January 17, 2011 • 18 mins
Driven by visions of unimaginable riches, Spanish explorers subjugated the cultures of South America and exploit the resources for their masters in Europe. Chief among these visions was the hallowed El Dorado, or the City of Gold. Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deblieing chokoateboarding. And I know
we've been talking a lot about Europe recently, the Bourbon
family and all of that, but we're going to venture
(00:23):
to the New World today and talk a little bit
about the conquistadors. And something funny I've noticed in a
lot of our New World episodes, but the settlers and
the conquerors are always completely focused on one thing, and
unfortunately for them, that's not like how to get food,
how to farm correctly in an entirely different environment. It's
(00:44):
always always gold, even when they're in a place where
there is definitely no gold. As we know now. Yeah,
we know that now, but at the time it was
kind of no wonder that they were so interested in it.
For example, the myth of El Dorado had spread like
wildfire from the Kinkistadors and onward. Here's one account, and
I found this one in David Grant's The Lost City
(01:05):
of z which is a pretty interesting book about El
Dorado in general and one man's quest for it. And
this quote is from a sixteenth century historian named Gonzalo
Fernandez to Oviato. And you're gonna notice pretty soon that
El Dorado starts off not as a city, but as
man here goes. The great lord goes about continually covered
(01:27):
in gold dust, as fine as ground salt. He feels
that it would be less beautiful to wear any other ornament.
It would be crude and common to put on armor
plates of hammered or stamped gold for other rich lords
where those when they wish. But to powder one's self
with gold is something exotic, unusual, novel, and more costly.
(01:48):
For he washes away at night what he puts on
each morning, so that it is discarded and lost. And
he does this every day of the year, so much
gold that you can wash it off in a day.
That's pretty sounds promising if you're a compete store. So
pretty soon the man, this king, who covers himself in
(02:08):
gold dust comes to mean a kingdom, El Dorado, a
poll city of gold. And as the Indians tell this
story to the Spaniards, it goes, you know, the rumor
starts to spread, and pretty soon the conquette stores are
off looking for this El Dorado determined to find it. Right, So,
the first expedition to actually find the city of Gold
(02:31):
happens in fifty one. It's led by a guy named
Gonzalo Pizarro, who is the half brother to Francisco Pizarro,
and Francisco Pizzaro was the famous founder of Lima and
murder of the last independent Incoan emperor. Yeah, and so
Gonzalo Pizarro had heard about El Dorado. He had heard
enough about the city from other Spaniards and from old
(02:54):
Indian chiefs, and he thought that it might be worth
his time and his assement of money to go off
looking for it. So he sunk his entire fortune into
funding this mission. You know, his entourage is pretty intense
when you when you check it out. It was two
hundred soldiers on horseback as nights, and I think they
even wore iron hats. Iron hats, I mean armor in
(03:17):
the Amazon, in the middle of Amazon, going to come
back to get them. They also had four thousand enslaved
Indians along for the ride. Lono pulled cards filled with
two thousand pigs and two thousand hunting dogs and they
headed east over the Andies. I know it's it's probably
it seems like they'd be going the other way, but
imagine them patting east over the Andes and uh, that's
(03:39):
when trouble really starts to happen. A lot of the
Indians start to die of cold while they're crossing the
mountains because they're just wearing like a fur, they don't
have all the armor on. Um. But once they're down
into the jungle, it's the Spanish men who start to
suffer because they are encased in these iron suits and
they're absolute miserable in the heat with all the insects. Yep,
(04:03):
and the Indians they met along the way were tortured
for info on the city that they actually knew nothing about.
So even people who weren't part of their journey were
suffering too. Yeah, you can imagine this Spanish dude comes
up to you and asks where El Dorado is and
probably don't even really understand him. You've never heard of
El Dorado. So it's a very bloody scene. And um,
(04:25):
eventually the party starts to die, I mean in larger
larger numbers because they're starving and um. Over time, most
of the Indians die, the animals die of the heat,
and finally even most of the dogs have been eaten,
so to survive, Pizzaro decides the only way to get
(04:47):
through is to split up the party, send half of
the group down the river to hopefully try to find food.
