Letter to my lovely Bess

5^th October 1591

Dear Bess,

                I know that you are concerned about my situation with the queen, but she is a wonderful and fair queen, she won’t let us punish for much time. She likes you and she has an admiration that it’s a little bit surprising for me, but I know that she likes me too. I touched her heart when i talked about my expedition to the New World, you were there, and you could saw her face when I started to describe the quantity of things they possessed and the large of land unexplored and “virgin” that exists. She was very interesting and i think that might be perhaps, because her curious nature and her spirit of courage and adventure. We both know that if she could, she will explore with me this New World and she will be delightfully. She has a soul of child and an innocence of a young girl who doesn’t know how far the moon to the earth stays.               
              However my love we also both know that she won’t be able to come with me into the New World, she is a queen. The Queen of England for God’s sake, she cannot have a private life without anyone knows it and comment on it.

                Now my dear Bess, do you want me to describe just for you the New World? I will. So can you imagine what it feels like seeing nothing besides an immensity of ocean and water? Just this, nothing more, for weeks and weeks without seeing anything but water? No land, no women, no food enough, just a group of men lonely with all that emptiness and that peace? You start to feel fear, fear for everything, fear of storms, and fear of get sick or die. But we must take our fear and put it behind our bags, we cannot give it one of our thoughts, we cannot doubt about us and our faith, our God’s and our hearts. We must keep hope. When, suddenly we start to glimpse something but we don’t know what it is, so we wait, wait and wait for days until finally we saw what it is… it’s land, land virgin and unexplored, land with food and safe places to sleep, land with so many things to see that we cannot absorb everything for just one look. You must keep looking and assimilate all you can see, because it’s magic, its pure magic of nature, it’s a miracle of God and we were the first to see such beauty. In the end we all pray for that bless and I, I pray for my Queen one day could saw what I saw.    
                I’m sorry… I got emotional, the Queen when I told her my trip to New World she said. “I like your immensities. Your ocean is an image of eternity I think. Such grand spaces make us small. Do we discover the New World Mr. Riley or does the New World discover us?” (Elizabeth the Golden Age) I never forget her face when she told me that, she is a remarkable women and she is a great queen.

With all my love

Walter Raleigh

Published by: Catarina