Gold Fever

Searching for El Dorado: A Journey into the South American Rainforest on the Tail of the World’s Largest Gold Rush<br> By Marc Herman | Nan A. Talese. 255 pages. $25.95

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In the sixteenth century, not long after Spanish explorers found their way to the world they termed new, a myth developed about a king who bathed himself in gold, a myth that soon evolved to include a city built from the precious metal. The Spanish called both El Dorado, and devoted costly expeditions and frittered away years hacking through the jungle, searching for the golden ones.

Nobody ever managed to locate, let alone capture, El Dorado the man, and nobody set foot in the utopian city. (Though if you take proto-travel writers like Sir Walter Raleigh at their word, some did come tantalizingly close.) Despite, or perhaps because of, this epic tale of frustrated ambitions and loss of life, the myth has persisted through the centuries, and journalist Marc Herman has found ample evidence that what was unreal but nonetheless believable almost 500 years ago remains as unreal and believable today.

Beginning in 1994, Herman traveled to Guyana, a country rich in timber, diamonds, and, gold, but poor by almost every other measure, including per capita income, gross domestic product, and life expectancy. Yesterday’s conquistadors have become young, local miners, working in small groups inside holes they dig with hand tools, as well as huge international mining concerns. Herman balances his on-the ground reporting with historical background about gold rushes, mining technology, and the economics of gold, and talks to everyone — miners and mining company executives alike. In the book’s strongest chapter, he travels into the interior with two men who quit mining to drive a supply truck, a steadier if less often romanticized occupation.

If Herman is at times too hesitant to draw conclusions, he nonetheless remains sensitive to the complexity of the story. He acknowledges that mining companies, however gargantuan their operations and however much cyanide they use in the mining process, are kinder to the environment than the local miners, who poison the water and themselves with mercury.

Although contemporary miners have discovered more gold than the Spanish ever did, they are not getting all that rich. Gold is not as valuable as it was, and its price continues, save the occasional spike, to drop. For the mining companies, hunting for gold is grossly inefficient — the country’s largest mine in typical years dug up twenty million tons of rock to produce 300,000 ounces of gold. For the local miners, the scale is smaller but results similar: they do not get rich quick so much as make ends meet laboriously. And yet Guyana cannot stop mining; the livelihood of its people, its economy, everything depends on the unending search for more gold.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate