A Stay of Shipping

by Walter Raleigh, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

John White came up the turret stair at Durham House with his paintings under his arm in a case of oiled canvas, and before he had his breath back he had the case open on my table and was weighting the corners of the first sheet with whatever lay nearest: my inkhorn, the brass head of a cross-staff, a candlestick, and the lump of Cornish tin I keep there to remind me what I am Lord Warden of.

"You have seen these," he said.

"I have seen them."

"See them again."

It was the last evening of March, in the year of our Lord 1588, and the tide was making. From the turret you can hear the Thames work against the water-stairs below, a sound like a man chewing slowly, and you can see the whole bend of the river from the Bridge round to Lambeth, with the wherries putting their lanterns out one after another as the light goes. I have sat in that room through a good many evenings for the sake of the view. I chose the house for it. A man who must live at court had better keep one window that looks somewhere else.

The sheet under my candlestick was the village of Secotan. I knew it as I know my own hand: the long houses roofed with mats, the walk between them, the fields of maize at three heights, one sown, one green, one ripe, so that a man looking at it understands at once that the country gives three harvests while Devon gives one. I had shown that sheet to the Queen. I had shown it to Walsingham, and to three aldermen of London who between them put up nine hundred pounds, and to a Bristol merchant who put up nothing but went away thinking. It had earned its keep. White had painted it to show what was there. I had used it to show what could be.

He lifted it off and laid the next: the flying fish, the land crab, the loggerhead turtle with its plates done in a green he had ground himself. Then the men of Pomeiooc at their fire. Then the conjurer with the bird bound in his hair.

"Master White," I said. "I know the inventory."

"Then you know what you are leaving there."

He has a painter's hands and a governor's temper, and the second has never fitted the first. He came back to England in November, by way of Ireland, in a fly-boat that had been beaten off its course by every wind the Atlantic owns. He had been sent home by his own colonists to fetch their supplies. They had begged him to go, he told me, because he was the only man among them whose word would open doors in London, and he had gone believing them, and every week since he has been learning what his word is worth in London without mine beside it.

He laid down the last sheet but one. It was the wife of a chief man of Pomeiooc, standing, her arms folded high; and beside her a girl of perhaps eight or ten years, naked but for a little apron, holding up in her two hands a doll.

It was an English doll. White had painted it exactly: the stiff farthingale, the ruff, the little painted face with its red mouth. Some sailor of the first voyage had given it to the child, and she held it up toward the painter as children hold up anything they have been given, to have it admired.

"I had forgotten that," I said, which was not true.

"Eleanor's girl will be eight months old on the eighteenth of next month," said White.

I had not forgotten that either.

---

I will set down here what I knew that night, since a man's accounts are no use to him unless they are kept honestly in the private book, whatever goes into the public one.

In July of last year White put a hundred and more men, women and children ashore on Roanoke Island. They were not meant to be there. They were meant for the Bay of Chesapeake, where there is deep water and good ground and nothing of the bad blood that our first company left behind it among the people round Roanoke. The pilot, Simon Fernandes, would not carry them farther. He had his own business with the Spanish shipping and the summer was going, and he set them down at the old fort and stood off. White will tell you this at any table you seat him at, and he is not wrong, and it is no use to him.

They are incorporated. I did that. They are the Governor and Assistants of the City of Raleigh in Virginia, under my hand and seal, with a coat of arms granted by the heralds: a red cross, a roebuck, my own fusils. There is a city with my name upon it on the far side of the ocean, and I have never stood in it, and as matters go I am not likely to. That is what the Queen intends. She keeps her Captain of the Guard at the door of her privy chamber, where she can see him. She does not lend him to Virginia.

On the eighteenth of August, White's daughter Eleanor, the wife of Ananias Dare, was brought to bed of a girl, and they christened her Virginia. Nine days later White sailed for England. He left behind his daughter, his granddaughter, his armour, his books, and the pictures he had not yet finished, packed in chests and buried against the damp.

Before he sailed they had agreed between them that if the company moved from Roanoke, as they spoke of moving fifty miles into the main, they would carve the name of the place they had gone to on a tree or a post at the fort; and if they went in distress, they would cut a cross above the name. White told me this the first night he was back. He has told me twice since. It is the one fact he can hold.

