Lord of Darkness Read online

  In those months I grew a liking for good red wine, I discovered the way of walking a deck without sprawling, I had my first real fight and gave better than I got, and, long overdue, I left my aching virginity in the belly of a dark-haired French whore. Thereafter I worried about the pox for days, without need. I found I could sleep well on hard planks and I came not to mind the drench of salt spray. My body hardened and my legs lengthened, and I told myself I was now a man, and the sound of that had a good ring in my ears. Betimes I imagined myself a thousand leagues from home, on my way to the Japans or Hispaniola or Terra Australis on a voyage that no one would ever forget. Well, and I was only plying a tub between England and France, ferrying wine.

  Nor did I even then think to make the sea my trade. For all my eagerness to straddle the globe and see strange lands and marvels and fill my purse with Spanish gold, my true and deepest notion was to set by some pounds and one day buy me the freehold of a farm, and marry and prosper, and live comfortably in hard work and the bosom of a family, reading books for pleasure and attending the plays betimes in London, like a gentleman. At the end of my year’s voyage I found I had set by not as much as I had expected—two shillings less than two pounds. But even that seemed a fair fortune for a lad of seventeen, and more than I could have earned ashore, for in those days a skilled workman—a thatcher, say—could hope for no more than seven and sixpence a week, out of which must come rent and clothing and food and all, and a young clerk hardly that much. So I went to sea again after two months at home.

  This time it was a farther voyage, to Flanders and Norway, and the year after that all the way to Russia aboard a vessel of the Muscovy Company, and a cold time I had of it then. But these journeys were making a complete sailor of me, for each time I did less clerking and more seamanship, and I was finding my way around the maps and charts, the compasses and leads, not because it was asked of me but because my curiosity led me to know at first hand what sort of trade my father and his son Thomas the pilot had plied. So the years of my early manhood went.

  In those years the Spaniards began once more to break the truce between their lands and ours, and the Queen sent Drake out to punish them with the loss of gold and silver. This was in 1577, and it was destined to become a voyage around the world, though that was not Drake’s first plan. My brother Henry was with him aboard his flagship, the Pelican, that Drake would rename The Golden Hind in mid-passage. My father, too, applied for command of another ship, the pinnace Christopher, but he was refused with thanks, on account of his age. I also would have gone, but my father would not let it, saying, “Thomas is dead and John is fled to Ireland and Henry sails with Drake, and I want one son for England.” I could have thwarted him in that, but I had no heart for it. He was suddenly old, and he did not so much forbid me as implore me, and how could I say him nay?

  So Henry Battell went with Drake through Magellan’s Strait and up to Valparaiso and on to loot the gold of Peru, and to unknown northern lands of horrid fog and cold, and out into the South Sea to the Spice Islands and Java and Africa, and home again in just short of three years, leaving his left arm behind, that had become inflamed by a poison dart on some tropic isle. In the meanwhile Andrew Battell sailed four times to Antwerp and thrice to Sweden and once to Genoa. Which I suppose is no small travelling, but hardly a patch on going to the Spice Islands or Java, and often I thought ruefully of Drake’s prediction of how far I should journey. Who could possibly go farther than Henry, who had encompassed the globe? But there is voyage outward and there is voyage inward, as I would learn, and my twenty years inward to the heart of African deviltry took me farther indeed than Drake himself could have gone, as I will relate.

  Yet I thought my sailing days were over by the time Drake and his men had come home. I was two-and-twenty, and by thrift and sweat I had earned my freehold, and I had my land and I had my wife. Her name was Rose Ullward of Plymouth, and she was small and dark, with sparkling eyes. I blush when I tell you that that is almost all I remember of her, save that she was a barmaid at the licensed house that her father kept by the docks. We lived as man and wife a year and some months. Together we went to Deptford that spring day in 1581 when Queen Bess made Francis Drake a knight; because my brother was a man of The Golden Hind, we were allowed on board, and I stood so close to the Queen that I could see the pockmarks on her cheek. She was a fine royal woman, quite tall and handsome, and I was almost weeping for being so near her. A great crowd attended on that day, so that the bridge laid from shore to the ship collapsed, and two hundred people were thrown into the Thames, though none was injured or drowned. I jumped in to save several, and Henry also, thrashing about valiantly with his one arm. Sir Francis embraced me as I shivered on deck afterward, and said, “I know you, fellow,” which amazed me, for he had met me only once and that many years before. But the men of my family have all had a single face, and he must have seen Henry on my features. It was a happy moment.

  Soon my Rose’s belly was swelling, which gave me joy but also fear, for I remembered how my mother had died with me in childbed. Such misplaced worry! In brooding about imagined perils we often fail to see the real foe stealing upon us. Three months before her time Rose took the smallpox, and perished swiftly of it, and my unborn child of course with her. In that same dark season my father died, of an apoplexy, in his sixty-third year.

