The Ignominious End of Charles Leigh
After limping back to the mouth of the Wiapoco from the falls at Saut Maripa, things only got worse for Charles Leigh and the men unlucky enough to have joined his adventure.
After staving off a mutiny and all but losing control of his expedition after his crew vociferously rejected the idea of planting at the Saut Maripa falls, Leigh returned to the Yao village of Caripo. The Yao cacique Anakayuri invited the English to stay in Caripo in houses provided for them, apparently aware that the English were out of food and would need to be help finding food for the time being. The cacique wanted two things from the English that was worth his inconvenience: a military alliance and productive trade relationships.
In the former Leigh and his men proved little help, but in the latter they succeeded. A plantation might not have been possible, but a trade factory (a name for warehouses manned by agents of adventurers or merchants) worked well -at least for the moment. One survivor account of the expedition mentioned a wide variety of tropical commodities that could a fetch a high price in European markets:
Waxe, fine white long Feathers, Flaxe, Tabacco, Parrots, Monkeyes, greene and blacke, Cotton-yarne and Cotton-wooll, sweet Gummes, red Pepper, Urapo, and Apriepo woods, Spleene stones, matiate stones, Roots and Berries, which we thought to be medicinable…
The Yao also benefitted from this trade, despite what many historians have noted was an unfair exchange rate in the value of European manufactured goods and raw materials gathered from a rainforest. Indians living in the South American interior prized the beads and metal tools (especially axes) that the Yao could provide, and the raw materials extracted from the rainforest that they bartered with the Yao found their way to the hulls of European ships.
The Yao rise to prominence as Amazonian middlemen did not depend on trade alone; military expansion meant a reduction in competition and a greater share of the profits. No doubt the Carib tribe living in the Cayenne River mouth had well-earned Yao enmity, but it was not just a happy coincidence that the Carib were sitting on the best harbor west of the Wiapoco. Anakayuri had expansion in mind. Amazonian migrants who had been forced to leave their homelands further east were coalescing around Yao leadership. When the Leigh settlers arrived in the Wiapoco, there were already refugees from two other tribes displaced from the Orinoco Delta -Suppoyo and Lokono- living in Caripo.
Leigh’s misapprehension of the situation prevented him from realizing that the adventure was becoming an absurdity. Nowhere is this clearer that in his penchant for renaming local landmarks. To the self-styled “Generall of Guina,” the village of Caripo became Principium, Mount Caripo became Mount Howard (named for Lord Admiral Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham), and the Wiapoco itself was rechristened the Caroleigh. The Wanary River, the Arrocawo River, and Mount Comaribo became the Jotramleigh (after another of Leigh’s brothers named Jotram), the Olivoleigh, and Mount Huntley, respectively.
Anakayuri had likely determined that Leigh was useful and unthreatening enough that he could humor the Englishmen’s sillier ideas. Leigh might have envisioned the sort of plantation colony Walter Ralegh eschewed, but like many other explorers Leigh shared the imprisoned knight’s El Dorado fever. When Leigh decided to canoe upriver to search for gold, the Indians obliged him and even provided an interpreter the English called William.
William had been to England a few years earlier, but unlike some of his tribesmen he does not seem to have been impressed with England or the English. He does not appear to have been readily helpful, and may well have disliked being ordered to escort a fool upriver. Leigh complained to Olive that “he understandeth but little to any purpose.” William understood Leigh perfectly well, or at least more than enough; he was surly, not stupid.
The trip began badly when one of Leigh’s men fell ill soon after the group began rowing and had to be left behind. After journeying further upriver, Leigh met with an old man from the Marrias tribe who he consulted about the possible location of gold mines. One of Leigh’s men described what happened next:
An old man spake unto him and pointed up into the Countrey, and the Captaine asking the Interpreter what he said, he told them that there was no such that way. The Captaine perceiving the falshood of his Interpreter would goe no further
How awkward was that moment, you guess? Imagine that you have a guide somewhere, and you ask a local where the hotel is and he points down the road. Then your guide tries to tell you, “no, he’s saying the hotel is *not* that way.” You would start to seriously worry because you are in an unfamiliar place and do not speak the language, and the person you relied on to do that for you seems to have some sort of nefarious purpose in mind. Now imagine that unfamiliar place is the Amazon Rainforest.
