River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  One of the gold-wearing chiefs of the area, a man the Spaniards referred to as Aparia the Lesser, came forward to meet with Orellana. He was an elderly chief, quite talkative and forthcoming, and he had a fascinating story. He said that farther downstream there existed villages of wondrous wealth, and there was even a kingdom, ruled by a powerful overlord called Ica, located many miles inland up a tributary (perhaps the nearby Curaray), a kingdom rich in gold. Then Aparia the Lesser mentioned something even more compelling. He said that as a boy, he had visited a place far downriver that was peopled by fierce women warriors whom he had seen with his own eyes.

  For Orellana and his men, stories of women warriors or “Amazons” would not have seemed fantastic or unbelievable, for it had long been believed that such women of legend—whose origin in classic mythology was north of the Black Sea—would be found in the New World. Columbus himself, back in 1493, had made reference to an island peopled only by women, women who periodically took men from nearby islands for procreation and who kept only female offspring. The grand conquistador Hernán Cortés had written to the king in 1524 about a place in the province of Ciguatan, south of Panama, “an island inhabited only by women, without a single man … and many of the chiefs have been there and have seen it.” This island, according to Cortés, was also rumored to be rich in pearls and gold. Similar tales persisted among the conquistadors exploring throughout the Orinoco (Venezuela) as well as in the Colombian llanos (vast plains) between 1536 and 1538.

  Orellana listened intently to the stories related by the chieftain Aparia the Lesser, filing them away in his memory. Perhaps spurred by the possibilities of wealth and exotic lands, he pressed upon his men the need to pursue their work with renewed enthusiasm and speed. Two men, Juan de Alcántara, a stout hidalgo, and Sebastián Rodriguez, a Galician, volunteered for the duty of nail fabrication, which greatly pleased their captain, who promised them payment and extra reward for their efforts. Orellana delegated others to continue with the forge and the charcoal:

  He ordered at once some bellows to be made from buskins, and all other necessary tools also. And he ordered other comrades to form groups and prepare good kilnfuls of charcoal. All this was promptly done. Each man took up his axe and went into the forest to cut wood and bring it on his shoulders to the village, a distance of nearly two miles. Then the pits were built with very great toil indeed, since our men being feeble and not expert in this kind of work collapsed under their loads; those who were too weak to cut wood worked the bellows, while others fetched water.

  Orellana and his contingent, which was now down to fifty men—seven having perished since their arrival in Imara—spent three hard weeks at this work, toiling through incessant rains, oppressive heat and humidity, and clouds of mosquitoes. The mosquitoes were so thick and bothersome, in fact, that during certain times when the swarms were at their worst, each Spaniard had to be paired with a partner whose sole job was to use a coat or shirt to fan away the insects, or swat them from his companion so that he might continue using his hands. Despite these hardships, in under a month Orellana’s makeshift industries had managed to produce “two thousand very good nails” as well as hardware to rig masts for an oceangoing vessel.

  Near the conclusion of their arduous labors, Captain Orellana noted that the food deliveries from the people of Imara and the surrounding villages now came with decreasing frequency. Fifty hungry working men consume a great deal of food, and the Imarans were apparently giving their guests a hint that it was time for the Spaniards to be on their way. The locustlike consumption of food and resources, plus the noise and clanging of constant metalworking and the attendant smoke and stench from the forge fires, all disturbed the bucolic villagers. Sensing that they had overstayed their welcome, the Spaniards began storing food for departure, as Carvajal reported: “We laid in what foodstuffs we could, because this was not the time to stay any longer in that village, on the one hand, because, so it seemed, this was beginning to become irksome to the natives.” They would have to build the second boat somewhere down the river.

