River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  As compensation, Orellana was to receive a salary of five thousand ducats from the date that the armada set sail, this figure capping at one million maravedis per year,* which would pass on to Orellana’s heirs into perpetuity. Should everything go as planned, this payout would certainly make Francisco Orellana an extremely wealthy man.

  But there was one significant problem with the terms, though they were quite common for such expeditions. Orellana must undertake the entire expedition—the purchasing of materials, arms and powder, men and weaponry, equipment, horses, boats and rigging, food—at his own expense. The crown was thorough and deliberate in its contractual language, stating that Orellana would be responsible for all the preparations “at your own expense and on your own responsibility, without there being on the part of His Majesty or of the kings who shall come after him any obligation to pay you back or to settle for the expenses which you shall have incurred in it, beyond what is going to be credited to you by the terms of this agreement.”

  Looking over the documents, Francisco Orellana felt badly snubbed. He had hoped that his discoveries would have put him in a more advantageous and powerful position, and that the crown would at the very least subsidize his venture. Now he realized that if he were to ever see the magnificent braided streams again, the banks teeming with manatees and turtles, the rivers the size of whole seas, he would have to finance the journey on his own, essentially a speculative investment in his own personal dream.

  Orellana went away disappointed but undaunted, and he appears never to have considered abandoning the enterprise, not for an instant. Just five days later he signed the articles of agreement in the presence of a notary, making sure that the language of the first paragraph absolved him of any treachery or wrongdoing in his previous expedition under Gonzalo Pizarro, to which the prince consented. The papers signed, Orellana set to work frenziedly organizing his own return to the Amazon.

  By May 1544, the industrious and indefatigable Captain-General Orellana had managed to raise enough money, either through relatives he still had in Trujillo or loans from investors, to procure two caravels and two galleons, all of which he claimed were ready and waiting in the waters of the Guadalquivir River, navigable as far as Seville. The two smaller vessels, which would be used for ascending the Amazon after the towns had been constructed, were apparently also being built, so initial preparations seemed to be progressing well. At this time Orellana tried to appeal to the king’s good nature and requested arms and guns for the ships—he would, after all, be sailing under the royal banner and was quite likely to be attacked by pirates—but this request was flatly refused.

  To hamper matters further, Orellana deeply desired to employ a Portuguese pilot for the journey, for no Spaniards knew the Brazilian coastline well enough; but this request, too, was denied, for under the agreements of the time, no foreigners could be hired for journeys of exploration and discovery. As a concession, Prince Philip did suggest the Spanish pilot Francisco Rodriquez (whom he attempted to lure with promises of lucrative financial gains), but on interviewing the man, Orellana found him ill suited for the job, saying “this man talks less intelligently about the coast than any other” he had interviewed.

  During this time Orellana made some progress, hiring on Cristóbal de Segovia—Maldonado—as chief constable for the journey, responsible for recruiting, hiring, and equipping the cavalry and infantry for the voyage. Maldonado, it turned out, was the only compatriot of the original expedition down the Amazon to enlist for the return. Orellana also found a suitable treasurer, an accountant and revenue collector named Vicencio de Monte, whom Orellana hired to help raise money and agreed to install as magistrate of one of the two towns they would found and build at the Amazon. Shortly afterward, however, there arrived in Seville a man named Friar Pablo de Torres, the king’s inspector-general for the expedition, and it was through him that all details had to pass before Orellana might set sail. He had the power of final oversight, and in fact came carrying a secret envelope to be opened in the event of Orellana’s death, inside which was the name of the person who should succeed him.

  Problems plagued Orellana’s great venture from the beginning. A number of arguments broke out between the crew members, most notably between Maldonado and de Monte, the fund-raiser, who Maldonado felt had too much influence over Orellana. Orellana began to distrust those around him, going so far as to suggest that there might be someone on the inside trying to thwart his journey. He wrote a letter to the king, saying that there was without question “a worm within our midst.” Orellana’s concerns seemed well founded, for things went afoul at every turn. A promise of financial backing and support would come, only to be withdrawn, sometimes shortly after the original offer. Merchants selling gear and rigging demanded cash payment when before they had agreed to credit. Soldiers of fortune signed on to the expedition, then instantly backed out.

