1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [162]
Encounters with the river’s inhabitants were frequent and often hostile. Passing the native domains strung along the river was like passing a line of angry hives. Forewarned of the visitors’ arrival by drum and messenger, Indians awaited them behind trees and in concealed canoes, shot fusillades of poisoned arrows, then withdrew. A few miles downriver would be the next group of Indians, and the next attack. Except when demanding food, the expedition navigated as far as possible from every village. Nonetheless three Spaniards died in battle. An arrow hit Carvajal in the face, blinding him in one eye.
Carvajal wrote little about the peoples who spent so much time trying to kill him. But the small amount he did write depicts a crowded and prosperous land. Approaching what is now the Peru-Brazil border, he noted that “the farther we went the more thickly populated and the better did we find the land.” One 180-mile stretch was “all inhabited, for there was not from village to village a crossbow shot.” The next Indians down the river had “numerous and very large settlements and very pretty country and very fruitful land.” And just beyond them were villages crowded cheek by jowl—“there was one day when we passed more than twenty.” In another place Carvajal saw a settlement “that stretched for five leagues without there intervening any space from house to house.”
Near the mouth of the Tapajós, about four hundred miles from the sea, Orellana’s ragtag force came across the biggest Indian settlement yet—its homes and gardens lined the riverbank for more than a hundred miles. “Inland from the river, at a distance of one or two leagues…there could be seen some very large cities.” A floating reception force of more than four thousand Indians—two hundred war canoes, each carrying twenty or thirty people—greeted the Spanish. Hundreds or thousands more stood atop the bluffs on the south bank, waving palm leaves in synchrony to create a kind of football wave that Carvajal clearly found peculiar and unnerving. His attention riveted to the scene, he for once noted some details. Approaching in their great canoes, the Indian soldiers wore brilliant feather cloaks. Behind the canoe armada was a floating orchestra of horns, pipes, and rebecs like three-stringed lutes. When the music played, the Indians attacked. Only the tremendous surprise created by the Spaniards’ firearms provided the opportunity to escape.
Orellana died in 1546 on a second, failed voyage to the Amazon. Carvajal went on to achieve modest renown as a priest in Lima, dying peacefully at the age of eighty. Neither Orellana’s journey nor Carvajal’s account of it received the attention they merited; indeed, Carvajal’s work was not formally published until 1894. Part of the reason for the lack of attention is that Orellana didn’t conquer anything—he simply managed to emerge with his life. But another part is that few people believed Carvajal’s description of the Amazon.
The main cause for skepticism was his notorious claim that halfway down the river the Spaniards were attacked by tall, topless women who fought without quarter and lived without men. When these “Amazons” wanted to reproduce, Carvajal explained, they captured males. After the women’s “caprice [had] been suited,” they returned the spent abductees to their homes. Any bravo who saw the prospect of some caprice-suiting as inviting enough to visit the Amazons himself, Carvajal solemnly warned, “would go a boy and return an old man.” This absurd story was viewed as proof of Carvajal’s untrustworthiness and Orellana’s faithlessness. “Mentirosa [full of lies],” historian Francisco López de Gómara scoffed soon after Carvajal finished his manuscript.
Physical scientists were especially unwilling to accept his depiction of the Amazon. To ecologists, the great tropical forest in South America was and is the planet’s greatest wilderness,