A Guianan El Dorado

When Ralegh set sail for South America in early 1595 it was not with the intention of discovering the mythical golden kingdom of El Dorado. Instead, Ralegh hoped to discover and secure for the English Crown the city of Manoa, which he believed to be rich in precious commodities, particularly gold. It was only during his voyage that the two golden lands, El Dorado and Manoa, became conflated. It was this conflation that dictated and shaped the ways Ralegh attempted to authenticate his beliefs and the types of sources he used to do this. In order to understand the strategies employed by Ralegh to convince his readers of the veracity of a Guianan El Dorado, then, it is first critical to understand how he came to believe in the golden kingdom's existence in the first place.

At first glance, Ralegh's description of Manoa in The Discoverie is strikingly similar to other sixteenth-century accounts of El Dorado. Ralegh described Manoa as having “more abundance of Golde then any part of Peru.”Footnote ¹⁵ According to Ralegh, the city was founded on a “lake of salt water,” and the elite men who pledged allegiance to the native chief were regularly anointed all over with a type of white balsam, after which “certaine servants of the Emperor, having prepared gold made into fine powder blow it thorow hollow canes upon their naked bodies.”Footnote ¹⁶ In a similar description of El Dorado, centred on the Muisca territories of modern-day Colombia where the legend began in the 1530s, the Spanish historian and poet Juan de Castellanos explained how the local king “with no clothes” made offerings at a sacred lake.Footnote ¹⁷ His body was anointed all over with resin and gold dust, “shining like a resplendent ray of the sun.”Footnote ¹⁸ Despite these similarities in description, from a close reading of The Discoverie it is clear that Ralegh's vision of Manoa, and its connection to the wider El Dorado story, was by no means fully formed before he left for America.

In the dedication to Charles Howard and Robert Cecil, Ralegh explained how “many years since” he had “knowledge by relation of that mighty, rich and bewtifull Empire of Guiana” and its principal city Manoa.Footnote ¹⁹ This “relation” came from Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, an expert in Inca history and a prisoner of the English court in the late 1580s.Footnote ²⁰ As Ralegh would learn from his many conversations with his prisoner, Sarmiento, having been a commander in the Spanish campaign to capture the last Inca, Tupac Amaru, was an expert in the history of the Incan Empire and its apparently lost stores of gold.Footnote ²¹ Whilst it is likely that Ralegh learned of a kingdom rich in hidden Incan treasure from Sarmiento, it is less clear whether he also learned from him the wider story of El Dorado. In fact, and as we shall see, Ralegh appears to have acquired information on El Dorado from an entirely different Spanish source once he arrived in the New World in 1595.

The only other information Ralegh appeared to have regarding Manoa and the Empire of Guiana prior to leaving England in 1595 was gathered by Captain Jacob Whiddon the previous year. Whiddon had been involved with the American projects of Ralegh's half-brother Sir Humphrey Gilbert in the late 1570s and probably entered Ralegh's service as a captain sometime after Gilbert's death at sea in 1583.Footnote ²² Ralegh recorded that he had sent Whiddon to the New World in 1594 to “get knowledge of the passages.” The Discoverie contains little detail about the information with which Whiddon returned, save for the suggestion by Ralegh that Whiddon's intelligence about the location of Guiana was incorrect as the country turned out to be “600. English miles further from the sea” than he was “made beleeve it had beene.”Footnote ²³ Whiddon did not return to England in 1594 with a description of Manoa, but simply with a vague notion of where the city might be found.

Ralegh lacked specific details about Manoa prior to the voyage of 1595, and he also appeared to be unaware that the city was known amongst the Spanish by another name. Sarmiento may have told Ralegh about a legendary golden city that was named Manoa by the native inhabitants and home to the lost treasure of the Inca Empire, but it was from another Spaniard, on arrival in America, that he learned that this rich and prosperous land had been dubbed “El Dorado” by the Spanish. Ralegh and his men arrived in Trinidad on 22 March 1595, having left England in February of the same year. Ralegh explained his reasons for remaining in Trinidad, rather than setting out immediately for the attempted conquest of Guiana. Firstly, Ralegh wished to exact revenge on the island's governor, Antonio de Berrío, who had captured a number of Whiddon's men during the reconnaissance mission of the previous year. Secondly, Ralegh also intended to garner more information on Guiana from the Spaniards who had been involved in earlier voyages to discover the hidden empire, suggesting once again that Ralegh's information about Guiana prior to leaving England was relatively scant.Footnote ²⁴ After receiving a number of Indian visitors aboard his ship who complained of Spanish mistreatment, Ralegh decided to take the newly established Spanish city of St Joseph, eventually capturing Berrío and setting the new city alight.Footnote ²⁵ It was from his influential prisoner that Ralegh seems to have extracted the description of Manoa set forth in The Discoverie.

