River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  After a few hours in this seemingly tranquil village, the comrades got together to ask Orellana whether they might make camp here. Certainly the presence of unattended women influenced this request, although the petitioners added that the next day was Corpus Christi—the first day of celebration after Holy Week—and it would please them to celebrate by staying in comfortable accommodations rather than on the boats or on the soggy banks of some uninhabited island. Initially, Orellana bristled at the suggestion. For one thing, given the treatment they had been receiving just upriver, there was no reason to doubt that—although this place appeared thinly populated—the outlying area held warriors who might this very moment have heard of their arrival and were readying to attack. Orellana, shrewd leader that he was, argued that the best thing to do would be to load up as much fish as they could carry and “go on as we were accustomed to doing, and get to the wilderness to sleep.”

  But the men were persuasive, as they had been in the past. Tired of the constant raiding and running, they literally begged to stay, asking that the captain grant this wish as a favor to them for all their hardships. Orellana, who some have criticized as being “too kind-hearted a soul by far,” consented, against his better judgment. The men dispersed to the nearby houses, enjoying the comfort of shelter from the sun and the elements and perhaps female company, many of them falling fast asleep.

  Orellana would soon regret his acquiescence. For just at sunset, the village men began returning from the interior, where they had apparently been busy working crops or trading fish. Shocked, frightened, and angered to find their homes occupied by ironclad aliens, an uproar arose as they shouted at the Spaniards, gesturing for them to leave. Some of them took up arms and massed for a concerted attack. A handful of the Spaniards, responding to the general confusion, banded together and formed a defense line, and not a moment too soon. In poured the angry warriors—but their first experience against slashing steel swords and clanking metal armor was utterly foreign and frightening, and they backed away, for the moment relinquishing their homes to the trespassers.

  Night fell, the moon rising and reflecting ominously on the water. Orellana told his men to rest in their armor and be ready for an attack. He doubled the normal number of guards. But despite these preparations, the Indians returned—this time in a fearsome swarm. They funneled in quietly from three sides, their attack so silent and sudden that they seriously wounded three sentinels and then were upon and among the Spaniards. When the alarm pierced the night, mixed with the screams of the attacking warriors, Captain Orellana leaped into the fray, rallying his men. Interloper and Indian fought under the glow of the shadowy moonlight, the warriors darting about with their palmwood clubs. Orellana barked orders to his lieutenants, and the Spaniards repelled the attack, chasing some of the Indians back through the village and into the woods, forcing others to leap into the water as they attempted to flee in canoes.

  Orellana took advantage of the pause in the fighting to order the area scoured for timbers and other materials to build a blockade defending the main entrance to the village, where the largest attack was likely to come. He put Friar Carvajal in charge of dressing the wounds of the injured sentinels, and then he moved about posting fresh guards around the periphery. They spent the rest of the long moonlit night fighting subsequent waves of attacks, Orellana directing defense tactics, racing from line to line of their impromptu squadron. When light finally poured over the scene, the Spaniards held a few of the warriors prisoner. As soon as it was bright enough to load safely onto the brigantines, Orellana ordered the bulk of his expeditionary corps onto the ships. He took a few men and rounded up the prisoners, and then he decided to send a message, one that conspicuously contradicted his character and standard behavior.

  He hanged the prisoners right there in their own village, in their own homes, in front of their families. Then, as a cruel punctuation to this act, he lit the houses of the village on fire.

  Friar Carvajal would explain or justify the act by saying that Orellana hoped to make a point “in order that the Indians from here on might acquire fear of us and not attack us,” and there was certainly a good deal of conquistador precedent for such tactics. Cortés famously—at the Massacre of Cholula—slaughtered upward of five thousand unarmed civilians in just two hours, his intention being to strike fear and awe into the population. Orellana knew firsthand of Francisco Pizarro’s wholesale annihilation of some seven thousand Incas on the field at Cajamarca, and was of course privy to his own captain Gonzalo Pizarro’s torture and assassination approach. But public hangings of this kind were not typical of Orellana; they were not his style. Perhaps he was angry with himself for allowing his mind to be swayed by his men; he had not wanted to stay there, after all—his intuition on that had been right and it had been a bad decision. Perhaps the pressures, the long and seemingly endless journey, had driven him to such barbarity. He certainly knew that word traveled quickly downriver, and he probably hoped the act would give tribes second thoughts about attacking as he and his boats made their way downstream.

  In any event, as they rowed resolutely from the place, which they named Corpus Christi Village, they could see people massing on the banks, warriors preparing to follow after them in canoes, women and children wailing and mourning their slain loved ones. Orellana charged his men to make speed, and soon they had outstripped the war canoes chasing them. The village receded into memory behind them, the black plumes of smoke from the burning homes forming dark, angry-looking clouds above the jungle canopy.

  * The reference to shields made of wood is noteworthy, since Orellana and Carvajal point out that the river-based Omagua used shields of manatee hides. Wooden shields might suggest less access to the river, or people living much deeper in the interior.

