SOURCE: Connell, Evan. “The Golden Man.” The Atlantic Monthly 241, No. 6 (June 1978): 65-71.

[In the following essay, Connell describes the hardships and madness endured by expeditions led by Ambrosius Dalfinger, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, Gonzalo Pizarro, Lope de Aguirre, and Walter Raleigh as they vainly sought El Dorado.]

If you go to Bogotá and visit the Banco de la República you will see, in the bank's Museo del Oro, nearly 10,000 pre-Columbian gold artifacts: labrets, nose rings, brooches, masks, spoons, pincers, receptacles, representations of birds, snakes, crocodiles, people, animals—so many that you think they must be dime-store replicas. You walk along a corridor filled with display cases, each case cluttered with dull gold knickknacks. You turn right, walk down another long corridor past more of the same. Then more. And more. Finally, instead of going out, you enter a room which is completely dark. After you have been there a while the lights very gradually rise and you are surrounded by gold from the floor to the ceiling. If Tutankhamen's gold were added to this collection, together with everything Schliemann found at Mycenae and Hissarlik, you could scarcely tell the difference.

Quite a lot of it is Muisca. Unless you happen to be an anthropologist, or a collector, or at least a Colombian, the name Muisca may not mean anything. The Muisca Indians were one of the Chibcha tribes living in the highlands around Bogotá. They were sedentary farmers with no great authority or influence; but for a number of years, nobody knows just how long, until they were deprived of their independence by some Chibcha cousins, they observed a ritual unlike any other in the world.

Guatavitá was their principal village, and high above it at an altitude of about two miles is a small circular lake which was created several thousand years ago when a meteorite plunged into the earth. People were living in the Andean cordilleras at that time and a memory of the phenomenon must have survived, because Chibcha mythology relates how a golden god dropped from the sky to make his home at the bottom of Lake Guatavitá.

In any event, whenever a new Muisca chieftain was elected—or possibly each year as a form of reconsecration—he paid his respects to this radiant underwater deity. After first being anointed with sticky balsam gum he was sprayed with gold dust through cane tubes until he became a glittering living statue. Then he walked from the temple to the lakeshore, accompanied by priests wearing black cotton robes and by the Muisca men whose bodies were painted red. At the shore he stepped aboard a raft and was paddled to the center of the lake where—possibly at dawn, just as sunlight illuminated the surface—he dove in and washed away the gold. Then the people who had followed him, who now stood all around the perimeter of the lake, hurled emeralds and golden trinkets into the water.

The last performance of this ceremony seems to have taken place about 1480, but when the Europeans arrived they heard stories of a gilded man; and after they had told the stories to each other often enough the Muisca chief became an omnipotent king who ruled a golden empire. Not only did the king himself go about his daily affairs dressed in a golden crust, so did the nobles of his realm; and because it was uncomfortable to sleep in a golden suit they washed it off every night, gilding themselves afresh in the morning. And the warriors wore golden armor. And the buildings were sheathed in gold. That is to say, practically everything in this kingdom except food either was made of gold or was sheathed in gold.

The first European to go looking for it was a young German, Ambrosius Dalfinger—some say Ehinger—who had been appointed governor of Venezuela as the result of a little hanky-panky in the Old World. After Maximilian of Habsburg died three rulers competed for the title of Holy Roman Emperor: Henry VIII, Francis I, and Charles I of Spain. Who received this crown would depend on the Electors; and, as the Spaniards say, Don Dinero speaks with a loud voice. Charles borrowed a truckload of ducats from two German banking families, Welser and Fugger, in order to bribe the Electors. Dalfinger was related to some Welser officials, Charles owned Venezuela, etc.

Thus, in 1529 young Ambrosius landed at Coro, a settlement consisting of several dozen thatched huts, a church, a town hall, and a gallows. He was expected to infuse the colony with a more businesslike spirit and speed up the exports—the most profitable being a substance derived from the bark of the guaiac tree which reputedly cured the so-called French disease, morbus Gallicus. But the Welser did not know their deputy because Dalfinger very soon went marching into the jungle with 180 men and several hundred native “volunteers” to see what he could see. How much he knew of El Dorado at this point is uncertain; perhaps not much because the legend was just taking shape, although he probably had seen a few gold ornaments in Coro.

