The Wrath of God

The Wrath of God

Often when I’m researching a book project, I come across intriguing ancillary stories that aren’t necessarily germane to the central narrative I’m writing at the time but are compelling nonetheless. Sometimes, as is the case with The Wrath of God, the story never really leaves me. I wake up in the middle of the night and jot down some cryptic reminder in my notebook, adding—“Damn, that would be a good book.” Then I fall back into fitful slumber and forget about it … until the story haunts me again later …

During my research for River of Darkness, I happened onto one of the more bizarre and macabre episodes of the Spanish forays into the so-called “New World” during their period of empire expansion. I wanted to share this ghastly episode with you, a story that was immortalized, in its weird way, by Werner Herzog in his 1972 “epic historical drama” Aguirre: The Wrath of God.¹

I was equally repulsed and mesmerized by the story when I first encountered it, and have deliberated writing a book about it. The story illustrates the lengths to which power hungry leaders will go to either seize or remain in power. It’s a story as old as history itself, and I think one that, sadly, still resonates today.

Let me know in the comments section below if it’s a book you’d be willing to read.

Here’s the short (ish) version:

In the wake of Orellana’s discoveries, over the next fifty years, two significant follow-up expeditions in search of El Dorado took place, one in 1560 under Spaniard Pedro de Ursua aimed at finding and colonizing the rich lands of the Machiparo and Omagua that Orellana had found, and the other in 1595, by Sir Walter Raleigh himself. Raleigh’s voyage later officially heralded the death of the El Dorado myth. I will try to tell that one in a subsequent installment.

The Pedro de Ursua venture came less than twenty years after Orellana’s historic descent of the Amazon. The new expedition was fueled by Orellana’s story, then fully ignited when Spanish colonists in Chachapoyas, an Amazon headwater river settlement in the northeast of Peru, witnessed the arrival of 200 to 300 Indians who had traveled more than 1,500 miles to reach the outpost—on foot at first, and afterward in their canoes, paddling upstream on theAmazon, the Maranon, and finally the Huallaga. They said they had fled to escape the Portuguese now encroaching on their lands from the Atlantic coast of the Amazon. Their journey of migration had consumed ten years.

The Indians, probably Tupinambs, described in similar terms the very lands that Orellana had passed through: “They emphasized thevariety and multitude of the tribes they had encountered, and particularlythe wealth of the province called Omagua.” The Spanish reports added thatthe arriving nomadic Tupinambs spoke of “the inestimable value of the[Omagua’s] riches, and the vastness of their trading.”

Those enticing descriptions, echoing as they did Orellana’s and his scribe Friar Carvajal’s narratives, were all the Spanish King needed to finance yet another assault on El Dorado, though now he began referring to it as a place, a province of “Omagua and Dorado.” The Gilded One, a person, had morphed into a golden place.

It did not take long for Pedro de Ursua, the man chosen to lead this foray, to recruit and assemble 370 Spanish mercenaries to go along, ruffians and vagabonds and civil war veterans who had sat idle for the decade when expeditions had been banned. With thirty horses, this motley crew, and a few thousand conscripted Andean bearers, the Ursa-Aguirre expedition, as it came to be known,would be almost equal in size to that of Pizarro-Orellana. From its very beginning, it would be an unequivocal, unmitigated catastrophe that would ultimately devolve into utter pathos and horror, the darkest of theAmazonian annals. (Which begs the question: Why do I like such stories??)

The untested Ursua turned out to be a tragically incompetent leader prone to disastrous decisions. His two biggest blunders were bringing along his mestizo mistress, Ines de Atienza (plus a dozen other women guaranteed to cause fighting among the men), and the inclusion of a paranoid, maniacal Basque named Lope de Aguirre who believed he would one day soon conquer and rule all of Peru. In fairness to Ursua, neither he nor anyone else could have known or predicted the impending behavior of Aguirre, who turned out to be a full-scale psychopath, a man who began his Amazonian voyage insane and deteriorated from there.

Aboutforty-five years of age, Aguirre had been in Peru for more than twenty years and had participated in the civil wars, fighting against Gonzalo Pizarro’s rebellion, but for all his efforts receiving nothing but a missing hand and two bullet wounds in his leg that left him lame. Aguirre took with him his beloved and desirable sixteen-year-old daughter, Elvira, over whom he doted and kept armed guards.

In September 1560, after trekking through dense mountains and cloud forest, the expedition embarked in three large transport boats and a flotilla of canoes, first down the Huallaga, which farther downstream becomes the Maranon. Ursua’s personal transport barge was built with a cover, like a houseboat, to comfort and accommodate his stunningly beautiful Ines—said by all accounts to be among the most beautiful womenever seen in Peru. But the bulky construction made this boat awkward, heavy, and prone to running aground, and all the transport craft leaked and ultimately failed.

For seven weeks and 750 miles they worked downriver, passing the mouth of the Ucayali, the headwaters of which constitute the origin of the Amazon in official calculations of its length. They sailed past the confluence of the Napo, where Orellana had met the main Amazon, and arrived eventually in Machiparo’s domain, which, just as Orellana had said, was organized and well populated and rich with resources such as turtle farms. But the long-sought El Dorado was nowhere to be found.

By now, half-crazed by salt deficiency, the incessant rains, and swarms of black flies and mosquitoes, Aguirre had planned a coup and enlisted a dozen other mutinous soldiers.

