 |
  |
 |
In Peru, the war of Las Salinas was won by the Pizarro faction; Hernándo Pizarro had his prisoner Pedro de Almagro strangled in 1539. Francisco Pizarro hoped to install his younger and somewhat hot-headed brother, Gonzálo, as gobernadór of Quito - with de Benalcásar away to the north seeking fame and fortune in the kingdoms of the Chibchá, it should not be too difficult. Gonzálo duly arrived in Quito and without de Benalcásar there to oppose him, duly assumed governorship. Although of limited intelligence for such a lofty position of colonial authority, Gonzálo was ambitious, dynamic and lecherous - characteristics clearly befitting a conquístador of the time. First he heard the tales of cinnamon trees growing 'in abundance' in a vaguely-defined region dubbed La Cañela. If these could be found and exploited, Spain could steal a march on the Portuguese, whose control of Ceylon and the Spice Islands had given them a virtual monopoly on the cinnamon trade. And he also heard tales of an 'El Dorado,' the Kingdom of the Golden Man. Now this had to be found.
Gonzálo Pizarro left Quito in 1541 with a force of 350 Spaniards and no fewer than 4,000 Indians. The expedition climbed the mountains, crossed the páramos, and at first followed the valley of the Cauca. At Sumaco, Gonzálo was joined by another soldier of fortune, Francisco de Orellana, gobernadór of La Culeta province on the coast of Ecuador and (third) founder of Guayaquíl. Together they came upon a river called the Napo. Here the expedition divided into two. De Orellana felled trees and built a bergantín to explore the river for villages and food, whilst Pizarro set up camp at the new village of El Barco in order to explore to the east. Like de Benalcásar before him, Pizarro made several sorties in search of La Cañela, the 'Land of Cinnamon,' some of them modestly successful: some cinnamon was found, but not enough to compete with the Portuguese. And all the time the rains swept down mercilessly, swamping the camp. When the rains lifted, Pizarro's force was reduced by hunger and fever. De Orellana and his riverine party failed to return. Finally, Pizarro's group, now turning cannibal, clawed its way back to Quito, leaving behind in the jungle three-quarters of their number dead of starvation and disease.
Meanwhile, de Orellana had travelled down the Napo, reaching its junction with an even greater river on 11 February 1542. Here he decided that the current was too strong to allow the bergantín to return upstream. Suggestions to find an alternative route back almost provoked a mutiny from his men. As it was believed that El Dorado could not be very much further downstream, it was decided to follow the great river to wherever it took them.
The title of Adelantado of Nueva Andalucia was conferred upon him, with jurisdiction over an undefined area around the mouth of the great river he had encountered. Royal backing for the new venture was half-hearted - de Orellana's 'treachery' against Gonzálo Pizarro was taken seriously by some - but several wealthy Genoese merchants were interested. His haphazard expedition eventually reached the channels of the 'Marañón' where a base-camp was established prior to expeditions into the interior. However, starvation and disease rapidly reduced the hopeful force - this time killing the dispirited Francisco de Orellana as well. The pitiful survivors subsequently set sail north along the coast and reached Margarita in December 1546.
It was an epic based on a mistake, for although Francisco de Orellana crossed the South American continent from one side to the other, he did not know it, believing that the great river flowed to the north to what he presumed to be El Dorado. Although the Spaniards referred to that great river as the Orellana or the Marañón, it has since become known as the river of the Amazonas, after its long-haired fighting women, who reminded de Orellana of Hippolyte and the Amazons of Scythia of Greek mythology.
It took them ever eastward, after a "... perilous battle with canoe-borne Indians ..." and past primitive villages whose inhabitants fired poison-tipped darts through blowpipes. With difficulty, de Orellana managed to befriend some in order to effect repairs to the bergantín and to gather food. One of the fierce warlike tribes was ruled by a great chieftainess, Coñorí, whose women-warriors greatly impressed the Spaniards. De Orellana and his companions found neither the land of cinnamon trees nor the kingdom of the Golden Man, but they did hear tell of a wealthy land to the north called 'Omagua.' The long and arduous voyage ended when they reached the mouth of the great river and then followed the coast northward to Nueva Cadíz on the pearl island of Cubagua. There de Orellana made his way to Lisbon and then back to Spain to report to Charles V.