Berrío had himself been an obsessive seeker of mythical golden kingdoms, undertaking a variety of voyages in the 1580s. His initial searches for these hidden golden lands, like those of others before him, focused on the lands around the Muisca territories where the legend of El Dorado had begun. Setting out from Bogotá in 1584, Berrío's first voyage explored the regions surrounding the Casanare and Meta Rivers. During this voyage, local Achagua Indians told Berrío to focus his search for El Dorado on the far side of the Orinoco River instead. It was in this region, so the Indians told Berrío, that a land rich in gold and precious stones and home to a magnificent lake called Manoa could be found. This revelation thus pushed Berrío and his men farther eastward in search of a golden land named Manoa.Footnote ²⁶ By 1590, after much additional exploration around the Orinoco, Berrío came to the conclusion that the passage into El Dorado, or Manoa, as it was now known, was located at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroní Rivers. By the time Ralegh arrived in the New World, then, the notion that El Dorado could be found in the vicinity of the Caroní, rather than in the regions of the Muisca federation, had solidified. The name Manoa had also become synonymous with that of El Dorado in the minds of Berrío and his fellow Spaniards. Despite this, Ralegh appears to have been entirely unaware of this wider context. Whilst the conflation of El Dorado and Manoa had taken place for Berrío in the late 1580s, for Ralegh the moment of attachment occurred after he read the testimony of Juan Martín de Albújar, a Spaniard who claimed to have seen Manoa firsthand.Footnote ²⁷ This instance of conflation is critical as it went on to dictate the strategies that Ralegh employed to authenticate his account to his sceptical readers back home.

Martín had been a soldier during Pedro Maraver de Silva's ill-fated expedition to find El Dorado in 1569. During this voyage the native inhabitants of the lower Orinoco had reportedly taken Martín captive.Footnote ²⁸ According to Ralegh, it was Martín's testimony about his time in Indian captivity that convinced Berrío to continue his search for El Dorado in the lands surrounding the Caroní River.Footnote ²⁹ Martín, as Ralegh explained to his readers, was blindfolded by his captors and taken to the city of Manoa, where he lived for seven months. Martín gained the favour of the native chief and was allowed to return to his own country with as much gold as he could carry. Unfortunately, Martín was robbed of all his treasure, save for two gourds filled with beads of gold. Martín eventually made his way to San Juan in Puerto Rico, where an account of his time in Manoa was, according to Ralegh, recorded at the chancery. It was from this record, of which Berrío purportedly had a copy, that Ralegh learned of the story and also of Manoa's connection to El Dorado.Footnote ³⁰

The link between Martín's written testimony and Ralegh's description of Manoa is easy to miss in The Discoverie. The only potential reference to Ralegh actually having read this written account for himself comes directly after his account of Martín's time in Manoa and prior to his description of the ritual of covering elite men in gold powder. In the sentence preceding this description, Ralegh claimed, “those Guianians and also the borderers, and all others in that tract which I have seen are marveylons great drunkardes” (my emphasis).Footnote ³¹ Coupled with the fact that Martín was the only person thought to have seen Manoa firsthand, it is highly likely that Ralegh's description of Manoa, which closely echoed Spanish descriptions of El Dorado, was derived from Martín's testimony. It was also from Martín's account that Ralegh learned the name El Dorado. As he told his readers, it was Martín “that christened the citie of Manoa, by the name of El Dorado.”Footnote ³² It would seem, then, that Ralegh's El Dorado was not an extension of the earlier story of a golden Muisca chief but an original tale of an Amazonian golden city. El Dorado, in Ralegh's mind at least, was a golden city located in the hidden empire of Guiana and Juan Martín was the only person to have ever witnessed its riches first hand.

