West - Gold on credit: Martin Frobisher's and Walter Raleigh's economies of evidence.

Criticism, Vol. 39, 1997

Gold on credit: Martin Frobisher's and Walter Raleigh's economies of evidence.

by William N. West

Of the marvels that flooded from the Americas into Europe in the sixteenth century, none was more marvelous than the apparently limitless amount of gold.(1) Thomas More's Utopia, where gold is designedly held in such contempt that it is used to shackle slaves,(2) was no more strange to Europeans than a New World which seemed every bit as rich and whose natives seemed every bit as uninterested in making use of their wealth. More's Utopians accumulated their gold through the slow process of trade with neighboring lands, but most European explorers disdained the slow accumulation of capital from farming and trade in the New World, preferring a differently utopian fantasy of effortless, instantaneous, infinite wealth in the form of American gold. The American gold that so fascinated the English, that posed a threat to their economy internally as it wrecked their markets, and to their autonomy externally as it built up the Spanish military, had one important problem. It did not belong to them. After 1569, when John Hawkins's third and last attempt to challenge the profitable Spanish trade routes to America was thwarted, for the English "the only way to profit from the riches of Latin America was by piracy and warfare ..."(3) The English were painfully aware that their enterprises in the New World did not turn out as well as those of the Spanish. John Smith confesses in the General Historie of Virginia that "all the world doe see a defailement" in the Virginia colony.(4) Walter Ralegh is even more sour about the low level of success of colonial ventures; in his Apology for his Voyage to Guiana, he argues that it is not his failure to return with gold that requires explanation, but the absence of any better English examples of colonialism: "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."(5) As it stands, Ralegh observes, his disaster hardly qualifies as being out of the ordinary.(6)

Instead of the gold they hoped to bring home, most English colonial and exploratory ventures returned with stories to woo their investors and their monarch for continuing support in spite of the limited returns, the equivalent of verbal promissory notes for gold at some point in the future. In their voyages towards El Dorado and Cathay, Walter Ralegh and Martin Frobisher address their narratives to the monarch in the hope of convincing the crown to prolong its investment in them; back in England, further narratives present what each returns with, even if the returns are themselves only stories, as evidence, signs or promises of the gold that is over there and in the future. But in spite of the roughly comparable outcomes of their voyages -- Ralegh and Frobisher both come back with small amounts of worthless ore, and each thinks he has nearly discovered a land of fabulous wealth (Ralegh in fact compares the legendary golden city Manoa to Frobisher's target, China)(7) -- Ralegh and Frobisher manage the narrative terrain of uncertainty very differently, and their different strategies bear different fruit. Frobisher's unspectacular voyages earn him a name and a reputation; a decade after his last voyage, while Michael Lok, a merchant who had put up much of the cost the voyages and had been Frobisher's partner, was in debtor's prison, Frobisher shared a command with Drake and Hawkins against the Armada. Ralegh's first voyage to Guiana failed to salvage what was left of his reputation after he married one of Elizabeth's ladies in waiting without permission and was dismissed from court, and his second failed to save him from execution. But Frobisher and Ralegh try to recover success through very different kinds of narratives, and their relative successes in the end may be connected more to the routes they chose for their narratives than to those they chose for their ships -- to the rhetorical devices, in short, that they chose for establishing their evidence of gold.

To be sure, gold already possessed many of the characteristics of language; it is exchanged like language, forms and breaks alliances like language, and like language is a tool of persuasion. It is rhetorical: Spanish gold "indaungereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe, it purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into Councels, and setteth bound loyalty at libertie, in the greatest Monarchies of Europe."(8) There is no gap between word and thing or description and event as there is with language.(9) For Thomas Smith in his Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm, gold was naturally suited to be a medium of exchange.(10) It possesses the qualities of beauty, durability (unlike many goods, it does not spoil with age or weather), softness (it can take a stamp verifying its weight and purity), and portability (it may be more easily carried than a stack of wool or a load of grain). "[B]ecause gold and silver have all these commodities in them," concluded Smith, "they are chosen by a common consent of all the world, that is known to be of any civility, to be the instruments of exchange to measure all things by ..." (73). The presence of these "commodities" in gold and silver is what let other goods become commodities in the sense of exchangeable goods; gold evaluates other commodities, but is not evaluated by them. Paradoxically, gold, in its universal exchangeability, is also identical to itself in a way that language can never be, and certainly never with another object. Unlike language, gold is perfectly exchangeable with any other object; as Ralegh says, "Where there is store of gold, it is in effect nedeles to remember other commodities for trade."(11) Like language, gold has no form of its own, which lets it take on the form of other things, and so perfectly reproduce their value -- one of Thomas Smith's characters in the Discourse praises it because it can take the imprint of a seal and because gems, unlike gold, cannot be "divided without perishing of the substance, nor put together after they be once divided" (72-73). Like language, then, gold is a kind of perfectly flexible non-object that serves to represent other objects. In this set of terms, gold's value, unlike that of language, is not illusory, but transcendentally real, a kind of Kantian Ding-ansich untroubled by the impossibility of its own existence.

