by Buddy Levy
Although the crew’s entreaties were reasonable and prudent, Orellana still felt inclined to move. He argued that he knew from firsthand experience that the lower reaches of the river were well inhabited, and that there would be numerous landing places even better than this one. So, on Christmas Day 1545, almost exactly four years from that fateful day he took the San Pedro and split from Gonzalo Pizarro at Christmas Camp, Francisco Orellana made another momentous decision. Overruling his crew, he ordered the ships loaded and started upriver in search of the primary channel.
Though remaining there to recover and construct a boat made sense, it is not difficult to see Orellana’s rationale, either. Fatigued though he and his men were, Orellana must have felt that with the armor, men, horses, weapons, and gunpowder that he possessed, they certainly presented a sufficiently strong force to begin the complicated navigation upriver, and he felt that he knew what to expect, having been there before. Cortés had, after all, landed in mainland Mexico with just sixteen horses, and within a year he held the great Montezuma captive and in chains, the emperor’s golden treasure at his disposal. Perhaps Orellana, seizing the initiative with equal celerity, could capture a wealthy overlord like Machiparo, or Ica, or even Queen Conori of the Amazons, and begin sending his own treasure ships of gold back to King Charles.
The two ships sailed up the giant entwining braids, swallowed in the river’s great mouth. Under sail and using the tides to their advantage, they passed through flooded forests and rough woodland savanna, Orellana always on the lookout for landmarks he might recognize. What he failed to realize was that the channel he had entered was foreign and different and unrecognizable—certainly not the broader main channel through which he had earlier escaped with his life in the Victoria. To make matters worse, this circuitous and marshy limb of the river was virtually uninhabited. The tribes and villages he had counted on visiting, trading with, and conquering were nowhere to be found on this stretch of the river. After sailing up this branch of the Amazon for over three hundred miles, they at last came upon a half-dozen Indian huts, hardly the chiefdom of the Omagua or the Aparians. Still, Orellana stopped, figuring they must now build a brigantine for more efficient maneuvering up the braids in search of the main channel.
It was a wretched and inhospitable place to survive and build, but the dogged Orellana had overseen the building of two brigantines under such conditions already, so he pressed his men on in their work, though in this instance without the support of villagers daily bringing them food. Here, the only Indians they encountered were hostile, arriving in small and stealthy attack parties, some of them wielding the dreaded and deadly poison arrows. For three long months—through January, February, and March of 1546—Orellana’s expedition encamped here, some of the men scouring about for food while most worked, but it was a “country so poor that little food was to be had in it,” and they were forced to eat all of the horses and dogs they had brought.
By the end of three months’ time, resorting to dismantling the smaller of the two ships and salvaging from it planking and nails, Orellana had succeeded in building a rivergoing brigantine, but this had come at devastating cost, for during that nightmarish time another fifty-seven of his men had perished through starvation, lingering disease, or violent Indian attack.
Once the brigantine was completed, rigged with oars, and ready, Orellana sent a small crew away in it to find food, but this search yielded only more tragedy: “Their efforts were fruitless, and, after many of the crew had died also of hunger or from wounds received in the encounters which they had with Indians, the survivors returned to camp.” There was now disaster everywhere Orellana looked or turned, and both he and what few remained of his corps clung tenuously to their lives and their faculties.
Orellana decided that they must make an attempt for the central channel of the Amazon, though in truth by now he had no idea where it might be. Taking the last of his ships and the newly constructed brigantine, Orellana went in tandem, navigating on a southeasterly course, hoping for some miracle. But it seems that all of Orellana’s miracles were used up, for they had not gone seventy-five miles when, as they lay idle at anchor, a sudden and violent river tide surged and spun the ship he was in, snapping its only hawser, spinning them out of control, and dashing the vessel into the shore, wrecking it.
The crew and remaining women, including Orellana’s young and no doubt terrified wife, Ana, clambered from the shipwreck and sought safety on a small island a short distance away, where in a stroke of rare good fortune they found a tiny band of peaceful Indians who sheltered them and gave them food.
