At Nombre de Jesus, Andrés de Viedma decided that anything was better than the inexpressibly bleak and wind-swept Patagonian steppes, and took his 200 or so souls to Rey Don Felipe, which from Sarmiento's accounts should at least offer them better shelter and more varied resources. They reached the town in August 1584, in the depths of winter, and were soon disillusioned: the forests and the beaches could support the small bands of Indians, habituated to the climate and with generations of experience in hunting and gathering; but not a large body of civilised men bewildered in their new and savage environment. In despair, Viedma sent 200 of them to make their way back to Nombre de Jesus, virtually a sentence of death on these prisoners of starvation: they were instructed to keep a close watch for any ships that might pass.… The rest waited at Rey Don Felipe. They waited through winter and the next summer; in the autumn of 1585 Viedma and his sixty or so survivors built two boats and set out for Nombre de Jesus. One boat was soon wrecked, though all in it were saved; Viedma took twenty men back to Rey Don Felipe, telling the rest to live as best they could along the beach. When summer returned he collected the survivors: all told fifteen men and three women. Towards the end of 1586 this handful set off eastwards again, with the aimless aim of reaching Nombre de Jesus:[27] the way was dotted with the bodies of those sent off on the same track two years before.
Off Terceira, Sarmiento had managed to throw overboard his papers and charts, but his rank was betrayed by his pilot. So notable a captive was received in England with honour. The English ships belonged to Walter Raleigh, prisoner and gaoler were kindred spirits, and it is very likely that Raleigh's obsession with El Dorado owed much to their long and friendly conversations. Far distant- 275 -from his Governorship, in more than a merely geographical sense, the Captain-General was received by Burghley, Howard of Effingham, and Elizabeth herself: he plumed himself on his conduct of an hour and half of Latin discourse with the heretic monarch, discourse so important and confidential that it could be reported only verbally to the King in person. He was soon released, in October 1586, without ransom, but charged with an ambiguous personal message from Raleigh to Philip, and almost certainly with peace feelers from Elizabeth herself.
He had a long conference with Parma, Philip's Governor in the Netherlands, and then set off, with Elizabeth's passport, across France: Viedma's remnant was probably nerving itself for the hopeless trek to Nombre de Jesus. And then, in a wayside tavern near Bordeaux, he was snapped up by a band of Huguenot partisans. This time his captivity was not to be as elegant as that in Raleigh's hands: eventually he was confined in a foul dungeon, where he lost teeth and hair, all the time negotiating for his ransom—a double haggle, with his captors and Philip's bureaucracy—and pleading for succours to be sent to his colony. At last Treasury agreed to advance the money—but only as a deduction from the considerable debt on the colony's account which was owed to Sarmiento by the Crown.
He was freed, broken in health and fortune, in October 1589; two years later the ‘singular grandeza’ of the King, and the liberal hand for which Sarmiento thanked him (perhaps not without irony), had not got round to settling his accounts. He had a fruitless interview with Philip, and then, like Quiros, entered on the dreary course of submitting memorial after memorial, moving but useless, crying out for the rescue of his colonists. The year after the Invincible Armada's shattered return was no time to put forward projects which could only weaken Spain in the main theatre of war; and in fact the non-decision had already been taken. In December 1586 Philip had asked three of his advisers what should be done: he had ordered two ships from Peru (we hear no more of these), should he send two from Spain? Only Santa Cruz approved; Medina Sidonia more realistically said that it was too late, the settlers by now would be back in Chile, or dead; soon this latter was to be true.[28]
The rest is anticlimax. Sarmiento was employed as a censor of poetry, deleting at a stroke 109 sheets of a long verse narrative whose author was unduly appreciative of the pirate Drake, and of Mendaña, hardly less of a sin. When at last recalled to active service, he must have felt it too reminiscent of Diego Flores (now in prison for his Armada failure), for it was as almirante to an Indies convoy. His appointment to the fleet about to sail in October 1592 is the last we know of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa; probably he died on the voyage, and all but one of his colonists had died before him.
January 1587: a ragged handful on a Patagonian beach saw four ships standing into the Straits; that night they lit fires, the ships' lanterns signalled back. In the morning a boat was seen pulling along the shore, and with Viedma's permission—there- 276 -was so much discipline left!—three soldiers ran to show a white flag where the boat must pass. It came to the beach, but the joy of the moment was shattered: the newcomers were not reliefs from Spain or Brazil, but Englishmen going to Peru. They offered passage, but the Spaniards drew back, fearful: these heretics would be quite capable of throwing their dupes into the sea. The English reassured them, saying that they themselves were the better Christians, and one of the three, Tomé Hernandez, stepped into the boat, which pushed off. Hernandez begged the leader to pick up his two comrades, and was asked how many Spaniards there were in all; he replied: twelve men, three women.
The General then desired this witness to tell the other two soldiers
to go to the rest of their people, and that for his part he would
come to embark them all, and that they were to wait for him …
[but] When Thomas Candi went on board, seeing it was good
weather for navigating, he made sail without waiting for the rest
of the people to whom he had sent … [29]
Still, after four centuries, the bald statement chills the blood.
