America Before

by Graham Hancock

  The expeditionaries frequently faced extreme privations. On one occasion, for example, Carvajal reports that after many days without food,

  we were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs, with the result that so great was our weakness that we could not remain standing, for some on all fours and others with staffs went into the woods to search for a few roots to eat and some there were who ate certain herbs with which they were not familiar, and they were at the point of death, because they were like mad men and did not possess sense; but as Our Lord was pleased that we should continue our journey, no-one died.2

  Whether by divine intervention or by good luck, or because of Orellana’s effective leadership, none of his tough and resourceful men died of starvation on the voyage, and only a handful lost their lives due to infections, disease, and battle wounds. It was, all in all, a 7,000-kilometer journey, the whole of which, from departure from Quito in February 1541 to arrival at Marajo Island in the Amazon estuary on the Atlantic coast of Brazil in August 1542, took 18 months.

  More important by far than his descriptions of the risks and dangers of the adventure, the great historical significance of Carvajal’s journal is the shockingly counterintuitive picture it paints of a vast and complex Amazon. Certainly there were regions of complete wilderness where the expeditionaries suffered badly—hundreds of kilometers of deserted riverbanks with no people, no crops, and apparently no wildlife. But we discover as we read on that these empty quarters were interspersed with regions of astonishing, heavily populated abundance, where “great cities” more than 20 kilometers from end-to-end, roughly the length of Manhattan, lined the riverbanks.3 Here Carvajal reports that enormous expanses were given over to productive agriculture4 and there were signs everywhere of large and well-organized political and economic systems linked to centralized states that were capable of fielding disciplined armies thousands strong.5

  These last glimpses of the Amazon before the ruination of European contact hint at a glorious, sophisticated, and technologically advanced indigenous prehistory. Carvajal tells of one stretch of the mighty river, 80 leagues—possibly more than 500 kilometers6—in length, ruled by a “great overlord named Machiparo.” Throughout his territories a single language was spoken and the towns and villages stood so close together that there was usually not more than “a crossbow shot” between them.7

  A week later the Spaniards came to a “fortified village” and, finding themselves short of food they took it by storm, killing some of the inhabitants and forcing the remainder to flee into the jungle. They then “remained resting, regaling ourselves with good lodgings, eating all we wanted, for three days in this village. There were many roads here that entered into the interior of the land, very fine highways.”8

  Orellana took these latter as an ominous sign—the locals they had driven out of their homes might easily return with reinforcements—and the expedition sailed on, enjoying the abundant and varied foods that they now found everywhere on their route downriver.9

  The next major halt was at “a village that was on a high bank, and as it appeared small to us the Captain ordered us to capture it, and also because it looked so nice that it seemed as if it might be the recreation spot of some overlord of the inland.”10

  The residents put up a tough fight but were eventually expelled:

  And we were masters of the village, where we found very great quantities of food of which we laid in a supply. In this village there was a villa in which there was a great deal of porcelain-ware of various makes, both jars and pitchers, very large, with a capacity of more than twenty-five arrobas [one hundred gallons], and other small pieces such as plates and bowls and candelabra of this porcelain of the best that has ever been seen in the world, for that of Malaga is not its equal, because this porcelain which we found, is all glazed and embellished with all colors, and so bright are these colors that they astonish, and, more than this, the drawings and paintings which they make on them are so accurately worked out that one wonders how with only natural skill they manufacture and decorate all these things making them look just like Roman articles; and here the Indians told us that as much as there was made out of clay in this house, so much there was back in the country in gold and silver.11

  From this village, as from others through which they had passed, “there went out many roads and fine highways to the inland country.”12 Orellena had previously resisted the impulse to explore these enticing jungle thoroughfares but now, wishing to find out where they led to—perhaps even to El Dorado itself!—he took several companions with him and set out. Once again, however, discretion got the better of valor:

  He had not gone half a league when the roads became more like royal highways and wider and when the Captain had perceived this, he decided to turn back, because he saw that it was not prudent to go on any further.13

  No doubt Orellana’s prudence was among the reasons that so many of his men survived the perilous 7,000-kilometer voyage from the Andes to the Atlantic, but it is a matter of profound regret that he did not explore those “royal highways” through the jungle. In consequence, today we may only imagine where—and what—they led to.

  UNPALATABLE TRUTHS

  ALTHOUGH WIDELY DISCUSSED AT THE time, Carvajal’s journal, the first eyewitness account of the full length of the Amazon in a near-pristine state, subsequently disappeared from public view for more than 300 years.14 It only resurfaced in the nineteenth century following an exhaustive archival search by the Chilean scholar José Toribio Medina, who published it in 1895.15

  Still it seemed that forces were at work to sideline Carvajal’s uniquely important contribution to our understanding of the ancient Amazon. No sooner was the journal in print, at any rate, than it began to be “debunked” by scholars.16

  For example, there were strident objections to a claim made at one point in Carvajal’s account that statuesque female archers, whom the friar unhesitatingly calls “Amazons” after the warrior women of classical Greek myth,17 had participated in an attack on Orellana’s expeditionaries.18 Carvajal also states that many of the other peoples they met on the journey were “subjects of the Amazons” whose dominions were extensive and whose sumptuous capital city had five enormous temples at its heart:19

  In these buildings they had many gold and silver idols in the form of women, and many vessels of gold and silver for the service of the Sun.20

  Such descriptions enjoyed wide currency and inflamed the public imagination in the years following the voyage.21 As a result, the great river system Orellana explored is not today named after him, or some other Spanish adventurer, but called the “Amazon” instead.22 To the skeptics of a later age, however, the link to the classical world that Carvajal suggested, and the notion of a lavish city in the depths of the jungle, seemed ridiculous.