On this march Dalfinger acquired some gold. Nothing remotely comparable to what Cortés had found at Tenochtitlán, but either by force or by trade he did pick up some high-carat gold pins, nose rings, diadems, and bracelets. More significant than the gold itself was the fact that Venezuelan Indians had not made it. The workmanship was beyond their ability. It came from a place called Xerará which was rich also in green stones—emeralds. In Xerará one could trade seashells and cotton for emeralds and gold.

Dalfinger spent ten months in the jungle searching for this wonderful place.

After his return, while attending to gubernatorial business, he accumulated supplies and soldiers for another attempt. And he became convinced that the way to locate the kingdom was to terrorize the natives. Sooner or later, he reasoned, they would stop being evasive and lead him straight to it.

In June of 1531 he set out with forty cavalrymen, 130 foot soldiers, and a column of slaves. Even by conquistadorial standards he seems to have been unusually brutal and shortsighted. Indians who welcomed him with gifts and songs were shot or sliced apart. Rebellious captives were burned alive. He had linked his porters together by a neck chain and when one died of exhaustion it was at first thought necessary to unshackle them all to get rid of the corpse; then Dalfinger realized it was simpler to decapitate the body, or, in some cases, a living porter who was unable to carry his load.

Meanwhile they were collecting gold. The expedition's accountant listed sixteen gold representations of eagles, fourteen anthropomorphic figures, a quantity of brassards, earrings, labrets, and so forth, whose weight totaled more than 100 kilos. Dalfinger loaded it on some Indians and dispatched them to Coro with a guard of twenty-nine soldiers. One man, Francisco Martín, survived. Either he stumbled into Coro several weeks later half-dead of starvation, or he was adopted by a tribe and told his story long afterward. Historians disagree. In either case, it appears that the convoy got lost and when food ran out the Europeans began eating Venezuelans before being eaten themselves by predators and scavengers. As for the gold, Martín said they buried it at the foot of a ceiba tree.

Two years and three months after leaving Coro thirty-five exhausted ragged men tottered back into town. Governor Dalfinger, who had stopped a poisoned arrow with his throat, was not among them. They brought very little gold, but of harrowing stories they had more than enough. Bloodsucking vampire bats. Malaria. The nigua—a sand flea that lays its eggs in the toes of animals and men. Yellow fever, accompanied by black vomit and death. A fever called verrugas, carried by flies, which disfigured the body with horrible suppurating wounds. Crocodiles, jaguars, a climate where everything rotted, to say nothing of invisible human enemies—one torment after another. And as for the soldiers who exercised themselves with native women, they had syphilis.

Those who listened to the grim recital and looked at the survivors grew more than ever convinced that someplace in the jungle a kingdom of inconceivable splendor must exist. As proof, a sizable treasure already had been found—though regrettably lost. Then too, if such a kingdom did not exist why would God create so many obstacles to its discovery? Therefore it must be.

After Dalfinger came Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a lawyer who foresaw nothing but a life of genteel poverty in the gloomy Andalusian courts. He sold everything and embarked for Santa Marta on the Colombian coast.

In 1536 he was sent upriver with approximately 900 men to look for a passage to the South Sea. Charles wanted a short route to the Spice Islands, so those were Quesada's marching orders—although everybody in the expedition and everybody in Santa Marta understood that he would be looking for the Gilded Man. Obedezco pero no cumplo. Which is to say: I obey but I do not comply.

