The Myth of El Dorado

Author(s): John Silver

Reviewed work(s):
Source: History Workshop, No. 34, Latin American History (Autumn, 1992), pp. 1-15
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4289179 .
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ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
_~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~O v
The Myth of El Dorado
by John Silver
The story of British involvement in Latin America could fill several volumes,
but very little is known of it outside separate specialist circles. This article
will briefly outline one strand in the story from the period between the Wars
of Independence and the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on the
relatively unknown region stretching southward from the Orinoco river to
the jungles and waterways of the Amazon valley. This is the region most
prominently associated with searches for El Dorado, and the history
sketched out below is of the British Victorian veision of this enduring myth
of a rich 'promised land' lying hidden in the unmapped heartlands of South
America.
Though there had been earlier searches for lands believed to be rich in
gold, the Venezuelan historian Demetrio Ramos Perez has made a strong
case for dating the first rumours of a golden king just prior to Pizarro's
expedition of 1541, which was shortly followed by an equally disastrous one
led by Sebastian de Benalcazar.' Both Conquistadores led their expeditions
northwards from Peru, seeking an indian king whose body was said to be
powdered in fine gold-dust every morning. Whatever the origins or veracity
of these reports, they fuelled belief in a third, still richer indian empire after
Mexico and Peru, which was also mixed up with the Spanish explorers'
anxiety that the Incas had escaped with the greater share of their gold, and
that Atahualpa's ransom (his weight in gold) was only the tip of a vast
iceberg.2
By the time of Pedro de Ursdias expedition in 1559, El Dorado had
become a golden land rather than a golden man, and the official name of a
province. Ursua had lobbied hard for the title of Governor of El Dorado and
Omaguas, the latter being the name of the reputedly fierce indians living in
the rich lands then believed to lie to the east of Peru, down the river we now
know as the Amazon.3 The geography was understandably vague, and the
province of El Dorado covered a hazy region of jungles and rivers towards
Brazil, whose extent was not known. By the time Sir Walter Raleigh arrived
on the Orinoco river in 1595, his captive Antonio de Berrio, Governor of El
Historv Workslzop Journal lssue 34
?
History Workshop Jo u rnal 1992
2 History Workshop Journal
Dorado, held the title to the area between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers,
and extending westward to the Venezuelan llanos by the Orinoco's upper
reaches near present-day Colombia.4
The myth of a Golden Land, or City, or King, was perhaps the most
powerful and enduring of the many myths that held the imaginations of
European adventurers in that century, and it has continued to haunt the
imaginations of Latin American writers and artists to this day, including
Gabriel Garcia Mairquez, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Otero Silva, Abel
Posse, Carlos Fuentes, Francisco Herrera Luque, Arturo Uslar Pietri, Jose
Gamarra, Miguel von Dangel and Emilia Sunyer, as well as writers in
English from Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad and W. H. Hudson to Wilson
Harris and V. S. Naipaul. The Spanish historian Emiliano Jos has said that
more territory was explored as a result of searches for El Dorado than for
any other single reason,5 and to this day exploration continues in search of
gold in the very region where Raleigh claimed to see the towers of Manoa
gleaming beside Lake Parima, while European maps of the region between
the Orinoco and the Amazon continued to show Lake Parima and the gold
towers of El Dorado on its shores up to the early nineteenth century.6
Despite the continuation of literal belief, from the seventeenth century
El Dorado was increasingly claimed by literature and science and consig-
ned to the realm of symbolism. In Voltaire's Candide, it was clearly identi-
fied with fantasy. No member of the French educated elite was expected to
miss the ironical point when Candide mused, 'Surely, all is well only in El
Dorado, and nowhere else in the world'.7 Similarly, in 1745, some fifteen
years before Voltaire's work was published, the Public Assembly of the
French Academie des Sciences heard the Enlightenment scientist Charles
de La Condamine report, after working for nine years in South America,
that El Dorado was merely a 'belle chimere': a beautiful dream (though he
declared the war-like Amazons a fact).8
The most formidable attempt to consign El Dorado once and for all to
the past, and to cleanse geography of this anachronism, was made by
Baron Alexander von Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury. At the same time as the Spanish American colonies were 'throwing
off the yoke of Spain' and 'opening up' to the modernizing forces of inter-
national capital and enterprise, his Personal Narrative of Travels to the
Equinoctial Regions of America was appearing in English translation
(1814-1829).9 As well as being the first generally available and widely read
work containing descriptions of the agriculture, mineral resources, trans-
port facilities, social customs, settlements, and other relevant geographical
details of the region (comprising roughly the upper half of Spanish
America), Humboldt's Personal Narrative powerfully advocated rational
development of the continent. He deplored the pillaging of its resources
and the exploitation of its peoples by greedy and short-sighted adventurers
under Spanish rule, and advocated industry over get-rich-quick projects,
enlightened development over colonial exploitation, general trade over
The Myth of El Dorado 3
monopoly, and civilized institutions over the barbarism of political tyranny.
