Robert Silverberg - Lord of Darkness

I need not retell here how we English, with the help of the winds and storms, scattered and routed the silly Dons and sent them fleeing up around Scotland to smash themselves on the Irish shores: you know all that. For me the weeks of battle were an especial joy, both for giving my strength for Queen and country and for getting the whiff of the sea into my nostrils once more. You should know that until that summer I had secretly thought myself but half a man, since I had sailed only in clerkish ways while my father and brothers were by way of being heroes, and since in my life at home I had lost my land and made myself a figure of shame. But all that was mended now. I had sailed heavy seas; I had fought our enemies without fear; I had enrolled myself among the heroes of the realm.

There was aboard the Margaret and John a man of Leigh, one Abraham Cocke, who had much to do with the shaping of my life thereafter. This Cocke was a sour sort, with a ragged brown beard and one eye asquint, who had known my brother Thomas in boyhood and later had taken up the trade of piracy. Ill luck it brought him, for he went raiding along the coast of the Brazils in the ship of Drake’s cousin John, and a little short of the Rio de la Plata was captured by the Portugals, who kept him prisoner several years. From this captivity he was delivered at last by the Earl of Cumberland, who while marauding on that same Brazilian coast fell in with a Portuguese vessel aboard which this Cocke was serving, and rescued him back to England. That was in 1587. Cocke’s sufferings taught him nothing but greater greed for Spanish gold, and he hungered to return to the lands where he had come to such grief. He told me this on a summer day of dead calm and heavy sluggish air as we followed the Armada from Portland Bill to Calais Roads.

“This war will be the shattering of Spain,” said Cocke to me. “King Philip has pissed away much treasure on the building of these doomed galleons of his, and he will need to milk the Indies for gold aplenty to renew his coffers. When this work is done, I will put myself between King Philip and his gold. Will you join me in that, Battell?”

“Aye,” I said, and in that single short word I spoke away twenty years of my life.

Cocke told me that every year great store of treasure is transported overland out of Peru to the port of Buenos Aires on the Rio de la Plata, and from there it is shipped along the coast to Bahia in Brazil, where four or five caravels wait to carry it to Spain. It was Cocke’s intent to intercept the treasure-ships between Buenos Aires and Bahia, not by brutal force but by making a lightning swoop with two small vessels of great swiftness. I saw this plan as being much to my favor. If God gave us strength, I could earn as much in that one piracy as in ten years of scribbling invoices aboard merchantmen, and I could have my land and my Anne Katherine, and finally set about the making of sons and the reading of books. And then farewell to maritime life, for I was somehow come to be thirty years of age now, and longed for the shore and my warm bed and Anne Katherine beside me in it.

When the business of the Armada was finished and the Spaniards were ruined, I spoke of my intent to Anne Katherine. I feared she might object to my going privateering, as women sometimes take exception to such doings, but not she. With a smile as broad as the sun she said, “By all means, go and harvest gold. For the Spaniards only steal it from the poor Indians, and have but the Devil’s claim on the stuff themselves. Why should we not have some of the use of it, too, who are peaceful folk whom God loves?”

Henry, too, gave me his blessing. I think I was an embarrassment to him—the unlucky younger brother—and he hoped this voyage would settle me in life at last. He himself was becoming a great man then, having fallen in with Walter Ralegh, and planning with him an expedition in search of the great treasure of El Dorado in Guiana. Which some years later it seems he undertook, and my brother left his bones along the banks of the Orinoco for his troubles, but I know little of that.

Cocke raised his money and bought two pinnaces of fifty tons each, the May-Morning and the Dolphin. We sailed from the River Thames the twentieth of April, 1589, I having spent all the night before in the arms of my Anne Katherine, and the fragrance of her sweet breasts still in my nostrils as we stood forth into a greasy fog. “When will you be back?” she asked me at the hour before dawn, and I said, “Before Christmas, with pouches of golden doubloons, and we will marry by Twelfth Night.” Though that she had had not a moment’s sleep her eyes were bright and her face was fresh and clear, and I saw the love and God’s grace in her good smile. She was of eighteen years then, already growing a little old for marriage, and I bitterly begrudged the year’s delay. But without gold I could not be marrying, if we were to live properly ever after.

In all my wanderings ahead, the image of Anne Katherine burned brighter in my memory than do the faces of the saints among the Popish. But many a strange thing befell me before I saw that face again, and when I came at last to the seeing of that face it was a passing strange thing in itself, a seeming miracle. Of that tale in its proper moment, though.

On the sixth and twentieth of April we put into Plymouth, where we took in some provision for the voyage. The seventh of May we put to sea, and with foul weather were beaten back again into Plymouth, where we remained some days, and then proceeded on our voyage. As England fell from sight behind us I saw the great curving green sphere of the open sea and cried out for joy, for I was on my way into the world at long last, that vast round thing so full of wonders and splendors and marvels.

Running along the coast of Spain and Barbary we put into the road of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, one of the islands called Canary. Here I breathed the soft air of the lands of eternal springtime, with so many perfumes upon it that it made me wild. Jesu! Such beauty and such strangeness! I had a friend aboard ship, Thomas Torner of Essex, who had been the Tenerife way before, and Torner said to me, “This is the isle of the Raining Tree, which is enveloped by a cloud every day at noon. The tree’s great branches absorb much moisture, which travels quickly downward to gush in great streams from its roots into certain cisterns placed nearby. And the whole water supply of the island is had from this one tree.”

My eyes went wide and my heart thundered. For I had come on this voyage to gain gold, aye, but also to see marvels. The Raining Tree of Tenerife! Well, so be it. God wot, I saw no such tree there, though I found another of which I had heard much. This was the famous Dragon’s-Blood Tree, that dripped scarlet blood. Thus I described it to Torner, as it had been described to me. But he only laughed and said, “Andy, Andy, it is no such thing! Come and see!”

He pointed to me the Dragon’s-Blood Tree, and there were many of them indeed on the isle. A fine peculiar tree it was, too, fat-boughed and swollen, with leaves like long daggers, and when you pulled the leaves off, there was a bit of a red stain left behind. I wonder how many of the other travelers’ tales have been inflamed and magnified in that fashion, from Marco Polo’s day to ours. Yet I swear to you by the wounds of God that I tell you nothing but the truth in this my narrative, and if anything I make what I experienced seem more sober than in truth it was.

We were carrying with us the kind of little vessel called a light horseman, or rowing-boat, which we had in two pieces. On the quiet shore of Tenerife we assembled this craft and thenceforth carried it alongside us, for in-shore venturing. When that was accomplished we put to sea.