River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  From here on, Aguirre led a bloodstained retracing of Orellana’s journey. Reduced to one boat, much as the Pizarro-Orellana expedition had done with the original San Pedro, Aguirre and Guzmán moved downriver—some hacking overland along the tangled shores, the others in the leaking craft—dragging a sorry train of weakened bearers and useless horses with them. Just as Pizarro and Orellana had discovered, horses were ill suited to dense jungle travel, and Aguirre slaughtered them all, consuming the meat and using the hides for clothing. There remained now some two hundred people on the expedition, who would never make it out on foot with only one vessel; the decision was made to build two more. The search for El Dorado had once again devolved into a struggle for survival.

  Deep in the Amazon, as the group labored on the new boats, Aguirre’s delusional fantasy of ruling Peru reached fever pitch. Before witnesses, he and Guzmán drew up yet another bizarre paper, this one naming Fernando Guzmán “Prince of Peru,” which Aguirre celebrated by kissing the hand of his new prince as he lay in a hammock attended by mock pages, who cooled him with feather fans. The new Prince Fernando also took to sleeping with the gorgeous Doña Inés, causing jealousy throughout the camp.

  The goal of settling “Omagua and Dorado” having been abandoned, the insane plan was now to finish the boats, sail the remaining length of the Amazon, march overland across Venezuela, then cross the Andes to claim Peru.

  By early April 1561, the two new and larger boats were completed, so they continued slowly descending the mighty river. But soon Aguirre snapped completely, deciding that he must lead. He persuaded a corps of forty trusted infantrymen to rally behind him, convincing himself and them that they must kill all “gentlemen or persons of quality.” Over the next few months Aguirre and his armed henchmen went on a killing spree, stealthily and in cold blood murdering more than a hundred people, strangling them in their hammocks, slitting their throats, or stabbing them repeatedly as they pleaded for mercy and forgiveness. It was a macabre and gruesome bloodletting.

  Among the first to be slain was the lovely Inés, who was stripped of her jewelry and fine clothes, no doubt raped, then impaled with more than twenty sword thrusts. Shortly afterward, Aguirre fell upon Prince Fernando in his own quarters, shooting him with a harquebus and finishing the deed with a sword. Aguirre now proclaimed his blood-slaked crew of forty “Men of the Amazon,” and himself “the Wrath of God.”*

  Aguirre and the remainder of his select ghastly crew continued downriver, stopping only for food raids and rest. Unlike Orellana and Carvajal, they made no notes or observations about the river and its inhabitants, focusing only on trying to get out—which they just managed. In early July 1561 they reached the mouth of the Amazon and the Sweetwater Sea and, precisely as Orellana had done, caught the strong coastal current that drove them along the shores of Guiana. By July 21, nearly a year after the expedition for El Dorado and Omagua had departed, Aguirre and his horsehide-covered crews arrived on the island of Margarita, where the rogue tyrants promptly murdered its governor and took over the island.

  The Wrath of God was short-lived. Aguirre and his rebels sailed to mainland Venezuela and commenced their overland march. By now, however, many of his own men, back in Christian civilization, in fear of the megalomaniac Aguirre and perhaps realizing the sinful error of their ways, deserted whenever they could, stealing off into the night. And, apprised now of the bloody takeover on Margarita, a royal army had been dispatched to overtake and capture or kill the self-proclaimed traitor Aguirre and his rebels. When he realized that the end was near, in October 1561, Lope de Aguirre wrote a letter to King Philip (who had been Prince Philip during Orellana’s journey), a now-famous, seething missive in which he boasted about the people he had murdered, then closed with dire warnings about the fool’s errand that attempts to settle the Amazon had become:

  This river has a course of over two thousand leagues of fresh water … And God only knows how we ever escaped out of that fearful lake. I advise thee not to send any Spanish fleet up this ill-omened river, for, on the faith of a Christian, I swear to thee, O king and lord, that if a hundred thousand men should go up, not one would escape, and there is nothing else to expect, especially for the adventurers from Spain.

