WORKS ISSUED BY
THE HAKLUYT SOCIETY
—————
Series Editors
W. F. Ryan
Michael Brennan
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S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
THIRD SERIES
NO. 15
(Issued for 2005)
THE HAKLUYT SOCIETY
Council and Of*cers 2005–2006
PRESIDENT
Professor Roy Bridges
Dr John Bockstoce
Stephen Easton
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INTERNATIONAL REPRESENTATIVES OF THE HAKLUYT SOCIETY
Australia
Dr Martin Wood, Curator of Maps, National Library of Australia, Canberra,
ACT 2601
Canada
Dr Joyce Lorimer, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University,
Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3C5
France
Contre-amiral François Bellec, 1 place Henri Barbusse, F92300 Levallois,
France
Germany
Thomas Tack, Ziegelbergstr. 21, D-63739 Aschaffenburg
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Dr Derek Massarella, Faculty of Economics, Chuo University, Higashinakano
742–1, Hachioji-shi, Tokyo 192–03
New Zealand
John C. Robson, Map Librarian, University of Waikato Library, Private Bag
3105, Hamilton
Portugal
Dr Manuel Ramos, Av. Elias Garcia 187, 3Dt, 1050 Lisbon
Russia
Professor Alexei V. Postnikov, Institute of the History of Science and
Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1/5 Staropanskii per., Moscow
103012
Spain
Carlos Novi, Calle de Vera 26, E-17255 Begur (Girona), Spain
and 39 Hazelmere Road, Petts Wood, Kent BR5 1PA, England, UK
USA
Dr Norman Fiering, The John Carter Brown Library, P.O. Box 1894,
Providence, Rhode Island 02912 and Professor Norman Thrower, Department
of Geography, UCLA, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, California
90024–1698
Figure 1: Ralegh in a tent talking to Topiawari. From Theodor De Bry’s Americae, Pars VIII, Frankfurt, 1599.
Photograph courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S
DISCOVERIE OF GUIANA
Edited by
Joyce Lorimer
Published by
Ashgate
for
THE HAKLUYT SOCIETY
LONDON
2006
© The Hakluyt Society 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Published for The Hakluyt Society by
Ashgate Publishing Limited
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Ashgate Publishing Company
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Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 1552?–1618
Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana. – (Hakluyt Society. Third series)
1. Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 1552?–1618 – Travel – South America
2. South America – Discovery and exploration – English – Early works to 1800
I. Title II. Lorimer, Joyce III. Hakluyt Society IV. Discoverie of Guiana
918'.041092
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana / edited by Joyce Lorimer.
p. cm. - (Works issued by the Hakluyt Society ; 3rd ser., no. 15)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–904180–87–5 (alk. paper)
1. Guiana – Description and travel – Early works to 1800. 2. Guiana – Discovery and exploration.
3. El Dorado. 4. Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 1552?–1618 – Travel – Guiana. 5. America –
Early accounts to 1600.
I. Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 1552?–1618. II. Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 1552?–1618. Discovery of the large,
rich, and beautiful empire of Guiana. III. Lorimer, Joyce. IV. Series.
E129.R2S57 2006
970.01'7–dc22
2005024201
ISBN–13: 978–0–904180–87–9
ISBN–10: 0–904180–87–5
ISSN 0072 9396
Typeset by Waveney Typesetters, Wymondham, Norfolk.
Printed in Great Britain by
the University Press, Cambridge.
CONTENTS
page
ix
Maps and Illustrations
Preface
xi
Introduction
Physical Description of the Manuscript
The Relationship of the Manuscript to the Text
Cecil’s Response to Ralegh’s Proposals
‘Of the Voyage for Guiana’
The Queen’s Response to Ralegh’s Proposals
Revising for Print
The Empire of Guiana
The Background to the Spanish Searches for El Dorado
Gold Mines
Native Alliances
Amazons and Ewaipanoma
The Printing of The Discoverie
From Discoverie of the Large Rich and Bewtifvl Empire to
‘the blessing of an untraded place’
Key to Annotation
xvii
xxiv
xxiv
xxxi
xxxv
xxxvii
xxxix
xl
xliii
xlvii
lxi
lxxii
lxxvi
lxxxiii
xcvii
The Manuscript and the Printed Text of The Discoverie
Captain Popham’s Documents
Appendices
I
Ralegh’s First Reconnaissance of the Orinoco 1587?
II
‘Of the Voyage for Guiana’
III Intelligences from Spain Relating to Guiana
IV Letters from Ralegh and his Associates
V
Correspondence 1607–1618, Describing the Gold Mine
Allegedly Discovered by Ralegh in 1595
VI Dutch and English Explorations of the Guiana Coast 1598–1601,
in Response to the Publication of Ralegh’s Discoverie
1
228
245
253
265
279
289
307
References
333
Index
341
vii
This page has been left blank intentionally
M A P S A N D I L L U S T R AT I O N S
Figure 1: Frontispiece: Ralegh in a tent talking to Topiawari. From Theodor
De Bry’s Americae, Pars VIII, Frankfurt, 1599.
Photograph courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
Figure 2: Map showing major physical features of the Lower Orinoco-Essequibo
region, focus of the Eldorado expeditions 1590–95.
xiv
Figure 3: Map showing Ralegh’s expedition into the lower Orinoco, 1595 –
outward and return route.
xv
Figure 4: Map showing Ralegh’s explorations near the confluence of the River
Caroní, 1595.
xlviii
Figure 5: Map showing Ralegh’s explorations as he returned downstream in 1595. xlix
Figure 6: Map showing the location of Manoa and its bordering peoples derived
from Ralegh’s reports of his conversations with Antonio de Berrío, Topiawari,
Wanuretona and others.
lxii
Figure 7: El dorado being gilded with gold dust. From Theodor De Bry’s Americae,
Pars VIII, Frankfurt, 1599.
Photograph courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
222
Figure 8: ‘Mapa de las costas y parte de la provincia de Venezuela’, AGI,
MP Mexico 22.
Photograph courtesy of the Archivo General de Indias.
244
Figure 9. Ralegh’s map of northern South America showing the lake of Manoa
(c. 1595). British Library MS Add. 17940a. North is bottom.
Photograph courtesy of the British Library.
282
Figure 9a. Theodor De Bry’s version of Ralegh’s map from Americae, Pars VIII,
Frankfurt, 1599.
Photograph courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
283
Figure 10. Map showing John Ley’s coastal explorations, 1597, 1598.
309
Figure 11. Title page from Cornelis Claesz’s Waerachtige end grondighe beschryvinge
van het groot ende Goud-rijk Coninckrijck van Guiana, Amsterdam, 1598, illustrating
cannibals and Amazons.
Photograph courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
310
ix
This page has been left blank intentionally
P R E FA C E
This book is dedicated to the memory of the late David Beers Quinn. I was privileged
to work with David Quinn, first as an undergraduate and subsequently as his doctoral
student, at the University of Liverpool where he held the Andrew Geddes and John
Rankin Chair of Modern History from 1957 to 1976.
David Quinn was only thirty-one when he published his two-volume study on The
Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert as volumes 83 and 84 of the
Hakluyt Society’s 2nd Series in 1940. He was to publish five more magisterial works
with the Society over the next fifty years: The Roanoke Voyages, 1584–1590: Documents to
Illustrate the English Voyages to North America under the Patent Granted to Walter Raleigh in
1584. 2 vols, 2nd ser., 104–5 (1955); Richard Hakluyt, The Principall Navigations, Voiages
and Discoveries of the English Nation: A Facsimile of the Edition of 1589 (with R. A. Skelton
and with an Index by Alison Quinn), 2 vols, extra series, 39 (1965); The Hakluyt Handbook, 2 vols, 2nd ser., 144 and 145 (1974); The English New England Voyages, 1602–1608,
(with Alison M. Quinn), 2nd ser., 161 (1983); and The Discourse of Western Planting (with
Alison M. Quinn), extra series, 45 (1993). He remained dedicated to the interests and
purposes of the Hakluyt Society throughout his life, serving as Vice-President from
1960 to 1982, as President from 1982 to 1987, and for many years on its Council.
David Quinn’s first and subsequent Hakluyt Society editions set unrivalled scholarly
standards for the transcription of manuscripts and the annotation of documents and
early printed texts. In these volumes and in the innumerable other books and articles
which he published, David Quinn demonstrated his brilliance at what he modestly
described as ‘documentation and descriptive writing’. He showed how the ‘chance ragbag of survivals’ which constitute the archives of early North American exploration and
settlement could be pieced together into a coherent narrative by a combination of
meticulously detailed research, which turned up documents where no one else had
thought to look for them, and an inspired flair for imaginative but rigorously careful
reconstruction, where the evidence was not available. His volumes were enriched by his
study and actual field reconnaissance of the environmental conditions which defined
where ships could sail and whether fledgling colonies could survive. He was intensely
interested in anthropology and made signal contributions to the ethnohistorical record
of encounters between Englishmen and indigenous North Americans. His wife Alison,
who was trained in English literature and botany and was his partner in scholarship as
well as life, influenced his reading of the sixteenth-century travel accounts of the New
World and the strange eco-systems which their writers struggled to describe. David’s
Hakluyt Society volumes were distinguished by Alison’s impeccable indexes.
In 1987, H. G. Jones published Ralegh and Quinn: The Explorer and his Boswell, a
compilation of papers read at the International Sir Walter Raleigh Conference at
Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The title was extremely apt. David Quinn’s short volume
on Ralegh and the British Empire (1947, 1962 enlarged, 1973) remains the seminal
xi
S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
comprehensive statement on Ralegh’s colonial ventures. The fate of Ralegh’s Lost
Colony in North Carolina kept his interest until the last years of his life.
Like so many other projects in my scholarly career, this book was inspired by David
Quinn’s scholarship. It was David Quinn who informed me that a hitherto unpublished
manuscript draft of Ralegh’s Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana
was preserved in the collections of Lambeth Palace Library and who encouraged me to
approach the Hakluyt Society with a proposal to produce an edition which would
compare the manuscript to the three editions printed in 1596. In the 1980s David
Quinn and a group of other Ralegh scholars, among them the late Ernest A. Strathmann, had hopes of publishing a comprehensive edition of all Ralegh’s written works.
Ernest Strathmann, known for his many publications on Ralegh, in particular his Sir
Walter Ralegh: A Study in Elizabethan Skepticism (1951, reprinted 1973) had uncovered
the Lambeth Palace manuscript of the Discoverie. Before the greater Ralegh project
collapsed for lack of funding, he had already circulated to the group a description and
preliminary transcription of the manuscript and a short essay in which he gave a physical description of the same, identified the major, obvious differences between the
manuscript and printed version and suggested that the editorial annotations on it may
have been made by Sir Robert Cecil. By the late 1980s Professor Strathmann’s health
had already become too fragile to continue such scholarly work. He generously passed
on to me his materials relating to the Lambeth Palace manuscript through David
Quinn. I wish to acknowledge here that the sections of the Introduction entitled ‘Physical Description of the Manuscript’ and ‘The Relationship of the Manuscript to the
Text’ are based on Professor Strathmann’s initial exploratory work. In the ten years or
so since then my own research interests in the early history of English and Irish exploration and settlement in Guiana, and the travel literature that arose from it, has taken
this book on very different and more complex journey than was originally envisaged
with Sir Walter Ralegh. In that long process I have received help from many institutions and individuals. Grants from Wilfrid Laurier University made it possible for me
to undertake research trips to England and Spain. I am particularly indebted to the
staffs of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, of the Reading and Manuscript rooms of the
British Library, of Lambeth Palace, of the National Archive at Kew, of the John
Rylands University Library in Manchester, the Wiltshire Record Office in Trowbridge
and of the Archivo General de Indias, Seville and the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. The
copy of the 1590 Spanish painted map of north-eastern Venezuela (Fig. 8) and that of
Ralegh’s map of Guiana (Fig. 9) appear by kind permission of the Archivo General de
Indias and the British Library respectively.
It was the two summers spent in Providence, Rhode Island in 1989 and 1990 at the
John Carter Brown Library, as a Jeannette D. Black Memorial Fellow, that gave me the
time and the inspiration to think about how I might shape this book. The JCB, as it is
fondly known to those who work in it, has magnificent holdings in the literature of
European exploration and travel but reputation of its collection is, if anything, exceeded
by that of its splendid staff who go out of their way to make each researcher’s visit as
productive as possible. Conversations with its Director, Norman Fiering, and other
librarians initiated me into the mysteries of the bibliographical description of the
book. Through discussion with other Fellows at lunches and coffee breaks I came to
appreciate how my understanding of Ralegh’s text could be deepened by ‘new historicist’ literary approaches to the interpretation of travel accounts. I greatly appreciate
xii
P R E FA C E
having been given the opportunity to work at the JCB and the friendship and scholarly
support which I still receive from its staff. Figs. 1, 7, 9a, and 11 appear by kind permission of the John Carter Brown Library.
The format of this volume generally follows Hakluyt Society house style with the
exception that I have been permitted to adopt a special form of annotation for the transcription of Lambeth Palace MS 250, in order to make the places where it differs from
the printed text immediately more visible to the reader. I wish particularly to thank Will
Ryan and Michael Brennan, series editors, and Sarah Tyacke, who have expertly
resolved all the technical complexities of this edition and shepherded it through the
press.
