For a long time, people's imaginations have been excited by stories about distant countries, in which gold, silver and jewelry can be found in abundance and at every step. Pliny the Elder wrote about the golden island of Chryza, located somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Later, Ptolemy even reported one of the coordinates of this island: 8 degrees 5 minutes south latitude. As time went on, and gradually the golden island turned into a whole group of islands. According to one of the maps of the 9th century, these islands were to be found south of Ceylon. They believed in them back in the XII century: the famous Arab geographer of the XII century Idrisi wrote that there allegedly "is so much gold that, according to rumors, even dogs wear collars of pure gold there." The land of gold, located somewhere in Africa, is mentioned in the works of the Arab historian and traveler of the 10th century Masudi. Another mysterious country, rich in gold, ivory and ebony, is reported in the Bible - this is Ophir, where King Solomon and King Hiram of Tire sent their expeditions. The Bible is a special source, which is why many attempts have been made by European historians and geographers to locate Ophir. The German historian B. Moritz, for example, suggested looking for Ophir in South Arabia, the French researcher J. Oyer in Nubia. Others hoped to find traces of it in East Africa, India, and even the Solomon Islands. One of the first Europeans to visit West Africa, Mungo Park, wrote in the 18th century that there is a country south of the Niger River in which gold was exchanged for salt, and in equal quantities.
Mungo Park, Scottish surgeon who made 2 trips to West Africa (late 18th and early 19th centuries)
Some believe that he was referring to the Gold Coast - today's Ghana. However, all these stories did not cause a stir in Europe, whose practical inhabitants for the most part tended to treat them as fairy tales and legends. And everything suddenly changed dramatically after Columbus discovered the New World.
The era of great geographical discoveries was a very special time in the history of mankind. Before the gaze of the astonished Europeans, new unknown worlds and spaces suddenly opened up, in which nothing seemed impossible. Even the stories about the source of eternal youth were considered in those days as quite real. The search for the legendary island of Bimini, on which this source was supposedly located, with the approval of King Ferdinand the Catholic, was led by a member of the 2nd Columbus expedition, Juan Ponce de Leon.
Juan Ponce de Leon monument in San Juan, Puerto Rico
But gold and silver, unlike the never-before seen water of eternal youth, were completely real and widely used metals. And how could one not believe the stories about unimaginable treasures literally lying around in the New World under the feet of enterprising conquistadors, if ordinary members of the expeditions of Cortes and Pizarro, upon arrival at home, turned out to be richer than other counts and dukes? In the Inca city of Cuzco, robbed by Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, houses were discovered, "the walls of which, both outside and inside, were lined with thin gold plates … three huts were filled with gold and five silver, and in addition, one hundred thousand gold nuggets mined in mines ". Temples of the Sun and royal palaces were also faced with gold.
Francisco Pizarro. Painting by an unknown artist. XVI century
Diego de Almagro, portrait
Diego de Almagro, Spanish brand
An incredible amount of gold was brought from America. If all the gold coins of Europe before the voyage of Columbus weighed no more than 90 tons, then after 100 years there were already about 720 tons of gold coins in circulation. The temptation for adventurers was too great: people abandoned their families and sold their property for a pittance in order to set off on a long and tedious voyage to the shores of South America. In search of the mythical countries of gold and silver, they suffered for weeks and months from hunger, thirst, unbearable heat, fell dead from deadly fatigue, died from the bites of poisonous snakes and poisoned arrows of the Indians. All these unprecedented trips deep into the unknown continent with an unusual climate that would kill or rather any weapon, at first bore the character of plundering expeditions for gold and jewelry, and only then, after the conquistadors, did the colonists come. Passionate Europeans, of course, met in the New World with tribes at the stage of obscuration or homeostasis. In addition, the conquistadors skillfully used the enmity of various Indian tribes. So, Cortez used the Tlaxcaltecs in the hostilities against the Aztecs, and then the Aztecs against the Tarascans. During the siege of Cuzco, Pizarro was supported by up to 30,000 Indians hostile to the Incas. All the more we have to be surprised at the diplomatic abilities of these, as a rule, not too educated people and the strength of their natural charm. Recognizing their cruelty, and without questioning the numerous crimes, it is impossible not to wonder how much they achieved with such small forces. And, despite the current, rather absurd situation with political correctness and tolerance, when monuments are demolished or desecrated, even to Christopher Columbus, monuments to nameless conquistadors still stand in some cities as a sign of surprise and admiration for their exploits.
