The Muysca lived in villages—“pueblos”—of which an exaggerated terminology has made cities; and their large communal houses, which were intended, according to the Indian custom, for the whole family, have been magnified into palaces. These buildings were made of wood and straw; but the temple at Iraca had stone pillars. Their tools and weapons were of stone and hard wood; but vessels of copper or bronze, such as the Peruvians possessed, have not been found among them, although a recent authority, Dr. Rafael Zerda, believes that they were acquainted with alloys. Their organization was a military democracy, such as prevailed throughout America. In each tribe the position of chief was hereditary in a particular clan or gens, out of which the uzaque, as he was called, was chosen. This chief, or uzaque, simply represented the executive power. As in Mexico, the council of the elders of the tribe acted with him in decision.
Concerning the religious ideas of the Muysca, as well as concerning their language, so much has been published in recent times and since Herr von Humboldt directed attention to them in his celebrated researches (“Vues des Cordillères,” etc., and “Calendrier des Muyscas”) that we refrain from superfluous repetition. Their language was probably similar to the Peruvian Quichua, but their numeral system was more like that of the Central American peoples. Their calendar combined with the Peruvian month of thirty days the double, civil, and ritual year of the Mexica. Besides the worship of the sun and moon (Bochica and Bachue or Chia), which was performed with stated human sacrifices, in which the Mexican rite of cutting out the heart was employed, there existed, as in Peru, a kind of fetish worship of striking natural objects. The numerous lakes of the plateau were holy places. Each of them was regarded as the seat of a special divinity, to which gold and emeralds were offered by throwing them into the water. In the execution of the drainage works which have been instituted at different places in more recent times, as at the lagoon of Siecha, interesting objects of art and of gold have been brought to light.
Among the many lakes of the table-land of Bogotá known as such places of offering, the lake of Guatavitá became eminently famous as the spot where the myth of el dorado, or the gilded man, originated. This water lies north of Santa Fé, on the páramo of the same name, picturesquely situated at a height of 3199 metres above the sea. A symmetrical cone, the base of which is about two hours in circumference, bears on its apex the lake, which has a circuit of five kilometres and a depth of sixteen fathoms. The bottom of the lake is of fine sand. Near this water, at the foot of the páramo, lies the village of Guatavitá. The inhabitants of this place about the year 1490 constituted an independent tribe. A legend was current among them that the wife of one of their earlier chiefs had thrown herself into the water in order to avoid a punishment, and that she survived there as the goddess of the lake. Besides the Indians of the tribe of Guatavitá, pilgrims came from the communes around to cast their offerings of gold and emeralds into the water. At every new choice of a uzaque of Guatavitá, an imposing ceremonial was observed. The male population marched out in a long procession to the páramo. In front walked wailing men, nude, their bodies painted with red ochre, the sign of deep mourning among the Muysca. Groups followed, of men richly decorated with gold and emeralds, their heads adorned with feathers, and braves clothed in jaguars’ skins. The greater number of them went uttering joyful shouts, others blew on horns, pipes, and conchs. Xeques, or priests, were in the company, too, in long black robes adorned with white crosses, and tall black caps. The rear of the procession was composed of the nobles of the tribe and the chief priests, bearing the newly elected chieftain, or uzaque, upon a barrow hung with discs of gold. His naked body was anointed with resinous gums, and covered all over with gold-dust. This was the gilded man, el hombre dorado, whose fame had reached to the seacoast. [12]
Arrived at the shore, the gilded chief and his companions stepped upon a balsa and proceeded upon it to the middle of the lake. There the chief plunged into the water and washed off his metallic covering, while the assembled company, with shouts and the sound of instruments, threw in the gold and the jewels they had brought with them. The offerings completed, the chief returned to the shore and to the village of Guatavitá. The festival closed with dancing and feasting.[13]
Till about the year 1470 the tribe of the Tunja was the most powerful clan on the highland; at that time the Muysca of Bogotá[14] began to extend their dominion. Their chief, or zippa, Nemequene, overcame the Guatavitá Indians in the last decade of the fifteenth century, and made them tributary. With that he put an end to the ceremony of the dorado. The gilded chief had ceased to wash off his glittering coat in the waters of Guatavitá thirty years before Juan de Ampues founded the colony of Coro, but news of this change on the highlands of Cundinamarca had not yet reached the coast, and the dorado still continued to live in the mouths of the natives there.
Ambrosius Dalfinger, of Ulm, in Suabia, the new German governor of Venezuela, was the first to hunt upon the trail of the “gilded man.” He left Coro in July, 1529, sailed across the Gulf of Venezuela, on the western coast of which he established the post of Maracaybo, and then pressed westwardly inland to the Rio Magdalena. He was not aware that he was thereby encroaching upon the territory of the government of Santa Marta. No white man had ever entered these regions before him. Thick woods, partly swampy and partly hilly, covered the country, and warlike tribes, who often possessed gold, lived in the valleys. Dalfinger was a valiant soldier, who permitted no obstacle interposed by tropical nature, or resistance offered by the natives, to keep him back. He was, moreover, a rough, heartless warrior of a kind of which the European armies of the time supplied many examples. Gold and slaves were his object, and in pursuit of them he plundered the inhabited country, and then devastated it in so terrible a manner that even the Spanish historians relate his deeds with revulsion. The rich valley of Cupari was wholly overrun and partly depopulated. When in 1529 Dalfinger reached the Magdalena at Tamalameque, he found the stream in flood, and the Indian villages surrounded by water, so that he could not get to them; he then turned up the river toward the hills. Herrera says: “He went up the country, keeping by the river and the hills, to the Rio de Lebrija, the windings of which he followed as closely as possible. And when the way became barred by the numerous lagoons he went up into the hills, where he found a cool region (tierra fria) thickly populated. He was forced to fight with the people, and suffered severely from them.”[15] He had here in all probability reached the edge of the plateau of Bogotá, and the Indians before whose resistance his weakened army had to yield were the Muysca, to whose linguistic stem the dorado had belonged. Dalfinger wintered at the foot of the hills. The next year (153O) he continued his murderous campaign of plunder on the right bank of the Magdalena, till in the Ambrosia Valley the natives inflicted a second defeat upon him. Then he, with his troops, diminished to a few more than a hundred men, retreated to Coro, where he arrived about May. He brought with him 40,000 pesos in gold. He had already sent 30,000 pesos to Coro the year before, but both the treasure and its escort had been lost in the forest.[16]
From the settlement of Santa Marta, on the northern coast of New Granada, the Spaniards advanced in the meantime very slowly toward the south. The periodical overflows of the Magdalena, the thick woods of the interior, the resistance of the exasperated Indians, and, above all, the previous devastation of the inhabited districts by Dalfinger, created extremely formidable obstacles to their progress. Tamalameque, which Luis de Cardoso captured in 1531, was, till 1536, the most southern point which the Spaniards could reach from Santa Marta or Cartagena.
In the meantime reports had been brought from the western coast of South America which caused great excitement in all the Spanish colonies in America, and even in the mother-land itself. The coasting voyages southward,