The Search for El Dorado

Volume VIII of Theodor De Bry's Grand Voyages.

The story of El Dorado was one of the most influential myths connected with the ‘New World.’ The legend first appeared in the 1530s or 40s as a story of an Indian chief who was rich enough to cover himself with gold dust during certain ceremonies; this chief was the golden man, “El Hombre Dorado.” The legend had its source in the Colombian highlands, near present-day Bogota, but when the Spanish conquistadors reached this region they found no such rich chief or kingdom. The legend didn’t die, however, but instead transformed itself and moved slowly across the continent. After an amazing series of horrific and unsuccessful searches for El Dorado, the myth finally solidified as a story about a rich city of El Dorado, called Manoa by the natives, located on a huge lake in the highlands of Guiana.

In 1595, Sir Walter Raleigh set sail to find El Dorado. His search was unsuccessful, but Raleigh continued to believe in the city, and the report he wrote on the subject was the first popularization of the legend. This is De Bry’s version of Raleigh’s account of his expedition in search of El Dorado. It uses Raleigh’s text which appeared earlier, but with its greater distribution and its inclusion of the first images of El Dorado, De Bry’s version had a significant impact on the European imagination. As Michael Alexander said, De Bry’s work “brought to the European public the first realistic visualization of the exotic world opened up across the Atlantic by the explorers, conquerors and settlers.” (Discovering the New World, p. 7). These illustrations are imaginary, but they do give us a unique view of how this most famous of legends was understood at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

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