  Shortly after writing this letter, Aguirre prepared to continue his overland flight across Venezuela, but the royalist force had hemmed him in, and most of his men had by now deserted. Alone in his tent now with only his daughter Elvira, he heard the arrival of the authorities. Convinced that they would rape her, and exclaiming that he wished to spare her the shame of being called the daughter of a traitor, Aguirre palmed a crucifix into the unfortunate girl’s hand and stabbed her to death with his sword. A few moments later, the royalists stormed in and fired two fatal harquebus shots into Aguirre’s chest. They beheaded the traitor, quartered his corpse, and carried back his tyrannical head on display in an iron cage.

  So the second complete transcontinental navigation of the Amazon Basin—this one mostly retracing precisely Orellana’s original voyage, though starting at a place farther south in the Andes—had been accomplished. Aguirre’s horrific trip, which has been called the “most appalling in the annals of Spanish enterprise,” confirmed much of what Orellana witnessed and reported, especially concerning the prosperity and complexity of the Omagua peoples, though the shocking nature of the Aguirre journey and his despicable actions offered Spain nothing to celebrate or even make public. For a time this psychotragic chapter of Spain’s conquest history remained little known.

  But sensational sagas such as El Dorado die hard, and eventually Elizabethan courtier, philosopher-poet, and captain of Queen Elizabeth’s guard Sir Walter Raleigh heard about it. By 1595, using his significant powers of rhetoric and persuasion, he had managed to convince Queen Elizabeth that there was indeed much gold to be found beyond the Orinoco hills, and he succeeded in obtaining from her a commission of colonization, discovery, and exploitation of The Empire of Guiana and the Golden City of Manoa, Which the Spaniards Call El Dorado.

  An educated and well-read man who thrived on adventure, Raleigh was aware of all the Spanish stories and legends connected to El Dorado, from Ordaz, Orellana, and Aguirre (he mentions each in turn in his book). In the mid-1590s, Raleigh had discovered that a Spaniard named Antonio de Berrio, an elderly conquistador who had spent more than a decade up the Orinoco River, claimed to have located the mythical place at last, near a Lake Manoa, a great salt lake so huge that it took three days to cross in canoes. According to Berrio, “They say that once this lake is crossed, the great provinces of Guiana stretch to the Maranon.”

  Raleigh wasted little time. In early April 1595, he sailed to Trinidad, landed, sacked a town, and captured the seventy-five-year-old Berrio, with his intimate knowledge of this Lake Manoa and the Guiana highlands. He took Berrio as his prisoner-informant-guide, crossed to mainland Venezuela, and planned an ascent of the Orinoco, just as Diego de Ordaz had done sixty-five years earlier. Raleigh pried as much information as he could from Berrio, but the Spaniard—who clung still to his own dream of winning the rich region—tried his best to dissuade the Englishman by exaggerating distances and emphasizing the real hardships they would encounter. The tough conquistador saw clearly that Raleigh was a pampered court dandy, his skin soft and white. Raleigh bore out this assessment of his character when he wrote of the crossing to the mainland, which is a very short journey, exclaiming that he had been forced “to lie in the rain and weather, in the open air, in the burning sun, and upon the hard boards, and to dress our meat … there never was any prison in England that could be found more unsavory and loathsome.”

  Once across, on the boggy mudflats at the Orinoco’s mouth, Raleigh retrofitted five boats of his large sailing vessels into serviceable upriver galleys that could be rowed or sailed, and off he and a hundred men went on an exploration aimed at ascending the Orinoco to the mouth of the Caroni, and then continuing up the Caroni until he reached the magnificent salt lake Manoa. On the way up
river, Raleigh grew confounded, much as Orellana had been on his return journey, by the endless twists and snaking of the river: “I know all the earth doth not yield the like confluence of streams and branches, the one crossing the other so many times, and all so fair and large, and so like one to the another, as no man can tell which to take.… We might have wandered a whole year in that labyrinth of rivers.…”

  Orellana had known exactly how this felt, and just as Orellana had been, very soon Raleigh himself was lost, frequently running aground despite having an Arawak Indian guide along. They toiled in the brackish tidewaters for weeks, arriving at May’s end on the main Orinoco. The landscapes here enchanted Raleigh, and he described the savannas in glowing phrases:

  We passed the most beautiful country that ever mine eyes beheld … plains of twenty miles in length, the grass short and green, and … groves of trees by themselves, as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world so made of purpose: and still as we rowed, the deer came down feeding by the water’s side, as if they had been used to a keeper’s call.

