behind with his dead a fortune of two million dollars scattered along the trails of the wilderness.

The quest of El Dorado of Manoa lowers a curtain, rich and somber and yet of fantastic design, upon the career of the most remarkable Englishman of the Elizabethan age. In this last phase of a long delusion other explorers led their thousands to die in the jungles of the Orinoco, but their endeavor does not so engage attention as that of Raleigh, who lost little save his own fortune and head. There are two names, and then the Elizabethan. Antonio de Berreo, married to Quesada's niece, came from New Granada down the Meta and part way down the Orinoco for three years of dark futility. He came again and founded towns at the confluence of the Caroni and the Orinoco, and in the island of Trinidad at the Orinoco's mouth. His lieutenant, Domingo de Vera, went on to Spain and came back with a fleet and two thousand men. These perished, all but a few, in the two towns de Berreo had founded, or in the leagues of turbulent river that rolled between them, or in the fever-wasted jungles into which they set forth to find Manoa. De Berreo himself fell a prisoner to Raleigh, who had set sail from England about the same time that de Vera embarked from Spain.

This time the Gilded Phantom, in order to make sure of victims in an age about to grow weary of long quests and wary of far horizons, had come almost across the continent to entrap them. Not in the eastern foothills of the Andes, but along the lower reaches of the Orinoco where the Atlantic tides still throbbed, the snare was spread. In the mighty empire of Guiana, it was said there was a lake of salt water almost as great as the Caspian Sea, and upon it the largest, the fairest, and the richest city of the world. A fugitive Inca had come down from the Andes, and the nobles and merchants had followed him, and long trains of llamas had borne their possessions through the wilderness, and an armed host went before. They "conquered, reedified and inlarged" Manoa, says Raleigh.

So vast was the city that when the Spaniard, Juan Martinez, was brought into it blindfold at noon, and his face then uncovered, he moved through it all that afternoon and night, and the next day from sun rising to sun setting, before he came to the palace of the emigrant Inca. At the feasts of this emperor,

so de Berreo told his captor, when he "carouseth with his captaines, tributaries and governours," the company stripped and were anointed with balsam and dusted off with finely powdered gold, blown through hollow canes. So they sat, in radiant drunkenness, for six or seven days together.

Thus the striking inaugural ceremony of a vanquished Indian tribe on the tableland of Bogota had become in the lowlands of Venezuela the symbol of a luxurious and sensual court, and of an intolerable splendor. Not one man, once in a lifetime, but a host of drunken sybarites, carousing in repeated revels, wore the golden coat; the raft on a tarn of the western plateau had become a palace and a city greater than any other, and seated in the eastern wilderness on a lake that was an inland sea. Upon the mythical estate and possessions of the Gilded King had been piled the fugitive prestige and riches of the Incas. The magnificent and yet sordid culmination of a century of splendid dreams and desperate endeavor, with cupidities, basenesses and heroisms uncounted, it needed for its final victim one who embodied in signal fashion the strength and the weaknesses of the age. It found him in Sir Walter Raleigh.

Raleigh was the most accomplished man of his time, and every fiber of him was Elizabethan. On the scaffold he said, "I have been a soldier, a sailor, and a courtier, all of them courses of wickedness and vice." Let it be added that in them he excelled most other men. He learned soldiering under Coligny, fighting the battles of the Huguenots. As a sailor he took prizes of Spanish treasure ships, captured Fayal, led the attack on the Spanish fleet at Cadiz, contributed to the strategy that threw back the Armada; with him, as with Drake and his companions, the ruling passion was to singe the beard of the king of Spain. As a courtier he had his place among the vivacious friendships of the Virgin Queen, and he was rewarded and rebuked in turn with honors, monopolies, rustication, exile.

Raleigh introduced the use of tobacco in England and the culture of the potato in Ireland. He founded two short-lived colonies in North Carolina, which has honored his memory in the name of the state capital. He aided the colonizing ventures of his stepbrother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and came to North America with him. He encouraged and aided the poet Spenser.

He assisted Richard Hakluyt in bringing out his remarkable collection of explorers' manuscripts. It falls in with the picture that Raleigh was skilled in brewing new drinks, one of which bore his name; in the Tower of London he divided the time between his library and a small distillery he had set up in a hen-house.

Like his great contemporaries, Raleigh was both a man of action and a man of affairs-compound of statesman, condottiere, and merchant-adventurer. He was also a writer of noble gifts. Instead of moping in his long years of confinement in the Tower, he wrote there his History of the World. And he made beautiful poems. "If all the world and love were young" is his line. His is the epigram, "The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb." In one mood he could pen the invocation beginning, “O eloquent, just and mightie Death," and in another carol,

If she undervalue me,

What care I how fair she be?