The language of economics was mysterious in early modern England because it encompassed two competing tendencies that ultimately pointed at the same transcendence of gold, but by gesturing in opposite directions. On the one hand, gold was becoming increasingly fetishized as a measure and a locus of wealth. It was easier and easier to think in terms of economic "facts," of the value of gold and the developing market economy it supported, as natural and prior to human interpretation;(12) it was gold's autonomous value that made a commodified market possible, as all trade could be represented as an exchange of gold at some level of remove. On the other hand, the large-scale trade made possible by the reduction of the goods on both sides to a standard value measured in gold increasingly took place through bills of exchange and other instruments of credit; as the value and power accorded to its material form increased, gold increasingly disappeared from sight. This in-between realm of trade, backed by gold that would sometimes never be seen, was a magical one in which a person's belief in a value could inflect that value up or down. It was not the world of gold described by Thomas Smith, but one of credit. Credit, though, as the word's etymology implies, is about belief, and belief concerns a relation of an observer to an object rather than an object imagined as standing outside any relation.(13) The double valence of gold could materialize uncomfortably in practices that brought together the power of absent gold with the mystique of its material presence, for instance at the periodic "Besancon fairs," at which merchants from all over Europe would hold a clearing house and settle their bills of exchange. A Venetian visitor was astonished at one such fair that the "millions of ducats" of bills outstanding were reduced in the end to "a few handfuls of ecus, di oro en oro, in other words real money."(14) But the magic of credit was merely another one of gold's miraculous properties, while the visitor's certainty that only the gold ecus were real continued to idealize its material form.

The narratives of Ralegh and Frobisher address more than mere language, and something other than proof of gold, either of which suggests a kind of absolute and binary distinction that does not allow for intermediate degrees. These narratives of the New World seek credit, in both its financial and psychological senses, from their hearers. Their solutions link conceptions of both language and money -- or gold -- and ideas of how, in the absence of the infinity of riches represented, that wealth can best be put into effect. What is at stake is literally economic and the process is in each case a negotiation. The question to be answered is in both cases, "how much is gold that isn't here (and ultimately isn't anywhere) worth?" These narratives can be called economic because they concern not only the quantifications and comparisons of value, but actual cash; Frobisher and Ralegh make their livelihoods as investments incarnate, as temporary transfers of funding between the yes and the no of a bipolar system without credit. Hope, suspense, and uncertainty are what sustain colonial narratives; they fill the gaps between expectations and results, and so allow the narrator to continue to work on his tale, to buy on margin, and to defer the final reckoning of loss and gain. The difference between them is that Frobisher accepts the binary terms of the gold standard; gold determines value, and so gold will have to represent itself back in England to demonstrate its value in the New World. Ralegh, though, tries to find a way to turn his narrative into credit, and to bring evidence of the gold back while leaving it there.

The narratives of Martin Frobisher's three voyages in the 1570s to what is now northern Canada can be read as a single, ongoing attempt to find a definitive proof. What he is looking for proof of changes over the course of the three voyages from a passage to China to a new land mass to, finally, gold, which serves logically as an end-point -- actual value itself rather than the merely potential value of trade. In each case, Frobisher wants to close the gap that demands a narrative account of his voyage by filling it with an object that will speak for itself and so render further explanation unnecessary, or at least require no explanation itself.(15) He conceives of the goal of his voyage from the beginning in these unequivocal, material terms; he will "bring true certificat of the truth, or else never retourne againe."(16) The choice of words made by George Best, who accompanied Frobisher on all three voyages, is significant, and, as the recurrence of the word "certificate" and its cognates in the accounts of both Best and Lok suggests, not accidental. Frobisher is looking for something that will make the truth of his discovery certain and present it beyond a doubt to his royal audience and his potential investors in England. In doing this, Frobisher is not trying to write or enact a narrative, but to close one off and to make it unnecessary.

Frobisher's sense of what constitutes a certificate capable of putting an end to questioning is frustratingly difficult to fulfill. In Lok's account of the first voyage, after losing the one small boat carried by his ship and the five men in it, Frobisher is "oppressed with sorrow that he should return back agayn to his cuntry without bringing any evidens or token of any place whereby to certify the world where he had been."(17) This lack of evidence leads Frobisher to kidnap an Eskimo to provide tangible proof that he has at least been somewhere other than Europe.(18) In Best's account, Frobisher's desire for proof is thwarted from the beginning by the ice floes that keep his boat from shore, and he orders his men "if by anye possible meanes they could get ashoare, to bring him whatsoever thing they could first find, whether it were living or dead, stocke or stone, in token of Christian possession" (50). In Best's report, when Frobisher's men finally do reach the shore they break into frenzied scavenging, tearing up flowers, green grass, and a black rock that will eventually prove to be the token that allows Frobisher to get the financing to make a second voyage in search of gold-bearing ore.

The materials the men picked up seem to have been generally accepted as adequate proof that Frobisher had at least found new territory. The black rock, though, proved to be an object that required further narratives rather than one that brought them to a close. Its retrieval was said to be the result of mere luck during the scramble for tokens; the story also provides a neat way of explaining the otherwise difficult matter of why someone would have picked up the ordinary-looking black stone.(19) More tales are required to explain why the stone was tested for its gold content. Best records that it was fortuitously found to contain gold when the wife of a sailor accidentally dropped it into a cooking fire in England (51), while Lok recalled taking it at once to an assayer for an analysis. Lok's suspicion that there is gold in the stone in turn produces another set of narratives. He records that three separate English assayers pronounced the stone worthless before Lok finally found an Italian one, John Baptista Agnello, who discovered the gold in it. When Lok expressed surprise at Agnello's success after three others had failed to find anything, Agnello replied disconcertingly, "Bisogna sapere adulare la natura" -- "It is necessary to know how to flatter nature."(20)

In spite of the narratives that multiplied around it, Frobisher's black stone was a sufficient certificate for him and Lok to obtain a royal charter to form the Cathay Company, and to raise money to outfit a second voyage in 1577 and a third in 1578. But these voyages never seemed able to produce a certificate of the presence of gold that could serve as a final proof. Even during the third voyage, with his boats loaded with ore and witnesses to his discoveries, Frobisher and his men were still looking for "some certificat of a further discoverie of the Countrie, which thing to bring to passe (having sometime therein consulted) they found verye hard, and almost invincible."(21) That Frobisher was still seeking a certificate during his third voyage shows that Best is not exaggerating the difficulty of the project.

