River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  As Pineda and his scouting party pushed off in canoes, their emaciated countrymen were eating the carcasses of dead dogs and horses, “without wasting any of the entrails, skin, or other parts, for all was food for the Spaniards.” Pineda crossed the swamp, so focused on the import of his responsibilities that he would have been oblivious to the chatter of wattled jacana birds squawking off of their lily pads as the men paddled past, or the graceful silhouettes of resplendent scarlet macaws flying overhead. Pineda steered the canoes back out onto the Napo River, imploring his men to dig with deep purpose in every stroke.

  For days they raced downstream, going well beyond where Mercadillo had been before, arriving finally at a river the chroniclers described as “larger and mightier than the one they had been navigating, the two becoming one.” The Aguarico is also known today as “the gold-bearer” for the iridescent speckles of gold that sparkle in its sands. Reasoning that this must be the place that Chief Delicola had originally told them about, Pineda drew into an eddy and pulled the canoes ashore to do some reconnaissance.

  Along the banks they began to see telltale signs—“cuts made by wood knives and swords”—of Orellana’s passage. The marks on the trees, the trodden banks, areas cleared for sleeping, all were indications that Orellana had camped there, but there was no sign that he remained in the vicinity. It was obvious to Pineda, given the size of the river, that here was the place where Orellana should have waited after going up the Aguarico to find food—this was a likely rendezvous spot. But Orellana and his men had left nothing but transient traces—no letters or messages nailed to trees, no canoes left for support, no food, nothing. Pineda and his men were racked with discouragement, convinced now that, unless by some miracle Orellana had headed up the Aguarico River and was still there or making his way back down, their esteemed lieutenant-general was not coming back.

  Armed with only the remote hope that Orellana was somewhere up the Aguarico, though this seemed extremely unlikely given how much time had passed, Pineda convinced his men, disconsolate though they were, that they themselves must ascend this other river in search of food. To sustain themselves for the difficult upriver journey, the men ate “palm shoots and some fruit stones which had fallen on the ground from trees, together with all the various kinds of noxious wild beasts which they had been able to find.”

  Pineda and his compatriots had by now learned to use the tippy native dugout canoes with serviceable skill, and they began their labored ascent. The work was backbreaking, as well as mentally exhausting, the current strong enough in places to make them feel as though they were paddling in place. Still, upstream they stroked, steadfast in their toil, until they had gone what they estimated was thirty miles. Finally, as they lurched their way upriver beneath the sun’s furnace, they spotted something different along the bank line ahead. Beyond the shore, toward the interior, were clearings, and rows of what appeared to be crops, evidence of habitation. The men shook themselves alert, landed, and, swords brandished, went ashore to meet whoever might still be there.

  To Pineda’s great relief—for he and his men were in no condition to do battle—the place was abandoned. And to their delight—and, for some, salvation—it had been a large, well-organized, and highly productive yuca plantation. The fields were overgrown and looked untended, but still they found evidence of a once thriving farm, with “many very thick patches of yuca so large that the stems that came from their roots looked like a small forest.” The plantation extended for a number of miles along the river, though any huts or dwellings the Spaniards encountered had been deserted long ago. Realizing that they were safe from enemy attack, the men fell to their knees in praise to their merciful God, then, despite Pineda’s exhortations to restrain themselves, fell upon the yuca in a feeding frenzy.

  Some bent over and some crawled around, pulling the bulbous tubers from the ground with as much zeal and excitement as they would have shown had they discovered a rich gold vein. Pineda must have had the wherewithal and good sense to start some fires for roasting the yuca, or even rooted around for abandoned cooking pots, for not all ate the raw plants. After the members of the scouting party were satiated they loaded their canoes high with as many of the roots as they could carry and hurried back down the Aguarico to where it met the Napo, then began the difficult upstream paddle, made even harder laden as they were with the yuca.

