rmous treasures of the last Inca
of Peru to pay much heed to the lure of golden legends beckoning them
further inland. The first attempt to go in search of the gilded man
and his kingdom was made, not by a Spaniard, but by a German, Ambrosius
Dalfinger, who was in command of a colony of his countrymen settled on
the shore of the Gulf of Venezuela, a large tract of that region having
been leased by Spain to a German company. He pushed inland to the
westward as far as the Rio Magdalena, treated the natives with horrible
barbarity, and was driven back after losing most of his men.

A few years later, and the legend was magnified into a wondrous
description of a golden city. In 1538, there marched from the Atlantic
coast, Gonzalo Ximenes de Quesada, surnamed _El Conquistador_, to find
the El Dorado. At the head of six hundred and twenty-five
foot-soldiers and eighty-five mailed horsemen, he made his perilous way
up the Rio Magdalena, through fever-cursed swamps and tribes of hostile
natives, enduring hardships almost incredible until at length he came
to the lofty plateau of Bogota, and the former home of the real gilded
man. More than five hundred of his men had died on the journey of
hunger, illness, and exposure. He found rich cities and great stores
of gold and jewels, but failed to discover the El Dorado of his dreams.

Many stories were afloat of other treasures to be wrested from the
Muysca chiefs, but Quesada, having no more than a handful of fighting
men, feared to go campaigning until he had made his position secure.
He therefore established a base and laid the foundations of the present
city of Bogota. One of his scouting parties brought back tidings of a
tribe of very war-like women in the south who had much gold, and in
this way was the myth of the Amazons linked with the El Dorado as early
as 1538.

Now occurred as dramatic a coincidence as could be imagined. To
Quesada there appeared a Spanish force commanded by Sebastian de
Belalcazar, the conqueror of Quito, who had come all the way from the
Pacific coast, after hearing from an Indian of New Granada the story of
the gilded man. No sooner had this expedition arrived than it was
reported to Quesada that white men with horses were coming from the
east. This third company of pilgrims in quest of El Dorado proved to
be Nicholas Federmann and his hard-bitted Germans from the colony in
Venezuela who had followed the trail made by Dalfinger and then plu