And while Pizarro's group eventually retreats over the Andes and
this back with only eighty men, I mean, think of
how many they left with. The other groups sort of
has the more adventurous yet equally harrowing time, definitely. The
(05:10):
guy who's in charge of the second group is Pizarro's
number two, Francisco day Oriyana, and he takes fifty seven
men and two slaves downriver to find food and they
don't know what they're going to find out there, basically,
so just an example of some of the things they
ran into. If they happened to have Dominican friar guess
bar de Carba Hall along for the ride, and he
(05:32):
kept a diary of things that went on during their journey,
and he described the men mad with hunger. He says
that they were actually so hungry that they were reduced
to eating their shoes and belts, which he said were
quote cooked with certain herbs, which for some reason that
makes it sound just doubly worse to me. And you're
trying to you know, like trying to make it real food.
(05:53):
You would almost see it softening belts, animals, flesh. I
don't know, it's risky too to pick random herbs out
of the rainforest, but you know, the group decides to
see what's going to happen. They're they're clearly starving if
they were duced to eating their shoes and belts, and
they're the point of their whole mission was to find
food for the other guys and bring it back. They
(06:14):
know that's not going to happen. They're not going to
be able to make it back to the rest of
the party. So they decide, let's get down the river
or die trying to see what happened. See what happens,
and so it's very tough going there. Indian attacks, uh,
they describe what sounds like Amazon woman attacks. And then
(06:35):
finally on August two, they shoot out into the Atlantic.
So they're the first European men to travel the length
of the Amazon River. But still, even after all that way,
the whole Amazon no El Dorado, no El Dorado, and
that's what they wanted. And Oriana, he can't get his
(06:57):
mind off of the place. Even when he's back into Vain,
he's still thinking about it, and he decides to try
to put together another little mission. Spends all his money
trying to put this together, and he has a ship.
First he's denied permission to sail, and then a ship.
People on it get plague, they get sick and die. Finally,
(07:18):
when they get there, they reached the mouth of the Amazon.
More people die there, and finally Orianna dies, presumably feeling
rather defeated. You could imagine, I would imagine so um so,
I mean, that sounds that's our first trip down the Amazon,
and it's um the events that came immediately after, and
it sounds pretty bad already. It sounds like it can't
(07:40):
get a whole lot worse looking for El Dorado. But
as bad as that one expedition sounds, the truly notorious
mission came two decades later, in fifteen sixty, and the
leader of that party, um Pedro de Orsua, wasn't the
issue with a mission, or at least it seems. He's
(08:02):
described by historian Bart L. Lewis as a thirty five
year old wunderkind, and writer Stephen mint To described him
as a handsome and respected soldier, um but still a
soldier who had some misjudgments, including bringing along his mistress
on this trip to the amazon Um. But the issue
wasn't with him, it was with some of the men
(08:23):
on the party, right. So the men that he brought
along with him were considered undesirables. So getting them away
from settlements and into the rainforest was actually thought of
as a pretty pretty good thing and it was um
one option to kind of minimize I guess the risk
they posed to those settlements. But one of the men
who was on the expedition, one of those undesirable characters,
(08:45):
was a guy named Lope Day a gray and uh,
he sort of was the instigator. He's got quite the reputation.
Maybe you've seen the Verner his Zog movie about him.
He's uh, yeah, we'll find out soon. He's pretty wild guy.
So Dave Geary was actually a lot older than the
leader of the party. He had been around the block
(09:07):
a few times. He was pushing fifty. We're not exactly
sure when he was born, but he was definitely middle
aged during this expedition. In his pre Peruvian life is
extremely obscure. He was probably born fifteen ten to fifteen
eighteen in Onate, Spain, and he came to South America
(09:28):
as a young man and then just went through a
series of jobs. To Plina and I were laughing about that.
Some of these are considered jobs, but they include grave
robbing and alderman and horse breaker. Um, so he got
out of the grave robbing business early on. Do you
imagine that job posting I wanted grave robber. Yeah, both,
(09:51):
that would be good money, better than um el Dorado
hunting it scenes. Um, but a Geary didn't really like Spain.
