Volume 14, Number 10 · May 21, 1970
Triste Trinidad
By J.H. Elliott
The Loss of El Dorado
by V.S. Naipaul
Knopf, 334 pp., $7.50
The words floated down from the minstrels' gallery during a feast at a Cambridge University college last December. They come from the Airs or Fantastic Spirits to Three Voices of Thomas Weelkes, and date from 1608. At the time of their composition, both tobacco and 'Trinidado' had only quite recently impinged on the collective consciousness of Englishmen, many of whom may well have instinctively associated them with the name of the last of the great heroes of Elizabethan England, Sir Walter Raleigh. It was he who had helped to popularize the new craze for smoking; and he, too, who had introduced them to Trinidad in his best seller of 1596, The Discoverie of the Large and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana: 'This iland of Trinidado hath the form of a sheep-hook and is but narrow; the north part is very mounteynous, the soile is very excellent…'
Review, 2074 words
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