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The Quest of El Dorado

IN our time the golden word Eldorado has come to mean the goal of unattained desires, the magic country of dreams that forever lies just beyond the horizon. Its literal significance has been lost in the mists of the centuries since when one deluded band of adventurers after another was exploring unknown regions of the New World in quest of the treasure city hidden somewhere in the remote interior of South America. Thousands of lives and millions of money were vainly squandered in these pilgrimages, but they left behind them one of the most singularly romantic chapters in the whole history of conquest and discovery. The legend of El Dorado was at first inspired by the tales of a wonderful and veritable dorado, or gilded man, king of a tribe of Indians dwelling, at the time of the Spanish conquest, upon the lofty tableland of Bogota, in what is now the republic of Colombia. Later investigations have accepted it as true that such a personage existed and that the ceremonies concerning which reports were current early in the sixteenth century took place at the sacred lake of Guatavia. There lived on this plateau, in what is still known as the province of Cundinamarca, small village communities of the Muysca Indians, somewhat civilized and surrounded on all sides by debased and savage tribes. They wor 335 336 THE BOOK OF BURIED TREASURE shiped the sun and moon, performed human sacrifices, and adored striking natural objects, as was the custom in Peru. The numerous lakes of the region were holy places, each regarded as the home of a particular divinity to which gold and emeralds were offered by throwing them into the water. Elsewhere than at Guatavita jewels and objects wrought of gold have been discovered in the process of draining these little lakes. Guatavita, however, is most famous of all because here originated the story of "el hombre dorado." This sheet of water is a few miles north of the capital city of Santa Fe de Bogota, more than nine thousand feet above sea level, in the heart of the Cordilleras. Near the lake is still the village called Guatavita. In 1490 the inhabitants were an independent tribe with a ruling chief. They had among them a legend that the wife of one of the earlier chiefs had thrown herself into the lake in order to escape punishment and that her spirit survived as the goddess of the place. To worship her came the people of other communities of the region, bringing their gold and precious stones to cast into the water, and Guatavita was famed for its religious pilgrimages. When-ever a new chief, or king, of Guatavita was chosen, an imposing ceremonial was observed by way of coronation. All the men marched to the lake in pro-cession, at the head a great party wailing, the bodies nude and painted with ocher as a sign of deep mourning. Behind them were groups richly deco-rated with gold and emeralds, their heads adorned with feathers, cloaks of jaguar skins hanging from their shoulders. Many uttered joyful cries or blew on trumpets and conch-shells. Then came the priests in long black robes decorated with white crosses. At the rear of the procession were the nobles escorting the newly-elected chief who rode upon a barrow hung with disks of gold. His naked body was anointed with resinous gums and covered with gold dust so that he shone like a living statue of gold. This was the gilded man, El Dorado, whose fame traveled to the coast of the Caribbean. At the shore of the lake, he and his escort stepped upon a balsa, or raft made of rushes, and moved slowly out to the middle. There the gilded one plunged into the deep water and washed off his precious covering, while with shouts and music the assembled throng threw their offerings of gold and jewels into the lake. Then the worshipers returned to the village for dancing and feasting.' In the last decade of the fifteenth century, or while Columbus was making his voyages, the tribe of Guatavita was conquered by a stronger community of the Muysca race, and the new rulers, being of a thriftier mind, made an end of the extravagant ceremony of el dorado. It is therefore assumed that the gilded man had ceased to be, full thirty years before the Spaniards first heard of him at the coast. Humboldt became interested in the legend during his South America travels and reported : "I have examined from a geographical point of view the expeditions on the Orinoco, and in a west 1 The performance of these ceremonies is vouched for by Lucas Fernandez Piedrahita, Bishop of Panama; Pedro Simon, and other early Spanish historians, translated and quoted by A. F. Bandelier in his work, "The Gilded Man (El Dorado)." This version agrees with that described in the volume written by the modern historian, Dr. Liborio Zerda, professor of the University of Colombia, El Dorado, Estudio Historico, Ethnograrco, Y Arqueologico. 