The search for El Dorado was the greatest of the dream quests of Spain. It was not the first, it was not the last. Along with lesser ventures without number Spain sought certain grand objects. These included the Fountain of Youth, the Earthly Paradise, the Temple of the Sun, the Cradle of Gold, the Country of Cinnamon, the Enchanted City of the Cæsars, the Islands of Solomon, El Gran Moxo, El Gran Paititi, the Sepulchres of Zenu, the Temple of Dobayba, the Seven Cities of Cibola, Quivera the prairie capital. And Spain sought also buried cities and phantom lakes and craters abrim with liquid gold.

Through most of these quests is the flow of delusive water. It sparkles in the youth-conferring spring which De Leon failed to find. It moves in the River Jordan, for which red man and white hunted in Florida. It sweeps past the mythical Quivera, bearing huge canoes with prows of gold. It shines on the far horizon of Cibola, and on it there are barks of Cathay. It glimmers in the tarn of Guatavitá. In the legendary sea of Manoa it reflects the fugitive gold of El Dorado. It laves the enchanted City of the Cæsars hard by the lake of Nahuelhuapi. In the Laguna de los Xarayes it ripples around the island home of El Gran Moxo. It flashes on the beaches of fabled islands west of the southern continent.

There were reasons for the illusory lakes of Spanish adventure. The City of Mexico was seated in a lake with causeways crossing it and canals reaching the heart of the city. The Empire of Peru held Lake Titicaca as sacred. The scarcely less remarkable civilization of the Chibchas of Colombia rendered homage to the lakes of the central plateau. So the Spaniards thought that when they sought other golden cities in the wilderness they would find them on the shores of inland seas.

The periodic inundations of the Orinoco, the Amazon, the Paraguay, and the tributaries of these streams deceived and disturbed men with appearances which they could not understand. One explorer would come upon a vast sheet of still water, and in due time it would get upon the maps. Another would lead his column dry shod over the same place, and men were slow to realize that each had made correct report of what he saw. For example, the legendary lake of Xarayas, long supposed to be the source of the Paraguay, is merely a seasonal inundation; but during high water this transitory sea extends three hundred and fifty miles north and south and one hundred and fifty miles east and west.

The things of the spirit—religion, romance, pure fantasy—animated Spain in some of the quests it followed beside the still waters of the lakes of dream. Its rude chivalry could serve the ideal with a whole heart. But for the most part cavalier and muleteer sought gold alone. Gems, spices, pepper, dyewoods, grain fields, raw materials, rubber, bananas, coffee—these are objects of ancient or modern enterprise in strange lands. They meant little to the Spaniard. Nor was his deepest interest in metal that was still underground. He was looking for the gold that for generation after generation Indian civilizations had brought to the surface and stored in their capital cities. The rewards of savage toil he would seize for himself who better knew their value, or thought he did.

That is why the visionary expeditions of Spain are in the main a search for cities, or, failing these, projects to loot temples and rifle graves. Neither the digging nor the assembling of the golden treasure was in the scheme. The purpose was to take the central treasure houses. So Spain had already done in Peru. The captive Inca Atahuallpa had himself suggested a kindred thing. For ransom he offered to fill his prison chamber, a room seventeen feet wide and twenty-two feet long, with gold to the depth of nine feet, or as high as the reach of the tallest cavalier. When the bargain was made, gold began to pour in from all corners of the empire—statues, vases, vessels, utensils, plaques, disks, chains, temple ornaments, nuggets, and golden dust. Of course his captors killed the Inca, and rushed on to seek the sources whence flowed the maddening stream; and what they found did not satisfy. Much of the treasure of the Incas had disappeared. Nor has it been uncovered since.

Those vain enterprises of Spain, with which a great part of the New World’s sixteenth century was filled, were attempts of adventurers to lay hold of the gold which had escaped the conquistadors in Mexico and Peru, or which it was imagined had escaped them. It was supposed that the descendants of the Montezumas, taking rich treasures with them, had retreated northward to Cibola or to Quivera, and there renewed their state. It was reported, and with some basis of fact, that princes of the Inca blood had gone north, south, or east from Cuzco and set up new cities in the wilderness. The basis of fact was the flight of Manco Capac, called the Last of the Incas. This prince raised the country against its conquerors, flung an army of two hundred thousand warriors against the Spanish garrison in Cuzco, and before night settled on the empire of the Andes gave proof on the battlefield that there was valor in the Quichua blood. At the mountain fortress of Choquequirau, the Cradle of Gold, six thousand feet above the valley of the Apurimac, Peruvian geographers believe the Last of the Incas made his seat.

The Fountain of Youth

It is best to begin the recital of the dream quests of Spain with the dream of all ages—the search for lost youth. It was the first of those adventures in the New World in which the sons of Spain were to show they were different from other men, in that when they imagined a vain thing their imagination rushed on to action.

