The Golden Dream

Seekers of El Dorado

Robert Silverberg

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780821441022
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

One of the most persistent legends in the annals of New World exploration is that of the Land of Gold. This mythical site was located over vast areas of South America (and later, North America); the search for it drove some men mad with greed and, as often as not, to their untimely deaths.

In this history of quest and adventure, Robert Silverberg traces the fate of Old World explorers lured westward by the myth of El Dorado. From the German conquistadores licensed by the Spanish king to operate out of Venezuela, to the journeys of Gonzalo Pizarro in the Amazon basin, and to the nearly miraculous voyage of Francisco Orellana to the mouth of the Amazon River, encountering the warlike women who gave the river its name, violence and bloodshed accompanied the determined adventurers. Sir Walter Raleigh and a host of other explorers spent small fortunes and many lives trying to locate Manoa, a city that was rumored to be El Dorado—City of Gold. Celebrated science fiction author Robert Silverberg recreates these legendary quests in The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado.

1

THE GILDED MAN OF CUNDINAMARCA

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Illustrations
• 1. The Gilded Man of Cundinamarca
• 2. The German Conquistadores
• 3. The Conquest of New Granada
• 4. El Dorado of the Omaguas
• 5. The Cruise of the Tyrant Aguirre
• 6. Many Seekers
• 7. The Journeys of Antonio De Berrio
• 8. Raleigh and the Gold of Manoa
• 9. The End of the Quest
• Bibliography
• Sources of Quoted Material
• Index