In a letter to his wife dated 14 November 1617 and written from the Cayenne river on his second ill-fated voyage of exploration in Guiana, Sir Walter Ralegh writes: ‘To tell you that I might be here King of the Indians were a vanitie; but my name hath still lived among them; here they feed me with fresh meat, and all that Countrey yields, all offer to obey me’. This was not a lie. In fact, travellers report that both the words ‘Waterali’ and ‘Gualtero’ are attested in the seventeenth century in local Amazonian dialects as honorific titles, enduring well into the eighteenth century. This extraordinary fact reveals the impact Ralegh made on political consciouness and oral traditions as early as his first 1595 expedition, and how, while he was dealing with what Lévi-Strauss would call ‘cold cultures’ – i.e. societies which do not possess a written culture – his own memory (or a shadow of it) was preserved through oral transmission. One of the purposes of this paper is to try and assess the significance of this incorporation of Ralegh's name into local cultures, even though his exploration failed to advance the English presence in Guiana. In 1595, Ralegh promised the Indians he would be back with an army to free them from the Spaniards, but he had to delay his expedition until 1617, where divisions among the Indians and new skirmishes between the English and the Spaniards caused his men to set fire to a Spanish town – in direct contradiction with James I's instructions. In the process, he lost his son Wat, and his trusted friend and captain Lawrence Keymis committed suicide. He sailed back to England only to be sent to the scaffold.

In his edition of the 1596 Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, Neil Whitehead describes the narrative as an ‘enchanted text’, whose magic appeal derives from its unique ‘blending of the factual and fictitious’, which might account for the enduring attention it has received over the years.