![]() But the chronicler of Orellana’s journey, the Dominican priest Gaspar de Carvajal, reported that along the banks of the Amazon in one long section they passed numerous towns and cities including one so immense that there was hardly space to walk between houses for fifteen miles. Pizarro soon lost hope and retraced his steps back over the Andes, while Orellana, having little choice, followed the ever-widening river for thousands of miles to its mouth.Īfter a century or two men quit looking for the mythical El Dorado and lost interest in the “cinnamon trees,” which, it turned out, were only cousins of the money crop. ![]() When the expedition ran short of food, as all Amazon expeditions did, Pizarro sent one of his lieutenants, Francisco de Orellana, downriver in search of Indian villages that might provide corn. It began to unfold in early 1541 when the Spanish adventurer Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of the conqueror of the Incas in Peru, crossed the Andes into the valleys of the upper Amazon basin in search of the city of El Dorado, ruled by a king said to gild himself with gold dust, and of rumored forests of cinnamon, then one of the world’s leading money crops. The first navigation of the Amazon River by a European may properly be described as an accident. ![]() Aidan Monaghan/Amazon Studios/Bleecker StreetĬharlie Hunnam as Percy Fawcett and Tom Holland as Jack Fawcett in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, 2016 ![]()
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