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Updated: July 23, 2025
The river was named after Orellana, but, from reports he made of the existence of a tribe of female warriors, was afterwards known as the river of the Amazons. The author spread reports of another El Dorado to the north, in which the roofs of the temples were covered with gold. This report afterwards led to the disastrous expedition of Sir Walter Raleigh to Guiana.
According to his story, it was far richer in gold than Peru. The name El Dorado, "The Golden," was given to this fabled country; and for a score or more of years after Orellana had told his story, efforts were made to find it. Expedition after expedition set out in search of El Dorado.
The voyage of the latter was one of the most remarkable on record. Orellana was a lieutenant of Gonzalo Pizarro, Governor of Quito, and accompanied the latter in an adventurous journey which he undertook across the easternmost chain of the Andes, down into the sweltering valley of the Napo, in search of the land of El Dorado, or the Gilded King.
Rodrigo de Orellana, and many of the citizens, who now joined the rebels, acted merely from fear of losing their lives if they refused or even hesitated, though loyal subjects in their hearts. Immediately after the murder of Hinojosa, intelligence was sent in various directions of the insurrection, and great numbers of malcontents flocked to the city of La Plata to join the rebels.
He will have under him more golden towns and nations than the King of Spain, the Sultan of the Turks, and no matter what Emperor!" We have already spoken of the fables which Orellana had invented in 1539, and which had been the fruitful source of more than one legend.
It bore prickly, heart-shaped pods an inch long, filled with seeds coated with a red waxy pulp. This was a famous plant Bixa Orellana, Roucou; and that pulp was the well-known Arnotta dye of commerce. In England and Holland it is used merely, I believe, to colour cheeses; but in the Spanish Main, to colour human beings.
Yet must the Niger yield very considerably to the Missouri and Orellana, those stupendous rivers of the new world. But it appears at least as great as any of those which water the old continents. There can rank with it only the Nile, and the Yang-tse-Kiang, or Great River of China.
He thinks of the great deep, and of those who go down unto it; of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance, or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells, and the mariner For many a day, and many a dreadful night, Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape;
Which is also by others called Maranon, although Andrew Thevet doth affirm that between Maranon and Amazons there are 120 leagues; but sure it is that those rivers have one head and beginning, and the Maranon, which Thevet describeth, is but a branch of Amazons or Orellana, of which I will speak more in another place.
Father Charlevoix's portrait appears to us somewhat too black, and he does not seem to estimate at its true value the great discovery which we owe to Cavelier de la Sale; a discovery, which has nothing like it, we do not say equal to it, except that of the river Amazon, by Orellana, in the 16th century, and that of the Congo, by Stanley, in the 19th.
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