I mean, if he had come to the colonies with
a love of Spain, he lost it pretty quickly. Um.
He served with Gonzalo Pizarro, who was, you know, the
earlier guy we mentioned, and when he wasn't rewarded for
that service, he served in an uprising against him, and
(10:14):
that was really just the beginning of trouble. Right. He
spent a lot of time fleeing from one part of
South or Central America to another, and he was pretty
much always in trouble an entire time. Just a few
examples of things that he did. He broke a law
against hiring Indian porters and was punished with a hundred
to two hundred lashes and salt in the wounds, which
(10:34):
sounds rather painful. He stabbed the magistrate who sentenced him
in his temple and escaped the city of Cuzco in disguise.
And he also fought with rebels then against them, and
he wounded his leg in hand. And finally he had
a daughter with an Indian woman, which was considered controversial
at the time. So, I mean, the basic situation here
(10:55):
is that he needed a way to escape from his reputation,
redeem his name if he could, um or just go
off the map, if if he couldn't redeem his name,
start something new away from what he considered civilization. Um
folks in charge didn't mind this convenient way to get
(11:16):
rid of kind of a troublesome guy. So on September
fifteen sixty a gear A joined the expedition and went
looking for El Dorado. And El Dorado was thought to
be at the headwaters of the Amazon River, so that's
where they were headed. Yeah, the Amazon was kind of
attractive to them now, and I guess they had sort
of changed their mind about the exact location that I
(11:37):
thought it was. But part of the way into the
trip a gear A he started a rebellion against Ursua,
who he thought was too cautious, so in an Indian
village he had him hacked to death. Yeah, he's pretty
serious about his uh his rebellions way of taking care
of things. So immediately after that murder, he swears allegiance
(11:59):
to der Sue's replacement, a man named Fernando D. Guzman.
And this is where things start to get a little weird.
Um less, just killing one leader and installing a new one.
He raises Gooseman, and the party as a whole raises
Gooseman to king. So he's not just the leader of
(12:20):
the party. They're swearing allegiance to him as king forget
the King of Spain. Uh so, yeah, this is their
first act of disobedience to the crown. But this guy
Guzman doesn't really suit a Geary either, and he's murdered too.
As a Geary later writes and a letter to the
King of Spain about the murder of Da Guzman. He
he says this, they appointed me their field commander, and
(12:43):
because I did not consent to their insults and evil deeds,
they tried to kill me, and I killed the new king,
the captain of his guard, the lieutenant general, his majordomo,
his chaplain, a woman in league against me, a night
of Rhodes, an admiral, two endsigns, and six other of
his allies. It was my intention to carry this war
through and die in it. For the cruelties your ministers
(13:05):
practiced on us, and I again appointed captains in a
sergeant major. They tried to kill me and I hung
them all. That really gives you the gist of Age
as decision making process. He does not mess around, No,
he doesn't. Anybody who opposes him might as well be dead. Um.
So he himself is the new head of the Party
(13:27):
of Men. And he supposedly said that quote, I am
the wrath of God, the Prince of Freedom, lord of
the Tierra Firma and the provinces of Chile. And from
there he sailed down the Amazon or perhaps the Ornoco River,
We're not sure, and kept killing, massacring pretty much all
a lot of people that he met along the way,
and thirty nine people in his own party too. A
(13:49):
witness in the party later wrote that Age was so
sure that his soul could not be saved that he
might as well commit acts of cruelty and wickedness by
which the name of age A would ring throughout the earth,
even to the ninth Heaven. So he figured, I'm not
going to heaven anyway, so I might as well just
be as bad as I want to be. Yeah, and
the reputation spreads, and by fifteen sixty one, when he
(14:12):
takes the island of Margharito off of what is now
the Venezuelan coast and displaces a bunch of Spanish settlers,
he's notorious. Um. The Spanish armies know who he is,
and they're out to get him. Taking the island definitely
means war um. But when he learned that the King's
armies in Venezuela and New Granada were after him, he
(14:34):
writes off this letter to fill up the second and uh.
You can find the whole letter online. It's pretty interesting,
but it's a mixture of very rational complaints and just
complete insanity. Like it sounds like a Garay out in
the rainforest who's gone off as Rocker, but luckily through
(14:56):
a letter and not in person, luckily for the king.
