River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  As the Spaniards rowed away, they saw along the banks thousands of tribesmen, chanting and parading. “The Indian men kept uttering cries, and the women and children kept beating the air with pairs of fans resembling fly-shooers, and kept jumping and dancing, executing many gestures and contortions of their bodies, manifesting great delight and joy, like people who had come out victorious, in that they had driven us out of their country.”

  The battle had lasted all morning, and now Orellana ordered his oarsmen to hurry to the opposite side of the river so that they might skirt away from the more populated and developed lands they could see coming up fast. As they moved across the river, they noticed that one of their comrades, a mercenary soldier named García de Soria, writhed about in anguish. An arrow had struck him in his thigh, and though the arrow point barely pierced the surface of his skin, actually falling out on its own, the tip of the arrow was glazed with deadly poison—sometimes harvested from the glands of poison dart frogs or, more often, made from toxic tree bark—and he was to suffer the same horrific fate as Carranza before him. In less than twenty-four hours Soria, a native of Logrono, fell dead after suffering unspeakable pain, fevers and convulsions, and finally paralysis. His agonized passing served as yet another terrifying reminder of the fate that awaited anyone so much as grazed by a poison arrow.

  The lands the Spaniards were now passing had fortresses and some ramparts heavily garrisoned against attack, and these sat positioned on scrubby, barren hillsides that were some distance to the interior—back quite a span from the river shore. This line of flat-topped hills was likely the Serra de Almeirim, which ascends nearly a thousand feet above the river and runs for nearly a hundred miles along its northern shore. Passing these, they came to a deserted section, and Orellana chose to risk going ashore, for his men sorely needed to walk about and stretch and get out of the boats for a time. The stop was risky, for they were only a few miles downstream from the violent village they had just fought their way through, but the flagging morale of the men seemed to require it.

  The land here was savanna, interspersed with thin groves of trees, which reminded the Spaniards of the cork oaks and white oaks of their homeland.* Orellana chose to stay a few days, and while most of the men rested along the vacant shore, he dispatched a small reconnaissance party inland, cautioning them not to stray too far from the main camp. The scouting party discovered a large network of well-used trails leading to and from the water. The tracks, likely made by hunters and fishermen, did not appear fresh, but were well established and deeply fissured and had clearly received much use over a long period of time. They encountered a torched village, apparently raided by rival tribes from the far interior. After two days, when they were well enough rested, Orellana rallied the men to show courage for the remainder of the voyage—whatever it brought—and they put into the river once more to continue their journey, quite literally “come hell or high water.”

  The fine savanna country soon changed, turning into a wild and nebulous maze of marshes and estuaries and islands, with river channels and arteries so webbed that they could no longer see the mainland shores on either side. Now they threaded their way through narrow channels between islands, forced to row sometimes against the rush of tidal inflow, navigating all the time now on a freshwater sea. “We struck out among islands that are really a part of the river’s course,” recalled a chronicler, “that are too numerous to count and in some cases very large, navigating among which calls for highly skilled mariners or pilots able to decide where to go in and where to come out, because the islands make the river divide up into many arms.” The boats were often in danger of foundering, buffeted by coastal winds hurtling up the channels.

  Many of the islands throughout the channels supported villages, some of them quite large. Orellana went ashore at one that appeared abandoned, hoping to make a food raid. But before finding any stores worth taking, Orellana and his men encountered a sight to make them shiver: “flesh roasted on barbecues … kept ready to eat, and it was readily recognized as the flesh of a human being, because there were a number of pieces of it—a few feet and hands that had belonged to a human being.” The Spaniards quickly departed this macabre place.

  At another village they came across some very intriguing artifacts, suggesting not only that they were now quite near the sea, but that the inhabitants had been in contact with, and been impressed by, other Europeans: two clay representations of sailing ships, hung up on display, possessing both the shape and proportion of brigantines, and very lifelike. These may well have been made to commemorate or illustrate encounters with the ships that Pinzón sent upriver from the mouth, or perhaps even those of Diego de Ordaz. They found, too, a shoemaker’s awl, “with the thread and brass sheath that go with it, whence it was understood that the Indians of this country knew of the existence of Christians.”

  Most remarkable to the Spaniards was the colorful and highly decorative pottery that they found among these islands. So impressive were the illustrations and workmanship that the Spaniards made expressive and elaborate recordings of them, including the following:

  A thing well worth seeing are the pictures which all the Indians along this river put on the vessels which they use for their household service, both clay and wooden ones, and on the gourds out of which they drink, because of the exquisite and beautiful leaves and the carefully drawn figures, and in the excellent skill and organization that is required in making them: they apply colors to them and make them stay on very well, and these colors are very good and very fine, each one being of a special kind and different in shade. They manufacture and fashion large pieces out of clay, with relief designs in the style of Roman workmanship, and so it was that we saw many vessels, such as bowls and cups and other containers for drinking, and jars as tall as a man … very beautiful and made out of a very fine quality of clay.