Monument to the Conquistador, Costa Rica
Monument to the Conquistador in San Antonio, Texas
The unexplored areas of the New World were as if specially created for the search for treasures, and, starting from the 40s of the 16th century, numerous expeditions of the Spaniards and Portuguese searched for the White Kingdom with a silver mountain in the territory of what is now Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. In the southern deserts of North America, they sought to find the country of Sivol. In the upper reaches of the Amazon, they tried to find the country of Omagua, and in the northern spurs of the Andes, the country of Kherire. In the Andes, they tried to find the lost city of Paititi, in which (according to legend), after the murder of Atahualpa, the Incas hid all the gold they had left. At the same time, in the Canadian province of Quebec, stories appeared about a fabulously rich country called Saguenay (Sagney) whose inhabitants allegedly owned countless warehouses of gold, silver and fur. Many French researchers, including Jacques Cartier, paid tribute to the search for this country. Today the names of these legendary countries are practically forgotten and are known only to historians. A happier fate turned out to be in another fictional country - Eldorado, where, according to the stories of "eyewitnesses", the treasures were "as common as we have an ordinary cobblestone." But why, exactly this country with a beautifully sounding, exciting soul and exciting name, remained in our memory? Why has its name become a household name, and all the great seemingly impossible feats and unheard-of atrocities of the conquistadors are associated with the search for this particular country? Now it’s hard to believe, but Eldorado was glorified not by gold and precious stones, which were never found by any of the numerous expeditions, and not full of terrible details memoirs of their participants, but a small "philosophical story" by Voltaire. In this work ("Candide", 1759), the great enlightener revealed to the world his description and his vision of this ideal state of the Indians, and it was since then that the country of Eldorado became widely known to all reading Europe.
Marie-Anne Collot, sculptural portrait of Voltaire, Hermitage
Eldorado - illustration for Voltaire's novel "Candide"
The theme of the search for Eldorado was continued and developed in their works by other writers and poets of the era of Romanticism. The most famous of them is Edgar Poe, who wrote the famous ballad of the same name.
The myth of El Dorado (literally - "the golden man") arose from the actually practiced rite of the Muisca Indians (Colombia), associated with the election of a new leader. The priests brought the chosen one to the lake, where a raft loaded with gold was waiting for him. Here, his body was anointed with resin, after which it was powdered with gold dust through the tubes. In the middle of the lake, he dumped jewelry into the water and washed off the dust. Not understanding the mythological essence of the described rite, the Spaniards perceived it as a symbol of unprecedented abundance.
Jumping ahead a bit, let's say that material confirmation of this legend was obtained in 1856, when the so-called "golden raft of Muisca" was found in a cave near Bogotá (the capital of Colombia) - a sculpture depicting the ritual ceremony of appointing a new zip (ruler) on the lake Guatavita.
Muisca golden raft, found in 1856
The first of the Europeans to learn about this rite was Sebastian de Belalcazar, a colleague of Pizarro, who was sent by him to the north of Peru. After defeating the Peruvians near Quito (present-day Ecuador), one of the Indians told him about the Muisca people living even further north, who celebrate the election of a new leader with a ceremony with a "gilded man." In early 1536 Belalcazar reached the Muisca country, but it turned out that it had already been captured and conquered by an expedition led by Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, which arrived from the Caribbean coast.
Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada
At the same time, a Spanish detachment appeared in the Muisca country, led by the German mercenary of the Welser banking house, Nicholas Federman.
Nicholas Federman
But the Spaniards were late. Ironically, just a few years before their arrival in the land of the Muisca, this tribe was conquered by more powerful neighbors (Chibcha Bogota - the current capital of Colombia is named after this tribe), and this rite was no longer observed. In addition, the Muisca themselves did not mine gold, but received it from trade with the Peruvians, already robbed by Pizarro. The small mountain lake Guatavita, where the sacrifices were performed, was about 120 meters deep, and was inaccessible to divers. In 1562, a merchant from Lima, Antonio Sepúlvedra, nevertheless tried to raise the treasures from the bottom of the lake. Several hundred Indians hired by him cut a canal in the rocky shore to drain the water. After the lake level dropped by 20 meters, emeralds and gold items were indeed found in some places in the black mud. Attempts to completely drain the lake were unsuccessful. It was continued in 1898 when a joint stock company with a capital of 30 thousand pounds was founded in England. By 1913, the lake was drained, several items of gold were found, but in the sun the silt quickly dried up and turned into a kind of concrete. As a result, the expedition did not pay for itself: the trophies were rather archaeological finds than rich booty.
However, let's go back to the 16th century. The Spaniards, who did not find the treasures, did not lose heart: they unanimously decided that by mistake they had found some other, not that Eldorado, and continued their search for the desired country. Rumors about Eldorado also spread to Europe, where another associate of Pizarro, Orellano, spoke about the outlandish Muisca ritual and for many years set the coordinates of the search for a wonderful country, which, in his opinion, should have been in Guiana - on the shores of Lake Parime between the Amazon rivers and Orinoco.