338 THE BOOK OF BURIED TREASURE ern and southern direction in the eastern side of the Andes, before the tradition of El Dorado was spread among the conquerors. This tradition had its origin in the kingdom of Quito where Luiz Daza, in 1535, met with an Indian of New Granada who had been sent by his prince, the Zipa of Bogota, or the Caique of Tunja, to demand assistance from Atahuahalpa, the last Inca of Peru. This ambassador boasted, as was usual, of the wealth of his country; but what particularly fixed the attention of the Spaniards who were assembled with Daza was the history of a lord who, his body covered with gold dust, went into a lake amid the mountains. "As no historical remembrance attaches itself to any other mountain lake in this vicinity, I suppose the reference to be made to the sacred lake of Guatavita, in the plains of the Bogota, into which the gilded lord was made to enter. On the banks of this lake I saw the remains of a staircase, hewn in the rock, and used for the ceremonies of ablution. The Indians told me that powder of gold and golden vessels were thrown into this lake as a sacrifice to the Adoratorio de Guatavita. Vestiges are still found of a breach made by the Spaniards in order to drain the lake. . . . The ambassador of Bogota, whom Daza met in the kingdom of Quito, had spoken of a country situated towards the east." The latter reference means that the legend had spread from coast to coast. On the Pacific, the conquistadores of Pizarro were for a time too busily engaged in looting the enormous treasures of the last Inca of Peru to pay much heed to the lure of golden legends beckoning them further inland. The first attempt to go in search of the gilded man and his kingdom was made, not by a Spaniard, but THE QUEST OF EL DORADO 339 by a German, Ambrosius Dalfinger, who was in command of a colony of his countrymen settled on the shore of the Gulf of Venezuela, a large tract of that region having been leased by Spain to a German company. He pushed inland to the westward as far as the Rio Magdalena, treated the natives with horrible barbarity, and was driven back after losing most of his men. A few years later, and the legend was magnified into a wondrous description of a golden city. In 1538, there marched from the Atlantic coast, Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada, surnamed El Conquistador, to find the El Dorado. At the head of six hundred and twenty-five foot-soldiers and eighty-five mailed horsemen, he made his perilous way up the Rio Magdalena, through fever-cursed swamps and tribes of hostile natives, enduring hardships almost incredible until at length he came to the lofty plateau of Bogota, and the former home of the real gilded man. More than five hundred of his men had died on the journey of hunger, illness, and exposure. He found rich cities and great stores of gold and jewels, but failed to discover the El Dorado of his dreams. Many stories were afloat of other treasures to be wrested from the Muysca chiefs, but Quesada, having no more than a handful of fighting men, feared to go campaigning until he had made his position secure. He therefore established a base and laid the foundations of the present city of Bogota. One of his scouting parties brought back tidings of a tribe of very war-like women in the south who had much gold, and in this way was the myth of the Amazons linked with the El Dorado as early as 1538. Now occurred as dramatic a coincidence as could be imagined. To Quesada there appeared a Span- 340 THE BOOK OF BURIED TREASURE ish force commanded by Sebastian de Belalcazar, the conqueror of Quito, who \had come all the way from the Pacific coast, after hearing from an Indian of New Granada the story of the gilded man. No sooner had this expedition arrived than it was re-ported to Quesada that white men with horses were coming from the east. This third company of pilgrims in quest of El Dorado proved to be Nicholas Federmann and his hard-bitted Germans from the colony in Venezuela who had followed the trail made by Dalfinger and then plunged into the wilderness beyond his furthest outpost. Thus these three daring expeditions, Quesada from the north, Belalcazar from the south, and Federmann from the east, met face to face on the hitherto unknown plateau of Cundinamarca. None had been aware of the others' march in search of this goal, and each had believed himself to be the discoverer of this country. They were ready to fly at one another's throats, for there could be no amity when gold was the prize at stake. Curiously enough the three forces were evenly matched in fighting strength, each with about one hundred and sixty men. One might think that the two Spanish parties would have united to drive the Germans from the home of El Dorado, but greed stifled all natural ties and emotions. A conflict was averted by the tact and sagacity of Quesada and the priests of the expeditions who acted as a committee of arbitration. It was finally agreed among the leaders that the several claims should be submitted to the Spanish Court, and Quesada, Belalcazar, and Federmann set out for Spain to appear in person, leaving their forces in possession of the disputed territory. The command of the Spanish troops was turned over to Hernan Perez de Quesada, the cruel and greedy brother of the leader, who fortified himself at Bogota and proceeded to rob the Muysca people of the last ounce of gold that could be extorted by means of torture and all manner of unspeakable wickedness. In 1540 he tried to drain the lake of Guatavita, tempted by the stories of the vast treasures of gold and jewels that, for centuries, had been thrown into the water by the worshipers, but he recovered valuables only to the amount of four thousand ducats. It was the remains of his drainage tunnel which Humboldt found and made note of. With the conquest of this region was obtained the last great store of gold discovered by the plundering Spaniards in South America. These explorers finished when Pizarro had begun in Peru. To convey the treasure from Bogota to the coast of the Carribean a road was built through the mountains, much of it