Die Konquistadoren: The Strange, Forgotten Tale of the German Quest for El Dorado

Name a country that colonised the New World.

Immediately, I’m sure you’ll think of the Spanish and their conquistadors: Hernán Cortés or Francisco Pizarro, laying waste to an entire continent in the name of plunder, glory, and God. Perhaps you’ll name the Portuguese, those other Iberian trailblazers whose efforts created the modern state of Brazil. There are, of course, the English, who held onto Canada long after every other European power had been thrown off the continent, and the French, who the English threw out themselves. If you’re very interested in this sort of thing, you might mention the Dutch (“Actually, before New York, it used to be called New Amsterdam…”) or even the tiny, fleeting saga of New Sweden on the Delaware River.

One country you likely won’t think to mention is Germany – not least because in the 16th century, no such country existed. Instead, dozens of statelets spread across the region were far more preoccupied with local matters – wars, politics, and religious reformations – to bother with any grand projects of exploration. If there was ever going to be any attraction in colonising the New World, it lay in the potential riches – spices, metals, and most infamous of all, the fabled city of gold, El Dorado.

Enter the Welsers, a powerful banking family based in Augsburg, who already ran a network of sugar plantations on Madeira and the Canary Islands. Augsburg, like much of Germany, was then a member of a loose political entity known as the Holy Roman Empire, which was led by the King of Spain, Charles V. Any person entertaining the idea of colonial ventures would first have to go through the Spanish, and so it was from Charles V that the Welsers won a contract in 1528, authorising them to settle a stretch of land in northern South America, running from the Guajira Peninsula to Maracapana, on behalf of the Spanish crown. The territory, encompassing what is today the coast of Venezuela, was named Klein-Venedig, ‘Little Venice,’ by the Germans, who were contractually obligated to establish two cities and three forts in the area.

Unfortunately for all involved, the men actually tasked with this colonisation effort had far more lucrative goals in mind. The first Governor of the territory, Ambrosius Ehinger, arrived on the shores of Klein-Venedig in 1529, taking with him an agent of the Welsers, Nikolaus Federmann. Together, the two men disregarded any proper effort at settling the territory, in favor of mounting search after search for gold in the region. When these expeditions failed to return any results, they promptly took to viciously capturing and enslaving the local population. For three years, Ehinger terrorised the native people, performing spectacular acts of cruelty – the Historia constitucional de Venezuela details how the German conquistador forced lines of chained-together locals to carry food and baggage for his explorations. In their search for El Dorado, the colonisers found no golden city, but tantalising suggestions of the myth, in the form of supposed disused goldsmiths found in native villages.

By 1533, Ehinger was dead, having been struck in a skirmish by a poisoned arrow (some say by his own men). Georg von Speyer, an agent of the Welser banking house, was dispatched to succeed him, to the anger of Federmann, whom the Welsers had passed over after reports of his cruelty trickled back to Europe. Von Speyer was even more enraptured by the legend of El Dorado than his predecessor, and in 1535 he set off on his own search with 400 men. The expedition, which lasted four years, was a total disaster, as Von Speyer’s men were ravaged by sickness, attacked by the locals, and incited to mutiny on several occasions. Whenever they encountered a local settlement, the hapless Germans were encouraged by the natives’ tales of riches just a little further ahead, as they trekked ever deeper into the South American wilderness. Eventually, the expedition was confronted by the might of the Orinoco River and forced to turn back empty-handed. Von Speyer’s host staggered back to Klein-Venedig with just 90 of the 400 men who had originally departed – and here, the Governor was appalled to find that Federmann, whom he had left in charge of the colony, had grown restless and mounted his own expedition, striking west into the Andes. Federmann’s search, no more successful than Von Speyer’s, had encountered only two rival missions by Spanish explorers, with all three claiming to have discovered the region (what is today southern Colombia). The German explorer was persuaded to return to Spain to argue his claim over the land, whereupon arrival he was promptly arrested and imprisoned by the Welsers for abandoning his post. Von Speyer, for his part, died of illness in 1540.

The third and final Governor of the colony, Philipp von Hutten, had been a survivor of Von Speyer’s doomed expedition, yet the experience apparently did little to dampen his own faith in uncovering El Dorado. The German launched a renewed hunt for the fabled city in 1541, following an almost identical path to his predecessor, and encountering all the same issues. Beset by seasonal flooding and disease, Von Hutten’s army was mauled in an attack by the native Omagua people, with the Governor himself badly wounded. His expedition resolved to return home, but upon doing so found that in their absence, the Spanish had grown tired of German shenanigans and appointed one of their own as Governor, Juan de Carvajal. By the time Von Hutten returned in 1546, it had been 18 years since the Welsers had first been granted the settlement contract, in which time they had fulfilled only one of the agreement’s terms: the enslavement and sale of the local population. Now, even this had trickled to a halt, with the remaining locals having fled the region for nearby mountains. Spanish patience had run out, and Carvajal himself was in no mood to relinquish power to the absentee German. Instead, upon Von Hutten’s return, Carvajal had the expedition survivors arrested. Von Hutten, alongside a member of the Welser family, Bartholomew Welser the Younger, was subsequently beheaded, bringing an inglorious end to the doomed German effort to colonise the New World. The Spanish quickly renamed the meagre colony to Venezuela, ‘Little Venice’ in Spanish, and got to work settling the territory substantively. The strange, sorry episode of Klein-Venedig was largely forgotten – save for in the family history of the Welsers themselves, who celebrated their colonial adventure long after the Welser banking house had collapsed.

Bibliography

Lacas, M. M., 'A Sixteenth-Century German Colonising Venture in Venezuela', The Americas, 10 (1953), 55-84.

Avellaneda, Jose Ignacio, 'The Men of Nikolaus Federmann: Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada', The Americas, 43 (1987), 1-25.

Searing, Susan, 'German Conquistadors: The Forgotten Rulers of Venezuela and Their Legacy', Binghamton University, https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/3984/german-conquistadors-the-forgotten-rulers-of-venezuela-and-their-legacy [accessed 30 July 2024].

'Federmann, Nicholas', in Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography, Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Appletons%27_Cyclop%C3%A6dia_of_American_Biography/Federmann,_Nicholas [accessed 30 July 2024].