In an unfinished poem Heine sketches the beginning of this quest. Ponce de Leon, the veteran ex-governor of Porto Rico, lies in his hammock and an old Indian servant sings to him of the Bahama island of Bimini with its bird song and undying flowers, and of its interesting tenants. These were old men restored by a magic spring to riotous youth and beldames who had drunk of its waters and regained girlhood’s bloom; they were afraid to return home because of the scandal their shamefully youthful appearance would work among their friends. Poetic license carries this sketch only a little beyond the credulity of the period, for Peter Martyr had written at length to the bishop of Rome of an island with a youth-restoring spring some three hundred leagues north of Hispaniola.

The Spanish cavalier set sail with three ships in 1512, in search of Bimini. There were nearly seven hundred islands and islets in the Bahamas and his journey was through a labyrinth. For a part of the voyage he had the strangest, and perhaps the most fitting, of pilots. To a clump of islands near the Lucayos he gave the name of La Vieja or the Old Woman group because he found them without inhabitants save one ancient woman. Her he took aboard to help guide him through the sea passages. He found Florida, but he did not find Bimini, which was discovered later by his captain, Juan Perez de Ortubia, the sagacious old woman directing him to its shore. The water there was like any other water. Ponce de Leon, however, escaped the disabilities of age. A poisoned Indian arrow launched from a Florida bow did for him when he was about sixty-one.

Before his death, the quest for a fountain from which one might quaff the draught of youth had been broadened to include a River Jordan of rejuvenating baths. This was somewhere on the peninsula of Florida, where for half a century red men and white searched for it, bathing in every stream, lagoon, and swamp they found, in the hope that the magic water, in some sudden transformation scene, might betray its whereabouts.

Though they did not know it, the Spaniards themselves brought to the New World the legend of the fountain of youth and the name of Bimini, as well as that of the River Jordan. Wiener has traced each step. In 1493, a year before the Pope made the line of demarcation between the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, he had given to Spain the newly discovered lands on condition that the natives should be baptized in the Catholic faith. Amerigo Vespucci falsely reported that, in compliance therewith, a fountain of baptism had been placed on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. Peter Martyr in his Decade of 1511 called this the fonte perenni, but the cartographer misread his Latin, and on the map attached to his work a coast line north of Cuba is called isla de beimeni parte. Thus the perennial fountain became Bimini, and the fiction of a Christian baptismal font revived a pagan myth.

The Enchanted City of the Cæsars

The quest of the Enchanted City of the Cæsars was the southernmost adventure of the dreaming mind of Spain. It was prosecuted along the slopes of the southern Andes and the Patagonian plains beyond—that mysterious and desolate region which made so deep an impression upon Darwin. Over the remote prairies, peopled only by huanacos and roving bands of tall savages, Spanish commands hunted for a capital which the natives called Trapalanda, and which, according to the oath of those who said they had seen it, was as great as ancient Nineveh and as populous as Peking.

Outbound to the Moluccas, the story ran, a vessel belonging to the bishop of Palancia was shipwrecked in the Straits of Magellan. The captain of the stranded craft, Sebastian de Arguello, found himself on the Patagonian coast with three thousand miles of mountain and plain between his little band and the outpost of Spanish power at Cuzco. Followed by about two hundred soldiers and sailors, thirty adventurers, twenty-three married women, and three priests, he struck boldly into the heart of the pampas, moving northward. When the company reached a region of lakes and meadows rimmed by snowy summits resolution was taken to found there an independent state aloof from the perturbations of the world. Other fugitives had reached this inviting spot before the Spaniards—a numerous native people flying from the wreck of Peru.

It would seem from the rapid growth of the city which was said to have arisen upon the shore of Lake Nahuelhuapi that red men and white mingled their blood. The first report of the austral capital reached Concepcion in Chile, in 1557.

The Spanish settlements were led to picture a great, rich city in the south. A strong wall ran around it, and over it the roving Indians of the prairies could see reddish roofs that gleamed as with gold. The houses were of cut stone and those who had been within them spoke of beds, chairs, and table service made of precious ores. The central edifice in the capital was a noble church roofed with silver, and from it were decreed and regulated the pompous festivals of the ecclesiastical year.

Wishing to keep their isolation inviolate, its inhabitants had an understanding with the Indians that the secret of the city should be told to none. But when it received the name of La Ciudad encantada de los Cæsares (the enchanted City of the Cæsars), it was a presage that from all the Spanish settlements of the south, expeditions should go forth to seek it out, for the very words were a challenge to the imagination.

It was called the city of the Cæsars because the men who founded it had been subjects of Charles V of Spain, whom men had styled the Cæsar in recognition of his world-wide dominion. It was called enchanted because of the beauty of its lake setting and the splendors within its walls. Soon its people became known as the Cæsars, and the men who conducted expeditions to reach them as the Cæsaristas.

There were other motives for the quest beside the golden treasure to be found there and the wish to visit a clime so fair that none died save of old age. Here were a kindred people, cut off from their fellows, and, it might be, lapsing decade after decade into a splendid barbarism. The purity of their Christian faith was in danger of corruption from every sort of heathen error. Civilization and religion were both concerned in the rescue of this fascinating creole capital, which had done so well by itself and yet needed to renew its contacts with the world. So said the Spaniard wherever fortune had placed him—in the homeland, in Mexico, in the Philippines, and most of all in the colonies of the southern Cordilleras and the eastern plains.

