UPON HIS ARRIVAL IN HIS NATIVE SPAIN IN MAY 1543, Francisco Orellana could now rightfully call himself “Discoverer of the Amazon,” and given what he had accomplished, he should well have been heralded as a national hero. But unlike Gonzalo Pizarro, who staggered into Quito after his disastrous march to a street-lined hero’s welcome, Orellana—the first European to successfully descend the world’s largest river—sailed into port in Spain and disembarked in relative anonymity.
Despite this apparent snubbing, Orellana wasted no time with his ambitious plans. He had long before determined—perhaps even before the battle with the Amazons—that he must be the one to return to this mythical region of unimaginably giant rivers, his memories fueled by images of albino Indians casting spells in great plumes of ashes blown from wooden pipes, of black-painted warriors two heads taller than the tallest Spaniard, of great highways leading from chiefdoms into the interior, where powerful overlords possessed untold riches waiting there to be plundered. Perhaps he had even convinced himself that somewhere out there among those endless rivers dwelled El Dorado himself, the vaunted Gilded Man.
But there was much for Orellana to do before he could return to see all of this for himself once again. First, he needed to give a personal account of his expedition to the king and his council, both verbally and in writing, and in so doing also persuade the crown to grant him the title of El Gobernador that he believed he had earned. If his account was well received and his title granted, he would be in position to request permission—and financial and material support—to mount a return expedition to officially conquer and claim the Amazon regions for Spain and secure immortality for himself.
And of course there was the important matter of Gonzalo Pizarro’s written accusations of Orellana’s treason to contend with. Fortunately for Orellana, he had less to worry about than he had feared. Gonzalo’s letter, written in September 1542 from Peru, had indeed arrived and been read by the court by the time Orellana landed safely back home and sought audience at Valladolid in May of the following year, but its contents and accusations of treason, mutiny, and desertion were not particularly convincing or persuasive to the Council of the Indies. As luck and empire building would have it, the council, the court, and the crown were much more interested in the possibility of acquiring new and rich realms than they were in the squabbles between two rival conquistadors, even if one happened to be a Pizarro. Further aiding Orellana, Gonzalo Pizarro was far away in Peru, his mind and labors at that time still occupied with avenging the death of his brother. He had not yet pressed, and, destined soon to embark on another fateful path, never would.
This freed Orellana to proceed with his personal case, which he did immediately, submitting to the royal court an oral testimony of his entire journey from the time he split with Pizarro’s main expedition up to his arrival at the Pearl Island of Cubagua. Along with this, Orellana presented one version of Carvajal’s written account, as well as the two legal documents penned by the scrivener Isásaga and signed by all the men under Orellana, documents that fundamentally supported Orellana and Carvajal’s version of all that had taken place. His tale, his descriptions of the people he had encountered, their lifeways, the animals never before witnessed, the jaw-dropping descriptions of the river’s immensity, and of course his battle with the Amazons, all aroused tremendous excitement in Valladolid, in Seville, in his native Trujillo, indeed all across Spain as people told and retold Orellana’s story of discovery.
But the initial official governmental response, delivered almost instantly by Charles’s secretary Juan de Sámano, practically devastated Orellana. Sámano ruled that because the great river’s mouth might well be within Portugal’s jurisdiction, as designated by the most current mariners’ charts, its further exploration might not be to Spain’s advantage. Still, Orellana was urged to submit formally his written account and appeal, in which he might clarify the location of the river and assuage any doubts about a return expedition. This he did immediately.
Orellana’s written appeal and petition included a summary of his considerable services in Nicaragua and Peru prior to the expedition, “performing many services for the King in the various honorable commissions with which he had been interested, not only as captain, but as lieutenant-governor.” Orellana went on to outline and summarize the personal expenses he had laid out and lost in the expedition to La Canela and down the Amazon, focusing at length on the importance of his recent discoveries, the immense size and wealth of the country and its provinces, and their potential benefit to Spain. He closed with a formal request to return to and colonize the Amazon region:
I beseech Your Majesty to see fit to give it to me as a territory to be held by me as governor in order that I may explore it and colonize it on behalf of Your Majesty, and in case Your Majesty grants me the favors … I offer myself for undertaking what follows, for the sake of serving God and Your Majesty.