Joyce Lorimer
Wilfrid Laurier University,
Waterloo, Canada, 2005
xiii
Figure 2: Map showing major physical features of the Lower Orinoco-Essequibo region, focus of the
Eldorado expeditions 1590–95.
xiv
Figure 3: Map showing Ralegh’s expedition into the lower Orinoco, 1595 – outward and return route.
xv
This page has been left blank intentionally
INTRODUCTION
The Hakluyt Society was established ‘for the purpose of printing rare or unpublished
Voyages and Travels’.1 This volume, although it contains within it a transcription of the
sole surviving manuscript draft of Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of the Large, Rich and
Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (Lambeth Palace MS 250), as well as other previously unpublished materials relating to his Orinoco expedition, is more concerned with how Ralegh
approached the production of his travel narrative than with the events described in it. It
is, perhaps, more about the ‘painefull pilgrimage’ he endured as he tried to describe his
‘so great trauel’ than his actual ‘iorney’.2
One of the most onerous expectations of literate Europeans who ventured to the
Middle East, Africa, Asia and the New World in the sixteenth century was to report,
both to those who had actually invested in their particular venture and to a broader
domestic audience which might be induced to do so in the future. In the introduction to
her book The Witness and the Other World, a study of the evolution of travel literature
through the Middle Ages to the end of the sixteenth century, Mary Campbell raises
numerous questions about the difficulties of translating an actual experience of travel
into a written record. How does one distinguish fact from fiction, either as a writer or a
reader, where one is dealing with unverifiable records of private experience taking place
in profoundly unfamiliar surroundings? How do the pressures of the audience’s expectation and the writer’s predisposition transform the content of such records? These
problems, she notes, became particularly acute in the sixteenth century when information about that New World was not intended just for entertainment of the reader but
had urgent, practical, promotional uses.3 As Philip Edwards notes ‘for the Elizabethan
voyager, writing was participation, as necessary to the eventual outcome of the voyage
as hauling on ropes or joining a shore-party’. The requirements of a report, he argues
dictated a ‘form of literature which cannot be granted the freedom permitted to ‘the
poet’ and which can legitimately incur the charge of lying or falsification’. Those who
wrote such narratives faced questions of
design, interpretation, and presentation in narratives which as often as not were as keen to
make out a case as to give a faithful record of events, there are imponderable forces pushing
these accounts away from ‘what actually happened’ – the quite unconscious sifting and
rearrangement that time, memory, and language must have imposed are incalculable.4
Post-imperialist historians studying particular colonial encounters have learned from
1
From a statement of the aims of the Hakluyt Society by the first Honorary Secretary, William Desborough Cooley; see R. C. Bridges and P. E. H. Hair, Compassing the Vaste Globe of the Earth, Hakluyt Society, 2nd
ser., 83, London, 1996, p. 7.
2
STC 20633 st. I, A3, l. 20, see below p. 5.
3
M. B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World, Ithaca, 1988, pp. 218–66.
4 P. Edwards, ed., Last Voyages, Oxford, 1988, pp. 8, 10, 12.
xvii
S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
rhetoricians that they must pay much greater attention to the processes of selection and
representation involved in the production of colonial promotional texts. As the translator of Michel de Certeau’s The Writing of History rightly states:
every indexical act entails forces of attention and oblivion, simultaneously in the past (in
what was then included, what excluded) and the present (in the analyst’s will to privilege
given documents over others). Both the student of rhetoric and the student of history
discover that whatever is deemed trivial or worth forgetting may, upon close scrutiny,
evince a ‘strategy’ that wills to efface, marginalize, or even repress more complicated and
ambivalent designs.1
Mary Fuller argues that in the England of Elizabeth I, before any permanent American
colonies were established, the task of presenting such ventures in a positive and attractive light ‘proved surprisingly difficult, and not only because of an atmosphere of resistance, suspicion, real or perceived persecution’. Elizabethan colonial propagandists were
forced to adopt an approach which was ‘as much apologetic as descriptive’, evolving
‘almost from the outset as a genre concerned with recuperating failure – as noble,
strategic, even as a form of success’.2
A man of Sir Walter Ralegh’s literary ability should, one might think, have had no
difficulty writing about his ‘Discoverie’ of Guiana, were it not for the problematic fact
that he had not actually discovered it. As a result his work has always raised questions of
authorial credibility. At the time of publication his report was subjected to unusually
intense official and public scrutiny. His contemporaries doubted his claims and were
unwillingly to spend money on a search for the hidden empire ruled by el dorado, when
he had nothing to offer as proof for its existence beyond reports of his discussions with
native leaders.
Most historians have tended to dismiss Ralegh’s claims as inventions, intended to
regain him favour at court and distract attention from just how little he had achieved by
his 1595 expedition to the lower Orinoco. When Sir Robert Schomburgk completed
his edition of Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of
Guiana in 1848, the third volume printed by the recently formed Hakluyt Society, he
clearly felt a close affinity with his Elizabethan fore-runner and a need to defend him
against critics. As he noted in his preface:
As Her Majesty’s Commissioner to survey the boundaries of British Guiana I explored in
1841 the wondrous delta of the Orinoco: … encamped at Punta Barima, visited the
Amacura and Aratura, and traversed at a later period the regions which Keymis describes as
the site of the gorgeous capital of El Dorado, with the seasonal lake, enlivened by a multitude of canoes; what wonder therefore that I should read Ralegh’s descriptions, expressed
with such force and elegance, with the greatest delight? Every page, nay almost every
sentence, awakened past recollections, and I felt in imagination transported once more
into the stupendous scenery of the Tropics.3
1 M. de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley, New York, 1988, p. x. For a further discussion
of this question see also A. Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, New Haven, 1993.
2
M. C. Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America 1576–1624, Cambridge, 1995, frontispiece.
3 R. H. Schomburgk, ed., The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (London, 1849),
pp. vii–viii. For Lawrence Keymis, Ralegh’s close associate, see below pp. lxxxv–lxxxix. Keymis did not visit
the seasonally flooded Rupununi plain, referred to here by Schomburgk, but heard about it from indigenous
informants encountered on the coast in 1596.
xviii
INTRODUCTION
Schomburgk apologized to his reader for burdening his rendition of Ralegh’s text with
‘copious notes’. He excused himself by stating that his ‘chief object was to prove, from circumstances which fell within my own experience, the general correctness of Ralegh’s
descriptions, and to exculpate him from ungenerous reproaches’.1 Much of his introduction was devoted to exonerating Ralegh ‘from some of the gravest accusations of bad faith
and gratuitous inventions that have been brought against him. Many remarks to a similar purpose will be found in the following pages, where passages in the body of the work
have called forth the animadversions of the historians and biographers of this great man’.2
V. T. Harlow’s edition of the Discoverie, published by the Argonaut Press in 1928,
took advantage of the mass of transcribed Spanish documents which had been collected
by researchers for the British government’s legal proceedings with Venezuela and Brazil
over the boundaries of British Guiana. These, as N. M. Penzer noted in his preface to
the volume, rendered ‘it possible at last to compare Ralegh’s own account of the 1595
expedition with the narratives of contemporary Spaniards actually on the spot’.3
Although Harlow’s study made it clear that the Spaniards had devoted several decades
to searching for what had been dismissed as Ralegh’s golden fantasy, it did, however,
drastically deconstruct ‘the Ralegh of Romance’. Harlow expeditiously demolished any
lingering notion that Ralegh was a great, practical sea-man and ruthlessly exposed the
difficult and contrary aspects of his personality, in which he felt was concentrated ‘in
intensified form almost all the virtues and failings characteristic of his generation’.
Nevertheless for Harlow, who did not himself question Great Britain’s imperial destiny,
Ralegh retained his ‘title to fame … not as a man of action, but as a man of ideas … his
prophetic imagination called up a vision of England overseas which was translated by
his successors into glorious reality’.4
In the post-imperialist climate of the later twentieth century ‘new historicist’ literary
scholars began to dissect Ralegh’s text as a prime example of the literary act of colonial
appropriation. His account of his first expedition to the Orinoco is used as an exemplary text for how rhetorical practices were bent to the service of English imperialism.5
Ralegh’s Discoverie, Stephen Greenblatt points out, was meant to draw English adventurers and investors to Guiana, ‘to testify, to persuade, to provoke action’.6 It is, Louis
Schomburgk, ed., Discoverie, p. xi.
Schomburgk, ed., Discoverie, p. lxiv.
3
N. M. Penzer, ‘Preface’, in V. T. Harlow, ed., The Discoverie of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh, London, 1928,
p. v. Extensive archival researches were conducted to build the cases for the arbitration of two distinct
disputes, one between Great Britain and Venezuela, another between the former and Brazil, over the boundaries of then British Guiana. The materials relating to the matter of the northern boundary can be found in
Arbitration with the United States of Venezuela. The Case on behalf of the Government of her Britannic Majesty, 12
vols, London, 1898, 1899; The Case of the United States of Venezuela before the Tribunal of Arbitration to convene
at Paris, 3 vols, New York, 1898; The Counter-case of the United States of Venezuela before the Tribunal of Arbitration to convene at Paris, 3 vols, New York, 1898. Those relating to the southern boundary may be found in
British Foreign Office, Question de la frontière entre la Guyane Britannique et le Brésil, 4 vols, London, 1903;
Joaquim Nabuco, ed., Limites entre le Brésil et la Guyane Anglaise, 8 vols, Rio de Janeiro, 1903.
4 Harlow, Discoverie, pp. xvi, xliii.
5
See S. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, New Haven, 1973, pp. 99–126;
Marvelous Possessions: the wonder of the New World, Chicago, 1991, pp. 6–25, 86–151; Fuller, ‘Ralegh’s Fugitive
Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana’, in New World Encounters, ed. S. Greenblatt, Berkeley, 1993, pp. 218–40; L. Montrose, ‘The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery’, in Greenblatt, New
World, pp. 77–217; Fuller, Voyages, pp. 55–84.
6 Greenblatt, New World, p. xiv.
1
2
xix
S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
Montrose argues, one of the clearest examples of what Michel de Certeau termed ‘writing which conquers’, deliberately using gendered language, to represent the land of
Guiana as the body of a beautiful virgin. His incitement of his male contemporaries to
join in the assault upon her ‘Maydenhead’ is justified by her own desire for possession
and protection from the Spaniards, who threaten to despoil her just as they violate her
Amerindian women.1 Early Modern travellers’ accounts of peoples they encountered
were subconsciously shaped by their implicit confidence in the superiority of their own
culture and by the common stock of descriptive metaphors which they drew from it.
The picture of indigenous peoples which was ‘produced’ was consciously designed to
support the interests of the particular colonial objective. The native material in Ralegh’s
text has, until recently, been treated merely as a projection of European cosmographies
and ethnographies onto native cultures.2 For some, the content of Ralegh’s text is as
much an allegory of his life experiences as it is a report of his expedition. The golden
empire, which he did not have the resources to conquer, and the gold mines, which he
did not have the time to open, are emblematic of political and social treasure lost to him
because of his fall from royal favour.3 The text is also seen as a pivotal piece in the
development of the genre of English travel literature which stemmed from early colonial endeavours, and which was central to the building of perceptions of English nationhood. The pressing need to convince sceptical readers that they were not travel-liars
and that English settlement in America was both achievable and worth the effort
produced the ‘important and debilitating perception that colonial problems were
discursive and could be solved discursively, or that the truths about America were to be
located less in what was discovered than in the discoverers …. In this way, the decades
1576–1624 could be recorded not as years of waste and catastrophe but as years whose
heroes were the stuff of greatness’. Ralegh’s work, Mary Fuller argues, epitomizes the
strategy common to all later Elizabethan and early Stuart colonial propagandists, shifting the focus away from lack of profit by stressing the noble self-restraint and physical
suffering of the narrator.4
Neil Whitehead’s recent edition of the Discoverie offers a welcome scholarly exegesis
on the ethnological material in the printed text. His discussion and application of literary and anthropological theory brings a salutary and accessible dose of common sense
to the question of the use and the value of European accounts of encounters with nonliterate New World peoples. As he rightly points out, if the written accounts of the
complex and ambiguous process of encounter are simplistically dismissed as no more
than depictions of the European self, then the witness of peoples who had so little
historical time remaining to them will, once again, be marginalized and effaced.5 The
Montrose, ‘The Work of Gender’, pp. 182, 188–90, 208–10.
Montrose, ‘The Work of Gender’, p. 201, for example, argues that while ‘Ralegh frequently writes
respectfully and admiringly of the native Americans whom he purports to have encountered during his
discovery’ it is ‘important to acknowledge such sympathetic representations of various indigenous individuals
and groups, while at the same time remaining aware that the very condition of sympathy may be enabled by
prior processes of projection and appropriation that efface the differences and assimilate the virtues of the
Indians to European norms’.
3 See Fuller, ‘Ralegh’s Fugitive Gold’, pp. 226–37.
4
See Fuller, Voyages, pp. 13, 14, 36.
5
N. L. Whitehead, ed., The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, Norman, 1997, pp.
33–52, 60–110.
1
2
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INTRODUCTION
value of Ralegh’s reports of his conversations with indigenous leaders of peoples settled
on the lower Orinoco has been re-established by his careful analysis of their ethnological basis.
Travel writing, whatever the complexities in interpreting it, is not, after all, absolute
fiction. Ralegh did go to the Orinoco. As Philip Edwards reminds us:
while recognizing the extreme difficulty of penetrating the disguises of language and the
infidelity of the human mind, we should at all costs avoid manoeuvring ourselves into a
corner and declaring that after all we live in a world of words and there is no difference in
the end between writing about things that have happened and writing about things that
have not happened … these voyages did happen, outside the narratives that mediate them
to us … even in their prejudiced imperfections they are as vitally a part of the drama of the
real voyage as were the individual perceptions from which they grew. We are in no god-like
position to judge where exactly these writers falter in their faithfulness towards what they
did and what they saw.1
In the last few years I have had an opportunity to look at how Ralegh struggled to
reduce his experiences into a readable report, immediately after his return from the
Orinoco in the autumn of 1595. Until now scholars have only had access to what he eventually published, rushed into print in three editions in 1596. Ralegh’s letters, as well as his
‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ and his preface ‘To the Reader’, make it clear that he had found the
production of his printed work a bruising experience. In his letter to Sir Robert Cecil of
the 12/22 November 1595, Ralegh inveighed against the ‘blockishe and slouthfull’
dullards whose carping criticisms stood to lose England treasure equal to that possessed
by Spain.2 In the face of personal attacks and ‘malicious slaunder’ Ralegh had, like all travellers, to assert the authority of the eyewitness over the scepticism of the armchair critic,
‘to answere that out of knowledge, which others shall but obiect out of malice’.3
What he eventually published was not how he first chose to characterize his experiences in South America. The degree to which the pressures noted above shaped his
final text can be judged by comparing the printed versions to the manuscript,
completed shortly after he returned from the Orinoco. The manuscript version of The
Discoverie which Ralegh circulated for advice and comment varies frequently and significantly from the printed text, both in content and in style. It is possible to see which
passages passed virtually unaltered from draft to print, what was omitted, what was
changed and what was added. Even more importantly, it allows the reader to appreciate
the difference between Ralegh’s unedited and edited voice. The manuscript represents
how Ralegh first felt and chose to write about his expedition in search of the empire of
Guiana. The text contains what it was felt advisable for him to publish.
Here then we have a rare opportunity to look at how an author’s earlier draft was
edited in preparation for wider dissemination in print. A close comparison of the two
affords a rare insight into the strategy and process behind the transformation of one
into the other. Even more unusual is the fact that the manuscript gives evidence of the
way that editorial process was influenced by criticism from Sir Robert Cecil, who
clearly had his own decided opinions about the difference between a travel text
Edwards, ed., Last Voyages, pp. 9, 14.
See below Appendix IV, no. 2.
3
STC 20636 st. I, A2v, ll. 6–7; A3, ll. 13–14; ¶2, ll. 10–11; ¶2v, ll. 30–34; ¶3, ll. 34–5, see below pp. 4, 5, 11,
12, 13.
1
2
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S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
designed to amaze and entertain the armchair reader, and a promotional piece designed
to prod that reader to offer either his money or his person to the Guiana enterprise.
Faced with a general climate of scepticism about the profitability of colonial ventures,
Mary Fuller argues, Elizabethan and early Jacobean venturers were forced to find ways
of theorizing about their enterprises to make them acceptable to potential investors.1
The changes between Ralegh’s manuscript and printed text demonstrate how his original authorial voice was shaped and restrained by Sir Robert Cecil and other associates at
home who had not travelled with him to the Orinoco but had a direct financial interest
in the undertaking.
The presentation of Ralegh’s manuscript required, as will be seen, unusual delicacy
given his own personal standing with the Queen. Although Robert Devereux, earl of
Essex, had outshone all rivals as Elizabeth I’s prime favourite since 1588, Ralegh was
solely responsible for his own dramatic fall from her favour. While the noble Essex’s
marriage to Frances Walsingham (the widow of Sir Philip Sidney) in 1591 was forgiven
by his royal mistress, the upstart Ralegh’s seduction of and secret marriage to Elizabeth
Throckmorton in the same year had quite different consequences. Once the affair had
come to the Queen’s knowledge Ralegh and his wife had been conveyed to the Tower
on 7 August 1592, imprisoned not so much for their deceitful actions as for their
unforgivable failure to apologize for them. Although both had been released from
confinement by late 1592 and Ralegh retained his lease of Sherborne and his offices in
the West Country, he was forbidden to appear at court and exercise his duties as
Captain of the Queen’s Guard. The ban was to endure for five interminable years
excluding him not from the Queen’s service, but from her presence and from any direct
possibility for further self-promotion from the vacancies created by the passing of the
first generation of the Queen’s most trusted counsellors. While it is true that Ralegh
had been interested in reports of the Spanish search for El Dorado since about 1587,
his decision to risk his own person in search of it rather than send others, as will be
argued here, must also be read in terms of his desperate belief that he had been
‘blasted’ with misfortunes and that there was no other means to ‘recouer but the
moderation of excesse, and the least tast of the greatest plentie formerly possessed .…
other way to win … euen to appease so powrefull a displeasure’.2 For Ralegh, the
private and public representation of the account of his expedition to Guiana always had
two goals. The first was to assemble sufficient support for the conquest of the golden
civilization which had temporarily taken hold of his imagination. The second and far
more important, was to achieve, by the act of offering to the Queen the possibility of
such a conquest, re-entry into her court and into the El Dorado of her favour that he
had once won and now lost.
If, as the sum of the materials presented here will ultimately suggest, Ralegh’s
interest in Guiana was more politically opportunistic and transient than is traditionally assumed, the engagement of Sir Robert Cecil in Guiana ventures was, by
contrast, more serious and enduring. Recent work on Lord Burghley’s second son
has pointed out that the younger Robert Cecil of the 1590s was a much more convivial and adventurous personality than the seasoned, cautious statesman of the first
Fuller, Voyages, pp. 11–12.
STC 20636 st. I, A2v, l. 21–A3, l. 5, see below pp. 4–5. For the most detailed discussion of Ralegh’s
marriage and its consequences see A. L. Rowse, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, Aldershot, 1964, pp. 129–88.
1
2
xxii
INTRODUCTION
decade of James I’s reign. He enjoyed the company of witty contemporaries and, as
a neighbour to Ralegh’s Durham House residence in London since the mid-1580s,
was one of Ralegh’s close circle of ‘friends’, in spite of the fact that his father, Lord
Burghley, had advised him ‘not to affect popularity too much: seek not to be E[ssex]
and shun to be R[alegh]’.1 Moreover, the Elizabethan court of the 1590s was not, as
recent studies have clearly established, a regnum Cecilianum. Although Lord
Burghley succeeded in winning his son a knighthood and appointment to the Privy
Council in1591 and passed over to him many of the secretarial responsibilities held
by the late Sir Francis Walsingham, he did not manage to persuade the Queen to
grant him officially the latter’s position until 1596. The entrenchment of Burghley
and his son Robert Cecil in royal administration and their reluctance to waste the
resources of the state in aggressive prosecution of the war against Spain was challenged by the earl of Essex’s vigorous assertion of the right of ancient aristocracy to
counsel the crown and his support for outright war.
Even then continuous hostilities between the two sides did not really develop until
about 1597, when the aged Queen lost the capacity to use and control the conflicts
between her officers. In the more fluid politics of court and parliament of the early
1590s the Cecils were frequently forced into cooperation and accommodation of the
Queen’s prime favourite. Ralegh, who had a more reasonable relationship with Essex
than is often assumed, could work with both. In the light of this, Robert Cecil’s investment in and promotion of Ralegh’s venture to Guiana should be seen as arising out of
genuine interest and was not, as earlier studies tend to suggest, a cynical by-product of
his manoeuvres to keep Ralegh in subordinate clientage to him after the latter’s
dismissal from court.2 P. M. Handover’s older assessment that Robert Cecil saw no
value in privateering or overseas plantations is now superseded by the record of his
numerous partnerships in privateering ventures and his active engagement in Guiana
ventures as evidenced below.3 As the following analysis of his role in the management
and presentation of Ralegh’s early Guiana ventures indicates, the latter’s short-lived and
delusory dreams of a vice-royalty in South America were only a sideshow to serious and
sustained efforts by Cecil and other associates to investigate the real possibilities of
goldmines or plantations south of the more well-defended Spanish settlements on the
Caribbean.
1
William Cecil, Lord Burghley to Robert Cecil, [1582], quoted in P. M. Handover, The Second Cecil: The
Rise to Power 1563–1603, London, 1959, p. 31.
2
For the career of Robert Cecil see Handover, The Second Cecil; A. Hayes, Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury,
London, 1989; A. J. Loomie, ‘Sir Robert Cecil and the Spanish Embassy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical
Research, 42, 1969, pp. 30–57; L. Stone, ‘The Fruits of Office: The Case of Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury, 1596–1612’, in F. J. Fisher, ed., Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England in
Honour of R. H. Tawney, London and Cambridge, 1961, pp. 89–116; P. W. Hasler, ed., History of Parliament, the
House of Commons 1558–1603, London, 1981, I, pp. 571–9; Pauline Croft, ‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil:
Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, 6th ser., 1, 1991, pp. 43–69; ed., Patronage, Culture and Power: the Early Cecils, New Haven,
2002; N. Mears, ‘Regnum cecilianum? A Cecilian Perspective of the Court’, in J. Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 46–64; P. E. J. Hammer, ‘Patronage at Court, Faction and the Earl of Essex’,
ibid., pp. 65–86.
3
Handover, The Second Cecil, p. 125; K. R. Andrews, ‘Sir Robert Cecil and Mediterranean Plunder’, English
Historical Review, 87, 1972, pp. 513–32.
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S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
Physical Description of the Manuscript
The manuscript version of Ralegh’s Discoverie is to be found in Lambeth Palace MS
250, ff. 315r–337v. The manuscript is bound in a volume entitled Elizabethan Voyages,
part of the deposited papers of the Carew family. It is listed in A Catalogue of the
Archiepiscopal Manuscripts in the Library at Lambeth Palace (London, 1812) as ‘Sir Walter
Ralegh’s Discourse of his first Voyadg to Guiana, addressed to his distant kinsman,
Charles Lord Howard and to Sir Robert Cecil’.1 The manuscript consists of twentytwo folios, numbered and written in a small, secretary hand. It has no title, but is prefaced by a few dedicatory lines to Howard and Cecil. The manuscript is marked up by a
reader, in a hand different from that which wrote the text. These editorial marks consist
of occasional underlinings and bracketing of portions of the text, index fingers and
other symbols placed in the margins to highlight particular points, and seventeen
marginal notes. The endorsement on the last folio reads ‘sir Wallter Ralleghes
dyscourse: of his first voyadg to Guiana.’ What appears to be one is, in fact, two separate endorsements written in different early seventeenth-century hands, neither of
which is the same as that of the copyist of or the commentator on the manuscript. The
first hand wrote ‘sir Wallter Raleghes dyscourse:’. The second added ‘of his first voyadg
to Guiana’. The latter comment may well have been written after 1617, so that the
owner of the manuscript could distinguish this description of Ralegh’s ‘first’ personal
voyage from his recent, second, disastrous visit to the Orinoco.
The Relationship of the Manuscript to the Text
The manuscript would appear to be the only surviving example of a very few fair copies
of Ralegh’s complete first draft of his account of his voyage to Guiana, circulated some
five months before the first printed edition of The Discoverie was published. Their
sequential relationship is readily demonstrated by numerous revisions of verb tenses
and of references to time (indicated below in bold), from the manuscript to the first
printed text. The introductory sentence of the manuscript reads ‘The sixte of February
we departed from England this yere 1595, on Thursday …’. The printed text, which
was entered into the Company of Stationers Register on 15/25 March 1596 reads
‘On Thursday the 6. of Februarie in the yeare 1595. we departed England …’.2 In the
1
For the career of Charles, Lord Howard of Effingham, later earl of Nottingham see R. W. Kenny, Elizabeth’s
Admiral: The Political Career of Charles Howard earl of Nottingham, 1536–1624, Baltimore and London, 1970.
Ralegh was related to him through Howard’s mother Margaret Gamage, daughter of Sir Thomas Gamage of
Coity, Glamorgan. Ralegh’s desire to advertise that his enterprise enjoyed the patronage of the influential second Lord Howard of Effingham is hardly surprising. Cousin to Elizabeth I and married to Catherine Carey who
was her intimate friend, Howard had been a member of the Privy Council since 1584 and had held the office of
Lord Admiral since 1585. Overall commander of the defence against the Spanish Armada in 1588, he remained
preoccupied with the administration of the navy and the conduct of the sea war against Spain throughout the
1590s. He showed particular concern for the pay and conditions of the men who served in the Queen’s fleets.
Elizabeth I’s confidence in him is demonstrated by her decision to confer the earldom of Nottingham on him
in 1597 for his services in the previous year’s expedition against Cadiz, and her appointment of him as Lord
Lieutenant General of England in 1599, when another Spanish invasion was anticipated.
2
London, Lambeth Palace, MS 250, f. 316r (hereafter LP, MS 250), STC 20636 st. I, p. 1, ll. 1–3, see below
pp. 18–19.
xxiv
INTRODUCTION
manuscript draft Ralegh recollects that, after the sack of the Spanish settlement on
Trinidad, he had been concerned about how few men he would able to take with him up
the Orinoco, particularly since his prisoner Berrío ‘assured us that his sonne must by
this tyme be come down with many soldiors, I sent away King … to trie another
braunch of a river … which is called Amana …’. In print this is amended to read ‘Berrío
assured that his sonne must bee by that tyme come downe with manie soldiers, I sent
away one King … to trie another branch of a riuer … which was called Amana …’.1 By
the substitution of the past for the perfect tense of the verb, an allusion to ‘The sonne of
Topiawari which I now have brought with me into England’ is changed to ‘The son of
Topiawari, which I brought with me into England’.2 The published description of the
curative properties of a root of a plant named Tupara merely notes that ‘the same also
quencheth merveyloslie the heat of burning fevers, and healeth inward wounds, and
broken veynes that bleed within the body’. In the process of revision Ralegh had eliminated from the manuscript a passage with further details on the specimen of the plant
‘of which I have brought with me some into England, which being kept in a box so
many moneths in the heat, do yet in the same dry box keep green, and sproot out buds’.3
The manuscript was clearly produced immediately after the events it describes. At the
time of writing it Ralegh was still caught up in the recent expedition. In the process of
revising the manuscript for publication the outdated current references were eliminated
to take account of the delay between manuscript and actual publication.
Ralegh probably began to draft his account on the homeward voyage. His correspondence indicates that he had produced a manuscript fit to circulate among a select
circle of trusted advisors before the end of October 1595. It was probably completed by
15 October, when Lord Burghley expressed his desire to see it.4 Ralegh sent a copy to
Sir Robert Cecil, intended for review by himself and the Lord Admiral Charles Lord
Howard, and another was certainly provided for the Queen and the Privy Council.
Ralegh wrote to Sir Robert Cecil from Sherborne on 10/20 November, 1595 anxious to
know ‘What becumes of Guiana … whether it pass for history or a fable.’5 There is no
question that Ralegh’s report was already in circulation by 7/17 November, on which
day the Privy Council received from Captain George Popham documents captured
during the latter’s return voyage from the West Indies.6 Although Latham and Youings
assume that Ralegh was responsible for forwarding this package of corroborative Spanish documents to the Privy Council, he did not, nor did he claim to have done so. As the
dockets on the translations of the merchant letters and extracted notarial report of
Domingo de Vera y Ibarguen’s activities handed to the Privy Council indicate, the
documents came directly from Popham and were certified by him ‘as a trewe Extract of
such letteres as I recovered at sea’.’7 The dispirited tone of Ralegh’s letter to Robert
Cecil, previously written from Sherborne on the 10/20 November, indicates that he
LP, MS 250, f. 325r, STC 20636 st. I, p. 36, l. 30 p. 37, l. 4, see below pp. 88, 89, 90, 91.
LP, MS 250, f. 329r, STC 20636 st. I, p. 70, ll. 6–7, see below pp. 156, 157. Another such tense change in
the references to Topiawari’s son may be seen between f. 322r and p. 33, l. 3.
3
LP, MS 250, f. 327r, STC 20636 st. I, p. 59, ll. 29–31, see below pp. 134, 135.
4 MS Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS EE iii 56, no. 62.
5
See below Appendix IV, no. 1.
6
See below pp. 228, 230, 232, 234, 236, 238, 240, 242.
7 See below p. 242; A. Latham and J. Youings, eds, The Letters of Sir Walter Ralegh, Exeter, 1999, p. 128, n. 2.
1
2
xxv
S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
knew nothing of this eventuality and was only anxious to know the response to his own
report, fearing that Robert Dudley1 and others already had plans to pre-empt the
conquest of Guiana. Ralegh received a copy of Popham’s documents from Cecil on the
12/22 November. He wrote back within the hour, fired to action by reading a ‘relation’
which, to his mind, proved ‘that it is no dreame which I have reported of Guiana’.2
The manuscript preserved in Lambeth Palace 250 appears to be the fair copy
forwarded to Cecil and Howard. Presumably the manuscript was originally accompanied by a covering letter, which has not survived. It is, however, a reasonable assumption that the introductory portion of ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie’ in the printed text,
particularly Ralegh’s reference to having sent them ‘a bundle of papers’, was adapted
from the missive which had accompanied his first manuscript.3 In addition to the
evidence of the dedicatory address, close comparison of the hand of the marginal annotations to samples of the handwriting of Sir Robert Cecil indicate that these and the
textual markings were made by him. There are clear indications that Ralegh originally
intended to dedicate his manuscript solely to Charles Lord Howard, since the references to ‘my Lord’ or ‘your Lordship’ in the manuscript are consistently singular.
While many of these allusions are not corrected in the printed version, nevertheless, by
the end, Ralegh shifts from the singular to the plural ‘your Honours’.4 This might be
seen as a further indication of his recognition of the importance of Cecil’s support in
advancing the enterprise, and working with his text. The marked-up manuscript was
clearly returned to Ralegh, who must have referred to it when making revisions to his
final version. In several cases passages underlined, placed in square parentheses or indicated by index fingers or other symbols in the margins, were subsequently eliminated
from the printed version. Ralegh’s account of the beast called Jawari, his descriptions of
spleen stones, his joking allusion to the tendency of men to get distracted by women, all
highlighted by Cecil’s symbols in the margin, disappeared from the final version. So did
Ralegh’s raucous characterization of Guiana as a paradise for drunkards, womanizers
and tobacco smokers, which Cecil had carefully placed in square brackets for excision.5
Although Ralegh urged Cecil and Howard to limit access to his manuscript draft and
to his soon to be completed map, he himself and members of his company had
contributed to the circulation of anecdotes and rumours during the weeks in which
both documents were being completed.6 He had divided this time between Sherborne
and London. Sir Robert Cecil had participated ‘in merriments’ at Sherborne in late
September.7 Rowland Whyte provided his correspondent Sir Robert Sidney with a
running commentary on Ralegh’s activities. After Ralegh prepared to remove to
London Whyte reported that
Sir Walter Rawleis frendes doe tell [me] her Majestie what great service he hath donne
unto her by his late voiage, in discovering the way to bring home the wealth of India, and in
See below pp. 27–9.
See below Appendix IV, no. 1 and 2.
3
STC 20636 st. I, A2, ll. 12–19, see below p. 3.
4
See, for example LP, MS 250, f. 331v and STC 20636 st. I, p. 80, l. 30. Robert Cecil was knighted in 1591,
but did not receive a title until 1603 when James I conferred a barony upon him as Lord Cecil of Essendon.
5
LP, MS 250, ff. 316r, 320r–v, 334v, see below pp. 22, 64, 206.
6
Ibid., ff. 319v, see below p. 58.
7 H. Beeston to Sir Robert Cecil, 26 Sept. 1595, HMC, Salisbury, V, f. 391.
1
2
xxvi
INTRODUCTION
making knowen to that nation, vertues, and her Jostice. He hath brought hither a supposed
prince and beste [lefte] hostages in his place: the Queen gives good care unto them. I am
promised for you his own discours to the Queen of his journey.
On 15 October he wrote again ‘Sir Walter Rawley is here and goes daily to heare
sermons, because he hath seen the wonders of the Lord in the deepe; ’tis much
comended and spoken of …’.1 John Dee dined with Ralegh at Durham House on 9
October.2 On 15 October, Lord Burghley declared his interest in seeing a copy of the
expedition ‘Journall’.3 There is little doubt that this swirl of rumour and expectation
was carefully orchestrated by Ralegh and his close supporters, in hopes of persuading
the Queen to readmit him to court. More than anything else, however, it was fuelled by
Ralegh’s own irrepressible excitement about what he had achieved.
Stephen Greenblatt suggests that Ralegh’s heady account of the golden city of Manoa
was a rhetorical contrivance designed to distract the reader’s attention from the fact that
he had returned from Guiana virtually empty-handed.4 It is ahistorical to question
whether Ralegh believed in the existence of the hidden empire so rich in gold that its
ruler, el dorado, powdered his whole body with the dust of it. One must be careful not to
read back into Ralegh’s educated late sixteenth-century scepticism an entirely different
late twentieth-century world view. While it is true that the El Dorado was an hallucination brought on by an acute attack of gold fever, Ralegh was only the first English man
to be so infected. Spaniards had been suffering from the malady for over half a century
and had, in the process of searching for it, traced the waters of the Amazon and the
Orinoco from the innermost recesses of their basins to the sea and trekked north and
south through the unforgiving terrain of the rain forest and the llanos. The discovery of
the Aztec and Inca kingdoms before 1531 had convinced Spanish soldiers of fortune
that the New World was an inexhaustible fount of precious metals. If two such civilizations could exist it was not unreasonable to assume that the like would be found elsewhere. As Ralegh assured his readers ‘Nowe although these reportes may seeme
straunge, yet if wee consider the many millions which are daily brought out of Peru into
Spaine, wee may easely beleeue the same …’.5 In 1530 indigenous traders from the
Orinoco delta had told settlers in the Spanish pearl colonies of the eastern Main that
there were wealthy peoples with stone cities and temples in the interior of the Orinoco
basin. These garbled references to Peru prompted unsuccessful expeditions up the
Orinoco river by Diego de Ordás in 1531 and southwards across the Venezuelan llanos
by Jerónimo Dortal in 1534. Contemporaneous expeditions from Coro, led by
Ambrosius Dalfinger (1531–3) and Nicolaus Federman (1530–31), had also struck
south into the grasslands and the north-eastern cordillera of the Andes in search of
peoples reputedly rich in gold. Rumours about an ‘indio dorado’ somewhere in the
cordillera to the north began to circulate in Quito about 1535. In 1539, showing a
remarkable coincidence of purpose, three Spanish expeditions had converged on the
neighbourhood of Bogotá, two from the Main (conducted by Gonzalo Jiménez de
1
Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney, 27 Sept., 4 Oct., 15 Oct. 1595, HMC, De l’Isle and Dudley MSS, II,
pp. 166, 173.
2 Ibid., 15 Oct. 1595.
3
Ibid.
4
Greenblatt, New World, pp. vii–xviii.
5 STC 20636 st. I, p. 12, ll. 23–6, see below p. 41.
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S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
Quesada and Federman) and one from Quito led by Sebastian de Benalcázar. There
they had encountered the Chibcha or Muisca, settled, prosperous agricultural people
who had a monopoly of rock salt and emeralds which they traded to lowland tribes for
gold and other foodstuffs. Ironically they had no gold sources of their own. From here
the myth of El Dorado began its odyssey, changing constantly as new inflationary
rumours and miscellaneous pieces of indigenous tradition were incorporated into it. In
1541 Hernán Pérez de Quesada had descended from the Colombian Mesa and struggled south-eastwards towards the upper Orinoco and the Meta in vain search of a
golden city near a sacred lake enclosed by mountains. In the same year Gonzalo de
Pizarro led a vast expedition from Quito inland as far as the River Coca in search of a
reputed rich land of cinnamon trees. His lieutenant, Francisco de Orellana, became
separated from the main party and was forced to descend the River Amazon to the
Atlantic and then navigate northwards to the pearl fisheries. From there he had
returned to Spain, carrying fantastic tales of kingdoms populated by female warriors
and of the rich Omagua nation settled in the hinterland north of the upper main stream
of what rapidly had become known as the river of the Amazons. The search for the rich
cities ruled by ‘el dorado’, situated near a sacred lake and now supposedly bordered by
kingdoms of Amazons, refocused temporarily on the lands of the Omagua. Pedro de
Ursúa’s expedition from Chachapoyas into their territories in 1560 came to a violent
end with the mutiny of Lope de Aguirre.
Six years later Pedro Maraver de Silva took part in another venture from
Chachapoyas, trekking northwards along the eastern fringe of the Andes and, as a
consequence, shifting the search for the territories of the Omagua back to the inner
reaches of the Orinoco and the River Meta. It was Maraver de Silva who incorporated into the El Dorado legend the notion that the hidden golden city had been
founded by fugitive Inca leaders. In the late 1560s the quest was resumed by the
Quesada family. Between 1569 and 1572 Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada wasted countless lives fruitlessly scouring the llanos for the hidden civilization. His licence to
explore the region between the rivers Pauto and Papameme was inherited by
Antonio de Berrío, the husband of his niece. In the course of three gruelling expeditions between 1583 and 1591 Berrío had traced the route via the Casanare and
Meta into the Orinoco and pinpointed the location of El Dorado south of the lower
Orinoco, near the headwaters of the River Caroní in the mountains of the Guiana
Highlands. His efforts to assert his rights to the conquest of that region, and to claim
the jurisdiction of Trinidad and the lower Orinoco which gave access to it, brought
him into conflict with Juan Sarmiento de Villandrando, governor of Margarita, and
Francisco de Vides, governor of New Andalucia. Desperate to cement his hold
Berrío had despatched his campmaster, Domingo de Vera y Ibarguen, to Trinidad in
early 1592 to establish the small outpost of S. Josef de Oruña. Berrío ensconced himself there in 1593 and ordered his lieutenant to return to the mainland with a small
party to explore the Caroní. When Vera returned in the autumn of the following
year with further exciting details about the nature and proximity of El Dorado as
well as samples of indigenous gold work, Berrío immediately sent him back to Spain
to raise support and argue his claim to the conquest. Captain Popham captured an
excerpted form of the notarial record of Vera’s discoveries as well as accompanying
letters which indicate the excitement aroused among those who had heard of them.
When Ralegh reached Trinidad in 1595 the long chronic Spanish obsession with El
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Dorado had flared up into a new fever of expectations.1 Ralegh’s personality and circumstances made him particularly vulnerable to such an infection.