  But there were also dangers lurking in the dark and frightening waters. Raleigh reported seeing thousands of alligators—largatos—lolling like logs along the banks.

  When he encountered Indian tribes, Raleigh took great care to treat them well, much as Orellana had, whenever possible. He forbade his men to treat the Indians roughly, and particularly outlawed the rape of their women, for which the Spaniards were notorious. He always paid or bartered for food.

  En route upstream to the Caroni River, Raleigh observed much about the Indians’ lifeways and customs, including their weaponry and warfare. The alchemy of poisoned arrows fascinated him, as did finding out what plant mixture constituted a remedy. He surely knew of Orellana’s graphic reports of soldiers dying daylong, excruciating deaths, and referred to such encounters:

  There was nothing whereof I was more curious, than to find out the true remedies of these poisoned arrows, for besides the mortality of the wound they make, the party shot endures the most insufferable torment in the world, and … a most ugly and lamentable death, sometimes dying stark mad, sometimes their bowels breaking out of their bellies, and are presently discolored, as black as pitch.

  Raleigh’s reconnaissance reached as far as the mouth of the Caroni River, eventually arriving at a village called Morequito where their chief, a man named Topiawari, hosted the Englishmen elaborately. The curious villagers laid out a feast, bringing venison, fish, fowl, various tropical fruits including pineapples, manioc wine, and delicately cooked parakeets. The impression on Raleigh was of an idyllic Eden, and he later waxed poetic about its beauty, especially at the hour of sunset: “The birds towards the evening singing on every tree with a thousand several tunes, cranes and herons of white, crimson, and carnation perching on the river’s side, the air fresh with a gentle easterly wind, and every stone that we stooped to take up, promising either gold or silver by its complexion.” This last was exaggerated, for they had as yet to find great stores of gold.

  Well fed, they pushed up the Caroni in search of Lake Manoa, but the powerful river precluded their rowing upstream. Forced to go on foot, Raleigh and his men pressed overland upriver until they saw great plumes of mist that appeared like smoke in the distance. On closer inspection, Raleigh realized they were great waterfalls, a dozen or so, as high as church steeples and sending spray into the air like rain. These would prove impassable, much as the Atures rapids had been for Ordaz on the Meta, and Raleigh turned back.

  Preparing to leave Morequito, Raleigh gathered some alluring information from chief Topiawari concerning Lake Manoa and its gold operations and smelting. Topiawari explained to the engaged Englishman that

  most of the gold which they made in plates and images was not severed from stone, but that on the lake of Manoa, and in a multitude of other rivers they gathered it in grains of perfect gold and in pieces as big as small stones, and that they put in it a part of copper, otherwise they could not work it, and that they used a great earthen pot with holes round about it, and when they had mingled the gold and copper together, they fastened canes to the hoes, and so with the breath of men they increased the fire till the metal ran, and then they cast it into moulds of stone and clay, and so make those plates and images.

  Raleigh mentally filed away these elaborate images and vowed to return.

  Within a month, Raleigh had navigated back downstream, reached the mouth of the Orinoco, and boarded his ships. By the middle of June 1595, his “discovery” of Guiana—as he soon called it—was complete. As evidence of the region’s great wealth, he brought back many ore samples—some that appeared to hold veins of gold and silver, and others that resembled sapphires. On his way home, he released Antonio de Berrio on the mainland, figuring he had served his purpose.

