Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 929 pages of information about Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth.

Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 929 pages of information about Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth.

So Ayacanora went home to Burrough, and Raleigh the Indian to Sir Richard’s house.  The entry of his baptism still stands, crooked-lettered, in the old parchment register of the Bideford baptisms for 1587-3: 

     “Raleigh, a Winganditoian:  March 26.”

His name occurs once more, a year and a month after: 

     “Rawly, a Winganditoian, April 1589.”

But it is not this time among the baptisms.  The free forest wanderer has pined in vain for his old deer-hunts amid the fragrant cedar woods, and lazy paddlings through the still lagoons, where water-lilies sleep beneath the shade of great magnolias, wreathed with clustered vines; and now he is away to “happier hunting-grounds,” and all that is left of him below sleeps in the narrow town churchyard, blocked in with dingy houses, whose tenants will never waste a sigh upon the Indian’s grave.  There the two entries stand, unto this day; and most pathetic they have seemed to me; a sort of emblem and first-fruits of the sad fate of that worn-out Red race, to whom civilization came too late to save, but not too late to hasten their decay.

But though Amyas lay idle, England did not.  That spring saw another and a larger colony sent out by Raleigh to Virginia, under the charge of one John White.  Raleigh had written more than once, entreating Amyas to take the command, which if he had done, perhaps the United States had begun to exist twenty years sooner than they actually did.  But his mother had bound him by a solemn promise (and who can wonder at her for asking, or at him for giving it?) to wait at home with her twelve months at least.  So, instead of himself, he sent five hundred pounds, which I suppose are in Virginia (virtually at least) until this day; for they never came back again to him.

But soon came a sharper trial of Amyas’s promise to his mother; and one which made him, for the first time in his life, moody, peevish, and restless, at the thought that others were fighting Spaniards, while he was sitting idle at home.  For his whole soul was filling fast with sullen malice against Don Guzman.  He was losing the “single eye,” and his whole body was no longer full of light.  He had entered into the darkness in which every man walks who hates his brother; and it lay upon him like a black shadow day and night.  No company, too, could be more fit to darken that shadow than Salvation Yeo’s.  The old man grew more stern in his fanaticism day by day, and found a too willing listener in his master; and Mrs. Leigh was (perhaps for the first and last time in her life) seriously angry, when she heard the two coolly debating whether they had not committed a grievous sin in not killing the Spanish prisoners on board the galleon.

It must be said, however (as the plain facts set down in this book testify), that if such was the temper of Englishmen at that day, the Spaniards had done a good deal to provoke it; and were just then attempting to do still more.

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Westward Ho!, or, the voyages and adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the county of Devon, in the reign of her most glorious majesty Queen Elizabeth from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.