The Legend of El Dorado Criticism: Overviews - Essay - eNotes.com
316–402 minutes
A. F. Bandelier (essay date 1893)

Last Updated on June 7, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 8275

SOURCE: Bandelier, A. F. “Cundinamarca.” In The Gilded Man (El Dorado) and Other Pictures of the Spanish Occupancy of America, pp. 1-30. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1893.

[In the following essay, Bandalier describes how the myth of El Dorado and the lure of gold spurred Spanish exploration and conquest of the New World.]

While the early Spanish adventurers in America are justly charged with neglecting the true interests of colonization in their excessive greed for treasure, and thereby bringing harm to those parts of the Western Continent which they entered, it cannot be denied that their irrepressible seeking for the precious metals contributed directly to an earlier knowledge and a more rapid settlement of the country. The Spaniards' thirst for gold led them into adventures which excite admiration and wonder as expressions of manly energy, while they offer the saddest pictures from the point of view of morals.

In every age gold has presented one of the strongest means of enticing men from their homes to remote lands, and of promoting trade between distant regions and the settlement of previously uninhabited districts. We have received from the earliest antiquity the stories of the voyage of the Argonauts, of the expedition of Hercules after the golden apples of the Hesperides, and of the settlement of the Phœnicians in Spain, the gold of which they carried to the Syrian coast. For gold the Semitic navigators sailed from the Red Sea to Tarshish and Ophir.1

Portuguese seamen as early as the middle of the fifteenth century brought gold from the west coast of Africa; in order to find a sea-route to the gold-lands of India, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope; and in order to obtain a shorter route from Spain to India Christopher Columbus ventured out upon the Atlantic Ocean and there reached the new gold-land, America.

On Thursday, October 11, 1492, Columbus landed upon Watling Island, or Guanahani, one of the Bahama group, and on Saturday, the 13th, he wrote: “Many of these people, all men, came from the shore, … and I was anxious to learn whether they had gold. I saw also that some of them wore little pieces of gold in their perforated noses. I learned by signs that there was a king in the south, or south of the island, who owned many vessels filled with gold.”2

This was the first trace of gold which the Europeans found in America. Cuba, where the Admiral next landed, afforded him no gold, but he found the precious metal so abundant in Hispaniola (Santo Domingo, or Hayti) that he was able, after he returned, to write from Lisbon to his sovereigns, March 14, 1493: “To make a short story of the profits of this voyage, I promise, with such small helps as our invincible Majesties may afford me, to furnish them all the gold they need.”

Hispaniola continued till the first decade of the sixteenth century to be the seat of gold production in the newly discovered western land. The consequences of this gold-seeking to the unhappy natives are well known, and need not be dwelt upon. The operations were continued on this island for only a very short time. As a result of the fearfully rapid disappearance of the aborigines, the supply of laborers began to fail, and the mines fell into disuse, although, according to Herrera,3 they furnished to the mother-country, Spain, down to the discovery of Mexico, five hundred thousand ducats in gold.

The Admiral saw the mainland of South America for the first time on...

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his third voyage, at Punta de Icacos, Trinidad, July 31, 1498, and found evidences of gold on the coast of Venezuela. The expedition of Ojeda in 1499 and 1500, although it sailed along the whole northern coast to New Granada, yielded only a small return, for after the largest pearls and gold pieces were turned into the royal treasury only five hundred ducats were left to be divided among one hundred and fifty sharers. A few months before Ojeda, an expedition had returned to Spain from the same region which had attained considerable material results, notwithstanding the small means with which it had been undertaken. Christoval Guerra and Pero Alonzo Nino, with a poor caravel of fifty tons and thirty-three men, had crossed the ocean to Venezuela and sailed along its coast from bay to bay, trading and bartering with the natives, and had thus acquired much gold and more than one hundred and fifty marks' worth of pearls. They brought the report that while gold-dust was rare in the eastern part of the northern coast of South America, the metal was more abundant the farther west they went. When in 1500 Rodrigo de Bastidas of Santa Marta discovered the snow-covered foot-hills of the Cordilleras, his first thought might well have been that the noble metal which the warlike Indians of the coast wore so abundantly as a decoration was derived from those distant heights.4

While Ojeda was vainly trying to found a settlement near Maracaybo, the great Admiral was industriously preparing for a new voyage of discovery. He sailed in 1502, and on the 17th of August of that year he landed, after meeting much tempestuous weather, at Truxillo in Honduras. Sailing along the Mosquito Coast, beaten day and night by severe storms, Columbus reached Porto Bello and Chiriqui. Gold was found in quantities at Chiriqui and Veragua, in the vicinity of the famous mines of Tisingal, which the French filibuster Ravenau de Lussan mentioned as late as 1698.5 The various efforts of the Spanish to plant colonies on the Isthmus and in western New Granada6 had only insignificant results till Vasco Nuñez de Balboa in 1511 assumed the direction of the colony in Darien, with a firm hand, but without any higher right, and with great sagacity immediately brought about closer relations with the surrounding Indian tribes. The tribe of Dabaybe on the Rio Atrato, who had many ornaments of gold, pointed to the west and south as the regions from which this gold came. Balboa, following the directions of the Indians, who hoped to get rid of their distrusted guests and send them to their nearest enemies, reached the coast of the Pacific Ocean on the 25th of September, 1543. There he seems to have heard a report7 of a wealthy tribe which lived on the seacoast far to the south and used large sheep as beasts of burden. From this time forward the attention of the Spaniards was directed to the countries south of the Isthmus.8

Prescott says, in his Conquest of Peru, that Balboa learned in this way of the riches of that kingdom. His authorities are Herrera, who says: “And this was the second report which Vasco Nuñez received of the condition and wealth of Peru;”9 and the later Quintana. Pascual de Andagoya, who went in 1522 as far as Punta de Pinas, on the western coast of New Granada, says: “He had received there exact accounts through traders and chiefs concerning the whole coast to Cuzco.”10 Still, it may be doubtful whether this notice does not refer to the civilized tribes of central New Granada, who carried their salt over the beaten mountain paths to the cannibal inhabitants of the Cauca Valley and received gold in exchange for it. Without forgetting that the llama was never used as a beast of burden in New Granada, the supposition that accounts of Peru had reached the Isthmus, notwithstanding the great distance, involves nothing impossible. Products of nature and art, and reports of conditions and events in single countries, are alike carried to great distances through war and trade.

Although languages and dialects were separated from one another by uninhabited neutral regions, prisoners of war could tell of what was going on at their homes; the booty would include a variety of strange objects; and traders traversed the country in the face of numerous dangers, visited the enemy's markets, and carried their goods to them, with many novelties. This process was repeated from tribe to tribe; and in that way the products of one half of the continent passed, often in single objects, to the other half, and with them accounts of far-off regions, though changed and distorted by time and distance, into remote quarters.

The centers of this primitive trade were among those tribes which, being the most civilized, had the largest number of wants and the most abundant productions. They were the agricultural tribes, the “village Indians” of the higher races. These, although in America they never lived in a gold-bearing country, accumulated the metallic treasures of the lands around them, acquiring them by means of successful wars, or through an active and extensive trade. But the Spaniards, who had no taste for work, preferring chivalrous robbery, sought first the centres of trade and the treasure already laid up in them. The conquest of Mexico gave them evidence of the existence of such a centre in the central part of the Western Continent; but concerning South America there were only rumors and vague guesses.

Excepting the colonies on the Isthmus of Darien and at Panamá, the Spanish settlements in New Granada and Venezuela made little progress. Panamá grew vigorously; ships sailed thence southward to the Pearl Islands and to the west coast of New Granada. The whole western slope of the Andes, from the Rio Atrato southward, the provinces of Antioquia and Cauca, were very rich in gold. But they were inhabited by savage and warlike tribes addicted to a horrible cannibalism, whose villages were rarely situated upon the coast, while access to them by land from Panamá was attended with great difficulties. The Spaniards on the western side of South America were therefore involuntarily led into making coast voyages, which in the course of time took them to Peru.

The Spanish enterprises in Venezuela, after the pearl fisheries on the island of Margarita were organized, were limited to making single landings, the chief purpose of which was barter, and especially man-stealing. This practice depopulated the coast, and embittered the natives to such a degree that they became dangerous enemies to all attempts at permanent colonization. By them the well-intended effort of the famous lieutenant Las Casas to found a colony at Cumaná was defeated with bloodshed in the year 1521. Only in Coro, on the narrow, arid isthmus that connects the peninsula of Paraguana with the country around Lake Maracaybo, Juan de Ampues succeeded in 1527, with seventy men, in founding a colony and establishing friendly relations with the Coquetìos Indians around him.

The Spaniards had by their predatory expeditions excited the resentment of the Indians along the northern coast of New Granada, and those tribes, populous and rich in treasures accumulated by their trade with the interior, but little civilized, offered them a vigorous resistance. Their poisoned arrows were formidable weapons, and the thick woods gave them secure hiding-places and natural fortifications. Rodrigo de Bastidas, having founded a settlement at Santa Marta in 1525, returned to San Domingo in consequence of an outbreak among his men. His successors, Palomino, Badillo, and Heredia, tried without success to overcome the gold-rich tribes of northern New Granada. They could advance no farther than the valley of La Ramada. Palomino was drowned, and a bitter quarrel arose between Heredia and Badillo, the adjustment of which was left to the Emperor Charles V. Without regarding the claims of the two candidates, the Spanish Government appointed Garcia de Lerma governor of Santa Marta, with a new military force. At the same time the Emperor leased the Province of Venezuela, extending from Cape de la Vela on the west to Maracapanna, now Piritú, on the east, to the house of Bartholomäus Welser & Co., of Augsburg, and in 1529 Ambrosius Dalfinger and Bartholomäus Seyler landed at Coro with four hundred men, and took possession of the post for “M. M. H. H. Welser.” Ampues had to yield, and the Germans became lessees of a large part of northern South America. They found the colony of Coro prospering, and the Indians in the neighborhood friendly. A story was current among these Indians of a tribe dwelling in the mountains to the south with whom gold was so abundant that they powdered the whole body of their chief with it. This was the legend of “the gilded man”—el hombre dorado, or, more briefly, el dorado, “the gilded.” The story was based on a fact: a chieftain who was gilded for a certain ceremonial occasion once really existed, on the table-land of Bogotá, in the province of Cundinamarca, in the heart of New Granada.

According to Lucas Fernandez Piedrahita, Bishop of Panamá,11 the district of Cundinamarca included nearly all eastern and central New Granada. The eastern Cordilleras bounded it on the east, it extended on the north to the Rio Cesar and the region of Lake Maracaybo, on the west to the Rio Magdalena, and on the south to Reyva. But the heart of the district, Cundinamarca, in its strictest sense, was the high table-land of Bogotá, once the home of “the dorado.” “This table-land,” says Alexander von Humboldt, in his Vues des Cordillères et Monuments indigènes (Chute de Tequendama), on which the city of Santa Fé is situated, “has some similarity to the plateau that encloses the Mexican lakes. Both lie higher than the convent of St. Bernard; the former is 2660 metres and the latter 2277 metres above the level of the sea. The Valley of Mexico, surrounded by a circular wall of porphyritic mountains, was covered in the central part with water, for before the Europeans dug the canal of Huehuetoca the numerous mountain streams that fell into the valley had no outlet from it. The table-land of Bogotá is likewise surrounded by high mountains, while the perfect evenness of the level, the geological constitution of the ground, and the form of the rocks of Suba and Facatativa, which rise like islands from the midst of the savannas, all suggest the existence of a former lake-basin. The stream of Funza, commonly called the Rio de Bogotá, has forced a channel for itself through the mountains southwest of Santa Fé. It issues from the valley at the estate of Tequendama, falling through a narrow opening into a cañon which descends to the valley of the Magdalena. If this opening, the only outlet the valley of Bogotá has, were closed, the fertile plain would gradually be converted into a lake like that of the Mexican plateau.”

On this high plain, whose even, mild climate permitted the cultivation of the grains of the temperate zone, lived, in small communities, according to their several dialects, the agricultural village Indians, the Muysca. Isolated by nature, for the highland that girt them on every side could be reached only through narrow ravines, they were entirely surrounded by savage cannibal tribes. Such were the Panches west of Bogotá, and in the north the semi-nomadic kindred tribes to the Muysca, the Musos and Colimas. Engaged in constant war with one another, the Muysca lived in hereditary enmity with their neighbors. While the Panches ate with relish the bodies of fallen Muysca, the latter brought the heads of slain Panches as trophies to their homes. Yet these hostilities did not prevent an active reciprocity of trade. The Muysca wove cotton cloths, and their country contained emeralds, which, like all green stones, were valued by the Indians as most precious gems. But their most valuable commodity was salt. In white cakes shaped like sugar loaves this necessary was carried over beaten paths west to the Rio Cauca, and north, from tribe to tribe down the Magdalena, for a distance of a hundred leagues. Regular markets were maintained, even in hostile territories, and the Muysca received in exchange for their goods, gold, of which their own country was destitute, while their uncivilized neighbors, particularly the Panches and other western tribes, possessed it in abundance. The precious metal was thus accumulated to superfluity on the table-land of Bogotá. The Muysca understood the art of hammering it and casting it in tasteful shapes, and they adorned with it their clothes, their weapons, and both the interior and the exterior of their temples and dwellings.

The Muysca lived in villages—“pueblos”—of which an exaggerated terminology has made cities; and their large communal houses, which were intended, according to the Indian custom, for the whole family, have been magnified into palaces. These buildings were made of wood and straw; but the temple at Iraca had stone pillars. Their tools and weapons were of stone and hard wood; but vessels of copper or bronze, such as the Peruvians possessed, have not been found among them, although a recent authority, Dr. Rafael Zerda, believes that they were acquainted with alloys. Their organization was a military democracy, such as prevailed throughout America. In each tribe the position of chief was hereditary in a particular clan or gens, out of which the uzaque, as he was called, was chosen. This chief, or uzaque, simply represented the executive power. As in Mexico, the council of the elders of the tribe acted with him in decision.

Concerning the religious ideas of the Muysca, as well as concerning their language, so much has been published in recent times and since Herr von Humboldt directed attention to them in his celebrated researches (Vues des Cordillères, etc., and Calendrier des Muyscas) that we refrain from superfluous repetition. Their language was probably similar to the Peruvian Quichua, but their numeral system was more like that of the Central American peoples. Their calendar combined with the Peruvian month of thirty days the double, civil, and ritual year of the Mexica. Besides the worship of the sun and moon (Bochica and Bachue or Chia), which was performed with stated human sacrifices, in which the Mexican rite of cutting out the heart was employed, there existed, as in Peru, a kind of fetish worship of striking natural objects. The numerous lakes of the plateau were holy places. Each of them was regarded as the seat of a special divinity, to which gold and emeralds were offered by throwing them into the water. In the execution of the drainage works which have been instituted at different places in more recent times, as at the lagoon of Siecha, interesting objects of art and of gold have been brought to light.

Among the many lakes of the table-land of Bogotá known as such places of offering, the lake of Guatavitá became eminently famous as the spot where the myth of el dorado, or the gilded man, originated. This water lies north of Santa Fé, on the páramo of the same name, picturesquely situated at a height of 3199 metres above the sea. A symmetrical cone, the base of which is about two hours in circumference, bears on its apex the lake, which has a circuit of five kilometres and a depth of sixteen fathoms. The bottom of the lake is of fine sand. Near this water, at the foot of the páramo, lies the village of Guatavitá. The inhabitants of this place about the year 1490 constituted an independent tribe. A legend was current among them that the wife of one of their earlier chiefs had thrown herself into the water in order to avoid a punishment, and that she survived there as the goddess of the lake. Besides the Indians of the tribe of Guatavitá, pilgrims came from the communes around to cast their offerings of gold and emeralds into the water. At every new choice of a uzaque of Guatavitá, an imposing ceremonial was observed. The male population marched out in a long procession to the páramo. In front walked wailing men, nude, their bodies painted with red ochre, the sign of deep mourning among the Muysca. Groups followed, of men richly decorated with gold and emeralds, their heads adorned with feathers, and braves clothed in jaguars' skins. The greater number of them went uttering joyful shouts, others blew on horns, pipes, and conchs. Xeques, or priests, were in the company, too, in long black robes adorned with white crosses, and tall black caps. The rear of the procession was composed of the nobles of the tribe and the chief priests, bearing the newly elected chieftain, or uzaque, upon a barrow hung with discs of gold. His naked body was anointed with resinous gums, and covered all over with gold-dust. This was the gilded man, el hombre dorado, whose fame had reached to the seacoast.12 Arrived at the shore, the gilded chief and his companions stepped upon a balsa and proceeded upon it to the middle of the lake. There the chief plunged into the water and washed off his metallic covering, while the assembled company, with shouts and the sound of instruments, threw in the gold and the jewels they had brought with them. The offerings completed, the chief returned to the shore and to the village of Guatavitá. The festival closed with dancing and feasting.13

Till about the year 1470 the tribe of the Tunja was the most powerful clan on the highland; at that time the Muysca of Bogotá14 began to extend their dominion. Their chief, or zippa, Nemequene, overcame the Guatavitá Indians in the last decade of the fifteenth century, and made them tributary. With that he put an end to the ceremony of the dorado. The gilded chief had ceased to wash off his glittering coat in the waters of Guatavitá thirty years before Juan de Ampues founded the colony of Coro, but news of this change on the highlands of Cundinamarca had not yet reached the coast, and the dorado still continued to live in the mouths of the natives there.

Ambrosius Dalfinger, of Ulm, in Suabia, the new German governor of Venezuela, was the first to hunt upon the trail of the “gilded man.” He left Coro in July, 1529, sailed across the Gulf of Venezuela, on the western coast of which he established the post of Maracaybo, and then pressed westwardly inland to the Rio Magdalena. He was not aware that he was thereby encroaching upon the territory of the government of Santa Marta. No white man had ever entered these regions before him. Thick woods, partly swampy and partly hilly, covered the country, and warlike tribes, who often possessed gold, lived in the valleys. Dalfinger was a valiant soldier, who permitted no obstacle interposed by tropical nature, or resistance offered by the natives, to keep him back. He was, moreover, a rough, heartless warrior of a kind of which the European armies of the time supplied many examples. Gold and slaves were his object, and in pursuit of them he plundered the inhabited country, and then devastated it in so terrible a manner that even the Spanish historians relate his deeds with revulsion. The rich valley of Cupari was wholly overrun and partly depopulated. When in 1529 Dalfinger reached the Magdalena at Tamalameque, he found the stream in flood, and the Indian villages surrounded by water, so that he could not get to them; he then turned up the river toward the hills. Herrera says: “He went up the country, keeping by the river and the hills, to the Rio de Lebrija, the windings of which he followed as closely as possible. And when the way became barred by the numerous lagoons he went up into the hills, where he found a cool region (tierra fria) thickly populated. He was forced to fight with the people, and suffered severely from them.”15 He had here in all probability reached the edge of the plateau of Bogotá, and the Indians before whose resistance his weakened army had to yield were the Muysca, to whose linguistic stem the dorado had belonged. Dalfinger wintered at the foot of the hills. The next year (1530) he continued his murderous campaign of plunder on the right bank of the Magdalena, till in the Ambrosia Valley the natives inflicted a second defeat upon him. Then he, with his troops, diminished to a few more than a hundred men, retreated to Coro, where he arrived about May. He brought with him 40,000 pesos in gold. He had already sent 30,000 pesos to Coro the year before, but both the treasure and its escort had been lost in the forest.16

From the settlement of Santa Marta, on the northern coast of New Granada, the Spaniards advanced in the meantime very slowly toward the south. The periodical overflows of the Magdalena, the thick woods of the interior, the resistance of the exasperated Indians, and, above all, the previous devastation of the inhabited districts by Dalfinger, created extremely formidable obstacles to their progress. Tamalameque, which Luis de Cardoso captured in 1531, was, till 1536, the most southern point which the Spaniards could reach from Santa Marta or Cartagena.

In the meantime reports had been brought from the western coast of South America which caused great excitement in all the Spanish colonies in America, and even in the mother-land itself. The coasting voyages southward, initiated by Pascual de Andagoya in 1522, were continued by Francisco Pizarro in 1524. The accounts which he received concerning the southern country (Peru) on his first expedition determined him on his return to Panamá to lay out the plans for a larger enterprise, and on March 10, 1526, an agreement was made between him, Diego Almagro, and the licentiate Gaspar de Espinosa, in which the subsequent conquest of Peru was designated as a “business.” On a third voyage, in 1528, Pizarro touched at Tumbez, in Quito, and saw the stone houses, the llamas, the emeralds, and the gold of the land of the Quichua. Three years later the actual descent upon the Peruvian coast began, and events succeeded one another with surprising rapidity. On the 15th of November, 1532, the Capac Inca Atahualpa was a prisoner of the white men at Cassamarca. The weak bonds which held together the government of the Quichua tribe were broken at once, and every chief, every subjected district, acted independently. Huascar Inca, the regularly chosen chief in Cuzco, was murdered at his brother's command; the Apu Quizquiz tried in vain to defend Cuzco; the Apu Rumiñavi fled to the north, whither Sebastian de Belalcazar pursued him as far as Quito, worrying him with bloody battles; and the Inca Manco Yupanqui surrendered to the Spaniards. The conquerors found the whole land open to them almost without having to draw the sword, and their spoil in precious metals was immense. According to the partition deed which the royal notary, Pedro Sancho, drew up at Cassamarca in July, 1533, Atahualpa's ransom, as it was called, amounted to 3,933,000 ducats of gold and 672,670 ducats of silver. The plundering of Cuzco yielded at least as much more. In the presence of such treasure the recollection of the riches of Mexico grew faint. A gold fever seized the Spanish colonists everywhere in America, and every one who could wandered to Peru. The existence of many of the settlements was thereby endangered. The leaders and founders of those colonies could not look on quietly while their men were leaving them to hasten into new lands of gold. In order to retain them they were obliged to make fresh efforts to find treasures in the vicinity, and occupation that would attach them to the country.

Georg von Speyer fitted out a campaign from Coro southward into the plain of the Meta. In Santa Marta, where a new governor, Pedro Fernandez de Lugo, adelantado of the Canary Islands, had arrived in 1535 with a reënforcement of twelve hundred men, an expedition was organized to ascend the Rio Magdalena to the highlands—those highlands concerning which vague accounts were afloat, and from which came the white cakes of salt that were found in the possession of the Indians of Tamalameque.

This expedition was divided into two parts. One part was to ascend the river in a number of brigantines, and was commanded by Lugo himself. The other division was to proceed inland from Santa Marta to Tamalameque on the right bank of the river and there meet the brigantines. The command of this division was given to the governor's lieutenant, the thirty-seven-years-old licentiate Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada of Granada, afterward rightly surnamed el Conquistador. Under his leading were six hundred and twenty foot-soldiers and eighty-five horsemen. Both divisions started on April 5, 1536, but the flotilla, badly directed and overtaken by storms, never reached its destination. Some of the carelessly built boats went to the bottom, and all but two of the others returned to Cartagena in a damaged condition. Lugo died before a new flotilla could be collected; the building of new vessels was given up after his death; and the land expedition under Quesada, left alone to its fate, was gradually forgotten at the coast.

Before Quesada lay dense woods, in which lived once wealthy Indian tribes, who were now shy and hostile. A way had to be cut through the luxuriant tropical vegetation of these forests. They afforded the Spaniards but little food, while they abounded in poisonous reptiles and insects, with treacherous swamps in the lowlands, out of which rose dangerous miasms. The once fertile valleys were deserted; an ambuscade was often lying in wait in the forest border that girt them; and instead of nourishing fruits the Spaniards received a rain of poisoned arrows. Dalfinger had, indeed, previously accomplished a similar march, but in his time the country was populated, and he could support his men on the stored provisions and ripening crops of the natives. Quesada found only the wastes which his predecessor had created; every day some of his men fell ill or succumbed to the hardships. The Indian porters soon died because of them. Their services had become of little value, for there were shortly no more provisions for them to carry. The energy, quiet consideration, and self-denial of the leader had then to be brought into play to keep up the courage of his men.

Quesada justified the trust which his former superior had, perhaps without particular forethought, placed in him. He never spared his own person, and he did all he could for his men. If a rapid stream was to be bridged he was the first to lay the axe to the trees of which the bridge was to be built. He carried the sick and feeble in his own arms through swamps and across fords. He thus, by devotion combined with strictness in discipline, controlled his men so that the exhausted company followed him without demurrer to Tamalameque, where they expected to find the boats. The Rio Magdalena was in flood, and its shores were overflowed for miles. Instead of the expected flotilla loaded with provisions, Quesada found only two leaky brigantines, and a hundred and eighty famishing men. The disappointment was bitter; he felt as if he were abandoned. But the round cakes of salt that came from the mountains in the south had reached this region, and Quesada determined to follow the paths over which they had been brought. A retreat by land would, at any rate, involve sure destruction. Again his weary men followed him, and he reached Latora, one hundred and fifty leagues from the mouth of the Magdalena. Eight months had passed since he had left the coast, and his march had been disastrous, but the worst seemed to be yet awaiting him at this spot. A wooded, uninhabited waste of waters encompassed the force, and the swollen river cut off alike all advance and all retreat. Attempts to move the brigantines up the stream were vain; they could not be taken more than twenty-five leagues. Despair then overcame discipline. The men, dejected and weeping, besought their leader to send them back in the brigantines by detachments to the coast, and to give up an enterprise which had so far brought them, instead of gold, only misery, hunger, and death. The moment was imminent in which every bond of respect for their leader seemed about to be broken, when the captains Cardoso and Alburazin returned to the camp after several days of absence and reported that they had discovered a river flowing down from the mountains, and ascending it had come to a spot where traces of men could be seen. On the strength of this story Quesada was able to silence his men's complaints and gain time to make further research in the direction pointed out by his captains. Captain San Martin found, twenty-five miles farther up this mountain stream, a trodden path leading up into the mountains, and along it a number of huts which contained salt. Quesada himself started off with his best men and found the path, but fell ill and was obliged to halt. Antonio de Lebrixa went on to the mountains with twenty-five men, and came back with the welcome intelligence that he had found there a fertile plain inhabited by men who lived in villages and went about clothed in cotton. Quesada hastened back to his camp at Latora, put the sick and weak upon the brigantines, and sent them back to Cartagena. In the beginning of the year 1537 Quesada, at the head of one hundred and sixty-six of his most effective men, stepped upon the plateau of Cundinamarca, the former home of the dorado. He had lost more than five hundred men by hunger, illness, and exposure.

The sight of the first villages on the plateau satisfied the Spaniards of the wealth of the country. The people imagined that the strangers were man-eating monsters and fled to the woods, but left behind them a quantity of provisions, which were very acceptable to the half-starved Spaniards, and some gold and emeralds. The Indians posted themselves on the defensive in a ravine near Zorocota. Quesada tried unsuccessfully to storm their strong barricade. In the evening, after both sides had returned, tired with fighting, to their camps, two of the Spaniards' horses broke loose and ran, chasing one another, over to the natives. The Indians, frightened by the strange beasts, fled into the woods. The Spaniards found the large village of Guacheta deserted, the inhabitants having taken refuge among the rocks overlooking it. In the midst of the place was an old man stripped and bound to a stake, as an offering of food to the whites. They unbound him, gave him a red cap, and sent him away. Thereupon the men on the rocks, supposing that they considered him too tough, cast living children down to them. Seeing that these little ones, too, were not touched by the strangers, they sent down from the heights a man and a woman, both stripped, and a stag, bound. The Spaniards sent back the man and woman with small gifts, and kept the stag. The Indians upon this were reassured, left their place of refuge, came down from the rocks, and gave themselves up to the white men. This was on March 12, 1537. Quesada followed the wise policy of conserving the strictest discipline. He caused one of his men who had stolen cloth from an Indian to be hung. This course secured him the good-will of the natives, so that many places received the Spaniards as liberators; for the country they had so far passed through was tributary to the Muysca of Bogotá, and, as was the case everywhere among the Indians, the subjected races hated the conquering tribe. The people were therefore not at all loath to point out to the strangers by signs the direction of Muequeta, the chief town of Bogotá, near the present Santa Fé, where, they intimated to the eager Spaniards, emeralds and gold were plentiful. The rulers of Bogotá witnessed with apprehension the approach of the strangers, and their braves having assembled for a campaign against Tunja, the whole force, in which there were five hundred uzaques, or chiefs, alone, turned against the Spaniards. The Muysca fell upon Quesada's rear-guard near the Salines of Zippaquira, their xeques, or priests, carrying in front the bones of deceased chieftains, while in the midst of the host was the head chief of Bogotá, Thysqueshuza, on a gilded barrow. The first assault having been repelled by the Spaniards, the Indian warriors scattered in every direction; the zippa leaped from his barrow and fled to the woods, and each chief hastened back with his men into his village. Quesada took possession of Muequeta without meeting resistance, for the power of the tribe of Bogotá was broken forever. But he did not find the treasure he was in search of and had expected to obtain. The place had been stripped of everything valuable, and the conqueror surveyed the bare and empty rooms with no little disappointment. Every attempt to put himself in communication with the fugitive zippa miscarried, while no promises of reward, no torture, could extract from the Indians of Muequeta the secret of the spot whither the treasure had been taken. Muequeta became Quesada's headquarters, and thence he sent out scouting parties to explore the country. A few villages surrendered to the Spaniards, but others, like Guatavitá, the home of the dorado, resisted them strenuously, and hid their gold or threw it into the lagoons of the páramos. The region subjected to the Spaniards in this way grew continuously larger, for the Muysca never offered a united resistance. The dissensions and the mutual hatreds of the smaller tribes contributed quite as much as the superiority of their own weapons to the victory of the conquerors. Out of hostility to that clan a rival uzaque informed a Spanish scouting party of the great wealth of the powerful tribe of the Tunja. Quesada himself went against them, and so quiet was his march that the uzaque of Tunja and all the chiefs of the tribe were surprised in their council-house. Quesada was about to embrace the chief, but the Indians looked upon this as an offence, and threw themselves, armed, upon the Spaniards. A savage combat ensued, within and without the council-house. By sunset the village of Tunja was in the possession of the whites, the uzaque was a prisoner, and the pillage was fully under way. The booty, when piled up in a courtyard, formed a heap so large that a rider on horseback might hide himself behind it. “Peru, Peru, we have found a second Cassamarca!” exclaimed the astonished victors.

The Spaniards were less fortunate in Duytama than in Tunja. They were not able to capture the fortified position; but they anticipated a rich compensation for this failure when they beheld the glitter of the golden plates of the large town of Iraca. The Sugamuxi of Iraca submitted, but a fire broke out, through the carelessness of two Spaniards, during the pillage of the great temple of the sun, and consumed the whole building with all its treasure of gold and emeralds. Quesada returned to Muequeta, where the spoil was divided, and the royal fifth was set aside. Although it is certain that much gold had been stolen or lost or hidden by individuals, and the treasures of the wealthy tribes of Bogotá and Iraca had all disappeared, the prize was still worthy of the home of the dorado. It was officially valued at 246,976 pesos in gold and 1815 emeralds, among which were some of great value.

The conquerors of Cundinamarca had, however, not yet found the dorado himself. Exaggerated stories were still current of Muysca chiefs rich in gold, and it was said that the fugitive zippa of Bogotá lived in the mountains in a golden house. That chief was hunted out and murdered in his hiding-place, but his death did not bring to light the gold of Bogotá. One reconnoitring party of Spaniards looked down from a mountain summit eastward upon the plain of the Upper Meta, and another party brought in a report that there or in the south lived a tribe of war-like women who had much gold. In this way the myth of the Amazons became associated in 1538 with the tradition of the dorado.

Quesada felt himself too weak to go in search of the origin of these reports; it was necessary first to secure the conquered country. In August, 1538, therefore, the foundation of the present city of Santa Fé de Bogotá was laid, not far from Muequeta. Quesada intended then to go in person to the coast and obtain reinforcements; but before he could carry out this design news was brought to him from the south that caused him to delay his departure.

He was informed that a number of men like his own, having horses, had come down out of the Cauca Valley into the valley of the Magdalena. A few days later it was said that this troop had crossed the Magdalena and was advancing into southern Cundinamarca. It was the force of the conqueror of Quito, Sebastian de Belalcazar, who, after driving the Peruvian Apu Rumiñavi out of Quito, and by his intervention making Pedro de Alvarado's landing at Manta harmless, had gone northward through Pasto to Papayan. An Indian from New Granada had already, according to Castellano, told him in Quito the story of the gilded chieftain, and had thus induced him to undertake this march. From Papayan he had proceeded along the Upper Cauca to the tribes of Anzerma and Lile, which were rich in gold but addicted to the most abominable cannibalism, and thence following the path on which salt was brought down from the mountains to the high tableland of the interior.

Quesada had hardly received this news when it was also reported to him that white men with several horses were approaching from the east out of the plain of Meta, and were coming up through the ravines of the mountain. These men were the German Nicolaus Federmann of Ulm and his company. On his return from Europe Federmann had received a position as lieutenant of Georg von Speyer in Coro. His chief was engaged in a campaign in the southern plains, and Federmann was to have gone after him with reënforcements, but had faithlessly struck out for the mountains, and was following on the track of Dalfinger to the home of the dorado.

Thus, led thither by the same inducement, Quesada from the north, Belalcazar from the south, and Federmann from the east, found themselves at the same time on the plateau of Cundinamarca. The positions which the three Spaniards took formed an equiangled triangle, each side of which was six leagues long. Each leader had the same number of men—one hundred and sixty-three soldiers and a priest. None of them had been aware of the vicinity of the others, and therefore each of them thought he was the discoverer of the country. A fatal conflict seemed inevitable, but the encounter, which might have provoked a rising of the Indians and a massacre of the Spaniards, was averted by the wisdom of Quesada and the mediation of the priests. The three leaders agreed to submit their claims in person to the Spanish court, and in the meantime to leave all their forces on the plateau in order to hold the conquered land. The three—Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada, Sebastian de Belalcazar, and Nicolaus Federmann—then departed from Bogotá and proceeded together to Spain. Federmann was destined never to see America again, for the Welsers would not overlook the treachery which he had committed against his commander, Georg von Speyer. Quesada suffered the basest ingratitude from the Court. Nine years passed before he was allowed to return to the scene of his activity, and he received as the only reward for his great services the title of Marshal of the new kingdom of Granada.

