Naipaul on Columbus, God, and Gold


A short passage from a history of early Trinidad written by the great Trinidad/UK novelist and travel writer Sir V.S. Naipaul: his 1969  The Loss of El Dorado: A History.  For Naipaul, the history of the colonial world is uniformly tragic, and early European conquest was both vicious and absurd: brutality in the pursuit of dreams. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.


  There had been a golden man, el dorado, the gilded one, in what is now Colombia: a chief who once a year rolled in turpentine, was covered with gold dust and then dived into a lake. But the tribe of the golden man had been conquered a generation before Columbus came to the New World. It was an Indian memory that the Spaniards pursued; and the memory was confused with the legend, among jungle Indians, of the Peru the Spaniards had already conquered.
   Always the Indians told of a rich and civilized people just a few days' march away. Sometimes there were pieces of gold, finely worked; once a temple of the sun was found in the jungle; once a crazed explorer returned with a tale of an enormous city of long straight streets, its temples full of golden idols. After Mexico, Peru, and New Granada anything was possible; after fifty years and a score of disasters rival conquistadores could still race one another to Spain to ask for permission to explore some new region of promise. The search that had begun in the west of the continent moved east. In 1569 three men claimed Trinidad for the highest reasons. The man who was chosen to reduce the Indians to Christianity landed with twelve priests; a fortnight later he reported complete evangelical success; then he disappeared.
   Of all these journeys little remains. The conquistador who found nothing had nothing to report. Believing in wonders, he had no gift of wonder. Columbus, coming to Trinidad, thought he had come to the outer approaches of the Garden of Eden. He asked the natives for pearls: pearls were created from drops of dew falling into open oysters. The natives were pale: a disappointment: the greatest riches of the world were to be found in the lands of the blackest Negroes. On the Atlantic, the Ocean Sea, flying fish had just been fish that flew into Columbus's ship: another confirmed item in the created world's finite catalogue. It is an English soldier who, crossing to Trinidad a hundred years later, will write like a discoverer: "Oftentimes we might see a great multitude of thease flying fishes flie togeather, beinge pursued by some other fishes, as if thease had bin some flocke of larkes dared by the hobbie [a falcon]."
   To the conquistador where there were no wonders there was nothing. A place was then its name alone, and landscape was land, difficult or easy. Valleys, mountain ranges, peaks, woods, meadows, rivers, plains and springs, with naked, noble natives: this inaccurate catalogue is a Spanish priest's description of Trinidad in 1570. The spareness of much Spanish narrative is a Spanish deficiency. Untouched by imagination or intellect, great actions become mere activity; it is part of the Spanish waste. El Dorado becomes an abstraction; deaths become numbers.
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