Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799-1804, Vol.3 — 06 - Chapter 3.25, Part 6

The junction of three bodies of troops on the table-land of New Granada spread through all that part of America occupied by the Spaniards the news of an immensely rich and populous country which remained to be conquered.

Sebastian de Belalcazar marched from Quito by way of Popayan (1536) to Bogota; Nicholas Federmann, coming from Venezuela, arrived from the east by the plains of Meta.

These two captains found, already settled on the table-land of Cundirumarca, the famous Adelantado Gonzalo Ximenez de Queseda, one of whose descendants I saw near Zipaquira, with bare feet, attending cattle.

The fortuitous meeting of the three conquistadores, one of the most extraordinary and dramatic events of the history of the conquest, took place in 1538. Belalcazar's narratives inflamed the imagination of warriors eager for adventurous enterprises; and the notions communicated to Luis Daza by the Indian of Tacunga were compared with the confused ideas which Ordaz had collected on the Meta respecting the treasures of a great king with one eye (Indio tuerto), and a people clothed, who rode upon llamas.

An old soldier, Pedro de Limpias, who had accompanied Federmann to the table-land of Bogota, carried the first news of El Dorado to Coro, where the remembrance of the expedition of Speier (1535 to 1537) to the Rio Papamene was still fresh.

It was from this same town of Coro that Felipe von Huten (Urre, Utre) undertook his celebrated voyage to the province of the Omaguas, while Pizarro, Orellana, and Hernan Perez de Quesada, brother of the Adelantado, sought for the gold country at the Rio Napo, along the river of the Amazons, and on the eastern chain of the Andes of New Grenada.

The natives, in order to get rid of their troublesome guests, continually described Dorado as easy to be reached, and situate at no considerable distance.

It was like a phantom that seemed to flee before the Spaniards, and to call on them unceasingly.

It is in the nature of man, wandering on the earth, to figure to himself happiness beyond the region which he knows.

El Dorado, similar to Atlas and the islands of the Hesperides, disappeared by degrees from the domain of geography, and entered that of mythological fictions.

I shall not here relate the numerous enterprises which were undertaken for the conquest of this imaginary country.

Unquestionably we are indebted to them in great part for our knowledge of the interior of America; they have been useful to geography, as errors and daring hypotheses are often to the search of truth: but in the discussion on which we are employed, it is incumbent on me to rest only upon those facts which have had the most direct influence on the construction of ancient and modern maps.

Hernan Perez de Quesada, after the departure of his brother the Adelantado for Europe, sought anew (1539) but this time in the mountainous land north-east of Bogota, the temple of the sun (Casa del Sol), of which Geronimo de Ortal had heard spoken in 1536 on the banks of the Meta.

The worship of the sun introduced by Bochica, and the celebrity of the sanctuary of Iraca, or Sogamozo, gave rise to those confused reports of temples and idols of massy gold; but on the mountains as in the plains, the traveller believed himself to be always at a distance from them, because the reality never corresponded with the chimerical dreams of the imagination.

Francisco de Orellana, after having vainly sought El Dorado with Pizarro in the Provincia de los Canelos, and on the auriferous banks of the Napo, went down (1540) the great river of the Amazon.

He found there, between the mouths of the Javari and the Rio de la Trinidad (Yupura?

) a province rich in gold, called Machiparo (Muchifaro), in the vicinity of that of the Aomaguas, or Omaguas.

These notions contributed to carry El Dorado toward the south-east, for the names Omaguas (Om-aguas, Aguas), Dit-Aguas, and Papamene, designated the same country--that which Jorge de Espira had discovered in his expedition to the Caqueta.

The Omaguas, the Manaos or Manoas, and the Guaypes (Uaupes or Guayupes) live in the plains on the north of the Amazon.

They are three powerful nations, the latter of which, stretching toward the west along the banks of the Guape or Uaupe, had been already mentioned in the voyages of Quesada and Huten.

These two conquistadores, alike celebrated in the history of America, reached by different roads the llanos of San Juan, then called Valle de Nuestra Senora.