At this point, when all seemed fairly lost, Captain Orellana might well have turned back, but his steadfast confidence in finding the main source of the river compelled him to take the remaining brigantine, a small crew, and his wife and search once more for the mighty river that had brought him fame. He left behind at the island camp twenty-eight or thirty soldiers, telling them that he would soon return with information, but by now they could see that they were essentially on their own, and after Orellana had been gone a few days the soldiers started building another boat, gathering wood and making shuttle forays to the shipwreck for beams, planking, and futtocks.
Orellana was gone twenty-seven days in the brigantine, his skeleton crew including a pilot and shipmaster named Juan Griego. Up and across the wide waters they coursed, casting toward a promising-looking branch here, then another miles upriver, every twist and turn in the coiling labyrinth a mirage, a phantom, a cipher as numinous yet unattainable as El Dorado himself. At last, after nearly a month of aimless wanderings, Orellana returned to the shipwreck. Juan Griego told the others that they had sailed nearly five hundred miles and still failed to rediscover Orellana’s river.
The men at the shipwreck had meanwhile busied themselves in their boatbuilding project, and they were now clearly bent on escaping the Amazon’s grip and sailing, if they possibly could, back to safety. Orellana, now feeble, feverish, and perhaps clinging to the last threads of his sanity, seemed in some sort of dream state. He did not remain at the shipwreck long, but told the men that he intended to continue his search. Francisco de Guzmán recalled Orellana’s final words before he left:
He went off again saying that he was ill and would not be able to wait for us, and that, by way of saving time, inasmuch as he did not have enough men to set up a colony, he wanted to go back again to look for the branch of the river and go up as far as the point of San Juan to barter for a certain amount of gold or silver to send to His Majesty, and that if we felt like following him after our boat should be built, we should find him somewhere around there.
To the last, Francisco Orellana conjured gold and silver and images of the Amazons, for San Juan, where he believed in his mind he was heading, was the place they had named St. John, near the Trombetas River, in the heart of Queen Conori’s fabulous domain: the realm of the Amazon warriors.
As they watched their delirious captain, his wife, and half the remaining crew sail away, the shipwrecked soldiers turned resolutely back to their boat, now their only hope for salvation, quite doubtful that they would ever see the one-eyed, single-visioned Orellana again. After two more months of continuous construction, they had indeed built a boat, but the fresh-cut lumber rendered it porous and leak-prone. Still, it floated. So they persuaded some Indians with canoes to guide them, and, rather nobly, went looking for their captain, the Adelantado of New Andalusia.
The Indian guides led them well upriver, to a place where the Amazon splits into three large arms—quite close, it turned out, to the very place that Orellana sought.* But they could find no sign of him, nor of his boat, and given their shortage of provisions they chose finally to turn back and make for the sea, their God willing. On their escape from the rivers Amazon, at a point still some two hundred miles from the Atlantic, they came across a small and prosperous village, and six of the Spaniards, perhaps themselves now crazed by this endless maze, ran off into the trees, choosing to re
main there rather than submit to the horrors of the ocean in such a small and unseaworthy craft. Shortly afterward, four other soldiers also leaped from the boat onto shore and went native, “because they considered the country to be a good one.” Now there would be tales of Orellana’s men in the region to go along with the stories of Diego de Ordaz’s shipwrecked survivors living among the river tribes.
Those still on the boat prepared for the worst, and they got it. Once on the open sea a violent tide dashed them back toward shore, battering them through a tree-choked mangrove swamp, where they stayed marooned for three days on the tepid banks, tormented by mosquito swarms. But eventually the seas and the undertows calmed and they managed to push and pole the craft onto open water again, where they caught—as the San Pedro and Victoria had done some years before—the strong Southern Equatorial Current. Staying as close as they could to shore and bailing constantly in shifts both night and day, on one of the final days of November 1546, these eighteen survivors, incredibly, landed on the island of Margarita. There, to their utter disbelief, were twenty-five of their compatriots as well as Ana de Ayala. They, too, no doubt captained by Juan Griego, had managed to escape the dark and impenetrable river.