Humboldt was the first major voice to argue for the implantation of
nineteenth-century European values of world development in Latin
America, and his views were echoed and developed in particular directions
in the steady flow of British writings on the area throughout the nineteenth
century. Many of the worst aspects of the past were demonstrated, for him,
by the Spaniards' pursuit of El Dorado.
In volume III of his Personal Narrative, Humboldt established his view
that the topic of El Dorado belonged primarily to the domain of science,
specifically to geography:
The discussion to which I shall devote the end of this chapter is important,
not only because it throws light on the events of the Conquest, and that
long series of disastrous expeditions made in search of El Dorado, the last
of which was in 1775; it also furnishes, in addition to this simply historical
interest, another, more substantial and more generally felt, that of
rectifying the geography of South America . .. The town of Manoa, and
its palaces covered with plates of massy gold, have long since dis-
appeared; but the geographical apparatus serving to adorn the fable of El
Dorado, the lake Parima, which, similar to the lake of Mexico, reflected
the image of so many sumptuous edifices, has been religiously preserved
by geographers. ''
Like La Condamine, Humboldt was concerned to fix the distance between
reality and chimerical dreams. His treatment of the topic was more
systematic, principally because the opposition between reality and chimera
was clearly mapped onto one between geography and mythology: 'El
Dorado, similar to Atlas and the islands of the Hesperides, disappeared
from the domain of
geography,
and entered that of
mythological
fictions'.
1
Geography, emphatically, was on the side of reality. It was opposed to
fabulous mythological tradition, imaginative fiction, and the artifice and
deceit of which Humboldt, like Hume, accused Raleigh.'2 It was thus on the
side also of scientific evidence, reason, substance, and truthfulness. By 1841
Humboldt could confidently proclaim the triumph of geography over its
opponent, and declare that El Dorado had 'gradually stepped out of the
realm of poetry to take up a position in that of systematic geography'.'3
Humboldt's treatment of El Dorado in his Personal Narrative was
informed by his sense of the danger it posed not only to science, but also to
South America's welfare and the world's econornic health in general. The
'thirst for gold' represented an economic as well as moral distortion: desire
for riches and not for that 'real wealth' produced by 'agricultural industry'.
As he said of the Venezuelan Guayana region at the beginning of his chapter
on El Dorado:
The real wealth of this country is founded on the care of the herds and the
cultivation of colonial produce . . . according to popular traditions, the
4 History Workshop Journal
banks of the Carony lead to the lake Dorado and the palace of 'the gilded
man': and this lake, and this palace, being a local fable, it might be
dangerous to awaken remembrances which begin gradually to be
effaced. 14
In Humboldt's discourse on South American progress there were lines of
interconnection between the divide separating science, truth and reality
from desire, fable and deceit, and the divide separating public well-being,
wealth, and things (goods) from selfish greed, gold, and insubstantial signs.
The contrasts across those divides evidently operated through forceful and
clear concepts of the real and the unreal. What Humboldt opposed was
denied reality. What he advocated was grounded in natural truth. Science
shared the same order of reality as the agricultural, animal, or mineral
products of industry. And civilization, which he defined as productive and
commercial activity, shared the same rational domain of truth as science.
El Dorado was the point in Humboldt's discourse where the oppositions
between scientific truth and mere fantasy, and between development of
commerce and the mere pursuit of gain, met and supported each other. The
subsequent British nineteenth-century discourse on South America's pro-
gress repeated these divisions, but with particular national and historical
inflections. At the time when Humboldt's authoritative work was appearing,
the republican forces under Sim6n Bolivar were effectively answering his
call for modernization in unofficial alliance with the world's leading trading
and naval power, Britain, which actively helped to secure the success of the
South American Wars of Independence, and remained the most influential
European power in the region throughout the century. Britain's interest was
not colonization, despite the clumsy attempt to occupy and hold Buenos
Aires in 1807, which may or may not have been officially sanctioned.
Rather, it was the 'opening to our manufactures [of] the markets of that
great Continent', as stated by Lord Castlereagh in a Memorandum later that
year which explicitly discouraged acquisition of territory in the continent.
15
Latin America was different from the other places that Britain and its
rival powers were to 'open' up in the course of the nineteenth century,
because it had already been through over three hundred years of European
colonial rule. Supposedly, the population had acquired the tastes and habits
of European civilization, making them a potential market as consumers, and
a potential workforce as labourers familiar with the disciplines of efficiency.
One of the main reasons the Spanish colonies sought their independence was
for greater freedom to trade, and Britain was an obvious political ally against
Spain's economic monopoly. While remaining officially neutral during the
struggles between republicans and loyalists within the colonies, Britain's
crucial role was to oppose any international alliance to help Spain reconquer
the rebellious colonies, such as the one proposed by Tsarist Russia in 1820.
