The unfortunate Gonzalo and his companions, thus left starving in the Amazon forest, suffered many vicissitudes and many lost their lives. They were forced to return to Quito without having reached any El Dorado of their dreams. The backward journey was one of the most terrible in the early history of America, and out of all that great band which set forth with such high hopes only about eighty Spaniards and half that number of Indians returned to tell the tale--little over a hundred haggard adventurers, who, falling down on the floor of the cathedral, rendered thanks to heaven for their own escape from the terrors of the Amazon wilds. Thus ended the first expedition to the Amazon. It was Orellana who gave the river its name. On his dangerous journey adown the current, his band fought with what they believed to be an army of women-warriors, or _Amazonas_, who rushing from the depths of the forest, attacked the white men, but who, in reality, were only wild Indians in loose cotton chemises or shirts flying in the breeze. There is no legend here of an empire of women. That the Amazon could be navigated was again shown later by Pedro de Texeira, who, with his companions, performed the great feat of ascending from the mouth of the river up to Quito, and returning thence--a marvellous voyage for that period. The River Napo, by which the Spaniards first entered upon the main stream of the Amazon (there was an earlier exploration of the mouth of the river in Brazil), is but one of many great navigable tributaries which traverse the territories of those nations--Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil--which lies partly within the region. Many thousands of miles of such navigable waterways intersect it, some of them very little known or used. We may gain an idea of the size of the region drained by the Amazon by noting that it covers four-tenths of the entire area of South America. Yet less than a hundred square miles of it is cultivated, and its "population"--if the term may be used for the bands of savage or semi-savage Indians that dwell there and the few white settlements--number perhaps half of that of the city of London: a few million souls, who are lost in this immensity of forest, jungle and river.