WALTER RALEGH
Hondius’s map of the region now known as French Guiana (1598). The central feature is the mythical Lake Parime, marked as the site of the lost city of Manoa, or El Dorado, so keenly searched for by Sir Walter Ralegh. Below are equally fantastic illustrations of the Blemmye (headless men) and the Amazons.
The trouble with rumour, especially of the geographical strain, is its talent for adaptation. The twelfth-century tale of Prester John, for example, mentioned previously as a motivator for early Portuguese exploration (see The Portuguese Explore the African Tropics entry here), told of a fabulously wealthy Nestorian Christian monarch whose vast resources could be a valuable ally for the Crusaders mourning the shock loss of the county of Edessa to Saracen forces in 1144. But where precisely was this kingdom? Otto, bishop of Freising in Germany, writes in his contemporary chronicle of it being in ‘the extreme orient, beyond Persia and Armenia’, but no trace was ever found. The search for this ‘lost’ priest–king gripped Europe for five hundred years. Mongolia was considered an option in the thirteenth century until the Empire collapsed. Then, Africa – Ethiopia perhaps. (Certainly this was the conviction of Ortelius, who shows the glittering kingdom on his 1573 map A Description of the Empire of Prester John or of the Abyssinians.)
And then there is the most elusive of legends: El Dorado. Meaning ‘the gilded one’, the fantasy originates from a native coronation ceremony in which the chieftain covered himself in gold dust to form a living idol, and hurled great quantities of gold and jewels into a lake to appease a water demon. Spanish conquistadors picked up hearsay of it in Ecuador in 1535. The custom was extinct before the Spanish arrived, but the story was passed around so often that El Dorado no longer referred to a figure but an entire city of gold, a utopia somewhere among the Andes, or the llanos (plains) of Venezuela, or amid the broadleaved forest of the Amazon biome, or in the land of ‘Guiana’ somewhere beyond eastern Peru.
The last iteration reached the attention of Sir Walter Ralegh, a knighted favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Few men have paid a greater price for the pursuit of rumour than Ralegh, who learnt of the El Dorado myth from a Spanish letter captured by the colonist George Popham. Its writer conflated the story with the equally mythical ‘golden city of Manoa’, said to lie on the shore of a ‘Lake Parima’ (also non-existent), awaiting discovery. Ralegh left Plymouth on 6 February 1595 to find it, arriving off Trinidad on 22 March. Easily seizing the Spanish town of San José de Oruña, he captured the governor, Antonio de Berrio, who saved himself by claiming to be an expert on the Orinoco river. With Berrio’s piloting, Ralegh led his men up this labyrinthine Venezuelan river, one of the longest in South America. The Englishmen became hopelessly lost, and were forced to return to the coast and eventually Britain, on 5 September, with little to show for the effort.
Ralegh compensated for the failure with an exaggerated account of the adventure, published as The Discovery of Guiana (1595), which was rightly regarded with scepticism and remains a colourful example of myth propagation. Ralegh’s faith in the golden city remained undaunted: ‘I have been assured by such of the Spaniards as have seen Manoa, the imperial city of Guiana, which the Spaniards call El Dorado’, he writes in the journal, ‘that for the greatness, for the riches, and for the excellent seat, it far exceedeth any of the world, at least of so much of the world as is known to the Spanish nation.’
Before he could consider returning, however, more pressing matters presented themselves. When Elizabeth I died in 1603 her successor, James VI and I, had Ralegh arrested for his alleged involvement in the Main Plot, a rumbled conspiracy against the new monarch. After defending himself in court Ralegh was found guilty, but his life was spared by King James and instead he was imprisoned in the Tower on a thirteen-year sentence. By 1616, though, James was low on funds and in need of a cash injection, and so a freshly pardoned Ralegh emerged blinking in the daylight to find himself granted royal permission to lead a second expedition to find the ‘mountain of gold’ he had claimed to have glimpsed on his first voyage.
The mission was blighted with misfortune from the start. Chaotic weather scattered the ten-strong fleet, and on their arrival at Venezuela in November 1617 a portion of the crew, including Ralegh, were enfeebled by a violent illness. As Ralegh was incapacitated his devoted deputy and friend Lawrence Keymis led an expedition up the Orinoco, taking with him Ralegh’s son Wat. For three weeks the party navigated the river inland, entering the Caroni river. On 12 January 1618 the English flotilla attacked a Spanish outpost called San Thomé, believing it to be the site of a goldmine. After taking the fort in a bloody assault no gold mine was found, and a distraught Keymis learnt that young Wat had been killed in the melee.
They returned to Ralegh in Trinidad to break the news of his son’s death, and their contravention of his order to not engage the Spanish, for this had been an express condition agreed with King James to maintain the fragile post-bellum peace of the Anglo-Spanish. Devastated, Ralegh refused Keymis his forgiveness, and the lieutenant shot himself.
On his return to England on 21 July 1618 Ralegh was arrested, and on the demands of the Spanish ambassador was beheaded in the Old Palace Yard at the Palace of Westminster on 29 October 1618, officially decried for betraying his king, but lauded as a hero by a public still highly charged with anti-Spanish sentiment.
