The high plateau of Cundinamarca in the interior of Colombia was once
an inland sea. Its vestiges remain in small lakes which the Indians
held sacred, and into which they cast offerings of emeralds and golden
ornaments. There was a special ceremony at Lake Guatavitá. When a
cacique died and another was chosen, a long procession moved down to
the shore. At the head went mourners, nude and wailing, their bodies
stained with red ochre. Behind them were other groups in jaguar skins,
their hair dressed with feathers, their limbs agleam with barbaric
jewelwork. Amid the joyful tumult of horns and pipes followed the
priests in tall black caps and long black robes. In the rear came high
priests and nobles carrying a barrow hung with disks of gold. Upon the
barrow rode El Dorado--the Gilded Man--newly chosen chief of an obscure
native tribe, and destined to become, through no quality of his own,
the elusive central figure in the most singular chapter in exploration,
above all others the figure of fate in South America.
He was well named, with the poetry wherewith Spain had invested the
very headlands and harbors that her sons had found in the west. Like
the mourners, the Gilded Man was naked, and yet he was clad. His body
had been rubbed with fragrant gums, and priests with tubes had blown
gold dust over him, until he gleamed like the god of day incarnate.
Arrived at the shore, the enameled chief went upon a raft with his
cortège and was ferried to the middle of the lake. There he plunged
in and laved himself while the people shouted and the trumpets brayed
on the beach. The golden dust that had covered him glimmered down
through the water as an offering to its deity. In its wake followed the
bracelets and brooches which the attendant lords flung into the pool.
So the ceremony ended.
This rite, beautiful and significant, is history, and not baseless
legend. Golden ornaments have been uncovered in the lake, which was
drained by modern treasure-seekers; among them was a piece wrought with
some art which seems to be a representation of the sacred raft and its
passengers. Humboldt thinks that the rite came from warmer regions and
that the nude figures and coronation bath are alien to the climate of
the tableland. But the fatal feature of the ceremony is that it was
already history when the Spaniards heard of it. The Muysca Indians of
the Bogota region subjugated the Muysca Indians of the Guatavitá region
about the time of the discovery of America. The custom of bathing a
gilded cacique passed with this small tribal conquest. The memory of it
remained. Unique among the customs of the continent, it was talked of
along the coasts of the Caribbean when the Spaniards came. There were
rumors of it in Peru, and even farther south.
“Let us go in search of that gilded Indian,” said Belalcazar when a
native of the north brought the first news of him to Quito, which had
fallen to Pizarro a few years before. The Spaniards went, and found
all there was to find--the deep waters of Guatavitá. But this did not
content them. The Gilded Man was a symbol. He stood for something
larger than a rite that might take place once in a generation. He stood
for the very arrogance and folly of a royal and a priestly wealth that
must be beyond measure. Every sunrise the body of the haughty savage
was covered afresh with glittering dust. Every sunset, so the Spaniards
fabled, he cleansed himself in a pool, the bottom of which had slowly
paved itself with gold, as generation after generation of his dynasty
performed their ablutions. Only a mighty nation and a rich could have
so prodigal a king; and so El Dorado came to mean not so much a man as
a golden city in a gilded land. The altars and ewers and basins of its
temples, the furnishings and plate of its palaces, the jewels and table
service of its nobles--here was promise of a booty to match the loot of
Mexico and Peru.
In seeking it Spain spent more lives and sank more treasure than in all
its conquests in the New World.
Somehow the land that held it seemed to recede as the exploring columns
advanced. It was sought in Colombia, in Venezuela, in eastern Peru,
in northwestern Brazil, in Bolivia, and from Paraguay. Over a great
inverted triangle the base of which was a line nearly a thousand
miles long drawn east from the Cordilleras of Colombia nearly to
the mouth of the Orinoco, and the apex of which was in Paraguay two
thousand miles to the south, ceaselessly marched the expeditions. The
El Dorado country of the exploring parties--the region which knew
their tread--was thus a territory of about a million square miles.
It repeated the general lines of the continent itself, an enclave of
illusion surrounded by the realities of mountain and coast.
Into this triangle from all sides struck the Spanish columns. They
moved east, north, and south from Quito, south from the Caribbean,
south and west from Trinidad, north from Asuncion. They climbed
mountains, forded rivers, penetrated deserts. They froze in the passes
of the Andes, sickened in the flooded, fever-haunted valley of the
Amazon, died of hunger in the pathless plains; and everywhere the
poisoned Indian arrows found their targets. Three of the columns, one
of which had been on the road for five years, entered the plateau
of Cundinamarca at the same time--a coincidence without parallel in
history. Germans and Englishmen also essayed the adventure. As for
Spain, when de Silva appealed for funds and followers, the country
could have been depopulated, says Padre Simon, so strong was the belief
in the Gilded Land.
