Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/18

4 the whole northern coast to New Granada, yielded only a small return, for after the largest pearls and gold pieces were turned into the royal treasury only five hundred ducats were left to be divided among one hundred and fifty sharers. A few months before Ojeda, an expedition had returned to Spain from the same region which had attained considerable material results, notwithstanding the small means with which it had been undertaken. Christoval Guerra and Pero Alonzo Nino, with a poor caravel of fifty tons and thirty-three men, had crossed the ocean to Venezuela and sailed along its coast from bay to bay, trading and bartering with the natives, and had thus acquired much gold and more than one hundred and fifty marks' worth of pearls. They brought the report that while gold-dust was rare in the eastern part of the northern coast of South America, the metal was more abundant the farther west they went. When in 1500 Rodrigo de Bastidas of Santa Marta discovered the snow-covered foot-hills of the Cordilleras, his first thought might well have been that the noble metal which the warlike Indians of the coast wore so abundantly as a decoration was derived from those distant heights.

While Ojeda was vainly trying to found a