The coast lands of Venezuela offered no hope of a profitable result; but golden reports came from the interior, and, clad in the alluring dress of the dorado legend, led the Germans on to those useless and destructive expeditions of which we have just described the last one. In pursuit of the gilded chieftain Dalfinger conducted his fatal campaign of desolation; after him Federmann pressed fruitlessly into New Granada; in the chase for the echo of the dorado in “Meta” Von Speyer sacrificed his fine troop and his own precious person; in the final effort to grasp the phantom were extinguished Von Hutten’s young life and the last spark of the manhood and vigor of the colony. When we give close attention to the history of the German settlement in Venezuela, the importance of the part played in it by the dorado appears very clearly.
We have already shown that Von Hutten came back persuaded that he had really seen the home of the gilded chieftain in the country of the Omaguas. Henceforth, therefore, Omagua becomes nearly synonymous with the dorado, and the legend is localized near the Amazon, west of the Rio Negro and Cassiquiare. Oviedo had already placed it there at the time of the death of Philip von Hutten. Von Hutten’s unhappy fate, the complete extinction of the settlement at Coro, the threatened depopulation of the Venezuelan peninsula, precluded any further thought of an expedition into the interior southward. The Brazilian coast, hardly touched at a few points by the Portuguese, was too far from the unknown interior, which was concealed in immense forests. The western coasts, particularly those of New Granada and of Peru, where the Amazon begins its course, not only lay geographically nearest to the region in question, but were also the seat of the strongest and richest settlements of the Spaniards in South America, the only ones from which any campaigns could now be undertaken.
But although the population had rapidly increased under the stimulus of the rich metallic treasures found in the country, events occurred, especially in Peru, which made further expeditions impossible for many years. The civil disturbances in Peru provoked in the extreme south by the conflict between Pizarro and Almagro concerning the limits of their respective jurisdictions culminated in bloodshed at Las Salinas near Cuzco, on the 26th of April, 1538. Hardly three months afterward, Almagro was strangled by Pizarro’s command. An unbroken succession of betrayals and crimes, to which nearly all the conquistadors of importance fell victims (thereby expiating their own offences), marked the progress of the insurrection, till it reached such a height as to overshadow the whole west coast, like a dark cloud, from Chili to Popayan. And when, in consequence of the new laws and ordinances issued by the Spanish Crown for the protection of the aborigines, this cloud began to unload itself in a storm of open revolt against the mother-country; when Gonzalo Pizarro, urged by his lieutenant Carvajal,[59] refused obedience; when the viceroy Blasco Nuñez de Vela had fallen at Añaquito in Ecuador on the 18th of January, 1546, and the insurrectionists prevailed from Popayan to Atacamata—then the threatening storm loomed also over the southern horizon of New Granada, and the stunning reverberations of the thunders of revolt reached the heart of Cundinamarca. It was no time for daring expeditions into the mythical interior; every force had to be used for self-preservation. In this period a man came upon the stage of history in New Granada who was to be especially associated with the phantom of the gilded chieftain. He was Don Pedro de Ursua, a young knight from Pampluna, in the kingdom of Navarre. He was the nephew of the royal judge Miguel Diaz de Armendariz, and arrived with him in New Granada in the year 1545. Armendariz came to the “new kingdom” as inquisitorial judge, “Juez de Residencia,” and appointed his nephew his “lieutenant.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE EXPEDITION OF URSUA AND AGUIRRE.
The government of Bogotá and Santa Marta was lodged in 1542 in the hands of Alonzo de Luga, a son of the former overseer of Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada, the conqueror of Cundinamarca. With reckless greed Lugo had levied contributions on the province, plundered the original Spanish conquerors, and robbed the royal treasury. When he learned that a royal inquisitorial judge had been sent to Bogotá he hastily gathered up his spoil—300,000 ducats, according to Joaquin Acosta—and fled to Europe, where he died in Milan. Armendariz, having at first enough to do at Cartagena in hearing the numerous complaints against Lugo, despatched his nephew Pedro de Ursua into the interior. The latter established himself in Bogotá without opposition, and summarily arrested Lope Montalbo de Lugo, who had remained there as the deputy of the fugitive governor. Armendariz himself occupied the capital of New Granada in the year 1546, while Ursua became his military aid, although he was then only twenty years old.
