Imagine, if you will, that beyond your towns and farms - the only world you know - dwell large settlements of aliens from outer space, of which you know very little, except that they are completely different, and incomprehensible. You see their flying saucers passing overhead, and more and more frequently they themselves are intruding into your domain. But you keep your distance, because oral tradition tells how they once committed terrible atrocities against your kind, or that once there were friendly relations, but then they brought the plague upon you.
This, essentially, is the experience of thousands of Indians who are literally hiding from the outside world in the fastness of the Amazon jungle. Every time it is announced that the last uncontacted tribe has been discovered, another turns up. But once there were millions of them - only to be wiped out by massacre and enslavement, but mostly, as in North America, by infectious diseases which could devastate whole communities before any white man arrived. And somewhere in this maelstrom of destruction there was lost a community which most people now relegate to mythology: the women warriors after which the Amazon River was named.
As every schoolboy is supposed to know, but doesn't, the first European leader to visit the great river was Francisco de Orellana in 1542. Charged with exploring the Coca River in what is now Ecuador by Gonzalo Pizarro, the brother of the conqueror of Peru, Orellana and his men found great difficulty returning against the current, and decided to press on eastwards. The result was an epic eight month journey down the mightiest of all rivers, in constant danger of starvation and attack. Eventually finding his way back to Spain, Orellana struggled on two fronts: in persuading the king that his discovery was worthwhile, and in defending himself from Pizarro's quite reasonable accusations of desertion. The upshot was that he finally managed to return to the great river, bringing with him a young bride, who promptly became his widow after a final altercation with the Indians.
Now, there are two aspects of this expedition worthy of note. The first is that, while in Ecuador, Orellana learned the Indian language. David St. Clair, to whom I am indebted for this account, calls it the linga geral, or "general language". This is a Portuguese term, which would not have been used by a Spaniard like Orellana. The Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge, asserts that the modern descendant of the língua geral amazônica is a Tupian language known as Nheengatu. Since this originated on the coast, I am far from certain we are dealing with the same thing. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Orellana could communicate with the Indians.
The second point is that the journey was recorded by two men. One was the expedition's official scribe, and the other was the highly respected Dominican priest, Gaspar de Carvajal, who maintained a diary of the adventure, and who returned to Peru when Orellana returned to Spain. Thus, what you are about to hear is not simply one man's yarn spun years after the event.
Even before the expedition commenced, when he was in a village just six leagues from Quito in Ecuador, Orellana was told of a nation of warrior women who never married, but raided the neighbouring villages once a year in search of mates, and they dwelt on the banks of a gigantic river. When asked how far distant these women were, the Indians replied: "You go there young and you return old."
Later, when the expedition had commenced, and they were building a ship in order to descend the Curary River, also in Ecaudor, an Indian leader called Aparian took Orellana aside and told him about "the women without men" in terms identical to what he had heard earlier. Aparian knew the story to be true, for he had met them himself when he visited their country as a youth. They were fierce fighters, but affectionate to their male captives, whom they would release after eight months. He warned the white men they would try to mate with them.
Then, once they had reached the Marañon, the headwaters of the Amazon, they heard for a third time the tale of the warrior women. They were now in a heavily populated zone. Formerly, his stories of great wooden towns were treated as gross exaggerations, but we now know them to be true. The whole of the Amazon jungle is dotted with areas of terra preta, or "black earth", artificially produced by the addition of charcoal and other nutrients from the more stable agriculture of pre-Columbian times. Recent archaeological discoveries have confirmed the presence of massive population centres throughout the whole Amazon basin prior to the introduction of European diseases. Even so, when it was reported that for six days they held off attacks from 50,000 Indians, one wonders how just they were counted.
After a long ordeal of fighting off Indians and near starvation, they arrived at the junction with the Rio Negro. It came as a real relief when another day's journey took them to a beautiful village without walls, where the inhabitants welcomed them with food and drink, and a guided tour of their city. Much to their surprise, the centre of the city was taken up with an open square in which stood a wooden structure ten feet high, representing another city with walls, towers, and doors. The towers themselves were marked with widows and connecting parapets, while at the main gates stood two roaring "lions" (? jaguars). This, they were told, was a model of the city of the rulers of the land: "the women who live alone", and he was shown the headdresses made as gifts for them.
In the next village stood an identical monument. But in the next one, a different adventure awaited them. The men were all away, but the women welcomed them with open arms - and spread legs! Unfortunately, their cockulded husbands returned at midnight and put up a terrible fight. How unreasonable of them! The Spaniards drove them off, killing some, and capturing some others. Then they went back to what they had been doing before. In the morning they hanged the captives, then departed, leaving their mistresses to deal with their surviving husbands.
The feast of St John the Baptist found them somewhere between 57 and 56 degrees latitude, perhaps near the site of the modern city of Parintins, and Fr. Gaspar suggested they go ashore to celebrate mass. However, as they approached the bank, the entire town came out to meet them. In itself, this was nothing unusual, but what amazed the Spaniards was that in the forefront stood a regiment of women: tall, muscular, and light-skinned, their long braided hair wrapped around their heads, and animal skins around the loins of their otherwise naked bodies. And they wielded bows and arrows.
