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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