  By the time Pineda returned to Gonzalo Pizarro and the wretched swamp camp, nearly a month had passed. For twenty-seven long days Pizarro and his men had waited, with each passing day their condition growing more and more hellish and their hope of survival diminishing. Wanting to preserve the last of their precious horses, they had subsisted on “nothing but saddle and stirrup leathers, boiled in water and afterward toasted over the ashes.” Then, with nearly all hope lost, Pizarro and his men looked across the swamp and saw vessels approaching. They might have imagined or hallucinated hostiles at this point, but instead, as the boats drew closer, they “saw the canoes and learnt what they brought, and they all wept for joy.”

  After a brief reunion, the captains divided the yucas among the men, who tore at the vegetables, eating them unwashed and uncooked, many biting into the crunchy flesh with clumps of dirt still sticking to the tubers. Given the number of men and their level of hunger, they mowed through the few canoeloads of yuca in a very short time. Pineda reported to Pizarro that up the Aguarico River were vast plantations of the food stretching for many miles, and it was agreed that they should all make a concerted effort to hurry there.

  During Pineda’s absence, Pizarro had not been entirely idle, and the ablest men had built a few rafts by lashing downed trees together with vines and creepers. In this way they also lashed the canoes together with cords, and with the vision of the Aguarico yuca plantations having replaced their dreams of gold, they crossed the great swamp in shifts, swimming the remaining horses, some of the men clinging for their lives to the sides of the canoes. It took Pizarro and his men eight days to trample downstream to the Napo’s confluence with the Aguarico, where they were confronted with another problem: the river was very deep here, and the yuca plantations, according to Pineda, were all on the other side. They would have to cross.

  They spent the next week crossing over, using the tied-together canoes as rafts to ferry the men and remaining dogs, and again swimming the horses—though as Pizarro noted, not without loss. “I determined to take the expeditionary force across the large river in the canoes, in which crossing much difficulty was encountered, accompanied by a loss of horses due to the great size of the river and the depth of the water.” Once across, Pizarro saw the blazes and tree marks left by Orellana, then turned and resolutely marched his troops upstream for thirty miles, making an average of three miles a day with difficulty, wading across creeks and streams and snake-filled bogs, sometimes sinking as high as their armpits.

  On the tenth day they arrived at the abandoned plantations, famished beyond reason once again. They staggered through the fields of umbrella-shaped plant leaves. “As all came in an exhausted state,” reported one chronicler, “not having eaten anything for so many days, they did nothing but pull up yucas, with the earth still sticking to the roots, and began to eat them at once.” One Spaniard, a man named Villarejo, sat chewing on a “root of white color, and rather thick.” According to his comrades, he had hardly even tasted it when he stood, then became delirious and unintelligible, then “lost his reason and became mad.”

  Not long afterward other compatriots, including some of Pineda’s men, started falling sick, their bellies distending grotesquely, some flopping about the ground and moaning in agony. Nevertheless, Pizarro ordered camp made—they would stay for a time where there was a guaranteed food source.

  Surely Pizarro, or some of the other men, had seen the elaborate sequential preparations of yuca conducted by the people of El Barco during their lengthy stay there, for yuca—as the Spanish call it—or manioc (Manihot esculenta), the “super-crop that enabled man to ev
olve from foraging to farming,” was ubiquitous throughout the river populations of the Amazon. As it was the region’s most important food source, great and systematic care was adhered to in its preparation. What Pizarro was coming to understand, through the hard experience of his sickening men, was that eaten raw, yuca was deathly poisonous.

  There are two main types of manioc, bitter and sweet. Both are toxic in varying degrees, and unfortunately for Pizarro’s men, the two varieties are extremely difficult to tell apart, especially for the uninitiated. “Subtle morphological traits differentiate the deadly ‘bitter’ from the innocent ‘sweet’ plants, and their recognition is literally a matter of life and death.” Sweet manioc, though slightly poisonous, may simply be boiled or baked or roasted and eaten. Even consumed raw, though it will make one sick, it is not typically lethal. Bitter manioc, on the other hand, is full of cyanide (prussic acid) and requires elaborate preparation and leaching out of the cyanide before it is safe for consumption.

