A lieutenant had played him false. Nicolaus Federmann[1569] had been disappointed in not getting the command of the expedition, but being made second, was instructed to follow after his chief with supplies. Federmann avoided making a junction with George, and wandered at the head of about two hundred men, who were faithful to him, seeking glory on his own account, till after three years of labor he emerged in April, 1539, from the mountain passes upon the plains of Bogotá. Two years before this (in 1537) Gonzalo Ximenes Quesada, following up the Magdalena River, had arrived on the same plateau, and completed the conquest of New Granada. The year following (1538), Sebastian de Belalcazar, marching north from Quito, had reached the same point.[1570]
QUESADA.
Cf. Markham’s Travels of Cieza de Leon, p. 110; and his Narrative of Andagoya, p. xxv.
Thus the three explorers from three directions came together. They joined forces and descended the Magdalena to Santa Martha, where Pedro Fernandez de Lugo, the associate of Quesada, died, while Quesada himself proceeded to Spain to obtain the government of the newly discovered region. Meanwhile Hernan Perez, a brother of Quesada, being left in command in Bogotá, committed the usual cruel excesses upon the Chibchas, but finally left them, to follow another adventurer who had arrived in the track of Federmann, with the same stories of the golden city. So the recreant Governor joined the new-comer Montalvo de Lugo, and together they marched eastward on their golden quest. He returned to Bogotá in a year’s time, wiser but not happier.
Meanwhile a new expedition was forming on the Venezuela side. Among the followers of George of Spires had been one Philip von Huten,[1571] who after George’s death, and when Rodrigo Bastidas had succeeded him, was made the commander of an expedition which left Coro in 1541 by vessels, and, prepared for an inland march, landed at Barburata. The next spring he got on the track of Quesada and resolved to follow it; but the expedition only journeyed in a circle, and after suffering all sorts of hardships found itself at the point of setting out. Huten, undaunted, again started with a smaller force. He encountered and made friends of the Uaupe Indians, and under their guidance proceeded against the towns of the Omaguas, where they encountered resistance; and Huten being wounded, the invaders retreated, and brought to an end another search for Eldorado. The expedition had added a new synonym, Omaguas, for the attractive lure.
SKETCH MAP, AMAZON AND ELDORADO.
Huten, on his return to Coro, found that Carbajal had seized the government. This brutal soldier now executed Huten, and held his iniquitous sway until the licentiate Juan Perez de Tolosa arrived with the imperial authority in 1546, when Carbajal was in turn put to death. Thus ended the German efforts at South American discovery on this side of the continent.
Meanwhile Gonzalo Ximenes Quesada’s visit to Spain had failed in making him the Governor of New Granada, as he had hoped. Luis Alonzo de Lugo, the son of Quesada’s associate, was the successful applicant for the position. The new Governor arrived in 1542, but a residencia interrupted his career, and Pedro de Ursua, a nephew of Armendariz, the judge who had taken the residencia, was sent to Bogotá to take charge. Thence his patron sent him on the old quest for the rivers flowing over golden sands. He failed to find Eldorado; but he founded the city of Pampluna in the wilds, and ruled its stately lots for two years. Then Armendariz had his downfall in turn, and Pedro de Ursua in 1549 found favor enough with those who then administered the government to get command of another expedition to Eldorado, during which he founded another city, which he had to abandon in 1552 because the natives attacked it so persistently. Next, Pedro was put in command of Santa Martha, and began to fight the Indians thereabout; but seeking a larger field, he started for Peru. His fame was sufficient to induce the authorities at Panamá to engage him to quell the Cimarrones, who infested the Isthmus. In two years Ursua accomplished this task, and then went on to Peru, where at Lima, in 1559, the new viceroy Cañete appointed him to lead a well-equipped expedition to Eldorado and the Omaguas. If the fabled city should not be reached, the quest for it would draw away from Cañete’s province the prowling ruffians whom the cessation of the civil wars had left among the settlements. But it was thought the quest was more likely to be successful than any previous one had been, since Viraratu, a coast chieftain of Brazil, had with two Portuguese recently ascended the Amazon, and had confirmed to Cañete the old stories of a hidden lake and its golden city.