El Dorado
Episode 167: How the Mythical City of Gold Was Actually Always a Person
A colorized version of Edouard Riou's 19th century engraving titled "L'Eldorado"
Listen:
Watch:
Transcript:
In the 1500s, a time of exploration and exploitation, a time when the world seemed theirs for the taking, a new world, a world dripping with gold and precious gems, exotic plants, cotton, sugar, and tobacco, rich lands as far as the eye could see, just waiting to be taken, many European explorers set their sights on the prize of all prizes: El Dorado, the golden city of lore, surely nestled somewhere in South America. They had heard tales of this place told again and again by indigenous South Americans: it’s over there, it’s over here, it’s just down the river, it’s away from me and my village. Just get away from us. And so these fearless explorers had gone, over the freezing Andes mountains, through the perilous Amazon rainforest. They hurled themselves down rivers, faced starvation, mutiny, and murder. And in the end? Not a one of them found anything halfway resembling the golden city they sought. But, when we look at the roots of this story, this myth, the myth of El Dorado, one thing becomes clear - El Dorado was not a city at all. It was never a city. It was a person, a man, El Dorado, the gilded one. So who was El Dorado and how did his story get so very twisted? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Last week I told you the story of Sir Walter Raleigh, favorite courtier of Queen Elizabeth I, best known for sending the first failed English colony to the Americas in the 1580s and helping to introduce tobacco and potatoes to England. I feel like we mostly focus on that part of Raleigh’s story and forget about the last 20 or so years of his life which he mostly spent imprisoned in the Tower of London under the reign of King James I. But in those last 2 decades of Raleigh’s life, he actually did extraordinary things. He traveled to South America twice to search for the fabled golden city of El Dorado. He even wrote a whole book about the area where he believed it could be found: Guiana, or present day Venezuela. Eventually, after Raleigh’s second expedition to this region went horribly awry, and he was ultimately responsible for attacking a Spanish settlement and killing the Spanish governor after promising not to, Raleigh was executed, beheaded. So it’s not a stretch at all to say that Raleigh gave up his life in search of El Dorado. But why, why was he so sure that it was real? Where had these tales of El Dorado, a golden city even come from? Today, we’re going to get to the bottom of that. It’s also hispanic heritage month, by the way, from September 15th to October 15th, bit of a weird one, it doesn’t get an entire month it gets like half of two different months, which, you know, is an entire month. But anyway, El Dorado is the perfect segue from Sir Walter Raleigh into some hispanic heritage.
So where did the myth of this golden city in South America come from? Well first let’s quickly recap how the Spanish ended up in South America to begin with. As you know, Spanish exploration of the Americas started with Christopher Columbus in 1492, I have a whole two parter on that fool, episodes 80 and 81. He landed and began colonizing islands in the Caribbean. He saw small amounts of gold when he got there and then mistakenly made lofty promises to the Spanish king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, that he could bring them as much gold as they could ever want. They were like “yes please.” But then of course he realized that there wasn’t actually much gold there at all. So the Spanish started setting their sights on the mainland, Central and South America. They begin conquering large, powerful indigenous civilizations, mostly by accident by the spread of disease. We have Hernan Cortez conquering the Aztecs in Mexico, that’s episode 22. And we also have Francisco Pizarro conquering the Inca which I have not yet covered but it’s definitely been added to my list. I can’t decide if I’m going to talk about that next week or if I’m going to go back to England and talk about when King Charles I, son of King James, was beheaded and the monarchy was temporarily dissolved. I’m torn. I think I’m going to put up a poll on Instagram, @historyfixpodcast, so y’all go over there and let me know which topic you’d rather hear.
Anyway, Cortez and Pizarro are conquering these vast civilizations and claiming all this territory for Spain and Spain is really setting up shop in Central and South America. Spain was like terrible over there, guys, the things that they do, the way that they treat the indigenous people is so horrific, according to the records left behind anyway. I remember after my, I think it was after my episode about the Mayan calendar, episode 39, this concept of Mayanism, that the Maya are this mystical almost magical group of people stemming from essentially racism and a disbelief on the part of Europeans that they could be as advanced as they were. I had just talked about Cortez defeating the Aztecs and then about the Maya and I remember a listener contacting me, he was from Latin America, or maybe he was from Spain, sorry I don’t remember, if you’re listening, please reach back out. And he said, something to the effect of “a lot of that is just the leyenda negra, the black legend” this idea that Spanish exploits in the Americas, their cruelty there was exaggerated by their enemies at the time, like the English, that English accounts and even some Spanish accounts of what the Spanish did in South America were intentionally exaggerated to make the Spanish look bad and like these horrible cruel tyrants. I don’t know. Were the Spanish demonized in history by their enemies or were they actually just acting very very badly. That’s a rabbit hole for another day, possibly for a mini fix? But I always keep it in the back of my mind. With all history, really, we should remember that there’s at least two sides to every story and quite often we only hear one of them. But, then again, with these tales of the Spanish conquest of South America, we are mostly hearing the Spanish side, and this is what they are telling us that they did. So, there’s that.