Where the U.S.A. curried favour by announcing the Monroe Doctrine in
1823, which expressed its backing for the Independence movements, Lord
The Myth of El Dorado 5
Canning withheld political recognition of the new Republics until they had
signed favourable commercial treaties with Britain.16 One imagines that the
enthusiasm among businessmen and politicians at the liberation of the
Spanish colonies was similar to that shown in 1989 over the fall of the Berlin
Wall. In both cases, vast new markets were seen to fall open, with consumers
eager for European products offering a rich field for commerce, investment,
and enterprise.17 One major difference is that in 1825 Britain was 'first
among equals' in a busy trading world.
Robert Southey, Poet Laureate since 1813, reflected the British national-
ist inflection given to Humboldt's contrasts between past greed and future
industry, and fable and fact in his 1821 The Expedition of
Orsua;
and the
Crimes of Aguirre, which he called in the preface 'a frightful, but salutary
story; exemplifying that power, which intoxicates men, makes wicked ones
mad'. In Southey's work, El Dorado had a particular national significance: it
was 'the greediest hope of the Spaniards'.18 His choice of the bloodiest
expedition in search of El Dorado under Spanish leadership (Germans and
Britons had also pursued that 'greedy hope' in the sixteenth century)
connected clearly with the contemporary rhetoric of 'throwing off the yoke
of Spain'. The assumptions informing it were clearly stated in his poem A
Tale of Paraguay, published in 1825, which shows how directly Spanish
colonial enterprises in the sixteenth century (as opposed to British
commercial enterprises in the nineteenth century) were identified with plain
avarice and greed in the work of this Member of the Royal Spanish Academy
and Royal Spanish Academy of History, translator of Amadis of Gaul (1803)
and The Cid (1808), and author of A History of Brazil (1810-19), who
described 'the Spaniard' as:
A fearless but inhuman conqueror,
Hard-heartened by the accursed lust of gain.
O fatal thirst of gold! 0 foul reproach for Spain!
Three verses later, in a move of which Humboldt would have thoroughly
approved, Southey pointed up the ironic distance between this 'lust of gain'
and the lack of real effort (agricultural industry) on the part of greedy
Spaniards, who introduced slavery for the extraction of gold, so that:
An annual harvest there they might attain,
Without the cost of annual industry.19
An emphasis on Spanish violence, illiberal despotism, backwardness,
plunder and greed was to become almost automatic in nineteenth-century
British writing on searches for El Dorado, from children's books to reports
by businessmen and works of history. Of the same expedition, the Hakluyt
Society's Honorary Secretary, Sir Clements Markham, wrote in 1861: 'in
this cruise of Aguirre all that is wildest, most romantic, most desperate, most
6 History Workshop Journal
appalling in the annals of Spanish enterprise seems to culminate in one wild
orgie of madness and blood', noting that these were
'amongst
the tales which
made the blood of Raleigh and Sir Richard Hawkins boil with generous
indignation at the very name of a Spaniard'.20
James Mudie Spence, a businessman with mining interests in
Venezuela,
declared in his 1878 The Land of Bolivar:
The rapacity and cruelty of the early Spanish adventurers fills us with
horror. Our highly sensitive modern feelings are shocked at their blood
guiltiness. We shudder at the narrative of the tortures they inflicted upon
the Indians in their search for the land of El Dorado.2"
And James Rodway, whose The West Indies and the Spanish Main (1896)
was published in T. Fisher Unwin's 'Story of the Nations' series, commented
of Columbus's belief that he had discovered a paradisical site: 'Into this
beautiful world he let loose a band of robbers and murderers, to depopulate
and make it a wilderness'.22 He then concentrated mostly on the Aguirre
expedition in his chapter on 'the Quest for "El
Dorado"', continually
emphasizing the cruelty of the Spaniards, while the expeditions of Raleigh
were treated in a separate chapter, whose celebratory tone was set by its
title: 'Singeing the Spaniard's Beard'. When Markham published his The
Conquest of New Granada in 1912, he commented that it was still 'the
fashion to denounce all the Spanish "Conquistadores" as cruel and ruthless
oppressors'; though he objected that one or two had belonged 'to the type of
the good and true knight', he still held that 'the thirst for gold seemed to turn
men into fiends'.23
For obvious competitive reasons, Spanish colonialism was the negative
against which nineteenth-century British writers defined their commercial
or colonialist intentions in the hemisphere, which they were keen to
distinguish from cupidity and the violent exercise of superior force. Yet
while the Spanish expeditions in search of El Dorado were confined to the
domain of myth, plunder, and 'insane voyages' from the past, at the same
time El Dorado came to symbolize the contrasting future promised by
Britain's involvement in the area following the end of Spanish rule.
This re-semanticisation of the myth can be seen clearly in the work of Sir
Robert Schomburgk, a Prussian by birth, who explored the watershed of the
Essequibo and Orinoco Rivers from 1835 to 1839 for the Royal Geographi-
cal Society, and who was commissioned by Queen Victoria to determine the
boundaries of British Guiana
-
which are still disputed by Venezuela
-
from
1841 to 1843.
