543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God

“Anyone who even thinks of abandoning this mission will be cut up into a thousand pieces…I am the wrath of God!” At the height of the age of exploration, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one story in particular gripped the imagination of European colonialists: El Dorado, a legendary city of gold, hidden in the very heart of the South American Rainforests. But no kingdom sought this prize more furiously than the mighty Spanish Empire. Determined to restore their fortunes with El Dorado’s treasures, they sent countless expeditions in search of the golden city, to no avail. Then, in 1559, the authorities in Lima assembled a new expedition, bigger and better than ever before, under the leadership of the knight Pedro de Ursula. The group he mustered to go with him would prove ill chosen indeed. Among them was his famously beautiful mistress, Dona Inez, and more ominously still, a fierce eyed, limp-footed man by the name of Lope de Aguirre. Little did his companions know that they had a devil in their midst. Aguirre would prove to be one of history’s strangest and most unsettling characters, and one of the great villains of the Spanish conquests of the New World. Cruel and psychopathic, he would eventually violently usurp Ursula’s command, and lead his companions not in search of El Dorado, but further and further into the Amazonian interior, enacting a regime of paranoid terror as they went. It would prove to be one of the strangest, most gruesome, and also the most horrific journeys of all time, replete with murder, betrayal, treason, and above all, madness….  Join Tom and Dominic, as they discuss the iniquitous Spanish conquistador Aguirre, and his journey both into the heart of the South American wilderness, but also into human madness. It is a story of mystery and adventure, gold and greed, horror and death. EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 0:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 0:42Tom Holland?

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 0:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 1:24Tom Holland?

  So they asked over 100,000 people. And what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 1:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ask yours at claude.ai restoishistory. And keep thinking.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  I am the great traitor. There must be no other. Anyone who even thinks about deserting this mission will be cut up into ninety-eight pieces. Whoever takes one grain of corn or one drop of water more than his ration will be locked up for hundred and fifty-five years. If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees, then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble. Whoever follows me on the river

• 2:39Speaker 02

  will win untold riches. We will control all of New Spain and we will stage history as others stage plays. I, the wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and this have found the purest dynasty ever known to man. Together we will rule the whole of this continent. I am the wrath. The wrath of God.

• 3:13Tom Holland?

  So, that was Klaus Kinski, the great German actor as Lopez de Aguirre in the film Aguirre: The Wrath of God, which was made in 1972, directed by funster Werner Herzog and loosely based on, I mean, one of the most remarkable episodes of European exploration in history. A 16th-century Spanish band of conquistadors venturing into the Amazon rainforest in search of El Dorado, and it doesn't end well. And it's one of the maddest films ever made, partly because, of course, the conquistadors speak in German and we know that they would have spoken in English.

• 3:58Tom Holland?

  Obviously, but also, Dominic, I guess because it ranks alongside Francis Ford Coppola's attempt to finish Apocalypse Now as a kind of cinematic folly de grandeur, doesn't it?

• 4:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  It does indeed.

• 4:11Tom Holland?

  Because they go into the jungle and it's all terrible and Herzog tries to kill Kinsky. Kinsky's going mad, he's got his great bolting eyeballs.

• 4:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Tom Holland?

  The making of the film is carnage.

• 4:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is.

• 4:22Tom Holland?

  And it's holding a mirror up to the carnage of the original 16th century expedition.

• 4:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, it's very like Apocalypse Now in that sense, so they shot it in the early 70s, as you say, they shot it on location in the Peruvian Amazon and Herzog at one point threatened to shoot Kinsky, his lead actor, and then turned the gun on himself. And that's sort of been reported as he was basically forcing Kinsky to film scenes at gunpoint, which I think is a slight exaggeration, but the film of it was demented. But that actually, of course, reflected the subject matter, which is this, as you say, this expedition that's very, very heart of darkness, actually. The 16th century expedition, it's about European colonizers, colonialists, conquistadors. In Heart of Darkness, which we did a podcast on a few weeks ago, you know, they go up the Congo, Joseph Conrad and his narrator Marlowe goes up the Congo, he's in search

• 5:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  of this guy Kurtz who's lost his mind. Well, in this story, it's the people who are going up the river who lose their minds and particularly this bloke Aguirre, who I think it's fair to say is one of the strangest and most unsettling characters we've ever done on this podcast. It's really interesting, the books about him are often written by, some of them are by professional historians, but one of the best, for example, is by a guy called Robert Silverberg, who's actually a science fiction writer.

