In Amazonia (16 page)

Despite disavowal, then, relations with indigenous Americans were the cause of tremendous anxiety. For Ralegh, they demanded the politics of embodied restraint, a moral and strategic continence that was also the measure of his leadership:

I suffred not anie man to take from anie of the nations so much as a
Pina
, or a
Potato
roote, without giving them contentment, nor any man so much as to offer to touch any of their wives or daughters: which course, so contrarie to the Spaniards (who tyrannize over them in all things) drew them to admire hir Majestie, whose commandement I told them it was, and also woonderfully to honour our nation. But I confess it was a very impatient worke to keepe the meaner sort from spoile and stealing, when we came to their houses, which bicause in all I could not prevent I caused my Indian interpreter at every place when we departed, to know of the losse or wrong done, and if ought were stolen or taken by violence, either the same was restored, and the party punished in their sight, or els it was paid for to their utmost demand.
⁵⁰

This remarkable behavior had two self-conscious reference points, both immediately recognizable to Ralegh's readers. The first was personal: Ralegh's ragged reputation as a sexual adventurer, his estrangement from the queen following his marriage, and his attempt to recover his favored status—a complex cluster to which I return below. The second association was with the
leyenda negra
, the Black Legend of Spanish barbarity in the Americas. Humanist Catholic texts such as Las Casas'
Breuissima relacion de la destruycion de las Indias
(1552) had demonstrated to the English that the divine right to empire could be forfeited on moral grounds—reasoning that Hakluyt appropriated in support of the manifest destiny of Protestant colonization.
⁵¹
This was a serviceable but highly contingent ethics, absent, for example, from the Irish campaigns and selectively applied where it might create tactical advantage. Temperance was part of a larger strategic practice: Spanish conduct provided an opening to the more self-controlled outsider; successful alliance with disaffected but still dependent elites required the sustained work of diplomacy.

The key relationship Ralegh establishes in Guiana is with the aged “king” Topiawari, an ally he presents as the most reliable client of the Crown. Topiawari's territory offered access to the borders of El Dorado, and treaty with him was a central goal of the expedition. It was also Ralegh's only clear accomplishment and, accordingly, is described in careful and sympathetic detail. It is this sympathy that has led Mary Campbell to praise Ralegh for the “widening of consciousness” he achieves in his representation of native Guianans, people who most often enter his account as individualized interlocutors, emerging through reported speech as multidimensional subjects.
⁵²
Campbell explains this in terms of the structural position of such people as Topiawari in Ralegh's campaign and narrative. They are his informants, providers of the vital data he needs to accomplish his mission. Ralegh introduces them through events in which they themselves are central actors. It is a rhetoric designed to convey the credibility of his sources, as well as the authenticity of his own presence.
The Discoverie
, above all, is an argument for intervention: an argument based not only on the existence of El Dorado, but on the military vulnerability of Guiana and on the authority of the narrator himself.

But there is a certain delicacy here. For his project to succeed on either side of the Atlantic, Ralegh's informants should themselves be convincingly authoritative and substantial. As allies, they must be capable of delivering arms and resources. They must also be moral beings, appreciative of the superior English virtues. Yet, at the same time, neither his field practice nor its reporting can leave any doubt as to Ralegh's own mastery of encounter. Thus, at the outset of their first meeting, Ralegh explicitly subverts Topiawari's local authority, managing the idiom of courtliness to claim for himself the rights of host. In a show of condescending deference to the “king of
Arromaia
,” Ralegh establishes the ground for their interview by raising a tent and allowing Topiawari, now the visitor in his own domain, to rest in its shade. Eventually, with the aid of Ralegh's interpreter, they talk:

