Fortune and Glory Page 5

  At which point the walls of the channel collapsed, killing hundreds of slaves, and re-filling the lake. The cut in the lakeshore where the channel had been built is still visible today, but Sepulveda never managed to rebuild it or drain the lake again. Nevertheless, people now knew that there was indeed treasure in the lake.

  When Alexander von Humboldt surveyed the Guyana River, he decided that the lake part of the El Dorado story was a myth inspired by seasonal floods at the confluence of rivers – even though he had already pronounced upon the value of the actual genuine lake which really was the source of the myth.

  At the end of the 19th century, The Company for the Exploitation of the Lagoon of Guatavita was founded as a shell company for Contractors Ltd of London. The company tunnelled under the centre of the lake, and managed to drain it until only a few feet of mud and silt remained. Since this was essentially deadly quicksand, the explorers had to wait until it dried a bit. It did, like cement or concrete. They only managed to chisel about £500 worth out to auction off at Sotheby’s, which was a lot less than the expedition had cost. The pieces ended up at the British Museum, and the company went bust. Finally, an American group recovered about $20,000 worth of gold in the 1930s.

  In 1965, the Colombian government put laws in place to protect the area and clamp down on private treasure-hunting expeditions. They also know that El Dorado is a famous legend that could be a big tourist draw, and so are keen to attract environmental tourists, which means you can buy package tours to visit the site.

  After the fiasco caused by Sepulveda, the Europeans focused more on where the Muisca had sourced their gold, rather than where they dumped it. Because of the contemporary legend of the Seven Cities of Gold, and the promises of the Aztec Empire up in Mexico, they began to conflate this with the source of El Dorado’s gold, and assumed there must be a city full of it somewhere. There was no sign of any large gold mines in the territory, and the geology just wasn’t right for those elements.

  In total, about 30 per cent of the Conquistador manpower that set out searching for El Dorado made it to the Muisca lands, which they thought were paradise compared to what they had endured on the journey. The Muisca continued to offer the Spaniards gold, and in total the Spanish took about 80 tons worth from Muisca, most of which was shipped home to Spain.

  This wasn’t the end of the search, however. In 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh got his hands on a map showing El Dorado as being located in Guyana, on the shores of another lake, Lake Parime. There was actually an existing city there, called Manoa, and Raleigh believed this to be El Dorado, which it wasn’t.

  Raleigh did find various pieces of gold along riverbanks, and returned to make another search, but all he got was his son killed by natives, and himself executed back home. In the 17th century, there were more expeditions, by monks, the Governor of San Thome del Agostura (who conducted several massacres while mapping Paraguay), and two men commissioned by Spanish governors, Nicholas Rodriguez and Antonio Santos.

  The main search for El Dorado faded after this, for various reasons, but the name stuck in the minds of other explorers, such as Hiram Bingham, who did actually find a genuine lost city, in the form of Machu Picchu in 1911. El Dorado was also doubtless in the minds of both the British (Thomas Payne) and German (August Berns and J. M. von Hassel) explorers who had also found Machu Picchu in the 19th century (it was also conveniently marked on maps by 1874, so wasn’t hard for Hiram).

  Milton wrote about the search in Paradise Lost in 1667, while, in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a poem called Eldorado, about an old knight who spends his life searching for it. Poe’s poem also references the Mountains of the Moon, which are in Africa, so it’s ironic that Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, which is set in Africa, echoes the legend by having the protagonists being part of the Eldorado Exploring Expedition.

  Voltaire’s Candide has a sequence set in El Dorado, which he casts as a city built of material finer than gold and diamond, and this is then echoed in the Dr Who story Death to the Daleks, which implies that aliens built such cities. Of course modern ‘reality’ shows on what is increasingly inaccurately called The History Channel, such as Ancient Aliens, have tended to suggest the same thing about El Dorado and Cibola.

