The Discovery of Guiana is a book by Sir Walter Raleigh, who wrote this account one year after his 1595 journey to Guiana, the Venezuelan region of Guayana. He also visited Trinidad. The book includes some material of a factual nature, but postulates the existence of a gold-rich civilisation (El Dorado) on the basis of little evidence.
As was common practice in this time period, The Discovery of Guiana had a longer name. It was actually called The discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado). [1] However, today it is generally simply referred to as The Discovery of Guiana. [2]
After enjoying several years of high esteem from Queen Elizabeth I, which stemmed in part from his previous exploits at sea, Raleigh suffered a short imprisonment for secretly marrying one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting. [3] In an attempt to bring himself back into favour, Raleigh sailed to Guiana in 1595, hoping to find gold and other material to exchange or extort.
One modern scholar remarks of this journey, "Although the expedition itself was hardly a success—Raleigh conquered no lands, found no stores of wealth, and discovered little not observed by earlier adventurers—he created a triumph for himself by publishing The Discovery." [4]
The title page shows people without necks. Raleigh's dubious report that such people lived in Guiana may have given Shakespeare a line for Othello .
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
However, there are references in classical literature to headless men which Shakespeare may have known.
There are gold deposits in Venezuela, but Raleigh appears to have exaggerated how easy it was for him to find gold there. Venezuela's gold was not exploited on a large scale before the 19th century when mines were developed at places like El Callao.
Raleigh having promised Queen Elizabeth a "gold-rich empire more lucrative than Peru", [5] King James was probably a little more willing to temporarily forgive Raleigh's charge of treason to see if he could find the place he had claimed to have found, and make it profitable. But the scholar argues that this came from Raleigh's prodigious literary skill, wherein he was able to make it sound like he had found much gold, but without ever saying or relating the precise finding of it, or bringing anything back. [5]
He returned to Guiana in 1617 after a twelve-year imprisonment at the hands of King James I. [3] On this second voyage, Raleigh's men, under the command of Lawrence Keymis, attacked the Spanish on the river Orinoco on 1617–18. At Raleigh's subsequent trial, he was not only tried for treason against the crown for disobeying King James I's orders to avoid engaging in combat with the Spanish, [3] but, argues one scholar, also for essentially lying about the abundance of gold to be had in Guiana. [5] [6]
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Sir Walter Raleigh was an English statesman, soldier, writer and explorer. One of the most notable figures of the Elizabethan era, he played a leading part in English colonisation of North America, suppressed rebellion in Ireland, helped defend England against the Spanish Armada and held political positions under Elizabeth I.
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, KG, PC was an English nobleman and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I. Politically ambitious, and a committed general, he was placed under house arrest following a poor campaign in Ireland during the Nine Years' War in 1599. In 1601, he led an abortive coup d'état against the government of Elizabeth I and was executed for treason.
The School of Night is a modern name for a group of men centred on Sir Walter Raleigh that was once referred to in 1592 as the "School of Atheism". The group supposedly included poets and scientists Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, Matthew Roydon and Thomas Harriot.
El Dorado is commonly associated with the legend of a gold city, kingdom, or empire purportedly located somewhere in the Americas. Originally, El Hombre Dorado or El Rey Dorado, was the term used by the Spanish in the 16th century to describe a mythical tribal chief (zipa) or king of the Muisca people, an indigenous people of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense of Colombia, who as an initiation rite, covered himself with gold dust and submerged himself in Lake Guatavita.
Saint Joseph was founded in 1592 by Antonio de Berrio and is the oldest town in Trinidad and Tobago. Originally named San José de Oruña, it was the capital of Spanish Trinidad between 1592 and 1783. In 1595, it was attacked and held by Sir Walter Raleigh and was used as a base for his exploration of the Orinoco River in search of the fabled city of El Dorado. Soon after his return the place was burnt and sacked.
The Guianas, also spelled Guyanas or Guayanas, is a region in north-eastern South America. Strictly, the term refers to the three Guianas: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana, formerly British, Dutch and French Guiana. Broadly it refers to the South American coast from the mouth of the Orinoco to the mouth of the Amazon.
