“Anything might happen. We were about to go into the unknown and no one could say what it held.”
Even in 1913, a man could say that about the Amazon. The man was Theodore Roosevelt, adventurer, naturalist, former President of the United States, about to enter a region of Amazon rainforest cross-hatched by unknown rivers and, perhaps, “tenanted only by unfriendly savages, where failure to get through means death by disease and starvation.”
In 1925, a man such as experienced Amazon explorer Percy H. Fawcett could disappear into the wilderness of northern Mato Grosso state in Brazil and never be heard from again.
Even in the 1970s, Brazilian Indian Foundation contact teams and Highway Authority workers were still being attacked by hostile Indian warriors armed with blow pipes and poisoned arrows.
The fact is that Amazonia has been an immense, frustrating puzzle for outsiders since the beginning of New World exploration in the Sixteenth Century. In many respects, nothing has changed since Francisco de Orellana became the first European to traverse the Amazon River from west to east.
Early Explorers: The Search for Fame and Fortune
Spanish explorer Vicente Yañez Pinzón, probable “discoverer” of the Amazon River in 1500, didn‘t even know what he had found. Impressed by the outpouring of fresh water around what we know today as the Amazon River Delta, Pinzón postulated the existence of a huge inland sea, which he called El Mar Dulce, to the west. But Pinzón didn’t pause to explore this “freshwater ocean.” If he had, his ships might have travelled 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) upriver to the eastern base of the Andes, finding no inland sea, only the most mysterious and impressive river in the world.
The first European explorer of the Amazon rainforest itself was Francisco de Orellana. A man of tremendous personal courage and commanding presence, Orellana had been appointed captain-general of what is today western Ecuador by the Spanish Conquistador of the Andes Francisco Pizarro.
Orellana governed his province in uneasy partnership with Pizarro’s younger brother, Gonçalo, the captain-general of eastern Ecuador, who ruled from the present-day city of Quito.
Both men were ambitious and their dreams were fed by rumors of the fabled kingdom of Manôa, ruled by a fat, naked king who daily encrusted his entire body in gold dust. The Spanish dubbed this probably mythic figure El Dorado, the Gold Encrusted or the Gold Coated One. The kingdom of El Dorado was said to be east and north of Quito, probably in present-day Colombia.
Both Pizarro and Orellana were willing to stake their reputations on the search for illusive El Dorado. Neither would win the prize. But the bolder of the two, Orellana, did return with something of value—detailed knowledge of South American geography and a tale worthy of a great adventurer.
Knights-in-Armor
Separate expeditions left Ecuador late in 1540. Gonçalo Pizarro, from Quito, traveled with 220 armored soldiers, several dozen Indian guides, 2,000 hunting dogs, and 5,000 pigs. Orellana left his capital, today’s Guayaquil, with only 23 Spanish soldiers and a handful of Indian guides. The two expeditions joined forces at a mountain trading post along the remote periphery of Spanish-controlled Ecuador. The inexperienced Pizarro was in overall command.
The combined expedition ran into trouble as soon as its absurdly attired knights-in-armor, trailed by clamorous packs of dogs and pigs, began its descent of the eastern slopes of the Andes. Hostile Indians attacked and killed several of Pizarro’s ill-prepared knights as the expedition penetrated the semi-tropical zone of the Andean foothills. With the first attacks came desertions among the Indian guides and soon the remaining Spaniards, with their poor knowledge of western Amazonian flora and fauna, went hungry, having first exhausted their supply of pigs and then the howling packs of hunting dogs.
Orellana, seeing a chance to desert the incompetent Pizarro, and with luck, realize his own ambitions, volunteered to lead a hunting party into even deeper jungle terrain to the east. Pizarro agree but was appalled when 52 of his own men decided to follow Orellana’s lead into the rainforest.
Orellana would only be heard from again after he had traversed the entire Amazon, emerging from the mouth of the river almost a year after deserting Pizarro. Meanwhile, the hapless Gonçalo would eventually break camp in the western rainforest and return ignominiously to Quito with only 80 ragged soldiers still behind him, never having left the region which is today modern Ecuador.
Orellana’s style was vastly different from Gonçalo Pizarro’s. For one thing, he travelled light, abandoning most of the cumbersome armor and other useless baggage which had weighted down the original expedition, making it seem more like a Medieval military parade than an excursion into tropical rainforest. Second, he travelled fast, ordering his men to craft swift, arrow-shaped canoes from tree trunks in the fashion of the river Indians they had encountered after entering the western Amazon lowlands. By keeping to the rivers and living off the land, Orellana and his men covered ten times the distance of the original Pizarro-led expedition.
But Orellana found no gold, only a vast Green Hell of monotonous jungle, wild animals, and often hostile tribes.
The Strange Life of the Amazon Women
The Indians fascinated him most, especially the tribe he described as “the women who live alone.” Later, these remarkable females would be dubbed Amazons, after the warrior women of Greek mythology who removed their right breast to facilitate use of the bow and arrow.
Orellana, however, had little interest in the niceties of nomenclature. The Amazon women, who seemed to control a huge swath of rainforest crisscrossed by Amazon tributaries, captured his entire party with the help of male warriors from outlying tribes.
Orellana and his men marveled at the fact that these obviously skilled male hunters seemed subservient to the women warriors, whom he described as “very white and tall and (they) had their hair braided and wrapped around their heads and they were muscular and wore skins to cover their shameful parts and with their bows and arrows they made as much war as ten men.”
Orellana knew what he was talking about. The would-be conquistador eventually fought his way out of the region of the warrior women but only at the cost of 14 killed and 40 wounded. He noted that the Amazon women demanded something close to total loyalty from their male allies, often killing those who attempted to flee a scene of battle.
Orellana managed to take a male prisoner, one Couynco, during the final battle against the Amazon women. Speaking an indigenous dialect understood by some of Orellana’s man, Couynco described the warrior women’s social system in some detail. It included, he said, the forceful domination of outlying tribes by the fierce women fighters. He said the women lived alone in an unusual stone and thatch-built village surrounded by a high stone wall. Indian families were permitted to live in an outer village but were mere servants of the warrior women, who retreated at night behind the forbidding walls of their private enclosure.
Once a year, said Couynco, the warrior women invited adult males from surrounding tribes to a days-long mating festival. The male offspring of these unions would be returned to the tribes of their fathers, but the females would be kept by the warrior women to be raised by them within the confines of the mysterious enclosure. Attempts to penetrate the walled-in village were met by fierce armed resistance. Whenever outlying tribes had attempted to conquer the warrior women, said Couynco, they were handily defeated by the deadly female warriors, whose queen, called Coñori Malen, was feared and respected by all.
Orellana faithfully reported Couynco’s remarkable story after his own return to Spain in 1543. But neither Orellana nor any other European explorer during his lifetime was able to rediscover the Amazon women and the region of western rainforest they apparently controlled. And yet it was they, through the intervention of Spanish scholars who had studied Orellana’s account, who gave their name to the world’s greatest rainforest and the mighty river which sustains it.
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
Photo Credits: Jeronimo Roure Perez, Museo Naval de Madrid; https://thx-trailer.com/replica/indy4/Orellana/Orellana.htm
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