policy in such cases Sir Robert Naunton says "Finding his favour declining, and falling into a recess, he undertook a new peregrination to leave that terra infirma of the court for that of the wars, and by declining himself, and by absence, to expel his and the passion of his enemies,-which in courts was a strange device of recovery, but that he knew there was some ill office done him, that he durst not attempt to mind any other ways than by going aside, thereby to teach envy a new way of forgetfulness, and not so much as to think of him: however, he had it always in mind never to forget himself. And his device took so well, that at his return he came in, as some do by going backwards, with the greater strength, and so continued to the last hour in her grace." And another (the author of Aulicus Coquinaria) observes-"His enemies of greater rank kept him under-sometimes in, sometimes out; and then he would wisely decline himself out of the court road; and then you found him not but by fame; in voyages to the West Indies, Guiana's new plantations, Virginia, or in some expeditions against the Spaniard." And a third to the same effect-" It is observable that Sir Walter Ralegh was in and out at court so often, that he was commonly called the tennis ball of fortune, which she delighted to sport with. His enemies perpetually brought him into disgrace with his mistress, and his merit in a little time restored him again to her favour; and as she always grew cold to the Earl of Essex after absence, so she ever received Ralegh with greater marks of her esteem; and he was too hard for his rivals by the very means which they intended for his destruction." But before he set out upon the adventure, the prosecution of which had filled his mind for many years, there was something at court to make his enemies fear, not only that he was about to be restored to favour, but that he was to be called to the Queen's councils. One of them says in a letter,-" Of choice of councillors Thy belt of straw and ivy-buds, But could youth last, could love still breed, Had joys no date, had age no need; Then those delights my mind might move To live with thee, and be thy love. there is a bruit, but nothing assured. Sir Walter Ralegh looketh for a place amongst them; and it is now feared of all honest men that he shall presently come to the court, and is thereto wrought to serve a turn. And yet it is well withstood. God grant him some further resistance, and that place he better deserveth, if he had his right." But finding no present fruition of his hopes, Ralegh decided upon leaving England, having no less an object in view than the discovery and conquest of El Dorado. The acquisition of the "large, rich, and beautiful" empire of Guiana was an enterprise which had baffled the repeated efforts of some of the ablest and most renowned captains and cavaliers of Spain for nearly a hundred years. In their own authors we find commendations of many brave commanders, who, during that time, had endured miseries while treading this maze, and losing themselves with five hundred, and sometimes a thousand men each, in an endeavour to find this country. The example of these adventurers, however unsuccessful and perhaps for that reason-stimulated Ralegh to this undertaking; for whatever he might have thought of the policy of Spain, he had a sincere admiration of the enterprise of their discoverers, whom he has thus celebrated in his "History of the World." "Here I cannot forbear to commend the patient virtue of the Spaniards. We seldom or never find that any nation hath endured so many misadventures and miseries as the Spaniards have done, in their Indian discoveries. Yet persisting in their enterprises with an invincible constancy, they have annexed to their kingdom so many goodly provinces, as bury the remembrance of all dangers past. Tempests and shipwrecks, famine, overthrows, mutinies, heat and cold, pestilence, and all manner of diseases, both old and new, together with extreme poverty and want of all things needful, have been the enemies wherewith every one of their most noble discoverers, at one time or other, hath encountered. Many years have passed over some of their heads in the search of not so many leagues: yea, more than one or two have spent their labour, their wealth, and their lives, in search of a golden kingdom, without getting further notice of it than what they had at their first setting forth. All which notwithstanding, the third, fourth, and fifth undertakers have not been disheartened. Surely, Nicholas Faunt, somewhile secretary to Sir Francis Walsingham, and a creature of his son-in-law, the Earl of Essex. they are worthily rewarded with those treasuries and paradises which they enjoy; and well they deserve to hold them quietly, if they hinder not the like virtue in others, which (perhaps) will not be found." Having collected as much information as he could procure relative to Guiana, and the means of entering it, he drew up, in 1594, instructions for the use of Captain Whiddon, an old and welltried captain of his own, and sent him to make a survey of the coast. The captain returned, in the following year, with a highly favourable account of the riches of the country, which he had obtained from some of the chief Caçiques upon its borders. Upon this, Ralegh, at a considerable expense, got together a squadron of ships, which the Lord Admiral Howard and Sir Robert Cecil augmented. We have no certain knowledge of the number of the vessels; but from Ralegh's own account of the voyage, published after his return, there must have been five at least, besides barges, wherries, and tenders. He set sail from Plymouth, on the 6th of February, 1595, and proceeded to the Canaries, and arrived at Trinidad on the 22nd of March, when he made himself master of St. Joseph, and took the Spanish governor, De Berrio, prisoner. This cavalier, grateful for the courtesy with which Ralegh treated him, frankly communicated to him the knowledge and experience he himself had gained during the many years, and at a vast cost, he had spent upon Guiana. But Sir Walter, who was not to be daunted by prospective difficulties or danger, left his ships at Curiapan, in Trinidad, and with a hundred men, in several little barks, sailed 400 miles up the river Orinoco, in search of Guiana.