Buddy Levy · 2011 · river

Buddy Levy's account of the first descent of the Amazon, 1541 to 1542. Sent downriver from a starving expedition to fetch food, Orellana found the current would not let him return - and came out at the Atlantic eight months and two and a half thousand miles later, having crossed a continent by accident.

1. 1
   Quito

   February 1541, and Gonzalo Pizarro leaves with two hundred and twenty Spaniards, four thousand Andean porters and two thousand pigs to find the Land of Cinnamon east of the Andes - which does not exist.

2. 2
   Coca

   Over the cordillera and down into the rainforest, and the expedition starving - so a brigantine is built and Francisco de Orellana sent downstream with sixty men to find food and come back.

3. 3
   The Napo

   The current takes them and they cannot return against it - which Orellana's enemies later called desertion and his chaplain Carvajal called simple hydraulics, and which is the argument the whole voyage rests on.

4. 4
   The Amazon

   Into the main river, and a scale nobody in Europe had a category for - villages miles long on the banks, pottery, roads inland, and a population Carvajal describes that later travellers found gone.

5. 5
   The Tapajos

   The stretch where they are attacked by warriors led by women - which Carvajal reports and which gives the river its name, though he never claims they were anything other than local.

6. 6
   Belem

   August 1542, and the mouth: two thousand five hundred miles in eight months, in boats built with no forge, no nails and no pitch, by men who had set out to fetch supplies for somebody else.

7. 7
   Cubagua

   Up the coast to the pearl island off Venezuela and the first Spanish settlement they meet - and the beginning of an argument about whether Orellana was an explorer or a traitor that outlived him.