For his first voyage, Frobisher sought funds from the English merchant community; like Frobisher, though, they had an overriding interest in certainty, and they rejected his project as too risky. The merchants want gold for its commodity and not its symbolic value; they "never regard vertue withoute sure, certayne, and present gaynes"(22) and this forces Frobisher to look elsewhere for support for an attempt to find a passage to China. But Frobisher is not interested in gold only as a source of wealth. Though the idea of the wealth that gold would bring him is never wholly absent from his mind, and certainly not from Lok's and his other sponsors', gold represents for Frobisher primarily an object that is unquestionable. What Frobisher is really looking for is an object that will speak clearly of where it comes from without the need of an uncertain narrative to support it. Such an object is simply impossible. In Frobisher's fantasy, though, gold is just such a magical substance. Frobisher is, in fact, a kind of idealist materialist, whose interest in certainty leads him to look for a transcendent proof in the world of things. On the third expedition, Frobisher brings back hundreds of tons of ore without any certain gold content rather than smaller samples. This is because Frobisher does not see his ore as a sample; it is a way of producing the gold itself in England. In spite of the uncertainty attached to it, Frobisher is willing to run surprising risks to secure more of the ore. While his fleet of fifteen ships, in the face of a headwind and surrounded by ice floes, is desperately trying to make the harbor in which they had anchored earlier, Frobisher takes a pinnace out, ostensibly to find another possible anchorage -- but really, as Best reports, to look for more of the black ore (98). Ore that merely promises gold in the New World is not enough proof; the only gold that Frobisher thinks of as certain is what he carries with him.

The most telling of Frobisher's attempts to certify his discovery occurs during the second voyage and is not connected with the gold at all, although his approach illuminates his thinking about certification. He leaves a letter for the five men who had gone ashore on the first voyage and never returned, with extra pens, ink, and paper, asking them "to write backe unto me agayne, if personally you can not come to certifye me of your estate" (Best, 72; my emphasis). Frobisher is in part simply stating a reasonable preference to see the men themselves rather than only a letter from them. In part, though, he also consciously or unconsciously draws a distinction between the acts of writing and certifying. Like the ore, a letter from his men will not provide a final answer but a new set of questions; it will not be the conclusion of a narrative but the beginning of one. For Frobisher, the certificate is not linguistic. It is in fact the opposite of text or narrative, which remains somehow uncertain and thus inferior to direct contact; the certificate is a thing that speaks for itself and so closes off the need for additional narrative. To Frobisher, with his blunt preference for the real and his association of it with the unequivocal, the presence of the thing itself is the only proof of its existence. Anything brought back requires an explanation and so falls short of the transparency that Frobisher seeks; any certificate that he can find demands some kind of narration, and is therefore falsifiable and uncertain.(23) The gap between certainty and uncertainty in which credit is extended is what Frobisher is trying to fill with some unarguable object, some thing that will avoid the need for narrative and all its uncertainty, the perfect language of gold instead of the imperfect coin of language.(24)

Because what he gathers is not pure gold, but ore, Frobisher never completely escapes the need for verification in language. The ore must be assessed and valued by the gold refiners that he brings with him. But Frobisher tries to control the information about the ore and the narratives that can be built on it by issuing orders that nobody besides the refiners may make any tests on it. No crew member is permitted to possess any of the ore privately. On his third voyage, Frobisher dedicates most of the space in two sets of orders, one issued on arrival in America and one before departure for England, to controlling possession of, and conversation about, the ore that the men are mining.(25) These precautions may be necessary because Frobisher knows or suspects that the ore is nearly worthless, but the fact that his rules govern not so much the ore itself as information about it -- even the rules against possession seem to be there to ensure that no private testing is possible -- together with his apparently ongoing attempts to find more ore, suggest that what Frobisher is really doing is trying to eliminate rumor and narrative from the process, and to depend on the things themselves to provide evidence of success or failure. Ralegh's reported openness with his sailors about the scantiness of his mine in Guiana just after leaving on his second voyage makes Frobisher's attempt to eliminate all discussion about the possible problems with his ore even more striking.(26) Ralegh's expedition generates pages of accusations, explanations, counter-explanations, and letters interpreting actions that Ralegh took or failed to take. Frobisher, who in the end has essentially the same results as Ralegh, never wrote anything about his voyages that survives. The accounts of Frobisher's voyages are all simple narratives by participants, free from much of the acrimony that Ralegh's journey produced. But given his concerns about narrative and certainty, it is perhaps not accidental that Frobisher does not write his own memoirs of the voyages. The real heroes of the history, which can never find their way into print, are the objects brought back by the expedition to certify the new world, and the gold, it has found.

Ralegh's two voyages to Guiana, even the first in 1595, are as spectacularly inconclusive as Frobisher's trips to Canada, but Ralegh adopts a very different strategy for handling his evidence. When the material proofs he returns with fail to convince anyone -- people speculate that his ore may have been bought in Barbary, and even that he never went to America at all, but hid out in Cornwall(27) -- Ralegh turns for support to the narrative that is so carefully shunned by Frobisher. Louis Montrose and Mary Fuller, in their interpretations of Ralegh's writings on his Guiana voyages, are right in seeing that in 1596 Ralegh's strategy is one of deferral and restraint.(28) With little material evidence and not wholly reliable eyewitnesses, Ralegh was forced to present the success of his mission in terms of his continence in the service of "her Majesties future Honor, and Riches" (Ralegh, [A3.sup.v]). By casting his scanty returns as an example of his laudable continence, Ralegh makes a bid to correct retroactively his failure of restraint at court; he had recently enraged Elizabeth by marrying Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of her ladies-in-waiting, in secret.