For the king, he's mostly criticizing the King for spending
so much of the money brought home by the conquist
stores from the New World on these German wars, and
not leaving enough for the men when they're old. Um.
But the most famous part of the letter, even though
it's coming from a man who has clearly gone crazy,
(15:18):
seems like actually it's pretty good advice for future El
Dorado mission. He writes, I advise you, King and Lord,
not to attempt nor allow a fleet to be sent
to this ill fated river, because in Christian faith, I
swear King and Lord that if a hundred thousand men come,
none will escape, because the stories are false, and in
(15:39):
this river there is nothing but despair. So finally, the
King's armies do catch up with him, and they capture
him after he crosses back to the mainland, but not
before he has a chance to murder his own daughter,
so no mercy even for his kin, and he is
beheaded on October six e one, and his body parts
(16:01):
are sent throughout the realm and his head displayed in
a cage as a warning to other traders. We keep
on having me. These head heads kind of become a
new sub theme. I think of exhimation, honest um. But
according to Encyclopedia, Britannica. A Gary's name is quote practically
synonymous with cruelty and treachery in colonial Spanish America. UM Yet,
(16:25):
I think it's so interesting. Despite this terrible example of
this man losing it and becoming so power hungry and
depraved that he kills his daughter, he kills all these
men in his own party, he kills all the settlers,
he's coming across all the Indians, He's coming across that.
People still go out looking for El Dorado. Nobody can
(16:48):
give up that myth. And it's interesting. The book I
mentioned earlier, the Lost City of z is dealing with
um hunts for the for El Dorado that go into
the twentieth century. I mean, people just they can't let
it go. Gold is a pretty attractive, when pretty treasure
if you can find it. I think that's about all
for today. But if you want to learn a little
(17:10):
bit more about conquistadors and the Incan Empire, we have
an article called how did one d and sixty eight
Conquistadors take down the Incan Empire? And you can find
that by visiting our homepage and entering in Incan Empire
at www dot how stuff works dot com. For more
(17:32):
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click
on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of
our homepage. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise.
Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deblieing chokoateboarding. And I know
we've been talking a lot about Europe recently, the Bourbon
family and all of that, but we're going to venture
(00:23):
to the New World today and talk a little bit
about the conquistadors. And something funny I've noticed in a
lot of our New World episodes, but the settlers and
the conquerors are always completely focused on one thing, and
unfortunately for them, that's not like how to get food,
how to farm correctly in an entirely different environment. It's
(00:44):
always always gold, even when they're in a place where
there is definitely no gold. As we know now. Yeah,
we know that now, but at the time it was
kind of no wonder that they were so interested in it.
For example, the myth of El Dorado had spread like
wildfire from the Kinkistadors and onward. Here's one account, and
I found this one in David Grant's The Lost City
(01:05):
of z which is a pretty interesting book about El
Dorado in general and one man's quest for it. And
this quote is from a sixteenth century historian named Gonzalo
Fernandez to Oviato. And you're gonna notice pretty soon that
El Dorado starts off not as a city, but as
man here goes. The great lord goes about continually covered
(01:27):
in gold dust, as fine as ground salt. He feels
that it would be less beautiful to wear any other ornament.
It would be crude and common to put on armor
plates of hammered or stamped gold for other rich lords
where those when they wish. But to powder one's self
with gold is something exotic, unusual, novel, and more costly.
(01:48):
For he washes away at night what he puts on
each morning, so that it is discarded and lost. And
he does this every day of the year, so much
gold that you can wash it off in a day.
