vii. Bancroft accounts Pizarro himself the most detestable man in the
Indies after Pedrárias. He collates the authorities on many disputed points, and is a valuable assistant, particularly for the relations of operations on the isthmus to those in Peru,—such as the efforts of Gonzalo Pizarro to make the isthmus the frontier of his Peruvian government, and Gasca’s method of breaking through it. In his chapter on “Mines and Mining” in his _Mexico_ (vol. iii.) he incidentally recapitulates the story of the wealth which was extracted from Peru.
The dignified and well-balanced story as told in Robertson’s _America_ (book vi.) is not without use to-day, and his judgment upon authorities (note cxxv.) is usually sound. He has of course fallen behind that sufficiency which Dr. Smyth found in him, when he gave his _Lectures on Modern History_ (lecture xxi.). The latter writer reflected an opinion not yet outgrown when he says that “Pizarro was, after all, a vulgar conqueror, and is from the first detested, though he seizes upon our respect, and retains it in defiance of ourselves, from the powerful and decisive nature of his courage and of his understanding.”
The latest English summarized view of the Conquest will be found in R. G. Watson’s _Spanish and Portuguese South America during the Colonial Period_ (London, 1884). The author lived in South America about twenty years ago, in various parts, as a diplomatic agent of the English government.
THE
AMAZON AND ELDORADO.
BY THE EDITOR.
IN 1528, in order to follow up the explorations of Ojeda and others on the coast of Venezuela the Emperor had agreed with the great German mercantile house of the Velsers to protect a colony to be sent by them to found cities and to mine on this northern coast.[1567] This was the origin of the expedition led by Ambrosio de Alfinger to find a fabulous golden city, of which reports of one kind and another pervaded the Spanish settlements along the coast. It was in 1530 that Alfinger started inland. This march produced the usual story of perfidy and cruelty practised upon the natives, and of attack and misery experienced by the invaders. Alfinger died on the way, and after two years (in 1532) what was left of his followers found their way back to the coast.
Meanwhile an expedition inland had started under Diego Ordaz in 1531, by way of the Orinoco; but it had failed, its leader being made the victim of a mutiny. One of his officers, Martinez, being expelled from the force for misbehavior, wandered away until he fell into the hands of people who blindfolded him and led him a great way to a city, where the bandage was removed from his eyes. Here they led him for a day and night through its streets till they came to the palace of Inga their Emperor, with whom being handsomely entertained he stayed eight months, when, being allowed to return, he came down the Orinoco to Trinidad, and thence to Porto Rico, where, when dying, he told this tale of Manoa, as he called the city. He was the first, the story goes, to apply the name of Eldorado to the alluring kingdom in the depths of the continent. This is the pretended story as Raleigh sixty years later learned from a manuscript which Berreo the Governor of Trinidad showed to him.[1568]
Again, the Germans made another attempt to penetrate the country and its mystery. George of Spires, under the imperial sanction, coming from Spain with four hundred men, started inland from Coro in 1534. He succeeded in penetrating about fifteen hundred miles, and returned with the survivors in 1538.
A lieutenant had played him false. Nicolaus Federmann[1569] had been disappointed in not getting the command of the expedition, but being made second, was instructed to follow after his chief with supplies. Federmann avoided making a junction with George, and wandered at the head of about two hundred men, who were faithful to him, seeking glory on his own account, till after three years of labor he emerged in April, 1539, from the mountain passes upon the plains of Bogotá. Two years before this (in 1537) Gonzalo Ximenes Quesada, following up the Magdalena River, had arrived on the same plateau, and completed the conquest of New Granada. The year following (1538), Sebastian de Belalcazar, marching north from Quito, had reached the same point.[1570]
Thus the three explorers from three directions came together. They joined forces and descended the Magdalena to Santa Martha, where Pedro Fernandez de Lugo, the associate of Quesada, died, while Quesada himself proceeded to Spain to obtain the government of the newly discovered region. Meanwhile Hernan Perez, a brother of Quesada, being left in command in Bogotá, committed the usual cruel excesses upon the Chibchas, but finally left them, to follow another adventurer who had arrived in the track of Federmann, with the same stories of the golden city. So the recreant Governor joined the new-comer Montalvo de Lugo, and together they marched eastward on their golden quest. He returned to Bogotá in a year’s time, wiser but not happier.
