From The Expedition to Mexico:

Governor Velazquez now spoke to Cortes. The islands of the Yucatan were rich and their inhabitants were 'highly civilized people with law and order and public places devoted to the administration of justice'. The land would obviously yield great wealth. The failure of Grijalva had been due, many said unfairly, to his craven attitude. This is where Cortes came in as one of the riches men in Cuba. A new expedition would make him a greater fortune, and make him famous. The governor would provide two or three ships if Cortes would find the rest of the money, and lead the army. Cortes saw his chance and agreed.

Cortes was expected to act within the law. The expedition was supposed to be a journey of discovery and modest trading; any Indians encountered were to be fairly treated, the women not abused. His instructions contain no hint that they expected to encounter a great empire. But Cortes knew he was entering lands occupied by civilized peoples with organized polities, and we must assume that his instructions left much unsaid: that Cortes and the governor had agreed that he might exceed their bounds, if and when the opportunity arose.

Governor Velasquez perhaps regarded the expedition as a holding operation, to stake a claim in the face of rival speculators. Cortes, though, may already have had a grander design. Perhaps he secretly planned a more ambitious operation to find the route west. We know that he remained fascinated by the passage to Japan, even after his conquest of Mexico. In the end, we simply cannot guess his imaginings. But he surely must have talked about the mysterious empire of Mexico which seemed to lie inland from the Isle of Sacrifices. He may even have devised a plan to go there without sharing all the information with the governor, whom he tolerated but may have disliked or mistrusted. At any rate, he was careful to form his own team, among them the charismatic Pedro de Alvarado, who had already been to the Yucatan; he was a man who, although rash and cruel, Cortes knew he could trust.

This might explain why Cortes invested his all in the expedition. The stakes were high and he acted as if he felt Fortune was running with him. He organized the expedition swiftly, borrowed funds from friends, purchased ships, supplies, bought rations and hired footloose young soldiers on the basis of a cut of the profits. The atmosphere of those days was like a gold rush, and in hardly a fortnight Cortes had two ships, a brigantine and 300 men.

This rang alarm bells with Velasquez and his family and supporters, who became concerned about the scale and success of Cortes's preparations. As part-funders of the enterprise, they now regretted giving Cortes control. For his part, Cortes began to worry that Velasquez would not keep his side of the bargain on the sharing of profits. Eventually Velasquez decided to remove Cortes as captain-general and issued orders that he should not be allowed to buy any more food and provisions. Cortes ignored this, and Velasquez then sent orders to relieve him of his command, but Cortes's brother-in-law killed the messenger and took the governor's papers to Cortes himself.

Alerted to Velasquez's plans, Cortes now moved fast. Having seized all the meat supplies in Santiago, he decided to set sail at daybreak on 18 February 1519. At the last minute, Velasquez hurried down to the quayside where he had an almost comic last exchange with Cortes, who was pulling away in a small boat: 'Come, come, my dear fellow [compadre], why are you setting off in this fashion? Is this a good way to say goodbye to me?' Cortes shouted back: 'Forgive me, but these things have all been thought about for some time before they were ordered. What are your orders now?'

Velasquez was too stunned to reply; Cortes gave the orders to sail.

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From Massacre in the Temple:

While Cortes was away on the coast, things came to a head in Mexico. We will never know whether, as the Spanish claimed, the Mexicans were planning an armed assault on the Spanish but, as we have seen, there are hints that they were trying to organize an alternative government and had raised an army of resistance. The Spanish mention no troubles, but one of the earliest and most interesting Aztec accounts - a brief set of annals, written in Tlatelolco, in the north of Mexico City, in 1528 - gives some crucial clues.

During the time Cortes was absent fighting Narvaez, Alvarado imprisoned two important leaders, including the military chief of Tlatelolco. He hanged another chief, and murdered the king of Nautla by shooting him with arrows and burning him alive. So the situation had already taken a turn for the worse when the time came for the great Aztec spring festival: 'That was why our warriors were on guard at the Eagle Gate. . . sentries from Tenochtitlan at one side; Tlatlolco on the other.'

