by Georges Fery
The dream of limitless land and riches drove the conquest of the New World. However, all other quests paled compared to the search for El Dorado, literally the Gilded One, and its untold wealth in Gold. Foremost were the hopes to get rich beyond anyone’s dream in an unknown world that also had terror and death for the newcomers. By the end of the 15th century, the discovery of a shorter, less costly passage to the South Seas (the Pacific) and the Spice Islands, had also become an obsession, for spices were almost as expensive as gold.
Lack of geographic knowledge led many to believe that a sea route to Asia could be found sailing west into the ocean bypassing the Portuguese monopoly off the coast of West Africa, that had been granted to them under the Treaty of Alcáçovas on September 4, 1479. Christopher Columbus had to overcome scorn and ridicule in 1491, when he presented to the Junta de Salamanca, a proposal for opening a route to the Indies through a western passage, bypassing the Cape of Good Hope and the Portuguese monopoly. His persistence overcame doubt and antagonism, and on October 12, 1492, he was able to give Spain its first glimpse of an unknown world.
The conquest of the New World is associated with the achievements of Spanish discoverers and conquistadores (conquerors). But Portugal had its share of the newfound lands under the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, and by the later part of the 17th century, European nations – England, France, and Holland – had appeared on the scene. In Germany, too, adventurers dreamed of contributing to explorations in those new lands where the belief that everything and anything was possible by anyone, was overwhelming. How then were Germans associated with discoveries in the New World and carved their names among the conquistadors seeking El Dorado?
It was the conjunction of two seemingly unrelated events that brought Germans to the shores of the New World. The first was the subjugation of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan by Hernan Cortez in 1519 and, during that same year, the death in Innsbruck of Maximilian von Hapsburg, the German king and Holy Roman emperor. Maximilian’s greatest territorial gains owed more to marriages than adventure or warfare. One of his sons ensured the Hapsburg’s hegemony over Hungary, while another, Philip the Fair, in 1496 married Joanna, third child of Queen Isabella, thus ensuring a strong influence at the Court of Spain.
Joanna was not in good physical and mental health, but she gave birth to several children, including two boys: Charles and Ferdinand. Queen Isabella knew that Joanna could not rule, so she inserted a clause in her will specifying that her daughter would be Queen of Castile with her husband Philip as her consort, but it would be their son Charles who would wear the crown of Spain. At the age of seventeen, Charles became King of Spain, even though he had been born and reared in Flanders and knew little Spanish. Few in Flanders and Spain foretold that Charles would emerge as a great European monarch.
On a cold dawn of September 1517, a young Charles landed on a remote Spanish shore near the village of Asturias and met with the Primate of Spain, Guillermo de Croy (1517-1521), his first tutor and chamberlain. It was de Croy who favored Charles as King and who helped him present his claim to the various Spanish courts as was customary in Castile, Aragon, and other courts. Charles had to swear to observe the laws and customs of each court. He also took an oath that he would not make further requests for money during the following three years, except for extreme necessity.
When in Catalonia, on January 11, 1519, Charles was notified that his grandfather Maximilian had died. The title of Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was now vacant. Charles.I of Spain immediately set out for Germany to press his claim for the title. To secure it, he needed to “persuade” the electors with incentives designed to forestall the ambitions of Henry VIII of England and Francis.I of France. Yet he lacked money, and his oath to the Courts of Spain precluded him from requesting financial assistance.
Two powerful German merchant-bankers’ families from Augsburg, the Fuggers and the Welsers were ready to lend the money to bribe the electors. Their rewards: noble lineage and the power derived through bankrolling the nobility. Both families operated all over Europe, with offices and factories in Antwerp, Venice, Seville, and Valencia, as well as in Germany and Austria. They were later joined by the banker Ulrich von Hutten, and other merchants and traders from the Hanseatic League.The Welsers’ fortune was grounded in trade of goods and spices, the Fuggers’ in banking and mining in central Europe. Although the Welsers had considerable experience in overseas trade and investments, until the arrival of Hernan Cortes and his Aztec gold, their main contact with the New World had been to procure the bark of a tree that grew in the West Indies and was used as a decoction believed to treat syphilis.