Following his expedition's multifarious failures, Gonzálo Pizarro arrived back in Ecuador incensed by de Orellana's perceived treachery .... and found de Benalcásar both back in Quito and vying to re-establish his governorship [6]. But events in Peru attracted Gonzálo's immediate attention. For in 1541, following Gonzálo's departure, Francisco Pizarro himself was murdered by a group of Chilleños led by Juan de Rada. The 'War of Chupas' then broke out between the compadres of Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro, and was destructive enough to cause the despatch of a royal governor from Spain. The licentiate Vaca de Castro, Presidente of the new Audiencia of Panama, accordingly took command of the Pizarro faction, turning it thereby into a Royal army operating against an armed rebellion.
And Manco Inca? He must have rubbed his hands in glee to see the invaders killing each other by the score. De Almagro's faction was defeated and its leaders executed. De Castro then had to use all his lawyer's skill and patience to dissuade Gonzálo Pizarro from claiming, sword in hand, the succession to his brother's authority. For Gonzálo was incensed by the Crown's decrees to ease Indian burdens at the expense of the conquístadores - had they fought for His Most Catholic Majesty, conquered an empire, and earned their due rights of repartimiento ... only for it to be given away? Thwarted in his designs on government, he started another civil war in 1544 against the new viceroyal martinet, Vasco Núñez de la Vela. He succeeded in defeating the viceregal forces, but eventually lost the battle of Jaquijaguana on 9 April, 1548, to de la Vela's successor, the priest Pedro de la Gasca. Gonzálo was beheaded the next day. Unlike Hernándo Cortés, conquístador of the Aztecs of Mexico, the more impetuous of the Pizarros did not live out their lives in the peace and comfort of their spoils and titles. Months earlier, Hernándo Pizarro had returned to Spain to plead the Pizarro's case. He was imprisoned in La Mota castle at Medina del Campo. This arbitrary act probably saved his life; not until 1561 was he released, retiring to his native Trujillo where he built a sumptuous palace from the accumulated proceeds of the Pizarro brothers' booty.
However, these civil wars helped to feed the 'El Dorado fever,' as the losing factions, seeing all they had fought for and gained taken from them by Royal or Viceroyal decree, felt they had but little option than to advance further into the unknown in search of new booty. With Peru increasingly under firm governmental control, the disaffected soldados drifted north toward Quito, further from the increasingly centralised authority of the Audiencia, and perforce the main clearing house for multiplying rumours of mysterious and wealthy kingdoms in the hinterlands - particularly that of the increasingly alluring 'Gilded Man.'
Manco Inca was still at large in Vilcabamba somewhere - civil wars amongst the Spaniards notwithstanding - and still a nuisance. Small expeditions disappeared into the rain-forests of the Marañón, only to return decimated by disease and hostile Indians ... or not at all. Manco Inca unwisely gave sanctuary to five renegade Spanish soldados, who repaid his hospitality by robbing and murdering him. One of Manco's sons, Titú Cusi, took up the struggle, launching periodic raids before disappearing back into the mountains and jungle. A small missionary station was overrun and one of the brothers killed, providing the Jesuits with one of their first martyrs in the New World. Another three or four expeditions crossed the páramos, only to return soon afterwards, claiming there was no way through the moist, thick jungle to open country. Yet another set out in search of the Gran Orejón, a 'rich prince' of whom the expedition's leader had been told by a young girl in Cuzco. The principal result of all these endeavours was that a number of frontier settlements was made by the Spaniards near the headwaters of rivers which flowed out of the eastern Andes into the Marañón basin. Any of these could be used as a base for further exploration of the eastern slopes.
In 1556, ten years after de Orellana's death, the first journey in the opposite direction was made, from some unknown point in Brazil, up the Marañón to the Andes. Viarazu was the chief of some tribe, driven by the Portuguese to seek new lands. With his army of 1,400 were two Portuguese who may have been motivated by stories of 'El Dorado' and the land of the 'Omaguas.' When the expedition arrived in the area of the Motines, a tribe in the Andean foothills owing some vague allegiance to the Viceroyalty of Peru, a mere seventy were left. The Motines attacked these weary remnants, killing the remaining Portuguese, and sent their prisoners to the nearest Spanish settlement, Santiago de Moyabamba. With what little Portuguese they had picked up, Viarazu and his followers told lavishly of the gold and silver they had 'seen' in the interior. They were sent on to Lima.
The new Viceroy, Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza, Marqués de Cuñete, had arrived from Panama in 1556 and found Peru still full of adventurous but ungovernable Spanish soldiers demanding extravagant titles and riches who could foment another civil war at any moment. He instantly came to the unusually shrewd conclusion that these zealous El Dorado hunts were an ideal opportunity to get rid of some of the worst ruffians in his charge. As expeditions into the hinterlands fostered colonial settlements and expansion, he actively encouraged the quest. Also, he did not like the idea that the Portuguese might be extending their sphere of influence westward into an area Spain thought was rightfully hers.
