ties in his career. Ultimately he
grew reserved with Wilson, as may easily be understood. At first, before
he had thoroughly gauged his companion, he conversed freely. He
discoursed almost too freely and fully for Wilson's ability to condense
the whole into a narrative which would be plausible enough to give the
King a sense that they were on the verge of real discoveries. Wilson
complained to Naunton that he often tried to gain information by talking
on matters which might lead to it.

[Sidenote: _Apology for Flight._]

From the Tower, though one biographer believes it was from Devonshire,
he wrote to the King, asking why it should be lawful for Spaniards to
murder thirty-six Englishmen, tying them back to back, and then cutting
their throats, yet be unlawful for Englishmen--'O miserable English! O
miserable Ralegh!--to repel force by force.' The Spanish atrocities are
not disputed. The strange thing is that historians who condemn Ralegh's
alleged violence to Spaniards never seem to suppose he was really
resentful of them. They treat his indignation as factitious. Another
letter he appears, at Wilson's instigation, to have written to the King
on September 17 or 18, which has been lost or suppressed. In it, from an
indorsement, dated September 19, on Wilson's covering letter, it seems
that he asked for an examination of one Christofero, the Governor of
Guiana's mulatto valet, whom Keymis had brought from San Thome. He would
be able to speak, it was mentioned, of 'seven or eight several mines of
gold that are there.' It was not convenient to order any such
examination. Ralegh wrote other letters from the Tower. He wrote to
Villiers, to explain, not so much to him or his master, as to his own
wounded self-respect, the one act of which he was really ashamed. It was
his ineffectual flight, that 'late and too late lamented resolution.' He
recounted to deaf ears the dreams on which he had brooded of permission
to lead yet another expedition in search of his El Dorado; his despair,
when the peremptory summons by the Council to London demonstrated to him
that his vision of treasures and glory was to be extinguished for ever
by actual or virtual death. In a much bolder letter to George Carew,
intended for the King's perusal, which sounds more like a manifesto to
the English nation, he frankly avowed the things he had left undone as
well as the things he had done, and his reasons. He admitted he had not,
in his description of hi