In other words, the Aztecs were expecting trouble. But at Montezuma's specific request, according to the annals, the festival still went ahead. The Aztec annals, although laconic in the extreme, differ from the more detailed accounts in Spanish, and from the eye-witness reports gathered later by Father Sahagun. According to the Aztecs, the first day passed as normal: the idol of Huitzilopochti was made and dressed and the celebrants sang their songs without interference. It was on the second day that the Spanish struck:

They began to sing again but without warning they were all put to death.
The dancers and the singers were completely unarmed. They brought only their embroidered cloaks, their turquoises, their lip plugs, their necklaces, their clusters of heron feathers, their trinkets made of deer hooves. Those who played the drums, the old men, had brought their gourds of snuff and their timbrels.

The Spanish attacked the musicians first, slashing at their hands and faces until they had killed all of them. The singers - and even the spectators - were also killed. This slaughter in the Sacred Patio went on for three hours. Then the Spaniards burst into the rooms of the temple to kill the others: those who were carrying water, or bringing fodder for the horses, or grinding meal, or sweeping the floor. . .

Those are the bare facts, undisputed by either side. In the Florentine Codex account, which gives a report from an Aztec eye-witness who was present that day, there is an horrendous, agonizingly painful, and detailed description of the slaughter that triggered the Mexican uprising against Cortes. Through his words, we watch in slow motion as the camera turns from one horror to the next in the wide stuccoed courtyard: the sun beating down, the turquoise-blue and emerald-green feathers of quetzals and macaws, the gorgeous finery of the warriors, the flash of gold arm-rings, the liquid sheen of jade lip-plugs. The Spanish suddenly move forward in their armour, bearing their long swords of Toledo steel. The first Mexican victim, we are told, was a drummer. First his hands were severed, then his neck: 'Of some they slashed open their backs, then their entrails gushed out. Of some they cut their heads to pieces. . . Some they struck on the shoulders; they split openings. . . they split bodies open. . . '

Although the Mexicans had heard reports of what happened at Cholula, they had never seen Spanish swords at work first-hand. What was the meaning in this cutting of unarmed warriors? The Mexicans, for all their 'fierce and unnatural cruelty', as the Spanish describe it - and as we still tend to see them today - had very precise rules about the conduct of warfare, and very precise rules about violence to the human body. As their sacrificial ceremonies show, their cruelties were strictly controlled, ritualized. The idea of this kind of pre-emptive strike - a primitive massacre, like that at Cholula - was incredible to them, and the tone of the Aztec account is full of incredulity. For them, it was the Spanish who exhibited 'unnatural cruelty'.

The massacre in the temple is a key inciting moment in the tale: why did it happen? Did Alvarado panic? Obviously Cortes knew that Alvarado was impetuous - and, doubtless, in the way that calculating people are drawn to their opposites, this was why Cortes was drawn to Alvarado. Cortes must have left Alvarado with contingency plans, and these must have included the use of force if Alvarado believed they were threatened. But with that act of violence, the spell exerted by the bearded foreigners was broken. The upshot now was war: 'It was the twentieth day after Cortes left for the coast. . . We allowed the Captain to return to the city in peace. But on the following day we attacked him with all our might, and that was the beginning of the war. . . '

Cortes had returned on 25 June 1520. By 30 June, his situation was desperate. The causeways had been cut, the bridges taken away and the net had closed. The Spanish were now denied food supplies and there was an acute shortage of drinking water. With growing terror, they found themselves imprisoned in the heart of the City of Dreams.

What happened next on the Aztec side is shrouded in mystery, but we have to assume that, in secret rituals, they stripped Montezuma of the power of tlatoani, and appointed a successor - something which had never happened before in Aztec history. Did Cortes know this before he took his next step? We do not know, but he now forced Montezuma to speak to the crowds from the rooftop to try and pacify them. But, having already lost his power, Montezuma was forced to duck back under a hail of missiles.

The Spanish later claimed that Montezuma was wounded and later died of his injuries. But, hurt or not, when he was taken back to the palace, it seems clear that the Great Speaker was now understood by Cortes to have lost all his power and was, therefore, of no further use to the Spanish. The other captive nobles were also considered to be an encumbrance who should not be allowed to go free. That night, as the crowd roared outside, Cortes conferred with his captains and decided that Montezuma should be killed. Then, according to Father Sahagun's Aztec informants, he 'garrotted all the nobles he had in power'. The bodies were thrown off the roof into the courtyard below.

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In November 1524, Pizarro and his partner Almagro made their first voyage with eighty men and four horses. It was not a success: they only got a short way below the isthmus of Panama, as far south as the aptly named 'Port of Hunger'. Almagro lost an eye in a skirmish; no riches were found and the landscape, with its intractable mangrove swamps along a coast plagued by insects, deterred any idea of colonization. On their return they had some difficulty in persuading backers to finance a further attempt.