• 5:37Tom Holland?

  Yeah, he did, so all those books with kind of giant spaceships on the cover.

• 5:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and he wrote an absolutely brilliant book called The Golden Dream, A History of Quests for El Dorado, like very scrupulously researched, very serious book, and he describes Aguirre in this book, he says he's the single most villainous figure in the annals of the Spanish conquest, which is, you know, it's quite a high bar to clear.

• 5:59Tom Holland?

  Yes, it is.

• 6:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then there's the great historian of the Amazon, John Hemming, who wrote a brilliant book about the fall of the Incas, and he says of Aguirre, simply cruel, psychopathic. A man of unmitigated evil.

• 6:11Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so people are going to enjoy this. Yeah.

• 6:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it's always good to have a character like that on the podcast.

• 6:15Tom Holland?

  I mean, it is very Heart of Darkness, so very reminiscent of the series we just did on the Congo. But we've also just done an episode on Dr. John Dee, Elizabeth I's kind of great magus. And his great ambition is to track down secrets that will unleash untold wealth.

• 6:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 6:34Tom Holland?

  And the whole Eldorado quest.

• 6:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 6:37Tom Holland?

  This sense that there is a golden ruler, a golden city, lost somewhere in the jungle. And that if only you can find it, then you will be unspeakably rich. This also is part of the Aguirre story. So it's a kind of fusion of the two, isn't it?

• 6:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's absolutely part of the Aguirre story. And yet the mad thing about it is there's pretty much only one person in this story who thinks that Eldorado is a complete myth and a nonsense. And that's Aguirre.

• 7:00Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's an argument possibly, he's the only sane man on the expedition.

• 7:06Tom Holland?

  Isn't there some historian who says that he's the only man in history to look for Eldorado who didn't want to find it?

• 7:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly, exactly. Well, we'll come to that. In fact, he tries to dissuade other people from trying to find it. So let's give everybody a bit of context because there'll be lots of people who are not familiar with this story at all. So we're in the Spanish Empire in the late 1550s. So that means the Aztecs and the Incas have been conquered a generation ago. Loads of silver is flowing back to Europe from Mexico and Peru. But if in your mind you're thinking, okay, well, South America has been conquered by Spain, the story is over. That's not right at all. Spanish rule is very fragile and it's really just confined to the coasts. And Spain itself, although it's very rich and powerful, it's in a kind of world of trouble. So the emperor, Charles V, abdicated in 1556. And Spain and its empire passed to his son Philip II. He appears to be very rich and powerful, but he inherits a great mess.

• 7:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's huge inflation, thanks to all of this silver. Spain has been fighting all these wars in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. He has to default on Spain's loans straight away. He's got no money. He's struggling to raise taxes in Spain itself. And the obvious place to look is the New World. Let's get more gold and silver from the New World. But the problem is that his authority, and this is going to be really important to explain the political context to this story. His. Royal authority is very weak in the Spanish colonies. So in Peru, for example, you know, the Incas have, as it were, fallen. But there are still only about four thousand European Spaniards in Peru, in Lima and whatnot. And they are fighting these endless civil wars and there are little rebellions and feuds and things.

• 8:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  And in fifteen fifty six, a new viceroy called the Marcus of Canete arrived in Lima from Spain.

• 8:45Tom Holland?

  And Dominic, when he arrives in Lima, does he find the lilting of a Spanish guitar?

• 8:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  He doesn't actually, Tom. He hears the sound of screams and chaos. Because law and order have slightly broken down in Lima. This is not the world of Paddington Bear, it's fair to say. It's a much darker world. The place is in chaos. There are unemployed soldiers and ruffians everywhere. Total sort of feuds and vendettas. And he has to try to sort this out. You know, he wants to find money to impress Philip the Second.