  Orellana wished to leave while relations with the Imarans were still cordial, and he ordered the men to begin readying for a prompt departure. There were, however, a few matters of political expedience to attend to before he left. Orellana, an ambitious and visionary dreamer, had certainly not forgotten why he had come here, why he had left the comforts of his home back in Puerto Viejo and risked his life. Before he had departed from Guayaquil, Orellana had been careful to lay out, in “memorial” documents that were legally registered with and signed by magistrates, the duties and services that he had already performed in service of the crown, all with a political eye toward someday becoming the independent governor of a region or province somewhere in these newfound lands, with the requisite legal and royal consent. He had yet to find the right place, but with the optimistic vision of a conquistador, he would continue to seek such a domain. But what he needed to do now was take the time to document his actions from his initial separation from Gonzalo Pizarro as well as from this point onward, being careful to address how his actions would be perceived and scrutinized back in Quito, as well as far away in his homeland of Spain.

  His plan to send canoes back upriver to try to find the main force had met with a negative response. Aside from the few reluctant volunteers, most of the men had flatly refused, saying that they “feared certain death in view of the long time it would take them to make the journey,” which they estimated at a few hundred miles against a very stiff current. Their refusal, Orellana now figured, might just work in his favor, providing a documented rationale for his decision to continue down the river system. Probably prompted by Orellana himself, the scribe Francisco de Isásaga, who had earlier been put in charge of recording everything of a legal nature that “may occur and come to pass” in his presence, now brought forth a petition and went about the camp, asking for signatures from the men.

  The petition—written to Captain Orellana himself but clearly aimed at a higher audience, namely the king—claimed that despite Francisco Orellana’s desire and entreaties to go back up the river, the men, for various reasons, pleaded otherwise. The petition reiterated the great distance they had come, the impossibility of “so up-hill a journey,” and pointed to “how much more danger of death there would be for us were we to go with Your Worship back up the river!” Peppered with much beseeching and begging, the document ended by pleading that Orellana not place his men in the difficult position of having to obey him or otherwise appear as traitors, but assuring their captain that they would happily follow him by an alternate route “by which at least their lives might be saved.”

  Both of the priests present, as well as Isásaga and all the other members of the expedition (save two, who were either dying or too feeble even to mark an X with their hands) signed the document, which Isásaga folded and stored securely with the other important legal papers. The petition was a shrewd move by the politically savvy Orellana, for it provided written proof that his men had overruled his desires, and it essentially justified his decision to continue downstream on what was clearly now a “strange and hitherto never experienced voyage of discovery.”

  On February 2, 1542, after hearing mass and saying prayers for their fallen compatriots, Orellana and his captains bade farewell to the chiefs of Imara, including Aparia the Lesser, whose fanciful tales still hung in the air and fired the Spaniards’ imaginations. Loaded with as much food as they could safely store in the San Pedro and the canoes, and the heavy nails and ironwork they had manufactured, the Spaniards lumbered out into the Napo River, riding its swift southeastward current once more.

  The San Pedro and fleet of canoes had gone only a short distance when they reached the junction of another impressive river pouring into the Napo from its southern shores, coming at them with terrifying turbulence. It was the mighty Curaray River, a magnificent tributary that thunders its way from the eastern slope of the Andes and runs roughly parallel to, but south of, the
Napo. Where the rivers met, the waters boiled like a muddy cauldron, and the oarsmen of the San Pedro and the men paddling the canoes dodged rolling and bobbing tree trunks and enormous knots of gnarled vegetation. The light canoes struggled, close to overturning, in violent whirlpools. Orellana directed the laden San Pedro to a safe eddy away from the dangerous confluence and paused to contemplate an upstream reconnaissance in canoes.

  While the Spaniards were staying in Imara, one of the chiefs who came to pay a visit and bring food had said that he lived up a nearby river and was an important overlord of that domain, and Orellana suspected that this, the Curaray, was that river. Could it also be the river of Ica’s realm that Aparia the Lesser had described? Orellana was tempted to explore the region, and in fact some of his men reported hearing drums emanating from up the river and then seeing “many Indians in canoes ready to defend the landing place.” The prospect of encounter was tantalizing, but Orellana knew that getting the San Pedro up that river would be impossible. Even the canoes had almost been sunk in the tumultuous confluence of currents, some of his men having barely escaped drowning. Reluctantly he opted to continue on their way, assuming that they would reach other villages and people soon enough.