Still, on 10 March 1526 in Panama, Pizarro and Almagro drew up a formal business contract. Their second voyage, from November 1526 to late 1527, was a much bigger affair, with 160 men and several horses carried in two ships. After some initial probing, they split up: Almagro went back to Panama for reinforcements and supplies; Pizarro camped by the San Juan river in Colombia; the pilot, Ruiz, sailed on, crossing the Equator for the first time. Then, suddenly, came the first contact with people from another civilization.

A brisk northerly was gusting down the coast when Ruiz encountered a large balsa trading raft with a huge triangular cotton sail. On board were twenty crew and passengers (see illustrations page 111). Such ocean-going rafts, with a cabin, and deck space for cargo, were still used in these waters up to the early nineteenth century. The raft was on a trading mission to barter Inca artifacts for corals and crimson spondylus shells. The Spanish boarded and, to their delight, saw:

. . . many pieces of silver and gold. . . belts, bracelets, body armour, clusters of beads and precious stones, rattles and strings. . . mirrors decorated with silver, cups and other vessels; there were many wool and cotton mantles and tunics, and other pieces of dyed clothing. . . different kinds of figured embroidery depicting birds, animals, fish and trees. There were small stones in bead bags, emeralds, chalcedonies and other jewels and pieces of crystal and resin.

Ruiz returned to Pizarro with his prisoners and their trade goods, and then ferried him and his troops onwards to explore the coast of Ecuador. But, by the middle of 1527, the expedition had again separated, and the initial expectations raised by the treasures on the raft were long forgotten. By now, Pizarro's men had grown sick of the promises of their craggy leader, and he found himself, with his army, camped on an uninhabited island, just off the steamy mangrove coast of Colombia. Mutiny was in the air. And this was the turning point in the story and, indeed, a turning point in history. The place was called Isla del Gallo, 'Isle of the Cock'.

Today, you get to the island from the little port of Tumaco on the Pacific coast of Colombia - a down-at-heel sort of a place, subject to the floods and storms of El Nino, with many dirt streets, and ramshackle wooden houses built on stilts over the sea. It rains most of the year here, on a population now mainly black - descendents of slaves brought over when the native Indian peoples died of disease. The island is close to the shore on the northern side of the bay, washed by the warm brown swell of the Pacific, and frequently shrouded in mist. Situated almost dead on the Equator, it is uninhabited except for seasonal fishermen who will take you out there in fishing boats and land you under a creeper-hung cliff.

On this leashore, away from the Pacific breakers, a ragged band of desperados camped - just eighty left. Their leader, Francisco Pizarro, was now approaching fifty and had seen better days, his face bearded, sunburnt and gaunt like the rest of his men. In some he inspired great loyalty: 'the bravest man I ever met,' said one. He always took the lead, fished and hunted to feed his men, and went through all the hardships they endured, and more. Behind his twinkling eyes, though, was a cool calculating man who had already evaluated the societies of the Americas, and learned the technical and ideological skills needed to survive as a conquistador.

Pizarro was practised in deception and had the capacity to be unflinchingly cruel. He had personally tortured and burnt alive chiefs in Panama to make them give up their possessions. 'Perpetrating cruelties on the Indians,' said one historian of the time, 'was a habit Pizarro knew off by heart - he'd used it for years.' There is no mystery about Francisco Pizarro. He knew the world, and knew himself, before he ever set foot in Peru.

But at that moment, he had reached the end of the line. His starving men were eating snakes and shellfish. Two or three were dying of disease every week; others were on the edge of mutiny. He had promised them a world beyond - a world where they could make their fortunes. But most of these men, recruited in Panama, no longer believed in his dreams. Some had already smuggled a message out with Ruiz's boat which had left them there: a message pleading to be rescued. Pizarro, they claimed, was a lunatic, a 'butcher' who insisted on them hanging on in this hellish place.

The message reached Panama and, at the end of August 1527, the governor ordered the rescue of any men who wished to get out. When the boat arrived, a memorable scene ensued. Pizarro took his sword and drew a line in the sand: 'Comrades and friends, on that side lies the part which represents death, hardship, hunger, nakedness and abandonment; this side here represents comfort. Here you return to Panama - to be poor! There you may go on to Peru - to be rich. You choose which best becomes you as brave Spaniards.'

