Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/76

62 than that of maintaining himself, and might in the end consider that he had done well if he escaped with his life. All their horses perished, and also the Indians; and the condition of the miserable remnant of the troop when it appeared again, on the tableland of Quito, after two years' absence, is thus described by the contemporary Augustin de Zarate, who came to Peru in 1543 as royal treasurer: "All, the General as well as the officers and men, were nearly naked, their clothes having been rotted by the constant rains and torn besides, so that their only covering consisted of the skins of animals worn in front and behind, and a few caps of the same material. . . . Their swords were without sheaths, and all eaten up with rust. Their feet were bare and wounded by thorns and roots, and they were so wan and wasted that one could no longer recognize them. . . . They threw themselves upon the food with so much eagerness that they had to be held back and to be gradually accustomed to the taking of it." Such was the ending of the campaign to the cinnamon country.

It would be unjust to hold Gonzalo Pizarro responsible for this failure. The numerous rivers in these forest wildernesses are the only highways practicable to man, and his plan was from the beginning to use for his further movements one of the tributaries of the Amazon—that is, one of the streams issuing from the eastern slopes of the Andes; of the existence of the Amazon itself, as well as of its magnitude, he had no knowledge. For this purpose he had ordered his lieutenant, Francisco de Orellana (a native of