Lord of Darkness Read online

  So I lived three or four days alone. Again I tried to bury the dead, but the earth ashore was hard and full of rock, and at the beach the sand slipped and fell about as I dug it, so that I could not make graves. I would have tied rocks to the men and buried them in the sea, but I had no cords for tying, and it seemed un-Christian merely to push them into the water, where they would float and bloat in the surf and be eaten by vermin. So I did nothing, except feel shame that I left them unburied. The stink of them became noisome and the sight of them was a reproach, so I moved on around the edge of the island and passed by a fair river that ran into the sea.

  Here I thought to make my abode because of the fresh water. But I had not been there scarce the space of half a quarter of an hour, but I saw a great thing come out of the water, with great scales on the back, with great ugly claws and a long tail. I knew it not, though later I would learn that it is the animal known as the coccodrillo, or in some parts called the allagardo.

  This monster put me into a fright close to perishing. It came toward me and I would not flee, nay, could not, but strangely went and met it, as though drawn by sorcery. When I came near it I stood still, amazed to see so monstrous a thing before me. It was like a diabolus, a mage, something from Hell come to fetch me, and I yielded utterly to its malign power. Hereupon this beast seemed to smile, and opened his mouth, and thrust out a long tongue like a harpoon. I commended myself to God, and thought there to be torn in pieces, but the creature turned again and went into the river. And I burst out into laughter, not that I saw any jest, but only the deep jest that is the frailty of our flesh, the ease with which at any moment our bodies may be parted from our souls.

  The next day I walked farther around the island, fearing to tarry in that place, and I found a great whale lying on the shore like a ship with the keel upwards, all covered with a kind of short moss from the long lying there. As I examined this marvel a familiar voice cried out, “Andy, for the love of Jesus!” It was Thomas Torner, who had made his camp on the whale’s far flank.

  An immensity of joy rose in me at the sight of him, for he gave me hope that I might escape this place, which would not be easy for two but was well nigh impossible for one. We embraced like brothers.

  “I feared I was left alone,” I told him.

  “Nay, there are several of us,” said Torner, and led me around the whale’s heavy flukes. “Look ye,” he said, and I beheld three others of our company, Richard Jennings and Richard Fuller and one other whose name the years have washed from my memory. These men had been in divers separate places at the moment of the Indian attack and each had fled a different way into the forest, and one by one had come together here. “God’s wounds,” cried Richard Jennings, a great burly man half as high as an oak tree, “Do you know, Battell, that we were betrayed and abandoned by Cocke the cockless, and will live the rest of our lives among these crabs and other insects?”

  “Aye,” I replied, “I know of our betrayal, for I saw the ship depart. But as to the second part I say you nay, friend. I think we will see England again.”

  “Do you now? Will dolphins carry us there?”

  “God will provide. And if He do not, we must provide for ourselves, or indeed these crabs will be our neighbors forever. Are there others of us here?”

  “Just we four,” said Torner, “and you are the fifth. I think there are no others in the part of the island behind us. Were there more in your direction?”

  “Only six dead men, rotting and unburied on the beach. But five of us are enough to build a boat and take it to the mainland,” I said, and explained my plan of capturing a Portuguese pinnace in Santos and using it to cross the ocean by small hops and skips and jumps. They listened intently and without scoffing. Fuller was a carpenter’s mate, which gave us a great advantage in this project. We spoke of searching for a fallen tree, and hollowing it for our hull, and such things, and as we talked I understood that I had silently been elected the leader of these men. It surprised me greatly, for I had only a deckhand’s skills and had never held authority of any sort, indeed had in some ways been cramped and diminished by being the youngest of so many brothers. But that counted for nothing here. I was thirty years of age, and strong of body, and such failings or smallnesses of spirit that might have afflicted me in youth were unknown to my companions and had no bearing. I think also it was my determination to reach England again that gleamed like a beacon out of my soul, and gave them courage, and had them turn to me; for until I came upon them, these four had been concerned only with finding food and shelter, and had given no thought to a plan of recovery.