The brother of the conqueror, the avaricious and cruel Hernan Perez de Quesada, remained at Bogotá as the commanding officer of the Spaniards. He completed the subjugation of the Muysca. The unhappy natives suffered exceedingly cruel maltreatment, for the sake of gold, from him and his barbarous lieutenants. No means was too violent or too immoral if gold could be got by it. Hernan Perez made an unsuccessful attempt in 1540 to drain the lake of Guatavitá in order to recover from it the gold of the dorado; but four thousand pesos was all the return he realized from the experiment. The Muysca, plundered and plagued by the whites amongst them, and warred upon on their borders by the Panches and Musos living around them, who were not subjected to the Spaniards till some time afterward, went down almost irresistibly to extinction. Their vigor was broken, and they had no hope of consideration or forbearance from their rulers. When the former Sugamuxi of Iraca was told that a new governor had come who was a friend to the Indians, he asked a Spaniard if he believed the river was going to flow upstream; when the white man answered this question in the negative, the chief responded, “How do you suppose, then, that I am going to believe in the existence of a Spanish officer who will feel and act justly and reasonably toward us?”

With the conquest of Cundinamarca was secured the last great treasure of gold that awaited the Spaniards in America. Their wild greed was, however, doubly excited by their success so far, and they thirsted for more and greater. The Minorite monk, Fray Toribio of Benevento,17 wrote with truth in 1540: “And gold is, like another golden calf, worshipped by them as a god; for they come without intermission and without thought, across the sea, to toil and danger, in order to get it. May it please God that it be not for their damnation.” Then rose again, like an avenging spirit, the legend of the gilded chieftain, in the still unknown regions of the South American continent. Transplanted by the over-excited imagination of the white men, the vision of the dorado appeared, like a mirage, enticing, deceiving, and leading men to destruction, on the banks of the Orinoco and the Amazon, in Omagua and Parime.

Notes

    While we may look for the former treasure region in Sumatra, the latest researches make it probable that Ophir represented not only Sofala, but also the coasts and interior of East Africa south of it, including Mozambique, Monomotapa, and the country of the ruins of Zimbabue (Mashonaland). This conclusion appears more credible than the opinion persistently maintained by Montesino that Ophir was Peru. The difficulties of a long sea-voyage from Ezion-Geber to the western coast of South America would be partly removed if we could accept Professor Haeckel's hypothesis of a continent of Lemuria having once stood in the Indian Ocean, and should also suppose the Western Atlantis to have existed—which the natives of Australia sought in the eastern part of their quarter of the globe.

    Journal of the Admiral, published by Navarrete, from the Historia apologética de la Indias of Bartolomeo de Las Casas, MSS. at Madrid.

    Decada iii.

    Emeralds may also have been shown to the Spaniards then; for in the capitulation with Ojeda, on his second voyage, July 5, 1501, islands are mentioned, near Quiquevacoa, on the mainland, where the green stones were of which specimens had been brought to him. Quiquevacoa, or Coquivacoa, was the Indian name for the country around the Gulf of Venezuela.

    The name of “The Rich Coast,” Costa Rica, is still attached to that part of Central America north of Chiriqui.

    Ojeda and Diego de Nicuesa.

    Quintana, and Herrera, dec. i. lib. x. cap. iii.

    The discovery of Mexico by Córdova and its conquest afterward by Cortés affected the Spanish colonies south of the Isthmus very little. The influence of the colonization of the Mexican table-land extended no farther than to Yucatan, Guatemala, and a part of Honduras. The booty which the Spaniards gained there, partly in gold, was not great. The presents which the chiefs at Tenochtitlan sent to the seacoast to Cortés were lost at sea, and all the treasures which the Mexicans had accumulated in their great “pueblo” in the lagoon were ruined by the inundation during the retreat of July 1, 1519, or were burned during the subsequent attack.

    Decada i., p. 267.

    Relacion de los sucesos de Pedrarias Davila, etc.

    Historia general del nuevo Reyno de Granada, 1688.

    Zamora treats these ceremonies as fabulous, but they are vouched for by Piedrahita, Pedro Simon, and others, as having once existed.

    A group of ten golden figures has been found in the lagoon of Siecha, representing the balsa with the dorado.

    Bacatá—the extreme cultivated land.

    Dec. iv. lib. iv. cap. i., p. 101.

    Dr. Clements R. Markham supposes, following Oviedo y Baños (Historia de Venezuela, 1728), that Dalfinger died from a wound in 1530; but this appears to be erroneous, as is the assertion, too, of the same author that Dalfinger got no farther than the Rio Cesar. As to the latter point, Herrera, who is very exact in relating the deeds of the Europeans, mentions very plainly his reaching the cool country (adonde halló tierra fria). Dalfinger's death can hardly have taken place before 1532. Nicolaus Federmann, Dalfinger's provincial successor, says that he went to San Domingo in 1530 to be cured of a fever. When Federmann returned, in 1532, from his first expedition (southward to the plain of Meta), the governor was still living. Herrera's statement (dec. iv. lib. ii. cap. ii.) that Dalfinger died at Coro in 1532 is the probable one. Federmann went back to Europe, but we shall see him later seeking for the dorado. Hans Seissenhoffer (Juan Aleman) succeeded him as governor of Coro, but died soon afterward without having undertaken anything. His successor, Georg von Speyer, was likewise inactive till the year 1535.

    Called Motolinia, “the poor.” Historia de los Indios de Nueva España.

J. A. Zahm (essay date 1917)

Last Updated on June 7, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 4547

SOURCE: Zahm, J. A. “Chief Sources of Information Respecting El Dorado” and “Expedition of Sebastian de Belalcazar: Conflicting Reports Regarding El Dorado.” In The Quest of El Dorado: The Most Romantic Episode in the History of South American Conquest, pp. 1-8; 9-36. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1917.

[In the following essay, Zahm recounts several versions of the El Dorado legend and argues that the main reason so little is known about the expeditions which searched for El Dorado is that few of the original accounts have been translated into English.]

During a year's wanderings in Andean lands and in the valleys of the Amazon and the Orinoco I was frequently reminded of the numerous expeditions that centuries ago went in quest of that extraordinary will-o'-the-wisp, usually known as El Dorado—the Gilded King. Whether gliding down a Peruvian river in a dugout or traversing in the saddle the llanos of Venezuela and the lofty tablelands of Colombia, I found myself following the courses pursued by those intrepid adventurers who while seeking a phantom did so much toward exploring that vast region of mountain and plain which lies between the Equator and the Caribbean. At one time I was in the footsteps of Gonzalo Pizarro and Von Hutten, at another in the wake of Ursua and Orellana. Now I was following the course taken by Belalcazar and his eager band, as they hurried across the Cordilleras in pursuit of the Gilded King; anon I was pushing my way through the dense and tangled forests which had been traversed by Ximenes de Quesada and his sturdy men, when in search of the great and peerless capital of the Omaguas; and still again I was sailing on the tawny waters of the Casanare and the Orinoco, which had witnessed the mad race of the fleets of Antonio de Berrio and Sir Walter Raleigh for the golden city of Manoa—for that

Imperial El Dorado, roofed with gold;
Shadows to which, despite all shocks of change,
All onset of capricious accident,
Men clung with yearning hope which would not die.

And yet, strange as it may seem, little is known about these expeditions that at one time commanded such universal attention in both the New and the Old World, and which for the historian still constitute the most romantic episode of the conquest of South America. One reason for this lies in the fact that the most authentic and elaborate accounts of these stirring enterprises are to be found only in the old Spanish chronicles, some of which are comparatively rare, while others, forgotten or unknown, have for centuries been buried in the dusty archives of Spain and Peru and have only recently been given to the press.

Among the most important of these chronicles are the Noticias Historiales, of Fray Pedro Simon, a learned Franciscan friar, who wrote nearly three centuries ago, while some of the Conquistadores were still living and while the memory of the events connected with the first expeditions in quest of El Dorado was still fresh in the minds of many of the survivors. Of scarcely less value are the Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias and the Historia del Nuevo Reino de Granada, by Juan de Castellanos, the poet-priest and historian of the conquest, who had served with distinction under Ximenes de Quesada in his celebrated campaign against the Muiscas and who knew personally many of the most celebrated of the adventurers who had taken part in the search for the Gilded King on the plateau of Cundinamarca and in the sultry lowlands of the Meta and the Guaviare. But the Historia del Nuevo Reino de Granada, of Castellanos, which contains the most graphic account of Ximenes de Quesada's expedition in quest of El Dorado, was not published until 1886. Similarly the manuscript containing the authentic narrative of Ursua's expedition to Omagua and Dorado by Francisco Vasquez, who was one of the participants in the enterprise, remained in manuscript until it was published by the “Society of Spanish Bibliophiles” less than a third of a century ago. What, however, is still more remarkable, is the fact that the original Relacion of Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition in quest of the Gilded King—an expedition which is considered by some as the first of that long series of phantom-chases in which so many lives and so much treasure were sacrificed, was not published until 1894, more than three and a half centuries after it had been penned by its accomplished author, the Dominican, Fray Gaspar de Carvajal, who was at first the chaplain of Pizarro and subsequently that of Orellana, the immortal discoverer of the Amazon.

But although these and similar invaluable works bearing on the expeditions in quest of the Gilded King have appeared in Spanish, comparatively little of the information contained in them has yet made its way into English. This explains the numerous errors that are found in what has hitherto been written on the subject and why many adventurers like Antonio Sedeno, Diego de Ordaz, Nicolas Federmann, and others of their contemporaries are classed among those who sought for El Dorado when, as a matter of fact, these treasure-seekers had not even heard of this mythical personage. To the earlier adventurers, like those just named, the auri sacri fames—the accursed thirst for gold—was indeed as strong a lure as it was to their successors, but they confined their operations chiefly to rifling the temples and cemeteries of the aborigines or to seeking a certain Casa del Sol—temple of the sun—that was supposed to exist somewhere east of the Andes, presumably in the valley of the Meta.

It is a pity that those who love the curious and romantic phases of history have not given more attention to the interesting episode of El Dorado. An exhaustive and authoritative work on the subject, one which shall embody the results of the most recent researches in Spain and Latin America, is certainly a desideratum in the history of the conquest and exploration of the northern portion of our sister continent. For the years devoted to the quest of the Gilded King were not only “years crowded with incident, streaked with tragedy, stained by crime, darkened by intrigue,” but they were also years during which the amazing audacity, the matchless prowess, and the thrilling heroism of the Conquistadores were seen at their best. And the study of these years will show that the prime mover of the Spaniards in their extraordinary adventures was not a thirst for gold, as is so often asserted, but a love of glory and a sense of patriotism which impelled them to make sacrifices and to undertake enterprises before which even the bravest men of our degenerate age would recoil with horror. So marvelous, indeed, were their achievements that, were they not attested by the most unquestionable of documents, we should be disposed to place the old chronicles which describe them in the same category as the Arthurian romances, and to regard the exploits of some of the members of the chief expeditions as no more deserving of credence than the glorifying myths of El Cid Campeador. Even today, as he slowly pursues his lonely course through the dark forests which fringe the Orinoco and the Amazon, or scales the precipitous flanks of the lofty Cordilleras, the traveler feels the spell of romance and can easily dream of the gorgeous capitals and mighty empires, whose glamour in days gone by proved such an attraction to thousands of the most gallant and noble spirits of the Spanish conquest.

.....

It was in 1535 that a roving Indian first told the Spaniards the story of the gilded chieftain to whom they forthwith gave the name El Dorado—the Gilded Man or King—a name which was subsequently applied not only to the gilded chief himself, but also to the city wherein he was supposed to reside, and to the province over which he bore rule, and to the lake on which his capital was said to be located. At that time Sebastian de Belalcazar, the lieutenant of Francisco Pizarro, was in Quito, whither he had gone after his victorious campaign against the generals of Atahualpa, and here it was, according to Castellanos, where—

An alien Indian, hailing from afar,
Who in the town of Quito did abide,
And neighbor claimed to be of Bogatá,
There having come, I know not by what way,
Did with him speak and solemnly announce
A country rich in emeralds and gold.

Also, among the things which them engaged,
A certain king he told of who, disrobed,
Upon a lake was wont, aboard a raft,
To make oblations, as himself had seen,
His regal form o'erspread with fragrant oil
On which was laid a coat of powdered gold
From sole of foot unto his highest brow,
Resplendent as the beaming of the sun.

Arrivals without end, he further said,
Were there to make rich votive offerings
Of golden trinkets and of emeralds rare
And divers other of their ornaments;
And worthy credence these things he affirmed;
The soldiers, light of heart and well content,
Then dubbed him El Dorado, and the name
By countless ways was spread throughout the world.(1)

According to the chronicler, Juan Rodriguez Fresle, who was a son of one of the Conquistadores of New Granada, the lake on which were made these offerings of gold and emeralds, was Guatavitá, a short distance to the northeast of Bogotá. And the source of his information respecting the nature of the ceremonies connected with these offerings was, he assures us, no less than one Don Juan, the cacique of Guatavitá, who was the nephew of the chief who bore sway at the time of the arrival of the Spaniards under Ximenes de Quesada, and who was even then preparing himself by a six years' fast to succeed his uncle as cacique of Guatavitá. After this long fast, which was made under the most trying conditions, the successor to the caciqueship was obliged to go to the Lake of Guatavitá and offer sacrifice to the Devil, who, Fresle informs us, was regarded by the aborigines as their god and master. After being stripped, he was anointed with a viscous earth, which was then overspread with powdered gold in such wise that the chief was covered with this metal from head to foot. He was then placed on a balsa provided with a great quantity of gold and emeralds, which he was to offer to his god. Arriving at the middle of the lake, which was surrounded by a vast multitude of men and women, shouting and playing on musical instruments of various kinds, he made his offering by throwing into the lake all the treasure which he had at his feet. After this ceremony was over, he returned to the shore where, amid acclamations, music and rejoicing, he was received as their legitimate lord and prince.

“From this ceremony,” our author continues, “was derived that name, so celebrated, of ‘El Dorado,’—which has cost so many lives and so much treasure. It was in Peru that this name ‘Dorado’ was first heard. Sebastian de Belalcazar, having met near Quito an Indian from Bogotá, who told him about the Gilded Man just described, exclaimed ‘Let us go in search of that gilded Indian.’”2 Hence the report of El Dorado was spread throughout Castile and the Indies, and Belalcazar was moved to go in quest of him as he did, and hence also the cause of that celebrated meeting with Quesada and Federmann, which constitutes one of the most thrilling and dramatic chapters in the history of the conquest of New Granada.3

I am aware that certain recent writers on El Dorado are disposed to give slight credence to Fresle's account of the Gilded Man, and that, following the indications of a specious theory, they attach little, if any, more value to the statements of Castellanos and Padre Simon, who, as a matter of fact, are our chief and best authorities on this interesting topic. The quotation above given from Juan de Castellanos they characterize as a mere poetical fancy. Holding such views, they naturally find fault with Humboldt for having spread broadcast the error, as they regard it, concerning the connection between El Dorado and Lake Guatavitá—an error, they assert, into which the great German savant was led by conceding undue authority to what the historian of Granada, Bishop Piedrahita, writes on the subject.4 Plausible as they are, however, the reasons of these writers for rejecting the testimony of such veracious and conscientious chroniclers as Fresle, Padre Simon, Castellanos, and Piedrahita are far from conclusive, and most readers who will take the trouble to consult what these four writers have to say on the matter in question will, I think, agree with Humboldt and be satisfied that the accounts given of El Dorado by the early chroniclers named are founded on facts that can not be gainsaid.

The fact that only a few years after the arrival of Belalcazar at Bogotá, the Spaniards began to make efforts to secure the gold and precious stones which, according to tradition, had been cast into the sacred Lake of Guatavitá by the Gilded King, is evidence that the statements of Fresle and other contemporary writers regarding the connection between this lake and El Dorado are substantially true. For more than three centuries many attempts were made to drain the lake, with a view to securing the priceless treasures which were supposed to be spread over its bottom, but the success which attended the efforts of those who had the matter in charge was only partial. There were never sufficient funds available to complete the work of drainage until a few years ago, when the attempt was again made by some Englishmen, who are still engaged in the undertaking. But a number of gold objects were found, among them some interesting figurines, which confirmed many people in the belief which they had before entertained regarding the existence of untold amounts of gold and precious stones at the bottom of the lake, the offerings of El Dorado to his god before the Spanish Conquest, and which convinced them of the accuracy of the accounts of the early chroniclers regarding the ceremonies performed here centuries ago, in which the Gilded Man was the chief actor.5

According to Padre Gumilla the word “Dorado” had a different origin from that assigned by Fresle and Castellanos. It originated, declares this writer, on the Caribbean Coast near Cartagena and Santa Marta, whence it passed to Velez and thence to Bogotá. When the Spaniards reached the elevated plain of Cundinamarca, they learned that “El Dorado was in the pleasant and fertile valley of Sogamoso.” On reaching this place they found that the priest who made his oblation in the great temple there was wont to anoint at least his hands and face with a certain kind of resin over which powdered gold was blown through a hollow reed or cane. From this circumstance the famous “Dorado” took his name.6

Those who reject the accounts above given regarding El Dorado declare that the first authentic information we have of him is contained in a letter, dated January 20, 1543, of Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Valdes to Cardinal Bembo, in Venice. This letter refers to the celebrated expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro to the land of Canela—cinnamon—which was on the eastern versant of the Cordilleras and but a few days' journey from Quito. The ostensible object of the expedition, as announced by Pizarro, was to find the region which was reputed to be as rich in aromatic shrubs and trees as the spice islands of the Orient. If this could be found the fortunes of the leader and his companions would be assured, and Spain would be independent of her hated rival, Portugal, which then had a monopoly of cinnamon and other precious spices. But the real object was not so much the discovery and conquest of the land of Canela7 as the quest of a great and powerful prince who was called El Dorado.8

“When I ask, [writes Oviedo] why they call this prince the Gilded Cacique or King, the Spaniards who have been in Quito or have come to Santo Domingo—and there are at present more than ten of them in this city—make reply that from what they hear respecting this from the Indians, this great lord or prince goes about continually covered with gold as finely pulverized as fine salt. For it seemeth to him that to wear any other kind of apparel is less beautiful, and that to put on pieces or arms of gold stamped or fashioned by a hammer or otherwise is to use something plain or common, like that which is worn by other rich lords and princes when they wish; but that to powder oneself with gold is something strange, unusual, and new and more costly, because that which one puts on in the morning is removed and washed off in the evening and falls to the ground and is lost. And this he does every day in the year. While walking clothed and covered in this manner his movements are unimpeded, and the graceful proportions of his person, on which he greatly prides himself, are seen in beauty unadorned. I would rather have the chamber besom of this prince than the large gold smelters in Peru, or in any other part of the world. Thus it is that the Indians say that this cacique, or king, is very rich and a great lord, and anoints himself every morning with a very fragrant gum or liquor and over this ointment he sprinkles powdered gold of the requisite fineness, and his entire person from the sole of his foot to his head remains covered with gold, and as resplendent as a piece of gold polished by the hand of a great artificer. And I believe, if this cacique uses this, that he must have very rich mines of a similar quality of gold, because I have seen much in tierra firme of the kind called by the Spaniards volador, and so fine that one could easily do with it what is above stated.”9

From the foregoing it is seen that there were at the time of the arrival of the Conquistadores in South America three different reports in circulation among the Indians regarding the mysterious personage whom the Spaniards, from the descriptions given of him by their informants, agreed in calling El Dorado, an abbreviation for El Hombre o Rey Dorado—the Gilded Man or King.

That they should have heard of him in different places widely separated from one another is not surprising when we remember that the Indians of Darien and Costa Rica, long before Francisco Pizarro's advent in Peru, were aware of the wealth and the power of the Incas in the remote south. And that there should have been different accounts regarding the character and place of abode of this marvelous savage is what might have been expected by one who knows how prone Indians are to exaggerate, or to modify what they have heard so as to suit their own fancy.

It was not, then, surprising that the Spaniards should have been misled by these divers and alluring reports. After the successes achieved by their countrymen in Mexico and Peru, and after the millions of treasure which had been found in the lands of the Aztecs, Chibchas, and Incas, they were prepared for anything. Nothing seemed impossible, and no tale about gilded men or golden palaces was so extravagant as to be rejected by them as false. They were ready to give full credence to even greater fictions than the Golden Fleece or the Apples of the Hesperides, and would not have been surprised to find Ophir or Tarshish in the valleys of the Orinoco or the Amazon. The spirit of adventure and romance dominated everyone not only in the Indies but in the mother country as well.

“For all this Spanish nation [writes an old chronicler] is so desirous of novelties that what way soever they bee called with a becke only or soft whispering voyce, to anything arising above water, they speedily prepare themselves to flie and forsake certainties, under hope of an higher degree, to follow incertainties, which we may gather by that which is past.”

It was a vague and fantastic rumor like this that lured Belalcazar from Quito to the Sabana of distant Bogotá, where he met Quesada and Federmann. According to the Indian from whom the Spanish chieftain received his information, the Province of El Dorado was called Cundirumarca, and was not more than 12 days' distant from Quito. This distance, if the Indian's statement was true, would preclude the plain of Bogotá as the home of the Gilded Man, for it was impossible to reach this place in so limited a time. Besides, Cundirumarca is a Quichua word, and could not, it is asserted, have been the name of a province in New Granada, where the language of the Incas was unknown. Despite, therefore, the positive statement of Piedrahita that the motive of Belalcazar's expedition to the north was the discovery of El Dorado and the House of the Sun, it may be that the real reason was the desire on the part of Pizarro's lieutenant to cut loose from his chief and find a country of which he might himself become the adelantado. Subsequent events and the realization of his desire to be appointed governor of Popayan give color to this surmise.

Whether, however, Belalcazar misunderstood his informant regarding the location of the Province of Cundirumarca, or whether he was merely looking for a pretext for escaping from Peru, where he was overshadowed by Pizarro, it is certain that the next expedition in search of El Dorado, by some considered the first genuine expedition in quest of the Gilded King, was headed for the eastern slopes of the Andes instead of for the northern plateau of New Granada. The country of the Gilded King, it was now thought, was in the vicinity of the “Land of Cinnamon,” and preparations were forthwith made to add these rich lands to the possessions of the Spanish Crown.

Notes

    Elejias de Varones Ilustres de Indias, Parte III, Canto II, Madrid (1850).

    Conquista i Descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada de las Indias Occidentales del Mar Oceano i Fundacion de la Ciudad de Santa Fé de Bogotá. Cap. II, Bogotá (1859.)

    See the Author's Up the Orinoco and Down the Magdalena, p. 294 et seq. New York (1909).

    Cf. El Dorado, Aus der Geschichte der ersten Amerikanischen Endeckungs-Reisen. Separat-Ausdruck aus den Mittleilungen der Geographischen Gesellschaft in Hamburg (1889); Historia General de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reino de Granada, Lib. VI, Cap. III, por D. Lucas Piedrahita, Antwerp (1688); The Gilded Man, by A. F. Bandelier, New York (1893); Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America during the Years 1799-1804, by Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Vol. III, Chap. XXV, Bohn edition.

    Special mention should here be made of a most interesting find made in 1856 in Lake Siecha, a small body of water near Lake Guatavitá. It consists of a small group of figures of men on a raft, all of gold, and weighing 268 grams, which, in the opinion of competent archeologists, represents El Dorado on a rush balsa surrounded by his priests as he proceeded to the center of Lake Guatavitá to offer sacrifice to his god. See El Dorado—Estudio Historico, Etnografico y Arqueologico de los Chibchas, Habitantes de la Antigua Cundinamarca, p. 11, por Dr. Liborio Zerda, Bogotá (1883).

    Historia Natural, Civil y Geografica de las Naciones Situadas en las Riveras del Rio Orinoco, Tom. I, Cap. XXV, 3, Barcelona (1791).

    Cinnamon is actually found in this and other parts of tropical America, but it belongs to a different genus from that of Ceylon, which supplies the well-known article of commerce.

    Gonçalo Piçarro, determinó de yr á buscar la canela é á un gran principe, que llaman El Dorado, de la requeça del qual hay mucha fama in aquellas partes. Historia General y Natural de las Indias, Islas Y Tierra Firme del Mar Oceano, Tom. IV, Lib. XLIX, Cap. II, Madrid (1851).

    Historia General y Natural de las Indias, Tom. IV, p. 183.

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John Hemming (essay date 1978)

Last Updated on June 7, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 7220

SOURCE: Hemming, John. “Chapter 6.” In The Search for El Dorado, pp. 97-109. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978.

[In the following essay, Hemming examines the earliest Spanish references to El Dorado, concluding that the legend was unknown before 1541, although several explorers would claim earlier knowledge of the golden kingdom in their attempts to gain exclusive rights to the region where it was believed to be.]

The legend of El Dorado, the Golden Man, was born in Quito at the beginning of 1541. It was a beguiling story and it quickly caught the imagination of the conquistadores. It spread fast, gained momentum and credibility, and evolved in detail during the ensuing century. It became one of the most famous chimeras in history, a legend that lured hundreds of hard men into desperate expeditions. Such is the conclusion of the distinguished Venezuelan historian Demetrio Ramos Pérez, who traced the genesis of the legend through elaborate detective work in documentary and chronicle sources. His painstaking research led him to fix the time and place of the birth of the legend, and to conclude that it was entirely unconnected with the Muisca. If he is right, he refutes the accepted version, an attractive story told by the chroniclers within a few decades of Jiménez de Quesada's conquest.

What exactly was the legend? Fernández de Oviedo was surprised by it and, with his usual diligence, interrogated men who could advise him. ‘I asked Spaniards who have been in Quito and have come here to Santo Domingo … why they call that prince the “Golden Chief or King”. They tell me that what they have learned from the Indians is that that great lord or prince goes about continually covered in gold dust as fine as ground salt. He feels that it would be less beautiful to wear any other ornament. It would be crude and common to put on armour plates of hammered or stamped gold, for other rich lords wear these when they wish. But to powder oneself with gold is something exotic, unusual, novel and more costly—for he washes away at night what he puts on each morning, so that it is discarded and lost, and he does this every day of the year. With this custom, going about clothed and covered in that way, he has no impediment or hindrance. The fine proportions of his body and natural form, on which he prides himself, are not covered or obscured, for he wears no other clothing of any sort on top of it.’1 The chronicler marvelled at the thought of such waste: ‘I would rather have the sweepings of the chamber of this prince than the great meltings of gold there have been in Peru or that there could be anywhere on earth! For the Indians say that this chief or king is a very rich and great ruler. He anoints himself every morning with a certain gum or resin that sticks very well. The powdered gold adheres to that unction … until his entire body is covered from the soles of his feet to his head. He looks as resplendent as a gold object worked by the hand of a great artist. I believe that, if that chief does do this, he must have very rich mines of fine quality gold. On the Mainland, I have in fact seen plenty of the gold that Spaniards call placer gold, in such quantities that he could easily do what is said.’2

Fernández de Oviedo told this legend in the context of events at Quito in mid-1541. He told the story in full because it was new, and he was careful to warn that it was based on hearsay from Indian sources. But, as a good historian with an open mind, he did not dismiss El Dorado as pure fantasy. He had been told it on good authority, and he reasoned that a region rich in gold mines could easily produce enough for this magnificent custom. His vision of a handsome naked prince, gleaming with the brilliance of gold, was not utterly impossible. The sun temple of the Incas had yielded a garden of life-size golden statues of llamas, maize and other plants and attendant figures. It was—and still is—very common for American Indians to paint their naked bodies.

A Jesuit called José Gumilla lived among the tribes of the Orinoco in the seventeenth century. He observed that ‘with very few exceptions, all tribes of those lands anoint themselves from the crowns of their heads to the tips of their feet with oil and achote. Mothers anoint all their children, even those at the breast, at the same time as they anoint themselves, at least twice a day in the morning and at nightfall. They later anoint their husbands very liberally. On special days a great variety of drawings in different colours goes on top of the unction … The ordinary daily unction is a mixture of oil and anatto that we call achote. It is ground and kneaded with oil of cunamá or turtle eggs. It serves not only as clothing but as a sure defence against mosquitoes, which abound in such a great number of species. It not only prevents mosquitoes from biting them’,3 but the insects stick in the gum. It is also cool, a protection against the heat of the sun. Amazon tribes still do this regularly, painting their bodies with scarlet anatto or black genipapo vegetable dyes. So, if naked tribes painted themselves red or black, why not gold also?

The next chronicler to mention El Dorado was Pedro de Cieza de León, a soldier historian who wrote an incomparable account of the conquest of Peru. He was the only contemporary chronicler to visit Quito, passing through that Andean city in the late 1540s. He said that Gonzalo Pizarro, youngest brother of Francisco, the conqueror of the Incas, went to Quito in 1541 ‘and observing in that city many [unemployed] men, either youths or veterans, he became eager to discover the valley of El Dorado.’4 According to the recent story, this land lay beyond the mountains east of Quito. An expedition had just returned from an attempt to find cinnamon in those wild hills, the territory of the Quijos Indians. ‘The Indians said that further on, if they advanced, they would come to a wide-spreading flat country, teeming with Indians who possess great riches, for they all wear gold ornaments, and where there are no forests nor mountain ranges. When this news spread in Quito, everyone there wanted to take part in the expedition.’5 Gonzalo Pizarro himself wrote to the King that ‘because of many reports which I received in Quito and outside that city, from prominent and very aged chiefs as well as from Spaniards, whose accounts agreed with one another, that the province of La Canela [Cinnamon] and Lake El Dorado were a very populous and very rich land, I decided to go and conquer and explore it.’6 This letter of 1542 was the first time that the legend of the Golden Man was linked to a lake.

Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada never mentioned El Dorado in those early years—although it later became an obsession of his brother and of himself in old age. In his Logbook of the conquest of the Muisca he spoke of many fabulous places—the country of the Amazons, the rich land of Menza, the House of the Sun and the enchanting plains visible from the high Andes—but he never spoke of the Golden Man. Nor did he do so in the interrogation at Cartagena in July 1539. It was only in the Epítome, an account of the conquest apparently written by him in 1550, that he suggested that the Meta or El Dorado that everyone had been seeking for the past nine years was the rich land of the Muisca that he himself had conquered in 1537: ‘All the reports … which set everyone's feet marching from the North Sea so excitedly … later appeared to be the same thing, namely this kingdom of New Granada [the lands of the Muisca].’7 This was a wonderfully tidy solution. All the expeditions had been moving towards the same goal, which was why Quesada, Benalcázar and Federmann had all met so dramatically in 1539. It was an explanation developed and repeated by later chroniclers. The only trouble was that it was not true: we have seen how each of those three expeditions reached Bogotá for different reasons, and none of them in search of El Dorado.

Jiménez de Quesada was also interested in the idea of rich lakes. On the journey up from the Magdalena valley, he thought that his men would find a lake that produced the salt cakes traded by the Muisca. This was ‘the lake of the salt, in which, as they were assured by the Indians, there was a very large town of many huts and many golden effigies as big as pitchers.’8 In the event, the salt came from saline wells. But there were many lakes in Muisca territory, as well as large towns and gold objects. Quesada later said that the Muisca ‘have many woods and lakes consecrated to their false religion … They also go to do their sacrifices in these woods and they bury gold and emeralds in them … They do the same in the lakes which they have dedicated for their sacrifices. They go there and throw in much gold and precious stones, which are thus lost for ever.’9

Sacrifice in a sacred lake was the theme of Juan de Castellanos, the next serious chronicler to deal with El Dorado. Castellanos was the vicar of Tunja, a careful author who checked his facts and knew most of the participants in the conquest. His main failing was to see himself as an epic poet rather than a historian. He wrote long elegies to famous men, modelled on classical heroic verse and sometimes allowing poetic licence to overrule historical accuracy. Castellanos composed his verse epics between 1570 and the late 1580s, a time when El Dorado was long established as a lure for successive expeditions. Castellanos wanted to follow Quesada in establishing that the elusive El Dorado was his own homeland of Bogotá. He wrote that rumours were rife in Quito after its first discovery. ‘Benalcázar interrogated a foreign, itinerant Indian resident in the city of Quito, who said he was a citizen of Bogotá and had come there by I know not what means. He stated that [Bogotá] was a land rich in emeralds and gold. Among the things that attracted them, he told of a certain king, unclothed, who went on rafts on a pool to make oblations, which he had observed, anointing all [his body] with resin and on top of it a quantity of ground gold, from the bottom of his feet to his forehead, gleaming like a ray of the sun. He also said that there was continual traffic there to make offerings of gold jewellery, fine emeralds, and other pieces of their ornaments. … The soldiers, delighted and content, then gave [that king] the name El Dorado; and they spread out [in search of him] by innumerable routes.’10 But Castellanos went on to warn his readers that ‘El Dorado does not and never had any foundation, beyond what I have declared … I know for sure that it does not certify news of any rich land.’11

These few authors—the chroniclers Fernández de Oviedo, Cieza de León and Castellanos, and the conquistadores Gonzalo Pizarro, Jiménez de Quesada and Sebastián de Benalcázar—were the only primary sources for the original El Dorado legend. All later writers embellished these early accounts. Pedro de Aguado, a friar who wrote a valuable contemporary history, never told his version of the origin of El Dorado: this part of his history was removed by an ecclesiastical censor. Antonio de Herrera, who published an official history of the Spanish conquests in 1615, based his account on Cieza de León and Castellanos. He said that the ‘itinerant Indian’ was an ambassador from the ruler of Cundinamarca who had gone to request military help from the Inca Atahualpa. According to Herrera, Luis Daza captured this envoy near Quito, and Benalcázar interrogated him. He told of the great wealth of his land, which lay twelve days' march away. All this tallies well with Daza's official contemporary report of his capture of the ‘indio dorado’ in 1534. It could well have referred to the rich Quimbaya lands of the Cauca valley. Herrera made no mention of Bogotá or of sacrifices on a lake; but he commented that the story ‘has been the cause of many men undertaking the discovery of El Dorado, which until now seems an enchantment’.12

The legend of El Dorado really took shape in the writing of Father Pedro Simón. His Noticias historiales de las conquistas was written in 1621-3 and shamelessly plagiarized Castellanos—Simón simply turned Castellanos' verse into prose, and added corroborative details apparently derived from his own common sense. Simón wrote that the Indian in Quito called his land Muequetá and its chief Bogotá. He gave a lyrical description of the raft, lake and gold dust ceremony, which took place on a clear morning with the sun shining brilliantly on the radiant chief. Father Simón then connected the Indian's account with the Muisca custom of making sacrifices to lakes. He located the ceremony at Lake Guatavita, an eery, perfectly round lake on desolate hills 50 kilometres north-east of Bogotá. He also told a dramatic story of an adulterous chieftainess. His legend was that the unfaithful wife of a chief of Guatavita, unable to endure her husband's scorn, threw herself and her daughter into the lake. She remained in its depths, living with a monster. There were apparitions of the chieftainess, which led to a cult, with offerings to gain her protection. The chief himself started to gild his body, to sublimate his own offerings; and when the Spaniards invaded, the Indians threw treasures into this sacred lake.13

The story evolved further with the next chronicler, Juan Rodríguez Fresle, who wrote the Conquest and discovery of New Granada in 1636. In his version, the gilding ceremony became the ancient ritual of investiture of the successor to the Zipa of Bogotá. The heir was stripped of his Muisca cloaks, anointed with gum and gold dust, and launched on to the lake on a raft with four other chiefs and a pile of gold and emerald offerings. As chanting and liturgical music from the shore reached a climax, the prince and his attendants cast their tribute into Lake Guatavita. ‘From this ceremony was taken that famous name “El Dorado” that has cost so many lives and fortunes …’14

A later history of the conquest, by the astute Bishop Lucas Fernández Piedrahita, sought to reconcile the various earlier stories. He implied that the Indian captured by Benalcázar at Quito directly inspired the march towards Bogotá—although there was in fact a gap of four years. He said that the ‘indio dorado’ of Quito came from a people who were fighting against the Muisca or Chibcha, and he prudently omitted any detail of the offerings or investiture ceremonies.15

A final version of the legend, by the eighteenth-century author Basilio Vicente de Oviedo, located El Dorado on the Ariari river, near the Orinoco. It was a land so rich that tufts of grass pulled from the ground had gold dust on their roots. Every year a young man was chosen by lot, and then offered as a sacrifice to their idol. ‘They open him up and salt him with gold dust, and offer him as a sacrifice in their church. Because of this they call him El Dorado.’16

So the legend of El Dorado evolved from a vague notion of a rich, flat land east of Quito, to Fernández de Oviedo's prince anointed daily, to the offerings of Castellanos, the penitent chief of Simón, the investiture of Rodríguez Fresle, and the sacrifice of Basilio de Oviedo. The constants in all these versions are: the Indian messenger at Quito, the lake, and the anointment with gold dust. By analysing these elements, Ramos Pérez has shown how difficult it is to accept that the El Dorado of the legend was the ceremony at Lake Guatavita.

