Last days of November 1546. On one of the banks of the main course of the Amazon, under a random tree, about twenty men recited prayers while a young woman cried inconsolably at her husband's grave. Francisco de Orellana from Trujillo had died, exhausted and dying, with the glory of having been the first to completely descend the longest and mightiest river on the planet. But without having completed his ambitious project of conquest.
In the context in which the man from Extremadura started his companies, the Spanish public coffers were not going through their best moment. The entire country was plunged into unrest due to the numerous military campaigns being fought in Europe. With such a panorama, the news that arrived about discoveries in America was a stimulus for those men who, devoid of fortune, wanted to leave everything behind and live an adventure in the New Continent. Among them were around ten thousand Trujillanos, from several generations.
It is not surprising that the young Orellana decided to follow in the footsteps of Francisco Pizarro, to whose lineage he was related. Little is known about his childhood and adolescence, only that he must have been quite cultured, something unusual in explorers of the time.
There is evidence of his presence in America starting in 1527. A few years later he enlisted in Peru, precisely in Pizarro's troops. Together with him he fought some battles, such as the one in Puerto Viejo, in which he lost an eye. Since then, he always covered the scar with a black patch, and became known as El Tuerto.
From the distribution of territories after the battle of Las Salinas in 1538 (the confrontation between Pizarro and Diego de Almagro for possession of the city of Cuzco), the young man benefited quite a bit: he was named governor of Culata, a coastal province in the present-day Ecuador that was not yet pacified. There he founded a city, Santiago de Guayaquil, in the name of God and Emperor Charles V.
When he was already adapting to this new life of wealth, Orellana began to be interested in two of the legends to which the native population often referred. One was the Country of Cinnamon, an area in eastern Ecuador that is difficult to locate exactly, where abundant trees of the precious spice supposedly grew. Another spoke of a prince who, covered in fine gold dust, bathed daily in a lake (the myth of Eldorado, although it seems that it was inspired by partially true events).
The Extremaduran's impulse to embark towards the unknown was encouraged by the news that Gonzalo Pizarro, the youngest of the famous family, was preparing an expedition. Orellana did not hesitate to appear in Quito to offer his services to Pizarro, and the two Trujilloans agreed to tackle the new campaign together.
In December 1541, Orellana returned to Santiago de Guayaquil to organize preparations for the trip. Meanwhile, Gonzalo Pizarro recruited 200 Spaniards and about four thousand indigenous people, in addition to gathering a large number of pigs, llamas, horses, dogs and other animals. When Orellana returned to Quito, where he was going to meet Pizarro again, he received with surprise the news that he had undertaken the trip a few days before. Everyone advised him to abandon the company, since he only had 23 men, but he refused to give up and immediately set out in search of Pizarro, which he achieved.
Pizarro moved forward again, heading towards Capua and Guema in the hope of finding Eldorado in his area. There the indigenous people told him about the existence of rich settlements downstream, so he decided to send a message to Orellana to meet him again next to the Coca River, a tributary of the Napo. The two explorers agreed that the most convenient thing to do was to build a support brig. The San Pedro was finally launched into the river loaded with provisions and weapons. Orellana captained him. Pizarro would continue by land with his troops and horses.
But as the supplies were consumed, hunger began to take hold among the adventurers. The men began to request the abandonment of the mission. To quell their complaints, Orellana offered to continue forward in the brig with a small group: this way he would find a town and could return with provisions.
When, finally, after countless hardships, Orellana and his men came across a town, its inhabitants presented themselves as the Imarais, tributaries of the lord of Aparia, on whom a dozen more towns depended. During the following weeks, the chiefs of these villages arrived and told them about the gold of a powerful lord, named Ica, who lived a little further down the river. But Orellana was no longer thinking about Eldorado: at that point he was convinced that he would find his way to the sea. However, he didn't want to do it alone. His desire was, as he had promised, to return upstream to supply Pizarro's men.
What was not expected was the refusal of his own soldiers, who signed a document arguing the obstacles they would have to overcome to navigate some two hundred leagues against the current. They wanted to follow the river. That flight forward would end up going down in history as “Orellana's betrayal.”
