Turns out there's a whole genre of European Explorers from the Spanish in the 1500s right up to the 20th century, they walked into the jungle….and the lucky ones barely got out alive
by Chumlee1917
Turns out there's a whole genre of European Explorers from the Spanish in the 1500s right up to the 20th century, they walked into the jungle….and the lucky ones barely got out alive
by Chumlee1917
17 Comments
The jungle ain’t fucking around.
Yeah that jungle will happily chew you up and spit you out if it doesn’t just swallow you whole.
Evelyn Waugh wrote a cool book about Euros going to Guyana, Handful of Dust
Walking into any wilderness not understanding the dangers usually doesn’t end well. Explorers, dudes “roughing it”, eco-travelers, doesn’t matter.
At least the first explorers had the excuse of no guidebook.
It’s called the green hell for a reason
They thought it was fun and games
The climate of the Amazon existed about 100 million years ago, but the rain forest itself didn’t take hold until the K-T extinction burned out all the ferns and let gymnosperms, modern trees and flowering plants, to gain the upper hand.
Since then, for 60 million years, 30 times the lifetime of our species, the Amazon has been rich in water, soil, and sunlight, the fuel to feed a very… *energetic* ecosystem
Conquistadors and explorers relentlessly searched the Amazon and surrounding regions for El Dorado(city of gold) for over two centuries, spanning from the 1540s into the 1700s.
During this era, introduced European diseases, causing the deaths of an estimated several million local people.
Concurrently, millions of indigenous people and displaced African laborers were captured and forced into brutal slavery to fuel colonial enterprises.
To escape enslavement, entire communities fled deep into the dense, uncharted interiors of the Amazon rainforest where colonizers could not easily follow.
Other groups chose mass suicide over a life of captivity.
Will someone PLEASE think of the explorers!?
It’s all fun and games until Simon Bolivar enters the fray
When ppl realize that aside from the most infamous conquistadors, the story for alot of the first explorers were that they were either killed by locals, nature, or just straight up disappeared and were never seen again.
I am Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Percy Fawcett knows.
Do you think the natives telling Europeans about cities of gold were pranking them? Because I do.
My man forgot the portuguese who OWNED ts
A bullet couldn’t stop Teddy but the Amazon did
Don’t worry, with enough financial backing and aid by the locals you can just hoist a boat across a mountain and create a shortcut between two arms of the Amazon river
Even worse, their diseases wiped out the very civilizations they were seeking, ie, the lieks of El Dorado.
The Amazon was home to fliurishing cities wiped out by both European diseases brought by missionaries, as well as by Malaria’s introduction making the river a much worse deathzone