“To Seek New Worlds, for Gold, for Praise, for Glory”: El Dorado and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Guiana

Abstract

In the spring of 1595, Sir Walter Raleigh undertook an expedition to the north coast of South America with the express purpose of discovering El Dorado, the fabled golden city. Upon his arrival in the area, Raleigh quickly came into conflict with Antonio de Berrío, the governor of Spanish Trinidad, who was gripped by a similar enfermedad doradista. Berrío and Raleigh met at a critical historical moment. Theirs was an inflection point in the trajectory of the European enterprise in the New World, as for a fleeting interval during the decades surrounding the turn of the seventeenth century mutually exclusive paradigmatic frameworks for the future of the colonizing project existed in a delicate balance. Surprisingly, Berrío and Raleigh were more alike than different in their words and actions. Insofar as the men were representatives of the expansionary vanguards of their respective empires, their interwoven narratives offer a vantage point onto the similar ideological crossroads at which the Atlantic ambitions of Spain and England had arrived by the turn of the seventeenth century. The conjunction of Berrío and Raleigh in pursuit of El Dorado crystallized the role of the golden myth in characterizing a wasteful and wanton approach to the subordination of the Americas to European ends with distinct temporal delimitations. Berrío, who died in 1597, would not live to see the end of this moment, but Raleigh would – his second expedition to Guiana in 1617, which would ultimately cost him his head, was already an anachronism.