Only thirteen - the famous 'glorious thirteen', all of whose names are known - crossed the line. But the historian Cieza de Leon has a different take on this epic scene on the beach: he was a young soldier at the time and talked to some of those present. This is what they told him:

Pizarro was downcast when he saw they all wanted to go. He quietly composed himself and said that of course they could return to Panama and the choice was theirs. He had not wanted them to leave because they would have their reward if and when they discovered a good land. As for himself, he felt that returning poor to Panama was a harder thing than staying to face death and hardship here. And he told them one thing more. He took satisfaction in one thing: if they had all gone through hardships and starvation, he had shared it with them: indeed he had always gone first. Therefore he begged them to re-examine and re-examine their options, and to follow him, taking a sea route to discover what lay beyond. After all, the Indians that the pilot Ruiz had seized said such marvellous things about the land ahead.

Most of the troops, says Cieza de Leon, did not want to hear his words and abandoned their friends, 'weeping with joy as if this had ended the captivity of Egypt'. According to him, the thirteen who stayed 'did so out of compassion for Pizarro', or because they did not wish to go back to Panama. As he prepared to leave, the ship's captain refused a request to leave them a small boat. However, he agreed to drop Pizarro and the thirteen on another island which they knew from earlier in the voyage. They named it Gorgona (the Isle of the Gorgon), after the snake-headed monster of Greek myth.

The captain sailed in close enough to drop Pizarro and the thirteen into the surf, pausing only to unload the maize rations he had agreed to leave them, dumping the provisions loose on the sand, where some were spoiled and rotted. Pizarro made a last request: he wanted the Indians, whom Ruiz had captured, to stay with him so that they could be trained as his interpreters. After an argument, the captain reluctantly agreed, and cast them ashore before pulling away and sailing off over the horizon. Effectively they were marooned. What on earth had Pizarro hoped to do?

'Those who have actually seen Gorgona, as I have,' says Cieza de Leon, 'will not be surprised at how much stress I lay on the what the Spaniards went through. It is a vision of hell. The rain, thunder and lightning are continuous. The sun is rarely seen. There are enough mosquitoes to wage war on all the armies of the Grand Turk.'

But, apart from the many dangerous snakes, it was safe. When the clouds lift, which is not often, it can be a magical place, covered with lush tropical forests, although it is hot and very humid, and has almost continuous rainfall. And it was large enough to sustain them. Six miles long, it has an abundance of fresh water, and, although there are no big mammals, there are many small animals: monkeys, lizards, bats, and birds. An hour's walk through the forest from the shore, there is a little lake containing freshwater turtles, and in the breeding season sea-turtles some ashore to bury their eggs on the beaches. Unlike the Isla del Gallo, the Spaniards could survive here.

Up on the lonely northern edge on the landward side is a cove still called 'Pizarro's beach'. Here they made huts of leaves and wood to keep off the incessant rain and just about managed to survive. Feeling entirely responsible for having hitched the thirteen to his dreams, Pizarro took it upon himself to go out every day and make sure his men had food to eat. He made a canoe from a fallen kapok tree and went hunting for capybaras, the island's largest rodents, with his crossbow.

For seven months, Pizarro and his thirteen companions lived like castaways, while he dreamed of lands of gold far to the south - lands unknown to the rest of the world, which were described to him by the Indian men and women who had stayed with him on the island.

And, in the middle of the night, as Pizarro heard the breakers roll out in the Pacific, the Inca ruler of those vast lands to the south slept with his beautiful coyas, his queens, unaware of the strangers on the edge of his world, lying on their beds of palm fronds and seaweed under the stars by the roar of the Southern Sea.

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Journey into the Interior

The next stage of our journey was to follow in Pizarro's footsteps. Ahead of us was 1000 miles of Inca road to Cusco - and, beyond this, more travelling still across deserts, up glaciers and through trackless jungles in search of the conquest of the Incas. And this was just part of the astonishing series of journeys which led the Spanish, in a few years, into the forests of Colombia and Venezuela, over the High Andes of Peru into Amazonia, and as far south as the Rio Maule in Chile. Never in history has knowledge of the world expanded so fast, by sea and land.

So, on 16 May 1532, Pizarro left Tumbes. The diary by his secretary, Xerez, gives us an eye-witness account, and his route can still be followed, along the Inca road to the south - parallel lines of stones covered in windblown sand, which weave in and out of the old Pan-American Highway: 'We were astonished to see the extent of their road system,' says Xerez, 'well-paved footways crossing the whole country.'