Hernan Perez de Quesada (1541) passed the Cordilleras of Cundirumarca, probably between the Paramos of Chingasa and Suma Paz;

while Felipe de Huten, accompanied by Pedro de Limpias (the same who had carried to Venezuela the first news of Dorado from the land of Bogota), directed his course from north to south, by the road which Speier had taken to the eastern side of the mountains.

Huten left Coro, the principal seat of the German factory or company of Welser, when Henry Remboldt was its director.

After having traversed (1541) the plains of Casanare, the Meta, and the Caguan, he arrived at the banks of the Upper Guaviare (Guayuare), a river which was long believed to be the source of the Orinoco, and the mouth of which I saw in passing by San Fernando de Atabapo to the Rio Negro.

Not far from the right bank of the Guaviare, Huten entered Macatoa, the city of the Guapes.

The people there were clothed, the fields appeared well cultivated; everything denoted a degree of civilization unknown in the hot region of America which extends to the east of the Cordilleras.

Speier, in his expedition to the Rio Caqueta and the province of Papamene, had probably crossed the Guaviare far above Macatoa, before the junction of the two branches of this river, the Ariari and the Guayavero.

Huten was told that on advancing more to the south-east he would enter the territory of the great nation of the Omaguas, the priest-king of which was called Quareca, and which possessed numerous herds of llamas.

These traces of cultivation--these ancient resemblances to the table-land of Quito--appear to me very remarkable.

It has already been said above that Orellana saw llamas at the dwelling of an Indian chief on the banks of the Amazon, and that Ordaz had heard mention made of them in the plains of Meta.

I pause where ends the domain of geography and shall not follow Huten in the description either of that town of immense extent, which he saw from afar; or of the battle of the Omaguas, where thirty-nine Spaniards (the names of fourteen are recorded in the annals of the time) fought against fifteen thousand Indians.

These false reports contributed greatly to embellish the fable of El Dorado.

The name of the town of the Omaguas is not found in the narrative of Huten; but the Manoas, from whom Father Fritz received, in the seventeenth century, plates of beaten gold, in his mission of Yurim-Aguas, are neighbours of the Omaguas.

The name of Manoa subsequently passed from the country of the Amazons to an imaginary town, placed in El Dorado de la Parima.

The celebrity attached to those countries between the Caqueta (Papamene) and the Guaupe (one of the tributary streams of the Rio Negro) excited Pedro de Ursua, in 1560, to that fatal expedition, which ended by the revolt of the tyrant Aguirre.

Ursua, in going down the Caqueta to enter the river of the Amazons, heard of the province of Caricuri.

This denomination clearly indicates the country of gold;

for I find that this metal is called caricuri in the Tamanac, and carucuru in the Caribbee.

Is it a foreign word that denotes gold among the nations of the Orinoco, as the words sugar and cotton are in our European languages?

This would prove that these nations learned to know the precious metals among the foreign products which came to them from the Cordilleras,* or from the plains at the eastern back of the Andes.

(* In Peruvian or Quichua (lengua del Inca) gold is called cori, whence are derived chichicori, gold in powder, and corikoya, gold-ore.

) We arrive now at the period when the fable of El Dorado was fixed in the eastern part of Guiana, first at the pretended lake Cassipa (on the banks of the Paragua, a tributary stream of the Carony), and afterwards between the sources of the Rio Essequibo and the Rio Branco.

This circumstance has had the greatest influence on the state of geography in those countries.

Antonio de Berrio, son-in-law* (* Properly casado con una sobrina.

Fray Pedro Simon pages 597 and 608. Harris Coll.

volume 2 page 212. Laet page 652. Caulin page 175. Raleigh calls Quesada Cemenes de Casada.

He also confounds the periods of the voyages of Ordaz (Ordace), Orellana (Oreliano), and Ursua.

See Empire of Guiana pages 13 to 20. ) and sole heir of the great Adelantado Gonzalo Ximenez de Quesada, passed the Cordilleras to the east of Tunja,* (* No doubt between the Paramos of Chita and of Zoraca, taking the road of Chire and Pore.

Berrio told Raleigh that he came from the Casanare to the Pato, from the Pato to the Meta, and from the Meta to the Baraguan (Orinoco).

