River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  For his part, Francisco Orellana’s course was clear in his mind. The wonders he had witnessed along the river, the good and peaceful tribes of Aparia, the thriving chiefdoms on the lower reaches of the Amazon, the mysterious women warriors rumored to possess untold wealth, all had an irresistible hold on him, and he vowed to himself to return, properly outfitted, on another expedition, this one bent not only on discovery but on conquest. In order to achieve this goal, Orellana knew that he must have the backing, support, and approval of his crown and government, and in order to garner this support, he would need to return to Spain to make his case and justify all his previous actions to date.

  Of all the surviving comrades and hidalgos, only four chose to sail with Orellana to Santo Domingo, an important seat of Spanish power in the region. These men were Comendador Enríquez, Alonso Gutierrez, Hernán Gutierrez de Celis (one of the more accurate and skillful harquebusiers), and, most notably, the thirty-year veteran Cristóbal de Segovia—Maldonado—who had agreed to serve as Orellana’s lieutenant should they manage to mount a return expedition. Maldonado, a driven and ambitious conquistador, was politically important, for he had been with Sebastián Benalcázar during the taking and founding of Quito in 1534 and was established as one of the city’s first settlers and prominent citizens. He had distinguished himself in the conquest of Popayán (also with Benalcázar), and he had been among Gonzalo Pizarro’s soldiers when they rode out on the expedition to La Canela. Under Orellana, Maldonado had fought courageously on numerous occasions, proving a trusted leader and fearless soldier.

  Maldonado possessed enough savvy and experience to understand the legal workings of the Indies and his native Spain, and so while agreeing in principle to travel with Orellana, he took steps to explain and justify his own exploits as well. While Orellana arranged for transport from Cubagua to Trinidad, where he hoped to buy or deal for a ship to Santo Domingo, then to Spain, Maldonado called on magistrates from the island of Margarita to draw up papers outlining and detailing his services: signed legal affidavits and testimonies that he could present and have housed at the Council of the Indies and later, if needed, in Spain. Most of the documents attested to his early and long-standing record in Nicaragua and New Granada, but the last few questions addressed his service under Orellana on their recent journey of discovery. The most important of these protected Cristóbal de Segovia and his captain, Francisco Orellana, from charges of desertion and treason:

  Item, whether they knew that, desirous though they were of returning to the main expedition, where the Governor [Gonzalo Pizarro] had remained behind, it was impossible to do so since the currents were so strong, and they were thus in a desperate situation, and that Captain Francisco de Orellana therefore ordered a boat to be built despite the fact that there was no shipmaster to build it, and in this and another small boat, they continued down the river until they reached the Maranon, down which they went to the sea, coming to port in the island of Cubagua, nearly dead from hunger and thirst, where God saw fit to bring them, and where they found salvation of their lives and consciences.

  Before an assemblage of magistrates, Orellana’s companions swore and signed to the veracity of this statement, and the entire document was filed and deposited in October 1542.

  It took another month for Orellana, Maldonado, and their three compatriots to work some kind of deal and purchase a ship in Trinidad. By the end of November they were ready to share embraces and bid farewell to Friar Carvajal and the rest of their brethren, men with whom they had toiled, built ships along hostile shores, and witnessed wonders no one else in Christendom had yet seen. Father Carvajal opted to return to Peru immediately, hoping to find out all he could about the death of his mentor, Bishop Valverde, and to provide his own clerical expertise and assistance in the region.

  Orellana, Maldonado, and the others set off from the tiny Venezuelan Pearl Islands and headed northwest, through the Caribbean Sea, past the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico to Santo Domingo—Hispaniola—the administrative headquarters of the Indies. Here Orellana would need to make his first real case for what he had accomplished, discovered, and encountered before a Royal Audiencia, a representative appellate court overseeing issues related to the Spanish Empire both at home and abroad.