  Certainly, throughout their stay in El Barco, the Spaniards had seen the villagers coming from the manioc fields, burdened by large carrying baskets strapped to their backs, the baskets brimming over with tubers. Once the manioc was harvested and collected and brought back to the village, the women loaded baskets full of the tubers, took them to the river, and submerged them, shaking them vigorously to clean the manioc tubers of dirt before peeling them of their outer skins, cutting the sweet manioc into chunks or slicing them, and leaving the poisonous manioc whole. Then began the essentially never-ending process of grating, using ingenious hardwood boards studded either with stone or hardwood, or with animal-based teeth, palmwood thorns or flecks of hardwood, or fish bones or bone splinters.

  The women bend over these graters, or sit on the ground with the grater between their knees, and then, holding a tuber in each hand, grate vigorously back and forth until the tuber is mashed into a pulp.

  The manioc pulp or mash is transferred to a tipiti, a long, tubular woven basket that closes at one end. About six or seven feet long, the tipitis hold the watery manioc mash, and, with a stone or heavy log tied to one end, compress it in order to leach out the poisonous prussic acid, making the manioc safe for consumption. Who knows how many people died from eating yuca tubers before this process was discovered? At any rate, the tipitis and the process proved a “groundbreaking invention,” allowing varying forms of manioc—it is used as a porridge, as bread, as beverages both fermented and fresh—to become the essential mainstay carbohydrate diet throughout the Amazon, second only to rice as a crop of global significance.

  Pizarro and his party remained at the yuca plantation camp for eight days, during which time the place became a macabre, almost ghoulish scene: men grew jaundiced and weak from vomiting, their stomachs bulging grossly, and they fell to the ground from dizziness, only to find themselves racked with terrible and incessant bouts of diarrhea. The men were described, with some understatement, as “very sick and sore, wan and wretched, and in such an afflicted condition that it was very sad to look upon them.” Seeing his men sickening in their food lust, Pizarro and other captains must have realized the cause, for they are said to have “themselves grated the yucas by means of very sharp thorns that grow on certain trees in those forests, and made bread of the meal, finding it to be … wholesome.” In this way, after cooking the yuca correctly, the men began to recover their strength, though a few died from cyanide poisoning and from overeating.

  There was certainly no shortage of the croplands, which extended for many miles along the Aguarico River. Pizarro and his men reported that the plantations went on for 120 miles. The cultivated areas had likely been the domain of ancestors of the Siona-Secoya peoples, who once held sway up and down long reaches of the river but were apparently driven off by enemies, ironically providing Gonzalo Pizarro and his band with unlimited feasting (once they employed proper preparations and cooking techniques).

  While at this camp, during which time Pizarro noted that he and his men “rested after a fashion, and … laid in a supply of food for another uninhabited stretch,” the captain now understood with certainty that Francisco Orellana was gone. He had taken the brigantine, most of their weaponry, and the bulk of their tools and abandoned the main force.

  Gonzalo Pizarro had been brooding about his vanished second for weeks, both while he had awaited Pineda’s return and now, as his fury smoldered at the camp. He had been going over in his mind the agreement that he and Orellana had struck. The essential details of the plan appeared clear enough, and in fact both Pizarro and Orellana agree, in writing, on most of the particulars, though their renderings do differ in several crucial respects.* Pizarro would later record his version of their pact in a letter to his king:

  Captain Orellana told me that in order to serve Your Majesty and for the love of me he was willing to take upon himself the task of going in search of food.… And being confident that Captain Orellana would do as he said, because he was my lieutenant, I told him that I was pleased at the idea of his going for the food, and that he should see to it that he returned within the twelve days and in no case went beyond the junction of the rivers but brought the food and gave his attention to nothing else … and he answered me saying that by no means would he exceed what I had told him and that he would come with the food within the time that he had stated.