  We lunched on the meat of the whale, which was still unspoiled though not much to my liking, and talked long and earnestly of our strategies, and afterward we commenced a search for wood with which to build our craft. Whether we would have fulfilled this project is a question I can never answer, but I tell you that the planning of it gave us hope, without which life would have been cruel indeed for us. An ocean separated me from my Anne Katherine. A tropic sun burned my skin. Buzzing things hovered in clouds, and bit and stung. Nightmare creatures dwelled in the rivers and could march upon us in any moment. Yet I did not despair, for what use has despair? And my strength became the strength of the others. I talked of schemes that even I knew were sheer madness, and made them sound plausible. The one I most clearly remember was a notion of journeying up the whole coast of this southern America, and from isle to isle in the West Indies, and northward aye to Virginia, where Walter Ralegh had founded a colony on Roanoke Island. In my mind that distance was not so great, although in fact it is nigh as far as sailing to Africa, and we would be in enemy waters all the way. But the idea, rash or not, sustained us for a few days. And in the end the rashness of it mattered not at all, since we never had a chance to put it in practice, owing to the return of the Indians to the island.

  They came upon us as stealthy as cats. A canoe laden with them landed on the west side of our island, and they made their way through the woods and emerged out of the mists of dawn, surrounding us in a ring with drawn bows. Their bows were long and black and their arrows long also, with heads of sharpened cane, and they would have skewered us wonderfully had we given any resistance. But to resist was folly. These Indians were naked, and some were painted in quarters with their paints, others by halves, and others all over, like a tapestry. They all had their lips pierced; some had bones in them, though many had not. All were shaven to above the ears; likewise their eyelids and eyelashes were shaven. All their foreheads were painted with black paint from temple to temple, so that it seemed they were wearing a ribbon round them two inches wide. Their chieftain spoke to us in jabber, or so it seemed, “Umma thumma hoola hay,” and words like that, which he repeated five or seven times.

  Torner said to me, “You have the knack of languages, Andy. Tell him we mean no harm, that we are enemies of the Portugals, and hope to be friends of his folk.”

  “Shall I say it in umma and thumma?” I asked.

  The chief spoke again. I tried to imitate it, though learning a language at the point of an arrow is wondrously ticklish. We might have spoken nonsense back and forth at each other all morning, until they lost patience and slew us, but then the chief said a few words in unmistakable Portuguese, and the words were, “You come with us.”

  To my comrades I said, “These are tame Indians, that belong to the Portugals, I think. We will not be slain, but I think will be made slaves.”

  “Better to be slain,” muttered Richard Jennings.

  “Nay,” I said, “dead men never escape, but lie dead forever. Slavery is less permanent. And these Indians do but save us the trouble of getting ourselves to Santos.”

  So the Indians took us over to the mainland in their canoe, a boat that they had made of a whole tree. When we came to the shore of that place we saw a town of some hundreds of people, very silent, and out of the silence we heard the ringing of a bell. “It must be Sunday,” said Torner, and we all spat, for we knew by that be
ll that the Portugals were at their Mass, and at that same instant the friar was holding up the bread of sacrament before the people for them to worship it. So it was, for the Indians marched us right to the church, and would have thrust us clear inside. But a Portugal in leather breeches came out and forbade it, saying, “You may not enter. You are not Christians.”

  I translated that for the others and high color came to Richard Fuller’s face and he cried, “I would not enter that building even to shit in it!” and such. The Portugal, I think, understood some English, or else he knew the essence of Fuller’s words from his tone, for his eyes grew very cold and he took from his neck a heavy crucifix of silver, and put it in front of Richard Fuller’s mouth and commanded him to kiss it. I knew what Fuller was apt to do, and I began to say, “Have care,” but it was too late, for Fuller had already gathered in his mouth a gob of spittle and let it fly over the image of Jesus and the Portugal’s hand. Whereupon the Portugal took his silver idol and struck it across Richard Fuller’s mouth to split his lips and break his teeth and send blood into his beard, and then thrust its end into Richard Fuller’s gut so hard that the man retched and puked; and then he waved his hand and the Indians took Fuller away toward some trees behind the town. We never saw him again. I could not then believe that one European would have another one slain in this strange land for mere disrespect for a Popish idol, except perhaps a Spaniard might, but I thought higher of the Portugals. So I believed they only had Fuller kept in solitary confinement to punish him for impiety. But since those days I have seen much of the world and its cruelties, and I now know that blood is shed for even more trivial reasons, sometimes for no reasons at all, by Portugals and Spaniards and French and Dutch and everyone else, and even an Englishman is capable of murdering a man for a fancied or real slight to his religion, though perhaps he would hold court on him first. Did not King Henry have a man’s head struck off for eating meat on Fridays, and others for denying certain tenets of the Creed, and did not Queen Mary burn good Protestants like roasting-oxen for speaking out against the Pope? I think this is not the way of Jesus, but it is the way of princes and men, and not uncommon.

  The rest of us they made captive in the cellar of a storehouse for a few days, chaining our wrists and ankles with manacles, and letting us eat by giving us bowls of the mashed root called manioc, that we had to lick with our tongues like dogs. The governor of that place came to us and spoke with me, asking why we were intruding in the territory of the Portugals, were we spies or only pirates, to which I made reply that we were settlers going to the Virginia colony, blown far off course and shipwrecked in the Brazils. “So you will be,” he said, “shipwrecked a long while in the Brazils.”

  I think he wanted no part of us, for very shortly a sloop arrived at Santos and took us off to a larger town that the Portugals had built to the north, in the mouth of the river called the Rio de Janeiro. On this journey we passed the Ilha Grande, where Cocke had left the Dolphin, and saw no trace of it. In the Rio de Janeiro we remained four months. Here there were two things of importance, a Jesuit college and a great sugar-mill on an isle called the Island of the Governor. Jennings and the other man were sent to be servants at the College of Jesus, I suppose swabbing the floors so the friars would not soil their robes when they knelt, and Torner and I were turned out to the sugar-mill. I know not which pair of us fared worse, those that slaved for the Popish scholars or those that broke their backs to feed that mill: I dare say Torner and I suffered greater pain of the body, and the other two a larger pain of the soul. But we had no chance to compare notes, because after we were separated I never encountered the other two afterward, and for all I know they are still there, maybe Jesuits themselves by this time, old and bowed and fluent in Latin and skilled at singing the Mass, God pity them.

  For me it was an education of a different kind. They had me on a bark going day and night up and down for sugar canes and wood for the mill. I had neither meat nor clothes, but as many blows as a galley-slave would receive, and Torner as well. We talked daily of escape, but there was little chance of that, the mill being on an island and the surrounding waters said to be full of man-eating fishes. We were desperate enough before long to risk testing if that were true, except that the case seemed hopeless, there being nowhere safe to flee. The Portugals had enslaved certain tribes of Indians and made them do their bidding, but a little way beyond the town the Indians were wild, and they too were man-eaters. Cannibal fishes by sea and cannibal men by land: prudence argued that we stay awhile where we were, since we were only being beaten, which is less barbarous a fate than being eaten.

  I know not whether the warm and gentle waters of that estuary indeed do hold man-eating fishes, but of the cannibal Indians I have no doubt. In the second month of my captivity I and Torner and a dozen Portugal soldiers were despatched inland a short way, to collect timber of a certain rare kind, and we were set upon by a tribe called the Taymayas or Tamoyas, who are the most heated enemies the Portugals have in these parts. They tethered us and carried us away deeper into the forest, and a Portugal named Antonio Fernandes said to me, “Make your peace with your God, for these people mean to eat us at their festival.” We were kept in their village, near a river full of allagardos and huge serpents, and other strange beasts. I recall one as big as a bear, and like a bear in the body, but with a nose of a yard long, and a fair great tail all black and gray. This beast puts his tongue through ant-hills, and when the ants are all upon his tongue, he swallows them up. Torner said, “And can you find such joy in monsters, when you are about to die?”