But where, the men asked, was Captain Orellana?
Francisco de Guzmán listened silently to Ana de Ayala, who was with Orellana at the last, and he related her story:
[She] told us that her husband had not succeeded in getting into the main branch which he was looking for and consequently, on account of his being ill, he had made up his mind to come to a land of Christians: and during this time, when he was out looking for food for the journey, the Indians shot seventeen of his men with arrows.
These last indignities—his sickness, and the deaths of his men and his dream—finally proved too much even for Orellana. He died, she said in a whisper, “from grief.”
* A ducat was a gold coin of 23¾ carats fine and equaled 375 maravedis.
* Francisco de Guzmán reports ascending to a wide branch of the river that divides into three large arms. Here, for three days, as many as a hundred Indian canoes accompanied them. Guzmán and the searchers appear to have reached the Amazon, though Orellana did not.
For the conquistador the El Dorado adventure ended in kidnap, solitude, and lunacy. His province—the dream of the third Spanish marquisate in the New World, after Mexico and Peru—became the ghost province of the Spanish Empire.
—V. S. NAIPAUL, The Loss of El Dorado
Epilogue
THE SPANISH SAYING THAT HAD BEEN ASSOCIATED with Diego de Ordaz, that “he who goes to the Orinoco either dies or comes back mad,” could now be rewritten and hung on Francisco Orellana: “He who goes to the Amazon goes mad and dies.”
For those who measure an expedition’s success or failure in ledger-book fashion, Orellana’s ill-fated attempt to return to the river kingdoms becomes an accumulated sum of numerical disaster: of the nearly 350 men and handful of women that departed with him, only 44 survived—43 of the men and Ana de Ayala, Orellana’s wife.* Lost were the lives of more than 300 men and women and 200 horses. Gone were all four ocean ships, tons of powder, ammunition, and Spanish firearms and cannons.
But ironically, despite all this, the myths of El Dorado and the Amazons still lived.
For a short time after his journey, for a decade or so, the stupendous river system he and his men pioneered and explored bore his name: the Orellana River. And it is likely that had Orellana lived to rediscover it instead of perishing on its banks, the great waterway would bear his name still. But in a short time the river—a singular misnomer given its thousand tributaries—came to be called the River of the Amazons, truncated today to the Amazon.
Orellana’s discovery engendered in his native Spain excitement, speculation, and desire for continued exploration, although any follow-up expeditions would have to wait, at least for a while. The influential Las Casas had continued to preach his anticolonial message in the mother country, railing against the injustices and immoralities of torturing, enslaving, and killing native Americans in the New World. He went so far as to warn King Charles about Spain’s reckoning at the Day of Judgment, and of the jeopardy of his very soul should such atrocities persist: “Because of these impious and ignominious deeds, so unjust, tyrannical and barbarously done in the Indies and against the Indians, God must certainly envelop Spain with his fury and anger.”
Such persuasive rhetoric had a profound impact on the devout monarch-emperor, and from 1550 to 1560 he suspended all expeditions of conquest in the New World until the issues regarding his own soul and salvation, and that of Spain’s, could be resolved through a debate between the clergyman Las Casas and the humanist philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The eloquent Las Casas won the debate, but in the end, power, politics, and empire expansion outranked moral indignation, however well-meaning, and Charles V lifted the ban. The plundering could continue, eternal damnation or not.
In the wake of Orellana’s discoveries, over the next fifty years, two significant follow-up expeditions in search of El Dorado took place, one in 1560 under Spaniard Pedro de Ursúa aimed at finding and colonizing the rich lands of the Machiparo and Omagua that Orellana had found, and the other in 1595, by Sir Walter Raleigh himself. Raleigh’s voyage later officially heralded the death of the El Dorado myth.