There were a number of small expeditions to seek the legendary city, and three of importance. Diego Flores de Leon reached Lake Nahuelhuapi from the Pacific side, heard of savage armies massed on his front, and went no further. Half a century later came the Jesuit father, Nicolas Mascardi. Fearing that the southern capital might have forgotten the mother tongue of Spain, he collaborated with another churchman in a letter which was translated into seven languages—Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Chilean, Puelche, and Poya. The letter was sent ahead by an Indian courier after he reached the shores of Nahuelhuapi. Hearing a report that the site of the city was near the Atlantic, he crossed the continent, and then turned southward toward the Straits of Magellan, falling at last to an Indian arrow. This was in 1673. More than a century afterward the Franciscan friar, Menendez, was sent out by the viceroy of Peru, but found no city beside Nahuelhuapi.

Thereafter faith in the fable died, save among the imaginative and the credulous. Of the former was Charles III of Spain, who died believing it in 1788. Of the latter are the common people of Chile and Argentina, who see in the streams of lava and volcanic sand at the foot of Osorno the roads of a hidden people, and who still hear in the noise of the avalanches upon Tronador the thunder of artillery along enchanted battlements.

The Seven Cities of Cibola

In the quest of the Seven Cities of Cibola Spain dreamed northward, and again deluded itself by the magic and sonority of a name. When the fable was full blown it was of a city as great as the capital of the Montezumas and ruled by a fugitive prince of that house. Lesser cities surrounded it, as they surrounded Tenochtitlan on the plateau of Anahuac. It stood beside a great inland sea out of which flowed the Colorado, and on the coasts of this land were ships from China.

The inhabitants of the plains were cattle of deformed shape and ferocious aspect, which the Spaniards called the kine of Cibola. The inhabitants of the seven cities, says Friar Marcos, who saw them at a distance, were a people “somewhat white,” clad in cotton garments and dwelling in stone houses with flat roofs. The Franciscan continues: “They have emeralds and other jewels, although they esteem none as much as turquoises, wherewith they adorn the walls and porches of their houses, and their apparel and vessels, and they use them instead of money through all the country. They use vessels of gold and silver, for they have no other metal, whereof there is greater avail and more abundance than in Peru.”

This capital of the buffalo country was located within the limits of the present United States. Somewhat shrunken from the dimensions of legend, it is still in existence and the descendants of the men fabled to traffic with Cathay go about its streets. Their skins are darker than Marcos reported them, but they have the features and expression of white men.

Here is another myth of a gilded land and a refugee king, but overlaid with material of a strange texture brought from afar. Its scene is inland where buffalo are feeding; yet one of its windows commands the Pacific with slanting Chinese sails upon it, and into the other comes an old tale of the open Atlantic. The Seven Cities of Cibola are the legendary seven cities of Antilia, founded by seven Spanish bishops who fled the Moor, and they are the seven caves out of which came the Aztecs. But they are also seven towns, the remains of which, waste or tenanted, are to be found in New Mexico near the Arizona line. The vice of the legend is that they are small towns, and poor.

There are names of consequence in the quest of the Seven Cities of Cibola, but a broad blotch of buffoonery is smeared across it. Alone of all the visionary searches of Spain, it invites the treatment of ironic burlesque. Yet there is heroism in the story and a great chapter of geography.

The first of these names is that of the luckless but stout-hearted Cabeza de Vaca who left a trail of wandering mishap clear across the continent of North America, and who was yet to break new paths through the forests and savannas of South America where he founded the capital of the Silver Republic. In 1536 the outposts of Melchior Diaz, who commanded in the northern Mexican district of Culiacan, came upon a strange party—a white man, nearly naked, with matted hair and beard, a negro, and eleven Indians. The white man spoke in Spanish and with such joyful agitation as to arouse a momentary suspicion. It was Cabeza de Vaca. His negro companion was named Estivanico. There were three other Spaniards a day’s march behind. In what was to follow, singularly enough, the negro is the central figure; in what had gone before the story is the Spanish captain’s.

In 1527 he had sailed for Florida as treasurer of an expedition with five vessels and six hundred men, in search of the Golden Apalache, one of the minor dream quests of Spain. Quitting the fleet in a Florida bay, three hundred men marched inland to their objective. What they found was a collection of forty wigwams on the Suwanee River and a rude people that engaged them in daily skirmishes at arms. So they marched on, became entangled in the swamps and bayous along the coasts of Alabama and Louisiana, made one fatal attempt to build rafts and cross the Gulf to the Mexican coast, and then succumbed by degrees to the wilderness. All but four of the Spaniards perished and these were buffeted from tribe to tribe in an aimless drift westward. They had almost reached the Gulf of California when they met the Spanish outpost, and in eight years they had wandered from Atlantic to Pacific.