  Food being a constant concern, Orellana diligently scouted the riverbanks all along their way for signs of people, crops, or even harvestable animals, though neither he nor any of his men had yet learned how to effectively hunt the local fauna, which would in any case require a time-consuming and exhausting detour. At its lowermost reaches the Napo River grows wide and braided with huge channels, the lands between the braids appearing as islands. Once, Orellana allowed a party of eleven Spaniards in two canoes to reconnoiter some such islands, looking for fish in the shallows, but by the end of the first day apart there was no sign of the smaller group. After two days, Orellana grew deeply grieved, “expecting never to see them again.” Late on the second evening the canoes returned, and there was rejoicing and storytelling and backslapping among the reunited men. Afterward, Orellana ordered that all vessels remain within sight of one another at all times.

  The canoes and brigantine sailed on, passing through what one chronicler described as “many hardships and extraordinary dangers,” though he gives no details of these travails. They passed ominous-looking burned villages, recently torched and still smoldering. They arrived at a few small abandoned settlements, then reached a sparsely inhabited village of about sixty huts, most of whose population had vacated in advance of the Spaniards’ arrival. Orellana assured the Indians whom he met there that he and his men meant no harm, and Orellana took pains to remind his men that under no circumstances were they to molest or mistreat the Indians in any way. Shortly thereafter, his diplomacy was rewarded: “They brought back turtles of the very large variety … and they also brought parrots, which food was sufficient to enable the companions to dine plentifully that night.”

  On February 12, 1542, Francisco Orellana and his fleet noticed a truly great river coming in to meet them from the south bank. The incoming flow from the right impressed and even frightened the men, for it was far bigger than the river they were on, bigger than anything they had ever seen.

  The one which came in on the right side as we came downstream … did away with and completely mastered the other river, and it seemed as if it swallowed it [the Napo] up within itself, because it came on with such fury and with so great an onrush that it was a thing of much awe and amazement to see, such a jam of trees and dead timber as it brought along with it … it was enough to fill one with the greatest fear just to look at it, let alone to go through it.

  Francisco Orellana had reached the confluence of the Napo and the Maranon, the origin of the Amazon River proper. Though he certainly could not know it at the time, Orellana and his crew were the first Europeans to experience the world’s largest river. The Spaniards grew awed by the stupefying scope and scale of the river, a grander and more inspiring body of fresh water than any of them had ever encountered, or ever would again. “It was so wide from bank to bank,” they recounted, “that it seemed as though we were navigating launched out upon a vast sea.”

  Indeed, the Amazon River is so immense that superlatives fall short of doing it justice. More than 4,500 miles long, the Amazon discharges one-fifth of all the freshwater that flows into the earth’s oceans, about sixty times the amount contributed by the Nile, its closest rival in size. Snaking across an entire continent in a languid west-to-east flow, the immense river drainage is fed by some five hundred tributaries, a number of which themselves, were they located anywhere else in the world, would be the largest river on their continent. In places the Amazon sprawls a remarkable fifty miles wide; it can vary in depth with floodwaters or tides by as much as fifty feet; and, near its terminus at the Atlantic, it contains an island the size of Switzerland.

  Orellana and his men saw trees many times the size of the San Pedro twisting violently in the river’s whorls, and they knew they must stay always on alert to avoid being struck and wrecked. Here, too, they encountered floating islands, some more than a mile wide, great rafts of moving meadows, wondrous and bewildering to behold. The banks of the river teemed with wildlife that they viewed fleetingly as they sailed on: brown capybaras, giant rodents up to four feet in length, that dived from the banks into the muddy water to escape predators, and huge tapirs—hoofed animals related to rhinoceroses and horses—with their short, bristling neck hair and downward-curving snouts, that wallowed through the mucky bog lands, disappearing into the marsh as the expedition came near. Numerous felines, black-spotted jaguars, pumas, ocelots, and margays, lurked in the shadowy forests along the river as well, their predatory eyes luminous in the moonglow at night.

