Napo or Putumayo: Aparia, Machifaro, "Oniguayal," Omagua, and the Distribution of Early Amazon River Indigenous Groups

It has long been assumed that the first major European expedition to explore the Amazon River in 1541-1542 -- that of Francisco de Orellana, chronicled by the Dominican priest Gaspar de Carvajal -- descended the Napo River from modern-day Ecuador. As part of this descent, the expedition encountered indigenous groups known by the names of chiefly figures, in particular Aparia, Machifaro, and Oniguayal (spellings to be clarified below), after which point they observed "otro río muy poderoso y más grande a la diestra mano" enter their course. There were three islands at its entrance, and so in Catholic fashion they dubbed it the Río de la Trinidad. At this point, Carvajal writes, "esto era ya en el señorío y tierra de Omagua." On the received chronology, the expedition had before their observation of the Río de la Trinidad already left the Napo, entering the Amazon proper. As such, the Aparia, Machifaro, Oniguayal, and Omagua have been said to be indigenous groups of the Amazon River, and the Río de la Trinidad has been said to be some right-bank tributary of the Amazon. More recently, the Polish Latin Americanist historian Jerzy Achmatowicz of the University of Wrocław has argued -- based primarily on Carvajal's distances described in leagues -- that it was not the Napo that was the route of Orellana's expedition, but rather the next major left-bank tributary of the Amazon to the east, the Putumayo (known as the Içá in Brazil). On this account, the Río de la Trinidad is simply the Amazon, viewed from the lowest reaches of the Putumayo. Achmatowicz's is a significant claim, which, if correct, would restructure much of how we understand the earliest histories of this region from the mid-16th century. In this post, I want to offer additional linguistic and ethnohistorical evidence that is consistent with the Putumayo route, challenging previous equivalences between Aparia and Omagua, a powerful upper Amazon people, "dissolving," as it were, the notion of an Oniguayal people based on manuscript evidence, and drawing on Jesuit Samuel Fritz's (1691) map of Omagua villages, among other points. It is worth noting here what a reliable source Fritz is, having lived regularly in Omagua villages for multiple decades beginning in 1685.

The only complete manuscript copy of Carvajal's chronicle (the Relación, as it's typically known) was in the possession of Juan Pérez de Guzmán y Boza (1852-1934), 2nd Duke of T'serclaes de Tilly, and was published in Seville in 1894. The manuscript is now in the holdings of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, and has been digitized. This allows us to observe some of the earliest written instances of Machifaro and Omagua without the mediation of transcribers, for whom the representation of indigenous names is notoriously difficult. The passage was transcribed as follows (1894:30): "Cumplidos doce días de mayo llegamos a las provincias de Machiparo, que es muy gran señor y de mucha gente y confina con otro señor tan grande, llamado Omaga [sic], y son amigos que se juntan para dar guerra a otros señores que están la tierra dentro, que les vienen cada día a echar de sus casas." The extent of Machifaro's territory was said to be more than 80 leagues, and all one language. Carvajal describes villages in this region as typically not more than a crossbow's shot from each other, and that the most distal pair was not more than half a league from each other. The largest village was said to be five leagues in length along the river.

First instances of Machifaro (second line) and Omagua (third line) in Carvajal's Relación

Carvajal describes the expedition's departure from Machifaro's territory as follows (1894:41): "Desta manera y con este trabajo salimos de la provincia y gran señorío de Machiparo y llegamos a otro no menor, que era el comienzo de Oniguayal, y al principio y entrada de su tierra estaba un pueblo de manera de guarnición, no muy grande, en un alto sobre el río, a donde había mucha gente de guerra." This transcription, however, is incorrect, as is clearly visible in the manuscript. The word Omagua is split over two lines, then run together with y 'and' and al 'at the.' That is, what is written as <o-maguayal principio> should be parsed as 'Omagua y al principio.' Indeed the transcriber duplicates the <yal> portion, both appending it to the name Omagua and repeating it to license the adverbial expression 'at the beginning.' In short, when Orellana's expedition left Machifaro's territory, they entered into the territory of Omagua, not Oniguayal. Even the historian John Hemming, in his Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon (2008:30), got this wrong: in observing how it is unexpected that the Omagua lived downriver of the Machifaro (see below), he suspects Carvajal's Omagua was really Oniguayal. But Oniguayal has entered the literature solely due to a mistranscription.