The sedentary Indian tribe of Cundinamarca, the Muysca, had been completely subjugated, but numerous hordes of warlike, cannibal natives still roamed around their territory. These rovers by their constant attacks endangered the settlements of the Muysca and the Spanish colony itself. Their subjugation was therefore a necessity for the prosperity of the “new kingdom,” and seemed the more desirable because the gold which the Muysca possessed came from the regions inhabited by them. Already, under Lugo’s wretched administration, the captain Vanegas had chastised the Panches in the west and conquered their country, but northwest of Bogotá the Musos still roamed in the extensive forest flats and grassy prairies, and their predatory attacks threatened to depopulate the district of Tunja. Ursua had led an expedition to the northeast in 1548 and founded the settlement of Pampluna. On his return to Bogotá from this expedition (which is commonly spoken of as a “dorado journey”) the proposition was made to him, by the three royal judges who now ruled New Granada in place of his deposed uncle, to subjugate the Musos.
The knight, now twenty-three years old, advanced confidently into the enemy’s territory with one hundred and fifty men. So rapid were his movements that he assailed a fortified camp in the middle of the region before the Musos could collect their forces. A bitter war of extermination followed. Unable to repel the well-armed Spaniards by direct attacks, the savages swarmed daily around their camp, and tried to starve them out by burning their own crops. Ursua held his position and finally forced the Musos to negotiate; but when a large number of chiefs had come to him to conclude the treaty, he induced them to go inside of his tent, where they were murdered to the last man. He hoped by an act of such surpassing terror to paralyze the force of the tribe; but the war only broke out again all the more furiously, and as soon as Ursua returned to Bogotá the Spaniards were expelled and the settlement of Tudela was laid in ashes by the natives. Notwithstanding the crime he had committed, Ursua obtained the position of chief-justice in Santa Marta. He subdued the Tayronas Indians in 1551 and 1552, but he did not remain long in New Granada, for his mind had been turned toward Peru, and he went to Panamá. He waited there till Don Andreas Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañeta, viceroy of Peru, began his journey to Lima. The environs of Panamá and the Isthmus were then kept in a state of insecurity by bands of fugitive negroes (Cimarrones), and the perplexed municipality of the city were looking for a capable soldier who could deliver them from the plague. The story of Ursua’s deeds was known to the viceroy, and he recommended him to the officers. Ursua exterminated the blacks in a two years’ “bush war,” and then, in 1558, followed the Marquis of Cañeta to Peru.
Ten years previous to this the licentiate Pedro de la Gasca had suppressed the great Peruvian insurrection. Two later uprisings—those of Sebastian de Castilla in 1552 and of Francesco Hernandez Giron in 1554—had been likewise suppressed by the adherents of the Crown; but quiet was not yet fully established. A considerable number of men were living in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador who witnessed the return of order with a dissatisfaction that was well founded, because their past would not bear an examination in the light of the law. The number of this “disorderly rabble” was so large that the new viceroy did not rely upon the mere exercise of force against them, but was considering upon the ways and means of removing the dangerous element from Peru by means of a campaign into distant regions.
The unknown lands east of the Andes offered the only objective point for such a campaign. Chili, New Granada, and the banks of the La Plata were already occupied by the Spaniards, and it was desirable to send the expedition only to some point where it could disturb no already existing colony, and whence the danger of its returning to Peru would be small. Then, very opportunely, by a curious accident, the legend of the dorado again rose in Peru.
Pedro de Cieza of Leon says in the seventy-eighth chapter of his “Cronica del Peru”: “In the year of the Lord 1550 there came to the city of La Frontera ... more than two hundred Indians. They said that since leaving their home a few years before they had wandered through great distances, and had lost most of their men in wars with the inhabitants of the country. As I have heard, they also told of large and thickly populated countries toward the rising sun, and said that some of them were rich in gold and silver.” Cieza was in Peru from 1547 till 1550, and his statement is fully corroborated by a contemporary, Toribio de Ortiguera, who came to South America at the latest in 1561. It appears from the manuscript of the latter, entitled “Jornada del Marañon,” that these Indians originally lived on the Brazilian coast, near the mouth of the Amazon. They had started between 2000 and 4000 strong, under the lead of a chief named Viraratu, accompanied by two Portuguese, and sailed into the Amazon and up that river, amid hard-fought battles with the shore-dwellers, to the borders of Peru. Their appearance aroused great interest amongst the Spaniards. Fray Pedro Simon says of the event: “Those Indians brought accounts from the province of the Omaguas, which Captain Francisco de Orellana mentioned when he went down the Marañon River.... In that province, of which the Indians told when they came into Peru, lived the gilded man.”[60] Thus the idea of the dorado was awakened anew.