Meanwhile the Indians came to him every night with lamentable complaints of Berreo’s cruelty.  ’He had divided the island and given to every soldier a part.  He made the ancient Caciques that were lords of the court, to be their slaves.  He kept them in chains; he dropped their naked bodies with burning bacon, and such other torments, which’ (continues Raleigh) ’I found afterward to be true.  For in the city’ (San Josef), ’when I entered it, there were five lords, or little kings, in one chain, almost dead of famine, and wasted with torments.’  Considering which; considering Berreo’s treachery to Whiddon’s men; and considering also that as Berreo himself, like Raleigh, was just about to cross the gulf to Guiana in search of El Dorado, and expected supplies from Spain; ’to leave a garrison in my back, interested in the same enterprise, I should have savoured very much of the asse.’  So Raleigh fell upon the ‘Corps du Guard’ in the evening, put them to the sword, sent Captain Caulfield with sixty soldiers onward, following himself with forty more, up the Caroni river, which was then navigable by boats; and took the little town of San Josef.

It is not clear whether the Corps du Guard which he attacked was at Port of Spain itself, or at the little mud fort at the confluence of the Caroni and San Josef rivers, which was to be seen, with some old pieces of artillery in it, in the memory of old men now living.  But that he came up past that fort, through the then primeval forest, tradition reports; and tells, too, how the prickly climbing palm, {58} the Croc-chien, or Hook-dog, pest of the forests, got its present name upon that memorable day.  For, as the Spanish soldiers ran from the English, one of them was caught in the innumerable hooks of the Croc-chien, and never looking behind him in his terror, began shouting, ‘Suelta mi, Ingles!’ (Let me go, Englishman!)—­or, as others have it, ‘Valga mi, Ingles!’ (Take ransom for me, Englishman!)—­which name the palm bears unto this day.

So Raleigh, having, as one historian of Trinidad says, ’acted like a tiger, lest he should savour of the ass,’ went his way to find El Dorado, and be filled with the fruit of his own devices:  and may God have mercy on him; and on all who, like him, spoil the noblest instincts, and the noblest plans, for want of the ‘single eye.’

But before he went, he ’called all the Caciques who were enemies to the Spaniard, for there were some that Berreo had brought out of other countreys and planted there, to eat out and waste those that were natural of the place; and, by his Indian interpreter that he had brought out of England, made them understand that he was the servant of a Queene, who was the great Cacique of the North, and a virgin, and had more Caciques under her than there were trees in that island; and that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyranny and oppression, and that