Quesada's troops hacked their way through some of the most unpleasant territory on earth. Ants, hornets, snakes, ticks, bats, mosquitoes, fevers, and tropical rain made their days memorable, with a quick flight of arrows now and then for emphasis. Stragglers caught by Indians were eaten. One man was dragged from his hammock by a jaguar. Others were grabbed by crocodiles. Pack animals sank to their bellies in the swamps, which meant unloading and reloading. It took three months to go seventy miles. Graves marked the trail. Occasionally, says the record, “a hand clenched in its last agony was unable to be flexed and remained above the ground, seemingly to wave farewell to those who went in search of the accursed gold.”

When food ran low they swallowed insects, rats, bats, lizards, and whatever else might keep them alive a few hours longer; they gnawed at leather shields and the hides of dead horses.

Next came the mountains. They climbed and shivered and chewed on raw corn and dragged the surviving horses upward.

At last they looked down on a vast cultivated plain. Everything appeared green and peaceful. This was the plateau of Cundinamarca, land of the condor, home of the Chibcha Indians. A year had passed since Quesada left Santa Marta. Three fourths of his men were dead.

Descending from the mountain the Spaniards attacked—burning, killing, and looting—and came finally to the city of Tunja where they saw thin sheets of beaten gold hanging from almost every hut, reflecting the sunlight and giving off a faint tinkling sound. In a wooden palace they came upon one of the three Chibcha rulers. He was very old and fat, and was seated on a wooden stool intricately decorated with gold plate and encrusted with emeralds. Quesada, remembering the lesson taught by Cortés and Pizarro, seized the fat old man and never once let go, so that within a few minutes the city of Tunja capitulated.

It was late afternoon when they arrived. Now, by torchlight, they rushed around tearing sheets of gold from the huts, filling bags with emeralds and gold dust.

They also discovered a temple full of royal mummies embellished with parrot-feather headdresses, emerald eyes, and golden ornaments. The temple caught fire while they were stripping the mummies, but the treasure was salvaged and thrown into a heap—gold-plated litters and chairs and gold-spangled mantles. The gold made such a pile, wrote the chronicler San Martín, that Quesada mounted on his horse was nearly hidden by it.

Still they had not found what they were looking for, el hombre dorado.

They were shown the lake above Guatavitá and were told that here the story of a golden man had originated. Here, it was explained to them, the Muisca used to anoint and gild their chief. But that was a long time ago. Now there was no such man. El Dorado no longer existed.

The Spaniards refused to believe it.

Quesada and his men remained on the plateau for two years, searching relentlessly for hidden treasure and gold mines. What they uncovered was unquestionably worth stealing in the name of the Spanish crown, but it did not compare with the wealth of Mexico or Peru. So there must be more, they reasoned. Much more. But there was not. The Chibcha had no treasuries, no secret mines. Most of their gold came from trade with Ecuador.

At last, somewhat frustrated because he had expected to rival or surpass Cortés and Pizarro, Quesada began to think about returning to Spain to publicize his conquest and ask for a suitable reward—the governorship of this territory, which he had chosen to call New Granada.

Intrigue at the Spanish court persuaded Charles to reward the financier behind Quesada rather than the conquistador himself. Thus the financier's son, who had nothing to do with the discovery and conquest, became governor of New Granada. As for Quesada, ten years later he reappeared in the New World with a coat of arms, the meaningless title of marshal, and 2000 ducats annually. Even then, at the age of fifty, he continued to dream. Having actually found El Dorado—or at least the legend's origin—and found it less than he expected, he thought it must be somewhere else.

Pizarro's youngest brother, Gonzalo, set out from Quito in 1541. He, too, had heard rumors. From a tortured Indian he learned that El Dorado lay in a region known as the Guianas.

Gonzalo recruited 210 Spaniards, 4000 Peruvians, and several thousand pigs, dogs, horses, and llamas. Across the deadly cold Andes they went, then down into a jungle so thick they never saw the sun, losing five or ten members of the army every day.

They came to a tributary of the Amazon which they named the Coca, and decided to float downstream “to some region of plenty,” so they constructed a brigantine—making nails out of horseshoes, boiling tree sap for pitch, caulking the seams with their own ragged clothes. Then for two months Pizarro led his army alongside the Coca while the brig San Pedro, commanded by Francisco Orellana, carried the heaviest cargo and those who were too sick to walk or ride horseback. At night they bivouacked together, eating whatever they could swallow.