In the reign of James, though, Ralegh's strategy of deferral was not a display of self-control that served in part as its own end, as Montrose and Fuller have argued of the first voyage, but an attempt to forestall the all-too-literal closure of his own story either in the Tower or at the end of another failed adventure. That is to say, Ralegh's Guiana narratives under James are not meant to be demonstrations of restraint, but promises of evidence elsewhere. Ralegh tries to pay for his voyages with credit based on the gold that he has not brought back. James lost no love on Ralegh, but when parliament was dissolved in 1614 without providing James with new revenues, even the slim chance of Ralegh's finding the gold he promised must have seemed worth trying to James.(29) Still under sentence of death for his 1603 treason conviction and hoping that he would be able to bargain for a pardon with the results he obtained in Guiana, Ralegh sailed again in 1617 under the impossible condition of not interfering with the Spanish, who claimed the entire coast and, more problematically, had settled a town called St. Thome near the mine. In his second voyage, Ralegh tries to put off the decisive encounter with the material proof in Guiana that he, unlike Frobisher, seems to know will completely disappoint the hopes that he is building in his narrative and reduce him to the silence that Frobisher sought. The gap between language and the thing it describes is for Ralegh a space in which to play and to draw out hopes and desires into narratives. For Frobisher, this gap must be bridged with evidence, with certification; for Ralegh, it is the space that lets him write his Discoverie and his Apology.

The technique that Ralegh uses for proof in the Discoverie and the Apology is to establish a momentary illusion of certainty in a situation that is at best uncertain. The dedication of the Discoverie begins by dismissing promises as an insufficient return: "For your Honors many Honorable and friendlie parts, I have hitherto onely returned promises" ([A2.sup.r]). Here Ralegh promises that there will be no more promises, but his writings on Guiana center on the act of promising. In the Discoverie, Ralegh in one sentence promises to share the limitless wealth that Guiana had promised him --" every stone that we stooped to take up, promised eyther gold or silver" -- only to postpone its realization in the next --" and yet we had no meanes but with our daggers and fingers to teare them out heere and there, the rocks being most hard of that minerall spar"(68).

The white spar figures largely in Ralegh's account; more than any letter or hearsay Spanish report, it serves as his proof of the wealth of Guiana. In the Discoverie, it is the nearly impenetrable rock that prevents him and his men from digging out the gold that they are certain lies beneath it. By hiding the gold, Ralegh insists, it both proves the gold's existence and frustrates any attempt to recover it; he sees veritable mountains of it, but lacks the tools to mine it: "to stay to dig out gold with our nailes, had been Opus laboris, but not Ingenii: such a quantitie as would have served our turnes we could not have had, but a discovery of the mines to our infinite disadvantage we had made.... I could have returned a good quantity of gold readie cast, if I had not shot at another marke, than present profit" (51). But Ralegh does not seek present profit; he makes a symbolic investment and looks for a return on it. The white spar lets him have the gold and not have the gold, and the gold's shiftily absent presence and present absence, like Stella's for Astrophil, is what both allows and demands Ralegh's text. Unlike Frobisher, though, Ralegh, especially in 1617, is in no hurry to reach the end of narrative.

The importance to Ralegh of preserving the ability to remain in this ambigious space is seen in an event in the voyage of 1618. With Ralegh himself sick with fever, his lieutenant Laurence Keymis and his son Wat went to find the mine, which James' commission had given them permission to work. They stumbled into a battle with the Spanish settlement at Saint Thome, in which Wat Ralegh was killed, and returned without any ore. Ralegh was furious with Keymis, who offered a variety of excuses for not having located the mine,

All which his fancies when I rejected, and before divers of

the gentlemen disavowed his ignorance [of where the mine

was]; for I told him that a blind man might find it, by the

marks which he himself had set down under his hand; then I

told him that his care of losing so many men in passing

through the woods was but feigned; for after my son was

slain, I knew that he had no care at all of any man surviving,

and therefore had he brought to the king but one hundred

weight of the ore, though with the loss of one hundred men,

he had given his majesty satisfaction, preserved my

reputation, and given our nation encouragement to have returned

this next year with greater force.... (Apology, 494)

Ralegh plays not for the present, but for the future; he seeks not enough gold to satisfy the king, but enough to satisfy the king that there will be enough to satisfy him later. Even in this passage, though, the demands of his former promises are coming back to Ralegh. It is no longer enough to simply refer to the huge mountains of white spar that he saw in Guiana; now he must bring back a hundred weight as proof. But Ralegh has no hundred weight of gold ore to show James. All he can do is promise that such proof of the larger mine exists. Like a gambler writing a marker for a loan, Ralegh here bets that he can stretch the promise of a forthcoming proof into something approaching present proof of the gold mine's existence. Ralegh is in fact working at the opposite end of the inflationary chain of metonymy that Fuller describes as the hidden referent of the legends of El Dorado (51-52, 59-61). While Fuller shows how the incredible tales of the wealth of El Dorado grow metonymically in the retelling from the relatively mundane original referent of a priest putting gold dust on his hands for a ceremony, Ralegh begins with his tales of vast riches and then tests to see how low a bid he can offer as proof of their reality. A hundred weight of gold? The assurance that one could get a hundred weight of gold if one tried?

