River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  Having only just procured the stock of turtles, Maldonado found himself dangerously outnumbered. Fighting in tight ranks, protected by their metal armor and wielding steel blades, he and his dozen companions fended off attack after attack, pausing during any lulls to continue gathering whatever food they could in adherence to Orellana’s order. But the Indians constantly re-formed and replenished their ranks, and during the second wave of attacks two Spaniards suffered serious injury, which seemed to invigorate the Indians. They

  came back at Cristóbal Maldonado so resolutely that it was evident that they sought (and actually started) to seize them all with their hands, and in this assault they wounded six companions very badly, some being pierced through the arms and others through the legs, and they wounded the said Cristóbal Maldonado … piercing one of his arms and giving him a blow in the face with a stick.

  As the waves of Indian reinforcements seemed to be unceasing, and with more than half of their men badly wounded, a few of the Spaniards now considered themselves as good as dead should they continue to fight, and one or two appealed to Maldonado to retreat to Orellana’s position. Maldonado barked at these men, imploring them to fight on for their honor and reminding them their retreat would only serve to further inflame the Indians and signal their victory. Instead, Maldonado rallied the least injured of his comrades, and he “fought so courageously that he was the means of preventing the Indians from killing all our companions.”

  While Maldonado and his group fought for their lives, Orellana had problems of his own. After he had dispatched their raiding party, Orellana and his own small army had noticed a lull in the fighting around them. Fatigued from fighting and from the heat, he and his men in a moment of poor judgment stripped off their armor and retired to the huts to rest. Unbeknownst to the Spaniards, small bands of Indians crept back through the forest and now came at them in a silent surprise attack. Before the Spaniards even noticed or had time to react, the Indians were upon them and among them, felling four of the conquistadors with grave wounds before Cristóbal de Aguilar, a handsome young man with experience fighting in Peru, sounded the alarm. At the same time, he assumed an aggressive stance, facing the enemy, and fought with courage against the Indians who surrounded him.

  Hearing the alarm, Orellana leaped to see what was happening, sword in hand. The sight was daunting: the houses were completely flanked by warriors, and the upper village square teemed with more than five hundred chanting, angry Indians. Orellana cried out his own alarm, and with that all the remaining companions rallied behind, as he led an all-out attack on the main Indian squadron. They fought continuously, hand to hand, for two straight hours. One experienced fighter named Blas de Medina charged straight into battle with nothing but a dagger, rushing in among the throng of Indians with such passion and bravery that his friends were astonished, and were inspired to fight even harder when they saw his thigh pierced clear through. After the two hours, Orellana had managed to rout the warriors, but at a cost of nine Spaniards grievously wounded.

  This intense battle over—at least for the moment—Orellana led the fittest of his men to find Maldonado if they could. By good fortune, they met on the same path. Maldonado had been returning with his beleaguered men, and Orellana could see that Maldonado himself, and all the rest, were bludgeoned and bleeding. One of these men was so badly injured that he died of his wounds eight days later. Remarkably, Maldonado had managed to get away with many turtles.

  Looking over his troops and assessing the situation, Orellana ordered that the eighteen injured men receive immediate medical treatment back at the huts. The number of wounded was devastating, constituting a full one-third of his force. The two priests were charged with their care, though they could offer little in the way of medicine, having along with them “no other remedy but a certain charm.” Father Carvajal, who helped attend to the wounded, does not specify what this “certain charm,” was, exactly, but it is possible that the men had learned something of Amazonian medicine having to do with plants and herbs, or even connected to sorcery and shamanism, during their long months in Aparia.

  It is conceivable that they had learned and acquired some of the botanical (or spiritual) treatments for injuries while there. Carvajal would have been well aware that the Holy Inquisition in Lima, Mexico City, and Cartagena established charges against acts of superstition and charms, but under the circumstances, this far removed from civilization and without any of their own medicines, these rules and writs could respectfully, and of necessity, be ignored. Whatever “charm” Carvajal employed, he believed it had positive results, for within two weeks “all were cured except the one who died.”

  While the priests were attending to the wounded, sentries arrived short of breath, reporting to Orellana that the warriors had begun to return, and that many were now hiding in a gully, preparing for yet another attack. Orellana quickly dispatched sixteen men, under Cristóbal Enríquez, with orders to dislodge this new force from the creek bottom. Some of the gunpowder had dried by now, and Enríquez brought with him a harquebusier, but that unfortunate was soon impaled through one of his legs, rendering his services useless. Without the firepower of the harquebusier, the small detachment failed to make any impact on the large force of natives, and Enríquez sent a messenger to apprise Orellana of his difficulties, asking for more men because the number of Indians, already impressive, was growing by the minute.

  Orellana now came to a decision. Instead of sending more men, he sent back the messenger, ordering Enríquez to fall back little by little, without giving the impression of a forced retreat, which would only incite an attack. Rather, Enríquez and his men should steal back stealthily, undetected if possible, and immediately begin helping to load the boats, for Orellana planned to depart as soon as they could. He would not allow a single Spaniard to die in this village. When all were once again safe on the shore near the brigantines, Orellana gathered the men together and made a resounding speech, “recalling to them the hardships already endured and bolstering them up for those to come.”