  Nor was this all.

  What really stuck in the skeptical craw were the accounts Carvajal gave of the inhabitants of the rainforest, of the general level of their civilization, of the refinement of their arts and crafts, and particularly of the extent of their settlements—not only the fabulous capital of the Amazons but also other “very large cities,” including some that “glistened in white.”23 By the 1890s the view had already set in among anthropologists and archaeologists that the Americas as a whole had only been peopled relatively recently—and it was strongly believed that one of the very last places to be settled, in this generally very late migration scenario, would have been the Amazon. As this view tightened its grip in subsequent decades, it began to seem obvious to all serious-minded researchers—so obvious as to be beyond question—that the Amazon could only been have been inhabited for about 1,000 years, and then only by very small groups of hunter-gatherers since the jungle was “resource-poor.”24 Indeed in this same vein, even as late as the 1990s, the rainforest was still being depicted by environmentalists as “a counterfeit paradise whose lush vegetation hid nutrient-poor soils incapable of supporting large populations and
complex societies.”25

  The reason Carvajal’s account was disbelieved for most of the twentieth century by almost everyone who reviewed it is therefore plain to see. The picture he painted of the pre-contact state of the peoples and cultures of the Amazon flew in the face of a dominant (and domineering) scholarly theory. Predictably, therefore, the first reaction of most archaeologists was not to question the theory in the light of the rediscovery, after long neglect, of an on-the-spot, eyewitness account. Instead they chose to defend the theory and undermine Carvajal by accusing him of lying in order to glorify the achievements of the expedition.

  The friar gives us his word—no small matter for such a man—that he wrote only “the truth throughout.”26 But his accounts of cities, huge populations, advanced ceramics (“surpassing those of Malaga”), and enormous, fertile agricultural lands along the course of the Amazon were too subversive to be accepted. Quite simply, if he was right about all this, then the modern “experts” were wrong—and that could not be tolerated.

  Indeed the judgment that Carvajal was a fantasist and a liar, and that nothing he had said about the Amazon could be taken seriously, seemed about to be set in stone when the first shreds of the evidence that would ultimately exonerate him, proving that he had indeed told the truth throughout, began to emerge.

  DID AMAZONIAN CITIES EXIST?

  PROFESSOR DAVID WILKINSON OF UCLA, an authority on long-term and large-scale phenomena in world politics, including empires and systems of independent states, has made a special study of the level of civilization in the Amazon prior to European contact.

  The key question for civilizationists is: were there Amazonian cities before European contact? “Civilizations” require “cities,” and “cities” are the defining feature of “civilizations.” And by “cities,” we mean 4th magnitude settlements, i.e. settlements with a population of not less than the order of 10^4 (~10,000) … Did Amazonian cities exist?27

  Judging from the earliest reports of Spanish and Portuguese expeditions, says Wilkinson, “the answer would certainly have to be in the affirmative.”28 He draws particular attention to one of the cities, mentioned earlier, that extended for more than 20 kilometers from end to end,29 and to another settlement that Carvajal describes as “more than two leagues long.”30 The exact length of a league, Wilkinson notes, was “not a fully agreed-upon or stabilized physical distance, but was probably not less than 2.5 English statute miles nor more than 4.”31 A settlement of close-packed housing covering 2 leagues would therefore have been between 5 miles (8 kilometers) and 8 miles (13 kilometers) in extent. Here Wilkinson refers us to a study by an international team of anthropologists and geologists who focused on what is known about this settlement and calculated that it would have housed “perhaps 10,000 inhabitants.”32 As Wilkinson notes, this therefore makes it, by definition, a fourth-magnitude settlement—that is, a city, and “hence part of a civilization.”33 It follows that the larger settlement, with an extent of more than 20 kilometers, would likely have had at least twice as many inhabitants, that is, 20,000 or more.

