Excerpt from The Gilded Man (El Dorado): And Other Pictures of the Spanish, Occupancy of America Portuguese seamen as early as the middle of the fifteenth century brought gold from the west coast of Africa; in order to find a sea-route to the gold lands of India, Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope; and in order to obtain a shorter route from Spain to India Christopher Columbus ventured out upon the Atlantic Ocean and there reached the new gold-land, America. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.