Sir Walter Raleigh was Jersey’s last Elizabethan Governor. His legacy casts a long shadow; his life was a blend of brutality and brilliance, scholarship and recklessness that defies the easy verdict of the historian’s pen. This is the story of his last voyage, his final gamble, one played for the highest of stakes. ~ Paul Darroch
Sir Walter Raleigh
London, 1616
At last the walls parted and the Tower spat me out. After so many years of incarceration, I was myself a carcass, shuffling along on my dead leg, an old man rasping his way through an unfamiliar world. Here I was: Sir Walter Raleigh; poet, adventurer and mage, adrift on strange new seas.
London has changed in these latter times, and the hearts of men have turned. The city of my youth, that once dazzled with all the colours of a Guyana parrot, has turned dark and sombre. Men wear plainer, duller clothes; the panache of Queen Elizabeth’s reign has fled. The fabric of the city itself has darkened, with new halls and monuments. London is forever restless, forever becoming something new. I ride through the familiar streets as if in a dream.
Queen Elizabeth, the lodestar of my life, now lies frozen in marble. Her effigy is entombed in her father’s royal chapel at Westminster Abbey. I stopped and gazed awhile at her, at that face serene as the moon, as cold as the winter skies. My fate was sealed at the very moment the last breath fled her body. The new King James soon turned on me like a wolf.
I fondly remember my final days before the fall, when I held the Queen’s stewardship of a most beautiful realm. I was the Governor of Jersey, my last haven before the prison walls closed in on me. From my perch at Mount Orgueil, I reigned as a happy little monarch, dispensing justice, establishing a land registry, and overseeing construction of a new fortress in the bay. Some urged that brute old Mount Pride should now be demolished, but I demurred. I captured my thoughts in a letter: “To say true, it is a stately fort of great capacity… And if a small matter may defend it, it were a pity to cast it down”. As it happened, I would be the great and ancient castle that would fall.
In those painful years in the Tower of London, I never forgot my beloved Island. In my long decade of captivity, I poured my sorrows into my History of the World, my vainglorious and voluminous manuscript, which they have forced me to publish as an anonymous man. Jersey was too painful to my heart, too close a device to reveal; but I revelled in recounting the valiant history of neighbouring Sark.
In the dog watch of the evening, the gaoler’s key turned in the door. I was at last released; free in some manner of speaking, yet not at liberty, never absolved. An armed watchman escorted me at all times. And I have been sent out for one purpose only: to discover new worlds for the King, and to bring peaceably home a ship laden with gold. And if I openly clash with the Spaniards, or resort to piracy, the King will claim my head.
Remember this: I am legally dead. I have already been tried and convicted by the courts of England, and my execution remains a legal certainty. It is only the timing and manner that is open to review. Nothing has changed.
And yet my fresh letters patent from the King have given me martial command of a fleet, and the power to enforce life and death is once again placed in my hands. Yet the wily old fox has altered the traditional form of the document; the words “trusty and well beloved” have been deliberately struck out. I know I am walking as if on a wire, high above a void, with all the world waiting for me to fall.
I am grown poor in my dotage; my release was secured not by my heartfelt pleas but by several plump and astutely placed bribes. I have poured my own plate and mortgaged my treasure into this last expedition, this final throw of the dice. I have assembled a surly crew of misbegotten rogues and thieves. They have already squabbled with the Plymouth locals and come up worse the wear in a riverine fight. Their discipline is appalling, and if truth be told, even my beloved son Wat is a brawling hothead. It will be a miracle if we leave port in good order, let alone complete our madcap mission.
We will be travelling far south, towards the burning equatorial sun, to find the City of Gold. Long ago, on my travels in Guyana, a trader brought me some shards of rock, flecked with gold ore. The natives spoke in reverent tones of a great table-mountain, where the cliffs shimmer with rainbows of gold, and the hills bleed silver. Somewhere beyond must lie Lake Parime, and the shining city of El Dorado itself. I let that enticing vision sustain me in my cell and drive me half-mad with its promise. In the end, I almost believed in it. In the fevers of the night I can see the way there: it is always three miles hence, always further beyond, just another turn in the river.
Now I face a stark choice: to find this gold or die. I am in the autumn of my years now. My leg pains me daily, for I am betrayed by the splinters of an old wound. Still the crowds flock to me; this relic, a curio, a grey-haired myth that somehow lingers on from Elizabeth’s glorious age. As we march down to the quayside, the good burghers of Plymouth cheer and beat the drums in unison. The West still remembers, even as the capital forgets its fallen hero, and treats me like just another man they used to know.
I board my flagship, as we prepare to set off round the Plymouth Hoe, to leave England for the last time. My ship bears a proud, almost theatrical name: Destiny. Life is but a play, after all. The audience are cheering and hooting from the galleries as I strut into the third act of my life. I bow low and walk up the gangplank, back onto the stage. Somewhere beyond, I can sense the shadow of the axe waiting in the wings.
To be continued…
The full story of Sir Walter Raleigh’s voyage is told in Jersey: Secrets of the Sea, available across Jersey and on Amazon. © Paul Darroch 2021. Published by Seaflower Books.