A Problematic Eyewitness

The process of transmitting this new and intriguing development to an English readership was by no means straightforward for Ralegh. By the time he came to write his narrative in the 1590s, what constituted credible testimony had radically changed. Prior to the European “discovery” of the New World, autopsy in travel writing was not a necessity. As Mary B. Campbell has argued, before the Renaissance, overseas travel among Europeans was so rare that travel writers could “lie with authority.”Footnote ³³ They could also rely on the works of classical authorities to help inform their interpretations of far-flung countries and cultures.Footnote ³⁴ With the “discovery” of America, however, classical texts lost much of their authority, with firsthand experience becoming the new standard of authentication for early modern travel writers. Eyewitness testimony was thus an increasingly crucial ingredient of accurate and credible travel writing.Footnote ³⁵

Juan Martín, for a variety of reasons, was a highly unreliable witness. As we shall see, his apparent “experience” of Manoa was decidedly suspect, and Ralegh's invocation of his story thus profoundly problematic. Martín's account of his time in Manoa is shrouded in mystery and controversy. It is unclear exactly what the text was that Ralegh claimed to have had access to, how Berrío had acquired it in the first place, and whether or not it was actually composed by Martín himself. What is clear, however, is that the tract Ralegh had purportedly read did not square with other contemporary accounts of Martín's time in captivity. Juan de Castellanos, the Spanish poet and historian who had detailed the Muisca ritual of El Dorado, had also provided his readers with information on Martín's time in the region surrounding the Orinoco River. In his epic poem, Elegías de Varones Ilustres de Indias (Elegies of illustrious men of the Indies), Castellanos gave a thorough account of Spanish colonial activity in the regions of modern-day Colombia and Venezuela, including Pedro Maraver de Silva's attempt to find the hidden city of El Dorado which culminated in Juan Martín's capture by Amerindians.Footnote ³⁶

According to Castallanos, Martín never visited Manoa during his time in captivity, nor were the Amerindians who took him prisoner rich in gold and other precious materials.Footnote ³⁷ In fact, the natives that Martín spent time with were described by Castallanos as “a poor people,” lacking in all resources and treasure, save for a small amount of gold that was mixed with copper.Footnote ³⁸ John Hemming has argued that the story of Juan Martín's time in El Dorado was no doubt embellished and embroidered over time to make it more appealing to adventurous Spaniards.Footnote ³⁹ Going one step further, V. S. Naipaul has suggested that Martín may never have even existed, his story being a mere invention.Footnote ⁴⁰ Like many other remarkable tales told about the American lands in the sixteenth century, from the legend of the Fountain of Youth to the lost golden cities of Cíbola and El Paitití, Martín's El Dorado story can be seen as another example of the European myth-building process that was so characteristic of the encounter between the Old World and the New.Footnote ⁴¹

The fact that Martín's story also seemed to be missing some crucial information further undermined its reliability. As Ralegh explicitly told his readers, Martín had been blindfolded by his captors and therefore could not recount the exact location of the golden city. Nor could Martín provide any physical proof of Manoa's existence, as according to the record, he had inconveniently (or for the more sceptical, conveniently) been robbed of all the treasure he had been given on his release.Footnote ⁴² It is possible that these details were added to the story by those who had created it in order to excuse the fact that, despite this apparent eyewitness testimony from a man who had spent an extended period of time in El Dorado, the city still remained stubbornly hidden. As will be discussed in more detail later, Ralegh attempted to mitigate these omissions by providing his own physical proof for the veracity of Martín's story through the testing of ore samples brought back from the New World. As Martín is said to have died soon after his arrival in Puerto Rico it is almost impossible to deduce whether or not he was responsible for the story or whether his account of his time in captivity was embellished, or created, by others and then retrospectively attached to the legend of El Dorado.Footnote ⁴³ It is, of course, entirely possible that Ralegh's readers, and perhaps Ralegh himself, were unaware of the controversies surrounding Martín's tale. This did not mean, however, that Martín's eyewitness testimony would have been credible to an English readership, whether factually accurate or not.

One of the problems with Ralegh's presentation of Martín's story, aside from the fact that it may have been a complete fabrication, was that he did not record it verbatim. From Ralegh's rendering of the tale the reader is given no indication as to its faithfulness to the original text. He does not quote directly from the textual source, providing instead a summary of what he considered to be the most salient points of the story. If Ralegh did read the story for himself in the tract from San Juan de Puerto Rico, as he implicitly suggested he did, it could be assumed that he read it in Spanish and translated it into English, summarising it for his readers. Whilst there were a variety of cultures of translation that coexisted in sixteenth-century Europe, for those engaged in producing translations of colonial texts into English, providing an accurate and faithful rendition of the original appears to have been critical to establishing the authenticity of the translated work.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nowhere is this clearer than in the work of Richard Hakluyt, the most influential and avid promoter of English overseas activity and colonial expansion in the sixteenth century. From Hakluyt's earliest translations it is clear that he was anxious that his work be seen as an accurate reflection of the original source material. Not only did Hakluyt often take the time, and the added expense, of printing both the translation and original text together, he also explained in the prefatory material how he set about translating a foreign text into English.Footnote ⁴⁵ In his address to the reader in the 1589 edition of The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, Hakluyt explained that whatever testimony he found, whether “strange or naturall” he recorded it “word for word,” citing the original author's name and the page of the book it could be found in.Footnote ⁴⁶ Hakluyt revered the authority of the printed book and sought, therefore, to produce faithful renditions of the eyewitness testimony he translated, even if it meant presenting information that appeared contradictory to what he had written previously.Footnote ⁴⁷ In contrast, Ralegh appears to have given little thought to his presentation of Juan Martín's apparent eyewitness testimony. Ralegh did not make it particularly clear to his readers that he had actually read Martín's account for himself, save for one potential reference to the manuscript when discussing the drunkenness of the native Guianans, nor did he provide his readers with direct quotations from the source or a transcript of the original Spanish text.Footnote ⁴⁸

