The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the sixteenth century belief that somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay the fabulous kingdom of El Dorado. Two centuries of multinational intrigue followed, personified in the rivalled quest for the mythical kingdom of gold between the aging conquistador Antonio de Berrio and Sir Walter Ralegh, and culminating in the brutal stewardship of Thomas Picton, the English governor put on trial for the torture of a fourteen-year-old mulatto girl. Relating this labyrinthine story with clarity and novelistic drama, V. S. Naipaul accomplishes an unparalleled feat of historical writing.

In this masterpiece about Trinidad, the Nobel Prize-winning author has “given us a lesson in history [and] shown us how it is best written” (The New York Times). The history of Trinidad begins with a delusion: the belief that somewhere nearby on the South American mainland lay El Dorado, the mythical kingdom of gold. In this extraordinary and often gripping book, V. S. Naipaul—himself a native of Trinidad—shows how that delusion drew a small island into the vortex of world events, making it the object of Spanish and English colonial designs and a mecca for treasure-seekers, slave-traders, and revolutionaries. Amid massacres and poisonings, plunder and multinational intrigue, two themes emerge: the grinding down of the Aborigines during the long rivalries of the El Dorado quest and, two hundred years later, the man-made horror of slavery. An accumulation of casual, awful detail takes us as close as we can get to day-to-day life in the slave colony, where, in spite of various titles of nobility, only an opportunistic, near-lawless community exists, always fearful of slave suicide or poison, of African sorcery and revolt. Naipaul tells this labyrinthine story with assurance, withering irony, and lively sympathy. The result is historical writing at its highest level.

Focusing on the early 19th century, when British occupants inflicted a reign of terror on the island's black population, V.S. Naipaul's recreation of the history of Trinidad exposes the barbaric cruelties of slavery and torture and their consequences on all strata of society.

This history of Trinidad exposes the barbaric cruelties of slavery and torture. Essentially two stories, the first tells of Walter Raleigh's raid on Trinidad and South America in 1595, the second, the attempt by Britain 200 years later to set up a revolution against the Spanish Empire in Trinidad.

From the 18th century, African Americans, like many others, have migrated to California to seek fortunes or, often, the more modest goals of being able to find work, own a home, and raise a family relatively free of discrimination. Not only their search but also its outcome is covered in Seeking El Dorado. Whether they settled in major cities or smaller towns, African Americans created institutions and organizations—churches, social clubs, literary societies, fraternal orders, civil rights organizations—that embodied the legacy of their past and the values they shared. Blacks came in search of the same jobs as other Americans, but the search often proved frustrating. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African American leadership in the state consistently focused on achieving racial justice. The essays in this book speak of triumph and hardship, success, discrimination, and disappointment. Seeking El Dorado is a major contribution to black history and the history of the American West and will be of interest to both scholars and general readers.