River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  Though the Spaniards were themselves exhausted and cold, they pressed forward for the next month at Gonzalo Pizarro’s stern urging. He ordered his men to head toward a place called Sumaco, a village in a valley where he believed, from Pineda’s scant reports, that he might reprovision and obtain proper rest. Getting there proved no easy task, not even for hardship-hardened conquistadors. The volcanic eruptions dissipated as their train descended from the mountains, only to be replaced by the torrential downpours of the tropical rain forest. And Pizarro’s difficulties were only beginning. They had crossed a high Andean pass—nearly 14,000 feet above sea level—at Papallacta, and then descended into cloud forest again on the other side, still in the midst of the mountains. Though the surroundings were stunningly beautiful—the air was filled with dazzling swarms of hummingbirds—most of the green splendor was lost on Pizarro and his men, who spent each day literally hacking roads and trails with machetes. Pizarro lamented the hardships later, in a letter to his king:* “We came to very rugged wooded country, and great mountain ranges through which we were obliged to open up new roads, not only for the men but for the horses.” He added that the rains were a constant problem: “It just rained; it never stopped long enough to dry the shirts on our backs.”

  As the clouds spat funnels of rain, the streams filled, eroding the canyons and blocking their way. Pizarro ordered carpenters and some knowledgeable porters to build bridges in the Peruvian fashion, using lianas as cordage and cables, then tying cut tree branches in place as flooring or footboards and securing yet more lianas for handrails. Crossing such rickety bridges was a predictably excruciating and nerve-racking endeavor as they inched their way across a few at a time, until the entire mass of men and women and beasts and baggage had attained the other side. The cavalry led their horses across, the animals perilously bucking and snorting and protesting, and the swine and hounds came starting and stamping next. Last came the heavy crates and barrels of powder and armaments. The work was exhausting and slick and slow. Finally, after building bridges one after another across flooded torrents and hacking their way through the forests, Pizarro’s troops and remaining bearers spilled out into the Valley of Sumaco, a lush region that, compared to the country they had just been through, appeared habitable and accommodating.

  Mused Pizarro,

  We continued our journey till we reached the province of Sumaco, a good sixty leagues [actually, only thirty—or about 110 miles] away [from Quito] and within which it was reported there was a big population, but it was impossible to travel about there on horseback, and there I halted the expeditionary force in order to get it rested, both the Spaniards and the horses, for all were quite worn out in consequence of the great hardships which they had gone through in climbing up and going down the great mountains, and because of the many bridges which had to be built for the crossing of the rivers.

  Here Pizarro decided to encamp his motley corps, to replenish supplies as best he could, to discover what he might learn about this Land of Cinnamon, this La Canela and El Dorado as well, and to await the arrival of his second-in-command, Francisco Orellana, who Pizarro had just learned from messengers was not too far behind.

  ORELLANA’S EXPEDITION DEPARTURE lacked the pomp and grandiosity of Pizarro’s. Though he had tried to make it to Quito in time to leave with Pizarro, Orellana’s administrative duties and business in Guayaquil had held him up. He busied himself, too, purchasing gear and equipment for the journey, as well as hiring at his own expense, with paid contracts, as many able soldiers of fortune as he could muster. By the time Orellana arrived in Quito with his twenty-three companions, Pizarro, as expected, was already gone. Orellana quickly inquired as to the route Pizarro had taken, for he planned to follow the same one if possible. Prominent Spanish citizens of Quito, including government officials close to Pizarro and those who had watched him leave, took Orellana aside and counseled him to reconsider, arguing that it would be extremely dangerous to proceed with so few men and such scant provisions, and that there would likely be hostile Indians en route.

  Orellana considered these warnings only briefly. At length he was given a message Pizarro had left in Quito that reiterated the Valley of Sumaco as the point of rendezvous. Pizarro would wait for him there. Orellana vowed to continue, despite the dire warnings. He had, after all, given Pizarro his word.

  Orellana led his contingent up into the foothills, finding the going arduous and exhausting before they had even reached the base of the mountains. Soon afterward, as he continued upward, Orellana discovered that the warnings he had been given were well warranted: as he entered the narrow upland valleys, Indians came forth with spears and stones and attacked in small detachments. Apparently they found Orellana’s smaller force much less formidable than they had Pizarro’s. The few horses Orellana had brought along were lost, killed, or abandoned in these skirmishes, and though he was indeed ultimately able to follow Gonzalo’s trail and hacked-out roadway, he found scant game or provisions en route, and what few inhabitants there were had been scattered in the wake of Gonzalo’s procession. With some regret, for he had hoped to join Gonzalo as a kind of reinforcement, Orellana was forced to dispatch emissaries ahead instead, asking Gonzalo for assistance in the form of food, lest he and his men perish on the mountainside.

