Manaus - The sources are vague and scattered. The sightings and reports are far and few between. But like tales of Nessie, the legendary sea monster of Loch Ness, Scotland, stories of a tribe of Amazon women warriors living deep in the rainforests of South America persist to this day. There must be something to the rumors, right?
The first report of a peculiar tribe of women warriors inhabiting parts of South America’s Amazon basin dates back to the beginnings of Amazonian exploration. In 1541 the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana, one of Gonzallo Pizarro’s most trusted lieutenants (at least initially!), became by accident the first Europeans to travel the Amazon River from the Andes to the Atlantic. His voyage was chronicled by a Franciscan friar named Gaspar Carvajal who formed part of Orellana’s group.(1)
Nowhere is the account more thought provoking or vivid - most of the time it’s pretty tedious and repetitive - than when the would-be Spanish plunderers find themselves fighting hand to hand for their lives against a group of Indians who count a dozen splendid women warriors amongst their number. Carvajal names these women “Amazons,” after the legendary Greek myth, and goes on to provide a fascinating account of their supposed existence in the new world. Subsequently the name Amazon came to replace that of Orellana as the name of the greatest river in the world.(2) And from this, perhaps fictitious meeting, the legend of the Amazons has passed from generation to generation of Amazon adventurers and explorers to the present day.
Of course, the source of the Amazon legend is not Amazonia. Greek mythology tells of a tribe of tall women warriors called the Amazons who lived in Scythia near the Black Sea. This is the source of Carvajal’s coinage of the term, as it was for Columbus and other early European mariners exploring the New World. Greek mythology informs us that Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, was killed by Achilles during the siege of Troy.
Two sources of the term “Amazon” can be found in the early Greek language. One word, “A-mazon,” had been translated to mean “without a breast”; the Amazons reputedly cut off their right breasts to facilitate the use of their bow and arrows. Oddly though there has never been found a single piece of Greek pottery depicting this peculiar practice of self-mutilation. A more plausible source is the Greek word “Ama-zona” which means “joined with a belt” and refers to an ancient tribe of African women warriors who fought in pairs, often joined by a belt. Today the term “Amazon’ suggests what it did to the first explorers of the new world - an aggressive, all-powerful tribe of beautiful women warriors.
Throughout the ages the power of this particular Greek myth has persisted in the imagination of far-flung travelers. It reached its fruition during the Spanish Discovery of the New World and conquest of the Americas. In a bloodthirsty rush for gold and other fabled treasures the conquistadors feasted on a steady diet of legend and fantasy. Besides El Dorado (“the Golden One”), the most appetizing of these legends was that of the Amazons.
The legend - or longing - finally bore fruit when Orellana encountered a group of fighting women near the mouth of the Nhamunda river, a tributary of the Amazon river 300 kilometers east of Brazil’s Rio Negro river. In the words of his chronicler, Friar Carvajal, Orellana did not doubt the identity of his foes. But were they a self-supporting tribe of Amazon women or part of a larger mixed culture? The Chilean painter and anthropologist, Roland Stevenson, believes there never was a unique tribe of women warriors though he also believes Orellana was no liar.
Stevenson has researched the legends of Amazonia for 25 years. His investigations suggest that several waves of women travelers known as the “Virgins of the Sun” entered the Amazon in the years following 1533. He believes the women encountered by Orellana were Incas whom the Conquistadors had driven from Peru at the height of the conquest. Stevenson has uncovered a lost west-east highway upon which these women refugees supposedly traveled. The highway ultimately led to the fabled Lake Parime, an inland sea northwest of the Brazilian city of Boa Vista on the Venezuelan border. Because it had dried up 200 years before the first Europeans ever set foot in the New World,(3) this legendary lake was never discovered by the many expeditions that went in search of it and the golden city of Manoa said to lie upon her shores.
No concrete evidence of the Amazons as an independent society has ever been uncovered in the rainforests of Amazonia. Nor is any tribe of women Indians known to presently exist in the vast Amazon basin. (And Brazil alone is home to over 220 Indigenous tribes.) This lack of physical evidence adds weight to Stevenson’s argument that the Amazons were phenomena unique to a specific time and place, namely one June morning in 1541 by the mouth of the Nhamunda river. Still, Orellana is not the only visitor to tell of a tribe of women warriors living deep in the Amazon rainforest.
Alexander von Humboldt, one of the first scientists to travel through tropical America, collected numerous stories of an independent society of Amazon women from isolated Indian tribes he encountered in the late 18th century.(4)
In Ecuador there exists an Indian tribe called the Yagua. To this day their peculiar wardress includes grass skirts and long blond grass wigs. Under the panic and tension of battle could naked Yagua men have been mistaken for breastless women warriors by Spanish soldiers? They may not have been as beautiful and tall as in legend but neither were the ocean sirens that seduced so many of Odysseus’s fellow sailors. And along the Vaupes River in northwestern Brazil Indian men continue to wear their hair long and braided, pluck their eyebrows, and keep themselves as clean shaven as possible in pursuit of some intrinsic ideal of human beauty.
Indians from these and other Amazon tribes could easily have been mistaken for Amazon women warriors, especially by a group of crazed and lustful conquistadors bloated by a steady diet of the strange and fantastic since even before they reached the Americas. It is undeniable that the Spaniards brought the Greek legend of the Amazons with them - Columbus himself wrote about it - and it appears to have been used to explain away, describe and even justify something extraordinary which was encountered in the New World.
But for a moment let us push aside the legendary, the fantastic, and the ridiculous. Let’s look just a little deeper into this fascinating story of the Amazons. As we search through the records and pry open some oddly dispersed sources, some very interesting facts are revealed.
