The first European expedition to traverse the Amazon from its tributaries to its mouth, from which it emerged on August 26, 1542, was led by Francisco de Orellana. Born in Spain, Orellana arrived in the New World in the late 1520s, seeking his fame and fortune. In 1533 he joined Francisco Pizarro in his conquest of the Incas and the subsequent civil wars among the conquistadors. Sent to Ecuador, he was appointed second in command of an expedition under Francisco's brother, Gonzalo, to locate the "Land of Cinnamon" supposedly located on the east side of the Andes. The expedition quickly fell apart as most of the 4,000 Spaniards and Indians gathered for the trek died or deserted, and Gonzalo returned to Quito. However, Orellana, with about 50 men, decided to push on, using a river which proved to be a tributary of the Amazon about which they knew nothing, leaving in December 1541. Over the next eight months Orellana and his men traveled over 2,000 miles.
(Map from Wikipedia)
Two years later, Orellana left Spain with a substantial expedition to conquer and exploit the Amazon basis, a voyage that ended in disaster with Orellana's death.
The significance of the expedition is in what Orellana verbally reported seeing and was reported in a book by Gaspar de Carvajal, the Dominican missionary who accompanied the expedition, which was not published until 1895, an account that was disbelieved until recent decades because it contravened the belief that the status of the peoples of the Amazon, encountered when European settlement and exploitation of the area began more than a century after Orellana first saw it, had always existed in that state. Europeans entering the Amazon basin in the late 17th century reported encountering no substantial settlements with a scattered and small native population living precariously in the jungle. In contrast, Carvajal reported, according to Wikipedia, " large cities, well developed roads, monumental construction, fortified towns, and dense populations". The impossibility of Carvajal's report was further demonstrated by 19th and early 20th century scientists concluding that the soils of the basin were of too poor a quality to support large scale agriculture.
That story began to change in the late 20th century with the discovery of evidence of large scale landscape manipulation by the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Amazon basin, terra forming that allowed for sustainable agriculture, a tale that first received larger public recognition with the publication in 2005 of Charles C Mann's 1491, an excellent account of the populations of the Americas prior to the arrival of Columbus.
I was reminded of this by a recent thread by Jacob Shell, a geography professor at Temple University, who writes of even more recent findings supporting the existence of a more sophisticated and populous Indian existence in the 16th century. You can read the thread below:
A historical account which is as tantalizing and mysterious as they come: Gaspar de Carvajal's description of the peoples along the Amazon River in 1542. Possibly one of the last glimpses of a living "El Dorado." 🧵 pic.twitter.com/sbnqjplYLW
— Jacob Shell (@JacobAShell) October 16, 2022
What happened to cause such a contrast between what Orellana and Carvajal saw in 1542 and what was observed in the late 1600s? The most likely culprit were the diseases that accompanied the European explorers, diseases to which the Indians did not have immune defenses (in 1491, Mann explains the details of the immunological differences which made Indian populations in the Western Hemisphere so vulnerable). The waves of diseases like smallpox may have killed 80-90% of the pre-Columbian population, leaving the survivors with little ability to support and maintain a more settled and agriculturally based life. And that level of death would have a shattering impact on the social life and structure, a subject I wrote about regarding the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
While estimates of the population of the pre-Columbian Americas vary greatly, it is generally agreed that about 95% lived south of the current border of the United States. But even in the U.S. we have evidence of a similar impact from contacts with the first Europeans.
At the same time Orellana was exploring the Amazon, Hernando de Soto was leading his disastrous expedition (1539-42) through what is now the southeastern U.S. The accounts of the survivors report large, well organized Indian communities, living in substantial towns surrounded by wooden walls. The next wave of explorers, more than a century later, encountered nothing of the sort. Once again, disease had taken an enormous toll.
This also echoed the experience of the first English settlers in New England. Plymouth was founded in 1620 on the ruins of an abandoned Indian village. What the Pilgrims didn't realize, but we now do, is that the Europeans who fished the Grand Banks, starting in the late 1500s, often landed to dry their catch and trade with the natives, unwittingly spreading the diseases which killed most of the local population.
There is a lot more to discover about the pre-Columbian populations and societies.
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