  * The noted field biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, contemporary of Darwin and some would say his superior when it came to actual fieldwork, brought the terms “whitewater” and “blackwater” rivers to international attention when he published his work A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro in 1853. The term “whitewater river,” borrowed from the Portuguese agua branca (whose Spanish equivalent, agua blanca, is used in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru), described muddy rivers the color of coffee with cream, such as the Amazon, while the term “blackwater river” referred to nutrient-poor, sandy-soil-dominated rivers, deep black in color, such as the Rio Negro.

  * While the sun was certainly an important symbol—even a deity in much Amazonian cosmology, often associated with creation mythology as well as fertility rites—there does not appear to be evidence of human sacrifice associated with the sun as it was practiced, and on a very large scale, by the Aztecs of Mexico.

  CHAPTER 14

  Encountering the Amazons

  THE NEXT DAY, HAVING NARROWLY SURVIVED THE midnight attack and subsequent night-long fighting, Orellana found an uninhabited anchorage and pulled over to rest his weary men and help the wounded to recover. They slept in a thick bramble of woods a short distance from their boats. The respite was much needed, for the all-night battle, the building of ambuscade barriers by dull moonlight, and the lack of sleep and sustenance had exhausted the men. Orellana finally rousted his haggard oarsmen and set them to toil again. They had traveled only about ten miles when the character of the river changed. They saw what appeared to be a great lake or sea of water downstream and on the right, on the southerly bank. “We saw emptying in on the right side a very great and powerful river, indeed greater than the one which we were following, and, because of its being so wide, we gave it the name of the Rio Grande.”*

  The river they dubbed the Rio Grande was the present-day Madeira, and their impression of its size and volume were well founded. Its discharge, the power of which they felt beneath the floorboards of the boats, exceeded even that of the mighty Rio Negro, and though they only took the time to look up its impressive mouth, the Madeira’s headwaters were actually an astonishing two thousand miles upstream, making it the longest
of the Amazon’s myriad tributaries. The muddy Madeira surges into the main Amazon as thick and dark as chocolate, conveying nearly half of all the sediments carried to the ocean by the main river. At the time, Orellana and his men simply gawked at its sprawling width and power, the currents at the confluence sufficiently strong to force them to cross the main river to its northern bank to avoid its violent whorls.

  As they neared the northern shore, Orellana could make out a series of large settlements hewn out of a hillside and descending right down to the river. Wishing for a closer inspection, he ordered the navigators to steer toward the shoreline. What he saw enticed him; here were open roads leading from the forest to the river, and an apparently vacated village. But Orellana’s recent debacle with an ostensibly empty village remained fresh in his memory, and he thought better of landing. His instinct turned out to have been prescient, for just as they passed the empty town there materialized more than five thousand warriors from hiding, who poured down the roads shouting and chanting and striking their weapons together in percussive unison. The clamor these warriors made could be felt through the air and on the water, so much so that, according to those present, “beating their weapons together, they made such an uproar that we thought the bottom had dropped out of the river.” Orellana’s decision not to land probably saved all their lives.

  Almost immediately, just a mile or two later, they approached an even larger settlement, and Orellana steered his oarsmen well away, traversing back toward the river’s center. They passed out of this hostile territory, noting that the character of what landscape they could see appeared “temperate and one of very great productiveness.” They cruised along through similarly developed country unmolested for a few days, until one morning around eight o’clock they advanced on a gorgeous village perched over the river on high ground. Its tidiness and grandeur drew them in, for they described it as “a fine looking settlement, which, from appearances, must have been the capital of some great overlord.”*

  They rowed hard for the arresting site, but particularly strong currents drew them past the access channel to the wondrous place and prevented them from rowing back upstream. As they passed they gazed back and saw a sight that all remembered in grisly detail: at intervals along the shore stood high wooden posts, onto each of which was nailed the head of a slain victim, probably tribal enemies. “In those villages they have many poles and large sticks of timber stuck up in the ground, and on top of them were placed the heads of Indians, fastened there as trophies or as tokens meaning that the tribe must be respected, or as a souvenir of their victories or as war reminders.” The head posts reminded the Spaniards of hanging gallows, and as a result they named this area the Province of the Gibbets. They described seeing seven such displays there, and many more as they continued down the river through this province, which they reported continued for more than 150 miles. But they also spotted evidence of high culture, with “roads made by hand, and on the one side and on the other were planted fruit trees, wherefore it seemed probable to us that it was a great overlord who ruled over this land.”†

  By the next day they were low enough on food to be forced to make another raid landing. They approached a seemingly silent village with some trepidation, as the image of those ghastly gibbets was still very fresh in their minds. Beaching the boats, they sprang out onto land ready for a fight, which they promptly received. Residents poured from out of hiding and came on with wrath, led by a chieftain of great courage, who ran before them, screaming as he charged into combat. One of Orellana’s crossbowmen swung about at the charging leader, leveled his weapon, and dropped the overlord as he came in full stride. This put an immediate halt to the charge. Their leader slain, the Indians dispersed, some fleeing the area, others regrouping to their homes, where they frantically threw up barricades and defense works.

