Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  Outraged by what he saw as an example of abject cowardice and treachery, Pizarro put his sick men on the few remaining horses, tying their legs round the girths to stop them falling off, and led the party towards the Andes. A small advance guard blazed the trail, lighting a huge signal fire every evening, while the remainder waded after them, waist-deep in swamps. After 320 miles Pizarro was ‘very depressed ... for he did not know in what land he was, nor what direction to take to reach Peru, or any other part where Christians might be’. Following now this river, now that, they toiled on, growing hungrier by the day. At first they drank their horses’ blood; then they cut steaks from them while they were still alive, filling the holes in their flesh with clay. Finally they slaughtered them. After that they boiled vegetable soup in their helmets, collected wild berries and, occasionally, managed to shoot a jungle animal whose skins they used to replace their disintegrating clothes. ‘In these conditions they pushed forward,’ wrote one chronicler, ‘half-starving, naked and barefoot, covered with sores, cutting a path with their swords, as it rained endlessly, so that for days on end the sun was obscured and they could not dry themselves. They cursed themselves repeatedly for having placed themselves in this situation, [exposing] themselves to these privations and hardships, which they could so easily have avoided.’

  Having fought a fierce battle with Indians, they finally saw on the horizon the familiar peaks of Quito on the horizon. Not long afterwards they came to a set of rapids, which confirmed that they were on track for the foothills. It also meant they had a hard climb ahead of them, but after so long in the bogs and marshes of the forest they did not care. The prospect of being on firm ground was exhilarating: the stones in the rapids were the first they had seen in a thousand miles. Following the river as far as it went, and then striking towards the nearest pass, they crossed the Andes in a state of hallucinatory weakness. Pizarro was disturbed by dreams, in one of which his heart was ripped out by a vulture. The expedition’s astrologer, Jerónimo de Villegas, interpreted it as a sign that someone close to him would die. Thus disheartened, they also saw a comet that they took to be an omen – but whether good or bad they could not tell. In June 1542 they limped down the steep gorge towards Quito. According to one account, horses were sent to carry them home but Pizarro refused to accept any assistance and covered the last miles, as he had the previous hundreds, on foot.

  It had been 16 months since the expedition left Quito. Of the 4,280 who set out only 80 or so returned – half the number who had bade farewell to Orellana the previous November – and those 80 ‘were all so weak and gaunt that no one would have recognised them’. In practical terms the expedition had been a failure: it had discovered neither gold nor spices, and the region was worthless as a colony. Pizarro had also suffered a personal loss. On their return he learned that his brother Francisco had been murdered, fulfilling the prediction of his dream, and that Peru had been taken over by one of his confederates (a situation Gonzalo soon corrected, albeit briefly). In defence of the enterprise all that could be said – as one man immediately did – was that it had shown how tough the conquistadores were: ‘No other race or nation,’ wrote Pedro de Cieza de León, historian and conquistador himself, ‘has with such resolution passed through such labours, or such long periods of starvation or traversed such long distances as [the Spanish] have. And in this expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro assuredly very great hardships were endured, for this exploration and conquest ... I am bound to say, was the most laborious expedition that has ever been undertaken in these Indies, and in it the Spanish endured hardships, famine and miseries, which truly tried the virtues of their nation.’

  Forgotten, save for a few denigratory despatches to Spain, was Orellana. From the point where they had either deserted or, maybe, found the current too powerful to return to Pizarro’s camp, Orellana and his men had sailed downriver on the San Pedro. According to a priest who accompanied him, Gaspar de Carvajal, he had offered 1,000 gold pieces to anyone willing to walk back to Pizarro’s camp and tell him of their predicament. But nobody was willing. (Carvajal made no mention of the abandoned man, Varga.) In fact, 49 of the 57 petitioned him not to return. Thus, putting the reasons for his decision in writing, Orellana sailed down the Napo to a world of terrifying excess. He passed a sediment-rich tributary whose water was ‘black as ink ... The current so big and strong that for sixty miles it forms a black streak through the other river and the waters do not mix.’ They called it the Rio Negro. At another river which they called the Madeira, they were astonished by the quantity of logs that poured from its mouth. They found, too, settlements that made beautiful ceramics: ‘the finest porcelain that was ever seen in this world, enamelled and embellished with all colours, so shiny and gleaming as to astonish the viewer’. The Napo led eventually to a bigger river, so vast that it was almost a flowing sea. Here the countryside was heavily populated* and although they kept to the middle of the stream they were attacked by warlike tribes who fired at them from both banks for more than 200 miles. ‘What hardships, what bodily suffering, what extraordinary dangers we passed through,’ wrote Carvajal, who lost an eye in one battle.