Could the ‘indio dorado’ captured near Quito really have been an envoy from the Muisca? It seems impossible. The Incas had conquered the region of Quito and what is now southern Colombia only a few years before the arrival of the Spaniards. The Muisca were not an expansive military empire, and they were under no threat that would justify seeking help from such a distant source. The Incas were fighting on their northern marches when the civil war between the Incas Atahualpa and Huascar broke out. There were hundreds of kilometres of mountain and forest, and innumerable hostile tribes separating the two rich Andean peoples. It is hard to imagine how a single Muisca could have survived such a journey to seek an Inca alliance.

Another theory is that the ‘foreign itinerant Indian’ was a trader—for the Muisca were above all accomplished traders. They had a lively commerce, exchanging salt and finished cotton textiles for gold or raw cotton, with tribes of the Magdalena valley or the eastern llanos. But these commodities were too bulky to trade as far afield as Quito; and there was no Quitan produce that they would want in return. Perhaps he was an emerald merchant—for the Spaniards found many emeralds on the coast of Ecuador? It is an ingenious theory, until a careful reading of Garcilaso de la Vega and other Peruvian chroniclers shows that the Ecuadorean and Muisca emeralds were of quite different quality: Garcilaso was interested in precious stones, and he wrote a long account of the differences between emeralds from these two regions.17 No conquistador found any sign of trade or other contact between the Muisca and Inca—apart from the one wishful remark in Castellanos and, following him, Simón.

The concept of El Dorado as a lake is intriguing. Gonzalo Pizarro did say that he was looking for ‘Lake El Dorado’ in his letter to the King in 1542—although no other early source connected El Dorado with a lake, not Cieza de León, Fernández de Oviedo, Benalcázar, Jiménez de Quesada or his brother Hernán Pérez de Quesada. It is also true that the Muisca venerated lakes. Jiménez de Quesada described their offerings in woods and lakes, in his Epítome de la conquista of 1550. This was a small element in Muisca religion, whose main worship was of the sun, moon and stars. They had idols in their temples. Castellanos, who as a Christian priest was concerned to destroy these rival manifestations, described Muisca idols: ‘Some [were] of gold and others of wood or fibre, large and small, all with hair and badly sculpted. They also make idols of wax or of white clay. They are all in pairs, male with female, adorned with mantles placed on them in their infamous sanctuaries …’18 Water entered into many Muisca rituals, such as the washing of the dead or the puberty rites of girls. The chief of Chía used to bathe ceremonially in the fountain of Tíquisa, and the chief of Bojacá bathed in Lake Tena. Guatavita was one of a series of sacred lakes, which included Guasca, Siecha, Teusacá and Ubaque.

One of the questions in the Catholic inquiries designed to eradicate pre-conquest ‘idolatry’ was: ‘Have you worshipped in the lakes?’, and Muisca artefacts have occasionally been found on the beds of old lakes. One of the most fascinating of all such finds was a golden replica of a raft with a tall central figure and four attendants. This amazing discovery was made at the edge of Lake Siecha. It convinced Ernst Röthlisberger, Eduardo Posada, Liborio Zerda and many others that this was proof of the Guatavita legend of El Dorado. The golden raft certainly looks like a religious ceremony, although Vicente Restrepo Tirado thought that the two tiny tubes of gold held by the central figure represented trophy heads, the skulls of Panche or other enemies being offered to the lake deity. The raft is only 19.5 centimetres long, but beautifully detailed, with six outer rows of logs curving inwards at the ends and enclosing a central section covered in matting. There are ten attendants on the raft, all flat, triangular figures with features and limbs of wire-thin gold, in typical Muisca style. They wear diadems that probably represent feather headdresses. The central figure towers above the rest, although his height is only 10 centimetres. All the figures face forward. Their careful grouping and static postures leave no doubt that they are performing a ritual.

It is important to place this raft in perspective. It evidently portrays a ceremony on a lake. But it is only one of thousands of surviving gold Muisca artefacts. Worship of lakes was only one element in Muisca religion. The first observers of Muisca society wrote much about its religion but scarcely mentioned the importance of lakes, for the Muisca worshipped mountains, celestial bodies, ancestors, and the magnificent rock gorges and outcrops that make the scenery around Bogotá so exciting. The Muisca did not produce gold: they traded it from other tribes, and their gold objects tended to be small as a result. They could not have afforded the prodigal waste of gold dust described in the El Dorado legends. Thus, although there was religious significance in the mysterious Lake Guatavita, it was not central to Muisca beliefs. It is difficult to see how it could have given rise to the powerful El Dorado legend, so far away in Quito, when contemporary conquerors of the Muisca had not heard of it.

A third element in the different versions of El Dorado was powdered or ground gold. Jiménez de Quesada had heard that the Muisca obtained raw gold from the Neiva region of the upper Magdalena: he hurried off to investigate in a disappointing mission, early in 1538. Sebastián de Benalcázar's men emerged into the same valley a few months later, after their harrowing crossing of the Cordillera Central, and were delighted to find its Indians in possession of gold dust. Benalcázar himself and two of his leading officers testified about their trip, at Cartagena in July 1539. Benalcázar and Pedro de Puelles made no mention of El Dorado, although they told about the gold of the Neiva region and the wealth they later saw in the Muisca lands. But Benalcázar's royal treasurer Gonzalo de la Peña made a surprising remark. He said that the expedition left Popayán ‘in search of a land called the golden [el dorado] and Paquies, of very great fame in gold and jewels’.19 Peña went on to describe the towns and temples of the Muisca ‘where they offer gold and jewels and make their sacrifices’.20 He never again used the words ‘el dorado’. His use of this expression was its first appearance in any source; it does not recur until 1541, after which it was on everyone's tongue. Demetrio Ramos Pérez thought that Gonzalo de la Peña was simply using this as an adjective, calling the valley of Neiva a golden land (although the adjective should then have been ‘dorada’ and not ‘el dorado’). Possibly the El Dorado legend had just begun to take shape at Quito, so that Peña mentioned it; but it was still too insignificant an idea to be repeated by Benalcázar or any other contemporary.

Nicolaus Federmann wrote to a friend that Benalcázar told him that ‘he had come 500 leagues in search and demand of’ the lands of the Muisca. But this was a typical claim by Benalcázar who, on seeing the wealth of Bogotá, liked to think that this was what he had been seeking all along. He had left Popayán to escape arrest by Francisco Pizarro. Doubtless, like any conquistador, he hoped to strike some rich land. But he was clearly not aiming for Bogotá. He moved eastwards to Neiva rather than northwards; and when his men did turn north, to descend the Magdalena, they were looking for a route to the Caribbean. They had no inkling of the rich land in the mountains to their right. When Hernán Pérez de Quesada came to meet them, Benalcázar himself was already looking for a route back to Popayán, and his men were on the far side of the Magdalena from the Muisca homeland.

Benalcázar himself never claimed that he had been looking for the lands of the Muisca21 or for El Dorado. He did not do so in the testimony at Cartagena in July 1539; or in a meeting with the King in Spain later that year; or in a conversation with Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in Santo Domingo in 1540; or in his letter to the King from Cali in March 1541. This was not from any false modesty. Benalcázar was one of the most ambitious and pushing of all the conquistadores, and his letters show that he was a forceful, eloquent writer. It was only after mid-1541, after he had received reports about events in Quito, that Benalcázar suddenly started talking about reaching El Dorado. In his subsequent letters he often mentioned it, and he and his lieutenants made strenuous efforts to reach it. From then on he sought to establish a prior claim on El Dorado, for he believed that it could be reached from his new governorship of Popayán. He and his men were convinced that El Dorado lay in the mountains south of Neiva and Timaná, the towns he had founded on the upper Magdalena.

It was apparently Benalcázar's son Francisco who persuaded Juan de Castellanos that his father had been seeking El Dorado when he reached Bogotá. The young Francisco later marched with his father on abortive attempts to explore for El Dorado south of Timaná. He then became convinced that his father had not received due recognition among official historians of the Spanish conquests. He applied to the Council of the Indies for permission to examine its records, so that he could write a justificative biography of his father's exploits. He also organized a probanza, a judicial inquiry, about his father's ‘merits and services’. This Francisco de Benalcázar was in Bogotá in 1569 when Castellanos was gathering information for his Elegies of Illustrious Men. The diligent vicar Castellanos interviewed anyone who could help him, and he would certainly have questioned this son of such a famous conquistador. One of Castellanos' epic poems was about Benalcázar; and in the preamble Castellanos echoed Francisco de Benalcázar's view that his father's exploits needed to be brought out of obscurity. So it was almost certainly Francisco de Benalcázar who persuaded Castellanos that his father had been seeking El Dorado in Bogotá—a view repeated by Pedro Simón and many later writers, but not confirmed in contemporary sources.22

So how did the idea of El Dorado begin? All sources show that it started in Quito; and contemporary sources leave no doubt that it took shape there in late 1540. The story seems to have been brought back by Spaniards returning from Bogotá. It was the creation of the Spaniards themselves and not of any ‘itinerant Indian’. All Benalcázar's men had been impressed by the gold dust of the Neiva-Timaná region, and of course by the wealth of the Muisca. The men who were left as settlers at Timaná, near the famous archaeological sites of San Agustín, soon found themselves fighting very hard against Yalcones Indians. Benalcázar's lieutenant Pedro de Añasco brought the son of a Yalcon chief back to Popayán and had him baptized Rodrigo. It may have been this boy who inspired the legend; for Cieza de León attributed it to reports by Añasco.23 Pedro de Añasco returned to Timaná and was soon killed, with most of his men, by the Yalcones. A punitive expedition by Juan de Ampudia, at the beginning of 1540, suffered a similar fate, with its fat leader riddled by Yalcones lance thrusts. The Spaniards became convinced that the Indians were defending Timaná so fiercely because it was the gateway to greater riches. But the man who was probably the final catalyst in originating ‘El Dorado’ was Pedro de Puelles. He had gone down the Magdalena with the three leaders in 1539; in his testimony at Cartagena he stressed the ‘fine gold and gold dust from mines’ of the upper Magdalena, and he hinted that there was more to be found, since his expedition had only ‘begun to find some rich settlements’.24 Puelles returned to Quito just before Gonzalo Pizarro arrived there at the end of 1540.

The idea of gold dust, so fine that it could be anointed like the dyes used by the Orinoco Indians, seems to have combined with earlier notions that the rich lands should be sought ‘behind the mountains’ and in the gold-bearing lands close to the equator. The region east of Quito or south of Timaná would fit this location. A report written in 1541 was quite specific. It said that Timaná was situated in an ‘armpit’ of two mountain ranges, one of which held the source of the Magdalena and Cauca rivers, and the other led to Bogotá, 62 leagues to the north-east. It also stated: ‘From the province of Timaná to the province of El Dorado, which … is considered a rich affair, there are about 36 leagues of road, according to information I have received. [El Dorado] has a large [lake] with certain islands … and appears [to be] on the equator or very close to it …’25 So, when Gonzalo Pizarro, youngest and most impulsive of the four Pizarro brothers, reached Quito to replace Benalcázar as its governor, he was immediately excited by all these reports. He heard that the men of Popayán and Timaná were about to march south to conquer El Dorado. He became ‘greedy to discover the valley of El Dorado’26 and decided to race to reach it first.

There was another element connected with the legendary land of El Dorado. It was the spice, cinnamon. Ever since the Spaniards first conquered Peru they noticed that the Incas used a form of cinnamon, which they obtained from forest tribes east of Quito. Spices were very highly prized in Europe in the days before refrigeration: they helped preserve food and hid the taste of rotting meat. The Portuguese made vast profits with their spices from India and the East Indies (Indonesia); Columbus himself had crossed the Atlantic hoping to find a fast route to the gold and spices of the Orient. Francisco Pizarro was therefore eager to discover the source of the Incas' cinnamon. When Pizarro sent Gonzalo Díaz de Pineda to Quito to replace Benalcázar in 1538, he urged this mayor of Quito to search for the cinnamon. Pineda set out, but after reaching the high mountains of the eastern Andes and descending to the ‘Cinnamon Valley’, his expedition was repulsed by Quijos Indians. These were the Indians who told Pineda's explorers that, farther on, there was a broad, flat land full of Indians who all wore gold ornaments. This news, coupled with the thrilling reports coming back from Timaná and Bogotá, galvanized Gonzalo Pizarro into action. ‘When this news spread in Quito, everyone who was there wanted to take part in the expedition. The Governor Gonzalo Pizarro began to make presentations and collect men and horses. In a few days he assembled 220 Spaniards, horse and foot …’27 From then on, Gonzalo Pizarro always said that he set out to find the province of Cinnamon (La Canela in Spanish) and El Dorado.

Sebastián de Benalcázar was also keen to find this cinnamon. He told the King about it when he was in Spain, and on 31 May 1540 the King granted him a licence to search for and extract cinnamon, ‘since you gave me a report that you have news of some lands that contain spices or at least cinnamon’.28 When Benalcázar was back in the Americas later that year, he met Fernández de Oviedo, who wrote: ‘He had many reports of cinnamon, and he told me … that his opinion was that he would find it towards the Marañón [Amazon] river, and that this cinnamon should be taken to Castile and Europe down that river, for the Indians had given him information about the route. He thought that he could not fail … He considered his information to be certain, [obtained] from many Indians.’29 A few months later, in March 1541, when he had reached his new governorship of Popayán, Benalcázar wrote to the King about the exciting news of wealth beyond Timaná. ‘Since coming to this land, I have great reports of rich lands of far greater dimensions than what I told Your Majesty there [in Spain] about the Cinnamon, which Your Majesty awarded to me. … For Indians have come [to Timaná] to say that they want to give and show the Christians rich lands, beyond there.’30 Benalcázar had not yet heard the El Dorado legend; but he connected the land of cinnamon with reports of rich country south of Timaná—exactly as Gonzalo Pizarro was doing at that same moment in Quito.

When Benalcázar finally did learn the El Dorado idea, he immediately claimed that this was the land he had always been planning to conquer. He wrote to the King again in 1542: ‘I have decided to make this expedition called El Dorado and Cinnamon, of which I have news for so many years. [I am financing it] of my own person, although poor and wasted and more in debt. I discovered the entry to it via the town of [Timaná]. To the great content of the explorers and with all speed, I am preparing and have prepared a quantity of men and horses and cattle and other necessary things. God willing, I shall be ready four months from now to fulfil what I have agreed with Your Majesty. I am certain that Your Majesty will be well served by it, and your royal patrimony increased. I plan to run on towards the [Caribbean] and find a port on it, so that there may be trade with all places, specially of the cinnamon which we have seen in such quantity.’31 Having often spoken about his cinnamon plans, it was easy for Benalcázar to couple these with the new concept of El Dorado in that same region. He wanted to establish a prior claim to this El Dorado. From then onwards, Benalcázar frequently talked about El Dorado, and he managed to connect himself with the origin of the legend in the minds of two important chroniclers, Cieza de León and Castellanos. It was this that led Castellanos (who wanted to locate El Dorado in his own homeland near Bogotá) to say that when Benalcázar found his way to the Muisca lands in 1538-9, he was looking for El Dorado. We now know that he had never heard of it at that date.

Notes

    Fernández de Oviedo, bk 49 (pt 3, bk 11), ch. 2, BAE cont. 121, 1959, 236.

    Idem.

    Gumilla, El Orinoco ilustrado, pt 1, ch. 7 (Caracas, 1963), 116, 121.

    Cieza de León, The War of Chupas, ch. 18, trans. C. R. Markham, Hakluyt Society, 2 series, 42 (London, 1918), 55.

    Idem, 55-6.

    Gonzalo Pizarro to King, Tomebamba (Cuenca), 3 September 1542, in Bertram T. Lee trans., Gaspar de Carvajal, The Discovery of the Amazon (New York, 1934), 245.

    Jiménez de Quesada, Epítome de la conquista, 44.

    Jerónimo Lebrón letter, Santa Marta, 9 May 1537, DIHC, 4, 195.

    Jiménez de Quesada, Epítome, in Demetrio Ramos Pérez, El mito del Dorado, 331.

    Castellanos, Elegías de varones ilustres, pt 3, Elegía to Benalcázar, canto 2, verses 37-9, BAE 4, 1847, 453.

    Castellanos, idem, 454.

    Herrera, decada 5, bk 7, ch. 14, 11 173-4. Luis Daza's Probanza, held at Popayán, 3 October 1542, is in Ramos Pérez, El mito del Dorado, 470. It clearly states that the report given by the ‘Indian called Dorado’ led to the discovery of Popayán ‘and the news of El Dorado’. Herrera seems to have based this part of his history on a missing work by Cieza de León.

    Pedro Simón, Noticias historiales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme …, pt 2, noticia 3, ch. 1, 1953 edn, 163-4. This famous chapter was first published by Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough, in his translation of Augustine Aglio, Antiquities of Mexico (9 vols, London, 1830-48), 8 221-38. However, it was not until 1891 that Father Simón's complete work was published by Medardo Rivas at Bogotá.

    Rodríguez Fresle, Conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada, ch. 2.

    Fernández Piedrahita, Historia general de las conquistas …, pt 1, bk 4, ch. 1, and bk 6, ch. 3, 1688 edn, 109, 204.

    Basilio Vicente de Oviedo, Cualidades y riquezas del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Bogotá, 1930).

    Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas, pt 1, bk 7, ch. 23 (Lisbon, 1609), BAE cont. 133 (Madrid, 1960), 325-6. Federmann also noted the difference between Ecuadorean and Colombian emeralds in his letter to Francisco Dávila, Jamaica, 1 August 1539, in Fernández de Oviedo, pt 2, bk 25, ch. 18, 2 321. José Pérez de Barradas, Los Muiscas antes de la conquista (Madrid, 1950), 1 147. Ramos Pérez, El mito del Dorado, 302-9.

    Castellanos, Elegías de varones ilustres, pt 4, canto 1 (Bogotá, 1955 edn), 155.

    Peña testimony, Cartagena, 4 July 1539, DIHC, 5 208.

    Peña testimony, idem.

    Federmann to Francisco Dávila, Jamaica, 1 August 1539, in Fernández de Oviedo, pt 2, bk 25, ch. 17, 2 320.

    Demetrio Ramos Pérez established this ingenious and convincing explanation of Castellanos' remark, in El mito del Dorado, 134-20. One of Dr Ramos' research students, María de las Mercedes Velasco Fito, found Francisco de Benalcázar's application to search the Council of Indies' papers, in the Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Justicia, box 1122. The Probanza of the merits of the Benalcázars was published by José Manuel de Groot in his Historia eclesiástica y civil de la Nueva Granada (Bogotá, 1889), 1 477-83.

    Cieza de León, War of Chupas, ch. 18, Hakluyt Society, 2 series, 42 55. Cieza said that the report also came from Benalcázar; but he could not have brought it, for he did not return to Quito until late 1541, after Gonzalo Pizarro had gone to seek El Dorado.

    Puelles testimony, Cartagena, 4 July 1539, DIHC, 5 213-4.

    This anonymous fragment was found by Demetrio Ramos Pérez in the Archive of the Indies in Seville, Patronato, legajo 27, ramo 1: El mito del Dorado, 366-7.

    Cieza de León, War of Chupas, ch. 18, Hakluyt Society, 55.

    Cieza de León, War of Chupas, ch. 18, Hakluyt Society, 2 series, 42 56; Fernández de Oviedo, pt 3, bk 49, ch. 2, 1852 edn, 4 383.

    Royal grant, Louvain, 31 May 1540, CDIA 23, 1875, 33-5.

    Fernández de Oviedo, pt 3, bk 49, ch. 1, BAE cont. 121, 1959, 235.

    Benalcázar to King, Cali, 30 March 1541, DIHC, 6 132-3. In this letter, Benalcázar worried that a rival governor, Pascual de Andagoya, had also written to the King about the wealth beyond Timaná. He poured scorn on the unadventurous Andagoya, who acted only on reports from his officers: ‘He learned about it, seated, with papers going and papers coming, and sleeping in a very soft bed.’

    Benalcázar to King, Cali, 20 September 1542, DIHC, 6 298. Soon after reaching Cali, Benalcázar had welcomed a royal emissary, Cristóbal Vaca de Castro, who was going to Peru to try to resolve the quarrel between Francisco Pizarro and the heirs of his former partner Diego de Almagro. Then came news that Pizarro had been murdered, in his palace in Lima, on 26 June 1541. Vaca de Castro sent to order Benalcázar to march south to help him suppress a rebellion in Peru led by Almagro's young son. Benalcázar went down to Quito, but was eventually sent back to Popayán when Vaca de Castro decided that he was too sympathetic to Pizarro's murderers.

Abbreviations

BAE: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nuestros dias, ed. Manuel Rivadeneira, 71 vols (Madrid, 1846-80); Continuación, ed. M. Menéndez-Pelayo (Madrid, 1905-).

CDIA: Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonización de las posesiones españolas en América y Oceania sacadas en su mayor parte del Real Archivo de Indias, ed. Joaquín F. Pacheco, Francisco de Cárdenas and Luis Torres de Mendoza, 42 vols (Madrid, 1864-84).

DIHC: Documentos inéditos para la historia de Colombia, ed. Juan Friede, 10 vols (Bogotá, 1955-60).

Bibliography

Early sources

Carvajal, Gaspar de, Descubrimiento del río de las Amazonas, ed. José Toribio Medina (Seville, 1894); trans. Bertram T. Lee and ed. H. C. Heaton, The Discovery of the Amazon (New York, 1934).

Castellanos, Juan de, Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias (Madrid, 1589); ed. Caracciolo Parra (2 vols, Caracas, 1930-2); ed. Miguel A. Caro (4 vols, Bogotá, 1955).

Cieza de León, Pedro de, La guerra de Chupas, trans. C. R. Markham, Hakluyt Society, 2 series, 42, 1918.

Daza, Luis, Probanza (sobre el indio dorado), Popayán, 3 October 1542, in Demetrio Ramos Pérez, El mito del Dorado (Caracas, 1973), 467-76.

Federmann, Nicolaus, Indianische Historia, eine schöne kurtz-weilige Historia, Nicolaus Federmann des Jüngers von Ulm (Hagenau, 1557); ed. Karl Klüpfel, Bibliotek des Literarischen Vereins in Stuttgart47 (Stuttgart, 1859); trans. Juan Friede, in Joaquín Gabaldón Márquez ed., Descubrimiento y conquista de Venezuela,2 155-250 (Caracas, 1962).

Fernández Piedrahita, Lucas, Historia general de las conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada (Antwerp, 1688).

Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas (Lisbon, 1609, Córdoba, 1617), BAE cont. 134-5, 1960; trans. Harold V. Livermore (London and Austin, 1966).

Gumilla, José, S. J., El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido (Madrid, 1741), ed. Demetrio Ramos Pérez, Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia 63 (Caracas, 1963).

Herrera Tordesillas, Antonio de, Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y Tierrafirme del Mar Océano (Madrid, 1610-15), ed. Antonio Ballesteros Beretta and Miguel Gómez del Campillo (17 vols, Madrid, 1934-55).

Jiménez de Quesada, Gonzalo, (attributed to), Epítome de la conquista del Nuevo Reino de Granada (c. 1550), ed. Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Jiménez de Quesada3, no. 13 (Instituto Colombiano de Cultural Hispánica, Bogotá), December 1962, 43-60.

Oviedo, Basilio Vicente de, Cualidades y riquezas del Nuevo Reino de Granada, ed. L. A. Cuervo, Biblioteca de Historia Nacional 45 (Bogotá, 1930).

Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo Fernández de, Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y Tierra-firme del Mar Océano (Seville, 1535-47), ed. José Amador de Los Rios (4 vols, Madrid, 1852); ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso, BAE (continuation) 117-21 (Madrid, 1959).

Rodríguez Fresle, Juan, El Carnero de Bogotá: Conquista y descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada (1636), ed. F. Pérez (Bogotá, 1942); trans. William C. Atkinson, The Conquest of New Granada (London, 1961).

Simón, Pedro, OFM, Noticias historiales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme, en las Indias Occidentales (Cuenca, 1627); part trans. William Bollaert, The Expedition of Pedro de Ursúa and Lope de Aguirre in search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560-1, Hakluyt Society 28 (London, 1861); (5 vols, Bogotá, 1882-92); ed. Demetrio Ramos Pérez, Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia 66-7 (2 vols, Caracas, 1963).

Modern works

Pérez de Barradas, José, Los Muiscas antes de la Conquista (2 vols, Instituto Bernardino de Sahagún, Madrid, 1950-1).

Ramos Pérez, Demetrio, El mito del Dorado. Su génesis y proceso (BANH 116) (Caracas, 1973).
Robert Silverberg (essay date 1985)

Last Updated on June 7, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 11642

SOURCE: Silverberg, Robert. “The Gilded Man of Cundinamarca.” In The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado, pp. 3-38. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Silverberg establishes how Spaniards could have believed in El Dorado by describing the riches in gold accumulated by explorers like Columbus, Cortés, and Pizarro.]

The quest for El Dorado was an enterprise of fantasy that obsessed the adventurers of Europe for more than a century. Tales of a golden kingdom and of a golden king, somewhere in the unexplored wilderness of South America, spurred men on to notable achievements of endurance, chivalry, and—too often—crime. Nothing halted the pursuers of the golden dream, neither snow-capped mountains nor blazing plains, neither the thin air of lofty plateaus nor the green intricacy of steaming tropical jungles. They marched on, killing and plundering, suffering incredible torments, often traveling—as one chronicler put it—con el alma en los dientes, with their souls between their teeth.

They did not find El Dorado. The stuff of dreams cannot easily be transmuted into solid reality. The seekers sought, and their deeds constitute a monument to futility as well as an epic of high adventure.

Yet there was a kernel of truth within the fantasy. This is where the quest began, a third of the way through the sixteenth century: with a glittering story that journeyed down from the high tableland of Bogotá to dazzle the conquistadores.

The tale came out of Cundinamarca, “the land of the condor,” now the Andean highlands of the Republic of Colombia. No white man had then penetrated that remote inland plateau, although the Spaniards had gained a foothold in bordering lands. There were Spanish settlements along the coasts of what now are Venezuela and Colombia; Spaniards had mastered the proud Incas of Peru; they had nibbled at the shores of Guiana. But as late as 1535 Cundinamarca was terra incognita. On that great plateau, more than 7500 feet above sea level, it was possible that a high civilization of spectacular wealth, comparable to the civilizations of Peru and Mexico, might still await the lucky explorer.

This was the legend out of Cundinamarca:

At a lake called Guatavitá on the Bogotá plateau, a solemn ceremony was held each year to reconsecrate the king. On the appointed day the monarch came forth, removed his garments, and anointed his body with turpentine to make it sticky. Then he rolled in gold dust until covered from head to foot with a gleaming coat.

Gilded and splendid, the king arose and proceeded to the shores of Lake Guatavitá while all the multitudes of his subjects accompanied him, celebrating with music and jubilant songs. The king and his nobles boarded a canoe and paddled to the middle of the mountain-rimmed lake. There he solemnly hurled offerings of gold and emeralds into the water; and at the climax of the ceremony the gilded man himself leaped from the canoe and plunged in to bathe. At the sight of that flash of brightness, the crowd on shore sent up a mighty cheer. Soon the king emerged and returned to shore, and a festival of dancing and drinking and singing began.

A gilded man—el hombre dorado—ruling over a nation so wealthy that it could afford to coat its monarch's skin with gold! That fabled plunge kindled the imagination of many a gold-seeker. Already the treasuries of the Incas and the Aztecs had yielded wealth so immense as to unbalance the economy of Europe and set in motion a formidable inflation. Not content, the gold-seekers looked now for the land of the gilded man of Cundinamarca.

The legend underwent mutations. El dorado, the gilded man, became El Dorado, the kingdom of gold. The location of that kingdom shifted in steady progression eastward across South America during the century of pursuit, migrating from Colombia to the basin of the Amazon to the jungles of Guiana as each site in turn failed to fulfill its glistening promise. The original El Dorado, where the annual rite of the gilded chieftain actually had been performed, was discovered early in the quest; but since it did not conform to the hopes of its discoverers, the seekers continued to search.

It was a time of quests. Men had searched for Prester John, the Christian king of Asia; they had looked for the lost continent of Atlantis, for King Solomon's mines at Ophir, for the Seven Cities of Cíbola, for the Fountain of Youth, for the Holy Grail, for the domain of the women warriors, the Amazons. Often gold had been the mainspring of the search, as in the instance of the Río Doro of Africa, the River of Gold that Arab merchants described. Gold in plenty was found during that age of exploration, but rarely did it coincide with the site of one of the grand romantic quests. The golden cities of Cíbola turned out to be the mud pueblos of the Zuni; Prester John, that king of rubies and diamonds, was tracked to a Mongol tent in a grim steppe; and El Dorado became a trap that unmanned even the most valiant.

But the joy of a quest is in the questing. The kingdom of the gilded man lay always over the next mountain, beyond the next turn in the river, past the next thicket of the jungle. Each successive adventurer was aware of the perils and pitfalls of the quest, and knew the grim fate of his predecessors; yet the pull of El Dorado was relentless. The record of earlier failure only served to intensify the hunger of the new generations of explorers. As Sir Walter Raleigh, the last and most tragic of the Doradists, wrote in 1596, “It seemeth to me that this Empire is reserved for her Majesty and the English nation, by reason of the hard success which all these and other Spaniards had in attempting the same.”1

The ceremony of an Indian tribe became the magnet of doom for hundreds of bold men. A will-o'-the-wisp, a fantasy, a golden dream—a chieftain transformed into a shining statue—the bright gleam of his diving body—El Dorado, the realm of gold—it was an obsessive quest from which there was no turning back, no reprieve for those condemned to follow its fruitless trails.

2

Gold is a beautiful metal and a useful one. It is dense and heavy, with a satisfying feeling of mass. It has a splendid yellow gleam which is virtually imperishable, for gold is not a chemically active metal and therefore not subject to rust. Its unwillingness to combine with other elements made it easily accessible to primitive man; when smelting was unknown, such metals as iron were unattainable but nuggets of pure gold could be found in many parts of the world.

Gold is malleable. It can be hammered or drawn into attractive shapes. The Egyptians and Sumerians recognized the beauty and utility of gold and fashioned it into jewelry six thousand years ago. Before the concept of currency was known, gold was desired above all other metals and must have been a choice barter item.

Gold is scarce. That added to its value. Scarce but not too scarce, easy to fabricate, beautiful, durable, massy, divisible into small units without impairment of value, gold quickly established itself as a high prize. Eventually the idea arose of coining it into pieces of uniform weight; the traditional birthdate of coinage is about 700 b.c. in the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor. Iron, copper, lead all served as the basis of currency in some lands, and their deficiencies were demonstrated. Silver won great acclaim, and much of Europe preferred the silver standard well into modern times. But gold was always the master metal. Hercules went in quest of the golden apples of the Hesperides. Phoenician miners quarried gold in Spain and fetched it to the Levantine coast to grease the wheels of commerce. King Solomon sent treasure-fleets down the Red Sea to Tarshish and Ophir. “Men now worship gold to the neglect of the gods,” Propertius complained in his Elegies, two thousand years ago. “By gold good faith is banished and justice is sold.”

Propertius had good reason to grumble. Few nations pursued gold as assiduously as Rome. The Romans were the inheritors of Alexander's Greek empire, and Alexander had taken possession of the Persian hoard, and the Persians were successors to Babylonia, Egypt, and Assyria. All that shining treasure cascaded down to the regime of the Caesars. The Romans worked the mines of Spain to virtual exhaustion, and their coffers bulged accordingly. The high point of their prosperity came in the reign of Augustus. At his death, in 14 a.d., the Roman gold supply may have been as great as 500,000,000 ounces.

That matchless treasury was gradually dissipated. Roman gold flowed eastward in exchange for such goods as Chinese silks, deflating the Roman economy considerably, but much more damage was done by the barbarian incursions that cut Rome off from the lands where gold was mined. The yellow metal disappeared into private hands, was carried off by Goths and Vandals to become jewelry, or simply vanished. By 800 a.d., the total recoverable gold supply of Europe—the basis of currency—was less than a tenth of what it had been in the time of Augustus Caesar. The lack of gold, and a corresponding shortage of silver, hampered trade and kept prices low in relation to the purchasing power of precious metals.

