River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  By now the San Pedro had been repaired, and Orellana made sure that it was fitted for eventual sailing, suggesting—as evidenced by the seagoing design of the newer boat—that he now fully intended to cross the continent in these ships and sail to the Northern Sea (the Atlantic). The brand-new boat, which was considerably larger than the San Pedro, would allow all the men to travel in the two boats, dispensing with most of the canoes from this point onward, retaining just a few for stealthy and fast tributary reconnaissance. They calked the new ship with cotton and tarred her with pitch (perhaps resin from local rubber trees or black beeswax), all brought at Orellana’s request by the people of Aparia. When finished, she measured, at waterline, nineteen joas, making her “quite large enough for navigating at sea.” Wide-beamed, with nine thwarts to accommodate eighteen oarsmen, she would be the sturdier, more defensible, and less vulnerable of the two vessels, Orellana hoped. She would need to be something of a battleship.

  They named the new craft Victoria, showing a blend of bravado and hopefulness, honoring the great victories they would no doubt win by her means.

  The boats ready, and now with legal documents sealing his past and securing his future, Orellana “ordered that all the men be ready and make up their ship-stores,” because it was time to depart. The two months the Spaniards had sojourned in Aparia had been a blessed respite, as they had dined on delightful fresh fish, turtles and manatees and forest fowl with hot peppers, yuca in all its styles, with chicha to drink. But now it was time to move on.

  By sharpening his language skills and vocabulary during his extended stay, Orellana had learned much from Aparia the Great and all the other chiefs he had met. The consensus was clear: for the next 200 to 300 miles, they would continue to sail through the tranquil dominions of Aparia the Great, where they would not be attacked and food would be readily available. But beyond the lowermost reaches of Aparia the Great’s chiefdom,* they would confront the warlike Machiparo, and they had best be well prepared when they reached this powerful overlord and his warriors.

  Orellana, now in command of a small fleet, approached their departure with order, organization, and definitive leadership. The gunpowder—which up until this point they had hardly used but which might ultimately prove their salvation—was loaded and packed with extra caution, the kegs well wrapped to protect them from tropical deluges or splashing river water. The harquebusiers readied their matchlocks, which relied on dry powder, breaking them down, cleaning them, and reconditioning them until the bronze barrels and hook triggers gleamed in the sun. The crossbowmen tended to their weapons in turn, making certain that the nuts and windlasses were in proper repair and that they had plenty of steel-headed “bolts” or arrows, with their feather flights sleek and streamlined.

  Although Aparia the Great and the neighboring chiefs had assured him that food would be available for a time, Orellana remembered all too well their recent near-starvation and took no chances, stocking the holds of the ships with as much food as his hosts would provide and the boats could safely carry.

  On the eve of St. Mark’s Day, April 24, 1542, Orellana and his men bade farewell to Aparia the Great and his people, leaving what paltry parting gifts they could. The Spaniards boarded their boats, eighteen oarsmen having been selected to power the virgin Victoria. Unsure of what lay ahead, but steadfast in his goal now, which was to “complete this novel voyage of discovery,” Orellana set off with his men into the mysterious waters of the massive Maranon, the soon-to-be-immortalized river of the Amazons, adrift once more.

  * Futtocks are the curved timbers that form the ribs in the frame of a ship.

  * There is considerable debate regarding the extent and organization of these “chiefdoms” or multivillage polities. The term “chiefdom” was first coined by Kalvero Oberg in 1955. The evidence for the existence of Amazonian chiefdoms gathered by archaeologists and anthropologists such as Anna Roosevelt and Robert Carneiro suggests more organized, structured, and complex societies than had been previously believed to inhabit the Amazon River Basin. See Robert Carneiro, “The Chiefdom: Precursor to the State,” 37–79, in Grant D. Jones and Robert R. Kautz, The Transition to Statehood in the New World.

