The Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Orellana and the Dominican friar Gaspar de Caravajal and about 120 of their men were the first Europeans to travel down the Amazon River in 1542. Orellana was a bit of a genius: he studied native languages before the expedition and had the extraordinary ability to acquire new languages as he went along. He would stop from time to time at a native village along the Amazon, and with his language skills he would make himself welcome. He would then set up a forge and workshop to repair his boats, which would take weeks. Both he and Caravajal reported that countless chiefs and delegations of tribes from the interior would come to the village to see and observe them, and that the ethnic variety and sophistication of the visitors were astonishing. Some, he even reported were tall and blonde, others told him that they were from large cities far in the interior.
It was more than a generation before any other European went down the river, but apparently by that time disease had devastated the region and nothing was left of the civilizations Orellana had encountered.
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