The slow awakening of Europe in medieval times coincided to some extent with the revival of the gold supply. Old mines were reopened, new ones discovered; and as seamen grew more bold, it became possible to replenish the treasuries of Europe by venturing abroad. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo and other Venetians reached as far as China, but that was a false dawn of commerce. It was nearly two centuries later that Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal goaded his captains to journey ever farther down the western coast of Africa, until at last in 1488 Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope and showed that a sea route to India lay ahead. Dias fell short of the goal, but nine years later Vasco da Gama sailed completely around Africa and reached India, opening a glamorous new trade route that gave Portugal a short interlude of world dominance.

While the Portuguese went east for gold, the Spaniards went west. They found a new world brimming with the yellow metal and changed the path of history. The story of El Dorado is largely a Spanish story, and its starting point is the year 1492.

That year merits its place among history's exalted dates for several reasons. It was, of course, the year in which a stubborn Genoese seaman named Cristoforo Colombo persuaded the Spanish Queen to finance a westward voyage that brought him to the Indies. More than that, it was the year that Spain as a nation took form, and without that event there would have been no voyage of Columbus, no conquest of the Americas, and probably no quest for El Dorado.

Spain lies closer to Africa than any other European state, and in the eighth century had fallen victim to that spectacular surge of Arab militarism that erupted across the Christian world. For centuries thereafter the Iberian Peninsula was an outpost of Islam. The enlightened Moors brought their universities to Spain, their doctors and poets and astronomers, and in a rude and ignorant Europe the Moslem kingdoms of Spain became the channel by which learning entered. The overthrown Christian rulers of Spain had taken refuge in the mountains of Asturias, and maintained a shaky independence there. Gradually the Moors yielded ground as resurgent Spanish Christians pressed them from the north in a seemingly endless war of reconquest.

There was no real unity in Spain during the reconquista. Geographically, Spain is a broken land, divided by mountain chains and lacking the navigable rivers that can bind a nation together. Thus Christian Spain became a patchwork of small kingdoms that vied for dominance—Castile, Aragon, Navarre, León, and others. Now and again one kingdom attained brief supremacy, but the general picture was one of restless little states vying for power while moving in and out of complex dynastic alliances and somehow prosecuting the common war against the Moors. The Spaniards themselves referred to their peninsula until quite recent times as las Españas, “the Spains,” and not as “Spain.”

A complex mixed society of Christians and Moors took form in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a result of the shifting alliances of “the Spains.” By the middle of the thirteenth century the conquest of the Moorish-held territories had proceeded to the point where most of the Moslems were concentrated in the kingdom of Granada along the Mediterranean coast. Granada acknowledged the supremacy of the Christian kingdom of Castile in western Spain. To the east, the kingdom of Aragon extended its sway over what was left of Moorish Spain. The two kingdoms of Aragon and Castile emerged as the leading powers of the land and the Moors remained in their part of the peninsula mainly by tolerance of their Christian overlords.

A significant marriage in 1469 indicated the ultimate destiny of “the Spains.” Prince Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon, wed Princess Isabella, the heiress to the throne of Castile, and by 1479 they had come to power in their respective kingdoms. Though Aragon and Castile remained separate states, they were joined at last by a bond of marriage, and the dynastic link gave the pair of monarchs control over most of the peninsula.

During the period of uncertainty while the youthful Ferdinand and Isabella were coming to their thrones, the Moors of Granada had chosen to withhold their customary tribute. In 1482, the joint rulers commenced a final war against the Spanish Moors—the last crusade of Europe. Village by village, Granada was conquered and drawn into full Christian power. The war lasted a decade. On January 2, 1492, the city of Granada itself fell to the Catholic kings, and the rulers of Castile and Aragon now ruled all of Spain. It was a propitious time for Columbus to come before Isabella and offer her Cathay.

Ferdinand and Isabella maintained the separateness of their states. Ferdinand's Aragon, the smaller kingdom, was a limited monarchy with a strong parliament—the Cortés—and its government was stable and orderly. Isabella's Castile, upon her accession, had been loosely run, infested with corrupt officials and haughty nobles who indulged in private wars; it received a thorough overhauling at Isabella's hands, and she emerged as Castile's absolute monarch. By imposing the total supremacy of the Castilian crown she shaped the pattern for the conquest of the Americas.

It was a time for shaking old traditions in “the Spains.” The heritage of Arab learning and tolerance was brushed aside. The intensely religious Isabella, determined to maintain her power both against her nobles and against a possible resurgence of Moslem strength, cast aside past liberalism. The Catholic Church underwent drastic reform and was given awesome powers of investigation and punishment. The new Inquisition became an arm of Isabella's policies. The Jews were expelled from the land; the Moors of Granada were forcibly baptized. Feudal revolts were sternly repressed. A harshness settled over the sunny land of Spain.

The exercise of power, however, requires an underpinning of money and Isabella was painfully conscious of her country's poverty and isolation from the rest of the world. Arid Spain could not grow fat from agriculture. Poor transportation thwarted commerce and even made it difficult for the Spaniards to benefit from the mineral wealth of their own mines. Nearly eight centuries of warfare with the Moors and among the Spanish kingdoms had made the development of manufacturing impossible. There was no Spanish navy, for old Castile and Aragon, the unifiers of the nation, had been landlocked kingdoms.

Meanwhile the nimble Portuguese, Iberians themselves who had gained independence only a few centuries earlier, were winning an empire in the Orient. Spurred on by the extraordinary Prince Henry, Portuguese navigators had found the track to the Indies, and the spices and luxuries of Arabia and India were enriching Portugal to the envy and annoyance of Spain. To Isabella, a sudden and dramatic increase in the Castilian stock of gold was the best way of building the potent imperial state she and her husband wished “the Spains” to become.

To Isabella, then, came Columbus, hat in hand, full of dreams and false geography. He had read Marco Polo, and hungered for a sight of Cambaluc and Xanadu, the capitals of Kublai Khan. He knew the tales of lands in the western ocean. The Florentine geographer Toscanelli reinforced his beliefs by telling him of the island of Cipangu—Japan—in the west, “rich in gold, pearls, and gems: the temples and palaces are roofed with solid gold.” Toscanelli had read Marco Polo, too.

Near the end of 1483, Columbus had begged King John II of Portugal to finance an expedition to the west. Portugal, thriving on its eastward trade, declined. Columbus moved on to Spain, while his brother Bartolomé presented the proposal to King Henry VII of England. King Henry said no; Queen Isabella of Spain was more interested, but unfortunately had to devote her resources to the completion of the war against Granada. For five years a Spanish royal commission mulled Columbus' suggestion. In 1491 came the verdict: Spain was not attracted by the idea. Columbus prepared to take his venture to France. A friend found him despondent at the town of La Rábida; he was Juan Pérez, sometime confessor to Queen Isabella, who heard the story and wrote to the court. The Queen summoned Columbus to the military camp at Santa Fé, not far from the Moorish bastion of the Alhambra. The Moors were near defeat. “I saw,” Columbus wrote a year later, “the royal banners of your Highnesses on the towers of the Alhambra; and I saw the Moorish King come out to the city gates and kiss your royal hands.”

Again the councillors of the realm debated, and again they rejected Columbus' proposal. The Genoan departed; but a messenger overtook him that same day, and called him back. Isabella had relented. Columbus could have his three caravels. With the Moors prostrate, the Queen was looking outward toward empire and perhaps this persistent man from Italy could bring her the gold of the Orient.

3

Awkwardly, two huge continents turned out to lie between Spain and Asia. Columbus made his landfall in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, and persuaded himself that he had found the outlying islands of the Indies. It was not so, and gradually the immensity of the unknown western territory made itself apparent. So, too, did the New World's riches demonstrate themselves.

On Saturday, October 13, Columbus recorded in his journal the details of his first contact with the islanders: “Many of these people, all men, came from the shore … and I was anxious to learn whether they had gold. I saw also that some of them wore little pieces of gold in their perforated noses. I learned by signs that there was a king in the south, or south of the island, who owned many vessels filled with gold.”2

The first gleam was encouraging. But Columbus was after bigger game. He did not plan to search immediately for the southern land of gold, “for I must endeavor to reach Cipangu quickly.”

He pioneered that pleasant institution, the Caribbean cruise. Asking everywhere for news of the Great Khan, he sailed from island to island. On October 28 he landed at Cuba, an island big enough to be his dreamed-of Cipangu; but the natives told him to keep going if he would find the true home of gold. He sailed on through blue water and tropical warmth, but his men grew restless. Late in November his lieutenant, Martín Pinzón, took the Pinta and went off on a private voyage to the land of gold. A few days later Columbus discovered Hispaniola, the island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where gold abounded. The chastened Pinzón returned, empty-handed, to learn that he had missed the great moment. In January, 1493, Columbus went back to Spain to bring the glad tidings to Isabella. He could not claim that he had found Cathay or Cipangu, but certainly he had found gold.

Queen Isabella, well pleased by the news, claimed the Indies as the direct and exclusive possessions of the Castilian crown, as was her right, and thereafter all ventures to the New World were conducted under license from the throne of Castile. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI confirmed the Castilian right of discovery by obligingly dividing the world between Spain and Portugal. The Pope drew a line from pole to pole, a hundred miles west of the Azores. All that lay east of that line was granted to Portugal for exploitation; the land to the west was Spain's.

Spanish activities at first were confined to the West Indies, centering about the settlement that Columbus planted on Hispaniola. It was known, in a vague way, that the isles found by Columbus were flanked by two gigantic land masses, neither of which was Asia. The Spaniards settled down to the occupation of the West Indies and the destruction of their native inhabitants, but gradually the lust for wealth drew them to the mainland.

Columbus first glimpsed the mainland of South America on his third voyage, in 1498. He found evidence of gold on the coast of what shortly would be called Venezuela. That name was given two years later when a former companion of Columbus, Alonso de Ojeda, explored over a thousand miles of the northern coast of South America from Guiana to Colombia. He thought that the islanded coast reminded him of “a queer little Venice”—Venezuela. One of his navigators, Amerigo Vespucci, also contributed to the growing terminology of the New World; in a mysterious way his first name became attached to the western continents themselves.

Ojeda found gold on the Venezuelan coast, and pearls as well. The best pearls and the lion's share of the gold went into the Spanish royal treasury, for all this land belonged to Castile, and by Castile's laws the monarch took a bullion royalty of two thirds the value. (In practice this proved too much to extort from the explorers; between 1500 and 1504, the royal share was successively reduced by petition of the American settlers to a half, a third, and a fifth. There it remained, and the “royal fifth,” the quinto reál, was demanded by Spanish officials until the eighteenth century.)

The reconnaissance proceeded rapidly. In 1500, Rodrigo de Bastidas, a notary from Seville, explored the region around the Isthmus of Panamá on foot and came away with gold in abundance. About the same time, Christoval Guerra and Pedro Alonso Niño guided a rotted caravel along the Venezuelan coast and returned to Spain with gold and a multitude of pearls. They reported that gold was scarce among the Indian tribes of the eastern part of South America's northern coast, but was more abundant farther to the west, toward the Isthmus. Vincente Yañez Pinzón went in the other direction, past the Equator and down the coast of Brazil as far as the mouth of the Amazon, but he was ruined by shipwreck and came home with only a few survivors.

On his last expedition in 1502, Columbus called first at Santo Domingo, Hispaniola, where he met a fleet of thirty ships about to depart for Spain laden with West Indian gold. The veteran explorer warned of storms but the Spaniards would not heed him, and hurricanes sent twenty ships to the bottom, one of them carrying a nugget of gold said to weigh 36 pounds. Columbus himself waited out the storm and then went on to Jamaica, Cuba, and Honduras. He moved southward along the eastern coast of Central America, collecting a considerable quantity of gold. The Indians told him of a wealthy and civilized nation lying nine days' march overland to the west, on the Pacific shore, but they also told him that the western coast was “ten days' journey from the Ganges,” so Columbus evidently was hearing what he chose to hear. No European yet had crossed that narrow strip of land that divides the great oceans. Columbus sought in vain for some navigable strait that would bring him to the western coast of Central America. Finding none, he returned to Jamaica, poverty, and a year of sickness and hunger. By 1504 he was back in Spain just as his patron, Queen Isabella, was dying. Columbus, gouty and deprived of the benefits of his discovery, survived her by eighteen months. After his first great voyage, his life had been a sequence of misadventures, and other men reaped the harvest of the Indies.

It was a cruel harvest, not only of gold and pearls but of the bodies and souls of men. The ruthless behavior of the Spaniards toward the natives of the New World was an unhappy accompaniment to the expansion of Spanish power. The historian William H. Prescott, a New England puritan at heart, criticized Spanish harshness this way in his classic History of the Conquest of Peru in 1847: “Gold was the incentive and the recompense, and in the pursuit of it [the Spaniard's] inflexible nature rarely hesitated as to the means. His courage was sullied with cruelty, the cruelty that flowed equally—strange as it may seem—from his avarice and his religion. … The Castilian, too proud for hypocrisy, committed more cruelties in the name of religion than were ever practiced by the pagan idolater or the fanatical Moslem.”3 Prescott could not resist drawing the contrast between the cruel “children of Southern Europe” and his own forebears, “the Anglo-Saxon races who scattered themselves along the great northern division of the western hemisphere. … They asked nothing from the soil, but the reasonable returns of their own labor. No golden visions threw a deceitful halo around their path and beckoned them onward through seas of blood to the subversion of an unoffending dynasty.”

The Spaniards have few apologists, though recent historians have attempted to countervail the “black legend” of Spanish atrocity by insisting that they were, at least, no more cruel than anyone else of their time. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, in his The Conquest of New Granada (1922), points out that “Spaniards then, as now, were the most individualistic people on the earth. Thus fortified, both by religious and by racial pride, holding their faith with fierce intensity, they felt they had a mission to fulfill, laid on them from on high. Gold was not always their chief aim, as Protestant historians aver, although they loved it, wading ankle-deep in blood in its pursuit. When all is said and done, they were much like ourselves, not knowing, and not caring much to know, where their greed ended and their faith began.”4

They were tough men from a rugged land. Those who went to the New World were warriors, all sentimentality burned from them by the Spanish sun. They swore by Christ, but not the loving Christ of the Gospels; they saw no contradiction in spreading the worship of Jesus by the sword, if necessary, nor did they hesitate to enslave men they deemed lacking in souls. Some Spaniards clearly embraced terror for its own sake; others used it as an instrument of policy; still others, and they were few, recoiled from bloodshed except in the last resort. The fact stands that the Spaniards were more ruthless in their treatment of the natives than their great rivals, the English; and we will see English voyagers turning that fact to their own advantage. The best that can be said for the average conquistador is that he was as unsparing with his own life as with the lives of others. Sir Walter Raleigh, who had little reason to love the Spaniards, managed high praise for their “patient virtue” in his History of the World:

    “

    We seldom or never find any nation hath endured so many misadventures and miseries as the Spaniards have done in their Indian discoveries. Yet persisting in their enterprises, with invincible constancy, they have annexed to their kingdom so many goodly provinces, as bury the remembrance of all dangers past. Tempests and shipwrecks, famine, overthrows, mutinies, heat and cold, pestilence, and all manner of diseases, both old and new, together with extreme poverty, and want of all things needful, have been the enemies, wherewith every one of their most noble discoveries, at one time or other, hath encountered. Many years have passed over some of their heads in the search of not so many leagues: Yea, more than one or two have spent their labor, their wealth, and their lives, in search of a golden kingdom, without getting further notice of it than what they had at their first setting forth.5

Valor and vainglory, murderous cruelty and rocklike endurance—these were the marks of the Spaniards as they spread out into South America. A harsh light plays over their exploits. They were fed on romantic dreams of chivalry and on the somber inflexibility of the Inquisition, and out of this brew of fantasy and militant intolerance they took the nourishment of empire. For their crimes, their bravery is their only absolution. They stand indicted by one of their own people, the saintly Bartolomé de las Casas, “the apostle of the Indies,” who wrote in 1542 of the destruction worked on the Indians of the West Indies:

“Upon these lambs so meek, so qualified and endowed of their Maker and Creator, as hath been said, entered the Spanish … as wolves, as lions, and as tigers most cruel of long time famished: and have not done in those quarters these forty years past, neither do at this present, ought else save tear them in pieces, kill them, martyr them, afflict them, torment them, and destroy them by strange sorts of cruelties never neither seen, nor read, nor heard of the like … so far forth that of above three millions of souls that were in the Isle of Hispaniola, there are not now two hundred natives of the country.”6 The Dominican friar had been on the scene; he had witnessed the holocaust, and cried out to all the world against it.

Clearly there was gold to be had at the meeting-place of Central and South America. Many men now approached the Spanish throne to ask for licenses to exploit the New World. Each expedition required a capitulación, or contractual charter, from the crown. Customarily, the adventurers could not hope for a royal contribution to their expenses, but were bound to pay over the royal fifth of any takings. The throne retained all rights of government in the territories to be occupied, granting merely the concession to seek wealth.

Two licenses were awarded in 1509. Alonso de Ojeda was permitted to settle what is now the north coast of Colombia adjoining the Isthmus. The right to colonize present-day Panamá, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua went to a certain Diego de Nicuesa, over the loud objections of Columbus' son, Diego. Neither man met with good fortune.

Ojeda dropped anchor in the harbor of the future city of Cartagena, Colombia, and led a force of seventy men to attack the Indians. They jolted his confidence with poisoned arrows, and slew all but Ojeda and one companion, who slipped away to the ships. Some 230 men remained in Ojeda's force, but the natives picked them off daily; Ojeda himself was pierced in the thigh by a poisoned arrow, and saved his life with a cautery of red-hot iron. Eventually only a few Spaniards remained. When a pirate ship from the Spanish settlement at Hispaniola arrived, Ojeda boarded it to seek reinforcements from that island, leaving a soldier named Francisco Pizarro in charge. Ojeda's journey back was marked by hardships, and he died in Hispaniola without ever returning to his camp on the South American coast.

The reinforcements finally arrived under the command of a lawyer named Enciso. Aboard one of Enciso's ships was a stowaway named Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, who had left Hispaniola to avoid payment of some embarrassing debts. Balboa, who was about thirty-five years old, was energetic and intelligent, and—despite his attitude toward financial obligations—a man of considerably finer moral fiber than most of his companions. He was also familiar with the region around the Isthmus, for he had visited it ten years earlier as part of Bastidas' expedition of 1500.

Balboa speedily took command of the demoralized remnants of Ojeda's expedition and the reinforcements from Enciso's party. He led them westward into Panamá by sea, and founded a village at a place the Indians called Darien. In the course of subjugating the Indians of Darien, Balboa and his men came into possession of “plates of gold, such as they hang on their breasts and other parts, and other things, all of them amounting to ten thousand pesos of fine gold.”7 While the gold was being weighed out, a young Indian who was present supposedly struck the scales contemptuously with his fist, scattering the precious metal about, and declared, “If this is what you prize so much that you are willing to leave your distant homes, and risk even life itself for it, I can tell you of a land where they eat and drink out of golden vessels, and gold is as cheap as iron is with you.”8 The legend of El Dorado was yet unknown, but the lure of a golden land somewhere to the south had already begun to exert its appeal.

While consolidating his position at Darien, Balboa learned of the fate of Nicuesa's Central American adventure. It was a tale of shipwreck and starvation and attrition. A rescue party sent out to find survivors came upon Nicuesa “dried up with extreme hunger, filthy and horrible to behold.”9 He and his remaining forty men—out of 700—were brought to Darien, which lay within Nicuesa's jurisdiction according to the royal charter. Balboa had no intention of yielding his firm, though highly unofficial, power to the wretched Nicuesa and sent him out to sea again, where he was lost.

Shrewd, fair by the standards of his time, particularly enlightened in his treatment of the Indians, Balboa built a powerful settlement at Darien. He married the daughter of a native chief, persuaded his father-in-law to embrace Christianity, and made submissive subjects out of the Indians. They brought him gold, which he valued much more than they, and regaled him with tantalizing stories of the wealth that lay near at hand, in kingdoms to the south or to the west.

Balboa communicated these stories to his monarch, King Ferdinand. Since his consort's death in 1504, Ferdinand had ruled Castile as regent for his deranged and widowed daughter, Joanna the Mad, while remaining King of Aragon as well. In January, 1513, Balboa told the sovereign that he had discovered “great secrets of marvelous riches,” and spoke of “many rich mines … gold and wealth with which a great part of the world can be conquered. I have learned it in various ways, putting some to the torture, treating some with love and giving Spanish things to some.”10 He asked for arms, provisions, materials for constructing ships, and a thousand men from the settlement on Hispaniola.

He could not get all that he requested, but shortly he embarked on his expedition to the land of boundless gold, taking with him 190 Spaniards and a number of Indian guides. They went by ship from Darien to the narrowest part of the Isthmus, where merely a sixty-mile-wide strip of land divided the oceans (though Balboa could only guess at that). Then he struck out overland for the western ocean, the gateway to the realm of gold. When hostile tribes barred his way, Balboa used diplomatic wiles to wheedle his way past them. At last he came to the summit of the lone hill that lay between him and the sea. Balboa advanced alone, and, in the scene immortalized in Keats' sonnet, “with eagle eyes … stared at the Pacific and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” Before him lay the broad Pacific. It was a memorable day—September 25, 1513. The perplexing geography of the New World now seemed unraveled: a mere strip of land lay between two mighty seas, and little could prevent the Spaniards from continuing down the western coast of South America as they had begun to do in the east. And on that western coast, so all the Indians said, lay the golden kingdom.

4

Through a pardonable poetic oversight, Keats credited the discovery of the Pacific not to Balboa but to “stout Cortez.” Like Columbus, Balboa had shown the way; and like him, he would not taste the sweetness of his discovery.

King Ferdinand, disturbed by the irregular way Balboa had come to power, appointed the savage and sinister Pedro Arias de Avila, or simply “Pedrarias,” as Governor of Darien. The King gave Balboa the resounding title of adelantado (governor) of the South Sea, but made him subordinate to Pedrarias. For five years Pedrarias allowed Balboa to conduct further explorations along the Pacific shore of Central America. Then, falsely suspecting treason, he sent Francisco Pizarro to arrest Balboa. The adelantado was tried, condemned to death, and speedily beheaded. An unchallenged tyrant now, Pedrarias descended heavily on the Indians of Panamá and ruled in terror for another dozen years until his death in 1530.

Balboa's investigations had alerted the Spaniards to the probable existence of a rich empire on the western coast of South America, and in time that empire would be revealed to be no myth at all, but the Peru of the Incas. However, it happened that a different golden realm was the first to fall.

Spaniards commanded by Juan de Grijalva set out from Cuba in 1518 on a voyage of reconnaissance. They landed on the Caribbean coast of Mexico, which was a land unknown to them. Some Spaniards had been shipwrecked off Yucatán in 1511 and had fallen into the hands of the Mayas, but nothing had been heard from them at the time Grijalva sailed. Besides, his landing was made at an entirely different part of Mexico.

The strangers' stay was short, but it aroused great interest among the Mexicans. Only a generation before, a tribe known as the Aztecs had succeeded in imposing its authority over most of central Mexico. The Aztecs ruled in splendor from their inland capital of Tenochtitlán, at the present-day site of Mexico City; but their king, the moody, superstitious Moctezuma II, was troubled by a prophecy that bearded white-skinned gods would come one day out of the eastern ocean to relieve him of his kingdom. Grijalva and his men were mistaken for these divine visitors. Moctezuma hastened to send loads of jewelry, precious stones, capes of feathers, and elegant articles of bright gold as gifts. Grijalva returned to Cuba laden with treasure.

Diego de Velásquez, a veteran of Columbus' voyages, now ruled Cuba. He was irritated with Grijalva for not having ventured farther inland, and chose a different man to go back to Mexico on a mission of conquest. He selected Hernando Cortés, a lively, even flamboyant, Spaniard of unswerving courage. Cortés quickly assembled a picked party. Velásquez was unnerved by the young Spaniard's show of ambition and tried to revoke the appointment; but in 1519 Cortés set out with a fleet of eleven ships, 500 men, thirteen musketeers, thirty-two crossbowmen, sixteen horses, and seven cannons hardly larger than toys.

The implausible story of Cortés' achievement is well known. With this tiny army he marched successfully across Mexico and brought the invincible Aztecs quickly to defeat. He had many advantages: the charismatic nature of his own leadership, the willingness of vassal Indian tribes to ally themselves with the Spaniards against the Aztecs, and the services of a slave girl named Malinal, or Dona Marina, who was his interpreter. Cortés had rescued one of the Spaniards shipwrecked off Yucatán in 1511, and he spoke the Mayan language; so did Malinal, who learned her Spanish from him. Thereafter she was the go-between through whom Cortés could communicate his precise wishes to the natives of Mexico.

As Cortés marched westward toward Tenochtitlán, the frightened Moctezuma attempted to placate him with rich gifts. Aztec ambassadors met the invaders laden with treasure. Bernal Díaz, one of Cortés' soldiers and probably the most reliable chronicler of the conquest, left this description of the gifts of Moctezuma:

    “

    The first article presented was a wheel like a sun, as big as a cartwheel, with many sorts of pictures on it, the whole of fine gold, and a wonderful thing to behold. … Then another wheel was presented of greater size made of silver of great brilliancy in imitation of the moon with other figures on it, and this was of great value as it was very heavy. … Then we were brought twenty golden ducks, beautifully worked and very natural looking, and some ornaments like dogs, and many articles of gold worked in the shape of tigers and lions and monkeys, and ten collars beautifully worked and other necklaces; and twelve arrows and a bow with its string, and two rods like staffs of justice, five palms long, all in beautiful hollow work of gold. Then there were presented crests of gold and plumes of rich green feathers, and others of silver, and fans of the same material, and deer copied in hollow gold … and so many other things were there that it is useless my trying to describe them for I know not how to do it.11

Cortés responded with two shirts and some blue glass beads for each ambassador, and requested an audience with Moctezuma at Tenochtitlán. This the Aztec ruler was unwilling to grant; but the Spaniards proceeded inland, picking up allies as they went, and entered Tenochtitlán unopposed. Soon Moctezuma was a captive, and Cortés was in command. Although the Spaniards suffered some severe reverses later in the conquest, they were unquestioned masters of Mexico by the summer of 1521.

Meanwhile the first shipload of Mexican gold was on the way to Spain—for Cortés, conscious of the fact that Governor Velásquez had revoked his permission to invade Mexico, was eager to have the blessing of the Spanish King. He had sent envoys and a mass of golden treasure to his monarch, by way of a first installment, and the arrival of the golden cargo provoked amazement in Europe.

Spain had a new ruler now, one of the most remarkable men of his era—the Emperor Charles V. He was just twenty years old when the envoys from Cortés reached him in March, 1520, but already he was the master of the greatest empire since the time of Charlemagne. It was the destiny of Charles V to preside over much of the quest for El Dorado.

A series of dynastic accidents had given this not very aggressive young man his startling collection of crowns. His grandparents on one side were Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile; on the other they were the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and Mary, Duchess of Burgundy. Charles was born in 1500; six years later his father, Philip of Burgundy, died with the boy as his sole heir. From him Charles inherited an assortment of duchies in the Netherlands and France. Since his mother, Joanna of Castile, was insane, his grandfather, Maximilian of Habsburg, acted as his regent for these properties. His grandfather Ferdinand of Aragon was already serving as the regent for Castile. When Ferdinand died in 1516, Charles inherited both Aragon and Castile, technically sharing the throne with his demented mother. Finally, in 1519, Charles secured the succession to the main Habsburg domain—the Holy Roman Empire—which included much of Germany and Austria. Thus, before he was twenty he found himself ruling over Spain, the Low Countries, a substantial segment of France, most of Germany, Austria, a fair portion of Italy, and scattered provinces elsewhere in Europe—and, of course, through the throne of Castile he also claimed possession of the entire New World. “God has set you on the path towards a world monarchy,” his chief minister told him in 1519.

Charles' Spanish domains were restless under his rule. He made his first appearance in Spain in September, 1517—a solemn, ugly boy with the long Habsburg jaw, speaking no Spanish and surrounding himself with courtiers of Burgundy and Flanders. There was a curious strength in Charles, though, and in short order he made himself the acknowledged King of Castile and Aragon, subduing the protesting Spanish grandees by shrewd persuasion. Then he moved on, for the Emperor's life was going to be spent in an eternal and wearying shuttling from one to another of his many kingdoms.

He was back in Spain in the spring of 1520 when Cortés' gold arrived. By Castilian law, all treasure from the New World had to pass through Seville where a Casa de Contratación, or House of Trade, had been established through Isabella's decree in 1503. Until 1519, relatively little gold had passed through the customs house at Seville; but now a great commotion was caused. An emissary from Velásquez in Cuba arrived to claim the gold, arguing that Cortés' mission had been unauthorized, and the Sevillian authorities promptly sequestered the whole cargo pending a royal decision. The envoys from Cortés and the gold of Moctezuma were brought to Charles at Tordesillas, where he was visiting his mother, Joanna.

The members of the court stared in amazement at the gleaming objects, and marveled at the master craftsmanship. One of those present was Albrecht Dürer, who exclaimed, “Never in all my born days have I seen anything which warmed my heart as much as these things.”12 Another awed viewer was the scholar Peter Martyr, who wrote to Pope Leo X, “I do not marvel at gold and precious stones, but am in a manner astonished to see the workmanship excel the substance. … And in my judgment, I never saw anything whose beauty might so allure the eye of man.”13

To Charles, the esthetics of Mexican gold mattered less than the economics of the cargo. He was heavily in debt, after a costly election campaign that gave him the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and he welcomed any gold for its monetary value. Quickly he signified his approval of the American discoveries, and suggested that more such cargoes would be welcome. Then, in May, he took his leave of Spain without bothering to settle the dispute between Cortés and Velásquez. Such petty matters would always bore him. Cortés survived the opposition of the Cuban governor, and eventually won the favor of Charles V, who made him Governor and Captain-General of New Spain (Mexico). And the gold of the Aztecs continued to flow toward Seville.

5

None of the earlier explorers had known such success as Cortés. While they had found only islands populated by naked Indians, he had encountered and conquered a civilization as rich and complex as any of Europe. They had found scattered outcroppings of gold; he had gained possession of a stunning treasurehouse. Were there other Mexicos waiting for the lucky and the bold?

Fired by ambition and greed, Spaniards by the hundreds set out to make their fortunes in the New World. Balboa's Darien was the radial point from which many expeditions spread, upward into Central America and downward toward South America. From Cortés' Mexico they moved north toward the pueblos of the American Southwest. Florida was explored and settled. By 1525, so many Spaniards were on the trail of gold that the Venetian Ambassador to Spain, Andrea Navagiero, expressed his surprise at the general depopulation of the country. Seville, he wrote, “was left almost to the women.”14

New zones of treasure were uncovered all the time. One lay far down the eastern coast of South America, at the mouth of the Río de la Plata between present-day Uruguay and Argentina. An explorer named Juan de Solís sailed from Spain in 1515 with instructions to enter the South Sea (the Pacific) and journey northward along the western shore of South America to the Isthmus. To do that, he would have had to round Cape Horn or pass through the Strait of Magellan; but Magellan's voyage was still a few years in the future, and no one had any idea how far south one had to go before a sea route through the continent appeared.

Solís was an experienced navigator who had succeeded Amerigo Vespucci in the honored post of Pilot-Major of Spain. After touching the Brazilian coast at several points, he came to the huge mouth of the Plata in February, 1516, and named it El Mar Dulce, “the Freshwater Sea.” It seemed to offer the desired westward passage. But as Solís sailed inland along the Uruguayan bank of the river he was set upon by Indians and killed. Some members of his expedition managed to return to Spain; others were cut off and marooned and took up the life of castaways on the Uruguayan coast.

One of them was a Portuguese named Alejo García. García and a few companions undertook a trek deep into the mountainous heart of the continent, penetrating far enough to hear rumors of a wealthy and civilized kingdom somewhere to the west. This was the Inca kingdom of Peru, whose fame had reached in all directions. Balboa had heard tales of it from the Indians of Panamá, north of Peru; here, several years later, García picked up the same stories to the east and south of Peru.

On the journey back to the eastern coast, García was murdered by natives. The others returned to the mouth of the Plata and were still living there when a Spanish expedition led by Sebastian Cabot turned up in 1526. Cabot was Genoese in origin, English by upbringing—the son of the celebrated navigator John Cabot, who had discovered North America in 1497. Sebastian had left English service in 1512 to sail for Spain; after the death of Solís, Charles V had given him the title of Pilot-Major. The purpose of Cabot's voyage was to find a westward route to the Spice Islands, or East Indies, and so enable Spain to challenge the Portuguese monopoly of the East Indian trade. By the papal decree of 1493, the Spaniards had to remain west of the Line of Demarcation, but in a round world they could reasonably expect to reach the Spice Islands from the west if they could only find a path around the American continents.

Cabot's commission instructed him “to discover the Moluccas, Tarshish, Ophir, Cipangu, and Cathay, to barter and load his ships with gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, drugs, spices, silks, brocades, and other precious things.”15 He headed down the Brazilian coast and came at length to the body of water Solís had called El Mar Dulce. Cabot went ashore and was met by friendly Indians who gave him some objects of silver, leading him to name the great river the River of Silver, Río de la Plata.

He also encountered the survivors of Solís' expedition. These men told him of Alejo García's inland trek, and informed Cabot that “near the Sierra there is a white king, dressed like a Spaniard, and mines, and Indians bedecked in gold plates.”16 Cabot instantly dropped any plans to find the East Indies and decided to ascend the Plata until he found the place where “he could load a ship with gold and silver.”

When he had gone some hundred miles upstream, he obtained more silver from the natives. He asked after its origin, and they pointed westward and spoke of “the white king.” Indeed, it was Inca silver. Cabot proceeded until a waterfall blocked his ascent, then shifted to the Río Paraguay, which he followed upstream for about a thousand miles. Unfortunately, he did not seem to be getting any closer either to the Spice Islands or to the mysterious inland kingdom, and in 1529 he turned back with little to show for his three years of effort.

The persistent rumor of a great civilization in western South America drew a more determined response from Francisco Pizarro. Robust, courageous, stubborn, illiterate, cruel, and rapacious, Pizarro was the illegitimate, ill-favored son of a minor Spanish nobleman of the province of Estremadura, birthplace of many conquistadores. Spain offered him nothing better than a swineherd's career, and he joined the crowd of adventurers that passed through Seville to the Americas early in the sixteenth century. Pizarro suffered with Ojeda on the Colombian shore in 1510; he became one of Balboa's lieutenants, and was with him in the discovery of the South Sea. Pizarro was present when the young Indian chieftain told Balboa of the golden kingdom in the south. Affixing himself next to the grim Pedrarias, Pizarro took part in the arrest and execution of Balboa. By 1521, he had some detailed news of the southern kingdom, which he now knew to be called Peru. A sailor named Pascual de Andagoya had gone south from Panamá to the borders of the far-flung Inca empire. Pizarro, now about fifty and not yet wealthy, resolved to make Peru his own. The sensational example of Cortés stood before him as an ideal and as a model.