  Orellana had something of an epiphany in the village that day. He told his men that there was no need for any of them to die here or now, since they were not presently on a mission of conquest, but rather on a journey of discovery and exploration. It was true, he reminded his men, that God had brought them down this river. But Orellana exclaimed that his intention was to “explore the country in order that, in due time and when it should be the will of God … and of his Majesty, he might send him to conquer it.” Orellana was bent on returning, but he now knew that it would take a much bigger and better-equipped army to conquer the kingdom of Machiparo. For now, he must cut his losses and flee.

  Orellana ordered the men to work quickly, and in orderly fashion. First they loaded the food, including maize, manioc, many turtles, and stolen dried meat from the natives’ racks. Then, in a clever ploy, Orellana commanded that any men too wounded to walk without limping be carried aboard the ships on the backs of the others, wrapped up in blankets to appear like sacks of maize or manioc. He insisted that no men be seen limping to the ships, for he wanted to maintain the impression that the Spaniards were not vulnerable to the Indians’ weapons, or susceptible to wounds of any kind, let alone death.

  As the sun set, sending bloodred streaks across the darkening sky, the last of the men climbed aboard, and the oarsmen, some of their hands broken and bleeding, took painfully to their posts. Orellana called for the brigs to be unmoored, and in the dim evening light the tired and beaten men pushed off, the oars dipping silently into the murky Maranon. But this would be no silent or secret departure, for the moment the brigantines moved out into the main flow of the river, Orellana looked ashore and saw thousands of warriors on land raising their spears and screaming and chanting. But most worrisome, hundreds and hundreds more, even as darkness was falling, were leaping into canoes and racing toward the San Pedro and the Victoria.

  * The aggressive Indians were part of the powerful Machiparo div
ision of the Omagua chiefdom, at the time the most complex tribe in the entire Amazon.

  * Apparently, the Omaguas took their appearance very seriously, wearing their flattened heads as a source of great pride. According to Father Samuel Fritz, who visited the Omagua region extensively, “The distinguishing peculiarity of this tribe is the wearing their forehead flattened and level, like the palm of your hand, and of this they are exceedingly proud; the women especially to such an extent that they jeer at and insult women of other tribes by saying that they have their head round like the … skull of a savage from the forest.” Samuel Fritz, Journal of the Travels and Labours of Father Samuel Fritz in the River of the Amazons Between 1686 and 1723, translated from the Evora manuscript and edited by the Reverend Dr. George Edmundson, 47.

  CHAPTER 12

  Among the Omagua

  THE OARSMEN OF BOTH THE SAN PEDRO AND THE Victoria rowed furiously, their backs straining against the pull of their long and frantic strokes, but try as they might, they could not distance themselves from the inflamed canoe warriors of the Machiparo. Darkness descended around the boats so that the water and the hulls of the ships became eerie shadows, and the oncoming warriors were less seen than heard, their arrows whizzing over and into the boats with the sound of beating bird wings. They attacked continuously, “again and again, like men who had been wronged, with great fury.”

  The spears came at the ships with stupefying force, and from considerable distances, forcing the Spaniards to duck below the gunwales and fasten tight their armor and helmets. The native warriors achieved their distance and velocity by employing spear-throwers—level boards or planks of wood about three feet long and three or four inches wide, with a bone hook at one end to secure the spear or arrow, whichever was being thrown. The wooden spears could be up to six or seven feet long, tipped with a deadly sharp point or arrowhead made of very hard wood such as the black wood of the chonta palm, or sometimes animal or fish bone. Some of these arrowheads were intentionally detachable, allowing them to remain in the victim after the shaft of the spear was retrieved. To shoot with this instrument, according to chronicler Cristóbal de Acuña, “the arrow is taken in the right hand, with which the spearthrower is held by its lower end, and placing the arrow against the hook, they launch it with such force and accuracy that they do not miss at fifty paces.”

  Even amid the rain of whistling arrows* and spears, the Spanish crossbowmen and harquebusiers did their work, firing back with their own skill and accuracy, felling many natives in the closest canoes, the flaming belches of the harquebuses and the acrid stink of the spent powder frightening others so that they backed off for a time. Orellana ordered the boats to move to what he believed was the center of the river, hoping at least to limit the attacks from shore by staying out of range.

  That night proved eerily long and spooky, for the Indians in canoes pursued the Spaniards throughout the night, attacking intermittently, their only warning the ghoulish war cries and the onrushing whistles of swarms of airborne spears. At sunrise Orellana and his sentries peered over the decks, deeply concerned by what greeted them: “We saw ourselves in the midst of numerous and very large settlements, whence fresh Indians were constantly coming out, while those who were fatigued dropped out.”

  Orellana had no such luxury of begging off, and his men were flagging. Since their arrival in Machiparo’s domain, they had been fighting for their very lives almost continuously for over twenty-four cruel hours, with no time to eat or drink. Almost too exhausted to row, the oarsmen hung slumped on their benches, their palms blistered raw. Orellana took stock of the situation, eyeing the sacks and baskets of pilfered food. He knew that he and his men must eat soon, or they would lack even the strength to protect themselves. At about midday, Orellana spotted an island midriver, which appeared from a distance to be uninhabited. He exhorted his men to head for the nearest shore of the island and to land there if they could.