  When they reached less hostile territory, Orellana landed the San Pedro, rebuilt its rotting hull and at the same time constructed a new vessel, the Victoria. The Victoria was 24 feet long, with seats for 18 oarsmen and a full set of sails. It was deep and wide and was intended not as a river boat but as a proper ocean-going vessel, for Orellana had no doubt that this river would sooner or later reach the sea. He had his destination very clearly in mind: once they hit salt water they would sail north-west to the conquistador colonies. But before they did so he and his men had to endure the ritual of the female warriors.

  Ever since Marco Polo had reported the existence of Male and Female Islands off the coast of Africa it had become an idée fixe that there existed a domineering race of female warriors called the Amazons. Columbus had mentioned them, as had Vasco da Gama, and now Orellana elaborated the theme. According to Carvajal, they were attacked by an army led by a wild race of women, ‘fighting as if they were in command’. Carvajal was specific as to their appearance and martial ability. They were white and tall, with long braided hair that they wound round their heads, and went naked’ [but] with their privy parts covered’. One woman fought as hard as ten men, and together they peppered the boats with arrows so that they looked like porcupines. But they weren’t strictly Amazons, he warned, because they did not cut their right breasts off to make it easier to fire their bows. When he interrogated a (male) prisoner he learned that they lived in stone-built houses whose furnishings were made – unsurprisingly – of gold and silver. Like Magellan’s Patagonian giants, Carvajal’s strange Nordic fantasy was immortalized on the atlas. So impressed was Orellana by these women that he named the river in their honour – Río de las Amazonas, the Amazon.

  The San Pedro and the Victoria reached the mouth of the Amazon in early August, after a ‘long and winding voyage’ of, by their own calculation, approximately 5,000 miles. For nearly three weeks Orellana prepared them for the sea journey ahead. Dismantling both boats, he reforged their nails, replaced their planks and sailed for a place where he could give them a comprehensive overhaul. He landed on an island whose beaches were shallow enough for him to tip the vessels on their sides and scrape their hulls. Within a few weeks he re-rigged them with ropes made of vines and palm-fibre, provided them with bilge pumps made of hollowed tree trunks, and fashioned anchors from lumps of wood studded with rocks. Meanwhile, his men were reduced to grubbing snails and crabs from the beach. They called the place Starvation Island.

  When they sailed again on 26 August it was one of the most preposterously optimistic departures in the history of exploration. According to Carvajal, they lacked everything: pilots, sailors and even compasses – all of which, he noted sardonically, ‘are necessary things’. They had only the smallest amount of food. Their boats were homemade. They had little experience either of the sea or of navigatio
n. And yet Orellana hoped that they could travel the 1,200-odd miles to Colombia. Creeping along the coast, they were blown out to sea by a storm so violent that the two ships became separated. The San Pedro survived the gales and by dint of good fortune and lucky navigation reached Colombia on 9 September. Assuming the others had been lost, the crew were lamenting the deaths of their compatriots when, two days later, the Victoria straggled into harbour. The combined companies of both vessels came to 47. During the whole journey Orellana had lost ten men – almost a fifth of his original muster. Proportionately, this was a terrible cost; but it was as nothing when set against Pizarro’s losses on his overland trek. Indeed, given the distance they had covered, the company had emerged surprisingly intact. Even so, as one man remarked, it had been, ‘Less a journey than a miracle.’