The first attempts were failures. The year 1527 saw Pizarro marooned on Gallo Island off the Pacific coast of Colombia, facing mutiny by his resentful men. They had come to doubt the existence of Peru, and all but thirteen of his followers deserted him. With maniacal persistence, Pizarro and his loyal thirteen sailed to Peru and landed at the town of Túmbez. It was only a provincial outpost of the great empire, but it was splendid enough, and they beheld its wonders with their own eyes. Then they returned to Panamá. Unable to gain support there, Pizarro sailed to Spain in the summer of 1528. He came before Emperor Charles at Toledo with llamas, fine woven fabrics of vicuña wool, and vessels of gold and silver. A new Mexico seemed within grasp.

For a year Pizarro haunted the court. Charles absented himself to Italy, but in July, 1529, Pizarro received a capitulación signed by the Queen Regent, assigning him high rank and authorizing him to conquer Peru. The ex-swine-herd now bore the titles of governor, captain-general, adelantado, and alguacil-mayor of Peru for life. All that remained was the conquest itself.

He recruited men of Estremadura, including four of his brothers and half-brothers. Late in 1530 the expedition set out: 180 men, 27 horses. Pizarro spent a short time at Panamá, then began his march down the coast of South America, establishing bases as he went and collecting a healthy booty in gold, silver, and emeralds. The tropical sun was fierce on Spanish mail and quilted jackets, but the lure of gold obliterated all hardships.

Pizarro had studied the campaigns of Cortés, who was his kinsman, and he did a superb job of imitating them. Though he was an unprepossessing man who lacked the animal vitality of the magnetic Cortés, Pizarro bound his men in a web of loyalty through an example of total dedication. Like Cortés, he was invading an empire that had only recently been assembled by a conquering army, and so could easily be taken apart again. In Peru as in Mexico there were legends of bearded white gods who must be received with respect. And here, too, society had a pyramidal structure, so that the removal of the man at the top would transfer all power to the Spaniards.

Marching through Peru, Pizarro learned of one more favorable event: a civil war between the reigning Inca, Atahuallpa, and his half-brother Huascar. Atahuallpa, it seemed, was a usurper who had deposed Huascar in 1532. In November of that year Pizarro entered the Peruvian town of Cajamarca after a quick march through a country weakened by the civil war. Atahuallpa unwisely came into Cajamarca to speak with the Spaniards. He was borne in on a litter carried by Inca nobles, so laden with jewelry that, one Spaniard wrote, “they blazed like the sun.”

Pizarro took a direct approach. He had his chaplain invite Atahuallpa to become a Christian. The Inca, who regarded himself as a living god, declined, casually tossing the Bible to the ground. At a signal from Pizarro, Spanish muskets opened fire, and in the confusion Atahuallpa was made a prisoner. Without the loss of a man the Spaniards had taken Peru, for the master of Atahuallpa was the master of the empire.

And this was the land of gold. What Cortés had found in Mexico was eclipsed by the treasure of the Incas. Francisco López de Gómara, whose Crónica de Indias and Historia de la Conquista de Nueva-España were published at Seville in the middle of the sixteenth century, set down this account of the magnificence of Atahuallpa (the translation is Sir Walter Raleigh's):

    “

    All the vessels of his home, table, and kitchen were of gold and silver, and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and hardness of the metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which seemed giants, and the figures in proportion and bigness of all the beasts, birds, trees, and herbs, that the earth bringeth forth: and of all the fishes that the sea or waters of his kingdom breedeth. He had also ropes, budgets, chests and troughs of gold and silver, heaps of billets of gold that seemed wood, marked out to burn.17

Another contemporary chronicler was Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish father and Peruvian mother. Garcilaso, called “the Inca,” was born in 1539, and wrote a lengthy account of the conquest of Peru about 1600. Garcilaso described the gardens of Atahuallpa's palace:

“Here were planted the finest trees and the most beautiful flowers and sweet-smelling herbs in the kingdom, while quantities of others were reproduced in gold and silver, at every stage of their growth, from the sprout that hardly shows above the earth, to the full-blown plant, in complete maturity. There were also fields of corn with silver stalks and gold ears, on which the leaves, grains, and even the corn silk were shown. In addition to all this, there were all kinds of gold and silver animals in these gardens, such as rabbits, mice, lizards, snakes, butterflies, foxes, and wildcats (there being no domestic cats). Then there were birds set in the trees, as though they were about to sing, and others bent over the flowers, breathing in their nectar. There were roe deer and deer, lions and tigers, all the animals in creation, in fact, each placed just where it should be.

“Each one of these mansions had its bathing suite, with large gold and silver basins into which the water flowed through pipes made of the same metals. And the warm springs in which the Incas went to bathe were also ornamented with very finely wrought gold trimmings.”18

To the Incas, gold was precious purely for its ornamental value. Garcilaso tells us, “Nothing could be bought or sold in their kingdom, where there was neither gold nor silver coin, and these metals could not be considered otherwise than as superfluous, since they could not be eaten, nor could one buy anything to eat with them. Indeed, they were esteemed only for their beauty and brilliance, as being suitable for enhancing that of royal palaces, Sun temples and convents for virgins.”19 Indeed throughout all the New World gold and silver had no monetary value, even in those lands where—unlike Peru—private commerce was customary. José de Acosta, whose Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias of 1590 is one of the most useful and fascinating accounts of the Americas in the era of discovery, remarked that “We find not that the Indians in former times used gold, silver, or any other metal for money, and for the price of things, but only for ornament. … They had some other things of greater esteem, which went current amongst them for price, and instead of coin: and unto this day this custom continues among the Indians, as in the Provinces of Mexico, instead of money they use cacao (which is a small fruit) and therewith buy what they will. In Peru they use coca to the same end (the which is a leaf the Indians esteem much) as in Paraguay, they have stamps of iron for coin, and cotton woven in Saint Croix, of the Sierra.”20

Though the Indians were perplexed to find the Spaniards placing such a high value on the yellow metal, they were quick to sense that only through gold could they keep their new masters content. Atahuallpa, Pizarro's captive, offered a mighty ransom for his freedom. He would, he said, cover the floor of his cell with gold. The cell was about 25 feet by 17 in area, and the Spaniards were dazzled into silence by the offer. Mistaking their silence for rejection, the Inca increased his bid, and volunteered to fill the room in three dimensions, not merely in two, loading it with gold as high as he could reach. A line was duly drawn nine feet from the floor, and Atahuallpa was given two months to obtain the gold. In addition, the Inca undertook to fill an adjoining room of smaller size with silver.

From every part of the huge empire came llama-loads of gold for the Inca's ransom. Gold ornaments and utensils were stripped from the palaces and temples. The distances were great, and the room filled slowly, but it filled. Some of the slabs of gold plate weighed twenty-five pounds apiece. An unbelievable treasure accumulated at Cajamarca. Pizarro's men demanded a division of the spoils even before the ransom was complete. The royal fifth was weighed out, and Pizarro despatched his brother Hernando to Spain with it. The rest was melted down, despite the objections of a few of the more cultured Spaniards, who grieved to see items of such rare and delicate workmanship reduced to mere bullion. Gold by the weight was what Pizarro's men craved, though, and teams of Indian goldsmiths worked day and night for a full month, reducing to uniform yellow ingots the goblets, ewers, and vases, the temple ornaments, the fanciful golden birds and animals, the elegant utensils and cunning artifacts.

The booty was weighed at 1,326,539 golden pesos or pesos de oro. Calculating the modern cash value of this cache is difficult; the peso de oro (“weight of gold”) was a unit of measure, not of currency, in sixteenth-century Spain. But the peso de oro was equivalent in weight to the gold coin known as the castellano, which had been minted in Spain until 1497. The castellano's weight had been fixed at one one-hundredth of a Spanish pound of fine gold, or.001014 pound avoirdupois. That was roughly a sixth of an ounce, worth slightly less than $6 at the post-1933 price of gold.

But the purchasing power of the castellano in 1533 was considerable, though it underwent a sharp decline as American gold unbalanced the economy of Europe later in the century. Moreover, the modern price of gold is an artificially pegged figure that bears no necessary relation to true demand. Prescott, writing in 1847, calculated the buying power of the castellano at about $11.67 in United States currency of his day, putting the overall worth of Atahuallpa's ransom above $15,000,000. Allowing for a century and a quarter of further inflation, we can say that the castellano or peso de oro of Pizarro's day bought as much as $100 or so will buy today, which would give the Inca's gold a value of over $150,000,000.

Pizarro solemnly divided the spoils. His own share was 57,222 pesos of gold, some silver, and the solid gold throne of the Inca, valued at 25,000 golden pesos. The other leading figures of the conquest did nearly as well. The officers became millionaires; the ordinary soldiers grew wealthy as dukes. Of course, their wealth was all in the form of metal, valuable in Spain but not overly useful in Peru. One immediate result of the bonanza was a surfeit of gold that produced sudden and violent inflation among the conquistadores. A bottle of wine changed hands for sixty golden pesos, a sword for forty or fifty, a cloak for a hundred, a pair of shoes for forty, a good horse for several thousand. Ten pesos de oro could buy many acres of land in Castile; in Peru it was the price of a quire of paper. The treasure of the Incas made a mockery of the traditional scale of European values. Within twenty years, one Spaniard was offering 10,000 golden pesos—perhaps a million dollars in modern purchasing power—for an ordinary saddle-horse, and he found no sellers.

Atahuallpa still languished a prisoner. In a rash moment, Pizarro allowed a belligerent faction among his men to bring him to trial on charges of idolatry, polygamy, treason against the Spaniards, the murder of his half-brother Huascar, and other absurd charges. Swiftly he was sentenced to death, and executed on August 29, 1533. Instantly the treasure-trains still en route to Cajamarca halted. The bearers of gold for the ransom hurled their burdens into rivers and lakes. Among the lost items, so it was said, was a chain of gold 700 feet long, weighing several tons. The casual treachery of the Spaniards had cost them heavily in gold, and it cost them the peace of Peru as well, for while Atahuallpa alive was a helpless puppet, Atahuallpa dead was the martyred symbol of revolt. It now became necessary for the Spaniards to follow their easy and bloodless conquest with a series of taxing military campaigns before Peru was finally subdued.

The Casa de Contratación at Seville enjoyed a steady stream of gold. Between 1516 and 1520 it had recorded imports totalling 993,000 pesos de oro—the last output of the dwindling West Indian mines, and the first dividends from Panamá. From 1521 to 1525, only 134,000 pesos de oro arrived. The first impact of Cortés' conquest of Mexico was felt in the statistics for 1526-30, which showed a new high figure of 1,038,000 pesos de oro. The totals for 1531-35 reflect the yield both of Mexico and Peru: 1,650,000 pesos de oro. In another five years, the harvest had risen steeply: 3,937,000 pesos de oro between 1536 and 1540.

Spain was enriched by the Indies, although, as we will see, all this wealth brought little prosperity to the homeland. The statistics compiled at Seville showed a rising trend, but yet the golden flow itself diminished rapidly once the treasures of temples and palaces were looted. It was easy to grab golden objects that had been accumulated over generations; prying new supplies of gold from the earth took more time. Between 1493 and 1530, more than 98٪ of the treasure received at Seville was gold. Then the scales tipped, and between 1531 and 1550 more than 85٪ of what came in was silver, far less valuable by the ounce. At the peak of Spanish imperialism—1591-95—the New World would produce treasure to the value of 35,185,000 pesos de oro, but 98.5٪ of this would be in silver.

Mexico and Peru were not enough, then. Their treasuries were cleaned of gold, and the natives, weakened by disease and sullen from mistreatment, had little incentive to dig more for their Spanish masters. Yet the Americas were Spanish imperialism—1591-95—the New World would repay its finders as Mexico had repaid Cortés and Peru Pizarro?

The legends of golden kingdoms persisted. Balboa and Solís and Cabot had sniffed out the wealth of Peru, and Pizarro had found it. Now came new stories, tales of the gilded man of Cundinamarca, El Dorado, he who coated his skin in precious dust. The rumors of Peru had proved to be no fantasies. The quest for El Dorado commenced in earnest, with the shining examples of Cortés and Pizarro to serve as spurs for the brave.

Notes

    Raleigh, Discoverie, 22.

    Bandelier, 2.

    Prescott, Peru, 829.

    Cunninghame Graham, 5.

    Leonard, 10.

    Purchas XVIII, 87.

    Holmes 1888, 35.

    Prescott, Peru, 830.

    Kirkpatrick, 50.

    ibid, 52.

    Bernal Díaz, 74.

    Easby 1965, 89.

    ibid.

    Prescott, Peru, 822.

    Penrose, 153.

    Steward V, 72.

    Raleigh, Discoverie, 18.

    Garcilaso, 152.

    ibid, 123.

    Purchas XV, 71.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. The True Story of the Conquest of New Spain, translated by A. P. Maudslay. The Hakluyt Society, London, 1908-16. Five volumes. Abridged edition, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York, 1956.

Garcilaso de la Vega. The Incas, translated by Maria Jolas from the French edition of Alain Gheerbrant. The Orion Press, New York, 1961.

Purchas, Samuel, editor. Purchas His Pilgrimes. Modern edition, James MacLehose and Sons, Glasgow, 1906. Twenty volumes.

Raleigh, Sir Walter. The Discoverie of … Guiana, edited by V. T. Harlow. The Argonaut Press, London, 1928.

Secondary Authorities

Bandelier, A. F. The Gilded Man. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1893.

Cunninghame Graham, R. B. The Conquest of New Granada. William Heinemann, London, 1922.

Easby, Dudley T., Jr. “Pre-Hispanic Metallurgy and Metalworking in the New World.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 109, Number 2, April 9, 1965.

Holmes, William H. “Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia.” Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology, Sixth Annual Report, 1884-85. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1888.

Kirkpatrick, F. A. The Spanish Conquistadores. Adam and Charles Black, London, 1963.

Leonard, Irving A. Books of the Brave. Gordian Press, New York, 1964.

Penrose, Boies. Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1952.

Prescott, William Hickling. The Conquest of Peru. The Modern Library, New York, no date.

Steward, Julian H., editor. Handbook of South American Indians. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin Number 143. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1946-59. Seven volumes.
Fernando Ainsa (essay date 1986)

Last Updated on June 8, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 9438

SOURCE: Ainsa, Fernando. “From the Golden Age to El Dorado: (Metamorphosis of a Myth).” Diogenes 34 (Spring 1986): 20-46.

[In the following essay, Ainsa examines the ways in which the European myth of a lost Golden Age contributed to the formation of the myth of El Dorado.]

The geographical Utopias that present a New World, from classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the exploration and conquest of American territories by Spain, give a two-fold vision of the myth of gold. On the one hand, the legendary lands in which were found the wealth and power generated by the coveted metal—El Dorado, El Paititi, the City of the Caesars—establish the direction of a venture toward the unknown, and a geography of the imaginary marked the ubiquitous sign of the mythical gold. But at the same time, America permitted the felicitous re-encounter in its territory of the Golden Age that had been lost in the Old World. The first steps of Western man toward the American adventure wavered contradictorily between these extremes, in that gold was at the same time “booty and marvel.”1

Colombus's enterprise itself is marked by that ambivalence. Does not the discoverer of America write in his copy of Imago Mundi indications of the precious stones and treasures of the mythical islands of Antiquity that he hoped to find in the West Indies, while in his diary and in the accounts of his voyages he writes his progressive conviction of being invested with a spiritual mission closely allied with the search for the earthly paradise on American soil?

However, if the myth appears unequivocally under this dual sign, we may ask ourselves: How could such contradictory missions as the recovery of the Golden Age and the conquest of the land of El Dorado be reconciled in a single enterprise?

AN ACCIDENTAL FIND OR THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA?

In this essay we propose to find an interpretation of the dual sign of gold in the discovery of America. In order to do so, we will start with some of the most significant literary presentiments of the New World, the famous final verses of Act II of Seneca's tragedy, Medea:

    “

    The time will come as the years go by in which the ocean will unfasten the barriers of the world, and the earth will be opened up to its full extent, and Thetis will uncover for us new universes and the confines of the earth will no longer be Thule.2

Enclosed in this short text, written at the beginning of the Christian era, is the key to the contradiction that fourteen centuries later will mark the enterprise of discovery. On the one hand, lamentation for the irremediable loss of the Golden Age and on the other the announcement of new universes on the geographical horizon of mankind.

But to understand fully the textual meaning of Seneca's tragedy, we must forget for the moment the retroactive force that the prophecies of the Chorus had in 1492 when they were converted into a fulfilled prophecy, because from October 12, 1492 on we are faced with the historical verification of a literary predetermination. To the correct guess at the indicated direction—west of Europe, across the Mar Tenebroso where throughout the Middle Ages indications of new worlds had been concentrated—could be added the note of an arrogant patriotism. Seneca, a Cordovan, granted to Spain the merit of founding a vast empire, already intuitively felt in the first century of the Christian era.

It is no exaggeration to say that the original meaning of the verses of Medea were lost in that moment dominated by the historical consequence that best expressed the condition of the man of the Renaissance. An inquisitive man who, not satisfied with the known world, looked for new spaces beyond his frontiers and to whom the text of Medea gave an unexpected endorsement springing from the depths of classical history.

However, not only did the literary presentiment of Seneca give a poetic foundation to discovery: it was also supported scientifically by the maps of cosmographers and navigators. Strabo, and the sages of the 15th century, among whom figure the Florentine Toscanelli and the German Behaim, affirmed that they took the words of the Chorus in Medea into account when they worked out their geographical projections of navigation in the direction of the setting sun. Moreover, according to the testimony of Hernando Colón, the son of America's discoverer, this prophecy was a decisive factor in the plans for his father's expedition. In the margin of a page of Seneca's tragedies, a copy of which he owned, he wrote: Haec prophetia expleta est per patrem meum Christoforum Colon almirantem 1492: in translation, “This prophecy was fulfilled by my father, the admiral Christopher Columbus, in 1492.”3

A poetic, philosophical and scientific endorsement that had its political connotations: due to Seneca's prediction, Colombus could again be credited with the intentional discovery of America that history seemed to have deprived him of. In the face of what some called the accidental discovery of America and others called the explicit project of discovering a region whose existence was known beforehand, Columbus was transformed into a navigator who came across the New World by chance, while Amerigo Vespucci was the one who had the deliberate consciousness of the discovery.

To again credit Columbus as the discoverer of America, Francisco López de Gómara, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas and Columbus's own son, Hernando, searched among the names of the authors of Antiquity, those who had announced with their literary or vaguely scientific predictions the purposeful and conscious discovery of a New World. Everything served Christopher Columbus in the recovery of that prediction of America. Aristotle, Averroes, Strabo, Pliny, Marco Polo, Mandeville, Pedro de d'Ailly and Julius Capitolinus were profusely quoted, along with anonymous accounts and legends about island paradises and lands within the limits of the Mar Tenebroso.

Actually, from the “Kingdom of the dead” of ancient Egypt to the Greco-Roman and Celtic paradises, and including the mythical geography of legendary lands with an ideal climate and abundant harvests that are registered in the cartography of the unknown, the ideal spaces of the imaginary Occident were generally located to the west of Europe. With these antecedents, it was not difficult to see the reflection of a sort of geographical consensus in the prophecy of the Chorus in Medea.

A PROPHECY THAT WAS MORE FATALIST THAN OPTIMIST

The disproportionate historical effect of Seneca's prophecy obscured the internal meaning of the tragedy, because in reality, if we rely exclusively on the tragic function of the announcement of the Chorus, we discover that the message in the prediction of the “new confines” of the world is not optimistic. On the contrary, we see a gloomy interpretation of the story of mankind. If men abandon their homelands in pursuit of new boundaries, it is because they have lost their happiness in their native land, the Cordovan philosopher suggests. The prophecy that Thetis, sister and wife of Oceanus, will one day allow the secrets hidden beyond the limits of the known to be unveiled is a malediction cast at the future rather than the joyful announcement of a discovery.

In the first century a.d. the voyage toward the unknown was not an enterprise guided by an optimistic confidence in the progress of humanity or by a curiosity about unexplored space, as it was perceived in the Renaissance; on the contrary, this voyage toward the unknown was the consequence of a fall from a previous paradisiacal state in which man lived, inherent in the Golden Age. At that time, the spirit of geographical exploration was not a virtue but a fatal curse resulting from the natural and divine order of the Golden Age having been broken. Man fled from the territory of the lost paradise, and if he acquired the notion of “change” that led him to “confusion,” it is because he had to confront a world in which “all barriers had been eliminated.”

Far from the repeated (not to say stereotyped) glorification with which the illustrious Cordoban, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, has been exalted since 1492, an interpretation based exclusively on the literary text of Medea is necessary. In its light—and not without surprises for the reader—the discovery itself of America is seen in a different light.

Let us see how and why.

I. THE NATURAL ORDER AND THE GOLDEN AGE

For the Greco-Latin authors writing about the Golden Age, from Hesiod to Macrobius and including Democritus, Lucian, Lucretius, Ovid and Virgil, there was a time, under the reign of Saturn, in which the land spontaneously produced the food necessary for man's survival. Men were born and reached old age “in the paternal fields” (Seneca) and “lived like gods with tranquillity far from pain and fatigue” (Hesiod).4

In those days,

    “

    Spring was eternal, and soft winds caressed with their warm breath flowers that grew without being planted. The untilled earth produced harvests and the uncultivated field was covered with heavy spikes of grain. 

(Ovid)5

Because in the Golden Age,

    “

    There were no doors in the houses and the udders of the gentle sheep were swollen tight with milk. An age without hatred, without anger, without armies, without arms. 

(Albius Tibullus)6

Indeed, everything seemed simple at this first stage of mankind. However, as Isaac J. Pardo has recalled, quoting the sacred book of Dilmun a thousand years before Greece heard the songs of Homer, the Sumerian civilization already referred to that

    “

    Other time in which there was an age that had no serpents nor scorpions, nor hyenas, nor lions, no wild dogs, no wolves, no fear or terror. Man had no rival.7

Man did not know what pain and death were, a certainty that the Greeks repeat with conviction when they proclaim that in that Golden Age there was no heavy toil, moral and physical suffering did not exist and there was repose from birth to death. Even to die was like going to sleep “overcome by dreams,” as Hesiod reminds us. The idyllic and primitive life did not require necessities of any kind, so abundant and easily available was the little that was needed to be happy. In the classical perspective, it was evident that desire and necessity are the result of want or scarcity, never of satiation or abundance. Moreover, if there was no conflict or violence, it was because each human being was content with what he had and what he was, the secret of happiness having always consisted in being content with what one had.

This happiness reappears with similar characteristics in the earthly paradises of all religions, a vision of the Garden of Eden that repeats the same notes of the “world as a gift,” given once and for all and with no need to be questioned or exchanged for another. Happiness based on the absence of necessities and on the satisfaction of basic desires acquires hyperbolic and popular tones in the land of Cockaigne of the Middle Ages, the Jauja of the Hispanic world, and is rationalized in the Utopia of the Renaissance. Myths and all their variations repeat the sustractum of a perfect, closed world that appeared in the Golden Age.

This same sustractum may be recognized in the myths of contemporary society: the abundance of consumer goods, the possibility to choose freely from a variety of products whose supply must always exceed the demand, the satisfaction of basic needs, the subtle inducements of publicity, the progressive reduction in working hours, idleness converted into a prerogative (vacations, leisure time, the forty-hour or less work week), simplified human relationships for a growing egalitarianism and the projects for new social laws, usually qualified as Utopian.

Nevertheless, although the myth survives today in a reality metamorphosized into signs that recall, almost without our knowledge, its most apparent virtues, we would do well to remember that the principle on which the felicity and harmony of the classical Golden Age was based, that which was lost in illo tempore, is that of the immutability of a world that should not change since it was fixed once and for all.

IMMOBILITY AS A GUARANTEE OF PARADISE

The foundation of the Golden Age is one of an unquestioned order, because it is inherent in the nature of things. An order that basically is one of natural cycles marking the seasons of the year and the rhythm of crops repeating each other monotonously following divine laws. Seneca himself mentioned it in the letter to Lucilius: “The first mortals, and those born to them, followed nature without corruption.”8

But that natural order was also guaranteed by the division of the world into continents with no inter-communication because of vast seas and oceans. The previous chaos had been that of an undifferentiated and formless mass. The fragile equilibrium of the established Golden Age was guaranteed by the principle of the division of the world, a constant that reappears in the cosmogonies of almost all religions. Cronus, the god of time, ordered and fixed the Greek world in the center of three continents distributed around the omphalos of the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum as the Romans would later call it. On the shores of that sea were disposed “like frogs on the bank of a pond” (Plato) the three continents: Asia (Asú, where the sun rises); Europe (Ereb, where the sun sets); and Africa (Afar, the arid, over which the sun passes), that the Greeks called Libia.9 The known world had fixed limits: Sidon in Phoenicia and the Euxine in the Black Sea in the east; the pillars of Hercules and the Mar Tenebroso in the west; Thrace to the north and Abyssinia to the south. In all, simplified in geometric terms, it was a flat disk whose boundaries were formed by the river Oceanus that encircled the three parts.

For this view of the world to survive in time, it had to remain immobile, as the Chorus in Medea explains:

    “

    Pure were the centuries in which our fathers lived, completely free of malice. Each one peacefully in contact with his own shore and reaching old age in the paternal fields, rich with little, without knowing other benefits than those which his native soil gave him.10

Tibullus recalls that the Golden Age was:

    “

    An epoch without equal, when the earth did not have wide roads, when the hollowed-out pine tree did not defy the seas and the merchant did not entrust himself to the dangers of unknown lands.11

It was simply a matter of being born and dying within the narrow limits of “one's own shores,” of being satisfied throughout one's life with the products of one's native soil and, above all, of not knowing about or having the curiosity to know about what was outside the precincts of daily life.

The felicity of the Golden Age was guaranteed by isolation and self-sufficiency but also by that lack of curiosity toward what might exist beyond the limits of one's own immediate world. The rationalization is simple. If primary needs were satisfied on one's own shore there was no reason to look for new worlds outside the native plot of ground.

THE AURA MEDIOCRITAS AND THE SIN OF NAVIGATING

Nevertheless, an existence in which there are no preoccupations inevitably leads to boredom and mediocrity. The very Latin poets who sang praises to the Golden Age spoke of the aura mediocritas, that golden mediocrity that is the phantom threatening the contented of the world.

As in the earthly paradise of Genesis, from which Adam and Eve were expelled, while everything had been given to them by the divine and natural order of creation, we suspect that the man living in the Golden Age must have been tempted by a forbidden fruit: a temptation induced by the dissatisfaction that comes with full satisfaction, paradoxically.

Only by starting from this idea can we understand why man would let such a blessed time as the Golden Age escape him. To break the golden circle that surrounded Paradise, he had to venture outside its limits, although by yielding to the seduction of the new, man consciously lost his golden condition and degenerated into the silver, bronze and iron races, as Hesiod precisely explained in a text that was a classic even during Greek Antiquity. Democritus—in the Dialogue of Plato explaining the origin of culture through the myth of Protagoras—as well as Poseidonius in which the mythological references to the poets Orpheus (son of Apollo and Calliope) and Linus (son of Apollo and Urania) dwells upon that progressive degradation of the Ages in humanity's history.12

But what is the fruit that tempts man with such intensity that it leads him to conclude with such a happy age? Beginning with Seneca, the classic authors are unanimous in pointing out that the evil fruit is “the wicked ship” with which man abandoned for the first time the shores of his “own coast.” “A pine from Thessy carried them from the perfect laws of the division of the world to chaos,” he explains in Medea, recalling how the Argo was built from the pines of Mount Pelion in Thessaly to go beyond the limits of the known, the Euxine. Navigation reintroduced chaos into the world by permitting communication between those parts of it that had been separated by natural order, as the Chorus laments:

    “

    Nothing has remained in its place in the universe, since it has become navigable. Any little boat is rowed on the high seas. All barriers have fallen.13

And Ovid, speaking of the Golden Age, limits it chronologically to the time when

    “

    the pines of its mountains were not cut down and there was no descent to the watery plain to visit a foreign world and mortals knew no other shores than those of their own country.14

Tibullus also established the end of the Golden Age at the moment when “the hollowed-out pine” floated “defying the waves”.15 The conclusion is decisive and clear: the equilibrium of the world based on the isolation of its parts was destroyed because of navigation that put them into contact with each other.

To understand the real significance of this rupture, we must remember that if until that moment Greece saw itself as the center of the universe, it was because of the immobility of the observer and the privileged point of view that such immobility seemed to grant. With navigation appeared a variable and thus relative point of view. There were no privileged places. In the same way, therefore, that the world was ordered around the Mediterranean in the golden and paradisiacal view, once its exclusive central point had disappeared “other inhabited lands could refer to the Atlantic,” as Aristotle had already intuitively felt. The “inhabited lands,” that is, the men who lived in them, related to seas that were not necessarily the Mediterranean which, for the first time in Western history, had ceased to be the only possible center of the universe. A step had been taken in the justification of maritime ventures that were being prepared, far beyond the Pillars of Hercules in the Straits of Gibraltar.

II. THE TRANSGRESSION OF THE MYTH

Nevertheless, instead of joyfully assuming the possibilities opened up by navigation, classical man only lamented for the lost Golden Age. It is interesting to recall that when Virgil in his fourth Eclogue of the Bucolics announces a new Golden Age for Rome, he does so on the basis that the sailor “will abandon the sea” and there will be no more merchandise “exchanged by the floating pine.” It is only possible to envisage the future beginning with the disappearance of every “trace of the ancient deceit that sent ships to Thetis.” The “time to come” is a simple regression to the primitive and idyllic past before navigation. Isolation and the end of inter-communication are once more the guarantees of Paradise.

“The great order of new centuries is born,” prophesied the poet, inverting the chronological sign that the Golden Age is no longer irremediably lost in illo tempore. None the less, this “great order” is no more than a past recovered by force. In the vision of the approaching end of the Iron Age that was announced during the reign of Octavius, the significant note is given for the return to earth of Astrea, the daughter of Zeus and Themis who was forced to take refuge in the heavens at the end of the Golden Age.

THE RECOVERY OF THE PAST IN THE FUTURE

“See how everything rejoices for the coming century” insists Virgil to the Consul Pollio to whom he dedicates his Eclogue. “Everything will return to the way it was.” There will be an end to “a people of iron, and a people of gold will arise throughout the world,” evil will disappear and the earth will be freed from “eternal fear,” the serpent will die and “the flocks will not be afraid of the lions.” The future Golden Age will permit mankind to enter into a new era of abundance:

    “

    The earth will freely scatter its first fruits (…) the young goats themselves willingly bring to the house their udders distended with milk (…) and the golden grape will be picked from the wild brambles and the sturdy oaks will exude honeydew …”16

Virgil does no more than project the nostalgia of a lost past, the idealization inherent in the laudator temporis acti which would be transformed into a topic for literature: “The ages of the past were always better.” It suffices to recall the memories of Cacciaguida in Canto XV of Dante's Paradise on the golden epoch of Florence when “in the midst of so much calm, and such a beautiful life for everyone and amid such proud citizens,” the city

    “

    Within the old walls where could be heard even tierce and nones, he was in peace, sober and modest.17

Or the quip of Verdi, when he exclaimed, “Let us go back to the old days, and it will be progress,” or the propositions of William Blake in Songs of Innocence:

    “

    We must restore the Golden Age, eliminating Progress that is none other than a punishment from God that was brought about by the Iron Age.18

The past is in the future, even in the most revolutionary and progressive Utopias. Is it by chance that a Utopian socialist like Saint Simon wrote in Le Producteur: “The age of gold that a blind tradition has placed in the past is before us”?19

This same ambiguity between past and future is seen in the myth of Paradise, with which that of the Golden Age shares many aspects, because the simultaneous vision of the two paradises is the mark of almost all religions. If the Garden of Eden is at the origin of Mankind, the post mortem Paradise of the Blessed is in the future, because hardly was man expelled from the earthly paradise than he looked for the Promised Land of Canaan. Due to the power of the happy past, the hope for the future may be legitimately nourished.

Although the myth of Paradise deserves a separate study, it is interesting to recall that its range of influence in the first vision of America was fundamental. The analysis of the topos of the Promised Land as a primary stimulus for emigration, especially in the countries where groups of colonists were moved by religious motives (the United States, Paraguay and Argentina) proves its importance, as stands out in the profuse bibliography that has been devoted to it.

However, let us return to the Golden Age.

SUBVERSION THROUGH THE FESTIVAL

Until now we have spoken of the myth of the Golden Age as an exclusively temporal idea, as a nostalgic expression of the human being attempting to transcend the limits of history, establishing the prestige of origins in a moment that he wished to be preserved uncontaminated through eternity or that he wished to recover in identical form to project into the future. Nevertheless, it is also possible to recover the golden past and compare it with the present, thus making more evident the evils of the society of the Iron Age. One may then propose a revolutionary change of the present by the artifice of remembering the past.

In the Dialogue of the Saturnalia, Lucian dramatizes the annual Roman festival in which slaves dressed in purple told their masters what they wanted and received gifts in exchange. In memory of the happiness during Saturn's reign, every December 6 and for six days of festival, the Romans relived the lost times of the Golden Age through a representation that allowed the inversion of the traditional roles of master-slave.

At the beginning of the Dialogue, the god Saturn nostalgically recalls the epoch of his reign:

    “

    In that age everything sprouted without sowing or plowing; the earth did not produce ears of wheat but bread and prepared meats; wine flowed in streams and springs abounded in milk and honey; all men were virtuous and golden. 

For this reason, during the celebrations of that epoch:

    “

    All is noise, songs, games and equality between free men and slaves, because in my reign there were no servants, nor did I, the master, have them.20

Nevertheless, Lucian's tone is satirical, and obviously his purpose was not so much to recall “the ephemeral empire of Saturn” as it was to criticize the reality of the present through accusations made by Chronosolon, “priest and prophet of Saturn,” in the letter of protest directed to his god.

    “

    “What is wrong, Chronosolon?” Saturn asks. “You seem troubled.”

