Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries (15 page)

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied
"If you seek for Eldorado!"
"El Dorado" by Edgar Allan Poe (1849)

A city of untold wealth buried deep
in the heart of the Amazonian
rainforest, a Mexican king or Gilded
Man covered from head to foot in powdered gold, an idea, a quest for a Holy
Grail always just out of reach of the

seeker, a destroyer of lives, and a giver
of dreams. El Dorado has been and still
is all of these things. In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors undertook
journeys fraught with danger in the
hope of glimpsing the fabled city of gold, and English explorer Sir Walter
Raleigh wrote in 1596 that he knew its
exact location. Even 21st century explorers have not given up hope of finding a physical El Dorado, perhaps in
the dense jungles of Peru or at the bottom of a mysterious lake in Columbia.
Are all these efforts in vain? Is there
an El Dorado to find or does the city
only exist in the mythology of the
Native American peoples of Colombia?

The legend of the Golden Man (El
Dorado in Spanish) was well-known
in Colombia and Peru when the Spanish arrived in the early 16th century.
Some researchers believe that the legend is based on a ceremony performed
by an isolated tribe called the Muisca,
a highly developed gold-working community who lived around 8,200 feet up
in the Andes Mountains. Apparently
the ceremony (for the appointing of a
new king or chief priest) took place
at Lake Guatavita, north of presentday Bogota. At the beginning of the
ritual, the new ruler made offerings
to the god of the lake, after which the
tribe constructed a raft from rushes
and filled it with incense and perfumes. The naked body of the new
king was then covered with balsam
gum, and a fine gold dust spread on
top of it. When the chief was ready,
the tribe placed him on the raft along
with a great pile of gold and emeralds, and four subject chiefs who
brought along gold crowns, pendants,
earrings, and other precious items. To
the accompaniment of music from
trumpets and flutes, the raft left the
shore and sailed out into the middle
of the lake. Once the vessel reached
the center, all was silent, and the king
and his subjects cast all their riches

into the water as an offering. The new
chief was now recognized as lord and
king.

John Hemming notes in his book,
The Search for El Dorado, that in the
17th century it was common among
tribes living along the Orinoco River
in Venezuela to anoint their whole
bodies with a specially made oil, which
served as clothing and protection
against mosquitoes. On certain feast
days the people covered the oil with
various multicolored drawings. Even
today, tribes of the Amazon paint their
bodies with vegetable dyes. If there
was an abundance of gold among the
tribe it is certainly plausible that it
could have been used as body decoration. Perhaps there was some truth in
the Gilded Man legend after all, but
could it be the origin of the El Dorado
story?

There are, however, other elements involved in the beginnings of El
Dorado. Another rumor circulating
among the Spanish at the time of the
conquest was that a rebel group of
Inca warriors had managed to elude
the conquistadors and escape to the
mountains of Venezuela. The rebels
allegedly took large amounts of gold
and precious stones with them and
founded a secret new empire. There
were also various stories told by captured Indians of a rich land lying beyond the mountains east of Quito, the
modern capital of Ecuador, where the
people strolled about covered in gold
ornaments. In a letter written in 1542
to Charles V, King of Spain, conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro refers to this
rich land as Lake El Dorado, perhaps
a reference to the Golden Man ceremonies of the Muisca. Pizarro was one of a number of Spanish invaders who organized expeditions to search for the
fabulous lost city. Another element in
the El Dorado story is the interest the
Spanish had in the cinnamon the Incas
used. In Europe, spices were highly
valued as a method of preserving food
(in the days before refrigeration), and
huge profits could be made from trading in the commodity.

The conquistadors found out from
the natives that the spice originated
with tribes located east of Quito. In
February 1541, an expedition headed
by Gonzalo Pizarro with Francisco de
Orellana as his lieutenant, and including 220 Spanish adventurers and 4,000
mountain Indians serving as porters,
left Quito in search of cinnamon and
the fabled El Dorado. During his obsessive quest for these valuable commodities, Pizarro would often brutally
torture Indians until they told him
what he wanted about the existence of
hidden gold and cinnamon trees. The
expedition followed the courses of the
Coca and Napo rivers, but soon began
to run short of provisions, and before
long more than half of the Spanish and
3,000 of the Indians had perished. In
February 1542 the expedition split into
two parts, with Francisco de Orellana
pursuing a course down the Napo, and
Pizarro eventually deciding to struggle
back overland to Quito. From the Napo,
Orellana and his men finally found
their way to the Amazon and sailed its
entire length to the Atlantic Ocean, an
incredible achievement. But they
never found El Dorado.

But this did not deter the Spanish.
Driven by their lust for gold and spices,
a series of adventurers spent much of
the 16th century in search of the vast

treasure they believed existed in some
hidden location in the jungles or mountains of Ecuador or Columbia. In 1568,
wealthy explorer and conquistador
Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada received
a commission from King Philip to
explore the southern Llanos, a vast
expanse of tropical grassland plain
situated in Colombia. In December
1569, the expedition, which included
300 Spaniards and 1,500 Indians, set
off from the Columbian capital of
Bogota in search of El Dorado. But the
expedition, confronted with the harsh
mosquito-ridden environment of the
dismal swamps and the blankness of
the dusty plains, was a disaster. Three
years later, Quesada arrived back in
Bogota accompanied by just 64 Spaniards and four Indians.