  On a more historical note, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God is about a Conquistador (played by Klaus Kinski) who leads his followers to disaster in a search for the lost city of gold, and making it almost finished off both director and star. A happier film version of the legend came along in the form of a Dreamworks animated film, The Road to El Dorado, though the movie owes more to Cortez’s campaigns in Mexico than to the search for El Dorado in South America.

  El Dorado has been mentioned in quite a few Clive Cussler novels, since his Dirk Pitt series always has some historical artefact or treasure to find, but the closest he has come to doing it as a main story is in 1994’s Inca Gold, which concerns the search around the Chachapoya region of northern Peru for Inca treasures first stolen from the Spanish by Sir Francis Drake, and swept back inland during a tsunami. The spin-off novel Serpent, by Cussler and Paul Kemprecos, also deals with pre-Columbian artefacts in Mexico.

  The most memorable version, to a certain generation at least, is probably the Franco-Japanese TV series The Mysterious Cities of Gold, which was a huge hit in the 1980s. This was about a group of kids and Conquistadores, who were searching for the Seven Cities of Gold, of which El Dorado was merely one, and who got caught up in strife between the cities, helped by the daughter of an Inca high priest. Unusually, not all the cities were in South America in the series, but were spread around the world. A sequel series aired in 2012/13.

  To a certain extent, the Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider franchises could well be said to have been influenced by the myth of El Dorado. Both the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the latter part of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull involve treasures in lost South American settlements, while in the game Indiana Jones Adventure World, El Dorado is the objective.

  The treacherous Satipo, played by Alfred Molina at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark, may well be named for Satipa the Muisca chief.

  Tomb Raider: Underworld also delves heavily into South American lost cities, and especially Cibola, in its guise as Xibalba. The Journeyman Project 3 is another game set in El Dorado, and also links it to aliens, while Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is based on a search for El Dorado, and for Francis Drake’s semi-pirate treasure.

  THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

  Although the Spanish never found a lost city full of gold, they did discover lots of other things, including avocados, and the Amazon River. The river was discovered by Pizarro’s younger brother during his search for El Dorado in 1540. His 340 soldiers were attacked by a group of female warriors at a riverside, and so he named the river after the Amazons of Greek mythology.

  A golden model raft found between Bogota and Guatavita in 1969 provided proof of the stories about the chief taking to the lake in a raft, and since it was itself buried, also provided proof that the Muisca did not view gold as something to be hoarded, the way Europeans did. They saw it as something to be offered to the gods; its value wasn’t in its rarity, or as a commodity, but in its holy colour, the colour of sunlight. For them, it was all about the religious symbolism of the material. To this end, they would alloy it with other metals to get the right colour to sacrifice, so it was never worth as much as the Spanish would have thought anyway. For example, the model raft found in 1969 turned out to be only 63 per cent gold, 16 per cent silver, and 20 per cent copper, with the rest in impurities.

  What the Muisca were really sacrificing was their time and effort, because this showed their faith and devotion. This is why they were happy to give it away.

  The biggest irony of the Spanish obsession with finding the hoard belonging to the Muisca is that they were looking at things the wrong way round, and so walked right on past the source of the gold on pretty much every expedition.

  The Muisca never mined gold.
What they mined was salt, a vital commodity in such a humid region, and which could not be obtained from seawater, as their territory was 300 miles from the coast. Having a monopoly on this vital-to-life substance, they traded it with the people who lived along the Rio Magdalena for clothes and gold. The Muisca gold came from veins along the Rio Magdalena, and was panned and mined by the very people of whom the Spanish only wanted to know ‘which way to the Muisca?’

  In the end, the Spanish took around 80 tons of gold from the Muisca. Most of it was shipped home, but some was used in churches, such as Santa Clara Church in Bogota, which is covered in gold leaf made from Muisca gold. It could be seen as an offering to the Catholic god, just as it used to be to the Muisca gods. Ironically, in 1575, Friar Vincente Brigiara, a priest in a Muisca village, left in his will an instruction that the people of his village should be paid 100 gold pesos each, in restitution for abuses against them. Muisca artefacts were melted down, made into coins and paid back to their original owners.

