by Buddy Levy
So they pushed on through this coastal morass, the winds and tides so strong here that they sometimes lost an entire day’s forward progress in a single hour, and all they could do was pull up oars and take in sails and watch the boats move backward up the shoreline. It was disheartening, but at least during these weeks the men were learning—to the degree that they could in such extreme circumstances—how to sail. At some of these coastal villages the inhabitants approached Orellana and his men and pulled or pointed to their beards, ran their hands over their Spanish clothes, their padded linen brigandines and jerkins, then indicated, through animated sign language and speech, that “not far away from there were some lost or colonizing Spaniards.” Orellana and his men could not know whether this was true, but they took it as a good sign that they might soon again be among Christians.
At the last of these docile villages, near the end of the Amazon, Orellana exchanged the remaining barter goods he had on hand for a few fish, and here he told his men that they must make final preparations for the sea, which they would soon enter. There was much to do. They needed to stock up on strong ropes and hawsers for the rigging, which they made from bush-rope vines and other lianas or vines dangling from trees in the mangrove forest; here also they constructed proper rudders for the ships, made final adjustments to the bilge pumps, and sewed together spare sails for the voyage, in the event that the ones they were using, pieced together as they were, should become torn or tattered in a squall.
Orellana told each man to carry his own provisions for the voyage, which included very scant stores: a small jarful of freshwater each, and a small satchel of roasted maize or some yams—meager fare at best. Orellana divided the most experienced seamen between the two brigantines, so that each ship might have at least some crew members with nautical backgrounds, but they lacked trained navigators or pilots, and the men were apprehensive about the next part of their journey, knowing that despite all they had survived and fought through on their epic odyssey, they might easily die in the next day or two on the open sea:
In this manner we got ready to navigate by sea wherever fortune might guide us and cast us, because we had no pilot, nor compass, nor navigator’s chart of any sort, and we did not even know in what direction or toward what point we ought to head.
But this aspect of the unknown had never stopped Orellana before, nor would it now. Nearly the entire expedition, from its origins in Quito in early 1541, had been predicated on the unknown. Still, some of his men were terrified of the impending sea journey, and it took a good bit of diplomacy and leadership on Orellana’s part to calm their nerves and bolster their spirits. There was palpable tension among the men, and Carvajal remembered it very well indeed: “I am telling the truth when I say that there were among us a few so weary of this kind of life and of the long journey that, if their consciences had not kept them from so doing, they would not have failed to remain behind among the Indians.” But Orellana’s control, guidance, natural leadership, and skilled captaincy kept even a single man from deserting, and they loaded the ships, each man with his water and food kit, and prepared to set sail.
Captain Orellana and his trusted priest Gaspar de Carvajal boarded the Victoria. It was Saturday, August 26, 1542, and they had taken nearly three weeks to navigate the saline marshes and islands and tributaries, the coiling river braids that comprise the region inside the great mouth of the Amazon. Even more remarkable, it had been more than eight months—and seemed like a lifetime to some of the men—since that fateful day after Christmas 1541 when they had split from Gonzalo Pizarro’s force and struck out down the river in search of food. Now they finally sailed to the north of the big island of Marajó, a massive, country-sized landform in the Amazon’s maw, the world’s largest river island. Orellana and his compatriots felt the curious freshwater sea breeze in their faces, tasted the sweet seawater wash on their lips as they passed from the mighty Amazon, the greatest river in the world, and out onto the ocean. For here, the Amazon’s freshwater discharge is so voluminous as to prevent salt water from inundating the main channel of the river, the water remaining fresh for more than one hundred miles out to sea. And while they did not yet know exactly what they had achieved, they were awed by what they saw heading out to the open ocean: the mouth of the river channel they passed through, “from cape to cape,” was more than fifteen miles wide, and as they sailed along they could see other mouths even larger and more impressive.
Captain Francisco Orellana had successfully navigated and descended the world’s largest river, from its source in the Andes to its nearly two-hundred-mile-wide mouth at the Atlantic Ocean, but his journey was far from over. Though he did not know precisely where he was, Orellana did know that there were Spanish-occupied settlements to the north, on the pearl-fishing islands of Cubagua and Margarita, lying just off the northern coast of what is today Venezuela. What Orellana would not have known, nor perhaps would have wanted to, given all he and his men had endured, was that those islands were more than 1,400 miles away.
During their first few days at sea, Orellana was blessed with the same brand of good luck that had helped him get this far already. The weather held, for one thing, and they were not buffeted by the summer squalls that can characterize the mouth of the great river. Most fortunate, though, they were almost immediately caught up in and rode the Southern Equatorial Current, a massive current deflected northward along the coast that pushes straight up past the Guianas toward the top of the South American landmass, which is exactly the direction they needed to go.
For three days the San Pedro and the Victoria sailed in tandem up the coast, tacking as best they could so as to maintain sight of the mainland shore. Sometimes they drew far enough away to lose sight of land, and this concerned Orellana greatly, given that they were traveling in small handmade brigs with no navigation systems, and not proper caravels built for ocean crossings. Also, each man had so little water that losing sight of land meant losing sight of freshwater rivers, and this to the men spelled potential death from thirst at sea, something none wished to think about but certainly all did.