Pizarro's route has never been accurately pinned down, but we now know that the main Inca Royal Road from Quito to Chile came down the coast, through Tumbes, and crossed the Chira river, close to where Pizarro founded the little town of San Miguel. The Spanish crossed the river at this point and slept on the south side. They marched for three days to the Piura valley, and then turned in towards the mountains, sending an exploratory foray up into the Andes. There, for the first time, they say the Inca terrace-systems all the way up the mountainsides, wonderfully maintained. Coming from barren Estremadura, an austere land of swineherds, they were taken aback by 'the vast productivity of the land. . . We were amazed to see what an orderly state it was,' says Xerez, 'and also to see evidence of such rationality in the Indians.'

The news had spread that the bearded strangers no longer had peaceful intentions, and there was fighting - resistance from the local leaders. Meanwhile, all the way, 'every day, every hour' almost, the Inca Atahuallpa received reports about their progress; he knew exactly what they were doing, but the war with his brother Huascar occupied all his attention. Although he debated with his leaders whether they should divert to attack the foreigners, all judged Huascar the greater threat. The Spaniards, after all, were only 160 men. It is, indeed, astonishing to think how small Pizarro's army was: sixty-two horsemen and 102 foot, to attack an empire of at least five million, and perhaps as many as ten million. But he had deadly weapons - the latest technology: guns and mechanical crossbows. And he had that other priceless asset in war - fearlessness.

Through his interpreters, Pizarro interrogated the locals. He knew about the bitter civil war which had rocked the empire, and news now came that the new Inca, Atahuallpa, was only a few days away in northern Peru. For Pizarro, this was crucial news. Cortes had exploited internal dissensions to conquer the Aztecs; perhaps he could do the same. In fact, he, too, gathered Indian allies during this march because many of the regional peoples in Peru were hostile to Inca rule, especially in the north where it had been only recently imposed. So Pizarro was now marching with a force of Bronze Age warriors, their clubs and spears and feathered headdresses contrasting with Spanish lances and steel helmets.

About 300 miles south of Tumbes, they arrived at a place where the plain narrows, between sea and hills, and the Andes begin to loom up on the left. On 6 November, they stopped 'at the foot of the mountains' where the road divided. Here, a minor path left the main road and ascended into the mountains. Pizarro's local guides told him that this was the direct route to Cajamarca, some twenty leagues (sixty miles) away, but it crossed passes at high altitude. There was some argument over what to do next, but Pizarro was adamant that they should go this way. He wanted to get to the Inca Atahuallpa as fast as he could.

On 8 November, Pizarro's small army left the plain and started its ascent of the Andes on a narrow made-up road. 'Sometimes the ground was so steep,' says Xerez, 'that the path was the only place where an ascent could be made.'

More and more breathless as the altitude affected them, they climbed up to Paucal, where there is a fantastic view down to the Pacific coast; just beyond the crest, they camped for the night at a large Inca-fortified tambo, an ancient staging post, which, although now in ruins, still stands in these beautiful hills. Next day, they continued along the Inca path, which still runs through San Miguel de Palaques, and found themselves marching over bare hills at over 10,000 feet. Still it rose, till they crossed the watershed of the Andes over freezing windswept uplands at 13,500 feet. But, to their surprise and relief, the Incas had left the passes undefended.

The altitude made some of Pizarro's men sick, and the place was also unexpectedly cold. Used to the equatorial heat of the plains, they were wearing the light, quilted, cotton armour developed in Panama, and found the conditions at altitude trying - especially after nightfall when the temperature drops sharply: 'The cold in these mountains is so intense after the heat of the valley that we had to kindle fires at night, and we slept in cotton tents we brought with us.'

At night, their minds were whirling with stories about what lay ahead, and many of them were now very nervous. It was as if Atahuallpa were allowing them to go on. . . as if he had decided - like a spider in a web - to let the strangers come to him. But Pizarro spurned them on: 'It was not appropriate to show fear,' he said, 'and still less to think of turning back. . . '

Finally, late on 14 November 1532, after a seven-day hike over the mountains, the Spanish came out over the valley of Cajamarca and gazed down on the town below. Atahuallpa was still there. Beyond the town, they could see an immense camp and the smoke of thousands of fires - and the Inca army, with its vast assembly of servants, bearers, and hangers-on.