  WHERE IS IT NOW?

  Most of the treasure looted from South America was shipped back to Spain and entered into the economy there. Some was used in palaces and churches across Spanish and Portuguese-held South America, and much of it is still there. Likewise, given that the Muisca liked to sacrifice their gold artefacts both to Lake Guatavita and to burial, a lot of it is doubtless still hidden from history.

  There are a few Muisca artefacts in the British Museum in London, but there’s a lot more of it at the Museo del Oro del Banco de la República – usually just referred to as the Museo del Oro – in Bogota, Colombia. The museum is both an archaeological centre of conservation and a tourist attraction.

  El Dorado never existed in the sense that popular culture believes. Yes, there were settlements with gold, and there were cities of various sizes – and some perhaps still to be found – but there was never a city devoted to storing imaginative levels of gold.

  The real, original source of the Golden Man’s wealth, however, is not a city. It’s the Magdalena River itself. So, if you want to try your hand at acquiring some of the gold from El Dorado’s supply and storehouse, you need to try panning or mining along the Rio Magdalena in Colombia. You can also visit Lake Guatavita, though excavating is forbidden.

  THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY

  Nowadays there are fewer treasure hunters making actual expeditions to South American mountaintops in search of El Dorado, thanks to wider knowledge of the truth. However, there are still many scientific and archaeological explorers looking for ruins and relics of past civilizations who will not be happy at your interfering with such places in search of fortune and glory.

  Sadly, there are also looters. So many sites were looted in the 20th century that the gold they were dumping onto the market actually caused a crash in the world’s gold market in the 1970s. Because these looters – often paramilitaries, rebels and drug gangs seeking capital – needed plain gold to dump on said market, they melted down their finds, destroying forever their value as historical pieces that might lead to further understanding.

  Many parts of South America – and especially Colombia – have been afflicted with drug and kidnapping cartels. Colombia’s Medellín and Cali cartels may have been the most famous drug cartels, but were far from the only ones. Those cartels were put out of business in the late 1990s (movies leave the general public thinking they’re still current), and – contrary to popular belief – Colombia is no longer the world’s biggest cocaine producer, but there are still many smaller yet equally vicious drug gangs around.

  The largest producer of cocaine in the world for the illicit drug trade is now the other country you’re most likely to be looking for a lost city in: Peru. As well as these notorious gangs, you run the risk of falling foul of rebel and guerrilla groups who’ve still been fighting the Cold War, and other older class wars. In Colombia, there is FARC, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Forces of Colombia. FARC is probably the biggest revolutionary government-in-opposition group in South America, and raises most of its funds by ‘taxing’ the drug cartels, and, in more recent years, other local and international corporations. They have been heavily into kidnap for ransom and follow the pattern more common to African paramilitary armies of pressing children into their forces.

  These days FARC’s stronghold is mostly in south-eastern Colombia, with a lesser outpost in the north-west. Thankfully the Muisca region is in the north-east.

  Peru has the Shining Path, a Maoist insurgent group notorious for attacks on both government and civilians, in the forms of kidnapping for ransom, enslavement of local farmers, rocket and bomb attacks on government forces and utilities companies, and so on. In recent years, their leaders have been captured or killed, and have acknowledged that the war is lost, but some individual cells continue to fight, while others have just gone outright into the cocaine business and become private cartels. They are now the world’s largest producer of cocaine, and are based between Lima and Cusco, which unfortunately is right on the way to Machu Picchu.

  There are also plenty of everyday criminal dangers in Colombia, particularly drugging by a natural Mickey Finn called burundanga (made from tree sap) in order to commit robberies, rapes, kidnappings, robbery by fake cops, and armed robbery.

  That said, things have improved a lot in the past decade, largely due to an excellent and trustworthy military and Federal police. Unfortunately local cops are still less reliable, with bullying and soliciting of bribes commonplace, though this can be handy if you’re flush with cash and want to hire some private security.

