Welcome to another episode of the History Islands. This week we complete the story of Sir Walter Raleigh, the former Governor of Jersey, on his final, doomed journey. ~ Paul Darroch
Sir Walter Raleigh, Guyana, Mouth of the Orinoco
Saint Valentine’s Day, 1618
The Caroni is a blackwater river, red and sluggish, charged with the blood of the land. Somewhere along it lies Mont Aio, which I had once seen with my own eyes: a great and high plateau, many miles across, raised stark above the forest like Jersey above the sea. And deep in the wilderness beyond must lie the magic mountain; whose very pebbles are nuggets of gold ore, whose very cliffs are stained with silver. This mother lode will be enough.
Yet I was too weak to follow on. My best and most loyal friends were dead. So, I chose what poor cards I could from my frail hand: I selected Lawrence Keymis, seadog and rogue, doubter and ditherer. He would lead the expedition west to the heart of the Orinoco, to search and find the gold. The success of our mission rested on his shoulders. Into his protection I placed my beloved Walter, my eldest son, the very image of me. Hot-headed and strong, blood of my blood, fault of my stars.
Then their pinnace, their little band of adventurers, sailed out to meet the sunset. As darkness fell over my ship, I little guessed in my heart that the mission had already failed. The ink had spilled on my death warrant. The axe had already dropped.
Two days later, we witnessed the marvel of a double rainbow, a perfect circle breaking behind the ship. For a moment, I briefly recalled the divine promise: “And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: and I will remember my covenant”. Then the bow faded, and I returned to my obsessive quest for gold.
There was no news from Keymis. We loitered in the swamp-lands of the Orinoco, at the Serpent’s Mouth itself. Here a native guide led us into the rainforest, to show us the balsam tree, sticky and sweet-smelling. ‘The balm of Gilead’, the men called it. The name sits aright. The days dripped on.
There was no news from Keymis. I counted each day since the expedition departed; and I anxiously toyed with the hourglass in my cabin. I mused on the strange alchemy of time, and its promise of transmutation, which changes the elements of all things, and leaves nothing undone. Child into man, earth into gold, fame into dust. I thought of the walls of my prison, of all those years consumed. The nature of time must be heat after all; rising, infiltrating, burning. We ate sweet blood oranges in the sunset, the flesh as bright as the dying sun.
The next morning, a letter was thrust into my hand. The sun died. The hourglass emptied.
The expedition, as the letter revealed, had slipped into bloody, tragic disaster. Keymis had expected to find a few huts in the jungle, and gold mines lying wide open to plunder. Yet the world had changed since the glory days of their earlier expedition some twenty-three years earlier. Instead, the motley band of adventurers stumbled upon San Thomé; a walled and fortified Spanish town. Inevitably, the blunderers were discovered, and a full-scale gunfight ensued. They say that Raleigh’s son, Wat, stood at the head of the charge, recklessly storming the gates of the citadel. He was cut down like a stray dog.
The city fell; but there was no gold, and the wrath of the Spanish Empire would soon be falling upon them. King James could not forgive this flagrant breach of international relations. In despair, the little expedition scouted hundreds of miles upriver, scouring every cove and bend of the Orinoco for treasure; they found nothing. Talk of the golden city was on every tongue, the common currency of the rainforest, but it remained a stubborn, elusive mirage.
On his return to the ship, Lawrence Keymis found his master Sir Walter shredded by grief, in a vengeful and unforgiving temper. Keymis knew his duty; after a few days, he retreated to his cabin and shot himself in the chest with a pistol. When the gunshot agonisingly misfired in his ribs, he slashed open his own heart.
His sacrifice was to no avail. Raleigh wrote in a letter: “My brains are broken”. The suicide of Keymis barely registered; he was lost in the abyss of his own pain. Men deserted; the expedition was crumbling around him like fool’s gold. The crew refused to return to the Orinoco. On the journey home, Raleigh could have slipped away in Trinidad, or Newfoundland, or France, or chosen one of a dozen opportunities to escape, but he refused. The show must go on and the play enter its final and most terrible act.
The rest of the script is well-known. The voyage of the Destiny had been cursed; it proved the shipwreck of all their estates. Gondomar, the silver-tongued Spanish ambassador, soon twisted King James’s mind against this rogue adventurer who had betrayed him. Over bowls of plump cherries, they plotted revenge together.
Visionary, alchemist and scholar, Raleigh had been the finest Governor of Jersey, yet was ultimately broken on the wheel of his own pride. On the scaffold, he dazzled the crowds for one last time, defending his life and his record with wit, passion and eloquence. He scoffed at the axe: “This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician that will cure all my diseases”. Then he placed his head on the block.
Raleigh refused a blindfold. Chided at the very last for kneeling away from the east, away from the Lord’s rising, he replied with one final rejoinder: “So the heart be right, it is no great matter which way the head lieth”. Yet his heart was already lost somewhere on a faraway shore.
Then a strange and curious silence fell upon the crowd, and the last moment seemed to stretch for an eternity. As Raleigh the poet had once written, “Even such is time that takes in trust / Our youth, our joys, our all we have /And pays us but with age and dust …”
Raleigh’s severed neck spurted so much blood that the spectators gasped. Such energy, such promise, so many worlds left undiscovered. The crowd lamented and sighed and shuffled back to work. Above them, it was threatening to rain. A pall of smoke rose awhile over the palace yard, languidly turning, then vanished up into the autumn skies.
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Paul Darroch is the author of Jersey: The Hidden Histories and Jersey: Secrets of the Sea, both published by Seaflower Books and available across Jersey. This story is taken from the latter book. © Paul Darroch 2019, 2021
