Namely that one.....

Putting the Record Straight

The historical record, hitherto, had relied heavily on exerpts that appeared in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia General y Natural de las Indias (General and Natural History of the Indies, written in 1542 but not published until 1855). In it, Orellana was accused of abandoning Pizarro’s hunger-wracked party to their fate, when he set off with 50 men (and Pizarro’s consent) to try and procure supplies downriver. It was February, 1542. He didn’t return. Oviedo’s reading of events, however, clashes with the affidavits given by those who accompanied Orellana and, by the man himself, in a statement to the Emperor Carlos V (Carlos I of Spain).

Having travelled 200 leagues (a league equates to 2.6 miles) down fast-flowing rivers through inhospitable country where food was scarce, in the end his party hadn’t the food, the capacity, the support or the means to alleviate Pizarro’s predicament. There was no way back. They were both in the same famished predicament only in different places.

Tantalus

Private empire-building was not unusual among the conquistadores. Indeed, the battle between the Almagros and Pizarros for control of Quito and Peru (Nueva Castilla) is a case in point. But as Carvajal’s testimony attests, Orellana, was put in an impossible position from which, like Pizarro, he was fortunate to escape.

Whilst dreams of El Dorado primed the imagination of everyone from Diego de Ordaz (1480-1532) to Francisco de Coronado (1510-1554) to Hernando de Soto (1496/1497–1542), for the most part the accounts from Indians about the existence of El Dorado often turned out to be tantalising promissory notes.

Sold on Going Down the River

Gonzalo Pizarro (1502-1548), Francisco de Orellana (1511-1546) and Lope de Aguirre (1510 -1561), three conquistadores who entered the Amazon jungle’s clutches in the first half of the 16th century, escaped by the skin of their teeth. Others weren’t so lucky.

Indeed, at the conclusion of Colombian writer José Eustasio Rivera’s novel about the rubber boom of the 1920s, La Voragine (The Vortex, 1924), the narrator says of the hero (Arturo Cova) and his compadres: “The jungle swallowed them up.” For many adventurers the jungle has been seen as a monstrous natural autarchy that consumed all who fell within its grasp.

Emerald Heaven or Emerald Hell?

Werner Herzog, who directed Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre: Wrath of God, 1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), talks of an “emerald hell”.

Europeans didn’t fair well in this milieu nor, as subsequent events and epidemics would prove, did the indigenos who came in contact with the Spanish and Portuguese. For the Europeans, it was another “dark continent”, where if disease didn’t get you, hunger, insects, wild beasts, hostile Indians or madness would. The world knew it as a place of seeming abundance, which paradoxically couldn’t, so it was thought, support more than isolated bands of hunter-gatherers.