It is also due South of Trinidad and Tobago..........................in the movie.........Victory...........with Sylvester Stallone.........Rambo, Rocky.........Pele said he learned to play soccer........in the streets of Trinidad...........

This is the context in which Ralegh’s first expedition can strike us almost as touching. It took place as late as 1595, when no Spaniard but the stubborn old Antonio de Berrio, whom Ralegh captured and grilled in Trinidad, still believed the myth. It unfolded with the minimum of violence, its imagery being Arcadian rather than demonic. Ralegh was inclined to Edenic notions of New World community, following Spenser and Dee, and for him the Golden City blurs into a Golden Age complete with sinless primitives – mirror images of the dark cannibals invented and repressed by the mass of Spanish desperadoes, as later by the English in North America. Today, however, the self-romanticising fringe of the indigenismo movement toes a line similar to Ralegh’s, strangely endorsing the sunny side of that Eurocentric fantasy.

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.