The women shot arrows into the air, and had them fall harmlessly into the water. Then they aimed into the boat, and five Spaniards were wounded. Orellana ordered them to respond with muskets and crossbows. Suddenly, the male warriors surged forward, but always in front, encouraging them, were the women. Some of the men who refused to fight were even killed by the women. For two hours the battle raged, while Orellana could only stand and watch in fascination of these female warriors. When seven or eight of them fell dead, the Indians retreated, but when a fresh wave of warriors was seen approaching, they white men themselves decided to return to the ship.
But before they left, they managed to seize one of the male warriors, and that night Orellana spent several hours interrogating him, while the official scribe and Fr. Gaspar recorded the whole session.
His name was Couynco, and he was one of the subjects of the warrior women, who lived seven days journey into the interior. The women had expected the strangers to offer gifts and he, who had been to their village many times, had been sent as a messenger to collect the tribute. He himself knew the names of at least seventy villages, and he knew there were many more. Whereas the typical Indian riverine town was constructed of wood, the villages of the Amazons were of stone, an uncommon commodity in the rainforest. Between the villages were walled-in roads, while guards prevented entry to anyone without permission and without tribute. The streets were clean and the houses in perfect order, and every male worker had to be outside the gates by sundown on pain of death. Tribute of gold, silver, skins, and feather work were brought in annually from the subject villages, for the women were feared by everyone, even those who lived many days away. And above them all was a queen known as "Coñori".
Every year the Amazons would invade their subject villages and choose the best males for procreation. Later the men would be returned unharmed. Any girls born of such unions were raised to become a new generation of warriors, while sons were either killed or sent back to their fathers. Readers may note that a similar custom was told of the Amazons of classical mythology.
Couynco added another interesting tidbit of information: at a lake near the warrior women's village occurred a magic green stone called Muirakitán, which only the women were allowed to wear. The significance of this is that, over the centuries, items of green jade, carved in the shape of frogs, deer, or other animals, have turned up. Yet the actual quarry has never been located.
That was the first and last time any white man saw the fabled warrior women of the Amazon, and most commentators now treat them as purely mythical. But were they?
Suppose that Orellana was lying about it all, in an attempt to merely please his regent and to embellish his discovery of the great river. But Orellana was in bad grace when he got back home and to have been caught in such a bold faced lie as this, would have caught his neck in a noose. Pizarro's angry letters to Philip II arrived in Spain before Orellana did. He expected trouble, and he certainly was not going to throw wood on his own fire by telling lies. Pizarro's friends in Madrid had money and influence, and they could have made it very profitable for any of Orellana's crew to come forward and denounce the explorer as a charlatan. Many of the crew were against Orellana when they finally got back home, for their voyage had been long and arduous and he had not let them help themselves to the gold and silver they had found in some of the villages. Yet, none of them called him a liar. They even signed a paper saying that what Orellana had said was the truth. They too had seen the Amazons.The priest had no reason to lie about the women either. What had he to gain? He didn't even return to Spain with Orellana, but parted at the Island of Santo Domingues and returned to Peru. Yet, when the King asked him for the story, he got the Amazon women as gospel truth.[David St.Clair, 1968, The Mighty, Mighty Amazon, Funk & Wagnalls, p 37]
That argument sounds pretty reasonable to me. There is also another point: Orellana might have had a motive to exaggerate the economic value of the river he had discovered, but what possible reason could he have for making up something like this?
There's more. Intrigued by this account, Sir Walter Raleigh decided to make enquiries about the warrior women when visiting what is now Guyana in 1595, and he managed to find a chief who had once been to the Amazon River, hundreds of miles away. He told him that the warrior women collected their men in the month of April, and when children are born, the daughters are kept, and the sons sent back to their fathers. They were said to live south of the Amazon, in the the region of the Tapajós River - which is consistent with Orellana's experience.
Then in 1640, a priest called Cristobal d'Acuña kept a diary of what he heard on his way down the Amazon. At approximately the site where Orellana had met the warrior women nearly a century before, he heard exactly the same story: how the women would come every year to the territory, collect men, and raise the daughters born to them. Significantly, he mentioned the custom by which the women used to approach, bows in hand, and the sides exchanged arrows in a mock battle until it was determined that they came in peace. This is reminiscent of the custom of many societies of treating a wedding as a mock abduction of the bride, with the bride's family putting up a mock defense. Also, during visits between villages of the fierce Yanamami Indians, the guests put on a mock war dance, with a child dancing behind them to signify their peaceful intent.
Now we can see how Orellana's battle was the result of a mistake. When the women initially fired their arrows so that they fell harmlessly, they were not attacking; they were greeting them - commencing a mating ritual. As Couynco explained, they wanted to mate with the formidable strangers.