The Marqués engaged Viarazu and his company to act as guides on a major expedition. In command, and appointed with the grandiose title of Gobernadór de El Dorado y Omagua, would be a young officer, Pedro de Ursúa, whom the Marqués had fortuitously met in Panama just after the latter had completed the subjugation of a well-armed and disciplined band of cimarrones in the mountains above the Trajín [7] between Panama and Nombre de Díos. Before that de Ursúa had undertaken some campaigns of conquest against recalcitrant Indians in Venezuela, in the course of which he would inevitably have come across tales of 'El Dorado.'
Whilst raising money, recruiting soldiers and purchasing supplies in Trujillo, de Ursúa met a young widow mestiza who captivated him from the outset. He invited her to join him on the expedition - an offer she readily accepted in order to escape an ongoing scandal in the colony in which she was the main cause. Doña Inés de Atienza was exceptionally beautiful, so much so that several of de Ursúa's more sober compadres advised him against bringing her along, fearing trouble because of her later on in the expedition. But it was too late; Doña Inés was already on her way to the advance base at Chachapoyas with a lady-in-waiting and several hundredweight of personal baggage. July 1560, and advance guards were sent ahead who soon became mutinous when the main party failed to turn up on time. When it did, the entire procession resembled a travelling fair, not a determined expedition attempting to penetrate the dense, gloomy and hostile jungle. In poorly-built boats, the force of some 300 soldados, 120 arcabuceros, a number of Negroes, "600 head of Indians, male and female," thirty horses, three priests, seven married and five unmarried women, set off down the rapid and broad Huallaga river.
Jealousies were rife from the start. The mere presence of the beautiful Doña Inés, the Gobernadór's private concern, quickly managed to exasperate the great majority who were travelling womanless. After enduring many hardships, believed by the growing anti-Ursúa faction to be of their leader's doing, the expedition reached the domain of the friendly Machiparo, who agreed to vacate some huts in order to accommodate the visitors. Here, Lope de Aguirre and his cronies made their move, stabbing Pedro de Ursúa and Juan de Vargas to death on New Year's Day, 1561.
Lope de Aguirre was a minor nobleman from the Basque country, and he had suffered considerable 'deprivation of privilege,' as he called it, both in Spain and in the New World. The sweltering heat of the Marañón basin, the mosquitoes, and the fevers all combined to increase his claustrophobic and paranoid tendencies. He did not believe in 'El Dorado,' the 'Land of the Omaguas,' or even the new supposed 'Kingdom of the Icá,' but wanted to use 'his' army, the Marañónes, for an assault on Peru. Instead of assuming outright leadership of the expedition, Lope de Aguirre and his myrmidons engaged in a farcical crowning of Hernando de Guzmán as 'Lord and Prince of Peru,' repudiating King Philip II's authority and drawing up documents to legalise the event. During the building of new boats, Doña Inés' excess of baggage led to her murder. The neurotic Lope de Aguirre began to see conspiracies everywhere and had even the slightest dissenter killed as well. It was still believed that the Marañón flowed northwards into the Mar del Norte [8], and it was decided to follow it - perhaps El Dorado could be found on the way - and then capture Nombre de Díos as a base for the eventual assault on Peru.
As the Marañónes moved on, the killings continued: garottings, hangings, shootings, stabbings, or a consigning to the murky waters where alligators and piranhas did the rest. Near the mouth of the Marañón fertile savannahs were encountered, and scouting parties reported that they could see 'gleaming white cities' and 'glowing furnaces' to the north [9]. These strengthened beliefs that fabulous civilisations were nearby. However, Lope de Aguirre dismissed such notions, more intent on revenge against the establishment in Peru.
Upon reaching the island of Margarita, the Marañónes lured the gobernadór into a trap and occupied Espiritu Santo. A plan to capture a nearby armed mission ship before it could raise the alarm misfired due to a number of desertions, and the entire Tierra Firme was put on armed alert for the tyrant. De Aguirre then embarked on a spree of murders, sackings and lootings, attempting to attach the remaining Marañónes irremediably to his cause. He also wrote a letter of quasi-apology to King Felipe II, explaining his actions, and asking for both understanding and justification thereof. The 200-strong 'army of the damned' crossed to Burburata [10] with a number of horses, ten captured artillery pieces, and ample ammunition and supplies, ready to march through Nueva Granada to Peru.
