The Gilded Man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America

by Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier

Dr. Markham, on the strength of a few verses of the licentiate Castellanos, calls Iñez de Atienza, after Madame Godin des Odonais, the heroine of the Amazon. The comparison is hardly admissible between Ursua’s mistress, who shortly after his death became so readily the mistress of his murderer, and the faithful wife who, to seek her husband toiling in the service of science at Cayenne, bravely made her way through the wilderness of the Amazon shores almost alone. It is also painful to read Dr. Markham, in his defence of this woman, a concubine in station, calling the eye-witness Vasquez, who maintained his fidelity to the Crown through constant danger to his life, a “gold-seeking adventurer,” and the noble Bishop Piedrahita, of Panamá, a “dirty friar.”

Salduendo’s death aroused Guzman from his dreams, but it was too late. Not able to accomplish anything openly against Aguirre, he determined to make an attack upon his life. Aguirre anticipated this, and speedily collected his adherents. The murderers pressed in the darkness of night into the quarters of the “prince of terra firma.” The priest Henao was the first victim, six captains fell next, and lastly the simple-minded youth himself was shot. On the next morning, Aguirre, accompanied by eighty armed men, came into the midst of the camp and was without opposition proclaimed “General of the Marañon.”

By this name, Marañon, Aguirre henceforth called the mutiny, of which he was now absolute commander, and it was so applied by the men themselves. Simon[62] says the word was derived from maraña (complication), and survived after Aguirre’s campaign as a by-name for the Amazon. This is, however, not correct. Peter Martyr had already, in his “De Orbe Novo,” applied the name to the Amazon, of which Pinzon had seen the mouths; Oviedo, who died in 1557, describes the Amazon River as the Marañon; and Gomara, whose “Historia general de las Indias” was printed in 1552, applied the name in an indefinite way to the great South American river that empties into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Amazon is, however, also known as the Rio de Orellano; and in view of the extremely vague geographical ideas that prevailed in the sixteenth century, no conclusion can be drawn from the application of the term “Marañones” to Aguirre’s men concerning the further course or route of the expedition. It is significant that Acosta[63] says, on the authority of a witness who was in the expedition of Ursua and Aguirre, and afterward went into the Order of Jesus, that the Amazon, Marañon, or Rio de Orellana, emptied into the sea opposite the islands of Margarita and Trinidad. In connection with this the statement of Cristoval de Acuña (1639), that Aguirre reached the sea through a side-mouth of the Amazon opposite Trinidad, is of considerable importance. Mr. Markham, therefore, does not seem to be wholly unjustified in supposing that the Marañones, having sailed up the Rio Negro, passed into the Orinoco through the Cassiquiare and thence through one of the mouths of the Orinoco, and not through the Amazon, into the Atlantic Ocean. In further confirmation of this view is the mention by Pedro Simon of Aguirre’s having met a cannibal tribe, the Arnaquinas. In fact, the Arekainas, thorough-going cannibals, now dwell on the Upper Rio Negro. On the other side are the facts that the Falls of the Orinoco are not mentioned in the few meagre accounts we have of the further course of the expedition, and that the torrent at Atures and Maypures, and even below, was hardly navigable for the brigantines although, according to Simon, they were “as strongly built as ships of three hundred tons.” But whether through the Orinoco or the Amazon, it seems to be certain that Aguirre with his two vessels reached the ocean on the first day of July, 1561.

With the murder of Guzman, Aguirre obtained supreme authority; and the compressed narrative of the voyage down the river to its mouth and into the ocean, which lasted not quite three months, gives us but little else than accounts of the Biscayan’s behavior in the exercise of unlimited power. His whole course was intended to establish this power, and since he was burdened with guilt and crime, and guilt and crime alone bound his men to him, doubt and suspicion of his own people were his predominant feelings. At least eight of the Marañones fell victims to these feelings in the course of three months; and every new crime attached the rest, by the sense of common guilt, more closely to their leader, who, like an evil spirit, led them, with an iron will, to further crimes. No one dared to speak or hardly to think of the dorado; the men were permitted to entertain but one thought—that of the conquest of Peru.

The island of Margarita was to afford the first base for this enterprise. Aguirre reached it in seventeen days, sailing around Trinidad. The appearance of the two brigantines excited general astonishment. Aguirre knew how to appeal to the emotions of the inhabitants. The governor of the island and some of the other officers went down to the landing to see the new-comers. Aguirre seized and imprisoned the governor; his men then captured the fort; and before the people of Margarita came to their senses the island had passed without drawing a sword into the hands of the Marañones. The royal treasury was immediately seized, independence of Spain was proclaimed, and provisions and ammunition for the further prosecution of the campaign were energetically collected, by gentle means or forcible. Aguirre now needed larger and swifter vessels for the execution of his audacious plan, for Nombre de Dios and Panamá were to be surprised in the same manner as Margarita had been, before the news of the event could spread. A large vessel, which had brought the Dominican-Provincial Montesinos with his military escort to Venezuela, was anchored before Maracapanna (the present Piritú), on the coast of the mainland, opposite Margarita. Some of the Marañones were sent to seize the vessel. Instead of doing that, they took the opportunity to desert the standard of rebellion and surrender to the Provincial, to whom they also made a circumstantial confession of all the atrocities which Aguirre and his band had committed. Fray Francisco de Montesinos was shocked by the story, and at once sent messengers to all the settlements in Venezuela. The report of the impending danger spread so rapidly over the mainland that in a short time fifteen hundred men were under arms in New Granada. Venezuela had been so exhausted by the dorado expeditions of the previous period that it was only with extreme effort that it could supply two hundred and sixty poorly armed men.