  The messengers arrived at Sumaco wan and haggard, but they found Gonzalo immediately attentive and concerned about his late-arriving second-in-command and their countrymen. He conferred with campmaster Antonio de Ribera, ordering him to immediately send a small relief party. The party backtracked, led by one of Pizarro’s trusted captains, and, according to chronicler Cieza de León, “When Orellana’s party saw him they rejoiced at the sight, and still more at the food he brought, of which they were in much need.” After resting and rejuvenating for a time, Orellana and his men straggled into the Pizarro camp at Sumaco threadbare and diminished. According to Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who witnessed their arrival, Orellana came not as a fortifying, fresh reinforcement for the expedition, but rather beggarly, “carrying only a sword and a shield, and his companions likewise.”

  Gonzalo nevertheless embraced Orellana and his men warmly, immediately took Orellana aside, then called for an assembly of all the captains and commanders to discuss how the next stage of the expedition ought to proceed. After much consultation, Pizarro decided that Orellana and his group should remain in Sumaco to rest and recover as best they could, while Pizarro would lead an advance army of his fittest seventy-odd soldiers, including skilled crossbowmen and harquebusiers and a handful of recently captured native guides, on a reconnaissance mission to the east in search of cinnamon. He chose to forgo horses on this venture, leaving them behind because the terrain was so dense and difficult, still devoid of any roads at all beyond primitive human footpaths. So near the end of March 1541, Gonzalo Pizarro, among the finest cavalrymen in the New World, went ahead as infantry, a foot soldier in a strange land.

  Strange it was. The rains continued, pounding and incessant, turning the forest floor into a squelchy bog. Pizarro and his reconnaissance force spent seventy interminable days hacking through clogged and brambly forest seething with vicious mosquitoes and biting black flies, the ground covered with armies of stinging ants. During the sweltering days, drenched equally from the rains and their own pouring sweat, the men cut a swath through the forest with adzes, axes, machetes, and swords, stopping only to drink from streams and swat at swarming insects.

  In addition to the lack of trails or roads, fallen ancient trees blocked the Spaniards’ passage, forcing them to clamber over the giant trunks or slash their way around, tripping over root buttresses, their faces sliced by vines and thorns and spines of the understory. At night they hunkered against ceiba trunks under palm fronds, sharing the soaked ground with venomous pit vipers, bushmasters, and scorpions. Sleep came fitfully, if at all, amid the cacophonous croak of bullfrogs, then the unnerving thrum of cicadas, and the ever-present threat of vampire bats. These nocturnal mammals fed exclu
sively on blood and hunted relentlessly, navigating by sonar and the heightened vision of their wide eyes, using their razor-sharp incisor and canine teeth to impale their sleeping victim’s nose or neck or head, and lapping at wounds kept oozing by an anticlotting agent in their saliva.

  Week after week Pizarro and his men plodded on, sometimes aimlessly in great circles and parabolas, skirting flooded areas too deep to wade, fording swollen rivers, and passing beneath raging waterfalls. Now and then the terrain would rise and open, and from some elevated headland they viewed endless rolling mountains plunging steeply to the river valleys still far below, and occasional high savannas in the distance.

  Then, at last, Pizarro began to come across dispersed stands of canelas, cinnamon trees. The trees, which reminded the Spaniards of olive trees, had “big leaves like laurels; the fruit consisted of bunches of small fruits growing in husks like acorns.” Pizarro’s hopes surged, and in his wishful state he imagined vast stands of the tree he could cultivate, sending the coveted spice back to Spain to please his king and compete with the significant Portuguese trade. “This is cinnamon of the most perfect kind, and of much substance,” exclaimed chronicler Cieza de León; “no other trees like them have been met with in all the regions of the Indies.… The natives value them highly, and in all their settlements they trade with this cinnamon.”

  Pizarro soon happened upon small bands of local Indians whom he detained and questioned, using other captives as interpreters and relying on sign language. Holding up samples of the trees, he inquired where there might be more, perhaps whole plains of them. The Indians shook their heads, saying truthfully that they did not know of any other trees, or more of them. Pizarro pressed them further, inquiring also of these poor, naked aboriginals when the land would open up into the wealthy kingdom of El Dorado, and where might be realms of rich populaces and civilizations. Again, they answered that they knew nothing. This was hardly the response that Gonzalo Pizarro had been looking for. Exasperated, and seeing his dreams of empires of cinnamon and gold dwindling into a sodden nightmare, Pizarro determined to torture a better response from the Indians. Soldier Cieza de León recalled the dark and brutal process:

  So he [Pizarro] ordered some canes to be fixed across poles, like rather thin hurdles, about three feet wide and seven in length, and the Indians to be put on them and tortured until they told the truth. The innocent natives were promptly stretched on these frames or barbecues … and some of them were burnt.

  Of course, even after having been tortured with flames, the unfortunates could offer nothing but their cries of agony. Disgusted, Pizarro then threw the victims—some from the racks and others, including a few women, torn from their pleading families—to the dogs, “who tore them to pieces with their teeth, and devoured them.”