  CHAPTER 9

  River of Darkness, Brothers of Doom

  WHILE FRANCISCO ORELLANA AND HIS MEN FEASTED daily on succulent manatee steaks, roasted partridges, ducks, and turtle meat, their countrymen, led by Gonzalo Pizarro, were experiencing a living hell. Gonzalo, described by contemporaries as “a lover of warfare and very patient of hardship,” was certainly having his patience tested now.

  His dreams of El Dorado had been replaced by a nightmare on the banks of the Aguarico, his sick and bloated men moaning against the faint crackle of the campfire. All through the long night the remaining dogs, stick-thin and skittish, whined and howled, their own famished yips swallowed by the infinite forest understory. How far was Gonzalo Pizarro now from those exalted days when he and his brothers claimed the Inca Empire as their own, watching the emperor Atahualpa fill entire rooms with gold. He had been to the farthest reaches of that empire, won it for crown and country, won fame and riches and honor, and now here he lay, on the sodden ground, riddled and swollen with insect bites, his once stout frame gaunt as a vine. He was already wealthy beyond measure—had it been ambition or avarice or ego that had led him here, or some dire combination of these?

  Whatever his current regrets, Gonzalo Pizarro remained first and foremost a well-respected captain and a conquistador, a proud Extremaduran, and he would behave as such. He and his men must move, and move now. A few of his soldiers had already died, their ravaged bodies laid to rest with a prayer in the soft earth near the yuca plantation, and others now “swelled in such a way that they could not walk on their feet.” Pizarro ordered that these hobbled men, and the others who were too weak to walk, be hefted onto the backs of the remaining horses and tethered to the saddles with leather cords and forest lianas, their splayed feet lashed together beneath the horses’ midriffs so that they would not fall off as the pack animals plodded upstream. A few of the fitter men mumbled complaints, calling these mounted men laggards and weaklings for not walking on their own.

  Captain Pizarro and a handful of his healthiest men led the main bedraggled body, hacking away through the dense forest with wood knives and axes. By now many of the men went forward in bare feet, their boots having long since rotted off or been lost in the squelchy muck or cooked into broth along with saddle leather, girth straps, and reins. Pizarro placed a trusted man or two in the rear guard to keep the train of men moving along; sometimes they had to pick up the fallen, or prod forward those who slumped among the ferns. The horses, lank and knobby-kneed and rib-bare in their weakened state, struggled mightily.

  At least there was food. For nearly a hundred miles they remained among abandoned yuca plantations and foraged as they went, and this sustained them until they at last noticed some footpaths in the forest and came upon a small populated village. The natives, seeing the horses and the ghoulish men strapped to their backs, fled into the dark and shadowy forest or leaped into canoes and paddled away on the river. Eventually, some curious men returned by canoe with food, which they threw onto the banks from a safe distance. Grateful for the food, Gonzalo Pizarro tossed in return “hawks’ bells, combs, and other trifles” that he always kept for barter, and he tried to communicate with his benefactors through sign language. Desperate to discover where they were and for direction on where they wanted to go, he must have deeply resented Orellana at that moment and envied his linguistic skills.

  Pizarro’s ignorance of language again proved detrimental, for he was able to glean no useful information from these villagers. Frustrated, without guidance, he drove his men headlong upriver in an extended forced march through the thinly populated terrain of the region, but after eight consecutive days the trails and paths connecting villages—likely of the Secoya peoples—became sparse and indefinite and then disappeared altogether. Finally, “there were no lon
ger any Indians, nor any track leading in any direction, because the natives from this point used the river as their only road.” The last peaceful Indians they encountered had indicated, through signs, that beyond—farther upriver—there would be no roads and no more food. Learning this, Pizarro had taken all available food from the villagers, lashing the pilfer to the backs of horses, each man carrying as much as he could without toppling over.