In his recounting of past services, Orellana conveniently and shrewdly left out his participation in the Battle of Las Salinas during the War of Chupas, during which time he had sided with the Pizarros in open civil strife against the rival Almagristas, for he well understood that open participation in Spanish civil strife was looked upon quite unfavorably by the crown.
His story, documents, and petition presented, now all the one-eyed Orellana could do was await the decision of the council and court. Orellana’s petition had been convincing in its own right, but two other factors contributed to the court’s final decision, both with global political significance. The council was well aware of Orellana’s recent stopover and extended visit with the king of Portugal, and as well, they knew that “some three or four years earlier the king of Portugal … had built a fleet to go up the Amazon from the coast; that in the House of Trade in Seville it was rumored that as a consequence of Orellana’s voyage another fleet was being fitted out for the purpose of penetrating up the river.” If this competition for the region were not enough, the council had also heard rumors of a possible French fleet: “It also seems quite likely to us,” they added, “that, as far as may be judged from the indications that have been given out on the part of the King of France of a desire to look into matters connected with the Indies, if this thing should come to notice he might have covetous designs in connection with it.”
For Orellana, bent on titles and fired by dreams of a return to the New World, the wait for a decision must have seemed interminable. Finally, after careful deliberation, the Council of the Indies concluded the following:
According to the said account and judged from the location in which this river with the lands that he says he has discovered is, it might be a rich country and one by the occupation of which Your Majesty might be rendered a service and the Royal Crown of these realms enhanced.… And for this reason, it is the opinion of the greater part of the Council that it is advantageous … that the banks of this river be explored and settled and taken possession of by Your Majesty, and that this be done within the shortest time and with the greatest amount of diligence as possible … and that this expedition of exploration and colonization be carried out, and that it be entrusted to this man Orellana on account of his having discovered [the river].
With a few strokes of a quill pen, his future appeared ensured. Orellana would return to his river. But that return would not be as soon as the anxious conquistador hoped, and there would be stipulations and provisions attached to his expedition.
First of all, the opinions of the Council of the Indies suggesting actions by the crown in no way guaranteed them, and Orellana still needed Prince Philip, handling things in his father’s absence (for the king was away from court on other royal business), to accept these opinions and formally grant them. At long last, after a nine-month period in which Orellana visited family and attempted to get his personal business and finances in order, Prince Philip on February 14, 1544, signed into law the council’s recommendations and granted Orellana the title of Adelantado—or governor—of this outpost frontier and its Amazonian regions, authorizing him to conquer, settle, and colonize “New Andalusia.” It was a well-earned vindication, final attainment of the titles and power that he sought and dreamed of and toiled for. Now, Orellana must have lustily fantasized, he could become the third marquis of the New World, after only Cortés and Pizarro.
Francisco Orellana needed to consider carefully the expedition’s numerous stipulations before he formally signed his response—called “articles of agreement.” Of the central expectations, first and foremost was that Orellana, on reaching the Amazon again, build and garrison two towns, one as near as possible to the river mouth and the other farther upstream and inland, both of them at locations chosen by Orellana and approved by the royal officials and friars who would be going with him. The region granted him was rather vague—he could conquer and settle “the regions that stretched towards the south from the river that he had discovered, for a distance of two hundred leagues as the crow flies.”
He was obliged to take on the expedition at least three hundred Spaniards, one hundred of whom would be cavalry and two hundred infantrymen, a total that the crown considered to be “a sufficiently large number and force for colonizing progressively and defending yourself and your men.” After building the two towns, he could proceed upriver, in boats either built there or brought along in parts in the ships’ holds, accompanied by eight friars (to be hand-selected by the council), whose mission would be to convert the native populations to Christianity.
Heading upriver, Orellana could then attempt to settle what domains, chiefdoms, and lands he wished, provided that under the New Laws he enlist no Indian slaves for the purpose, other than the occasional interpreter. Last, he must take great care to respect the Treaty of Tordesillas and its line of demarcation, attempting to ensure that these newfound lands fell within Spanish jurisdiction, and he must refrain from altercations with any Spanish captains who happened to already be in the area, “so that there may be avoided those disturbances which have hitherto arisen out of such situations, both in Peru and in other parts.” This last was a direct reference to the unseemly and ongoing Pizarro-Almagro situation, but the crown had dealt with similar problems in Mexico with Cortés.
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 the 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.
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 remain 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.