In 1636, when the conquistadors conquered America, the Spaniard Juan Rodriguez left to descendants a description of one curious rite. Hundreds of natives converged on the shores of a deep black lake, which lay at an altitude of 2700 m in the mouth of an extinct volcano. During the solemn ceremony, the priests took off the clothes of the ruler, coated him with clay and showered him with golden sand.
And the ruler turned into El Dorado, the Golden Man. He was taken to the raft, on which four were already waiting. Loaded with offerings of gold and emeralds, the raft slid to the middle of the lake.
The four on the raft lowered the offerings into the water, and the ruler jumped off after. When he appeared on the surface again, the golden cocoon was gone …
Rodriguez, who described this scene, was not an eyewitness. In 1636, the rite of the Golden Man was already a thing of the past, and it is not known whether it was ever sent at all.
A hundred years before the events described, the Spaniards, in search of legendary Indian treasures, invaded the hills of modern Colombia, but did not find anything significant. But with great success they eradicated the indigenous culture of the Chibcha people.
The ease with which Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec empire in Mexico, and Francisco Pizarro brought the Incas to his knees, whetted the predatory appetites of other Europeans.
In 1536, about 900 white adventurers set out from the Santa Marta settlement on the northeastern coast of Colombia. The expedition wanted to go up the Magdalena River, get to its source, find a new route through the Andes to Peru and, with luck, open up another native empire that could be ravaged and plundered.
The leader of this campaign was the stern and devout assistant to the provincial governor, solicitor from Granada, Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada.
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For eleven months, his people endured incredible hardships, hacked their way through the impenetrable thickets, overcame marshes teeming with poisonous snakes, alligators and predators. The natives showered them from ambushes with a rain of poisoned arrows.
The grief invaders starved, suffered from fever, and died like flies, while the survivors ate frogs and lizards. Quesada decided to turn back, but then his half-dead army of less than 200 people got out to the Cundinamarca plateau.
Before the stunned invaders lay the manicured corn and potato fields and the tidy huts of wealthy villages. There was a melodic chime of thin gold plates swaying by the wind, which hung over the doors.
Europeans have never heard such sweet music. After a long ordeal, they finally reached the country of the Chibcha Indians.
Frightened by strangers, and especially their horses, many Chichba left the settlements. But the rest greeted the Europeans as gods descended from heaven, offered food, women and, most importantly, the much-desired gold. The Chibcha did not consider despicable metal to be of any special value.
They exchanged it with neighboring tribes for emeralds and salt, which were abundant in these places. The Chichba did not have the slightest idea about the value of gold; they valued it for its brilliance and fusibility, which made it possible to make delicate jewelry, utensils and religious objects.
Greedy Europeans found few friendly gifts, and they began to plunder. A few months later, Quesada subdued the entire region, while losing only one soldier.
But the Spaniards did not succeed in immediately finding out where the Chibcha gold came from. It took a long time before an old Indian (probably under torture) told them the secret of El Dorado, the Golden Man. To get countless treasures, you need to go east, to the mountains, where Lake Guatavita is hidden.
It was there that one of the leaders annually gives to the gods the offerings of the Indians, lowering gold and emeralds into the waters of the lake, and then, covering the body with golden sand, dives into the lake himself in order to add his gift to the donations of his fellow tribesmen.
True? Legend? An old man's trick to distract the invaders from plundering their home country? However, the story made a huge impression on the Europeans, went down in the history of the Conquest and soon turned from the Golden Man into Eldorado - the object of desire of a host of gold prospectors, a country of fabulous treasures, which, as usually happens, lies “beyond the next mountain” or “on the other side of the nearest river.
Before leading his people in search of El Dorado, Quesada decided to return to Santa Marta and establish himself as governor of the highlands he conquered, which he renamed the new Granada.
But in February 1539, news came to the mountains of a new European expedition, approaching from the northeast to the capital city of Santa Fe de Bogotá, which had just been founded by Quesada.
It turned out to be a gang led by the German Nicolae Federmann, who acted on behalf of the Welser trading house from Augsburg. As a token of gratitude for the financial assistance in the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, King Charles I of Spain gave the province of Venezuela to the Welser House. In search of a still “free” native kingdom, the German set out from the coastal settlement of Koro.
For more than two years he searched for a passage through the mountain range on the Cundinamarca plateau. Quesada greeted the emaciated, half-starved and almost naked strangers warily, but offered them food and clothing - hoping for their help during the invasion of the land of El Dorado.
And then the news came of the approach from the southwest of another detachment, led by Sebastian de Belalcazar, the closest assistant to the conqueror of Peru, Francisco Pizarro.
Belalcazar pursued the remnants of the retreating Inca army. Having driven them to Ecuador, he founded the city of Quito there, but on the way he also heard about the hidden fabulous riches.
