The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History

Here is Naipaul's extraordinary, gripping early history of Trinidad. That history began with a delusion: the sixteenth-century belief that somewhere nearby lay El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold. Two centuries of multinational intrigue followed, personified in the rivalry between the conquistador Antonio de Berrio and Sir Walter Ralegh and culminating in the brutality of Thomas Picton, the English governor put on trial for the torture of a fourteen-year-old mulatto girl. With clarity and novelistic drama, V. S. Naipaul presents an unparalleled feat of historical writing.