Under the fable of the Gilded King ran other delusions. It was thought
that the northern part of South America was rich in the precious
metals. It was thought that the auriferous steeps of Peru and New
Granada swept eastward almost to the mouth of the Orinoco. There was
no comprehension of the continental extent of intertribal trade, and
the presence of gold among Indian tribes was thought to be proof that
it could be had in their country, even when this was flat prairie or
inundated forest. Native traders followed their own path from the Andes
to the Caribbean; it is significant that the site of the legendary city
moved along it through successive generations almost from end to end.
The search for it falls into four chapters--the quest of El Dorado of
Cundinamarca; the quest of El Dorado of Canelas; the quest of El Dorado
of the Omaguas; the quest of El Dorado of Manoa.
By the chance meeting of three expeditions, already noted, the end of
the quest for El Dorado of Cundinamarca is sheer pageantry. Belalcazar,
lieutenant of Pizarro and governor of Quito, had sent his captains in
1535 to discover what he conceived to be a golden valley between Pasto
and Popayan in the Cordilleras of southern Colombia, not far from the
South Sea. The following year he undertook the search in person and
pushed it farther north to the plateau of Bogota. There he found two
other expeditions already in contact. Quesada had started from Santa
Marta with eight hundred men and a hundred horses. With this command
he had subjugated the Chibcha nation, numbering a million persons if
the chroniclers are right, and dispersed an army of twenty thousand men
which they had put in the field. After difficult marching and fighting
he brought a handful of men--a hundred foot and sixty horse--to the
neighborhood of Bogota. Soon he saw approach the remnants of an
expedition which had left the coast of Venezuela five years before. The
German, Federmann, brought to the plateau a hundred ragged men out of
the four hundred well-equipped soldiers with whom he had started.
The three commands bivouacked almost within striking distance of each
other. They presented a spectacular contrast, for the men from Peru
were in Spanish steel and scarlet, those from Santa Marta wore Indian
fabrics, while the men from Venezuela were clad in the skins of wild
animals. The clergy labored feverishly to avert the expected appeal to
arms, and for once in the history of New World exploration resolute men
of the Iberian strain settled their differences without fighting. The
three captains went back to Spain together where each laid his claim
to the governorship of New Granada before the throne. Only Belalcazar
was recognized and he only with the post of Adelantado in the Popayan
region.
The quest of El Dorado of Canelas is the story of the expedition
of Gonzalo Pizarro and the secession therefrom of his lieutenant,
Orellana. Across all the history of Spanish exploration flashes the
treacherous and brilliant deed of Orellana, somewhat as the “moving
equator”--the Amazon--which he discovered, cuts across the meridians
of longitude between the Andes and the Atlantic. Canelas was the Land
of Cinnamon, and here, and here only upon the soil of America, the
two leading motives of exploration--the search for gold, the search
for spices--were interwoven. Pizarro had heard of a fabled spiceland
hard by the territories of the Gilded King, and this was his avowed
objective. But his imagination roved further. In the valley of the
Napo, a stream which for a space forms the boundary between Ecuador and
modern Colombia, there were plains where the inhabitants wore armor of
“massy gold.” Gonzalo would have a look at this armor. He set forth
with 500 Spaniards, 4,000 Indians, 150 horses, 1,000 dogs, and 5,000
swine and “Peruvian sheep.”
While threading the passes at the very threshold of the journey a
tremendous earthquake rocked the mountains under his feet, and an
Indian village with hundreds of houses sank out of sight. Followed
the tempests, and for six weeks tropical rainstorms with incessant
thunder and lightning beat upon the men. It was a prelude in keeping
with the disasters to come. The Land of Cinnamon was found, and left
behind as too remote to offer present profit. A brigantine was built
on the Napo, and Orellana was sent ahead with it to gather supplies in
the Indian settlements. The party never came back, but swept down the
Amazon in a wild adventure to the Atlantic sea, whence their tales of
the mighty river, its warrior women, its still stranger peoples, and
its temples roofed with gold, set Spain on fire. Gonzalo waited for
months, but he was of the strain of the Pizarros--all hero as well as
all scoundrel--and did not succumb when he knew he had been betrayed.