  I have never known such bleakness. For the only time in my life all heart left me, all faith, all strength. I wandered as if in a dream, wifeless and fatherless and childless. In my foolish sorrow I turned to the taverns, and neglected my farm and drank up my savings and drank also the six pounds I inherited of my father, which is no small quantity of drinking, and in time everything was gone and the bailiffs came to tell me I had lost my land. Then did I sign on in Leigh as a clerk in the customs-house. I was barely four-and-twenty and thought of my life as almost ended, though in truth it had hardly begun.

  At the lowest ebb the tide turns. In the year 1586, after an interminable dreary time of this waking slumber, I came to my senses and looked about me and saw that the world was still beautiful, and I began to recover into life. I fell in love, I pledged myself to marry again, I began once again to amass the money to buy me a freehold; in short, the interruption of defeat and black dejection was put at an end for me. And out of these renewed hopes and ambitions I came by easy stages to take up my long-abandoned career at sea, for how else could I come quickly by the wealth I needed? And by one step and another I set myself all unknowingly on the path that would carry me far from home for so many years, to Africa, to the torments the Portugals laid upon me, to the royal courts of Kongo and the Angola, to the jungles of coccodrillos and elephantos and the broad plains spangled with zevveras and gazelles; I began my long journey to the side of that diabolical Jaqqa cannibal, Imbe Calandola, the incarnation of the Lord of Darkness, whose lieutenant I became and whose monstrous wisdom rings to this day in my soul like terrible discordant music.

  TWO

  HOW DID it happen? Why, I fell in love.

  Her name was Anne Katherine Sawyer. She was but fifteen. Her hair was golden, not mere yellow like mine but the golden gold of the gold of Ophir, and her skin was fair and her lips were sweet. She was the daughter of the registrar of customs. I had seen her about the place as a pretty child, and then one day I woke and saw she was a child no more, and I felt the blood coursing again in my veins, that had been slow and sluggish since the day my wife Rose closed her eyes. I strolled with Anne Katherine along the docks, I spoke with her of Antwerp and Muscovy, I told her of my brother, who had sailed with Drake, and my father, who had seized Spanish treasure at Nombre de Dios, and I touched her shoulder one day and her elbow the next and her hand after that, like a boy afraid of frightening his girl with overmuch forwardness.

  A bit of a coquette is what she was, and as things grew more urgent she held me lightly apart from her body when first I attempted her. But desire burns in woman as it does in man—let no fool tell you otherwise�
�and in time she yielded her maiden treasure to me, which was not a shameful thing, for I knew I would have her to be my wife. I gave her, for a token, the pearl on a beaded chain that I had had long ago from my brother. All the next day I was dizzied with the memory of my hands to her silken thighs and my lips to her round pale breasts, and the sound she made—soft, soft—when I went at last into her. And I dreamed of doing such things, night after night, all the nights of our life together.

  But first there was money to put by all over again and land to buy, perhaps even the same that I had earlier lost in my folly. And also it was unseemly to marry her so young, sixteen or seventeen being more fitting. I looked about for service on some merchantman, but there was little to be found, as times were hard then in England. Nor was there even piracy to turn to. God’s death! That was a terrible time for me, and no one to blame but myself.

  What brought me up out of despond was the mighty audacity and vacuity of King Philip, that sent the Armada of Spain against England in the summer of 1588. When our great captains gathered to meet that troublesome attempt—Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher and the rest—every seaman in the land was there to do the work, and there among them was I. If I had had my way I would have been on board Drake’s flagship Revenge, next to my brother Henry, but I was too obscure for that, and had my berth on a lesser though not contemptible vessel, the privateer Margaret and John, of two hundred tons and a pretty turn of speed.

  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.

  Not far south of the Canaries is the usual place for turning westward for the Atlantic crossing. We did not do that. Instead we clung to the coast of Guinea and rounded the great hump of Africa, as if Captain Cocke planned to take us to some destination other than Brazil. I know not why that was, whether it was sheer incompetence on his part, or honest error, or hope of encountering some treasure-ship of the Portugals in those waters.

  It was a bad time for us. We were becalmed, because we were too near the coast. For days we were driving to and fro without puff or wind. In this time most of our men fell sick of the scurvy by reason of the extreme heat of the sun, and the vapors of the night. From that misery I was spared, owing to my faith in God or more likely the strength of my frame, but it was hardly easy for me, standing double and triple watches, and going about among the sufferers to give them ease. We baked under the great yellow eye of fire above us. My skin was darkening as my brothers’ skin had, and I knew I would cut a swaggering figure with it in Essex now, but this was not Essex, and I felt as though I were turning to leather, fit only to bind books in. We ate little but salted meat and dried peas in those days.