Amazon Stories – Explorers

Statue of the Pinzon brothers

Spanish explorers, or exploiters as they might properly be called, were the first Europeans to see the Amazon. Vincente Pinzon, who sailed with Columbus as skipper of the Pinta, was the first to find it. The Pinzon brothers played prominently in the New World, as Vincente’s brother was captain of the Nina and his other brother was first mate. Yet, history books give them barely a nod. He was given his own fleet to explore south of the Caribbean in 1499 and landed in central Brazil. While making his way back to Puerto Rico, he noted some brownish water miles out at sea. When his crew reported that it was fresh water, his curiosity adroitly turned him to port to discover its source. He landed in a huge bay that was actually the mouth of the great river, which he learned when sailing some 50 miles inland. He named the river “Rio Santa Maria de la Mar Dulce”. Fortunately, he was a better explorer than river-namer and the name never really caught on. In true Spanish conquistador form, he captured dozens of natives as slaves and confiscated what small treasures they had, leaving nothing but disease in his wake. Thinking that it might be the sought after passage to the west, he returned a few years later, only to have his expedition wiped out by the then wisely hostile natives.  The Amazon would go untouched by the Spanish for the next 40 years, thanks to a Papal decree that gave exploitation rights to the eastern South American bulge, east of the 40W longitude, to the Portuguese.

Enter the Conquistador par excellence Francisco Pizzaro, who began his illustrious career as a member of Balboa’s monumental 1513 trip across Panama to the Pacific. He repaid his leader by arresting and beheading him just 6 years later, which got him promoted to the post of Mayor of Panama City. After hearing of Cortes’s excellent exploitations of the Aztecs in Mexico, his position gave him latitude to launch his own expeditions along the Pacific coast of Ecuador and Peru, hoping to find riches of his own. His instincts were spot-on. After his first two attempts were repelled by the fierce Incas, his luck turned when he caught them with their pants down and succeeded in butchering and looting untold wealth from the Incan empire in 1532. Pizzaro’s greed and treachery led to his own demise at the hands of fellow Spanish exploiters. But his younger brother Gonzalo, who has been said to be the one who actually killed the Incan ruler, would carry on the fine family tradition and lead the next Spanish foray into the Amazon.

Orellana lost an eye to the arrow of an Amazon warrior

Gonzalo Pizzaro, anxious to emulate his big brother’s success, led an expedition south-east from Quito, Ecuador in 1541 to find the fabled El Dorado – the city of gold. By the time the ill-fated group crossed the Andes and entered the Amazon basin, over ¾ of his original party had been killed or deserted. Pizzaro then built a small sailing vessel and sent his second-in-command Francisco Orellana down-river to explore and report back. Big Mistake. Orellana and his small crew had to shoot several rapids in the clumsy craft and upon reaching the confluence with the larger Napo River, decided that returning with the craft or on foot would be impossible. So, just as Balboa and Pizzaro had done, they mutinied and continued down river, miraculously reaching the sea and sailing into history as the first Europeans to navigate the length of the Amazon. On the journey, they encountered a tribe of fierce and large women warriors. Orellana thus named the river Amazonas, after the legendary Amazons of Greek mythology. He returned to Spain a hero and was granted control of the Amazon basin, which caused a crisis with Portugal, since the mouth of the Amazon rested in Portuguese territory. All this mattered little, as his expedition was fraught with problems and ended in abject failure and Orellana’s death. Karma is a bitch.

13 years after Orellana’s Amazon expedition, another Spaniard, Lope de Aquirre, copied the feat. After seizing power of the expedition, slashing, burning, torturing and looting everyone and everything in his path, “El Loco” (the Crazy Man) made his way to the mouth of the Amazon, proclaiming himself King of Peru. In another karmic display of justice, his own men repaid his cruelty by beheading him and proudly displaying his severed head on their top mast.

Brazilian history tends to ignore all the Spanish work and instead credits Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral with the first explorations of Brazil in 1500, just months after Spanish Pinzon had landed there and found the mouth of the Amazon. Moreover, Cabral’s “discovery” of South America was quite accidental. He was aiming to follow De Gama’s route to the orient around the tip of Africa, when contrary winds and currents blew him into Brazil. Since he was still within the Papal zone assigned to Portugal, he claimed the land for his country and returned as an accidental hero, though he never even saw the mouth of the Amazon. Brazilians point out that since Pinzon was illegally in Portuguese territory, his discoveries didn’t count. Such is the power of rabid nationalism to change history.

Nearly a century would pass before the Portuguese got around to exploring the Amazon. In 1637, Pedro Tiexiera travelled up-river, from the mouth of the Amazon to a source high in the Andes (near Quito, Ecuador) and returned, more or less intact. While earlier Spanish expeditions had noted many towns and cities along the Amazonian banks – some with gold and silver treasures, Tiexiera’s group found only “virgin forest, rich in game and fish” and sparse populations. As usual, the Spanish had left their traditional gift of European disease, which had wiped out an estimated 90% of the indigenous population in the intervening years. Owing to the expedition’s reports of no riches to plunder, the Amazon was left to the Christian missionaries to explore and convert what few savages remained there.

 

Percy Fawcett never did find his City of "Z"

The next wave of Amazon exploration came in the late 1800’s, as British, Dutch and German botanists flocked to the area to study its extraordinary diversity of flora and fauna and to map its extent. Perhaps the most famous of this group of explorers is Percy Fawcett, a British Army Major who was sent to map the jungle of the Brazil-Bolivia border. In the course of his mapping, he found evidence of an ancient civilization, which intrigued him. Further research uncovered Spanish documents which hinted at the location of an El Dorado, deep in the Amazon basin. Fawcett became obsessed with the idea of finding this great city, which he named “Z”. He made several trips to the area, all of which failed to find his “Z”. His final trip, with his eldest son, was to be his last. Despite his wealth of jungle experience and fortitude, his party disappeared into the Amazon rainforest, never to be heard from again. His disappearance sparked many expeditions to find him. All of which met with a similar disastrous fate.

Since then, many an adventurer has used the Amazon as a vehicle for fame and glory, including Teddy Roosevelt. Folks have kayaked, rafted and even walked the entirety of the great river, in order to claim some “first” title or other. The one thing they all have in common is an uncanny underestimation of the power of the Amazon, and the many dangers and obstacles it contains. The Amazon has claimed thousands of lives this way. It is a river and a land that commands respect. I certainly intend to give it that.