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The Amazon represents over half of the total area of remaining rainforest on Earth. The majority of the rainforest is in Brazil, but its lush, emerald green canopy also reaches into Peru and Colombia. In all, the region includes territory belonging to nine nations and over 3,000 Indigenous territories.
Spanish conquistadors were the first Europeans to encounter the Amazon. But the true pioneers of Amazon rainforest exploration were the botanists, zoologists, and naturalists who discovered and recorded the region's vast wealth of flora and fauna, much of it new to science.
So, who were those brave and heroic individuals who helped broaden our understanding of one of the planet's last great and increasingly fragile wildernesses?
Click through and embark on a fascinating expedition to the Amazon.
In 1500, Spanish navigator and explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón became the first documented European to encounter the Amazon River. He called it the Río Santa María de la Mar Dulce ("River of Saint Mary of the Fresh Water Sea"). It would take another 40-odd years before the river and the basin it flows through were explored further.
Francisco Pizarro was one of the most notorious Spanish conquistadors. Cruel and brutal, Pizarro was known for his expeditions that led to the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.
Pizarro made his first voyage to the New World in November 1524. From 1532, he ruthlessly pursued his goal of claiming territory for Spain.
During his conquest of Peru, Pizarro captured and later executed the Inca leader Atahualpa.
After Atahualpa's death, Francisco Pizarro was joined by his younger brother Gonzalo in the wholesale annihilation of the Incas.
In 1541, Francisco Pizarro was murdered by a rival faction of conquistadors. The same year, Gonzalo Pizarro, accompanied by Francisco de Orellana, embarked on an expedition inland along the Coca River.
The purpose of the voyage was to find the legendary El Dorado, a city in the east, which supposedly boasted an abundance of gold and silver.
No such gold-laden community was found. Instead, the expedition ran out of food, was plagued by disease, and ended up attacked by angry Indigenous peoples. Eventually, Pizarro and Orellana became separated.
Pizarro returned to Quito. Francisco de Orellana, however, persevered. In doing so, he was the first person to navigate the entire Amazon River—still one of the most improbable voyages in the history of exploration.
A confrontation between Orellana's expedition and the Pira-tapuya, in which the women of the tribe fought alongside the men, is said to have given rise to the name "Amazon."
In his account, Orellana described the river as "the river of the Amazons," referring to the mythical Amazons—the female warriors of Asia described by Herodotus. The journal was in fact written up by the Spanish Dominican missionary Gaspar de Carvajal.
Francisco de Orellana's historic expedition resulted in one of the earliest maps to show the results of Spanish exploration of the interior of South and Central America, as well as southern portions of North America.
The manuscript atlas of the world created in 1587 by Joan Martines, cosmographer to King Philip II of Spain, clearly depicts the Amazon basin and two estuary mouths.
This fascinating 'new world' was not lost on the great botanists of the age, men like Prussian geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.
Between 1799 and 1804, Von Humboldt, together with fellow botanist Aimé Bonpland, explored the Orinoco and Amazon regions of South America, collecting 60,000 plant specimens. And they discovered the first animal to actually produce electricity: the electric eel.
Following in their wake was Henry Walter Bates. The English naturalist and explorer was already lauded for imparting the first scientific account of mimicry in animals when he first visited the Amazon in 1848.
Bates traveled to South America with Alfred Russell Wallace, the Welsh naturalist who developed a theory of natural selection at the same time as Charles Darwin.
The pair worked together for a year before splitting up to focus on different areas of the Amazon. Wallace returned to England in 1852, but Bates remained in the region for 11 years.
Bates journeyed extensively throughout the Amazon and its tributaries, collecting over 14,000 species, mainly insects, of which 8,000 were new to science. His book, 'The Naturalist on the River Amazons,' was published in 1863.
Following Bates and Wallace into the Amazon in 1849 was botanist Richard Spruce, another one of the great Victorian explorers.
Spruce nurtured a passionate interest in plants. He spent 15 years exploring the Amazon from the Andes to its mouth, discovering and naming a number of new plant species. In particular, a jungle vine now known by the scientific name of Banisteropsis caapi, or simply caapi in Brazil and ayahuasca in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.
One of Spruce's most important discoveries was the cinchona flowering plant in the Andes of Peru. He'd studied the Indigenous cultivation of cinchona that produced quinine, a drug used to prevent malaria.
While in the Amazon, Spruce lived with Indigenous people and learnt several languages. He later collected vocabularies of 28 native Amazon languages.
One of the most compelling mysteries of the Amazon is the fate that befell British army officer and explorer Percy Fawcett.
Fawcett first visited South America in 1906 after the Royal Geographical Society sent him to Brazil to map an area of the jungle bordering Bolivia. He made several more expeditions between 1906 and 1924 after formulating ideas about a 'lost city' he named "Z."
In 1925, he returned to Brazil with his son Jack to lead an expedition to find the mythical city. Fawcett was last heard of in May. He and his son were never seen again. Many people assumed that local Indigenous peoples killed Fawcett's party, but their disappearance remains unexplained.
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United, is arguably the most famous person to explore the Amazon.
Four years after leaving office, Roosevelt jointly led with Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition, a survey to map the path of the Rio da Dúvida ("River of Doubt") in the Amazon basin.
The journey nearly killed the former president. He sustained a severe leg injury, and malaria plagued him from the outset. He later admitted that his health was permanently damaged as a result of the expedition. For his efforts, the Rio da Dúvida was renamed the Roosevelt River.
Since the 1960s, numerous scientific and archaeological expeditions have been deployed to the Amazon. Findings have proven the existence of a pre-Columbian civilization.
Amazon exploration today is very much focused on the ecology and anthropology of the region. One of the leading figures involved in this work is Brazilian explorer, social activist, and ethnographer Sydney Possuelo.
Possuelo is considered the leading authority on Brazil's remaining isolated Indigenous peoples, and credited with making contact with nine "lost tribes" since the early 1970s.
Sources: (World History Encyclopedia) (Rainforest Cruises) (SA Vacations) (Thinkjungle.com) (Survival International) (Library of Congress)
See also: An Indigenous tribe's struggle to protect their land in the Amazon
Who were the pioneers of Amazon rainforest exploration?
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The Amazon represents over half of the total area of remaining rainforest on Earth. The majority of the rainforest is in Brazil, but its lush, emerald green canopy also reaches into Peru and Colombia. In all, the region includes territory belonging to nine nations and over 3,000 Indigenous territories.
Spanish conquistadors were the first Europeans to encounter the Amazon. But the true pioneers of Amazon rainforest exploration were the botanists, zoologists, and naturalists who discovered and recorded the region's vast wealth of flora and fauna, much of it new to science.
So, who were those brave and heroic individuals who helped broaden our understanding of one of the planet's last great and increasingly fragile wildernesses?
Click through and embark on a fascinating expedition to the Amazon.