Ralegh uses a number of different arguments in attempts to keep the space between his language and referent open and so to bring back gold in the form of a bill of exchange, or narration as cash. He likens his story to that of Cortes, who also suffered a significant setback before success on a vast scale (Discoverie, 75), and further suggests that he could not have opened up the mines without risking the goodwill of the natives and intrusions of the Spanish (50, 79). In a more radical line of argument than his appeal to historical exempla, Ralegh offers his own commitment to the mission as evidence that he is telling the truth about what he has seen: "neyther am I so farre in love with that lodging, watching, care, perill, diseases, ill favoures, bad fare, and many other mischiefes that accompany these voyages, as to woo my selfe againe into any of them, were I not assured that the sunne covereth not so much riches in any part of the earth" (68-69; see also [paragraph]][3.sup.v]). Ralegh returns to this technique in his Apology, where he argues that he would never have returned to England if he had not believed in what he was doing, nor would he have sold his wife's house before leaving, to raise funds (498). Ralegh tries to make himself the certificate of his sincerity, but where Frobisher wanted the certificate to end the need for language, Ralegh relies on his own speech and narrative continuing. Unlike Frobisher, he does not offer an object outside of interpretation, but one that requires more interpretation the more it interprets itself. The object is himself.

In each of Ralegh's arguments, the rhetoric is literally inflationary; things of small significance trade at far above their value. What little description of Manoa, the missing golden city, Ralegh offers is purely relative, as if it borrowed its attributes from other places in the New World. His language refers to language, and produces more language; it is productive: it heaps things up, but only words, not gold. Like Cortes' Mexico, Manoa is situated on a lake; it has the same religion, laws and customs as Peru (Discoverie, 10). These similarities allow Ralegh to extrapolate Manoa from the other two, "because we may judge of the one by the other" (11), except that Manoa is always in excess of previous Spanish discoveries. The main descriptive device of the introductory and concluding matter is the favorable comparison: Guiana has more gold than the Indies or Peru (A[4.sup.r], 10, 93); Manoa exceeds any known city in wealth, "China excepted" (93); whoever takes it will find more treasure than Cortes in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru, "and the shining glorie of this conquest will eclipse all those so farre extended beames of the Spanish nation.... [t]he common soldier shall here fight for gold, and pay himself in steede of pence, with plates of halfe a foote brode" (94-95); the Prince that takes Guiana will gain an empire greater than that of Spain or the Great Turk (9), or simply be "greatest" outright (100). The only consistency that Ralegh can find in his imaginary referent is one of more than. Guiana is, in various ways, only more than whatever it can be compared with, a difference of pure degree. This excessiveness, according to Ralegh, is not finally a rhetorical effect; it is an accurate description of a landscape that can be described accurately only by describing it excessively. The narratives of the land's wealth are based on a metonymic extension of known referents or known narratives because the actual reality of the country demands it. Ralegh always says it is in excess of what can be said of it: "I will be contented to lose her highnes favour and good opinion for ever, and my life withall, if the same [Guiana] be not found rather to exceed, then to equall whatsoever is in this discourse promised or declared" ([paragraph][4.sup.v]). The value of the gold itself exceeds the value of the credit Ralegh asks for; Ralegh needs this inflation because he can only keep getting support if the gains will in the end exceed what he promises, and what has been invested in him. Ralegh's narrative economy divorces itself from the gold standard while remaining nominally tied to it; the value of the Guianan gold, Ralegh knows, is a function of James' belief in it.

This rhetoric of inflation provides Ralegh's best evidence for the great wealth of Guiana, which is just that he does not have any of it with him. The white spar is too hard and the vast quantifies of gold hidden in it too large to be mined by his unequipped men, even if he had not been restrained from so doing by concern for Elizabeth's best interests ([paragraph][2.sup.v]-[3.sup.r], 50f.). With this reversal, Ralegh tries to convert his lack of evidence first into a specular possibility and finally into a positive proof of the gold's existence. A thing's absence in one place becomes the proof of its existence elsewhere, and Ralegh's narratives serve as promissory notes or bills of exchange. According to this logic, when one native canoe of several is caught while the others get away, the fact that it is full of refiner's tools and equipment but no gold shows that "in those Canoas which escaped there was a good quantity of ore and gold" (49). Even the fact that many of Ralegh's sailors return to England with worthless but shiny marcasite, "and have thereby bred an opinion that all the rest is of the same" (68), proves indirectly the presence of gold. While Ralegh concedes that his men were mistaken to think that all is gold that glitters, it is no less of an error simply to reject what glitters at once because it is not gold. Some of the stones mistakenly picked up as gold and then dismissed as marcasite are in fact neither; when assayed, Ralegh claims, they prove to be "El Madre deloro" ([paragraph][2.sup.r-v], 68), still not gold and no more valuable than marcasite, but now "an undoubted assurance of the generall abundance" (81) of gold, a sign that the gold lies deeper in the ground as well as in the interpretation.

Such a perfectly ambiguous sign is ideally suited to the protraction of the narrative and the postponement of the moment when the referent will catch up with Ralegh. Frobisher's pretended ore, if it is in fact faked, is thus a completely different kind of deception from Ralegh's promises and signs of impending success. Ralegh's proof lies in his having nothing to show except what he doesn't want, and on his men having picked up the shiny rocks that are themselves worthless but that suggest that there is gold out there lying deeper, while Frobisher from the first has the thing he wants, but never enough of it. Frobisher relies on synecdoche to deliver his mine to Elizabeth. He seeks to offer a part for the whole, as in Best's tautological formula for what Frobisher wants: a "true certificat of the truth" (46). Ralegh, though, relies on a different tropic strategy from Frobisher's. Like Sidney in the "grammar rules" sonnet (Astrophil and Stella, 63),(30) Ralegh attempts to convert "No, no" into "no 'No'." Even in the imaginary world of the poem, though, this trick of grammar is not meant to convince, but to defer. The success of Ralegh's narratives is not in their persuasiveness, but in the ingenuity with which they keep finding ways to spin themselves out when there is really nothing more to say. Ralegh's technique is to find in every negative proof simply another obstacle to overcome, and behind every obstacle the promise of gold. By stressing the slenderness of his evidence, Ralegh seeks to magnify its presence in Guiana and postpone its narrative-ending nonappearance in England. Like the invisible gold of the Besanyon fairs, the less impressive the material that Ralegh produces in England, the brighter it shines in the New World. Frobisher's black stone and Ralegh's white spar are thus as different in their functions as in their colors. When Lok fails to get a favorable appraisal of the black stone, he simply goes to another assayer until one tells him what he wants. When some of Ralegh's ore fails to contain gold, he accepts the judgment, but analyzes the failure. Lok and Frobisher try to find value in the object; Ralegh tries to find it in the interpretation of the object. The competence or incompetence of their assayers can make the job of Frobisher and Lok easier or harder, but they can only collect the opinions of experts and use them as evidence. Ralegh tries to read behind the interpretations he gets in order to produce meanings that interpret his results.(31) Frobisher wants to bring back a piece of ore, and wants it to show that even if he does not know where the mine is, he has a piece of it that proves it exists; Ralegh has nothing from his mine, and wants his having nothing to prove that he has found what he is looking for in such abundance that it can only be transported to England by his language.

