GONZALO PIZARRO’S EXPLOITS FIGHTING THE Inca and battling Almagro were by now legendary, and his remuneration included the governorship of Quito and great tracts of land around it, much of it uncharted and unknown. In late 1540, not long after Gonzalo took up residence in Quito and assumed his mantle as governor, he began to hear stories swirling about, frenzied rumors that titillated his already gold-lusty imagination. Most tantalizing were repeated tales about a literal “golden man,” the Gilded One or El Dorado, an Indian king so fabulously wealthy that daily he charged his subjects with coating his naked body from head to toe with fine gold dust. At the end of each day he bathed in a lake, lining its bottom with gold. Other chiefs, his ancestors, so the story went, had performed the ritual dusting and bathing for untold generations. But where were this king and this lake? Spaniards returning from forays to the north, toward Bogotá, claimed it was there. Others speculated that the man of gold and his riches lived over the mountains and to the east, in the smoldering Oriente, a humid and hostile region lying east of the Andes that the Spaniards had yet to fully explore.
Coinciding with all the talk of gold were tales of another coveted commodity, cinnamon. Since Francisco Pizarro’s first arrival, he had observed that the Incas used in their cuisine a kind of cinnamon said to be acquired from remote tribes dwelling in the steamy forests to the east of the Andes. A countryman of the Pizarros named Gonzalo Díaz de Pineda had recently returned from a venture over the high Andes, where he claimed to have descended to a place called the Cinnamon Valley (La Canela). There, however, a hostile tribe called the Quijos soon repelled him, but not before he discovered from some captives that beyond the Cinnamon Valley there existed a limitless level land peopled with tribes clad in golden ornamentation and jewelry.
The gold rumors in Quito in 1540 became a central catalyst in what would ultimately be among the great chimeras in history—the quest for El Dorado. A number of precedents converged to create the idea—some would call it a myth—and these precursors excited passion and gold greed that took hold of Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro as they settled in to their respective governorships.
The first quest was undertaken by Diego de Ordaz, one of the most important captains who had served under Cortés in the conquest of Mexico. His exploits included a heroic climb to the summit of the erupting 18,000-foot volcano Popocatépetl, a climb that impressed King Charles enough to later grant Ordaz a commission to explore and potentially settle as governor the region of eastern South America between the mouth of the Amazon and the Orinoco River.
The mouth of the Amazon itself had been discovered in 1500 by the Spaniard Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, former captain of Columbus’s caravel Niña, who noticed with great interest that drinkable freshwater had flowed more than a hundred miles out into the salty sea. Attesting to this remarkable phenomenon, he named the river Rio Santa Maria de la Mar Dulce—later shortened to Mar Dulce,* or “sweet sea.” By the year 1513 the river was being referred to as the Maranon. He sailed up it a few days’ distance, about fifty miles, but by the time Ordaz arrived thirty-one years later, the Amazon remained entirely unexplored by Europeans. Ordaz had become confident that a wealth of gold was there to be discovered, somewhere at the headwaters of a large river, possibly either the Amazon or the Orinoco.
Diego de Ordaz assembled an impressive force for his foray to the Amazon: about 600 men and 36 horses on four ships, including a large flagship and three smaller caravels. In early 1531 they arrived to the north of the mouth of the Amazon, a massive tangle of estuaries nearly two hundred miles wide. During reconnaissance into these estuaries he encountered natives proudly displaying “emeralds as big as a man’s fist.” The Indians told him, “On going up a certain number of suns [a few days] to the west, he would find a large rock of green stone.” Further investigation of these supposed emeralds, which were actually more likely jade, was thwarted by a squall, and rough seas and heavy storms buffeted his armada, ultimately sinking the smaller ships, on which many men were lost. As a result, a rumor began—and persisted for many years—that some of Ordaz’s men survived the shipwreck and were living among Amazonian tribes somewhere upriver—no one knew exactly where. Ordaz regrouped but decided to abandon any hope of sailing up the Amazon itself, opting instead to travel northwest for a month and a half, along the coastline toward the Orinoco. Ordaz landed on the island of Trinidad, where he recuperated, stocked the holds with fresh water and grazed the horses, then landed on the mainland across the Gulf of Paria.
Ordaz, three hundred of his remaining men, and all his horses ascended the Orinoco for hundreds of arduous miles, heaving, rowing, and dragging their boats upriver, cutting through the llanos, stark plains and savannas and parched, dusty tablelands. They finally came to the confluence of another great river, the Meta, and here were faced with a choice. Indian guides advised Ordaz and his party to take the Meta toward the west, where he would find a civilized, populous nation ruled by “a very powerful prince with one eye,” and rich in gold. But eyeing the Meta, Ordaz was dubious; it was rough and shallow, and they would be forced to abandon the boats and proceed on foot.