That's pretty sounds promising if you're a compete store. So
pretty soon the man, this king, who covers himself in
(02:08):
gold dust comes to mean a kingdom, El Dorado, a
poll city of gold. And as the Indians tell this
story to the Spaniards, it goes, you know, the rumor
starts to spread, and pretty soon the conquette stores are
off looking for this El Dorado determined to find it. Right, So,
the first expedition to actually find the city of Gold
(02:31):
happens in fifty one. It's led by a guy named
Gonzalo Pizarro, who is the half brother to Francisco Pizarro,
and Francisco Pizzaro was the famous founder of Lima and
murder of the last independent Incoan emperor. Yeah, and so
Gonzalo Pizarro had heard about El Dorado. He had heard
enough about the city from other Spaniards and from old
(02:54):
Indian chiefs, and he thought that it might be worth
his time and his assement of money to go off
looking for it. So he sunk his entire fortune into
funding this mission. You know, his entourage is pretty intense
when you when you check it out. It was two
hundred soldiers on horseback as nights, and I think they
even wore iron hats. Iron hats, I mean armor in
(03:17):
the Amazon, in the middle of Amazon, going to come
back to get them. They also had four thousand enslaved
Indians along for the ride. Lono pulled cards filled with
two thousand pigs and two thousand hunting dogs and they
headed east over the Andies. I know it's it's probably
it seems like they'd be going the other way, but
imagine them patting east over the Andes and uh, that's
(03:39):
when trouble really starts to happen. A lot of the
Indians start to die of cold while they're crossing the
mountains because they're just wearing like a fur, they don't
have all the armor on. Um. But once they're down
into the jungle, it's the Spanish men who start to
suffer because they are encased in these iron suits and
they're absolute miserable in the heat with all the insects. Yep,
(04:03):
and the Indians they met along the way were tortured
for info on the city that they actually knew nothing about.
So even people who weren't part of their journey were
suffering too. Yeah, you can imagine this Spanish dude comes
up to you and asks where El Dorado is and
probably don't even really understand him. You've never heard of
El Dorado. So it's a very bloody scene. And um,
(04:25):
eventually the party starts to die, I mean in larger
larger numbers because they're starving and um. Over time, most
of the Indians die, the animals die of the heat,
and finally even most of the dogs have been eaten,
so to survive, Pizzaro decides the only way to get
(04:47):
through is to split up the party, send half of
the group down the river to hopefully try to find food.
And while Pizarro's group eventually retreats over the Andes and
this back with only eighty men, I mean, think of
how many they left with. The other groups sort of
has the more adventurous yet equally harrowing time, definitely. The
(05:10):
guy who's in charge of the second group is Pizarro's
number two, Francisco day Oriyana, and he takes fifty seven
men and two slaves downriver to find food and they
don't know what they're going to find out there, basically,
so just an example of some of the things they
ran into. If they happened to have Dominican friar guess
bar de Carba Hall along for the ride, and he
(05:32):
kept a diary of things that went on during their journey,
and he described the men mad with hunger. He says
that they were actually so hungry that they were reduced
to eating their shoes and belts, which he said were
quote cooked with certain herbs, which for some reason that
makes it sound just doubly worse to me. And you're
trying to you know, like trying to make it real food.
(05:53):
You would almost see it softening belts, animals, flesh. I
don't know, it's risky too to pick random herbs out
of the rainforest, but you know, the group decides to
see what's going to happen. They're they're clearly starving if
they were duced to eating their shoes and belts, and
they're the point of their whole mission was to find
food for the other guys and bring it back. They
(06:14):
know that's not going to happen. They're not going to
be able to make it back to the rest of
the party. So they decide, let's get down the river
or die trying to see what happened. See what happens,
and so it's very tough going there. Indian attacks, uh,
they describe what sounds like Amazon woman attacks. And then
(06:35):
finally on August two, they shoot out into the Atlantic.
So they're the first European men to travel the length
of the Amazon River. But still, even after all that way,
the whole Amazon no El Dorado, no El Dorado, and
that's what they wanted. And Oriana, he can't get his
(06:57):
mind off of the place. Even when he's back into Vain,
he's still thinking about it, and he decides to try
to put together another little mission. Spends all his money
trying to put this together, and he has a ship.
First he's denied permission to sail, and then a ship.
People on it get plague, they get sick and die. Finally,
(07:18):
when they get there, they reached the mouth of the Amazon.
