IN THE MORNING, STIFF AND SORE BUT FIRED BY THE possibility of further riches to explore and exploit should they ever return, Orellana’s men cast off from the scrubby grove, for the first time in days without being harried as they took their leave. They hoped that their greatest difficulties were behind them and that the stretch ahead would be uninhabited and uneventful and offer them an opportunity to rest their wounded men, eat in some semblance of comfort, and recover a bit of their strength.
But their wishes for a proper respite would not be realized quite yet. For very soon they approached some gorgeous country—among the “pleasantest and brightest land that [they] had discovered anywhere along the river”—high bluffs and savannas with hills and valleys. Unfortunately for the Spaniards, the lovely landscape was also quite thoroughly populated, and these people possessed a fighting mien. Still nursing their wounds from the continuous skirmishes, Orellana and his men did not like what they saw. “There came out toward us in midstream a very great number of pirogues to attack us and lead us into a fight.” They came from the left bank of the river, in the district of the confluence with the clearwater Tapajos River, a tremendous tributary whose bluish water courses in from the south just above modern-day Santarém, Brazil.
As the warriors came near, Orellana and his brethren could see that these fighters looked different from any they had yet encountered. They were inked soot-black from head to toe, and their hair was cropped tight, very short on their heads. But most noteworthy was their size—they appeared to be extremely tall, even on first encounter in their canoes. The Spaniards quickly assimilated their very large physical proportions, noting, too, their garb: “they came forth very gaily decked out.” And then the dyed-black warriors attacked.
Orellana had spotted them early enough to prepare a counter, and with deft maneuvering of the boats and some fast and furious firing of crossbows and harquebuses, the Spaniards did fair damage to them and kept them at bay as they proceeded down the river. Orellana named this region the Provincia de los Negros (the Province of the Black Men), and he later inquired of his captive trumpeter about their origins. The trumpeter explained that all the land that they could see—as well as a large domain that they could not see from the river—was ruled by a powerful overlord named Arripuna. This chieftain “ruled over a great expanse … back up the river and across country; he possessed territory so vast as to require eighty days journeying across it, as far as a lake which was off to the north.” The interpreter added, to Orellana’s great interest and concern, that Arripuna was an exalted warrior and that his subjects, these ink-dyed warriors, ate human flesh.
Orellana also learned that it was in Arripuna’s expansive lands, and under his control, that the survivors of Diego de Ordaz’s shipwreck remained. Perhaps even more interesting was the mention that Arripuna possessed impressive quantities of silver—yet another enticement for a possible return visit. But right now their primary concerns were avoiding confrontation if possible, and sustaining themselves with food—on which they were running short once again.
For two consecutive days they found no safe or suitable place to land. Finally they happened on a small village that did not appear particularly well defended, and so Orellana ordered a landing. The Indians there offered what resistance they could, but they were soon overwhelmed by the Spaniards, who seized every ounce of food available and then went on. Still needing better stores, Orellana was compelled to raid the next village as well, but this one was larger and the residents fought gamely from the shore, keeping the brigs at bay and denying them landing for half an hour. During this skirmish one of the Spanish compatriots, a man named Antonio de Carranza who hailed from Burgos, was struck in the foot by an arrow and cried out in extreme anguish, exclaiming that he was mortally wounded. He begged for a priest to hear him confess his sins and square his soul with his lord.
Carranza’s wishes were granted, but the party was initially puzzled as to how an arrow to the foot was causing him such unbearable pain. An inspection of the wound later in the day revealed that this had been no ordinary arrow, but rather a poisoned one. By the next day,
the wound turned very black, and the poison gradually made its way up through the leg, like a living thing, without its being possible to head it off, although they [cauterized] it with fire, wherefrom it was plainly evident that the arrow had been dipped in the most noxious poison, and when the poison had mounted to his heart, he died.
