SOURCE: Nicholl, Charles. “Mapping El Dorado.” In The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado, pp. 9-19. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Nicholl considers the search for El Dorado the result of a psychological “projection” onto the unexplored territory of South America of the desire for wealth and power.]

The purpose of Ralegh's Guiana Voyage was to locate El Dorado, and so a question immediately arises: Where was El Dorado?

The first and sensible answer is, nowhere. El Dorado did not exist. There never was a “great and golden city” (as Ralegh put it) lost in the South American jungle, and that is why it could not, and cannot, be found. There have been remarkable discoveries in Latin America this century—Machu Picchu, Buritaca, Akakor: genuinely lost cities, or anyway settlements, that lay undisturbed for centuries. There are probably others still waiting to be found, but El Dorado will not be among them. (I am aware of recent reports in the Brazilian press that a site being excavated near Boa Vista “is” El Dorado.¹ It has certain constituents—a mountain lake, evidence of early gold-working—but as such it joins a longish list of places that may have contributed to the El Dorado legend.)

In another sense, of course, El Dorado certainly did exist. It existed, during a period that can be defined quite precisely, as an idea in people's minds, as a destination of their journeys, as a vividly specified desire. From the late 1530s, and for about a hundred years after, El Dorado—by which I mean this idea of El Dorado: the probability that it was there, the possibility of finding it, the untold riches it contained—was a craze that gripped people. It has the force field of a cultish religion. There are sudden converts and hostile skeptics; an intense rhetoric of signs and revelations. There are joyful glimpses of the promised land, though always—as the skeptics point out—at second hand.

These are two answers to the question: Where was El Dorado? It was nowhere; it was in people's heads. There is a third answer, which is that it was in different places at different times. This is a story of people searching for something, and when they failed to find what they were looking for, they explained their failure by saying that it must be somewhere else, and so the location changes.

During the sixteenth century, the location of El Dorado shifted by stages, in a generally eastward direction, across the subcontinent. The story began in the late 1530s. It was in part a refraction of rituals performed by an Andean tribe, the Chibcha or Muisca, at the sacred lake of Guatavita.² The protagonist of this ritual, mixed in with other rumors, came to be known as el dorado, “the golden man” (also el indio dorado, “the golden Indian,” and el rey dorado, “the golden king”). The place El Dorado was the empire, or kingdom, or city of this legendary golden king. To begin with, the Spanish searched for it near the Andes of present-day Colombia, where the Chibcha were first located by the conquistador Jiménez de Quesada. Later the search moved east, to the headwaters of the Amazon: This is the El Dorado of the Omagua³ sought by Von Hutten and others. In northern Peru they searched for it in the guise of Lake Paititi, a legendary Inca location. By the end of the century, when Ralegh came on the scene—the first English expedition in search of El Dorado—its location had moved nearly a thousand miles from its original site, to the rugged Guiana Highlands south of the Orinoco River. The chief explorer of Guiana, the nominal Governor of this trackless region, was a man named Antonio de Berrio.

So this would be Ralegh's answer to the question. El Dorado stands, he would tell you, in the mountainous heart of Guiana, on the shores of a huge inland lake, the Lake of Manoa.⁴ This belief was mostly based on Spanish information obtained by Ralegh: It came from seized papers and seized people, notably Antonio de Berrio himself, whom Ralegh captured at Trinidad in April 1595. There was, at the time of his departure, no printed information about this latest siting of El Dorado.⁵ This was part of the excitement. Manoa was a secret, privileged superseding of those other known, printed, failed Dorados. Thus Thomas Harriot, Ralegh's chief adviser, writing to Sir Robert Cecil in 1596: “Concerning the Eldorado which hath been showed your Honour, out of the Spanish book of Acosta [i.e., José de Acosta, Historia Natural y Moral de les Indias, 1590] … I shall show you it is not ours, that we mean, there being three.”⁶ Guiana was not the only Dorado, but is “our” Dorado. It is what we mean when we say those magic syllables.

In one sense, I suppose, the location of El Dorado remains constant; it was always farther on. It is a few days' march away; it is in the next range of mountains. In the account of one Guiana expedition, led by Domingo de Vera in 1593,⁷ they seem to be only half a league away from it, less than two miles, practically close enough to smell the woodsmoke and see the first glint of solid gold spires rising up above the trees. But they are tired, and frightened of the fierce resistance they will encounter. They move away from the area. This near encounter is subsumed into the reservoir of rumors.