• 9:13Tom Holland?

  And you can see why this scenario would appeal to a science fiction writer.

• 9:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Tom Holland?

  It's the kind of staple, isn't it? The new colony on a distant planet.

• 9:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Tom Holland?

  Full of gun runners and smugglers and desperadoes.

• 9:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's exactly what it is. All I think we should assume that almost everybody in this story, who we mentioned at this point almost, has an enormous scar. Running from their eyebrow right down to their chin or something.

• 9:35Tom Holland?

  A weapon with a personal nickname.

• 9:39Tom Holland?

  Gut splitter.

• 9:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, the widow weeper or something of that kind. Anyway, at about this point. When the Marcus of Canete arrives in Lima, an Amazonian Indian chieftain arrives in Peru from the east. And it's very like the sort of barbarians on the periphery of the Roman Empire. There are all kinds of movements of people who are pushing other people because of the arrival of the Europeans. So it's caused kind of chaos among the tribes. And this bloke is taken, the leader of this tribe, is taken to see the Spanish authorities. And he says. We've travelled a long way, we've travelled along the Amazon, and I have seen lands rich in gold. And the Marcus of Caniette's eye, you know, he raises his eyebrows to this. The king. Yeah, he's, oh brilliant. And this tallies were two things that people in the two great colonial cities of the western

• 10:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  side of the continent, which are Lima and Quito now in Ecuador. This tallies were two things that they believe. First of all, 10 years or so earlier, a man called Francisco de Oriana had led one of the great expeditions in all history. The first European expedition along the whole length of the Amazon. And he had travelled for 4,000 miles. And he, Oriana, reported that he had seen very large, very rich settlements, people who lived in towns, people who wore fine woven clothes with great pottery and loads and loads of silver. And for centuries, people have assumed since then that this was all nonsense and just a fable. But actually, now, the trend among historians of Amazonia is to say, actually, Amazonia

• 11:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  probably was more built up than we think. And there were more people there and they were more sophisticated. And they were all killed in the long run, or a lot of them by disease and things. So they've been discounted ever since. But archaeologists now think there's a lot of truth in this. And then the second thing is that in Lima and Quito, people have been swapping stories about this place called El Dorado. And this seems to have originated as a very garbled and exaggerated and confused report of what the Spanish were doing on the other side of the continent in Colombia, where they were conquering a people called the Muisca. And these Muisca were quite rich. And this basically became embellished and garbled into a story of a land so rich that the king could sort of paint himself in gold dust, throw a load of gold into the lake

• 11:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  every year in a religious ritual. And there's gold everywhere and there's a lake full of gold and all of this kind of business. Because El Dorado is literally the golden man, isn't it? The golden one. Exactly. So the Marcus of Caniette, anyway, he arrives in Lima. And there's all of these different rumours hanging around, oh, there's stuff out there in the Amazon, who knows? And his great brainwave is, and it's really smart, I'll get rid of all these ne'er-do-wells with their scars by saying to them, lads, why don't you go off on a massive expedition to go and find El Dorado? Because if they do find it, he'll be the The man who saved Spain's finances. He can send all the gold back to Philip the Second and that's great. If they don't find it and they'll die. Brilliant. Brilliant, he's rid of them. It's win-win. So to command the expedition, he appoints a fellow called Pedro de Asúa,

• 12:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  who is a knight from Navarre, from Pamplona. Everyone says he's very brave, he's very gallant, he's very headstrong. He's actually not without experience. He has been serving in New Granada, which is Colombia, for about 10 years. He's already gone on some El Dorado expeditions. No joy really, but he's not a complete idiot. So he is appointed to lead the expedition. He is told, when you conquer the province of Amagua and Dorado, you will rule it as governor. And he thinks, well, brilliant, because this is, of course, what conquistadors want. They want a slice of territory and they want an official appointment so that they can make money out of it. That's what all this is about, is what Cortés, Pizarro, all of these people. So Asúa, over the next year or so, he gathers his team.