More people die there, and finally Orianna dies, presumably feeling
rather defeated. You could imagine, I would imagine so um so,
I mean, that sounds that's our first trip down the Amazon,
and it's um the events that came immediately after, and
it sounds pretty bad already. It sounds like it can't
(07:40):
get a whole lot worse looking for El Dorado. But
as bad as that one expedition sounds, the truly notorious
mission came two decades later, in fifteen sixty, and the
leader of that party, um Pedro de Orsua, wasn't the
issue with a mission, or at least it seems. He's
(08:02):
described by historian Bart L. Lewis as a thirty five
year old wunderkind, and writer Stephen mint To described him
as a handsome and respected soldier, um but still a
soldier who had some misjudgments, including bringing along his mistress
on this trip to the amazon Um. But the issue
wasn't with him, it was with some of the men
(08:23):
on the party, right. So the men that he brought
along with him were considered undesirables. So getting them away
from settlements and into the rainforest was actually thought of
as a pretty pretty good thing and it was um
one option to kind of minimize I guess the risk
they posed to those settlements. But one of the men
who was on the expedition, one of those undesirable characters,
(08:45):
was a guy named Lope Day a gray and uh,
he sort of was the instigator. He's got quite the reputation.
Maybe you've seen the Verner his Zog movie about him.
He's uh, yeah, we'll find out soon. He's pretty wild guy.
So Dave Geary was actually a lot older than the
leader of the party. He had been around the block
(09:07):
a few times. He was pushing fifty. We're not exactly
sure when he was born, but he was definitely middle
aged during this expedition. In his pre Peruvian life is
extremely obscure. He was probably born fifteen ten to fifteen
eighteen in Onate, Spain, and he came to South America
(09:28):
as a young man and then just went through a
series of jobs. To Plina and I were laughing about that.
Some of these are considered jobs, but they include grave
robbing and alderman and horse breaker. Um, so he got
out of the grave robbing business early on. Do you
imagine that job posting I wanted grave robber. Yeah, both,
(09:51):
that would be good money, better than um el Dorado
hunting it scenes. Um, but a Geary didn't really like Spain.
I mean, if he had come to the colonies with
a love of Spain, he lost it pretty quickly. Um.
He served with Gonzalo Pizarro, who was, you know, the
earlier guy we mentioned, and when he wasn't rewarded for
that service, he served in an uprising against him, and
(10:14):
that was really just the beginning of trouble. Right. He
spent a lot of time fleeing from one part of
South or Central America to another, and he was pretty
much always in trouble an entire time. Just a few
examples of things that he did. He broke a law
against hiring Indian porters and was punished with a hundred
to two hundred lashes and salt in the wounds, which
(10:34):
sounds rather painful. He stabbed the magistrate who sentenced him
in his temple and escaped the city of Cuzco in disguise.
And he also fought with rebels then against them, and
he wounded his leg in hand. And finally he had
a daughter with an Indian woman, which was considered controversial
at the time. So, I mean, the basic situation here
(10:55):
is that he needed a way to escape from his reputation,
redeem his name if he could, um or just go
off the map, if if he couldn't redeem his name,
start something new away from what he considered civilization. Um
folks in charge didn't mind this convenient way to get
(11:16):
rid of kind of a troublesome guy. So on September
fifteen sixty a gear A joined the expedition and went
looking for El Dorado. And El Dorado was thought to
be at the headwaters of the Amazon River, so that's
where they were headed. Yeah, the Amazon was kind of
attractive to them now, and I guess they had sort
of changed their mind about the exact location that I
(11:37):
thought it was. But part of the way into the
trip a gear A he started a rebellion against Ursua,
who he thought was too cautious, so in an Indian
village he had him hacked to death. Yeah, he's pretty
serious about his uh his rebellions way of taking care
of things. So immediately after that murder, he swears allegiance
(11:59):
to der Sue's replacement, a man named Fernando D. Guzman.
And this is where things start to get a little weird.
Um less, just killing one leader and installing a new one.
He raises Gooseman, and the party as a whole raises
Gooseman to king. So he's not just the leader of
(12:20):
the party. They're swearing allegiance to him as king forget
the King of Spain. Uh so, yeah, this is their
first act of disobedience to the crown. But this guy
Guzman doesn't really suit a Geary either, and he's murdered too.
