As far as I know, there was only one adventurer who visited both Guiana (as it was) and Newfoundland during the age of discovery.
As far as I know, there was only one adventurer who visited both Guiana (as it was) and Newfoundland during the age of discovery.
He was Robert Hayman, lawyer, poet, dilettante and layabout (and a distant relative of mine). Few men were less suited to either the challenges of the sub-arctic or the rigours of the tropics. Born into an up-and-coming Devonshire family in 1575, Robert spent his formative years floating around the universities of Oxford and Poitiers. If he’d ever had any aptitude for the law, by the age of forty-two, there was still no sign of it. In desperation, his father – who had friends at court – blagged him a job in the colonies. The following year, 1618, he was appointed Governor of Harbour Grace, a wind-scoured inlet in northern Newfoundland, famous for nothing but fish.
As governor, Robert ruled with spectacular indifference. He hardly seemed to notice that all his men were dying of scurvy. He himself was not a man to get his ruffs dirty, and, by his own admission, he refused to lift a finger. Instead, he spent his time translating Rabelais (‘that excellently wittie Doctor’) before beginning work on his own, rather curious oeuvre: Quodlibets, lately come over from New Britaniola. In reality, it’s merely vacuous doggerel, distinguished only by the fact that it’s probably the first English poetry to emerge from the New World.
By 1628, Robert’s Newfoundland venture was drawing to an end. His plans for the colony had been invariably daft. In one letter, Robert urged the building of a great new city out here amongst the fish. All it needed was a million men but it would be known forever as Carolinople (after Charles I). When this scheme failed to get off the ground, Robert began to look around for an empire somewhere else.
To anyone with a flair for disaster, Guiana was a perfect choice. At that stage, attention was still focussed on the ‘Wyapoko’ (now Oyapok) river, in what is now French Guiana (or Guyane). There, disease and Portuguese raids had already polished off several English colonies. Not that this would deter a man of great poetic vision. In November 1628, Robert prepared a new will before his departure ‘by God’s leave to Guiane’. Then, along with a hundred others, he set off from Gravesend in ‘a shipp of London called the little hopewell.’ Three months later, they arrived on the Wyapoko, built a fort and prepared the land for sugar.
It was, predictably, a disaster. Within eight months, Robert was in a grip of a ‘burning fever’ and died of ‘the fluxe’. He died and was buried here, on the banks of the Oyapok (see photo). The following year, the ‘Little Hopewell’ was wrecked off the mouth of the Amazon, with the loss of all but eleven lives. As for the colony, it was razed by the Portuguese, and no sign of it remains.
