From Eden to El Dorado
The Orinoco River's long history of attracting outsiders
This is our third week investigating the ways in which rivers shape human history and human history shapes rivers. You can catch the first two posts here:
This week, we’re looking at the Orinoco River, which has shaped so much about Venezuela. I wrote most of this before the recent American aggression against Venezuela, but I think recent events fit into some of the major themes here, especially how outsiders keep coming to the region to try to extract its natural riches.
It wasn’t until his third voyage to the New World, in 1498, that Columbus thought he’d found the Garden of Eden. What was his evidence? Columbus wrote the Spanish monarchs that
There are great indications of this being the terrestrial Paradise, for its situation coincides with the opinions of the holy and wise theologians whom I have mentioned; and, moreover, the other evidences agree with the supposition, for I have never either read or heard of fresh water coming in so large a quantity, in close conjunction with the water of the sea; the idea is also corroborated by the blandness of the temperature; and if the water of which I speak does not proceed from the earthly Paradise, it seems to be a still greater wonder, for I do not believe that there is any river in the world so large and deep.
Columbus and his crew were boggled by the amount of fresh water spilling out into the sea from this “Paradise.” They understood that such a powerful river must collect water from a very large area. Though Columbus misunderstood where he was — he still thought he was in Asia, exploring Biblical lands — he was right about one thing: a river this big must flow through a great continent. After landing on various Caribbean islands, Columbus found South America.
In 1498, Columbus stumbled onto the delta of the world’s fourth-largest river by volume, a river that carries far more water than the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Indus, or the Nile. The Orinoco River, which drains a huge area of wetlands and rainforest in South America, turned out not to contain the Garden of Eden. But it proved tantalizing nonetheless. Ever since, the Orinoco has been an object of fascination to outsiders — a paradise to some, and an exploitable resource to others.
The Orinoco basin has great natural riches. It flows through one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. Its waters were once teeming with giant crocodiles, river dolphins, and a staggering assortment of fish, while the nearby jungles, mountains, and savannas hosted anacondas, jaguars, monkeys, and capybaras. It was also a land full of people and history. It’s home to some of the “largest and most enigmatic” ancient rock art in the world. Many of the groups that live there, like the Warao people, have adapted their lifestyles to a world of water. Their children learn to paddle a canoe and swim early in life, sometimes before they learn to walk.
But it wasn’t natural beauty that the Europeans were after, nor was it cultural contact. They believed that the Orinoco basin was full of gold. They had heard stories about the Muisca people in the highlands of modern-day Colombia, hundreds of miles west of the Orinoco. The Muisca gave their gods offerings of gold alloys and inaugurated their leader with a ceremony that involved adorning his naked body with a covering of gold dust, which he would wash off by jumping into a sacred lake. The Muisca were exceptional goldsmiths:
Europeans heard the tales of this golden man — “El Dorado” — and eventually inflated it into the idea of a city of gold. Spanish conquistadors conquered Muisca lands rather quickly, but they didn’t get as rich as they had expected. The real city of gold, they concluded, must lie to the east, in the Orinoco watershed.
In the 1500s, Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, paid off some of his debts to the Welser banking family by allowing them to search for the city of gold in the Orinoco basin. Their colony — Klein-Venedig, or Little Venice, presumably named because of the watery nature of the Orinoco delta — was largely a failure. The German conquistadors engaged in pointless and murderous wars with indigenous people and stumbled around the jungle dying of tropical diseases. The last few Germans were captured and beheaded by a Spanish rival.
This newsletter is free to all, but I count on the kindness of readers to keep it going. If you enjoyed reading this week’s edition, there are two ways to support my work:
You can subscribe as a free or paying member:
Or you can “buy me a coffee” by sending me a one-time or recurring payment:
Thanks for reading!