Another possibility is that the confusion was genuine. Just because William had been to England does not mean he learned enough English to translate it to tribal languages cleanly. Leigh could have been overly suspicious, and could have unfairly blamed the interpreter for his own misunderstanding. Still, if William had not held ill intent towards the English before this excursion, he definitely did afterwards.
When Leigh returned after a downriver journey that must have been a bit tense, he and several other of his men had grown sick with malaria and dysentery. Leigh himself contracted the latter. Sandfleas tormented the settlers, and one man who lost his shoes had to suffer through the Indians’ remedy for a severe infestation: “hot melted Waxe which is blacke upon it, and letting it lye upon it till it was thoroughly cold, they forcibly pulled it off; and therewithall the Wormes came out sticking in the same, seven or eight hundred in number.” The English, already given to loafing, had become sick and unable to produce their own food.
The Yao were not best pleased to see the English eating all their food. William took advantage of the growing dissatisfaction with Leigh’s presence, and broached the possibility of killing them to Anakayuri. The cacique took the matter to council, and when he brought the idea up the meeting turned into bedlam. The wives of the men who had gone to England with Huntley would surely never returned if Leigh and his men were killed, and they rushed Anakayuri and tore at his clothes.
William soon knocked on Leigh’s door with some gifts of fish, but Leigh was in no mood to overlook the betrayal. He had already been told about William’s ploy and arrested his former interpreter on the spot. Leigh wanted to execute the man, but Anakayuri and the other Yao would not allow it. They paid for the “inconvenience” with foodstuffs, and consented to what was a harsh enough punishment for William. His hands and feet were bound together and he was left lying on the ground for a few days. There are all kinds of creepy crawlies on the floor of the jungle.
Leigh carried on as best he could, and continued to scribble accounts as his men accumulated more and more goods to load into the Olive Plant’s hull when Edward Huntley returned with a resupply of men and supplies. When Huntley arrived at Oiapoque Bay in 1605, he and the crew were shocked by what they found. Leigh and his men had been brought low by disease, and the rains had not improved their condition. Determined to continue on with an adventure that was literally killing him, Leigh mustered his new arrivals into a war party and joined the Yao for two fruitless raids on the Cayenne.
Leigh seemed to finally realize that things were coming to a disastrous end, and decided to return home aboard the Olive Plant as Huntley readied the ship to sail. Leigh died soon after boarding, before Huntley could mention that the ship did not have enough space and supplies for all the men to return on the same voyage. Huntley was in a real quandary; if it got out that Leigh was dead and the expedition was over, things could get violent when the men found out not all of them would be returning home.
Huntley hit upon a sad solution, and buried his former captain in an unmarked grave on the banks of the Wiapoco. He told the men aboard the Olive Plant that Leigh had changed his mind and decided to remain in country, and told the men on land that Leigh was aboard the ship. He then sailed away leaving a few of Leigh’s men stranded. A few of those left behind recovered their health, and managed to acquire some of their own goods before they found passage on a Dutch ship that docked at the Wiapoco to trade.
Leigh’s adventure happened at the very beginning of English colonization, three years before the founding of James Towne -the first permanent settlement in the English Americas. Like many adventurers, he saw the possibilities for American wealth but lacked the competency to acquire it. As I said before, successful colonization requires Money, Murder, and Martiall Lawe, and Leigh had no recourse to those things. It would take a few more years of experimentation in Guiana before Englishmen with hopes of West Indian adventure learned that colonization was an expensive process that required capital and commitment.
Next week I’m going to go a little more into Anakayuri, a man who deserves our fascination. He appears in several English and French sources; the Europeans that met him ascribed a regal bearing to him, and perhaps with good reason. Royalty was the only lens through which Europeans could understand such a leader, a man with noble countenance and manifest authority over his fellow tribesmen.
If you have been enjoying my work, please consider supporting it by becoming a paid subscriber. As always, thank you for reading.
Pictured above is an Amazonian parrot (parrot feathers were very valuable at the time), followed by Jesse Du Forest’s map of the Cayenne drafted in 1624.