SOURCE: Hemming, John. “Chapter 9.” In The Search for El Dorado, pp. 151-61. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978.

[In the following essay, Hemming describes expeditions by Antonio de Berrío and Domingo de Vera in the last two decades of the sixteenth century to find the elusive El Dorado.]

Gonzalo Jiménez died without any immediate family but with great estates of tribute-paying Muisca. He remained obsessed by El Dorado and determined that his heirs should conquer the kingdom that had eluded him. He chose as his heir his niece María, who was married to an old soldier called Antonio de Berrío, veteran of many Spanish campaigns in Italy, Flanders and against the Moors. In his will Jiménez de Quesada wrote: ‘Item: I declare as my successor in … the governorship [of El Dorado], Captain Antonio de Berrío, husband of my niece doña María …’¹ He could not possibly have chosen a better successor. Berrío proved to be as stubborn a fanatic and as indestructible an old warrior as the Adelantado Jiménez de Quesada himself.

Within two years of learning about the legacy, the Berríos obtained permission to move to New Granada with their many children. They reached Bogotá in 1581 and by the end of the following year had, after a long legal wrangle, obtained the succession as governor of El Dorado between the Pauto and Papamene rivers. They settled in the village of Chita, high in the Andes near the Sierra Nevada de Cocuy, and started to amass the revenues from their many encomiendas. The Indians of Motavita had to produce 72 pesos of gold a year; those of Chita, 567 pesos and many cotton cloaks; those of Peublo de la Sal, 180 pesos and salt ‘baked into loaves’; Baganique, 597 pesos; Chiscas, cotton mantles; and Tamara, ‘good, fine, white cotton mantles’.² All this tribute went towards the equipping of Berrío's attempt on El Dorado. He wrote to the King in September 1583; ‘May it please God to let this concealed province be discovered, and a great infinity of peoples be converted to the Catholic faith, and the royal patrimony be greatly increased, by the love of God!’³

Antonio de Berrío finally descended on to the plains with only eighty men, but with five hundred horses and great quantities of cattle, pigs and food. His column moved in a cloud of fine dust. There was deep silence in the llanos, a region of impressive monotony where the far horizons are lost in heat haze. The dreary march was interrupted only by occasional marshes, which the horses forded with difficulty, or dense thickets of palm or pine near the water courses. By February 1584 the expedition reached the Meta river.

There were occasional villages of Achagua Indians, whose large thatch huts were tightly closed against the myriad mosquitoes. ‘They are a tribe where Indian men and women go naked without wearing anything whatsoever. Their heads are shaven: they shave them with small canes that they grow for this purpose. … They sleep in hammocks of a cord they make from twisted palm hearts. Their barter consists of shells and beads, salt, and dogs, tools, and gowns that they obtain from peaceful Indians in exchange for Indian women and child slaves that they raid or obtain by barter from other tribes, jaguar skins, and birds they call caharos, macaws and parrots, and anatto dye. They seemed to me,’ wrote Berrío's man Alonso de Pontes, ‘a people of good disposition, who love knowing what we call all things and my name, and who are very shrewd traders.’⁴ The Achagua had plenty of food—manioc, ground maize, pineapples from which they made a spirit, and plenty of fat fish and guama fruit. They were generous in feeding the passing expedition. The Spaniards had a healthy respect for the Achagua, who knew the labyrinthine swamps of the llanos and who could creep up noiselessly to attack a sleeping camp. Diego Pinto described them as ‘a very bellicose people, cannibal and warlike, and they have a very fierce poison that takes only sixteen hours to finish off a person wounded by it.’⁵

One group of Achagua described a community of Amazons who lived five days to the east. Their village was a daunting paradise for visiting men. ‘When you arrive, they come out and each takes her Indian by the hand and leads him to her house. Next morning the men are paid, according to how well they laboured the night before, in arrows that the women make, very embellished with poison; but any Indian who did not perform well would be killed. They are very white and go naked; and they have much food, manioc and maize, sweet potatoes and fish, and they cook very well. [Indians] do not dare to stay there for more than one night, after which they immediately return.’⁶