Aside from the unsubstantiated, ambiguous, and openly contested nature of Martín's account and Ralegh's presentation of it, the fact that Martín was a Spaniard and his tale appeared to have been relayed in some form to Ralegh via the Spanish prisoner Berrío no doubt further undermined the story's credibility.Footnote ⁴⁹ The sixteenth century witnessed the emergence of new understandings of what constituted a reliable witness, especially in the context of overseas exploration. Prior to this period a witness's credibility was largely defined by his or her reputation and standing within a community. Andrea Frisch, in her innovative study of the changing nature of witness testimony, has dubbed this medieval figure “the ethical witness.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In the mid-sixteenth century, however, new forms of credible testimony came to the fore which prioritised the witness's experiences over his or her reputation. By the time Ralegh was writing in the 1590s, ethics in witness testimony had been given a secondary position to epistemology.Footnote ⁵¹ That does not mean, however, that the reputation of the witness amongst the community that received the testimony was no longer relevant. In fact, reputation continued to shape all facets of early modern life, whether in relation to economic status, sexual morality, codes of genteel and scientific conduct, or, of course, knowledge production regarding non-European lands.Footnote ⁵²

It is clear from sixteenth-century English translations of Spanish eyewitness testimony on the New World that the reputation, and indeed the nationality, of the witness remained of critical importance to notions of reliability and authenticity. In late sixteenth-century prefaces to English translations of Spanish texts about the New World, translators explicitly attempted to justify the publication of a text written by England's principal enemy and establish the reliability of the information contained within it. One way that English translators achieved this was by implying or, in some cases, explicitly claiming that they had received these Spanish texts by illicit means.Footnote ⁵³ A clear example of this technique can be seen in the preface to Richard Hakluyt's third volume of The Principal Navigations. In the text's first edition, published in 1589, Hakluyt had in many ways circumvented this problem by focusing his attention on accounts written by Englishmen. However, by the time his second edition was released, with the third volume on the Americas appearing in London in 1600, Hakluyt had decided to include a range of Spanish sources in order to make English knowledge of the New World more complete.Footnote ⁵⁴ Whilst he wished to provide his readers with the most up-to-date information on the New World, he was still careful to avoid praising Spanish overseas achievements. One way that he managed this was by claiming the texts he had translated from Spanish were illicitly procured.

In his dedication to Robert Cecil, who was also the patron of Ralegh's Guiana project, Hakluyt cleverly used continued English hostilities with Spain to his advantage. According to Hakluyt, since the war with Spain “all their secrets of the West Indies” had fallen into the hands of the English.Footnote ⁵⁵ By sacking Spanish towns and cities and by taking Spanish ships, the English had procured a number of documents that would be useful for their own explorative and colonial ambitions. Hakluyt, in his role as one of the most outspoken and well-informed advocates of English overseas expansion, endeavoured to publish “such secrets” of the Spanish, not merely to “annoy” England's enemy, but also to “availe” his fellow countrymen in their New World projects.Footnote ⁵⁶ These Spanish texts, then, were not intended for English eyes. The objective of the Spanish authors who created these texts was ostensibly to provide credible information on the New World to their compatriots. By intercepting these documents, Englishmen such as Hakluyt could access this credible testimony without having to explain and justify their reproduction. As we shall explore later, Ralegh also utilised this technique in The Discoverie by including a set of captured Spanish letters that seemed to support the existence of El Dorado as an appendix to the published text. Ralegh's over-reliance on the testimony of Martín and Berrío, however, and his seemingly uncritical acceptance of their stories remained problematic, especially when considered alongside his thorough denunciation of the Spanish conquistadors he came across during the voyage.