cut as a narrow shelf in solid rock, winding and dipping in a dizzy route to connect with the upper reaches of navigation on the Rio Magdalena. This was the famous El Camino Real, or "King's Highway" which is still used as one of the roads by which the capital of Colombia, Santa Fe de Bogota is reached by the traveler of the twentieth century. It was to intercept one of these treasure trains that Amyas Leigh and his doughty comrades of "Westward Ho !" lay in wait, and the fiction of Kingsley will better serve to portray the time and place than the facts as the old historians strung them together. "Bidding farewell once and forever to the green ocean of the eastern plains, they have crossed the Cordillera; they have taken a longing glance at the 342 THE BOOK OF BURIED TREASURE city of Santa Fe, lying in the midst of rich gardens on its lofty mountain plateau, and have seen, as was to be expected, that it was far too large for any attempt of theirs. But they have not altogether thrown away their time. Their Indian lad has discovered that a gold-train is going down from Santa Fe toward the Magdalena ; and they are waiting for it beside the miserable rut that serves for a road, encamped in a forest of oaks which would make them almost fancy themselves back in Europe were it not for the tree-ferns which form the under-growth; and were it not for the deep gorges opening at their very feet; in which while their brows are swept by the cool breezes of a temperate zone, they can see far below, dim through their everlasting vapor bath of rank, hot steam, the mighty forms and gorgeous colors of the tropic forest. . . . At last, up from beneath there was a sharp crack and a loud cry. The crack was neither the snapping of a branch, nor the tapping of a wood-pecker; the cry was neither the scream of a parrot, nor the howl of a monkey. `That was a whip's crack,' said Yeo, `and a woman's wail. They are close here, lads!' " `A woman's? Do they drive women in their gangs?' asked Amyas. `Why not, the brutes? There they are, sir. Did you see their basnets glitter V 'Men!' said Amyas in a low voice. `I trust you all not to shoot till I do. Then give them one arrow, out swords, and at them! Pass the word along.' "Up they came, slowly, and all hearts beat loud at their coming. First, about twenty soldiers, only one half of whom were on foot; the other half being borne, incredible as it may seem, each in a chair on the back of a single Indian, while those who marched had consigned their heaviest armor and their arquebuses into the hands of attendant slaves, who were each pricked on at will by the pikes of the soldiers behind them. . . . Last of this troop came some inferior officer also in his chair, who as he went slowly up the hill, with his face turned toward the gang which followed, drew every other second the cigar from his lips to inspirit them with those pious ejaculations . . . which earned for the pious Spaniards of the sixteenth century the uncharitable imputation of being the most abominable swearers in Europe. `" . . . A line of Indians, Negroes, and Zamboes, naked, emaciated, scarred with whips and fetters, and chained together by their left wrists, toiled upwards, panting and perspiring under the burden of a basket held up by a strap which passed across their foreheads. Yeo's sneer was but too just; there were not only old men and youths among them, but women; slender young girls, mothers with children running at their knee ; and at the sight, a low murmur of indignation rose from the ambushed Englishmen, worthy of the free and righteous hearts of those days, when Raleigh could appeal to man and God, on the ground of a common humanity, in behalf of the outraged heathens of the New World. "But the first forty, so Amyas counted, bore on their backs a burden which made all, perhaps, but him and Yeo, forget even the wretches who bore it. Each basket contained a square package of care-fully corded hide; the look whereof friend Amyas knew full well. " `What's in they, Captain' 344 THE BOOK OF BURIED TREASURE " 'Gold!' And at that magic word all eyes were strained greedily forward, and such a rustle followed that Amyas, in the very face of detection, had to whisper : " `Be men, be men, or you will spoil all yet.' " The muskets and long-bows of the stout English-men avenged the wrongs of this pitiable caravan, al-though there was no help for a vast multitude of Indians who were put to death with devilish torments by their conquerors. But the legend of the El Dorado still survived and it spread like an avenging spirit. "Transplanted by the over-excited imagination of the white man, the vision appeared like a mirage enticing, deceiving and leading men to destruction, on the banks of the Orinoco, and the Amazon, in Omagua and Parime." The conquest of Bogota made them believe that the gilded man and his golden kingdom were somewhere just beyond. The licentiate, Juan de Castellanos, wrote a poem which was published in 1589, telling of the legend as it had existed in Quito in the days of the Conquistadores. "When with that folk came Annasco, Benalcazar learned from a stranger Then living in the city of Quito, But who called Bogota his home, Of a land there rich in golden treasure, Rich in emeralds glistening the rock. A chief was there, who stripped of vesture, Covered with golden dust from crown to toe, Sailed with offerings to the gods upon a lake Borne by the waves upon a fragile raft, The dark flood to brighten with golden light." 2 2 Translated by A. F. Bandelier.