How they escaped the dangers of rocks, whirlpools and savage Indians; how they found considerable settlements of natives, and at length reached the mouth of the river, and taking ship arrived at the Court of Spain needs not to be related here. Orellana received considerable honour at the hand of the Spanish Sovereign, with command over the territory he had discovered.
The unfortunate Gonzalo and his companions, thus left starving in the Amazon forest, suffered many vicissitudes and many lost their lives. They were forced to return to Quito without having reached any El Dorado of their dreams. The backward journey was one of the most terrible in the early history of America, and out of all that great band which set forth with such high hopes only about eighty Spaniards and half that number of Indians returned to tell the tale—little over a hundred haggard adventurers, who, falling down on the floor of the cathedral, rendered thanks to heaven for their own escape from the terrors of the Amazon wilds.
Thus ended the first expedition to the Amazon.
It was Orellana who gave the river its name. On his dangerous journey adown the current, his band fought with what they believed to be an army of women-warriors, or Amazonas, who rushing from the depths of the forest, attacked the white men, but who, in reality, were only wild Indians in loose cotton chemises or shirts flying in the breeze. There is no legend here of an empire of women.
That the Amazon could be navigated was again shown later by Pedro de Texeira, who, with his companions, performed the great feat of ascending from the mouth of the river up to Quito, and returning thence—a marvellous voyage for that period.
The River Napo, by which the Spaniards first entered upon the main stream of the Amazon (there was an earlier exploration of the mouth of the river in Brazil), is but one of many great navigable tributaries which traverse the territories of those nations—Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil—which lies partly within the region. Many thousands of miles of such navigable waterways intersect it, some of them very little known or used.
We may gain an idea of the size of the region drained by the Amazon by noting that it covers four-tenths of the entire area of South America. Yet less than a hundred square miles of it is cultivated, and its "population"—if the term may be used for the bands of savage or semi-savage Indians that dwell there and the few white settlements—number perhaps half of that of the city of London: a few million souls, who are lost in this immensity of forest, jungle and river.
The chief obstacles to travel and development in the valley are the broken or flooded nature of the country, the impenetrable forests, through which, except off the few trails, the traveller has to hack his way by means of the machete, wielded by his Indians. The heavy rains, the mosquitoes and the malaria, the unreliability of the natives. Dangers from wild beasts have been exaggerated. The worst of these is the mosquito! The forests are not teeming with beasts of prey, although they are to be met with. Often the traveller may pursue his way for vast distances without seeing any living creature, and he must not depend upon game for any particular addition to his larder, for there is little, in many regions. Food must be carried, and the matter of transport is one of the most serious obstacles. Without adequate supplies the traveller will starve, and leave his bones in the dismal forest, as has befallen many an adventurer here.
Except by actual travel no adequate idea of the Amazon forests can be obtained: of their alternating gloom and splendour, of their superabundant vegetation, of the impenetrable ramparts of their dense foliage and matted trunks. The forest is the largest area of virgin woodlands on the face of the globe, extending back from the Atlantic seaboard to the slopes of the Andes for more than 2,500 miles, and ranging in breadth from 200 miles on the coast, at the mouth of the river or in Brazil to 900 miles between Venezuela and Bolivia.