For God and Gold — Story, Setting & Ideas

Voices in Collision

The excerpt brings together three distinct speaking styles. Mr. Oxenham, the veteran, delivers a rhapsodic vision of the New World as a 'Paradise where all is so wide and fresh and lovely,' using a lush, sensory vocabulary of 'azure and rose colour and golden sheen.' Frank, by contrast, speaks in the cadences of Puritan militancy: Spaniards are 'idolatrous hell-hounds of Antichrist,' and the enterprise is a 'glorious smiting.' His speech is peppered with scriptural allusion—'Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?'—and a practical, almost predatory energy ('pounce out like cats'). Festing, the narrator, filters both through a scholarly, introspective lens, noting how 'Frank's sound sense' and Oxenham's 'glowing pictures' set his imagination 'all on fire.' The collision of these registers—lyrical, homiletic, analytical—creates a tension that is central to the novel's method.

The Scholar's Conversion to Action

Festing's narration traces a psychological shift from detached intellectualism to committed action. He begins by admitting 'how idle was our scholars' contempt for men of action,' a self-critique that emerges from listening to Frank's 'honest practical way.' The language of conversion is explicit: 'In place of my faith a sense of destiny seemed to have come to me.' Corbett dramatizes this change through a series of contrasts—'lonely lodging' versus fellowship, 'blank morrow' versus a life of purpose—and through the physical setting of a long post-supper conversation. The narrator's earlier bookishness is not abandoned but repurposed: his 'imagination, on which I had already heaped so much that was inflammable from my books,' now finds a real-world object. This interior movement, rendered in Festing's own measured prose, gives the novel a psychological depth that complicates its swashbuckling surface.

The Rhetoric of the New World

Oxenham's description of the Americas is a set piece of colonial longing. He contrasts the 'old world'—'gray, and worn, and stifling'—with a land of 'colour and sunlight and freedom,' where 'the golden land brings forth without labour.' The passage employs a series of similes: Europe is 'like the paddling of a duckling in a puddle,' while the voyager is a 'god-like albatross, that never lights.' The rhetoric is deliberately excessive, even sensual: 'drink her fragrant breath, feel the richness of her warm embrace.' Corbett places this speech just before Frank's militant rebuttal, creating a juxtaposition that suggests the multiple motivations behind Elizabethan expansion—not just greed or piety, but a quasi-erotic yearning for renewal. The novel thus uses contrasting persuasive styles to explore how different characters justify the same enterprise.

The Editor's Conceit and Historical Play

The preface's editorial apparatus is more than a period flourish. By claiming that Festing's memoir closely follows Sir Francis Drake Revived—a real 1626 text—Corbett invites readers to compare fiction with historical record. The note about 'Pike' versus 'Culverin' as a punning substitution exemplifies this game: it asserts that the novel corrects or supplements the earlier account, while simultaneously acknowledging its own fictionality. The editor's refusal to explain how the manuscript 'came to light' adds a layer of mystery. This framing device does not merely authenticate the story; it makes the act of historical reconstruction part of the narrative. Readers are positioned as collaborators in evaluating evidence, weighing 'small discrepancies' between sources, and deciding what to believe about Festing's role in Drake's voyage.

Readers should attend to the way Corbett uses Festing's first-person narration to mediate between competing worldviews. The novel does not simply celebrate Drake's exploits; it interrogates the motives—religious, economic, personal—that drove them. Pay particular attention to moments where Festing's scholarly detachment wavers, and to the rhetorical strategies each character employs to persuade him. The preface's hint of suppressed names and altered details suggests that the narrative itself may be an act of self-fashioning, not just a record of events.

Reading the editorial note on For God and Gold, I found myself drifting back to a quiet afternoon with Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story — Inside the Classic. Both books feel like conversations between different selves—one voice anchoring what another romanticizes. That same tension, I suppose, remains: the world we imagine against the world we actually spoke in.