  The once proud leader of conquering armies, Gonzalo Pizarro now verged on despair, for “he knew not in what land he was, nor what direction to take to reach Peru or any other part where there were Christians.” He called together his best leaders, among them Juan de Acosta and Gonzalo Díaz de Pineda, and they talked among themselves, trying to reach a consensus on their next move. They decided that the best course of action would be to send Pineda ahead upriver. He would bring with him a crossbowman, a harquebusier,* and a few of the local Indians for their paddling expertise. Pineda and this small group would work their way upriver in two canoes they lashed together for stability, seeking for populated villages with food and shelter and making blazes and cuts in trees to show where they had been. Meanwhile, Pizarro would march the remaining force upstream along the banks, following the blaze marks to the camp Pineda would strike, where they planned to meet up each night. This march, which would come to be referred to as “the worst march ever in the Indies,” would take them nearly two hundred miles on foot through lands Pizarro himself described as “mountainous, with great ranges, and characterized by ruggedness, and uninhabitable.”

  The “worst march” claim appears not to have been hyperbole. Gonzalo Pizarro did his best to lead by example, but with each passing week he grew more and more despondent, watching the condition of his men disintegrate further each day. Many of them were now racked with dysentery, and most were barefoot, limping slowly and painfully forward. Some attempted to fashion alpargatas, grass woven shoes or sandals similar to those worn by the Basques, using remnant saddle leather and straps to tie them to their feet. Their leggings had long since rotted off, and vines and thorns tore and cut at their unprotected thighs and calves. They were a morbid and ghastly corps:

  In this condition they went on, nearly dead with hunger, naked and barefooted, covered with sores, opening the road with their swords; while it rained so that on many days they never saw the sun and could not get dry. They cursed themselves many times for having come to suffer such hardships and privations.

  In such a destitute condition Gonzalo Pizarro and his men lurched slowly up the Aguarico River under heavy rains, the lands now utterly devoid of natives. Pizarro gazed up through the treetops each night, or along the river horizon, for signs of smoke coming from Pineda’s signal fires, which he had promised to build daily. The wisps of smoke curling like vapors into the air were all Pizarro and his men had to look forward to each day, for the fires meant that at the very least their compatriots were just ahead, and they would be stopping for the night, scouring the campsite together, in shared suffering, for any edible fruits they might pick off the ground or from trees.

  Ahead in the canoes, Pineda rowed valiantly upstream with his party, worried daily that his captain and comrades would die of hunger unless he found prosperous habitations. The upriver paddling became more and more strenuous the higher they went, as the Aguarico was joined periodically by other raging tributaries, and one day the river poured so violently against their makeshift canoe-raft that they were forced to run the boat aground and leap ashore. Pineda discussed the situation with his mates, trying to figure a way around the heavy confluence, concernid that Pizarro and the rest would find it especially difficult or even impossible to get through “owing to the density of the forest and the large affluents that came to join the river.”

  As they discussed their options, Pedro de Bustamante stood to survey the river ahead and alerted Pineda and the others to what appeared to be a canoe eddying in the water just beyond a bend. It was indeed a canoe, very shortly to be joined by fourteen or fifteen more of them, each bearing eight or nine warriors armed with shields, spears, and atlatls, or spear-throwers. They eddied calmly in the slack pool, defiant in their home waters.

  Pineda acted quickly and struck flint to steel, igniting the match of his harquebus. Bustamante followed suit, loading his crossbow with a shaft and standing at the ready as the canoes eased downriver toward them, seemingly unafraid of the Spaniards. Just as they came within range, Pineda lowered the harquebus and fired, hitting one of the Indians squarely in the chest. The unsuspecting warrior crumpled, dropping dead in the river. Bustamante, spurred by Pineda’s blast, fired the crossbow, his arrow impaling one of the Indians in the flesh of his arm. Stunned—and no doubt confused by the thunderous explosion that had left one of his brothers dead and bleeding in the water—the Indian pulled the arrow from his arm and hurled it back at the Spaniards, prompting loud screams and a violent barrage of darts, spears, and arrows by the other Indians.