Aguirre, who had in the meantime sunk both brigantines, confidently awaited the arrival of the expected ships at Margarita. In the excited and tense condition of his mind, delay was hardly possible without violent outbreaks occurring. Not only were Aguirre’s own men exposed to his murderous caprices, but the defenceless people of the island stood in constant peril of death. Aguirre regarded their property as his legitimate spoil, and disposed of it arbitrarily for his own purposes. While the men of influence and means were robbed and murdered by him, the bad elements flocked to his party, and the reign of terror on the island increased as the Marañones gained accessions from the scum of the population. At last the Provincial’s vessel came in sight, but flying the royal standard. Aguirre fell into a furious passion. Having caused the governor of Margarita and the principal officers to be slain, he proceeded hastily down to the port to prevent the vessel’s landing. No battle ensued, however, for after an exchange of empty threats the Provincial set sail again in order to carry the alarm to the Antilles and the Isthmus.

Aguirre’s plan for surprising Panamá, having been thus defeated, he determined to invade Venezuela. Before doing so he instigated a number of murders at Margarita. At length he succeeded in getting a vessel, on which he sailed “on the last Sunday of August, 1561,” at the head of a well-armed band of criminals, for Burburata. The people of this place fled into the woods with their property as soon as they saw the vessel, which bore two blood-red swords, crossed, on its flag. Without halting at Burburata, Aguirre marched inland to Lake Tacarigua, on the shore of which the settlement of Valencia had existed since 1555. Some of his men deserted him in the tropical wilderness through which his road lay. Valencia had been abandoned, and the Marañones burned the vacant houses. Aguirre was ill, and therefore twice as irritable as usual, and gave himself up to the wildest cruelty, even toward his own men. In Valencia he composed a manifesto to the King of Spain, and sent it by a priest whom he had brought from Margarita as a hostage to the coast. The letter, which has been preserved by Vasquez and by Oviedo y Baños, begins, “To King Philip, a Spaniard, son of Charles the Invincible,” and ends with the words, “and on account of this ingratitude, I remain till death a rebel against thee.—Lope de Aguirre, the Wanderer.” The document is full of reasonable and unreasonable reproaches, contains the most glaring and absurd contradictions, and bears throughout the marks of insanity. From Valencia Aguirre went southwest toward Barquicimeto. The royal party was not prepared for resistance in the open field; but the number of the Marañones was perceptibly diminishing. Aguirre’s daily recurring frenzies were continually costing the lives of some of the men; the scanty population, instead of joining his party as he had anticipated, fled from before him, and his people deserted him at every opportunity.

The end was approaching. Barquicimeto was deserted, but the military force on the side of the king now appeared before the place, under the lead of the maestro del campo, Diego de Paredes. While not strong enough to attack him, it prevented Aguirre from proceeding farther. Well mounted, the royalists passed around his camp daily, cut off all access to it, and by the judicious circulation of amnesty proclamations which Governor Collado sagaciously issued, they encouraged his men to desert. The number of these diminished every day, and Aguirre’s mad spells of fury became steadily more impotent. At last Paredes decided to risk an attack on Barquicimeto. On the advance of the royal troops most of the Marañones threw away their arms and met their assailants with the cry, “Long live the king!” Aguirre found himself all at once entirely forsaken. Pale and trembling, he went into the chamber of his only child, a grown-up maiden, and with the words, “My child, God have mercy on your soul, for I am going to kill you, so that you shall not live in misery and shame the child of a traitor,” stabbed her in the heart, and then weakly tottered toward the door which the royal soldiers were approaching. He suffered himself to be taken without resistance. The royal maestro del campo desired to spare his life, but the Marañones insisted on the instant death of their former leader, and he fell under the discharge of musketry. His head was cut off and was exhibited at Tocuyo in an iron cage. His memory survives to the present time in Venezuela as that of an evil spirit; and when at night the jack-o’-lanterns dance over the marshy plains, the solitary wanderer crosses himself and whispers, “The soul of the tyrant Aguirre.”

With this closes the account of the series of expeditions which we undertook to describe in connection with the legend of the gilded man. The story justifies our comparison of the vision of the dorado after his real home had been conquered with a mirage, “enticing, deceiving, and leading men to destruction.”