Anyway, I’m spiraling, major Spanish influence in Central and South America now after Cortez and Pizarro, they are spreading throughout the region and setting up colonies left and right coming into the 1500s. And they are, of course, having a lot of contact with indigenous people who are pretty much everywhere before disease and conflict, but mostly disease killed something like 90% of them. And they start to hear bits and pieces about a man. Eventually this man gets twisted into a whole city, but he is very clearly a man that they are initially hearing about, that they, the Spanish, call El Dorado, the gilded one. In 1541 we have an account written by a Spanish historian named Oviedo. Oviedo records some stuff that he has been told by Spanish inhabitants of Quito in modern day Ecuador. Okay, so he hasn’t heard this from indigenous people. He’s heard it from Spanish colonists about a golden chief or king, the gilded one. Oviedo writes quote “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 ... 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 ... 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,” end quote. So Oviedo is describing a king or chief who covers his entire body in gold dust every day and then washes it off every night. So, that alone, they’re like, okay if this guy has enough gold that he can cover his body with it every day and just wash it away at night, just discard that much gold every night. He must have crazy amounts of gold. This place where he lives must have crazy amounts of gold.
Then, in the 1580s, we get more details about this gilded king guy. Juan de Castellanos, a Spanish poet, soldier, and priest living in South America wrote quote “Belalcázar [who was a Spanish conquistador] 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 ... The soldiers, delighted and content, then gave [that king] the name El Dorado,” end quote.
So the story has shifted slightly here. According to Oviedo this golden king covered his body in gold dust every day, just because, right, just cause he wanted to be all shiny and pretty. According to Castellanos, it doesn’t seem to be a daily occurrence that he’s covering his body in gold. It seems to be associated with a ceremony of sorts, “to make oblations,” oblations are religious offerings. So it’s very doubtful that he’s doing that every day. This is backed up in an account from the early 1600s written by Spanish chronicler Pedro Simon who elaborates on this ceremony where the king would make offerings or oblations. He says that it took place at Lake Guatavita near Bogota and that the gold dust that got washed off this guy's body was an offering, a sacrifice to a god like entity that lived in the lake. Then in 1636 we get even more details about this ceremony in the writings of Juan Rodriguez Freyle. He said that this ceremony where the gold dust was sacrificed to the lake god was actually only done when a new leader, called a zipa, came into power, like a coronation if you will. How does Freyle know this? He claimed to have been told this by the nephew of the last Indigenous ruler of Guatavita, that area where the lake was where they supposedly did this ritual. Freyle said that, when a zipa died, his successor, usually his nephew, would go through an initiation process to become the next zipa. This involved covering himself in gold dust and paddling out onto a sacred lake on a raft. According to Dr. Jago Cooper writing for BBC quote “Surrounded by the four highest priests adorned with feathers, gold crowns and body ornaments, the leader, naked but for a covering of gold dust, would set out to make an offering of gold objects, emeralds and other precious objects to the gods by throwing them into the lake. The shores of the circular lake were filled with richly adorned spectators playing musical instruments and burning fires that almost blocked out the daylight from this crucible-like lake basin. The raft itself had four burning fires on it throwing up plumes of incense into the sky. When at the very centre of the lake, the priest would raise a flag to draw silence from the crowd. This moment would mark the point at which the crowds would commit allegiance to their new leader by shouting their approval from the lakeshore,” end quote.
So we’ve gone from a daily application and washing off of gold dust, to occasional ritual ceremony, to just when a new ruler came into power, and then some modern historians believe that this may have actually only happened once, one time, one ruler did this one time, put on gold dust and washed it off in a lake. Maybe. There is some archaeological evidence to support Freyle’s account though. In 1969, three villagers exploring a small cave in the hills just south of Bogota found a golden sculpture sort of thing depicting a man covered in gold on a raft, going out into a lake. So it seems like this might have actually happened, but maybe only once.