Other Achagua excited Berrío by telling him that ‘within ten leagues there are ten thousand Indians.’ He sent a message to the authorities in Bogotá from the banks of the Casanare river. He told them that the Indians were giving him fantastic reports. ‘I have made great efforts to interrogate each one by himself, apart from the rest, and using great tricks and [interrogation] techniques; so that I believe that a great part of it is true.’⁷ So the expedition trudged forward across the plains. In April the rains set in: the hard dusty ground turned spongy and the rivers flooded. Berrío ordered his men to camp, four leagues from the Orinoco, to sit out the rains of 1584. Four thousand Achagua attacked but were driven off with some losses. Berrío questioned the prisoners. They told him to aim for the hills on the far side of the Orinoco—which was precisely where he was convinced he would find El Dorado. ‘They say that on the far side of it are great settlements and a very great number of people, and great riches of gold and precious stones. I asked whether there were as many people as on the plains. They laughed at me: they said that in the cordillera there were many settlements, in each of which there were more people than in all the llanos!’⁸

These mountains contained Lake Manoa, a vast saline lake, so large that it took the Indians three days to paddle their canoes across. ‘They say that once this lake is crossed, the great provinces of Guiana stretch to the Marañón [Amazon]. The Indians say that it would take two moons to go from Manoa to the [Amazon].’ In the language of the Achagua, Manoa actually means ‘lake’.⁹ It was a return to the idea connecting El Dorado with a fabulous lake.

The hills beyond the Orinoco were now firmly established as the target for El Dorado seekers. Juan de Salas, governor of Margarita island, had already described this wonderful place: ‘There is much news that there is gold in the province of Guiana, both from Aruak Indians who come to this island and also from Spaniards who go there to trade for slaves … Beyond a sierra, which is not very large, on the far side, are many settlements and a very mighty lake on that plain, over six leagues wide and as many long. Within it are many islands, of one or two leagues. There are great settlements within it and on the mainland beside it. On the mainland and on one of those islands is the smelting house where they do their melting. It is a very rich land. Lords who possess riches order that when they die all their treasures should be thrown into this lake; they also order that part of their treasure be placed beside them in their tombs.’¹⁰

When Antonio de Berrío heard all this and gazed up at the cordillera, he knew that he was about to make a spectacular conquest. ‘By the grace of God and his glorious Mother, on Palm Sunday in the year '84, I discovered … the cordillera so ardently desired and sought for seventy years past, and which has cost the lives of so many Spaniards. It is so high that I first sighted it from a distance of 28 leagues!’¹¹ He was already calculating how easy it would be to ship treasure from his great conquest back to Spain: he reminded the King that the Orinoco flowed into the ocean opposite Trinidad, so that ships would have an easy passage from his El Dorado.

As soon as the rains ended, Berrío was off, across the Orinocco and plunging towards the ‘ardently desired’ cordillera. Most of the men had fallen ill ‘from the vapours of the swamps and the fear that filled them’.¹² So the white-bearded old governor had to explore, on foot, with only thirteen companions. He hacked his way up through dense wilderness as far as a crag far above the Orinoco and, by his reckoning, only two leagues from the cordillera itself. Back at the river, Berrío took a canoe downstream from his camp and came upon an island filled with Indian warriors. With characteristic courage, Berrío approached and made friends by means of gifts. The Indians told him that their island, near the great Atures rapids, was the point of contact between the plains and the mountains. Beyond lay the open road to the cordillera. With this ‘certain knowledge’ Berrío paddled back to his camp and was disgusted to find not a single man fit for duty. Even this don Quixote decided that he must return to replenish and refit his expedition. ‘I decided that it would not be right, after having discovered the cordillera, … to venture further and to sacrifice my men, myself along with them, and the object of so many years' search, which by the grace of God I had found.’¹³ He reckoned that he would need three hundred men to enter El Dorado, ‘and more than three thousand to finish the business, for the settlements and land stretch as far as the Marañón.’¹⁴ So he marched his men right back across the llanos. They found a good dry route, westwards up the Meta and its tributary the Casanare. Berrío was back with his family by April 1585. He boasted to the King that, although the expedition had cost him 30,000 ducats, he had lost only eight men during seventeen months of travel: three killed by Indians and five by disease.

