The Quest for El Dorado

‘History at its most readable - thoughtful, well-researched and beautifully told’ Mensun Bound, author of The Ship Beneath the Ice

Welcome to the page for my non-fiction book The Quest for El Dorado: Sir Walter Ralegh and the City of Gold, published in May 2026 by Bloomsbury in the UK and in September by Pegasus Books in North America. This is my second non-fiction book after the bestselling A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks. Here you'll find a summary of the book, reviews and twelve embedded pages of additional material, including many images and related areas of interest. These are meant to complement the book for those who have already read it and provide an introduction for those who haven't. Please let me know if there are any other areas you'd like to see covered! Click on the images to enlarge them.

The story of Sir Walter Ralegh's expeditions in 1595 and 1617-18 to search for the fabled city of El Dorado has fascinated me since I first saw the mouth of the Orinoco as a boy. While I was writing A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks I began re-reading Ralegh's major works, including his own Historie of the World, his treatises on ships and seafaring and especially his Discoverie of Guiana, the account of his 1595 expedition - one of the first big bestsellers in travel and adventure literature. I also became very interested in the 'rediscovery' of Ralegh and of Guiana in the 19th century - the former through paintings and books that presented a romanticized view of Elizabethan seafaring and the latter through the explorations of Alexander von Humboldt and Robert Schomburgk, taking up where Ralegh had left off more than two centuries earlier.

For Ralegh, El Dorado, 'The Golden One', was first and foremost a dream of riches, of something for the English and Queen Elizabeth to complement the plunder that the Spanish had taken from the Aztecs and the Inca. Over time, El Dorado changed from being a golden man, to a city of gold, to golden objects, to gold mines, each time aligning more closely with the present-day reality of Venezuela and Guiana as one of the richest sources of gold in the world - a discovery that lay just beyond Ralegh's grasp. For Ralegh, though, El Dorado came to mean something more exalted. Like Columbus a century earlier, Ralegh thought he was seeing an 'earthly paradise' in the natural wonders that were unfolding before him. As I researched Ralegh's life, including the many years that he spent imprisoned in the Tower of London writing his Historie and dreaming of a return to Guiana, I began to feel a strong affinity with him and to see the quest for 'El Dorado' as a metaphor for the course that we all shape through our lives. I hope that this vision of Ralegh's will draw the reader in just as it did me when I was writing the book.

FROM MY PUBLISHERS:

‘In 1594, English adventurer Sir Walter Ralegh heard the story of a lost city in South America from a Spanish conquistador. Setting out from Plymouth in February 1595, Ralegh reached the mouth of the Orinoco River and travelled over 400 miles inland to find it. Along the way, he encountered galleons full of treasure, fought the Spanish and befriended the Indigenous peoples.

Hoping to win favour with Queen Elizabeth I, he was convinced that a 'gold-rich empire more lucrative than Peru' lay just beyond reach. He vowed to return once more, so he could finally earn fame and fortune. The book that he wrote about his voyage, Discoverie, reveals the worldview of Europeans on the cusp of the modern era and the enormous drive that the search for unimaginable riches gave men such as Ralegh during the Age of Exploration. But, after he was imprisoned by James I, with a death sentence hanging over him, his hope were put on hold for years until he was finally granted a second chance to try again ...

The Quest for El Dorado is a compelling new narrative of one of the most enduring myths in history. Based on contemporary sources and his own researches as a maritime archaeologist, David Gibbins tells a story of exploration and plunder, shedding new light on Ralegh's famous voyages.’