So Cavendish sailed on, to peer curiously through the streets of Rey Don Felipe, with its gibbet and its dead ‘in their houses, and in their clothes’; also, providently, to dig up four guns, and to give it the name it still holds: Port Famine, Puerto del Hambre (Plate XIX). This was not quite the end: three years later the Delight of Bristol was in the Straits: ‘by Port famine we spake with a Spaniard, who told us he had lived in those parts 6. yeeres … in an house by himself a long time, and relieved himself with his caleever [firearm] until our comming thither.’ They took him aboard, but on the return the Delight was wrecked near Cherbourg, and he was not among the six survivors.[30] Tomé Hernandez got away from Cavendish in Chile, and lived to make his Declaration in Lima in 1620: our only direct witness to those days of anguish and despair.
So ended Sarmiento's dream: the last great Spanish action in these regions, and either the most useless and tragic in the annals of the sea or the apex of Spanish heroism, according to choice;[31] but indeed one need not choose, for it was both. Nor, of course, was Spain the only country compelled ‘by pressing and perhaps greater exigencies to leave to their fate many heroic settlers’: at the very time of this agony in the Straits, far to the north the six-score English men and women of the lost Virginia colony were suffering and dying.[32] With the resources of the time, colonisation of so remote and harsh a region as the Straits was probably logistically impossible, even had the expedition moved smoothly and well-found to its destination. Even in detail, the site chosen was unfortunate: when in 1843 the Chileans asserted their claim to the Straits, their original settlement of Puerto Bulnes, actually at Puerto del Hambre, lasted only six years before being transferred to a much more favourable position at Punta Arenas,[33] but the existence of this modern city of over 67,000 is scarcely conceivable without fuel-powered shipping.
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An idealised Ciudad Rey Don Felipe realistically labelled ‘now Port Famine’, the fires of Tierra del Fuego, and an assortment of giants, including Pigafetta's arrow-swallower (cf. Plate VII). The toponymy reflects Magellan (B. de S. Iulian, C. 1100 Virgines), Drake (3 Ins. Draco), Sarmiento (Philippopolis), Cavendish (P. Famin, C. Froward), and the Dutchmen Cordes and van Noort in 1599–1600 (Oliuers B., Canal Maurity). From L. Hulsius's ‘Collection of Voyages’; reproduced in J. Parker (ed.), Merchants and Scholars (Minneapolis 1965). By courtesy of University of Minnesota Press. ANU.
Plate XIX. SARMIENTO IN THE STRAITS.
Yet legend would not let Sarmiento's colonists die so easily; together with the imaginary survivors of other luckless voyages, Simon de Alcazaba's and Camargo's, they were translated by popular imagination into the founders of the fantastic and magnificent ‘enchanted city of the Caesars’, hidden, somewhere in Patagonia, between two border ranges of diamond and of gold. As late as 1782, in the last great Indian rebellion, Gabriel Condorcanqui, styling himself Tupac Amaru II, ‘raised multitudes, proclaiming himself “Inca, señor de Jos Césares y Amazonas”.’[34] Irony could hardly go further than this evocation of ghostly splendour.
[27] Morales (Navegante, 259) says that they set out to walk to La Plata, and adds truly that ‘The venture was Dantesque, the design very sixteenth century’. But this rests only on the statement in Hakluyt (VIII.214) that ‘they were determined to have travailed towards the river Plate’, which in turn Cavendish must have understood, or misunderstood, from Tomé Hernandez, while the latter says definitely (Markham, Narratives, 363) ‘these survivors agreed to go to the first settlement’, which was Nombre de Jesus.
[28] Landín Carrasco, Vida y Viajes, 197, 202–7; cf. 171 for an example of the reasoning which earned for Philip the somewhat ironic title of the Prudent King.
[29] Tomé Hernandez, ‘Declaration’, in Markham, Narratives, 352–75, at 364–5. The fourth ship was a pinnace built in Brazil. Morison's account of this incident (Southern Voyages, 714) is marred by a number of minor errors.
[30] Hakluyt, VIII.282–5.
[31] Subercaseaux, Tierra de Océano, 144; Morales, Aventuras, 163.
[32] Landín Carrasco, Vida y Viajes, 183; for the ‘Lost Colony’, D. B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America 1481–1620 (London 1973), 432–42 [Discovery], and the moving passage in Hakluyt, VI.221–2.
[33] A. Braun Menéndez, Pequena Historia Magallánica (5th ed., Buenos Aires 1969), 41–50. Population of Punta Arenas is 1966 estimate.
[34] Morales, Aventuras, 163, and Navegante, 259–75. The name comes from Francisco Cesar, an officer on Sebastian Cabot's 1526 voyage to La Plata, not from the Romans—until our own day, there were limits even to myth! Cf. E. J. Goodman, The Explorers of South America (New York 1972), 170–8 (it is odd that this otherwise comprehensive book manages to make only three slight passing mentions of Sarmiento) and R. H. Shields, ‘The Enchanted City of the Caesars …’ in A. Ogden and E. Sluiter (eds.), Greater America (Berkeley 1945), 319–40.