What they told launched the search for the Seven Cities of Cibola. Farther north they had found tribes of sedentary Indians living in stone houses, wearing cotton garments and turquoise ornaments, and with indications of stores of gold to draw upon. Francisco Vasquez Coronado, governor of Northwest Mexico, was commissioned by Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain, to explore in that direction. Distrusting the reports of Cabeza de Vaca, his first step was a reconnaissance under the Franciscan, Fray Marcos. As guide and attendant the negro Estevanico went with him, and a party of Pima Indians accompanied them. They started northward from Culiacan in 1539, following the coast. In Sonora the friar committed the folly of sending the negro ahead with instructions to report to him at intervals by messenger. If he found a mean thing he was to send a cross a hand’s length long; if a larger matter, a cross two hands’ long; if the negro found a country better than New Spain he was to send back a great cross.

That was the last Fray Marcos saw of the negro, but he heard from him, and from time to time he heard about him. Four days after his departure an Indian came back bearing a wooden cross as high as a man and the word of Estevanico that thirty days’ march ahead were seven cities abounding in pearls and gold, and all subject to one lord. The houses were of stone and mortar, one, two, and three stories high, and the chief’s house was of four stories. One of the cities was named Cibola. As the friar proceeded, the natives brought tales which seemed to confirm the reports, and used place names that suggested grandeur. He heard of a province called Totoneac, of the city of Ahacus, and of the kingdoms of Hacus and Marata.

Meanwhile Africa was blazing a trail far ahead into Darkest America. It was broad, dusty with the feet of an accumulating multitude, and finger-posted by avarice and imposture. The negro had taken the adventure out of the hands of the too-trusting monk. In his wanderings with Cabeza de Vaca he had won assurance, some knowledge of the Indian nature, and a gourd rattle. He moved with the state and tumult of a medicine-man, this clapper his potent emblem of authority. The superstitious natives met all his demands, and he demanded much—more food than he could use, gold, green stones, women. The monk followed, several journeys behind, in a sort of anti-climax.

The procession of the black Bacchus had its inevitable ending. Marcos learned it while he was still some days from his goal. He met a number of the Indians who had been with Estevanico, and they were flying toward Mexico. They told of entering Cibola with the negro, where his arrogance and folly mounted to new levels. Noting the lowering looks of the sedentary Indians, several of these plains Indians went outside and, hiding themselves, awaited the finish they foresaw. One day they beheld their companions running from the town with men in pursuit. The negro was not with them. His hosts had killed him.

With two of the Indians Marcos went on to a hill from which he looked down upon a valley dotted with villages. The nearest of these and not the largest was Cibola. To Marcos it seemed “as large as the City of Mexico.” It is situate, he says, “on a plain at the foot of a round hill, and maketh shew to be a fair city, and is better seated than any that I have seen in these parts. The houses are builded in order, all made of stone with divers storeys and flat roofs.” Then he adds from hearsay details of golden vessels and turquoise-studded porches.

Setting up a wooden cross, Marcos hastened back, rejoicing, to make his report to the viceroy. Out of what he told, and the far-sounding names of provinces and kingdoms which he had heard, the Spanish mind made a thing too rich for the haggard realities of the American southwest. It seemed to call for a well-appointed expedition, and Coronado urged this on the viceroy.

With Marcos as his guide he was dispatched with a land force of three hundred and twenty Spaniards, three hundred native allies, and a thousand Indian and negro camp followers. He left San Miguel in February, 1540, and in May a fleet under Alarcon was sent from Acapulco to act in concert with him along the coast of the Gulf of California. Alarcon went to the head of the gulf with his ships, and up the Colorado, but, learning from natives that white men had already entered Cibola, he returned with his fleet to Acapulco.

What Coronado had entered was the Indian pueblo of Zuñi and its attendant villages in northwestern New Mexico. As soon as his soldiers beheld these little settlements, writes Castaneda, who went with the expedition, they “broke out in curses against Fray Marcos.” They accused him of deceiving them, and in fear of his life he was glad to go back with the courier who bore to the viceroy the report of Coronado. “I can assure your honour,” says the report, “the friar said the truth in nothing that he reported, saving only the names of the cities and great houses of stone; for although they be not wrought with turquoises, nor with lime nor brick, yet are they very excellent houses of three or four or five lofts high, wherein are good lodgings and fair chambers. The seven cities are seven small towns, and they stand all within four leagues together, and none of them is called Cibola, but altogether they are called Cibola.”

In his scholarly account of this expedition Bandelier defends the credulous monk, and urges that the Spaniards had tricked out his story with their own imaginings. He argues that the comparison with the City of Mexico was not with the old Aztec capital, but with the new Spanish town which, as Fray Marcos knew it in 1539, may not have had as many as a thousand inhabitants. As to the statement that the citizens of Cibola embellished their houses with green stones or turquoises, it has been learned that it was an old custom in Zuñi to decorate the roof hatches by which the people descended to their chambers with turquoise, malachite, phosphate of copper and other stones or ores of green and blue. This was truthful detail, although lending itself to exaggeration. But the golden vessels, which most concerned the Spaniard, were fable, and the Coronado expedition had cost $250,000.