Here is the rest of it. Since the winter Sir Richard Grenville has been fitting a fleet at Bideford for the relief: seven or eight sail, victualled, the men pressed and paid. My money, a good part of it. My money and the wine licence's money, which is to say the money of every vintner in England who wants to keep his door open, which is to say the Queen's grace turned into coin and the coin turned into biscuit and cordage. I have never been ashamed of that chain. Every link holds.

And two days since, the Lords of the Council sent down a letter to Bideford that every ship of force in the western ports should stay in harbour and hold herself ready for Sir Francis Drake at Plymouth. The King of Spain has a fleet at Lisbon such as the world has not seen. The Duke of Parma has an army on the Flanders shore and is building flat boats to bring it over. No ship that can carry a gun goes to Virginia this spring. That is the stay of shipping. I sat at the Council board when it was spoken of, and I did not speak against it.

---

White went down at last to get his supper, leaving the paintings on my table. I did not put them away. I lit a pipe of the Virginia leaf, which Master Harriot assures me clears the head of rheums and which I find clears it of company, and I sat with the sheets and with the other papers, and I did the arithmetic.

There are three things a man in my place can do with a crisis. He can stand aside from it and be forgotten. He can stand in the way of it and be broken. Or he can put himself inside it so completely that whatever comes of it comes partly through his hands.

If I went to the Queen in the morning and asked her to release Grenville's fleet for Virginia, I knew what she would hear. She would hear a young man with a private venture asking her to weaken the west in the month when Spain is coming. She would hear that I had weighed a hundred colonists against the realm and come down on the side of the colonists, which is to say on the side of my own name carved on a city. Worse than that, she would hear that I had not understood. She forgives a great deal in a man who has understood. I have watched her do it. I have watched her forgive Leicester things that would hang another man, because when the matter is grave he knows what it is. I have not had thirty years to prove that I know. I have perhaps six, and the Captaincy only since last summer, and there are men at that court who are counting the days until she tires of me as a man counts days to Michaelmas.

And yet I would not let the colony go, either. That is not sentiment. A planting that is abandoned in its first year is not a planting; it is a shipwreck with a charter. If they are left, every merchant who put up a pound for Virginia will tell every merchant he knows that Raleigh's Virginia is a hole to throw money into, and the next fleet will not be fitted, and the Spaniard will have the whole coast of America from the Florida channel to the Newfoundland fishing as surely as if Parma had landed at Margate. A colony is an argument, and an argument must be kept alive, or it is lost not once but for twenty years.

So the question was not whether to ask. The question was what I could ask for that would cost her nothing to grant.

I looked at the list from Bideford. Grenville had seven ships of force, and beside them two small pinnaces, the Brave and the Roe, neither of them worth a gun to Drake, neither of them a ship the Council would miss or even trouble to name. Too small for a fleet. Too small, if I am honest, for the voyage. But two pinnaces can carry a dozen planters and a hold of meal and powder, and a governor who knows the coast, and word that they are not forgotten. And a pinnace that goes is better than a fleet that stays.

Then the other side of the ledger. If I asked for the little ships, I must give her the great ones, and give them with both hands, so that she remembered the giving and not the asking. Grenville's seven sail to Drake at Plymouth, at once and gladly. The trained bands of Cornwall mustered and the beacons looked to, since I am her Lieutenant there. The best ship I ever owned she has already: she bought the Ark of me a year since, and Lord Howard flies his flag in her, and I have taken care that she knows I was glad to sell. So it must be the purse. The wine licence's next quarter, every penny, toward the victualling of Grenville's ships when they come into Plymouth, so that Drake should have them fed and not merely counted.

I sat a long while over that last line. Then I wrote it in.

It was close on midnight. The tide had turned. Below me the water had stopped chewing and begun to draw off, with that long sound of the ebb pulling through the piles. I put the paintings back in their case one by one, in the order White keeps them, and when I came to the woman of Pomeiooc and her daughter I did not put that sheet in the case. I rolled it by itself and tied it with a ribbon.

---

The Queen was at Greenwich. I had the door that morning, which is to say I stood where I stand most mornings, in the long gallery before the privy chamber, in the coat of the Guard, with forty yeomen at my back and every man in England who wanted something passing under my eye. A good door-keeper learns more in a week than a secretary in a year. He learns who comes early and who comes twice. He learns who has been sent for and who has only hoped. That morning there were three gentlemen from the Cinque Ports with a petition about pressed mariners, Lord Howard's man with a letter from the fleet, and a Portuguese who said he was a physician and plainly was not. I let Howard's man in first. One does not keep the Lord Admiral waiting in the year of the Armada, and she would ask me afterward whom I had kept waiting and why.