  Orellana did not linger in South America – Pizarro had already marked him as a traitor – but sailed for Iberia, where he first tried to interest the King of Portugal in his discoveries and, when that failed, approached the King of Spain. His reports were passed to an ecclesiastical council to determine whether he had overstepped the Tordesillas line separating Spanish and Portuguese spheres of interest. The verdict was that although the mouth of the Amazon fell on the Portuguese side of the line its upper reaches were open to Spain. Orellana was given the title of Governor of Nueva Andalusia and sent to colonize the Amazon Basin.

  He left in May 1545, with four ships, his new teenage wife and hundreds of would-be conquistadores. One ship foundered in the crossing and the others became lost in the Amazon delta. Orellana and most of his men died there. His teenage wife, however, escaped to Trinidad and reported that for 11 months they had wandered through a maze of rivers, where her husband and the others died one by one from fever. They had not even found the main body of the Amazon.

  THE QUEST FOR THE NORTH-EAST PASSAGE

  William Barents (1594–7)

  While the Dutch and Portuguese squabbled over their possessions in the Indies, northern European nations were wondering how they, too, might lay their hands on the wealth of Cathay. The accepted sea route via the Cape of Good Hope was under Iberian control and therefore out of the question. Magellan’s route through South America and the Pacific was similarly impossible, being too hazardous in terms of weather and enemy patrols. This did not mean, however, that the Orient was unattainable. For a long while Europeans had speculated on the nature of the Arctic. Ever since the fourth century BC, when Pytheas of Massilia had sailed to Britain and continued north for six days, sighting land – possibly Iceland – in a latitude where the sun shone constantly and the temperature was cold, conflicting legends had arisen about the polar region. Some said it was inhabited by dog-headed savages, others that it was home to a long-lived, peaceful and civilized race called the Hyperboreans, who lived in contempt of their neighbours, the one-eyed, gold-hungry Arimaspians. Whatever the physiognomy and morals of the inhabitants, it was generally agreed that the Pole was not as frigid as its surrounding ice would suggest. Somewhere to the north there must be a temperate zone – perhaps sheltered by mountains – where life was possible, or at least where ships could travel. This ran against all current geographical wisdom. The routes west to Iceland and Greenland were well known, and nobody had seen anything to suggest that the Pole was habitable. It was the same to the east: from Vardø and Kola, the northernmost ports in Scandinavia, where Dutch and English traders did business with the merchants of Novgorod, came tales of a bleak and dismal coast intersected by vast rivers whose outflow scarcely disturbed the year-round ice. Nevertheless, the belief in a temperate Pole persisted (encouraged by the report in 1360 of one Nicholas of Lynn that the earth’s axis was topped by a black magnetic rock surrounded by whirlpools and mountainous islands), and by 1569 the influential Flemish mapmaker Gerardus Mercator had established it as a solid landmass. To those who mattered, Mercator’s map was far more encouraging than the reports of sailors who said they had seen nothing but ice.

  Following Mercator’s projection, there existed three potential avenues to Cathay. One could go straight north; one could go to Greenland, where a North-West Passage was believed to exist; or one could sail beyond Vardø in search of the North-East Passage. Of these three, a group of English merchants decided the North-East Passage was the most accessible. In 1551 they founded ‘The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchants Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands and Places unknowen’. Two years later three ships, under Sir Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor, sailed for Vardø and beyond. The fleet became separated off Norway, Willoughby sailing east with the Bona Esperanza and the Bona Confidentia until on 14 August he sighted land. Possibly it was Novaya Zemlya, but there was no mention of such a place on his maps. Confused, he wrote that it ‘lay not as the Globe made mention’. Turning back, he followed the coast until he became trapped by ice not far from Kola.