Despite the forthright words of Coronado, one conquistador who would look facts in the face, his countrymen were unwilling to surrender the vision all at once. The English merchant, Henry Hawks, spent five years in Mexico and in 1572 made this report: “The Spanyards have notice of seven cities which old men of the Indians shew them should lie towards the northwest from Mexico. They have used and use dayly much diligence in seeking of them, but they cannot find any one of them. They say that the witchcraft of the Indians is such, that when they come by these townes they cast a mist upon them, so that they cannot see them.”

Zuñi lies south of the great Navaho reservation, and is a pueblo of the same type as Taos, Acoma, Laguna, and the Hopi towns. Its identification with the Seven Cities of Cibola rests on the reports of the explorers themselves, on an examination of their routes, and especially on the researches of Frank H. Cushing, commissioner of the American Bureau of Ethnology, who became a member of this Indian tribe in 1880 and lived with it four years while he studied its traditions. At that time Zuñi had sixteen hundred inhabitants.

These people called their home Shivano (Spanish, Civano). Cushing found that the sonorous Marata and Tontoneac were not kingdoms or provinces, but directions, and that one of the distant “cities” named by the natives was Acoma, which lies near the Mesa Encantada. While the Spaniards had denied that Marcos and Estevanico really made a journey to the north, Cushing heard from the Zuñi story-tellers that a “black Mexican” had come among them and had been killed for his rudeness to their women. Soon afterwards the first “white Mexicans” they had seen entered their land as conquerors.

Quivera

Coronado was not content to bring back his costly expedition, empty-handed, from the fiasco of Cibola. Again he dreamed northward, and the name of his dream is Quivera. Between this city of illusion in the Mississippi Valley, and the city of enchantment which the Cæsars had reared on the edge of the Patagonian plain, it is six thousand miles in a straight line. These two capitals of the mirage are the farthest north and farthest south of Spanish fantasy.

The conqueror of Cibola drifted into the Quivera adventure by degrees. There must be richer pueblos east of the seven towns, he thought, and went in search of them, discovering and occupying many. But he found New Mexico a sterile land. He became interested in the great buffalo herds that roamed the plains to the north and sent his lieutenant, Alvarado, on a hunt to secure meat. Alvarado took with him as a guide an Indian from somewhere far to the east whom he found living with the Pecos tribe and who figures in Spanish writings as El Turco, “the Turk,” which was what he looked like. The Spaniard did not stay long among the buffalos, for the homesick Turk had an exciting tale to tell. With it, Alvarado hastened back to his chief, and soon, with El Turco as pathfinder, the columns started toward the northeast and Quivera.

This was another golden city in a prosperous land. Through the land ran a river two leagues wide in which swam fish as large as horses. There were great canoes upon the river, with as many as forty men to drive them, and these had golden eagles for figureheads. The native sovereign slumbered in the afternoons beneath a tree the branches of which were hung with golden bells, where the wind made music. The houses of Quivera were built of stone and were like those of the pueblos of New Mexico, but larger and fairer. The meats and drinks of its citizens were served in vessels of precious metals.

Of this land the Turk himself was a native. But there was another Indian exile with the party. His name was Ysopete, and he, too, spoke of Quivera. It seemed to be a different place farther north.

With one guide bent on leading him northward and the other eastward, the expedition which Coronado conducted toward Quivera moved like a man lost in the wilderness. It traveled to the right for thirty-seven days and partly returned on its tracks. Soon the Spaniards became confused and ill at ease. In the vast monotony of the staked plains they saw no marks by which they could guide themselves forward or find the way back. A sense of helplessness stole over them. The very bison that grazed around them excited a sort of fear. Their horses went wild with terror when for the first time they saw these huge, misshapen beasts, whose glowing eyes and hollow bellowing were calculated to inspire awe even in men.

The wanderers were in latitudes less kindly to illusion than those where other men were seeking the Gilded King, and a glimmer of the scientific and reasoning spirit which weighs motives and scrutinizes facts was born in them. Was not this story of Quivera the Golden just a tale told by the settled Indians in order to get rid of them? Had not El Turco been instigated to lure them by confused trails into the wilderness and leave them to perish there? Had not one of them detected him talking to the devil in a pitcher of water?

While they harbored these distrustful forebodings the Spaniards fell in with a party of plains Indians who knew Quivera. It was forty days’ march ahead, they said, and the columns would die for lack of food and water upon the way. Stone buildings and plentiful provisions in precious vessels at the end of the way? The prairie nomads knew of none of these things. They spoke of an encampment where the houses were made of straw and skins, and a little maize in them, naught else. The shifty Turk changed his story. He had not told the truth, he admitted, as to the houses of Quivera, but it had a numerous population and a store of precious metals. In anger the Spaniards put shackles upon him. They were ready to go back, but Coronado was determined, without risking too many lives, at least to see for himself what lay at the end of the trail. He took twenty-nine horsemen, the manacled El Turco, and Ysopete, and rode northward with the plains Indians.