In a march of over a year he led the remnant of his command back to
Quito. All his Indians had died or deserted, and only eighty Spaniards
remained. When they entered the City of the Line in June 1542, it
seemed, says Prescott, as if the charnel-house had given up its dead.
El Dorado of the Omaguas had many seekers, and in some measure unveiled
itself before the eyes of Philip Von Hutten. After him, the Gilded
Land had for a time a place certain on the map. It was the region
between the Guaviare and Caqueta rivers in southeastern Colombia and
northwestern Brazil--the territory of the Omaguas, a rich and numerous
Indian nation.
Von Hutten was a relative of the Welsers, the Augsburg bankers to whom
Charles V had ceded a large tract in Tierra-firma, and who had already
sent out Federmann for the adventure of Cundinamarca. The second German
expedition began almost humbly. Von Hutten had only 130 men, and when
he found that Quesada was ahead of him with 250 men, he was content to
follow in his tracks, hoping to share the rewards of discovery. But
when Quesada reached the headwaters of the Caqueta, he had seen enough,
and Von Hutten pushed ahead into the unknown.
His Indian guide told him of a populous city called Macatoa in a
country rich with gold, and he even displayed small golden apples which
came from there. The winter rains overtook the command on its road to
this halfway house to El Dorado, and, marooned on high ground, the men
subsisted on maize and ants, and on grubs, beetles, and roots. Their
very hair and beards fell off, but at length they reached Macatoa, and
went on to the land of the Omaguas.
From a hill they saw at last the city they sought. It stretched beyond
the utmost range of the vision--long streets and densely clustered
houses, and a temple. In the temple, the guide said, were idols of
gold as tall as small children, and one golden statue as tall as a
woman, with other treasures above price. Beyond, he assured them, lay
still richer cities. What they saw and what they heard were enough
for Von Hutten and his band. There were only forty left of them, and
within the city, they were told, was a large force of native warriors.
The adventurers clapt spurs to their horses and dashed in--and then
dashed out again, their leader wounded and fifteen thousand Indians
in pursuit. The figures are their own, as well as the statement that
they beat off the attacking force and retired. Afterward Von Hutten was
murdered by his men.
To die on the march, to be stabbed by one’s companions, or to be
beheaded by one’s king, seemed the lot predestined for captains who
sought the Gilded Devil.
As was proved again when the Spaniards quested for Cibola, an Indian
town is a deceptive thing when seen at a distance. What Von Hutten
really saw was probably a collection of closely grouped villages, and
among them a council house or temple, larger than the others but no
more imposing than the bark communal houses under which at that time
Algonquins were living upon Manhattan Island. Yet the bruit of his
discovery launched expedition after expedition from New World and Old.
Martin de Proveda, starting from Peru, reached the country of the
Omaguas and went on to Bogota. Pedro de Silva brought a party of six
hundred out of Spain, and in a six months’ journey across the llanos of
Venezuela saw all but thirty die or desert. He tried again with another
party of 170 Spaniards going up the Orinoco. Famine, disease, and
Indian arrows accounted for every member of his party save one.
There is evidence that unruly spirits were encouraged to seek El
Dorado in order to rid the settled places of the New World of their
turbulence. Such was the expedition which Pedro de Ursua led out of
Peru in 1559. A rabble of lawless adventurers had been attracted
thither by the civil wars which followed the conquest. The viceroy was
glad to commission this young officer and see him depart with these
“Gentlemen and old souldiers of Peru” as Lopez Vaz called them. When
they reached the Indian villages of Omagua the expected happened.
The men murdered their leader, and the command fell to Aguirre, who
told them that whoever spoke further of El Dorado should die. With
his followers he set forth to reach the Atlantic and return by way of
Panama to Peru, where he purposed to seize “riches, bread, wine, flesh,
and faire women also.” His men murdered him in turn, but not until he
had done an amazing thing. Starting down the Amazon, his boats won the
sea by way of the Orinoco, having used the Cassiquiare to cross from
one river system to the other.
The Omagua chapter ends with the great and tragic expedition of
Gonsalo Ximenes de Quesada, conqueror of New Granada, and one of the
largest figures among the conquistadors, brother of the Quesada who
had sunk his means in a like search eighteen years before. With 350
Spanish soldiers, 1,500 Indians, a number of negro slaves, and a train
of cattle and swine, Ximenes left Bogota in 1579. Torrential rains,
inundated lands, prairie fires, mosquitoes, Indian warfare, disease,
famine--the disastrous routine of other expeditions--were repeated on a
larger canvas. Quesada got as far as the confluence of the Guaviare and
Orinoco, and then had to return. He brought back seventy-four Spaniards
and four Indians, and he left behind with his dead a fortune of two
million dollars scattered along the trails of the wilderness.