• 13:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  He gets a very, very large expedition by the standards of the day. About 400 Spaniards and thousands of Peruvian Indians, native Peruvians, I suppose people might call them now. And it's the largest European force for the next two centuries to enter Amazonia. I have to say, most of the people on this expedition are not people with whom one would choose to go on holiday. They're kind of gangsters, mercenaries, ex-cons. They're hard men, I think it's fair to say, Tom. And they start building all these rafts and brigandines on the edge of Amazonia that they will use to go into the kind of river network. It's kind of a spaghetti western, only in a jungle. Exactly. It's a spaghetti western or, so we're going to be doing some episodes about Harold Hardrada going into the lands of the Rus.

• 14:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I think there's a slight Viking element to this, kind of slightly terrifying men, who would be no strangers to a facial tattoo. Yeah. Kind of venturing in search of gold and hopefully some slaughter. A lot of stubble, though. Exactly, yeah. This is a slightly sweatier version, I think it's probably fair to say. Anyway, in the summer of 1560, before he sets off, Asúa gets a letter from a friend. And the friend says to him, look, you're making two dreadful mistakes. Mistake number one, you are taking your mistress. What? Who's called Donya Iniesta Atienza. Please tell me she is incredibly ugly.

• 14:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Please tell me she's not absolutely gorgeous. Tom, so gallant. Well, but it's for our own good and for the good of the expedition. So, no, she's said to be the most beautiful woman in all of Peru. That is mad. Disastrous. Four hundred desperadoes in one woman. Yeah, so she's a young widow, she's probably mixed race and mestizo. There were like four or five eyewitness accounts written after the event. On this issue, they're frustratingly inconsistent. So some say she's a woman of unimpeachable honour. Others say she's a little bit free with her affections. It's hard to say. So it's hard to know the truth there, Tom. I think you'd listeners just make up their own minds. Anyway, a sues mate says, you are mad to take her with you. Nothing good will come of it. And I quote, greater evils will follow than you can possibly suppose. And I have a sense they're not wrong.

• 15:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, well, especially as the friend also says, you're not just taking quite bad men. Some of the men you're taking are unbelievably bad men. And he says, the worst is a man called Lopez de Aguirre. So we know from a letter that Aguirre later wrote to Philip the Second, which we shall come on to. Aguirre had been born in 1510 in the Basque Country. He'd come to Peru in his early twenties. He'd worked as a horse breaker and a general enforcer. That's a terrifying CV, isn't it? And there's a wonderful account, based on other accounts by a Franciscan monk, Fré Simon. And Simon said of Aguirre, he was of short stature and sparely made, ill-featured, the face small and lean, beard black, the eyes like a hawk. And when he looked, he fixed his eyes sternly, particularly when angry.

• 16:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he's generally a slightly unsettling presence. Yeah. All the chroniclers agree that he talks a lot, he's very roughly spoken, he's incredibly bad tempered and he's incredibly vengeful. And when you think this is in the context of. The conquest of South America. Yeah, and people are saying now, this bloke, you know, he's crossed the line. That's very disturbing. So he's always been, you know, kicked out of towns. He really is a spaghetti western character. And as Fray Simon says, he has a limp, which I always think is an unsettling sign in a conquistador because he's been shot in the leg.

• 16:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Fray Simon says, he was driven from one province to another and was known as Aguirre El Loco, the madman. Right. So he's signed up to this expedition. And the other thing is, he's brought with him his daughter. So his daughter, he had a daughter with an Indian woman, and his daughter is called Elvira. And how old is she? Thirteen, thirteen years old. Oh, so he's taking her out of school? Well, she always travels with him and apparently he is completely devoted to her. Like, this is his real soft spot. Right. You know, he takes Elvira very seriously. But, um, I mean, you know, should anyone be listening and think you're taking their children out of school? Don't. Just don't do it. You have to pay a fine, don't you, in England? This is a salutary warning, I think, of what could happen, what could go wrong. Certainly don't go to the Amazon with a group of ne'er-do-wills. No.

