Amazons

by John Man

  In the belief that salvation would be found downriver, Pizarro’s No. 2, Francisco de Orellana, volunteered to sail ahead with fifty-seven armed men and return with food. Pizarro agreed.

  So began an epic voyage, starting in the province now named after him. Orellana never returned. Pizarro and his small band, abandoned and apparently betrayed, made a slow and dismal retreat, wracked by scurvy, their clothes in rags. By the time he reached Quito, he had lost all but eighty men. He had achieved precisely nothing, excusing himself in his official report by blaming Orellana for treachery and ‘the greatest cruelty’.

  In fact, both parties were victims of their inexperience. The Napo, fed by tributaries, flows broad and fast away from the Andean foothills. Return by sail or oar was impossible. And still they saw no villages. Orellana’s men starved, boiling up the soles of their shoes to eat, occasionally tearing up roots that proved poisonous. Seven died before, at last, the rest came across a tribe willing to trade food for knick-knacks.

  After several weeks and 800 kilometres, they floated out into a vast and sluggish mainstream that would, they were sure, carry them to the huge river mouth known both as the Mar Dulce and the Marañon, and so at last to the Atlantic. Other Indian groups provided food, and also materials that allowed them to build another, better boat. Then, in mid-1542, they came up against the aggressive Machiparo, a virtual nation of warriors dominating the river for hundreds of kilometres, and providing evidence of the size and complexity of some pre-Columbian flood-plain communities. The Spaniards were allowed to meet the chief, who was so amazed by their beards and awed by their weapons that he granted them living space. But they blew the opportunity by pillaging their hosts, who drove them out, killing sixteen of them.

  Downstream was another tribal nation, the Omaguas.fn5 ‘Numerous large settlements, very pretty country,’ recalled the voyage’s historian, Gaspar de Carvajal, with roads, decorated and glazed pottery ‘in the style of that made in China’, fine houses and stocks of food. One town stretched for 10 kilometres. Here, and further on, past the junction with the Rio Negro, where translucent ‘black’ waters run alongside the sediment-rich ‘white’ waters of the main river, the Spaniards raided village after village, shooting tribesmen and, as word of their vicious ways preceded them, fighting off flotillas of defiant warriors, paddling across a water-world swollen into an inland ocean by tributaries each larger than any European river.

  Now we approach the point of this story. An unnamed tribe had villages marked by totems on a huge tree-trunk:

  ten feet in girth, there being represented and carved in relief (thereon) a walled city with its inclosure and with a gate. At this gate were two towers, very tall and having windows, and each tower had a door, the two facing each other, and at each door were two columns, and this entire structure that I am telling about rested upon two very fierce lions, which turned their glances backwards as though suspicious of each other, holding between their forepaws and claws the entire structure, in the middle of which was a round open space: in the centre of this space there was a hole through which they offered and poured out chicha for the Sun … the one they worship and consider as their god.

  From a captured tribesman, Orellana understood that the altars were symbols of this community’s allegiance to a tribe of female warriors. Huts full of feathers and feather cloaks were apparently tributes for these women.

  The next villages were more threatening, and landings became rare. At one village, where Orellana agreed that his men could celebrate the festival of Corpus Christi (7 June), they found only women, until nightfall, when the men returned from the jungle and attacked. In the morning, the Spaniards retreated, taking with them prisoners, who were hanged ‘in order that the Indians from here on might become afraid of us and not attack us.’ It accomplished exactly the opposite. Attacks came almost daily. The crew kept their two ships well clear of the banks when possible, and killed when they ventured on land.

  At some point, somewhere in the 500 kilometres of river between today’s Manaus and Santarém, they saw villages, ‘very large ones, which shone white’. Subsequent events convinced Orellana that these villages were the homes of the fighting women they had heard about upriver. In Carvajal’s words, ‘we came suddenly upon the excellent land and dominion of the Amazons.’

  The Spaniards’ approach attracted armadas of canoes. ‘They mocked us and came up close and told us to keep going, for farther downriver they were waiting for us and would seize us there and take us to the Amazons.’ Crossbows and arquebuses took a heavy toll, but the tribesmen ignored their losses and kept raining down arrows on the two Spanish ships. As the Spaniards forced their way ashore, Carvajal himself was struck by an arrow that penetrated ‘as far as the hollow region’ – presumably his stomach. ‘Had it not been for my clothes that would have been the end of me.’

  How to explain such suicidal ferocity? Carvajal thought he could see the answer, in the form of club-wielding women warriors who seemed to be of a different tribe than the men.

  There came as many as ten or twelve, for we ourselves saw these women, fighting there in front of all the Indian men as women captains. They fought so courageously that the Indian men did not dare turn their backs, and anyone who did turn his back they killed with clubs, right there in front of us, and this is the reason why the Indians kept up their defence for so long. These women are very white and tall, and have their hair very long and braided and wound about their heads. They are very robust and go naked with their privy parts covered, with their bows and arrows in their hands, doing as much fighting as ten Indian men, and indeed there was one woman among them who shot an arrow a span deep into one of the brigantines, and others less deep, so that our brigantines looked like porcupines.