  As it happened, the man that Orellana was charged with meeting was none other than Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, the noted Spanish historian, chronicler of the Indies, and, at the time, governor of the Hispaniola fortress. Oviedo was respected and deeply trusted by the crown, and by 1523 he had already written his famous Natural History of the West Indies and much of his even larger General and Natural History of the Indies. During his illustrious lifetime and more than half a century of service to the crown, he would cross the Atlantic twelve times, explore many of the jungles of the New World, and contribute thousands of pages in a variety of genres. His responsibilities in Hispaniola included reporting to the crown the political and economic situation in the American colonies, as well as chronicling and transcribing reports of expeditions such as the one that Orellana had just concluded.

  Oviedo would have been particularly interested in Orellana’s story, since it appears that by now he was in possession of at least some of Gonzalo Pizarro’s version, for Oviedo had certain “letters written in August, 1542, received in Santo Domingo from Popayán, giving the first news of the return to the region of Quito of the remnants of Gonzalo Pizarro’s expedition to the Land of Cinnamon.”

  During Orellana’s visit to Santo Domingo, the captain relayed verbally to Oviedo the details of his itinerary, which even to the well-traveled scholar and historian seemed exotic, astounding, extraordinary. The court historian was particularly fascinated by the various chiefs who were said to be subjects or vassals of these curious and perplexing Amazons, and he recorded these names dutifully in lists. Captain Orellana supplemented his own personal verbal narrative of the expedition with a copy of the account that had been penned on the river and in Cubagua by Friar Carvajal, and this journal Oviedo pored over, transcribing his own version while remaining true to the original. Further supplementation and corroboration of Orellana’s story were provided by a handful of Orellana’s crew who traveled as far as Santo Domingo. These men Oviedo referred to as “other hidalgos and commoners,” and they testified to the events as described by Orellana and Carvajal. Oviedo was so struck by the story, and especially so impressed by its importance in the history of the region’s geography, that he claimed the expedition to be “one of the greatest things that have happened to men.”

  Oviedo deemed the discovery of the world’s largest river sufficiently important to immediately write a lengthy letter to the powerful Cardinal Pietro Bembo in Italy, in which Oviedo announced Orellana’s achievement and asked that the discovery be made known across Europe at once. Bembo, a Venetian scholar, poet, and literary theorist, was at the time in a love affair with the controversial Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of the mighty Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI). Bembo’s reach and influence were wide, and the letter sent to him by Oviedo was eventually published in a volume concerning significant world navigations.

  Orellana concluded these depositions with Oviedo and prepared to return to Spain, where he knew he would need to produce equal documentation and then gain audience with the king, before whom he would need to give his account once more. By early 1543 he and Maldonado boarded ships bound for their homeland, no doubt hoping for a hero’s welcome, celebration, fanfare, and—if everything went well—a governorship and license to return to the Amazon.

  During the arduous Atlantic crossing their ship sustained some damage, necessitating an unexpected stop in Portugal. Word of Orellana’s exploits had preceded him, for shortly after anchoring there, Orellana was visited by emissaries of the king of Portugal, who requested he remain for a time as the king’s “guest,” though it is not altogether clear just how convivial this guest-host relationship was. The king of Portugal, John III (John the Pious), had clear and important interests in Orellan
a’s expedition, especially in trying to locate precisely the mouths of the Amazon, which might well lie in Portuguese territory as set forth in 1494 by the Treaty of Tordesillas. This line of demarcation, accepted in principle by the rulers of both Spain and Portugal, fell 370 leagues (1,250 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands and gave all discoveries to the west to the rulership of Spain, and those to the east to Portugal. The line of demarcation, rather imperfectly mapped and measured longitudinally at the time, fell somewhere near the mouth of the Amazon, so just whose territory this uncharted resource was located in remained in serious question and the subject of further debate and exploration.