Roland Stevens, in his book “A Light on Amazonian Mysteries,” suggests that the Amazons (those encountered by Orellana anyway) formed part of a migratory wave of Andean women who had abandoned their men, who were to be slaughtered at Cuzco and other Inca strongholds as the conquest of the Incas reached its climax. They were fleeing the rape, pillage and destruction of the Spanish.
After traveling across the north of the Amazon these “Virgins of the Sun” dropped down into the Amazon basin and settled, most often mixing with other Indian groups who already inhabited these lands. Many of these Inca women were perhaps bearing bastard children of the conquistadors in their arms and bellies. Direct links to this shameful wave of immigration may be seen today in the facial structure, and eye and skin coloring of Indians from the Yanomami, Tucano, Wai-wai and other tribes of the northern Amazon rainforest. Stevenson suggests that Inca women who descended Amazon tributaries such as the Vaupes, Negro, Branco, Nhamunda or Trombetas Rivers would eventually have appeared upon the Amazon river itself accompanied by their spurned offspring. It must have been quite a shock for Orellana to face these wrathful girls of European descent in combat.
Stevenson’s further claim of an ancient highway running west to east across the Amazon also has foundation. The highway was supposedly built by the Incas or an even earlier Amerindian society to collect gold from the mountains of Parime and transport it back to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Evidence uncovered by Stevenson includes remnants of stone guardrails or walls that recall Friar Carvajal’s description of the walls of stone said to link one Amazon city to another.
Roland Stevenson’s work certainly casts new light on the mysterious legend of the Amazons. But it offers little conclusive proof, and is mostly hypothesis and conjecture. Can there be any truth behind Orellana’s story of a tribe of beautiful women warriors inhabiting the Amazon basin? As an archaeologist in Alex Shoumataoff’s book about the Amazons, “In Southern Light,” comments wryly, “who knows for sure - who’s dug there?”(5)
Modern myth has it that an exclusive tribe of Indian women do still lives somewhere deep in the Amazon rainforest. What if we were to use Friar Carvajal’s chronicle as a sort of literary road map and begin a search for the Amazons on the Rio Nhamunda where Orellana claimed to have encountered them first…?
According to Shoumatoff the river was originally called the Conori - the name of the queen of the Amazons, according to local Indian superstition. An article dated April 17, 1994, from the Manaus daily newspaper “A Critica” says that locals living near the river’s mouth believe something supernatural is at work around a small lake called the “Mirror of the Moon” (Espelho da Lua). Residents swear they’ve heard women at night laughing and swimming in the lake. The women are said to be ghosts of the Amazons who once lived in the dark forest around the perimeter of this mysterious “Mirror of the Moon.”
Do Indian women, or their ghosts, still venture forth from the forest to press-gang local men into service as love slaves as Orellana’s legend says they did? No one near Nhamunda wants to say for sure, but strange things have been reported from this lake and all of it has to do with the Amazons.
What if we put together all the pieces of the puzzle we have at hand: Carvajal and Medina’s literary road maps, Shoumatoff’s wandering up and down the Nhamunda, and Stevenson’s archaeo-anthropological treks across the northern Amazon? Then our search is directed away from the Amazon river itself, “seven days north” as Carvajal guides us - up into some very little explored rainforest straddling the Brazil-Guayana-Suriname borders.
Just northwest of this “terra incognita” lies the dry bottom of the legendary Lake Parime, true source of the legend of El Dorado, according to Roland Stevenson. It shouldn’t surprise us that the mountains above Boa Vista are today the center of the richest gold strikes in the Americas. To the east of “terra incognita” lies a group of mountains known collectively as the Serra de Tumucumaque where huge deposits of jade stone have recently been discovered. Jade stone too, like gold, figures prominently in the legend of Amazons in the form of green “muriquitas” (amulets shaped like frogs) which were presented to the Amazon’s lovers at the conclusion of their fabled love festivals.
Linking these two sources of gold and jade is a segment of Stevenson’s highway of the “virgins of the sun”, a system of Pre-Columbian roads which brought Inca women east and away from their Spanish persecutors and into the annals of history and legend. Could there be Amazons up there somewhere? Seven days north of the lake of the Mirror of the Moon? Somewhere in the mountains of Serra Tumucumaque or Serra Parime? Who knows? Who’s been there? Who’s dug there? But there’s something up there, isn’t there? You can feel it. In the air. On the water. Watching from the forest even. Something very mysterious is out there waiting to be discovered.
Notes
(1) “The Discovery of the Amazon,” ed. Jose Toribio Medina, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1988. Pg. 205.
(2) A Brazilian expedition to the acknowledged source of the Amazon, a mountain spring in the Mismi mountains of the Peruvian Andes named after National Geographic photographer Loren Macintyre, claims that the Amazon River is more than 240 kilometers longer than the Nile River, From “Amazonas: O Parto das Aguas Magicas”, by Paula Saldanha, Manchete Magazine (Brazil), April 1, 1995. Pg. 3.
(3) “Uma Luz Nos Mistérios Amazônicos: A light on Amazonian Mysteries,” by Roland Stevenson, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, 1994. Pg. 135.
(4) “Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinotical Regions of the New Continent,” by Alexander von Humboldt, Penguin Books, London, 1995. Pg. 240-41.
(5) “In Southern Light: Trekking Through Zaire and the Amazon, by Alex Shoumatoff, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986.
To learn more, check out Mark Aitchison’s short novel “The Mirror of the Moon.” To learn how to obtain a copy, click here.