On New Year’s Day 1561, at a small Machiparan village called Mocomoco, Aguirre and his murderous band silently attacked Royal Governor Pedro Ursua in his hammock, running him through with daggers and killing a brave officer who tried to save him. The conspirators then formed their own sort of river government, installing a man named Fernando Guzman as the expedition’s general and giving Aguirre the title of Camp Master. The next day, when they officially signed their new governmental papers—which they eventually presented, and which survive in the Archives of the Indies in Seville—Aguirre defiantly inscribed, “Lope de Aguirre: TRAITOR” on the formal “informacion” explaining his actions, which he fully intended to be read by his king.

From here on, Aguirre led a bloodstained retracing of Orellana’s journey. Reduced to one boat, much as the Pizarro-Orellana expedition had been with the original San Pedro, Aguirre and Guzman moved downriver—some hacking overland along the tangled shores, the others in the leaking craft—dragging a sorry train of weakened bearers and useless horses with them. Just as Pizarro and Orellana had discovered, horses were ill-suited to dense jungle travel, and Aguirre slaughtered them all, consuming the meat and using the hides for clothing. There remained now some two hundred people on the expedition, who would never make it out on foot with only one vessel; the decision was made to build two more. The search for El Dorado had once again devolved into a struggle for survival.

Deep in the Amazon, as the group labored on the new boats, Aguirre’s delusional fantasy of ruling Peru reached fever pitch. Before witnesses, he and Guzman drew up yet another bizarre paper, this one naming Fernando Guzman “Prince of Peru,” which Aguirre celebrated by kissing the hand of his new prince as he lay in a hammock attended by mock pages, who cooled him with feather fans. The new Prince Fernando also took to sleeping with the gorgeous Dona Ines, causing jealousy throughout the camp.

The goal of settling “Omagua and Dorado” having been abandoned, the insane plan was now to finish the boats, sail the remaining length of the Amazon, march overland across Venezuela, then cross the Andes to claim Peru.

By early April 1561, the two new and larger boats were completed, so they continued slowly descending the mighty river. But soon Aguirre snapped completely, deciding that he must lead. He persuaded a corps of forty trusted infantrymen to rally behind him, convincing himself and them that they must kill all “gentlemen or persons of quality.”

Over the next few months Aguirre and his armed henchmen went on a killing spree, stealthily and in cold blood murdering more than a hundred people, strangling them in their hammocks, slitting their throats, or stabbing them repeatedly as they pleaded for mercy and forgiveness. It was ghoulish and gruesome bloodletting.

Among the first to be slain was the lovely Ines, who was stripped of her jewelry and fine clothes, no doubt raped, then impaled with more than twenty sword thrusts. Shortly afterward, Aguirre fell upon Prince Fernando in his own quarters, shooting him with a harquebus and finishing the deed with a sword. Aguirre now proclaimed his blood-slaked crew of forty “Men of the Amazon,” and himself “the Wrath of God.”

Aguirre and the remainder of his select grisly crew continued downriver, stopping only for food raids and rest. Unlike Orellana and Carvajal, they made no notes or observations about the river and its inhabitants, focusing only on trying to get out—which they just managed.

In early July 1561 they reached the mouth of the Amazon and the Sweetwater Sea and, precisely as Orellana had done, caught the strong coastal current that drove them along the shores of Guiana. By July 21, nearly a year after the expedition for El Dorado and Omagua had departed, Aguirre and his horsehide-covered crews arrived on the island of Margarita, where the rogue tyrants promptly murdered its governor and took over the island.

The Wrath of God was short-lived. Aguirre and his rebels sailed to mainland Venezuela and commenced their overland march. By now, however, many of his own men, back in Christian civilization, in fear of the megalomaniac Aguirre and perhaps realizing the sinful error of their ways, deserted whenever they could, stealing off into the night. And, apprised now of the bloody takeover on Margarita, a royal army had been dispatched to overtake and capture or kill the self-proclaimed traitor Aguirre and his rebels.

When he realized that the end was near, in October 1561, Lope de Aguirre wrote a letter to King Philip (who had been Prince Philip during Orellana’s journey), a now-famous, seething missive in which he boasted about the people he had murdered, then closed with dire warnings about the fool’s errand that attempts to settle the Amazon had become:

This river has a course of over two thousand leagues of fresh water . . . And God only knows how we ever escaped out of that fearful lake. I advise thee not to send any Spanish fleet up this ill-omened river, for, on the faith of a Christian, I swear to thee, O king and lord, that if a hundred thousand men should go up, not one would escape, and there is nothing else to expect, especially for the adventurers from Spain.

Shortly after writing this letter, Aguirre prepared to continue his overland flight across Venezuela, but the royalist force had hemmed him in, and most of his men had by now deserted. Alone in his tent now with only his daughter Elvira, he heard the arrival of the authorities.

Convinced that they would rape her, and exclaiming that he wished to spare her the shame of being called the daughter of a traitor, Aguirre palmed a crucifix into the unfortunate girl’s hand and stabbed her to death with his sword. A few moments later, the royalists stormed in and fired two fatal harquebus shots into Aguirre’s chest. They beheaded the traitor Aguirre, quartered his corpse, and carried back his tyrannical head on display in an iron cage.

So, the second complete transcontinental navigation of the Amazon Basin—this one mostly retracing Orellana’s original voyage, though starting at a place farther south in the Andes—had been accomplished.

Aguirre’s horrific trip, which has been called the “most appalling in the annals of Spanish enterprise,” confirmed much of what Orellana witnessed and reported, especially concerning the prosperity and complexity of the Omagua peoples, though the shocking nature of the Aguirre journey and his despicable actions offered Spain nothing to celebrate or even make public. For much of history, this psycho-tragic chapter of Spain’s conquest narrative remained little known.

I don’t know. Perhaps it should stay that way. You tell me.

1. This might be of some interest. Herzog's film