As dusk fell, 'the camp fires of the enemy were a fearful sight. . . ' Anxiously, the Spanish soldiers tried to guess the number of their enemies: 'There seemed to us to be upwards of 30,000 men in the camp outside the town,' they said. 'Few of us slept that night, we just talked about what we should do. All were full of fear, for we were so few, and so deep into the land, with no hope of rescue.'

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. . . The discovery of the interior of Amazonia, the existence and course of the longest and greatest river on earth, as the great sixteenth-century historian Oviedo said, was entered into by accident. The tale takes us back to Quito in the 1530s and 1540s. It was from here that the Spanish mounted a series of expeditions into the interior of South America, over the Andes into Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, journeys that surpass most other land explorations in history. These began even before the conquest of Peru in the early 1530s, and led to the discovery of the gold-rich tribes of southern Colombia.

By the end of the 1530s, rumours of new lands of gold were rife. Somewhere, the explorers thought, in an as yet unlocated kingdom, the astonishing treasure trove of Peru would be repeatable. These tales now crystallized around a beautiful and haunting legend - El Dorado: the Golden Man. . . .

In the Emerald Forest

The Coca is a beautiful river. It turns east and south in a great curve as it threads the gorges and rushes from the Andes foothills. From the last of these you can see an immense flat horizon, green forest stretching like an ocean, shading in the far distance into a blue haze. Even with their limited geographical knowledge, the Spaniards understood at once that this stretched all the way to the Atlantic, that the Coca was, as Cieza de Leon says, 'an arm of the sweet sea' (Mar Dulce, the Amazon). But what lay in between? And how far was it? No one knew, as they had few good instruments and no means of calculating longitude. The sun and stars gave them rough directions, but essentially they had only the vaguest idea where they were.

For the next two weeks, they marched down along the left bank of the Coca, 'pushing on down river', Gonzalo Pizzaro says, 'through thick forest, hacking with axes and machetes, and often it was impossible to get the horses through. . . ' The river widened out: 'a beautiful and abundantly flowing river', over a hundred yards wide, with long sandbars and a glittering strand of whitened boulders along the northern shore where the current races down from the mountains, surging over rapids, ice-blue and cold.

Today, the landscape is sparsely inhabited, just a few isolated Runa, Quechua speakers. The chief sensation on the early part of the journey is provided by the wonderful green forest, blue river, and immense skies - pale china-blue in the mornings, daffodil yellow in the heat of the afternoon, with towering piles of dazzling white cloud. It was all very exhilarating for us, especially at first light and in the early hours before the sun rose over the forest tops and the heat of the day began. But for Gonzalo Pizarro there were no compensations in the view. Fording creeks and swamps, never getting dry, his progress was painfully slow. And here was still no sign of El Dorado. . .

By early October, seven months after they had left Quito, they were demoralized. The weather had improved a little (the best months here, although not free of rain, are from October to December), but by now nearly all of Gonzalo Pizarro's 4000 native bearers were dead, and many of his men were too sick to move. Decision time had come. Should he go back or go on? By now, they had passed the last rapids along the Upper Coca, and the river was 'wide, gentle and deep flowing'. So he stopped, made camp on a high bluff, safe from sudden rises in the river, and decided to build a boat.

With a boat he could carry the tools and heavy gear, ferry the sick and wounded, and fight off the Indian canoeists who were now beginning to trouble his men with their hit-and-run attacks, shooting arrows from the safety of the river. These were probably ancestors of the Cofanes tribes who were once widespread along the foothills of the Andes. Implacable resistors of conquistadors, gold-hunters and missionaries alike, there are now only a few hundred survivors to the north of here on the Aguarico river. But they are a people who, in the twenty-first century, have preserved shreds of their noble culture in their language, textiles and traditions.

So, through October, the Spanish stayed at their camp on that high bluff, surviving on fish, by killing and eating the last of their hogs and any sick horses, and by making forays into the jungle to plunder fruit and roots from isolated native settlements. Meanwhile, using wood from the forest, Gonzalo Pizzaro's carpenters set about making a brigantine (or pinnace). The boat was about twenty-six feet long, with an eight-foot beam, and a two foot draught. It would have carried twenty men comfortably, even more at a pinch.

They named the place where it was built El Barco (The Boat), and luckily this is recorded in a 1570's document as Barco: 'the place where Gonzalo Pizarro built his boat'. It is now San Sebastian, which is situated just below a gorge where the Coca river flows through a narrow passage between cliffs of brown rock, only ten or twelve miles above the junction of the Coca with the Napo.

