Pedro de Ursua started in boats down the Huallaga to the Marañon, and so on to the neighborhood of Machiparo. At this point, on New Year’s day, 1561, conspirators murdered Ursua, threw off allegiance to Spain, and made Fernando de Guzman their sovereign. One Lope de Aguirre was the leader of the insurrection, and it was not long before Guzman paid the penalty of his life in turn, and Aguirre became supreme. The conspirators went on to the mouth of the Negro, but from this point authorities differ as to their course. Humboldt and Southey supposed they still kept to the Amazon until they reached the sea. Acuña, Simon, Acosta, and among the moderns Markham, suppose they ascended the Negro, crossed by the Cassiquiari canal to the Orinoco, and so passed on to the ocean; or if not by this route, by some of the rivers of Guiana. Mr. Markham[1572] balances the testimony. Once on the ocean, at whatever point, Aguirre steered his vessels for the north and west till they came to the island of Margarita, then colonized by the Spanish. Having seized this settlement, Aguirre led his followers across the intervening waters to Venezuela, with the aim of invading and conquering New Granada; but in due time a Spanish force led by Gutierrez de la Peña confronted the traitor and his host, and overthrew them. Many of Aguirre’s men had deserted him; when killing his own daughter, that she might not survive to be stigmatized as a traitor’s child, he was set upon and despatched by his conquerors.
The earliest account of the expedition of Ursua and Aguirre is a manuscript in the Royal library at Madrid written by one of the company, Francisco Vasquez, who remained with Aguirre under protest till he reached Margarita. Vasquez’s story was a main dependence of Pedro Simon, in the sixth of the Primera parte de las Noticias historiales de las Conquistas de Tierra Firme en las Indias Occidentales, published at Cuenca in 1627. Simon, who was born in Spain in 1574, had come to Bogotá in 1604, in time to glean much from men still living. After many years of gathering notes, he began to write his book in 1623. Only one part, which included the affairs of Venezuela and the expedition of Ursua and Aguirre, was printed. Two other parts are in existence; and Colonel J. Acosta, in his Compendio histórico del descubrimiento y colonizacion de la Nueva Granada en el siglo décimo sexto, published at Paris in 1848, made use of them, and says they are the most valuable recital of the sixteenth century in existence which relates to these regions.[1573] The account of Simon, so far as it relates to the expedition of Ursua, has been translated by William Bollaert, and properly annotated by Mr. Markham; it constitutes the volume published by the Hakluyt Society in 1861, called The Expedition of Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre in search of Eldorado and Omagua in 1560-1561. It has a map which marks the alternative courses of Aguirre.[1574]
CASTELLANOS.
A fac-simile of the portrait in his Elegias, p. 10.
The main dependence of Simon, besides the manuscript of Vasquez, was a metrical chronicle by Juan de Castellanos, Elegias de Varones ilustres de Indias, the first part of which, containing, besides the accounts of Ursua and Aguirre, the exploits of Columbus, Ponce de Leon, Garay, and others, was printed at Madrid in 1589.[1575] De Bry makes use of this versified narrative in the eighth part of his Grand Voyages. Castellanos’ first part is reprinted in the Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1847-1850, where are also to be found the second and third parts, printed there for the first time. The text is there edited by Buenaventura Carlos Aribau. Ercilla has recorded his opinion of the faithfulness of Castellanos, but Colonel Acosta thinks him inexact. These second and third parts recount the adventures of the Germans in their search for Eldorado, and record the conquests of Cartagena by Lugo, of Popayan by Belalcazar, and of Antischia. A fourth part, which gave the conquest of New Granada, though used by Piedrahita, is no longer known.
Castellanos could well have derived his information, as he doubtless did, from men who had made part of the exploits which he celebrates; and as regards the mad pranks of Aguirre, such is also the case with another contemporary account, preserved in the National Library at Madrid, which was written by Toribio de Ortiguera, who was at Nombre de Dios in 1561, and sent forces against Aguirre when that conspirator was on his Venezuela raid. The story written from the survivors’ recitals does not materially differ from that of Vasquez. He gives also a short account of the expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro and Orellana, later to be mentioned.
Lucas Fernandez Piedrahita was a native of Bogotá, and, like Garcilasso de la Vega, had the blood of the Incas in his veins. He became a priest, and was successively Bishop of Santa Martha and of Panamá, and after having lived a life of asceticism, and been at one time a captive of the buccaneers, he died at Panamá in 1688, at the age of seventy. He depended chiefly in his Historia General de las Conquistas del nuevo Reyno de Granada,[1576] on the Compendio of Ximenes de Quesada, no longer known, the Elegias of Castellanos, and the Noticia of Simon. He borrows liberally from Simon, and says but little of Aguirre till he lands in Venezuela. Aguirre’s career in the Historia de la Conquista y poblacion de Venezuela of Oviedo y Baños is in like manner condensed from Simon, and is confined also to his final invasion of the main. The book is rare, and Markham says that in 1861 even the British Museum had no copy.[1577] The general historians, De la Vega, Herrera, and Acosta, give but scant accounts of the Ursua expedition. Markham[1578] points out the purely imaginative additions given to Aguirre’s story in Gomberville’s translation of Acuña, misleading thereby not a few later writers. Much the same incorrectness characterizes the recitals in the Viage of the Ulloas, in Velasco’s Historia de Quito (1789).
The faithlessness of Orellana and his fifty followers in deserting Gonzalo Pizarro in 1540, while this leader was exploring the forests of the Cinnamon country, is told in another place. Orellana, as has been said, was sent forward in an improvised bark to secure food for Pizarro’s famished followers, but was tempted to pursue the phantom of golden discovery. This impulse led him to follow the course of the river to the sea. It gave him the distinction of being the discoverer of the weary course of the great Amazon. In his intercourse with some of the river Indians he heard or professed to hear of a tribe of women warriors whom it was easy, in recognition of the classic story, to name the Amazons. At one of the native villages on the river the deserters built themselves a stancher craft than they had escaped in; and so they sailed on in a pair of adventurous barks, fighting their way past hostile villages, and repelling attacks of canoes, or bartering with such of the Indians as were more peaceful. In one of the fights, when Orellana landed his men for the conflict, it is affirmed that women led the native horde. From a prisoner they got signs which they interpreted to mean that they were now in the region of the female warriors, and not far from all the fabled wealth of which they were in search. But the marks of the tide on the banks lured them on with the hope of nearing the sea. They soon got unmistakable signs of the great water, and then began to prepare their frail crafts for encountering its perils. They made sails of their cloaks. On the 26th of August they passed into the Atlantic. They had left the spot where the river Napo flows into the Amazon on the last day of December, 1541; and now, after a voyage of nearly eight months, they spread their sails and followed the coast northward. The vessels parted company one night, but they reached the island of Cubagua within two days of each other. Here they found a Spanish colony, and Orellana was not long in finding a passage to Spain. The story he had to tell was a thrilling one for ears eager for adventure, and a joyous one for such as listened for the tales of wealth. Orellana might be trusted to entrap both sorts of listeners.