Ralegh not only used the Spanish to corroborate his vision of a Guianan El Dorado, he also used them to justify English conquest and colonisation by demonising their behaviour. Ralegh had used the apparent bad behaviour of the Spanish towards the indigenous population as justification for his attack on St Joseph, and his denunciation of Spanish activity in the region continued throughout his account of his time in South America.Footnote ⁵⁷ According to Ralegh, the Spanish took from the native men “both their wives, and daughters daily, and used them for the satisfying of their owne lusts.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Ralegh also accused the Spanish of buying native women from the treacherous, man-eating Canibals, making “great profit” from these transactions in which “a maid of 12 or 13 yeeres” could be purchased for “three or fower hatchets” and then sold at Margarita for fifty to one hundred pesos.Footnote ⁵⁹ In contrast, Ralegh portrayed the behaviour of himself and his fellow Englishmen much more positively. Unlike their Spanish counterparts, the English explorers remained entirely sexually continent. Ralegh assured his readers that neither himself nor any of his men had “companie one or other, by violence or otherwise” or “even knew any of their women,” even though they were “very yoong & excellently favoured.”Footnote ⁶⁰ By negatively portraying the Spanish of the region as deceitful and violent while simultaneously relying on their testimony to corroborate the notion of a Guianan El Dorado, Ralegh tried to have his cake and eat it; Ralegh's own credibility was reliant on him convincing his readers of the credibility of those he also wished, and indeed needed, to discredit.Footnote ⁶¹ Unsurprisingly, this strategy proved unsuccessful. Even Ralegh himself seemed to be aware of the shortcomings of this Spanish eyewitness testimony, given the great lengths he went to to corroborate the El Dorado story using a range of other forms of evidence.

Corroborating Evidence?

By conflating the Manoa of Martín's account with the wider story of El Dorado, Ralegh was able to utilise a range of evidence that seemed to support the existence of the latter. This set of evidence, then, was contingent on Ralegh's belief that Manoa and El Dorado were one and the same, and on his acceptance that Martín's story had at least some basis in fact. Spanish accounts of searches for El Dorado, rather than Manoa, were now useful pieces of information that could be redeployed by Ralegh in the context of his search for the lost treasure of the Inca Empire, and used to mitigate the problems associated with Martín's eyewitness testimony.

The first strategy that Ralegh employed to place his voyage within this wider El Dorado narrative was his use of fragmentary evidence from contemporary Spanish accounts of the conquest of Peru. This was a methodology that Ralegh would continue to utilise in his later works, especially in his History of the World.Footnote ⁶² In the sixteenth century, historical writing was increasingly cleaved from rhetoric and instead defined by a specific methodology in which fragments of evidence, derived from a wide variety of sources, were recombined into an overarching narrative of the past.Footnote ⁶³ By integrating pieces of information on the Spanish search for El Dorado and on the lost treasure of the Incas with his own beliefs about the existence of Manoa, Ralegh attempted to illustrate to his readers that the golden city did exist, it was to be found in the vicinity of the Orinoco and Caroní Rivers, and it was home to vast stores of treasure that had been transported to the region after the Spanish conquest of Peru.

The first point Ralegh attempted to prove to his readers by using fragments of information was his theory on how the Manoans had accumulated the vast stores of gold that Martín had detailed in his account. Ralegh recognised that many “doubtes” would arise amongst his readers as to how Guiana came to be so populous and rich in treasure.Footnote ⁶⁴ To assuage these doubts, Ralegh thought it “good to make it knowen” that the Emperor reigning in Guiana was “discended from those magnificent Princes of Peru.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Ralegh claimed that, after the execution of his brother, “one of the younger sonnes of Guaynacapa fled out of Peru, and tooke with him many thousands of those souldiers of the Empyre.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Based on what Ralegh had learned about both Peru and Manoa, he concluded that the people of Guiana “observe the same religion, and the same forme and pollicies in government as was used in Peru, not differing in any part.”Footnote ⁶⁷ It is once again likely that Ralegh first heard of this theory from the Inca history expert Sarmiento, but he also cited the work of Pedro Cieza de León and Francisco López de Gómara as evidence for this belief.Footnote ⁶⁸ The use of these sources, written by Spaniards close to the actions undertaken in the conquests of Mexico and Peru, would, so Ralegh hoped, make the existence of Manoa and its vast stores of treasure “seeme more than credible.”Footnote ⁶⁹

