2.29 America: a.d. 1501 to 1600  (Page 11/12)

In the meantime many other conquistadores were traveling all over the northern part of South America, looking for gold. In 1535 Sebastian de Balacazar, veteran of the Inca conquest and founder of Quito, was told of a king who sprinkled his body with gold dust before swimming in his sacred lake. The legend named the mysterious king "El Dorado - the Golden man" and it fanned the lust for the precious metal among all the Spanish explorers. Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada led an expedition inland from Columbia's northern coast in 1536, struggling through forests and swamps. Decimated by fever, malaria and attacks by hostile natives, only 200 of his original 900 men reached the Chibcha villages that were strewn across Colombia's Cundinamarca plateau. He found no gold, but did found the city of Santa Fe de Bogota, now the capital of Colombia. Others explored this same country, including the German Nicolaus Federmann and his countryman Philip von Guttan. Spaniards, including Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of Francisco and Francisco de Orellana also headed to the interior and when the latter came down a great river he encountered a tribe whose long-haired women drew a bow better than any man. Orellana gave the name "Amazonas" to the river, after those warrior women of the old Greek legend. Toward the end of the century, the hunt for gold shifted toward Guiana and then to the island of Trinidad, where the Spanish met the English adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh, who was on a similar search. Eventually some gold was found between the years 1525 and 1533 in Colombia and as has been noted, Potosi in Bolivia became for 100 years the biggest source of silver in the world. (Ref. 176 , 175 , 8 )

After conquering the Incas in Peru, the Spanish tried to extend down into Chile about 1536, but they were pretty well stopped by the cannibalistic Araucanian Indians. Pedro de Valdiva did reach far enough south to found the city of Santiago in Chile by 1541. There, eventually as elsewhere in South America, silver mines were found and worked by the natives under Spanish direction. Recent study of skeletons of colonial Indians who mined silver in Tarapaca, of northern Chile, has shown evidence of the occupational illness of pneumoconiosis and silicosis from silver mining. Little is known of the Araucanians who lived on the western slope of the Chilean cordillera and on Chiloe Island prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. There were at least three groups, each speaking a dialect of an exclusive South American language. Estimations of their number, when the Spaniards arrived, vary from 500,000 to 2,000,000. Peaceful relations with them were not really established until the 18th century, although they were farmers and not basically hunters. Only the Quechus and Aymaras tribes were city builders, while the Mapuches lived more agricultural lives. The tribes fought each other and captives were ritually tortured and sacrificed. Cannibalism was practiced. (Ref. 175 , 3 , 62 )

A few last words are indicated before we leave the west coast of South America. In 1526 when Francisco Pizarro left the Panamanian isthmus on his second and most intensive voyage down the coast, he encountered Peruvian merchant rafts coming north – rafts as large as Pizarro's caravel. The first one was a 36 ton raft with 20 Indians, masts with cotton sails, well rigged. The secret of control lay with multiple center-boards (guaras) in line along the center of the vessels, the skillful use of which allowed steering and beating up-wind to some degree. Some of the larger vessels had thatched bamboo huts with 4 or 5 rooms. They often carried salt along with other provisions for the 200 to 300 hundred mile trips between ports. Dry balsa wood would be too water absorbent for these rafts, but green balsa, when put to sea still filled with sap, is very water resistant. The description of these vessels from the early Spaniards is indisputable evidence that the Peruvians were capable of extensive ocean travel. (Ref. 95 )