The quest of El Dorado of Manoa lowers a curtain, rich and somber
and yet of fantastic design, upon the career of the most remarkable
Englishman of the Elizabethan age. In this last phase of a long
delusion other explorers led their thousands to die in the jungles
of the Orinoco, but their endeavor does not so engage attention as
that of Raleigh, who lost little save his own fortune and head. There
are two names, and then the Elizabethan. Antonio de Berreo, married
to Quesada’s niece, came from New Granada down the Meta and part way
down the Orinoco for three years of dark futility. He came again and
founded towns at the confluence of the Caroni and the Orinoco, and in
the island of Trinidad at the Orinoco’s mouth. His lieutenant, Domingo
de Vera, went on to Spain and came back with a fleet and two thousand
men. These perished, all but a few, in the two towns de Berreo had
founded, or in the leagues of turbulent river that rolled between them,
or in the fever-wasted jungles into which they set forth to find Manoa.
De Berreo himself fell a prisoner to Raleigh, who had set sail from
England about the same time that de Vera embarked from Spain.
This time the Gilded Phantom, in order to make sure of victims in an
age about to grow weary of long quests and wary of far horizons, had
come almost across the continent to entrap them. Not in the eastern
foothills of the Andes, but along the lower reaches of the Orinoco
where the Atlantic tides still throbbed, the snare was spread. In the
mighty empire of Guiana, it was said there was a lake of salt water
almost as great as the Caspian Sea, and upon it the largest, the
fairest, and the richest city of the world. A fugitive Inca had come
down from the Andes, and the nobles and merchants had followed him,
and long trains of llamas had borne their possessions through the
wilderness, and an armed host went before. They “conquered, reedified
and inlarged” Manoa, says Raleigh.
So vast was the city that when the Spaniard, Juan Martinez, was brought
into it blindfold at noon, and his face then uncovered, he moved
through it all that afternoon and night, and the next day from sun
rising to sun setting, before he came to the palace of the emigrant
Inca. At the feasts of this emperor, so de Berreo told his captor,
when he “carouseth with his captaines, tributaries and governours,”
the company stripped and were anointed with balsam and dusted off with
finely powdered gold, blown through hollow canes. So they sat, in
radiant drunkenness, for six or seven days together.
Thus the striking inaugural ceremony of a vanquished Indian tribe
on the tableland of Bogota had become in the lowlands of Venezuela
the symbol of a luxurious and sensual court, and of an intolerable
splendor. Not one man, once in a lifetime, but a host of drunken
sybarites, carousing in repeated revels, wore the golden coat; the raft
on a tarn of the western plateau had become a palace and a city greater
than any other, and seated in the eastern wilderness on a lake that was
an inland sea. Upon the mythical estate and possessions of the Gilded
King had been piled the fugitive prestige and riches of the Incas.
The magnificent and yet sordid culmination of a century of splendid
dreams and desperate endeavor, with cupidities, basenesses and heroisms
uncounted, it needed for its final victim one who embodied in signal
fashion the strength and the weaknesses of the age. It found him in Sir
Walter Raleigh.
Raleigh was the most accomplished man of his time, and every fiber of
him was Elizabethan. On the scaffold he said, “I have been a soldier,
a sailor, and a courtier, all of them courses of wickedness and vice.”
Let it be added that in them he excelled most other men. He learned
soldiering under Coligny, fighting the battles of the Huguenots. As a
sailor he took prizes of Spanish treasure ships, captured Fayal, led
the attack on the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, contributed to the strategy
that threw back the Armada; with him, as with Drake and his companions,
the ruling passion was to singe the beard of the king of Spain. As a
courtier he had his place among the vivacious friendships of the Virgin
Queen, and he was rewarded and rebuked in turn with honors, monopolies,
rustication, exile.
Raleigh introduced the use of tobacco in England and the culture of
the potato in Ireland. He founded two short-lived colonies in North
Carolina, which has honored his memory in the name of the state
capital. He aided the colonizing ventures of his stepbrother, Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, and came to North America with him. He encouraged
and aided the poet Spenser. He assisted Richard Hakluyt in bringing
out his remarkable collection of explorers’ manuscripts. It falls in
with the picture that Raleigh was skilled in brewing new drinks, one of
which bore his name; in the Tower of London he divided the time between
his library and a small distillery he had set up in a hen-house.