Why is it, then, that Ralegh's writing on Guiana is finally neither convincing nor effective in restoring him to favor with Elizabeth or in saving his life under James? It is because in some way his missing referent catches up with him, and his elegant circumlocutions, misdirections, and inversions are brought up against a material failure that his most careful rhetorical techniques cannot cover or recover. Ralegh tries to keep his works on Guiana within a purely discursive sphere, but he is tied to a referent, gold, that insistently comes back, or rather fails to come back, and so undermines his promises. Ralegh may have succeeded earlier in demonstrating his continence discursively to Elizabeth, but he cannot conjure the gold he needs politically under James with words. In the face of Elizabeth's indifference and James' hostility, Ralegh's clever play in the gap between words and things does not save him, although it perhaps earns his temporary release in 1617. His return from Guiana the next year after having attacked a Spanish town but found no gold suggests that, in the end, Ralegh may have placed too much faith in his power over words and in their exchangeability with things. While not powerless, his narrative control should not be mistaken for mastery. It remains partial, a brake rather than a rudder. The same gap Ralegh plays in also forecloses any further extension of his own story on his return, and so closes off another suspended narrative -- that of his life, under a death sentence from 1603 to 1618. Once he returns to England, though, Ralegh has no choice but to resist the way he does; with no gold in Guiana, all he can do in his narratives is draw out and defer the discovery of this absence. As the promised payoff diminishes from golden riches to a sample of riches to the promise of a sample, so does the value of what Ralegh is bargaining for -- a return to Elizabeth's favor, release from James' tower, and in the end, a stay of execution.

It is James who finally puts an end to Ralegh's games of uncertainty and demands that he either produce his gold or admit its nonexistence; he refuses Ralegh's credit and insists on a return to Frobisher's gold standard. Ralegh's Apology can be read as a last attempt to throw into doubt James' certainty that there was never any mine. He succeeded at least in confusing those who had been with him on the voyage and testified in the case against him on his return. Of the four witnesses whose evidence is given in V. T. Harlow's collection of documents relating to Ralegh's second voyage to Guiana, two, Robert Mering and William Herbert, were convinced that at least Ralegh believed a mine existed; the other two, Captain Roger North and Captain John Chudleigh, thought that he did not (255-60). When Ralegh was condemned under the old death sentence from 1603, "[h]e sued for four or five days longer, under pretense of having somewhat to communicate with his Majestie by writing,"(32) but writing could hold off the end of the story no longer, and the next day Ralegh was beheaded. If his narrative on Guiana failed to convince James or even many others, though, Ralegh's performance on the scaffold was impressive enough, as James had feared, to win many of the onlookers to his side; although again his rhetoric failed to save his life, it at least succeeded in turning the tables somewhat on the king, discomfiting him and commandeering his spectacle.(33)

James responded with a posthumous rhetorical counterattack of his own, A Declaration of the Demeanour and Carriage of Sir Walter Ralegh, Knight, in spite of Ralegh's request "that no Scandalous Writing to Defame him might be Published after his Death."(34) In this work, James sets himself up pointedly as a good king far removed from intrigues like Ralegh's who, for the benefit of his subjects, is willing to give "true and undisguised declarations of [his actions]; as judging, that, for actions not well founded, it is advantage to let them pass in uncertain reports; but for actions, that are built upon sure and solid grounds, such as his majesty's are, it belongeth to them, to be published by open manifests" (335). In spite of his declared openness, though, James is not above playing Ralegh's game of offering the possible as the certain. Certainly the fortified Spanish town of Saint Thome was attacked by Ralegh's men, and just as certainly Ralegh himself was not with them at the time. Ralegh had already complained in his Apology that it was impossible for the King really to have thought that he could both work a mine on Spanish territory and keep the peace, since to do so he would at least technically be stealing Spanish goods; rather, he argued, Saint Thome was on land that he had previously claimed for England, and so the breach of the peace was the fault of the Spanish (Apology, 500-2). While something of a verbal quibble, Ralegh's point is a strong one. Since not even James denied that he had been given permission to work the mine, any breach of the peace would have been done on royal authority, and Ralegh should not have been liable for it if in fact he was right that even to work the mine would be a breach of peace.

