David Grann - The Lost City of Z - A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

By a vast meandering river, Pizarro decided to split the surviving members of the party into two groups. While the majority continued to scour the shore with him, his second-in-command, Francisco de Orellana, took fifty-seven Spaniards and two slaves downriver on a boat they had built, in hopes of finding food. The Dominican friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who was with Orellana, wrote in his diary that some in the party were so weak that they crawled on all fours into the jungle. Many, Carvajal said, were “like mad men and did not possess sense.” Rather than return to find Pizarro and the rest of the expedition, Orellana and his men decided to continue down the massive river until, as Carvajal put it, they would “either die or see what there was along it.” Carvajal reported passing villages and coming under attack by thousands of Indians, including female Amazon warriors. During one assault, an arrow struck Carvajal in the eye and “went in as far as the hollow region.” On August 26, 1542, the men's boat was finally expelled into the Atlantic Ocean, and they became the first Europeans to travel the length of the Amazon.

It was both an incredible feat of exploration and a fiasco. When Pizarro discovered that Orellana had abandoned him, an act he considered mutiny, he was forced to turn back and try to retreat with his starving troops over the Andes. By the time he entered Quito in June 1542, only eighty men from his once-gallant army survived, and they were stripped almost naked. One person reportedly tried to offer Pizarro clothing, but the conquistador refused to look at him or anyone else, and simply went into his house and secluded himself.

Although Orellana went back to Spain, El Dorado still glimmered in his mind, and in 1545 it was his turn to pour all of his money into an expedition. Spanish authorities maintained that his fleet, with a crew of a few hundred people-including his wife-was unseaworthy and denied him permission to sail, but Orellana sneaked out of the harbor anyway. A plague soon swept through the crew, killing nearly a hundred people. Then a ship was lost at sea, with seventy-seven additional souls. Upon reaching the mouth of the Amazon and sailing barely a hundred leagues, fifty-seven more members of his crew perished from disease and hunger. Indians then attacked his ship, killing seventeen others. At last, Orellana collapsed on deck in a fever and muttered an order to retreat. His heart stopped, as if he could no longer bear the disappointment. His wife wrapped him in a Spanish flag and buried him on the banks of the Amazon, watching, in the words of one writer, “as the brown waters that had so long possessed his mind, now possessed his body.”

Still, the allure of this terrestrial paradise was too great to resist. In 1617, the Elizabethan poet and explorer Walter Raleigh, convinced that there was not only one gilded man but thousands of them, set out on a ship named the Destiny with his twenty-three-year-old son to locate what he called “more rich and bewtifull cities, more temples adorned with golden Images, more sepulchers filled with treasure, then either Cortéz found in Mexico or Pazzaro in Peru.” His son-“more desirous of honour than of safety,” as Raleigh put it-was promptly killed during a clash with the Spanish along the Orinoco River. In a letter to his wife, Raleigh wrote, “God knows, I never knew what sorrow meant till now… [M]y brains are broken.” Raleigh returned to England with no evidence of his kingdom, and was beheaded by King James in 1618. His skull was embalmed by his wife and occasionally displayed to visitors-a stark reminder that El Dorado was, if nothing else, lethal.

Other expeditions that searched for the kingdom descended into cannibalism. A survivor of a party in which two hundred and forty men died confessed, “Some, contrary to nature, ate human meat: one Christian was found cooking a quarter of a child together with some greens.” On hearing of three explorers who had roasted an Indian woman, Oviedo exclaimed, “Oh, diabolical plan! But they paid for their sin, for those three men never reappeared: God willed that there should be Indians who later ate them.”

Financial ruin, destitution, starvation, cannibalism, murder, death: these seemed to be the only real manifestations of El Dorado. As a chronicler said of several seekers, “They marched like madmen from place to place, until overcome by exhaustion and lack of strength they could no longer move from one side to the other, and they remained there, wherever this sad siren voice had summoned them, self-important, and dead.”

WHAT COULD FAWCETT learn from such madness?

By the early twentieth century, most historians and anthropologists had dismissed not just the existence of El Dorado but even most of what the conquistadores claimed to have witnessed during their journeys. Scholars believed these chronicles were products of fervid imaginations, and had been embellished to excuse to monarchs the disastrous nature of the expeditions-hence the mythological woman warriors.

Fawcett agreed that El Dorado, with its plethora of gold, was an “exaggerated romance,” but he was not ready to dismiss the chronicles altogether, or the possibility of an ancient Amazonian civilization. Carvajal, for instance, was a respected priest, and others in the expedition had affirmed his account. Even the Amazon warriors had some basis in reality, Fawcett thought, for he had encountered women chiefs along the Tapajós River. And if some details in the accounts were embellished, it did not mean that all of them were. Indeed, Fawcett viewed the chronicles as a generally accurate portrait of the Amazon before the European onslaught. And what the conquistadores described, in his opinion, was a revelation.

During Fawcett's era, the banks of the Amazon River and its major tributaries contained little more than small, scattered tribes. The conquistadores, however, uniformly reported vast and dense indigenous populations. Carvajal had noted that some places were so “thickly populated” that it was dangerous to sleep on land. (“All that night we continued to pass by numerous and very large villages, until the day came, when we had journeyed more than twenty leagues, for in order to get away from the inhabited country our companions did nothing but row, and the farther we went, the more thickly populated and the better did we find the land.”) When Orellana and his men went ashore, they saw “many roads” and “fine highways” leading into the interior, some of which were “like royal highways and wider.”

The accounts seemed to describe what Fawcett had seen, only on a grander scale. When the Spaniards invaded one village, Carvajal said, they discovered a “great quantity of maize (and there was also found great quantity of oats), from which the Indians make bread, and very good wine resembling beer, and this is to be had in great aplenty. There was found in this village a dispensing place for this wine, [a thing so unusual] that our companions were not a little delighted, and there was found a very good quality of cotton goods.” Villages overflowed with maniocs, yams, beans, and fish, and there were thousands of turtles cultivated in pens for food. The Amazon seemed to sustain large civilizations, and highly complex ones. The conquistadores observed “cities that glistened in white,” with temples, public squares, palisade walls, and exquisite artifacts. In one settlement, Carvajal wrote, “there was a villa in which there was a great deal of… plates and bowls and candelabra of this porcelain of the best that has ever been seen in the world.” He added that these objects were “all glazed and embellished with all colors, and so bright that they astonish, and, more than this, the drawings and paintings which they make on them are so accurately worked out that [one wonders how] with [only] natural skill they manufacture and decorate all these things [making them look just] like Roman [articles].”