Orellana arrived in the New World as a teenager, working for some years in Nicaragua before going south as part of reinforcements for the Pizarro clan around 1533. He fought in the campaigns to submit the rebellious Manco Inca, in whose course Francisco lost one eye (other sources say he lost it later). When the war between the Pizarros and Diego de Almagro broke out, Orellana remained as a loyal Pizarrist, and as a reward he was appointed governor of the lands of modern day Ecuador. For several years, his job involved working with the old Inca administration to develop the land and rebuild some collateral damage of the conquest (he even dedicated himself to learn the local languages to better coordinate things with the natives), and over time he proved good at the task, building a very stable province and becoming immensely rich all in one. Orellana might have perfectly stayed on the couch and lived off this to the end of his life, but a desire for adventure led him to join Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition in the search of the Land of Cinnamon, a fabulous realm in the heart of South America where the precious spices supposedly grew freely.note
The expedition, started in 1541, was effectively the largest land enterprise of the Spanish Empire up to the point, counting on around 360 Spaniards and 4,000 natives, and carrying masses of horses, dogs, llamas and pigs to ensure success against any eventuality. However, if those Iberian exploration expeditions were easy, they wouldn't be Iberian exploration expeditions in the first place, as it would turn out.
Merely crossing the Andes turned out to be a Caradhras-like nightmare, after which not less than 140 Spaniards and 3,000 natives had either died or deserted on the belief it would be a Suicide Mission. The unnerved Pizarro even executed their guides, believing they had conned them all, but the expedition continued anyway and eventually came upon the Coca and Napo rivers, where they built brigantines and bought canoes from friendly natives, learning in the process about supposed populated villages where they could resupply. After running out of food, the explorers decided for Pizarro to wait in land with most of the expedition while Orellana continued through the Napo river with 70 men until finding the damn villages, but it took so much time for Orellana to do so that the expedition broke up: Pizarro deemed Orellana MIA and ordered to go back to the Inca lands, while Orellana and his people equally believed they were too far to rendezvous and voted to continue the travel by themselves. Orellana and company, unsupported but undaunted, finally reached the end of the Napo and became the first Europeans to sight the largest river in the planet.
From this point, evidently, the journey became such an adventure that it's hard to say what is truth and what is fiction in the chronicle of the expedition. Orellana and his people apparently stopped finding friendly tribes, instead finding hostile peoples like Omaguas and Machiparo, and had to resort to fight and plunder in order to survive. Among their enemies they supposedly found Pira-tapuya indigenous warrior women like the famed Amazons of Greek mythology, which is the reason why they named the river Amazonas (their first option had been Orellana river). In any case, after defeating the women by good ol' steel and keeping on with the travel without pause, the expedition finally got out of the most dense parte of the Amazonian jungle, and when they found tribes they could identify as Caribes, they were overjoyed to discover the river was flowing into the Atlantic coast. On August 1542, after seven grueling months of expedition, Orellana and company finally sighted the ocean, not less happy that the Ten Thousand sighting the Black Sea, and managed to reach the Spanish settlement of Cubagua.
Predicting that the impetuous Gonzalo would not be happy, Orellana returned directly to Spain by ship. After rejecting an offer by King John III of Portugal to expand Brazil for them (there was some controversy whether the mouth of the Amazonas belonged to Spain or Portugal by the Treaty of Tordesillas), he was able to personally tell King Charles V of his epic, which landed Orellana governor of all the lands he had discovered, baptized New Andalusia, and saved him from the Pizarro family's accusations of having abandoned and betrayed them.
For Orellana, that was all past history, as now he had his own feud to conquer... as well as all the troubles that come with being your own boss. Orellana had surely proved to be a true survivor and leader, but compared to colleagues like Pizarro and Hernán Cortés, he lacked the necessary connections, Machiavellianism and sheer luck to pull his own expedition off. Politics delayed his fleet so much that he lost the king's favor, money did not arrive in time, and a minor scandal broke when Francisco married the humble and much younger Ana de Ayala (apparently a case of true love). Orellana and Ayala had to sail off hidden in their own fleet and resort to piracy to get supplies, eventually arriving in South America with only half of the ships. The maligned expedition, now reduced to 100 men and women, finally found a river mouth that Orellana believed to be part of the Amazonas delta, but he failed to find the main river.
Sometimes, what starts badly ends even worse, and this second expedition would be not only unsuccessful, but also Orellana's final. After weeks of walking in circles around the lands in the search of the main river, being attacked by natives, eating all of their food and just plain going insane, Orellana died, according to Ayala by a mix of illness and desperation. Only 46 expeditioners survived, led by Ayala and Diego García de Paredes Jr (the son of Diego García de Paredes) to the nearby settlement of Margarita Island, from which most of them embarked in the search of more fortunate conquests through America.
In fiction
Film- Aguirre, the Wrath of God features the disappeared expedition of Orellana at the background, and a cut subplot would have addressed it directly.
- Orellana is mentioned at the background of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
- La conquista del Amazonas is a historical novel about Orellana written by Spanish-British actor Edward Rosset.
- Orellana is featured in the El Dorado expansion of Age of Empires II.
- He also appears in The Amazon Trail.
