ABSTRACT
A soldier-poet who once served in the Anglo-Dutch fleet against the Azores with Raleigh in 1597, John Donne has a passage that distills a couple of dangers English protestants thought inherent in conducting tropical “discoveries” in South America like Sir Walter’s. One was the hot fire with which the Spanish and their Inquisition reputedly threatened heretic interlopers; the other, the literal heat of the tropical latitudes: thrise Colder then Salamanders, like divine Children in th’Oven, fires of Spaine, and the’line, Whose countries limbecks to our bodies bee, Canst thou for gaine beare? The word of special interest here for Raleigh’s journey up the Orinoco is “line.” The term doesn’t exactly denote “equator” but rather the literal “equinoctial line” around our blue ellipsoid, where days and night are of equal length. While at Trinidad Raleigh was not standing precisely on the one true east-west parallel which completes the great circle of the earth, he was only ten and a quarter degrees north of it.