Berrío rested only one month before going to Bogotá to start organizing another expedition. For a man in his middle sixties there was no time to be lost. He was well received, but there were frustrating delays. The authorities were preoccupied with native rebellions. Another governor, Francisco de Cáceres, was off seeking El Dorado in a different direction, south-eastwards to the lands that had ensnared Hutten and Limpias. So it was not until March 1587 that the intrepid Berrío entered the llanos again. He had managed to assemble 97 Spaniards (47 arquebusiers and 50 common soldiers), over five hundred horses and as many cattle on the hoof, and great loads of food, salt, maize, cheeses, hams, and six canoes. He was soon cruising down the Casanare with half the men and the serving Indians, while his lieutenant Alvaro Jorge and 47 horsemen drove the cattle across the plains. This Jorge was a Portuguese veteran as old as the governor himself: he had survived Hernán Pérez de Quesada's search for El Dorado, 46 years before. There is no chronicle narrative of Berrío's expeditions, apart from some passages in Pedro Simón: we must therefore piece together the events from Berrío's own letters to the King. The story that emerges is of hardship and endurance remarkable even for the sixteenth century.

On this second expedition, Berrío struck the Orinoco near the Atures rapids and took his expedition across on three rafts. Months were spent exploring the uninhabited forests on the far side. The expedition found a savannah with fresh grass for the horses, so they built a village of thirty thatch huts, a base for further explorations. But the natives were decidedly hostile. Every time someone went to the fields he risked being picked off in an ambush. It finally came to a pitched battle, with courageous fighting on both sides. Pedro Simón told about a horseman who pursued an Indian, but the warrior grabbed the horse by the neck and managed to force it to the ground. Another Spaniard rushed up and sliced open the Indian's stomach. The brave continued to fight, holding his entrails in with one hand and wielding his club with the other. Alvaro Jorge rode up and captured the valiant Indian; and managed to cure him within a week. In gratitude (or was it revenge?) the Indian told the camp great news about Lake Manoa.

The camp was again decimated by malarial fevers. Even the leathery old Berrío was ‘very stricken with a disease of fevers’.¹⁵ So, when a contingent of reinforcements organized by Berrío's wife doña María reached the camp in May 1588, there was uproar. The mutinous men persuaded the commander of this relief force that they were in the grip of a mad fanatic. He agreed to lead them to safety down the Orinoco in a flotilla of canoes. Berrío was stranded. ‘A large part of the men he had with him rebelled against him, so that he was forced to return …’¹⁶ He had to march back to New Granada, furious at the betrayal by this ‘rebel’. An official told the King: ‘Governor Berrío emerged from the El Dorado expedition in March of this year [1589]. It appears from most certain reports that he had arrived some eight leagues from settlements of innumerable Indians. He is lodging a complaint about a captain who made him miss this entry and who upset his men.’¹⁷

Berrío had spent 30,000 ducats organizing his first expedition and 25,000 on the second. He now managed to raise a further 40,000—much of it supplied by the wretched Indians of his encomiendas. It took a year to organize the third expedition, but it was well planned. Berrío thought of everything: powder, shot, fighting dogs, savannah horses rather than elegant mounts, arquebuses, and even wine for mass. The expedition left in March 1590, with Berrío taking seventy men in a great flotilla of 44 canoes and rafts, and Alvaro Jorge on land again with the cattle and 42 horsemen. This time Berrío took his thirteen-year-old son and heir, Fernando. He later wrote to the King: ‘It may seem a shame that so tender and rich a child should have experienced such hardship. But I consider it glorious that he should begin serving Your Majesty: so that he will know how to do it when he is a man.’¹⁸ Only by experience could the boy learn how to cross a river, how to sense an Indian ambush, how to attack a native village, how to lead tough backwoods-men, and above all how to crush an incipient mutiny.