She called for me a little after ten.

She was at a table by the window, with the Lisbon intelligence spread in front of her and her reading-glass in her hand, and she did not look up. I knelt. She let me kneel a little longer than usual. I have learned to read that, too.

"Grenville's ships," she said.

"Are at Your Majesty's service, Madam, and should have been at Plymouth already if my lords had asked me sooner. I have written to Sir Richard to sail on the first wind." This was true. The letter had gone at six, by my own man, before I had so much as shaved. "And their victualling, Madam, out of the wine licence, if Your Majesty will allow it. I would not have them come into Plymouth hungry."

Now she looked up. She has a way of looking at a gift that weighs it, the wood and the gilding separately, and I had made very sure that this one was solid through.

"You are generous with your ships this morning, Captain. And with my vintners."

"They are Your Majesty's ships, Madam, and Your Majesty's vintners. I have only been keeping them warm."

That got something at the corner of her mouth, which was as much as I had a right to. She asked me about the beacons in Cornwall, and I told her, and about the musters at Bodmin, and I told her that too, and what powder was wanting and where it could be had, and I did not hurry, because a man who hurries to the end of his business is a man with other business. When she had what she wanted she set down the glass.

"And?" she said.

I had the roll inside my coat. I took it out and untied the ribbon and laid it on the table beside the Lisbon papers, and held the corners flat with my two hands, since I did not dare weight them with anything of hers.

She knew the painting. She had seen it two years before, with the others. But she had seen it then as she sees a jewel that is offered to her, all at once and for its whole value. This time I put my finger by the child.

"The doll, Madam," I said. "It was given to her by a mariner of the first voyage. She had no use for it that her people could have taught her. She wanted it because it was English. That is a market. That is a whole nation that will want what England makes, before ever Spain has taught them to want what Spain makes. And it is a market that will go to whoever is there."

"Who is there?"

"A hundred and some of Your Majesty's subjects, Madam. In my city. Waiting for word."

She looked at the doll for a long time. I do not know what she saw. I know what I meant her to see, and I know that I am not the only man who has ever meant her to see something and found out later that she had seen something else.

"No ship of force leaves the west this spring," she said.

"No ship of force, Madam. I would not ask it. There are two pinnaces at Bideford that Lord Howard could not use if he had them. The Brave and the Roe. They can carry Master White and a dozen planters and a hold of victual, and come home in the autumn, before any of this is decided one way or the other."

"Two boats."

"Two small boats, Madam."

She rolled the painting up herself, which I had not expected, and held it out to me, and when I reached for it she did not at once let go.

"Two boats," she said, "and you will not ask me again for Virginia until the Duke of Parma has gone home."

"I will not, Madam."

She let go of the painting.

---

White had been waiting for me since dawn at the Greenwich water-stairs, which I had told him not to do. He was standing on the lowest step with the tide over his shoes, as though he would have walked down the river to Bideford if I had come out of the palace shaking my head.

I told him. I watched him count it: two pinnaces where he had looked for seven ships; a dozen souls where he had meant to carry a hundred; meal and powder where he had meant cattle and seed corn and a smith. I watched him put his own anger on one side of the scale and his granddaughter on the other.

"When?" he said.

"As soon as they can be victualled. Grenville will see to it. I have written."

"It is not enough."

"No," I said. "It is what there is."

He might have said a good deal then. He had the right. He might have said that a city does not need a coat of arms, it needs bread; that I sat warm in a turret over the Thames and spent his daughter like a wager. I believe he had the words ready. I watched them come up in him and go down again, because he is not a fool, and because he knew as well as I did that there was no other door in England he could have come through.

I gave him back the woman of Pomeiooc and her daughter, rolled and tied. He took it without looking at it and put it inside his coat, against his chest, with the rest of his business.

Then he went down the last step into the waiting wherry, and the waterman pushed off, and I stood on the stair in the coat of the Guard and watched the boat go out into the ebb, small and low and dark, steering west.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem tertium decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (20 October 2026), ā Gualterō Raleghō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Walter Raleigh, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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