The search for El Dorado

Plot

The lure of the sacred gold of the American Indians in Central and Southern America gripped the imagination of the early sixteenth-century European explorers. When Cortes discovered and conquered the fabulous empire of the Aztecs in Mexico, and Pizarro then overthrew the even richer empire of the Incas in Peru, it seemed possible that there were other golden kingdoms to be conquered in the heart of South America. The north of that continent was explored by a series of tough and brutal expeditions, some of which march inland with purely geographical aims. But most were gold-rushes, lured onward by enticing reports from native tribes and forever seeing undiscovered rich lands. This book describes the nature of the conquistador, and tells from contemporary sources the appalling cruelty of these explorers, who preyed on the Indian tribes but who themselves suffered indescribably hardships. Once the El Dorado legend had evolved, it became an obsession of successive adventurers. There was the handsome Gonzalo Pizarro, betrayed by Orellana in the first European descent of the Amazon River. The paranoid murderer and rebel Lope de Aguirre, the aged Antonio de Berrio and Sir Walter Raleigh, the epitome of an Elizabethan courtier, who tried to found a British empire in Guiana. The Gold Museum at Bogota with nearly 25,000 objects provides the splendid backcloth to this story. The best of these objects, photographed in colour by Mario Carrieri, are here reproduced for the first time.