This time it was a farther voyage, to Flanders and Norway, and the year after that all the way to Russia aboard a vessel of the Muscovy Company, and a cold time I had of it then. But these journeys were making a complete sailor of me, for each time I did less clerking and more seamanship, and I was finding my way around the maps and charts, the compasses and leads, not because it was asked of me but because my curiosity led me to know at first hand what sort of trade my father and his son Thomas the pilot had plied. So the years of my early manhood went.
In those years the Spaniards began once more to break the truce between their lands and ours, and the Queen sent Drake out to punish them with the loss of gold and silver. This was in 1577, and it was destined to become a voyage around the world, though that was not Drake’s first plan. My brother Henry was with him aboard his flagship, the Pelican, that Drake would rename The Golden Hind in mid-passage. My father, too, applied for command of another ship, the pinnace Christopher, but he was refused with thanks, on account of his age. I also would have gone, but my father would not let it, saying, “Thomas is dead and John is fled to Ireland and Henry sails with Drake, and I want one son for England.” I could have thwarted him in that, but I had no heart for it. He was suddenly old, and he did not so much forbid me as implore me, and how could I say him nay?
So Henry Battell went with Drake through Magellan’s Strait and up to Valparaiso and on to loot the gold of Peru, and to unknown northern lands of horrid fog and cold, and out into the South Sea to the Spice Islands and Java and Africa, and home again in just short of three years, leaving his left arm behind, that had become inflamed by a poison dart on some tropic isle. In the meanwhile Andrew Battell sailed four times to Antwerp and thrice to Sweden and once to Genoa. Which I suppose is no small travelling, but hardly a patch on going to the Spice Islands or Java, and often I thought ruefully of Drake’s prediction of how far I should journey. Who could possibly go farther than Henry, who had encompassed the globe? But there is voyage outward and there is voyage inward, as I would learn, and my twenty years inward to the heart of African deviltry took me farther indeed than Drake himself could have gone, as I will relate.
Yet I thought my sailing days were over by the time Drake and his men had come home. I was two-and-twenty, and by thrift and sweat I had earned my freehold, and I had my land and I had my wife. Her name was Rose Ullward of Plymouth, and she was small and dark, with sparkling eyes. I blush when I tell you that that is almost all I remember of her, save that she was a barmaid at the licensed house that her father kept by the docks. We lived as man and wife a year and some months. Together we went to Deptford that spring day in 1581 when Queen Bess made Francis Drake a knight; because my brother was a man of The Golden Hind, we were allowed on board, and I stood so close to the Queen that I could see the pockmarks on her cheek. She was a fine royal woman, quite tall and handsome, and I was almost weeping for being so near her. A great crowd attended on that day, so that the bridge laid from shore to the ship collapsed, and two hundred people were thrown into the Thames, though none was injured or drowned. I jumped in to save several, and Henry also, thrashing about valiantly with his one arm. Sir Francis embraced me as I shivered on deck afterward, and said, “I know you, fellow,” which amazed me, for he had met me only once and that many years before. But the men of my family have all had a single face, and he must have seen Henry on my features. It was a happy moment.
Soon my Rose’s belly was swelling, which gave me joy but also fear, for I remembered how my mother had died with me in childbed. Such misplaced worry! In brooding about imagined perils we often fail to see the real foe stealing upon us. Three months before her time Rose took the smallpox, and perished swiftly of it, and my unborn child of course with her. In that same dark season my father died, of an apoplexy, in his sixty-third year.
I have never known such bleakness. For the only time in my life all heart left me, all faith, all strength. I wandered as if in a dream, wifeless and fatherless and childless. In my foolish sorrow I turned to the taverns, and neglected my farm and drank up my savings and drank also the six pounds I inherited of my father, which is no small quantity of drinking, and in time everything was gone and the bailiffs came to tell me I had lost my land. Then did I sign on in Leigh as a clerk in the customs-house. I was barely four-and-twenty and thought of my life as almost ended, though in truth it had hardly begun.
At the lowest ebb the tide turns. In the year 1586, after an interminable dreary time of this waking slumber, I came to my senses and looked about me and saw that the world was still beautiful, and I began to recover into life. I fell in love, I pledged myself to marry again, I began once again to amass the money to buy me a freehold; in short, the interruption of defeat and black dejection was put at an end for me. And out of these renewed hopes and ambitions I came by easy stages to take up my long-abandoned career at sea, for how else could I come quickly by the wealth I needed? And by one step and another I set myself all unknowingly on the path that would carry me far from home for so many years, to Africa, to the torments the Portugals laid upon me, to the royal courts of Kongo and the Angola, to the jungles of coccodrillos and elephantos and the broad plains spangled with zevveras and gazelles; I began my long journey to the side of that diabolical Jaqqa cannibal, Imbe Calandola, the incarnation of the Lord of Darkness, whose lieutenant I became and whose monstrous wisdom rings to this day in my soul like terrible discordant music.
2
How did it happen? Why, I fell in love.
Her name was Anne Katherine Sawyer. She was but fifteen. Her hair was golden, not mere yellow like mine but the golden gold of the gold of Ophir, and her skin was fair and her lips were sweet. She was the daughter of the registrar of customs. I had seen her about the place as a pretty child, and then one day I woke and saw she was a child no more, and I felt the blood coursing again in my veins, that had been slow and sluggish since the day my wife Rose closed her eyes. I strolled with Anne Katherine along the docks, I spoke with her of Antwerp and Muscovy, I told her of my brother, who had sailed with Drake, and my father, who had seized Spanish treasure at Nombre de Dios, and I touched her shoulder one day and her elbow the next and her hand after that, like a boy afraid of frightening his girl with overmuch forwardness.
A bit of a coquette is what she was, and as things grew more urgent she held me lightly apart from her body when first I attempted her. But desire burns in woman as it does in man—let no fool tell you otherwise— and in time she yielded her maiden treasure to me, which was not a shameful thing, for I knew I would have her to be my wife. I gave her, for a token, the pearl on a beaded chain that I had had long ago from my brother. All the next day I was dizzied with the memory of my hands to her silken thighs and my lips to her round pale breasts, and the sound she made—soft, soft—when I went at last into her. And I dreamed of doing such things, night after night, all the nights of our life together.