Anton Welser was at the helm of the family fortune when he loaned 241,000 ducats to Charles.I in 1519. The Fuggers loaned 295,000 ducats. Both merchant-bankers requested and received from Charles.I to pledge the Crown property of Castile to guarantee the debt payment when he became Charles.V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. On January 3, 1529, the Welsers signed at Burgos the capitulación, or patent, that would grant them the governorship of a large territory in the New World, the area known today as Venezuela. The contract was a guarantee of the king’s ability to repay the 241,000 ducats and an additional security of one million ducats of credit granted by the Welsers. The contract contained the same conditions as those imposed upon Spaniards contracting for the right of conquest. The terms were meticulously laid down by the Casa de Contratación, or government “patent office,” founded in 1503 in Seville. They granted the right to conquer and populate the lands, take the titles of Governor and Captain-General, build fortifications from the King’s fifth (or twenty per cent share of incomes produced by the territories), enslave the indigenous people (should they rebel), and import horses.
Since the time of Columbus, the island of Hispaniola had been the administrative center of the Antilles. In 1528, Bartolomew Welser and Company settled in Hispanioila (today’s Dominican Republic) and prepared to conquer Venezuela. Ambrosius Ehinger (aka Alfinger), was named the territory’s governor, functions he assumed on February 24, 1529. From the start, the Germans had underestimated the fact that the New World conquest was understood to be the exclusive domain of Catholic Spain. The average Spaniard in Hispaniola rose against the bankers and merchants from Augsburg and the Flemish lenders who had been elevated to conquistadors, a status that up to then had been exclusive to the Spanish. Worst still, these foreigners were more inclined toward Luther than Rome. The major difference between German and Spanish conquistadors, however, was that the business oriented Welsers, were looking for a reasonably fast return on investment, while the Spanish Crown saw the New World as its exclusive domain, to be set in its own culture and under the Catholic religion.
Santa Ana de Coro, located at the base of the Peninsula de Paraguana on Venezuela’s north coast, was founded on July 26, 1527, by the Spaniards, with Juan de Ampues as governor. Ambrosius Ehinger arrived at Coro in early 1529 together with Philip von Hutten, the son of a prominent banker from Franconia. The Germans renamed the town Neu-Augsburg and the small peninsula they called Kleine-Venedig or Little Venice. It was the first German colony in the Americas and Ehinger was the first German captain-general confirmed by Seville. Coro was watered by a small river, the coast covered with a sparse, arid vegetation, dry forest, and fiercely spined cacti; it was an inhospitable place to settle.
The peninsula was almost empty of its original inhabitants, the Caquetio, for many had been captured by Spanish slave traders and taken to work in the fields of Hispaniola, where the local Taino Indians had been decimated. The remaining Caquetios had fled south to remote, densely forested hills. It took Ehinger five months to organize the governorship, and to prepare its first expedition to explore and map the land. He was convinced that the large body of water to its southwest, the Gulf of Venezuela, could be the route to the South Seas, later called the Pacific.
The first expedition from Coro took place at the end of August 1529, when Ehinger left Coro and sailed westward across the Gulf of Venezuela. At the place where the gulf meets Lake Maracaibo, he set up a few shacks that became the nucleus of the future city of Maracaibo. He then set off southwestward into an unknown territory with a rough topography and numerous hostile native tribes controlling ancestral areas, that made their travel difficult. The German group of 300 men, 100 native carriers, and 37 horses were accompanied by the royal notary who, by the law of Burgos, had to read the Requirements (Requerimientos) to the native inhabitants, demanding that they yield to the king and to Christianity or be liable to the steel of Toledo. The Requirements were read aloud in Spanish, never mind that the inhabitants most likely did not understand it or that there might not have been anyone to listen. The expedition crossed over to the west coast of Lake Maracaibo and was under constant attack by aggressive tribes, the Motilones and the Guajiros among others. The fighting was costly in European and Indian lives. Beyond the lakeshore, in the coastal plain, Ehinger clashed with the fierce Jirajira, who had never encountered the sword or the arquebus.
Ehinger fought and parlayed his way through, exchanging hawk’s bells, knives, and other trinkets for food, gold ornaments, emeralds, and ornamental shells, especially the great strombus used as a trumpet by shamans “to call down the gods.” The unknown territory, difficult topography, and numerous native tribes controlling valleys and river accesses, made their travel strenuous. Additionally, feeding dozens of men trekking twelve hours a day required one-quarter of a ton of food daily, a volume that could not be found in villages. This first expedition, after over a year of hard trek, stumbled back empty handed into Coro on April 18, 1530; almost all were half-dead, including Ehinger, who was hanging on to life only by the voice of some golden siren. Meanwhile, the Welser’s house in Hispaniola, having heard nothing from their governor for a year, presumed that he and his men had perished, and sent his replacement Johannes Seissenhofer, together with another German, Nicolaus Federmann.