Sir George Somers was an English privateer and naval hero, knighted for his achievements and the Admiral of the Virginia Company of London. He achieved renown as part of an expedition led by Sir Amyas Preston that plundered Caracas and Santa Ana de Coro in 1595, during the undeclared Anglo-Spanish War. He is remembered today as the founder of the English colony of Bermuda, also known as the Somers Isles.
A treasure map is a map that marks the location of buried treasure, a lost mine, a valuable secret or a hidden locale. More common in fiction than in reality, "pirate treasure maps" are often depicted in works of fiction as hand drawn and containing arcane clues for the characters to follow. Regardless of the term's literary use, anything that meets the broad definition of a "map" that describes the location of a "treasure" could appropriately be called a "treasure map."
The European explorer-colonial historical record in North America begins in the second half of the 16th century, with ongoing European exploration.
Events from the 1610s in England.
Lake Parime or Lake Parima is a legendary lake located in South America. It was reputedly the location of the fabled city of El Dorado, also known as Manoa, much sought-after by European explorers. Repeated attempts to find the lake failed to confirm its existence, and it was dismissed as a myth along with the city. The search for Lake Parime led explorers to map the rivers and other features of southern Venezuela, northern Brazil, and southwestern Guyana before the lake's existence was definitively disproved in the early 19th century. Some explorers proposed that the seasonal flooding of the Rupununi savannah may have been misidentified as a lake. Recent geological investigations suggest that a lake may have existed in northern Brazil, but that it dried up some time in the 18th century. Both Manoa and Parime are believed to mean "big lake".
The Islands Voyage, also known as the Essex-Raleigh Expedition, was an ambitious, but unsuccessful naval campaign sent by Queen Elizabeth I of England, and supported by the United Provinces, against the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire of Philip II from the House of Habsburg during the Anglo–Spanish War (1585–1604) and the Eighty Years' War.
Lawrence Kemys or Keymis was an English seaman and companion of Sir Walter Raleigh in his expeditions to Guiana in 1595 and 1617–18.
Arthur Barlowe (1550–1620) was one of two British captains who, under the direction of Sir Walter Raleigh, left England in 1584 to find land in North America to claim for Queen Elizabeth I of England. His account survives in a letter written to Raleigh as a report on their journey. It is one of the earliest detailed English commercial reports written from direct observation about any place in North America and has been called "one of the clearest contemporary pictures of the contact of Europeans with North American Indians."
Sir Lewis Stucley (1574–1620) lord of the manor of Affeton in Devon, was Vice-Admiral of Devonshire. He was guardian of Thomas Rolfe, and a main opponent of Sir Walter Raleigh in his last days. Stucley's reputation is equivocal; popular opinion at the time idealised Raleigh, and to the public he was Sir "Judas" Stucley.
The Preston–Somers expedition, or the Capture of Caracas, was a series of military actions that took place from late May until the end of July 1595 during the Anglo-Spanish War. The English expedition headed by George Somers and Amyas Preston sailed to the Spanish Main initially intending to support Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition which set out at the same time.
Raleigh's El Dorado expedition, also known as Raleigh's first voyage to Guiana, was an English military and exploratory expedition led by Sir Walter Raleigh that took place during the Anglo-Spanish War in 1595. The expedition set out in February 1595 to explore the Orinoco River on the northeast tip of South America in an attempt to find the fabled city of El Dorado.
Antonio de Berrío (1527–1597) was a Spanish soldier, governor and explorer in Colonial America.
The History of the World is an incomplete work of history by Sir Walter Raleigh, begun in about 1607 whilst the author was imprisoned in the Tower of London, and first published in 1614. It covers the course of human history from Genesis to the conquest of Macedon by Rome. Raleigh intended to write more volumes relating the rise and fall of the great empires, but his release in 1615, his expedition to Guiana, and his execution in 1618, prevented the accomplishment of his plan. According to Edmund Gosse, "This huge composition is one of the principal glories of seventeenth-century literature, and takes a very prominent place in the history of English prose."
Jacob Whiddon was an English sea captain.
