A Failed Raleigh
Legendary English explorer, Sir Walter Raleigh, joined the legions of adventurers seeking the fabled treasure in 1594. He waited almost a quarter of a century to launch his second attempt in 1617, and it was a complete disaster. During this trip, he sent his son Watt up the Orinoco Valley where he was killed in a fight with Spanish explorers. Apparently, Raleigh blamed the man who told him the news for Watt’s death and the distraught messenger committed suicide in his cabin that same day. Raleigh didn’t have better luck when he returned home as he was executed in 1618 by King James I; among the many reasons for his decision was that Raleigh ignored his orders to avoid conflict with the Spanish.
No matter how badly one expedition failed, there was always another willing to try and find El Dorado. Some found bits and pieces of gold but most found disease and death. The governor of a province in Venezuela, Don Manuel Centurion, made an attempt to find El Dorado in 1740 but his expedition resulted in the deaths of hundreds. There was a variety of other attempts as explorers searched various locations across South America.
In 1801, a famed naturalist named Alexander von Humboldt tried to calculate how much treasure was beneath the Lake Guatavita water. He measured the lake and determined that if 1,000 Muisca had thrown five objects a year into the water over the course of a century, there would be approximately $300 million worth of treasure in the lake. Other so-called experts claimed there was five times that amount and this idle speculation led to a brand new generation of treasure hunters.
Modern Expeditions
Most of the focus was on Lake Guatavita as more people tried to cut through the crater rim to lower the level of the water. All of these attempts failed, and hundreds of people perished. One of the worst examples occurred between 1823 and 1826 when a British Navy captain and a local businessman combined to dig a number of trenches and tunnels. The tunnel inevitably collapsed and killed scores of laborers.
In 1898, a British contractor called Harvey Knowles helped set up a deal to ensure London Contractors Ltd. of London took over the Company for the Exploitation of the Lagoon of Guatavita; at least they didn’t pretend to hide the purpose of the company. After several years of digging, the company was able to use an extremely powerful steam pump to drain water from a tunnel that extended 400 meters from the middle of the lake.
The company thought it had achieved its goal in 1904 when it finally drained all the water from the lake. Alas, the workers were faced with a gigantic pit of mud which hardened rapidly in the Colombian sun. What little gold was found had been beaten thin, and Knowles received just £500 for the treasure haul; a small fraction of the cost of the project. Predictably, the company went bankrupt and ceased trading in 1929.
Several more failed attempts later and the Colombian Government finally had enough of treasure hunters risking their lives to find booty that clearly didn’t exist. In 1965, Lake Guatavita was declared a protected area, so attempts to drain the lake or other private salvage attempts are now illegal.
When Richard Nixon practically destroyed the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the value of gold went all over the place, and it crashed in the mid-70s. One of the reasons for this was the amount of new gold sites found by treasure hunters across Northern Colombia. There is certainly an incredible amount of treasure buried all across South America, but explorers were often fixated on Lake Guatavita when there was actual gold located not very far away. The city of El Dorado is very much a myth yet for hundreds of years; explorers lost their lives looking for something that didn’t exist; their actions were because of greed rather than a sense of adventure.