  Orellana took stock of his troops. A few of his men had been wounded in the initial fray, and he had no intention of losing men or risking others. From the looks of their fortifications, these warriors planned to fight to the death. As a tactic, with the assistance of the skillful harquebusiers, Orellana ordered the houses set ablaze. The flames crackled up the sides of the wooden and thatched huts, dried leaves and vines exploding in fiery bursts. Men and women and children ran screaming from their homes, allowing the Spaniards their chance to move in and pilfer food. They found many turtles—apparently kept and harvested in ways similar to that of the Omagua—and a large variety of fowl, parrots, turkeys (curassows), and ducks, and much bread and maize.

  As the Spaniards scavenged around the burning buildings, they came to one that offered a ghastly revelation: it was filled with a number of burned-alive women and children who had failed to escape. For this reason Orellana named the place Quemados Villa, the Place of the Burned People.

  Among the wreckage and ruins they also found a lone girl, who was talkative and clearly highly intelligent. They brought her along with them and rowed across to an uninhabited island where they could rest and eat some of the food they had just stolen. Orellana’s intention was to speak with this girl and learn as much as he could, and according to Carvajal, with a little time and practice the captain was indeed able to converse with her—and the story she told fascinated him:

  She said that nearby, in the interior, were many Christians like ourselves, and they were ruled by a chief, who had brought them upriver, and that two of them had Christian wives and the others had married Indians who had borne them children. She told us that these were the people who had been lost out of Diego Ordaz’s party—or so we thought from her indications regarding them, for she pointed to the north.

  This story—or some version of it—while seemingly fantastic and improbable, had persisted ever since Diego de Ordaz’s ill-fated trip up the Orinoco in search of El Dorado. Ordaz, it will be remembered, was an important conquistador, a knight of Santiago and holder of a good deal of property in Mexico, property won through his exploits conquering the Aztecs under Cortés. In the course of his 1531 expedition to find and explore the Maranon—ironically, the very river Orellana was now on—Ordaz’s flagship made land somewhere north of the Amazon’s mouth, but the second ship, under Lieutenant-General Juan Cortejo, failed to arrive. Some said it struck rocks and fell to the bottom of the sea, while others said that it ran aground in the Amazon’s shallows and that many of its men—some said up to two hundred—survived, went ashore, and were either captured or taken in by various Amazon River tribes.

  As unlikely as such scenarios seem, rescues, recoveries, and discoveries of shipwrecked Spaniards living among indigenous populations had in fact occurred, and recently. These, in all likelihood, Orellana would have known about. In 1519, just after Cortés landed on Cozumel off the Yucatán Coast, he heard from locals on the island that across the way, on the mainland, were some white men, Christians like Cortés and his men. Cortés, intrigued by the possibility of Spanish-speaking countrymen who had been living among the mainland Indians, dispatched a ship with two captains—Juan de Escalante and, ironically, Diego de Ordaz himself, with fifty armed men for protection—to look for these Spaniards and deliver a handwritten message from Cortés to them. A week later, Escalante and Ordaz returned saying that they had delivered Cortés’s message to a village chieftain, but nothing had come of it.

  Then, just as Cortés was set to sail from Cozumel, where they had been repairing their leaky boats, a canoe came paddling up to shore, making land down the beach from where Cortés was hearing mass. Cortés’s men ran down the beach to investigate, and they were stunned by what they found. A tall man stood in the prow of the boat, next to a half-dozen naked men holding bows and arrows. The tall man spoke: “Brothers, are you Christians?” he asked.

  When the Spaniards nodded that they were, the man knelt in the sand and wept. He was a priest named Jerónimo de Aguilar, and the story he told was miraculous. Back in 1511 the ship Aguilar had been on struck low shoals off the coast of Jamaica, and he and some twenty other survivors escaped
in a rowboat. With no food or water, trading turns at their one set of oars, they caught a westerly current and washed up on the shores of the Yucatán, half their number dead and the rest barely hanging on.

  Mayan tribesmen found them and took them prisoner, immediately sacrificing their leader—a conquistador named Valdivia—and four other men, then eating those Spaniards during a festival feast. Aguilar and his remaining surviving friends, including a man named Gonzalo Guerrero, were crammed into cages and could only look on in horror at the sacrificial ceremonies, as drums rumbled into the lowland jungle and celebrants blew mournful songs on conch shells. The Spaniards were being fattened for sacrifice. Once they understood their imminent fate, they banded together and broke the cage slats, then escaped into the night.

  Aguilar and Guerrero, along with a few others, found refuge in another village but were quickly enslaved, though they were allowed to live. Aguilar acquired the nickname “the white slave,” and through hard work, luck, and his deep faith, he survived eight years among his Mayan captors and finally earned his freedom. He had received Cortés’s letter from the messengers, and then visited his countryman Guerrero, who by now was living in a nearby village. Guerrero had won his own freedom through feats of strength and hard work, and he was now an accepted member of his tribe, a warrior and a military leader. He had taken a wife, a chief’s daughter, and she had borne him a daughter and two sons. His heavily muscled body was covered with tattoos, his ears were pierced, and he wore a hunk of green jadestone as a labret. He had gone native, and he told Aguilar that he had no desire to return.