The overall tone of the manuscript indicates that Ralegh’s venture to Guiana in 1595
had the same intoxicating effect upon his imagination as the native beverages which
they sampled had upon the sobriety of his company. This was Ralegh’s first venture to
the New World, his own personal adventure. A self-admitted sedentary courtier,
usually ‘dieted and cared for in a sort farre differing’, ‘a very ill footeman’, ‘not hable
myselfe to indure’ long marches in heat and humidity, he had, nevertheless, brought
his small company safely through the arduous short foray into the lower Orinoco.2 His
feeling of exhilaration and of personal, manly accomplishment resonates in the
passages found only in the manuscript draft. Even in the printed text it is clear how
Ralegh presented and fashioned himself as the predestined heir and superior of Berrío
and other Spanish ‘Conquerors’, who had wasted years in search of what he had been
able to definitively locate in one month.3 What is missing, however, is the arrogant
swagger which characterizes significant deletions from the manuscript. In his original
description of his surprise attack on the Spanish hamlet of S. Josef on Trinidad Ralegh
claims that ‘at the instance of the Indians I converted the new city into ashes, and wrote
this saying of christ on a great stone in the market place, Omnis plantatio quam Pater
meus non plantavit eradicabitur’.4 The engaging bravado of this dubious application of
holy writ, ‘every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up’
(Matthew 15:13), is of a piece with the boisterous humour of his later aside, cut from his
digression about Amazons, on the tendency of men to wander ‘out of the way among
theis women, an error whereto many men are subject’.5 There is nothing in the printed
text which comes close to the flamboyant, roistering exuberance of his characterization
of Guiana’s appeal to the soldier and the adventurer
Those that cannot indure cold may keep themselues in temperate heate, and those that are
impatient of warmth, lett them but sytt in the shade, they shalbe sure of a perpetuall easterlie winde [in their faces. Those that have hott lyvers, and love drinke, shall find store of
pott companions which can neither be out gone in their trade by Germaynes, nor Flemings,
no, if they list to carouse 7 daies together, both of good artificiall wine, well peppred for
cold stomacks, and of wine of Pinas fytter for Princes, then for borachos. Those that are not
married, and will christen of theis nacions shall buy wives for themselves and their freinds
for 3 or 4 hachets a peece of all ages, and not inferiour in shape and fauour to any of Europe,
cullour excepted. Those that love Tobacco may here smoke themselues tyll they become
|bacon, for the plentie: and those that are sweet lipped may fill] themselues with Pinas
Princes of all fruites, besides 10000 other sorts very delicate. The Painter shall find cullors,
the herbalist variety of flowers and herbs, the phisicion of trees, rootes, gumes, stones,
waters and poysons of Sympatheticall, and Antepatheticall natures more then in anie part of
the world. Merchaunts shall sell our worst trash, our thinnest kerseys, sayes, Lynnen, hats,
beads, and all sortes of Iron workes for a marveylous price. And to conclude I will not leave
out those that desire to be made young again, which if it may be by eating of snakes (as I
1
For the most comprehensive account of the Spanish quest for El Dorado see J. Hemming, The Search for
El Dorado, London, 1978, passim; see also below pp. 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59.
2 LP, MS 250, ff. 317v, 328v, 332r, see below pp. 34, 150, 182.
3
STC 20635 st. I, p. 99, ll. 15–20, see below p. 217.
4
LP, MS 250, f. 317r, see below p. 30.
5 Ibid., f. 320v, see below, p. 64.
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have read I know not where) they shall find them here as bigg as a man thigh [sic], and 20
foote long for a need.1
In the weeks during and immediately following his return to England, Ralegh was still
energized by his brief intervention in the long-running saga of the quest for El Dorado.
The passage rings with the heady excitement of the recently returned explorer who, at
least in his own opinion, and as he had clearly informed Lady Ralegh, had achieved
heroic feats of daring and leadership ‘with as gret honnor as ever man can’.2
The manuscript allows the reader to reconstruct the conversations at Ralegh’s dinner
table in September and October 1595. In its passages we encounter Ralegh as the expansive raconteur, entertaining his guests with his exotic stories. In the manuscript draft he
was unable to resist regaling his selected readers with an anecdote about his narrow escape
from two ‘overgrown’ jaguars who broke up his company’s riverside picnic on roasted
armadillo. He repeatedly reminisced about the incomparable taste of the pineapple which
he jovially noted that Spaniards said ‘was the apple that Eua tempted Adam withall’. He
made his friends a gift of his views on the curative properties of spleen stones and the usefulness of the hammock which ‘in mine opinion there is nothing more necessary for soldiors, for they are light to carry, and easie to lodg in, and will keep them from the cold and
weet ground, the lying whereon breedeth so many fluxes and agues in every campe, and
they are bought there for the value of a 2 peny knife, or lesse.’ Still warmed by the afterglow of his adventure, Ralegh spun his traveller’s tales to his immediate circle in an easy,
informal style, apostrophizing his makeshift galley as ‘our goodlie shipp’ and reminiscing
about taking pot shots at exotic wild fowl for ‘our pease pott’.3
Having convinced himself that a golden empire to equal Mexico and Peru lay within
his sovereign’s grasp, Ralegh initially assumed that his own enthusiasm would readily
communicate itself to his readers. The voice of his manuscript draft is brash and
assertive, prone to exaggerated or categorical statements. In the manuscript Ralegh
professed to have seen ‘millions’ of oysters growing on the branches of mangroves, or
heard that the Spaniards had martyred and tortured ‘hundreds’ of the unfortunate
native inhabitants in search of information about a cure for arrow poisons. Elsewhere in
the manuscript draft Ralegh claims to ‘know that all the earth doth not yeild the like
confluence of streames and braunches.’, as did the maze-like delta of the Orinoco. Cecil
crossed through the word ‘know’ and replaced it with ‘think’. In this case Ralegh must
have urged his own experience, since the word ‘know’ was retained in the printed text.
His pretension that ease of travel within Guiana was such that any garrisons planted
there could easily relieve one another, while ‘in the West Indies there is not one town or
Province that can succor or relieue one the other’ was modified to read ‘there are few
townes, or provinces’ by the time of going to press. Ralegh’s original assertion that he
had described the majesty and virtues of Elizabeth I, to ‘those of the empire itself’,
was replaced in print by ‘those of the borders’, since Ralegh could hardly claim to have
entered the territories of the ‘Inga’ of Manoa. Ralegh’s first instinct was to overwhelm
rather than to persuade, to bludgeon the Queen and her advisors into supporting his
enterprise by the sheer force of his flamboyant hyperbole.4
Ibid., f. 334v, see below, p. 206.
Lady Ralegh to Sir Robert Cecil, Sept. 1595, HMC Salisbury, V, p. 396.
3
LP, MS 250, ff. 322v, 324v, 325r, 327v, 333r, see below pp. 84, 104, 106, 138, 192.
4 Ibid., ff. 316r, 317r, 323v, 327r, 335v, see below pp. 20, 30, 94, 134, 214.
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INTRODUCTION
Cecil’s Response to Ralegh’s Proposals
Most of the available information about the public response to Ralegh’s expedition
comes from Ralegh himself, communicated in the defensive passages of ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ and address ‘To the Reader’, with which he prefaced his published account.
Here he lists the doubts which influential persons had cast upon his late voyage. An
‘alderman of London & and officer of her Majesties Mint’ had spread rumours that the
gold ore which he brought back was worthless. This, Ralegh countered, was ‘because
there came ill with good, & belike the same Alderman was not presented with the best,
it hath pleased him therefore to scandall all the rest, and to deface the enterprize as
much as in him lieth’. Others had concluded that if Ralegh had really picked up the
good ore samples in Guiana he would surely have brought back a greater quantity, and
therefore the gold-bearing specimens were an elaborate confidence trick, picked up in
Barbary, to salt the pretended mine and stir up investment. Some had gone further and
hazarded that he personally had never gone to Guiana at all, but had gone to ground in
Cornwall for seven months while his company sailed without him. Although there is no
hard evidence as to when these alleged libels were circulated, they were probably part of
the swirl of rumour and speculation which diverted court observers in the late autumn
of 1595, as Ralegh talked about the account he was drafting, carried ore samples to
London, to be assayed by refiners, and had the stones which he had brought back from
the Orinoco polished and valued by jewellers.1
Sir Robert Cecil’s close review of the arguments in Ralegh’s manuscript were probably part of efforts to advance a sensible version of the enterprise to the Privy Council.
Pierre Lefranc characterized Cecil’s support for Ralegh at this juncture as likely driven
by his own political self-interest in building allies against the earl of Essex and designed
to encourage Ralegh’s hopes ‘while frustrating their fulfilment’.2 While it is extremely
unlikely that Cecil was swept off his feet by Ralegh’s visionary scheme, there is clear
evidence that he was genuinely interested in Guiana. He invested in both Ralegh’s
exploratory voyage and the follow-up expedition led by Lawrence Keymis in 1596 and
appears to have assumed direction of matters relating to the outcome of the latter’s
voyage during Ralegh’s absence at Cadiz.
There is no direct evidence as to exactly when Cecil returned his annotated copy of
the manuscript draft of The Discoverie to the author. If there was any correspondence
about it, as seems likely, it has been lost. Ralegh’s letter of 12/22 November pleads that
the Spanish documents which Popham delivered to the Privy Council must convince
Cecil that ‘which I have reported of Guiana’ is ‘no dreame’ and offers the now
completed ‘plott’ as well as cut gemstones as further support for his arguments.3 Ralegh
in all probability had the gist, if not the actual script of Cecil’s reaction to his written
report and, in the light of them, was impatiently awaiting the response from the Queen
and her Privy Council.
In the absence of any correspondence, some sense of Robert Cecil’s reaction to
Ralegh’s account can be inferred from his editorial markings on the manuscript copy.
STC 20635 st. I, A3, ll. 13–14, ¶2, ll. 10–11, ¶2v, ll. 30–34, ¶3, ll. 34–5, see below pp. 5, 11, 12, 13.
P. Lefranc, ‘Sir Walter Ralegh, a Biography’, Thèse complémentaire Doctorat d’Etat, University of Paris,
1967, I, p. 248.
3 See below Appendix IV, no. 2.
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These consist of occasional underlinings and bracketing of portions of the text, eleven
index fingers [L] and eight other symbols placed in the margins to highlight particular
points in the text, and seventeen marginal notes. The great body of these suggest that
Cecil was sorting and marshalling Ralegh’s information so as to be able to assess and
defend his proposals in discussion with the Queen or others on the Privy Council who
had been made privy to it.
Most of the underlinings, marginal markings and eleven of the annotations seem
to reflect Cecil’s efforts to get the scattered information about the personalities and
events of the previous Spanish expeditions in search of El Dorado straight in his own
mind. Two marginal symbols note the beginning of the passage on the ill-starred
venture of Pedro de Ursúa and the violent history of Lope de Aguirre.1 His marginal
notes follow Berrío’s odyssey. They highlight the fact, also picked up by underlinings, that he inherited the quest through marriage to the daughter of Gonzalo
Jiménez de Quesada. They distinguish his first expedition, note the geographical
limits of his explorations, follow his dealings with the cacique Morekito and his rivalries with Juan Sarmiento de Villandrando and Francisco de Vides, the governors of
Margarita and New Andalucia.2 At the same time, Cecil was obviously interested in
comparing the achievements of Ralegh, who was not used to such exertions and, as
Cecil underscored, had been ‘dieted and cared for in a sort farre differing’ from those
of his recent Spanish prisoner. He noted that Berrío never ‘came within 8 daies
Jorney’ of the River Caroní, while Ralegh had actually entered the river which was
said to be the true entrance to the hidden empire. Also, Berrío’s ‘Tyrrany hath lost
him the Indian Lords’.3
Some of the underlinings and marginal marks focus on the names of other witnesses
and the information they could provide to substantiate Ralegh’s claims. Captain Amyas
Preston could testify to having taken a prisoner at Caracas who had served with Diego
Fernández de Serpa. He had brought another aboard Ralegh’s ship who had met
Domingo de Vera y Ibarguen (Berrío’s campmaster) at Caracas and seen the gold and
other rarities which he had picked up on the lower Orinoco and was carrying to show
the King of Spain. Ralegh had taken another Spaniard prisoner, a Captain George who
had served with Quesada and now followed Berrío. Ralegh had encountered the son of
Balthasar de Mucheron, together with other Zeeland merchants in Cumaná. They
could verify stories picked up from Lucas Fajardo, a ranchholder living outside
Cumaná, about the execution of the cacique Morekito.4
A cluster of marks, made at the beginning of the manuscript, suggest that Cecil was
highlighting for himself the salient information about the supposed Inca empire. The
name of its capital city, Manoa, was underlined on the verso of the second folio of text,
and signalled by a symbol in the margin. Further down the same page he put another
marginal mark against the information that the city was founded by a sibling of Huascar
and Atahualpa, after their civil wars had opened up the opportunity for Pizarro to
conquer Peru. A few lines further down he made another sign against Ralegh’s
comment that the writings of Pedro Cieza de León contained ‘merveylous’ stories
LP, MS 250, f. 319r, see below p. 50.
Ibid., ff. 319v, 320v, 321v, 322r–v, see below pp. 56, 58, 64, 74, 76, 78, 80, 84.
3
Ibid., ff. 317v, 320v, 321v, see below pp. 34, 66, 74.
4 Ibid., ff. 319v, 322r, 328v, see below pp. 56, 80, 148.
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INTRODUCTION
about the wonders and riches of Inca Peru.1 On the fifth folio of text he signalled the
names of the two provinces said to be inhabited by Amazons, and on the folio following
underlined the name of the Caroli [Caroní] and noted that it was the river which
provided ‘nearest’ access to territories of the as yet unconquered Inca.2
Three marginal comments and several of the underlinings and marginal symbols relate,
as might be expected, to the gold which had already been recovered from outside the borders of the empire which Ralegh and the Spaniards who had preceded him were seeking.
Cecil placed an index finger against the ‘curiouslie wrought’ gold plates and inlaid swords
which Domingo de Vera y Ibarguen was reported to have collected in the region of the
Caroní river. He made a marginal note and underlined another description of these
objects when Ralegh returned to the subject again later in the manuscript. He underlined
Berrío’s name, to highlight that it was he who ‘confessed’ that Amapaia, a province eight
days’ journey from the Caroní, was also ‘marveylous rich in gold’ and underscored the
name of the Orinoco to remind him that it was ‘situate’ on that river. He made a note that
Ralegh had recovered ‘A Basket with ore’ and stroked under his discussion of its contents.