  Some of the vessels seem to have been made in daily household contexts, for regular consumption of food, but other more ornate pieces suggested a more ceremonial usage, perhaps during special feasts, and also those associated with tobacco consumption, and the ritual use of hallucinogenic beverages like yajé.* Subsequent archaeological digs in and around this area, particularly on Marajó Island, have turned up remarkable gender iconography, with female representation predominating on the funeral vessels and figurines and suggesting elaborate female rites as well as their important (perhaps even dominant) social and political importance and ranking within these elaborate chiefdoms. The Spaniards concluded that the quality of the artisans’ work illustrated keen intelligence and high creativity, with style and design of such a level as would “make a very good showing in the eyes of the highly accomplished artisans in that profession in Europe.”†

  Food, however, was scarce, and it soon became obvious to Orellana that, though he wished to avoid it, he was going to need to land at an established and occupied village and either use diplomacy or weaponry to gain fresh sustenance for his flagging company. They navigated up an estuary of a stream, rowing hard and fast at high tide, Orellana piloting the larger brigantine Victoria toward the shoreline of an island village situated on an estuary, landing her with a flourish and the companions leaping out, battle-ready.

  Following behind, the San Pedro attempted the same maneuver, the oarsmen bringing her up to beaching speed on the surging wash of tide, when they felt a sickening impact and came lurching to a halt. The San Pedro had impaled itself on a submerged timber. The pole stove in a plank, rupturing a great hole in the bottom of the boat. It listed now over to one side, water rushing in and swamping the vessel until she lay imperiled, “until there remained only four finger widths of the gunwales uncovered.”

  Up ahead on the beach, Orellana and his crew had scattered the inhabitants they encountered and were scouring the village for food. But only moments later, crowds of Indians began to return, armed and dangerous, and they drove the Spaniards back to the Victoria, which to their dismay had now been left aground by the receding tid
e. Carvajal reported that “Here we saw ourselves in a very trying situation, one more trying than any into which we had fallen along the whole course of the river, and we thought we should all perish.”

  With one boat swamped, one beached, and hostile Indians pouring down the creek, Orellana belted out orders, dividing his crew into squads: one would remain engaged with the Indians, fending them off as best they could, while the other group had dual duty, trying simultaneously to heave the large Victoria into the water where it might float freely again, and to repair the leaking San Pedro enough to sail it away. Orellana and the two priests stayed aboard the Victoria, guarding the exposed water to their rear against canoe attack.

  For three terrifying hours the Spanish fighters managed to fend off the island-dwelling Indians while the rest of the crew worked tirelessly to repair the San Pedro, stuffing blankets and bedding and clothing into the rupture and hammering spare planks inside and out, furiously bailing water to make the vessel at least temporarily seaworthy. At almost the same moment, the San Pedro was repaired and the Victoria finally floated on the water once more. The Spaniards loaded what foodstuffs they had originally found, boarded the brigs, and hurriedly departed, limping away from this hostile harbor and thanking their God for deliverance.

  Floating aimlessly through the marshlands, that night the crews slept aboard the brigantines. At sunrise Orellana began looking for a suitable place to land. Although the men were seriously malnourished, his most immediate concern was the repair of the San Pedro, which was unfit for navigating the flat tidal waters they were on, much less the open ocean, which they now seemed destined to reach. They came later that morning to a protected wooded area that looked to Orellana defensible and sheltered, and he ordered the boats moored there and tied off to trees along the shore. His plan was to repair the San Pedro first, and also to begin preparations for serious retrofitting of both boats to make them seaworthy oceangoing vessels. To do this, they were again going to need more nails.

  At this island encampment Orellana set up another forge and nail-making factory. While volunteer carpenters pulled the San Pedro out of the water, dried its hull, and began patching its damaged bottom, others set to felling trees, drying them, and manufacturing charcoal in order to melt, form, and forge nails from ferreted-away pieces of metal. It was the first time they had done such work since leaving the village of Aparia the Lesser, and the break in monotony did the men good, a respite from fighting and foraging for food.

  But the work was slow and laborious, in part because the men were weak from undernourishment, and also because hard rains made it difficult to keep the forge going and timbers dry. Food ran so low here that Orellana ordered the strictest of rations: “We ate maize in rations counted out by grains.” During one of these toilsome evenings, Orellana stood peering out at the river’s swirl when he saw an odd shape floating along, a bobbing quadruped that appeared to be the size of a mule. As it floated near, he saw that it was a dead tapir, and he quickly ordered a few men to take a dugout canoe and go after it—perhaps the carcass would be in good enough shape to consume. The men returned soon with the providential animal that “had been dead for only a short time, because it was still warm and had no wound whatsoever on it.”

  Orellana and his men could offer no explanation for the tapir’s demise, but they were too hungry to care. They considered it a divine gift or intervention that saved their lives, for the very large animal (tapirs are the largest terrestrial animals in Brazil, some weighing as much as 650 pounds) sustained the crew of fifty Spaniards for nearly a week. They consumed every ounce of it, entrails and all. By the time the San Pedro’s hull was fully repaired and Orellana decided that enough nails had been fabricated for the work that remained, eighteen days had passed—most of the month of July—during which they had all “toiled with no little amount of endeavor.” But Orellana needed a bigger, flatter, more open beach where both boats could be brought ashore and fitted out for sea, and so on about July 25, he continued in search of such a place.

