Among the Gilded Paupers

The quest for El Dorado, the mythic city of gold, is at the heart of the tumultuous history of the Americas. In the decades after Columbus landed on these shores, the Spanish conquest grew only hungrier, more feverish in its search for gold. Hernán Cortés ransacked Aztec temples in Mexico; Francisco Pizarro

plundered the Inca kingdoms in Peru after capturing and murdering the Inca ruler Atahualpa in 1533. Then, the marches of his brother, Gonzalo, and his lieutenant Francisco Orellana across the Andes and into the Amazon jungle--half starved and lost, but still driven by a bloodthirsty greed. Each time, however, the location of the mysterious El Dorado eluded them, taunted them--literally drove them insane.

That's what happened, also, to the most celebrated of the explorers on its trail, Sir Walter Raleigh, who in 1595 charted a course through the labyrinthine delta of the Orinoco River and into the highlands of southern Venezuela. Twenty years later he tried again but, frustrated and forlorn, barely escaped with his life and his wits (only to be beheaded when he returned to London). Clearly, a pattern had developed, and the all-consuming search for El Dorado, if at first quixotic, became a curse. And yet its seductive powers have lasted through the centuries and still exert a magnetic pull on imaginations across the region.

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