Born c. 1490.
Trujillo, Spain
Died November 1546,
Amazon delta, Peru
Francisco de Orellana’s story is an example of how an important discovery or achievement can be made as the result of an accident. Orellana was on an expedition in South America with Francisco Pizarro (see entry) when he became separated from the main party. Stranded on the Napo River, he drifted to the Amazon River, then floated down the Amazon to its mouth, thus becoming the first European to travel the length of the world’s largest river.
Orellana was born in the town of Trujillo in the Spanish province of Extremadura; he was a relative of Pizarro. Orellana may have gone to America in about the year 1527, possibly traveling to Panama and then to Nicaragua. Accompanying Pizarro when he set out to conquer Peru, Orellana participated in battles at Lima, Trujillo, and Cuzco. He lost an eye when he was injured in a skirmish with the Incas. After the conquest of Peru, he was awarded an estate at Puerto Viejo in what is now Ecuador.
While he was stationed in Peru Orellana heard that Pizarro was being besieged in Lima by a force of Native Americans. He recruited a group of 80 men and rode to help defeat them. In 1538, when civil war broke out between Pizarro and Cuzco governor Diego de Almagro, Orellana took part in Pizarro’s victory. As a reward for his services, he was made lieutenant governor of Guayaquil; he refounded the city of Puerto Viejo on the site of the present-day city of Guayaquil.
In 1540 Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo left Quito with a large force of Spaniards and Native Americans in search of cinnamon, a valuable spice that was rumored to grow on the eastern slopes of the Andes. When Orellana heard about the expedition, he resigned his office in Guayaquil and gathered a group of 23 men to join Pizarro. By the time they reached Quito, Pizarro had already left. When Orellana and his men caught up with the larger force in Zumaco in March 1541, Orellana was named second-in-command of the expedition.
By the time the expedition reached eastern Ecuador and discovered the Napo River, one of the headwaters of the Amazon River, the men were lost, exhausted, and hungry. As an eyewitness put it, the difficulties were “such that anyone but Gonzalles Pizarre would have abandon’d such an Enterprize as seem’d to be opposed by both Heaven and Earth.”
Pizarro decided to build a boat to carry the weaker members of the party and to look for food farther downstream. The work took two months. When the boat was completed, it was launched on the Napo River, with Orellana in charge. According to the accounts left by both parties, this arrangement was made by mutual consent, and when Orellana took leave of Pizarro on January 1, 1542, he clearly planned to return. However, the fast-flowing rivers quickly carried Orellana’s boat downstream through an area where they saw no signs of human habitation; finally he and his men realized they would never be able to row back up the river. When the remainder of Pizarro’s expedition concluded Orellana’s party was missing, they had no choice but to return overland to Quito. Pizarro then wrote a letter to King Charles I of Spain, bitterly accusing Orellana of desertion.
Meanwhile, Orellana had sailed down the Napo to where it met the Aguarico River, which he reached on February 2, 1542. Along the way he and his companions had stopped in Native American villages where they were well received and were given food. Continuing on, they reached the main stream of the Amazon River on February 11. They stayed for awhile in a village called Aparia where they had plenty to eat and started work on a new, bigger boat.
The records of Orellana’s journey were kept by Gaspar de Carvajal, a Dominican friar. He recorded that one day while they were in Aparia four very tall and light-skinned men, dressed in gold, arrived in the village. The men stayed for a short while and then left. It was the first mention in European literature of “White Indians,” about whom there were to be persistent rumors over the centuries but of whom no trace has ever been found.
Leaving Aparia on April 24, the Spaniards entered the domain of the Machiparo. These people were not friendly, and from that point on Orellana and his men had to fight many battles as they made their way down the river. On June 3, they passed the point where another large river joined the Amazon, and its dark waters did not mingle with the brown Amazon for many miles. They named it the Rio Negro, which is the name it still has today.
Shortly after passing the junction of the Madeira River, the Spaniards were once again attacked. This time the Native American warriors included women. Carvajal immediately labeled them “Amazons,” the name given by the ancient Greeks to the mythical women warriors of Scythia. Carvajal described the Amazons as being light-skinned and very tall and robust and armed with bows and arrows. This story created quite a stir when it was published in Europe, and within a few years the world’s greatest river became known as the “River of the Amazons.”
Orellana reached the mouth of the Amazon on the Atlantic Ocean on August 26, 1542. From there, the Spaniards in their two boats headed northwestward along the coast of Guiana and eventually reached the island of Cubagua near Margarita off the coast of Venezuela. Many of the men returned to Peru, but Orellana went back to Spain, where he arrived in May 1543.
Orellana made a personal report of his expedition to King Charles I. He asked to be named governor of the territories that he had found; his request was granted in February 1544. The king authorized Orellana to lead a colonizing expedition to the Amazon, but he was required to finance the venture himself. During his stay in Spain, Orellana married Doña Ana de Ayala, who came from a good family but had no money. Her lack of a dowry did not help Orellana, who was having difficulty finding the money he needed to finance his expedition.
Having finally raised sufficient funds, Orellana left Spain for the Amazon on May 11, 1545, with a fleet of four vessels and about 300 to 350 men. The ships were in poor condition and there were fewer men than he had wanted. Stopping in the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands along the way, Orellana and his party did not reach the Amazon until the end of December. During the voyage half of the men had either died or deserted, and one of the ships had disappeared in the mid-Atlantic.
Once they had reached the Amazon, Orellana went upstream with one of the ships and a boat. After the ship was wrecked the survivors divided into small groups; some of the men were able to reach Cubagua. Orellana did not return safely, however; sometime during the month of November 1846 he died from fever while traveling in the complicated waterways of the Amazon delta.
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