Berrío was steadily exploring all the right bank of the Orinoco, continually seeking the elusive pass into El Dorado. This time he started in the province of Aritaco, between the Parguaza and Suapure rivers well below the great cataracts. The first entry was blocked by an impenetrable belt of palm thickets and swamps. Then came the rains, which Berrío weathered in the fertile lands of the Amaipagoto tribe, possibly on the lower Cuchivero. Even during the rains, with leaden skies and dispiriting downpours, Berrío kept his men chopping inland, forever seeking the first outposts of the kingdom beyond the mountains. The land near the Orinoco was uninhabited because of regular raids by cannibal Caribs. Further inland the tribes had destroyed their homes and crops to repel the intruders. The expedition's supplies were exhausted: soon its sorties were merely to steal food, not to find roads to the fabulous kingdom. The starving expedition was struck by a terrible illness, a form of madness that affected men, dogs and horses alike. One by one, thirty soldiers and two hundred serving Indians died there. Men died raving of hunger, even when they had enough to eat; dogs and horses set upon one another. Nine men tried to escape down the river: it was later learned that they had been caught by Caribs, killed and eaten.

Nothing daunted by these disasters, Antonio de Berrío marched inland again as soon as the rains ended. With fifty men, he penetrated thirty leagues and emerged into better country. There were frequent paths and some food to steal. Plumes of smoke were visible in the distance: to an optimist as ardent as Berrío, these were a sure sign of dense population. When the expedition found Indian hearths, these were ‘foundries’ for melting gold. Berrío decided to explore a river. Everyone, himself included, wielded axes and adzes to build four dugout canoes. They loaded themselves into these and somehow managed to descend this wild river, surviving its many fallen logs, rapids and cataracts. These rivers flowing into the Orinoco from the Guiana highlands are still little known: to a modern explorer, this descent alone would be considered a notable expedition. Berrío's river was perhaps the Parucito and Parú. He was disappointed to find no traces of advanced civilization along it; and it led, not to Lake Manoa, but back to the Orinoco itself.

Berrío now made a historic decision, comparable to Cortés burning his boats on the shores of Mexico or Jiménez de Quesada sending his brigs back down the Magdalena when he marched up towards the Muisca. Berrío described his dilemma to the King: ‘I had great reports, but was certain that it was impossible to cross the cordillera except by pushing in by a route downstream through the province of Caroní … I had endured the greatest calamities ever suffered in the Indies, with two-thirds of my men dead or fled, and the majority of those who remained determined to return to the kingdom [of New Granada]. I considered that if they did return this time, my aspirations would be totally finished. I therefore decided on a move of great daring. This was to descend the river to a place where logs were found for making boats. God, in a form of miracle, was pleased to send me five logs, all together—when for many leagues round about there were none at all—and they were the most beautiful and largest that I had ever seen in my life! When I found them, I decided to kill all the horses, so that the soldiers would lose any hope of returning to the kingdom. Using salt that we treated, we made jerked meat [from the horses] to eat there while the canoes were being made—which we needed very badly. With the meat that was left over, and almost no other food, I commended myself to God and to fortune, and cast myself off down the river. I sailed down it for almost 250 leagues to reach the Caroní river, which descends from the great and rich provinces that we call El Dorado …’¹⁹

The Caroní river was quite well known to Spaniards. It was the largest tributary flowing into the Orinoco from the south, and its lower reaches had been investigated by various explorers during the course of the sixteenth century. Berrío was absolutely convinced that this river was the pass he had been seeking: ‘The great river called Caroní comes down from Guiana and cannot be navigated because of a great waterfall; but a little higher up, where a chief called Morequito lives, the mountains end and the provinces of Guiana begin, behind which in turn come those of Manoa and El Dorado and many other provinces.’²⁰

During his descent of the Orinoco, Berrío made friends with some canoe loads of Caribs—normally bitter enemies of the Spaniards—and they confirmed his hopes. ‘We had much friendship on this journey; two of their chiefs came into my canoe and I handed one Spaniard over to them. They revealed great secrets about the land, and confirmed all the information which I had received higher up. … I shall state my opinion in this matter. These great provinces lie between two very great rivers, the Amazon and the Orinoco.’ Explorers on the Orinoco were deceived by seeing no rich settlements on its banks. ‘But the Indians tell the truth, because the great towns and the riches are very much up from the border country of Morequito; but it is not possible to enter there, and the large towns begin more than sixty leagues inland. I have travelled down the streams and explored around the mountains—over 700 leagues by land and water—during my three expeditions, and have spent ten years in continuous labours, so that I am well informed and know the facts. From the mouth of the Amazon to that of the Orinoco the map indicates more than 400 leagues in latitude and over 1500 in longitude, in which there is not a single Spanish habitation. … I came across specimens of gold in every district during my journey of 700 leagues or more, skirting the mountains; and when I asked whence they brought it, they all said from the far side of the mountains; and they exaggerated the quantity so greatly that it is incredible. … I shall enter into Guiana without delay; and if it is one twentieth part of what is believed, it will be richer than Peru!’²¹