Things got worse until at last Orellana with about sixty men continued downstream in the brig and several canoes, the plan being that when they discovered food they would load up the San Pedro and return. Whether this was Orellana's idea, or Pizarro's, is disputed. In any case, the plan could not work; Orellana could not possibly sail upriver against the current. Nevertheless, away he went. Later, when describing the voyage, Orellana remarked: “After boiling our boots in herbs we set off for the kingdom of gold.”

Pizarro's army waited and waited beside the Coca, meanwhile enjoying such delicacies as toasted stirrup leather and dog flesh simmered with tree leaves.

At last, their tattered clothes moldering in the tropical climate, they realized they must turn around.

Two years after the army left Quito, Pizarro returned with seventy-nine men; and of these, several died almost immediately because they would not stop eating. How many Indians got back is unknown; by some accounts not one of the 4000 survived. Near the end of this journey Pizarro had a dream in which a dragon plucked out his heart and tore it to shreds.

A priest who accompanied the Orellana detachment, Father Gaspar de Carvajal, kept a journal and by his reckoning the clumsy brig was traveling on the current as much as ninety miles a day. Otherwise, life on the river was not idyllic. Foragers saw nothing edible, so that before long they were boiling and chewing not only the last of their boots but their leather sword scabbards and their belts. Sometimes they crawled ashore, many of them unable to stand up, and grubbed for roots.

Eventually they saw a village, rushed into it and began devouring everything while the Indians fled.

After eight months on the world's most powerful river they arrived at the estuary with blankets for sails and vines for rigging. It is said that one island in the estuary is larger than Switzerland, and so strong is the current that fresh water can be found 100 miles offshore.

Orellana's men followed the coast up to Nueva Cádiz on the island of Cubagua near Trinidad, and from there they reached Santo Domingo. Orellana then returned to Spain where Charles—entranced by his adventures—commissioned him to return and colonize the florid river basin. It sounds peculiar. You would expect Orellana to be hanged for deserting Pizarro. He must have told his story with great skill.

Anyway, his triumphant return started badly. An epidemic swept through the fleet before it left the Canary Islands. Then three of his captains and a number of soldiers refused to cross the Atlantic, some because they were sick, others because they sensed trouble. The water gave out, and if it had not been for a rainstorm everybody would have died. On the Amazon they were hit by arrows, fever, snakes, crocodiles, etc. Orellana died aboard ship. A few of his wretched colonists turned around and got to Margarita Island, their lives indirectly ruined by the Gilded Man.

In 1560 the Viceroy of Peru commissioned a renowned disemboweler of Indians, Pedro de Urzúa, to go after the elusive prince.

Deep in the Amazon basin Urzúa was stabbed to death by mutineers and a weak young aristocrat named Guzmán was appointed in his place. The actual commander was a middle-aged gallows bird named Lope de Aguirre who seems to have been a bona fide psychopath. He was small, ugly, about fifty years old, with a black beard and malevolent eyes. What is curious about him is that he never believed in El Dorado. The maddest of a demented lot, he could not be tricked by a luminous phantom in the jungle. He proposed returning to Peru.

Because of the current they would have to float all the way down the Amazon to the Atlantic, sail north around Guiana and Venezuela, march across the Isthmus of Panama, then walk or sail down the Pacific coast. En route they would attack settlements, kill the administrators, and recruit more men for an invasion of Peru. There, after overthrowing the Spanish government, they would divide the kingdom's enormous wealth.

According to one scholar there are certain men “so shaped by birth and breeding that they dedicate themselves to a nihilistic demolition of all human institutions.” Now this may be argued; but if it's true, Aguirre was such a man.

