In the last days of 1835 the explorer Robert Schomburgk stood on the shores of Lake Amucu in western-central Guiana. In April the surrounding savannah would be inundated by the rising tides of two nearby river systems – creating the illusion of a great body of water – but now, in December, the waters were low. All Schomburgk could see were rushes broken by the occasional glimpse of clear water. The brook feeding the lake was some three yards wide. The sense of bathos was overwhelming; he uses the word ‘scarcely’ three times in as many sentences.
And yet Schomburgk was in no sense displeased. He was there not because he thought it to be the site of Lake Parima, on whose glittering shores El Dorado was said by some to be located; Schomburgk was there because he knew that it wasn’t. He wanted to be the first man to stand where El Dorado might have been, were it not fantasy.
It’s a powerful myth that can draw a man halfway around the world to see for himself its refutation. But that’s El Dorado. By 1835, it was already three centuries old. Its beginnings are unclear – not so much shrouded in mystery as cloudy with hearsay and rumour, with false memories and Renaissance imaginations stunned into wonder by the strangeness and heat of the New World. It is indivisible from