Berrío sent a letter to the governor of Margarita, the island near the mouth of the Orinoco, begging for reinforcements. He had useful meetings with chief Morequito near the mouth of the Caroní. There was further confirmation of the wealth that lay near the source of that river. But the reinforcements did not arrive. Berrío had lost more of his men, and the majority of those who remained were afflicted by a form of blindness: doubtless a trachoma caused by a parasite that is still prevalent on the upper tributaries of the Orinoco. The dried horse meat was all consumed. So Berrío left a small garrison in the village of a friendly chief called Carapana, on an island a day's journey down the Orinoco from the mouth of the Caroní, and himself moved down to seek reinforcements among the men on the Caribbean.

It must have been terribly frustrating for a man of Berrío's conviction to face further delays and intrigues. He reached Trinidad in September 1591 and decided to establish a base on the island for his conquest of Guiana. He then moved to Margarita and set up a recruiting office in a small house, despite the coolness of the island's governor. Berrío attracted a number of followers, including one man who was to become his most valuable lieutenant, an amiable giant called Domingo de Vera e Ibargoyen. The first task for this faithful new supporter was to found a town on Trinidad. Domingo de Vera did this, with plenty of proclamations and some makeshift ceremonial, in May 1592. By the time Berrío arrived in January 1593 a flourishing town called San José de Oruña was being laid out and built, inland of Trinidad's modern capital Port of Spain. Domingo de Vera was also sent to recruit men in Caracas, and he proved to have a genius for promotion and publicity. His tales of the potential wealth of Guiana soon attracted a crowd of aspirants, despite the long history of failures to reach El Dorado. Berrío also sent a recruiting officer back to New Granada: his own son Fernando, aged fourteen.

Early in 1593 Captain de Vera was given a chance to investigate the approaches to El Dorado. Berrío sent him up the Orinoco with 35 men and by April he was unloading his canoes full of presents—red bonnets, glass beads, knives, machetes, combs and flutes—for the happy Indians of chief Carapana. On 23 April he was with Morequito at the mouth of the Caroní. Captain Vera was a tall man who looked most imposing in his cuirass and curved morrion helmet; but he was simple, warm-hearted and as easily influenced by Indian reports as was Berrío himself. He also loved pageantry. He decided that his first sight of the Caroní justified a speech, and declared to his men: ‘Captains and soldiers! You know that our governor Antonio de Berrío discovered the rich provinces of Guiana and Dorado through eleven years' effort and the expenditure of over 100,000 pesos of fine gold, and he took possession of them for his government … He has now sent me to learn and discover the easiest roads to enter and settle those rich provinces, to find where cattle can be kept and armies can enter those plains.’²²

Captain Vera then marched along the banks of the Caroní, planting crosses at each Indian village and taking possession of the land for the King of Spain and governor Berrío. The villages increased in size as Vera moved up the Caroní. The people were well fed and very hospitable, providing Vera's men with plenty of food. The women were ‘healthy, tall, obliging and well-formed’.²³ Back in Trinidad a few weeks later, Captain Vera gave his master a detailed, circumstantial description of El Dorado. Both explorers were convinced that Vera had entered the outer marches of the long-sought empire. It was now possible to state categorically that Guiana began 12 leagues from the Orinoco, beyond the lands of chiefs Ahuyacanare and Taruca. It consisted of some fifty leagues of densely populated savannahs, valleys and unforested hills. It was a richly-endowed land, with its own salt and spices. It was a cool, temperate place, supporting a population of two million in its many settlements. (A large population was as great an attraction to Spanish conquistadores as was gold: for the native population would provide labour and tribute after the land was divided into encomiendas.) There was, of course, gold in abundance. The natives wore it in their noses and ears, on their chests and arms. If Vera failed to see any of these ornaments, it was only because his guide, chief Morequito, had warned the Indians to hide their gold. ‘Eleven days’ journey from where the Spaniards reached, they say that there is a very large lake, which is called the land of Manoa, around which there is a vast number of clothed people and towns and lords.’²⁴ Most of the people had pigtails, except for great warriors who allowed their hair to flow free.