But when we look back at Oviedo’s version of the story from the 1540s, one of the earliest mentions of this, he says daily. He says the guy was doing this every day. And so from that, the quantity of gold dust required to do that every day and to just wash it away each night, you can see how the Spanish must have assumed that whoever this guy was, he had endless amounts of gold at his disposal. In fact, he must have lived in an entire city of gold to be able to pull something like that off. Initially, we see the assumed location of this man, or this city, El Dorado near that lake Lake Guatavita which is near Bogota in Colombia.
Well, before Bogota was Bogota and before Colombia was Colombia, that area was, and still is, inhabited by an indigenous group called the Muisca. The Muisca have lived in that region since about the year 800. So for the Spanish, for whom finding gold was a big part of their whole reason for being in the Americas at all, hearing rumors of this gilded king and lake Guatavita, they decide to go pay a visit to the Muisca, see if they can’t find this El Dorado guy slash place.
We’ll start with Sebastian de Belalcazar, whom Castellanos mentioned in his account of the El Dorado story. Belalcazar was a Spanish conquistador who had helped conquer the Incan empire and then was based in Quito after that. Around 1535 he set out north towards the Muisca territory, Bogota, Colombia, right, to follow up on these rumors of El Dorado. He reaches these lands, the highlands of present day Colombia and he finds the Muisca, but no El Dorado. Now, the Muisca did have gold though, more specifically it was a mix of gold silver and copper called tumbaga. And their goldworking skills were very very impressive, like nothing the Spanish had ever seen, what they were doing with their gold. The Muisca were clearly one of the most sophisticated groups in the area, by modern day European standards of what it means to be sophisticated of course. They were creating a lot of gold, or tumbaga anyway, artifacts as offerings to their gods. Many of these pieces were only in existence for a few hours or a few days at most before being given as offerings, usually tossed into bodies of water which, of course completely bewildered Belalcazar and the Spanish. Archaeologist Roberto Lleros Perez, who is an expert on the Muisca, says in that BBC article quote “"No other society, as far as I know, dedicated over 50% of their production for votive offerings. I think it is quite unique," end quote.
And so, to the Spanish, the fact that 50% of their production is gold, or at least part gold, pieces that they are making and then literally just throwing away is further proof that somewhere, somewhere around here someone has a lot of gold. Right? How would they be so wasteful with it if they didn’t have a crazy amount somewhere… a city of gold. But of course this misconception comes down to a cultural difference. In Spain, gold is a measure of wealth and prosperity. That is not the case for the Muisca. Dr. Cooper writes for BBC quote “Within Muisca society gold, or more specifically an alloy of gold, silver and copper called tumbaga, was highly sought after, not for its material value but for its spiritual power, its connection to the deities and its ability to bring balance and harmony within Muisca society. As Muisca descendant Enrique Gonzalez explains, gold does not symbolise prosperity to his people. [quote within a quote] "For the Muisca of today, just as for our ancestors, gold is nothing more than an offering... gold does not represent wealth to us,” end quote. And so if gold does not represent wealth and instead it represents spiritual power, it makes a lot more sense why they would be chucking gold into rivers instead of stockpiling it, even though it was rare. So Belalcazar did find a wealthy, sophisticated group of people, but it was not El Dorado. It was not at the level that the legend had described.
Belalcazar was not the only one curious about the Muisca, though. He’s not the only one who followed the legend there. Two other guys did too. All three of them pretty much converged on this area around Lake Guatavita at about the same time. So there was Belalcazar, there was another Spanish guy named Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada who we’ll talk more about soon, and then the third guy was actually German. The Germans were also interested in these tales of El Dorado. In the early 1500s, the German Welser banking family had obtained rights to colonize parts of Venezuela. Now why would a bank want to colonize a foreign land? Well, pretty much exclusively to obtain gold and riches, right? Banks aren’t trying to spread Christianity or look for better lives or any of these other reasons colonizers had. They wanted money. So of course they’re interested in El Dorado. A German guy named Nikolaus Federmann worked for this family and he decided to go poking around in Muisca territory too to see if there was any truth behind the stories. So Belalcazar, Quesada, and Federmann all pretty much converge on the Muisca at the same time from three different directions. Belalcazar came from the southwest, from Quito, Ecuador, Federmann came from the northeast, from Venezuela, and Quesada came from the north. He came from the Caribbean then up the Magdalena River into Colombia.