    “Not without reason,” he answers. “I see the wicked and perverse loaded with wealth and living delightfully, while I and many other cultivated people are in poverty and without resources. My lord, would you not like to put an end to this injustice and reestablish equality?21

For the first time, the memory of the Golden Age allows a critical vision of the present through the narrative process of comparing the two ages. Iniquities and injustices are made evident by the simple confrontation between the image and counter-image of actuality. The reverse of the reality—the World in Reverse that reappears in other myths and allegories of the Middle Ages, such as the Feast of Fools, the Child Bishop, the Lord of Misrule—is always subversive. It suffices to read the final complaint that Chronosolon makes to Saturn:

    “

    The poor can support everything better if they do not see the felicity of the rich. They have so much gold and silver locked up (…) This is what suffocates us, Saturn, and makes our lot unbearable (…) Then change our condition and reestablish the early equality.22

The principle of Lucian's satire, one that reappears in other negative Utopias of literature, especially in Gulliver's Travels, by Swift, gives a meaning of social demands to the myth of the Golden Age, not only located in the past as it had been traditionally or in the future announced by Virgil, but in a present that would have to be radically changed.

The change can also be brought about by authoritarian means. The model of the past is imperatively installed in the present, as Plato claims in the Laws. More than well-being, leisure and rich food within one's reach, Plato proposes to recover the essential of the Golden Age by moral and political laws that establish a model that is inspired in its principles but applied due to the force of the law. He thus recommends to his contemporaries:

    “

    Imitate with all possible means the legendary life of the age of Cronus and obey all there is in us of immortal principles.23

That “legendary” life is not only

    “

    The life of those times, with abundant harvests that had no need of cultivation, a permanently pleasant climate that made clothing and houses unnecessary, or a soft bed in the thick grass24

as he described it in Politics; it also supposes an active and deliberate intervention of man, following the principle of good government.

“Well then, what if with our imagination we invent a State,” proposes Socrates as a challenge. Plato accepts it in The Republic and writes: “Let us build an ideal city as if we founded it on a principle.”25 This foundation of a world newly perfect in agreement with a model that would be theoretically proposed announced the passage from the myth of the Golden Age to the rationalized construction of Utopia, made explicit with the publication of Thomas More's work in 1516.

TO EMIGRATE TO THE LANDS WHERE THE GOLDEN AGE HAS SURVIVED

To the variants of the classical literature on the Golden Age remembered nostalgically and to the active intervention of the lawmaker to reestablish it morally, Horace proposes an alternative that is decisive in the American perspective of the myth. The Roman poet tells us: if the Age of Gold no longer exists here (in Europe) we must emigrate to the lands beyond (a New World) where it may still survive.

A contemporary of Virgil, Horace does not believe it is possible to return to a past before navigation. Given that Rome is engaged in its own ruin through internal quarrels and civil wars, there is no recourse left for true patriots but to emigrate. If the Golden Age no longer exists or can return in the continental world of Iron, the new country must be constructed in a “different place,” where the Golden Age reigns supreme.

It is enough, then, to abandon the present, not for the artifice of nostalgically remembering the past or projecting it into the future, but by the simple act of sailing across the seas to lands where a man can still live in the present as he lived in the past. Curiously, the navigation that had submerged continental Europe in the evils of the Iron Age can help man recover his lost happiness.

The certainty that in those unknown lands the Golden Age still reigned is given by the fact that “the Argo did not take that route.” History can only begin again, freed from its fatal errors, in an undiscovered land, in a protected land, because the sacrilegious ships had not landed there, “a provident god had separated the lands of the unsociable Ocean”.

Thus, the poet proposes in his epodes:

    “

    The ocean, surrounder of the world, is waiting for us: let us look for the fortunate countries, let us look for the rich islands where the earth gives grain without plowing every year and the unpruned vine is in bloom and without fail the olive shoots germinate and the black fig is the ornament of its tree, and honey flows from the hollow oaks and from the high mountains the slender stream of water slides with its cool and sonorous verse. 

In these islands, located beyond the ocean, the climate is pleasant. There are no torrential rains nor droughts:

    “

    Nor does the watery Eurus crack the earth with its floods nor the arid clods parch the fat seed, because the heavenly king tempers all extremes.26

The poetic intimation of classical Greek literature is concretized in the Latin expression of Horace: the Golden Age, banished by the Iron Age from the continental lands, survives preserved in far-off and inaccessible islands. Ulysses, the great navigator of Homer's poem, had thought it opportune to land in the island of Syros “where no hateful illness happens to unfortunate mortals” and where cattle, fields of grain and vineyards favor a long life and a peaceful death. The historian Hesiod had assured in Works and Days that “A divine race of men-heroes, called demigods” had been settled by “Zeus's father, Cronus, at the ends of the earth,” where they live

    “

    With their hearts at peace, the islands of the Blest, near the Ocean, with deep vortexes, happy heroes! to whom the earth, giver of harvests of fruit sweet as honey, produced three times a year, far from the immortals, and Cronus reigns over them.”27

Horace explains the origin of these distant and unknown lands where the Golden Age has survived, affirming that “Jupiter segregated these shores from the world and reserved them for a pious race, when the Golden Age was tarnished by bronze: first by bronze, then by iron were the centuries hardened from which, according to my prediction, men escaped with a timely flight.”28

THE MYTHICAL VOYAGE AND THE DIFFERENCE FROM THE OTHER

The “timely flight” toward lands segregated by the Creator from the origin of the world and “reserved for a pious race” that Horace spoke of can be no other than those of the American continent. The times of longing transformed into the spaces of longing, due to his vision, announce the sign under which fifteen centuries later they will be geographically discovered. America, the scene of eu-topos, a happy place, will be waiting in that location which from Antiquity was intuitively perceived as the last refuge of the Golden Age.

From then on, it could be said that a certain harmony of the lost Golden Age was exchanged for other possible forms of happiness, because in the end it is thanks to travel favored by navigation that the unknown was explored and those other lands were found where an identical Golden Age survived.

Moreover, thanks to navigation man perceived other realities and understood the differences between people and lands. His confrontation with the other gave him a sense of relativity which was lacking in the autarchic and closed world in which he lived. The voyages of the Odyssey had given an indication of their fantastic variety. Each island visited by Ulysses is different and has a distinct order, at times paradisiacal, at times infernal. Even reduced to the scale of the Mediterranean that he traveled over, the diversity of the world became evident to Ulysses and to classical man. The Odyssey is no other than the chronicle of that voyage, where the differences are accumulated within the inventory of realities, but where the existence of idyllic and paradisiacal islands is discovered, such as the island of Syros or the grotto of the nymphs, the palace of Alcinous in the land of the Phaeacians, the origin of the locus amoenus of Western literature. While more was discovered and explored, more was the right to difference, and the more new horizons appeared. Curiosity was not satisfied; on the contrary, it was awakened in the same degree in which reasons for the impulse that inclined it to adventure were verified.

In reality, from the moment in which man took to the sea the story of humanity embarked, in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word, on an expedition that had no limits. The broken natural order and the lost Golden Age of his own land had, as an inevitable consequence, the voyage of the navigator over more and more distant seas.

At this point, a question may arise. Why were the Greco-Latin authors who had set forth the merits of the Golden Age so cutting in their condemnation of navigation? Although the natural order that provided isolation and self-sufficiency had been replaced by the relativity of the multiple points of view provided by maritime expeditions, it was evident in Homer and Hesiod in Greece and more clearly with Horace in Rome that it was precisely due to the possibility of navigation that the Golden Age could be recovered in another world.

III. THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE GOLDEN MYTH

Why then continue to deprecate the explorers when they announced new spaces for lost hope?

To understand the reasons underlying this apparent contradiction, we must go back and recall what the true purpose of Jason was when he built the Argo with the pines of Thessaly. In fact, if navigating was the original sin for which men renounced the Golden Age in order to acquire the right to the venture of launching themselves toward the unknown, even when they were driven by a curiosity born of the boredom of the aura mediocritas in which they lived, after Jason's transgression the sought-for gold took on a distinct nature. The gold sought by the Argonauts was not that of a place of peace and harmony beyond the seas, but the golden fleece that incorporated a dimension of booty and treasure into the egalitarian society of the time.

The myth is metamorphosized. Behind the world of “houses without doors” appears the coveted objective of a treasure that would justify the new risks undertaken. To navigate, yes, not for a simple curiosity to explore but driven by a new emerging myth: the fleece that was waiting for the daring navigator who would be capable of winning it at the end of a voyage plagued by obstacles and adventures.

MERCHANT SEAMEN BURST INTO HISTORY

Symbolic gold, but a valuable metal in the end, erupts into history to banish the Golden Age of humanity. So that no doubt remains, its ambivalent significance reappears in other paradisiacal scenarios, such as the golden apples of the fertile gardens of the Hesperides or in the ubiquitous El Dorado of the American mirage in whose name, during the 16th and 17th centuries, numerous expeditions were organized. We need only recall Columbus himself and his obsessive search for gold in the Antilles to understand the reach of the change that had come about.

The question is not rooted, then, in the fact of navigating but in the mercantile motivation of that navigation. The venture toward the unknown was planned with the hope of obtaining a golden prize. Only for that—and for no other reason—it deserved repudiation and scorn.

In their condemnation of navigation, the Greek authors keep clearly in mind the active presence of the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean. It was the sons of Tyre and Sidon who committed the sacrilege of uniting parts of the world that were “naturally separated,” in the pursuit of precious metals such as tin, copper and gold, founding colonies and trading posts on the coasts of a sea whose peoples had to remain unknown to each other if they were to continue to be happy.

If the Greeks despised the Phoenicians, the Romans felt the same contempt for their heirs, the Carthaginians. In Rome, everything that was commerce and lust for gain was associated with the city of Carthage, a pejorative connotation that has come down to our own day.

The legend still survived in the mid-nineteenth century when Domingo Faustino Sarmiento spoke of the dangers of the “Carthaginian epoch” that threatened Argentina. A little later, Miguel Cané wrote scornfully that the immigrants who disembarked in the ports of Rio de la Plata were “storekeepers and peddlers.”

And José Enrique Rodó in Ariel (1900) feared that because of the influence of Caliban, Spanish-American cities “will end as Sidon, Tyre and Carthage.”

The example of Rodó is very significant. In the openly opposed worlds incarnated by the spirits of Ariel and Caliban the civilizations that gave them birth meet face to face. On one hand we have Greece, to whom the “gods gave the secret of eternal youth,” the qualities of youth being “enthusiasm and hope” that “in the harmonies of history and nature correspond to movement and light,” virtues that incarnate the spirit of Ariel. On the other is the “utilitarianism” and “poorly-understood democracy” of the Phoenician and Carthaginian civilization, represented in contemporary times by the United States. The spirit of Caliban in Spanish America is translated by a “nordomania” and an “Americanism,” neologisms with which Rodó defined the evils that threatened it.

Speaking of the origin of navigation, Rodó refers to “the prosaic and self-interested activity of the merchant who for the first time puts one people into relationship with others,” and notes how once destroyed, “of the stones that made up Carthage, not one particle transfigured in spirit and light has endured.”

To prevent the cities of the New World from ending up as Sidon, Tyre and Carthage is the task of American youth to whom the message of Ariel is directed: Do not lose your courage in preaching the gospel of fineness to the Scythians, the gospel of intelligence to the Beotians, the gospel of disinterest to the Phoenicians.29

Paradoxically, it was the Carthaginians who best foresaw America in classical Antiquity. In the Mirabilis Auscultationes, the book of unheard-of marvels that is attributed to Aristotle, is narrated an amazing voyage of some Carthaginian merchants to the lands of the setting sun where the American continent was situated:

    “

    “They say that in the sea that extends beyond the pillars of Hercules the Carthaginians discovered an island, today deserted, that abounded in forests and in navigable rivers and beautified with all sorts of fruit, which is a voyage of many days from the continent.”30

This same legendary land already discovered in Antiquity according to testimony attributed to Aristotle is mentioned centuries later in a famous essay by Montaigne, Des Cannibales. Certain Carthaginians who had ventured beyond the Straits of Gibraltar had discovered a large fertile island, covered with forests and with great and deep rivers, far from the mainland. There they had emigrated with their wives and children, enticed by the bounty and fertility of the land, and had become accustomed to this new life, to the point of forgetting their European origin.

In the famous book by Diodorus Siculus in which fantastic and real voyages are inextricably mixed, the Phoenicians are also credited with the discovery of the world in which “it could be said that it is more the habitation of the gods than of men,”31 words that reappear significantly repeated in many Chronicles and reports on the discovery of the New World. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, for example, alludes to the merchants who while navigating found a very rich and “large island that had not been discovered or inhabited by anyone.”32 In support of Oviedo's thesis, Teófilo de Ferraris confirms in his Vitae regularis sacri ordinis predicatorum what was imputed to Aristotle in the Mirabilis Auscultationes, that is, the knowledge and not the simple presentiment that man had held from Antiquity of the existence of a fourth region that should be added to the sacred trilogy of the classical world.

But that the credit for that discovery belonged to merchants and not to poets or philosophers must have filled the spirit of classical man with embarrassment and confusion. It seems that we have not yet recovered from that, as we shall see as we continue.

THE PRE-COLUMBIAN GOLDEN AGE

This same contradiction reappears in the first steps of Western man toward the American certainty. On the one hand, America offered itself as the land in which the Golden Age, lost in Europe, still survived. On the other hand, however, the ambition of the new Argonauts increased with each unequivocal sign of the golden fleece grasped in the lands of that recently discovered world.

It is strange that the enterprise of Columbus and the succeeding ones of the conquistadors were marked by that same ambiguity. If the erudite considerations gathered from the indications and presentiments of classical and medieval literature as to the existence of legendary territories guided them in their adventurous search for the Promised Land, Jauja, the Fountain of Youth and the Paradise that Columbus is believed to have discovered at the mouth of the Orinoco, America simultaneously promised the gold with which to buy power. The Golden Age cannot be dissociated from El Dorado. One and the other only reflect the different attitudes with which Western man confronted the reality of the New World.

Each one saw or thought he saw what he wanted to see.

For some, the signs of the survival in America of the Golden Age increased. The Indians of the Antilles where Columbus landed rarely worked: they had their crops in common and found all they needed in the very place in which they lived. In the pre-Columbian myths and legends that missionaries and chroniclers collected references also appear to the epoch in which humanity lived in a “fortunate condition,” an age in which “there was no price put on food supplies, our sustenance” as the Nahuatl songs tell about the days of the ancient Toltec heroes:

    “

    “And those Toltecs were very rich, very happy, no one was poor or unhappy. Nothing was lacking in their houses, no one among them was hungry.”33

The Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún in Historia de las cosas de la Nueva España gives the Toltec version of this age in which fruit and metals were extraordinarily abundant and in which all “were very rich and lacked nothing, nor were hungry.”34

Probably influenced by European references to the classical Greco-Roman Age of Gold, the Inca Garcilaso in Comentarios reales also gives a picture of ancient Peru as an idyllic world lost through the Spanish conquest. The Indios also lived in nostalgia for the peace and equality of the Golden Age destroyed by the Iron Age brought by the Spaniards, according to Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala in Nueva crónica y buen gobierno.

Pedro Martin in his Décadas del Orbe Novo marvels at the Aztecs' use of cocoa for money to acquire things and proclaims it a “happy money” because it could not be hoarded like gold and because it was simultaneously used to prepare beverages:

    “

    “Oh happy money that provides the human race with such a delicious and useful potion and keeps its owners free of the infernal plague of avarice, since it cannot be buried nor preserved for long.”35

These affirmations should not surprise us, because at the time of the conquest of America the medieval mentality of scholastic theology still prevailed in Spain that preached against money and lending it at interest. There was an ostensible disdain for commerce, considered to be the occupation of Ligurians, Lombards, Flemish, Genoese and Jews. It is no exaggeration to say, along with Mariano Picón Salas, that “the Spaniard prefers the adventure of looking for wealth to economic speculation” and that “the economy of the conqueror is that of an adventurer, with small concern for organization, acting merely as a predator”36 not alien to which was a secret bad conscience.

The theme is repeated in the feverish search for El Dorado in the 16th and 17th centuries. Expeditions such as those of Jiménez de Quesada, Gonzalo Pizarro, or the better-known one of Lope de Aguirre end in the sublimation of the initial absurdity at grips with a harsh reality. It was as though gold itself had been metamorphosized. It was not only a question of its material value, as it might be evaluated today, which was at stake but the symbol in which that gold was becoming incarnated as the voyage progressed. Gold was an objective and not a quantifiable object.

AMERICA, BETWEEN BOOTY AND MARVEL

We would do well to remember that the golden fleece itself was an example of metal transformed by the very fact that it was searched for. For Jason and the Argonauts, the precious metal that led them to go beyond the limits of the Euxine was transformed into the trophy that crowns an effort and into the symbol of the prize that they received for having ventured into the unknown.

The metamorphosis of gold occurred even more clearly in the search for the Holy Grail that medieval Christian tradition borrowed from a Germanic legend. From the material value of the precious object sought by successive knights that incarnate the enterprise in literature, we pass to the miraculous symbol in whose contents man believed to find immortality. In the best-known version of the adventures of Parsifal, the Conte du Graal, by Chrétien de Troyes, the obstacles that must be overcome—the desert (Gasta foret), the infernal river, the garden of Eden (the country of Galvoie), are not only the successive initiating trials of the personal valor of the knight but also stages in the transformation of the essence of this golden chalice. Without that golden objective the voyage has no motive.

In the projects of the American conquest the same result is hoped for: the expectation of booty justifies the risk and appears to rationalize the pure marvel of discovery. The golden kingdoms of classical Antiquity reappear in America under other names. The biblical kingdom of Ophir, mentioned in the Book of Kings, where Solomon sent his ships to look for gold, is the territory that the Portuguese navigator Albuquerque believed to have discovered when he spoke of the “Kingdom of Monomotapa.” To the value of gold as metal is added the ambition of the conquest of a territory imagined as a sort of pagan paradise where a “happy state” has been enjoyed from time immemorial.

It is useless to juggle the facts about the double meaning that gold had in the conquest of America. In the perspective of the synthesis of an ambition that goes far beyond the simple bank quotation of the metal to which the conquest has been limited by an economist and reductivist view of history, one must read in the Cronicas de Indias the relations of the expeditions that were launched following the indications in the legends about treasures and golden cities, variously called El Dorado, City of the Caesars, El Paitití, Cerro de Plata or the Treasure of the White King. It is what Ernst Bloch calls the “geographical Utopias” in Le principe espérance, that ambiguous mixture of the search for gold as a metal and the Golden Age as a lost paradise. Expeditions were organized in the name of those geographical Utopias “at the end of which were found both booty and wonder.”37

Gold as booty and gold as marvel are the motivation of the most daring enterprises, thanks to which the process of discovery and conquest of the most isolated territories of America was accelerated. Peru, which Pizarro and Almagro had heard of, the Meta Range in Guiana, Lake Parimé, give rise to expeditions at the end of which an empire might be discovered, as happened with the Incas on the part of Pizarro, but also open the way to the megalomaniac delirium of Lope de Aguirre in the Amazon jungle or the fantastic decrees by which Pedro de Orsúa was named Governor and Captain General of El Dorado.

But as a curious trick of fate, when in 1527 the Spanish heard for the first time the indigenous legend of “the golden man,” pre-Columbian America history had already blotted out his traces. In fact, when the Spanish arrived in Velez in Nueva Granada (Colombia) the Guatavita Indians, who it seems inducted their chiefs during a ceremony in the center of a mountain lake into which they threw golden objects and bathed their chief covered from head to foot in gold dust, had already been exterminated by the Muysca Indians of Bogotá. The kingdom of El Dorado had already vanished when it entered into the history of collective Spanish imagination. It is a paradise that was lost before it was found.

The conquistador also arrived late in America and could not believe it, even less accept it. From that arises the reappearance of the myth as a wandering spirit in the most diverse territories, under different names but always revelatory of the same desire to seize the prize hidden behind the repeated legend, if not the lies of the natives who deliberately disoriented the white men. From that also arises the increase in rash expeditions, not only Spanish but also German, like those of Ambrose Delfinger and Bartholomew Seyler; English like that of Sir Walter Raleigh; the diplomatic reports of European consulates such as those of France and Holland; and the border conflicts in territories that one or the other occupied in the name of the ubiquitous kingdom of gold. Historical tradition was fed by geographical fable, native legends and old European myths. They all conformed to that ambiguous mixture defined by Bloch: gold as booty, gold as a marvel; the metal and the lost Golden Age, the dream and reality always confused.

Nothing more opportune than these words to define the symbol of the discovery and conquest of America: the duality in which mythical gold is expressed, El Dorado and the Golden Age that survived in the Promised Land. A duality that has marked with its contradictions the almost five hundred years of the history of the continent and that today allows us to understand better the meaning of the prophecy of Seneca in Medea: the simultaneous lament for the irremediable loss of happiness and the exciting announcement of new worlds, sadness and happiness that indissolubly mark the destiny of a region that still has not resolved which facet of the golden myth better defines it to itself and when confronted with the others.

Notes

    Ernst Bloch, “Les utopies géographiques,” Le Principe espérance, Vol. II, Paris, Gallimard, 1982.

    Seneca, Medea, Tragedias, Vol. I, Biblioteca clásica Gredos, No. 26, 1979, p. 308. The quotations which follow are from this edition.

    Quoted by Jesús Luque Moreno in the annotated edition of Medea.

    Hesiod, Works and Days.

    Ovid, Metamorphosis, I, verses 89-1159. Antonio Antelo in his essay on “El mito de la Edad de Oro en las letras hispanoamericanas del siglo XV”, Thesaurus, No. 1, January-April, 1975, Bogotá, Instituto Caro y Cuervo, p. 94. He stresses the influence of Ovid's text on poets, humanists and historians of the Middle Ages and how the myth was transmitted to America.

    Tibullus, Elegia III, in Antología de poesia latina, Bogotá, Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1981, p. 89.

    Quoted by Isaac J. Pardo in Fuegos bajo el agua: la invención de utopía, Caracas, Fundación La Casa de Bello, 1983, p. 20. Pardo recalls that in the Sumerian epos of Gilgamesh there was also a sumptuous locus amoenus, the garden of the gods that was “surrounded by shrubs of precious stones.”

    Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, XC. Seneca locates the Golden Age in Greece, following the opinion of Posidonius, that epoch in which “power was in the hands of the sages.” Solon, who “established Athens in the equality of the law was one of the famous seven sages,” the ideal model to which Pithagoras gave order and which would pass on to Sicily and Magna Grecia.

    These three regions are somewhat more than purely geographical at the coming of Christianity. They are consecrated by religious allusions and mystical significations, among which are the Holy Trinity, the three sons of Noah from whom descend the three human races—the descendents of Shem, Ham and Japheth—, the three Magi, the pontifical crown and even the cabalist significance of the number three.

    Medea, op. cit. p. 306.

    Elegia III, op. cit.

    Authors studied by Antonio Antelo in the quoted article.

    Medea, op. cit., p. 308, pp. 367-370.

    Ovid, op. cit.

    Tibullus, op. cit., p. 89.

    Virgil, Eclogue IV.

    Dante Alighieri, Il Paradiso, Canto XV.

    William Blake, Poemas proféticas y prosas, Barcelona, Barral Editores, 1971, p. 98

    Quoted by E.M. Cioran in Histoire et utopie, Paris, Gallimard, 1977, p. 133.

    Las Saturnales, I, quoted by Isaac J. Pardo in Fuegos bajo el agua: la invención de utopia, pp. 115-117.

    Idem.

    Ibidem.

    Plato, Laws IV, 713e.

    Plato, Politics, 272 a.

    The Republic II, 368c-e, 369a.

    Horace, Epode XVI.

    Hesiod, op. cit. vv. 169-174.

    Final words of Epode XVI.

    José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, Montevideo, Edic. del Nuevo Mundo, 1967, p. 157.

    Quoted by Rafael Pineda Yañez in La isla y Colón, Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1955, p. 17. He does not point out the apocryphal nature of the book attributed to Aristotle.

    The story of the Ciudad del Sol, an extraordinary country that would be situated in the “great Ocean Sea toward the meridian” was compiled by Diodorus Siculus in his Biblioteca Historica, Liber Tercius, II, 55s, Oxford University Press, 1968.

    Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firme del mar Océano, Book II, Ch. 3 Madrid, 1851.

    Roberto Godoy and Angel Olmo in Textos de Cronistas de Indias y poemas precolombinos, Madrid, Editora Nacional, 1979. A collection of some of the Nahuatl songs that Manuel Leon Portilla compiled.

    Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia de las cosas de la Nueva España, Mexico City, Editorial Porrúa, 1979, Book III, ch. 3.

    “It seems to me that our islanders of Hispaniola living in the Golden Age, naked, without laws, without slandering judges, without books, live without care for the future,” adds Pedro Martir de Angleria. Decadas del Orbe Nova, José, Porrúa, Mexico City, 1965, Decade I, Book III, ch. 8, recalling the times in which mortals did not care about “give me and I won't give you.” The American Indians did not have a “mine and yours.”

    Mariano Picón Salas, De la conquista a la Independencia, Mexico City, Fondo Cultura Económica, 1967, p 59.

    Ernst Bloch, op. cit.

Beatriz Pastor Bodmer (essay date 1992)

Last Updated on June 7, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 8570

SOURCE: Bodmer, Beatriz Pastor. “The Models in Crisis: The Search for El Dorado.” In The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America, 1492-1589, translated by Lydia Longstreth Hunt pp. 153-68. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992.

[In the following excerpt, Bodmer argues that belief in various myths about South America—including that of El Dorado—spurred the exploration of the interior of the continent.]

On the northern continent, territorial expansion had been organized in pursuit of two central goals: the Fountain of Youth and the Seven Cities of Cibola. Every great Spanish expedition to that region had been initially inspired by one of these two mythical objectives. Although these ventures ultimately failed, they never quite succeeded in curbing the mythical impulses of a people who persisted in identifying the unknown with the imaginary things and beings of ancient legends, Native American lore, and the “lying histories” that were the rage of the time.1

While expansion continued toward the north, the southern continent was gradually being explored from bases established along the coast in Peru, Quito, and Venezuela. The conquistadors who led these explorations seem to have been just as creative at myth-making as those who had developed and perpetuated the tales about the wonderful fountain and the enchanted cities. Irving A. Leonard notes that:

    “

    There is nothing to indicate that the fantastic notions so prevalent in the earlier years of the century had suffered any appreciable loss of vigor by the time the Spaniards addressed themselves seriously to the almost superhuman task of subjugating the continent of South America. Indeed, as New Spain and its hinterland failed to disclose the location of the enchanted cities, the fountains of youth, the Amazons, and the many other wonders so plainly expected, there was a disposition to shift their locale to the still more mysterious and forbidding Tierra Firme to the south in which the unshaken faith of eager adventurers would be vindicated.2

Actually, more than a resurgence of the specific myths in the southern hemisphere, it was the same collective penchant for fantasy that characterized the exploration of the north that was also present in the south. Except for the story of the Amazons, which persisted for reasons to be discussed later, the myths themselves were not transferred. The conquistadors (including men like Pedro de Alvarado, Diego de Ordaz, or Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca who had gone after mythical goals in the north) were more likely to formulate new myths than to transfer the earlier ones to the unknown territory they were about to explore.

The most important myths during the conquest of the southern continent were grounded on the hypothesis that there was a fabulous region located in the interior along the equinoctial line. Initially this hypothesis did not seem entirely fantastic, for it appeared to be related to one of the most credible cosmographical theories of the time: the theory of the distribution of precious metals over the globe.3 References to this theory in texts dating from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries seem to confirm its importance over a long period. There is an allusion to it in a letter to Columbus from the king and queen, in 1493, in which they consult him regarding the advisability of changing the bull to include more land lying in the tropics. They speak of Portuguese reports according to which “there may be islands and even terra firma which, depending on where they lie in relation to the sun, are thought to be very fruitful and richer than any other land. And because we know that you know more about this than anyone else, we request your opinion immediately, for if it be advisable and you believe it to be as good a venture as it is thought to be here, the bull will be amended.”4

In 1495 the prestigious cosmographer Jaume Ferrer wrote to Columbus, telling him that the area around the equinoctial line was especially rich in natural treasures: “Just around the equinox … precious stones, gold, spices, and medicinal plants are abundant and valuable; and I can speak of this because of my frequent commerce with the Levant, Cairo, and Damascus, and because I am a lapidary and have always been interested in learning about those places from people coming from there, and in knowing from what climate or province they bring such things. And what I have heard most often from many Indians, Arabs, and Ethiopians is that most of the good merchandise comes from a very hot climate.”5

Anghiera devoted an entire section of his Decades to the subject. The heading of the section reads: “Conjecture concerning the existence of other gold, spice, and pearl producing islands in the torrid zone, besides those already known.” He claimed that new lands would soon be discovered “either south of the equator or near by” and that these lands would be “rich in gold sand of the king already discovered in the Malucas and other previously described islands.” Anghiera based his conviction on “the virtue of the effect of the sun on terrestrial matter at the equinox,” maintaining that if this virtue had produced such fertile land in the tropics in the area of the Malucas, it was logical to expect similar conditions to have produced similar bounty at other sites along the same latitude: “That circle is greater than all the others. Therefore if in this small area nature is as I have said so great in her art and ability that she can produce in one region the same things that she produces in another subject to similar influences, can there be any doubt that with fragrances likewise there may be somewhere under the great globe of the sky other lands endowed with the same virtues as the Maluca islands and their neighbors, some of them on the equator and others just above or below it?”6

The theory regarding the distribution of natural treasures—mostly consisting of precious stones and metals, but also spices in Anghiera's version—continued to be widely respected throughout the sixteenth century. It was used by Father José de Acosta to support his theory on the nature of metals: “Metals are like plants buried in the bowels of the earth and they develop in a somewhat similar fashion, for they too have trunks and branches, meaning the larger and smaller veins, which are likewise intricately coordinated. And in a sense, minerals seem to grow like plants—for they occur in the bowels of the earth as a result of the virtue and efficiency of the sun and other planets.”7 It was referred to also by the chroniclers, from Gómara, who used it to challenge claims that the tropics in the New World were poor, to Herrera, who discussed the influence of the sun and the planets on the region in his Historia General.

The theory of the cosmographical distribution of metals provided the scientific foundation for the belief shared by a great many conquistadors that there were fabulous regions in the interior of the continent. But the specific way in which their imagination portrayed these regions, that is, the myths that provided incentives for the explorers, were related to Native American and European legends, historical tradition, and reports by people who had dwelled in the interior or survived one or more of a long series of expeditions that set out between 1530 and 1560, mainly from Peru, Quito, new Grenada, and Paria, to conquer the vast unknown hinterland.

One of the many myths that inspired the exploration of the interior of South America had already spurred the imagination of a large number of discoverers in the Caribbean and the northern territories (including Columbus and Cortés). It was a new version of a very old legend—the Amazons. Columbus may have been unfamiliar with Herodotus's classical tale, but he did know the version in The Travels of Marco Polo. Polo reconstructed Herodotus's myth in his description of two islands and the customs of the inhabitants: “one of which [islands] is inhabited by men, without the company of women, and is called the island of males; and the other by women without men, which is called the island of females. … The men visit the island of females, and remain with them for three successive months, namely, March, April, and May, each man ocupying a separate habitation along with his wife. They then return to the island of males. … The wives retain their sons with them until they are of the age of twelve years, when they are sent off to join their fathers.”8 The islands appear on Martin Behaim's 1492 map of the world, together with inscriptions describing some of their customs. Both Polo and Behaim refer to an important point that sheds some light on the important role played by the many versions of this myth throughout the conquest of America. According to the medieval version of the myth, the Amazons lived in Far East Asia and consequently were associated with the fabulous treasures presumed to exist there.

Columbus was the first to mention that there might be Amazons living in the New World (on the islands of Matinino and Carib), thus formulating the first American version of the myth and implicitly determining the function it would have for many years after the initial discovery. He did not consider the Amazons an objective as such, but they were an important piece of evidence in his set of identifications, for had he discovered them they would have given him undeniable proof of the proximity of the fabulous regions he was seeking.

After Columbus's first voyage, the Amazons were referred to frequently in narratives of expeditions that sought widely different objectives. Leonard has analyzed the development of this myth, wondered about why it was so persistent and ubiquitous, and noted its function as a means of identifying land containing treasure. He believes, however, that this function was secondary and that the discovery of the Amazons constituted a fundamental objective.9 It seems likely, however, that the myth's extraordinary vitality and persistence was due primarily to its value as a means of identifying wonderfully rich territory. The Amazons were interesting in that their presence had been associated time and again, since the Middle Ages, with great quantities of gold, silver, and precious stones. Rather than being an objective in themselves as Leonard claims,10 they were a sign confirming the existence and proximity of certain basic mythical objectives—from Columbus's Cipangu to Orellana's Kingdom of Omagua.

Once transferred to South America, the Amazon myth reappeared periodically, nourished by native reports consistently misinterpreted by the Spaniards according to the terms of their own versions of the myth.11 But it was always associated by the explorers with their own imaginary representations of the fabulous treasures of the hinterland. Some of the native reports described the matriarchal organization and customs of certain tribes in the interior, and most of them referred to the Inca virgins (called the wives of the Inca), who had consecrated their lives to the worship of the Sun. The custom attributed to the Amazons in the original myth, of keeping the girls with them while sending the boys to their fathers, became identified with the tribute of young girls and boys demanded by the Inca from his vassals. And the traditional association of the Amazons with rich treasure seemed confirmed by repeated reports of the great wealth that the Incas accumulated in the temples of the Sun—the same temples where the virgins believed by the Spaniards to be the Amazons lived, in close proximity to the fabulous objectives they all coveted.12 The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega speaks at some length of this treasure in his Comentarios Reales, where he says that most of the empire's collected gold and silver was used to serve and adorn the numerous Houses of the Virgins of the Temples of the Sun located throughout the empire.

From the time of Columbus to the eighteenth century there were many versions of the Amazon myth indeed.13 They ranged from brief references by Columbus, or by Cortés who speaks in his fourth letter of the women who lived “without a single man, and … at certain times men go over from the mainland and have intercourse with them; the females born to those who conceive are kept but the males are sent away,”14 to complex, ornate elaborations as in Gaspar de Carvajal's account of Orellana's expedition along the Amazon. Describing Orellana's questioning of a native who had come from somewhere near Omagua, Carvajal says the latter claimed that there were a great many women “living about seven days inland” in up to more than seventy towns:

    “

    they get together with Indian men when they wish to from time to time, and once they become pregnant send them back to their land without doing them any other harm; and when a child is born, if it is a son he is killed and returned to his father, and if a daughter, she is raised very solemnly and taught the things of war. He said there are enormous gold and silver treasures there, all the important ladies are served exclusively on gold and silver, and there are many gold and silver idols in the houses with which to serve the Sun. 