There were two other elements in this new picture of El Dorado. One was that it was peopled by fugitive Incas. Pedro de Cieza de León, a most careful and excellent chronicler of Peru, wrote that when the Incas defeated the neighbouring Chanca tribe, the defeated leader Ancoallo migrated eastwards into Amazonia with many of his people. ‘With the women in the van he set out and traversed the provinces of Chachapoyas and Huánuco and, having crossed the Andes mountains, they wandered through those sierras until, as they relate, they came to a great lake, which I believe must be the site of the legend that is told of El Dorado. They built their settlements there and multiplied greatly.’²⁵ Pedro Maraver de Silva repeated this idea, although for him the fugitives were Incas escaping after Pizarro's massacre of their leaders at Cajamarca. For the visionary Berrío, Guiana was the place of origin of the Incas: ‘There are many stories, with which everyone is acquainted … that the Inca kings of these provinces [of Guiana] went forth to conquer Peru, and afterwards, owing to quarrels arising between two brothers, the one returned, from fear of the other, fleeing to these provinces.’²⁶ So Berrío was hardly surprised when Captain Vera reported that the richest people near Lake Manoa had arrived only about twenty years before and had subdued many of the original inhabitants. These newcomers were clothed and spoke a different language. They ‘are a people of many trades and very rich in gold, which they dedicate to numerous shrines that they maintain in the hills and mountains.’²⁷

The other story concerned one Juan Martín de Albujar, a fugitive from Maraver de Silva's ill-fated expedition into the llanos to find El Dorado. Juan de Castellanos told this man's extraordinary story: ‘The report which I give now was revealed by Juan Martín, a soldier who is now a citizen of Carora in Venezuela. He spent seven years living among people who never wear clothes: their ornament and fashion consists of painting what nature gave them.’²⁸ He was the sole survivor of one group of Silva's men. Captured by Indians, Juan Martín soon demonstrated his talent for leading them to victory in battle. He learned his tribe's language and lived as an Indian, naked and with several wives. He came to know much of the savannahs of Guiana and its ‘numerous strong [tribes] in the midst of extensive provinces never seen or known up to now. … But all these lack treasures: they possess some gold mixed with copper, but in other respects are poor people.’²⁹ Juan Martín in fact reported that he had seen no sign of El Dorado or of the mountains ‘that run north to south across the plain, and in which we believe that news of Manoa or Guiana could be possible’.³⁰ He had sometimes seen Aruak traders bring back gold objects from distant canoe trips. But he convinced Castellanos that El Dorado ‘does not and never did have foundation …’³¹ Such objectivity was not what the believers wanted to hear. So Juan Martín's story was soon embroidered. He was said to have been taken, blindfold, to the city of Manoa, where he lived for seven months, saw a glimpse of its treasures, and conversed with its wise and powerful ruler.

Antonio de Berrío was overjoyed by Vera's success in finding the route into Guiana. It now remained only to organize the army that would enter the promised land. Poor Berrío was soon entangled in legal wrangles and intrigues more labyrinthine than the forests of the Orinoco. The governor of Margarita was sceptical and hostile: he sent a slave raiding party to seize Morequito's people. The governor of Cumaná, Francisco de Vides, appeared in Trinidad in October 1594 with a royal order confirming that Trinidad belonged to his jurisdiction. And the governor of Caracas, when Captain Vera reappeared with his wonderful stories about Manoa and Guiana, refused to let any men join Berrío—because he planned to invade Guiana himself. In New Granada, Berrío's devoted wife had died, and his many children were embroiled in legal actions. The old governor wrote, ruefully, ‘I leave ten children, seven of them females; … but I have spent all the girls' dowries!’³² The only hope was to send that brilliant salesman, Domingo de Vera, back to Spain itself to raise three hundred men and additional money and equipment.

Notes

1. Most of Jiménez de Quesada's will is lost. This fragment was found by the Jesuit historian Pablo Ojer and published in his La formación del oriente Venezolano 1, or Don Antonio de Berrío, Gobernador del Dorado, 28.