When the boat was ready, Gonzalo Pizarro put twenty-five of his sick men on board, plus the heavy gear and tools. The boat was christened San Pedro, and they set sail on the Coca on 9 November 1541.

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It was, however, a gloomy Christmas, and there was (one infers) much murmuring against the leadership. Next day, Boxing Day, matters came to a head. Starvation had now set in. Unaware of what was edible in the forest, the force of 200-300 men, with their remaining camp-followers, was like a plague of hungry locusts; for all Gonzalo Pizarro's famed expertise as a soldier, they had rapidly whittled away all their supplies and started to kill and eat their dogs and horses. And El Dorado was nowhere to be seen.

Christmas was made even more miserable by news from their native guides that a vast uninhabited region lay ahead - where no food whatsoever would be found. It was Gonzalo Pizarro's nightmare come true. What to do next? This is when the one-eyed Francisco Orellana enters the tale. . .

From The Expedition Splits

It was the beginning of one of the most famous dramas in the story of the conquest. As told by Gonzalo Pizarro, the conversation went like this:

Orellana told me he had questioned the guides I had placed in his charge so that he might get better information about the country beyond (as he had nothing to do since I looked after the fighting) and he told me that the guides had said that the uninhabited region was a vast one and that no food whatsoever was to be had this side of a spot where another great river joined up with the one down which we were proceeding; and that from this junction, one day's journey up the other river, there was an abundant supply of food.

Orellana now offered to take the brigantine and go on ahead, using oars and sails - that is, at good speed - to reconnoitre the land ahead, and see if there were inhabited areas with supplies. Gonzalo Pizarro says he agreed with this. . . .

Orellana left on Boxing Day with fifty-seven Spaniards, two African slaves, four or five crossbows, three arquebuses, a supply of powder, spare ammunition and some native canoes. Gonzalo Pizarro had thought that 'within ten or twelve days he would rejoin the expeditionary force'. But very soon, within three days, according to Orellana, it was obvious from the speed of the river that he could never get back as he had promised. As it happens, Orellana had a diary kept of what followed, written up by the expedition priest Father Carvajal (it is one of the most gripping eye-witness narratives from the New World) and, in it, we can read how he justified his decision:

We soon realized it was impossible to go back. We talked over our situation (seeing we were already nearly dead from hunger) and we chose what seemed to us the lesser of two evils. . . trusting to God to get us out, to go on and follow the river: we would either die or get to see what lay along it.

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To The Sea

During early June, Orellana moved down the main stream, eastwards from the junction with the Negro. Allowing for the river's twists and turns, they guessed they had gone about 1000 leagues (over 3000 miles) from El Barco (a pardonable over-estimate).

On 13 June, Orellana passed the mouth of another huge river which he called Madeira - 'river of wood' - after the immense islands of floating timber that kept passing them by. Then they entered a more temperate region, where the landscape began to change from the interminable jungle they had observed thus far. To the left, low heights began to open out, then hills, and reddish cliffs. Where this starts to happen - fifty miles beyond the Madeira - is still over 500 miles from the sea, but they began to get their first intimations of the presence of Europeans. The native people hereabouts said they had heard of white-skinned ones living in the hinterland - and this may have been true. They could have been survivors of the expedition of Diego Ordaz, who had investigated the mouths of the Amazon ten years before and lost one of his ships with a large number of people, including women, on board.

In the lower Amazon were countless villages whose populations grew maize, cassava and cane. These peoples knew of the depredations of the Europeans on the coast, and Orellana's men had to fight all the way - sometimes nightmarish battles against poisoned arrows. Among these battles was one on 24 June, which everyone had cause to remember. They were attacked by natives, including a dozen pale-skinned women with braided hair, who were experts with longbows and copper-tipped arrows. Real-life Amazons, if we are to believe the diary of the expedition.

Badly shaken, they made camp close to the Tapajoz river to make repairs to the San Pedro and heighten its bulwarks as a protection against arrows. They were now living on herons, iguanas, monkeys, sloths, and fish. And here, for the first time, they noticed the rise and fall of the tide, although - amazingly - they were still 300 miles from the sea. Their hopes raised, they sailed on. Then, on the left bank, they saw a line of flat-topped blue hills. This was the Sierra de Almeirin, which rises about 800 feet above the river and runs for ninety miles along its north bank.