This incredibly inauspicious start to the search for El Dorado did not deter others. In the late 1500s, the Spanish conquistador Antonio de Berrio competed with the English privateer Walter Raleigh in an effort to be the first to find the city of gold. They fixated on finding a city called Manoa on a mythical lake, which they called Parime. Raleigh wrote that
The empire of Guiana is directly east from Peru towards the sea, and lieth under the equinoctial line; and it hath more abundance of gold than any part of Peru, and as many or more great cities than ever Peru had when it flourished most. It is governed by the same laws, and the emperor and people observe the same religion, and the same form and policies in government as were used in Peru, not differing in any part. And I have been assured by such of the Spaniards as have seen Manoa, the imperial city of Guiana, which the Spaniards call El Dorado, that for the greatness, for the riches, and for the excellent seat, it far exceedeth any of the world, at least of so much of the world as is known to the Spanish nation. It is founded upon a lake of salt water of 200 leagues long, like unto Mare Caspium. And if we compare it to that of Peru, and but read the report of Francisco Lopez and others, it will seem more than credible…
A cache of gold comparable to the riches of the Inca people in Peru, and all they had to do was find Lake Parime!
Unfortunately, Parime didn’t exist. “Parime” just meant “big lake” in a local language; it probably referred to a wetland that flooded seasonally (for that matter, “Manoa,” the name of the city that Raleigh was looking for, meant the same thing in another language).
The mere absence of Lake Parime didn’t stop Europeans from imagining it. Parime showed up on many maps of the region, like this 1599 edition based on Raleigh’s observations. You can see the great lake stretching south and east of the Orinoco, with representations of the area’s wildlife (and the “nation of people whose heads appear not above their shoulders” that Raleigh described):
Raleigh captured his Spanish rival Antonio de Berrio, interrogated him about the location of El Dorado, and undertook an expedition hundreds of miles down the river in search of Lake Parime. He found nothing. Much of the crew became quite ill, and one man had his swim cut short when he was eaten by a crocodile (Raleigh wrote that “there were thousands of those ugly serpents”). The expedition eventually returned to England empty-handed.
Raleigh’s failure didn’t disabuse Europeans of the idea that Lake Parime and El Dorado lay somewhere in the Orinoco basin. This map from 1656 places El Dorado on the western end of the lake:
Even though a series of failed searches taught Europeans that El Dorado was just a myth, they had little understanding of the headwaters of the mighty Orinoco. The fictional Lake Parime (smaller by now) was thought to be the source of the Orinoco on this 1780 map:
And this one, from 1795:
After an initial series of attempts to plunder the Orinoco’s supposed precious metals, a second wave of Europeans came to understand its biological riches. The most prominent of them was the greatest scientist of the early 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt.
In 1799, after the death of his mother, the 29-year-old Humboldt took his inheritance and set off for the New World. He traveled with his friend, the botanist Aime Bonpland, across the Atlantic. The pair had hoped to go to Cuba, but an outbreak of illness on board their vessel persuaded them to disembark in Venezuela. They would spend a year exploring the Orinoco.
Humboldt used the Orinoco to investigate a visionary hypothesis. He told a friend that
I shall try to find out how the forces of nature interreact upon one another and how the geographic environment influences plant and animal life. In other words, I must find out about the unity of nature.
Humboldt had happened upon a perfect place to investigate his idea. Andrea Wulf, in her excellent book The Invention of Nature, explains how Humboldt’s discoveries in the Orinoco basin overturned the old Linnaean idea that “all things are made for the sake of man.”
Humboldt, Bonpland, and their servants first traveled across the vast grasslands of the Llanos, which grow in sedimentary soils laid down by millennia of flooding from the Orinoco. He was very excited to learn about the electric eels that lived in the area, driving wild horses into a pond so that they could watch the ensuing chaos. (I wrote about this and other experiments with electricity a while back)
The men would travel all over the wild lands that fed the Orinoco:
Once on the river, they observed the omnipresent fifteen-foot crocodiles, collected innumerable plant samples, and cataloged the water birds. They captured monkeys and birds, keeping them in cages to observe them. They listened to the sounds of jaguars devouring their prey in the night. It was a kind of Eden, just not the one Columbus thought he had found.