  Then, rather mysteriously and ominously, Maldonado—one of Orellana’s most trusted companions—disappeared. This must have pained Orellana greatly; they had fought and survived together down the entire span of the Amazon Basin. Now, it turned out, he might well be a spy for Portugal, where he resurfaced. This development intrigued and worried Orellana, for of course Maldonado had been with him during their lengthy visit with the Portuguese king, and there was the distinct possibility that he had formed some kind of alliance either with the king or with the wealthy businessman there who had originally offered to finance Orellana on an expedition. After his departure, Orellana learned that Maldonado, referred to now as part of “secret and sly factions,” had been involved in the slaying of a man in Seville.

  In October 1544, Orellana benefited from a visit by his stepfather, Cosmo de Chaves, who came in from Trujillo offering to assist with financing. He had some property in Trujillo to sell, but when no Seville buyers stepped forward in time, he raised the money in other ways and pledged this—some eleven thousand ducats—to the venture. This cash helped pay for some of the boats, but Orellana remained short, and much was still needed before he could convince the inspector-general, and by extension the crown, that he was ready and fully equipped to sail.

  With Maldonado gone, the Genoese backer-financier Monte became even more involved in the expedition, not only offering to help personally finance it, but also stepping forward to offer Orellana a wife. Orellana had decided that he did not wish to return to the Amazon unmarried, no doubt desiring to produce an heir, but also because there was no telling when, if ever, he would return to Spain. It also made fiscal sense, especially should the proposed wife come with a suitable dowry.

  In November 1544, Francisco Orellana indeed married, much to the surprise and consternation of Inspector-General Torres, who had encouraged what he believed was a more lucrative match. “The Adelantado has married,” wrote Torres to the king, “despite my attempts to persuade him not to, which were many and well founded, because they did not give him any dowry whatsoever, I mean not a single ducat, and he wants to take a wife over there, and even one or two sisters-in-law also: he alleged on his side that he could not go off without a woman, and in order to have a female consort he wanted to marry.” The wife in question was Ana de Ayala, a very young girl of perhaps only fourteen, arranged by Monte and presented with jewels and silks, so perhaps there was some secret dowry after all to which Torres was not privy.

  Just then came news that the Portuguese were indeed preparing an expedition of their own to the contested region, equipping four large ships with cannons, horses, powder, stores, and men—and worst of all, it appeared that they had employed Maldonado as their guide for his intimate knowledge of the Amazon. The Portuguese expedition would be financed by a wealthy Castilian recently arrived from Peru. The threat of competition from the Portuguese heightened the need for immediate departure, which Orellana most desired—for despite his hardships there, he longed to be back on the savannas of the lower Amazon, the river calling him like the sirens to Odysseus.

  By late March 1545
, with the combined support from Monte and Orellana’s stepfather Chaves, the four ships finally sailed down the Guadalquivir River to the port at Sanlúcar (some 55 miles below Seville) for final preparations. For Orellana, it had been a lengthy, painful, and frustrating process, one fraught with political and bureaucratic complexities he had grown unaccustomed to during the harsh simplicity of sailing down a river for more than a year. But he could almost taste the odd sweet tang of the Sweetwater Sea again, and he pressed forward with all of his resources and attentions.

  But first he had to pass inspection, and given the stringent royal requirements, this would be difficult. When Inspector-General Torres and the other appointed royal officers boarded the ships at Sanlúcar, they found them in substandard condition for a journey to conquer and colonize New Andalusia. First of all, not all of the required three hundred soldiers were on board, nor were the two hundred horses. Orellana pointed out that the horses remained grazing ashore, fattening for the Atlantic crossing, and as to the men, many were saying good-bye to their families and were on their way—he assured the inspectors of this. The inspectors noted the lack of rigging for the upriver launches, to which Orellana replied that such rigging was easily fabricated using timber and vines from the river mouth region—he had done so twice before, and at any rate, this was where he intended to build those craft.

