Hundreds of natives converged on the shores of a deep black lake, located at an altitude of 2,700 meters above sea level, in the mouth of an extinct volcano. Soon, a solemn ceremony began, and the Indians subsided, watching as the priests remove the clothes from the ruler, smear his naked body with clay and sprinkle it with golden sand. A few minutes later, the ruler, according to the Spanish chronicler, turned into El Dorado, the Golden Man, and he was taken to a large raft, on which 4 leaders were already waiting. Loaded with offerings of gold and emeralds, the raft slid slowly towards the middle of the lake.
The music and singing that shook the surrounding mountains died down. The leaders lowered the offerings into the waters of the lake, and the ruler jumped off the raft. When he reappeared on the surface, the golden cocoon was gone. Music again burst from the mountain slopes.
Juan Rodriguez, the Spaniard who described this scene so vividly, was not an eyewitness. In 1636, when he was creating his work, the rite of the Golden Man had already sunk into the past, and it is unclear whether it was ever performed at all. 100 years before the events described, the Spanish conquistadors in search of the legendary treasures of the Indians invaded the hills of modern Colombia, but did not find any significant treasures. But they very successfully eradicated the indigenous culture of the Chibcha people.
The relative ease with which Hernán Cortez conquered the Aztec empire in Mexico in 1521, and Francisco Pizarro brought the Incas to his knees 12 years later, aroused the predatory and predatory appetites of other Europeans. 1536 - About 900 white adventurers, accompanied by a large number of native porters, set out from the settlement of Santa Marta on the northeastern coast of Colombia.
The expedition wanted to go up the Magdalena River, get to its source, find a new path through the Andes to Peru and, if lucky, open up another native empire, which could then be subjected to ruin and plunder. The leader of this campaign was the stern and devout assistant to the provincial governor, 36-year-old solicitor from Granada, Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada.
For 11 months, his people endured incredible hardships, wielded a machete, hacking their way through impenetrable thickets, overcoming swamps, moving waist-deep in water through an area teeming with poisonous snakes, alligators and jaguars. Invisible 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.
In the end, Jimenez de Quesada decided to turn back, but then his half-dead army, numbering less than 200 people, made it to the Cundinamarca plateau. Before the stunned intruders lay the well-groomed corn and potato fields and the neat huts of what appeared to be rich villages. There was a melodic chime of thin gold plates swaying by the wind, which hung over the doors. Europeans, in their own words, have never heard such sweet music. After long ordeals, they finally reached the home country of the Chibcha Indians.
Frightened by the strangers, and especially their horses, many natives chose to evade acquaintance with the strangers and left their settlements. But the rest greeted the Europeans as gods descended from heaven, offered food, women and, most importantly, the much-desired gold. Gold was not considered by the Chibcha as any special value. They exchanged it with neighboring tribes for emeralds and salt, which were abundant in these places. The natives did not have the slightest idea about the value of gold, but they appreciated it for its brilliance and fusion, which made it possible for local craftsmen to make delicate jewelry, utensils and religious objects.
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Greedy Europeans found few friendly gifts, and they began to plunder. Chibcha clubs and spears could not hold back the invaders, armed with weapons spewing fire, and after a few months Jimenez de Quesada subjugated the entire local area, losing one soldier in the process.
But the Spaniards could not immediately find out where the Chibchas get their gold from. It took a long time before an old Indian (apparently under torture) told them the secret of Eldorado, the Golden Man. To get countless treasures, you should go east, to the mountain strongholds behind which Lake Guatavita is hidden. It was there, the old man told the gullible Spaniards, that one of the leaders every year gives the Indians' offerings to the gods, dropping gold and emeralds into the waters of the lake, and then, having covered 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? A ploy to distract the invaders from plundering their home country? Be that as it may, the story of the old man made an indelible impression on the Europeans. Eldorado went down in the history of the conquest and soon turned from the Golden Man into the city of Eldorado - an object of desire for a host of gold prospectors, a city 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 the city of El Dorado, Jimenez de Quesada decided to return to Santa Marta and establish himself as governor of the highlands he conquered, which he had already renamed the new Granada. However, in February 1539, news came to the mountains of a new European expedition, approaching from the northeast to the capital, Santa Fe de Bogotá, just founded by Jimenez.
The new arrivals turned out to be a gang of 160 people, led by a German named Nicolae Federmann, who was acting 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, Federmann set out from the coastal settlement of Coro a few months after Jimenez de Quesada left Santa Marta. For more than two years the German was looking for a passage through the mountain range on the Cundinamarca plateau. Jimenez greeted the emaciated, half-starved and almost naked strangers warily, but offered them food and clothing, because he hoped for the help of newcomers during the invasion of the land of El Dorado.
