They All Drowned

I love Hunter Thompson and random trivia so I love this.

It is a weird plan, rife with madness and a sort of low-tech desperation that nobody in Utah is proud of ... But it is necessary, they say, and it will not be the first time that white men in the Western Hemisphere have gotten involved in a tragic lake-draining project.

One of the uglist of these is the saga of the draining of the Lago de Amor, a remote inland lagoon in the highlands of Colombia where the legendary Treasure of El Dorado still rests in the foul black mud.

This nightmare is described in a book called The Fruit Palace, by a Britisher named Charles Nicholl, who came on the place while chasing a cocaine dream.

"Eldorado was not originally a place," Nicholl says, " but a person -- el dorado, the gilded man." He was the main figure in a coronation ceremony held for a new territorial chieftan (cacique) in the Chibcha empire.

"At the shores of the lagoon he was stripped naked, anointed with sticky resin, and sprayed with gold dust. A raft of reeds was prepared, with braziers of moque incense and piles of gold and jewels on it."

He and four other caciques floated to the middle of the lake, where he then dove into the lake, washing off the gold. The ceremony concluded with all the gold and jewels being thrown into the lake.

When the Spanish learned of the ceremony, they began many attempts to drain the lake, starting with Hernan Perez de Quesada in 1545.

"Using a bucket chain of Indian labourers with gourd jars, he succeeded in lowering the level of the water by some ten feet, enough to recover about 3,000 pesos of gold." They managed about three feet a month but rain refilled the lagoon almost as quickly. Antonia de Sepulveda and a crew of 8,000 Indians lowered the level by 60 feet about 40 years later. He recovered some gold and gems "including an emerald the size of a hen's egg." He failed to get financing for subsequent efforts and died "poor and tired."

A French scientist estimated in 1825 the value of the unrecovered treasure at 1,120,000 pounds.

The lake was completely drained after a British joint-stock company, Contractors, Ltd., bought the rights "to exploit the lagoon" in 1899.

"They drilled a tunnel right under the lake and up into the centre, and the water was sluiced away down this giant plughole, with mercury screens to trap any precious objects."

The lakebed, however, proved intractable, impossible to walk on because of layers of mud and slime, which became concrete with the sun's heat. Not even drilling equipment could free the mud-clogged sluices and tunnel, and eventually the lake refilled.

--HST May 19, 1986