The Marañónes marched inland to Valencia, which they found deserted. Marching on to Barquisimeto, they found that deserted as well, but royalist vecinos ambushed and captured the Marañónes' baggage-train. De Aguirre now believed the end was nigh, and walled himself and his remaining Marañónes into their last fortress of Barquisimeto. The 'Men of the Marañón' saw no way out of their plight and there were more desertions - de Aguirre saw some of his most trusted lieutenants go over to the enemy.
On 27 October, 1561, the bloodthirsty tyrant Lope de Aguirre placed a crucifix in his daughter Elvira's hands and ran her and her waiting-woman through with his sword, "to preserve her from rape and outrage by the King's soldiers." Then a number of his former Marañónes arquebusiers broke into the house and shot him before he could incriminate them further to the Royal officials if he was captured alive. They cut off his head and carried it back to the Royal army, hoping that it would confirm their pardons [11].
They were wrong. The burning of churches, murder of friars, and the raping and butchering of the townspeople of Margarita were crimes against the King too hideous to be pardoned. With the exception of two or three, who returned to Peru and Nueva Granada and chronicled their adventures, the Marañónes were hunted down and executed, only a few managing to escape into the interior, perhaps still searching for the 'El Dorado' they were convinced did exist.
One of these survivor-chroniclers was Gonzálo de Zuñiga whose Relación muy verdadera de todo lo sucedido en el río del Marañón is the principal source of those misadventures. This and other writings confirmed that 'El Dorado' and the 'Land of the Omaguas' were not to be found on or along the great river Marañón, but that they lay somewhere to the north of it. And this was the view still held by one of the first gold-searchers: Gonzálo Jiménez de Quesada still craved the title of 'the Third Marquis' after Hernando Cortés and Francisco Pizarro.
In 1568, after occupying a number of largely honourary positions, de Quesada sought royal approval for a new expedition to conquer part of Los Llanos. He left Bogotá with a force of 1,300 soldiers, 1,500 Indian porters and 1,100 horses. They hunted in vain for three years before de Quesada decided to give up. All the Indian tribes he encountered spoke of a wealthy kingdom "Allá, más allá!" [12] - 'just beyond the next range.' But there never was anything of note just beyond the next range. When he arrived back in Bogotá, he brought with him 64 Spaniards, four Indian porters and eighteen horses. The financial loss of the expedition amounted to some 200,000 gold pesos. After brief frontier service he retired to Huesca in Spain with what he could salvage from his personal fortune. Here he wrote El Antijovío, a classic of conquístador literature.
But Gonzálo Jiménez de Quesada still believed El Dorado was out there, awaiting discovery.
So, for over three decades expeditions had tramped across the Cundinamarca region, the 'land of the condor,' from Ecuador to Venezuela and the coasts of Colombia. The cost - financially, materially and in human lives - had been enormous; the rewards practically nil.
Back in Peru, the elusive Inca bands were still a thorn in the side of the Spaniards. Against Titú Cusi Inca Friars Marcos and Diego bent their crusading steps, still trying to root out the supposed 'University of Idolatry.' When they attempted to 'exorcise' a sacred rock over an Inca spring, Frey Marcos was stoned out of the province, as the Incas were not happy with this abuse of hospitality. Frey Diego was allowed to remain because of his medical knowledge, but when he tried to cure Titú Inca of double pneumonia and failed, he was dubbed a murderer and killed.
The new and dynamic Viceroy, Don Francisco de Toledo, was considerably irritated by the independent Inca enclave on the edge of his new territory, and was also furious at the murder of Frey Diego. He determined to destroy the Incas once and for all, and in 1572 he marched against Vilcabamba [13] and its new Inca, Túpac Amarú, Manco's third son. Túpac Amarú was chased into the jungle, relentlessly hunted down, captured and brought back to Cuzco, along with the mummies of his father Manco and his brother Titú Cusi. He was granted Christian absolution in the plaza mayor and ceremoniously beheaded [14]. After forty years, Inca resistance to Spain was at an end.
In Bogotá in 1580, a wealthy merchant and skilled engineer, Antonío de Sepúlveda, sought and received royal approval to drain Lake Guatavitá. He had houses built along the shore and took soundings from a boat. Using a labour force of some 8,000 Indians he cut a great notch in the rim of the lake's surrounding rim. Through it, the water level dropped by about 61 feet before the cut collapsed, killing many workmen. The scheme was abandoned but some gold had been found: the share sent back to Spain included a staff covered with gold plaques and an emerald the size of a hen's egg [15]. De Sepúlveda returned to Bogotá with designs of a second attempt at Lake Guatavitá and perhaps another scheme at Lake Seicha. However, he died before he could mount another operation. His efforts inspired two later syndicates, in 1625 and 1677, to drain the lake, enjoying the same terms given to Sepúlveda. A few small items of gold were collected - but not enough to cover the venture's initial outlay.
