ged with Ralegh that he seemed
to be ever offering clues, which only led astray. It imputed its
embarrassment to his cunning. He had no intention to deceive, or even to
abstain from promoting a revelation of the truth, which he did not fear.
Simply he and it were radically at cross purposes. They were mutually
unintelligible. The sincerity of his ardour for the attainment of a
footing in Guiana is unquestionable. He was honestly eager for it in the
Tower, in Trinidad after the return from San Thome, at Plymouth, when he
was grovelling in counterfeit madness at Salisbury, and when he was a
fugitive on the Thames. But Guiana was not his real end. Guiana was the
means he had finally and deliberately chosen to inflame the English
people and Crown with an inextinguishable ambition for the creation of
an American empire. He did not much mind how the national imagination
was kindled, provided that it caught fire. His motive was patriotic and
vast, and his judges and accusers, conscientious men like Caesar and
Abbot, as well as others, had not the faintest understanding of it. All
except the motive was talk, much of it reprehensible talk, but much not
truly reported; and his censors let their prejudices seduce them into
treating the entire mass as evidence of facts and acts. If he ever
instructed his officers to commence the expedition to the Mine by taking
the initiative in an attack on San Thome, the direction was confined to
talk. If, whether before or after the San Thome incident, he spoke of
the capture of the plate fleet, that was nothing but talk. Captain
Parker's report of the project of Ralegh and St. Leger for lying in wait
for homeward bound ships referred, if not wholly untrue, to talk, like
his own and Whitney's similar plans. When Ralegh told his wife he hoped
for something ere his return, that was talk. If he ever said he should
not come back, that was talk. If he boasted of a French commission, and
affirmed his preference for France, that was talk. The entire pile of
charges against him, proved, unproved, or disproved, was talk. All began
and ended in talk, unless that Bayley captured French boats, and Ralegh
redeemed them; that the Lancerota islanders murdered English sailors,
and he did not retaliate; that the San Giuseppe Spaniards were
aggressors, and he bore it; and that the garrison of San Thome laid an
ambush for his men, to hinder their access to a district which his
Sovereign had commissioned him to enter