  If, like Indiana Jones, you’re worried about snakes, you should be aware that Colombia is home to 295 species of them, several venomous. The most common is the coral snake, which is the red, white and black-striped snake you most often see represented in movies – though the movie ones are usually harmless milk snakes standing in so as to be less dangerous to the cast and crew. Coral snakes aren’t aggressive, but can be quite easily overlooked until stepped on – which is not a good idea to do barefoot or in sandals.

  Colombia is also home to aggressive eyelash pit vipers, but their venom isn’t generally fatal to healthy adults – just unpleasant enough to make you wish it was – and the Fer-de-Lance, which is aggressive and dangerous. And then there is the especially dangerous and aggressive bushmaster, the longest viper in the world. Fortunately it’s also rare and nocturnal. Unfortunately they’re also around in Peru.

  Health-wise, it’s recommended to be aware of and vaccinated against (if possible) malaria, rabies, dengue fever and yellow fever.

  AZTEC GOLD

  WHAT IS IT?

  When people who think about ‘Montezuma’s gold’, they usually think about the treasury of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, evacuated from the city on the orders of the Emperor Moctezuma (as it would more accurately be spelled) when the Spanish Conquistadores led by Hernán Cortés turned up in 1520.

  According to legend, the hoard consisted not only of gold, though that is what the Spaniards were mostly interested in, but also silver, gems and turquoise, which was used a lot in Aztec jewellery and art.

  There is, however, another Montezuma’s treasure, this dating only from the 19th century. In this case, it would be the product of a gold mine in Arizona, in the vicinity of a mountain nicknamed ‘Montezuma’s Head’. This would amount to a much smaller hoard than the legendary Aztec treasure, however.

  HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH TO YOU?

  If it exists, the Aztec treasure would be worth billions of pounds, let alone dollars, as it consists of several tons of gold, plus other precious stones and metals. It’s said to have been more than enough to fill a room, and it took thousands of slaves to carry it from Tenochtitlan to its eventual hiding place. It was estimated to have been worth $10 million in 1914, and one 1990s entrepreneur believed there to be 45,000lb of gold in the haul – which would be worth over £5 billion (about $8.5 billion) today.

  The stolen output of the Montezuma�
�s Head mine would be nothing like as much, but still not inconsiderable. It would have amounted to thousands of dollars of gold in the early 19th century and, by extension, millions today.

  THE STORY

  There are ‘Montezuma’s Gold’ legends throughout the US, mainly the south-west and desert states – New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada and Colorado – pretty much all the way along the Colorado River. Partly this was because many tribal leaders called themselves Montezuma, so all their goods got assumed to be a Montezuma’s treasure. The other reason is because of an Apache revolt against Mexican gold miners.

  During the Mexican–American War, a Mexican noble, Don Joaquin, enslaved some of the local Apache populace to dig for gold in a mine in the Sierra Estrella mountains in Arizona, to fund the Mexican war effort. In 1847, the US Army began making serious inroads into the Estrellas, and threatened the mine. Don Joaquin began having the mine’s output hidden in a canyon at a hill called Montezuma’s Head. The Apache saw their chance and launched a revolt. Caught between the Apache and the US Army, most of the Mexicans were killed, the rest fleeing south of the border. Legend has it that they left the gold behind.

  Around 1880, a survivor returned with a map, intending to recover the gold, but the Apache were still in a bad mood with Mexicans, and he failed.

  From 1895 onwards, local papers have occasionally published stories of people finding at least part of it, but these stories stopped before World War II, so most likely it was all recovered, if it existed. Certainly the US Army would have made sure to gather as much as possible when the Mexicans were routed in 1847.

  None of which has anything to do with the Aztec emperor of 1520.

  The Spanish under Hernán Cortés were at first welcomed by Moctezuma – albeit warily – because they fit the description in a prophecy about some gods who were supposed to visit from the heavens. In fact, Moctezuma had reportedly promised them the treasure, having already shown it to them as a symbol of his strength and power, describing it as ‘all the treasures of the world’.