Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
How did a race of legendary warrior women who the Greeks thought lived near the Caspian Sea end up in
South America?
To the Greeks, the Amazons were a race of brave female warriors who cut off one of their breasts in
order to be able to carry their shields or to draw their bows with greater ease; their name derives from the
Greek word for “breastless.” One of the labors of the hero Hercules was to steal the girdle of an Amazon
queen. Strabo wrote about them in circa
AD
23. And the medieval travel writer John Mandeville also de-
scribed the fierce Amazons in his
Travels
(circa 1356).
According to these and other accounts, accepted as literally true right through the Middle Ages, Amazo-
nia was an empire of women who did not tolerate the presence of men. Their only contact with the op-
posite sex was at an annual festival designed to ensure the reproduction of their race. Once in Amazonia,
the males were dispassionately used and then kept as slaves or expediently disposed of. Only the female
children were kept by the Amazons; the boys were sent away.
The idea that there were Amazons in South America dates back to the Spanish conquest. The first
Europeans to see the Amazon River were Spanish conquistadors in 1500 who called it the River Sea. Fran-
cisco de Orellana, one of those searching for the gold of El Dorado, led the first European descent of the
river in 1541, and it was briefly called Orellana. In Orellana's party was Father Gaspar de Carvajal, a
Dominican friar who chronicled this expedition and told of seeing women warriors leading the attacks on
the Spaniards' boats.
Father Gaspar wrote:
We ourselves saw these women, who were there fighting in front of all of the Indian men as women
captains. These [women] fought so courageously that the Indian men did not dare turn their backs,
and anyone who did turn his back they killed with clubs right there before us, and this is the reason
why the Indians kept up their defense for so long. These women are very white and tall, and have
hair very long and braided and wound about the head, and they are very robust and go about naked,
but with their privy parts covered, with their bow and arrows in their hands, doing as much fighting
as ten Indian men. And indeed there was one woman among these who shot an arrow a span deep
into one of the brigantines, and others less deep, so that our brigantines looked like porcupines.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, Brazil has made dramatic strides in reducing global
warming emissions slowing deforestation and regrowing its tropical forests. Between 2005 and 2010,
Brazil nearly met its goal of slowing deforestation. Data from 2009-2010 showed that Brazil's area of de-
forestation had dropped 67 percent. The cooperation of two countries (Norway and Brazil) has achieved
a “reduction in global warming pollution comparable to the reductions that both the United States and the
European Union have only pledged to achieve by 2020.”
*
If these were not the fierce warrior women written and told of for centuries in Europe, they were cer-
tainly close to the genuine Amazonian article. Adding weight to the notion that these were the Amazons
was the fact that the Indians called the river Amazunu (“big wave”). Later Spanish expeditions failed to
turn up any of these extraordinary fighting women, but the name River of the Amazons stuck.
The Amazon is the second-longest river in the world, after the Nile. But far more impressive is its
volume. The Nile, for its length, is a leaky faucet compared to the Amazon, carrying less than 2 percent of
the Amazon's volume. The Amazon contains more water than the Nile, the Yangtze, and the Mississippi
Rivers combined—nearly one fifth of the Earth's running fresh water.
The outpouring of the Amazon River, whose source is in the Peruvian Andes, is so great that the open
sea is freshwater for more than two hundred miles beyond the mouth of the Amazon. That is sufficient
fresh water—nearly seven million cubic feet every second—to supply two hundred times the municipal