  Because of tensions about the possibility of a rival Portuguese fleet landing first, many of these perceived insufficiencies were overlooked, though when the royal officers and inspector-general returned on May 5 for a final inspection, the assessment they gave Orellana’s armada could not have been less glowing. According to Father Torres, Orellana was attempting to conquer New Andalusia in four vessels that appeared “as thoroughly dismantled as if they had just been plundered by the French or the Turks”—hardly the endorsement that Orellana had hoped for. He was flatly instructed that under no circumstances should he even consider leaving port until personally ordered to do so by the king, under penalty often thousand ducats and the revoking of those commissions and favors that had been bestowed upon him. But by now he had decided to depart, inspector-general’s blessing or no, with or without the approval of the crown.

  Orellana understood that greatness was achieved through action and boldness, not slow deliberation. Cortés famously scuttled his ships and became a rogue, a fugitive from justice, then conqueror of Mexico and a Spanish national hero—wealthy beyond imagination and revered as the Grand Conquistador. Francisco Pizarro and his brothers freelanced, too, operating essentially under their own set of rules and laws, and this had won them the empire of Peru, untold riches, and glory. Orellana had seen his empire from inside the San Pedro and the Victoria, and he resolved now that nothing—including the censure of a king—would keep him from that quest.

  On May 11, 1545, two years to the day after his return to Spain and without formal approval from Inspector-General Torres—indeed, without Father Torres at all, for Orellana abandoned him on shore, along with another of the assigned clerics—the thirty-five-year-old conquistador Francisco Orellana pulled up anchor and sailed his four ships fast for the open sea, illegally and in direct defiance of the king. In the end he was embittered by the lack of support from his own country, and he feared that if he did not leave now he might never see his Amazon again. On board with him were his young bride Ana de Ayala, her sister-in-law, and many other Spanish women ensconced in the poop of the flagship. Serving as master of the flagship—also against the terms of his contract—was an unheralded pilot from Sicily. Orellana did by now have more than the three hundred required men on board, and most of the horses as well. Also on hand were many freshly slaughtered cattle, sheep, and chickens, which they cured and salted as they sailed, having only just stolen them the night before departure in a last-ditch farm raid that left some of the poor and defenseless shepherds seriously wounded. Apparently the pilfer-plunder-and-depart tactic learned by Orellana on his journey down the Amazon died hard in him.

  Francisco Orellana was now effectively a rogue, a pirate, a renegade, even a traitor. But he reasoned that the risk was worth it. He had sadly learned that it was not enough to discover an empire; one must conquer it to achieve everlasting glory. Perhaps if he could win for Spain one of these wealthy and exotic dominions in the mode of Cortés or Pizarro, all would be forgiven.

  No sooner had Orellana’s convoy found its way to open sea than he encountered a large caravel, which he waylaid, boarded, and plundered like a pirate for whatever supplies he could find, mostly food and water and jars for catching rainwater, for he was short on both should the trip take longer than a few weeks.

  Despite being ill equipped, Orellana’s fleet managed to reach Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, just off the coast of western Africa, near the end of May. Here Orellana made port and, free from the constraints of inspectors and officials, set to putting his ships into better repair, which took nearly three months. When he felt the ships and gear were in good enough order, he sailed on to the Cape Verde Islands, the last stopover before the nearly two-thousand-mile Atlantic crossing that would bring him to mainland South America.

  His stop at the Cape Verde Islands included procuring some much-needed supplies that he had arranged for. Unfortunately, Orellana spent too much idle time there, for during this interval an epidemic broke out aboard his ships and nearly everyone on the voyage fell dangerously ill, with ninety-eight dying. This number constituted nearly a third of Orellana’s entire force, and he had to abandon one of his ships. He salvaged its rigging, anchors, navigational equipment, and anything else useful and installed the gear on the other ships. Then he prepared to set sail for the coast of Brazil.

