River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  During their descent the men began to hear a strange, distant, roaring echo, and they became wary, taking up their arms and remaining constantly alert. The whooshing roar grew louder and louder as they went, and after they had traveled some ten miles the sound was so loud that they could no longer hear one another’s voices. They discovered the source of the noise: the San Rafael Falls,* a tremendous rush of water cascading more than five hundred feet into a dark chasm and sending clouds of spray hundreds of feet back up into the sky. It was an awesome, humbling spectacle, and they were forced around the deadly slick vertical walls of its mouth. Not much farther downstream the river narrowed and they approached a natural phenomenon equally impressive: a river gorge “so narrow it was not twenty feet across, yet as far down to the river as the water falls.” Here, using deadfall trees they found nearby and cutting others down, the Spaniards made a serviceable but terrifying and dangerous wooden bridge and carefully began crossing the gorge to scout the opposite side of the river. According to one chronicler, the defile was so deep and daunting that it was “rash even to look down, and one Spaniard who dared to look from the brink of the precipice down into the rushing stream in the gorge grew giddy and fell [to his death] into the torrent below.”

  The harrowing crossing was only one of the Spaniards’ problems. Local Indians on the north bank, having seen the Spaniards at work on the bridge, banded together to defend their territory. They dug deep trenches, fabricated forts with wooden barricades, and took up arms, and when the Spaniards reached the opposite side of the chasm they were met with a hail of spears and arrows. Pizarro acted quickly, ordering forward a handful of harquebusiers, who fired on the attackers. Almost instantly a half-dozen Indian warriors were slain, pierced through with metal balls. The shocking, apparently instantaneous deaths confused and terrorized many of the Indians, who struggled to comprehend what had caused their comrades to writhe and bleed and die. “The rest fled in astonishment at so strange a thing as seeing their companions slain at a distance of a hundred or two-hundred paces. They went off spreading reports of the wildness and ferocity of the newcomers, saying they wielded thunderbolts and lightning to kill any who disobeyed them.”

  Once across the gorge and with the bridge now secure, Pizarro marched in and captured a few of the chiefs of the villages on the north bank and put them in chains. He encamped there at Guema, still guarding the bridge, and dispatched two of his messengers back to Sumaco to retrieve Lieutenant-General Orellana, who was to lead the main force, presumably now rested and recovered, to Pizarro’s camp on the north side of the Coca. It was a poor place with very little food to pilfer, but it offered one important geographical advantage: it was on a high savanna, a long, flat area that made for a comfortable camp and offered some vistas over the lands downstream. From here, the plan was to continue descending the Coca along its north bank.

  Orellana arrived quickly, ready to serve in any way he was asked. Once the entire expeditionary force was reunited at Guema, the captains discussed their options. They decided to send campmaster Antonio de Ribera and fifty able men downstream to reconnoiter the territory and report their findings as soon as possible, which he did, according to Pizarro:

  He was fifteen days going and coming, and he brought back a story that he had found a great river, that there were houses right on the edge of the water, and that on the river he had seen many Indians wearing clothes, going about in canoes, and that it seemed to him that the province was a thoroughly settled one, because the Indians he had seen wore clothes and were quite civilized.

  Pizarro was elated by the prospect of advanced civilization. “As soon as he [Ribera] came with this story,” wrote Pizarro, “I set out … to this province that is called Omagua.”* Perhaps the stories that Delicola had told him were not exaggerated. Maybe he was on the verge of a fantastic discovery, as wondrous as that of his brother Francisco, or the legendary Hernán Cortés before him. Armed now with a concrete vision of a great empire to conquer, Pizarro and Orellana led the expedition down the thundering and roiling Coca River with renewed purpose. The breathtaking beauty of the river as it churned its way through gorges and cataracts, the lustrous verdure of the foliage against the wet-black rock walls—the wild magnificence was mostly lost on Orellana and Pizarro, so difficult was the travel.