Carvajal even includes a physical description of what he claims to have seen with his own eyes: “Up to ten or twelve came, which is the number we saw, fighting at the head of all the men, as their captains. … These women are very white and tall, their hair is very long and braided around their heads, they are very long-limbed, go naked except for something to cover their private parts, and carry bows and arrows.”15

Whether in the form of a brief remark or a detailed elaboration, however, every allusion to the Amazons is associated with the existence of fabulous treasures: gold and pearls in Cortés's fourth letter; gold mines richer than any beheld ever before according to Juan de San Martín and Alonso de Lebrija in their Relación del Descubrimiento del Nuevo Reino de Granada;16 a great accumulation of gold, silver, and precious stones in Carvajal's narrative or great quantities of “white and yellow metal,” according to Hernando de Ribera who maintained that “the table service and chairs in these houses were all made of this metal.”17

Throughout the exploration of the southern continent, the itinerary of the Amazon myth was associated with that of several other mythical objectives that embodied in different ways and at different times the fabulous character of the mysterious hinterland. The presence of the Amazons—for Columbus a sign of the proximity of Marco Polo's wondrous Asia—always indicated that the men were near imaginary wonders as diverse as the land of Meta, the hidden treasure of the Incas, El Dorado, the kingdom of the Omaguas—the very mythical objectives that would continue to provide the incentive to keep pushing ahead into the wildernesses and forests of South America.

During the sixteenth century, imaginary representations of the interior underwent several fundamental transformations and reformulations, producing the series of myths that provided the main objectives of the expeditions. In 1516 a caravel in Juan Díaz de Solís's expedition was shipwrecked in the Atlantic, near Puerto de los Patos. Some of the cast-aways were convinced by native accounts that there was a white king and unbelievable riches somewhere in the interior. They went well into the Brazilian jungle as far as the Charcas mines, where they seized a large amount of precious metal. But only a few native slaves survived the return of the expedition, for everyone else was killed by the Brazilian natives. Those who did return, however, brought back samples of gold and silver, and the castaways who had remained at Puerto de los Patos took this as confirmation that the Silver Mountains and the Empire of the Sun did in fact exist in the interior of the continent. Thus the existence of certain real mines and references to the as yet undiscovered Inca empire provided incentives throughout the first half of the sixteenth century for expeditions into the interior of South America originating on the Atlantic coast.18

In 1530 Diego de Ordás was authorized to put together an expedition to the interior along the course of the Orinoco river. His initial objective was the area around the equator, which he assumed to be rich in precious metals. The expedition set out in 1531 and was a complete failure. Diego de Ordás died in 1532 without having found what he was looking for. But one of his men, Gerónimo Ortal, organized another expedition inland in 1533. Here again the objective was land near the equinoctial line, but in this case it concerned a specific, fabulously rich region about which certain vague reports had been heard during Ordás's unlucky venture. This region was the marvelous Land of Meta, in search of which many expeditions journeyed between 1533 and 1538. The final outcome was the confirmation of the existence of this mythical country. Juan de San Martín and Antonio de Lebrija, who took part in these expeditions, wrote to the king listing the many gold and emerald mines they had discovered, describing treasures in precious stones found at the temples of Tunja and Sogamoso and presenting a compilation of native reports that claimed that even more extraordinary treasures were to be had a few days' journey away, and virtually in every direction, from where the men were staying.19

When, in 1538, the expeditions led by Benalcázar, Federman, and Ximénez de Quesada converged on the same “six league triangle” from such distant points of origin as Peru, Venezuela, and Santa Marta, the sum of information and proof accumulated by each along the way appeared to provide complete confirmation of incalculable riches in the interior. For Ximénez de Quesada, these consisted of the treasures of the Inca, which since the conquest of Cuzco had been assumed to be distributed in more or less unlimited quantities throughout the empire. The discovery and plunder of Tunja and Sogamoso had confirmed a general belief in these mythical treasures. Moreover, taking as conclusive evidence the discovery of gold and emerald mines in the interior and information from the natives on more and better treasures in the same region, Ximénez de Quesada's expedition also confirmed the existence of the mythical land of Meta. In addition, Federman (whose army included the expeditionaries who had rebeled agaisnt Gerónimo de Ortal) had gathered information from natives all along his route concerning Meta and the vast quantities of precious stones and metals to be found there. And Benalcázar added to all this lore his account of the booty taken at Irruminari and of the existence and capture of the Golden Indian around whom the myth of El Dorado would gradually be woven.

According to Enrique de Gandía, the tale of El Dorado was first heard of in 1534, but the complete version was not put together or passed along until 1538. Gandía claims that it was precisely after the meeting of Ximénez de Quesada, Benalcázar, and Federman that “the fame of El Dorado spread rapidly over the north of South America, then down to Peru, and from there a few years later to the River Plate.”20 The legend that inspired the myth was related to a Chibcha ceremony held in a village on the shore of Lake Guativitá, which had ceased to be practiced even before the arrival of the Spaniards. During the ceremony an offering of gold and precious stones was buried by the chieftain in the waters of the lake. According to the Indian legend, the custom dated back to a time when the wife of an Indian chief who had committed adultery was so fiercely and publicly punished and put to shame by her husband that in her despair, she threw herself into the lake. Filled with remorse, the chieftain consulted his priests, who told him that his wife was living in a palace at the bottom of the lake and persuaded him to make offerings to her in the form of gold. To fulfill the ritual, the Indian chief “covered his naked body from head to toe with a very sticky turpentine, over which he poured a large quantity of fine gold powder … and thus bedecked he went to the middle of the lake and made offerings and sacrifices there, throwing gold pieces and emeralds into the water.”21

Originally the myth focused on two well defined central elements: the offerings thrown into the lake, and the figure of the golden chieftain. But as time went on, “Dorado” began to be used as a preferred synonym for any region gifted with immense treasure. Hence perhaps the importance attributed to this myth by so many chroniclers and historians, who mistakenly claimed it to have been the objective of several expeditions bound for Meta, the House of the Sun, or the Inca treasures, all three of which had developed independently of the legend of the golden chieftain.

Felipe Huten left Coro in search of El Dorado in 1541, when the popularity of the myth was at its peak. He found no trace of El Dorado, but the expedition returned bearing news of another enormously rich kingdom, that of the Omaguas. Gonzalo Pizarro sailed in 1542 in search of the Land of Cinnamon, but upon hearing the latest reports of El Dorado added this objective to his plans. When he came to the Amazon he divided his expedition into two groups, and one, led by Orellana, was the first to sail as far as the mouth of the river. Describing his expedition, Father Gaspar de Carvajal spoke of the presence of the Amazons (always associated with wonderful treasures) in the proximity of the region of the Omaguas. The myth of the fabulous kingdom of the Omaguas, based on an actual province and on the discoverers' determination to find treasure in the hinterland, would later be confirmed with the arrival in Peru of the Brazil Indians. These natives claimed that they had been sailing up the Marañón toward Peru for ten years, and they “said such great things about the river and the provinces through which it passed, especially the province of Omagua; and about the large number of inhabitants and countless treasures there, that many people were inspired to go see and discover them.”22 By the time Pedro de Ursúa obtained authorization to conquer the region in 1559, the myths of Omagua and El Dorado had become fused, both referring to the rich mythical region now thought to lie not in the interior plains between Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela but in the Amazon Basin, which ever since Pizarro's expedition to the Land of Cinnamon had become the main focus of exploration.

The transfer of qualities implied in Ursúa's belief that Omagua and El Dorado were the same place was neither an isolated case nor even an exceptional one. The imaginary representations of the fabulous hinterland that emerged as South America was being explored were highly dynamic. Contacts among the expeditions and the constant dissemination of fantastic reports—absorbed first by one myth, then by another23—made the different versions extremely fluid. This extraordinarily dynamic quality was reflected in the way in which some of the conquistadors modified the purpose of their expeditions. Ximénez de Quesada, for example, first set out in 1536 with the intention of sailing along the Magdalena basin in search of an intercontinental connection with the South Seas. Demetrio Ramos notes that “the point was not to carry out Ordás's ideas, in regard to the route along the Gran Magdalena … but to attempt to reach the South Seas as proposed by Alvarado, whose purpose must have provided a powerful incentive for Fernández de Lugo.”24 But when in 1539 Ximénez de Quesada led his fourth expedition, he included in its objectives—as recorded by several of the expeditionaries—two of the most important mythical representations of the hinterland, the House of the Sun and the Land of Meta, both of which he associated with the presence of the Amazons, a sure sign of the proximity of any mythically rich territory.25

The statements of goals and the accounts of reports gathered during the expeditions eventually became composite formulations that merged various myths of diverse origin and heterogeneous nature with real news of actual treasures, usually from the Inca empire. Hernando de Ribera's report, certified by a notary in the presence of witnesses, on his exploration of the Igatu River toward the end of 1537, following the orders of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, is one of the best examples of how all the myths and legends about the interior that circulated at a given time could be combined within a single account. As if the formal circumstances under which he dictated his report were not enough to guarantee its accuracy and objectivity, Ribera begins his narrative with a detailed description of his careful, objective method for obtaining information:

    “

    And traveling by foot through many Indian villages he heard and took from the natives there and from other Indians from places further away who had come to see and talk to him, a long and profuse account that he examined and attempted to study in detail so as to know the truth from them, as a man familiar with the cario language, through the interpretation of which and statements he communicated and talked with those generations and gathered information about the land … he stated that to obtain the truth from the said Indians and ascertain whether their statements were inconsistent, he spent an entire day and night questioning each of them in different ways, and they in turn all spoke and made statements among which there was no disagreement.26

The representation of the fabulous hinterland is first introduced in Ribera's account by a complete presentation of the American version of the Amazons. All the features to be found in the texts, from Columbus to Carvajal and even to Herrera's Historia, are included: the Amazons are female warriors governed by a woman; they are hostile toward the neighboring tribes; at certain times of the year they cease their warfare temporarily to have sexual relations with natives from the regions on their borders, whom they expel once their function has been fulfilled; they raise and educate their daughters with great care, but send their sons to their fathers; they possess great wealth in the form of “yellow and white metal,” which they use to make their chairs and their table service; they live near very rich land, and “there are very large settlements with a great many Indians bordering on their territory.”27

The first item around which Ribera organizes his representation of the fabulous hinterland (suggested by the presence of the Amazons) is a lake. In native traditions, lakes were associated with ceremonial rites and the offering of gifts. The Chibchas and other groups in the interior considered them holy, and the tradition of casting offerings of precious gifts into their depths led to the development of legends such as that of the adulterous wife of the chieftain of Guativitá. With the complex process of generation, transformation, and reformulation of myths and reports that accompanied the conquest, lakes also became, from the time of the conquest of Tenochtitlan and the disappearance of the Aztec treasures, a symbol of concealment for the Spaniards.28 But there is no question that once the explorers became aware of the Guativitá ceremony and the tale of the golden chieftain, they associated lakes with El Dorado and often thought of them as vast reservoirs of treasures accumulated as a result of long years of Indian offerings. Ribera's version, however, reflects a shift in which the lake changes from being a place where treasures are buried, to a natural storage place from which the Indians in the hinterland draw gold and precious stones: “And also toward the west, there was a very large lake … and on its borders … larger settlements of people who wore clothing and possessed a large amount of metal, and their clothes were embroidered with precious stones, which shone mightily, and they took these stones from the lake.”29 The lake mentioned by Ribera's natives was probably the Titicaca, which according to Gandía30 was one of the places in South America identified for many years with the mythical El Dorado.31

The second central element in Ribera's representation of the fabulous interior is his description of the population living in this unexplored region. Ribera says that “just beyond the women's villages” there were other very large settlements “whose inhabitants were black and who, they said, have beards … similar to those of the Moors.”32 By saying that black people and men with Arabic features were living in the region, he repeats the claims of Jaume Ferrer who, in the first account ever written on the wondrous hinterland (his letter to Columbus), identified it with the equinoctial line.33 Ferrer associated the region with treasures and a hot climate and remarked that the richest regions on the planet were likely to be inhabited by blacks and Arabs or at least be near places inhabited by people like them.

Finally, the last item around which Ribera organizes his mythical representation consists of the legendary echoes of the splendor of the Inca empire. These include references to the Amazons (perhaps a modified version of reports on the Virgins of the Sun) and to the Temple of the Sun at Lake Titicaca. Ribera also refers to the Incas themselves and their llamas: “very rich people who wore clothing, owned a large amount of metal, and raised a large number of animals with very big ears.”34

Thus Ribera's mythical hinterland contains many features from earlier versions, brought together in a single imaginary representation. The region he describes is located in eastern Peru, but on the basis of native reports he extends it toward the north, so that it becomes necessarily associated with the mythical land of Meta searched for so assiduously by explorers from Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, and toward the southwest and the territory of Chile, which had barely been explored at the time and was eventually to constitute the last bastion of the myth of El Dorado.

Dictated in good faith—there is no reason to believe otherwise—and based on his interpretation of the natives' replies to his elaborate questioning, Ribera's account formulated a new mythical representation of the nature of the interior. The result of his narrative was not an accurate description of South America but a rather complete synthesis of the central elements shaping the basic myths that had been encouraging the exploration of the mysterious interior. It contains a rather heterogeneous mixture of things taken haphazardly from a variety of occasionally misinterpreted reports of mythical objectives, combined with a number of native reports—some misunderstood or invented—concerning the legendary splendor of the Peru of the Incas. The formulation is interesting precisely because of its synthetic and heterogeneous nature. For in its confusion of sources and objectives, it provides a singular illustration of how these myths were generated and transmitted while the exploration and conquest of the interior of South America was underway. It reveals how extremely dynamic the imaginary component of the experience of the conquest in fact was, and it illuminates the mechanism by which vague knowledge concerning cosmographical theories, geographical descriptions, legends, myths, and personal dreams came together and combined in the minds of the conquistadors, often very subjectively, with the information provided by the natives. The result was that new myths and imaginary versions were constantly being created, of an interior whose marvels had not yet materialized, but whose fabulous nature was not only not questioned but appeared to be reaffirmed with each new formulation. The extraordinary vitality of the urge to create mythical objectives so apparent in Ribera's relación provides yet another example of the same process underlying the successive transformations of mythical objectives in Ximénez de Quesada's expeditions. There, a specific if nonexistent geographical objective—the search for a passage to the South Seas—was replaced by a series of increasingly complex mythical goals. In this case the reformulation took place over the course of four expeditions, but there are several instances in which specific geographic or economic objectives were progressively substituted by mythical ones in the course of a single expedition. The expedition led by Pizarro and Orellana toward the end of 1540 is a case in point.

The initial objective of Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition—the Land of Cinnamon—was the same one that aroused the interest of many other discoverers. Its existence had recently been confirmed by Díaz de Pineda. The first reports of cinnamon in the interior dated back to 1534, shortly after Atahualpa's capture. In May 1540 Sebastián de Benalcázar obtained authorization from the emperor to explore the interior for cinnamon “or any other spice.” The terms of his authorization granted him exclusive right to “the profits to be had from this spice.”35 The chronicler Oviedo describes the objectives of the expedition: “And this Benalcázar learned that there was abundant cinnamon, and when he returned from Spain to be governor of Popayan, he told me here in Santo Domingo that he believed he would find it near the Marañón river, and that it was along this river that the cinnamon was to be taken to Castille and Europe.”36

Fray Gaspar de Carvajal confirms how Pizarro gave top priority to the search for cinnamon while planning his expedition. He states repeatedly that the expedition was inspired by “the many reports about a land where cinnamon was made”; that Pizarro and Orellana met in the province of Motín “to go after this cinnamon”; and that “After the said captain (Orellana) had come to where Governor Gonzalo Pizarro was, he set out personally to find cinnamon.”37 However, Pizarro's letter written to the king after returning from his expedition in September 1542 mentions a second objective that turns up systematically in association with cinnamon. Pizarro says that his objectives are “the province of Cinnamon and the Lake of El Dorado, both very rich and heavily populated.” His account of the early part of his expedition to the interior confirms, however, that the initial goal was cinnamon and that El Dorado came later. “I attempted to ascertain where the Land of Cinnamon was from some Indians I had taken from the natives, who said they knew its whereabouts; and because it had been so widely reported and was taken to be so rich … I decided to look for it personally … and so I searched for cinnamon trees … for well more than seventy days.”38 When Pizarro finally reached the cinnamon region he must have been exceedingly disappointed by the land, which turned out to be full of “very rough, uninhabited and uninhabitable mountains,” where the highly prized cinnamon trees are “at a very great distance from each other.” In the face of such disappointment, he concluded, “Your Majesty will gain no use or service from this land or its products.”39 And it must have been in the light of this assessment that the initial objectives of the expedition were canceled and reformulated to include the mythical El Dorado to which Pizarro would refer two years later in his letter to the king. Carvajal notes the circumstances of the cancellation of the plan to look for cinnamon, in the following brief remark, “He found no land or recourse that might be of service to Your Majesty, and decided accordingly to proceed onward.”40

It is unlikely that when cinnamon failed to materialize Pizarro would not have told his men that his other objective was El Dorado if so it had been. Surely the best means of boosting their morale would have been to offer a valuable substitute. The fact that he presented no more than a vague plan to “proceed onward” would seem to indicate pretty clearly that finding cinnamon had been his sole objective and that it had not yet been replaced by another one, real or mythical.

The goal of discovery soon gave way to the need to find provisions. This seems to be the reason why Orellana left the expedition, and his voyage down the river in search of food to remedy the critical situation of Pizarro and his men implied a second transformation of the original objective. The beginning of this voyage down the Marañón by Orellana and his followers marks the final stages in the cancellation of the initial objective, cinnamon, and the end of the attempt to find it. The valuable objective is first replaced by a somewhat aimless wandering, and then by a search for provisions. The process illustrated by Pizarro and Orellana's change of plans duplicates the development of the action in the narrative discourse of failure discussed earlier. But in Orellana's case, the acceptance of failure is short-lived, for as he sails down the Marañón the impulse to mythify takes over again, resulting in his formulation of a new myth about the fantastic kingdom of the Omaguas.

The first real element on which this new mythical formulation was based was the arrival of natives bearing offerings: “and they came with their jewelry and gold trays,” recounts Carvajal. It was the first evidence of gold in the region, and this brief note is followed by a reference to the proximity of the Amazons, associated as always with a region endowed with rich treasure. “Here they told us about the Amazons, and the riches below,” says Carvajal.41 The samples of gold offered by the Indians and the reports confirming its existence that Orellana and his men heard as they sailed down the Marañón were to be interpreted once the expedition reached the coast of the prosperous Omagua settlements as having constituted all along a concrete premonitory sign. “There are many very large settlements next to each other, and the land was very pretty and fertile.” According to Carvajal, the natives replied when questioned that “everything made of clay in those settlements was made of gold and silver further inland.”42 The mention of household objects of gold and silver links the representations of the rich kingdom of the Omaguas with the myth of the Amazons who, according to the American version, always drank and ate from bowls and vessels made of these metals. The connection between the Omaguas and other imaginary representations of the fabulous interior is further strengthened by a remark about the llamas, which Carvajal calls “the sheep of Peru” and which are always associated with legendary accounts of the Inca empire. Connected with these signs of premonition, and supported by reports from the Indians, the region of Omagua becomes thus, in Carvajal's account, a new mythical objective combining once again into a new imaginary representation all the treasures presumed to lie in the fabulous hinterland.

But Omagua is not Carvajal's only myth in his Relación del descubrimiento del Amazonas. Around the middle of June, Orellana and his men coasted along a region that they later named the province of San Juan, where Carvajal claims they first saw the Amazons. The mythical women are associated here as usual with gold, silver, and other riches, and are described as living in a region in the interior which shares a number of central elements with other mythical formulations. The first of these is again the llama, which Carvajal here calls a “camel.” The second and far more important element, since it links Carvajal's version directly to the myth of El Dorado, is a lake, which he locates near Amazons who live near “two salt water lakes from which they produce salt.” Later, describing the kingdom bordering on Amazon territory, Carvajal speaks of a land governed by a very powerful man named Arripuna “who was lord of a large amount of land up river requiring an eight days' journey to cross, to the north of which there was a lake in a densely populated area ruled by another man named Tinamaston—said to possess a great quantity of silver.”43

This representation of the interior, tied by the mention of a lake to the myth of El Dorado, concludes Carvajal's transformation of concrete objectives into mythical ones. The tangible goal of cinnamon, the existence of which had been confirmed by Díaz de Pineda, seems to have been forgotten. Two new mythical constructs emerge to replace it, each confirmed by the nearby presence of the Amazons: Omagua, and a new version of the myth of El Dorado.

The elaborate nature of Carvajal's formulation shows just how far the collective propensity to create myths (already evident in the survival and repeated reformulation of mythical objectives that propelled the spread of the conquest toward the north)44 encouraged and shaped the exploration of the south. Its dynamism in South America was proof of an intensity that allowed mythical objectives to persist and reemerge—as in Carvajal's account—in the face of new failures and disappointments. And in the south, the mysterious and impregnable character of the hinterland provided an ideal ground for the endless creation of new myths. Leonard refers to the mystery and fascination the unexplored interior held for the conquistadors,45 and Gil Munilla relates the real difficulties involved in penetrating its domains to the fact that certain myths survived even beyond the eighteenth century: “This vast, hard to explore region was thought of for a long time to come as the inaccessible domain referred to in a variety of fables and myths.”46 There is no doubt that South America offered far more to inspire the creation of myths than the northern continent. Marvel-seekers in the north found themselves more often than not before a reality that left little margin for invention, and they were forced to accept it as it lay before their eyes, with its endless sky, cows, and pasturelands, none of which were very likely to inspire dreams or fables. In South America, on the other hand, the Amazons continued to elude the conquistadors despite insistent reports of their whereabouts; the silver mountains, golden hills, and emerald rocks the natives seemed to be constantly referring to never appeared; and the marvelous kingdom of El Dorado remained undiscovered, amidst a tangle of confusing, contradictory accounts claiming that it lay in the most unlikely places on the continent. But emeralds had indeed been found; mines had been discovered at Charcas; temples dedicated to the Sun by the Inca were a tangible, verified reality, as were the treasures they contained and the virgins who lived there and dined exclusively with tableware made of gold and silver. Legends and facts came together to perpetuate an essentially mythical, imaginary representation of the nature and contents of a mysterious hinterland that was to remain largely unexplored for several centuries.

Notes

    See Chap. 3, “A Collective Penchant for Myth,” above.

    Leonard, Books of the Brave (Cambridge, Mass., 1949) pp. 54-55.

    Demetrio Ramos Pérez refers to this connection in El mito del Dorado: Su génesis y proceso (Caracas, 1973). The author provides an insightful discussion of the rational and scientific foundation—consistent with the scientific knowledge of the period—underlying the mythification process, thus identifying the area reserved to the imagination proper in the complex process of formulating and reelaborating the myth of El Dorado during the conquest and exploration of the continent.

    “Carta mensajera de los reyes al Almirante,” September 5, 1493. Reproduced in Fernández de Navarrete, Colección de viajes y descubrimientos (Madrid, 1954) vol. 1, p. 364.

    Lletras reals molt notables fetas a Mossen Jaume Ferrer: e regles per el ordenades en Cosmografía y en art de Navegar, les quals XVII anys ha trobi en semps ab lo pait Sumari a tinch los mateixos originals: Coopilat per so criat Raphel Ferrer Coll (Barcelona, 1545), quoted in Ramos Pérez, El mito del Dorado, p. 22.

    Pedro Martir de Anglería, Décadas del Nuevo Mundo (Buenos Aires, 1944), dec. 7, chap. 6, p. 448.

    Padre José de Acosta, Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (Madrid, 1954), bk. 4, chap. 1, pp. 88-89.

    The Travels of Marco Polo (New York, 1958), p. 309.

    Referring for example to the expeditions organized by Hernán Cortés, Leonard claims that “in all directions his lieutenants, as well as he himself, were heading expeditions with instructions to locate the Amazons and other oddities, along with gold and silver mines,” in Books of the Brave, p. 41.

    See Leonard, chaps. 4 and 5. On page 48, for example, speaking of the explorations undertaken from the base in New Spain, Leonard states specifically, “Chief among the latter objectives were the Amazon women, and again and again the proximity of their realm was reported.”

    See in particular Rómulo Cúneo Vidal, “Las leyendas del Perú de los Incas,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid, 1925), on the connection between the ancient myth of the Amazons and the native accounts. Based on an etymologico-historical analysis of his material, the author discusses aspects of the society and culture of the Peruvian Incas described by the natives to the Spaniards, which served to confirm to the latter the presence in South America of their own European myths. See also Gandía's, Historia crítica de los mitos de la conquista americana (Buenos Aires, 1929) for an analysis of the mingling of European facts and myths with native legends that characterized the development and evolution of Greek myth in America.

    See Gandía, Historia crítica, chap. 6.

    Even as late as 1778 there is a reference by La Condamine in his Relation Abregée d'un voyage fait dans l'intérieur de l'Amérique méridionale to warrior women who lived without men in the lands and along the river's edge, in the region of the Amazon basin. See Gandía, Historia crítica, p. 87.

    Cortés, Letters from Mexico tr. A. R. Pagden (New Haven, 1986), p. 298.

    Fray Gaspar de Carvajal, Relación del descubrimiento del río de las Amazonas (Seville, 1894), pp. 59-60, 66-69.

    Reproduced in Fernández de Oviedo's Historia General y Natural de las Indias (Madrid, 1959), bk. 26, chap. 11, p. 87.

    Hernando de Ribera, Relación de la expedición del río de la Plata, published together with Núñez's Naufragios y Comentarios (Madrid, 1957), p. 258.

    See “La sierra de la plata” in Gandía, Historia crítica, pp. 145ff.

    The “Carta de Lebrija y Martín” contains abundant information on the objectives and development of the expeditions in search of the fabulous hinterland, especially the one led by Ximénez de Quesada. The letter is reproduced in Fernández de Oviedo, Historia General, pp. 83-92. It is there that reference is made to the “triangle” I mention in the next paragraph of my text.

    Gandía, Historia crítica, p. 129.

    The quotation is from Fray Pedro Simón's Tercera Noticia (Caracas, 1963), chap. 1. See also Gandía, Historia crítica, p. 112. Cúneo Vidal, moreover, relates the source of the legend of El Dorado to the Inca empire's system for collecting tribute rather than to the Guativita Lake ceremony. According to Cúneo, the Golden Indian was in fact the Inca's factor, in the ceremonies held to collect tributes of gold. “After the manus' gold had been collected on the cumbi blankets,” says Cúneo, “the monarch's factor rolled about on it as if taking possession of it … so that his body, covered in particles of gold, shone in the sunlight like a burning coal,” in “Las leyendas del Perú de los Incas,” p. 25. Gandía mentions this theory but disregards it for lack of acceptable proof, although he acknowledges it to be highly suggestive.

    Relación de la jornada de Omagua y el Dorado: Relación del Bachiller Francisco Vázquez que narra la expedición de Pedro de Ursúa (Madrid, 1979), pp. 11-12.

    Ramos Pérez examines this transformation with admirable erudition in his study, focusing specifically on the myth of El Dorado. Both analytically and from the point of view of its documentation, his work is extremely interesting and thorough.

    Ramos Pérez, El mito del Dorado, p. 142.

    Ibid., p. 153.

    Ribera, Relación de la expedición del río de la Plata, pp. 256-61. Ribera's insistence on officially certifying the accuracy of his version is worth noting, precisely in view of the fantastic character of its information.

    Ribera, Relación de la expedición, p. 258.

    In El mito del Dorado, Ramos Pérez develops his theory according to which the increasing appearance of the lake as a symbol for concealment was based on the episode concerning the concealment of the treasure of Moctezuma. In effect, familiarity with this episode may have made it easier for the Spaniards to accept as true the native tradition according to which lakes were sacred and used as the depositories of offerings; it may likewise have contributed to making lakes an integral element of several myths.

    Ribera, Relación de la expedición, p. 259.

    Gandía, Historia crítica, p. 123.

    Ribera's reference (after his first mention of a lake) to the “House of the Sun,” which he takes to be the name given by the natives to the lake they describe, confirms the hypothesis that he was referring to Lake Titicaca and to the Temple of the Sun built by the Incas along its edges. Gandía summarizes the stories about lakes that were eventually all identified with a single lake deep in the unexplored hinterland: “The confusion surrounding imprecise and fabulous reports concerning Lake Titicaca, the Guativita Lake, Lake Parime, and the Lake of the Xarays, created in Peru and the River Plate the notion of an imaginary lake that was often identified with the Xarays, but also shared details in common with the other lakes.” Gandía, Historia crítica, p. 224.

    Ribera, Relación de la expedición del río de la Plata, p. 258.

    See above note 5.

    Ribera, Relación de la expedición del río de la Plata, p. 260.

    Ladislao Gil Munilla, El descubrimiento del Marañón (Seville, 1954), p. 154 and pp. 192-193.

    Fernández de Oviedo, Historia General, bk. 49, chap. 1.

    Carvajal, Relación, pp. 3 and 5.

    “Carta de Gonzalo Pizarro al Rey,” from Tomabamba, dated September 3, 1542. The letter is transcribed by Toribio Medina in “El descubrimiento del Amazonas,” a documentary appendix accompanying Fray Gaspar de Carvajal's Relación, pp. 85ff. The very inclusion of the search for El Dorado as an objective of the expedition makes the goal in Benalcazar's 1540 capitulaciones different from those in his “Carta al Emperador” written in 1542. This would appear to indicate that between 1540 and 1542 El Dorado began to be reported in Quito as being an objective at least as important as cinnamon.

    Gonzalo Pizarro, “Carta al Rey” from Tomabamba, pp. 85ff. There is no conclusive proof, however, that cinnamon constituted a false objective from the outset (as suggested by Gil Munilla) solely designed to disguise the true objective of Pizarro's presumed plan to find El Dorado. The only thing Pizarro's letter to the king makes clear is that the first time he reformulated his objectives was after his main design (the search for cinnamon) had failed.

    Carvajal, Relación, p. 5. Italics mine.

    Ibid., p. 15.

    Ibid., pp. 43-44. For more on the connection with the myth of the Amazons, see pp. 67-68.

    Ibid., pp. 67 and 70.

    See Chap. 3, “A Collective Penchant for Myth,” above.

    Leonard, Books of the Brave, pp. 54-55.

    Gil Munilla, El descubrimiento del Marañón, p. 152.

Fernando Ainsa (essay date 1993)

Last Updated on June 7, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 5457

SOURCE: Ainsa, Fernando. “The Myth, Marvel, and Adventure of El Dorado: Semantic Mutations of a Legend.” Diogenes 41, No. 4 (1993): 13-26.

[In the following essay, Ainsa traces the evolution of the myth of El Dorado from the story of a gilded king, to a belief in a treasure lying at the bottom of a lake, to the legend of a golden land.]

Dreams of gold have accompanied human history down through the ages. Gold is a beautiful and useful metal, easily shaped and immune to rust, and from the time of the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, it has been regarded as a precious metal from which jewels and decorative as well as everyday objects have been fashioned. Even before the concept of money turned it into one of the principal forms of exchange, gold was used as a medium of barter.

Apart from being of commercial and aesthetic value, gold is also a part of the stuff of fables and legends. Legendary and mythical lands where gold abounds have crowded the imaginative geography of almost all civilizations. The Bible itself, in the Book of Kings, speaks of the Mines of King Solomon, the Kingdom of Ophir, and the City of Sidon, while the prophet Zechariah observes that in the City of Tyre: “silver is heaped up like dust, and gold as the mire of the streets” [Zachariah, 9.3].

From the treasures of Solomon and Ali Baba's cave to the islands where the “golden apples” grow, from the gilded kingdoms sought by the knights errant to the quest for El Dorado, gold has always been inseparable from the idea of treasure, fortune and—above all—enchantment.

And when we speak of treasure and enchantment, we also speak of booty.

CHANCE, FORTUNE, AND LUST

It is no exaggeration to say that the myth of El Dorado has been the most persistent expression of this magic conception of riches characteristic of the Old Continent. For riches were seen as something one acquired by chance or fortune. Fortune and chance, indeed, were one and the same—the goddess who pursued her uncertain course on a winged wheel. Riches were the hidden treasure one came upon by luck or by supernatural revelation.

But gold has also been an object of covetousness: men have avidly sought, stolen, and even killed for gold. Thus, gold engenders evil. In the words of an elegy written over two thousand years ago: “Man today worships gold and neglects the gods; gold destroys faith and corrupts justice.”

Man's earliest expeditions and conquests were saturated with the idea of booty and enchantment. The most famous and archetypal of such expeditions is that of Jason and the Argonauts. Jason left behind him a happy life in the Golden Age, an uncomplicated world of plenty where everyone lived to a ripe old age, so that he could seek his fortune beyond the boundaries of the world known to the Ancient Greeks—the Pontus Euxinus or Black Sea. And he did so with a precise aim in mind: to seize the “golden fleece.”

The “golden fleece” has a symbolic value similar to that of later historical treasures. Its value is not simply an “economic” one, quantifiable in the same way that the value of a gold ingot can be measured by following the fluctuating stockmarket quotations on a computer screen. The “golden fleece” is also a trophy, the prize that is the reward for an enterprise fraught with difficulties and obstacles, an enterprise in which the adventure and labors involved in the conquest of the trophy are as important as the goal itself. The “golden fleece” marks the beginning of a myth: the epic adventure to seek out treasure in remote and unknown lands.

The epic accounts of these expeditions—especially in the Journey of the Argonauts by Apolonio de Rodas—describe it as being simultaneously a quest for booty and a voyage of initiation involving a series of trials leading to self-realization. Thus Jason had to harness wild bulls whose hooves were of bronze and whose breath was of flame; had to plant dragons' teeth in a field from which warriors sprang fully armed; and, finally, he had to employ guile to overcome the monster that guarded the fleece. His voyage was marked by a series of trials that had to be overcome before he secured his final triumph.

The dual significance of gold—as booty and enchantment—appears again in the quest for the golden chalice in the Holy Grail stories, borrowed from German legend by medieval Christian tradition. In the best-known version of the adventures of Perceval, the Conte del Graal, the obstacles that have to be overcome—the barren lands, the river of Hades, the garden of Eden—represent not only successive tests of the knight's personal valor but also stages in the transformation of the essence of the golden chalice. For while the journey would lack a purpose without the golden chalice as its goal, the journey itself serves to transmute the material value of the chalice into a spiritual symbol.