• 17:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Pedro de Asúa, the commander of the expedition, completely ignores this letter, which is madness. And on the twenty-sixth of September, fifteen sixty, he sets off with his expedition into the tributaries of the Amazon. And right from the start, surprise, surprise, things start to go wrong. They've built all these ships, but there are massive leaks on them and he has to leave all but one of them behind. What, so he's setting off and he's got all these ships built and then he can't take any of them, except for one? He can take one, brigantine, and then loads of rafts. Why doesn't he wait to fix them? Because it takes ages. And, you know, because the people are getting very impatient. And to be honest, I've had to cut out already a lot of feuding. Okay. There's been a lot of feuding already. I'm getting a really bad feeling about this.

• 18:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. So they all cram into these rafts, but Asúa insists on keeping one cabin just for himself and Donia Inés. And that does not go down well with the other people on the expedition. As Fray Simon says, the people were in such a state of ill humor that they almost mutinied. And this is before they've left? This is before they've left. Anyway, they're set off. After a few weeks, they reach a river called the Maranyon, which is the main source of the Amazon. So that runs from the Andes to the down and eastwards, deep into the jungle. So if they follow it, they will be swept along ultimately towards?

• 18:42Tom Holland?

  The Atlantic.

• 18:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, they're going from west to east.

• 18:45Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 18:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  From left to right, exactly. I mean, it's a heck of a way. It's 4,000 miles.

• 18:49Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're not intending to go to the Atlantic by any means. They think they'll go into Amazonia and there'll be a sort of Aztec-style kingdom.

• 18:56Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And they can seize its gold, make themselves the masters of it, then go back to Peru and say, brilliant, we've done it, you know.

• 19:02Tom Holland?

  And so they're not particularly worried about how they're going to go to get back coming upriver against the current?

• 19:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  They have not thought this through, I think it's fair to say, because we shall see quite quickly, they start to, some of them say, how are we getting back?

• 19:14Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think for some of them, it probably is always an option that they may have to continue all the way and then loop around the top of South America. And we shall return to this idea. Anyway, after a while, they find their first native villages. Frasimont reports that, you know, the people were very impressive. They had woven cloth sort of shirts and things. So they had, you know, this is not a totally unsophisticated civilization by any means, but they don't find any gold. And the Spaniards become increasingly restless. Surprise, surprise. As the weeks go by and they go deeper and deeper into the jungle, there's a lot of muttering that Ursua is more interested in dallying with Donia Inés than finding gold. There's no hint of gold. What's going on?

• 19:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Clearly, Ursua finds it very difficult to impose his authority on all these hundreds of kind of ex-cons.

• 20:02Tom Holland?

  What is the structure of control? Does it just depend on his charisma or?

• 20:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and he has a series of lieutenant that he employs who are constantly bickering and feuding among themselves. I mean, these are people who, it's not a military expedition. These are not people who are used to following orders. These are people who are used to being, they're mercenaries, they're kind of adventurers. I don't want to speak out of turn, Tom. I feel that you would be very uncomfortable in this environment.

• 20:25Tom Holland?

  I wouldn't like it at all.

• 20:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  No.

• 20:27Tom Holland?

  I'd stand on the margins wringing my hands.

• 20:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, I've been on tour with you when there was just four of us.

• 20:32Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  And I just can't see you enjoying this atmosphere.

• 20:35Tom Holland?

  No.

• 20:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  The sweat and the lack of shaving, if nothing else, because you're always a clean-shaven man.

• 20:39Tom Holland?

  I am.

• 20:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Anyway, they proceed down the river. Frasimont says of Ursua, he's too merciful and at times his acts savored of weakness. But then he does that classic thing that quite weak leaders do, which is from time to time, he kind of lashes out and afflicts severe punishments on people randomly. And so people say, well, you don't know where you stand with him, you know, he's not consistent. So they're not happy. They capture an Indian girl at one point and they say, these people that Oriana met, who were called the Amagua, you know, all these years ago, when he went down the Amazon, where are they? And she says, well, I've never heard of these people. And they realise with a sense of horror, we could be hundreds of miles from where these people live. If El Dorado exists, he could be 2,000 miles away.

• 21:21Tom Holland?

  Because I suppose in a jungle where you have no idea what the landmarks are, distance just becomes an abstraction.