I asked what nations those were which inhabited on the further side of those mountaines, beyond the valley of
Amariocapana
, he answered with a great sigh (as a man which had inward feeling of the losse of his conntrey and liberty, especially for that his eldest sonne was slain in a battel on that side of the mountaines, whom he most entirely loved), that he remembred
in his fathers life time when he was very old, and himselfe a yoong man that there came down into that large valley of
Guiana
, a nation from so far off as the
Sun
slept, (for such were his own words,) with so great a multitude as they could not be numbred nor resisted, & that they wore large coats, and hats of crimson colour, which colour he expressed, by shewing a piece of red wood, wherewith my tent was supported, and that they were called
Oreiones
, and
Epuremei
, those that had slain and rooted out so many of the ancient people as there were leaves in the wood upon all the trees.
⁵³

There is something quite out of the ordinary here: an ethnographic sensibility rare in the contemporary literature. Despite Ralegh's controlling of the terms of the interview, the passage is striking for its labor of empathy, the resolve to break the barriers of language and capture the voice, gesture, and historicized subjectivity of Topiawari, less an indigene than a fellow noble. It is a narrative of doubling. Ralegh offers us the inner life of an outsider, his “inward feeling,” a tale of dispossession made real through the immediacy of reported speech and by the appeal to the universality of the emotionally specific—the loss of homeland, parent, and, as Ralegh himself had recently experienced, child. He shows a willingness to allow the equivalence of rank, with its embedded confusions of sentiment and honor, to transcend difference.
⁵⁴
As such, the account of their meeting is intended to impress upon his status-conscious readers the wonder of similitude, within an environment of difference:
⁵⁵

This
Topiawari
is held for the proudest, and wisest of al the
Orenoquopeni
, and so he behaved himselfe towards me in all his answers at my returne, as I marvelled to finde a man of that gravity and judgement, and of so good discourse, that had no helpe of learning nor breed.
⁵⁶

The familiar bustle in Topiawari's camp takes Ralegh back to “a great market or faire in England,” and, when he again meets the old king on his return downstream, the deferential visitor “desires” him to “instruct me” some more about Guiana.
⁵⁷

Although by now we sense that this discoverie will be little more than a scouting trip, Ralegh uses the authority of the old man's detailed advice as the premise on which to abandon his planned march on El
Dorado. Finally, they undertake what Ralegh presents as a symbolic exchange of kin:

[H]e freely gave me his onelie sonne to take with me into England, and hoped, that though he himselfe had but a short tyme to live, yet that by our meanes his sonne shoulde be established after his death: and I left with him one
Frauncis Sparrow
, a servant of captain
Gifford
, (who was desirous to tarry and coulde describe a cuntrey with his pen) and a boy of mine called
Hugh Goodwin
, to learne the language.
⁵⁸

We have to be wary of reading too much of Topiawari through Ralegh. It is, however, clear that native leaders were faced with a number of competing options at this moment of sudden involvement in imperial competition. Topiawari, too, is negotiating an ally at these meetings, and their exchange patterns the relationship in a manner notable for its formal mutuality. We might regard this transaction as an inaugural moment in the relationship between Guiana and Europe. Ralegh, with no apparent sense of the potential ambiguities of such an act, offers it as a moment of purity: a ceremonialized meeting of distinct societies, untainted by cultural or—thanks to his vigilance—sexual miscegenation. We know that native Americans were already long marked by commercial and political intercourse with Europeans.
⁵⁹
Here though, we meet exchange of a different order. True, Ralegh presents a highly specific contract embodying strategic and affective association between the English and the “Arromaia.” But this transaction also transcends such individualities, signaling a new transoceanic regime as human bodies circulate, securing the cultural and genetic hybridization that has become axiomatic in local discourse on modern Amazonia. It is one of the starting points for a complex history of institutionalization and counter appropriation that today is often figured too easily as a tragic endgame of cultural extinction. Topiawari sent several men to London: of these, two will later assist Ralegh with botanical experiments during his imprisonment in the Tower, and it seems plausible that a third is the Anthony Canabre who serves as Robert Harcourt's interpreter on the Oiapoque in 1609, returning to mediate between what are no longer two worlds.
⁶⁰

Yet, even such elaborate dialogue cannot guarantee communication. Ralegh had failed to hear what Topiawari was telling him. The Guianan requested a body of fifty armed men as defense against the Spanish. The
Englishman demurred, leaving just Sparrey and the sixteen-year-old Goodwin. The following year, when Lawrence Keymis sailed out to consolidate the alliance, he found that Topiawari had fled ahead of a small force of Berrio's men and was now dead. Compounding disaster, Berrio had established the fort of San Thomé on the strategic site of the old man's port, blockading the gateway to El Dorado.
⁶¹
This was the garrison where Wat Ralegh, the eldest son, would be killed under Keymis' command in 1618 and the reef upon which the El Dorado adventure was finally wrecked.

