Grave Expectations: Sir Walter Raleigh and English Tomb Raiding in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic

In Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1595), the English explorer likened the Indians he met in South America to the Incas conquered by Spain. “In the graues of the Peruuians, the Spanyards founde their greatest abundance of treasure,” Raleigh declared. “The like also is to be found among these people in [Guiana].” Or so Raleigh had heard. He and his men had refrained from opening graves, lest they “grieued [the native peoples] in their religion at the first, before they had beene taught better.” Guiana “hath yet her Maydenhead, neuer sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not beene torne, nor the vertue and salt of the soyle spent by manurance, the graues haue not been opened for gold...” If England played its cards right, Guiana, and its graves, could be hers.
My paper examines why Raleigh framed his Guiana appeal within Spain’s fortunate but transgressive opening of Peruvian graves. Drawing from Raleigh’s Discovery and the illustrated plates and English translations of Spanish accounts of the Conquest of Peru, I will suggest that England’s earliest models of New World colonization throbbed with the hope that they might find their own heathen people whose graves were filled with gold. In the spirit of Jorge Cañizares’s Puritan Conquistadors, I will show how sixteenth century English and Spanish traditions of treasure-hunting and tomb-robbing were complementary; both were founded in Christian struggle with idolatry and the search for hidden knowledge. Finally, I follow that early English ambivalence over New World graves into one of the great mythical moments of English colonization – the Pilgrim’s first days in North America in 1620.