  The Spaniards encountered more villages, learning from their chiefs that they were now in the outer realm of a powerful overlord called Aparia the Great. Orellana and his men paused in one of these villages, but marauding mosquito swarms literally drove them away and they packed up and sought refuge farther downstream. They pulled ashore and rested for a few days, where Indians “came with peaceful intent to bring us large quantities of food.”

  On Sunday, February 26, rested and reasonably fed, Orellana started off again, coming soon to a large, two-forked channel in the river. Almost immediately they saw four or five canoes approaching them from below, paddling hard upriver. The Spaniards readied for possible confrontation, though up to now the Indians of the region had not been warlike. As the canoes drew closer, Orellana could see, to his continuing good fortune, that these craft were laden with foodstuffs, and as they came alongside, the Indians spoke to Orellana, who, after a bit of trial and error, began to converse back, and they exchanged introductory pleasantries. Friar Carvajal once again marveled at Orellana’s gift for language, saying, “The Indians remained very happy to see the kind treatment that was being extended to them and to see that the Captain understood their tongue, a fact which was of no little consequence with our getting to a haven of clear understanding.”

  Orellana produced a few gifts for these men, who he learned were prominent lords under vassalage to Aparia the Great. In exchange for Orellana’s trinkets, the lords proffered delectable foods, including “many partridges like those of our Spain, save that they are larger, and many turtles, which are as large as leather shields, and fish also of various kinds.” This convivial exchange completed, the Indians offered to guide Orellana and his men downstream to the main village where Aparia the Great resided, and Orellana agreed, following the canoes down one of the channels in the river.

  A few of the Indian canoes sped off, vanishing downriver, and as Orellana rounded a curve he saw a large settlement, and only minutes later witnessed an alarming sight: “It was not long before we saw many Indians come out of the aforesaid village and get into their canoes, in the attitude of warriors, and it looked as if they were getting ready to attack us.” Orellana felt certain that he had fallen into a trap.

  Quickly barking out commands to his men, Orellana orde
red the crossbowmen and harquebusiers to ready their weapons, and the rest of the soldiers brandished their blades. Orellana directed the oarsmen of the San Pedro and the Spaniards in canoes to row at full strength for shore above the village, and in minutes they were storming the banks. “The Captain leaped out on land all armed, and after him all the others, and at this the Indians became quite frightened.” The Spaniards stood their ground, defiant and at arms, while the Indians pooled in their canoes in the shallow bank waters, in a tense standoff.

  At length Orellana called out for some of the Indians to come ashore, waving to them. A few did so, and Orellana spoke calmly to them, assuring them that they need not fear harm, that he and his men came with peaceful intentions. The Indians apparently comprehended Orellana’s message, for they conveyed it to the many canoes that remained waiting there on the water, and moments later they began coming ashore, including, to Orellana’s amazement, Aparia the Great himself:

  The overlord leapt out on land, and with him many important personages and overlords who accompanied him, and he asked permission to the Captain to sit down, and so he seated himself, and all his followers remained standing, and he ordered to be brought from his canoes a great quantity of foodstuffs, not only turtles, but also manatees and other fish,* and roasted partridges and cats and monkeys.

  The stalemate had merely been a misunderstanding. The people of Aparia (as the Spaniards called the village—which lay just below present-day Iquitos, Peru) had come to welcome, not fight, the Spaniards. Orellana thanked Aparia the Great for the food, and he took the formal opportunity to launch into his requerimiento speech, his friars at his side, adding that the Christians “worshipped a single God, who was the creator of all created things, and not like them who walked in the paths of error worshiping stones.” Orellana explained that he and his companions were servants of a great emperor and master, who commanded the Christians and, in fact, “to whom belonged the territory of all the Indies and many other dominions and kingdoms existing throughout the world.”