  As the expedition descended, they came upon a bluff providing a broader vista of the lands to the east, and they halted to gaze at this wide and wondrous and seemingly never-ending sprawl—a virtual sea of treetops—casting outward far beyond the eye’s ability to see. The distances before them appeared incomprehensible, but Orellana and Pizarro immediately understood what they were looking at, and they were awed by the implications. They deduced, correctly (based on the little knowledge they had from the earlier Pinzón discovery of the mouth and Ordaz’s botched upriver attempt at the mouth), that the Coca was an arm of the Maranon (Amazon), and “must flow down to the Sweet Sea.” This expedition of conquest was becoming one of discovery as well. For the next few weeks the force continued down the north bank of the Coca, hacking their way through thick forest until at last the landscape began to flatten onto a plain and the narrow current broadened into “a beautiful and abundantly flowing river.” They had gone beyond the last of the giant cascades, and the river here was wide and calm, punctuated by lengthy exposed sandbars and a few small settlements that, according to Pizarro, “all have their homes and living quarters right down on the water’s edge.”

  Soon the water was dotted with canoes traveling frenetically back and forth, dashing across, up, and down the river. Before any enemy attacks could be mounted, Pizarro determined to “reduce to a peaceful attitude of mind” these natives. He mounted a preemptive strike, making a show of force with cavalry and armed troops. Almost instantly the villagers in canoes and along the shores were in general chaos, and many of them, including their chiefs, began to flee. “The natives were much alarmed at seeing the horses and so many Spaniards,” reported Cieza de León. They were so terrified that “the chief wanted to plunge into the river and to take flight.” Thinking this chief potentially useful, Pizarro captured him and had him put in chains alongside the other captive chiefs from upriver.

  Upon seeing their chiefs mistreated, a throng of local warriors mounted an offensive in their canoes, urged on by the shouts of the captive chiefs from the shore, including Delicola. The Spanish numbers and firepower proved too much, however, and after a brief skirmish Pizarro had thwarted the attempted rescue and commandeered fifteen of the Indians’ canoes.

  With all the chiefs, including Delicola, now bound as prisoners and the village taken, Pizarro encouraged his men to learn to use the canoes, as they seemed to be the major mode of transportation along this wider river section. He sent small raiding parties inland on foot and downriver in the canoes in search of food, because stores were getting dangerously low. He cautioned those traveling on the water to remain close by, “because there were frequently on the river as many as a hundred or a hundred and fifty canoes, all warriors; and they are so skillful in propelling these canoes about and in steering them that for this reason no one stands any chance of doing them injury or of being able to defeat them.”

  The Spaniards were able to do some bartering with a few of the local villages, exchanging the beads and bells and baubles they had brought with them for local yuca (manioc) and fish, but there wasn’t enough to sustain the more than two hundred famished Spaniards. The situation was becoming serious. Nearly all the native porters were by now dead or dying, succumbing to the smallpox and venereal diseases that the Spaniards had brought with them. Smallpox, which was initially introduced to the Americas by a slave traveling on a Spanish ship, was particularly devastating and horrific. The indigenous people possessed no immunity to the disease, and the porters broke out in flaming pustules and weals that gouged their faces and bodies. Some welts and blisters were so prevalent on the victims’ faces as to render them blind. The sickest were abandoned, moaning and dying i
n the jungle or along the river’s edge.

  Pizarro and Orellana contemplated their options. Orellana was put in charge of the prisoner chiefs because of his talent for acquiring languages quickly. He spent time with Delicola and the others, learning the vocabulary of some of the local languages spoken by members of the upper Amazon, including Arawakan, Panoan, and Tupian. Orellana understood the tremendous importance of language and communication as a tool, and he began to keep a dictionary of vocabulary as well as practical words and phrases that would hopefully be useful in time. As he continued on the journey, Orellana would become a highly competent interpreter.* He spent time with Delicola and the other chiefs, trying to find out what he could about what lay downstream. What he neglected to learn, but ought to have, were practical survival tactics, including which forest plants were edible and how to hunt monkeys, tapirs, manatees, or caimans for food.