Seissenhofer died from tropical diseases within weeks of reaching Coro, and Ehinger was restored to office. He named Nicolaus Federmann his lieutenant governor, captain-general and alcalde mayor of Coro, and was then carried in delirium aboard a ship bound for Hispaniola, to recover or die. Federmann’s first order from Ehinger was to ascertain that the disputed western border of German Venezuela was not breached by the Spanish vice royalty of Santa Fe. On his own, after completing his assignment as boundary surveyor, he set out to conquer land for the Welsers. On September 12, 1530, together with 100 soldiers, 16 horses, two monks and 100 carriers, Federmann struck out toward the southwest for his first expedition. He was indeed a well-liked man, and most were prepared to follow him to hell, which many had the occasion to do on his great treks. Federmann wrote Historia Indiana, the first ethnographic study on the natives of the hinterlands of northwest Venezuela. Heading south, he battled through Caquetio territory, crossed the Sierra de San Luis through a 4,500-foot pass looking for the way to the South Seas, and entered the land of the Jirajira which he crossed after baptizing over 50 cargo-carrying natives. They then reached the land of the dwarf, but valiant, Ayomán having to fight their way through this territory since the Ayomán did not understand the “Requirements.”
Further south, they crossed the Tocuyo River and reached the land of the Gayón, where they learned that all men are each other’s enemies. A 46-day battle brought them to the water people, the Xaguas, who lived on the Cojedes River. It is difficult today to understand what drove these men to go through such hardship and wilderness on horrifying journeys. Sickness and losses ultimately forced Federmann to turn back toward Coro on February 7, 1531. The return was harder than the southbound journey, for they had to battle both weather and nature, the poison-tipped arrows of the natives, and tropical diseases. On April 27, 1531, exhausted, some dying, half of the expedition force staggered back into Coro, where Federmann found Ehinger who had returned in good health from Hispaniola.
Despite his harrowing first experience and Federmann’s horror stories, Ehinger was not to be diverted from his golden dream. So, at first light on June 9, 1531, with 130 men, 40 horses and 100 natives carrying supplies, he headed straight to Lake Maracaibo. He crossed the lake and reached the settlement he founded in 1529. The men moved up the Socui River and through difficult topography, brushing aside minor opposition by local people. Alternately hauling, and hacking their way, they crossed a succession of landscapes. Ehinger’s “technique” to keep captured carriers from escaping was to “rope them up.” Each carrier had a rope knotted around his neck that was attached to a main line running the length of the column of carriers. Those unable to follow were beheaded on the spot without taking the rope off, not to slow down the column.
The invaders frequently fought brief but bloody battles. In an encounter with the Chiri people, the infantry was most effective with their long swords. It was on the plains of the Jerira River that Ehinger received confirmation from locals of what he had heard from the Maracaibo tribes that they traded tropical produces for gold ornaments, salt, and painted cloth with people “somewhere” in the mountains to the south. Believing the story that “where the salt comes, comes the gold,” the expedition headed south. They trekked from where Cucuta now stands to the high mesas above 8,000 feet and the Pemeno tribe territory around the Tamalameque trading center. Many battles later, Ehinger and his troop reached the Paramos de Chachira where they suffered from cold, hunger, and merciless assaults by natives on all sides. Ambrosius Ehinger was struck in the throat by a curare tipped arrow. The arrow was removed, the wound sucked, and human grease from a dead Indian was applied on it, all to no avail. The founder of Coro and Maracaibo was buried under the roots of a ceiba tree. The remnants of the expedition retreated towards Coro, where they arrived on November 2, 1533; there were only thirty-five survivors.
Undeterred by the cost of their American venture, the Welsers were bolstered in their beliefs that El Dorado was within reach when the galleon Santa Maria del Campo docked in Seville on January 9, 1534. On board were millions of pesos in gold and silver bullion from Peru, the ransom of Atahualpa Inca Yupanqui the 13th and last Inca (1502-1533). The Germans immediately prepared another expedition to their colonies and selected a new governor for their enterprises, Georg Hohemut from Speyer-am-Rhein, the bank “confidential” agent, who arrived at Coro on February 6, 1535. There he met with Nicolaus Federmann, who had arrived a few weeks earlier from Hispaniola. Hohemut recognized he had a need for such an experienced man, and promptly named him captain general.