Orellana and his men came to the dreadful realization that any arrow wound was potentially fatal, and having watched the horrific and protracted death of their countryman, they carried on in fear of suffering the same demise. They had managed to sack the village where Carranza was initially impaled, taking with them all the maize that they could stuff into the putrid brigantines, because now Orellana determined that they should land only in the most dire necessity, so shaken was he by the gruesome death of his comrade. They would proceed downstream with utmost caution, staying as far from arrow range as they possibly could.
They moved on nervously, eyeing the shores with a newfound fear and respect. By the afternoon of the next day they were exhausted and needed sleep. Orellana spied a wooded grove at the mouth of an incoming river tributary that appeared safe. There were no huts in sight, and he thought they might be able to sleep without incident. Here some of the men rested while Orellana put others to work on some protective measures. Badly shaken by the grotesque Carranza death, he instructed a small crew to harvest timbers from the nearby forest to make “railings on the brigantines in the manner of fortifications.” These bulwarks or bulkheads extended upward and inward from the brigantines’ gunwales “like a rim … as high up as a man’s chest, and covered with the cotton and woolen blankets which we had brought along,” adding, Orellana hoped, a surrounding shield against further poison arrow attack.
The timing of this defensive measure could not have been more opportune, because no sooner were the railings and bulkheads constructed than Orellana noticed great flotillas of canoes spreading out on the river behind and below them, not attacking so much as observing their actions. Orellana regarded these natives carefully, but as they did not attack, he maintained watch only, and they continued to rest for a day and a half, both sides at something of an impasse.
As night of the second day approached, Orellana again looked out over the main river. A multitude of canoes and natives idled on the water and along the shores, and Orellana feared that their position at the river mouth was too vulnerable—he suspected that they would be attacked should they remain there through the night. Some Indians sneaked along the shore, so close to the tied-up brigantines that Orellana and his men could hear them talking among themselves, and the captain told his men to remain absolutely silent and to proceed with a stealthy but hasty departure. With little sound, the Spaniards once again boarded their now reinforced brigs and slipped out onto the glassy waterway to make good their escape.
Orellana, spooked by what had almost befallen them and wanting to make distance, ordered his rowers “tied to the oars” all night long, with no breaks. They rowed rhythmically, backs and arms and legs aching against the pull, until daylight. As the sun rose in their faces, the rowing became even more difficult, the water now exhibiting tidal tendencies. Remembered Carvajal, “The flowing of the tide extended to where we were, whereat we rejoiced not a little in the realization that now we could not fail to reach the sea.” They might have been less heartened had they known they were still some three hundred miles from that goal.
Very soon they came to a narrow branch of a river that further cut short any celebration. Two detachments of canoes in full battle cry poured forth, attacking with spears and arrows the instant the brigantines were within range. Immediately, Orellana’s precautionary protective bulwarks paid off:
With a very great clamor and outcry … they began to attack us and fight like ravenous dogs; and, if it had not been for the railings that had been built farther back, we should have come out of this skirmish decidedly decimated; but with this protection and with the damage that our crossbowmen and harquebusiers did to them, we managed … to defend ourselves.
This battle, pitched at midriver, raged on continuously from sunrise until midmorning, and at no time did the Indians allow the Spaniards even a moment to rest or cease fighting. With every hour came more and more reinforcements, until the water was so cluttered with canoes that the Spaniards could scarcely see the surface between the enemy boats. Closer and closer they pressed up against the brigantines, until navigating an escape seemed desperate and the two Spanish ships were almost completely netted by canoes. The canoes impeded even the movement of the oars, placing the Spaniards in absolute peril, ducking as they now were beneath the protective railings and listening to the war chants of the horde, who fought under an overlord named Ichipayo.
Orellana could wait no longer to act, lest they all be slain right there. He called on Lieutenant Robles to rise to the occasion, and Robles proved true, standing up in the prow of the brigantine and firing his harquebus with precision, killing two Indians with one shot. The instantaneous deaths of the Indians, coupled with the concussion of the firearm booming like a violent thunderburst overhead, caused great fear and panic among the Indians, and they began to spin and wheel their boats away in terror and confusion. At this exact moment, another brilliant shot rang out, this one leveled by a loyal harquebusier from Biscayne named Perucho. His deadly aim felled another leader, and the explosion caused most of the Indians to leap or fall into the water, affording the Spaniards easy, slow-moving targets for their swords and crossbows. In the end, the canoes that were still upright fled for safety, leaving the natives in the water to drown or be slain by the Spaniards. None of those who fell into the water escaped with their lives.