  I made answer: “I live all my life as though I am about to die, and find such joy meanwhile as I can. And you and I are too stringy and tough from our labor to make good meals. They will dine on the Portugals first.”

  In sooth I could not credit that men could have a taste for the flesh of other men. The more fool I, for this world is full of cannibals that happily devour all they can hold, as I have come to know better now than any Englishman who ever lived. But I was right in one thing, that these Taymayas would eat the Portugals first. Their devilish feast began that night. The Indians came to us and selected the most plump of the Portugals, who cried out, “Jesu Maria!” and other such things, and called upon the saints. He could just as well have called upon the trees, or the allagardos in the river. They drew him forward by his rope and a lusty young man came behind him and struck him two terrible blows with a club, cracking open his skull and killing him. Then they took the tooth of some beast and unseamed his skin, and held him by the head and the feet over their fire, rubbing him with their hands, until the outer skin came off.

  I watched this thinking I was in a dream, and thinking also that at this same moment my Anne Katherine was quietly reading a book, and the great Queen Elizabeth might be sitting with her courtiers, and actors are on the stage of the Globe, speaking the lines of a play, that is, there is a civilized world somewhere that knows nothing of these matters, and here is Andrew Battell of Leigh in Essex sitting in a wild jungle watching a plump young Portugal being trussed for dinner. Truly this was no dream, and never did I feel further from the world into which I had been born than in this first episode of great horror, which by God I wish had been my last.

  They took from him his head and gave it to their chief, and then the entrails to the women, after which they jointed him joint by joint, first hands, then elbows, and so all the body. After which, they sent to every house a piece; then they fell a-dancing, and all the women brought forth a great store of wine. And later they boiled every joint in a great pot of water, and made a broth of it. I witnessed all these things in such shock and disgust that I thought I would die of it. For the space of three days the Indians did nothing but dance and drink, day and night. After that they killed another Portugal in the same manner as the first. But they did not get to enjoy his bounty, because a rescue party of Portugal troops burst upon the village just then with muskets blazing, and set us free.

  Free, aye, but
for me it was only the freedom to escape the dinner-pot, for they had me swiftly back at the mill slaving like a weary mule. Torner beside me said, “I almost regret being saved, for that was a quick death, and this is a living hell that may engulf us for fifty years.” And then he smiled and said, “Nay, Andrew, spare me your talk of preferring life to death at any cost. I know you too well by now, your stubbornness, your perseverance, your faith that all will end happily.”

  “Would you truly rather have died, then?” I asked.

  “Nay, I think not,” he said, and we went back to our toil.

  But though I never yielded to despair, yet did I feel it nibbling at my soul, for the weeks were passing and I longed for England and Anne Katherine and the cool gray skies and the clear sweet streams that were not all deadly with coccodrillos and the like. Why, it must be spring in England now, I thought, April or May of the year 1590, the land greening and the flowers bursting, and I am here in a land that knows no winter, a slave, and unto what purpose? A year of my life had passed away from England: how I lamented that!

  A year of my life! Yet my captivity was only beginning.

  In our fourth month at the Rio de Janeiro a Jesuit friar came to Torner and me, one who spoke some English, and said, “Will you embrace our faith, and come to our Mass?”

  I did not strike him, as another man might. I did not spit. I did not cry out that the Catholic faith is treason to England and I was no traitor. I am not excitable in that way. Though I felt all these things, I said only, “I would not. We have our own English faith, and we prefer it, for it is the only consolation we have just now.”