, the editor of the Hakluyt Society text, “we know nothing, except what may be gathered from his ‘Adventures’ and an occasional reference to him by his friend, neighbor, and editor, the Rev. Samuel Purchas.” Which set me to wondering: what could he have been like, this Englishman who spent two decades in the tropic heat of Angola, and dwelled for years amidst a flesh-eating tribe that must have seemed to him to be the next thing to devils? Would it be possible to re-invent such a man from the skimpy evidence at hand—to write his own memoir at full length, filling in all that this simple seaman had left unsaid, and much more that he would never have dreamed of saying?
The appeal to me was a three-fold one. On one level I would be paying homage to that book of Walter de la Mare that had been so essential in the shaping of my childish imagination. On another, I would be re-creating the lost world of British sixteenth-century maritime exploration and discovery, in which I had so passionate an interest. And, finally, I would be writing a kind of science fiction novel—for science fiction was the main pursuit of my life—in which I would be inventing not the future but the past, and bringing to life an alien civilization every bit as strange as those that had been imagined by the great science-fiction writers.
It was almost twenty years—a period nearly as long as that of Andrew Battell’s captivity in Africa—before I could realize my dream. Perhaps that is just as well, for I doubt that I had the literary resources, back there in 1962, to have sustained a book so large and ambitious as Lord of Darkness was to be. But the idea remained with me, year after year; and, year after year, I gathered collateral material for it, accounts of other travelers in the Congo and adjacent regions and all manner of anthropological and ethnographic lore. Finally, in 1981, I proposed the book to my American publisher at the time, Donald I. Fine of Arbor House.
I was, then in my mid-forties and at the peak of my powers as a writer. Science-fiction was what I was known for, though I had written some non-fiction books of what I called “romantic geography” as well, a book about the quest for El Dorado and another about the fabled kingdom of Prester John and others of that sort; now I in- tended to combine the two strands of my career with a major historical novel. To my surprise Don Fine was unenthusiastic. It was not that he found fault with the book I described to him; it was only, he said, that in the present state of American publishing, writers tended to become known for working in a single category of fiction—this one for science fiction, this one for horror stories, this one for political thrillers—and both readers and booksellers became confused and even hostile when a well-known writer did something that lay outside the category for which he was known. Beside, he said, there no longer was a readership in the United States for the serious historical novel, only for crudely written tales of tempestuous erotic adventure.
I was disappointed and dismayed—so dismayed that Don Fine, who understood the emotional makeup of writers very well, saw that I was determined to write Lord of Darkness no matter what, and would write it for someone else if he did not choose to publish it. So we arrived at a compromise: I would be allowed to do Lord of Dark-ness, yes, but also I would write for him a book called Valentine Pontifex, a sequel to my science-fiction novel Lord Valentine’s Castle, which was and remains my best-known and most commercially successful book. If he lost money on Lord of Darkness, well, he would earn it back on Valentine Pontifex.
So it was agreed, and so it happened. Early in 1982 I began at last writing Lord of Darkness. I based the book on Andrew Battell’s little 61-page narrative, and indeed I incorporated virtually every word of his account in my own manuscript of nearly 900 pages; but I vastly expanded and transformed Battell’s tale in the course of trying to recreate his personality and the intensity and quality of his strange experiences in Africa. I wrote the book virtually at fever heat, day after day for long hours, and by October of 1982 I was done: the longest novel I have ever written, and one of the most difficult to do, and for me perhaps the most rewarding as an artist. The style I chose to use was a modified Elizabethan prose, archaic but not incomprehensible to the modern reader. I took care to use no anachronistic words (or very few) that would have been unknown in Andrew Battell’s own time, and the rhythm and structure of every sentence was meant to be distinctly sixteenth-century in tone. It was as close as I could come, twentieth-century man that I am, to write the memoir of a sixteenth-century English mariner in his own words, though I know that the real Andrew Battell could never have written any book even remotely resembling the novel I created in his name.
In the end I was right to have written the book, which stands alone in my work, I think, in its power and scope; and Don Fine was right to have expressed misgivings about publishing it, for it did not do at all well in the American bookstores. Booksellers, recognizing the name of its author as that of a science fiction writer, put the book in the science fiction departments of their stores; and the science fiction readers, picking it up and looking through it, saw nothing in it about spaceships or time machines or other planets, and put it back on the shelf again. Meanwhile the readers of historical novels, never thinking to look for the book among the science fiction works, failed to find it at all. And so it passed quickly from sight in my own country, although it has won a steady and devoted readership in translated form elsewhere. At last it returns to print in English after having been unavailable for many years.
Thanks indirectly to Walter de la Mare’s remarkable novel of the three royal monkeys, Andrew Battell has been part of my life for many decades. And now, I hope, he will become part of yours.
—Robert Silverberg
BOOK ONE: Voyager
1
Almighty God, I thank Thee for my deliverance from the dark land of Africa. Yet am I grateful for all that Thou hast shown me in that land, even for the pain Thou hast inflicted upon me for my deeper instruction. And I thank Thee also for sparing me from the wrath of the Portugals who enslaved me, and from the other foes, black of skin and blacker of soul, with whom I contended. And I give thanks too that Thou let me taste the delight of strange loves in a strange place, so that in these my latter years I may look back with pleasure upon pleasures few Englishmen have known. But most of all I thank Thee for showing me the face of evil and bringing me away whole, and joyous, and unshaken in my love of Thee.
I am Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex, which is no inconsiderable place. My father was the master mariner Thomas James Battell, who served splendidly with such as the great Drake and Hawkins, and my mother was Mary Martha Battell, whom I never knew, for she died in giving me into this world. That was in the autumn of the year 1558, the very month when Her Protestant Majesty Elizabeth ascended our throne. I was reared by my father’s second wife Cecily, of Southend, who taught me to read and write, and these other things: that I was to love God and Queen Elizabeth before all else, that I was to live honorably and treat all men as I would have myself be treated, and that we are sent into this world to suffer, as Christ Jesus Himself suffered, because it is through suffering that we learn. I think I have kept faith with my stepmother’s teachings, especially in the matter of suffering, for I have had such an education of pain, in good sooth, that I could teach on the subject to the doctors of Oxford or Cambridge. And yet I am not regretful of my wounds.