But the 'Kingdom of El Dorado' had still not been found. By now the focus of attention had shifted away from Vilcabamba in Peru and the Marañón headwaters to the east, and was thought to be somewhere in the dim fastness of the Guianas, the large unmapped basin between the Orinoque and the Marañón/Amazon. And here it became the obsession and ultimate undoing of two more reputations.
Machu Picchu ('old peak'), 7,000 above sea level, invariably shrouded in the mists, well-served by an extensive system of aqueducts and fountains, and completely unknown to the Spaniards. Although in a fine position high above the Urubamba valley 'guarding' Cusco from the west, Machu Picchu was problably not a fortress but a ceremonial site, and evidence is strong that it may already have been deserted by the time the Spaniards arrived in Peru [see footnote 13]. Reasons for the place's desertion vary: a plague epidemic, being on the losing side in an Inca war of extermination, punishment for the defiling of a Sacred Sun Virgin (the putting to death of all inhabitants, livestock, animals, etc., of the town or locale). There is even a suggestion that Machu Picchu is/was a stargate or landing-strip for extra-terrestrials and that one day the inhabitants just left ....
Footnotes
- De Benalcásar's governorship of Quito was returned to him, following Gonzálo Pizarro's 'misdeeds,' and confirmed by the Crown. [return to text]
- Trajín - the arduous overland mule-train route between Panama and Nombre de Diós (and later Porto Belo), carrying the riches of Peru for trans-shipment to Spain, an area fraught with hostile Indian tribes and mutinous, runaway Black slaves. Later pirate-adventurers such as Charles Morgan and Bartholomew Sharp found them ready allies for raids on Panama. [return to text]
- Mar del Norte - the Atlantic Ocean, if one were in South America; or more particularly the Caribbean Sea. [return to text]
- Probably the snow-capped Tumac Humac range of the Guianas. [return to text]
- Now called Puerto Cabello. [return to text]
- Werner Herzog's film Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972, filmed on location) captured much of the paranoia of the ill-fated expedition, but ended with his 'army' slain around him whilst still on the Amazon, the eponymous villain (the perfectly-cast Klaus Kinski) contemplating his solitude and damnation. [return to text]
- Allá, más allá! - 'yonder, over there,' one of the first Spanish phrases picked up by South American Indians to get rid of the arrogant, domineering and greedy white men who rarely ever came as friends. [return to text]
- Debate is still ongoing as to both the identity and exact location of the Incas' last capital, known to the Spaniards as 'Vilcabamba,' somewhere in the province of that name. 16th Century chroniclers believed it was Vitcos, with its 'sacred rock.' For most of the 18th and 19th Centuries it was believed to be Choqqueqirau, 'Cradle of Gold' in Quechua, and some 10,000 feet up in the mountains (1768). Guided by local Indians, Hiram Bingham ventured high above the Urubamba river valley and stumbled upon the spectacular mountain-top Machu Picchu (1911), perennially shrouded in the mists from the roving Spaniards in the valley below. Further excavations convinced Bingham that Machu Picchu was both the first Inca capital of Tampu Tocco, and the last Inca capital of Vilcabamba. Gene Savoy believed Machu Picchu was more an 'isolated holy place' of the Incas, and ventured further into the steamy jungle of the Peruvian Andes, to a remote habitat called Espíritu Pampa (1964), by then overgrown and practically a ruin. Both Savoy's excavations, and British historian John Hemming's reinterpretation of the old Spanish Chronicles suggest Espíritu Pampa to have been the the last Inca capital of 'Vilcabamba.' [return to text]
- The Last Inca, Túpac Amarú, has enjoyed an almost romantic cult-hero status from many South Americans. In the late 1770s a series of Indian uprisings against the burden of tribute occurred throughout the Viceroyalty of Peru. One of these was led by José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a mestizo who proclaimed himself the 'Liberator' and took the Inca name of Túpac Amarú. The uprising against the Peninsulares and Criollos lasted two years (1780-1782), being suppressed only with great difficulty and after much bloodshed. Similarly, a Marxist urban guerrilla group in Uruguay adopted the name of the Last Inca, calling themselves Túpamaros (1967-1973). And more recently an epic five-months occupation of the Japanese embassy in Lima was carried out by an extremist 'native' Peruvian organisation calling itself ... Túpac Amarú. [return to text]
- Accounts vary on this find. Others refer to the emerald as being the 'size of an apple.' [return to text]