  Orellana had only just put his ships to shore, and his cooks were preparing to strike fires for a meal, when another series of attacks came at them, this time from both the water and the land. Indians had swung downriver, beached their boats, and now swarmed forward on foot, while others struck in surges from the water. They mounted and sustained a series of three concerted charges, forcing Orellana to relinquish the beachhead. He ordered his men back into the boats, which they took to in full retreat. Orellana figured rightly that they were safest inside the protection of the boats, and off they moved again, famished and forlorn, pursued all the while by ever-growing numbers of Indians. Orellana must have doubted whether his men could withstand another day of this, for as they went, more canoes issued from each successive village, as if the invaders’ arrival had been announced well in advance.

  Ahead, Orellana and his crew witnessed along the banks a truly daunting sight: the shoreline was thickly settled with houses and structures, and “on the land the men who appeared were beyond count.” One chronicler said that there came at them more than 130 canoes, and that there were more than 8,000 Indians in this village. Then, as the floating battle raged on, the Spaniards noted a strange and foreign phenomenon, for the Indians had resorted to a different sort of weapon altogether, one that Orellana, his men, and his priests would have had no idea how to combat:

  There went about among these men and the war canoes four or five sorcerers, all daubed with whitewash and with their mouths full of ashes, which they blew into the air, having in their hands a pair of aspergills,* which as they moved along they kept throwing water about the river as a form of enchantment, and after they had made one complete turn about our brigantines … they called out to the warriors, and at once these began to blow their wooden bugles and trumpets and beat their drums and with a very loud yell they attacked us.*

  Given Machiparo’s great numbers and the relatively few Spaniards, and the difficulty the Indians were having vanquishing this mysterious foe, it is hardly surprising that the natives would have employed assault sorcery, shamanism, or witchcraft, practices which played significant roles in their daily lives. Shamanism was often inextricably linked with warfare and tactics, and it would have been an obvious means to combat these unannounced and uninvited interlopers. The Spaniards were unlike anything these Indians had ever seen: white-skinned and hairy, with long, grizzled beards. They came in enormous high-sided canoes, and their weapons launched fire and spit smoke and searing-hot balls that killed from great distances. Their swords flashed fiery in the sun, blinding and cutting, able to cleave a man with one overhead blow. Machiparo and his people would do whatever it took—constant warfare or witchcraft—to banish them from their land or, better yet, kill them.

  Warfare shamanism sometimes employed particular spells aimed directly at enemies, either known intertribal enemies with whom a group had long-standing animosities, or foreign, unknown marauding hostiles like the Spaniards. The “assault sorcery” spells “possess devastating power that veteran light shamans employ, not just to cause pain … but to kill.” The shamans, as part of their complex and highly ritualized assault sorcery, used effigies (wooden figurines, and sometimes quartz pebbles, that did the shaman’s bidding) to attack or decimate enemies directly, or even whole enemy villages:

  To perform assaultive sorcery, the master … awakens the effigy by fumigating it with tobacco smoke and makes it stand and sway on the palm of his cupped hand. Suddenly, the figurine lifts off with the roar of a hurricane and flies to the targeted village, whose residents can hear the missile approaching but not see it. Only the local white shaman beholds the flying image and warns the people of the dying days that lie ahead. When in the air, the quartz pebbles surge in a triangular formation closely followed by the figurine. Hovering over the village … the intrusive foursome selects its victims, swoops down, and kills the enemies one by one in quick succession. The pebbles tear into their bodies like an arrowhead, allowing the effigy to penetrate deeply into its victims. The siege may last for four days, until many have succumbed as if to
an attack by … a war party.

  Orellana and his company must have wondered if the spell these sorcerers had cast on them was working, because downstream, just ahead, the river narrowed. They had been driven into an enemy-lined gauntlet that they must pass through, a slender branch of the main river where they would be steered dangerously close to the shore. It looked like a planned ambush, and as they approached they saw that a chieftain stood onshore among his warriors rallying them forward, as well as encouraging those still chasing and attacking the boats from all sides. “Those on the water resolved to wipe us out,” the Spaniards recalled.

  Sensing the gravity of the moment, Orellana called on his finest marksman, a harquebusier named Hernán Gutierrez de Celis, and gave him orders to shoot. They might have only one chance to save their lives now. Celis readied and steadied, took careful aim, and fired just as they floated near the bank. The firearm exploded and concussed, shocking the Indians with its thunderous boom, and the ball struck the chieftain square in the chest, tearing him open and killing him instantly. The explosion of the gun and sudden death of their chief sent the assembled warriors into panicked confusion, and they stood over their lord with wide and frightened eyes, not knowing what to do. Seeing them in this state of shock, Orellana charged his oarsmen to row for their lives, and they churned through the narrows and into the open water beyond the channel, gaining again the safer center of the widening river.