"Alsoomse and Wanchese" Scenes

Chapter 25, Pages 255-257

 

Thomas Harriot stood on the starboard side of the Dorothy’s quarterdeck watching beneath its furled sails the Bark Raleigh one hundred rods ahead being towed by oarsmen in long boats toward the narrow exit of Sutton Pool. Ebb tide had begun, the bells of St. Andrew’s having minutes before struck two o’clock. Ushered similarly through the thirty yard passageway into Plymouth Sound, the Dorothy would join its companion ship, unfurl its sails, and begin the two to three-month journey to Bahia de Santa Maria, somewhere between Spanish Florida and Norumbega. The sky was clear, the breeze gentle. The colors of the multiplicity of craft in the large inlet pool of water -- between the mouths of the Tamar and Plym Rivers -- and the colors of the shops along the streets of the Barbican connoted extemporaneous celebration.

Raleigh’s protracted project had begun.

How many evenings he had spent educating himself in the popular taverns here carousing with the port’s numerous ship masters and captains! He and Raleigh’s “gentlemen travelers” – he one of them -- had spent the past two nights in these same taverns awaiting departure. April 27, 1584, etched in his brain, to be etched, he fervently wished, in history!

The painter John White joined him at the gunwale. They watched silently the Bark Raleigh float through the narrow exit way, the side of its three-story square blockhouse a scant twenty yards from the ship’s starboard rigging.

“What would our patron say if the ebb current and those wherries pulling us took our starboard spars into the blockhouse?” White muttered.

“Would you draw a picture of it?” Harriot answered, grinning at the deck.

“I will need to husband my allotment of paper. Better subjects many longitudes beyond wait to be replicated.”

Harriot half-turned. “I have seen your painting of the savage that Frobisher brought back in 1576 and the woman and child from the 1577 expedition. I have been wanting to ask you about them.”

“Ask.”

“What … did you see? Are these people so behindhand as to be mentally deficient? I do not know what to expect.”

White leaned against the gunwale, his long coat bending near his right hip. “I saw human beings, who think, who suffer, who in our presence sought of hide human emotion.”

“What was their sense of us, as best you could tell?”

White moved his left foot ahead of his right. He looked across the deck where another gentleman traveler, Benjamin Wood, was scrutinizing the left side of the narrow exit. “I wish there had been some way besides the use of gestures and facial expressions to communicate. What they thought and felt I can only imagine.”

“What did you think they felt?”

“Fear. Despair. Resignation. We uprooted them, Harriot. We took them to London as specimens! What they could have told us, if they had survived and learned our language!”