By now, they had all lost sense of the distance they had covered, reckoning they had gone 1600 leagues (about 5000 miles) since the split with Gonzalo Pizarro. At last, they passed into the labyrinth of islands in the Amazon mouth. The sea was near now, and they had to give thought to what they would do when they reached it. They may have got all the way down the great river - but how could they get home?

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The Spanish become Healers

What Cabeza de Vaca chooses to record of his adventures - and what he does not say - constitutes the great riddle of his text. But in one area, though, he allows us a detailed glance. It was first of all on the island 'that the Indians tried to make us into medicine men or healers'. This moment is one of the inciting incidents in his inner journey: a key part of the process by which Cabeza de Vaca came to see things the Indian way, although it was obviously understood by him in Christian terms as he shaped his remarkable story into a book eight years later:

It was on that island that they tried to make us into medicine men, without examining us or asking for our credentials: for they cure illnesses by blowing on the sick person, and by blowing, and use of their hands, they cast the illness out of him; and they ordered us to do the same and to be of some use. We laughed at it, saying it was a joke, and that we did not know how to heal, and because of this they stopped giving us food, until we did as they had told us. And seeing our resistance, one Indian said to me that I did not know what I was talking about when I said that his knowledge would be no use to me - for [he said] stones and other things that grow in the fields have virtue, and by using a hot stone and passing it over the stomach he could take away pain; and we, who were superior men, surely had greater virtue and power than that.

It is, of course, a fantastic moment in this encounter with the Other. Like those first exchanges on the shore of Peru (told on page 119), this is another conversation in which the 500 years separating us are simply erased: 'At last we were under such pressure that we had to do it, without fear that we would be held up to scorn for it. . . ' (Remember that Cabeza de Vaca is excusing himself here to his readers in Spain, many years later.)

He then goes on to describe the Indian methods of healing, including not only their rituals, but also their practical medical interventions, such as cutting (with a sharpened bone or shell blade) and simple forms of cauterization by fire, 'which I have tried with good results,' he adds. He continues:

The way we cured was by making the sign of the cross over them, and blowing on them, and reciting a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria, and then we would pray as best we could to God our Lord to give them health and inspire them to give us good treatment. And God out Lord, and His mercy, willed that as soon as we had done this, all those for whom we had prayed, told the others that they were well and healthy. . .

So the themes of the odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca are laid out. The poor Karankawas on the Isle of Misfortune give us the signs by which we are meant to read the inner map of the tail - the journey that Cabeza de Vaca made to encounter and understand what it is like to be the Other. Such stories of healing happen too often in his accounts for us to disbelieve them - indeed, as we shall see, they are attested independently by four or five widely separated testimonies recounted by Indians to other Spanish expeditions over the next twenty years. No question, then, that these things happened. As for their meaning, this no doubt lies in the realms of the psychology of healing - and of belief. As far as we know, during his years on or near the Texas coast, Cabeza de Vaca remained a Christian - at least, that is how he presents the story. As far as the Indians were concerned, of course, to separate the world of spirits and the world of perceptible reality was not a meaningful division. The hidden world for them - as it still is for many surviving North American peoples - is palpable and always liable to break in on the present. For them, the spiritual life is life, and everything in the waking world is conditioned by it. To them, it was quite natural that a receptive person such as Cabeza de Vaca might be able to heal, and hence they asked him to do so.

At first, the Spaniard says he does not know how, and uses his Christian techniques of prayer in a true believer's way. It was the beginning of a long, strange and fruitful intermingling of Christian and indigenous religion in these parts. The tale, then, is extraordinary, but neither unnatural nor unbelievable. And it is noteworthy that, at the very end of his account, recollecting these events in the tranquillity of Spain, Cabeza de Vaca - as if in rebuke to those who wrote about Indian 'idolatry' - says simply, that 'in all the thousands of leagues I travelled, I never saw idolatry: for there is none among the Indians'. It is one of the most astonishing statements made by a European in the entire Age of Discovery.

Cabeza de Vaca could now speak the Karankawas' language and began to reconcile himself to a life among the Indians, far away from the Christian world. In the early days he was kept as a slave, working for his hosts. In the spring, he collected birds' eggs on the shore; sometimes he crossed to the mainland to kill a few deer or buffalo, saving the skins for clothing. Eventually, though, he could face their cruel existence no longer, and used his knowledge of their contacts to leave the island and move into the interior where the people treated him more kindly. For the next few years he lived among semi-nomadic Coahuiltecan Indians, trading for them, bartering seashells and coral with the people of the coast.

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