Similarly he reminded himself of the fact that a ‘Qwantity of his Mettals were fownd in
Guiana’ and underlined Ralegh’s references to the ore samples which he had brought back
‘to make tryall’. Ralegh’s summary statement that the ‘Inga’ living in Manoa had more
gold than anything so far discovered in Peru or the entire West Indies, and that the
Orinoco would lead to multiple nations and provinces ‘the most either rich in gold or
other merchandizes’ merited a long line down the left hand margin of the passage.3
Some of Cecil’s information locators suggest that he was thinking about the factors
which would allow for the successful execution of Ralegh’s proposed venture. He was
obviously interested in potential native allies. He placed a pointer next to the information that not all the chiefs on Trinidad were hostile to the Spaniards since some had
been resettled there by Berrío to ‘eate out and wast those that were naturalls of the
place’. The name of Toparimaca, the first ‘Indian lord’ to give Ralegh a friendly
welcome once he made it through the Orinoco delta, was underlined and noted in the
margin. In three other marginal comments he observed that the cacique Morekito had
‘betraied 10 Sp[aniards]. and a Frier’ and had subsequently been executed for this by
Berrío who, as a result, ‘hath lost the Indian Lords’. Ralegh had failed to make contact
with the cacique of the Nepoios, Carapana, who was on friendly terms with the
Spaniards, but, as Cecil remarked, Ralegh had made clear that the native leader ‘by
temporizing saved himself from spoile’.4
Elsewhere Cecil picks up on the strategic geography of the Orinoco. He drew attention to the reference to the uncompleted ‘Platt’ and showed his own appreciation of the
importance of the need to ‘secreat it’ by underlining and a marginal index finger. He
put a c next to Ralegh’s remark about the contrast between the dense jungle of the
Orinoco delta and the open grassland which bordered the main river and its major tributaries. He noted that the Orinoco provided a navigable highway to ‘Peru and Nueuo
reyno de Granada’, and considered and underlined a portion of Ralegh’s claim that the
Orinoco, once conquered was
Ibid., f. 317v, see below p. 36.
Ibid., ff. 320r, 321r, see below pp. 62, 72.
3
Ibid., ff. 319v, 320v, 322v, 325v, 334v, see below pp. 56, 66, 84, 114, 204.
4 Ibid., ff. 317r, 321r–v, 322r, 326r, see below pp. 30, 74, 78, 124.
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so defensible that if two fortes be builded in the province of Emeria, upon each side of the
river of Orenoke, the fludd setteth in so neere the banke where the Channell also lieth that
no ship can passe up, but within a pikes length of the artillerie first of the one and afterwards of the other: which two fortes wilbe sufficient guard to both the Empire of the Inga,
and to 100 other severall kingdomes ….
He obviously felt that this latter argument did little to advance Ralegh’s case, since, as
he succinctly pointed out in the margin ‘This may as well be done by the Spaniards’.1
As his latter comment indicates, and as one would expect, Sir Robert Cecil read the
manuscript with a critical eye, acutely conscious of which arguments might sell with the
Queen and Privy Council and which would most certainly not. Several of the underlinings pick up on sweeping overstatements or categorical assertions. Some of these disappeared from the published text, and others did not. Where they did survive Cecil’s
underlining may only have been intended to draw attention to particularly noteworthy
phenomena, or to emphasize the authority behind Ralegh’s declarations. Thus when
Cecil underlined Ralegh’s asseveration that the natural pitch lake on Trinidad was sufficient to load ‘all the ships in the world’ he may only have wished to draw attention to a
profitable commodity, and when he underscored Ralegh’s claim to have set down ‘what
hath been delivered me for truth of all those people’ about the Amazons, he may have
wished to emphasize that Ralegh was only reporting common native opinion. On the
other hand Cecil may have felt that these were unwarranted and unwise exaggerations.
Their survival into print could either be an indicator of Ralegh’s stubborn defence of his
own better information, or the speed with which the final text was prepared for the
printer. It is worth noting that the underlined phrase ‘all the ships of the world’ appears
on the same folio and page as Ralegh’s description of the strange beast called Jawari
‘whose yong, after they are brought forth by the damme do again enter into her body
vppon anie freight or chaunce chace, till they be of a certein age, whereof we saw the
proofe, and therefore know it to be true’. Here Cecil’s underscoring and marginal mark
seems to have marked this passage for deletion.2 One editorial revision makes it
absolutely clear that Cecil had no taste for inflationary language. When Ralegh
pretended to ‘know that all the earth doth not yeild the like confluence of streames and
braunches’, Cecil impatiently struck through the word ‘know’ and replaced it with
‘think’. 3
Other markings also suggest that he felt that Ralegh had struck the wrong tone in
certain passages of his report. As was mentioned earlier, he clearly had misgivings about
Ralegh’s roistering description of Guiana as a place where those willing to join the
adventure could ‘find store of pott companions’, drink pineapple wine, ‘fytter for
Princes, then for borachos’, buy themselves as many women as they wanted and smoke
tobacco ‘tyll they become bacon’. He placed the whole passage in [ ], marking it for
deletion, and it was subsequently excised before the manuscript went to print.4 Cecil
also underlined Ralegh’s joking apology for his digression about Amazons, ‘having now
wandred out of the way among theis women, an error whereto many men are subject’.5
Ibid., ff. 319v, 325r, 326v, 335r, see below pp. 58, 112, 128, 210.
Ibid., ff. 316r, 320r, see below pp. 22, 62.
3
Ibid., f. 323v, see below p. 94.
4
See above p. xxix.
5 LP, MS 250, f. 320v, see below p. 64.
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INTRODUCTION
This similarly disappeared before publication. It could be that it was Cecil’s own prurient interest which led him to underscore and signal with index fingers and crosses
Ralegh’s accounts of the comeliness of particular native women, and of encountering
‘many hundreds’ of them, ‘starke naked’, ‘not inferior in shape and fauor to any of
Europe, cullor excepted’.1 It seems more likely, however, that he was nervous about
putting in any references to women at all, given that Ralegh was trying to make a case to
the Queen that his Guiana enterprise could be critical to the advancement of the interests of her state. The Queen had neither forgotten nor forgiven the scandalous seduction which had preceded Ralegh’s marriage to Bess Throckmorton, and had yet to
permit him to return to court. It would be difficult enough to win her support for the
enterprise, without adding fuel to her still smouldering resentment. This may also have
been why Cecil placed an index finger against and underlined Ralegh’s recollection that
the Queen had once given him a spleen stone ‘when I had many yeres before been
grieved with a hard spleen’. It was safer not to remind her of past kindnesses when she
still felt that he had shown himself to be unworthy of them.2
‘Of the Voyage for Guiana’
The context of and need for the memorial entitled ‘Of the Voyage for Guiana’,
preserved among the Sloane manuscripts in the British Library, becomes more intelligible, given the tone and the rambling construction of the long manuscript which
Ralegh had prepared and Cecil’s reaction to it.3 Although undated, the document is
clearly contemporaneous. Pierre Lefranc noted the disjunction between the arguments
of the published Discoverie, and those contained in the memorial. The former focuses
on the riches of Manoa and the possibility of gold mines, while the latter is entirely
devoted to a discussion of colonial policy, setting out how the subjugation of the Empire
of Guiana might serve as the base for the substitution of benevolent English for violent
Spanish imperialism throughout South and Central America.4 To use D. B. Quinn’s
admirably concise summary, it
… argues that it will be honourable, profitable, necessary, cheap and easy to acquire
Guiana – honourable from the conversion of millions of heathen to Christianity and
their preservation from Spanish tyranny; profitable from gold and jewels and, possibly,
the ultimate capture of Peru; necessary because the Spaniards, strengthened by possession of Guiana, would be the more dangerous to England; easy since the alliance of the
natives against the Spaniards was assured, the voyage easy and the country easily
defended.5
It was written while Ralegh’s sole objective still was the subjugation of the empire of
Guiana, while he still had high hopes that it would ‘please her highnes to undertake’ it,
Ibid., ff. 326r–v, see below pp. 120, 126.
Ibid., f. 320r, see below p. 64. For the Queen’s reaction to Ralegh’s marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton
see W. Oakeshott, The Queen and the Poet, New York, 1961, pp. 41–8; Rowse, Ralegh, pp. 129–69.
3 London, British Library (hereafter BL), Sloane MS 1133, ff. 45r–52v, also published in Schomburgk, ed.,
Discoverie, pp. 135–53 and Harlow, Discoverie, pp. 138–49. See below pp. 253–63.
4
P. Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh écrivain: l’oeuvre et les idées, Quebec, 1968, p. 56.
5 D. B. Quinn, Raleigh & the British Empire, rev. edn, New York, 1962, p. 159.
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and, as the arguments contained within it indicate, while he was still so deeply under
the influence of his intoxicating personal adventure that it had not yet even occurred to
him that she would not do so.
Presumably the Queen and her councillors were the intended audience of the memorial, whether as an attachment to the manuscript account of the voyage to the Orinoco
or as a subsequent addendum. Quinn was of the opinion that it is unlikely that Ralegh
actually wrote the memorial himself, but rather that he employed either Lawrence
Keymis or Thomas Hariot to pen it for him. Given his activities after his return in the
early autumn of 1595, Ralegh would hardly have had either the time or the patience to
marshal the arguments in the orderly fashion in which they appear, or to collect support
for them by references to the Bible and the writings of Bellarmino and Las Casas. The
formal, scholarly structure of a memorial, a series of reasoned propositions, with anticipated objections followed by answers, might suggest that it was Hariot’s work, but the
stylistic resemblances to Keymis’s Relation indicate that Lefranc was correct to assign it
to the latter.1 Whichever of them may have been the author, the treatise was clearly
intended to hammer home the feasibility, practicality and overriding importance of
Ralegh’s New World project.
Probably the discussions which he had held with his friends and associates after his
return had made it clear to Ralegh that his grandiose scheme needed a more serious and
reasoned articulation of how it might be executed. ‘Of the Voyage to Guiana’ was meant
to provide this. Ralegh’s swashbuckling descriptions of the possibilities of finding gold
and adventure in Guiana were made to give place to a reasoned invocation of the strategic and moral imperatives which demanded its conquest. Whoever wrote the memorial, however, it was still fatally infected with Ralegh’s inflated expectations and
instability of purpose.
‘Of the Voyage for Guiana’ is premised on the assumption that its reader is already
convinced that the Empire of Guiana exists. What remains to be settled is if and how
the conquest of it is to be accomplished. If the Queen had not already been irritated
by Ralegh’s blithe assumptions about the potential wealth of Guiana, and the unauthorized commitments in her name which he had already made to some indigenous
leaders, she must have been profoundly annoyed by the ethical meanderings in ‘Of
the Voyage for Guiana’. Despite the promises made to Topiawari and other caciques
which had established that ‘The Bordurers, who are sayd to bee naturalls, & to
whom onely the Empire of Guiana: doth of right aperteine, are already prepared to
joyne with us, having submitted themselves to the Queens. protection both against
the Spaniards: & Emperor of Guiana: who usurpeth upon them’, the memorial
argues that the Queen’s interests would be best served if the Empire of Guiana is
annexed to England as a tributary state. ‘The effecting of the former seemeth more
profitable, but the latter more safe and more con’venient as our case standeth which
I doe gather by these reasons following’. Mature reflection, after his departure from
the Orinoco, had convinced Ralegh that the English should attempt to bring ‘the
Bordurers & the Epuremei & Guianians to an unity among themselves’.2 Guiana
will provide treasure, ‘fruitfull countryes’ in which to establish settlements, and military assistance against the Spanish colonies and other indigenous empires, in return
1
2
Ibid.; Lefranc, Ralegh écrivain, p. 58.
BL, Sloane 1133, ff. 45v, 47r, 48v, see below pp. 254, 255, 258.
xxxvi
INTRODUCTION
for English protection and instruction in ‘the liberall arts of Civility’.1 This approach
sat better with Holy Writ which enjoined that ‘No chri[sti]ans may lawfully invade
with hostility any heathenish people not under [thei]r allegiaunce, to kill, spoile, &
conquer them, only upon pretence of [thei]r fidelity’. By God’s law and ‘the lawe of
nature & nations … priority of possession only, giveth right unto lands or goods,
against all straungers, indefesable by any but the true owners’.2 On the other hand,
the principle might just as easily be honoured in the breach ‘because her Majestie is
already invited to take upon her the Seignorie of Guiana by the natuaralls therof,
whose ancient right to that Empire may be followed if it be thought convenient’.3
Convenience also trumps in the long discussion about whether the English might
properly ally with a people who have not undertaken to ‘renounce their Idolatry &
to worship they only true god, unto which vnlesse thei will yeeld it may bee doubted
whether we being κρians may joyne with them in armes against the Spaniards: or
not’. Biblical admonitions on this point notwithstanding, the treatise concludes that
‘if after deliberation it shall be found agreeable for us to joyne with them before their
conversion, then this first condicion & the objections therupon arising, need lesse to
trouble us’.4 Naked self-interest is inconveniently apparent behind the invocations
of high-minded imperialism. The concluding recommendation of the memorial also
indicates that, if Keymis did serve as Ralegh’s ghost-writer on this occasion, he was
either infected by the same overweening excitement which had overtaken Ralegh or
that the latter directed him to include what a cooler head would certainly have omitted. In addition to pursuing Guiana, the Queen should send some four to five hundred men ‘landed by hundreds in severall places next confining to Peru, Noua
Hispania., Castilia del Oro, Nueuo Regno, Terra Florida, or els where as shalbe most
convenient for prouision of armor & munition to furnish the people, with instruction to sett them to warr against the Spaniards’.5 There was no possibility that this
dubious effort to provide a moral and strategic context for the Guiana scheme could
repair the damaging impression created by the inflationary language of the manuscript which had preceded it. Ralegh had quite simply overreached the bounds of his
already severely diminished political credibility.