Francisco de Orellana
Orellana goes in search of Eldorado
Very handy, the Spanish conquistador Martinez who appeared (with the light hand of whom the mythical country of the Indians received the excitingly beautiful name of Eldorado) claimed that he had lived for seven whole months in the capital of Eldorado, the city of Manoa. He described in detail the royal palace, which, in its splendor, allegedly surpassed all the palaces of Europe. According to him, the ritual that excites the imagination was performed more than once every few years or even decades, but every day. Of course, such a barbaric waste of precious metal should be stopped as soon as possible. In the first 10 years, 10 expeditions were sent to the interior regions of Colombia and Venezuela, which claimed the lives of over a thousand conquistadors and tens of thousands of aboriginal lives. It was at this time that the Tupinamba Indians, who lived on the southeastern coast of Brazil, moved west, where, according to their priests, there was a Land without Disaster. In 1539 they met with the Spaniards, who were eagerly told about the kingdom of gold everything they wanted to hear from them. This is how the new legend of El Dorado developed, which turned from El Hombre Dorado (golden man) to El Dorado (golden land) - a name perfect for all the "golden lands" that were yet to be discovered. Around 1541, this country was "almost found" by another agent of the Welser bankers - the German knight Philip von Hutten. He encountered the powerful Omagua tribe in southeastern Colombia. During one of the skirmishes, Gutten was wounded, captured and ended up in the capital of the state of the Amazons, whose queen gave him a precious necklace. At least, that is how he recounted his adventures in the report to the Welsers. Philip von Hutten could not repeat his journey, since he was killed on the orders of Juan de Carvajal, who challenged him for the post of governor of Corot (Venezuela). Later, luck smiled at the Portuguese, who found the so-called Martyrs gold mines somewhere in the central part of Brazil. But in the 18th century, Indian slaves rebelled and killed their masters. The location of these mines has been lost and they have not been found to this day.
Searched for Eldorado and the famous English poet and navigator Walter Reilly (1552-1618).
Monument to Walter Raleigh, London
During his first expedition, Reilly captured and sacked the city of San Jose (now Port of Spain, Trinidad). The captured Governor de Berreaux told him everything he had heard about the great lake and the city, immersed in gold, "which has long been called Eldorado, but which is now known by its true name - Manoa." The approach of a strong Spanish fleet forced Reilly to abandon the campaign to the mouth of the Orinoco River and return to England. Here, luck changed the brilliant adventurer: after the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession to the throne of Mary Stuart's son James I, he was accused of high treason and sentenced to death, waiting for which he spent 12 years in prison. To get free, he decided to use his information about Eldorado: in a letter to the king, he wrote about a wonderful country, whose inhabitants, for lack of another metal, use gold for the most ordinary purposes. And, most importantly, the Spaniards have long been looking for this country, the path to which only he knows. If they delay, they might get there first. Jacob I believed him. Outstanding courage, tenacity and dedication had been Reilly’s hallmarks before, but now he tried to surpass himself. He understood that in England failure would not be forgiven him, and there would be no second chance. He did not spare anyone, went ahead, but luck turned away from him, and he was not able to defeat the elements of nature. The ships did not manage to enter the mouth of the Orinoco, the sailors were already on the verge of revolt, when Reilly nevertheless ordered to lie on the opposite course. He had nothing to lose to compensate the Treasury for the expenses associated with the expedition, Reilly began to plunder the oncoming Spanish ships. The king did not refuse the stolen gold, but, in order to avoid complications in relations with Spain, ordered the execution of Reilly. The only result of his travels was a book of travel sketches, published in 1597 in London and entitled "Discovery of the vast, rich and beautiful empire of Guiana, describing the large city of Manoa." Manoa, the second El Dorado, first appeared on a map drawn by Rayleigh around 1596 and haunted treasure seekers for a long time. The last deliberate attempt to discover this country was made in 1775-1780. expedition led by Nicolo Rodriguez. Only by 1802, when the entire Orinoco River basin was explored by Alexander Humboldt, it was proved that there were no lakes. True, Humboldt admitted that the rivers flood such a large area during a spill that rumors about the lake could have real ground.
Stieler Joseph Karl, portrait of A. Humboldt 1843
But the legends about the golden cities hiding in the impenetrable forests of the Amazon suddenly reminded of themselves in the twentieth century. In 1925, several traveling Jesuit monks were attacked by Indians and killed by arrows smeared with curare poison. Fleeing from the pursuers, their guide, Juan Gomez Sanchez, allegedly found himself in the middle of the city, where there were golden statues, and a huge golden disc of gold flaunted on top of the main building. As proof of his words, Sanchez presented a golden pinky, which he chopped off with a machete from one of the statues. However, he categorically refused to return to the selva and show the way to the city.
So, the search for Eldorado, which did not stop for 250 years, was not crowned with success. But they brought very valuable geographical and ethnographic results. The country of El Dorado was not found in South America, but this name can still be found on geographical maps: cities in the American states of Texas, Arkansas, Illinois and Kansas bear this name; and also a city in Venezuela.