Finally, as late as 1755, another priest, Samuel Fritz, recorded the same story on the banks of the Amazon.
What are we to make of all this? Two very strange aspects will immediately be apparent: that the women were warriors, and that they lived in an all female community, except for those males who were temporarily guests.
The only significant all female military regiment in history was the "Amazons" of Dahomey. Generally, war is a man's domain, and women are kept out of it for obvious reasons: they do not have the strength and stamina of men, and their presence not only slows down the male war party, but disrupts it. Also, it is bad policy for a society to put the mothers and carers of its children in danger. (Don't let me get started on the current push to put women into combat roles!) There are serious doubts about women warriors in Viking society, but literary sources suggest that they might have occasionally appeared. In any case, it is fairly certain that the Scythian women used bows and knives, and were the inspiration for the Amazons of Greek mythology, even if they did not live separate from men.
And it is the bow which is the crucial aspect. Swinging a battleaxe while holding a shield is heavy work, but knives and bows - especially the short-range bows used in the jungle - are much less discriminatory as to sex. Also, although a woman's place is in the home, when push comes to shove, she may have to join in the defense of that home. The male war party may take the battle into the enemy's territory, but everyone has to take a stand when the home itself is threatened. Even today, intruders into the jungles of the Xingú have been confronted with both male and female archers. Modern commentators will tell you that this was simply what Orellana encountered, but the evidence suggests something more.
Specifically, the women were living without men - except for a minority of guests or servants, depending on your interpretation. However, with primitive subsistence agriculture, based on hoes rather than ploughs, women typically do the majority of the work. Thus, a community of women would likely be economically self-sufficient, provided they had men to do the really heavy work, such as the initial clearing of the forest. As for animal protein, these were riverine societies, and the most common method of catching fish was with bow and arrow.
However, I have serious doubts about their reported status as overlords, simply because I don't believe any community could dominate such as large area. To do so would require garrisons in the subject towns, and rapid response teams to put down any rebellion, something which would be impossible given the economic level of the society. The Amazonian Indians were at a cultural level with those of the northeast United States: forest communities based on primitive agriculture and hunting. In the latter area, we know that intertribal violence was endemic, but was there any case of a particular tribe holding the others in subjection?
And what about the "general language" with which Orellana communicated with them? Amazonian languages may have had smaller vocabularies than European ones, but their grammar was often complex. I doubt if the white man understood it at more than a basic level. Hundreds of languages cluster in the Amazon basin, and today it would sound incredible that a single lingua franca could be spoken from Ecuador half way down the river, but in the days of dense population and easy movement by canoe, it may have been a reality. I can't help thinking, however, that it would have gradually changed as you moved downstream. Probably the reason Orellana's interrogation of Couynco lasted several hours was sheer difficulty in mutual comprehension. Did the local language contain exact equivalents of "rule" and "tribute", and would Orellana have known them? Most likely he interpreted the deference accorded the women warriors in terms appropriate to his own culture.
But what was the reason for the deference? Were they priestesses of some sort? Or did their unusual lifestyle lend them a mystical air? Many primitive societies regard the insane, the retarded, and the perverted as somehow uncanny, and therefore infected with some supernatural power. Perhaps the aura attached to their lifestyle, as well as the fact that they would have made dangerous enemies, meant that their neighbours found it better to "make love, not war". After all, being led off for several months to be a stud, and to work no harder than you would at home, sound more like a holiday than an oppressive exaction, and the "tribute" paid to them sounds suspiciously like wedding gifts.
How did this extraordinary society develop? More often than not, primitive villages contain a men's hut, where the fellows sit around and talk about male things - a custom far from extinct in our own society. Primitive man may not have had a club over his shoulder, but he certainly had the other sort of club. Some tribes go even further, and the men sleep there. The sexes are effectively segregated. Many communities in New Guinea follow this custom, and so do many South American Indians.
St. Clair mentioned the extreme example of the Mundurukus, who were first contacted by Franciscan missionaries at the beginning of last century. To their surprise, they found the sexes completely segregated. The men worked in the fields, and sometimes were away for weeks on hunting expeditions, while the women guarded the village, or rather, themselves. The boys all grew up together in the men's hut, and often did not know their own fathers. When they marry, the man cannot take his bride into the men's hut, so they go off into the jungle. When they return, and she is pregnant, she goes to live with the women. These days a man seeks out the girl's mother for permission to marry, but originally the marriage rite was a game of war in which the woman took bow and arrows and "conquered' the man.
Significantly, their centre is the upper Tapajós region, the same as the legendary headquarters of the warrior women. Obviously, it would have been easy under such circumstances for a group of woman to completely separate themselves into their own villages, possibly forming a secret society of a quasi-religious nature.
Of course, a society which had to import its breeders could not survive the great depopulation resulting the introduction of European diseases. The jungle quickly reclaims any abandoned human habitation, so probably, somewhere in the dense rainforest, lies the overgrown remains of the fabulous stone city of the women warriors.
The Lost City of Z, perhaps.