Perhaps it is useful here to recall Stephen Greenblatt's comment that the “overriding interest” of these chroniclers of New World encounters was “not knowledge of the other but practice upon the other.”
⁶²
Clearly, the separation is not so clean and, as I have emphasized, there are also reciprocities: local people were involved in a set of practices that were no less tied up in the political economy of exploration than were those of the Europeans whose invention it was. Yet, the emphasis on practice is rewarding. For Topiawari, practice on the other, however disadvantageous the terms, extended across the Atlantic to the Elizabethan Court. For Ralegh, it also stretched beyond Guiana to London, and, similarly, to the reception of
The Discoverie
in the chambers of state and the joint-stock companies. Both men knew that the return voyage carried the burden of the colonial future. However much he may elide the structural asymmetries, Ralegh infuses his text with this powerful intimation that, like himself, Topiawari and the other Guianan leaders are involved in a high-stakes game for personal and political survival. It is with a sense of ontological equivalence that he creates these recognizable Americans, as circumscribed by calculation and micropolitics as any Tudor courtier or statesman.

But this is shifting ground. And there is another, radically different language in which Ralegh tells the story of Guiana. It is, unmistakably, what Michel de Certeau has called “
writing that conquers
,” writing that uses the New World as “a blank, “savage” page on which Western desire will be written.”
⁶³
It is writing that draws the lines of difference and spells out their consequences. And it arrives most jarringly at the end of Ralegh's narrative in a vision of violation, a proposition that colors all that came before:

To conclude,
Guiana
is a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead, never sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth
hath not been torne, nor the vertue and salt of the soyle spent by manurance, the graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their Images puld down out of their temples.
⁶⁴

Complicated figures. But conventional also. George Chapman, in
De Guiana carmen Epicum
, his epic poem that commemorates Ralegh's first voyage, imagines the English conquerors with “their glad feet on smooth Guiana's breast.”
⁶⁵
For Lawrence Keymis, Guiana is also a woman, and similarly enticing, although no longer so innocent. Her lands “do prostitute themselves unto us,” he writes in his account of 1596, “like a faire and beautifull woman in the pride and floure of desired yeeres.”
⁶⁶

Sexual conquest was already a commonplace metaphor for colonial subjugation, drawing on the long-standing symbolic alignment of nature and the feminine.
⁶⁷
The figuring of Guiana as woman—in the context of the male expedition—extends the logic of contemporary gender relations, feminizing Guianan landscapes and Guianans, naturalizing the politics of dispossession. For the Elizabethan Englishman, it also has its more specific referent: an assertion of subject masculinity in an age of peculiar ambivalence.
⁶⁸
Ralegh's virgin Guiana, the site of his own sexual restraint, is a too-transparent metaphor for his virgin queen, and its symbolic violation at the close of his account can be read as a mark of his recent humiliations, a textual response to his banishment, wounded and nasty. His tone turns threatening, the wheedling diminishes. If Elizabeth is not willing to “invade and conquere”—to perform the rape in her own name—she will forfeit dominion to “men worthy to be kings thereof” who “will undertake it of themselves.”
⁶⁹
He resolves the ambivalence around his vaunted continence but in a manner dangerous and self-defeating. His parting shot becomes a further instance of
The Discoverie
's failure as a persuasive text. It strikes the wrong tone, as if he suspects the limits of his writerly powers and has tired of this game, as if he knows already that Elizabeth will not be seduced into supporting this extravagant American fantasy.