Surrounded by many veterans from previous expeditions, Hohemut, seconded by Andreas Gundelfinger from Augsburg, launched his own expedition. He had an impressive force of 409 soldiers, crossbowmen, pike men and 60 horses. The heat and humidity of the malarial lowlands brought tropical fever that decimated his army. Five hundred miles from Coro, he had to send back most of his force, but he kept moving south with 100-foot soldiers and 30 horses. Crossing the mountains of Xideharas, he quickly clashed with the Guajibo tribes beyond the southernmost reaches of Federmann’s old trail. Hohemut sent his vanguard to the south through the Sierra de San Luis, and on July 26,1535, the bulk of the army attacked Acarigua, the first village in the Vararida valley.
A soldier who strayed from the group was seized by the natives; his remains were found in the village ruins, half eaten and burned; his sword was later found in a hut. For the death of the soldier, Philipp von Hutten diary tell us, Hohemut had Indians ripped to shreds by war dogs, in front of their brethren. The expedition then entered the llanos, truly tierra incognita. Like an ocean, its tall grass undulating under the winds, the llanos stretch southward for 1,000 miles to the upper reaches of the Amazon. It is a land flooded during the rainy season and a sweltering inferno in the dry season. On March 19, 1536, 700 miles from Coro, Hohemut and his men reached the banks of the Ariporo River, a triburary of the great Meta River, where he encountered the Wakiri tribes from whom they learned that their goal was within reach, a few weeks south in the high sierras. By the time they reached the territory of the aggressive Choques, however, the rainy season had started. Between overflowing swamps and narrow canyons, they were at a clear military disadvantage. Esteban Martin, Hohemut second in command, was attacked while looking for a way out. He was captured with two other soldiers and drowned by the natives; most Europeans were wounded.
Their painstaking efforts to breach the high valleys and find a pass through the steep rock faces of the lower Andes failed. The many battles against men and nature they had waged over the 1,500-mile journey from Coro had taken their toll. Now, they were among the Huitotos who fiercely defended their land. The expedition kept following narrow valleys in the mountain range and crossed the Opia River into the land of the Guaipies. In a hamlet, they found pieces of gold and silver, which the Indians said came from beyond the mountains. They were close, about 40 miles from Sogamoso, the eastern-most village of the salt people, the Chibchas of the Muisca federation, with great wealth in gold and emeralds, and the legendary origin of their quest, El Dorado. Upon reaching the Caqueta River, a tributary of the Amazon in the heart of the rainy season, Hohemut decided to turn back. It would take close to a year for the remnants of the expedition to return to Coro. 300 dead for less than a handful of gold was the governor’s reward when Hohemut entered Coro on May 27, 1537.
The Europeans relentless search for El Dorado was the stuff of legends surrounding Lake Guatavita in central Colombia. There, each year, a solemn ceremony was held to reaffirm the zipa or lord in its functions. On an appointed day by the shamans, the zipa removed his garment and his body anointed with a sticky substance. The priests would then blow gold dust on his body, from head to toes, coating him with a gleaming coat. He would then board a raft, together with priest-shamans; the party rowed the raft to the middle of the lake and, with prayers and incantations, threw gold artifacts in the lake as atonement to the gods of the underworld. The zipa then plunged into the water releasing the gold dust to the depths and the deities. The crowd on shore sent up a mighty sheer for the deities would, once again, protect the wellbeing of the communities for another year. The legend of the Gilded One was yet another that sustained the zeal of the Europeans, fueled by the vast wealth in gold and silver seized by Cortes in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, and others from conquered lands. The legend spread far and wide and, in later years, the Gilded One was “seen” by people still believing in the same dream, searching for him and his wealth from the depths of the Amazon to the high valleys of the Andes. To this day, some search for him still.
From the Capitania de Venezuela, on his third and last trek from Coro, Nicolaus Federmann and his army had marched through a thousand miles of jungles, the llanos, and brutal battles with numerous tribes and a no less brutal cold through the mountains. The environment and the native tribes had decimated his army. When he arrived in the Muisca homeland, his army numbered less than 200 weak, starved, and emaciated men. Federmann would quickly find out he was not the first to get there. In the mid-1530s, unbeknownst to each other and lured by the tales of El Dorado and the fables of gold and emeralds, three separate armies had headed toward the Muisca homeland, a land in the heart of the vice royalty of Santa Fe, that would later be known as Nueva Granada. By now, all pretense of looking for a route to the South Seas was gone.
One group led by Captain-General Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada y Rivera, a lawyer turned conquistador from Granada with his brother Hernán, headed south in March 1537 from Santa Marta, 900 miles away on the Caribbean coast, with 800 soldiers. It had not been Quesada’s idea to head south looking for gold, but that of the governor of Santa Fe in Santa Marta, Pedro Fernandez de Lugo. Two years before, Federmann had requested three supply ships loaded with food, men, horses, and weapons from Hispaniola, but one of the ships was blown off course in a hurricane and landed at Santa Marta. It was then, thanks to the ship captain’s loose mouth, that de Lugo learned of Federmann’s plans to find El Dorado. De Lugo moved fast, for gold and country.