The Pedro de Ursúa venture, coming virtually as the ink dried on the parchment lifting the king’s ban, was fueled by Orellana’s story, then fully ignited when Spanish colonists in Chachapoyas, an Amazon headwater river settlement in the northeast of Peru, witnessed the arrival of 200 to 300 Indians who had traveled more than 1,500 miles to reach the outpost—on foot at first, and afterward in their canoes, paddling upstream on the Amazon, the Maranon, and finally the Huallaga. They said they had fled to escape the Portuguese now encroaching on their lands from the Atlantic coast of the Amazon. Their journey of migration had consumed ten years. The Indians, probably Tupinambas, described in similar terms the very lands that Orellana had so recently passed through: “They emphasized the variety and multitude of the tribes they had encountered, and particularly the wealth of the province called Omagua.” The Spanish reports added that the arriving nomadic Tupinambas spoke of “the inestimable value of the [Omagua’s] riches, and the vastness of their trading.”
Those enticing descriptions, echoing as they did Orellana’s and Carvajal’s narratives, were all the king needed to sanction yet another assault on El Dorado, though now he began referring to it as a place, a province of “Omagua and Dorado.” The Gilded One, a person, had morphed into a golden place.
It did not take long for Pedro de Ursúa, the man chosen to lead this foray, to recruit and assemble 370 Spanish mercenaries to go along, ruffians and vagabonds and civil war veterans who had sat idle for the decade when expeditions had been banned. With thirty horses, this motley crew, and a few thousand conscripted Andean bearers (so much for the New Laws, apparently), the Ursúa-Aguirre expedition, as it came to be known, would be almost equal in size to that of Pizarro-Orellana. From its very beginning, it would be an unequivocal, unmitigated catastrophe that would ultimately devolve into utter pathos and horror, the darkest of the Amazonian annals.
The untested Ursúa turned out to be a tragically incompetent leader prone to disastrous decisions. His two biggest blunders were bringing along his mestizo mistress, Inés de Atienza (plus a dozen other women guaranteed to cause fighting among the men), and the inclusion of a paranoid, maniacal Basque named Lope de Aguirre who believed he would one day soon conquer and rule all of Peru. In fairness to Ursúa, neither he nor anyone else could have known or predicted the insane behavior of Aguirre, who turned out to be a full-scale psychopath, a man who began his Amazonian voyage insane and deteriorated from there. About forty-five years of age, Aguirre had been in Peru for more than twenty years and had participated in the civil wars, fighting against Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion, but for all his efforts receiving nothing but a missing hand and two bullet woun
ds in his leg that left him lame. Aguirre took with him his beloved and desirable sixteen-year-old daughter, Elvira, over whom he doted and kept armed guards.
In September 1560, after trekking through dense mountains and cloud forest, the expedition embarked in three large transport boats and a flotilla of canoes, first down the Huallaga, which farther downstream becomes the Maranon. Ursúa’s personal transport barge was built with a cover, like a houseboat, to comfort and accommodate his stunningly beautiful Inés—said by all accounts to be among the most beautiful women ever seen in Peru. But the bulky construction made this boat awkward, heavy, and prone to running aground, and all the transport craft leaked and ultimately failed.
For seven weeks and 750 miles they worked downriver, passing the mouth of the Ucayali, the headwaters of which constitute the origin of the Amazon in official calculations of its length. They sailed past the confluence of the Napo, where Orellana had met the main Amazon, and arrived eventually in Machiparo’s domain, which, just as Orellana had said, was organized and well populated and rich with resources such as turtle farms. But the long-sought El Dorado was nowhere to be found. By now, half-crazed by salt deficiency, the incessant rains, and swarms of black flies and mosquitoes, Aguirre had planned a coup and enlisted a dozen other mutinous soldiers.
On New Year’s Day 1561, at a small Machiparan village called Mocomoco, Aguirre and his murderous band silently attacked Royal Governor Pedro Ursúa in his hammock, running him through with daggers and killing also a brave officer who tried to save him. The conspirators then formed their own sort of river government, installing a man named Fernando Guzmán as the expedition’s general and giving Aguirre the title of Camp Master. The next day, when they officially signed their new governmental papers—which they eventually presented and which survive in the Archives of the Indies in Seville—Aguirre defiantly inscribed “Lope de Aguirre: TRAITOR” on the formal información explaining his actions, which he fully intended to be read by his king.