On the third night moving northward in unison, a storm set in and separated the two boats. At sunset on August 29, the men aboard the Victoria—including Captain Orellana and Friar Carvajal—worried that their compatriots aboard the smaller and frailer San Pedro were forever lost at sea, or had smashed into the rocky coastline, because they perceived they “had been navigating along the most dangerous and roughest coast that there is around this whole vast ocean.” Scanning the ocean horizon, Orellana could see nothing but whitecaps and an endless expanse of blue water, with no sign of the scrappy little San Pedro, the boat he had built with Gonzalo Pizarro and in which he and his followers had gone off in search of food those many months ago.
By the ninth day at sea, Captain Orellana had problems of his own. After passing by the mouth of the mighty Orinoco (which Ordaz had ascended a decade before), Orellana skirted the devilish and narrow Boca de la Sierpa (Serpent’s Mouth) and managed to navigate around the island of Trinidad, between Trinidad* and Tobago, but found himself drawn into the northern entrance to the Gulf of Paria, the dangerous Boca del Dragon (Dragon’s Mouth) named by Christopher Columbus on his third voyage. Here treacherous rocks and small islands extend from the anvil-shaped point of northwestern Trinidad, jutting out toward the Paria Peninsula, and even today this narrow entrance presents extreme hazards to small craft. The Victoria, narrowly escaping disaster entering the Mouth of the Dragon, followed too far into the gulf thinking this was their best route, and spent the next week trying to sail and row free from its jaws. Deep inside the Gulf of Paria, the freshwater pouring out from the Rio Grande and San Juan River of mainland Venezuela mixes with the salt water, creating an angry turmoil difficult to maneuver in. Remembered Carvajal of that perilous time, “When we found ourselves within it we tried to go out to sea again; getting out was so difficult that it took us seven days to do so, during all of which time our companions never
dropped the oars from their hands, and during all these seven days we ate nothing but some fruit resembling plums, which are called hogos.”
After a week of constant struggle the winds abated long enough to allow them to row themselves from the Dragon’s Mouth—which they described as a “prison”—and out to safety. Two more days of sailing, without really knowing where they were or where they were heading, and they spotted land over the bow, the low-lying outline of an island just ahead. The oarsmen lay slumped, their hands destroyed. Others clenched their water jars, which they had been holding aloft to catch rainwater whenever there was a squall or even a drizzle. Their lips were cracked and bleeding.
The navigator bellowed out “Land ho!” and the men woke and peered excitedly over the gunwales, hardly able to contain their elation when they saw a small port, the Spanish outpost town of Nueva Cádiz. They had reached Cubagua, the tiny eight-square-mile “Pearl Island,” lying just south of the much larger Margarita Island and the site of the first Spanish outpost in the Americas. With incredible circumstantial irony that Orellana would learn of only later, the entire city of Nueva Cádiz had been leveled by earthquake and tidal waves on Christmas Day 1541, just before Orellana and his small crew embarked on their ordeal down the Amazon.
Now, on September 11, 1542, at around three in the afternoon, they had arrived at the partially rebuilt township, joyful to see a few proper sailing vessels in the small harbor and the outlines of recognizable dwellings—and even a Spanish flag—coming into focus in the distance. They made port, dropped planks, and disembarked, wobbling weakly ashore and standing on this tiny island, Captain Francisco Orellana and his crew having completed one of the most remarkable, daring, and improbable journeys in the history of navigation and discovery. Orellana’s achievement would later be called one of the world’s greatest explorations, “something more than a journey, and more like a miraculous event.”
News of Orellana’s arrival spread quickly about the town, and soon, to Orellana’s immeasurable relief and euphoria, some members of the San Pedro came down to the beach. Astonishingly, they had arrived on the island two days before, somehow having managed to avoid the savage jaws of the Mouth of the Dragon. Remarked Father Carvajal, “So great was the joy which we felt, the ones at the sight of the others, that I shall not be able to express it, because they considered us to be lost, and so we considered them.”
After a meeting of men that included tears and embraces, Orellana took a muster roll: 43 of his original 57-man expedition had survived the ordeal. Only three had been killed in battle; the other eleven had succumbed to disease or starvation or consumption of poisonous food. As Captain Orellana strode up the path from the port leading into town, the one-eyed hidalgo from Trujillo had no way of knowing exactly what he had accomplished, but the briny smell of the fishing town would have reminded him and the others of what they had all been dreaming and fantasizing about for a very long time—sitting down at a big table for a lavish and sumptuous Spanish meal, one with plenty of wine.
* According to botanist Richard Spruce, these trees were Curatella americana and Plumeria phagedaenica; they are definitely found in the region around Santarém that Orellana and Carvajal describe as having these trees.
* Banisteriopsis, called yajé in Brazil and ayahuasca in Peru and Ecuador.