Garcilaso de la Vega relates that in 1548, at Potosí, Aguirre received 200 lashes for mistreating Indians, after which he vowed to kill the judge, Esquivel. This threat so alarmed Esquivel that he gave up his post and fled to Lima, but within two weeks Aguirre found him. Esquivel fled to Quito. Twenty days later Aguirre arrived. Esquivel fled to Cuzco, but presently Aguirre arrived, “having traveled on foot and without shoes, saying that a whipped man had no business to ride a horse.” For three years and four months Esquivel tried to escape. Aguirre followed him, and caught up with him in Cuzco at noon on a Monday, asleep over his books, and stabbed him.

This was the brain behind Guzmán, the expedition's new figurehead.

Somewhere along the way Aguirre learned from Indians that it was possible to switch rivers. That is, to move entirely by water from the Amazon to the Orinoco because of a stream called the Casiquiare which empties into them both. The Orinoco would deliver them close to a settlement on Margarita Island.

While they were in the midst of this transition Don Fernando de Guzmán, reflecting upon his subordinate's temper, began to think it might be wise to kill Aguirre. However, he was slow getting organized and Aguirre heard about the plot. As a result, Don Fernando and three of his associates quickly joined their ancestors.

Aguirre now proclaimed himself “General of the Marañón”—the Marañón being a tributary of the Amazon—and promised his followers victory in Peru.

They devastated Margarita Island—slaughtering, raping, burning, and looting. The governor and several other officials, having been assured by Aguirre that he meant them no harm, were strangled at midnight in the fortress. So it went. Anybody who displeased him was garroted, shot, or stabbed.

Told of a conspiracy against him, he butchered the supposed ringleader and then summoned a longtime friend, Antón Llamoso.

“They also tell me that you were one of the party,” Aguirre said to Llamoso. “How was this? Was this friendship? And dost thou hold so lightly the love I feel for you?”

According to Padre Simón, Llamoso was so terrified by Aguirre's words that he fell upon the body of the dead conspirator, shouting: “Curse this traitor, who wished to commit so great a crime! I will drink his blood!” And putting his mouth over a horrible wound in the head he began sucking the blood and brains, swallowing what he sucked “as if he were a famished dog.”

Before leaving the island Aguirre murdered two priests, various citizens who got in the way, and several of his own men. Then he embarked for Venezuela in three ships flying a black flag with crossed red swords. At the moment of departure he killed his admiral, Alonso Rodríguez, who had suggested that Aguirre go belowdecks to avoid being splashed by the waves.

He now had approximately 150 insurgents, although when they stepped ashore this number was reduced by one; he shot a Portuguese named Farias who asked whether they were landing on another island or the mainland.

They seized the port of Burburata, and here the touchy general declared war on Philip II. Their next stop was Valencia, a short distance up the coast, where he wrote an irrational vituperative letter to the Spanish king, concluding: “I am a rebel against thee until death.” This letter was carried by a priest to Santo Domingo and from there it reached Spain. Whether Philip saw it is not known; probably no one dared show it to him.

After executing a few more of his revolutionaries who did not sound enthusiastic enough, Aguirre marched on Barquisimeto, which he found deserted. But the hour had come. Government troops besieged him, his little army melted away, and at last, as wild as Hitler, he stabbed his adolescent half-breed daughter Elvira who had accompanied him all the way from Peru. “Commend thyself to God,” he told her, “for I am about to kill thee; that thou mayest not be pointed at with scorn, nor be in the power of anyone who may call thee the daughter of a traitor.”

He was shot by two of his own men. His head was cut off and exhibited in an iron cage as a warning. His body was quartered, its pieces thrown into the street. And in faraway Peru the house in which he had lived was torn down and salt was sprinkled over the earth where it stood so that nothing of him would remain. All of which, provided your mind has a skeptical slope, may cause you to reflect on the nature of madness.