In a passage taken from Gómara's Historia General de Las Indias, there are multiple references to the magnificence of Guaynacapa's court. As well as having “nothing in his country, whereof hee had not the counterfeat in gold,” Guaynacapa also had “an infinite quantitie of silver and gold unwrought in Cuzco” which was hidden away by the Incas after the death of his son Guascar.Footnote ⁷⁰ The implication is that this hidden treasure was somehow transported to the new Empire of Guiana with Guaynacapa's younger son. By recombining these fragments of information, Ralegh concluded that the lost treasure of Peru became the treasure of Guiana and its capital city Manoa. To reinforce the authenticity of the information he had derived from Gómara, Ralegh employed the same method that had been utilised by his associate, Richard Hakluyt, in earlier English translations of foreign texts; Ralegh included Gómara's original Spanish, alongside his English translation of the relevant passage.Footnote ⁷¹ Ironically, this attention to replicating Gómara's words accurately further undermined Martín's story. Whilst Ralegh was able to provide clear and unambiguous references for where he found the information on Peru, he was unable to do the same for Martín's tale of Manoa, making it seem all the more likely that Ralegh had never had direct access to his testimony.

Ralegh, however, had one more set of what he thought was compelling and corroborating evidence. On his return to England in 1595, Ralegh was made aware of a set of documents that seemed to support the claims that he had been making about El Dorado. Ralegh was not the first Englishman to go in search of treasure in the region surrounding the Orinoco River. Around two months prior to Ralegh's arrival at Trinidad, Robert Dudley, the illegitimate son of Robert, Earl of Leicester, had already landed in Trinidad, explored the island for gold mines, and made his way to the Orinoco delta in search of El Dorado. Dudley's voyage had been triggered by an encounter with Captain George Popham. Popham had been involved in late 1594 with a chance capture of a vessel bound for the Canary Islands from Spain. On board, the Englishmen found an English prisoner, Captain Harper, and a series of letters written to correspondents in Spain on the subject of El Dorado and the recent Spanish searches for the hidden city. It was this information that convinced Dudley to set a course for Trinidad. Dudley's voyage, like Ralegh's, was largely unsuccessful, with Dudley setting sail for the return trip to England on either 11 or 12 March 1595, a mere ten days before Ralegh arrived in Trinidad himself. When Popham returned to England from his own adventures in the Caribbean in late 1595, he surrendered the captured Spanish documents to the Privy Council, possibly at the instruction of Robert Cecil, who would have considered this correspondence to be good supporting evidence for Ralegh's project.Footnote ⁷²

Whilst Ralegh would have undoubtedly been annoyed by Dudley's voyage as it in many ways sought to beat Ralegh to the ultimate prize of El Dorado, he nonetheless recognised the importance of Popham's evidence, attaching the letters to the published version of The Discoverie as an appendix.Footnote ⁷³ As we have seen, the acquisition of Spanish secrets about the New World, especially in the form of captured documentation, represented a compelling form of evidence in late sixteenth-century England. Ralegh suggested in the introduction to the appendix that the captured letters “confirme in some parte the substance, …the riches of that Countrey.” As the letters appeared to corroborate Ralegh's account of Guiana, he thought it “fitte that they shoulde be thereunto adjoyned.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Ralegh also made the strategic decision to record the letters verbatim in an appendix, rather than try and incorporate the material into the main text. This decision was not driven by time constraints but by authorial calculation.Footnote ⁷⁵ Ralegh, like Hakluyt before him, hoped that by presenting these materials intact and without alteration, and by leaving them open “to the consideration and judgement of the indifferent reader,” they would be received more favourably.Footnote ⁷⁶

In the introduction to the letters, Ralegh also attempted to connect their content with Martín's story. He reminded his readers that “the Spanyardes seeme to call Guiana and other Countries neere it, bordering upon the Orenoque, by the name of Nuevo Dorado, because of the greate plenty of Golde there.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Skipping over the fact that “Nuevo Dorado” and “El Dorado” did not necessarily mean the same thing, Ralegh claimed that the fact that these letters referred to a “Dorado” in some form meant they were “alluding also to the name of El Dorado which was given by Martínes to the greate Citie of Manoa.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Ralegh, therefore, performed yet another sleight of hand in relation to the naming of Manoa, whether intentionally or not. Manoa was, according to Ralegh, not only known as “El Dorado” amongst the Spanish, but also as “Nuevo Dorado.” Any documentation mentioning these three places, then, could be used to authenticate both Ralegh's vision of a Guianan El Dorado and Martín's account of Manoa from which it was derived. The utility of these documents was contingent on the conflation of Manoa with El Dorado and on their ability to authenticate the problematic eyewitness testimony of Martín.

