Gaspar de Carvajal

Gaspar de Carvajal (c. 1500–1584) was a Spanish Dominican missionary to the New World, known for chronicling some of the explorations of the Amazon.

De Carvajal was born in Trujillo. After entering the Dominican order in Spain, he set out for Peru in 1533, dedicating himself to the conversion of the Indians. In 1540, Carvajal joined as a chaplain the expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro, governor of Quito, which was searching for La Canela, the supposed "Land of Cinnamon", to the east of Quito.

The expedition, under difficult conditions, crossed the Andes and into the Amazonian jungle, an inhospitable territory devoid of provisions. Gonzalo Pizarro ordered his second in command, Francisco de Orellana to follow the Napo River with fifty men, in order to find its mouth. The hope was that the men would be able to find provisions and bring them back in the small boat in which they went. Orellana reached the confluence of the Napo and Trinidad, but he didn't find provisions. Unable to return because of the current, he decided to continue following the river, until he reached the estuary of the Amazon in 1542.

Caravajal, who was one of the survivors of the expedition, narrated the events in his work Relación del nuevo descubrimiento del famoso río Grande que descubrió por muy gran ventura el capitán Francisco de Orellana ("Account of the recent discovery of the famous Grand river which was discovered by great good fortune by Captain Francisco de Orellana"). In it, the friar recorded the dates of the expedition as well as a large number of notes of ethnological interest such as the sizes and dispositions of the indigenous peoples which occupied the banks of the river, their tactics of war, rituals, customs, utensils, and the like.

This work remained obscure for a long period, being published only in 1895 by the Chilean José Toribio Medina. Parts of Relación, in addition to interviews of Orellana and some of his men, were used by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia general y natural de las Indias ("General and Natural History of the Indies"), which was written in 1542, but not published until 1855. In 1934, Relación was again published, this time extensively revised by a H. C. Heaton. It is in a large extent due to Relación that Friar Carvajal is remembered in history.

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