y of roots and berries grew scarcer and men
perished daily from starvation. So Pizarro ordered Orellana to go
quickly down the river with fifty men to some inhabited land of which
they had heard, to fill the boat with provisions, and return.

Off started Orellana down the river, but no villages or cultivated
lands appeared; nothing was to be seen save flooded plains and gloomy,
impenetrable forests. The river turned out to be a tributary of a much
larger river. It was, indeed, the great river Amazon. Orellana now
decided to go on down this great river and to desert Pizarro. True,
his men were utterly weary, the current was too strong for them to
row against, and they had no food to bring to their unhappy companions.
There was likewise the possibility of reaching the kingdom of gold
for which they were searching. There were some among his party who
objected strongly to the course proposed by Orellana, to whom he
responded by landing them on the edge of the dense forest and there
leaving them to perish of hunger.

It was the last day of 1540 that, having eaten their shoes and saddles
boiled with a few wild herbs, they set out to reach the kingdom of
gold. It was truly one of the greatest adventures of the age, and
historic, for here we get the word El Dorado, used for the first time
in the history of discovery--the legendary land of gold which was never
found, but which attracted all the Elizabethan sailors to this
romantic country. It would take too long to tell how they had to fight
Indian tribes in their progress down the fast-flowing river, how they
had to build a new boat, making bellows of their leather buskins and
manufacturing two thousand nails in twenty days, how they found women
on the banks of the river fighting as valiantly as men, and named the
new country the Amazon land, and how at long last, after incredible
hardship, they reached the sea in August 1541. They had navigated some
two thousand miles. They now made their rigging and ropes of grass
and sails of blankets, and so sailed out into the open sea, reaching
one of the West India islands a few days later.

And the deserted Pizarro? Tired of waiting for Orellana, he made his
way sorrowfully home, arriving after two years' absence in Peru, with
eighty men left out of four thousand three hundred and fifty, all the
rest having perished in the disastrous expedition. And so we must leave
the Spanish conquerors for the present, still exploring, still
conqu