We must not confound this Rio Pato (a name connected no doubt with that of the ancient mission of Patuto) with the Rio Paute.

) embarked on the Rio Casanare, and went down by this river, the Meta, and the Orinoco, to the island of Trinidad.

We scarcely know this voyage except by the narrative of Raleigh; it appears to have preceded a few years the first foundation of Vieja Guayana, which was in the year 1591. A few years later (1595) Berrio caused his maese de campo, Domingo de Vera, to prepare in Europe an expedition of two thousand men to go up the Orinoco, and conquer El Dorado, which then began to be called the country of the Manoa, and even the Laguna de la gran Manoa.

Rich landholders sold their farms, to take part in a crusade, to which twelve Observantin monks, and ten secular ecclesiastics were annexed.

The tales related by one Martinez* (Juan Martin de Albujar?

), who said he had been abandoned in the expedition of Diego de Ordaz, and led from town to town till he reached the capital of El Dorado, had inflamed the imagination of Berrio.

(* I believe I can demonstrate that the fable of Juan Martinez, spread abroad by the narrative of Raleigh, was founded on the adventures of Juan Martin de Albujar, well known to the Spanish historians of the Conquest; and who, in the expedition of Pedro de Silva (1570), fell into the hands of the Caribs of the Lower Orinoco.

This Albujar married an Indian woman and became a savage himself, as happens sometimes in our own days on the western limits of Canada and of the United States.

After having long wandered with the Caribs, the desire of rejoining the Whites led him by the Rio Essequibo to the island of Trinidad.

He made several excursions to Santa Fe de Bogota, and at length settled at Carora.

(Simon page 591).

I know not whether he died at Porto Rico; but it cannot be doubted that it was he who learned from the Carib traders the name of the Manoas [of Jurubesh].

As he lived on the banks of the Upper Carony and reappeared by the Rio Essequibo, he may have contributed also to place the lake Manoa at the isthmus of Rupunuwini.

Raleigh makes his Juan Martinez embark below Morequito, a village at the east of that confluence of the Carony with the Orinoco.

Thence he makes him dragged by the Caribs from town to town, till he finds at Manoa a relation of the inca Atabalipa (Atahualpa), whom he had known before at Caxamarca, and who had fled before the Spaniards.

It appears that Raleigh had forgotten that the voyage of Ordaz (1531) was two years anterior to the death of Atahualpa and the entire destruction of the empire of Peru!

He must have confounded the expedition of Ordaz with that of Silva (1570), in which Juan Martin de Albuzar partook.

The latter, who related his tales at Santa Fe, at Venezuela, and perhaps at Porto Rico, must have combined what he had heard from the Caribs with what he had learned from the Spaniards respecting the town of the Omaguas seen by Huten; of the gilded man who sacrificed in a lake, and of the flight of the family of Atahualpa into the forests of Vilcabamba, and the eastern Cordillera of the Andes.

Garcilasso volume 2 page 194. ) It is difficult to distinguish what this conquistador had himself observed in going down the Orinoco from what he said he had collected in a pretended journal of Martinez, deposited at Porto Rico.

It appears that in general at that period the same ideas prevailed respecting America as those which we have long entertained in regard to Africa; it was imagined that more civilization would be found towards the centre of the continent than on the coasts.

Already Juan Gonzalez, whom Diego de Ordaz had sent in 1531 to explore the banks of the Orinoco, announced that "the farther you went up this river the more you saw the population increase."

Berrio mentions the often-inundated province of Amapaja, between the confluence of the Meta and the Cuchivero, where he found many little idols of molten gold, similar to those which were fabricated at Cauchieto, east of Coro.

He believed this gold to be a product of the granitic soil that covers the mountainous country between the Carichana, Uruana, and Cuchivero.

In fact the natives have recently found a mass of native gold in the Quebrada del Tigre near the mission of Encaramada.

Berrio mentions on the east of the province of Amapaja the Rio Carony (Caroly), which was said to issue from a great lake, because one of the tributary streams of the Carony, the Rio Paragua (river of the great water), had been taken for an inland sea, from ignorance of the Indian languages.