In most part

His best-known line, "Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall," graven by him on a windowpane for the eye of Elizabeth, was least characteristic of Raleigh. If always he sought to climb the heights of adventure, he had little fear to fall. This record concerns his strangest adventure and his final fall. it is the story as recounted in his book, The discoverie of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden citie of Manoa, which the Spaniards call El Dorado. It is a fascinating book, for seldom before or since has pen so gifted set down a travel tale; but there is tragedy in the very title, which is the memorial of a vain dream. Let the historian Bancroft recite the justification, or the excuse, for the illusion of a worldly-wise man who was also an Elizabethan: "If Elizabeth had hoped for a hyperborean Peru in the arctic seas of America, why might not Raleigh expect to find the city of gold on the banks of the Orinoco?"

The bare narrative of Raleigh's first quest of El Dorado of Manoa need not long detain, for this skillful administrator, intrepid explorer, and subtle diplomat found no golden city, lost

no men in the wilderness, and had no trouble with the Indians, whom his engaging bearing and politic address won to his side. He had sent a ship to reconnoiter in 1594, and after his own expedition came and went in 1595, he sent another ship in 1596 to continue the exploration, while he himself took command of the squadron that dashed in upon the Spanish shipping at Cadiz. Raleigh's Guiana flotilla of the year before consisted of five ships, one of them from the British Admiralty. That there might be no enemy behind him, he seized the Spanish settlement at Trinidad, capturing de Berreo; anchoring his ships there, he set off in barges with a hundred men up the stubborn current of the Orinoco. Six months after he sailed from England, he was back again with some Indian hostages, some pieces of golden ore, and the marvelous stories with which his Discovery is adorned.

His travel narrative lays its scenes in "the insular regions and broken world" of Guiana, which then included a good part of Venezuela. Through its pages flows "the great rage and increase" of the swollen Orinoco. Through them flit "birds of all colours, some carnation, some crimson, orange-tawny, and purple," so that "it was unto us a great good passing of the time to behold them." "I never saw a more beautifull countrey, nor more lively prospects," exclaims Raleigh. From afar off he gazed on a "mountaine of Christall." "There falleth over it," he says, "a mighty river which toucheth no part of the side of the mountaine, but rusheth over the toppe of it, and falleth to the ground with so terrible a noyse and clamour, as if a thousand great bels were knockt one against another." Enters the note of gold and of politics: In Guiana, it seemed, "every stone that we stouped to take up, promised either golde or silver by his complexion." For "health, good ayre, pleasure and riches,” he concludes, "this country hath no equal, East or West." It would be easy for the English to defend it, for the woods are so thick along the rivers that "a mouse cannot sit in a boat unhit from the banke."

The book holds also the statement of the large national aims of Raleigh, into which, as he assured himself, the gold hunt fitted. Not for him were mere "journeys of picory," nor "to go long voyages, to lie hard, to fare worse, to be parched and with

ered," solely to "cozen myselfe." Here was "a better Indies for her Majestie than the King of Spaine hath any." With the gold of western America Spain bade fair to dominate the world. Only by tapping the Indian treasure-house of eastern America could the balance of power be restored. In a notable passage Raleigh enunciates a theory of international politics that would sound familiar to modern ears, if for the gold lust there were substituted the lust of markets.

"If we consider," he says, "the affaires of the Spanish king, what territories he hath purchased, what he hath added to the acts of his predecessors, how many kingdoms he hath indangered, how many armies, garrisons & navies he hath and doth mainteine, the great losses which he hath repaired, as in 88 above 100 saile of great ships with their artillery, & that no yeere is lesse unfortunate but that many vessels, treasures, and people are devoured, and yet notwithstanding he beginneth againe like a storme to threaten shipwrack to us all: we shall find that these abilities rise not from the trades of sacks, and Sivil oringes, nor from ought else that either Spaine, Portugal, or any of his other provinces produce: it is his Indian gold that indangereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe, it purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into counsels, and setteth bound loyaltie at libertie, in the greatest Monarchies of Europe.

This enterprise of matching gold with gold, Guiana against Peru, Raleigh hoped would be intrusted to him, and he must have pictured himself as viceroy, under England, of such another India as Englishmen of later centuries were to attain. Yet the Discovery is a defense, as well as a political tract and a collection of mirabilia. Raleigh's return, empty-handed, had aroused the resentment of some who had put money into his venture, and the ridicule and censure of more. It was alleged that he had procured his golden ore in Barbary, and naught better than marcasite from Guiana. It was even noised abroad that he had not been with the fleet at all, but had been concealed in Cornwall while his ships were away. The dreaming adventurer had his enemies.

After his second voyage to Guiana they were able to destroy him. Twenty-one years had elapsed since the first expedition. Twelve of these Raleigh had spent in the Tower, imprisoned on