  Pizarro continued to muse. His men were restless, but many were also sick and weak, and as this place was at least habitable, he was reluctant to depart just yet. It was the beginning of October, and they had been gone from Quito for seven torturous months, though they had traveled only some 150 miles. Then one day, while watching the ease of the canoes moving along the river, Pizarro had something of an epiphany: he would build a boat! It was a simple and obvious solution, thought Pizarro, as well as one driven by necessity. First of all, since nearly all the native porters and bearers had perished, there were not enough slaves to carry the Spaniards’ heavy equipment. A boat would allow for conveyance of their arms and gunpowder and other stores, and also could carry the sick and injured. Orellana had learned from the chiefs that the river was the central highway or thoroughfare for as far as one could imagine, and that as a result, there were no roads along the way, only sparse footpaths between villages. Boats—especially canoes—were the primary means of travel.

  Yes, a boat. Pizarro rounded up his captains and told them of his idea. Some of the captains, including Orellana, favored a retreat to the higher savannas, where they might, if fortunate, begin to find some roads or highland llama trails for easier passage, and larger settlements, similar to Sumaco, where they might find food. But Pizarro had made up his mind, and he later justified his decision in a letter to his ruler back in Spain:

  I found it advisable to build a brigantine to protect and accompany the canoes I had captured, and because we were compelled to search for food for the expeditionary force and to cross over the river from one side to the other in order to look for it, and without this brigantine and the canoes the men … could not be kept in condition, both from the point of view of food and from the point of view of the problem of transporting their weapons and the munitions for their arquebuses and crossbows and the other things indispensable.

  Pizarro’s move, while industrious and innovative, was clearly not without famous precedent. He certainly would have recalled the celebrated exploits of Cortés some twenty years earlier, which had now become Spanish (and particularly Extremaduran) legend: how he had harvested timber from the hillside of a dormant volcano, had his porters carry enough wood for thirteen brigantines fifty miles over a mountain pass, then cut a two-mile-long channel into the earth, fabricated the thirteen boats in a makeshift shipyard, and launched an armada onto Lake Texcoco, thus bringing the Aztec Empire to its knees. Gonzalo Pizarro’s plan was significantly less ambitious—certainly he and his men could build one boat. But given their condition and the scant resources available to them, building any kind of navigable craft would prove difficult enough.

  For the duration of the month of October 1541, the small riverside camp became a center of intense effort and activity. They dubbed the place El Barco, the Boat (which is present-day San Sebastián del Coca, about ten miles above the confluence of the rivers Coca and Napo), named for the ship the Spaniards would build there, which they prayed would be their salvation.

  Once the decision was made, everyone, the captains included, devoted themselves to the task. According to one of the priests, Orellana “showed himself more active than anyone else in getting together the material that was needed.” He hurried throughout the sodden camp, ordering all iron available, including that from spare horseshoes or those pried from the hooves of dead animals, to be brought forward. He also directed the felling and preparation of the necessary timbers, ordering these brought to selected soldiers from the port cities of Biscay and Andalusia, who had some shipbuilding experience and had been put in charge of the construction of the craft. The boatbuilding process was intricate and time-consuming, and it required the skill and ingenuity of all the men fit and able enough to work. Garcilaso de la Vega described the work:

  They set up a forge to do the riveting; and made charcoal with considerable difficulty, for the rain was so frequent that it prevented them from burning their fuel. They made shelter to cover it, and also huts to shelter from the rain, for though the country is under the equator and extremely hot, they had no way of protecting themselves from the downpour. Part of the riveting was made with the shoes of the horses which they had killed to give the sick food, and also to nourish those who were well when they had no other resources. Another part of the riveting was made of their own armor, which they valued more than gold.

  Gonzalo Pizarro, for his part, worked tirelessly in concert with his captains, being among the first to fell trees, and he assisted in all aspects of the building, including the most demanding physical labor. They produced pitch for the boat from resin gleaned from trees, and with the aid of the native chiefs, they scoured the forest for the best lianas for strong cordage. The Spaniards also learned from the natives how to make heavy cordage from the inner bark, or bast, of the Cecropia tree, lighter-gauge cord from the fine cuticle peeled from the underside of young palm leaves, and narrow twine from the fiber of wild pineapple.

