Orellana would stop at various villages along the river to resupply and refit. He was a linguistic genius and kept notes about the various dialects he encountered, slowly building up a general fluency to the point where he could speak with and understand the people he encountered. At one especially friendly village he set up a forge to convert horseshoes into nails and built a second boat from local timber. This took several months, and as news of his arrival spread far inland, dozens of other tribes came to visit him. Orellana describes one especially distinctive group as being tall and blond. It was more than twenty years before any other Spaniards went down the Amazon and they encountered very few people or settlements, unlike what Orellana saw. This convinced people at the time that he had just made everything up, but it appears now that the Amazon was well settled at the time of his visit, but he may have brought European diseases with him that devastated countless civilizations.
