‘Women Fighting as Ten Men’

Carvajal went on to describe the driving force behind those bold Indians. ‘We saw women fighting in front of the men as women captains. These women are white and tall, with their long hair braided and wound about their heads. They are robust and, with their bows and arrows in their hands, are doing as much fighting as ten men.’

Whether the explorers’ sighting of women warriors was real or, as one source puts it, “merely a mirage born of jungle fever” is unknown. But according to at least some accounts, by the time Orellana and Carvajal reached the mouth of the massive river and sailed into the Atlantic Ocean, they believed they had glimpsed the New World’s version of the Amazons, the fierce female warriors described in Greek mythology.a

Friar Carvajal preserved the tale of the American Amazons for posterity by including it in his eyewitness account of Orellana’s eight-month-long expedition. Captain Orellana, for his part, sailed to Spain, where he gave a vivid account of his journey along what he romantically called the Río de las Amazonas, or Amazon River. Before long, 16th-century cartographers were scratching a fresh name across the budding map of South America—the Amazon. So the Amazon forest became shrouded in myth, but now that forest is plagued with realities.