  The Portuguese king, then, took great interest in what Orellana had to say, and to that end he detained the Spanish captain in Portugal for nearly three weeks, during which time, according to Orellana’s subsequent report to the Council of the Indies, the king was busy “acquainting himself in very great detail with the facts in connection with this voyage of discovery and making advantageous offers to him [Orellana] in an effort to get him to stay there, it being his intention to make use of him in the matter.” At the same time, perhaps under the aegis of and direction from John III, Orellana was approached by a wealthy Portuguese official who clandestinely offered the discoverer of the Amazon considerable financial assistance and backing should he agree to make a return expedition to the region under Portuguese banner and sail.

  As tempting as this offer may have sounded to the cash-strapped Captain Orellana, he graciously declined, aware that his patriotic obligation (and personal political plan) was to return to Spain to make his case to his own sovereign. He managed, through his skillful diplomacy and appeals, to extricate himself from this somewhat awkward situation in Portugal, though he now understood that the Portuguese had their own vested interest in his discovery of the region, and he suspected that with or without him, they would be immediately planning an expedition of their own to the Amazon. King John III, after all, had listened with rapt attention to every tale and detail of the miraculous journey, though Orellana took care to be intentionally obfuscating and circumspect about the precise location of the mouth of the Amazon.

  With the ship repaired and his dealings there concluded, Francisco Orellana departed Portugal around the first of May and sailed for Spain on his homeward reach. He arrived at the Spanish court at Valladolid on May 11, 1543, his first homecoming since departing for the Indies and the New World sixteen years before and, for the intrepid conquistador and discoverer of the Amazon River, what must have felt like a few lifetimes ago.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Last Stand of the Last Pizarro

  ALTHOUGH FRANCISCO ORELLANA DID NOT KNOW it at the time, and would only learn the details by degrees, back in Peru, Gonzalo Pizarro, his captain turned nemesis, was now embroiled in full-scale civil strife that had become his full-time occupation. The young Pizarro’s struggle through the jungle, his arrival in Quito at the head of eighty men in rags, and his stoic refusal to mount a horse for his final few miles into the city had made him something of a legend in the country, celebrated for his toughness, his stubborn and steadfast will; he was a survivor, and his actions garnered him a significant personal following, one he would very soon require. Events surrounding the timing of Pizarro’s return also dramatically helped Orellana, because political exigencies there in Quito and throughout Peru put dealing with Orellana well down on Gonzalo’s list of priorities.

  The situation in Peru on Gonzalo’s return had transformed since his departure for La Canela. He learned, of course, that his rich and powerful brother El Señor Gubernador Francisco Pizarro had fallen, mercilessly murdered at the hands of Almagro’s henchmen. Now, he discovered, Licenciado Cristóbal Vaca de Castro, the man originally sent to adjudicate the constant Pizarro-Almagro disputes, had been granted the governorship—one that Gonzalo Pizarro felt was rightfully his own. Had not he and his brothers, through battle and toil and tenacity, won the empire for the crown? As he fumed and pondered his next move, Gonzalo stole some time to deal hastily with the case of Francisco Orellana, which he did in his concise September 3, 1542, letter to the king.

  In addition to summarizing the details of his journey into the land of La Canela, Gonzalo Pizarro reported on the building of El Barco, the expedition’s separation at Christmas Camp, and Francisco Orellana’s failure to return upriver after the agreed-upon twelve days. This failure Pizarro viewed as an act of outright mutiny, saying that in abandoning them, Orellana thus “[displayed] toward the whole expeditionary force the greatest cruelty that ever faithless men have shown, aware that it was left so unprovided with food and caught in such a vast uninhabited region and among such great rivers.” Gonzalo added, in no uncertain terms, that he believed “Orellana had gone off and become a rebel.”

  Unfortunately for Gonzalo Pizarro, Orellana was now the least of his problems. Two coincidental factors complicated Gonzalo’s immediate situation. The first was that, with Vaca de Castro now installed as governor of New Castile, Gonzalo had lost his political (and, he thought, legal) hold on the Quito region. Francisco Pizarro had in fact bequeathed to Gonzalo the governorship by “previous royal concession,” but this was now a contentious matter for the courts and audiencias to decide, should the impetuous young Pizarro choose to wait for legal proceedings to run their course. He decided to meet with Vaca de Castro at Cuzco, where the new governor had made his headquarters and was charged with eradicating the remnant Almagro faction; Gonzalo even offered his services to Vaca as a kind of political concession. Vaca tactfully, though conclusively, declined, for the Pizarro brothers were now persona non grata in the eyes of the crown, despite all they had won in its name.

