When James the Cur sat on the throne of great Elizabeth, his courtiers had Raleigh tried and condemned to death. The charge was treason in taking Spanish bribes, not a likely act of Spain’s great enemy, one of the few items omitted from Sir Walter’s menu of little peccadillos. James as lick-spittle and flunkey-in-chief to the king of Spain, kept Raleigh for fifteen years awaiting execution in the tower of London. Then Raleigh appealed to the avarice of the court, talked of Manoa and King El Dorado, offered to fetch gold from the Orinoco, and got leave, a prisoner on parole, to sail once more for the Indies. They say that the myth of El Dorado is based on the curious mirage of a city which in some kinds of weather may still be seen across Lake Maracaibo. Raleigh and his people found nothing but mosquitoes, fever and hostile Spaniards; the voyage was a failure, and he came home, true to his honor, to have his head chopped off. “I have,” he said on the scaffold, “a long journey to take, and must bid the company farewell.” The headsman knelt to receive his pardon. Testing with his finger the edge of the ax, Raleigh lifted and kissed the blade. “It is a sharp and fair medicine,” he said smiling, “to cure me of all my diseases.” Then the executioner lost his nerve altogether, “What dost thou fear?” asked Raleigh. “Strike, man, strike!” “Oh eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou hast cast out of the world and despised: “Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, _Hic jacet_.” [Illustration: JAMES I] XXXV A. D. 1608 CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH The sentence just quoted, the most beautiful perhaps in English prose, is copied from the _History of the World_, which Raleigh wrote when a prisoner in the tower, while wee James sat on the throne. It was then that a gentleman and adventurer, Captain John Smith, came home from foreign parts. At the age of seventeen Mr. Smith was a trooper serving with the Dutch in their war with Spain. As a mariner and gunner he fought in a little Breton ship which captured one of the great galleons of Venice. As an engineer, his inventions of “flying dragons” saved a Hungarian town besieged by the Turks, then captured from the infidel the impregnable city of Stuhlweissenburg. So he became a captain, serving Prince Sigismund at the siege of Reigall. Here the attack was difficult and the assault so long delayed “that the Turks complained they were getting quite fat for want of exercise.” So the Lord Turbishaw, their commander, sent word that the ladies of Reigall longed to see some courtly feat of arms, and asked if any Christian officer would fight him for his head, in single combat. The lot fell to Captain Smith.