On his horrendous trek, battling and losing men to beasts and nature alike, Quesada would be the first to reach the land of the Chibchas of the Muisca alliance in central Colombia. He was the first to read the Requerimientos to the chief or Zipa, Tisquesusa at Bacatá capital of the confederacy. In early 1538, Quesada found Lake Guatavita in the Cordillera Oriental. He would be joined within a few months by two other men who had the same dream of reaching the land of the Gilded One; one was the fearless conquistador Sebastián de Belalcazar, governor of Quito, a city he founded, as well as the towns of Popayan and Cali, who battled his way north from Quito.
De Belalcazar had traveled 800 punishing miles and arrived in late 1538 in the Muisca highlands with 166 well-equipped men in rather good health and spirit. Federmann the stubborn German, thus became the third to reach the salt people. By the time de Belalcazar and Federmann arrived, Quesada had already pillaged the riches of the Muisca towns. Gold and emeralds had fueled his soldier’s zeal. To avoid a feud that would have been fatal to all, they agreed to split the booty three ways, though not evenly, to later plead their respective claims to both jurisdiction and treasure before the Spanish crown. On August 6, 1538, Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, Nicolaus Federmann the last German conquistador, and Sebastian de Belalcazar would write their names in history as the three co-founders of the city of Santa Fe de Bogotá of the New Kingdom of Granada, which would later become the capital of the Republic of Colombia.
About the author:
Freelance writer, researcher and photographer, Georges Fery (georgefery.com) addresses topics, from history, culture, and beliefs to daily living of ancient and today’s communities of Mesoamerica and South America. His articles are published online at travelthruhistory.com, ancient-origins.net and popular-archaeology.com, in the quarterly magazine Ancient American (ancientamerican.com), as well as in the U.K. at mexicolore.co.uk. The author is a fellow of the Institute of Maya Studies instituteofmayastudies.org Miami, FL and The Royal Geographical Society, London, U.K. rgs.org. As well as member in good standing of the Maya Exploration Center, Austin, TX mayaexploration.org, the Archaeological Institute of America, Boston, MA archaeological.org, the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC. americanindian.si.edu, and the NFAA – Non-Fiction Authors Association nonfictionauthrosassociation.com.
Contact:
Georges Fery – 5200 Keller Springs Road, Apt. 1511, Dallas, Texas 75248
(786) 501 9692 –[email protected] and www.georgefery.com
Image Credits:
Christophe Colomb devant le conseil de Salamanque – Emanuel Leutze: Emanuel Leutze, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
German States Fugger 1621 10 Ducats: National Museum of American History, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Conquest of Colombia routes: Colombia_relief_location_map.jpg: Grundkarte Shadowxfox, Relief Alexrk2derivative work: Dr Brains, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Federmann is Back: ©Ediciones Edime, 1958
Back to Coro: ©Ediciones Edime
Ehinger’s Fate: ©Ediciones Edime, 1958
The Prize: ©georgefery.com
The Gilded One: ©georgefery.com
Santa Fe de Bogota: ©procolombia.com
Further Reading:
Daniel de Barandarian, 1993 – Los Hijos de la Luna
Chapman, Walker, 1967 – The Golden Dream
Oviedo y Baños, J. 1723 – Historia de la Conquista y Poblacion de Venezuela
Coppens, Walter, 1988 – Los Aborigenes de Venezuela
Pardo, Isaac, J., 1959 – Historia de Venezuela – Descubrimiento y Conquista
Saignes, Miguel Acostsa, 1958 – Historia de Venezuela – Epoca Prehispanica
Strauss, A. Rafael K., 1992 – El Tiempo Prehispanico de Venezuela
Daniel de Barandarian, 1993 – Los Hijos de la Luna
Chapman, Walker, 1967 – The Golden Dream
Oviedo y Baños, J. 1723 – Historia de la Conquista y Poblacion de Venezuela
Coppens, Walter, 1988 – Los Aborigenes de Venezuela
Pardo, Isaac, J., 1959 – Historia de Venezuela – Descubrimiento y Conquista
Saignes, Miguel Acostsa, 1958 – Historia de Venezuela – Epoca Prehispanica
Strauss, A. Rafael K., 1992 – El Tiempo Prehispanico de Venezuela