Several of the Spanish historians believed that this lake, the source of the Carony, was the Grand Manoa of Berrio; but the notions he communicated to Raleigh show that the Laguna de Manoa (del Dorado, or de Parime) was supposed to be to the south of the Rio Paragua, transformed into Laguna Cassipa.

"Both these basins had auriferous sands; but on the banks of the Cassipa was situate Macureguarai (Margureguaira), the capital of the cacique of Aromaja, and the first city of the imaginary empire of Guyana."

As these often-inundated lands have been at all times inhabited by nations of Carib race, who carried on a very active inland trade with the most distant regions, we must not be surprised that more gold was found here in the hands of the Indians than elsewhere.

The natives of the coast did not employ this metal in the form of ornaments or amulets only; but also as a medium of exchange.

It is not extraordinary, therefore, that gold has disappeared on the coast of Paria, and among the nations of the Orinoco, their inland communications have been impeded by the Europeans.

The natives who have remained independent are in our days, no doubt, more wretched, more indolent, and in a ruder state, than they were before the conquest.

The king of Morequito, whose son Raleigh took to England, had visited Cumana in 1594, to exchange a great quantity of images of massy gold for iron tools, and European merchandise.

The unexpected appearance of an Indian chief augmented the celebrity of the riches of the Orinoco.

It was supposed that El Dorado must be near the country from which the king of Morequito came; and as this country was often inundated, and rivers vaguely called great seas, or great basins of water, El Dorado must be on the banks of a lake.

It was forgotten that the gold brought by the Caribs and other trading people was as little the produce of the soil as the diamonds of Brazil and India are the produce of the regions of Europe, where they are most abundant.

The expedition of Berrio which had increased in number during the stay of the vessels at Cumana, La Margareta, and the island of Trinidad, proceeded by Morequito (near Vieja Guayana) towards the Rio Paragua, a tributary stream of the Carony; but sickness, the ferocity of the natives, and the want of subsistence, opposed invincible obstacles to the progress of the Spaniards.

They all perished; except about thirty, who returned in a deplorable state to the post of Santo Thome.

These disasters did not calm the ardour displayed during the first half of the 17th century in the search of El Dorado.

The Governor of the island of Trinidad, Antonio de Berrio, became the prisoner of Sir Walter Raleigh in the celebrated incursion of that navigator, in 1595, on the coast of Venezuela and at the mouths of the Orinoco.

Raleigh collected from Berrio, and from other prisoners made by Captain Preston* at the taking of Caracas, all the information which had been obtained at that period on the countries situate to the south of Vieya Guayana.

(* These prisoners belonged to the expedition of Berrio and of Hernandez de Serpa.

The English landed at Macuto (then Guayca Macuto), whence a white man, Villalpando, led them by a mountain-path between Cumbre and the Silla (perhaps passing over the ridge of Galipano) to the town of Caracas.

Simon page 594; Raleigh page 19. Those only who are acquainted with the situation can be sensible how difficult and daring this enterprise was.

) He lent faith to the fables invented by Juan Martin de Albujar, and entertained no doubt either of the existence of the two lakes Cassipa and Rupunuwini, or of that of the great empire of the Inca, which, after the death of Atahualpa, the fugitive princes were supposed to have founded near the sources of the Essequibo.

We are not in possession of a map that was constructed by Raleigh, and which he recommended to lord Charles Howard to keep secret.

The geographer Hondius has filled up this void; and has even added to his map a table of longitudes and latitudes, among which figure the laguna del Dorado, and the Ville Imperiale de Manoas.

Raleigh, when at anchor near the Punta del Gallo* in the island of Trinidad (* The northern part of La Punta de Icacos, which is the south-east cape of the island of Trinidad.

Christopher Columbus cast anchor there on August 3, 1498. A great confusion exists in the denomination of the different capes of the island of Trinidad; and as recently, since the expedition of Fidalgo and Churruca, the Spaniards reckon the longitudes in South America west of La Punta de la Galera (latitude 10 degrees 50 minutes, longitude 63 degrees 20 minutes), it is important to fix the attention of geographers on this point.

Columbus called the south-east cape of the island Punta Galera, on account of the form of a rock.

From Punta de la Galera he sailed to the west and landed at a low cape, which he calls Punta del Arenal;

this is our Punta de Icacos.

