Francisco de Orellana Navigates the Amazon
Francisco de Orellana became the first European to descend the Amazon, arriving at the Atlantic in August 1542 after a journey of some 4,000 miles that he had not intended to make. He had set out from Quito in 1541 as second in command to Gonzalo Pizarro, on an expedition of 220 Spaniards and some 4,000 conscripted indigenous porters, looking for the land of cinnamon and for El Dorado. It found neither, and starved. Orellana was sent ahead with about fifty men in a brigantine to look for food, on the understanding that he would return. The current made returning impossible, and he went on downstream — a decision Pizarro denounced as desertion and for which Orellana was later tried and acquitted. The party built a second boat from felled trees with nails made from horseshoes, and survived on whatever they could take or beg from riverside villages, several of which were substantial and well provisioned. Friar Gaspar de Carvajal kept the account. He described a fight with warriors he said were led by tall, pale women, and named them after the Amazons of Greek myth, which gave the river its name. His descriptions of dense populations, roads and pottery along the banks were dismissed as fantasy for four centuries, and archaeology has since largely vindicated them. Orellana returned in 1546 with a new expedition to settle the river, and died there of illness within months. Gonzalo Pizarro walked back to Quito with about eighty survivors of the original two hundred and twenty. The Amazon basin is now thought to have supported several million people before European disease reached it, largely along the very banks Carvajal described.
- Year: 1541 CE
- Category: Political