As Humboldt noted, it was Sir Robert who decisively made Raleigh's
great Sea of Parima 'dwindle back' into the two or three mile long Lake
Amucu.24 Yet El Dorado, specifically in its association with Raleigh,
operated unambiguously as a symbol of the promise and legitimacy of
British colonialism in the book Sir Robert published upon his return to
The Myth of El Dorado 7
England in 1840, whose full title suggests the tight links between
geography
(science), commerce and colonialism: A Description of British
Guiana,
Geographical and Statistical: Exhibiting its Resources and
Capabilities,
together with the Present and Future Condition and
Prospects of the
Colony.25
Britain did not share what Sir Robert would call in The Colonial
Magazine in 1848, two months before his appointment as British Consul in
Santo Domingo, the 'irrational system of governing her Colonies' of
Spain,
whose rulers after Philip II, 'in lieu of protecting the labours of the Colonists
and encouraging habits of industry, felt only anxious to draw gold and silver
in profusion from their possessions, and delegated their powers to viceroys,
who ruled with iron rods, and shackled the commerce of the Colonies with
heavy fetters'.26 Rather, British Guiana's treasures were in the order of what
Humboldt had called 'agricultural industry':
Guiana bids fair ere long to become a focus of colonization; and with her
fertility, her facilities of water communication, she may yet vie with the
favoured provinces of the eastern empire, and become, as Sir Walter
Raleigh predicted, the El Dorado of Great Britain's possessions in the
West.27
The reference to Raleigh connected El Dorado's operation as a symbol of
the commercial promise of the colony, with its status as a symbol of British
colonialist tradition and legitimacy. When Schomburgk introduced Sir
Walter Raleigh's Discovery of Guiana a few years later, he declared that the
object of his introductory biographical sketch was 'to view Raleigh chiefly as
the father of American colonization and a promoter of commerce and
navigation'. 8 By this argument, which also underlies the treatment of
Raleigh's search for El Dorado in the immensely popular mid-century novel
by Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! (1855), Britain's 'first position in point
of national greatness' in the world was the mid-nineteenth-century legacy of
sixteenth-century expeditions such as Raleigh's in search of El Dorado:
The origin of this superiority is to be ascribed to the valour of those
intrepid men who, towards the end of the sixteenth century, wrung from
Spain the supremacy on the ocean; it is founded upon the enterprize and
prowess of the maritime discoverers who distinguished the Elizabethan
age, but above all upon the establishment and extent of the British
colonies, those grand sources of national wealth . . . What was in the
commencement merely the offspring of a spirit of adventure, was
gradually converted into a regular system.29
The promise of the future symbolized by El Dorado was inextricably
connected in this British discourse to the commercial attractiveness of the
region. Progress was the watchword of the age; its natural effect was world
civilization, its necessary and natural condition, at least in Britain from 1830,
8 History Workshop Journal
was free trade, and its natural engine was commerce, as we see when Foreign
Secretary Lord Granville praised 'the great natural advantages of our
Foreign Commerce, and the powerful means of civilization it affords' in a
Memorandum of 1852.30 By the mid-1800s, El Dorado had developed from
standing for error, fantasy, and violent desire, to become a symbol of the
golden future awaiting South America as it joined the family of
trading
nations. In the mid-eighteenth century it had gained its meaning within a
scientific, rationalistic opposition between fact and fable. One hundred
years later, its meaning was defined by a parallel contrast pitting the 'facts' of
British progress, commerce, civilization and colonization against the 'fables'
of non-capitalist, unprogressive Spanish control. As Eric Hobsbawm has
said of this period:
Progress was therefore as 'natural' as capitalism. Remove the artificial
obstacles to it which the past had erected and it must inevitably take
place, and it was evident that the progress of production went hand in
hand with that of the arts, the sciences, and civilization in general. Let it
not be supposed that the men who held such views were mere special
pleaders for the vested interests of businessmen. They were men who
believed, with considerable historical justification at this period, that the
way forward for humanity was through capitalism.3"
Reading through the archive of nineteenth-century British descriptions of
this region of South America, one notes a remarkable consistency in the
terms in which it was described. Whether the travellers were natural
scientists or businessmen, they saw potential products in the vegetation,
potential means of transport in the rivers, potential labour in the local
inhabitants, and future settlements of modern civilization projected onto the
landscape. Though lacking the direct links with imperial administration
which Edward Said identified in Orientalist discourse, the British discourse
on South America similarly assumed both the power and the right to make
the transition from 'merely textual apprehension, formulation, or definition'
of bright commercial prospects to 'the putting of all this into practice', if only
at some indefinite point in the future.32
The famous British naturalist Alfred R. Wallace's Travels on the Amazon
and Rio Negro, which was to acquire a similar prestige among later British
writers on the area between the Orinoco and the Amazon to the work of
Humboldt and Schomburgk, continually praised the lands through which he
travelled for their unequalled agricultural potential, though he registered
less enthusiasm for their human inhabitants, whose 'indolent disposition,
and the scarcity of labour, will prevent the capabilities of this fine country
from being developed till European or North American colonies are
formed' ."