  Sir Walter Raleigh’s journey, compared to that of Orellana, was something of a lark. Still, it was historically the first English pioneering quest into Spanish-held South America, and it prompted the literary Raleigh to write a book about his travails. Almost immediately on his return, driven in part by naysayers who doubted the veracity of his journey and in part to persuade Queen Elizabeth, with whom he had fallen out of favor, to back a return venture, he penned the magically narrative and lyrical (and, in places, imaginatively fanciful and fictional) Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (Which the Spaniards call El Dorado). Published in at least four different editions in 1596, the sensational narrative became an immediate best seller in England and was subsequently published in numerous languages, including Latin, German, French, and Dutch. Though he had failed to find a golden man, lake, or city, that did not stop Sir Walter Raleigh from making the legend of El Dorado a commercially viable, mass media, almost pop culture event.

  Raleigh’s effort was the last great hope for the golden dream, but his failure to mount a full-scale return signaled the beginning of the end of the El Dorado myth.

  The remainder of Raleigh’s star-crossed life was a web of legal and political complexities, and his world disintegrated around him. After the death of his patron Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the new king (James VI of Scotland) tried Raleigh for high treason and tossed him into the Tower of London, where he would remain for the next twelve years (now with plenty of time to contemplate whether this London prison was indeed “more unsavory and loathsome” than the exposed deck of a sailing ship). Raleigh became an even more celebrated national hero and the Tower of London’s most popular tourist attraction of the day.

  Raleigh was temporarily released in 1616, just long enough to launch a disastrous return to his “discoverie” of Guiana. Raleigh was by now too old and decrepit to make it all the way, and during the voyage, his own son Wat was killed in a skirmish with the Spaniards.

  Raleigh was later thrown back into the Tower of London by King James, this time after a closed and secret trial on counts of high treason, and sentenced to beheading. On October 29, 1618, Sir Walter Raleigh placed his head on the block and bravely told the executioner to “fear not, but strike home.”

  These were the last words of the last of the men who would go in search of El Dorado.

  FRANCISCO ORELLANA’S EPIC JOURNEY ultimately fueled the imaginations of a wave of followers who struck out for the exotic, measureless region on their own expeditions of adventure, discovery, and colonization. In 1542, Orellana opened a last frontier, a river portal to an uncharted new world. His transcontinental voyage was a seminal, watershed moment, at once climactic and cataclysmic, for it also foretold the beginning of the end of many of the tribes Orellana encountered.

  Amid the undeniable catastrophic failure of Orellana’s tragic return voyage, one must consider him and his journey in light of what he did accomplish rather than what he did not, and the implications of what those accomplishments engendered and ignited. Whatever else one can say about him, Francisco Orellana was the audacious but judicious leader who first navigated the m
ost sprawling, complex, grand, and voluminous river in the world. He discovered peoples and places no European had ever seen or even imagined, great chiefdoms with mystical customs and perhaps even magical powers. He discovered previously inconceivable plants and animals, rodents the size of small horses, and freshwater fish the size of small whales.

  And the river itself, nonpareil, an inland freshwater sea beyond scope or comprehension. All this Orellana saw and lived.

  Orellana’s first expedition down the Amazon indeed taught us a great deal, much of which bears directly on the thinking of modern anthropologists and archaeologists. The large, relatively complex, and densely populated “chiefdoms” he encountered showed that—contrary to popular scientific thought as recent as the mid- to late twentieth century—the Amazon River Basin once sustained tremendous numbers of people, somewhere on the order of four to five million. Those populations were decimated by the diseases brought by the flood of Europeans and are much smaller today than they were when Orellana traversed the continent.

  As a result of Francisco Orellana’s incredible voyage, what followed in the succeeding decades and centuries was a mass invasion of this wild and untamable basin, this extraordinary, inscrutable river that sinks its teeth like a vampire bat into all who go there and will not relinquish them. First the missionaries, then the slavers, then the naturalists, then the rubber barons, then the timbermen and the oilmen, and finally the biotech companies and the New Age gurus and the ecotourists—all came and come still, drawn inexorably toward the river’s mysteries, bounties, and riches, whether these be in the form of people, plant and animal products—or ideas. Orellana’s Amazon remains a final frontier, to this day one of only two places on earth (the other is Papua New Guinea) to support tribes of people who have never been contacted by the outside world.