"'Gold!' And at that magic word all eyes were strained greedily forward, and such a rustle followed that Amyas, in the very face of detection, had to whisper:
"'Be men, be men, or you will spoil all yet.'"
The muskets and long-bows of the stout Englishmen avenged the wrongs of this pitiable caravan, although there was no help for a vast multitude of Indians who were put to death with devilish torments by their conquerors. But the legend of the El Dorado still survived and it spread like an avenging spirit. "Transplanted by the over-excited imagination of the white man, the vision appeared like a mirage enticing, deceiving and leading men to destruction, on the banks of the Orinoco, and the Amazon, in Omagua and Parime." The conquest of Bogotá made them believe that the gilded man and his golden kingdom were somewhere just beyond. The licentiate, Juan de Castellanos, wrote a poem which was published in 1589, telling of the legend as it had existed in Quito in the days of the Conquistadores.
"When with that folk came Annasco,
Benalcazar learned from a stranger
Then living in the city of Quito,
But who called Bogotá his home,
Of a land there rich in golden treasure,
Rich in emeralds glistening the rock.
. . . . . . . . . .
A chief was there, who stripped of vesture,
Covered with golden dust from crown to toe,
Sailed with offerings to the gods upon a lake
Borne by the waves upon a fragile raft,
The dark flood to brighten with golden light."[[2]]
Another and more imaginative version of the story was told to Oviedo[[3]] by divers Spaniards whom he met in San Domingo. They had heard from Indians in Quito that the great lord, El Dorado, always went about covered with powdered gold, because he thought this kind of garment more beautiful and distinguished than any decorations of beaten gold. The lesser chiefs were in the habit of adorning themselves likewise, but were not so lavish as the king who put on his gold dust every morning and washed it off at night. He first anointed himself with a fragrant liquid gum, to which the gold dust adhered so evenly that he resembled a brilliant piece of artfully hammered gold metal.
For more than half a century, the mad quest continued, and always there came tragedy and disaster. The German colony of Venezuela was wiped out because of these futile expeditions into the interior. Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the great Francisco, set out to find the city of legend, and returned after two years, in such dreadful plight that the survivors of the party looked more like wild animals than men, "so that one could no longer recognize them." Pedro de Urzua started from Bogotá to find a "golden city of the sun," and his expedition founded the town of Pampluna. In 1560 the same leader was appointed "governor of Omagua and El Dorado," and he set out to find his domain by way of the Amazon. Urzua was murdered by Lope de Aguirre who treacherously conspired against him, and Aguirre descended the great river and finally reached Venezuela after one of the maddest piratical cruises ever recorded. Guimilla, in a "History of the Oronoke," says:
"I find it (El Dorado) related with such an exact description of the country, as the missionaries of my province and myself have recognized, that I cannot doubt it. I have seen in the jurisdiction of Varinas, in the mountains of Pedrarca, in 1721, the brass halberd which Urzua took with him in his expedition. I have been acquainted with Don Joseph Cabarte who directed for thirty years the missions of Agrico and the Oronoke, the countries traversed by Urzua, and he appeared to be fully persuaded that that was the route to El Dorado."
Meanwhile the myth had assumed new forms. On the southwestern tributaries of the Amazon were the fabled districts of Enim and Paytiti said to have been founded by Incas who had fled from Peru and to have surpassed ancient Cuzco in splendor. North of the Amazon the supposed city of El Dorado moved eastward until in Raleigh's time it was situated in Guiana beside Lake Parima. This lake remained on English maps until the explorations of Schomburgh in the nineteenth century proved that it was nothing more than a pond in a vast swamp. The emerald mountain of Espirito Santo and the Martyrios gold mine, long sought for in Western Brazil recalled the El Dorado myth; while far to the southward in the plains of the Argentine the city of Cæsar, with silver walls and houses was another alluring and persistent phantom. It was said to have been founded by shipwrecked Spanish sailors, and even late in the eighteenth century expeditions were sent in search for it.
It was not until 1582 that the Spanish ceased to pursue the fatal phantom city of El Dorado and Southey's History of the Brazils is authority for the statement that these "expeditions cost Spain more than all the treasures she had received from her South American possessions." There is more meaning than appears on the surface in the Spanish proverb, "Happiness is only to be found in El Dorado which no one yet has been able to reach."
Alas, that Sir Walter Raleigh should have been lured to seek in Guiana the fabled El Dorado which had now become the splendid city of Manoa built on the shores of a vast inland lake of salt water. It was in this guise that he heard the transplanted and exaggerated story of the gilded man. His own narrative, as included in Hakluyt's Voyages, is entitled:[[4]]