Sir Walter Ralegh and Westward Ho!

The story of Sir Walter Ralegh’s search for El Dorado was given a fictional slant in Charles Kingsley’s novel Westward Ho!, published in 1855 and an instant bestseller. It tells the story of Amyas Leigh, a young man from Bideford in North Devon – where Kingsley wrote the novel – who goes to the coast of South America in search of gold. Amyas Leigh is loosely based on the real-life Amyas Preston, captain of one of the ships in Ralegh’s first Guiana expedition in 1595, and on Ralegh himself, though Ralegh also appears as a character. Much of the novel is taken up with Leigh’s antipathy towards the Spanish, culminating in the battle against the Spanish Armada in 1588. The novel reflects Kinglsey’s anti-Catholicism and support of British colonial expansion, themes that make it seem very dated today but help to explain the huge enthusiasm for it during the Victorian period.

Both of my grandfathers had copies of Westward Ho!, and you can see them here – my one grandfather, Lawrence Gibbins, a future sea captain, gave me his copy with his name in it, and the other, Tom Verrinder, was awarded it as a school prize not long before joining the army for the First World War. Its massive popularity led to a group of entrepreneurs developing a holiday village near Bideford that they called Westward Ho! In 1874 it became the location of United Service College, a public school aimed especially at educating future military officers and colonial administrators – very much in keeping with the tenor of the novel. The school’s most famous pupil was Rudyard Kipling, who was there at the same time as three of my grandfather Lawrence Gibbins’ great-uncles – their father, a former army officer who had retired from India and New Zealand, lived in Bideford. In this way, the romanticized story of Ralegh and his adventures became an ingredient in the British imperialist endeavour of the mid to late 19th century.