Like his great contemporaries, Raleigh was both a man of action
and a man of affairs--compound of statesman, _condottiere_, and
merchant-adventurer. He was also a writer of noble gifts. Instead of
moping in his long years of confinement in the Tower, he wrote there
his _History of the World_. And he made beautiful poems. “If all the
world and love were young” is his line. His is the epigram, “The
shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.” In one mood he could pen the
invocation beginning, “O eloquent, just and mightie Death,” and in
another carol,
If she undervalue me,
What care I how fair she be?
His best-known line, “Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall,”
graven by him on a windowpane for the eye of Elizabeth, was least
characteristic of Raleigh. If always he sought to climb the heights
of adventure, he had little fear to fall. This record concerns his
strangest adventure and his final fall. In most part it is the
story as recounted in his book, _The discoverie 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_. It is a
fascinating book, for seldom before or since has pen so gifted set
down a travel tale; but there is tragedy in the very title, which is
the memorial of a vain dream. Let the historian Bancroft recite the
justification, or the excuse, for the illusion of a worldly-wise man
who was also an Elizabethan: “If Elizabeth had hoped for a hyperborean
Peru in the arctic seas of America, why might not Raleigh expect to
find the city of gold on the banks of the Orinoco?”
The bare narrative of Raleigh’s first quest of El Dorado of Manoa
need not long detain, for this skillful administrator, intrepid
explorer, and subtle diplomat found no golden city, lost no men in
the wilderness, and had no trouble with the Indians, whom his engaging
bearing and politic address won to his side. He had sent a ship to
reconnoiter in 1594, and after his own expedition came and went in
1595, he sent another ship in 1596 to continue the exploration, while
he himself took command of the squadron that dashed in upon the Spanish
shipping at Cadiz. Raleigh’s Guiana flotilla of the year before
consisted of five ships, one of them from the British Admiralty. That
there might be no enemy behind him, he seized the Spanish settlement at
Trinidad, capturing de Berreo; anchoring his ships there, he set off in
barges with a hundred men up the stubborn current of the Orinoco. Six
months after he sailed from England, he was back again with some Indian
hostages, some pieces of golden ore, and the marvelous stories with
which his _Discovery_ is adorned.
His travel narrative lays its scenes in “the insular regions and broken
world” of Guiana, which then included a good part of Venezuela. Through
its pages flows “the great rage and increase” of the swollen Orinoco.
Through them flit “birds of all colours, some carnation, some crimson,
orange-tawny, and purple,” so that “it was unto us a great good passing
of the time to behold them.” “I never saw a more beautifull countrey,
nor more lively prospects,” exclaims Raleigh. From afar off he gazed on
a “mountaine of Christall.” “There falleth over it,” he says, “a mighty
river which toucheth no part of the side of the mountaine, but rusheth
over the toppe of it, and falleth to the ground with so terrible a
noyse and clamour, as if a thousand great bels were knockt one against
another.” Enters the note of gold and of politics: In Guiana, it
seemed, “every stone that we stouped to take up, promised either golde
or silver by his complexion.” For “health, good ayre, pleasure and
riches,” he concludes, “this country hath no equal, East or West.” It
would be easy for the English to defend it, for the woods are so thick
along the rivers that “a mouse cannot sit in a boat unhit from the
banke.”
The book holds also the statement of the large national aims of
Raleigh, into which, as he assured himself, the gold hunt fitted. Not
for him were mere “journeys of picory,” nor “to go long voyages, to lie
hard, to fare worse, to be parched and withered,” solely to “cozen
myselfe.” Here was “a better Indies for her Majestie than the King of
Spaine hath any.” With the gold of western America Spain bade fair
to dominate the world. Only by tapping the Indian treasure-house of
eastern America could the balance of power be restored. In a notable
passage Raleigh enunciates a theory of international politics that
would sound familiar to modern ears, if for the gold lust there were
substituted the lust of markets.
“If we consider,” he says, “the affaires of the Spanish king, what
territories he hath purchased, what he hath added to the acts of his
predecessors, how many kingdoms he hath indangered, how many armies,
garrisons & navies he hath and doth mainteine, the great losses
which he hath repaired, as in 88 above 100 saile of great ships with
their artillery, & that no yeere is lesse unfortunate but that many
vessels, treasures, and people are devoured, and yet notwithstanding
he beginneth againe like a storme to threaten shipwrack to us all: we
shall find that these abilities rise not from the trades of sacks, and
Sivil oringes, nor from ought else that either Spaine, Portugal, or any
of his other provinces produce: it is his Indian gold that indangereth
and disturbeth all the nations of Europe, it purchaseth intelligence,
creepeth into counsels, and setteth bound loyaltie at libertie, in the
greatest Monarchies of Europe.”