† Archaeologist Anna Curtenius Roosevelt’s digs at Pedra Pintada (Painted Rock) in Brazil unearthed sherds of the oldest pottery found in the Americas, and other evidence at the site (tortoise shells, animal and fish bone remains, burnt firewood hearths) suggested that the early inhabitants were a culture able to adapt to their environment, contentions that contradicted previously held theory and sparked a long debate known as the Meggers-Roosevelt debate. Excavating in the 1980s at Marajó Island at the Amazon’s mouth, Roosevelt used the most modern techniques—ground-penetrating radar, total-station topographic mapping, and others—to construct a picture of the mound builders who had lived there that fundamentally challenged the controversial theories of Betty Meggers in her 1971 book Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise. Roosevelt argued that the “Marajoara culture was one of the outstanding nonliterate complex societies of the world,” and suggested that at its height, it supported more than a hundred thousand people. She concluded that these complex chiefdoms possessed “territories tens of thousands of square kilometers in size, larger than those of many recognized prehistoric states. Their organization, and ideology of deified chiefs and ancestors, nobles and seers, vassals or commoners, and captive slaves are more similar to those of early states and complex chiefdoms elsewhere in the world than to the present Indian societies of Amazonia.” Her theories and findings offered paradigm shifts in thinking and sparked debates that continue to this day; many of her theories—including early human arrival, and the existence of tribal societies and their pre-agriculture pottery—are now widely accepted.
* Although Columbus discovered Trinidad in 1498, it was not colonized by Spain until much later, in 1588, and thus there were no landing ports or populations there as Orellana sailed past in 1542.
CHAPTER 17
The Homeward Reach
THE MIRACLE OF FRANCISCO ORELLANA’S DISCOVERY of and his successful journey down and to the mouth of the Amazon was perhaps nearly equaled by the safe arrival of both the San Pedro and the Victoria on the tiny island of Cubagua. Using only the stars and a few Spaniards’ innate navigational abilities, and the good fortune of the Equatorial Current, the two retrofitted brigantines had sailed nearly 1,400 miles of ocean seas, and Orellana and his crews had much to be thankful for and proud of as they ate and rested and nursed their ill health and battle wounds. There would be time in the coming weeks and months for many among them to contemplate where to go next, but for Orellana there seems never to have been any question: he was destined to return to his river, it was only a matter of how and when.
However, there remained plenty to do and account for, not the least of which was the nagging question of Gonzalo Pizarro and where things stood with him. Soon after their arrival, the Spaniards learned of the death of Francisco Pizarro, which had occurred more than a year before. Father Carvajal also discovered, to his great sadness, that his dear friend and fellow prelate, the Dominican bishop Valverde of Cuzco, had been slain by Indians while fleeing from the Almagro faction. Orellana did not yet know of his former captain Gonzalo Pizarro’s fate, but all he could control at the moment was his own, and to that end he endeavored, with the dutiful assistance of his priest Gaspar de Carvajal, to chronicle and record the events as accurately and with as much detail as possible.
Captain Orellana and his friar, now with just two good eyes between them, worked from the notes Carvajal had been compiling along the way, ever since the expedition’s split at Christmas Camp. While Orellana made plans to secure ships and stores for his next move, Carvajal worked tirelessly on his narrative, making at least two copies, one for Orellana to take with him, and another that he would keep himself and carry back to Peru, where he had determined to return to fulfill his obligations and service to the Order of the Dominicans, which was his calling. When he had finished transcribing and copying the documents, he signed off with words underscoring the truth and accuracy of his tale, words that would subsequently be difficult to contest given that he went on to serve the crown for more than three more decades, ultimately ascending to the high office of archbishop of Lima:
I, Brother Gasper de Carvajal, the least of the friars of the order of Saint Dominic, have chosen to take upon myself this little task and recount the progress and outcome of our journey and navigation, not only in order to tell about it and make known the truth in the whole matter, but also in order to remove the temptation from many persons who may wish to relate this peregrination of ours or publish just the opposite of what we have experienced and seen; and what I have written and related is the truth throughout; and because profuseness engenders distaste, so I have related sketchily and summarily all that has happened to
Francisco de Orellana and to the hidalgos of his company and to us companions who went off with him [after separating] from the expeditionary corps of Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of Don Francisco Pizarro, the Marquis and Governor of Peru. God be praised. Amen.
Carvajal’s account, in addition to detailing Orellana’s discoveries, was at least in part intended to justify Orellana’s actions and protect him, to the extent that it was able, from any accusations of treason or desertion which might be levied upon him. Orellana was thorough in this regard, for though he did not know it, Gonzalo Pizarro had only days before recorded his own version of the events, which he sent to King Charles V on September 3, 1542. It would be up to the king’s court, and the very powerful Council of the Indies, to pore over the different versions and make their judgments concerning them.
Most of the companions who survived the Amazon journey were determined to return to Peru, despite the uncertainties and the factious political situation there. Since they had failed to garner any wealth or lands during their journey, no doubt most were motivated to return to Peru to regroup and access what possessions and assets they had left behind when they had begun their journey. Nearly all of these men eventually sailed from Cubagua to Panama and then back to mainland Peru, where they spent the remainder of their lives, most becoming embroiled in the civil strife that would dominate the next few years, now fighting under the royal banners of the Spanish crown and against their old leader Gonzalo Pizarro, who would soon be in open rebellion against his mother country.