  One can imagine Gonzalo Pizarro, whose temper is well documented, fuming by the fireside as he thought about Orellana. Words like traitor, deserter, and mutineer would have run through his mind, over and over, slapping him from sleep under the humming jungle canopy. Pizarro grew more incensed the more he thought about it, later adding in the missive,

  Paying no heed to what he owed to the service of Your Majesty and to what it was his duty to do as he had been told by me, his captain … instead of bringing the food he went down the river without leaving any arrangements for the aid of those who were to follow on, leaving only signs and choppings showing how they had been on land and had stopped at the junction of the rivers and in other parts … he thus [displayed] toward the whole expeditionary force the greatest cruelty that ever faithless men have shown.

  Indeed, Gonzalo Pizarro now considered Francisco Orellana a mutinous traitor, and he resolved to deal with him as such. In the meantime, he had men to lead. As he saw it, they now had only one option, and in this respect the future, though dark and unknown, lay before him in simple clarity. He would abandon his quest for El Dorado and strike a retreat for Quito. He would rally his men, take what food they could, and continue up the Aguarico River, hopefully to its headwaters in the lower Andes, and then, God willing, he would make a final push back over the rugged mountains and descend into Quito.

  If he ever saw that villainous rebel dog Francisco Orellana again, he would take justice into his own two hands, in the form of a razor-sharp Toledo sword.

  * Although the records do not explicitly clarify this, Gonzalo Pizarro’s delight at acquiring these five canoes suggests that Orellana and his men had taken with them all 22 canoes that the expedition had obtained when Orellana departed Christmas Camp on December 26, 1541.

  * Orellana’s version of their vague agreement, recorded by Carvajal, suggests that Pizarro was to await his second-in-command’s return “as long as he should see fit, and that, in case [Orellana] did not come, [Pizarro] should not be concerned about him; and thereupon [Pizarro] told [Orellana] to do whatever he thought best” under the circumstances. José Toribio Medina, The Discovery of the Amazon, 170.

  CHAPTER 7

  St. Eulalia’s Confluence—The Amazon

  DOWNSTREAM IN THE VILLAGE OF IMARA, FRANCISCO Orellana and his men labored on at their forest factory. Orellana had quietly determined, having seen that downstream river travel was their only viable alternative, that the salvation of his men and their expedition rested not only on the continued seaworthiness of the San Pedro, but on the construction of another boat. Moreover, he had the vision to look many miles down the serpentine and unexplored
river, an astonishing distance he would have had no way of truly comprehending or believing, to imagine navigating all the way to the sea. According to Friar Carvajal, Orellana knew that the San Pedro and the canoes would not be enough to take them all the way to the ocean:

  The Captain, seeing that it was necessary to make plans for what was ahead … [advised] that for this reason it was necessary to apply our wits to building another brigantine of greater burden so that we might sail on the sea … in spite of the fact that among us there was no skilled craftsman who knew that trade, for what we found most difficult of all was how to make nails.

  Orellana’s men worked diligently, following both his orders and his example, for rather then merely sitting idle and delegating, Orellana participated in all the various tasks that he asked of his men. Meanwhile, to Orellana’s eternal relief and appreciation, their good hosts the Imarans offered workers to assist and continued to bring the Spaniards abundant quantities of food, which enabled them to work long and productive days.

  Orellana and Friar Carvajal, who was always at his captain’s side witnessing and recording the events as they transpired, observed that the chiefs and higher caste members went about wearing “jewels and gold medallions.” The sight of gold certainly piqued Captain Orellana’s interest and imagination, as it had been the expedition’s primary goal, but he showed considerable restraint. One imagines that the likes of Hernán Cortés or any of the Pizarro brothers would have found a way to quickly appropriate the native treasure, but instead, Orellana chose an entirely different tack. “Never did the Captain permit that anything be taken away from them,” it was reported, “or even merely looked at, in order that the Indians might not conceive the idea that we valued such things, and the more indifference we showed in this matter, the more gold did they put on.” Orellana knew that his life and the lives of his men depended on the hospitality of his hosts, and he chose not to jeopardize that relationship, despite the Spanish propensity for gold lust.