• 21:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  And no proper map.

• 21:31Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  No sense of anything really, but just the sort of the green vastness and the sound of the sound of snakes slithering in the undergrowth and strange monkeys screaming in the night. You know, that's basically what.

• 21:44Tom Holland?

  Sloths snoring.

• 21:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. Now, after a while, this other brigantine, their shipwrights are clearly massively incompetent because this other brigantine springs a leak and they have to move everything out of there onto these rafts. So the German film version bears very little resemblance to reality. But the one thing it does have is a lot of raft action. And that is true to life because they are on these rafts. It starts pouring with rain. It's in the rainy season that by Christmas 1560, it's the rainy season. It's constantly raining. They've got no shelter. They're soaked, they've run out of food, they're really miserable and they are totally and utterly lost. And this is when Aguirre really enters the story. He and one of his mates, who's a man called Salduendo, are going around and muttering to the others.

• 22:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  First of all, Aguirre says, this business about El Dorado is clearly absolute total tosh. Like, this is just a stupid children's story. We should go back to Peru and just start rampaging through Peru and steal the gold of Peru if we really want gold that badly. And secondly, he says, Asuera is a terrible leader. He spends all his time with his mistress, Dona Iniesta, who's basically the real mistress of the expedition. He is selfish and I quote, "an enemy of giving away and a friend to receiving", which I quite like as an expression. And he is going to force us to stay in the jungle until we're grey haired old men. And, you know, if we don't act, we're going to get deeper and deeper and we're going to be just completely lost and we'll all die.

• 23:06Tom Holland?

  I mean, he's got a point with both, hasn't he? I mean, he's not wrong there.

• 23:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  Aguirre is a madman in many ways and we shall see, he does behave unbelievably badly even by rest of his history standards. But in this, he's not actually wrong. Wrong. Yeah. So when he goes around saying this, people say, well, who's going to be in charge? And Aguirre, to his credit, he doesn't say myself. He says, there's a young nobleman who's travelling with us called Don Fernando de Guzman. His birth and merits are worthy of greater honours. And he says to Guzman, he goes to Guzman, he says to him, look, if we get rid of Asure and you take over the leadership of the expedition, Philip the Second may well initially be annoyed, but when he hears the circumstances, he would consider it a good service and he will specially reward you. And he says to Don Fernando at this point, look, we won't kill Asure, we'll just leave him by the side of the bank or something. I mean, by the way,

• 23:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, that would be effectively to kill him, I'd imagine. I mean, it's not like he's going to make a new life for himself in the jungle. Anyway, Don Fernando, as I think is, you can expect with a man who goes around calling himself Don Fernando, he's a very vain man.

• 24:08Tom Holland?

  Right.

• 24:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he is, and I quote, swelled up by the wind of ambition. He gave thanks for what they offered him and assented to all their projects.

• 24:17Tom Holland?

  There was something in the air that night.

• 24:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  There was.

• 24:19Tom Holland?

  Stars so bright.

• 24:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Alan Partridge's son is called Fernando.

• 24:22Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  I imagine these people as being very similar. Right. So Don Fernando says, right, I'm in. Okay, let's get this plot started. And at that point, Aguirre says, yeah, there's one slight change. Actually, we probably will kill Asure after all. And Don Fernando was shocked by this, but he's in too deep. He's implicated in the plot, so he can't back out.

• 24:38Tom Holland?

  But I mean, it's ridiculous to be squeamish, as you said, because to just dump him on the side of the river. I mean, it's a death sentence anyway. Probably more merciful to kill him. That would be my attitude. I would have hardened up by this point.

• 24:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  You and I are completely on the same page on this. So on New Year's Day, fifteen sixty one, they're camped in this village by the side of the river. Asure has sent some of his key lieutenants to scout ahead, and that gives his opponents the perfect opportunity. And as darkness falls, a group of Aguirre's men gather outside Asure's hut. And they find him lying in his hammock, talking to a page boy. And he says to them, sort of in a friendly but suspicious way, caballeros, what seek ye here at this hour? And they kind of, I imagine there's a lot of cackling.