In the spring of 1595 four strange ships dropped anchor at Icacos Point, the southwest corner of Trinidad. A roving English gentleman of fortune had arrived, by name Sir Walter Raleigh, carrying a royal patent from Elizabeth to “offend and enfeeble the King of Spain, and to discover and subdue heathen lands. …”

Raleigh had done his homework. He had talked with captains of vessels that traded in the Caribbean and with men who had spent time ashore. He had read everything he could find on the subject of South America and he claimed to be familiar with the details of twenty-three expeditions that had searched for El Dorado.

“Guiana is a country that hath yet her maidenhead,” he wrote. “The face of the earth hath not been torn, the graves have not yet been opened for gold. … Men shall find here more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with gold than either Cortés found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru.”

His presence quickly was reported to Governor Don Antonio de Berrio, who dispatched some soldiers to find out what the English pirate wanted. They were assured that the English had stopped at Trinidad “only in search of refreshment.”

Berrio mistrusted this. He dispatched a larger party.

Raleigh invited these emissaries aboard. Four Spaniards accepted. And there, beneath Raleigh's personal flag—five silver lozenges on a blue field—the Englishmen and the Spaniards sat around drinking wine and pretending to be friends, meanwhile subtly pumping each other for information.

Raleigh learned from an Indian that there were less than eighty soldiers on the island. That being so, the hour was ripe. He sent a boatload of food and wine to the Spaniards who had remained ashore and when they settled down to enjoy English hospitality a landing party slaughtered them. Raleigh then murdered his four guests. It might be observed, if one wishes to pick at cause and effect, that during the previous year eight Englishmen who visited Trinidad intending to hunt for meat had been captured by Spanish soldiers who trussed them up like pigs and slit their throats.

Anyway, now that the preliminaries were over, Raleigh's men set out for San José. They marched all night and arrived at dawn. The attack was a great success; practically the entire garrison was killed and Berrio was captured. The English then looted the town, set it afire, and marched back to their ships in high spirits.

Raleigh began to interrogate his prisoner courteously because they both came from good families.

Berrio pretended to be senile. He answered vaguely, talked about how difficult it was to travel up the Orinoco, there were all sorts of wild animals, Indians with poisoned arrows, and so forth. Nobody could reach the land of gold.

But Sir Walter had not crossed the Atlantic for amusement. As a matter of fact, he loathed sea travel. He got sick easily, hated the stench of the forecastle, and called the ocean “a pasture for fools.” And now that he had put up with the crossing he did not intend to be duped by an elderly Spaniard's nonsense.

With Berrio as his prisoner he entered the mouth of the Orinoco—that is to say, one of the mouths—and got lost. The Orinoco delta, 150 miles wide, has at least seventeen major channels which divide and loop and braid together in such confusion that there are places where the current runs backward, away from the sea. Raleigh and his sailors never had seen anything like it.

Fifteen days after entering the delta they managed to get into the mainstream, which astounded them by its width—four miles across. They rowed upriver, sometimes helped by the wind, and occasionally met native fishermen in dugouts from whom they got not only fresh fish but gourds full of the local palm toddy. Raleigh was smarter than most of the Spaniards when dealing with Indians; he insisted that they not be robbed or abused, with the result that he and his men often were invited to the villages. Through Arawak interpreters he asked if they knew of a chief who covered himself with gold.

Oh yes! Yes indeed! Oh yes! Through the jungle. Beyond the mountains.

Raleigh decided he had gone far enough. The directions sounded familiar. Besides, the river was flooding, which made progress difficult, and there were hints of a Spanish flotilla approaching.

He weighed anchor and started home, accompanied by all the debris of the giant river in flood—whole tree trunks roiling beside the ship like battering rams. The level of the water rose ominously. In his diary he wrote: “The fury of the Orenoque beganne daily to threaten us with daungers in our return, for no half day passed, but the river began to rage and overflow very fearfully, and the raines came down in terribel showers, and gusts in great abundance: and withall: our men beganne to cry out. …”

Once out of these terribel daungers he returned to his base at Trinidad where, after failing to obtain any ransom for his distinguished captive, he exchanged Don Antonio for an English prisoner and sailed away to England.