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 tide. 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 rode 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.
So they pushed on through this coastal morass, the winds and tides so strong here that they sometimes lost an entire day’s forward progress in a single hour, and all they could do was pull up oars and take in sails and watch the boats move backward up the shoreline. It was disheartening, but at least during these weeks the men were learning—to the degree that they could in such extreme circumstances—how to sail. At some of these coastal villages the inhabitants approached Orellana and his men and pulled or pointed to their beards, ran their hands over their Spanish clothes, their padded linen brigandines and jerkins, then indicated, through animated sign language and speech, that “not far away from there were some lost or colonizing Spaniards.” Orellana and his men could not know whether this was true, but they took it as a good sign that they might soon again be among Christians.
At the last of these docile villages, near the end of the Amazon, Orellana exchanged the remaining barter goods he had on hand for a few fish, and here he told his men that they must make final preparations for the sea, which they would soon enter. There was much to do. They needed to stock up on strong ropes and hawsers for the rigging, which they made from bush-rope vines and other lianas or vines dangling from trees in the mangrove forest; here also they constructed proper rudders for the ships, made final adjustments to the bilge pumps, and sewed together spare sails for the voyage, in the event that the ones they were using, pieced together as they were, should become torn or tattered in a squall.
Orellana told each man to carry his own provisions for the voyage, which included very scant stores: a small jarful of freshwater each, and a small satchel of roasted maize or some yams—meager fare at best. Orellana divided the most experienced seamen between the two brigantines, so that each ship might have at least some crew members with nautical backgrounds, but they lacked trained navigators or pilots, and the men were apprehensive about the next part of their journey, knowing that despite all they had survived and fought through on their epic odyssey, they might easily die in the next day or two on the open sea:
In this manner we got ready to navigate by sea wherever fortune might guide us and cast us, because we had no pilot, nor compass, nor navigator’s chart of any sort, and we did not even know in what direction or toward what point we ought to head.
But this aspect of the unknown had never stopped Orellana before, nor would it now. Nearly the entire expedition, from its origins in Quito in early 1541, had been predicated on the unknown. Still, some of his men were terrified of the impending sea journey, and it took a good bit of diplomacy and leadership on Orellana’s part to calm their nerves and bolster their spirits. There was palpable tension among the men, and Carvajal remembered it very well indeed: “I am telling the truth when I say that there were among us a few so weary of this kind of life and of the long journey that, if their consciences had not kept them from so doing, they would not have failed to remain behind among the Indians.” But Orellana’s control, guidance, natural leadership, and skilled captaincy kept even a single man from deserting, and they loaded the ships, each man with his water and food kit, and prepared to set sail.
Captain Orellana and his trusted priest Gaspar de Carvajal boarded the Victoria. It was Saturday, August 26, 1542, and they had taken nearly three weeks to navigate the saline marshes and islands and tributaries, the coiling river braids that comprise the region inside the great mouth of the Amazon. Even more remarkable, it had been more than eight months—and seemed like a lifetime to some of the men—since that fateful day after Christmas 1541 when they had split from Gonzalo Pizarro’s force and struck out down the river in search of food. Now they finally sailed to the north of the big island of Marajó, a massive, country-sized landform in the Amazon’s maw, the world’s largest river island. Orellana and his compatriots felt the curious freshwater sea breeze in their faces, tasted the sweet seawater wash on their lips as they passed from the mighty Amazon, the greatest river in the world, and out onto the ocean. For here, the Amazon’s freshwater discharge is so voluminous as to prevent salt water from inundating the main channel of the river, the water remaining fresh for more than one hundred miles out to sea. And while they did not yet know exactly what they had achieved, they were awed by what they saw heading out to the open ocean: the mouth of the river channel they passed through, “from cape to cape,” was more than fifteen miles wide, and as they sailed along they could see other mouths even larger and more impressive.