  Of what happened to Willoughby and his 70 men during the winter of 1553–4 little is known. They searched the coast for habitation, then, finding none, they returned to their ships. Food was short, as was fuel, and their clothing was inadequate. Most of them were still alive in January 1554, as recorded by Willoughby. But by the end of the winter they were all dead, either from scurvy or starvation, or possibly poisoned by fumes from the sea-coal they shovelled into their stoves. Their floating graves were discovered the following year. That at least some of them may have been killed by fumes would account for a curious tale reported by the Venetian ambassador: ‘The mariners now returned ... narrate strange things about the mode in which they were frozen, having found some of them seated in the act of writing, pen in hand, and the papers before them, others at table, platter in hand and spoon in mouth; others opening a locker, and others in various postures, like statues, as if they had been adjusted and placed in those attitudes.’

  Chancellor was more fortunate. On the Edward Bonaventure he entered the White Sea, and at the Bay of St Nicholas, near modern Archangel, found a village that had contact with Moscow. Leaving his men, he travelled overland and established a trading agreement with the Tsar of Russia. Returning to England with news of his success, he sailed again in 1556 for the White Sea, this time promising to retrieve Willoughby’s ships. His luck did not last. Having located and manned the Bona Esperanza and Bona Confidentia, he lost both ships off the Norwegian coast. Then, after a four-month homeward journey, the Edward Bonaventure sank off Scotland, and Chancellor was drowned while trying to rescue the Russian diplomats he was carrying.

  Despite the loss of so many men and ships, the ‘Mysterie and Companie’ – renamed the Muscovy Company – continued to investigate the North-East Passage. Shortly after Chancellor’s death his sailing master Stephen Burrough took the tiny Searchthrift to the southern tip of Novaya Zemlya and discovered the strait between it and Vaigach Island that led to the Kara Sea. In 1580 another two Englishmen, Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman, followed in Burrough’s tracks aboard the George and William. Their instructions were optimistic: the two captains and their small ships were to sail to Cathay, present the emperor with gifts and letters from Queen Elizabeth, and return home, having spent a winter either in Cathay or the north and having charted as much of the Siberian coast as was possible. They went no further than Vaigach Island, where they were driven back by storms and ice. On the return journey they became separated, and Jackman’s ship was lost. Once again, nobody seemed to be deterred by this disaster. Over the next ten years Russian, Flemish and Dutch explorers travelled overland and by sea as far as the mouth of the Ob, in the Kara Sea. The usual exaggerated rumours seeped back to Europe. One said: ‘this sea beyond Ob ... [is] so warme, that all kinde of Sea Fowles live there as well in the Winter as in the Summer, which report argueth that this Sea pierseth farre into the South parts of Asia’. Another said that beyond the Ob was a mighty river on which sailed ‘great vessels, laden with rich and precious merchandize’. The people to whom these ships belonged were ‘none other than the [inhabitants] of Cathay’. The
prospect of the Orient being just around the corner was irresistible. And nobody, in the 1590s, found it more appealing than the Dutch.

  For the last 30 years the Netherlands – or more precisely the United Provinces of the north – had been in revolt against Spain’s Habsburg Empire, to which, by a dynastic quirk, they were deemed to belong. A loose coalition of city states rather than a single nation, the Provinces nevertheless operated under one flag, had strong mercantile ties and together owned the largest navy in Europe. They, more than anyone, had both the means and the motive to intrude upon Spain’s trade with the Far East. Accordingly, in 1594, the cities of Middelburg, Enkhuisen and Amsterdam jointly funded a fleet of three ships to push back the frontiers of the North-East Passage. In charge of the Amsterdam vessel was a skilled navigator named William Barents.

  It was a warm summer, with little ice to be seen, and the Middelburg and Enkhuisen ships managed to probe 150 miles into the Kara Sea. Barents, however, took a different route, following the west coast of Novaya Zemlya until he reached a spot – Ice Point – where the land fell away to the south. At a position of 77° N he was not only further north than any north-east explorer yet but, thanks to the eastward curve of Novaya Zemlya, he was also closer to China – although he did not have the instruments to calculate longitude accurately, Ice Point is almost at 70° E. When the fleet returned that year, Barents brought home a quantity of fool’s gold, a polar bear skin, a stuffed walrus and, importantly, the news that a passage might be found to the north of Novaya Zemlya.