The Queen’s Response to Ralegh’s Proposals
What did Ralegh expect to happen after the Queen and some of her closest advisors
had read his manuscript and the memorial written after it? Undoubtedly he dreamed,
as he wrote, that Elizabeth I would ‘undertake the enterprize’ of annexing the last
Inca stronghold either as a tributary client state or by outright conquest. It is
remarkable that Ralegh should even have fantasized about such an outcome, given
the years that he had spent at court, dependent on the Queen’s favour for his own
advancement. In the introduction to his edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse of
Ibid., ff. 47r–48v, 50v, see below pp. 255–8, 261.
Ibid., f. 47v, see below pp. 256–7.
3
Ibid., f. 48v, see below p. 258.
4
Ibid., f. 50r, see below p. 261.
5 Ibid., ff. 52r–v, see below p. 263.
1
2
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S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
Western Planting, the treatise on the strategic and economic advantages of establishing an English colony in North America which accompanied Ralegh’s earlier
attempts to settle Virginia, D. B. Quinn stated that it
would be too much to think that either Walsingham or Ralegh expected the Queen to
support the project with full-scale state aid, but the treatise must demonstrate to her why
she should take some substantial part in it and, perhaps, if the private ventures went well, in
due course take positive responsibility for such colonies as would be established.1
If Elizabeth I was well known to be ‘primarily concerned with the safety of her own
kingdom’ in 1584, she was even less likely to be tempted out of this position in late
1595. Economic distress at home, the ruinous drain of the war on the Crown’s finances,
the distraction and expense of simultaneously maintaining troops in France, Ireland
and the Netherlands, the cost of Drake’s last expedition, Ralegh’s own reports of
rumours that a Spanish armada was preparing against Ireland and his support of maturing plans to attack Cadiz precluded any possibility of a state-funded conquest of
Guiana.2 Nevertheless the tone of both the manuscript and the memorial show that
Ralegh had, against all the odds, deluded himself that ‘the same may be hereafter by her
Majesty attempted’.3 The process of writing, and the public interest which he had
courted, carried Ralegh to the crest of an emotional wave. When neither the Queen nor
the Privy Council showed signs of being swept up in it he crashed into despair. Ralegh’s
plea to know ‘what becumes of Guiana’ penned from Sherborne on 10/20 November,
‘this desolate place’, reflects how quickly his mercurial temperament had plummeted as
he waited for a response from the court. His spirits revived two days later when he
received copies of Popham’s documents, although he feared the dilatory English were
‘curst of God’, and two weeks later he was chafing at the delay which must mean
‘farewell Guiana forever. Then I must determyne to begg or run away, honor and gold
and all good forever hopeless’.4 Four days later again he beseeched the Lord Admiral ‘to
gett a resolution for our enterprize of Guiana …. Her Majestye shall by foreslowing it
lose the greatest assurance of good that was offred to any Christian prince …’.5 The
manuscript gives us every reason to believe that these sentiments were genuinely felt.
Ralegh returned to England infected with the same gold fever which afflicted Orellana,
Ordaz and Berrío and its hallucinatory effects only began to lessen when his soaring
schemes were treated with indifference from the Queen and outright scepticism from
other commentators.
The decision which Ralegh was so anxiously awaiting in late November appears to
have been communicated by the end of the second week of December. The Queen
would not commit resources to the conquest of Guiana. Its projector and any others
who might choose to join with him, would have to prosecute it as private venturers
without state support. Ralegh gloomily informed Lady Sidney when he visited her on
13/23 December that he was ‘a banished man from Court’ and might use his contacts in
D. B. Quinn & A. M. Quinn, eds, Discourse of Western Planting, London, 1993, p. xxi.
For a comprehensive treatment of the problems of the late Elizabethan regime see W. T. MacCaffrey,
Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588–1603, Princeton, 1992.
3
LP, MS 250, f. 331r see below p. 174.
4
See below Appendix IV, nos. 1, 2, 3.
5 See below Appendix IV, no. 4.
1
2
xxxviii
INTRODUCTION
the United Provinces to approach the States General ‘to join with hym in his intended
voyage’.1 A month earlier Ralegh had decided to send ‘away a barke to the countrey to
cumfort and asure the people that they dispaire not nor yeild to any composition with
any other nations’.2 Rowland Whyte wrote to Sir Robert Sidney on 14/24 December
that he had heard that Cecils planned to back it, Lord Burghley to the tune of £500 and
his son Robert £800.3 Lawrence Keymis, who commanded the small fleet which sailed
from Portland Road in January 1596, was later to list the Lord Admiral, Henry Percy,
ninth earl of Northumberland, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, and Sir Edward Hoby,
as other ‘favourers of this enterprise’.4
Although the financial contributions of Ralegh’s kinsfolk and a select group of influential officeholders and courtiers might be sufficient to float an interim expedition of
two vessels, they could not pay for the expeditionary force which would be necessary to
probe whether there were any tangible mineral resources to warrant the ambitious
programme of conquest which Ralegh visualized. To raise that force it would be necessary to make a public appeal for private investment. The rumours and gossip which had
circulated in the weeks immediately after Ralegh’s return from Guiana indicated that
there was considerable public interest in his late expedition. His manuscript which had
hitherto been restricted to a privileged few, would now have to be revised and published
to capitalize on it.
Ralegh was vain, difficult and arrogant, and those who had no love for him probably
took some pleasure in spreading unwarranted and malicious aspersions. Hurtful as they
were, Ralegh had, as his letter to Sir Robert Cecil on 12/22 November demonstrates,
nothing but contempt for ‘this dolt and that gull [who] must be satisfied or elce is nothing’.5 Reconceptualization and rewriting clearly did not come easily to Ralegh. Still
totally absorbed in his vision of golden empire some two or three months after his
return, it would take the representations of office-holders like Cecil and Charles Lord
Howard, as well as of his close household associates, to bring him down to some measure of reality, and to some appreciation of how to present the Guiana venture to the
public, if he was to get support for it.
Revising for Print
The crucial problem facing Ralegh and his backers was how to ‘sell’ the Empire of
Guiana, and make what so far could only be imagined real enough to induce ‘men of
qualitie and vertue’ to contribute to the search for it.6 For Ralegh, who had followed
the exploits of the Spaniards for almost a decade, it must have been hard to comprehend why anyone would not just take his word and leap at the chance to take ‘Manoa
1
Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney, 14/24 Dec. 1595, HMC De l’Isle and Dudley MSS, II, p. 200. Lady
Barbara Sidney was the daughter of John Gamage of Coity. The connections of Ralegh and Charles Lord
Howard to the Gamage family have already been noted above, p. xxiv, n. 1.
2
See below Appendix IV, no. 2.
3
Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney, 14/24 Dec. 1595, HMC De l’Isle and Dudley MSS, II, p. 198.
4 Lawrence Keymis, A Relation of the Second Voyage to Guiana, London, 1596, in R. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Glasgow, 1904, X, pp. 442, 458, 459, 477, 494.
5
See below Appendix IV, no. 2.
6 STC 20635 st. I, ¶4v, l. 8, see below p. 16.
xxxix
S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
the emperiall Citie of Guiana, which the Spaniards cal El Dorado, that for the greatnes,
for the riches, and for the excellent seate, it farre exceedeth any in the world’.1 It must
have been humiliating to learn, as he complained to Sir Robert Cecil and Charles Lord
Howard at the beginning of his ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’, that ‘whatsoeuer shalbe done, or
written by me, shall neede a double protection and defence’.2 In effect Ralegh was forced to
develop a strategy to mediate between what he believed to exist and what he actually
found, between his soaring dreams of what he might accomplish and the real obstacles
which faced him in the field, between the compelling creative force of his own imaginative response to his recent ‘paineful pilgrimage’ and the need to present it in such a
way that others would wish to undertake it with him.
An author of Ralegh’s creative and mercurial genius cannot have welcomed the
prospect of revamping his manuscript to scare up individual investors. Yet, as one compares the manuscript to the first printed edition, it is possible to see how this was done.
The original short dedication to Charles Lord Howard and Sir Robert Cecil was extended
into a full ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’. This was followed by a new prefatory address ‘To the
Reader’. In the body of the text, some passages passed virtually unaltered from draft to
print, some were omitted altogether, others were rewritten, more were added and the
author’s voice was generally refined and formalized. An appendix containing translations
of the Spanish materials captured at sea by Captain George Popham was added, preceded
by a short ‘Aduertisement to the reader’. Ralegh was probably involved in the composition
of the former, the ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’, the address ‘To the Reader’ as well as some of the
new material inserted into the body of the text, and may have corrected some of the information in the latter. It is unlikely that he had the patience to make the many small stylistic changes found in the body of the printed account, some of which ran contrary to the
meaning of his original draft. He almost certainly allocated that task to one of his
entourage. The overall tone of what finally went to print indicates that he had found the
whole process of initial presentation, summarization and then reformulation of his arguments a very bruising personal experience. It seems not unreasonable to assume that it
would have taken the combined influence of his two acknowledged patrons, Sir Robert
Cecil and Charles Lord Howard, who had stuck by him ‘when he was left of all, but of malice and reuenge’, to bring him to do it.3 The differences between the manuscript and the
printed text, taken together with Cecil’s commentary discussed above, suggest that Ralegh
must have been subjected to some fairly trenchant advice about what would make his project more credible to potential private investors. A concerted effort was made to tone
down his hyperbole, and to substitute sober, considered judgement for excited recollection and inflationary strategizing.
The Empire of Guiana
Not having reached Manoa himself, Ralegh had to convince his readers that it was not
an insubstantial myth. He rested his arguments for its existence on three premises.
Firstly, it was an offshoot of the Inca empire of Peru which was known to have been
Ibid., p. 10, ll. 26–9 see below p. 37.
Ibid., A2, ll. 23–4, A2v, l. 1, see below pp. 3, 4.
3 Ibid., A2v, ll. 2–3, see below p. 4.
1
2
xl
INTRODUCTION
fabulously rich. Secondly, the long history of the Spanish search for it showed that they
believed it to exist. One Spaniard had even visited it, and others had picked up gold
artefacts on its border regions which confirmed that there were treasures yet to be
discovered in the Caroní highlands. Thirdly, the native leaders he had encountered
spoke of it. The changes from manuscript to printed text suggest that Ralegh was
advised that he assumed too much on the part of uninformed readers and that he would
have to restate and expand upon his first two premises if he hoped to convince them.
In both manuscript and print Ralegh begins his account with narrative of his voyage
to Trinidad, his assault on the Spanish settlement of San Josef, his capture of Antonio de
Berrío, and his consultations with the native leaders he liberated from Spanish captivity.
In both he then makes the transition to inform the reader of the location and nature of
the empire of Guiana.1 In the manuscript version Ralegh felt it sufficient to make a bald
statement that the founder of Manoa was a younger son of the Inca Guaynacapa, who
with many followers had fled eastwards from the havoc caused by the Spanish conquest
of his late father’s empire. He added a brief reference to the marvellous ‘storie of theis
Ingas’, to be found in the ‘particuler discourse’ of Pedro Cieza de León, and a review of
Inca genealogy to bolster his arguments. It was only towards the end of his manuscript
that he came back to the riches of Peru and decided to include supportive testimony,
because he could not ‘avow on my credytt what I haue heard, although it is very likelie
that this Emperor Inga hath built and erected as magnificent pallaces in Guiana, as his
auncestors did in Peru’. He selected passages from the first part of Cieza de León’s
Chrónica del Peru, which described the wealth of the cities of Cajamarca, Quito, Jauja,
Vilcashuaman and Paria.2
Before his manuscript went to print he had been brought to see the shortcomings of
this approach. This is signalled in his new ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ where he introduces
his project to the reader in one admirably comprehensive sentence. The existence of
‘the mighty, rich, and beawtifull Empire of Guiana’ has been known to him for ‘many
yeares’, certified by ‘relation’ and its origin is succinctly tied to the Inca succession
wars at the time of Pizarro’s arrival in Peru.3 Although Ralegh did not specify where
his knowledge came from, it is generally accepted that his earliest information was
received from the Spaniard Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa who had been brought into
England in a vessel captured by two of Ralegh’s privateers in 1586. Sarmiento de
Gamboa, in addition to being a navigator and naval commander, was an expert on the
Incas of Peru having served under the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo and participated in
the conquest of the Inca stronghold of Vilcabamba. He was familiar with the history of
the Spanish searches for the empire ruled by el dorado. Ralegh, who treated his
prisoner with great courtesy and restored him to liberty without demanding any
ransom, may well have been indebted to him for his reading list on Peru.4 Ralegh may
LP, MS 250, ff. 316r–317v, STC 20635 st. I, pp. 1–9, see below pp. 18–35.
LP, MS 250, ff. 317v, 333v–334r, see pp. 36, 200–204. Ralegh’s material on Peru was taken from Pedro de
Cieza de León, Parte Primera de la chronica del Peru …, first published in Seville in 1553 by M. de Montesdoça.
Three other editions were published in Antwerp in 1554, by Martin Nuyts, J. Staels and Juan Bellère respectively. The passage included by Ralegh is found in ch. XLIIII, ff. 55v–58r, Montesdoça, Nuyts ff. 89v–90r,
Staels ff. 214–216r–216v, Bellère ff. 119v–120r.
3
STC 20635 st. I, A3v, ll. 12–23, see below p. 6.
4
For Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa see Hemming, The Search for El Dorado, p. 165. His work, Historia
indica, 1572, was translated and published as History of the Incas, by Sir Clements Markham, London, 1907.