After thirty days of hard riding through a great treeless plain dotted with buffalo herds and watered by a number of small streams, Coronado reached Quivera, where he stayed twenty-five days. He describes the region about it as a rich land in which grew plums like those of Spain, mulberries, and well-flavored grapes. But the settlement itself was merely the summer camp of an Indian horde that followed the buffalo and supplemented a beef diet with corn cakes, made from maize grown in the river bottoms.

The explorer tells the story with rough candor. “I had been told,” he says, “that the houses were made of stone and were several stories; they are only of straw, and the inhabitants are as savage as any that I have seen. They have no clothes, nor cotton to make them out of; they simply tan the hides of the cows which they hunt, and which pasture around their village and in the neighborhood of a large river. They eat their meat raw, and are enemies to one another and war among one another. All these men look alike.”

As Estevanico had met his fate at Cibola, so the Turk met his at Quivera. Its people did not know him, but they welcomed Ysopete, and for his sake the Spaniards. El Turco sought to lay the blame on the New Mexican Indians, who, he said, had engaged him to lead the Spaniards to their fate on the prairies. This tale failing to help his credit, he tried to raise Quivera against his masters, who incontinently hanged him.

Before turning southward to rejoin his command and take it back to Mexico, Coronado set up a wooden cross which bore a soldierly inscription, “Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, leader of a campaign, came to this place.”

Four states claim Quivera, and the blind wanderings of the Spaniards give conjecture a broad field to work in. One thing certain is that La Gran Quivera, the new Mexican mission, established after the suppression of the Indian uprisings in 1580, does not stand on its site. Bandelier thinks the site was in central Kansas about a hundred miles north of the Arkansas River. It has severally been contended that Quivera was a camp of the Wichita Indians; that it was in Nebraska not far from the state capital; and that the place the Spaniards reached was in the southwest corner of Missouri. Cyrus Thomas, who supports the latter view, holds that El Turco came from some tribe near the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi, that the great stream of which he spoke was the latter river and Quivera a town on its banks, while the place seen by Coronado was simply the homeland of Ysopete. Whatever the region, it would be as vain to seek the site as to look for the camping ground in the desert where some forgotten Arab tribe pitched its tents for a night, and struck them at sunrise.

The Islands of Solomon

There came a time when the New World was too small to hold the visions of Spain. North and south the conquistadors had marched, seeking what they did not find. So they dreamed westward over the sea. They had plunged their hands in gold. They might yet bathe in it at the Baths of Sunset.

As always, there were stories of islands in near-by waters where the superstition or simplicity of the natives had heaped up treasure that more deserving men might seize. The Spaniards went after it, at first from Mexico. Then from the harbors of Peru ships began to sail westward, and fantasies spread over the deep.

These voyages add two titles to the dream quests of Spain—the Enchanted Islands and the Isles of Solomon—and the names may stand for one reality. About six hundred miles west of the mainland of South America, and on the line of the equator, lie the Galapagos, comprising five large and ten smaller islands. From the Peruvians the Spaniards learned of them, but for a while they could not find them. They were vaguely called the Islas Encantadas because they seemed to elude the search. The buccaneers used them later as sallyports from which to attack the Peruvian plate fleet. Still later whalers resorted thither, but not until 1832 did Ecuador occupy the group.

This archipelago of the west may have been the basis of the legend that grew up among the seafaring folk of Peru. It was told that the Inca Tupac Yupanqui had made a voyage and come upon two islands which were called Nina-chumpi and Hahua-chumpi, or Fire Island and Outer Island. He brought back gold and silver, a throne of copper, black slaves, and the skin of an animal like a horse. Another account said the islands were distant a journey of two months, and one was so large it might be a continent. There were sheep, llamas and deer upon it and a bareheaded people who wore cotton and woolen garments. Although their king dwelt in a palace with mud walls, a frieze of gold ran around it.

A later legend, purporting to tell of a Spanish discovery, is very definite: A long time before, a ship from Chile had been driven out of its course to a large island, which it coasted for fifty days. One of the seamen, Juan Montanes, went ashore and found a race of tall, bearded Indians and women whose braided hair reached to their ankles. They lived in communal houses four hundred feet long by one hundred feet wide. Numerous rafts and sumptuously decorated canoes thronged with people plied along the coasts. Because of his beard, the natives treated the Spaniard kindly and pressed a gold plate and emeralds upon him.

The account continues with the exactness of a seaman’s chart: “These islands must be reached from Puerto de Arica, taking the volcano in the bay as a landmark, such being the custom of the Indians who come and go thither. As soon as the said volcano disappears, the desert islands are reached. Going in among them, after two days the large island which seems to be a continent is sighted, and what lies to the west is still to be discovered.”

There are elements in this story, such as the communal houses and the ornate canoes, borrowed from actual expeditions to the South Seas which the earlier legend itself had launched. What these expeditions had set out to find was a continent about two thousand miles to the west, which stretched northward for three thousand miles from the latitude of Tierra del Fuego to 15 degrees south, or almost on a line with Callao; a domain about the size of that afterward discovered and named Australia, but lying on the near side of the Pacific. Rumors of such a continent passed from tavern gossip to palace conferences. Sarmiento de Gamboa had gathered and analyzed Inca traditions of Pacific islands and the learned men of the colony assumed that a continental mass lay behind them. So in 1567 the governor of Peru dispatched two small ships with one hundred and fifty men and put his youthful nephew, Alvarado de Mendana, in command.