  The Spaniards killed seven or eight of the ‘Amazons’ – ‘these we actually saw,’ writes Carvajal, as if foreseeing doubt – before reaching their boats and drifting away on the current, too exhausted to row.

  A little further on, they approached another village to get food, because it seemed deserted. In fact, the inhabitants were lying in ambush with their bows. The Spaniards protected themselves with shields, all except Carvajal himself: ‘they hit no one but me, for they planted an arrow shot right in one of my eyes, in such a way that the arrow went through to the other side, from which wound I have lost the eye and (even now) I am not without suffering.’

  They took with them a prisoner,fn6 who in the course of the journey onwards downriver became the source of some fascinating ‘information’, which he was able to divulge because Orellana had made a ‘list of words’. First Orellana asked about the man’s origins. He was from the village where he was captured, came the reply, and his overlord was called Couynco or Quenyue (the two written versions of Carvajal’s history vary). And the women? They lived inland, a seven-day journey away. Orellana’s prisoner said he had been there often, bearing tribute from his lord. The ‘Amazons’ ruled over seventy villages, in which the houses were built ‘out of stone and with regular doors, and from one village to another went roads closed off on one side and on the other and with guards stationed at intervals along them so that no one might enter without paying duties’.

  Did the Amazons bear children, asked Orellana. Yes, indeed. But how?

  He said that these Indian women consorted with Indian men at times, and when that desire came to them, they assembled a great horde of warriors and went off to make war on a very great overlord whose residence is not far from the land of these women, and by force brought them to their own country and kept them with them for the time that suited their caprice, and after they found themselves pregnant they sent them back to their country without doing them any harm.

  The male children they killed, the girls they raised ‘with great solemnity and instructed them in the arts of war.’

  All this was done under the control of a queen, ‘one ruling mistress who subjected and held under her hand and jurisdiction all the rest, which mistress went by the name
of Coñori.’

  They possessed ‘a very great wealth of gold and silver’, and high-ranking women ate with gold and silver utensils, whereas those of lower rank used wood or pottery. Five large buildings in the capital were temples dedicated to the Sun:

  In these buildings they had many gold and silver idols in the form of women, and many vessels of gold and of silver for the service of the Sun; and these women were dressed in clothing of very fine wool, because in this land there are many sheep of the same sort as those of Peru [not sheep, of course, but llamas]; their dress consisted of blankets girded about them from the breasts down, [in some cases merely] thrown over [the shoulders] and in others clasped together in front, like a cloak, by means of a pair of cords; they wore their hair reaching down to the ground at their feet, and upon their heads were placed crowns of gold, as wide as two fingers … As we understand him, there were camels that carried them on their back … which were as big as horses.

  Their source went on: ‘They had a rule to the effect that when the sun went down no male Indian was to remain in all these cities.’ Neighbouring states were made to pay tribute, and with others they were at war, including the one they had just seen, whose men were carried home ‘to have relations with them’. The women were ‘of very great stature and white and numerous’, as he knew for certain, because he went back and forth daily.

  All this apparently confirmed a tale the Spaniards had heard not far from Quito. To see the women, men journeyed downriver 1,400 leagues (some 3,000 miles), so ‘anyone who should take it into his head to go down to the country of these women was destined to go a boy and return an old man.’ The country of the Amazons was cold, said the prisoner, without much firewood.

  Orellana and Carvajal made a willing audience, eager to believe that not far away was a land ripe for colonization. By the time Carvajal came to write his history, the dreams had hardened into an imperialist agenda:

  Inland from the river, at a distance of two leagues, more or less, there could be seen some very large cities that glistened in white, and besides this the land is good, as fertile, and as normal in appearance as our Spain … It is a temperate land, where much wheat may be harvested, and all kinds of fruit trees may be grown.

  Grasslands that called out for livestock, woods of ‘evergreen oaks, plantations of cork trees bearing acorns’, rolling savannas, game galore – why, the place was an Eden fit for seizure by king, country and Christ.

  What are we to make of this? Orellana gets into a fight with a previously unknown tribe and sees a dozen strapping women fighting with the men. They look different, and seem to exercise authority. There could obviously be no interpreter, because the Spaniards were the first European arrivals. Yet on the basis of a ‘word list’ Orellana builds a context: tribal hierarchies, a tribute system, seventy villages, stone houses, an economy.

  Take the language issue first. Orellana was, no doubt, as brilliant a linguist as Carvajal claimed. He was ‘next to God, the deciding factor by virtue of which we did not perish.’ But no one can be that brilliant. Once upon a time, it was not uncommon for anthropologists working in the field to claim to learn a new language in a couple of weeks. A century ago, they were safe to do so. Few worked with indigenous groups living traditional lives. The scholar was the only source. No one could check. After the Second World War, anthropology moved on. Language turned out to be rather more complicated than anyone had thought. You can’t pick up a language in a few weeks. The anthropologist and Waorani expert on whom I relied, Jim Yost, said it took him a year to feel comfortable in the language – and he had the immeasurable advantage that Waorani had already been analyzed by the missionary group he was working with. Waorani is a linguistic ‘isolate’, with no living relatives. It had taken years to crack. In a couple of months with the Waorani, thanks to a written grammar, I learned enough to ask a few simple questions, but certainly not enough to understand the answers.