  Downstream among the many islands and beaches they found a suitable island, uninhabited and well positioned for scouts and guards to survey the water above and below them for attackers. Most important, there was enough room on the beach to haul both boats ashore and set to the serious labor of making them oceanworthy. Using makeshift rollers of felled trees and spare (though rotting) ropes, the weak, gaunt men hoisted the boats up onto the beach and began the difficult retrofitting work.

  By now, they were fairly practiced at the craft, having already built the two vessels from scratch along the way. Some wove rigging and cordage for lines and halyards out of vines gathered nearby, while others set to sewing together sails out of the Peruvian blankets they had carried with them, as well as any spare woolen clothing they had brought along. Blacksmiths hammered away at the oar fittings and mast stays, while other crewmen found strong, tall palms for proper masts, shaping other cut timber into rudders and spars. Anticipating the very high likelihood of taking on water from sea spray and open ocean waves, the famished crews even built two bilge pumps—one for each craft—with plungers sealed with grease made from “rancid turtle fat” and the remaining leather parts they could find.

  While the smiths and carpenters worked, others scoured the beaches of the island for food. The starving and disoriented men plodded about, grim and despondent, “for we did not eat anything but what could be picked up on the strand at the water’s edge, which was a few small snails and a few crabs of reddish color the size of frogs.” They were reduced to roasting these on spits along the beach, along with a few maize kernels, and sharing all among the crew, making sure that the shipbuilders received more than a fair share to sustain them. Given the condition of these men, their achievement on this island was nothing short of miraculous.

  The effects of serious undernourishment include devastating lethargy, not only physical but psychological as well. With little to look forward to but more fighting with Indians, the specter of poisonous darts or arrows, and who knew how many terrible days of want—including vicious thirst and hunger—at sea, Orellana and his men might well have been at an all-time low. People who are starving—or severely undernourished—experience blackouts from standing up suddenly, swollen hands and feet, and abject irascibility. Concentrating on even the simplest task becomes nearly impossible. Couple all this with the very real fact of seeing their bodies weaken and emaciate, atrophying and losing muscle and fat, and there was the perfect recipe at this island—which the Spaniards named, appropriately, Starvation Island—for giving up. But it is a true testament to both their tenacity and Orellana’s leadership that in just two weeks, they had made both the San Pedro and the Victoria seaworthy.

  On August 8, 1542, Orellana urged his men aboard the ships and they departed Starvation Island now under sail, dizzy with hunger but bolstered by their accomplishment with the boats. They would continue toward the mouth of the Amazon, come what might.

  Through the intricate and convoluted maze of waterways they sailed, using the winds to tack from one side to the other of the widest sections of the river. The sailing was tricky, the shifting winds challenging the pilots, who, in any event, were not experienced sailors but mercenary fighters for hire who had either volunteered or been chosen for the arduous task of keeping the brigantines from shipwreck or running aground. The surging tides added to the difficulty, as did the fact that neither ship had a proper weighted anchor, an extremely useful tool for waiting out tides. According to Carvajal,

  What grieved us most was having no anchors for either one of the brigantines in order to be able to lie at anchor, waiting, as it was necessary to wait, for the tides, for the time when the water should fall; and, as we anchored to buckets made of stone and sticks, it happened many times that the brigantines would drag these crude anchors along the bottom, with the risk of being smashed to pieces.

  As they zigzagged their way through this tortuous and twisted patchwork of islands and streams, shorebirds r
ode the wind across the bows, terns and sandpipers flitting and swooping, and the men saw snowy egrets and huge jabiru storks wading the marshes, their tall white bodies bright flecks against the dark water. Sometimes they temporarily ran aground on sandbars created by the surging tides, but Orellana refused to allow the men to panic, instead ordering them to leap from the boats and lift them back into deeper water, or choosing to wait it out until the incoming tide would right them again. The want of food they had suffered on Starvation Island gripped them still, and the men moved with the sloth and despondency of the walking dead. Orellana understood that none of them could last much longer without food.

  When it finally became clear to Orellana that they simply must land and obtain food or perish, he risked going ashore in one of the estuaries, and with tremendous good fortune found the inhabitants mostly docile and hospitable. Still haunted by fear of being attacked with poisonous arrows, however, in this place he took aside a young woman and decided to test one of the arrows that had been pulled from the protective railing of the Victoria to see what happened. He scratched this girl on the arm with the arrow tip, then waited to see what fate befell her. When nothing happened to her, he decided that the village was safe, and they obtained what food they could, but it was scarce, or possibly hidden from them. But to the Spaniards’ great relief, the coastal Indians throughout the remainder of their estuary journey greeted them unarmed, and generally provided at least some food—mostly in the form of roots or tubers they referred to as inanes—a kind of yam—and some maize.