VI GUIANA IN VIEW 109 assumption that her influence contributed to defer the enterprise for a while. I hope for my sake you will rather draw Sir Walter towards the east than help him forward toward the sunset, if any respect to me or love to him be not forgotten. But every month hath his flower and every season his contentment, and you great counsellors are so full of new counsels, as you are steady in nothing; but we poor souls that hath bought sorrow at a high price desire, and can be pleased with, the same misfortune we hold, fearing alterations will but multiply misery, of which we have already felt sufficient. I know only your persuasions are of effect with him, and held as oracles tied to them by love; therefore I humbly beseech you rather stay him than further him. By the which you shall bind me for ever. And for two years she had her way, but it was toward the sunset that his heart was drawn, and the dream of his life was now at last to be realised. CHAPTER VII GUIANA 1595 HAD the Queen shown any disposition to relent in her treatment of the banished favourite, it is possible that Sir Walter might never have embarked upon the voyage which entitles him to rank with the pioneers of discovery. He never relaxed his efforts to retrieve his forfeited position, and as he was never formally deprived of office, he was encouraged to believe his eclipse was only temporary. Meanwhile he could not be idle. As one door of ambition closed, he cast about for some new outlet for his indomitable energy. It was his resolve, Naunton truly said of him, never to forget himself or suffer himself to be forgotten. Hitherto he had done the work of exploration by deputy, but now at last he was free to choose his own path towards the sunset, and realise a lifelong dream which promised restoration to the favour of a mistress whose anger was swift to melt before her glowing admiration for resolve and enterprise. The stories which had become associated with the fabled land of El Dorado, whither the princes of Peru CHAP. VII LEGEND OF EL DORADO III had withdrawn into a world of mystery, guarded by impenetrable jungles, and enmeshed by unnavigated streams, appealed to his eager imagination, while his practical ambition thirsted to disprove, by adding an empire to the narrow bounds of British sovereignty, the monstrous claim of Philip to all the unconquered lands beyond the ocean. In the dedication to his Discovery of Guiana he refers to a treatise which he composed on the West Indies, in which the possibility of invasion is discussed. His present design, however, was rather to open a new region, which had baffled the patient virtue of the Spaniard. The credulity with which he has been charged in countenancing the fables with which the sixteenth century associated the name of Guiana, he shared with his contemporaries, who readily accepted what Hume has unjustly stigmatised as deliberate falsehoods invented to popularise his scheme. Indeed, the legend which for upwards of two centuries continued to lure new dreamers to follow the quest of the golden city in the fever swamps and silent forests of the West, was based on some foundation of reality. In the year 1535 an Indian, sent by the Cacique of Bogotà to visit the Inca of Peru, arrived at Quito, and found the land in possession of a new white race, who bestrode strange animals of marvellous swiftness, and carried mysterious weapons which dealt death from afar. From the lips of this Indian the strangers who had come from the sea heard the tale of a great chieftain in his own land who on appointed festivals betook himself with all his people to a solitary tarn in the mountains. There he was anointed with perfumed resin and powdered from head to foot with dust of gold. Thus equipped he embarked in his canoe, and putting out into the middle of the lake plunged into the sacred waters, and figuratively, with the gold-dust, washed away the offences of his people. The story, repeated with circumstantial detail by the historian Orviedo to Cardinal Bembo, was no idle invention of the brain. Three hundred years later an English traveller found the tradition still preserved among the degenerate population in the ranges north of Bogotà, near the holy lake of Guatavita. They believed, moreover, that, when the land was conquered by the Spaniards, the old inhabitants had thrown all that remained of their wealth into the lake, and that the portion of the Cacique was the burden of a hundred men laden with gold-dust. A further legend, based on no reasonable foundation, made its way to Europe not many years after the story of the golden king. On the death of the last Inca some still surviving member of the royal house was said to have led his people across the Andes, to found a new empire beyond the white man's ken. The name of El Dorado, the gilded chief, was transferred to this undiscovered land, which ever receded before the advance of the explorer, while its visionary horde grew with every repetition of the tale. Somewhere between the Andes and the Atlantic, the Terra Ferme and the Amazon, on a lake two hundred miles in length, there lay a great city called Manoa. There a new Inca had revived the glories of the ancient court of Atahualpa, where Pizarro found, when he weighed the loot of precious metals, "52,000 marks of good silver, and 1,326,000 and 500 pesoes of gold." VII PREVIOUS EXPLORATIONS 113 The earliest attempt to enter Guiana was, however, undoubtedly anterior to the visit of the Cacique's envoy to Quito, for the Germans, the pioneers of colonisation in Venezuela, had already in 1530 advanced westward under Ambrose von Alfinger, and about the same time Diego de Ordaz first essayed the exploration of the Amazon. Alfinger perished at the hands of the Indians, whom he treated with savage severity, and some years later another expedition under Nicholas Federman led to no result; but in the mountains of Bogotà, he, coming from the north-west, joined hands with Gonzalo de Quesnada, the conqueror of New Granada, and Sebastian de Belalcazar, who had marched from Quito in the south. In 1540 Gonzalo Pizarro, setting out from Quito, reached a branch of the Amazon. Dividing his forces he despatched Orellana in a hastily constructed vessel to explore two thousand leagues of unknown waterways to the Atlantic, and himself continued his march through trackless wilds, only after two years to return with a remnant of his force, gaunt with famine, savage, unrecognisable. Well might Raleigh testify of the Spaniards that never had any nation. endured so many misadventures and miseries, and yet persisted with invincible constancy in their Indian discoveries. Philip von Hutten was the next to follow with a band of Germans and Spaniards from Coro in Venezuela, to be defeated after wandering for a year among baffling streams and forests. But his faith in the phantom gold led the chivalrous Hutten to set out once more on the path of doom with such few followers as his persuasive eloquence could enlist. Far south in the land of the Omaguas he is reported to have I |