Wallace's conception of the promising future in store for those 'colonies'
The Myth of El Dorado
9
was most explicitly described in the part of his narrative
dealing with his
return down the Rio Negro in November 1851:
When I consider the excessively small amount of labour required in this
country, to convert the virgin forest into green meadows and fertile plan-
tations, I almost long to come over with a half-a-dozen
friends, disposed
to work, and enjoy the country; and show the inhabitants how soon an
earthly paradise might be created, which they have never even conceived
capable of existing.34
After assuring his readers, perhaps stimulated by the nationalist bravado of
the second half of this sentence, that the climate and natural surroundings
were highly favourable to labour, he described how the forest could be con-
verted into green pasture and meadowland growing any variety of produce
and requiring half as much time and work as in England, and imagined
walks, avenues, and gardens replacing the monotonous gloom of the jungle.
Similarly, the geographer Clements Markham, introducing the 1859
Hakluyt Society volume Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, de-
scribed a natural movement of the mind from geographical study to pleasur-
able consideration of 'the great future which must be in store for the broad
basin of the Amazons, when many nations will people its banks, and a con-
stant flow of commerce will add fresh interest to its ceaseless tide'
-
a flow
described as consisting of steamers navigating the fluvial highways, profit-
able estates being established along the banks of rivers, and every means
being used to develop the 'inexhaustible resources' of the region.35
And the prominent Orientalist Captain Richard Burton, in his Explor-
ations of the Highlands of Brazil (1869), represented his own trip down a
river as the future advance of civilization in an extended metaphor recalling
Markham's 'flow of commerce':
A panorama passes before the eyes. The little stream so modestly purling
down its channel shall presently become a mountain torrent with linns
and kieves and cataracts and inundations that sweep all before them.
Then will it widen to a majestic river, watering acres untold, its banks clo-
thed with croft and glade, with field and forest, and supporting the lowly
hamlet and the mighty city. Last in the far distance spreads the mouth and
looms the port, busy with shipping, the link in the chain of communi-
cation which makes all nations brothers, and which must civilize if it has
not civilized mankind. Standing at the small fount we see these vistas with
a thrill of pleasant excitement, not unmixed with a faint suggestion of
anxiety. How many risks and hardships are to be undergone, how many
difficulties are to be conquered before the task can be accomplished,
before we can see the scenes of what is about to be.36
The shift from the fluvial metaphor to that of the chain of commercial com-
munication followed the logic of inevitability: as a river flowed naturally, so
10 History Workshop Journal
countries were bound to one another on their passage towards the ideal
future of a fully productive and civilized (in its precise sense of commercial-
ized) Amazon valley.
However, such confident assurances of the inevitability of this ideal
future were increasingly challenged in the decades of the 1860s and 1870s by
the twin notions of race and political instability. Where in the work of La
Condamine and Humboldt the possibility that the indigenous inhabitants of
the continent could become civilized by adapting to the conditions of
commerce had been left open (Humboldt wrote of efforts to 'disindianize'
them),3
the British understanding of the scope of human possibility in the
middle of the nineteenth century was considerably narrower. From Edward
Stanley to Anthony Trollope, both the descendants of Spaniards and the
indigenous inhabitants were deemed congenitally apathetic and irredeem-
ably incapable of discipline, efficiency, or change.38 A typical catalogue of
'scientific' views can be found in a work edited and extended by Henry
Walter Bates, Central America, The West Indies, and South America (1878
& 1882). Of the Indians, 'indolent, unimaginative, ignorant, and supersti-
tious'; of the Mestizos, 'docile, but ill-educated, of unbridled passion,
ambitious, sensuous, and void of all honourable feeling'; and of the Creoles,
'swayed by passions and capricious impulses, which can be held in check
only by the strong arm of despotism'.39 Returning to the theme in a section
on 'Causes of the Partial Failure of Latin Civilization in America', Bates
declared that the problems of the region were not due to a failure to
understand the art of colonization on the part of the Spaniards. Their cause
lay in the fact, very bluntly stated, that 'it was impossible to get rid of the
native element, as the erratic hunting tribes of North America were mostly
got rid of'.40
The earlier economic explanation, condemning Spanish illiberalism,
perhaps appeared less convincing after over half a century of rigorously
enforced free trade. 'Race' certainly filled the gap, and helped to extend the
ideological life of the discourse on progress, with its identification of the
natural order with civilization and commerce.4' As Bates' comments show,
the much commented-upon political instability of the South American
Republics was interpreted in terms of race. There was no reflection on the
possibility that British commercial practices, with the form of civilization
they required, were unsuitable; indeed, none can be expected, since that
civilization was believed to be natural. The consequence for the symbolism
of El Dorado was something similar to the 'fortress consciousness' discussed
by the Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris.42
The last two chapters of Edward Eastwick's 1868 Venezuela (an
important source for Joseph Conrad's Nostromo) presented contrasting
pictures of the destruction of agriculture and trade by 'ruinous civil wars' and
the bright prospects for colonists. El Dorado was invoked in connection with
the commercial-colonialist promise of Venezuelan Guayana, in Eastwick's
estimation the most important province of Venezuela. In support of this
The Myth of El Dorado II
judgement, he cited the commerce which would one
day
be
developed on
the River Orinoco, and the 'ancient tradition that gold is to be found in
abundance', invoking the quests of 'our Raleigh' for the Golden
City, and
concluding that 'there is every reason to think the gold fields of
Guayana
may yet attract thousands to Venezuela'." The structure of
thought wherein
perceptions of local instability were racially divided from a
conception of
commercial-colonialist promise was economically displayed in an appendix
containing a 'Sketch of the Gold Mine of the Yuruari in Venezuelan Guiana'
by a physician with twenty years of experience of the region:
How easy it will be to transform the country. When immigrations on a
larger scale take place, the present population will be soon absorbed, and
disappear in the general increase of population.