James's case, though, rested on showing that Ralegh intentionally broke the peace with the Spanish, and in the Declaration, he uses the absence of written orders for an attack on the settlement to show Ralegh's shrewdness in planning it. Too sick to march along the coast to the town and the mine from the ships, Ralegh "was wary enough not to express the taking of St Thome" in the "written commission" (344) he gave to Keymis and his men; instead he ordered his men to obey their serjeant-major as if he were Ralegh himself, and then secretly. told the serjeant-major to capture the town. Some of his men, apparently presciently, protested to Ralegh that to attack the town would break the peace with Spain and so go directly against the commission that James had given Ralegh, "whereupon, most falsly and scandalously, he doubted not with confidence to affirm, that he had order by word of mouth, from the king and his council, to take the town, if it were any hindrance to the digging of the mine" (344). The lack of an incriminating paper trail itself becomes incriminating, the sign of Ralegh's hidden agenda, made worse by his attempt to shift the blame to his sovereign. The Declaration, though, makes the same appeal to credit that Ralegh had and so throws the story back into confusion by saying more than it wants to. What James accuses Ralegh of doing, supplementing written orders with untraceable spoken ones, is exactly what Ralegh accuses James of doing to him in the story. It is also the same technique that Ralegh uses to establish the truth of the Guianan gold; in the Declaration the absence of Ralegh's orders proves the treasonous intent behind them just as the absence of gold in Ralegh's ship was meant to show its presence in Guiana. Without meaning to, James reopens the realm of discourse that he had closed by pressing the absence of gold home against Ralegh's defenses; having elided the uncertainty about one question -- is there a mine? -- and concluded that there is not, he produces a new uncertainty -- on whose orders was Saint Thome attacked, Keymis', Ralegh's, or the king's own? While claiming to be settling the accounts with the material certainty of Frobisher's narratives, James makes use of the promissory tactics of Ralegh's credit.

The gap between language and things opens again elsewhere, but James quickly slams it shut with the same trope that Ralegh tried to use to secure his own evidence. James does not raise this uncertainty as a question, but as an expression of horror at Ralegh's shamelessness in trying to cover his own misdeeds by implicating the King. In the end, in the realm of real action and not of discourse, it is neither slick rhetoric nor certain things that matter, but the king's authority, in particular to decide what is certain and what is not: "Anyone may be admitted as evidence for the king."(35) In this case, for his purposes, which include the desire to be rid of Ralegh, James concludes that he prefers Frobisher's kind of proof to Ralegh's narrative one -- without, however, concluding anything other than that preference and his justification for it:

But as to Sir Walter Ralegh's confession at his death, what he

confessed or denied, touching any points of this declaration,

his majesty leaves him and his conscience therein to God, as

was said at the beginning of this discourse. For sovereign

princes cannot make a true judgment upon the bare

speeches, or asseverations of a delinquent, at the time of his death;

but their judgment must be founded upon examinations,

reexaminations, and confrontments, and such like real proofs,

as all this former discourse is made up of and built upon.

(355)

James' "real proofs" are another way of bringing into discourse things that speak for themselves, unequivocal objects beyond interpretation. Ralegh's confession James leaves in abeyance; what he proves here is only that Ralegh has proven nothing, and that in that vacuum of proof James, as a sovereign, is free to act. James works to transfer the economic negotiations of Ralegh back into the true-false binary of meaning, so that to have no "real proofs," to live on nothing but credit, is to have nothing at all. Like Frobisher, James enforces the logical necessity of a proposition being true or false, and takes this real value out of the relative negotiations of the marketplace: there is no gold, and Ralegh lied. Unlike Frobisher, James admits the need for discourse, albeit one "made up of and built upon" such proofs, but conceals the similarity of his own narrative to Ralegh's, and how what distinguishes Ralegh's "bare speeches, or asseverations" from his own authorized "examinations, re-examinations, and confrontments" is not reality in some extra-discursive sphere, but the discursive reality of authority. The fact that the gap between what is said and what may have happened can open so surprisingly undoes some of the certainty with which James invests the "real proofs" he speaks of here, whether for an explorer trying to show that he has discovered what he wants to, or a king straining to get rid of an unloved subject. In spite of what James and Frobisher affirm, truth is not binary but economic and, as Ralegh knew, negotiated in language, even if that language cannot risk revealing itself as other than the certainty of "examinations, re-examinations, and confrontments, and such like real proofs."

Notes

I would like to thank Steven Mullaney for his careful comments on this essay, and for helping me to shape some of the ideas in it, and Lisa Manter for her discussions about this topic.

(1.) John Elliott, for instance, sees gold as one of two defining images of America: "Gold and conversion -- these were the two most immediate and obvious connotations of America . . ." (The Old World and the New, 1492-1650, Canto Editions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], 11). In spite of the other wonders and profits there, "inevitably it was the gold and silver of the New World which most attracted the attention of the sixteenth-century Europeans" (59-60). See also Philippe Desan, L'imaginaire economique de la Renaissance (Mont-de-Marsan: Editions InterUniversitaires, 1993), "Prolegomenes and ch. I, esp. 22-23.

(2.) Utopia, ed. and intro. Edward Surtz, S.J. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964 [1516]), 85-89. The Utopians also shame wrongdoers by forcing them to wear gold ornaments, and only their children wear gems.

(3.) D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England under the Later Tudors, 1549-1603 (London: Longman, 1992), 338.

(4.) Generall Historie of Virginia ... In The Complete Works, 3 vols., ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 2: 41-474, 136.

(5.) In The Works of Walter Raleigh, 8 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1829/ New York: Burt Franklin [1964]; [1618]), 8: 479-507, 479.

(6.) Jeffrey Knapp, in An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press), gives some other striking examples of the disparity between English and Spanish colonizations, and particularly the English recognition of it (1-5). John Smith is almost unique among early English explorers in rejecting the easy money of gold and instead arguing for the less glamorous trade in ordinary goods (ibid. 204-209).

(7.) Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre Of Guiana (London; repr. Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1968 [1596]), 93.

(8.) Idem, 3'. Fernand Braudel makes use of this metaphor in depth (see Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century, vol. 1, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, trans. Sian Reynolds [New York: Harper and Row, 1981], chap. 17 passim). Desan looks principally at the exchange value of language, but also considers the metaphor of words as gold, esp. 15-18, 20-21.

