About Amazonia
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Early Explorers in Amaz⌠nia

America was discovered in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, a Genoese explorer employed by the Spanish crown to find a proposed new sea route to Asia. However, Columbus spent most of his time in the Caribbean and Central America, and never ventured into South American coastline. The person generally credited with the discovery of Brazil was a Portuguese explorer called Pedro ┴lvares Cabral who accidentally landed in Brazil in 1500 on a voyage from Portugal, around the African continent to India.

However, it is thought that several other Europeans visited Brazil before Cabral. In 1499 a Spaniard called Vicente Yß±ez Pinz≤n was sailing along the South American coast when he discovered the outlet of a large river flowing into the sea – this is possibly the first ever sighting of the Amazon by Europeans. Pinz≤n was amazed to find that the force of the river water was so great that nearby seawater remained fresh enough to drink for many miles from the coast (today we know that the waters of the Amazon river continue for about 100km before finally mixing with the surrounding seawater).

Despite these discoveries, exploration of Amaz⌠nia didn't begin until more than 40 years later – with Francisco de Orellana's epic journey across the Andes and down the river from Quito in Ecuador.

The First Expeditions

After their conquests of Central America and Peru, the Spanish conquistadors heard rumours about another rich empire, El Dorado, across the Andes. This rumour also spoke of great forests containing trees of cinnamon and other exotic spices. The opportunity to discover more gold and spices (once worth almost as much as gold), encouraged an expedition across the Andes into Amaz⌠nia in 1541. The expedition was led by a Spaniard called Gonzalo Pizarro (brother of Francisco Pizarro, who had conquered the Inca Empire in Peru). The expedition found no trace of El Dorado, few spices, and eventually began to run out of food. Hungry and tired from attacks by local Indian tribes, Pizarro dispatched his lieutenant, Francisco de Orellana, and some men to set off downriver (the Napo River, in Ecuador) to search of food. By the time that they finally found food, a week later, Orellana and his men realised that the current of the river had been so swift that it had carried them a distance over 1200 km. They estimated that the return journey, travelling against the current, was likely to take several months – by which time, Pizarro would have left and Orellana's expedition would have run out of food. Instead, Orellana and his men (knowing that the river must eventually flow into the sea) decided to continue downriver then to set sail for the Spanish colony on the island of Cubagua, off the coast of Venezuela. No one realised how far they had to travel. Because the Napo river flows into the Amazon, the adventurers journeyed all the way across South America before finally reaching the Atlantic. This journey took them eight months, during which they had to continuously fight off Indian attacks, forage for food, and repair their boats. On this voyage they reported encountering a fierce Indian tribe of women warriors, and this is how the Amazon river got its name.

The next European expedition down the Amazon was a bloodthirsty rampage by an insane Spaniard, Lope de Aguirre, in 1560.

Early Explorers and the First Settlements

After the conquests of the New World, Europeans soon set about further exploration to learn more about and colonise their new possessions. There was also the business of establishing trade between the New World and the Old. The first explorers and settlers were Spanish and Portuguese, thanks partly to the Treaty of Tordesillas which granted most of the New World to Spain, with a tiny portion ceded to Portugal. Other European countries tried to establish colonies along the Amazon, but were driven off by the Portuguese in the River Wars. It was during this period that Portugal got to claim most of Amaz⌠nia (and most of modern-day Brazil), as a result of adventurers such as Pedro de Teixeira.

The earliest settlements along the Amazon were Missions established by the Jesuits. These were intended convert the Indians to Christianity, and to teach them European ways of society and agriculture. However, they also stripped the Indians of their native customs and language. The next wave of settlement brought many more colonists, and was even worse for the Indians.

Settlement meant more contact with the Indians – and more conflicts over land and resources. The Europeans colonists wanted to develop the land, but their plantations required a lot of labour for planting and harvesting. The colonists planned to use the local Indians to work on their farms, but the Indians preferred their traditional forest life to the hard toil of plantation work. For the Indians, life on a plantation often meant exposure to European cruelty and prejudice, disease, and possible starvation because many of the farming methods used by the Europeans simply did not work in Amaz⌠nia's tropical climate.

Because they refused to leave their villages willingly, the only way that the colonists could get Indians to work for them was often by force, taking Indians as slaves. Slaving missions came to be known as "descents" because European slavers would usually travel upriver from BelΘm, attack an Indian village, then bring the survivors (including women and children) back downriver where they would be "resettled" and required to work on colonists' plantations or as house-servants. In many cases, the slavers were the first Europeans that the Indians ever saw. Having heard stories about and witnessing their cruelty, the Indians were often very hostile to settlers – and there was a long series of wars between the colonists and many Indian tribes. Ironically, it was Indians from other tribes (and sometimes even from the same tribe) that helped the Europeans to attack Indian villages.

In other cases, European visited Indian tribes telling them about European friendship and technological wonders. There were even grand decrees which supposedly guaranteed equal rights to the Indians along with all the benefits of European society. When the Indians moved to villages (called aldeiras) built specially for them by the Europeans, they found themselves being ruled over by tyrannical army officers, forced to work on nearby plantations, and dying from diseases.

Other settlers obtained labour for their plantations by importing slaves from Africa. Although more expensive than using Indians, African slaves were better at plantation work because they were less likely to get sick, they were harder working, and had no home in the forest to run back to if they escaped.