1
2
xli
S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
also, as I have published elsewhere, have backed a tentative survey of the Orinoco
delta as early as 1587, in partnership with French privateers and under a commission
from the Portuguese Pretender Don Antonio.1 He did not, however, choose to refer
to the latter venture more directly, possibly because nothing had come of it. As the
new transition to his narrative of the Spanish quest for El Dorado in the body of the
published account states, he now recognized that he would have to expand on what he
knew of Peru since ‘there may arise many doubtes, on[and] how this Empire of
Guiana is so populous, and adorned with so manie greate Cities, Townes, temples, and
threasures’. He now ‘thought it good to make it knowen, that the Emperour now
raigning is discended from those magnificent Princes of Peru whose large territories,
of whose pollicies, conquests, edifices, and riches Pedro de Cieza, Francisco Lopez and
others have written large discourses …’.2 Someone, possibly Ralegh, more probably
Thomas Hariot, had reviewed the available Spanish authorities in the interim. The
material from Cieza de León was excised from the printed text. It was replaced by
long quotations from the 117th and 120th chapters taken from either H. de Laet’s
1554 Antwerp edition of López de Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias for J. Bellère,
or its reissue by de Laet for J. Staels in the same year.3 These describe the ‘court and
magnificence’ of the Inca Guaynacapa and the huge quantity of gold collected for
Atahualpa’s ransom. Ralegh and his advisors probably felt these passages would have
much more weight because they referred to the treasures of the father and the brother
of the alleged founder of the empire he was seeking. The new Spanish material was
used much more effectively, placed with Ralegh’s discussion of the origin and nature
of the empire of Guiana on pp. 9–12 of his published work.4 Ralegh also located the
empire better, situating it in ‘al that tract and valley of America which is situate
betweene the great riuers of Amazones, and Baraquan, otherwise called Orenoke and
Maranion’.5 Although Ralegh strenuously resisted providing any information which
might reveal the more precise whereabouts of Manoa to competitors, the general
reader could get a better idea of where it lay from this description than in the
manuscript, where he had vaguely placed Guiana ‘distant from Quito 2000 miles or
more, and lieth directlie from the middle and best part of Peru east, and in the same
height’.6
1
See J. Lorimer, ‘Ralegh’s First Reconnaissance of Guiana? An English Survey of the Orinoco in 1587’,
Terrae Incognitae, 9, 1977, pp. 7–21. A full transcript of the Spanish documents relating to this curious venture
is printed here for the first time, see below, Appendix I.
2
STC 20635 st. I, pp. 9, l. 30–10, l. 5, see below pp. 35, 37.
3
In this case it is possible to identify the edition from which the passages were taken. Ralegh references
chapters 117 and 120 of Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias, for the passages on
Atahualpa’s treasure and on the riches of the court of Guaynacapa. The two editions and reissues published by
A. Millán in Zaragossa in 1552, and that by H. de Mellis in Medina del Campo in 1553 have no chapter
numbers. The one edition and reissue by P. Bernuz and A. Millán in Zaragossa 1554, as well as their subsequent edition published in Zaragossa 1555 misnumbers ch. 117 as 118 and ch. 120 as 121. The edition
published by M. Nuyts in Antwerp 1554 has no chapter numbers. The numbers and chapter content referenced by Ralegh can only by found in the edition published by H. de Laet for J. Bellère in Antwerp 1554 and
the reissue of the same by de Laet for J. Staels in the same year.
4
See below pp. 35, 37, 39, 41.
5
STC 20635 st. I, p. 10, ll. 13–16, see below p. 37.
6 LP, MS 250, f. 317v, see below p. 36.
xlii
INTRODUCTION
The Background to the Spanish Searches for El Dorado
Cecil’s commentary on the manuscript suggests that he had experienced difficulty
in following Ralegh’s account of the Spanish searches for El Dorado. Comparison
with the printed text shows the effort that was made to provide a more coherent
and detailed history of them, although Ralegh never had sufficient information to
put the ventures into very intelligible chronological order. In the manuscript Ralegh
constructed a rather rambling and confused narrative of the expeditions of Francisco
de Orellana and Diego de Ordás.1 His commentary about Orellana was scattered
sporadically across three pages of manuscript. He interrupted the tale of the most
important outcome of the Ordás expedition, the travels of one Johannes Martines
who was said to have reached Manoa and lived there for seven months, with a
digression about the mutiny which took Ordás’s life. He then had to backtrack to
the Martines story with an awkward transition, made even more difficult to follow
by an unnecessary comment about the latter’s death. In the printed version, the
ventures of Orellana and Ordás are given more detailed and orderly treatment and
the alleged adventure of Martines flows without interruption.2 In the manuscript
Ralegh deviated from his account of the violent end of Pedro de Ursúa, and the
murderous rampage of Lope de Aguirre, to enlarge upon the death of Juan
Sarmiento de Villandrando, governor of Margarita. By the time of publication this
redundancy had been removed, replaced with more information about Aguirre’s sack
of Santa Marta.3 The roster of Spanish failures was updated by the insertion of a
sentence describing Jerónimo Dortal’s unsuccessful attempt to explore the Orinoco.4
The printed version made it clearer that Diego Fernández de Serpa had tried to
take an overland route from Cumaná across the llanos to the lower Orinoco.5
The account of Berrío’s activities was tightened up by the deletion of two distracting passages about the ‘discorse of that Empire’ which Zeeland merchants had
engaged in while trafficking with Lucas Fajardo, a Portuguese rancher settled near
Cumaná.6
Ralegh must, on his return, have been asked why he had not brought Antonio de
Berrío back to England with him, when the latter’s very presence would have constituted powerful testimony to the Spanish belief in the existence of the empire of
El Dorado. The circumstances in which he had released his former prisoner would
not have helped his credibility either. After leaving Trinidad he had tried to make
some return on his voyage by plundering the pearl fisheries of the eastern Spanish
Main. Fully forewarned of his presence, the authorities at Margarita had repulsed his
attempts to land, captured four of his men and refused to accede to his demand that
they should pay 1,400 ducats to ransom Berrío. When his subsequent attempt to
take Cumaná failed and with ‘many of his men slane’ Ralegh had simply put Berrío
ashore in the hope that the Spaniards would reciprocate by releasing any English
Ibid., ff. 318r–319r, see below pp. 42, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54.
STC 20635 st. I, pp. 13–16, see below pp. 43, 45, 47, 49.
3 LP, MS 250, f. 319r, STC 20635 st. I, p. 18 see below pp. 52, 53.
4
STC 20635 st. I, p. 19, ll. 11–14, see below p. 55.
5
Ibid., p. 19, ll. 24–6, see below p. 55.
6 LP, MS 250, f. 322r, STC 20635 st. I, p. 32, see below pp. 80, 81.
1
2
xliii
S I R WA LT E R R A L E G H ’ S D I S C O V E R I E O F G U I A N A
captives.1 The malicious gossip of detractors must have led Ralegh to regret this
action in the months after his return to England. By November 1595 he had come
to accept that written Spanish evidence was more likely to convince sceptics than his
own reports of discussions with his former prisoner.
Ralegh’s original manuscript makes no reference to the voyages of Robert Dudley
and Captain George Popham, although he would have known about them at the time of
writing. This is not surprising since the pair seem to have patched together a hasty
consortship intended to pre-empt his recent expedition to the Orinoco. Dudley, the
illegitimate son of Robert earl of Leicester, had since his youth ‘bene delighted with the
discoveries of navigation’ and had made plans in 1594 to sail to the South Seas to
emulate the feats of his late brother-in-law Thomas Cavendish. When the Queen
refused to allow the young adventurer to undertake such a risky exploit, Dudley had
resigned himself to ‘another course for the West Indies, without hope to doe anything
worth note: and so common as it is indeed to many, as it is not worth the registring’.2
He was rescued from the prospect of a humdrum voyage by an encounter with Captain
George Popham, who returned to England from a reprisals voyage some time late in
1594 before Dudley set sail for the West Indies on 1 December. Dudley makes it quite
clear that it was this meeting which made him decide to make for Trinidad, ‘meaning to
stay here some time about discovering the maine right against the same (the entrance
into the empire of Guiana) being shewed the discovery thereof by Captaine Popham,
who received the discovery of the said empire from one captaine Harper which being
prisoner learned of the Spaniards at the Canaries in the selfe same maner almost, as Sir
Walter Ralegh very discreetly hath written …. This discovery I greatly desired …’.3
Popham’s information came from the chance capture of a vessel bound from the
Canaries for Spain, which was carrying not only the English prisoner informed about
the latest news of the Spanish searches for El Dorado, but also a series of letters written
to correspondents in Spain on the same subject. One of them contained extracts from
the notarial record of Domingo de Vera y Ibarguen’s explorations in the region of the
Caroní in 1593.4 While Ralegh’s fleet had been still penned in harbour by foul weather,
Dudley had struggled out to sea, arriving at Trinidad in late January 1595. Struggling to
control his experienced and insubordinate ships’ masters, he had searched for mines on
south-west Trinidad and, on 20 February 1595, sent one Captain Jobson with fourteen
men to look for a ‘mine of Calcurie’ in the Orinoco delta. On the 7 or 8 March Jobson
returned, having collected a few gold ornaments in trade with a Warau cacique and
picked up information about ‘the rich nation, that sprinkled their bodies with the poulder of golde … and farre beyond them a great towne called El Dorado’. Captain
Popham had joined Dudley at Trinidad some five days earlier. After an unsuccessful
foray in search of a native gold-smelting centre, the pair waited for a few days to see if
1
Lady Ralegh to Sir Robert Cecil, 1595, HMC Salisbury MSS, V, p. 396. For accounts of Ralegh’s actions at
Margarita and Cumaná see Notarial record of Francisco López Uquilla, undated, BL Additional MS (hereafter Add.) 36315, ff. 178–182; Jerónimo Campuzano to Philip II, 8 July 1595, Simon de Bolivar to Domingo
de Vera y Ibarguen, 8 July 1595, Simon de Bolivar to Philip II, 15 Oct. 1595, Francisco de Vides to Simon de
Bolivar, 28 June 1595, Pedro de Salazar to Philip II, 10 July 1595 in Add. MS 36316, ff. 134, 150, 172–3, 201.
2 See G. F. Warner, ed., The Voyage of Robert Dudley … to the West Indies, 1594–1595, London, 1899, pp.
67–8.
3
Ibid., p. 71–2.
4 See below pp. 228, 230, 232, 234, 236.
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INTRODUCTION
Ralegh would arrive ‘(who as wee surmized, had some purpose for this discovery) to the
ende, that by our intelligence and his boates we might have done some good’. When
Ralegh did not arrive, they set sail about the 11 or 12 March. Dudley reached Cornwall
in late May. Popham made for the Caribbean and appears not to have reached England
until six months later.1
Dudley’s acknowledgement that he owed his interest in the Orinoco to Popham, and
the arrival of the latter at Trinidad one month after him suggests very strongly that
some form of consortship had been made between them before Dudley left England.
Although they spent some time waiting for Ralegh to arrive it is unlikely that they had
formed any such pre-arranged association with him. Ralegh mentioned in his manuscript his expectation of assistance from Captain Amyas Preston and his disappointment
when it did not materialize.2 He did not refer to either Dudley or Popham. His letter to
Cecil, written on 12/22 November 1595, makes it clear that this was the first time he
had seen Popham’s captured letters.3 On the whole it seems most probable that Dudley
and Popham concocted their own hasty plan to find Guiana without him. Had Ralegh
received any word of it before he sailed he would doubtless have complained that they
would ‘attempt the chefest places of my enterprize’, as he had to Cecil about Thomas
Heaton’s privateers on 7/17 Dec. 1594.4 When Popham returned to England in the
autumn of 1595 he delivered the Spanish materials he had picked up a year earlier to
the Privy Council, not to Ralegh.5 By then Robert Dudley would have reported that
Popham had them in his possession, and it is likely that he was directed to surrender
them, possibly by Robert Cecil or the Lord Admiral, as supporting evidence for
Ralegh’s project then under discussion.
Ralegh recognized the value of the documents as soon as he received a copy of them,
and whatever he may have felt about Popham’s behaviour, he attached them as an
appendix to his published work, preceded by a brief explanatory ‘Aduertisement to the
Reader’.6 In the introduction to his recent edition of the Discoverie, Neil Whitehead
notes the differences between the full notarized accounts of acts of possession carried
out by Berrío’s men in the territories of cacique Morequito in 1593 (preserved in the
Archivo de Indias), and the extracts published by Ralegh as part of the documents
recovered by Captain Popham. The latter contain references to el dorado, headless men
and indigenous gold mines not found in the formal notarial records in Seville. Whitehead suggests that Ralegh inflated these accounts by inserting ‘two wholly fictional
vignettes; of an encounter between Domingo de Vera and a cacique called Renato (the
entry of 4 May), and the information allegedly given in an encounter with a cacique
Arataco (the entry for 8 May)’. Not wishing ‘to see this textual discrepancy as just
the result of a cynical manipulation of information on Ralegh’s part’, Whitehead
suggests that he may have gathered this information independently, or ‘may well have
had other oral or documentary materials available that had been taken from Berrío on
See Warner, Voyage of Robert Dudley, pp. 19, 69–81.
LP, MS 250, ff. 316r, 317v, see below pp. 18, 34.
3
See above p. xxv.
4 Ralegh to Sir Robert Cecil, 7/14 Dec. 1594, Latham and Youings, eds, The Letters of Sir Walter Ralegh, pp.
120–21.
5
See above p. xxv.
6 STC 20635 st. I, pp. 102–12, see below pp. 229, 231, 233, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243.
1
2
xlv