Security may then be depended upon in Guayana, at least to a much
greater extent than in the other States. But, if we consider the want of
protection, may we not here refer to the vicinity of English Guayana . . .
in a country where roads could easily be made to bring men and goods
from America up to the right banks of the river Caroni. I only mention
this to prove that protection, if refused by the authorities of the State of
Guayana, could be found somewhere else.44
Venezuelan Guayana, the old Province of El Dorado, was protected by the
river Orinoco from the instability reigning elsewhere in Venezuela, while its
internal unstable elements
-
its Venezuelan population
-
could quickly be
diluted by an influx of commercially (not politically) energetic Anglo-
American pioneers. If this 'land of promise' continued to be menaced by its
unstable neighbours, it could find protection from its British neighbour. The
division in this structure of thought between instability and a promise
shading into utopianism was here graphically displayed: a 'natural' bound-
ary separating unstable and potentially stable zones (the river Orinoco),
hordes of unstable Venezuelans outside Guayana's borders, and the
protective opening of new lines of national-racial and commercial affiliation
(roads for Englishmen and goods) against both internal or external threats
to stability.
The suggested image here is of seething Venezuelan hordes outside the
golden citadel of progress, with natural frontiers policed by British colonial
officials; it is reinforced by the judgement of Lord Clarendon (not untypical
of British diplomats) in December 1857 that a British vessel of war should be
sent to the mouth of the Orinoco as a symbol of willingness to protect the
British gold miners and merchants in the region. Also, in 1863, during the
last phase of the Federalist War, as well as keeping the port of La Guaira
open, the Royal Navy held demonstrations off Puerto Cabello and Maturin
to protect the interests of British merchants.45 Further, in 1896 William
Curtis reported that Britain usually had two gun-boats on the Orinoco and
12 History Workshop Journal
had effectively occupied the entire mineral district for over a decade: 'in
1884, after the discoveries of gold, the agents of the British government
invaded the Venezuelan territory, established military posts, and appointed
magistrates to enforce the British colonial laws; and so the matter stands'.46
The condemnatory application of categories of race and instability to
Venezuela became more and more common, even automatic, in the second
half of the nineteenth century. As British interests were developed in
specific areas, and as Britain came into political conflicts with republics like
Venezuela, the focus shifted from a general sense of promise to more
localized and pragmatic estimations. Unsurprisingly, El Dorado continued
to be evoked most prominently in connection with the gold-mines south of
the Orinoco, in which British businessmen had interests, and when it was
evoked in connection with a general area, like the Amazon valley, the
fortress mentality displayed by Eastwick was evident. A striking example
occurs in the Brazilian Baron F. de Santa-Ana Nery's Le Pays des
Amazones, published in English translation in 1901, which expressed the
hope of 'inducing men boldly to visit and to colonise the most beautiful, the
richest, and the most fertile land in the world - the land of indiarubber - the
legendary "El Dorado", the virgin soil which awaits the seed of civilis-
ation'.47 At the end of his book, Nery proposed the creation of a touring
museum of Amazonia in European capitals. It was to display the raw
materials currently in use and those capable of being used, specimens of
every article of foreign manufacture required by consumers in the Amazon
valley, and descriptions of lands currently available. The divisions and
classifications of Nery's museum constituted the grid of knowledge of
Amazonia familiar to us from the British discourse of South American
progress, now unsurprisingly internalized by a member of a local elite. For
Nery, and for many of his contemporaries, such a museum was the domain
of that discourse - a domain furnished with ordered display cases exhibiting
the sum of scientific-commercial knowledge to the civilized viewer; a
domain traversed by Europeans on purposeful surveillance missions; a
domain representing rational, calculable possibilities, under the sign of
social and personal progress, whose promise to agriculture and industry of
endless wealth was symbolized by El Dorado, a legend transformed and still
shimmering on the horizon of hope:
The different peoples of Europe
-
for this exhibition ought not to remain
shut up in one single capital
-
would thus learn to know this land of the
Amazons, where the natives can supplement foreign labour,
-
this
legendary El Dorado, where vegetable gold is a surer source of wealth
than the mines of Australia and Africa.48
The structure of late nineteenth-century European knowledge not only of
the Amazon valley, but also more generally of the republics in the northern
half of South America, was displayed in Nery's imaginary museum. Within
The Myth of El Dorado 13
its purview were exhibited the materials necessary for raising the city of
civilization in territories as yet uncolonized by the partnership of European
capital and industry. At its walls stormed the well-known civil
disturbances,
and, quickly receding into the shadows beyond, lay the useless and thus
insignificant particulars of local life, visible only as an anonymous mass of
potential additional labour. For the knowledge of these regions of South
America was constituted around a division between the land's utopian
potential for commercial development (civilization), and the populations'
resistance to progress, due to their 'congenital unfitness' for commercial
relations - due, that is, to their 'racial backwardness'. Thence: inside the
imaginary museum, the promise of progress in fertile lands and vast natural
resources, the symbolic domain of El Dorado; without, the obstacles to
commerce from a violent and unstable populace, the historical memory of El
Dorado.