Omagua as "Oniguayal" in Carvajal's Relación (second to third lines)

The name Machifaro, as I have written it, warrants comment. This is clearly written with a <p> in the multiple instances of it in the manuscript copy of Carvajal's Relación. Yet it seems to be the same ending that Samuel Fritz reports in the name of an Ibanoma chief in an August 24, 1702 letter written in his own hand: Aurifaru, with a striking <f> (Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit, MSS #713). Relatedly, Hemming (ibid.) hypothesizes that the Machifaro correspond to the people later known (in Fritz's time) as Aisuares. He is confused, then, as to why the Machifaro and Omagua seem to have flipped, as it were, given that various later accounts, including detailed documentation during Fritz's time, make it clear that the order of indigenous groups on the Amazon proper was later (going downriver) Omaguas, Yurimaguas, Aisuares, Ibanomas, and Paguanas. However, assuming that the Río de la Trinidad was the Amazon, then there was no such flip: the Machifaro were simply a people of a left-bank tributary of the Amazon, after whom the expedition encountered Omaguas on the Amazon proper.

Fritz writing about the death of Ibanoma chief Aurifaru (second line)

The hypothesis that the Río de la Trinidad was the Amazon importantly relates to both Carvajal's observation that this juncture "era ya en el señorío y tierra de Omagua," and to Achmatowicz's hypothesis that the expedition had been traveling along the Putumayo all along, not the Napo. In 1691, Samuel Fritz drew a map of the distribution of ethnic groups and named village sites along the Amazon River, the importance of which cannot be overstated. The map, in the holdings of the Bibliothèque National de France, has similarly been digitized. On the map, Fritz uses a dotted line to delineate 22 Omagua villages, all but three of which have easily identifiable Omagua etymologies (e.g., Cururute /kururu-te/ 'place of many toads'). The primary Jesuit mission of San Joaquín de Omaguas lies significantly upriver of these villages, on the left bank of the Amazon upriver of the mouth of the Pevas River (today the Ampiyacu). Crucially, the remaining traditional Omagua villages span the mouth of the Putumayo: 13 upriver, nine downriver. In no sense do Omagua villages span the mouth of the Napo River. While Fritz's map is drawn nearly 150 years after Orellana's expedition, it is not plausible that the entire center of Omagua villages would have shifted so far downriver, especially in light of the frequent Portuguese slave raids that intensified from Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, throughout the 17th century. If Carvajal was correct that the juncture with the Río de la Trinidad was "en el señorío y tierra de Omagua," then, given Fritz's map, it is most probable that Orellana's expedition was near the mouth of the Putumayo at this time.

Portion of Samuel Fritz's (1691) map of the upper Amazon

There are two counter-arguments that might be raised at this point: perhaps the term Omagua did not refer to the same ethnic group in Carvajal's time that it did in Fritz's time; or perhaps the Río de la Trinidad was not the Amazon as viewed from the lower Putumayo, but something like the Javarí or the Jutaí (right-bank tributaries of the Amazon), viewed going downriver on the Amazon proper. To take the second counter-argument first, Carvajal nowhere else in the Relación describes a river that seems to have had the same flow as the Río de la Trinidad, making it improbable that it is either the Javarí or the Jutaí. The second counter-argument has been made artificially believable in the literature by an additional assumption that I now turn to, namely that the Omaguas of the 17th century really correspond to the Aparias of the 16th century. This takes us back to an earlier period of Orellana's expedition. (Full disclosure: I have repeated the specious Aparia-Omagua connection on this blog, and, indirectly, in a (2016:2) book with Lev Michael.)

Before they reached Machifaro's territory, Orellana's expedition had encountered at least two chiefs named Aparia and one named Irimara, both on the region along the right bank of the river they were descending. (The form of the latter comes from a different manuscript copy of Carvajal's Relación. The one pictured in this post has something more like <irrimarany>.) Hemming (ibid.) assumes the Aparias correspond to modern-day Omaguas, as do others such as Thomas Myers in "The Expansion and Collapse of the Omagua" (1992:130), in part because who Carvajal calls Omaguas seem to be out of place relative to other groups in the 17th century (see above). However, as Peruvian linguist Jaime Peña emphasized in his MA thesis (2009:17-18), both Paul Fejos (Ethnography of the Yagua, 1943) and Jean-Pierre Chaumeil (Historia y migraciones de los yagua de finales del siglo XVII hasta nuestros días, 1981) note that Aparias must have been a Peba-Yaguan group. Indeed as Thomas Payne writes plainly in the introduction to his PhD dissertation, Participant Coding in Yagua Discourse (1985:5), "These names could conceivably have come from the Yagua words (j)ápiiryá 'red macaw clan' and rimyurá 'shaman' respectively. The former could very well be a village name as well as a name applied to an individual; today clan names are still used by many Yaguas as family names." Carvajal goes on to say that Aparias called the sun, which they worshipped, chise, strikingly similar to the Peba word Castelnau recorded in his diaries in the 1840s, riesé.