Captain Francisco Orellana had successfully navigated and descended the world’s largest river, from its source in the Andes to its nearly two-hundred-mile-wide mouth at the Atlantic Ocean, but his journey was far from over. Though he did not know precisely where he was, Orellana did know that there were Spanish-occupied settlements to the north, on the pearl-fishing islands of Cubagua and Margarita, lying just off the northern coast of what is today Venezuela. What Orellana would not have known, nor perhaps would have wanted to, given all he and his men had endured, was that those islands were more than 1,400 miles away.
During their first few days at sea, Orellana was blessed with the same brand of good luck that had helped him get this far already. The weather held, for one thing, and they were not buffeted by the summer squalls that can characterize the mouth of the great river. Most fortunate, though, they were almost immediately caught up in and rode the Southern Equatorial Current, a massive current deflected northward along the coast that pushes straight up past the Guianas toward the top of the South American landmass, which is exactly the direction they needed to go.
For three days the San Pedro and the Victoria sailed in tandem up the coast, tacking as best they could so as to maintain sight of the mainland shore. Sometimes they drew far enough away to lose sight of land, and this concerned Orellana greatly, given that they were traveling in small handmade brigs with no navigation systems, and not proper caravels built for ocean crossings. Also, each man had so little water that losing sight of land meant losing sight of freshwater rivers, and this to the men spelled potential death from thirst at sea, something none wished to think about but certainly all did.
On the third night moving northward in unison, a storm set in and separated the two boats. At sunset on August 29, the men aboard the Victoria—including Captain Orellana and Friar Carvajal—worried that their compatriots aboard the smaller and frailer San Pedro were forever lost at sea, or had smashed into the rocky coastline, because they perceived they “had been navigating along the most dangerous and roughest coast that there is around this whole vast ocean.” Scanning the ocean horizon, Orellana could see nothing but whitecaps and an endless expanse of blue water, with no sign of the scrappy little San Pedro, the boat he had built with Gonzalo Pizarro and in which he and his followers had gone off in search of food those many months ago.
By the ninth day at sea, Captain Orellana had problems of his own. After passing by the mouth of the mighty Orinoco (which Ordaz had ascended a decade before), Orellana skirted the devilish and narrow Boca de la Sierpa (Serpent’s Mouth) and managed to navigate around the island of Trinidad, between Trinidad* and Tobago, but found himself drawn into the northern entrance to the Gulf of Paria, the dangerous Boca del Dragon (Dragon’s Mouth) named by Christopher Columbus on his third voyage. Here treacherous rocks and small islands extend from the anvil-shaped point of northwestern Trinidad, jutting out toward the Paria Peninsula, and even today this narrow entrance presents extreme hazards to small craft. The Victoria, narrowly escaping disaster entering the Mouth of the Dragon, followed too far into the gulf thinking this was their best route, and spent the next week trying to sail and row free from its jaws. Deep inside the Gulf of Paria, the freshwater pouring out from the Rio Grande and San Juan River of mainland Venezuela mixes with the salt water, creating an angry turmoil difficult to maneuver in. Remembered Carvajal of that perilous time, “When we found ourselves within it we tried to go out to sea again; getting out was so difficult that it took us seven days to do so, during all of which time our companions never dropped the oars from their hands, and during all these seven days we ate nothing but some fruit resembling plums, which are called hogos.”
After a week of constant struggle the winds abated long enough to allow them to row themselves from the Dragon’s Mouth—which they described as a “prison”—and out to safety. Two more days of sailing, without really knowing where they were or where they were heading, and they spotted land over the bow, the low-lying outline of an island just ahead. The oarsmen lay slumped, their hands destroyed. Others clenched their water jars, which they had been holding aloft to catch rainwater whenever there was a squall or even a drizzle. Their lips were cracked and bleeding.
