El Doradodo Research Paper

El Dorado: The Legend and the Myth
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Professor John Doe

Whether it is just a place of legend that once existed and has disappeared into history or a myth fabricated by European explorers looking for riches, El Dorado has always been a source of mystery to historians and explorers from around the globe. In the search for their “El Dorado”, the European explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would stop at nothing to obtain the untold wealth and notoriety that would come with a successful expedition. Along with the wealth that few found, European explorers were able to successfully rape, pillage and destroy an entire continents native population’s way of live in just a few decades. El Dorado, whether
However, Ordaz and his expeditionary crew did not fail for its inability to find riches; it failed because of internal strife that resulted in a mutiny. During this mutiny one of Ordaz’s lieutenants, Martinez, was also expelled from the expedition for misconduct. After his return to Porto Rico eight months later, he told a tale of becoming lost and wandering in the forest until being captured by natives that blind folded him and escorted him for a considerable distance to a great city called Manoa. He described the city, and taking a day and a night to traverse to reach the palace where he became the guest of the emperor Inga. Lieutenant Martinez according to the author was the first to apply the name El Dorado to the city of Manoa. This story though later proved to be fictional, is the one that would 60 years later be shown to Sir Walter Raleigh, on a manuscript, by the Governor of
Their expedition, while it did include the search for wealth, also had the task of searching for land suitable colonization by European immigrants. The immigrants faced many hardships, almost from the beginning. The party endured torrential rain, cold, earthquakes and even a volcano. This expedition was another of many launched by European explorers in search of gold and riches that was doomed to fail. What Pizarro did find was another item that was highly sought after by few explorers: cinnamon, a spice derived from the bark of a tree. By the time of this discovery Pizzaro’s company, which started out with 500 Spaniards, 100 mounted on horses, and close to 4,000 natives, had been reduced to a small portion of their original size. Many of the original party had died from disease, starvation, drowning and violent conflicts with many of the native tribes that they had encountered. The majority of the natives they had originally started with, because of the brutality of the masters, had quietly slipped away while in the jungles or during the night while the Spaniards slept. They were close to starvation, and the expedition’s horses, dogs and other domesticated animals they had started out with had already been eaten. The remaining expedition members were reduced to eating whatever they