  But a number of his men had now lost their nerve, or considered themselves unfit to embark on a journey that promised even greater hardships. Fifty or sixty soldiers deserted, including three captains. But Orellana, nearly mad in his obsession, would not give up. In the middle of November, he ordered what remained of his sorry crew onto the three remaining ships and hoisted sail for New Andalusia, which he still believed he could win and govern.

  The men who abandoned the mission at Cape Verde escaped a hellish ocean voyage, for foul weather beset Orellana immediately, slowing progress enough to see his ships run dangerously low on water. Men and women and horses alike slumped wan and parched on the blistering decks, the edges of their mouths cracked and salt-stained. It appeared that they would all perish before ever seeing land again. Mercifully, a tropical deluge filled their water jars, and this alone saved them. Just when matters seemed to be improving, one of the ships, this one carrying “seventy-seven colonists, eleven horses, and a brigantine that was to go up the river,” inexplicably disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again. There is no explanation for its loss—presumably the thirst-crazed and delirious crew lost their way or even died of thirst, or the ship ran aground somewhere along the coast. The only report concerning this misfortune, left by Francisco de Guzmán, who survived the journey, concluded, “And amidst this hardship and struggling one ship put in toward land, the persons on board saying that they had no water. Regarding [this] ship, up to the present time nothing more has ever been heard.”

  The two remaining ships managed to catch the north wind and regain a proper course. Finally, after believing they would certainly die at sea, Orellana and some of his men spotted land, and they sailed close to inspect, though Orellana knew to remain wary of the jagged and dangerous coastline: “We went and reconnoitered the shoals,” remembered Guzmán, “and taking our bearings from the shore we went in close, on the lookout for the Maranon.” Remaining in sight of the coastline, they sailed on until, some thirty miles out to sea, they found the vaunted freshwater, the Mar Dulce, the Sweetwater Sea. Orellana had long remembered the curious water’s distinctive taste and smell, of sea salt sweetened with the freshest water, and rejoiced: despite everything that he had endured, he had returned to the Amazon.

  But grave danger lay on the shoals extending from t
he coast; because the ships had lost some of their anchors en route, the pilots struggled to control the craft, and both nearly wrecked on the rocks. Somehow they plowed safely through, now using a few of their cannons as anchors, and on December 20, 1545, Orellana’s two sorry ships lurched into port at a village situated between two islands. More than three years since his first heroic arrival there, Francisco Orellana disembarked on the sandy banks. He was, in a way, home.

  Upon landing, however, there was little to celebrate. Counting the nearly one hundred dead in the Canaries, the fifty or so defectors, and the ship with seventy-seven lost at sea, Captain-General Orellana had already lost two of his ships and more than two-thirds of his original crew. The only good news was that there did not seem to be any sign of Portuguese or French presence, and the first village they came to appeared peaceful. But these were small consolations.

  For a few days Orellana and his weakened force rested at this village among the floodplain islands, the soldiers and women delighted by the hospitality of the locals, who in exchange for their barter goods brought forth plenty of fish, maize, yuca, and succulent local fruits. But almost immediately Orellana grew impatient, wanting to continue farther upriver to find the main branch of the Amazon. He certainly would have been mindful of the crucial role of the tides here, and the many confusing channels braiding and coiling, and he wished to start upriver straightaway, anxious to return to those exotic people and kingdoms that so captivated his dreams and fantasies.

  A number of his men, however, disagreed. Much better, they said, to regroup here, where they were guaranteed food, kind treatment, and what looked to be a suitable place for construction of a worthy upriver brigantine, parts of which they had brought over in their ships, that needed only to be assembled. The men also pointed out that the eleven horses that had survived the trip were in poor condition, lank and dehydrated, for on the ocean crossing they had suffered terrible want and they, too, needed to recover in order to be useful in explorations or battle.