  Vaca did listen attentively to Gonzalo’s story of his jungle and river adventures, and assured the now rebuked and ruffled conquistador that his efforts and exploits would be dutifully reported to the king. He then suggested that Pizarro ought to “return to his estates and there enjoy the leisure to which his valiant services entitled him.”

  Gonzalo Pizarro had been dismissed, brushed off and sent away, so he did the only thing he could at the time, which was to retreat to La Plata, in the Potosi region, to tend to his encomienda, which included significant silver deposits and other mining concerns.

  The second of the coincidental factors that kept Gonzalo busy—and by extension kept him from further pursuit of Orellana—was the imposition, begun on November 20, 1542 (just a few months after Gonzalo’s resurrection from the jungles), of the so-called New Laws, signed by Charles I of Spain as the revised code of colonial government. These New Laws, spurred by the writings of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, would have a direct impact on all encomienda holders in the New World, including Gonzalo Pizarro.

  Las Casas, who arrived in Hispaniola in 1502 and would come to be referred to as “the Apostle of the Indians,” was a Spanish priest (the first, in fact, to be ordained in the New World) and writer who lived and traveled throughout the West Indies during its initial conquest. Witnessing the atrocities perpetrated on the indigenous people and believing that they could be converted by more peaceful and humanitarian means, he became an ardent defender of their rights and improved treatment. By 1542 he had been back to Spain a half-dozen times, reporting to the crown on the situation in the Indies, and because of his standing and reputation, he had garnered a great deal of respect from and influence on the king.

  The New Laws that Las Casas urged were drastic, even radical, and among those holding encomiendas (like Gonzalo Pizarro), the laws were as unpopular as they were initially unenforceable. The laws called for no further exploitation of native peoples, the release of slaves, and no “branding of Indians under any pretext, as prisoners of war or otherwise.”* The Indians—on the islands as well as the mainland—were declared subjects rather than vassals of the king, guaranteeing them the same rights (on paper, anyway) as those held by their previous owners. And they went further: they outlawed the granting of any new encomiendas under any circumstances, and perh
aps most important and progressive was the provision that settlers who could establish legal title to their encomiendas could retain them, but not transmit them by inheritance—the title would revert to the crown upon the death of the original grantee, potentially leaving a landholder’s family homeless, penniless, and without a workforce. The implications for colonists like Gonzalo Pizarro and many of his companions were profound. If carried out, the New Laws would completely eradicate the entire encomienda system and eliminate the Indian as a source of nearly free labor—the very system on which much of the colonists’ wealth relied.

  To attempt to enforce these New Laws, the king needed emissaries in Peru, and to spearhead this cause he settled on Viceroy Don Blasco Núñez Vela, a haughty, well-bred cavalier whose egocentric overzealousness would soon precipitate more years of bloody civil strife. He, along with four judges, sailed for Peru. Núñez Vela arrived in early March 1544, charged with enforcing the controversial New Laws to the letter.

  But by now, opposition among the Peruvian colonists had galvanized and become widespread, and it was Gonzalo Pizarro who came out of forced retirement at his mining properties near La Plata and assumed the mantle of leadership in the rebellion against these New Laws. He took the position, urged by some of his faithful men and other encomenderos, with proud defiance. He had, after all, more than a decade before won this land for Spain with his brothers on the fields of Cajamarca. He would not relinquish his spoils without a fight, and he would gather arms and men in their defense. He wrote to fellow military commanders who had agreed to take his side, reminding them “[Spain wishes] to enjoy what we sweated for, and with clean hands benefit from what we [have given] our blood to obtain. But now that they have revealed their intentions, I promise to show them … that we are men who can defend their own.”