An incredible thing happened. These frail vessels, provisioned for a voyage of two thousand miles, drove westward without sighting land for seven thousand miles. In two months they crossed the width of the Pacific, making their land-fall in the East Indies. For six months the crews explored the capes, creeks, and jungles of a group of islands flanking New Guinea on the east. Then the ships started back and were off Callao twenty months after they had left it. They brought no gold, but stories of “a naked, cheerful people of a bright reddish colour”—in reality, head-hunting cannibals, to this day the most savage of men.

Nearly thirty years went by before another expedition was undertaken, and meanwhile legend was at work. It gave the distant group the name it bears upon the map. These were called the Isles of Solomon, says Lopez Vaz, “to the ende that the Spaniards, supposing them to bee those Isles from whence Solomon fetched gold to adorne the temple at Jerusalem, might bee the more desirous to goe and inhabit the same.” But the Portuguese writer adds that because Drake and other raiders had entered the South Seas, it was determined not to settle them, so that interloping vessels Molucca-bound might have no succor on the way.

In 1595 Mendana, now middle aged, undertook to colonize the islands, going out with four ships and 368 emigrants—men, women and children, his own wife among them. Then another amazing thing happened. The Spaniards could not find the Solomons. They discovered the Marquesas, and in the island of Santa Cruz founded a short-lived colony where Mendana died and whence the expedition went forth again to disaster. Quiros, Mendana’s great lieutenant, returning to Peru, represented to the viceroy that the islands come upon by his chief must screen an unknown continent, as in fact they did. In 1605 he was sent out to find them. He discovered the Society Islands, the Duff group and the New Hebrides, but nowhere was there trace of the Isles of Solomon.

Dissolved into fable, for two centuries they were lost to geography. In the waterside taverns of Peru, people still talked of them. But it had become a maxim of the viceroys to treat the discovery as a romance, and learned men concurred. The group was erased from the maps of the world. Although it includes ten great islands stretching for six hundred miles in an almost unbroken barrier across the track of navigators, and although the first Spanish expedition brought back information so detailed that every headland and harbor which Mendana passed has since been identified, yet for two hundred years nobody could find the archipelago. When it was rediscovered it was from the other direction. Carteret and Bougainville, rounding Africa and entering the South Seas in the latter part of the eighteenth century, came upon islands which were found to be the lost lands of Spain.

The Sepulchers of Zenu

There are significant words in Raleigh’s Discovery of Guiana. Here, he says, “commanders that shoot at honour and abundance shall find more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with treasure, than either Cortez found in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru.” Moreover, it is virgin soil: “the graves have not bene opened for golde, nor the Images puld downe out of their temples.” Spain’s hunger for gold pursued the Indians into their sanctuaries, and even into their graves.

The Bachelor Enciso and Balboa, each in turn commander of Darien, sought golden treasures, which, as report ran, Indian piety had heaped in the wilderness.

Enciso went forth to sack the Sepulchers of Zenu. This province lay some twenty leagues west of Cartagena. From its steeps the rains washed gold down in such profusion that the natives caught in nets nuggets as big as eggs. Zenu was also the cemetery for all the tribes of the country. For ages they had brought their dead thither for burial, and deposited golden ornaments with the bodies in the tombs. The soil, the Spanish lawyer thought, must have become incredibly rich from this long accumulation. It was no sacrilege to plunder the dead, for were these not pagans, buried according to the rites of an idolatrous faith?

Landing on the coast of Zenu, Enciso found an army under two caciques drawn up to oppose him. The lawyer in him prompted him to put his opponents in the wrong before appealing to arms. So he had a formal statement read to the two chiefs. The colloquy which followed, and which he reports himself, is one of the most interesting incidents in all the contacts of white men with savages. The statement recited that there was one God who ruled in heaven, that in the Pope He had a vicar who ruled on earth, and that the latter had awarded Zenu to the King of Spain. The Indians replied that they accepted the sovereignty of God in heaven, but nothing further. The Pope, they said, must have been drunk, to give away what did not belong to him, and the King somewhat mad, to ask of him what was not his to give. If the King came to take it, they would cut off his head and set it on a stake; and they pointed to other stakes on which heads were set.

Whereupon there was fighting, in which, Enciso says, the Indians had the worse of it. But two of his men, slightly wounded by poisoned arrows, died raving; the country was hostile beyond what he had anticipated, and his force small. He went away without rifling the sepulchers.

The Temple of Dobayba

Balboa, succeeding Enciso at Darien, heard of a province called Dobayba forty leagues away on the banks of the Atrato. It was named either from a goddess or from an Indian princess to whom, after death, divine honors were paid. Her worship was conducted in a great temple, whither natives came with their offerings. At stated times the caciques of remote provinces sent a golden tribute, together with slaves for sacrifice.