Of these three men, Quesada would be the one to conquer the Muisca, El Dorado or no El Dorado. Quesada gets what Quesada wants, apparently. Muisca territory was divided into independent chiefdoms but everyone was loyal to either the zipa who ruled the southern territory or the zacque who ruled the northern territory. Quesada goes to the southern territory, to a city that, at the time was called Bacata by the indigenous people, today it’s called Bogota, pretty much the same thing. He marches up to this city, defeats the warriors they send out to defend themselves and just basically marches right in. Their zipa, their leader flees the city, presumably with any treasure he may have had. Then he goes north and they capture the zacque, the leader of the northern territory. They loot his palace and temple taking what was described as quote “the single greatest haul of treasure in the entire conquest of Muisca territory.” They accidentally burn down the temple while attempting to loot it. Two guys who were sent in at night to remove gold ornaments stupidly set their torches on the grass floor matting and burnt the whole thing down. Then he goes back south to try to find the zipa who had fled with his treasure, he still wants that treasure, and he ends up accidentally killing the zipa, whose name was Tisquesusa. They didn’t mean to kill him they just didn’t actually know what he looked like and so they killed some Muisca guys without realizing that one of them was the zipa. His successor, Sagipa, managed to negotiate an alliance with the Spanish but refused to tell them where that missing treasure was hidden. And so he was later tortured to death, although Quesada claimed that wasn’t his fault. He denied responsibility for that. So, leyenda negra or cold hard truth. These events, the sacking of cities, the torturing and killing of leaders, the taking of treasure, they are fairly well documented, not by the English, but by the Spanish themselves. So anyway, while Quesada is busy destroying an entire civilization for the heck of it, he becomes aware that two other European dudes are camped out nearby also looking for El Dorado, that’s Belalcazar and the German guy Federmann who works for the bank or whatever. These guys come to an agreement that they are going to go back to Spain to settle their competing claims over El Dorado but, of course, none of them actually find El Dorado. Quesada does find a lot of riches as he sacks the Muisca territory but it’s not El Dorado. He even tries to drain Lake Guatavita where the story has this zipa, this gold dust covered leader, tossing in gold offerings to the lake god from that raft. He sets up a chain of indigenous people with clay pots and has them bail water out of the lake pot by pot which had to have taken a crazy amount of time and manpower. They manage to lower the water level in the lake a little bit, enough to recover some gold artifacts along the edges of the lake. So this confirms that, yes they were throwing gold offerings into that lake. But also, no it wasn’t on the level of El Dorado. Quesada also helps establish the Kingdom of New Granada and the city of Bogota on top of the Muisca cities he destroyed.
And then the location that is the focus of the El Dorado story seems to shift, I guess because three guys already failed to find it near Bogota. People start looking elsewhere. They go to the place where it’s supposed to be and don’t find it and instead of being like, “eh it must not exist,” they go “eh, it must be somewhere else.” And I think this, this is just my theory, but I think this is because they are like asking indigenous people, right, they ask the Muisca “hey where’s the city of gold? We were told it would be here.” And they, of course, are like, “um… nope, it’s not here. It’s definitely not here. You know where it is? I heard about something like that farther south. I heard about something like that on the other side of the mountains, down that super long river. I heard about a city of gold super far away from me and my village and my family. Go that way. Go far far away” That’s what I think personally. I think the indigenous people mostly had no idea what they were talking about but they went along with it and led them on sort of a wild goose chase to be rid of them. That’s my personal theory.
So let’s talk about some of these other dudes who tried to find El Dorado after Quesada, Belalcazar, and Federmann come up short in Muisca land. There’s another German, also working for the Welser banking family. This one is named Georg Hohermuth von Speyer. He’s based in Venezuela where the Welser guys have been granted territory or whatever. He puts together a little El Dorado seeking mission and they head south from Venezuela into the interior of the continent. He had heard reports of wealthy lands beyond the Andes mountains in that direction. I’m telling y’all it’s a wild goose chase. They’re like “yeah of course there’s a city of gold, you just have to cross that mountain range there. No big deal.” And dumb dumb von Speyer goes for it and of course it’s a complete disaster. They spent two years trekking through the middle mountainous part of South America and something like 200 of his men died along the way. Most of the survivors became too sick and weak to continue and von Speyer eventually had to give up and turn around.