Meanwhile a new expedition was forming on the Venezuela side. Among the followers of George of Spires had been one Philip von Huten,[1571] who after George’s death, and when Rodrigo Bastidas had succeeded him, was made the commander of an expedition which left Coro in 1541 by vessels, and, prepared for an inland march, landed at Barburata. The next spring he got on the track of Quesada and resolved to follow it; but the expedition only journeyed in a circle, and after suffering all sorts of hardships found itself at the point of setting out. Huten, undaunted, again started with a smaller force. He encountered and made friends of the Uaupe Indians, and under their guidance proceeded against the towns of the Omaguas, where they encountered resistance; and Huten being wounded, the invaders retreated, and brought to an end another search for Eldorado. The expedition had added a new synonym, Omaguas, for the attractive lure.
Huten, on his return to Coro, found that Carbajal had seized the government. This brutal soldier now executed Huten, and held his iniquitous sway until the licentiate Juan Perez de Tolosa arrived with the imperial authority in 1546, when Carbajal was in turn put to death. Thus ended the German efforts at South American discovery on this side of the continent.
Meanwhile Gonzalo Ximenes Quesada’s visit to Spain had failed in making him the Governor of New Granada, as he had hoped. Luis Alonzo de Lugo, the son of Quesada’s associate, was the successful applicant for the position. The new Governor arrived in 1542, but a _residencia_ interrupted his career, and Pedro de Ursua, a nephew of Armendariz, the judge who had taken the _residencia_, was sent to Bogotá to take charge. Thence his patron sent him on the old quest for the rivers flowing over golden sands. He failed to find Eldorado; but he founded the city of Pampluna in the wilds, and ruled its stately lots for two years. Then Armendariz had his downfall in turn, and Pedro de Ursua in 1549 found favor enough with those who then administered the government to get command of another expedition to Eldorado, during which he founded another city, which he had to abandon in 1552 because the natives attacked it so persistently. Next, Pedro was put in command of Santa Martha, and began to fight the Indians thereabout; but seeking a larger field, he started for Peru. His fame was sufficient to induce the authorities at Panamá to engage him to quell the Cimarrones, who infested the Isthmus. In two years Ursua accomplished this task, and then went on to Peru, where at Lima, in 1559, the new viceroy Cañete appointed him to lead a well-equipped expedition to Eldorado and the Omaguas. If the fabled city should not be reached, the quest for it would draw away from Cañete’s province the prowling ruffians whom the cessation of the civil wars had left among the settlements. But it was thought the quest was more likely to be successful than any previous one had been, since Viraratu, a coast chieftain of Brazil, had with two Portuguese recently ascended the Amazon, and had confirmed to Cañete the old stories of a hidden lake and its golden city.
Pedro de Ursua started in boats down the Huallaga to the Marañon, and so on to the neighborhood of Machiparo. At this point, on New Year’s day, 1561, conspirators murdered Ursua, threw off allegiance to Spain, and made Fernando de Guzman their sovereign. One Lope de Aguirre was the leader of the insurrection, and it was not long before Guzman paid the penalty of his life in turn, and Aguirre became supreme. The conspirators went on to the mouth of the Negro, but from this point authorities differ as to their course. Humboldt and Southey supposed they still kept to the Amazon until they reached the sea. Acuña, Simon, Acosta, and among the moderns Markham, suppose they ascended the Negro, crossed by the Cassiquiari canal to the Orinoco, and so passed on to the ocean; or if not by this route, by some of the rivers of Guiana. Mr. Markham[1572] balances the testimony. Once on the ocean, at whatever point, Aguirre steered his vessels for the north and west till they came to the island of Margarita, then colonized by the Spanish. Having seized this settlement, Aguirre led his followers across the intervening waters to Venezuela, with the aim of invading and conquering New Granada; but in due time a Spanish force led by Gutierrez de la Peña confronted the traitor and his host, and overthrew them. Many of Aguirre’s men had deserted him; when killing his own daughter, that she might not survive to be stigmatized as a traitor’s child, he was set upon and despatched by his conquerors.
