The Knight of El Dorado

THIS is the story of Don Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, one of the great Conquistadors of four hundred years ago. So stirring is the material from which the author builds his narrative that now and again he has to remind himself that he is writing a history and a biography and not a work of fiction. His spirited style adds to the illusion, though he contends that there is no necessity for adding decoration to the facts. He asserts that the discoverer of the New Kingdom of Grenada has already served as a model for the hero of one of the greatest novels of all times, that he is indeed none other than the Knight of the Rueful Countenance in person. In common with other adventurers of his kind, Quesada had a twofold object in his expedition to El Dorado, now Colombia, whose capital, Bogotá, he had helped to found. One was to force the Faith on the Red Man; the other, to force from him good gold in return. Many of the Conquistadors went to America nobodies and returned somebodies, their souls bursting with importance and their pockets with gold. Easy come, easy go; some of the adventures inevitably, in the end, lost both importance and gold. Quesada, however, was a just man, and in his maturity he went back to govern the province he had conquered. He did this job like the Christian gentleman he was; in the face of opposition, he tried to do justice to the Indian and fought abuses which were the result of the lust for power and gold. For a man of action, he was something of a philosopher; hence the marked resemblance to Don Quixote, whose prototype he was. A distinguished piece of work this - a real thriller for highbrows. J. C.