These accounts of the conquest of precious trophies or of legendary lands where the streets are paved with gold were given an unexpected boost by the European discovery of America. Stories of fabulous golden treasures of gold reappear in the New World in all their mythical force.

THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUTS

Indeed, the emergence of an American version of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts is almost simultaneous with the discovery of the New World. The quest for “new fleeces” is apparent in the myth of El Dorado as well as that of all the golden cities that flourish in the geography of the American imagination, from Cibola and the Seven Cities, situated in present-day Arizona, to the City of the Caesars, in the remote southern latitudes of Patagonia, taking in Manoa, Paititi, Trapalanda, Lin Lin or the “fleece of Colcos” mentioned in Columbus. Even in mid-twentieth-century accounts of the adventures of Francisco de Orellana and Fray Gaspar de Carvajal, we find the discoverers of the Amazon referred to as the “Argonauts of the jungle.”

By the same token, the golden realms of classical antiquity reappear in the New World under different names. Thus, the biblical kingdom of Ophir is the land that the Portuguese navigator Alburquerque thought he had discovered when he spoke of the “Kingdom of Monomotopall—to which King Solomon had sent his ships in search of gold. Sebastian Cabot sought the same land—under the name of the “Realm of the White King”—on the banks of the River Plate.

The city of Cipango—where, according to Marco Polo and Sir John Mandeville, streets and houses were fashioned “entirely of gold, like great paving stones two or three finger-breadths' thick”—was alluded to by Christopher Columbus when he wrote to the Pope in 1502 that “this island is Tharsis, it is Cethia, it is ophir and ophaz and Cipango, and we have called it Espaiiolail.”

The case of Christopher Columbus is worth examining in detail. His journeys exemplify the ambiguous fusion of religious mysticism and Judeo-Christian millenarianism with the ambition to conquer lands overflowing with gold and silver—an ambivalent attitude characteristic of many other enterprises in the conquest of the Americas. For while he was seeking gold, Columbus also declared that his quest could serve to liberate the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from Arab dominion. In his first letter to the King and Queen of Spain he wrote: “Gold is most excellent; from gold one can make treasure, and whoever has treasure can do what he wishes in this world, and can even ensure that souls go to Paradise.”

For Columbus, gold, while a symbol of “worldly power,” should also serve to reconstruct the old temple of Zion in Jerusalem. This idea—recurrent in the writings of Columbus—is taken up by later chroniclers. Lopez de Gomara notes in the dedication to the King of Spain of his General History of the Indes:

    “

    It was God's wish that the Indians should be discovered in your time and to your subjects so that you might convert them to your holy law, as many wise Christians say. The conquest of the Indians began once that of the Moors was completed, so that there might always be wars waged by the Spanish against the infidels. 

In this extension of the Reconquest to the Americas, gold held a double significance—as sacred symbol and base metal, as prize and salvation, an initiatory quest and a savage plunder, the cross and the sword.

The enterprise of Christopher Columbus is shot through with this ambivalence. The discoverer of America wrote in a copy of the Imago Mundi of the precious stones and treasures of the mythical islands of Antiquity that he hoped to find in the West Indies. At the same time, his diary and his accounts of his journeys tell of his growing conviction that he was on a spiritual mission involving the discovery of an Earthly Paradise in the New World. This messianic dimension to the discovery and conquest of America is what Ernst Bloch called the “ambiguous mixture of the search for gold as a metal and of the Golden Age as a lost paradise.” The quest for El Dorado, then, is part of a search for “geographical utopias.”

Thus, a geography of legendary countries said to contain vast treasures and riches—El Dorado, El Paititi and the country of the Omaguas—emerges alongside the discovery and conquest of America bearing the ubiquitous stamp of the myth of gold. The lure and enchantment of gold, in fact, provided the motive force behind the most extravagant ventures that accelerated the discovery and conquest of the remotest parts of America. The land of Pira (sic) of which Pizarro and Almagro heard tell, the Meta mountain range in Guyana, Lake Parime and the Guatavita lagoon, were all the pretext for expeditions that could lead to the capture of an empire, as occurred with the conquest of the Incas by Francisco Pizarro, but could also culminate in the megalomaniac delirium of a Lope de Aguirre in the Amazon forest, or the discovery by German explorers of the vast expanses of eastern Venezuela.

As Gabriel Gárcia Marquez said in his speech to the Swedish Academy on receiving the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature:

    “

    El Dorado, our imaginary and much sought-after country, appeared on numerous maps over many years, changing its location and shape according to the fancy of the map-makers. It became familiar in its minutest details, from the dazzling attire of its sovereign, the only king to be both naked and adorned in the greatest luxury, down to the materials with which the city was built, the toys of its children and the shape and name of the lake by which it was situated. Those who sought it most avidly and tenaciously were not only the imaginative sons of the Mediterranean but also the men of the North. 

Moreover, the quest was not all fantasy. The riches of Montezuma, the treasures of Atahualpa, the silver deposits of Mexico and Peru, the mountain of Potosi, all gave these dreams a certain basis in fact.

All Europe was astounded by the gifts made by Montezuma to Cortes: the jewels and golden objects; the huge gold and silver wheels, as large as those of a cart, which caused Albrecht Darer to exclaim: “Never in my life did I see anything that moved me as much as these objects!” The treasure of Atahualpa likewise amazed the world, prompting pages of detailed and admiring description: life-size statues molded in gold, models of animals, birds, fish, and trees as well as everyday objects—all cast in the precious metal.

Because gold had been found in Mexico and Peru, it followed that much more was waiting to be discovered in mines whose whereabouts were unknown, in treasures hoarded over centuries by peoples living in as yet unexplored lands. In this way the myth of the ultimate kingdom of gold, El Dorado came into being. This myth, though it appeared to be an invention, came to have its own reality; for “in the creation of the New World nothing is more real than El Dorado.”

But what exactly is the myth of El Dorado? What is this land so avidly sought?

ENTERPRISE FOR VISIONARIES

El Dorado was a quest for visionaries, a veritable obsession among the European adventurers who for more than a century scoured much of the north of South America in search of this fabled land. Pursuing often contradictory information, signs, and rumors of all kinds, they explored inhospitable forests, suffocating plains, and freezing mountain plateaux. They wandered for days and months, enduring every kind of privation, killing and pillaging, suffering and wreaking suffering (with the soul between their teeth”).

El Dorado is a many-sided myth. sometimes it refers to a man, a chief sprinkled with gold dust performing a ceremony in the Guatavita lagoon; sometimes to a city—Manoa—or a region—the “land of the Omaguas”—or a lake such as Parime. This fabulous gold is an elusive prize that dissolves in the meandering lines of maps and stories that range from the west of Columbia to the east of Venezuela, from the Amazon basin of Ecuador to the forests of eastern Bolivia, the foothills of the Sierra de Plata to the sources of the River Plate. The myth that shaped the quest—as well as the costly expeditions devoted to it—was not a simple one but assumed various forms.

A Colombian legend relates that whenever a new chief of the Mosca tribe came to power, a complex ceremony would take place. The naked body of the chief was daubed with a sticky turpentine mixture and coated with gold dust until he became like a living statue. He was then transported on a raft, surrounded by the head men of the tribe, to the middle of the Guatavita lagoon (in Columbia) where, to the accompaniment of shouts and the playing of native instruments, golden objects were thrown to the bottom of the lake and the chief himself plunged into its waters. It was this ceremony, of which the Spanish had heard echoes, that gave rise to the name El Dorado—or the Gilded One. Belalcázar, one of those who tried to track down the legendary lake, gave the name El Dorado to the famous “gilded one”—on the model of the names commonly given to the Spanish kings, such as the Wise, the Warrior [“Campeador”], the Brave, and the Cruel.

El Dorado became a veritable myth. And like all myths it gave rise to variants. In 1543, a few years after the original legend began to circulate, people were already talking about a chief who always went about naked, covered with gold dust, because any other attire, even golden armor, would be lacking in dignity.

Such a custom presupposed that every night the chief washed off the gold dust from the preceding day and renewed the operation the next morning, a habit that in the imagination of Gonzalo Pizarro added up to the existence of an absolute fortune. As the historian Fernandez de Oviedo remarked, one could have become effortlessly rich simply by having the good fortune to sweep up every night the gold dust remaining from the previous day, although he added on a skeptical note that, if such a custom existed, the gold mines in the region must be very wealthy indeed. …

Another variation on the original legend resembles the plot of a short story. A Mosca chief is said to have discovered that his beautiful wife was deceiving him. In his fury he condemned the lover to death by impaling and ordered that his adulterous wife should eat the lover's penis. The woman fled in despair with her daughter in her arms and drowned herself in the lake. It is said that thereafter Chief Guatavita covered himself in gold and presided from a raft over ceremonies in memory of his wife in which golden objects were cast into the middle of the lake.

When the lake was finally discovered, every possible means was tried to dredge up the legendary treasure. In 1580, Antonio de Sepúlveda obtained permission to drain the lake. After constructing a complicated engineering device, he proceeded—despite the doubts of skeptics—to recover from it gold objects and plate. Each draining operation brought with it new surprises.

The legend had turned out to be true: there were treasures at the bottom of the lagoon. However, the cost of the operation, together with the high price paid for the exploitation rights, made the Herculean task of draining the lake prohibitively expensive. Tired and ill, Sepulveda gave up the quest and went off to die in a hospital. Shortly after his death, torrential rain filled up the lagoon and the drainage works collapsed. Nobody dared to renew the attempt, although there was no lack of schemes envisaged. Even Alexander von Humboldt on his journey through Colombia at the beginning of the nineteenth century pursued his journey as far as Guatavita.

THE SEMANTIC MUTATIONS OF THE LEGEND

By a semantic mutation, El Dorado—the “gilded one” of the original legend—was turned into the name of a region, a legendary country containing cities of great wealth. Sir Walter Raleigh in The discovery of the large, rich and beautiful empire of Guiana, with a relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa, which the Spaniards call El Dorado (1596) goes as far as to say that the region of El Dorado, which he situates in Guiana, has a large population and great cities with temples and treasure. Its capital is Manoa and its emperor descended from the Incas who fled from the Spanish after their expulsion from Peru, taking with them whole populations and much treasure. In the empire of Guiana there is more gold than in any other part of Peru as well as great cities rivaling those of the Inca empire even in its heyday. It is governed by the same laws and has exactly the same form and practice of government as in Peru; the Emperor and his subjects belong to the same religion.

Walter Raleigh informed Queen Elizabeth of England that

    “

    the Spaniards who have visited Manoa, the imperial city of Guiana, have assured me that its size, its riches and its excellent site are superior to those of any other city on earth, at least among those known to the Spanish nation. It is situated on a salt-water lake two hundred leagues long, similar to the Caspian Sea. 

This lake also appears on the “New Map of the Gold-Rich Country of Guyana” by Jocundus Hondius. Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa said of the lake in his Compendium and description of the West Indies that it was the site of: “A city or town more than three leagues wide, called Manoa, which has great treasures of gold and silver and other precious things,” affirming with conviction that “There is a street of over two leagues in length, where gold- and silversmiths work the precious metals according to their custom.”

In other cases, El Dorado is the name of a golden mountain. Brother Juan de Santa Gertrudio relates that between Barbacoa and Panama is a mountain known as El Dorado. According to legend it contained a vein of gold compressed with such force that it exploded like a volcano and began to liquefy and spray gold all around. The entire mountain was said to be covered with the melted gold.

THE LEGEND OF THE LAKE

The truth is that ever since the conquest of Mexico it was suspected that the waters of the American lakes and lagoons contained hidden treasures of gold, silver, and precious stones. This stemmed from the belief that the gold and gems of Montezuma had been cast to the bottom of the lake on which Tenochtitlán was built.

This same myth—the lake with hidden treasures—in the expeditions of the German Ambrosio Alfinger along the shores of Lake Maracaibo; in the legend of the golden alligators sought by Juan Rodriguez Freyle in the Teusacá Lagoon; in the expedition of Martos to the Guasca Lagoon; and in the fatal attempt by Carriaga—well into the nineteenth century—to recover the hidden treasure from the Siecha Lagoon. The lakes make their appearance again in the Bolivian altiplano in a treasure quest focused on the Islands of the Sun and Moon in Lake Titicaca or on the Amazonian foothills of the Peruvian Andes, where the mysterious kingdom of the Paititi was said to be located.

The way in which different versions of the same myth proliferated on the American continent is truly amazing. Simultaneously in remote places unconnected by any form of communication there rose up a whole series of fabulous cities: El Dorado, Parima, Enim, the Gran Moxo, the Gran Para, the Gran Paytita, the Gran Quivir, and the City of the Caesars.

But what is even more astonishing is that the search for these mythical cities and lagoons mobilized vast human and material resources in a frenzy of activity extending throughout the sixteenth century and involving not only the Spanish Crown but Germans and Englishmen as well, not to speak of the interest of the French Chancellory and of the Dutch, whose diplomatic reports were at the origin of the colonization of Guyana. This gave rise to border disputes between the various parties in the belief that they territories contained these ubiquitous golden kingdom. Some idea of the intense activity in this period can be gauged from the map of the eastern extremity of the continent: the three Guyanas, English, French and Dutch, together with Spanish Guyana (today Venezuela), coincide with what was finally believed to be the location of El Dorado.

These ventures were accompanied by extravagant decrees, such as that which dubbed Pedro de Orsua “Governor and Captain-General of El Dorado,” or that by which Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo named part of the American Continent “Golden Castille.” Antonio Berrio, for his part, called on the King of Spain to grant him the title of Marquis of the New World in exchange for discovering El Dorado.

THE “GREAT PRIVATIONS” OF THE ADVENTURE

Nevertheless, the difficulties experienced by most of these expeditions were formidable.

The case of Gonzalo Pizarro, the brother of Francisco Pizarro, Conqueror of Peru, illustrates this point. In 1541 Gonzalo set off with several thousand Indians, hundreds of armed soldiers, horses, herds of pigs, llamas, dogs and equipment to conquer the legendary country of Canela of which rumors had reached Quito and Cuzco. For the next eighteen months they wandered blindly through the forest, all the Indians died, and the animals were eaten as they dropped with exhaustion. The chronicler of the conquest of Peru, Pedro Cieza de L6on, speaks of the “vast expanses of hunger” traversed by those who accompanied Pizarro in the search for El Dorado and tells how they ate horses, dogs, and even shoe, saddle, and stirrup leather “boiled in water and then baked in embers.” Cieza praises the ability of the Spaniards to withstand great privations. What is astonishing is that at the end of this long trek Pizarro found himself more or less at his point of departure. With no path to guide him, he had ended up describing a huge circle in the forest. The few survivors returned almost naked, their uniforms rotting, their swords eaten away by rust, and their unshod feet covered with sores and wounds.

Something similar happened to the expedition of Nicolas Federmann, who set off from the Venezuelan coast in search of El Dorado on behalf of the German Welser Bank. For some three years he wandered lost in the forest, including nearly a year spent looking for the path leading to the plateau of the Andes, at the altitude of present-day Bogatá. When he finally found the pass of Suma Paz he had to clamber up cliffs and gullies, hauling the horses after him by rope. When everybody had given the members of his expedition up for lost, they emerged emaciated, clothed in rough animal skins, and with beards and hair—which they had left uncut to protect themselves from the sun—half way down their shoulders.

The expedition of the German Philip von Hutten was reduced to eating snails, frogs, lizards, vipers, worms, grass, roots and other unnourishing fare. Some, “going against nature” as the chroniclers of the disastrous expedition relate, also ate human flesh. It is told how they found a “Christian” cooking a “cut of child meat” garnished with grasses.

A similar thing happened to Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, the founder of the city of Santa Fe de Bogatá. His soldiers, decimated by fevers, plagues, mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, crocodiles, and vampire bats made their way over marshes laying footplanks before them as they went. The Spaniards died like flies—according to the chronicler of the expedition Brother Pedro de Aguado—while the Indian packbearers dropped exhausted and were eaten by jaguars or crocodiles. After four months Quesada had only two hundred soldiers left out of the seven hundred with which he had set off. Food had to be rationed. Any animals they were lucky enough to catch had to be eaten at once before they rotted. Their horses disappeared, and cases of cannibalism were reported. After eight months, when death seemed inevitable, they finally reached the plateau in the region of Cundinamarca. There they founded Santa Fe de Bogotá, which was to be the capital of Colombia—another city, like so many in America, whose origin was related to the quest for El Dorado.

It is interesting to note that in this world of hunger and privation, whose ultimate aim was the kingdom of El Dorado, gold—on those rare occasions when it was found—lost all its value in circumstances where eating was the most important thing. In the account of von Hutten's expedition, we read how pieces of horsemeat from animals that had died “by arrow and the plague” were sold in the camps for four hundred or more pesos of gold per pound of flesh. And the chronicler admits somewhat shamefully that “I myself joined some other Christians in buying a dog for a hundred pesos. Deers' feet, soaked in water and cooked, were eaten.”

In the case of the conquest of Peru, the officers became millionaires, while the regular soldiers were rich as lords. Yet the vast quantities of gold produced enormous and unexpected inflation. A bottle of wine sold for seventy pesos of gold, a sword for fifty, while a pair of shoes cost forty, a cape one hundred, a saddle ten thousand (equal to a million dollars today), and a horse several thousand pesos. Despite these prices, a vendor could not always be found, such was the scarcity of goods for sale and the abundance of gold. A measure of how high this inflation had soared was that in Castille ten pesos of gold was enough to buy several hectares of land, while in Peru the same amount of money could not even buy a ream of writing paper.

The privations experienced during many of these expeditions seem to have been even more acute than the initiation rites in classical mythology. This is why Lope de Aguirre, “crazy” Aguirre, the “tyrant,” observed—in between oaths against God and insults to the King of Spain—“There is nothing here on this river except despair, especially for those of us who come from Spain.”

As V. S. Naipaul was to write in The Loss of El Dorado, El Dorado began as a search for gold but became something more—a romantic story of the New World, a dream of Shangri-la, the world whole and inviolable. And yet this world had existed, but the Spanish only profaned it. Out of a sense of frustration that served to stimulate their imaginations even more, these same Spaniards yearned to repeat the adventure, although the story had now become so blurred it had crossed the bounds of reality, and its shimmer had turned into a torment.

For, by a curious irony of fate, when in 1527 the Spanish first heard of the native legend of the Gilded One, pre-Hispanic history had already been erased. Indeed, when the Spanish reached Vélez in New Granada, the Guatavitas Indians—who were seemingly the origin of the gilded man legend had already been exterminated by the Muysca Indians of Bogotá. The Kingdom of El Dorado already belonged to the past when it entered the collective imagination of the Spanish, and thus was a paradise lost before it could be found.

In short, it was a utopia.

What then remained at the end of the sixteenth century of that fantastical vision?

THE KNIGHT OF EL DORADO IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW

Many chroniclers—such as Brother Pedro Simon—openly proclaimed the quest to be nonsensical, saying “They are all pursuing El Dorado with no more light to guide them than a few obscure tales that are without solid foundation, for all that their goal is invariably situated in the heart and entrails of terra firma.” For him, the “so-called Gilded One” was a fraud and a lie; it could even be seen as the cause of the “mangy and pestilential country Spain had become.”

Martin de Urus had been far-seeing enough in 1573 to identify the most harmful consequence of this quest: the time and effort wasted by the expeditions, which “instead of populating” the new kingdoms, squandered their resources in pursuit of this myth:

    “

    The blame lies with these adventurers, who instead of populating this new kingdom destroyed it by going off to seek the lagoon of the Gilded One or a new Atabaliba, thereby wasting their time and the resources available for developing this land. 

On occasion, a curse seemed to surround the hunted treasure like a protective halo. This was the view of Gonzalo Jim6nez de Quesada, who himself buried such gems and gold nuggets that he found in order that “nobody would touch them,” believing that “the person who did so would drop dead.” Others openly referred to the “greed that led the gold-seekers to this kingdom and the poverty and the disenchantment that was their reward,” and spoke of the “pestilential stench of gold.”

But the most amazing case is that of Antonio Berrio. After exploring the forest regions in eastern Venezuela in search of Manoa, the Golden City said to have been founded by the Incas when they fled the Spaniards, Berrio wrote in his Memories of the Discovery of El Dorado that, having reached that land of golden treasure the natives wished to show him, he declined to view it “so as not to display greed.” In other words, having arrived at his goal, our weary hero decided not to cast his eyes on the gold so as not to “appear greedy.”

The question must then be asked, as Father José Gumilla had put it: “Why so many dangerous voyages?” “Why all this striving?” “What is the purpose of these levies, marches and unbearable journeys?” He himself supplied the not inconsequential answer: “We seek the famous treasure-trove of El Dorado; so let none be surprised at our resolve and determination, for that which is of great value necessarily has a high price.”

A refinement to that answer is suggested by Edgar Allan Poe in his poem “El Dorado”: the “gallant knight” who “had journeyed long … in search of El Dorado” was on the point of renouncing his search when he meets a fellow soul—“a pilgrim shadow”—who spurs him to pursue his quest:

Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The Shade replied
—“If you seek for El Dorado.”

In other words—Poe seems to tell us—the quest is the goal and the goal is the quest. The search for El Dorado is the longing for an unattainable distant star. It is a dream of infinity.

References

Arciniegas, Germán, El caballero de El Dorado, Madrid, Revista de Occidente 1969.

Cobo Borda, Juan Gustavo, Fabulas y leyendas de El Dorado, Anthologie de textes, Barcelone, Biblioteca del Nuevo Mundo, Tusquets 1987.

Cólon, Cristóbal, Textos y documentos completos, Consuelo VARELA (éd.). Madrid, Alianza 1982.

Chapman, Walter, Le Rêve doré. Les Conquistadores, Paris, Albin Michel 1970.

Gerbi, Antonello, La Naturaleza de las Indias Nuevas, Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica 1978.

Naipaul, V.S., The Loss of El Dorado, London, Penguin Books 1987.

Raleigh, Sir Walter, El Dorado, Paris UTZ/UNESCO 1993.

Ramos, Demetrio, El Mito de El Dorado, Madrid, Istmo 1988.

Váquez, Francisco, Jornada de Omagua y El Dorado, crónica de Lope de Aguirre, Madrid, Espasa Calpe 1983.
Charles Nicholl (essay date 1995)

Last Updated on June 7, 2022, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 2467

SOURCE: Nicholl, Charles. “Mapping El Dorado.” In The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado, pp. 9-19. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Nicholl considers the search for El Dorado the result of a psychological “projection” onto the unexplored territory of South America of the desire for wealth and power.]

The purpose of Ralegh's Guiana Voyage was to locate El Dorado, and so a question immediately arises: Where was El Dorado?

The first and sensible answer is, nowhere. El Dorado did not exist. There never was a “great and golden city” (as Ralegh put it) lost in the South American jungle, and that is why it could not, and cannot, be found. There have been remarkable discoveries in Latin America this century—Machu Picchu, Buritaca, Akakor: genuinely lost cities, or anyway settlements, that lay undisturbed for centuries. There are probably others still waiting to be found, but El Dorado will not be among them. (I am aware of recent reports in the Brazilian press that a site being excavated near Boa Vista “is” El Dorado.1 It has certain constituents—a mountain lake, evidence of early gold-working—but as such it joins a longish list of places that may have contributed to the El Dorado legend.)

In another sense, of course, El Dorado certainly did exist. It existed, during a period that can be defined quite precisely, as an idea in people's minds, as a destination of their journeys, as a vividly specified desire. From the late 1530s, and for about a hundred years after, El Dorado—by which I mean this idea of El Dorado: the probability that it was there, the possibility of finding it, the untold riches it contained—was a craze that gripped people. It has the force field of a cultish religion. There are sudden converts and hostile skeptics; an intense rhetoric of signs and revelations. There are joyful glimpses of the promised land, though always—as the skeptics point out—at second hand.

These are two answers to the question: Where was El Dorado? It was nowhere; it was in people's heads. There is a third answer, which is that it was in different places at different times. This is a story of people searching for something, and when they failed to find what they were looking for, they explained their failure by saying that it must be somewhere else, and so the location changes.

During the sixteenth century, the location of El Dorado shifted by stages, in a generally eastward direction, across the subcontinent. The story began in the late 1530s. It was in part a refraction of rituals performed by an Andean tribe, the Chibcha or Muisca, at the sacred lake of Guatavita.2 The protagonist of this ritual, mixed in with other rumors, came to be known as el dorado, “the golden man” (also el indio dorado, “the golden Indian,” and el rey dorado, “the golden king”). The place El Dorado was the empire, or kingdom, or city of this legendary golden king. To begin with, the Spanish searched for it near the Andes of present-day Colombia, where the Chibcha were first located by the conquistador Jiménez de Quesada. Later the search moved east, to the headwaters of the Amazon: This is the El Dorado of the Omagua3 sought by Von Hutten and others. In northern Peru they searched for it in the guise of Lake Paititi, a legendary Inca location. By the end of the century, when Ralegh came on the scene—the first English expedition in search of El Dorado—its location had moved nearly a thousand miles from its original site, to the rugged Guiana Highlands south of the Orinoco River. The chief explorer of Guiana, the nominal Governor of this trackless region, was a man named Antonio de Berrio.

So this would be Ralegh's answer to the question. El Dorado stands, he would tell you, in the mountainous heart of Guiana, on the shores of a huge inland lake, the Lake of Manoa.4 This belief was mostly based on Spanish information obtained by Ralegh: It came from seized papers and seized people, notably Antonio de Berrio himself, whom Ralegh captured at Trinidad in April 1595. There was, at the time of his departure, no printed information about this latest siting of El Dorado.5 This was part of the excitement. Manoa was a secret, privileged superseding of those other known, printed, failed Dorados. Thus Thomas Harriot, Ralegh's chief adviser, writing to Sir Robert Cecil in 1596: “Concerning the Eldorado which hath been showed your Honour, out of the Spanish book of Acosta [i.e., José de Acosta, Historia Natural y Moral de les Indias, 1590] … I shall show you it is not ours, that we mean, there being three.”6 Guiana was not the only Dorado, but is “our” Dorado. It is what we mean when we say those magic syllables.

In one sense, I suppose, the location of El Dorado remains constant; it was always farther on. It is a few days' march away; it is in the next range of mountains. In the account of one Guiana expedition, led by Domingo de Vera in 1593,7 they seem to be only half a league away from it, less than two miles, practically close enough to smell the woodsmoke and see the first glint of solid gold spires rising up above the trees. But they are tired, and frightened of the fierce resistance they will encounter. They move away from the area. This near encounter is subsumed into the reservoir of rumors.

The last, synaptic gap is never bridged. No one ever gets there. There is only the journey, the approach toward something that you cannot reach, something—one might infer from De Vera's curious retreat—that you dare not reach.

We see already two aspects to this search for El Dorado: the geographical and the psychological. We have to hold both in mind to understand the nature of this enterprise. I am interested in Ralegh's journey as just that—an actual physical journey—but I am interested also in the peculiar mental ambience that pervades the El Dorado quest.

It is conventional to describe those who went looking for El Dorado as people gripped by an obsession. This seems true but vague. I think of El Dorado more precisely as a projection.

Early maps of South America show the literally marginal knowledge that Europeans had of the continent. By the mid-sixteenth century there are small settlements all around the coast, mostly Spanish, some Portuguese. There are expeditions up the rivers, over the mountains, into the jungles and savannas. But the travel was hard, and they never got very far. These are nibblings of reconnaissance around the coastal margins. The center, the core, of South America remained untouched. The great transverse rivers were navigated—the Orinoco by Diego de Ordaz in 1531, the Amazon by Francisco de Orellana ten years later—but what lay between them and beyond them no one really knew.

This is always where El Dorado is: somewhere farther in, in this unknown landmass at the center of South America. It is placed in the empty spaces of the map, like the axiomatic dragons of medieval cartography. This is what I mean by projection. Onto the blank screen of terra incognita is projected this image of the golden city (or really these twin images, of the golden king and his golden city). These images embody desires that are quite conscious and recognized—for wealth, for power, for possession—but also convey, as projections do, other more buried meanings, other fantasies and desires. There are analogies here with two other tenacious legends of the region, the Amazons and the cannibals. These are also to some extent projections, embodying European fantasies and, in this case, fears. Ralegh will have something to say about them as well.

This is a simple but necessary observation: that El Dorado is something that proceeds from the mind of the searcher, and from his European culture, but is externalized from it, placed out there in the unexplored hinterlands, the still-imagined landscapes, of the New World.

El Dorado is an image, but it is also very much a story. These descriptions and imaginings of El Dorado are a kind of early oral tradition in South America. The story is carried from place to place. Details are added and subtracted. It is smoothed and modified and reiterated. It travels like a folk tale, and has in itself something of the imagery and narrative of folk tales: a golden king, a lake in the mountains, a quest. This is perhaps useful as a slight modifying of the word “legend,” which suggests something dim and distant, whereas to those involved in these journeys it was the story of the day, and they were the latest episode of it. It almost begins to sound like a soap opera.

So we understand El Dorado as something constructed—an icon, a projected fantasy, an American folk tale—but we cannot consign it completely to the world of imagination, since the search for it involved real journeys that had many real and practical results.

Geographically, that shifting location of El Dorado is also the shifting frontier of exploration in South America. El Dorado, lying just beyond the known frontier, draws people on, forges the trails that will later convey settlers and soldiers and traders. In this sense, the quest for El Dorado is synonymous with the whole process of European exploration in tropical America. Those four syllables acted as a superb kind of slogan, a piece of publicity, a recruitment drive. It was something with the power to draw together these unwieldy and hugely expensive caravans of soldiers, adventurers, and press-ganged natives, and propel them off to reconnoiter new corners of the continent.

The typical charter, or “patent,” to an El Dorado searcher charged him to “discover and people” (descubrir y poblar) the lands all around. For the native tribes, the “peopling” of regions by Spanish settlers meant expropriation and enslavement, and sometimes extinction. This is a bleaker reading of El Dorado—a colonial propaganda, the gloss on a policy of genocide, the first logging roads.

Notes

    Chilean ethnologist Roland Stevenson, excavating burial grounds at Ilha de Maracá in northeast Brazil, has found petroglyph art, evidence of gold working, and shell fossils that suggest the former presence of a lake (Folha de São Paulo, May 27, 1993).

    The evolution of El Dorado from Chibcha religious rites is exhaustively studied in Ramos Perez, El Mito del Dorado. See also Hemming, pp. 97-109; A. L. Kroeber, “The Chibcha,” Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 2 (1947), pp. 905-9. I describe a visit to Lago de Guatavita in The Fruit Palace (London: Heinemann, 1985), pp. 105-7. The name El Dorado is first heard (as “el indio dorado”) in a report by Luis Daza, a lieutenant of Benalcazar's, in 1534, but he refers not to the Chibcha but to a more southerly Andean tribe, probably Sinu or Quimbaya (Ramos Perez, El Mito del Dorado, pp. 216-17, 470). The imagery and the name are initially disparate, but have merged by the beginning of the 1540s.

    Hemming, pp. 134-42. This advanced, gold working, Tupi-speaking tribe was contacted by Orellana and Von Hutten in the early 1540s, and became a focus for El Dorado expeditions in upper Amazonia.

    The origin of this name is variously interpreted. Schomburgk (p. 18) links it to the Mahanaos, a tribe formerly found around the upper Rupununi in Guyana; Ojer to the “river called Maroa” mentioned by Von Hutten in the 1540s (Ojer [1966], p. 472). The Manau Indians of the Río Negro, whose name is the origin of the Amazon port of Manaus, are often mentioned. More convincing is the observation first made by the Jesuit historian José Gumilla (Historia Natural del Río Orinoco, Vol. 1 [1791], p. 356), that manoa is simply the word for “lake” in the language of the Achagua, whom Antonio de Berrio encountered near the Meta River in 1585. The name is Berrio's coinage, based on Achagua rumors about the Guiana Highlands. See Hemming, p. 153; Gregorio Hernández de Alba, “The Achagua,” Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 4 (1948), p. 412.

    The reference to Manoa in Juan Castellanos, Elegías de Varónes Ilustres de Indias (Part 3, Canto 2) dates from the mid-1580s, but the third part of the Elegías remained unpublished during Ralegh's lifetime. It is anyway a dismissal of the claims for Manoa as El Dorado.

    Harriot to Cecil, July 11, 1596 (HMC Cecil 6, p. 276).

    A captured report of his expedition to the lower Orinoco, and his possession of the “provinces of Guiana and Dorado” on behalf of Berrio, is appended to the Discoverie (pp. 105-10). It was “taken at sea” by Captain George Popham in 1594.

Sources

1. Documentary Sources

Acronyms in the Notes refer to the following collections:

AGI: Achivo General de Indias, Seville

BM: British Museum, London

CSP: Calendar of State Papers (printed abstracts)

HMC: Historical Manuscripts Commission (Cecil MSS at Hatfield House; Sidney MSS at Penshurst Place)

PRO: Public Record Office, London (SP: State Papers; HCA: High Court of Admiralty proceedings)

2. Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana

The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) … By Sir W. Ralegh, Knight was published by Robert Robinson in early 1596. Minor variants in extant copies show that at least three further editions were issued in that year.

A facsimile of the 1596 edition (British Library, shelf mark G.7169) is published by Scolar Press (Leeds, 1967).

All page references to the Discoverie refer to the 1596 edition. I have not attempted to source every extract I use. Many occur within a narrative sequence, and can be found easily enough by the interested reader.

Other editions referred to are:

De Bry: Brevis Descriptio Regni Guianae, ed. Theodore de Bry (Frankfurt, 1599). This is Part 8 of De Bry's monumental part-work, known variously as America, or the Great and Small Voyages. A German edition appeared in the same year. There were second editions in Latin (1625) and German (1624).

Hulsius: Kurtze Wunderbare Beschreibung Desz Goldreichen Königsreichs Guianae, ed. Levinus Hulsius (Nuremburg, 1599). This is Part 5 of Hulsius's collection Sechs und Zwanzig Schiffarten. It is a very truncated text, interesting only for the engravings that accompany it.

Schomburgk: The first modern edition, by Sir Robert H. Schomburgk (London: Hakluyt Society, 1848), containing notes based on his extensive travels in British Guiana and Venezuela.

Harlow: The best modern edition, by V. T. Harlow (London: Argonaut Press, 1928), containing a number of previously unpublished documents drawn from AGI and BM.

Books and Articles

Hemming, John. The Search for El Dorado. London: Joseph, 1978.

Ojer Celigueta, Pablo. La Formación del Oriente Venezolano. Caracas: Universidad Católica, 1966.

Ramos Perez, Demetrio. El Mito del Dorado: Su Génesis y Proceso. Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1973.