The earliest account of the expedition of Ursua and Aguirre is a manuscript in the Royal library at Madrid written by one of the company, Francisco Vasquez, who remained with Aguirre under protest till he reached Margarita. Vasquez’s story was a main dependence of Pedro Simon, in the sixth of the _Primera parte de las Noticias historiales de las Conquistas de Tierra Firme en las Indias Occidentales_, published at Cuenca in 1627. Simon, who was born in Spain in 1574, had come to Bogotá in 1604, in time to glean much from men still living. After many years of gathering notes, he began to write his book in 1623. Only one part, which included the affairs of Venezuela and the expedition of Ursua and Aguirre, was printed. Two other parts are in existence; and Colonel J. Acosta, in his _Compendio histórico del descubrimiento y colonizacion de la Nueva Granada en el siglo décimo sexto_, published at Paris in 1848, made use of them, and says they are the most valuable recital of the sixteenth century in existence which relates to these regions.[1573] The account of Simon, so far as it relates to the expedition of Ursua, has been translated by William Bollaert, and properly annotated by Mr. Markham; it constitutes the volume published by the Hakluyt Society in 1861, called _The Expedition of Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre in search of Eldorado and Omagua in 1560-1561_. It has a map which marks the alternative courses of Aguirre.[1574]
The main dependence of Simon, besides the manuscript of Vasquez, was a metrical chronicle by Juan de Castellanos, _Elegias de Varones ilustres de Indias_, the first part of which, containing, besides the accounts of Ursua and Aguirre, the exploits of Columbus, Ponce de Leon, Garay, and others, was printed at Madrid in 1589.[1575] De Bry makes use of this versified narrative in the eighth part of his _Grand Voyages_. Castellanos’ first part is reprinted in the _Biblioteca de Autores Españoles_, 1847-1850, where are also to be found the second and third parts, printed there for the first time. The text is there edited by Buenaventura Carlos Aribau. Ercilla has recorded his opinion of the faithfulness of Castellanos, but Colonel Acosta thinks him inexact. These second and third parts recount the adventures of the Germans in their search for Eldorado, and record the conquests of Cartagena by Lugo, of Popayan by Belalcazar, and of Antischia. A fourth part, which gave the conquest of New Granada, though used by Piedrahita, is no longer known.
Castellanos could well have derived his information, as he doubtless did, from men who had made part of the exploits which he celebrates; and as regards the mad pranks of Aguirre, such is also the case with another contemporary account, preserved in the National Library at Madrid, which was written by Toribio de Ortiguera, who was at Nombre de Dios in 1561, and sent forces against Aguirre when that conspirator was on his Venezuela raid. The story written from the survivors’ recitals does not materially differ from that of Vasquez. He gives also a short account of the expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro and Orellana, later to be mentioned.
Lucas Fernandez Piedrahita was a native of Bogotá, and, like Garcilasso de la Vega, had the blood of the Incas in his veins. He became a priest, and was successively Bishop of Santa Martha and of Panamá, and after having lived a life of asceticism, and been at one time a captive of the buccaneers, he died at Panamá in 1688, at the age of seventy. He depended chiefly in his _Historia General de las Conquistas del nuevo Reyno de Granada_,[1576] on the _Compendio_ of Ximenes de Quesada, no longer known, the Elegias of Castellanos, and the Noticia of Simon. He borrows liberally from Simon, and says but little of Aguirre till he lands in Venezuela. Aguirre’s career in the _Historia de la Conquista y poblacion de Venezuela_ of Oviedo y Baños is in like manner condensed from Simon, and is confined also to his final invasion of the main. The book is rare, and Markham says that in 1861 even the British Museum had no copy.[1577] The general historians, De la Vega, Herrera, and Acosta, give but scant accounts of the Ursua expedition. Markham[1578] points out the purely imaginative additions given to Aguirre’s story in Gomberville’s translation of Acuña, misleading thereby not a few later writers. Much the same incorrectness characterizes the recitals in the _Viage_ of the Ulloas, in Velasco’s _Historia de Quito_ (1789).