  It is instructive to compare these figures with those of “civilized” Europe in a similar time frame.34 Certainly London, with a population estimated at 60,000 in the sixteenth century,35 was larger than either of the two Amazonian cities we are considering here, but the difference was one of degree, not of kind. The British city of York, an established urban center since Roman times, had a population estimated at between 10,000 to 12,000 in the sixteenth century36—very much on the same scale as the Amazonian cities—while in Spain, Toledo did not achieve a population of 13,000 until the mid-nineteenth century.37

  On Carvajal’s account, therefore, not only did the Amazon have cities but its cities were comparable in size to those of Europe at the same time. He also reports that the chieftain Machiparo ruled over “many settlements and very large ones which together contribute for fighting purposes fifty thousand men of the age of from thirty years up to seventy, because the young men do not go to war.” Aside from the interesting anthropological observation about the age at which men in sixteenth-century Amazonian society went to war, this statement has important implications for our understanding of the population of the region. Machiparo’s domain was just one among many through which the Orellana expedition passed, yet if Carvajal reported correctly it could muster an army 50,000 strong. This is a greater number than Denmark and Norway combined, or Sweden and Finland combined, or Brandenburg-Prussia, or even the Tsardom of Russia, could field in the same period.38

  A view of the Amazon as an “uncivilized” and “savage” place—indeed as the very epitome of savagery—has been deeply ingrained in the European psyche for centuries. It is therefore not surprising the Carvajal was disbelieved when his journal finally surfaced in 1895. Also disbelieved were the reports of the two similar adventures that followed—the Ursua expedition, which took place 20 years after Orellana’s voyage, and the Teixeira expedition of 1637–38.

  There was no official recorder for the Ursua expedition, but one of its officers, a certain Captain Altamirano, provides independent confirmation of Carvajal’s observations when he speaks of settlements with populations of around 10,000 in the heart of the Amazon jungle—at the lower end of the urban scale, but again, as Professor David Wilkinson notes, “city-sized.”39

  By the time of the Teixeira expedition the region had been riven by smallpox epidemics that caused depopulation across wide areas, and had also begun to suffer other negative effects of European penetration and exploitation. Nonetheless the expedition’s Jesuit priest, Father Cristóbal de Acuña, who, like Carvajal, kept a journal, could report that “the river of Amazons waters more extensive regions, fertilizes more plains, supports more people, and augments by its floods a mightier ocean” than the Ganges, Euphrates, or Nile. Like Carvajal and Altamirano before him, Acuña, too, was still able to speak of an “infinity of Indians” and of inhabited areas hundreds of kilometers in extent where the settlements were packed “so close together, that one is scarcely lost sight of when another comes in view.”40

  “These testimonials,” Wilkinson writes, “would seem sufficient. With eyewitnesses reporting the size of settlements and the wealth of surplus food available to support dense populations (and social complexity), there could be, and apparently there was indeed, pre-Columbian civilization in the Amazon basin.”41

  The problem, however, as Wilkinson immediately concedes, is that “serious doubts later arose.”42

  The first element of doubt had to do with the accounts of subsequent penetrations of Amazonia—after the Orellana, Ursua, and Teixeira expeditions. In this regard the observations of Padre Samuel Fritz, a Jesuit preacher, are of particular significance.43 He lived among the Omaguas, through whose domains along the banks of the Rio Napo, between the Coca and Aguarico, the Orellana expedition passed and which Carvajal (although he does not refer to the Omagua by name) describes as densely populated.44

  Not so according to Padre Fritz! Between 1686 and 1715 he established thirty-eight Jesuit missions among the Omagua and noted on a map that the important settlements among which he had planted these missions had a combined total population of just 26,000 people45—quite a different matter from the hundreds of thousands reported by Carvajal. Let us note in passing—for there is a hint here of what was really going on—that Fritz’s main preoccupation, other than preaching, was to advise “these small weak village communities on how to retreat and regroup upriver to evade continual Portuguese slave-raiding.”46

  Likewise, a little later—between 1743 and 1744—the French geographer Charles-Marie de la Condamine traveled through the region and reported no cities or armies in Amazonia, again in stark contrast to Orellana. For Condamine, the Omaguas were “a people formerly powerful” while along the entire river system he found “no warlike tribes inimical to Europeans, all such having either submitted or withdrawn themselves to the interior.”47

  These reports, and many others like them as the ei
ghteenth century merged into the nineteenth and the nineteenth into the twentieth, did serious damage to the credibility of the earlier explorers—to such an extent that Smithsonian Institution archaeologist Betty Meggers was still insisting, before she passed away in 2012, that Carvajal had either misunderstood everything he saw or, more likely, that his entire account was riddled with fantasy and invention.48

  THE LONG SHADOW OF BETTY MEGGERS

  THROUGHOUT HER WORKING LIFE MEGGERS was a passionate advocate of the view that no pre-Columbian Amazonian settlement could ever have supported even 1,000 people, let alone several thousands or even tens of thousands as Carvajal had reported. It was likewise her opinion that the level of sophistication Carvajal had described—the armies, the food storage, the porcelain specialists, and so on—was in fact completely impossible given the limitations of the Amazonian environment.49

  Meggers’s Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, published in 1971 (but expanding on work she had done and conclusions she had reached in the 1950s), has been described as possibly “the most influential book ever written about the Amazon.”50 And indeed, it was this book, and the “environmental limitation” movement that it spawned—because many other archaeologists, anthropologists, and ecologists simply followed Meggers without question—that for a long while served as the sole acceptable reference frame through which the prehistory of the Amazon would be understood. As Professor Wilkinson puts it, “the meticulously careful and systematic researches of 20th century cultural-ecologist archaeologists” like Meggers created a consensus that “large-scale settlements and societies” could never have existed in what the environmental limitationists saw as the “wet-desert” of Amazonia.51