  Leaving this abominable business behind, Pizarro mustered his reconnaissance troops and moved out, lurching loudly through this labyrinthine world in which he was essentially lost. The men cursed silently, and Pizarro himself began to grow despondent, though for appearances and for the morale of his men, he said nothing of it aloud. He had believed that by now he would be basking in glorious conquest of some “fertile and abundant province,” but instead he had nothing to show for his labors, nothing of merit to report to the throne. It was now painfully obvious that what cinnamon trees he had discovered were too few, and too scattered, to be commercially viable as a crop for Spain. Nor were there roads allowing unencumbered travel to exploit even these paltry specimens. Disillusioned, Pizarro was eventually forced to report to the king:

  We found the trees which bear cinnamon … which is in the form of flower buds … and these trees were on some mountainsides very rugged, unsettled and uninhabitable; and some of the trees were small and others somewhat larger in circumference, and they stood at long stretches from one another. It is a land and a commodity by which Your Majesty can not be rendered any service or benefitted in business, because the cinnamon is in small quantities and [would be a source] of even smaller profit.

  Pizarro and his men emerged from the forest and could see a large river. He had found the upper reaches of the Napo. The Spaniards felt relieved to at last have open sky above them, and they camped on a wide, level, and sandy beach along the riverside. Their respite was short-lived. That night, it rained so hard that the Spanish sentries stationed around the camp believed the rain pounding the ground, the trees, and the river itself to be the sound of enemy war drums, and they cried out in warning, waking the men, who leaped up and brandished their arms. The river rose and raged ashore in a violent flash flood, carrying away some of their bags and provisions, and they were forced to retreat hastily to higher ground for safety, lest they be swept downstream themselves. In the morning Pizarro surveyed his men, then peered up at a green expanse where “ranges of forest clad and rugged mountains stretched in all directions.” Perhaps, though he was racked with doubt, somewhere out there was El Dorado. Pizarro, by now deeply depressed, decided that his only choice was to backtrack the way they had come and return to the Valley of Sumaco, where he hoped, even prayed, that Francisco Orellana and his main force still remained.

  * Unfortunately, the exact dates of the meeting between Francisco Orellana and Gonzalo Pizarro, and of their respective departures, are unknown. What is known is that Pizarro departed Quito and Orellana departed Guayaquil (some 165 miles to the south) in late February 1541.

  * Two hundred horses is a staggeringly impressive number, given the cost and difficulty of getting the animals to such remote places. Hernán Cortés, by comparison, landed in Mexico with just sixteen horses.

  * Conquistadors, as a term of Spanish law, constantly wrote memorials and petitions, sworn statements of their exploits and achievements. These were forwarded to the office of the Indies at Seville, Spain, and there presented to king and emperor. These documents, sometimes composed during expeditions and sometimes after the fact, served several purposes: they chronicled services rendered to God and crown; they recorded events and discoveries and conversions; and they petitioned for future promotions, appointments, and expeditions. Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco Orellana both wrote memorials of this expedition, and many of their quotes are taken from these.

  CHAPTER 4

  El Barco and the San Pedro

  PIZARRO BACKTRACKED, BUT SOON—PERHAPS DRIVEN to leave the thick, closed-in country—he veered toward the north, away from Sumaco and his main force. At length he and his men came to a large river, and they immediately searched for a place where they might cross. They had found the mighty Coca River, a principal tributary of the Napo. The river was far too wide to cross where they came upon it, a few miles south of two small villages called Capua and Guema, and for a time Pizarro was at a standstill, contemplating what to do.

  It was not long before a few Indians materialized, paddling across the wide waters from a village on the other side. They approached in a friendly manner, exhibiting no hostility or show of arms. Remarkably, one of the first to disembark turned out to be their chief, a brave and curious man named Delicola. He had received reports from neighboring upriver tribes—and from his own messengers—of trespassing foreigners and their recently perpetrated atrocities, and he had decided to investigate, to see for himself who these invaders might be and what they might want. Pizarro, learning through crude interpretation that Delicola was a chief, and noticing that he was flanked by fifteen or twenty attendants, received him with as much honor and ceremony as he could, bestowing on him gifts of “combs and knives,” which seemed to please him.

  The men took a parley. Pizarro inquired, through leading questions that were characteristically devoid of tact, whether beyond, downstream, there might be lands more civilized and richer than these, lands where there might be gold. Perhaps there was even a place and chieftain known as El Dorado? Delicola took little time in answering, for armed with the knowledge of the fate that had befallen his neighbors, he was apparently eager to give these foreigners answers they wanted to hear and thus s
end them on their way. The clever chief nodded, yes, downstream to the east there were indeed lands and provinces that were very rich, lands ruled by powerful overlords. Delicola was not particularly specific, but that did not seem to matter to Pizarro and his men; they had been gone from Sumaco nearly two months, and were hungry both for food and for the renewed hope of riches. They were ready to believe just about anything that Delicola told them.

  The information bolstered Pizarro and his men, and in this way Delicola ensured that he would not be tortured, though he was immediately put under close guard and not allowed to leave. Instead, Pizarro appropriated him as a guide in their quest downstream, for it was clear that the chief knew the country intimately. Though he did not appreciate being taken, in effect, prisoner, Delicola possessed enough wisdom (and certainly a degree of fear) to acquiesce to the arrangement, at least for the time being. Even with Delicola as a guide, the going was rough and dismally slow—at times only a few miles of progress for an entire day—so steep and brambly and cavernous was the terrain. The sheer hills buttressing the river were riddled with landslides, and the men suffered terribly.