Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/69

Rh Where his chief had failed, he succeeded; he crossed over the steep mountain, and, as we have recorded in the first part of the "Dorado," reached the plateau of Cundinamarca. But he had come too late. Quesada, as we know, had anticipated him. Federmann bitterly deplored the fact in his letter of August 1, 1539, from Jamaica to Francisco Davila. He charged the dead Dalfinger, as well as the then still living Georg von Speyer, with incapacity and want of courage, because "they might otherwise the one eight years, the other three years before—have secured the wealth which now the people of Santa Marta had taken." In this letter, which Oviedo has preserved in abstract, Federmann wrote: "The stories about Meta are not wholly false, for that river does rise in the mountains that border the plain; and the House of Meta which was sought for so long is the Temple of Sogamosa, the holy objects in which the people of Santa Marta have now carried away in sacks." These words of an important eye-witness prove that it was the legend of the dorado which, transferred to Meta, distorted and diluted in many ways and spread throughout eastern South America, stimulated the bold enterprises we have sketched. If we dwell a little longer on some of these enterprises, it is, first, because they are so little known—in no case so well known as they ought to be; and second, there is associated with them, especially to the German public, a direct interest in the deeds of the Germans in South America. We shall, in the third part of the "Dorado," again, and for the last time, meet Germans in pursuit of the gilded chieftain.