El Dorado Viewed

Sixteenth Century Spaniards, to whom the Carib Indians although tortured would not tell the source of their gold ornaments, imagined a place of gold, El Dorado, at the headwaters of the Orinoco River. No known Spaniard nor other white, until last month, ever reached the Orinoco's source. Then Dr. Herbert Spencer Dickey of Tippecanoe City, Ohio* and Manhattan, his bright-eyed, hard-muscled little wife, and four men companions, after a three-month struggle up the hot, muggy Orinoco, reached the top of a "gigantic" peak of the Parima Mountains. From here they saw the second largest river in South America as a 20-ft., boulder-strewn torrent, "fed by myriad brooks which emanate from the surrounding mountains."

Actual El Dorado is bleak, barren, devoid of game, but infested with "mosquitoes an inch long--armed with weapons which seemed capable of penetrating the stoutest khaki cloth, and were." The place is at Lat. 2:25:30 North, Long. 63:45:31 West, in Brazil just east of the Venezuelan boundary. It is due south of Halifax, just above the Equator, and about 2,000 mi. from the Orinoco delta.

Dr. Dickey, who before he married and became a professional explorer, practiced medicine for 25 years in northern and western South America, named the Parima peak from which he saw long-sought El Dorado, the George G. Heye Mountain. That was to honor the important backer of this, his fifth expedition up the Orinoco --George Gustav Heye, 56, retired Manhattan electrical engineer and banker who for 35 years has been assembling relics of North, Central & South American Indians and who, with Archer Milton Huntington,/- in 1922 created the great Heye Foundation & Museum of the American Indian in Manhattan.

Last week Dr. Dickey was at an unmapped place on the Orinoco called Tama Tama. Like all enterprising explorers he had made a reportorial connection with the New York Times. To that paper he wirelessed first news of his discovery. Included in the despatch was mention of a 40-ft. waterfall over which his disabled outboard-motored canoe almost drifted and which he has "named, for a salient figure in the newspaper and exploration world, Russell Owen Cascade."*

Dr. Dickey was as cryptic as were the old Caribs concerning El Dorado. He wirelessed: "We . . . have made a discovery of such startling geographical importance that I must be sure of it beyond the slightest risk of error before I dare have it put in print." He said nothing about finding any gold.

*About 25 mi. from small Eldorado, Ohio. /-Writer (books, magazine articles), poet (Lace Maker of Segovia), authority on Spanish and Spanish-American affairs, son of California's late great Collis Potter Huntington. His wife is Sculptress Anna Vaughan Hyatt Huntington (small bronzes, large Joans-of-Arc in half a dozen cities, flagpoles in Manhattan). *For his indefatigable daily despatches to the Times from Little America dramatizing the exploits of the Byrd Expedition, Correspondent Russell Owen received the 1930 Pulitzer Prize in Journalism.

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