* * * * *
The faithlessness of Orellana and his fifty followers in deserting Gonzalo Pizarro in 1540, while this leader was exploring the forests of the Cinnamon country, is told in another place. Orellana, as has been said, was sent forward in an improvised bark to secure food for Pizarro’s famished followers, but was tempted to pursue the phantom of golden discovery. This impulse led him to follow the course of the river to the sea. It gave him the distinction of being the discoverer of the weary course of the great Amazon. In his intercourse with some of the river Indians he heard or professed to hear of a tribe of women warriors whom it was easy, in recognition of the classic story, to name the Amazons. At one of the native villages on the river the deserters built themselves a stancher craft than they had escaped in; and so they sailed on in a pair of adventurous barks, fighting their way past hostile villages, and repelling attacks of canoes, or bartering with such of the Indians as were more peaceful. In one of the fights, when Orellana landed his men for the conflict, it is affirmed that women led the native horde. From a prisoner they got signs which they interpreted to mean that they were now in the region of the female warriors, and not far from all the fabled wealth of which they were in search. But the marks of the tide on the banks lured them on with the hope of nearing the sea. They soon got unmistakable signs of the great water, and then began to prepare their frail crafts for encountering its perils. They made sails of their cloaks. On the 26th of August they passed into the Atlantic. They had left the spot where the river Napo flows into the Amazon on the last day of December, 1541; and now, after a voyage of nearly eight months, they spread their sails and followed the coast northward. The vessels parted company one night, but they reached the island of Cubagua within two days of each other. Here they found a Spanish colony, and Orellana was not long in finding a passage to Spain. The story he had to tell was a thrilling one for ears eager for adventure, and a joyous one for such as listened for the tales of wealth. Orellana might be trusted to entrap both sorts of listeners.
The King was the best of listeners. He gave Orellana a commission to conquer these fabulous countries, and in May, 1544, Orellana sailed with four ships and four hundred men. Misfortune followed him speedily, and only two of his vessels reached the river. Up they went for a hundred leagues or so; but it was quite different making headway against the current from floating down it, as he had done before. His men died; his vessels were stranded or broken up; he himself became ill, and at last died. This ended the attempt; and such of his followers as could, made their way back to Spain; and New Andalusia, as the country was to be named, remained without a master.
Of the expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro there is no account by any one engaged in it; but we have the traditions of the story told by Garcilasso de la Vega in the second part, book third, of the _Royal Commentaries_, and this account is put into English and annotated by Mr. Markham in the _Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons_, published by the Hakluyt Society in 1859,—and to this book its editor contributes a summary of the later explorations of the valley. Orellana’s desertion and his experiences are told by Herrera in his _Historia General_; and this, which Markham calls the best account possessed by us, is also translated by him in the same publication. Wallace, in his _Amazon and Rio Negro_, has of late years suggested that the woman-like apparel of the men, still to be found among the tribes of the upper Amazon, gave rise to the belief in the story of the female warriors.[1579]
* * * * *
The form which the story of Eldorado oftener took, and which it preserved for many years, gave representation of a large inland sea, called finally Parima, and of a golden city upon it called Manoa, the reminiscences of Martinez’s tale. Somehow, as Mr. Markham thinks, these details were evolved in part out of a custom prevalent on the plains of Bogotá, where a native chief is said to have gilded himself yearly, and performed some rites in a large lake. All this array of wealth was clustered, in the imagination of the conquerors of northern Peru, about the fabled empire of the Omaguas; and farther south the beckoning names were Paytiti and Enim. Whatever the names or details, the inevitable greed for gold in the mind of the Spanish invaders was quite sufficient to evolve the phantom from every impenetrable region of the New World. In 1566 Martin de Proveda followed in the track of Ursua; but sweeping north, his men dropped by the way, and a remnant only reached Bogotá. He brought back the same rumors of rich but receding provinces.
In 1568 the Spanish Government mapped out all this unknown region between two would-be governors. Pedro Malaver de Silva was to have the western part, and Diego Fernando de Cerpa to have the eastern as far as the mouths of the Orinoco. Both of the expeditions which these ambitious heroes led came to nothing beyond their due share of trials and aimless wandering; and one of the leaders, Silva, made a second attempt in 1574, equally abortive, as the one survivor’s story proved it to be.