In this passage, near a place (Punta de la Playa) where he stopped to take in water (perhaps at the mouth of the Rio Erin), he saw to the south, for the first time, the continent of America, which he called Isla Santa.

It was, therefore, the eastern coast of the province of Cumana, to the east of the Cano Macareo, near Punta Redonda, and not the mountainous coast of Paria (Isla de Gracia, of Columbus), which was first discovered.

), made his lieutenants explore the mouths of the Orinoco, principally those of Capuri, Grand Amana (Manamo Grande), and Macureo (Macareo).

As his ships drew a great deal of water, he found it difficult to enter the bocas chicas, and was obliged to construct flat-bottomed barks.

He remarked the fires of the Tivitivas (Tibitibies), of the race of the Guaraon Indians, on the tops of the mauritia palm-trees; and appears to have first brought the fruit to Europe (fructum squamosum, similem palmae pini).

I am surprised, that he scarcely mentions the settlement, which had been made by Berrio under the name of Santo Thome (la Vieja Guayana.

) This settlement however dates from 1591; and though, according to Fray Pedro Simon, "religion and policy prohibited all mercantile connection between Christians [Spaniards] and Heretics [the Dutch and English]," there was then carried on at the end of the sixteenth century, as in our days, an active contraband trade by the mouths of the Orinoco.

Raleigh passed the river Europa (Guarapo), and "the plains of Saymas (Chaymas), which extend, keeping the same level, as far as Cumana and Caracas;" he stopped at Morequito (perhaps a little to the north of the site of the villa de Upata, in the missions of the Carony), where an old cacique confirmed to him all the reveries of Berrio on the irruption of foreign nations (Orejones and Epuremei) into Guiana.

The Raudales or cataracts of the Caroli (Carony), a river which was at that period considered as the shortest way for reaching the towns of Macureguarai and Manoa, situate on the banks of lake Cassipa and of lake Rupunuwini or Dorado, put an end to this expedition.

Raleigh went scarcely the distance of sixty leagues along the Orinoco;

but he names the upper tributary streams, according to the vague notions he had collected; the Cari, the Pao, the Apure (Capuri?

) the Guarico (Voari?

) the Meta,* and even, "in the province of Baraguan, the great cataract of Athule (Atures), which prevents all further navigation."

(* Raleigh distinguishes the Meta from the Beta, which flows into the Baraguan (the Orinoco) conjointly with the Daune, near Athule; as he distinguishes the Casanare, a tributary stream of the Meta, and the Casnero, which comes from the south, and appears to be the Rio Cuchivero.

All above the confluence of the Apure was then very confusedly known; and streams that flow into the tributary streams of the Orinoco were considered as flowing into this river itself.

The Apure (Capuri) and Meta appeared long to be the same river on account of their proximity, and the numerous branches by which the Arauca and the Apure join each other.

Is the name of Beta perchance connected with that of the nation of Betoyes, of the plains of the Casanare and the Meta?

Hondius and the geographers who have followed him, with the exception of De L'Isle (1700), and of Sanson (1656), place the province of Amapaja erroneously to the east of the Orinoco.

We see clearly by the narrative of Raleigh (pages 26 and 72), that Amapaja is the inundated country between the Meta and the Guarico.

Where are the rivers Dauney and Ubarro?

The Guaviare appears to me to be the Goavar of Raleigh.

) Notwithstanding Raleigh's exaggeration, so little worthy of a statesman, his narrative contains important materials for the history of geography.

The Orinoco above the confluence of the Apure was at that period as little known to Europeans, as in our time the course of the Niger below Sego.

The names of several very remote tributary streams were known, but not their situation; and when the same name, differently pronounced, or not properly apprehended by the ear, furnished different sounds, their number was multiplied.

Other errors had perhaps their source in the little interest which Antonio de Berrio, the Spanish governor, felt in communicating true and precise notions to Raleigh, who indeed complains of his prisoner, "as being utterly unlearned, and not knowing the east from the west."