Superstition and fear piled up treasure at this shrine. At one time its worship had been neglected. Then a great drought fell upon the land, the springs and rivers dried up, and a scourge of death was visited upon the neglectful nations. The survivors renewed their zeal and redoubled their offerings of slaves and gold. Thus from generation to generation the wealth of many peoples drained into the blood-stained temple. The prospect of spoiling a heathen shrine profaned by human sacrifice and piled high with idolatrous gold presented itself not as a desecration but as a duty.

On his first journey Balboa mistook a deserted frontier village for the temple town. When he went again, it was at the behest of Pedrarias, who had been made governor of the colony, and whose jealousy prompted him to set Balboa a task that might bring disgrace. The quest of Dobayba was now deemed an enterprise of romantic promise but of high hazard. The way thither led through tribes of bold and crafty savages. In the dreary fens lurked animals to be dreaded, including monstrous importations from classic myth. Clouds of mosquitoes swarmed above the stagnant water, sinister lizards crawled on the banks, crocodiles haunted the ooze. Dragons couched there, so said report, and huge bats flitted by on vampire errands. Peter Martyr even mentions two harpies. A later age was to discover the enigmatic White Indians. Rather than enter this accursed region, the coast natives were wont to shun the direct routes and travel the steep paths of the mountains.

Balboa was to win neither gold nor glory upon his forbidding mission. Passing up the Gulf of Oraba and into the river Atrato with a fleet of canoes, the expedition was ambushed by Indian canoes, losing half its number. Its leader, wounded, made shore with the remainder and at sunset began a crestfallen retreat to Darien.

The temple of Dobayba—if there was a temple—was left inviolate, to receive the gold and shed the blood of heathen until the tropical forest swept in and buried it in a green oblivion.

Other Quests

Of certain other Spanish quests less has been recorded, because they were incidental to larger undertakings or were conducted by small parties of adventurers, monks, or treasure-seekers, rather than by columns of troops sent out by provincial governments. Pious men sought the Terrestrial Paradise toward the headwaters of the Orinoco. From all points of the compass explorers hunted for the Kingdom of Women. Sometimes the conquistadors reiterated their own exploits, as when Federmann looked for the House of the Sun in the Colombian Andes, although under the name of the Temple of the Sun it had already fallen to Pizarro. The adventure of the Golden Chain was attempted on several occasions, parties of Spaniards undertaking to drain the crater lake of Urcos, into which, tradition said, had been flung a massive chain of gold long enough to encircle the great square at Cuzco.

The quest of the Cradle of Gold is of the last century, and here the magic of a name again wrought its spell, two hundred years after the feet of the conquistadors had passed. Bingham, who climbed to this ruined mountain fortress a dozen years ago, believes that Choquequirau is just a name of Indian poetry, misunderstood. Seen from a distance, the ridge on which it lies resembles a hammock, and its only gold may be that which the setting sun flings upon it. But the name itself, and the vagueness of knowledge as to its last defenders, led to various attempts to reach the ruin from the valley below. One party brought back reports of rock-built “palaces, paved squares, temples, prisons and baths.” The prefect of the Peruvian department of Apurimac, using a company of soldiers and Indian carriers, built a way across the rocky gorges and up the steep mountain side to Choquequirau. This, it is thought, was the eyrie of the last Inca—neither temple town nor treasure house, but a frontier fortress of the long ago.

The legendary Laguna de los Xarayes was indicated on the early maps of South America as lying at the sources of the Paraguay. In it was the splendid island home of El Gran Moxo. The imagery of the Hebrew prophets was borrowed to describe his palace with its golden and silvern vessels, its doors of bronze where living lions in chains of gold kept guard, its cloud-like tower where a disk of silver, in shape like the moon, shed light over the waters.

Explorers sought this island magnificence in vain. When they came in the dry season, they could not find even the lake in which it swam, for what seemed to be a vast lagoon was merely high water on the Paraguay.

One of the golden visions of Spain recoiled upon its head. The Spaniards would not have it that with a single blow they had struck down the power of the Incas and laid hold of all their riches. It seemed to them they had merely precipitated a dispersal and an exodus—the going out of Indian princes and property to found new seats elsewhere. One of these was the great city of Paytiti, also called the White House, which had risen near the confluence of the Huallaga and Marañon in the forests of Peru. The legend which the conqueror propagated of a fugitive dynasty grown strong in exile was cherished by the humbled Quichuas, and twice it roused them to arms.

In 1740 Juan Santos assumed the name of Atahuallpa, raised an army from the uncivilized members of various tribes, drove out the missionaries, and for a space made the name and power of Paytiti a fact on the borders of Peru. Again, in 1780, Tupac-Amaru, a descendant of the Incas, appealed to the legend, aroused the country, abolished enforced mine service and ecclesiastical dues, and became master of most of the Peruvian plateau. The insurrection was put down and its leader executed, but the injustices he had fought were never restored in full vigor, and passed altogether when Peru rose against Spain in the War of Independence. The dream of Paytiti had become a vision of liberation.