River of Darkness Quotes

“According to Friar Carvajal, who watched the gruesome battle with an arrow sticking from his side, these Indians had more than just their homes to defend; they were fighting as the subjects, and allies, of the Amazons. For what Carvajal and the others witnessed next was mystifying. Amid the throng of warriors there appeared ten or twelve extremely tall women warriors, with pale white skin and long hair twisted into braids and wound about their heads. “They are very robust,” reported Orellana’s priest, “and go about naked, but with their privy parts covered, with their bows and arrows in their hands, doing as much fighting as ten Indian men, and indeed there was one who shot an arrow a span deep into one of the brigantines, and others less deep, so that our brigantines looked like porcupines.” The Spaniards were battling hand to hand with Amazons, live and in the flesh. According to their annals, the women fought at the front line, in the role of leaders or captains spurring on the men, and what the Spaniards witnessed amazed them, for the Amazons “fought so courageously that the Indian men did not dare turn their backs, and anyone who did turn his back they killed with clubs right there before us, and this is the reason why the Indians kept up their defense for so long.”
― Buddy Levy, River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana and the Deadly First Voyage through the Amazon

“Orellana’s achievement would later be called one of the world’s greatest explorations, “something more than a journey, and more like a miraculous event.”
― Buddy Levy, River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon

“Of the nearly two hundred men who had parted ways with Francisco Orellana’s group, only eighty made it back to Quito. They had traveled, mostly on foot, more than two thousand miles, and literally everything they had started the expedition with—200 horses, 2,000 to 3,000 swine, 2,000 dogs, and more than 4,000 native bearers—was gone, dead and gone, along with the 120 of their companions who had perished en route.”
― Buddy Levy, River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon

“Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition, would”
― Buddy Levy, River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon

“In places the Amazon sprawls a remarkable fifty miles wide; it can vary in depth with floodwaters or tides by as much as fifty feet; and, near its terminus at the Atlantic, it contains an island the size of Switzerland.”
― Buddy Levy, River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon