QUARANTINE BLOG # 348

March 13, 2021

Voyage Down the Amazon

We’ve spent considerable time talking about El Dorado, but there is one more important story to be told that is a direct result of the search for “The Gilded One.”

In February 1541, Francisco Pizarro’s half brother, Gonzalo, took 250 Spaniards, 4,000 Indians to serve as guides and laborers, more than 200 horses, dozens of hunting dogs, tons of food and supplies, and more than 2,000 hogs to provide fresh meat along the way. 

Gonzalo Pizarro

In addition, he included a Catholic friar, Caspar de Carvajal, who recorded their journey.

An actual page from Carvajal's journal

Even with all that provision, the food began to run out. Most of the Indian servants died from brutal mistreatment, starvation, and European diseases. Pizarro decided to build a boat to make it easier to navigate the river they had discovered.

His lieutenant, Francisco de Orellana, offered to take the boat and a few men downriver to search for food. 57 men, including Friar Carvajal, set out the day after Christmas. The speed of the river unexpectedly increased, and it became clear that going back would be impossible. Gonzalo Pizarro and his men turned back. 

 Francisco de Orellana

On August 26, eight months to the day after they separated from Pizarro, Orellana’s group emerged into the Atlantic Ocean, having traveled thousands of miles, the first Europeans to sail the entire length of the Amazon. From there, they safely made it another 1,200 miles to Spanish colonies on South America’s northern coast. 

They told fantastic stories of their ordeal. Stories of giant snakes, man-eating fish, and Indian tribes whose poisoned darts brought a slow, agonizing death, and of a tribe of giant women warriors who had attacked Orellana and his soldiers. The conquistadors claimed that they had found the land of the Amazons during their adventure and gave the river its name.

The Last Conquistador

In only two generations, the Spanish conquistadors changed the world forever. They swept into the Americas, and through the use of force, aided by deadly European diseases, they brought low those continents’ native empires.

Millions of the First Americans were slaughtered and millions more were enslaved. Entire societies and ways of life were devastated by invaders who viewed themselves as morally superior. Only a few like Bartolome de Las Casas believed that what their nations were doing was wrong and spoke out.

Hindsight easily condemns the conquistadors as arrogant and brutal thugs. Yet most human beings are products of the societies in which they were born. These men grew up in a world in which concepts such as conquest and the superiority of some races and religions were accepted norms. In history, there is no going back. Blame or regret are pointless. All we can do is try to understand, and avoid calamity in the future.

Mansio Serra de Leguizamon went to Peru in his teens, where he helped to destroy some of the last Inca strongholds. The words of his will seem like a fitting epitaph for all the conquistadors:

We have destroyed by our evil behavior such a society as was enjoyed by these natives. There is no more I can do to alleviate these injustices other than by my words, in which I beg God to pardon me, for I am moved to say this, seeing that I am the last to die of the conquistadors.

Mansio Serra de Leguizamon's signature on his final will.

During the first half of the 17th century, Spain was declining as a world power, defeated by the Dutch, English and French. Martinique, Barbados and Curacao were colonized by the French, British and Dutch. French “buccaneers” took the unsettled west coast of Hispaniola, while the English claimed the Bahamas and Jamaica. Havana, the strongest place in the Spanish Main, fell in 1762. 

The Spanish Main’s Greatest Treasure

To close our story, let’s step back to an unmarked date in the 1530s. On that day, a scouting party of Spaniards entered an empty Inca village, high in the Andes of Peru. The Spaniards went from empty house to empty house, hunting for loot. They found only maize, beans, and a strange vegetable unlike anything they had ever seen.

The vegetable came in many sizes, tiny as a nut to big as an apple. Its shape ranged from an irregular ball to a twisted oblong. Its skin was white, yellow, blue, purple, red, brown. Inside, its color could be white, yellow, purple, pink.

This funny-looking vegetable was the staple food of these mountain people. The Inca name for the vegetable was “papa.” We call it the potato.

When the Spaniards shipped gold to Europe, they also loaded potatoes on board – they had found they liked them, and introduced them to Europe.

In a strange twist of history, the potatoes turned out to be worth far more than the gold and silver they killed for. One year’s take from the world’s potato crop – $100 billion – is three times greater than the value of all the gold and silver the Spanish took from the Americas.

The treasures in the West Indies made Spain the greatest nation in the world, and other nations extremely jealous. In the competition empires rose and fell and social ideology changed. And the hunt for treasure goes on.

Oh, would you like fries with that?

Next week, “Museum Mosaic.”

👉  Discouraged?

Booker T. Washington was a man who could have been overcome by discouragement.  Instead, this man who was born into slavery become a leading African American intellectual of the 19th century, founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (Now Tuskegee University), and the National Negro Business League.  He often spoke of the “advantage of disadvantage.”  

The secret of how to turn discouragement into a stepping stone is found in the last of the “I AM” statements of Jesus we will look at this week: “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25 NKJV).

If ever there were two people you would single out to lead the parade of discouragement it would be Mary and Martha.

Their home was a sanctuary for Jesus.  When he was in Bethany, that is where he stayed.  More than once they welcomed him.  They were close very friends.  When John talks about them in his gospel, he says that Jesus loved Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus. 

So it is no wonder that when Lazarus was seriously ill, they sent word to Jesus with the expectation that he would come to them.  If you had been in their house that day you might have heard them say, “It’s going to be all right now.”  

But when word reached him of Lazarus’ condition, Jesus waited two days before he started for their house.  By the time he got to Bethany four days had elapsed, and Lazarus had died.

When Martha heard that Jesus was at last coming, she went out to meet him and her greeting of Jesus was filled with grief, confusion, despair, and devastating discouragement: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21).  Trying to read between the lines, I hear Martha saying, “We counted on you!  We trusted you!  And you weren’t here!”

Jesus answered here with a bold promise, “Your brother will rise again” (11:23).

Again, discouragement taints Martha’s response: “In the last day.  I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”  John doesn’t say it, but I hear Martha thinking, “He would be alive if you had been here.”

It is at that point that Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life” (11:25).  Yahweh, the God of here and now, the God who can meet your every need, the resurrection and the life.

By now Mary has met her sister and Jesus and her anguish mirrors her sister’s.  “If you had been here, Lazarus would not have died.”  Jesus cries because these people he loves are hurting, moves to the tomb door and shouts in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come forth!”  And the words of Yahweh, the Resurrection and the Life penetrated to where death reigned and pulled its victim from its grasp!

Discouragement saps our courage; it cripples our confidence, it diminishes our capacity to hope, and instead of living in resurrection victory, we live in despair.  At this moment, if you are discouraged, listen for that voice: Yahweh.  Resurrection.  Life.  Now, look towards the object of your hopeless.  But, Lord, he’s been dead four days and his body is stinking with decay.  Do you see that movement?  That’s God’s power overcoming your impossibility.  Take a step away from your discouragement.  Take a step towards Jesus in trust.

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