Search for El Dorado The Lost City of Gold

Search for El Dorado The Lost City of Gold

"CLUES FOR THE HUNT: In 1502, Columbus-on his 4th and last expedition to America-reached Venezuela, so named because its coast looked to him like "an odd little Venice." He had been told that there was "a gold city 10 days from the Ganges." Since he still thought he was in India, he mistook the Orinoco River for the Ganges. Earlier, he momentarily thought he had found El Dorado in Haiti, where nuggets were the size of hen's eggs. In 1510 Balboa, already at the Pacific Ocean and not impossibly far from Cundinamarca, was contemptuously told by an Indian as he knocked a handful of ornaments out of Balboa's hand, "I can tell you of a land where they eat and drink out of golden vessels and gold is as cheap as iron is with you." Cortes, too, had been informed of this land by an Indian slave girl whom he baptized-and then used for 6 years as both translator and mistress. She had merely pointed in the direction of Bogota. "