The King was the best of listeners. He gave Orellana a commission to conquer these fabulous countries, and in May, 1544, Orellana sailed with four ships and four hundred men. Misfortune followed him speedily, and only two of his vessels reached the river. Up they went for a hundred leagues or so; but it was quite different making headway against the current from floating down it, as he had done before. His men died; his vessels were stranded or broken up; he himself became ill, and at last died. This ended the attempt; and such of his followers as could, made their way back to Spain; and New Andalusia, as the country was to be named, remained without a master.
Of the expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro there is no account by any one engaged in it; but we have the traditions of the story told by Garcilasso de la Vega in the second part, book third, of the Royal Commentaries, and this account is put into English and annotated by Mr. Markham in the Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, published by the Hakluyt Society in 1859,—and to this book its editor contributes a summary of the later explorations of the valley. Orellana’s desertion and his experiences are told by Herrera in his Historia General; and this, which Markham calls the best account possessed by us, is also translated by him in the same publication. Wallace, in his Amazon and Rio Negro, has of late years suggested that the woman-like apparel of the men, still to be found among the tribes of the upper Amazon, gave rise to the belief in the story of the female warriors.[1579]
The form which the story of Eldorado oftener took, and which it preserved for many years, gave representation of a large inland sea, called finally Parima, and of a golden city upon it called Manoa, the reminiscences of Martinez’s tale. Somehow, as Mr. Markham thinks, these details were evolved in part out of a custom prevalent on the plains of Bogotá, where a native chief is said to have gilded himself yearly, and performed some rites in a large lake. All this array of wealth was clustered, in the imagination of the conquerors of northern Peru, about the fabled empire of the Omaguas; and farther south the beckoning names were Paytiti and Enim. Whatever the names or details, the inevitable greed for gold in the mind of the Spanish invaders was quite sufficient to evolve the phantom from every impenetrable region of the New World. In 1566 Martin de Proveda followed in the track of Ursua; but sweeping north, his men dropped by the way, and a remnant only reached Bogotá. He brought back the same rumors of rich but receding provinces.
In 1568 the Spanish Government mapped out all this unknown region between two would-be governors. Pedro Malaver de Silva was to have the western part, and Diego Fernando de Cerpa to have the eastern as far as the mouths of the Orinoco. Both of the expeditions which these ambitious heroes led came to nothing beyond their due share of trials and aimless wandering; and one of the leaders, Silva, made a second attempt in 1574, equally abortive, as the one survivor’s story proved it to be.
THE MOUTHS OF THE ORINOCO.
This is a portion of the map given by Schomburgk in his edition of Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana, published by the Hakluyt Society in 1848.
Markham says that the last expedition to achieve any important geographical discovery was that of Antonio de Berreo in 1582. He had received by right the adventurous impulse, through his marriage with the daughter or heiress of Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada. He followed down the Cassanare and the Meta, and pursued the Orinoco to its mouth. The English took up the quest when Raleigh sent Jacob Whiddon in 1594 to explore the Orinoco. Berreo, who was now the Spanish governor of Trinidad, threw what obstacles in the way he could; and when Raleigh arrived with his fleet in 1595, the English leader captured the troublesome Spaniard, and was confirmed in his belief, by what Berreo told him, that he could reach the goal. This lure was the lying account of Juan Martinez, already mentioned. The fortunes of Raleigh have been told elsewhere,[1580] and the expeditions which he conducted or planned, says Markham, may be said to close the long roll of searches after the fabulous Eldorado.
Nearly the whole of the northern parts of South America had now been thridded by numerous adventuring parties, but without success in this fascinating search. There still remained an unknown region in Central Guiana, where were plains periodically inundated by the overflow of the Rupununi, Essequibo, and Branco (Parima) rivers. Here must Eldorado be; and here the maps, shortly after this, placed the mysterious lake and its auriferous towers of Manoa down to a comparatively recent time. According to Humboldt[1581] and Schomburgk,[1582] it was after the return of Raleigh’s and Keymis’s expedition that Hondius was the first in his Nieuwe Caerte van het goudreyke landt Guiana (1599),[1583] to introduce the Laguna Parima with its city Manoa in a map. He placed it between 1° 45´ and 2° north latitude, and made it larger than the Caspian Sea.
We find the lake also in the Nieuwe Wereldt of De Laet in 1630, and in the editions of that year in other languages. Another Dutch geographer, Jannson, also represented it. Sanson, the French geographer, puts it one degree north of the equator in his Terre Ferme in 1656, and is particular enough to place Manoa at the northwest corner of a squarish inland sea; but he omits it in his chart of the Amazons in 1680. We find the lake again in Heylin’s Cosmographie of 1663, and later editions; in Blaeu’s Atlas in 1685. Delisle omits the lake in 1703, but gives a legend in French, as Homann does in his map in Latin, “In hac regione aliqui ponunt lacum Parima urbemque Manoa del Dorado.” In another of Delisle’s maps a small lake appears with the legend: “Guiane proprement dite ou Dorado, dans laquelle quelques-uns mettent le lac Parime.” We have it again in the map in Herrera, edition of 1728; and in 1729. Moll, the English geographer, likewise shows it. In the middle of the century (1760) the maps of Danville preserve the lake, though he had omitted it in an earlier edition; and the English edition, improved by Bolton in 1755, still continues it, as does an Italian edition (Venice) in 1779. The original Spanish of Gumilla’s El Orinoco (2d edition, Madrid, 1745) has a map which gives the lake, and it is repeated in the French edition at Avignon in 1758, and in a later Spanish one at Barcelona in 1781. Kitchen’s map, which was prepared for Robertson’s History of America, again shows it; and it is in the centre of a great water system in the large map of La Cruz, made by order of the King of Spain in 1775, which was re-engraved in London the same year. It is also represented in the maps in the Historia de la nueva Andalucia, of Antonio Caulin,[1584] Madrid, 1779, and in the Saggio di Storia Americana, Rome, 1780. Conrad Mannert’s map, published at Nuremberg in 1803, gives it; as do the various editions of François Depons’ Voyage dans l’Amerique méridionale, Paris, 1806. The lake here is given under thirty degrees north latitude, and Manoa is put at the northeast corner of it.