Up the Orinoco and down the Magdalena

by J. A. Zahm

During the halcyon days of the Callao mine, when all eyes were directed towards this quarter of the world, a certain syndicate tried to secure from the government a concession for building a railroad from the Orinoco to the Yuruari gold fields. The then president of Venezuela was quite willing to grant the concession, but insisted, it is said, on having by anticipation a much larger share of the prospective profits of the road than the company was willing to give. Had the railway been constructed, there is no doubt that many other valuable mines would have been developed, and that southeastern Guiana would soon have become one of the most productive regions of the republic. The road would have benefited not only the mining interests but would have led to a rapid development of the grazing and agricultural industries, which, in this part of Venezuela, could, under favorable conditions, be second only to those of the llanos of the Apure, and of the fertile plains of the states of Bermudez and Bolivar.

Aside from the interest that attaches to this part of South America, on account of its many scenic attractions and its varied natural resources of forest and field and mine, it will always possess an added interest by reason of its connection with Raleigh’s ill-fated search for El Dorado. When his purse became depleted, and he had fallen from the favor of Queen Elizabeth—who for a while was so “much taken with his elocution” that she “took him for a kind of oracle”—he bethought him of retrieving fortune and favor by the discovery and conquest of a second Incaic empire, and, with this end in view, he projected his famous voyage to

“Yet unspoil’d

Guiana, whose great city Geryon’s sons

Call El Dorado.”

It is beside my purpose to comment on the “cruell and blood-thirsty Amazones,” and the race of people who “haue their eyes in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts,”[3] about whom Raleigh writes in his remarkable book, so often quoted, The Discoverie of Gviana, and which caused Hume to brand the work as being a tissue of “the grossest and most palpable lies.” We are here interested only in what he says about the finding of gold in the region bordering the Caroni and in his fantastic tales regarding El Dorado.[4]

Whether Raleigh himself really believed in the existence of El Dorado, such as he has described it, or whether he wished to work on the imaginations of his countrymen, who were as credulous and as great lovers of the marvelous as were their contemporaries on the continent of Europe, cannot be affirmed with certainty. It is probable that he possessed a full share of the credulity of his age, and that, if he embellished his accounts of what he saw or exaggerated the reports which he received from the aborigines, he really gave credence to the leading features of the extraordinary stories that were then current regarding the fabulous riches of the great city of Manoa.[4]

And he was most likely in earnest when he declared that “whatsoeuer Prince shall possess it”—Guiana—“that Prince shal be Lorde of more gold, and of a more beautifull Empire, and of more Cities and people, then eyther the King of Spayne, or the great Turke,” and was probably honest in the belief that he who should “conquerere the same,” would “performe more than euer was done in Mexico by Cortez, or in Peru by Pacaro.”

The New World was, for the people of the Old, still a land of mystery and enchantment, and the great majority of the adventurers in the newly discovered lands were quite ready to credit the wildest tales, and follow the most elusive phantoms, provided they gave indications, however slight, of the possibility of satisfying that auri sacra fames which consumed the poor and rich alike.

The remarkable thing about Raleigh is that he actually found gold and gold-bearing quartz in the land watered by the Caroni, and located the capital of El Dorado near where the great Callao mine was discovered nearly three centuries later. And not only did he discover gold-bearing quartz, but he found a variety of gold quartz essentially the same as that which occurs in the Yuruari districts. It is interesting to speculate what effect the actual discovery by him of the Callao mine would have had on his subsequent career and on England’s schemes of expansion in the Western Hemisphere. One thing is certain. He would have recouped his lost fortunes, and his head, in all probability, would never have fallen on the block in Old Palace Yard.[5]