As was related last week the story of El Dorado moved around the continent, and tended to linger in areas where Spanish geographical knowledge was vague. It became fixed in Guyana because of one man – Sir Walter Ralegh.
Sir Walter Ralegh and his eldest son called ‘Wat’ Sir Walter Ralegh was an English soldier, poet, writer, courtier and favourite of Elizabeth I. In 1584, two of his pirate ships captured a boat carrying a Spanish explorer called Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. It was Gamboa who told him about El Dorado, a subject which came to obsess Ralegh to the end of his days. In 1595, he sailed to South America to look for El Dorado, and to explore ways to drive the Spaniards from the region.In Trinidad Ralegh captured a Spaniard named Antonio de Berrío, and he supplied for his captor the second part of the Guyana myth. Berrío had been on three expeditions into the interior of what is now Venezuela looking for El Dorado (among other reasons) and he had sent his lieutenant on another one subsequently.Berrío told Ralegh that he believed the golden city of Manoa (home to El Dorado) was close to the source of the Caroní River (in modern Venezuela). This information caused Ralegh to sail up the Orinoco River, because the Caroní flows into it. (The headwaters of the Caroní are not far from our Guyana.) He reached as far as the confluence of the two waterways, but had to turn back because it was the rainy season and he could go no further. While Ralegh’s name has always been associated with this country, he never came here at all, and there is doubt that he even laid eyes on it from a distance.Walter Ralegh in military gear In 1596 Ralegh sent Lawrence Keymis back to Venezuela and the Guianas, and he at least did a much more thorough job of exploring the coast than Ralegh ever did, including our portion of it. It is Keymis who supplied the last element in the myth. He said the large lake beside which the golden city of Manoa was located was called Lake Parime by one tribe, and Lake Ropo-nowini by another, and he thought the lake could be accessed by travelling up either the Essequibo or the Coren-tyne. This is how El Dorado (the name of the king by this time had been given to the land where he was said to rule) became linked to our Rupununi.El Dorado and ‘Guiana’ became firmly associated in the European mind because in 1596 Ralegh wrote a book called The discoverie of the large, rich and bewtiful empire of Guiana… It was the potboiler of its day, and ran to three editions in its first year of print. It was a mixture of fact and pure fantasy, but took Europe, and not just England, by storm. After reading it, cartographers began to include Lake Parime on their maps of the region, as in the case of the one above. At this period ‘Guiana’ referred to the whole area between the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers, and the mapmakers just stuck Lake Parime somewhere in the interior. But as their geographical knowledge increased, Lake Parime is shown on their maps as sited in the Rupununi, and it stayed there until almost the end of the 18th century.It was the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt who traversed the interior between 1799 and 1804, who finally laid the myth to rest. His view was confirmed by another German explorer, Robert Schomburgk, who some decades later said that the flooding of the Rupununi in the wet season gave the appearance of a vast lake where Parime was believed to be.
As for Walter Ralegh, he paid with his life for pursuing the El Dorado chimera. He persuaded James 1 to allow him to go on a second expedition in 1617 in search of gold. James I instructed him not to fight with the Spaniards or trespass on their territories, which he promised not to do. By the time he reached the region he was so ill, however, that he had to stay in Trinidad, and it was Keymis who led the expedition into the Orinoco River to find the gold mine. Against orders they got into a fight with the Spanish settlers in Santo Thomé, where Ralegh’s son Wat was killed. Ralegh so berated Keymis about what happened, that the latter committed suicide. Ralegh himself was arrested on his return to England, and beheaded in 1618.
