The first descent of the Amazon, read from both sides: Carvajal's relación and Gonzalo Pizarro's letter of accusation
The first navigation of the Amazon is usually told as Orellana's adventure. Two documents printed together in 1894 let it be read from both sides: the Dominican Gaspar de Carvajal's eyewitness relación, which describes riverbanks so densely settled that the boats could not land, and Gonzalo Pizarro's letter to the King of 3 September 1542, which calls the same voyage a desertion. This object quotes both, and says what neither of them settles.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the first Amazon descent run on a fixed track: Orellana, the Amazons, and a sentence about how the river got its name. Two things are almost never quoted, and both are here from the sheets. The first is what Carvajal actually reports about population — towns half a league apart, roads running inland, large settlements "blanqueando" two leagues from the bank, and a hundred and fifty leagues of river the party could not land on — which is the passage Amazonian archaeology now argues over, given in his words with its status as single-witness testimony stated rather than hidden. The second is Gonzalo Pizarro's letter of 3 September 1542, printed in the same volume, which calls the voyage a desertion and cruelty worse than infidels', so the counterpoint comes from a contemporary rather than from editorial balance. The entry then does what the popular accounts do not: it names the question the two documents cannot answer between them, and says which famous episode it did not open.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The narrative source for the voyage is a relación written by a man who was in the boats. Its own heading, as printed in the 1894 edition, describes it as the "Relación que escribió Fr. Gaspar de Carvajal, fraile de la Orden de Santo Domingo de Guzmán, del nuevo descubrimiento del famoso río grande que descubrió por muy gran ventura el Capitán Francisco de Orellana desde su nacimiento hasta salir á la mar, con cincuenta y siete hombres que trajo consigo y se echó á su aventura por el dicho río, y por el nombre del capitán que le descubrió se llamó el Río de Orellana". The text opens by explaining where the party came from: Orellana was "capitán y teniente de gobernador de la ciudad de Sanctiago" and of the Villa Nueva de Puerto Viejo in Peru, and went up to Quito to join the search for the land where cinnamon was made, which Gonzalo Pizarro had come to govern.
The claim in the relación that has aged best, and that Amazonian archaeology has spent the last four decades reopening, is about population. Carvajal writes that along one stretch "no distaba un pueblo de otro distancia de media legua, y menos en toda aquella banda del río de la mano diestra, que es de la banda del sur", and adds "y más digo, que la tierra adentro, á dos leguas, y más, y á menos, parecían muy grandes ciudades que estaban blanqueando". This object reports that as testimony, not as a finding: it is one interested eyewitness, writing to justify a voyage that needed justifying, and nothing read here corroborates it. What makes it worth quoting is that the report is specific and falsifiable — spacing, distance inland, the whiteness of the structures — rather than a rhetorical flourish about a rich land.
The same density is described from the other end, as an obstacle. Of the province the party called Sant Juan, Carvajal writes that it ran a hundred and fifty leagues, "todas las cuales pasamos con mucho trabajo de hambre, dejando aparte la guerra, porque, como era muy poblada, no hubo lugar de saltar en tierra", with piraguas and canoes following the brigantines the whole way and attacking when they chose. Inland from the night camp beyond it "había mucho poblado y caminos que entraban á ella" — roads, not just villages. A river bank that a European party could not land on for a hundred and fifty leagues is a statement about the people on it.
The cost is on the same pages as the description, in the narrator's own words. At one village the fighting lasted half an hour and the Indians killed Antonio de Carranza, natural de Burgos, inside the large brigantine with an arrow whose poison took him twenty-four hours to kill; the party then "tomó el pueblo y recogimos todo el maíz que cupo en los bergantines", which is to say they fed themselves by taking the food of the towns they passed. At another, offered trade goods floated out in a gourd to buy peace, the Indians "tuviéronlo en tan poco que hacían burla de ello" and drove the boats off anyway. Carvajal was hit in the face — "me dieron un flechazo por un ojo que pasó la flecha á la otra parte, de la cual herida he perdido el ojo" — and wrote the account one-eyed.
The counterpoint is not a modern historian's; it is the commander's, and it was printed in the same volume. Gonzalo Pizarro wrote to Charles V from Tomebamba on 3 September 1542 that, the camp starving before a great uninhabited stretch, Orellana had proposed to go ahead for food with the brigantine, the canoes and sixty men and to be back "dentro de diez ó doce días"; that he gave him the boats on that promise; and that Orellana, "no mirando á lo que debía al servicio de V. M.", "en lugar de traer la comida, se fué por el río sin dejar ningún proveimiento", carrying away "todos los arcabuces y ballestas y municiones y herrajes de todo el real" and "usando con todo el real de la mayor crueldad que infieles ningunos usaran". The men he left behind, he writes, were reduced to eating "cogollos de bihaos y algunos cuescos que hallaban por el suelo que caían de los árboles".
What the two documents establish jointly is narrower than either claims alone, and this object stops there. Both agree that Orellana left the main camp with a brigantine and about sixty men to look for food, and that he did not come back. They do not agree, and nothing read here decides, whether returning upstream against that current was possible — the question on which the charge of desertion turns. Pizarro is the losing party of a jurisdictional quarrel writing to the sovereign who would judge it, and Carvajal sailed with the man accused; each is an interested witness against the other. Any confident verdict on Orellana's conduct rests on evidence outside the two sources opened for this entry.
Two limits are stated rather than left implicit. First, the name: the relación's own heading says the river "se llamó el Río de Orellana", while the 1894 volume is titled Descubrimiento del río de las Amazonas and its running heads read RÍO DE LAS AMAZONAS. The episode that produced the second name — the reported fight with women warriors — is NOT among the pages opened for this object, and no claim is made here about whether it happened, what was seen, or what it was worth. Second, the motive: Pizarro states plainly that he went because caciques and Spaniards agreed that the province of la Canela and the Laguna del Dorado was "tierra muy poblada y muy rica". The voyage that produced the first description of the Amazon was a by-product of a failed treasure hunt, not a survey.
The provenance of the text should travel with the quotations. Carvajal's relación reaches this instance through José Toribio Medina's edition printed at Seville by E. Rasco in 1894, whose title page describes what it publishes as "la relación hasta ahora inédita de Fr. Gaspar de Carvajal" — that is, a manuscript first put into type three and a half centuries after the events it reports, at that distance from any hand of the author's, and no sixteenth-century printing of it was reachable from this instance. Pizarro's letter is better anchored: the volume's footnote gives its archival signature in the Archivo General de Indias, Patronato, estante 1.º, cajón 1.º, legajo 1/6, núm. 2, ramo 11, and records that Marcos Jiménez de la Espada had published it in 1892. Quotations here follow the 1894 sheets.