I

shall not here discuss the point how far the belief of Raleigh, in all he relates of inland seas similar to the Caspian sea; on "the imperial and golden city of Manoa," and on the magnificent palaces built by the emperor Inga of Guyana, in imitation of those of his ancestors at Peru, was real or pretended.

The learned historian of Brazil, Mr. Southey, and the biographer of Raleigh, Sir G. Cayley, have recently thrown much light on this subject.

It seems to me difficult to doubt of the extreme credulity of the chief of the expedition, and of his lieutenants.

We see Raleigh adapted everything to the hypotheses he had previously formed.

He was certainly deceived himself; but when he sought to influence the imagination of queen Elizabeth, and execute the projects of his own ambitious policy, he neglected none of the artifices of flattery.

He described to the Queen "the transports of those barbarous nations at the sight of her picture;" he would have "the name of the august virgin, who knows how to conquer empires, reach as far as the country of the warlike women of the Orinoco and the Amazon;" he asserts that "at the period when the Spaniards overthrew the throne of Cuzco, an ancient prophecy was found, which predicted that the dynasty of the Incas would one day owe its restoration to Great Britain;" he advises that "on pretext of defending the territory against external enemies, garrisons of three or four thousand English should be placed in the towns of the Inca, obliging this prince to pay a contribution annually to Queen Elizabeth of three hundred thousand pounds sterling;" finally he adds, like a man who foresees the future, that "all the vast countries of South America will one day belong to the English nation."

* (* "I showed them her Majesty's picture, which the Casigui so admired and honoured, as it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof.

And I further remember that Berreo confessed to me and others (which I protest before the majesty of God to be true), that there was found among prophecies at Peru (at such a time as the empire was reduced to the Spanish obedience) in their chiefest temple, among divers others which foreshowed the losse of the said empyre, that from Inglatierra those Ingas should be again in time to come restored.

The Inga would yield to her Majesty by composition many hundred thousand pounds yearely as to defend him against all enemies abroad and defray the expenses of a garrison of 3000 or 4000 soldiers.

It seemeth to me that this Empyre of Guiana is reserved for the English nation."

(Raleigh pages 7, 17, 51 and 100. ) The four voyages of Raleigh to the Lower Orinoco succeeded each other from 1595 to 1617. After all these useless attempts the ardour of research after El Dorado has greatly diminished.

No expeditions have since been formed by a numerous band of colonists; but some solitary enterprises have been encouraged by the governors of the provinces.

The notions spread by the journeys of Father Acunha in 1688, and Father Fritz in 1637, to the auriferous land of the Manoas of Jurubesh, and to the Laguna de Ore, contributed to renew the ideas of El Dorado in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies north and south of the equator.

At Cuenza, in the kingdom of Quito, I met with some men, who were employed by the bishop Marfil to seek at the east of the Cordilleras, in the plains of Macas, the ruins of the town of Logrono, which was believed to be situate in a country rich in gold.

We learn by the journal of Hortsmann, which I have often quoted, that it was supposed, in 1740, El Dorado might be reached from Dutch Guiana by going up the Rio Essequibo.

Don Manuel Centurion, the governor of Santo Thome del Angostura, displayed an extreme ardour for reaching the imaginary lake of Manoa.

Arimuicaipi, an Indian of the nation of the Ipurucotos, went down the Rio Carony, and by his false narrations inflamed the imagination of the Spanish colonists.

He showed them in the southern sky the Clouds of Magellan, the whitish light of which he said was the reflection of the argentiferous rocks situate in the middle of the Laguna Parima.

This was describing in a very poetical manner the splendour of the micaceous and talcy slates of his country!

Another Indian chief, known among the Caribs of Essequibo by the name El Capitan Jurado, vainly attempted to undeceive the governor Centurion.

Fruitless attempts were made by the Caura and the Rio Paragua; and several hundred persons perished miserably in these rash enterprises, from which, however, geography has derived some advantages.

Nicolas Rodriguez and Antonio Santos (1775 to 1780) were employed by the Spanish governor.

Santos, proceeding by the Carony, the Paragua, the Paraguamusi, the Anocapra, and the mountains of Pacaraymo and Quimiropaca, reached the Uraricuera and the Rio Branco.

I found some valuable information in the journals of these perilous expeditions.