Orellana Travels the Amazon

In 1541 and 1542, the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana led a party that traveled down the Amazon River from the Andean foothills to the Atlantic Ocean, becoming the first Europeans to navigate the river's full length. The journey, undertaken partly by accident, opened the interior of South America to European knowledge and gave the great river the name it still bears.

The expedition began as part of a larger venture led by Gonzalo Pizarro, half-brother of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the Inca Empire. Pizarro was governor of Quito, and in early 1541 he set out eastward across the Andes in search of a land of cinnamon and a rumored wealthy kingdom often associated with El Dorado. Orellana, an experienced officer who had served in Peru and helped found the city of Guayaquil, joined him with a smaller detachment. The combined force, which included hundreds of Spaniards and a much larger number of enslaved or conscripted Indigenous people, struggled through mountains and rainforest, suffering from hunger, disease, and exhaustion.

Low on food, Pizarro's party built a small vessel on one of the tributaries of the upper Napo River, and in December 1541 Orellana was sent downstream with a few dozen men to find supplies. The current carried them far faster than they could return. Orellana and his men decided, after debate, to continue downriver rather than struggle back against the flow. They built a larger boat along the way and, over roughly eight months, passed through many riverside communities, sometimes trading peacefully and sometimes fighting. They finally reached the Atlantic in August 1542.

The chronicler of the voyage, the Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal, wrote that the Spaniards were attacked by warriors including women, whom he compared to the Amazons of Greek legend. Historians debate this account. Some think Carvajal exaggerated or embellished, while others suggest he misunderstood the roles of women in local societies. His descriptions of large, densely populated settlements along the banks have also drawn interest, since later explorers found far fewer people, likely because of epidemics that followed European contact.

Orellana returned to Spain and obtained permission to colonize the region, but his second expedition, begun in 1545, ended in disaster. He died in the river's delta, probably in 1546, after losing many of his men. Pizarro's party, meanwhile, had returned to Quito in ruin, and Pizarro blamed Orellana for abandoning him. The voyage remains one of the most remarkable feats of river exploration in history, and it shaped European ideas of the Amazon as a place of both wonder and peril.