On their own, the letters appear speculative and ambiguous; the location of El Dorado was imprecise, and none of the writers of these letters had claimed to have direct knowledge of the city's existence. Instead, one writer claimed that he had it “for certaine” that the golden city had been found as he had “letters Written from thence by some that were in the discovery.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In another, the author relied on the fact that the news of the discovery passed “for good amongst the best of this City,” proving, in his mind, its veracity.Footnote ⁸⁰ Most worryingly of all though, many of these letters seemed to have one man at their centre: Antonio de Berrío, Ralegh's captive in Trindad who had searched for El Dorado in the regions surrounding the Orinoco and who had been the source of the disputed eyewitness testimony of Juan Martín. The most extensive piece included in the appendix was an extract of a report from Domingo de Vera y Ibarguen to the King of Spain. De Vera had been involved in Berrío's expeditions to find El Dorado in the early 1590s.Footnote ⁸¹ Unsurprisingly, de Vera was convinced of the golden city's existence and Berrío's claims to have discovered it. As de Vera wrote, “Anth. De Berreo, with the travel of 11 yeares, and expence of more than 100000. Pesos of Gold, discovered the royall provinces of Guiana and Dorado.”Footnote ⁸² In another letter composed by “Certaine Marchantes of Rio de Hacha,” Berrío was once again named as the principal source of their information. According to these merchants, a certain province “so rich in Gold as the report thereof may seeme incredible” had lately been discovered. The new province was named “Nuevo Dorado” and “Anthonio de Berreo made the said discovery.”Footnote ⁸³

Once again, this set of seemingly corroborating evidence had the insidious presence of Ralegh's prisoner lurking in the background. Ralegh's supporting evidence for the existence of the golden empire, although utilising innovative techniques of collection and presentation that had been tried and tested by other sixteenth-century travel writers, continued to rely on the conflation of Manoa with El Dorado and on the acceptance of the credibility of both Berrío and Martín's testimony. This evidence, and Ralegh's use of it to corroborate his vision of a Guianan El Dorado, was entirely determined by the contingent specifics of what he knew, or thought he knew.

When extracting this contingent evidence from Ralegh's narrative, what remains to support his claims appears to be exceedingly thin. If his readers were not willing to accept that Martín's story was accurate and that the El Dorado that the Spanish sought in the Amazon was the same place as the Manoa that Ralegh hoped to discover, how else could they be convinced of the validity of a Guianan El Dorado, and reassured that, should they invest, the Empire lay ready to be conquered and exploited by the English? Ralegh was left with one final strategic approach; to convince his readers of his reliability as an eyewitness.

Ralegh knew that the testimony of Martín and Berrío would not be enough to convince his sceptics of the existence of El Dorado. After all, Ralegh had been circulating this information since his return to England, well before the publication of The Discoverie.Footnote ⁸⁴ As Ralegh made clear, this information had not been received well back home. Ralegh complained that anything written by him would require “double” the “protection and defence” as many would object to his account “out of malice” and “revenge.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Whilst Ralegh did not name his critics, he gave his readers an indication of the kind of rumours that they had been spreading since he returned home from the New World. They had claimed that Ralegh had either “hidden in cornwell,” been “a servant to the Spanish king,” or bought “gold oar in Barbery” to pass off as the gold of El Dorado.Footnote ⁸⁶ When Ralegh published his account in 1596, then, his position as a credible eyewitness was on shaky ground.

The reason for this poor reception, aside from the fact that much of Ralegh's information came from disputed Spanish sources, was Ralegh himself. Ralegh had produced, as we shall see, very little original evidence of his own and, since his indiscretion with Elizabeth Throckmorton and subsequent courtly disgrace, he had been unable to shake off the reputation of being inherently deceitful and untrustworthy. In 1591 Ralegh had secretly married Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth I's ladies in waiting, without royal permission. When the marriage was discovered Ralegh was thrown into the Tower of London and his reputation was left in tatters.Footnote ⁸⁷ It was not, however, merely the fact that he had married without the Queen's permission that led to his disgrace. Ralegh's betrayal of the Queen was undoubtedly compounded by his refusal to admit to the marriage, even when many influential men at court were well aware that it had taken place.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a letter to Robert Cecil from March 1592, written well after his marriage to Elizabeth, Ralegh beseeched his patron and friend to “suppress” the “malicious report” that he had married without royal permission. He implored Cecil to “believe it not” that he was married, assuring him that he swore before God that there was “none on the face of the yearth” that he would “be fastned unto” in marriage.Footnote ⁸⁹ Ralegh's reputation amongst some at court was therefore highly damaged in the years preceding the Guiana venture. Mary Fuller has argued that Ralegh hoped the Guiana project would act as penance for his disgrace and restore his position at court.Footnote ⁹⁰