Markham says that the last expedition to achieve any important geographical discovery was that of Antonio de Berreo in 1582. He had received by right the adventurous impulse, through his marriage with the daughter or heiress of Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada. He followed down the Cassanare and the Meta, and pursued the Orinoco to its mouth. The English took up the quest when Raleigh sent Jacob Whiddon in 1594 to explore the Orinoco. Berreo, who was now the Spanish governor of Trinidad, threw what obstacles in the way he could; and when Raleigh arrived with his fleet in 1595, the English leader captured the troublesome Spaniard, and was confirmed in his belief, by what Berreo told him, that he could reach the goal. This lure was the lying account of Juan Martinez, already mentioned. The fortunes of Raleigh have been told elsewhere,[1580] and the expeditions which he conducted or planned, says Markham, may be said to close the long roll of searches after the fabulous Eldorado.
Nearly the whole of the northern parts of South America had now been thridded by numerous adventuring parties, but without success in this fascinating search. There still remained an unknown region in Central Guiana, where were plains periodically inundated by the overflow of the Rupununi, Essequibo, and Branco (Parima) rivers. Here must Eldorado be; and here the maps, shortly after this, placed the mysterious lake and its auriferous towers of Manoa down to a comparatively recent time. According to Humboldt[1581] and Schomburgk,[1582] it was after the return of Raleigh’s and Keymis’s expedition that Hondius was the first in his _Nieuwe Caerte van het goudreyke landt Guiana_ (1599),[1583] to introduce the Laguna Parima with its city Manoa in a map. He placed it between 1° 45´ and 2° north latitude, and made it larger than the Caspian Sea.
We find the lake also in the _Nieuwe Wereldt_ of De Laet in 1630, and in the editions of that year in other languages. Another Dutch geographer, Jannson, also represented it. Sanson, the French geographer, puts it one degree north of the equator in his _Terre Ferme_ in 1656, and is particular enough to place Manoa at the northwest corner of a squarish inland sea; but he omits it in his chart of the Amazons in 1680. We find the lake again in Heylin’s _Cosmographie_ of 1663, and later editions; in Blaeu’s _Atlas_ in 1685. Delisle omits the lake in 1703, but gives a legend in French, as Homann does in his map in Latin, “In hac regione aliqui ponunt lacum Parima urbemque Manoa del Dorado.” In another of Delisle’s maps a small lake appears with the legend: “Guiane proprement dite ou Dorado, dans laquelle quelques-uns mettent le lac Parime.” We have it again in the map in Herrera, edition of 1728; and in 1729. Moll, the English geographer, likewise shows it. In the middle of the century (1760) the maps of Danville preserve the lake, though he had omitted it in an earlier edition; and the English edition, improved by Bolton in 1755, still continues it, as does an Italian edition (Venice) in 1779. The original Spanish of Gumilla’s _El Orinoco_ (2d edition, Madrid, 1745) has a map which gives the lake, and it is repeated in the French edition at Avignon in 1758, and in a later Spanish one at Barcelona in 1781. Kitchen’s map, which was prepared for Robertson’s _History of America_, again shows it; and it is in the centre of a great water system in the large map of La Cruz, made by order of the King of Spain in 1775, which was re-engraved in London the same year. It is also represented in the maps in the _Historia de la nueva Andalucia_, of Antonio Caulin,[1584] Madrid, 1779, and in the _Saggio di Storia Americana_, Rome, 1780. Conrad Mannert’s map, published at Nuremberg in 1803, gives it; as do the various editions of François Depons’ _Voyage dans l’Amerique méridionale_, Paris, 1806. The lake here is given under thirty degrees north latitude, and Manoa is put at the northeast corner of it.
The same plate was used for the English version “by an American gentleman,” published in New York in 1806; while the translation published in London in 1807, apparently the same with a few verbal changes, has a like configuration on a map of reduced scale. One of the latest preservations of the myth is the large map published in London by Faden in 1807, purporting to be based on the studies of D’Arcy de la Rochette, where the inland sea is explained by a legend: “Golden Lake, or Lake Parime, called likewise Parana Pitinga,—that is, White Sea,—on the banks of which the discoverers of the sixteenth century did place the imaginary city of Manoa del Dorado.” I have seen it in German maps as late as 1814, and the English geographer, Arrowsmith, kept it in his maps in his day.[1585]
It was left for Humboldt to set the seal of disbelief firmly upon the story.[1586] Schomburgk says that the inundations of extensive savannas during the tropical winter gave rise, no doubt, to the fable of the White Sea, assisted by an ignorance of the Indian language. Nevertheless, as late as 1844, Jacob A. van Heuvel, in his _Eldorado, being a Narrative of the Circumstances which gave rise to Reports in the Sixteenth Century of the Existence of a Rich and Splendid City in South America_, published in New York, clung to the idea; and he represents the lake somewhat doubtingly as in 4° north, and between 60° and 63° west, in the map accompanying his book.