(9.) Braudel notes this confusion of gold with money in the history of economic thinking (ch. 7) and the formulation of money as the measure, and commodity as the thing measured, is his. Marc Shell's The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) contains a very useful discussion of the contusion of gold as money with gold as commodity from a theoretical standpoint (chs. 1 and 2). Even without this confusion, gold can take on a kind of transcendence beyond the mere conventionality of money. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, makes the distinction while preserving the autonomy of precious metals: ". . . Silver and Gold, have their value from the matter it self ... But that Coyne which is not considerable for the matter, but for the Stamp of the place, being unable to endure change of ayr, hath its effects at home only . . ." See Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1651]), 175.

(10.) Thomas Smith, A discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England, ed. Mary Dewar (Charlotteville: University Press of Virginia, 1969 [1581]), 74. I follow the Discourse's editor in assigning it to Smith; the title page gives the author as "W. S." The Discourse was probably written in the late 1540s, then revised and augmented for publication in 1581; see Dewar's introduction for a fuller explanation of the circumstances.

(11.) Ralegh, Discoverie, 95.

(12.) On gold's "naturalness," see Thomas Smith, passim; Desan, 32-34, and Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2. On the place of trade as a place of mystery, see Desan, 26-32; on the growing disparity between the scale of trade and "ordinary understanding, see Agnew, 37-48; see also Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 178-79, for a detailed account of the persistent "mystery" of international trade and New World wealth. Part 1 of L. C. Knights's Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957 [1937]), with its wealth of particular detail, suggests just how far Elizabethan and Jacobean practices were from even partial comprehension of things like investing, risk, and money exchange.

(13.) Braudel alludes to Schumpeter's deconstruction of the difference between money and credit: all money is in effect promissory as long as it is being exchanged, and all credit relations are similarly monetary, in that they act as if they had real value (476).

(14.) Ibid., 448.

(15.) In a reading of Ralegh's Guiana documents, Mary Fuller ("Ralegh's Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana," in Representations 33 [1991]: 42-64, 43-47 and passim) presents a Ralegh who resembles the Frobisher I delineate in his anxiousness for a material proof that will require no supplement of language. As will become clear, I see Ralegh's tactics somewhat differently. I am indebted to Fuller's superb treatment of what she calls "the trope of materiality," but I believe that in emphasizing the complexity of the relations between descriptions and referents, she has to some extent elided the ways in which Ralegh used his language as well as was used by it. Fuller's Ralegh seems surprised by the failure of the material to solve his problems; he is caught, as it were, in the trap of the trope. I see both Ralegh and Frobisher recognizing the problems posed by the trope of materiality, but adopting very different stances toward them: Frobisher compensatory; Ralegh exploitative.

(16.) George Best, A True Discourse of the late voyages of discoverie. . . (1578), in Vilhjamur Stefansson, ed., The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, 2 vols. (London; Argonaut Press, 1938), 1:1-129, 46; my emphasis.

(17.) Michael Lok, Account of the First Voyage [1577], in Stephansson, 1: 155-66, 163.

(18.) See Best, 49-50. Lok tells the same story; see 163-65. The man died in England. On the next voyage, Frobisher takes a second man captive and also a woman: for the encounter of the second captive with the portrait of the first, see Best, 59-65; for a more complete discussion of this event see Stephen Mullaney, "Brothers and Others, or the Arts of Alienation," in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber, Selected Papers from the English Institute, n. s. 11 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 67-89, 67-71.

(19.) On the Elizabethanness of the worthless stone being the source of wealth, see Jeffrey Knapp, 59-60.

(20.) See Michael Lok, Discourse touching the Ewre [1577], in Stefansson, 2: 84-90, 84 (my translation).

(21.) Best, 117.

(22.) Ibid., 70.

(23.) See Fuller (44-50, 59-61) for interesting discussions on practical as well as theoretical problems of reference in another colonial text.

(24.) I am drawing on Braudel's discussion of perfect and imperfect monies (Braudel, 441).

(25.) See Best, 103 ff., 118-20.

(26.) See James I of England, A Declaration of the Demeanour and Carriage of Sir Walter Ralegh, Knight [1618], in V.T. Harlow, ed., Ralegh's Last Voyage (London: Argonaut Press, 1932), 335-56, 342.

(27.) Ralegh, Discoverie, A3r [para]31'.

(28.) Excellent readings of Ralegh's Guiana documents are given in Knapp (189-204); Fuller; in Louis Montrose, "The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," Representations 33 (1992): 1-41, and in Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 99-114, 155-70. Much of my discussion of Ralegh in Guiana is indebted to their formulations.

(29.) See Harlow, 12-24; Greenblatt, 159-62.

(30.) Philip Sydney, Sir Philip Sydney, The Oxford Authors, ed. and comp. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

(31.) The difference between the approach of Frobisher and Lok and that of Ralegh is like the difference between "scissors-and-paste" historians and "scientific" ones defined by R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), in his discussion of historical evidence (249-82). The scissors-and-paste historian relies on testimony which can be more or less authoritative, but which is either accepted or rejected; the scientific historian reads the testimony and tries to decide what may be behind it. Collingwood's analysis suggests how easily the valorizations of these two roles can switch.

(32.) Letter of Thomas Larkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, in Harlow, 311.

(33.) See Greenblatt, 1-21.

(34.) Walter Ralegh, Speech Immediately before he was beheaded, in Harlow, 305-311, 310.

(35.) See William Staunford in his Plees (1557), quoted in Baker (289). The law, while nominally independent of the king, tended to support him: "[F]rom the fifteenth century the legal profession had been reforming the common law, particularly as regards procedures, rendering it a more effective instrument of state control which was rarely at odds with the crown" (Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Vie s on State and Society [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 11).