SIR WALTER RALEGH'S

APOLOGY.

IF the ill success of this enterprise of mine had been without example, I should have needed a large discourse, and many arguments for my justification. But if the vain attempts of the greatest princes of Europe, both among themselves and against the great Turk, are in all modern histories left to every eye to peruse, it is not so strange that myself, being but a private man, and drawing after me the chains and fetters whereunto I have been thirteen years tied in the Tower, (being unpardoned, and in disgrace with my sovereign lord,) have, by other men's errors, failed in the attempt I undertook.

For if that Charles the Fifth returned with unexampled loss, (I will not say dishonour,) from Algier in Africa; or if king Sebastian lost himself and his army in Barbary; if the invincible fleet and forces of Spain in eighty-eight were beaten home by the lord Charles Howard, admiral of England; if Mr. Strozzi, the count Brizack, the count of Vimioso, and others, with a fleet of fifty-eight sail, and six thousand soldiers, encountered with far less numbers, could not defend the Terceres, leaving to speak a world of other attempts furnished by kings and princes; if sir Francis Drake, sir John Hawkins, and sir Thomas Baskervile, men for their experience and valour as eminent as England had any, strengthened with divers of her majesty's ships, and filled with soldiers at will, could not possess themselves of the treasure they sought for, and which in their view was embarked in certain frigates at Puerto Rico; if afterward they were repulsed with fifty negroes upon the mountains of Vasques Numius, or Sierra de Capira, in their passage towards Panama; if sir John Norris (though not by any Inoyoso. Archbishop Sancroft.

fault of his) failed in the attempt of Lisbon, and returned with the loss, by sickness and otherwise, of eight thousand men; what wonder is it (but that mine is the last), being followed with a company of volunteers who for the most part had neither seen the sea nor the wars; who, some forty gentlemen excepted, had with me the very scum of the world, drunkards, blasphemers, and such others as their fathers, brothers, and friends thought it an exceeding good gain to be discharged of, with the hazard of some thirty, forty, or fifty pounds, knowing they could not have lived a whole year so cheap at home; I say, what wonder is it that I have failed, where I could neither be present myself, nor had any of the commanders (whom I most trusted) living, or in state to supply my place?

Now whereas it was bruited, both before and since my departure out of England, and by the most men believed, that I meant nothing less than to go to Guiana; but that being once at liberty, and in mine own power, having made my way with some foreign prince, I would turn pirate, and utterly forsake mine own country; my being at Guiana, my returning into England unpardoned, and my not taking the spoil of the subjects of any Christian prince, hath (I doubt not) destroyed that opinion.

But this is not all; for it hath been given out by an hypocritical thief, who was the first master of my ship, and by an ungrateful youth which waited on me in my cabin, (though of honourable and worthy parents,) and by others, that I carried with me out of England twenty-two thousand pieces of twenty-two shillings the piece, and therefore needed not, or cared not, to discover any mine in Guiana, nor make any other attempt elsewhere: which report being carried secretly from one to another in mine own ship, (and so spread through all the ships in the fleet, which stayed with me at Trinedado while our land forces were in Guiana,) had like to have been my utter overthrow in a most miserable fashion; for it was consulted, when I had taken my barge, and gone ashore, (either to discover or otherwise as I often did,) that my ship should have set sail, and left me there;

where either I must have suffered famine, been eaten with wild beasts, or have fallen into the hands of the Spaniards, and been flayed alive, as others of the English, which came thither but to trade only, had formerly been.

To this report of riches, I make this protestation; that if it can be proved, either now or hereafter, that I had in the world, either in my keeping or in my power, either directly or indirectly, in trust or otherwise, above one hundred pieces, when I departed from London, of which I had left forty-five pieces with my wife, and fifty-five I carried with me; I acknowledge myself for a reprobate, a villain, a traitor to the king, and the most unworthy man that doth live, or ever hath lived upon the earth.

It is true, that such as thought to find some great deceit in me in the detaining a great part of the monies adventured, in perusing the bills of adventure written by scriveners, found above fifteen thousand pounds more than all my charge demanded came unto; but of the money I never received any penny, for the monies and provisions adventured with all the other captains amounted to very nearly twenty thousand pounds, for the greatest part whereof I gave the bills.

Now whereas the captains that left me in the Indies, and captain Baily, that ran from me at Lancerota, have, to excuse themselves, objected for the first, that I lingered at Plymouth when I might have gone thence, and lost a fair wind, and the time of the year, or to that effect; it is strange that men of fashion and gentlemen should so grossly belie their own knowledge; that had not I lived nor returned to have made answer to this fiction, yet all that knew us in Plymouth, and all that we had to deal withal, knew the contrary for after I had stayed at the Isle of Wight divers days, the Thunder, commanded by sir Warram St. Leger, by the negligence of her master, was at lee in the Thames; and after I arrived at Plymouth, captain Pennington was not come then to the Isle of Wight, and being arrived there, and not able to redeem his bread from the bakers, he rode back post to London to entreat help from my wife to pay

for it; who having not so much money to serve his turn, she wrote to Mr. Wood of Portsmouth, and gave him her word for thirty pounds, which she soon after paid him, without which (as Pennington himself protested to my wife) he had not been able to have gone the journey: sir John Ferne I found there without all hope of being able to proceed, having neither men nor money, and in great want of other provision; insomuch as I furnished him by my cousin Herbert with a hundred pounds, having supplied him also in Wales with a hundred pounds before his coming to Plymouth; and procured him a third hundred pounds from the worthy and honest dean of Exeter, doctor Sutcliffe. Captain Whitney, whom I also stayed for, had a third part of his victuals to provide, insomuch as having no money to help him withal, I sold my plate in Plymouth to supply him. Baily I left at the Isle of Wight, whose arrival I also attended here some ten or twelve days, as I remember. And what should move Baily, not only to leave me as he did at the Canaries, from whence he might have departed with my love and leave, and at his return to do me all the wrong he could devise, I cannot conceive; he seemed to me from the beginning not to want any thing; he only desired of me some ordnance and some iron-bound cask, and I gave it him: I never gave him ill language, nor offered him the least unkindness to my knowledge: it is true, that I refused him a French shallop which he took in the bay of Portugal outward bound; and yet after I had bought her of the French, and paid fifty crowns ready money for her, if Baily had then desired her, he might have had her. But to take any thing from the French, or from any other nation, I meant it not.

True it is, that as many things succeed both against reason and our best endeavours; so it is most commonly true, that men are the cause of their own misery, as I was of mine, when I undertook my late enterprise without a pardon; for all my company having heard it avowed in England before they went, that the commission I had was granted to a man who was non ens in law; so hath the