The Discovery of Guiana

Raleigh's own account of the 1595 voyage up the Orinoco in search of the golden city, written to answer the accusation that he had never gone. He describes the rivers, the peoples and the tides accurately, and El Dorado on hearsay, and was believed on both counts for a century. Twenty-three years later a second voyage to the same river cost him his head; this is the book that made the second voyage possible. Fifty-five plates, from Turner to Fitz Henry Lane, trace how painters across a century pictured the rivers, coasts and cities that Raleigh's voyage opened to the English imagination.