The moral consequences for European settlers of this last transformation
in the myth of El Dorado were explored in Joseph Conrad's great novel,
Nostromo, where the dream of raising a modern fortress-city of civilization
was identified with the spiritual impoverishment of worshipping only
'material interests'. Yet the tragic structure and unremitting pessimism of
Conrad's vision also demonstrate the lack of an alternative vision of South
America's future at that time: the dream of progress may turn out to be a
mirage, but in its absence the region would only collapse into chaos. Today,
as belief in the global applicability of this discourse of progress is in a similar
phase of unquestioning self-confidence, spreading across Latin America as
well as Eastern Europe, we may do worse than to recall the utopian content
of El Dorado in the golden glow it lent the pursuit of material interests, and
to recall its increasing embattlement, not as a sign of the unnaturalness of
what lay beyond its frontiers, but as a definition of its existence as only one
vision of the future among others.
NOTES
I Demetrio Ramos Perez, El Mito del Dorado: su genesis y proceso, con el Discovery de
Walter Raleigh (traducci6n de Betty Moore) y otros papeles doradistas, Caracas, Academia
Nacional de la Historia, 1973, pp. 351-357.
2 See John Hemming, The Search for El Dorado, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1978.
3 Emiliano Jos, La Expedici6n de Ursua al Dorado, La Rebeli6n de Lope de Aguirre y el
itinerario de los 'maraniones' segun los documentos del archivo de indias y varios manuscritos
ineditos, Huesca, Imprenta V. Campo, 1927.
4 Ramos Perez, op. cit, pp. 457-461.
5 Emiliano Jos, Ciencia y Osadia sobre Lope de Aguirre el Peregrino: con documentos
ineditos, Sevilla, Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1950.
6 Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America. Volume II: Spanish
explorations and settlements in America from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, London,
Trubner, 1885, pp. 588-589.
7 Voltaire, Candide, ou l'optimisme, London, University of London Press, 1958, p. 73.
8 Charles Marie de La Condamine, Relation Abregee d'un Voyage fait dans l'Interieur de
l'Amerique Meridionale. Depuis la C6te de la Mer du Sud, jusqu'aux C6tes de Bresil & de la
14 History Workshop Journal
Guiana, en defcendant La Riviere des Amazones; Lae a l'Assemblepublique de l'Academie des
Sciences, le28. Avril 1745, Paris, Pissot, 1745, pp. 125-126.
9 Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of
America, during the Years 1799-1804, translated and edited by Thomasina Ross, London,
Henry G. Bohn, 1852.
10 Ibid., III, pp. 26-7.
11 Ibid., III, p. 48.
12 David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the
Revolution in 1688, London, George Routledge and Sons, 1894, II, p. 538.
13 Otto A. Schomburgk (ed.), Robert Hermann Schomburgk's Travels in Guiana and on
the Orinoco during the years 1835-1839. According to his reports and communications to the
Geographical Society of London. With a Preface by Alexander von Humboldt
Together with
his Essay on some important astronomical positions in Guiana. [Leipzig: Georg Wigand,
1841]. Translated by Walter E. Roth, Georgetown, British Guiana, The Argosy Co., 1931,
p. 6.
14 Alexander von Humboldt, op. cit. III, p. 25.
15 In D. C. M. Platt, Finance, Trade, and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815-1914,
Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968, p. 312.
16 See Charles K. Webster (ed.), Britain and the Independence of Latin America,
1812-1830: select documents from the Foreign Office archives, London, New York and Toronto,
Oxford University Press, 1938.
17 Jean Franco, 'Un viaje poco romantico: Viajeros britanicos hacia Sudam6rica, 1818-28',
Escritura, 4: 7, enero/junio 1979, demonstrates the primacy of the trading interest in the travel
accounts of the first British 'missionaries of capitalism' to South America, p. 129.
18 Robert Southey, The Expedition of Orsua; and the Crimes of Aguirre, London,
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1821, p. 6.
19 Robert Southey, A Tale of Paraguay, London, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown,
and Green, 1825, pp. 78-80.