The expedition traveled up the river to where it became narrow and rough in the mountains, collecting samples that often rotted in the extreme humidity. But Humboldt didn’t just want to collect specimens; he wanted to find the source of the Orinoco — or, better, a link between the Orinoco and Amazon river systems.
Humboldt’s intuition that such a link existed was correct. He traveled down the Orinoco to the Casiquiare River and realized that the Casiquiare runs into the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon. This was important — there’s no other link like this between river systems this large. But Humboldt’s discovery turned out not to be so earth-shattering when he ran into some missionaries who told him that they already knew the two systems were connected.
Humboldt did sketch out the first accurate map of the origins of the Orinoco:
His observations were later compiled into this map:
Humboldt emerged from his study of the dense web of life in the Orinoco basin with a deeper understanding of the idea that “everything is interaction and reciprocal” in nature — a keystone of modern ecology.
Humboldt’s time on the Orinoco inspired other writers, too. William Wordsworth based one of his poems on Humboldt’s writing:
Such fruitless questions may not long beguile
Or plague the fancy ‘mid the sculptured shows
Conspicuous yet where Oroonoko flows;
‘There’ would the Indian answer with a smile
Aimed at the White Man’s ignorance, the while,
Of the great waters telling how they rose,
Covered the plains, and, wandering where they chose,
Mounted through every intricate defile,
Triumphant, Inundation wide and deep,
O’er which his Fathers urged, to ridge and steep
Else unapproachable, their buoyant way;
And carved, on mural cliff’s undreaded side,
Sun, moon, and stars, and beast of chase or prey;
Whate’er they sought, shunned, loved, or deified!
Jules Verne set an adventure tale, The Mighty Orinoco, on the river in an homage to Humboldt:
This, in turn, inspired other adventure tales:
The source of the Orinoco was finally, definitively found by an American named Herbert Spencer Dickey in 1931. The New York Times excitedly proclaimed that he had traveled “UP THE ORINOCO TO STEAL ITS SECRET.” Dickey’s article is not about the majesty of nature or the riches of El Dorado but instead about a miserable jungle full of mosquitoes, crocodiles, piranhas, and dysentery:
We reached this fancied El Dorado and passed through it. We found neither gold nor diamonds. We found, instead, a place where man could not exist without enduring every imaginable privation excepting thirst; a place where it rained most of the time, where a thick mist which whirled down the canyons brought actual physical misery, where there was no game in the low, stunted woods and no fish in the turbulent, stone-paved streams.
Dickey may have, as the Times put it, “killed the legend of El Dorado” in 1931. But a new El Dorado soon appeared in the Orinoco basin. Five years later, Standard Oil of New Jersey drilled the first oil well in the Orinoco Belt, the largest oil reserve in the world. The Orinoco deposits are “heavy” (meaning dense and dirty), which makes them hard to extract, but the area had become a major oil producer by the 1980s. Oil has dominated the economy of Venezuela — and its geopolitical fate — ever since.
It turns out that Walter Raleigh and company weren’t altogether wrong about the gold, either. Mining is a huge business in the Orinoco basin; the “Orinoco Arc” has significant deposits of gold, bauxite, coltan, and diamonds. The Venezuelan economy, such as it is, has come to depend on the extraction of these resources from the Orinoco basin. These industries have inflicted immense damage on the rainforest and have often exploited the labor of vulnerable people.
Meanwhile, the complex and unique ecosystem of the area is under threat. The Orinoco crocodile, once so numerous that Humboldt always had one within his field of vision, is now critically endangered due to overhunting and habitat loss.
The Orinoco has been, for hundreds of years, a place of myth and wonder. It turned out not to be the Garden of Eden and it was not home to El Dorado. People tried to exploit it, but for a long time, disease and predators kept them from doing so. Eventually, human predators, both from inside and outside Venezuela, became powerful enough to penetrate the Orinoco basin and strip it of its resources.
Now this wild place full of life that can be found nowhere else on earth is truly being exploited, and it seems likely that the exploitation will only intensify. The quest for El Dorado seems like it may finally destroy Eden.
After the paywall: A little something extra for paid subscribers!
.jpg){kind=link}