  Yet here is Carvajal claiming that from a single ‘informant’ speaking an unknown language Orellana could, with nothing but a word list, elicit detailed information about an unknown culture in a few days. It’s simply not possible.

  So the result is rubbish. Stone houses and roads in a mud-floored tropical rainforest that was somehow short of firewood? Fields and oak trees? Take the mention of numbers: a seven-day journey, seventy villages. The numbers assume the existence of a counting system. But, it’s almost safe to say, most Amazonian tribes do not count. Well, they can, but they didn’t then, at least not in European terms. Both the Yanomamö and the Pirahã (more on them in the next paragraph) count ‘One, two, more than two’. Waorani is a bit more sophisticated: one to five is ‘One, two, two-and-one, two-and-two, a full hand.’ You can go up to ten (‘two full hands’), after which the system is too cumbersome to be of much use. It’s nothing to do with a lack of intelligence. The Waorani can learn to count in Spanish perfectly well. Once they have that intellectual tool, they can joke about how they count: ‘If we wanted to say twenty-two in our language, we would have to say “Two hands, two hands and two.”’ It seems that, traditionally, these cultures could do just fine without counting much beyond five. Why this was so is an open question, but it’s our problem, not theirs.

  How to explain what Orellana ‘discovered’ from his informant, at least as reported by Carvajal? The answer is: projection, explaining the alien and the far-off in terms of one’s own experiences and prejudices. It’s reassuring to think that our beliefs are universal. But they’re not. There’s a story of a teacher deconstructing Hamlet to Zulus, eager to present the evil deed that underpins the play: Hamlet’s uncle has murdered his own brother to seize the throne. Nods of approval all round. Everyone agrees: ‘He did well.’ So much for Shakespeare’s universal appeal. When Dan Everett, a missionary working with the Pirahã on the Madeira River, proudly read his translation of St Mark’s Gospel, he was convinced that he was offering a message of salvation for all mankind. He had reckoned without the Pirahã belief in a world of dreams and spirits that was as real to them as our physical world. The morning after listening to St Mark, one of the men ‘startled me by suddenly saying, “The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him.”

  ‘“Why not?” I asked.

  ‘“Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them round the village, trying to stick his large penis into them.”’

  Other tribesmen confirmed it. Game, set and match to the Pirahã. They were not, in Everett’s words, ‘in the market for a new world view.’ He lost his faith soon afterwards.

  Carvajal intended to be trustworthy, and was widely trusted. ‘He should be believed,’ wrote his friend Fernández de Oviedo, ‘by virtue of those two arrow shots, one of which tore out or destroyed one of his eyes; and with that single eye, not to mention his personal prestige and qualities … I would believe him more than I would those who, with two eyes … staying at home in Europe, are continually babbling.’ But he was led astray by his expectations. He was a well-educated man, familiar with the classics. He knew what Old World historians said about the Amazons, and had no reason to doubt that they were a historical reality. He came from a world of stone houses and roads and royalty, and a culture obsessed with gold, and with the idea that a gold-rich kingdom existed somewhere in the rainforest. It was this familiarity that led him to accept what Orellana said and enhance it with exaggeration and wishful thinking. Somehow, a few words exchanged with the prisoner served as a verbal Rorschach test, on to which the Spaniards imposed their culture, their dreams and their recent past. As with UFOs, ghosts, gods and the Loch Ness Monster, scanty ‘evidence’ inspires a spurious explanation, which inspires more ‘evidence’, producing a belief that seems to be a rock-solid truth.

  Another major source seems to have been the Peruvian Virgins of the Sun, about whom both men knew because they had been present during the conquest of the Incas less than ten years before. In the words of the nineteenth-century historian of the
conquest, William Prescott, the Virgins of the Sun ‘were young maidens, dedicated to the service of the deity, who were taken from their homes and introduced into convents … [which] consisted of low ranges of stone buildings, covering a large extent of ground, surrounded by high walls.’

  A trustworthy character is no guarantee of a trustworthy report. There never was a tribe of Amazons in the rainforest, any more than there was a gold-rich kingdom there.

  But Carvajal’s hopes and dreams had tremendous impact. After more adventures – attacks and counterattacks, food stolen or traded – the expedition reached the mouth of the great freshwater river, sailed north for another 2,000 kilometres and landed in Spanish settlements on the island of Cubagua, off the coast of Venezuela, in early September 1542. While Orellana went back to Spain, Carvajal returned to Lima, wrote up his account of the journey downriver (in two versions) and spent the next forty years in the service of the church, until his death in 1584.