20 Sir Clements Markham (ed.), The Expedition of Pedro de Orstia & Lope de Aguirre in
search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560-61. Translated from Fray Pedro Simon's "Sixth
Historical Notice of the Conquest of Tierra Firme.
"
By William Bollaert, London, The Hakluyt
Society, 1861, p. i and p. v.
21 James Mudie Spence, The Land of Bolivar: or, War, Peace, and Adventures in the
Republic of Venezuela, London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1878, p. 92.
22 James Rodway, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1896,
pp. 7-8.
23 Sir Clements Markham, The Conquest of New Granada, Port Washington, N.Y./
London: Kennikat Press, 1971, pp. 81-82.
24 Otto Schomburgk (ed.), op. cit, pp. 13-14.
25 Robert H. Schomburgk, A Description of British Guiana, Geographical and Statistical:
Exhibiting its Resources and Capabilities, together with the Present and Future Condition and
Prospects of the Colony, London, Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1840.
26 Robert Schomburgk, Contributions to the Commercial Statistics of the Republics of
South America. Reprinted from the Colonial Magazine for March, 1848, London, Simmonds &
Co., Colonial Publishers, 1848, pp. 3-4.
27 Schomburgk, A Description of British Guiana, p. 155.
28 Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with
a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado), etc.
performed in the year 1595. Reprinted from the edition of 1596, with some unpublished
documents relative to that country, and edited by Sir Robert Schomburgk, London, The Hakluyt
Society, 1848, p. xxii.
29 Ibid., p. 24.
30 In Platt, op. cit, p. xv (my emphasis). Platt also cites E. A. Bowring's 1855 description of
the principles of Free Trade as 'the reversion to the simple precepts of Nature, which have been
so well epitomized by a great Frenchman in five short words: "Laissez-faire et laissez
aller"',
P.
xxxvi.
31 E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, New York and Scarborough,
Ontario, New American Library, 1962, p. 282.
32 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books, 1978, pp. 92-96.
33 Alfred R. Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, with an
The Myth of El Dorado 15
Account of the Native Tribes, and Observations on the Climate, Geology, and Natural
History of
the Amazon Valley, London, Reeve & Co., 1853, p. 80.
34 Ibid., p. 334.
35 Sir Clements R. Markham (editor and translator), Expeditions into the Valley of the
Amazons, 1539, 1540, 1639, London, The Hakluyt Society, 1859, pp. lvi and lxiv.
36 Captain Richard F. Burton, Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil; with a Full
Account of the Gold and Diamond Mines. Also, Canoeing down 1,500 Miles of the great River
Sao Francisco, from Sabard to the sea, London, Tinsley Brothers, 1869, p. 177.
37 von Humboldt, Personal Narrative, III, p. 127.
38 See E. H. S., Six Weeks in South America, London: T. and W. Boone, 1850, p. 76 (the
title-page of the British Library's copy is hand-signed 'Hon. E. Stanley'); and Anthony
Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main, London, Chapman & Hall, 1859, throughout.
39 Henry Walter Bates (ed.), Central America, The West Indies, and South America, 2nd &
revised edition, London, Edward Stanford, 1882, pp. 14-22.
40 Ibid., p. 300.
41 One statement of the ideological status of that discourse (in the Althusserian sense of a
system of representations which are accepted cultural objects acting operatively upon people
through a non-conscious process) is in a work arguing against British imperialist dominion over
Latin America, D. C. M. Platt's Finance, Trade, and Politics: 'All Victorians were agreed,
politicians, traders, and officials, that the opening of trade was an objective which the
Government might be expected to pursue. They may well have differed about the means, but
they shared a belief in the ends; material and even moral progress, they felt, might be expected
automatically from the expansion of trade', p. 85, my emphasis. See also John Mayo, 'The
impatient lion: Britain's "official mind" and Latin America in the 1850s', Ibero-Amerikanisches
Archiv: Neue Folge, 9: 2, 1983, pp. 197-223.
42 Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: the cross cultural imagination, Westport,
Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1983.
43 Edward B. Eastwick, Venzuela: or, Sketches of Life in a South American Republic; with
the History of the Loan of 1864, London, Chapman & Hall, 1868, pp. 248-50.
44 Ibid., pp. 379-80.
45 See George E. Carl, FirstAmong Equals. Great Britain and Venezuela, 1810-1910, Ann
Arbor, University Microfilms International, 1980, pp. 111-12. Carl gives eleven further
examples of British shows or threats of naval force between 1835 and 1853.
46 William E. Curtis, Venezuela: A Land Where It's Always Summer, London, Osgood
Mcllvaine & Co.; New York, Harper & Brothers, 1896, pp. 242-243. (1882-1887 was the most
prosperous period of the famous gold mine at El Callao in Venezuelan Guayana.)
47 Baron F. de Santa-Ana Nery, The Land of the Amazons, translated by George
Humphery, London: Sands & Co., 1901, p. viii (original emphasis).
48 Ibid., pp. 391-2.