Then there’s Gonzalo Pizarro, brother to Francisco Pizarro who conquered the Inca. Gonzalo Pizarro set out from Quito in 1540 to look for El Dorado but he’s also looking for the Land of Cinnamon, yes, the Land of Cinnamon. The Land of Cinnamon was also a myth, like El Dorado, it was a mythical cinnamon forest, cause cinnamon, like the spice, comes from a tree bark. And cinnamon was very valuable, you know, spices were very valuable. Cinnamon, turns out, is not indigenous to the Americas and would not have been growing in South America in the 1500s. It grows naturally in Sri Lanka and parts of India so this land of cinnamon myth is, we now know, complete baloney. But Pizarro sets out in search of El Dorado and the Land of Cinnamon like he’s playing a massive, much more dangerous game of Candy Land or something. He heads out east from Quito across the Andes mountains and finds it just as inhospitable as von Speyer. Trying to cross the Andes mountains, you know, they are dying left and right, they are running out of food, their clothing is deteriorating, they are freezing, their horses die, they eat their dogs. It gets real bad. But they eventually make it through the mountains and they hit the Amazon rainforest, a completely different beast, an almost opposite, and yet just as dangerous beast.
By the time they reach the Amazon they are in bad shape. They need food or they’re all gonna starve. They come to a river called the Coca River and they make a boat to travel down the river in search of food and supplies, whatever they can get. Pizarro puts a guy named Francisco de Orellana in charge of this boat. He’s supposed to take the boat downstream to gather food, and then come back to give the food to the rest of the starving men who are waiting there. Orellana heads downstream. He quickly realizes that they could never gather enough food for all those men waiting for them up the river. Also, how are they going to get back up the river? The current is too strong. There’s no way they can paddle all the way back upstream in the shape they’re in. And so Orellana makes a decision. Screw Pizarro and all those other guys, we’re going on without them. And so they do. They continue downstream and they eventually enter an enormous river system that will become known as the Amazon river. They keep going down this river until they reach the Atlantic Ocean. Actually Orellana and his men were the first Europeans that we know of to travel the entire length of the Amazon river from the Andes mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. They meet a lot of indigenous people along the way, they get into battles, and skirmishes, they ask them about El Dorado and the Cinnamon forest or whatever. They have no idea what their talking about. They make it to the ocean. They’re like “eh, oh well.” They never find El Dorado. Meanwhile Pizarro eventually gives up waiting for Orellana to return with food and supplies. He has no choice but to turn around and hike it back to Quito with his skeletal crew.
In 1541 there’s another German guy coming out of Venezuela, Philip von Hutten, who tries and fails to find El Dorado in the Amazon. He did find some indigenous groups that he described as quite wealthy though which helped to keep the dream alive. Then in 1560 there’s Pedro de Ursua. By 1560 the location of El Dorado had completely shifted from the mountains of Colombia to somewhere deep in the Amazon basin, wild goose chase. “Yeah just go over the deadly freezing mountain peaks and into the even deadlier toxic snake swamp. You’ll be fine.” I’m telling you. Anyway, Ursua leaves out of Peru and heads into the heart of the Amazon with around 370 Spaniards and some indigenous people. As it has gone for pretty much everyone before him, this goes badly. He starts running out of food, people start dying, morale is at an all time low, but instead of giving up and turning around as most had done, Ursua’s group turns mutinous and they actually murder him. He is murdered by his own men and then one of the leaders of this mutiny takes over. His name was Lope de Aguirre. He hijacks the whole expedition and then, instead of continuing to look for El Dorado, he just goes completely rogue and declares himself in open rebellion against Spain. He becomes known as El Tirano, the tyrant. And he’s basically running around South America like “screw the king, screw Spain, I do what I want.” And then he gets caught in 1561 and killed, of course, as does his daughter, RIP, and the rebellion collapses. So anyway, the mission there switched from “let’s find El Dorado,” to “lets overthrow the Spanish monarchy,” for whatever reason. I don’t know, the Amazon makes people pretty crazy. It’s make or break out there.
By the late 1500s, the location of El Dorado changes once again to somewhere in Guiana which is the northern coast of South America near present day Venezuela and Suriname, the territory beyond the Orinoco River. So in the 1580s we have the expeditions of Antonio de Berrio who became obsessed with finding El Dorado. He set out from Colombia towards the Orinoco River and this Guiana region. He talked to indigenous people who gave him reports of wealthy settlements farther east. Not here of course, farther east. Far, far away. Keep going. And so with these tantalazing clues, he’s off on this wild goose chase and he becomes obsessed with finding El Dorado. Berrio tries three different times to penetrate this region. The first attempt fails, the second he manages to cross the Orinoco river but then it fails too after men start deserting, the third expedition in 1590 he makes it farther. He travels down the Orinoco and starts setting up settlements and forts, permanent bases from which to continue searching. He founded Santo Tome de Guayana which became an important Spanish settlement in the region.