  They calked the boat with stuffing made from their ragged or rotting shirts and cloaks, sealing the gaps with the pitch. Laboring for the better part of a month, by the end of October the Spaniards had built a worthy vessel that was “water tight and strong, although not very large.” It was a rowing boat, propelled by six to eight oarsmen, just large enough to carry twenty to thirty men, plus the heaviest of their equipment and stores of food found along the way. They christened the craft the San Pedro.

  On November 9, 1541, Pizarro and Orellana mustered the newly confident troops and prepared to move down the river, come what might. From up on the savanna, as they cast their gazes far to the east, the green horizon appeared misty and nubilous, their destination uncertain. But Pizarro was now at least hopeful, if not optimistic, and he had a general sense—though he had no idea just how far—of where these mighty rivers were headed. He had determined a course for his men, concluding that “if we did not find any good country wherein to found colonies, of not stopping until [we] should come out to the Northern Sea [the Atlantic].”

  They launched the San Pedro from El Barco after celebrating mass. Twenty or thirty of the weakest and sickest men rode in the boat, which was captained proudly by Juan de Alcántara, whom Pizarro had charged with her safety. They burdened their new vessel with as much gear as she could safely stow, and flanked the open brig with the fifteen or so canoes stolen from El Barco and its environs, and in this way began to move down the Coca River, with Gonzalo Pizarro and the rest of the crew proceeding afoot along the riverbank, leading what few horses, swine, and war hounds remained. After ten brutal miles, they reached the confluence with the larger Napo River.

  In the initial going the Spaniards encountered a few small villages and were able to acquire maize and yuca, and also some sweet-tasting guavas, “which afforded no small help to [the men] in their need.” They stored what they could and moved onward, but eventually the villages grew farther and farther apart, then seemed to vanish altogether in the swampy maze. The going was haltingly, painstakingly slow. Deep side creeks frequently forced those on foot to build makeshift bridges, since attempts to leave the river and tramp inland to find cross
ings proved ineffectual and also risked their losing contact with the San Pedro, which Pizarro had vowed not to do. To keep the party intact, Pizarro ordered that the marchers reunite with the boat each night and carve out a joint camp. “Continuing their journey down the river bank,” recalled one chronicler, the expedition

  sometimes wished to diverge in one direction or another to see what the country was like, but the morasses and other obstacles were so great that they could not, and so they were obliged to keep along the river bank, though with much difficulty, for the creeks in the swamps were so deep that swimming the horses through them was an arduous task. Some Spaniards and horses were drowned.

  Moving along like this, with the San Pedro periodically anchoring to wait for the slow procession straggling alongside, they kept on for “forty-three marches” (presumably forty-three days), encountering not a single day when they did not come upon numerous creeks to cross where they had to wade or swim the horses or construct bridges from felled trees. During these interminable weeks they encountered not a single inhabitant, and so little food that they were forced to consume the very last of their original herd of a few thousand swine. Game was scarce, but at any rate, even had Orellana learned from the natives how to hunt, there was hardly time for full-fledged hunting forays, as all their time and energy were occupied just trying to make it down the riverbanks. Then, to make matters even worse, the trusted Delicola and the three other imprisoned chiefs, now far from their homes and fearing their disgruntled captors would eventually kill them, escaped, slipping into the river while still in chains and swimming away before they could be captured. Now the Spaniards were without guides or interpreters in this hostile and alien jungle.

  By Christmas Day 1541, they were a threadbare and sorry lot. Gonzalo Pizarro ordered a halt and they pitched a camp. Perhaps he hoped that some respite from their toil might raise morale, which had plummeted to dangerously new depths. They were by now some 150 miles down the river and, according to the chronicles, “beginning to feel the pangs of hunger.” This was a serious understatement. In fact, they were malnourished and starving, and perilously weak. Their Christmas meal, instead of roasted fowl or fire-spitted beef, was a thin gruel of boiled saddle leather. Discord and murmurs swirled through the camp, with some of the men even whispering of mutiny, so acute was their distress: “All of the companions were greatly dissatisfied and the talk was of turning back and not going ahead any farther.” The friars held a somber mass, and the halting place was named, with a bitter irony, Christmas Camp. After nearly ten months of toil and hardship, the expedition had reached a critical impasse. Their options were running out.