* Some of the petty kings of the country resigned their sovereignty to the Queen of England. But the weather was so hot, and the rains were so violent, that he was compelled to retire, being in equal danger of destruction from the rapid torrents of water as from his enemies. The inhabitants of Cumana refusing to bring in the contributions he required, he set fire to the town, as also to part of St. Mary's and Rio de la Hacha; and having convinced himself that * Ralegh was the first Englishman who ever sailed up the Orinoco. His favourite and most trusted captain, Laurence Keymis, in a second voyage to Guiana, called the river "Raleana," in honour of his patron, a name which it was not likely to retain. there were gold mines in the country, of which he had discovered more in a month than the Spaniards had done in many years, he returned to England in the autumn of 1595, and, in the following year, published an account of his voyage and discoveries, which be dedicated to the Lord Admiral and Cecil. This relation, however, which contains a very graphic, curious, and interesting account of a country hitherto undiscovered, and which enlarged upon the riches of the land to which he had led the way, did not awaken the curiosity or stimulate the cupidity of the court and the city in anything like the degree he had expected. Ralegh brought home with him some of the white spar which he supposed to contain gold, and which was assayed in London, and found to contain a fair proportion of that metal; but some of the crew had brought marcasite, which is comparatively worthless, and had offered it for sale, and this to a great extent discredited the whole relation, as offering encouragement to a mercantile speculation.* Again, there were some who did not believe that one of the brothers of Atabalipa, Emperor of Peru, and put to death by Pizarro, had made his way to Guiana, and founded the golden and imperial city of Manoa, by the Spaniards called El Dorado; and they could by no means put faith in the existence of those warlike women the Amazons, with their queen; and in the Ewaipanoma, who were reported to have eyes in their shoulders, and mouths in their breasts, or on a level with them. But Ralegh did not speak of either as having himself seen them. He says that an ancient Caçique assured him that there was such a nation of women on the south of the Amazon river, whose manners and customs, as they were described to him, somewhat conformed with what is recorded of the ancient Amazons; "but that they cut off their right breasts," says he, "I do not find to be true." As to the Ewaipanoma, many of the chiefs, and the prince who came with him to England, avouched that there was a nation of such people; but, says Ralegh, "whether it is true or no, the matter is not great, neither can there be any profit in the imagination. For my own part, I saw them not; but am resolved that so many people did not all combine or forethink to make the report." By way of conclusion * A certain alderman of London, and an officer of the Mint, are said by Sir Walter to have busied themselves in propagating the "malicious slander," that the gold ore brought from Guiana was of no price. to this matter, he observes-" As to the Amazons, and those who had their faces in their breasts, having only heard talk of them, he left it for others to find them out."* The following passage from his "History of the World," extracted from the Life of Alexander the Great, will show that, eighteen years afterwards, he believed in the existence of the Amazons:- "Here it is said that Thalestris, or Minothea, a queen of the Amazons, came to visit him. Plutarch citeth many historians, reporting this meeting of Thalestris with Alexander, and some contradicting it. But, indeed, the letters of Alexander himself to Antipater, recounting all that befel him in those parts, and yet omitting to make mention of this Amazonian business, may justly breed suspicion of the whole matter as forged. Much more justly may we suspect it as a vain tale, because an historian of the same time, reading one of his books to Lysimachus (then king of Thrace), who had followed Alexander in all his voyage, was laughed at by the king for inserting such news of the Amazons; and Lysimachus himself had never heard of. One that accompanied Alexander, took upon him to write his acts, which, to * It is certain that Shakspeare had read attentively the narrative of Ralegh's voyage. In "The Tempest" we read of "the still-vexed Bermoothes." Ralegh says-"The rest of the Indies for calms and diseases very troublesome, and the Bermudas a hellish sea for thunder, lightning, and storms." In the same play, the honest councillor, Gonzalo, asks, "Who would believe "that there were such men Whose heads stood in their breasts? which now we find Each putter-out of one for five will bring us Good warrant of?" And in "Othello," where the Moor tells of having seen men "whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," we are to understand that a man of honour and veracity is speaking, not that a Mendez Pinto is telling travellers' tales to the council of ten. Seventy years after Shakspeare, Milton, in his "Paradise Lost," when the Archangel Michael shows the other hemisphere to Adam, says:— "In spirit perhaps he also saw Rich Mexico, the seat of Montezume, |