Then, another dude shows up, one you know a lot about if you listened to last week’s episode: Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh decides he wants to go find El Dorado too. He’s been banished from court for 5 years after secretly getting married and hiding it from Queen Elizabeth. He’s lost her favor and he’s trying to get it back. Finding El Dorado ought to do it. So he heads for Guiana in 1595, the current trending theory as to the location of El Dorado. But he’s not like carving out a path through the dense wilderness like all these other guys. He heads straight for the Spanish settlement and takes Antonio de Berrio hostage. He’s like “you’ve been at this for a while now, you ought to know a lot about El Dorado, tell me what you know. I won’t do the hard work, I’ll just steal the work you’ve done.” And it’s not a bad plan because Berrio has been exploring this region for over a decade and he knows a lot about the geography by now. Raleigh goes up the Orinoco. He doesn’t find El Dorado or anything like it. He goes back to England and he writes a book, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, in which he vastly exaggerates the likelihood that El Dorado exists. He’s like yeah I almost found it, I was getting close. No. Not at all. Also, just the nerve to call the book the Discoverie of Guiana. Like dude, you did not discover it. You literally kidnapped a guy who got there first and forced him to tell you what he knew, and he didn’t even discover it. The Spanish, the Germans, they’re all over that region, not to mention the Indigenous people who lived there for God knows how long. But of course Raleigh has something to prove so he’ll write whatever he needs to write to impress the Queen and win back her favor. This exaggerated account sort of backfires on him in 1617 though when King James I sends him back to South America to finish what he started, to find El Dorado without causing any trouble with the Spanish. Raleigh’s like “okay, find El Dorado, don’t mess with the Spanish… ohhh that’s gonna be tough. That was basically my whole plan last time.” And of course he can’t manage to do it. His men immediately destroy a Spanish settlement, kill the governor, and borderline incite war with Spain. The only way for King James to smooth things over is to execute Raleigh, which he does in October of 1618. But we also have more tragedies there, Raleigh’s son Wat was killed in squirmishes with the Spanish on that trip and then, after Raleigh accused one of the men of being responsible for his son’s death, that guy went into the cabin of the ship and killed himself.
So, I mean just death and destruction and murder and betrayal, mutiny, starvation, kidnapping, backstabbing, all of these men just desperate to find something that probably never existed to begin with. And for what? Did they want to meet and befriend the people who lived there? Did they want to learn about their culture and how they acquired so many riches? Did they want to gaze upon the beauty of their gilded artifacts, their leader covered in gold dust, gleaming like a ray of sun? Was it appreciation? Admiration? No, not at all. It was money. It was greed. They wanted to snatch up the gold and melt it down, stamp out coins with their king’s and queen’s faces on them. Screw the Muisca, screw Guiana, screw El Dorado, the gilded one. It was about Spain and England and Germany and Belalcazar, Federmann, and Quesada. It was about von Speyer and Pizarro, Orellana, von Hutten, and Ursua. It was about Aguirre and Berrio. It was about Sir Walter Raleigh and winning back the Queen’s favor. It was about all the wrong things. And, because of that, these men were blinded. They were blinded by greed, desperate for the story to be true, and completely ignorant to the reality of the situation.
How could people toss gold into a lake, throw it away, waste it? Surely they could only do that if they had so much gold its loss didn’t matter. Only El Dorado, the gilded one, could afford to be so wasteful with his gold. But what they failed to realize was that not everyone was as blinded by greed, by a desire for wealth, for personal gain as themselves. These people, the Muisca, the indigenous South Americans, had a greater purpose. To them, gold was not money. It was not wealth. It was security, protection for their family. It was a healthy harvest, a comfortable life. It was love and happiness and they were eager to throw it in the lake if it meant securing all that. In many ways they saw what the Europeans could not, then or now. Life is not about stockpiling shiny bits of metal and basing your worth on how much you can acquire. It’s about being in harmony with the Earth and with one another. You know, these explorers and conquistadors kept hoping to find a magnificent city covered in gold, a city far wealthier, better off, more advanced than their own cities in Europe and they thought they never did. In their minds they never found it. But I would argue that they did. They did find cities far wealthier, better off, more advanced than their own cities in Europe. It was just a different kind of wealth. It wasn’t wealth measured in ounces of gold. It was wealth measured in quality of life, in relationships with other people, and in peace and harmony with nature.
Sources:
Comments