The last, synaptic gap is never bridged. No one ever gets there. There is only the journey, the approach toward something that you cannot reach, something—one might infer from De Vera's curious retreat—that you dare not reach.

We see already two aspects to this search for El Dorado: the geographical and the psychological. We have to hold both in mind to understand the nature of this enterprise. I am interested in Ralegh's journey as just that—an actual physical journey—but I am interested also in the peculiar mental ambience that pervades the El Dorado quest.

It is conventional to describe those who went looking for El Dorado as people gripped by an obsession. This seems true but vague. I think of El Dorado more precisely as a projection.

Early maps of South America show the literally marginal knowledge that Europeans had of the continent. By the mid-sixteenth century there are small settlements all around the coast, mostly Spanish, some Portuguese. There are expeditions up the rivers, over the mountains, into the jungles and savannas. But the travel was hard, and they never got very far. These are nibblings of reconnaissance around the coastal margins. The center, the core, of South America remained untouched. The great transverse rivers were navigated—the Orinoco by Diego de Ordaz in 1531, the Amazon by Francisco de Orellana ten years later—but what lay between them and beyond them no one really knew.

This is always where El Dorado is: somewhere farther in, in this unknown landmass at the center of South America. It is placed in the empty spaces of the map, like the axiomatic dragons of medieval cartography. This is what I mean by projection. Onto the blank screen of terra incognita is projected this image of the golden city (or really these twin images, of the golden king and his golden city). These images embody desires that are quite conscious and recognized—for wealth, for power, for possession—but also convey, as projections do, other more buried meanings, other fantasies and desires. There are analogies here with two other tenacious legends of the region, the Amazons and the cannibals. These are also to some extent projections, embodying European fantasies and, in this case, fears. Ralegh will have something to say about them as well.

This is a simple but necessary observation: that El Dorado is something that proceeds from the mind of the searcher, and from his European culture, but is externalized from it, placed out there in the unexplored hinterlands, the still-imagined landscapes, of the New World.

El Dorado is an image, but it is also very much a story. These descriptions and imaginings of El Dorado are a kind of early oral tradition in South America. The story is carried from place to place. Details are added and subtracted. It is smoothed and modified and reiterated. It travels like a folk tale, and has in itself something of the imagery and narrative of folk tales: a golden king, a lake in the mountains, a quest. This is perhaps useful as a slight modifying of the word “legend,” which suggests something dim and distant, whereas to those involved in these journeys it was the story of the day, and they were the latest episode of it. It almost begins to sound like a soap opera.

So we understand El Dorado as something constructed—an icon, a projected fantasy, an American folk tale—but we cannot consign it completely to the world of imagination, since the search for it involved real journeys that had many real and practical results.

Geographically, that shifting location of El Dorado is also the shifting frontier of exploration in South America. El Dorado, lying just beyond the known frontier, draws people on, forges the trails that will later convey settlers and soldiers and traders. In this sense, the quest for El Dorado is synonymous with the whole process of European exploration in tropical America. Those four syllables acted as a superb kind of slogan, a piece of publicity, a recruitment drive. It was something with the power to draw together these unwieldy and hugely expensive caravans of soldiers, adventurers, and press-ganged natives, and propel them off to reconnoiter new corners of the continent.

The typical charter, or “patent,” to an El Dorado searcher charged him to “discover and people” (descubrir y poblar) the lands all around. For the native tribes, the “peopling” of regions by Spanish settlers meant expropriation and enslavement, and sometimes extinction. This is a bleaker reading of El Dorado—a colonial propaganda, the gloss on a policy of genocide, the first logging roads.

Notes

1. Chilean ethnologist Roland Stevenson, excavating burial grounds at Ilha de Maracá in northeast Brazil, has found petroglyph art, evidence of gold working, and shell fossils that suggest the former presence of a lake (Folha de São Paulo, May 27, 1993).

