El Dorado
The legend was first recorded in the 16th century by Spanish colonists in America; they referred to the king as El Dorado, 'The Golden One', a name which eventually came to be applied to the city itself.
In the early 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt conclusively declared Lake Parime to be a myth, bringing an end to the popular belief in El Dorado.
The mystery surrounding the lost city, and the supposed wealth of its inhabitants, have influenced creative media since the time of Voltaire, who included a trip to El Dorado in his 18th-century satire Candide.
[14] Dalfinger was an employee of the Welser banking family, a German firm to whom Charles V of Spain had granted, as security for a loan, the governorship of Venezuela and a licence to explore the country.
[19] Upon his return to Coro, Dalfinger found that in his absence he had been presumed dead; the Welser had sent along a replacement governor, Hans Seissenhofer, who had named Nikolaus Federmann as deputy.
[22][23] Having failed to find a route to the Pacific, and faced with difficult terrain, mass illness, and increasingly hostile natives, Federmann was forced to return to Coro empty-handed.
One of the prisoners, being asked if he knew of any gold in the vicinity, told the Spaniards that if they followed the westward course of the Meta River they would find a kingdom ruled by "a very valiant one-eyed Indian", and that if they found him "they could fill their boats with that metal".
[38] Hohermuth's party followed the course of the Andes south-southwest along the edge of the llanos; a two-year trek brought them to the region of the Ariari River, where they heard rumours of a rich land to the west.
[49] They acquired these raw materials through trade, their own principal exports being salt, which was extracted from naturally-occurring deposits, and manufactured objects such as golden jewellery and cotton blankets.
Gold played an important role in Musica religion; it decorated the principal temples and was used for votive offerings and funerary goods, often in the form of an anthropomorphic tunjo.
Then, on 29 April 1539, the three men jointly founded the city of Bogotá in the name of Charles V.[70] Aside from the aforementioned statement by Gonzalo de la Peña (from a testimony given in July 1539), there are no written references to a place or a person called "El Dorado" prior to 1541.
[61] It was in this year that the historian Oviedo recorded a story that was current among the Spanish inhabitants of Quito, relating to a native ruler called the "Golden Chief or King":[71] 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 looks as resplendent as a gold object worked by the hand of a great artist.The timing suggests that this story was brought back to Quito by the men who had assisted in the conquest of the Muisca.
Oviedo did not specify where the golden prince was to be found, but by the 1580s the legend had become definitely associated with the Muisca, as evidenced by the following account written by Juan de Castellanos:[72][note 3] Belalcázar 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.
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.A later author, Antonio Herrera, connected this "itinerant Indian" with the indio dorado captured by Belalcázar in 1534.
When Hernán de Quesada heard the story of El Dorado, he was eager to be the first to find it, and believed that his position in the heart of Colombia, together with the local knowledge of his men, would give him an advantage in the search.
[96] After a time, suffering greatly from illness and starvation, but urged on by persistent rumours of golden lands ahead, his party turned westward and found themselves in the region of Pasto, an area already colonized by Belalcázar.
A native chief informed them that there were no rich settlements in that direction, and added that he had received word from neighbouring tribes that the Spaniards who had passed that way earlier were now all dead or dying, but von Hutten believed this to be merely an attempt to distract him from his mission.
[98] Towards the end of 1543, on the banks of the Guaviare River, von Hutten heard from the locals that nearby were "enormous towns of very rich people who possessed innumerable wealth".
[106] A secondary purpose of the expedition was to find employment for the idle veterans of recent civil wars; among them Lope de Aguirre, a disgraced former soldier who had no interest in El Dorado and little motive for loyalty to his superiors.
Enthused by the arrival of Martín de Poveda's troops, and their news that El Dorado lay to the east, Quesada obtained permission from the king to conquer and explore the eastern plains.
[115] Unable to bring his ships into the narrow channels of the Orinoco delta, he had his carpenters adapt one of them (possibly a galleass) so that it drew only five feet of water; this vessel was able to carry sixty men, while another forty were distributed among the smaller boats.
Topiawari told him that his people had recently been driven out of inland Guiana by a warlike tribe from the west; this seemed to bolster the theory, current among the Spanish and strongly held by Raleigh,[121] that El Dorado was populated by fugitive Incans from Peru.
They received information that at the head of the Caroní stood a great lake some forty miles wide, in which large quantities of alluvial gold could be found; but having no means of advancing, and threatened by the rising waters of the Orinoco, Raleigh gave up the expedition, hoping to return at a more opportune time.
In 1596, Lawrence Kemys heard reports of a lake called Parime or Parima, which he assumed to be identical with Manoa; it was said to be so large that the natives "know no difference between it and the main sea".
[132][133] In 1800, Alexander von Humboldt conducted a survey of the area around the Orinoco; he discovered that "Parime" was the word used by local tribes for any large body of water, and suggested that the seasonal flooding of the plains around Lake Amucu might be the source of the legend.
Humboldt's influence eventually resulted in the final disappearance of Lake Parime from maps and gazetteers – the effacement, as Schomburgk wrote, "of those last vestiges of that delusive bubble, El Dorado".
A campaign in the strategy game Age of Empires II allows the player to take control of Francisco de Orellana, while Europa Universalis IV: El Dorado provides the option of sending out expeditionary forces to uncover the mysteries of the Americas.
The adventure game Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, set in the modern day, involves a search for El Dorado, which turns out to be the name of a cursed golden idol.