* * * * *
Later in the seventeenth century the marvellous story took on another guise. It was remembered that after the conquest of Peru a great emigration of Inca Indians had taken place easterly beyond the mountains, and in the distant forests it was reputed they had established a new empire; and the names of Paytiti and Enim, already mentioned, were attached to these new theatres of Inca magnificence. Stories of this fabulous kingdom continued to be hatched well on into the eighteenth century, and not a few expeditions of more or less imposing strength were sent to find this kingdom. It never has been found; but, as Mr. Markham thinks, there is some reason to believe that the Inca Indians who fled with Tapac Amaru into the forests may for a considerable period have kept up their civilization somewhere in those vast plains east of the Andes. The same writer says that the belief was not without supporters when he was in Peru in 1853; and he adds that it is a pleasant reflection that this story may possibly be true.[1587]
The most considerable attempt of the seventeenth century to make better known the course of the Amazon was the expedition under Texeira, sent in 1639 to see if a practicable way could be found to transport the treasure from Peru by the Amazon to the Atlantic coast. Acuña’s book on this expedition, _Nuevo descubrimiento del gran Rio de las Amazons_,[1588] published at Madrid in 1641, is translated in Markham’s _Valley of the Amazons_, published by the Hakluyt Society. It was not till 1707, when Samuel Fritz, a Bohemian and a missionary, published his map of the Amazons at Quito, that we find something better than the vaguest delineation of the course of the great river.[1589]
* * * * *
It is not the purpose of the present essay to continue the story of the explorations of the Amazon into more recent times; but a word may be spared for the strange and sorrowful adventures along its stream, which came in the train of the expedition that was sent out by the French Government in 1735 to measure an arc of the meridian in Peru, for comparing the result with a similar measurement in Lapland. The object was to prove or to disprove the theory of Sir Isaac Newton that the earth was flattened at the poles. The commissioners—Bouguer, La Condamine, and Godin (the last accompanied by his wife)—arrived at Quito in June, 1736. The arc was measured; but the task did not permit them to think of returning before 1743, when La Condamine resolved to return by descending the Amazon and then making his way to the French colony of Cayenne. He and his companion, a Spanish gentleman seeking some adventure, had their full content of it, but safely accomplished the journey.
Another of the commissioners, Godin, having tarried a few years longer in Peru, had finally proceeded to Cayenne, where he made arrangements for embarking for France. Through the favor of the Portuguese Government he had been provided with a galiot of sixteen to twenty oars on a side, to ascend the river and meet his wife, who on receiving a message from him was to leave Peru with an escort and come down the river and meet him. Illness finally prevented the husband from proceeding; but he despatched the vessel, having on board one Tristan, who was charged with a letter to send ahead. By some faithlessness in Tristan, the letter miscarried; but Madame Godin sent a trusty messenger in anticipation, who found the galiot at Loreto awaiting her arrival, and returned with the tidings. The lady now started with her father and two brothers; and they allowed a certain Frenchman who called himself a physician to accompany them, while her negro servant, who had just returned over the route, attended them, as well as three Indian women and thirty Indian men to carry burdens. They encountered the small-pox among the river Indians, when their native porters deserted them. They found two other natives, who assisted them in building a boat; but after two days upon it these Indians also deserted them. They found another native, but he was shortly drowned. Then their boat began to leak and was abandoned. On pretext of sending assistance back, the French physician, taking with him the negro, pushed on to a settlement; but he forgot his promise, and the faithful black was so impeded in attempting alone the task of rescue, that he arrived at the camp only to find unrecognizable corpses. All but the lady had succumbed. She pushed on alone through the wilderness, encountering perils that appall as we read; but in the end, falling in with two Indians, she passed on from one mission station to another, and reached the galiot.
Thus a hundred years later than Orellana, the great river still flowed with a story of fearful hazards and treachery.