Another guide pointed south, back up the Orinoco, and began making furious slapping and crashing sounds, and gesticulating with his hands, imitating water hammering down onto rocks. The Spaniards optimistically (and erroneously) interpreted this pantomime to represent goldsmiths hammering away at precious metals, and that was all Ordaz needed to continue his quest up the Orinoco. But in just sixty miles they learned the grim reality of the guide’s sign language: they arrived at the violent cascades or rapids of Atures, a violent and impassable defile of rushing white water and falls thundering over rocks, where their boats would be crushed.* The guides now reiterated what they had been trying to explain, that the headwaters that Ordaz sought could be reached only by a foot march up the Meta. Ordaz turned his back on his dream for the moment, resolving to return for an overland attempt for this land of the Meta later, with proper equipment and provisions.
The descent began smoothly, the men relieved to be going downstream for once, but they were soon attacked by Caribs (a rival tribe to the Arawak) wielding bows and arrows. Ordaz dispatched his cavalry to counter the attack, and the sight of charging warhorses clad in armor—the first such animals these tribesmen had ever witnessed—sent them scattering in all directions. Ordaz managed to capture and interrogate a few, inquiring particularly whether there was any gold in the area. He showed the prisoner a gold ring to illustrate what they sought. The Indian responded: “He said that there was much of that metal behind a mountain range that rose on the left bank of the river. There were very many Indians and their ruler was a very valiant one-eyed Indian: if they sought him they could fill their boats with that metal.” They also spoke of four-legged animals, describing them as “less than stags, but fit for riding like the Spanish horses.” The Indians of course referred to the Andean llama, which Ordaz had heard about from Francisco Pizarro while at court in Spain a few years earlier.
Diego de Ordaz’s mind must have been dizzy with the prospect of finally conquering his own empire, just as his countrymen Cortés and Pizarro had done. Why should the one-eyed ruler of the Meta, who could fill a boat with gold, not be his Montezuma, his Atahualpa?
When Ordaz finally reached the mouth of the Orinoco and the soothing waters of the Caribbean at the Gulf of Paria, he grew single-minded in his quest to return to the headwaters of the Meta, to the land of gold. He needed to return first to Spain, where he hoped to gain an extension on his license to explore and conquer, and to enlist more men and equipment. But the Orinoco had taken a fatal toll on Ordaz, who was harboring an illness contracted somewhere on the river. On his return trip to Spain, Diego de Ordaz died at sea. Afterward, a Spanish proverb surfaced, attributed in no small part to his expedition: “He who goes to the Orinoco,” the saying went, “either dies or comes back mad.”
But his dream of discovering gold lived on, and foreboding proverb or not, that dream would lure others, including Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro, to search for the one-eyed chieftain and his empire of gold.
By late 1540 the myth and legend of El Dorado had reached fever pitch in Quito, fueled in part by other recent multiyear journeys to the north, in what is now Colombia. A well-bred and well-funded lawyer, Licentiate Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, set out in 1536 to explore the untracked Rio Grande (since named Magdalena) river to its source, hoping that it would wend its way to Quito and eventually the Pacific Ocean. After a few years of arduous journeying and great loss of men, Quesada had discovered the Muisca (Chibcha) lands (near present-day Bogotá) and people, an advanced civilization that possessed rock salt, emeralds, and finely wrought gold—including a bejeweled and gilded royal litter, very much like those used to carry both Montezuma and Atahualpa. The gold fashioned by Muisca metalsmiths was ornate, pounded into thin sheets and crafted with delicate intricacy and design. Quesada, too, had heard stories about the wealthy land of the Meta, and perhaps believed he had found it—though it was said then to lie farther to the east and to be on a plateau or open plain, less mountainous, perhaps in the wilderness beyond the mountains east of Quito.
All of these tales piqued the adventurous interest of the young and ambitious Francisco Orellana. He then learned, to his great excitement, that Gonzalo Pizarro had organized an ambitious expedition in search of this El Dorado, this Land of Cinnamon. He heard that other competitors were also readying men and equipment for rival expeditions. On the eve of the New Year, 1541, Orellana sped to Quito to offer his services, funds, and men to Gonzalo and to accompany him on his endeavor. But he knew that he must hurry, and that there was no time to lose.
* See José Toribio Medina, The Discovery of the Amazon, 154–55. The Brazilians call the Amazon the Rio Mar.
* The Atures and the Maipures Falls proved so formidable, in fact, that they prevented Spanish conquistadors and explorers from entering the Upper Orinoco for more than two hundred more years, until 1744, when Jesuit missionary Father Manuel Roman skirted the falls and climbed upriver to the high Orinoco. See Marc de Civrieux, Watuna: An Orinoco Creation Cycle, 4–5.