onders does not belittle
his fame. He lived and fought and sailed in a world that had not been
explored and mapped and charted and photographed and written about
until all the romance and mystery were driven out of it. The globe had
not shrunk to a globule around which excursionists whiz in forty days
on a coupon ticket. Men truly great, endowed with the courage and
resourcefulness of epic heroes, and the simple faith of little
children, were voyaging into unknown seas to find strange lands, ready
to die, and right cheerfully, for God and their King. Sir Walter
Raleigh was bound up, heart and soul, in winning Guiana as a great
empire for England, and when his enemies at home scouted his reports
and accused him of trying to deceive the nation with his tales of El
Dorado, he replied with convincing sincerity and pathos:

"A strange fancy it had been in me, to have persuaded my own son whom I
have lost, and to have persuaded my wife to have adventured the eight
thousand pounds which his Majesty gave them for Shelborne, and when
that was spent, to persuade my wife to sell her house at Mitcham in
hope of enriching them by the mines of Guiana, if I myself had not seen
them with my own eyes! For being old and weakly, thirteen years in
prison, and not used to the air, to travel and to watching, it being
ten to one that I should ever have returned,--and of which, by reason
of my violent sickness, and the long continuance thereof, no man had
any hope, what madness would have made me undertake the journey, but
the assurance of this mine."[9]

He was referring here to his fourth and last voyage in quest of El
Dorado. Elizabeth was dead, and James I bore Raleigh no good will.
After the long imprisonment, for thirteen years under suspended
sentence of death, he was permitted to leave the Tower and embark with
a fleet of thirteen ships in 1617, it being particularly enjoined that
he should engage in no hostilities with his dearest enemy, Spain. It
is generally believed that King James hoped and expected that such a
clash of interests as was almost inevitable in the attempt to plant the
English flag in Guiana would give him a pretext to send Raleigh to the
headman's block. It was on this voyage that Raleigh lost his eldest
son, besides several of his ships, and utterly failed in the
high-hearted purpose of setting up a kingdom whose capital city should
be that splendid lost city of Manoa. He was unable to avoid battles
with