As a Geary later writes and a letter to the
King of Spain about the murder of Da Guzman. He
he says this, they appointed me their field commander, and
(12:43):
because I did not consent to their insults and evil deeds,
they tried to kill me, and I killed the new king,
the captain of his guard, the lieutenant general, his majordomo,
his chaplain, a woman in league against me, a night
of Rhodes, an admiral, two endsigns, and six other of
his allies. It was my intention to carry this war
through and die in it. For the cruelties your ministers
(13:05):
practiced on us, and I again appointed captains in a
sergeant major. They tried to kill me and I hung
them all. That really gives you the gist of Age
as decision making process. He does not mess around, No,
he doesn't. Anybody who opposes him might as well be dead. Um.
So he himself is the new head of the Party
(13:27):
of Men. And he supposedly said that quote, I am
the wrath of God, the Prince of Freedom, lord of
the Tierra Firma and the provinces of Chile. And from
there he sailed down the Amazon or perhaps the Ornoco River,
We're not sure, and kept killing, massacring pretty much all
a lot of people that he met along the way,
and thirty nine people in his own party too. A
(13:49):
witness in the party later wrote that Age was so
sure that his soul could not be saved that he
might as well commit acts of cruelty and wickedness by
which the name of age A would ring throughout the earth,
even to the ninth Heaven. So he figured, I'm not
going to heaven anyway, so I might as well just
be as bad as I want to be. Yeah, and
the reputation spreads, and by fifteen sixty one, when he
(14:12):
takes the island of Margharito off of what is now
the Venezuelan coast and displaces a bunch of Spanish settlers,
he's notorious. Um. The Spanish armies know who he is,
and they're out to get him. Taking the island definitely
means war um. But when he learned that the King's
armies in Venezuela and New Granada were after him, he
(14:34):
writes off this letter to fill up the second and uh.
You can find the whole letter online. It's pretty interesting,
but it's a mixture of very rational complaints and just
complete insanity. Like it sounds like a Garay out in
the rainforest who's gone off as Rocker, but luckily through
(14:56):
a letter and not in person, luckily for the king.
For the king, he's mostly criticizing the King for spending
so much of the money brought home by the conquist
stores from the New World on these German wars, and
not leaving enough for the men when they're old. Um.
But the most famous part of the letter, even though
it's coming from a man who has clearly gone crazy,
(15:18):
seems like actually it's pretty good advice for future El
Dorado mission. He writes, I advise you, King and Lord,
not to attempt nor allow a fleet to be sent
to this ill fated river, because in Christian faith, I
swear King and Lord that if a hundred thousand men come,
none will escape, because the stories are false, and in
(15:39):
this river there is nothing but despair. So finally, the
King's armies do catch up with him, and they capture
him after he crosses back to the mainland, but not
before he has a chance to murder his own daughter,
so no mercy even for his kin, and he is
beheaded on October six e one, and his body parts
(16:01):
are sent throughout the realm and his head displayed in
a cage as a warning to other traders. We keep
on having me. These head heads kind of become a
new sub theme. I think of exhimation, honest um. But
according to Encyclopedia, Britannica. A Gary's name is quote practically
synonymous with cruelty and treachery in colonial Spanish America. UM Yet,
(16:25):
I think it's so interesting. Despite this terrible example of
this man losing it and becoming so power hungry and
depraved that he kills his daughter, he kills all these
men in his own party, he kills all the settlers,
he's coming across all the Indians, He's coming across that.
People still go out looking for El Dorado. Nobody can
(16:48):
give up that myth. And it's interesting. The book I
mentioned earlier, the Lost City of z is dealing with
um hunts for the for El Dorado that go into
the twentieth century. I mean, people just they can't let
it go. Gold is a pretty attractive, when pretty treasure
if you can find it. I think that's about all
for today. But if you want to learn a little
(17:10):
bit more about conquistadors and the Incan Empire, we have
an article called how did one d and sixty eight
Conquistadors take down the Incan Empire? And you can find
that by visiting our homepage and entering in Incan Empire
at www dot how stuff works dot com. For more
(17:32):
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click
on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of
our homepage. The house Stuff Works iPhone app has a rise.
Download it today on iTunes.
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