2. Pleito of doña María de la Hoz y Berrío, in Archivo Nacional de Bogotá, Ernesto Restrepo Tirado, ‘Repartimientos del Adelantado’, BHA 45, no. 473, 1954, 251.

3. Berrío to King, Santafé de Bogotá, 8 September 1583, in Ojer, Don Antonio de Berrío, 44.

4. Alonso de Pontes, Relación de su jornada al río Meta, in Ojer, Berrío, 184.

5. Diego Pinto testimony, Información of Pedro Fernández, Santafé, 30 September 1566, FDNRG, 4 50.

6. Alonso de Pontes, Relación, in Ojer, Berrío, 181.

7. Berrío to Juan Prieto de Orellana, inspector of New Granada, 4 February 1584, in Ojer, Berrío, 47.

8. Berrío to King, Santafé, 24 May 1585, in Ojer, Berrío, 52; Berrío to President and oidores of Audiencia of New Granada, Banks of Casanare, 1 April 1587, idem.

9. Gumilla, Historia natural, civil y geográfica … del río Orinoco, 1 356. This is a more convincing derivation of the name Manoa than to relate it to the Manau tribe, who lived on the middle Río Negro and whose name is recorded in the modern city of Manaus.

10. Relación de lo que Juan de Salas hizo y descubrió en la isla de Margarita … (after 1570), in Martínez-Mendoza, La leyenda, 39-40. The spelling of Guiana presents a problem. In Spanish it is Guayana, which is the spelling of the south-eastern province of modern Venezuela. In English it is Guiana, as in the name of the British colony east of Venezuela, which since independence has become the republic of Guyana.

11. Berrío to King, 24 May 1585, trans. Harlow, in Ralegh, Discoverie … of Guiana, 92.

12. Idem, 93; Ojer, Berrío, 53.

13. Idem, 93.

14. Berrío to Audiencia, Casanare, 1 April 1587, Ojer, Berrío, 55.

15. Información on the banks of the Barraguán (Orinoco), 30 March 1588 (Archivo Nacional de Bogotá, Civil xiv, folio 3), in Ojer, Berrío, 63. Simón, Noticias historiales, pt 2, noticia 7, ch. 36. Información at La Asunción, 11 October 1591.

16. Información at La Asunción, 11 October 1591, question 4, in Ojer, Berrío, 65.

17. Licentiate Ferráez de Porras to King, Santafé, 18 June 1589, in Ojer, Berrio, 66. The captain was the future governor of Venezuela, don Gonzalo de Piña Ludueña. Berrío letters to King, 1 April 1587 and 1 January 1593 (AGI [Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla] Patronato 254, ramo 1 and Escribanía de Cámara, 1011-A, piece 8).

18. Berrío to King, Trinidad, 2 December 1594, in Ojer, Berrío, 197.

19. Idem.

20. Berrío to King, Margarita, 1 January 1593, in Harlow ed., Ralegh, Discoverie, 99.

21. Berrío to King. Idem, 99-100, 102-4.

22. Rodrigo Carranza, Translado bien y fielmente sacado de una escritura de posesiones que parece tomó Domingo de Vera Ibargoyen … (AGI Escribanía de Cámara, 1011-A, piece 6), in Ojer, Berrío, 95.

23. Report on the discovery of Guayana, by Vera e Ibargoyen and Berrío, Trinidad, 1593, in Harlow ed., Ralegh, Discoverie, 107.

24. Idem.

25. Cieza de León, Crónica del Perú, pt 1, chs 78, 90, trans. de Onis, 100, 131.

26. Berrío to King, Margarita, 1 January 1593, in Harlow ed., Ralegh, Discoverie, 103.

27. Report by Berrío and Vera e Ibargoyen, Trinidad, 1593, in Harlow ed., Ralegh, Discoverie, 108.

28. Castellanos, pt 3, Elegía to Benalcázar, canto 2, BAE [Biblioteca de Autores Españoles desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nuestros dias, ed. Manuel Rivadeneira, 71 vols (Madrid, 1846-80)]4 453.

29. Castellanos, idem.

30. Idem.

31. Idem.

32. Berrío to King, Margarita, 26 October 1591, in Ojer, Berrío, 82.