2. The evolution of El Dorado from Chibcha religious rites is exhaustively studied in Ramos Perez, El Mito del Dorado. See also Hemming, pp. 97-109; A. L. Kroeber, “The Chibcha,” Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 2 (1947), pp. 905-9. I describe a visit to Lago de Guatavita in The Fruit Palace (London: Heinemann, 1985), pp. 105-7. The name El Dorado is first heard (as “el indio dorado”) in a report by Luis Daza, a lieutenant of Benalcazar's, in 1534, but he refers not to the Chibcha but to a more southerly Andean tribe, probably Sinu or Quimbaya (Ramos Perez, El Mito del Dorado, pp. 216-17, 470). The imagery and the name are initially disparate, but have merged by the beginning of the 1540s.

3. Hemming, pp. 134-42. This advanced, gold working, Tupi-speaking tribe was contacted by Orellana and Von Hutten in the early 1540s, and became a focus for El Dorado expeditions in upper Amazonia.

4. The origin of this name is variously interpreted. Schomburgk (p. 18) links it to the Mahanaos, a tribe formerly found around the upper Rupununi in Guyana; Ojer to the “river called Maroa” mentioned by Von Hutten in the 1540s (Ojer [1966], p. 472). The Manau Indians of the Río Negro, whose name is the origin of the Amazon port of Manaus, are often mentioned. More convincing is the observation first made by the Jesuit historian José Gumilla (Historia Natural del Río Orinoco, Vol. 1 [1791], p. 356), that manoa is simply the word for “lake” in the language of the Achagua, whom Antonio de Berrio encountered near the Meta River in 1585. The name is Berrio's coinage, based on Achagua rumors about the Guiana Highlands. See Hemming, p. 153; Gregorio Hernández de Alba, “The Achagua,” Handbook of South American Indians, Vol. 4 (1948), p. 412.

5. The reference to Manoa in Juan Castellanos, Elegías de Varónes Ilustres de Indias (Part 3, Canto 2) dates from the mid-1580s, but the third part of the Elegías remained unpublished during Ralegh's lifetime. It is anyway a dismissal of the claims for Manoa as El Dorado.

6. Harriot to Cecil, July 11, 1596 (HMC Cecil 6, p. 276).

7. A captured report of his expedition to the lower Orinoco, and his possession of the “provinces of Guiana and Dorado” on behalf of Berrio, is appended to the Discoverie (pp. 105-10). It was “taken at sea” by Captain George Popham in 1594.

Sources

1. Documentary Sources

Acronyms in the Notes refer to the following collections:

AGI: Achivo General de Indias, Seville

BM: British Museum, London

CSP: Calendar of State Papers (printed abstracts)

HMC: Historical Manuscripts Commission (Cecil MSS at Hatfield House; Sidney MSS at Penshurst Place)

PRO: Public Record Office, London (SP: State Papers; HCA: High Court of Admiralty proceedings)

2. Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana

The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) … By Sir W. Ralegh, Knight was published by Robert Robinson in early 1596. Minor variants in extant copies show that at least three further editions were issued in that year.

A facsimile of the 1596 edition (British Library, shelf mark G.7169) is published by Scolar Press (Leeds, 1967).

All page references to the Discoverie refer to the 1596 edition. I have not attempted to source every extract I use. Many occur within a narrative sequence, and can be found easily enough by the interested reader.

Other editions referred to are:

De Bry: Brevis Descriptio Regni Guianae, ed. Theodore de Bry (Frankfurt, 1599). This is Part 8 of De Bry's monumental part-work, known variously as America, or the Great and Small Voyages. A German edition appeared in the same year. There were second editions in Latin (1625) and German (1624).

Hulsius: Kurtze Wunderbare Beschreibung Desz Goldreichen Königsreichs Guianae, ed. Levinus Hulsius (Nuremburg, 1599). This is Part 5 of Hulsius's collection Sechs und Zwanzig Schiffarten. It is a very truncated text, interesting only for the engravings that accompany it.

Schomburgk: The first modern edition, by Sir Robert H. Schomburgk (London: Hakluyt Society, 1848), containing notes based on his extensive travels in British Guiana and Venezuela.

Harlow: The best modern edition, by V. T. Harlow (London: Argonaut Press, 1928), containing a number of previously unpublished documents drawn from AGI and BM.

Books and Articles

Hemming, John. The Search for El Dorado. London: Joseph, 1978.

Ojer Celigueta, Pablo. La Formación del Oriente Venezolano. Caracas: Universidad Católica, 1966.

Ramos Perez, Demetrio. El Mito del Dorado: Su Génesis y Proceso. Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1973.