Belalcazar arrived in Santa Fe de Bogotá with a detachment of well-equipped and armed Europeans on fine horses, brought silver tableware and drove 300 pigs, which pleased the meat-hungry Europeans who had arrived on the plateau earlier. By an incredible coincidence, each of the three squads had 166 people.
A dispute began between the leaders about the priority right to conquer the next native empire. Unable to reach an agreement, they went to Spain to present their claims to the king.
Meanwhile, TD "Welser" lost Venezuela, captured by another Spanish adventurer, and as a result, Federmann, who remained out of work, died in poverty. Belalcazar was given the position of head of one of the cities he founded on the way to Santa Fe de Bogotá, but his star also went down, and he ended badly.
Quesada never received the post of governor and was forced to be content with the honorary military rank of Marshal of New Granada. He lived to be 80 years old and never for a moment gave up his dream of finding Eldorado.
While the three disputants were exchanging claims with the king, the search for El Dorado continued. The first who attempted to get the alleged treasures from the bottom of Guatavite was Hernán-Perez de Quesada, brother of the conqueror of New Granada.
In the dry season of 1540, he ordered his men to scoop all the water out of the lake with pumpkin buckets. For three months of painstaking work, he really managed to lower the water level by about 3.5 m and bring out more than 3,000 small gold items, but the Spaniards did not manage to get to the middle of the lake, where the lion's share of the treasures was supposedly lying.
Forty years later, an even more daring attempt was made to drain the lake. A well-to-do merchant from Bogotá hired several thousand natives to dig a drainage channel. As a result, the water level dropped by 20 m.
An egg-sized emerald and many gold trinkets were found on the exposed section of the bottom, but this extraction was not enough to cover the costs. Another treasure hunter also tried, but gave up when his workers died.
The last attempt to drain the lake was made in 1912. British treasure hunters, dragging huge pumps to the shore, managed to pump out almost all the water, but soft silt at the bottom immediately sucked anyone in.
The next day the sludge dried up and became as hard as concrete. Having spent $ 160 thousand on the enterprise, the British retrieved $ 10 thousand worth of gold jewelry from the lake.
In 1965, the Colombian government declared Lake Guatavita a national historic reserve and put an end to all attempts to get to its bottom.
In 1541, five years after the start of Belalcazar's campaign, Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the conqueror of Peru, also left Quito and set out in search of El Dorado, which was rumored to be rich not only in gold, but also very expensive at that time in cinnamon. Pizarro was soon joined by the soldier of fortune Francisco de Orellana.
But as soon as the expedition crossed the Andes and went east, to the selva, the companions parted. Pizarro eventually returned to Quito, while Orellana walked along a wide, calm river and reached the Atlantic coast.
Along the way, he came across an indigenous tribe, whose women were much better at bow and arrow than men. Remembering the ancient Greek legend of female warriors, Orellana called this river the Amazon.
Other Spanish adventurers followed in their footsteps and expanded the search area of Eldorado to the mouth of the Amazon and Orinoco. One of the most stubborn was Antonio de Berrio, the governor of the interfluve.
Like others, he was convinced that the subject of the search lay at the bottom of one of the high-mountainous lakes, but much to the east, in the mountains of Guiana, where the defeated Incas retreated and where they founded the legendary city of Manoa, whose streets were rumored to be paved with gold.
From 1584 to 1595, Berrio led three expeditions to Guiana. During the third campaign, he reached the island of Trinidad, where he met Sir Walter Reilly, who was trying to restore his lost glory as a colonizer.
The Englishman gave Berrio a drink, found out the secret of El Dorado from him and, having subjected the Spaniard to temporary imprisonment, returned to his homeland, where he wrote an enthusiastic account of El Dorado.
Reilly took Berrio at his word and ardently argued that El Dorado was much richer than Peru. Reilly's book did not generate much interest in Manoa, and his own attempt to find Eldorado ended in failure.
For over 400 years, the story of the Golden Man has excited the imagination of gold prospectors. None of them, of course, found a lake with a bottom of gold, or a city with golden pavements.
All the gold they discovered existed only in the form of bizarre ornaments and decorations that did not meet European standards. Therefore, most of the products were simply melted down, and the ingots were transported home. The little that has survived in its original form is now kept in museums.
No matter how much the Europeans darted around South America, they could not satisfy their insatiable greed. Fortunately, in the course of their search, they almost accidentally drew up detailed maps of almost the entire continent. The thirst for gold helped them endure the monstrous hardships and hardships in a foreign land and survive.
The Indians, however, could not understand why the aliens were so eager to get these shiny things for decorating houses and sanctuaries. They do not save from the cold, do not satisfy hunger, do not give pleasure. This plunged the Indians into complete confusion.
But not Europeans. They already knew what market relations were, and that is why they so readily believed in the Golden Man, who, if there was at all, disappeared long before they began to look for him.