The navigator bellowed out “Land ho!” and the men woke and peered excitedly over the gunwales, hardly able to contain their elation when they saw a small port, the Spanish outpost town of Nueva Cádiz. They had reached Cubagua, the tiny eight-square-mile “Pearl Island,” lying just south of the much larger Margarita Island and the site of the first Spanish outpost in the Americas. With incredible circumstantial irony that Orellana would learn of only later, the entire city of Nueva Cádiz had been leveled by earthquake and tidal waves on Christmas Day 1541, just before Orellana and his small crew embarked on their ordeal down the Amazon.
Now, on September 11, 1542, at around three in the afternoon, they had arrived at the partially rebuilt township, joyful to see a few proper sailing vessels in the small harbor and the outlines of recognizable dwellings—and even a Spanish flag—coming into focus in the distance. They made port, dropped planks, and disembarked, wobbling weakly ashore and standing on this tiny island, Captain Francisco Orellana and his crew having completed one of the most remarkable, daring, and improbable journeys in the history of navigation and discovery. Orellana’s achievement would later be called one of the world’s greatest explorations, “something more than a journey, and more like a miraculous event.”
News of Orellana’s arrival spread quickly about the town, and soon, to Orellana’s immeasurable relief and euphoria, some members of the San Pedro came down to the beach. Astonishingly, they had arrived on the island two days before, somehow having managed to avoid the savage jaws of the Mouth of the Dragon. Remarked Father Carvajal, “So great was the joy which we felt, the ones at the sight of the others, that I shall not be able to express it, because they considered us to be lost, and so we considered them.”
After a meeting of men that included tears and embraces, Orellana took a muster roll: 43 of his original 57-man expedition had survived the ordeal. Only three had been killed in battle; the other eleven had succumbed to disease or starvation or consumption of poisonous food. As Captain Orellana strode up the path from the port leading into town, the one-eyed hidalgo from Trujillo had no way of knowing exactly what he had accomplished, but the briny smell of the fishing town would have reminded him and the others of what they had all been dreaming and fantasizing about for a very long time—sitting down at a big table for a lavish and sumptuous Spanish meal, one with plenty of wine.
* According to botanist Richard Spruce, these trees were Curatella americana and Plumeria phagedaenica; they are definitely found in the region around Santarém that Orellana and Carvajal describe as having these trees.
* Banisteriopsis, called yajé in Brazil and ayahuasca in Peru and Ecuador.
† Archaeologist Anna Curtenius Roosevelt’s digs at Pedra Pintada (Painted Rock) in Brazil unearthed sherds of the oldest pottery found in the Americas, and other evidence at the site (tortoise shells, animal and fish bone remains, burnt firewood hearths) suggested that the early inhabitants were a culture able to adapt to their environment, contentions that contradicted previously held theory and sparked a long debate known as the Meggers-Roosevelt debate. Excavating in the 1980s at Marajó Island at the Amazon’s mouth, Roosevelt used the most modern techniques—ground-penetrating radar, total-station topographic mapping, and others—to construct a picture of the mound builders who had lived there that fundamentally challenged the controversial theories of Betty Meggers in her 1971 book Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise. Roosevelt argued that the “Marajoara culture was one of the outstanding nonliterate complex societies of the world,” and suggested that at its height, it supported more than a hundred thousand people. She concluded that these complex chiefdoms possessed “territories tens of thousands of square kilometers in size, larger than those of many recognized prehistoric states. Their organization, and ideology of deified chiefs and ancestors, nobles and seers, vassals or commoners, and captive slaves are more similar to those of early states and complex chiefdoms elsewhere in the world than to the present Indian societies of Amazonia.” Her theories and findings offered paradigm shifts in thinking and sparked debates that continue to this day; many of her theories—including early human arrival, and the existence of tribal societies and their pre-agriculture pottery—are now widely accepted.
* Although Columbus discovered Trinidad in 1498, it was not colonized by Spain until much later, in 1588, and thus there were no landing ports or populations there as Orellana sailed past in 1542.