He did not bring back much—some tobacco, a few gold trinkets, specimens of ore, and additional rumors concerning the whereabouts of the ephemeral golden kingdom:

“I have been assured by such of the Spanyardes as have seene Manoa, the emperiall Citie of Guiana, which the Spanyardes call El Dorado, that for the greatness, for the riches, and for the excellent seate, it farre exceedeth any of the world, at least of so much of the world as is known to the Spanish nation; it is founded upon a lake of salt water 200 leagues long. …”

Raleigh's sponsors, having put up quite a lot of money, were not pleased with the meager result. His enemies, though, were delighted; they claimed that the voyage never took place and said that for seven months he had been skulking off the English coast.

He thereupon wrote his magnificent, preposterous account of what he had seen, as well as much that he had not, entitled The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards call El Dorado).

This is less than the complete title, but it is the important part, even though untrue: Raleigh had discovered nothing that was not already known to the Spaniards. But his narrative was widely accepted and reprinted many times.

On March 24, 1603, Queen Elizabeth died and a few days later Raleigh woke up in the Tower of London under sentence of death. The charge was old, and apparently unfair; he had been guilty of negligence in failing to report treasonous talk, which was serious enough, but hardly deserving execution. In any case, he seems to have reasoned that his last hope of emerging from the Tower was Guiana—golden Guiana. If he could lead one more expedition, and if all went well, he would be restored. He may still have believed in the legend of a golden king, or he may have thought only that the mineral wealth of Guiana would save him. Or perhaps he was just pretending.

“It is a journey of honour and riches. I offer you an enterprise feasible and certaine,” he wrote to the Earl of Holderness, who might possibly intercede on his behalf. And if he could not lead an expedition to a Guiana mountain alight with silver and gold, he went on, “let the commander cut off my head then and there.”

In March of 1616 he was released from the Tower for one last attempt.

Twenty-one years had elapsed since his first voyage. He had spent thirteen of those years in the Tower. He was now troubled by headaches, fever, and persistent abscesses on his body, and he walked with a limp. An “ould and Sorroweworn Man,” he said of himself, “whom death would shortlye deliver.” He was sixty-four.

“Gualtero Rale has set forth …” wrote the Spanish ambassador to Philip III on June 26, 1617.

Before his flagship Destiny reached South America forty-two crewmen were dead.

Raleigh himself lay ill with malaria, and so appointed Captain Keymis to take charge of the trip upriver—a disastrous excursion that resulted in a battle with Spaniards, the death of Raleigh's elder son Wat, and Keymis's suicide.

“God knowes I never knewe what sorrow ment till now,” he said in a letter to his wife, “… my braines are broken and it is a torment for me to write.”

The ships of his fleet returned singly to England, until only the Destiny remained in South America. At last he, too, had no choice but to return. In England again he was called a pirate and doomed, the victim of changing times, reaccused of treason. On October 29, 1618, at nine o'clock in the morning in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, he delivered his final speech—which lasted nearly an hour. “I have a long journey to go,” he said at the end, “and therefore will take my leave.”

The executioner struck twice and picked up Raleigh's head by the hair in order to display it—“with great applause of the beholders.” Raleigh's eyes were still open. The head was presented to his wife, who had it embalmed and kept it in a red leather bag.

He left a slim estate: not much money, a sample of ore, two gold ingots, some rough maps of Guiana, and a diamond ring given him by Elizabeth “which he weareth on his finger.”

Today in Bogotá's Museo del Oro among those ancient Muisca treasures you will come across a gold raft on which a little gold king is riding, no doubt toward the middle of the lake. And should your mind have a certain cast—if, let us say, you believe yourself related to Sir Walter Raleigh, or Quesada, or Dalfinger, or those others—well then, as you contemplate this miniature tableau it might occur to you that South America is huge, much of it has yet to be explored, and those first adventurers may not have had the right information. And in the archives, as everybody knows, are innumerable musty old documents, some of which contain new directions.

After all, as the poet says, there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.