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Amazonia

WHAT ORELLANA SAW

The biggest difficulty in reconstructing the pre-Colombian past is the absence of voices from that past. Mesoamerican peoples left behind texts that are slowly giving up their secrets, but in other areas the lack of written languages has left a great silence. Hints of past events can be found in Native American oral traditions, to be sure, but these are concerned more with interpreting eternal truths than the details of journalism and history. The Bible has much to teach, yet professors must use it judiciously, supplementing it with other sources, when they teach ancient Middle Eastern history. In the same way, preserved Indian lore throws a brilliantly colored but indirect light on the past. To understand long-ago Indian lives, one cannot avoid the accounts of the first literate people who saw them: European swashbucklers, fortune hunters, and missionaries.

As historical sources, colonial reports leave much to be desired. Their authors often were adversaries of the Indians they wrote about, usually did not speak the necessary languages, and almost always had an agenda other than empathetic description of indigenous folkways. Some wrote to further their careers; others, to score political points. Nevertheless these chronicles cannot be dismissed out of hand for these reasons. Used carefully, they can corroborate, even illuminate.

Consider Gaspar de Carvajal, author of the first written description of the Amazon, an account reviled for its inaccuracies and self-serving descriptions almost since the day it was released. Born in about 1500 in the Spanish town of Extremadura, Carvajal joined the Dominican order and went to South America to convert the Inka. He arrived in 1536, four years after Atawallpa’s fall. Francisco Pizarro, now governor of Peru, was learning that to avoid outbreaks of feckless violence he needed to keep his men occupied at all times. One of the worst troublemakers was his own half brother, Gonzalo Pizarro. At the time, conquistador society was abuzz with stories of El Dorado, a native king said to possess so much gold that in an annual ritual he painted his body with gold dust and then rinsed off the brilliant coating in a special lake. After centuries of these baths, gold dust carpeted the lake floor. A lake of gold! To twenty-first-century ears the story sounds preposterous, but it did not to Gonzalo Pizarro, who had already helped seize an empire laden with jewels and precious metals. When he decided to search for El Dorado, Francisco encouraged him—he practically shoved Gonzalo out the door. In 1541 Gonzalo left the high Andean city of Quito at the head of an expedition of 200 to 280 Spanish soldiers (accounts differ), 2,000 pigs, and 4,000 highland Indians, the latter slaves in all but name. Accompanying the troops as chaplain was Gaspar de Carvajal.

Gonzalo’s quest descended rapidly from the quixotic to the calamitous. Having no idea where to find El Dorado, he blundered randomly for months about the eastern foothills of the Andes, then as now a country of deep forest. Because the mountains catch all the moisture from the Amazon winds, the terrain is as wet as it is steep. It is also pullulatingly alive: howling with insects, hot and humid as demon’s breath, perpetually shaded by mats of lianas and branches. Within weeks most of the horses died, their hooves rotting in the mire. So did most of the Indian laborers, felled by being worked to exhaustion in a hot, humid land twelve thousand feet below their cool mountain home. Having lost their beasts of burden, animal and human, the conquistadors painfully cobbled together a crude boat and floated their guns and heavy equipment down the Napo River, an upper tributary of the Amazon. Meanwhile, the soldiers slogged along the banks, a parallel but more laborious course.

The forest grew yet thicker, the countryside less inhabited. Soon they were utterly alone. “Not a bark dimpled the waters,” William H. Prescott wrote in his History