  Pineda and Bustamante, both battle-hardened and skilled in warfare, reloaded quickly, firing in unison and felling dead another pair of Indians, then took up their swords and shields, readying for hand-to-hand combat. These Indians had never before experienced the booming percussive echo of a harquebus blast, nor smelled the acrid, sulfurous scent of spent gunpowder in the air. With three of their warrior companions slain in the span of only a few seconds, the Indians grew frightened, tucked in, and sped off downriver in their canoes, steering wide of Pineda, Bustamante, and the others.

  The Spaniards, thrilled by their effective offensive and the flight of the Indians, swung into their canoe-raft and followed in hot pursuit, firing the harquebus at them as they closed the gap. Once again the loud explosion of the gun confused and terrified the Indians, who now leaped from their canoes and swam ashore, scattering. The Spaniards managed to reel in and retrieve some of the canoes, a few of which, to their delight, were loaded with food, including fish.

  Pineda and his men ate the newly won food with gusto, relishing something different, “for it had been many days since they had tasted anything but roots and herbs which they found on the banks of the river.” After they had finished, Pineda took out his sword and cut a series of crosses into the bark of trees along the riverbank, so that Pizarro, in following up, would know his scouts had been there and gone.

  Later that afternoon, invigorated by the fighting and the food, Pineda and Bustamante continued their reconnaissance upriver, working hard to push against the boiling current. By dawn the next morning the continuous rains abated and fog lifted off the river, exposing their surroundings bright and clear, and they could see, beyond the swaying green canopy of primary rain forest, what appeared to be the outline of high mountain ranges looming far in the distance. The river here was rapid and they saw rocks, according to Pineda the first they had seen in more than a thousand miles. They had reached the headwaters of the Aguarico, to the north of the Coca River. Hardly able to contain their excitement—for this must assuredly, they believed, be the Andes Cordillera—they stashed some food in the recently acquired canoes and hid them in the forest for their return. Then they climbed back into their double canoe and raced downstream to report the news to their captain. They were no longer lost, and, God willing, they would soon be among Christians again.

  GONZALO PIZARRO, MEANWHILE, continued his death march up the Aguarico. The expeditionary corps of friends and countrymen, comrades in arms, men with wives and families back in Quito or the Indies or the mother country, courageous Spaniards who had dreamed of encomiendas of their own, working mines, crates filled with gold borne to their loved ones in treasure-laden ships—these men were now barely recognizable. Wan and jaundiced and skeletal, many simply dropped dead in their tracks. When they had marched proudly and gallantly out of Quito more than a year ago, they had had more than two thousand strong and snarling war hounds at their heels; by now they had eaten all but two, Gonzalo Pizarro’s own personal dog and the one brought along by the original campmaster, Antonio
de Ribera.

  The rains had drenched the men and reduced what clothes they had left to tattered rags that hung from their bodies like torn bandages. Many of the men were so weakened by famine that they could walk for only a few minutes at a time before slumping again to the forest floor, sometimes crawling along on their hands and knees like wounded animals. During the interminable nights they could hear the padding footfalls of tapirs and capybaras and agoutis and deer feeding in the forest, but these animals could only be slain by skilled and patient hunters trained to stalk them. The Spaniards were reduced to fantasizing about eating them as they starved.

  Only a few horses now remained alive, and these poor animals were subjected to a most gruesome survival tactic. The men had begun slicing slabs off the horses’ sides as the animals clomped along; they would eat the meat and then dress the horses’ wounds with mud and river clay, packing it on thick to stanch the flow of blood. Later, when hunger overtook them, the men would remove the mud and clay plasters, letting the blood flow again and draining the thick red liquid into their helmets, to boil and then season with herbs and peppers, making a ghastly blood soup.

  Gonzalo Pizarro was himself barely hanging on. He would write of this anguished march, which included wading through leech-filled swamps and creeks for miles, in water and mud that was sometimes knee-deep, often armpit-deep:

  All the remaining horses, more than eighty in number, were finally eaten; and in this uninhabited stretch were found many rivers and creeks of considerable size … and there were many days when there were built in the course of advancing two leagues [about five miles] twelve, thirteen, fifteen and even more bridges to take the expeditionary force across.