The original myth of the Muisca
ceremony at Lake Guatavita combined
with the Lake El Dorado of Gonzalo
Pizarro convinced many explorers
that the lost city may in fact be located
near a lake. English explorer and
Courtier Sir Walter Raleigh launched
another search for El Dorado in 1595,
in an attempt to restore lost favor with
Queen Elizabeth I. His expedition
sailed along the Orinoco River for
many weeks, but found nothing. However, in his book The Discovery of the
Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of
Guyana with a Relation to the Great
and Golden City of Manoa, Raleigh
claimed that El Dorado was a city on
Lake Parima on the Orinoco in Guiana
(modern-day Venezuela). Raleigh's
map showing the the city on the lake
was so convincing that the mythical
Lake Parima was marked on maps of
South America for the next 150 years.
It was not until the early 19th century, with German naturalist and explorer
Alexander von Humboldt, that it was
proved that neither the lake nor the
city had ever existed.

Though Lake Parima was entirely
mythical, there was never any doubt
about the existence of Lake Guatavita.
Perhaps this was, after all, the location of El Dorado. As soon as the Spanish invaders learned that the Muisca
deposited precious objects in Lake
Guatavita as offerings, they immediately set about organizing the draining of the lake. Wealthy merchant
Antonio de Sepulveda used a workforce of Indians to cut a trench to drain
the lake in 1562, but only succeeded
in lowering its level slightly. De
Sepulveda did, however, find a number of gold discs and emeralds in the
mud at the lake's edge. Nevertheless,
the total haul from the drainage was
recorded as only "232 pesos and 10
grams of good gold." Another attempt
to drain the lake in 1823 by Don `Pepe'
Paris, a prominent citizen of Bogota,
found no precious gold artifacts. Further drainage projects in the early- to
mid-20th century discovered a few
items of interest, but nothing similar
to what would be expected from the
repeated deposits of gold supposedly
made in the sacred lake. Finally, in 1965
the Colombian Government brought an
end to these efforts, which by then had
visibly scarred the lake, and put Lake
Guatavita under national protection.

In 1969, an exquisitely detailed
solid gold model of a raft 10.5 inches
in length was found by two farm workers in a cave near the town of Pasca,
close to Bogota. The model raft contains a regal figure towering above 10
attendants, all wearing elaborate head

dresses. It has been interpreted by
many as confirming the existence of
the Muisca rite at Lake Guatavita. In
fact, an almost identical raft was found
on the edge of Lake Siecha, south of
the village of Guatavita, during a
drainage attempt in 1856. This golden
raft subsequently came into the hands
of a certain Salomon Koppel who sold
it to the Imperial Museum of Berlin,
from where it disappeared after World
War I. These rafts are certainly evidence of a ceremony taking place on a
lake, though the Muisca culture not
only venerated water, but mountains,
stars, planets, and ancestors as well.
More importantly, the tribe did not actually produce gold themselves; they
obtained it through trade with other
tribes. Consequently, their gold objects are small and usually very thin,
as is the surviving golden raft. It is
unlikely that the Muisca would have
possessed gold in enough quantities to
either cover their chief in gold dust or
tip prodigal amounts into the lake during the ceremony referred to in the
myth.

Nevertheless, modern explorers
continue to be fascinated by the possibility of finally locating El Dorado.
In 2000, the American explorer Gene
Savoy announced that he had discovered the lost pre-Columbian city of
Cajamarquilla deep in virgin rainforest in eastern Peru. Some members
of his team claimed that the site, which
includes temples and burial sites,
could possibly be the remains of the
fabled El Dorado. A Polish-Italian
journalist and explorer named Jacek
Palkiewicz was not quite so reticent
when in 2002 he announced that his
expedition had located El Dorado beneath a lake on a plateau next
to Manu National Park, southeast of
Lima in Peru. Investigations are apparently still ongoing in both of these
cases.

Despite more than 450 years of
searching, the discovery of the fabulous
wealth of El Dorado seems to be no
closer than it was for the Spanish of
the mid-16th century. The term itself
has become a metaphor for the single

minded pursuit of wealth that is always just out of reach, constantly
around the next corner. No doubt there
are lost pre-Hispanic cities still to be
discovered in the vastness of the Amazon rainforest, but El Dorado, whether
a Golden Man or a Golden City, only
exists in the minds of men obsessed
with discovering the quickest path to
riches.

© Dr. A. Siokou

The plain of Helike and the Gulf of Corinth from the mountains.

The ancient city of Helike, situated
on the southern shore of the Gulf of
Corinth, roughly 93 miles west of Athens, was originally founded in the
Early Bronze Age (2600-2300 B.c.).
The first prehistoric settlement was
submerged beneath the waves about
2,000 years before the city was destroyed. In the eighth century B.C.
Homer wrote of Helike sending ships
to the Trojan War under the command
of Agamemnon. By the time of its

destruction in the fourth century B.C.,
Helike had become a wealthy and successful metropolis, the leader of the
12 cities of the first Achaean league (a
union of local city states), and founder
of colonies abroad such as Priene, on
the coast of Asia Minor, and Sybaris
in Southern Italy. Helike's temple and
sanctuary of Helikonian Poseidon was
famous throughout Classical Greece,
and was rivaled only by the Oracle at
Delphi, across the Gulf of Corinth.