This enterprise of matching gold with gold, Guiana against Peru,
Raleigh hoped would be intrusted to him, and he must have pictured
himself as viceroy, under England, of such another India as Englishmen
of later centuries were to attain. Yet the _Discovery_ is a defense,
as well as a political tract and a collection of mirabilia. Raleigh’s
return, empty-handed, had aroused the resentment of some who had put
money into his venture, and the ridicule and censure of more. It was
alleged that he had procured his golden ore in Barbary, and naught
better than marcasite from Guiana. It was even noised abroad that he
had not been with the fleet at all, but had been concealed in Cornwall
while his ships were away. The dreaming adventurer had his enemies.
After his second voyage to Guiana they were able to destroy him.
Twenty-one years had elapsed since the first expedition. Twelve of
these Raleigh had spent in the Tower, imprisoned on one of the
charges of treason which in those days meant little save that a man
was disliked by the royal favorites of the moment. At sixty-four years
of age he was paroled and went to Guiana with a squadron of fourteen
vessels and the coveted commission of governor of the country. He spoke
now of a wonderful mine and little of a thing that was in the back of
his head, for still he dreamed of Manoa’s golden towers, which, as many
men would have it, were nowhere on earth.
The expedition turned out disastrously. King James had submitted to
Spain through its ambassador at London a detailed copy of Raleigh’s
plans and had received what was represented to Raleigh to be a pledge
of unmolested passage to the up-river country claimed by him by right
of discovery. He found the Spaniards fortified against him. There were
clashes in which his own son lost his life and also the governor of a
river town, kinsman of the Spanish ambassador.
Raleigh returned to face his fate, and in effect it was Spain’s
own hand that wrote the decree of death, for the two royal houses
were about to be united by marriage, and the Stuart was studiously
complaisant to the Hapsburg. Sir Walter was tried on a charge of
masking, under a project to discover a mine, a piratical raid on the
Spanish settlements--a charge which the national contacts of a hundred
years invested with a grim humor. But he was executed on a more
serviceable pretext, the long-suspended sentence for treason; nor did
it avail him to urge that the king’s commission for his voyage was in
itself a grant of pardon. The night before his death on the scaffold he
wrote these lines:
E’en such is Time, who takes in trust
Our youth and joys and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust.
Thus the great Elizabethan faced and dismissed two vanities. Equally
so he had found life itself and the mocking parable of his New World
quest--for hopes, frustration; dross for gold.
With Raleigh ended the larger expeditions to find El Dorado. There is
a little more to say. Some years before, two parties had sought the
Gilded City, starting from far south. One came from Buenos Aires in
1537, all the colonists leaving that ill-fated city, and passing up
the river in the hope either of finding El Dorado or of reaching the
Spanish settlements on Lake Titicaca. A detachment of this party halted
on the Paraguay and founded Asuncion. Another detachment, numbering two
hundred persons, pushed on into Bolivia, where the Indians ambushed and
killed them all. A later party which was led by De Chaves left Asuncion
in 1560, wandered northwest into Bolivia and there disbanded.
The imaginary lake of Manoa, sometimes called Mar Eldorado or the
Golden Sea, was delineated on maps of South America for nearly three
centuries after the time of Columbus. Periodical overflows of the
Orinoco tributaries, which cover wide regions with standing water,
serve to explain the origin and persistence of the lake legend. For the
shift of the basic legend from Colombia to Guiana, Humboldt suggests an
explanation in a custom of native tribes in the latter country. Instead
of tattooing themselves, the Indians anointed their bodies with turtle
fat and stuck spangles of mica with a metallic luster, white as silver
and red as copper, upon their skins, so that at a distance they seemed
to wear laced clothes.
In 1740 Don Manuel Centurion, the Spanish governor of Santa Thome del
Agostina, made further search for the fabled lake of Manoa and the
city washed by its waters. The popular imagination was inflamed by the
reports of an Indian who came down the river Caroni. In the southern
sky he showed the natives the dim radiance of the Clouds of Magellan.
This he said was the reflection of golden ore on an island in the lake
of legend. So may one leave the city of illusion where it belongs, in
cloudland.