In order to overcome the overwhelming criticism that circulated on his return to England, Ralegh attempted to provide his readers with some original evidence of El Dorado's existence. The first piece of this “evidence” is the focal point of Ralegh's address to the reader: the rock samples that he returned home with in 1595. By the end of the sixteenth century, explorers were increasingly returning home with artefacts from their travels that would corroborate what they claimed to have witnessed. The shelves of cabinets of curiosities swarmed with an array of objects brought back from distant lands, from mineral, animal, and plant specimens to cultural artefacts such as canoes, native weaponry, and ritual tobacco pipes.Footnote ⁹¹

It is also likely that Ralegh knew that one way to secure further investment in a New World project was to return home with physical proof of gold. This had, for example, been the case with Martin Frobisher's voyages to the far north of the American continent in the 1570s. Michael Lok, one of the venture's principal investors, described receiving a piece of black rock that had been collected on the first voyage to Meta Incognita in 1576.Footnote ⁹² According to Lok, a number of trials were made of the rock by the experimental Venetian alchemist Giovan Battista Agnello. As Lok suggested, “mutch mervaile was made” about the rock, as Agnello had concluded that the unpromising black specimen was in fact a “peace of a mynerall Ewre of a gold myne.” The story of “Frobisher's Gold,” as it became known, spread throughout Elizabethan London, sparking an increase in investment for voyages to the New World that went in search of gold, including a second voyage undertaken by Frobisher in 1577 and a third in 1578.Footnote ⁹³ After this third voyage, it became apparent that the ore that Frobisher had brought to England was in fact worthless, being nothing more than iron pyrite. With the realisation that there was no gold to be found in the Far North, investment for Frobisher's venture dried up and the project was eventually abandoned.Footnote ⁹⁴

Unfortunately for Ralegh, the samples he returned home with had also turned out to be mostly worthless. Ralegh bemoaned the fact that his Guiana samples had been met with “divers opinions” relating to their quality and worth. He also told his readers that due to “malicious slaunder” he felt it necessary to explain in more detail the trials of the ore that had taken place in London.Footnote ⁹⁵ The first issue he tackled was the fact that many of his company had returned home with marcasite, having mistaken it for gold. Ralegh explained how he had told his fellow voyagers that these rocks were “of no riches or value” but that they chose to trust in their “owne sence,” rather than listen to his opinion.Footnote ⁹⁶ Once back in England, and to Ralegh's obvious displeasure, these members of the expedition had had trials made of the worthless rock, leading to the accusations that there was no gold to be had in Guiana.Footnote ⁹⁷ The problems continued after he had his own specimens analysed by assayers. According to Ralegh, his assayers seemed to suggest that the ore he had brought home was of some value, and yet the Alderman of London seemed to disagree. Ralegh complained that the Alderman had detrimentally damaged his enterprise because, as he was not “presented with the best” of the Guianan ore, he did “scandall all the rest.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Ralegh also had to explain why he did not return home with more ore, if he was so sure that it was valuable. He reminded his readers that it was not easy to remove gold “out in heapes” and that even if the mountains of Guiana had “beene of massie gold” it remained impossible, due to the poor weather conditions, for he and his men to remain in the region any longer to “wrought the same.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Ralegh's samples had thus not had the impact he had hoped for. Arguably they had made things worse, increasing suspicion amongst his detractors that Ralegh's El Dorado was nothing more than a fantasy, his voyage was a fool's errand, and he had returned home with nothing more than fool's gold.

Ralegh, however, did attempt to mitigate the problems surrounding the samples by deferring to his own autopsy. This was perhaps not the most persuasive strategy, given the fact that many at court already thought him untrustworthy. Ralegh explained that he had witnessed “divers hils” of white Sparre “in sundrie places” that he was sure would contain grains of gold, but having “neither tyme, nor men, nor instruments” he was unable to take samples.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Ralegh also claimed to have seen natives with equipment used for gold mining. On the banks of the Orinoco he saw Indians carrying “quicksilver, saltpetre, and divers things for the trial of metals.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ From this, Ralegh concluded that there must be a significant gold mine located in the vicinity of the regions that he had explored. The gold of Guiana, however, remained frustratingly outside Ralegh's grasp. He could only offer his readers the narrowest glimpse of the potential wealth and abundance of El Dorado. What he could not offer was a sustained and credible gaze at the hidden golden city.