By then the brig was already in a terrible state, so the 48 survivors hurried to build a second ship, the Victoria, and took to the river in both boats, heading towards the unknown. In February 1542, a year after leaving Quito, they were sailing along the main course of the gigantic Amazonian river network, although they still did not know that.
Arriving at the Machiparo manor, they were constantly attacked by natives who shot them poisoned arrows, from the shore or using canoes. They had to navigate the central part of the river. They only landed on dry land if it was necessary to loot a village for supplies.
On Saint John's Day they reached the vicinity of the Nhamundá River, where they were attacked again. Fray Gaspar de Carvajal, who would become the official chronicler of the adventure, had one of the arrows cause the loss of an eye. Among the attackers they were able to observe some very peculiar warriors: tall, pale, long-haired women whom, in honor of the famous Greek myth, they would call Amazons.
The journey continued. They believed that, after having traveled 1,600 leagues, the exit to the sea could not be far away. Indeed, on August 24, 1542, they fulfilled their project of finding a communication route between the highlands of Peru and the Atlantic Ocean. Orellana became the first to verify the navigability of the longest and mightiest river on earth.
The adventurers did not know where they were exactly. His priority at that time was to reach Christian land and, from there, bring the good news to the Spanish court. They sailed along the Atlantic coast and, although the crew of the Victoria – on which Orellana was – lost sight of the San Pedro for a few days, the two ships met again on the morning of September 11 in Nueva Cádiz, in Cubagua, an island in the Caribbean northeast of Venezuela.
Orellana was eager to govern the lands he had discovered on his journey. After a brief rest in Cubagua, he hired a ship on Trinidad Island to travel to Spain, but a storm forced him to disembark on the coast of Portugal. The news quickly reached the court of the Lusitanian king, John III, who summoned the explorer to offer him a deal to benefit from his feat. Orellana thought that it was the Spanish monarch who should decide on the settlement and conquest of the discovered lands. But when he finally arrived at his destination, he did not find the attention he expected.
Gonzalo Pizarro, who had entered Quito in command of 80 cadaverous soldiers just the same day that Orellana's men were attacked by the Amazons, had been in charge of sending a letter to Charles V informing him of Orellana's betrayal and of the hardships they went through after their departure. He was able to defend himself by showing the document in which his subjects refused to return in search of Pizarro. Even so, the country's economic situation was disastrous, and the members of the Council of the Indies doubted the importance of the Amazon River.
Orellana did not give up. He wrote a memorial to the emperor. The resolution came on February 13, 1544. The Prince of Asturias (future Philip II) signed, in the absence of Charles V, a capitulation in which it was admitted that it had been impossible for the explorer to help Pizarro. He was also granted the titles of advance, governor and captain general. Orellana had to found two cities within the limits of the 200 leagues of land that were granted to him on the left bank of the river. He was also entitled to a life income of 5,000 ducats annually and one twelfth of what those lands produced. In exchange, he had to cover the expenses of the new expedition.
The man from Trujillo, aware that he could not pay the expenses to legally undertake his adventure, had no better idea than to take his ships and flee quietly on the night of May 11, 1545. He took with him more than four hundred men (in addition to his recent wife, Ana de Ayala, a young woman he had met in Seville) and did not have enough provisions for everyone. After landing in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, he spent two more months in Cape Verde, where almost a hundred men died due to some illness, and many others resigned from the company.
The man from Extremadura managed to set sail at the end of the year, but not before having lost half of the boats and crew due to the storms. The misfortunes would continue to occur while the group tried to reach the main course of the Amazon. First hunger struck them. Then they had to deal with the labyrinth of canals and river currents between islands. Finally, their only remaining ship ran aground and was destroyed.
The end was near for the Extremaduran explorer, who fell ill. Fever and weakness, perhaps caused by dysentery, did not allow him to stand. In 1546, at the end of November, he died at the age of 35, accompanied by his wife and the twenty men who had managed to survive. The failure of his expedition diverted the interests of the Crown. It would take Spain almost another century to resume the conquest of new territories in the Amazon.
This text is part of an article published in number 516 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
