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300 Mediterranean Reception in the Americas
flee. Completely surprised by their audacity, the Dominican
describes them as white and as having strong limbs, large stature,
and long hair tied up on the top of the head. They were all
naked, except for covering their genitalia, and were each as
valuable in combat as ten or twelve men. They were peerless
archers, and it was said later they used to cut off the right breast
just to become stronger in the fighting arm. 11 The Spaniards
had to kill all of them, so that they could control the remaining
men. Later, as soon as they had made camp, the chief explorer
Orellana questioned a recently captured Indian, using instant
polyglot skills that would have surprised even Apollonius of
Tyana. The Indian told him what he wished to know about
the warrior women and their golden treasures. They belonged
to a powerful tribe, exercising control over many other tribes in
the region: they lived in stone houses, with doors, windows, and
corridors, instead of in straw huts; there were no men in their
city; and they killed every newborn boy, allowing only the girls
to live. Above all, the Indian assured Orellana that they possessed
an enormous treasure in gold, and that their houses,
called ‘sun houses’, were all plated in gold, contained golden
tableware and were decorated with coloured parrot feathers,
which were a sign of richness, as valuable as gold. 12
With the same acuteness with which Buarque de Hollanda
related Tacitus and his reports of the voyage of Odysseus on the
Rhine to the description of the Florida of Ponce de León by
Pedro Mártir D’Anghiera, 13 he brings out the presence of geographical
information from Strabo, Arrian, and Diodorus Siculus
in the writings of Friar Carvajal and his fellow cartographers
and chroniclers. If we dig a little deeper, we can certainly find
some traces of Homer in these texts. The myth of the Amazons
‘came directly from Antiquity to install itself in America’. 14
11 Buarque de Hollanda, Visão do Paraiso, 35.
12 Cf. also the letters of Oviedo in 1543, in Eugenio Asensio, La carta de
Oviedo al Cardenal Bembo sobre la navegación del Amazonas (Miscelanea
Americana, Madrid, 1951), i. 111, quoted in Mix, América, 72 n. 42.
13 Tacitus leaves to the reader the choice of believing or not: ‘People say
those things, and I narrate them to you’, the same formula used by
D’Anghiera: ‘those things are reported, and I narrate them to you’ (Buarque
de Hollanda, Visão do Paraiso, 28 and 40 n. 26).
14 Mix, América, 70.