While he was thinking about how best to use the Germans, word 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 along the way he also heard about the fabulous wealth hidden in the interior regions of the country. At about the same time that Jimenez de Quesada left Santa Marta, Belalcazar set out from Quito on the long march north. He arrived in Santa Fe de Bogotá with a troop of well-equipped and armed Europeans, many of whom rode fine horses, and a host of native mercenaries.
Belalcazar brought silver tableware with him 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 detachments had 166 men, and the total strength of the army was 498 soldiers.
A dispute broke out between the leaders about the pre-emptive right to conquer another native empire. Without agreeing, all three went to Spain to present their claims to the king. Meanwhile, the trading house "Welser" lost Venezuela, captured by another Spanish adventurer, and as a result, Federmann, who was left out of the lot, died in poverty. Belalcazar received the post of head of one of the cities he founded on the way to Santa Fe de Bogota, but his star also went down, and he ended badly. Jimenez de Quesada did not wait for 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 the country of the Golden Man - the city of Eldorado. However, the days of his glory were already in the past.
While the three disputants exchanged claims in the presence of the Spanish king, the search for the city of El Dorado did not stop. The first to attempt to recover the alleged treasures from the bottom of Lake Guatavite was Hernán-Perez de Quesada, brother of the conqueror of New Granada. In the dry season of 1540, he ordered his men to make buckets from pumpkins and scoop all the water out of the lake. For three months of painstaking work, he really managed to lower the water level by about three and a half meters and bring out more than three thousand small gold items, but the Spaniards were not able to reach the middle of the lake, where the lion's share of the treasures was supposed to lie.
40 years later, an even more daring attempt was made to drain the lake. A wealthy merchant from Bogota hired several thousand natives to dig a drainage channel in the thickness of one of the hills. When the work was completed, the water level dropped by 20 meters. An egg-sized emerald and many golden trinkets were found on the exposed section of the bottom, but this production was not even enough to pay the costs. Another treasure hunter also tried to dig a tunnel, but was forced to abandon this venture when the vault collapsed and almost all of the workers died.
But the legend of the city of Eldorado turned out to be tenacious and even attracted the attention of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who visited Colombia as part of a scientific expedition in the early 19th century. Although his interest in the treasure was purely theoretical, Humboldt calculated that the waters of Lake Guatavita may be hiding $ 300 million worth of gold. The scientist proceeded from the assumption that over 100 years, 100,000 people took part in the rite of giving gifts, and each of them threw five golden objects into the lake.
The last attempt to drain the lake was made in 1912, when British treasure hunters brought huge pumps to its shore. They were able to pump out almost all the water, but the soft silt at the bottom instantly sucked in anyone who dared to descend into the basin. The next day, the bottom silt dried up and became as hard as concrete. At a cost of $ 160,000, the British recovered $ 10,000 worth of gold jewelry from the lake. And in 1965, the Colombian government declared Lake Guatavita a national historical reserve and put an end to all attempts to get to its bottom.
1541 - 5 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 the city of El Dorado, which, according to rumors, was rich not only in gold, but also very expensive in those days in cinnamon. Soon, a soldier of fortune named Francisco de Orellana joined Pizarro. 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. Recalling the ancient Greek legend of the women of war, Orellana called this river the Amazon.
Other Spanish adventurers followed in the footsteps of Pizarro and Orellana, expanding the search area of the city of El Dorado to the mouth of the Amazon and Orinoco. One of the most persistent seekers was Antonio de Berrio, governor of the interfluve. Like his predecessors, he was sure that the Golden Man lies at the bottom of one of the high mountain 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.
For 11 years, 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 Eldorado from him and, subjecting the Spaniard to temporary imprisonment, returned to his homeland, where he wrote an enthusiastic account of Eldorado, as he called the kingdom of the Golden Man. Reilly took Berrio at his word and ardently argued that the city of El Dorado was much richer than Peru. Reilly's book piqued little interest in Manoa, and his own attempt to find Eldorado ended in failure.
For more than 400 years, the story of the Golden Man (perhaps forcefully derived from an old native who would say anything just to drive the Europeans away) 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 whimsical ornaments and decorations that did not meet European standards of fine taste. Therefore, most of the products were simply melted down, and the ingots were sent home. The little that has survived in its original form is now kept in museums.
No matter how much Europeans darted through the mountains, jungles and savannas of South America, they never managed to 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, adapt to harsh weather conditions, survive among the far from friendly natives, who, unfortunately, turned out to be the owners of the yellow metal so highly valued by Europeans.
The Indians could not understand why foreigners were so eager to get hold of these shiny trinkets, intended to decorate 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, in the existence of the city of El Dorado, which, if it existed at all, disappeared long before they began to look for it.
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N. Nepomniachtchi