Instance of chise 'sun' in Carvajal's Relación (start of sixth line)

If Orellana's expedition were descending the Napo, it is implausible that they would have encountered Peba-Yaguan people on the right bank, this region as early as the 17th century being occupied by Zaparoan and other unrelated peoples (with Tukanoan peoples on the left bank). Even if the expedition were already on the Amazon by this point, the modern-day presence of Yaguas on the right bank seems to be a more recent residence pattern (cf. Fritz's map, where Mayoruna, or Matses, people are located). In contrast, if the expedition were descending the Putumayo, one would expect Peba-Yaguan people to live along the right bank, that is, in the hinterland between the lower Putumayo and upper Amazon, where Yaguas live today, and where Pebas still lived in the colonial period. Moreover, the existence of "Parianas" on the left bank of the lower Putumayo on Fritz's map should not be lost on readers.

After Orellana's expedition left Omagua's territory, they entered into the territory of a leader named Paguana. On Fritz's map, the Paguanas are located along the right bank of the Amazon directly across from the mouth of the Caquetá/Japurá. Here the discrepancies between Carvajal and Fritz are noteworthy. For Carvajal, Omagua and Paguana's territories adjoin; for Fritz, they are separated by two Yurimagua villages, four Aisuare villages, one Ibanoma village, and, confusingly, one village that Fritz labels "Omaua nación." In a July 2, 1691 letter written in his own hand (Fritz wrote this letter to summarize his return up the Amazon from Belém the previous fall; BEAEP MSS #537), Fritz does not mention the Paguanas or the "Omaua nación." The latter seems to correspond to an unnamed Ibanoma village they traveled through, between the named Ibanoma village Yoabeni and the Aisuare village Quirimatate (Omagua /kirimata-te/ 'place of many carachamas'). More to the point, the lengthy stretch of the Amazon downriver of the downrivermost Omagua village in 1691 attests to a high degree of demographic upheaval due to Portuguese slaving. The order of villages between Omaguas and Paguanas on Fritz's map is Yurimagua, Aisuare, and Ibanoma, but there are also additional Ibanoma and Yurimagua communities downriver of the Paguanas. This suggests that Yurimaguas, Aisuares, and Ibanomas had come to insert themselves, so to speak, between Omaguas and Paguanas between 1542 and 1691, presumably from farther downriver. Furthermore, all Yurimagua and some Aisuare (but no Ibanoma) villages have Omagua names, suggesting that the region they occupied in 1691 was formerly Omagua territory. This is consistent with a transition from Omagua territory directly into Paguana territory in in the preceding century.

Passage from Fritz's July 2, 1691 letter (Cuchihuara to Aisuare territory)

Another potential challenge to the idea that Orellana's expedition descended the Putumayo comes in the form of an account of Pedro de Orsúa's 1560 expedition heading down the Huallaga, Marañón, and Amazon rivers, a route that would have taken them by the mouth of the Putumayo but never up it. This group is nevertheless supposed to have entered Machifaro territory. However, the exact wording in the account is revealing: "A este pueblo llamaban los indios Machifaro" (Vásquez [1881]:25). This is unlike all preceding descriptions of named places and people in this account, for example, earlier, "Pasamos asimismo por otra provincia que llamamos Maricuri" (ibid.:23). On one interpretation, at least, the Orsúa expedition only understood themselves to be in Machifaro territory because of their familiarity with Carvajal's account, which had circulated by this time. In other words, Machifaro territory was where they thought they should be. This interpretation is made more plausible given the fact that, before reaching Machifaro territory (and other territories they name after Carari and Maricuri, spelled per published versions), they pass by a left-bank tributary they believe to be the mouth of the river Orellana descended. It is also made more plausible by the fact that Cristóbal de Acuña, in his 1641 account of Pedro de Teixeira's 1639 expedition along the Amazon, does not mention the Machifaro. If they were a main Amazon people who still survived, as one would expect given Omaguas' survival during this period, Acuña would be expected to have mentioned them.

To my mind, the question of the location of Machifaro territory aside, the most convincing evidence that Orellana's expedition descended the Putumayo is the description of the Río de la Trinidad combined with the observation that this was in Omagua territory. It is implausible to square this with a descent along the Napo, especially because a massive migration of Omaguas downriver subsequent to Orellana's expedition, which is necessary to explain the distribution of their villages on Fritz's map, is unlikely due to Portuguese slave raids after the founding of Belém in 1616. Moreover, the account sketched here simplifies dizzying rearrangements of mappings of names onto ethnic groups: the Aparias and Irimaras were Peba-Yaguan people, supported by fairly strong linguistic evidence, not modern-day Omaguas; the Oniguayals never existed; and the Omaguas are the Omaguas of later years. Finally, assuming the Machifaros occupied the main banks of the lower Putumayo, who were they? Were they related to Ibanomas, who in 1702 had a chief with a name ending in the same apparent suffix -faru? A project for another day!