• 25:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  They draw their, they draw their knives and swords, plunge them in, and that is the end of Pedro de Asturias, he is dead. And then they start shouting, it's interesting what they shout actually, they start, liberty, liberty, long live the king, the tyrant is dead. So at this point, they're trying to dress it up.

• 25:36Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  As an act of loyalty to Philip the Second. They've had a bad leader, they've got rid, and the king will be very happy.

• 25:43Tom Holland?

  Sixth Emperor Tyranus.

• 25:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. The camp is in total uproar because people can hear the shouting, screaming. They butcher another of Asturias' lieutenants, who's a man called Vargas, who's come out in his cotton armour. So this is one thing the German film gets wrong. They're all wearing enormous metal armour in the German film, but in reality, they'd worn sort of Aztec or Inca style cotton padded quilted armour.

• 26:05Tom Holland?

  But the metal makes them look sweatier. I mean, it's a good, good for the visuals, I think.

• 26:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  And wearing a quilt in a film just looks ridiculous.

• 26:11Tom Holland?

  It has not intimidated.

• 26:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no, no. So then, of course, with staggering predictability, they immediately break into the wine stores. They all drink this wine, get absolutely wasted. They round up Asturias' other mates, they kill them as well. They don't kill Donia Inés.

• 26:25Tom Holland?

  I was going to ask about her. What's her fate?

• 26:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  So she's just hanging around in her own hut. She's not mentioned at this point, but we know she's mentioned later on. So she's just presumably quaking in her heart, very anxious.

• 26:37Tom Holland?

  I mean, these don't seem the kind of guys who would necessarily be a hundred percent chivalrous towards the mistress of someone they've just killed.

• 26:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  I have to tell the listeners, if they've already formed a great attachment to her as a character, the second half will make, will make challenging listening. So they then assemble the next day with massive hangovers, and Don Fernando is the new leader. And he says, I've decided we'll continue the search for El Dorado, because when we find all this gold, the king will forgive the murders and he will give us handsome rewards. So we should draw up a document explaining, the Spanish are so legalistic, aren't they? They did this all the time in the conquest of, of Mexico. Do you remember when we did that series? They're always drawing up requirements and reading out legal documents to people who don't understand them and things.

• 27:19Tom Holland?

  So I've got a question, which is, this is a highly dangerous expedition. Everyone knows that there's disease and wild animals and people with blowpipes and all that kind of stuff. Why would they ever confess to having murdered this guy? Why don't they just say, oh, he died of, you know, some disease or something? I mean, it just seems a bit odd.

• 27:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's lots of them. Remember, they were travelling with 400 people. I suppose they think the news will come out.

• 27:41Tom Holland?

  I suppose, yes, I suppose.

• 27:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  And because some of the people there were not part of the plot and perhaps a little bit displeased about it. So they think it's better to have an excuse. So they draw up this legalistic document. Don Fernando signs first and then Aguirre steps up and he signs his name as follows. He writes, "Lope de Aguirre, the traitor." Wow. And there's great gasps and shock and Aguirre laughs.

• 28:04Tom Holland?

  And how does he laugh, Dominic?

• 28:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  I imagine a demonic laugh at this point.

• 28:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  So I'll do a variety of laughs later on. There'll be a lot of opportunities, put it that way.

• 28:15Tom Holland?

  That was terrifying.

• 28:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  He says, "You have killed the king's governor, one who represented his royal person clothed with royal powers. We have all been traitors. We have all been a party to this mutiny."

• 28:27Tom Holland?

  I mean, again, he's not wrong, is he?

• 28:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  No. See, again, there is an alternative explanation, which is the only sane person in a world of fools.

• 28:34Tom Holland?

  I mean, there is a kind of Shakespearean quality to this, where it's the villain who speaks the truth, like kind of Richard III or Iago or whoever.

• 28:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Well, because of what he says next, he then says to the symbol company, "This business about El Dorado is demented. Even if we found it, there is no way Philip the Second would allow us to keep it. He would send in viceroys and governors and bureaucrats. It's madness to be wasting our time on this. We should go back to Peru. There's a load of treasure there. Let's kill everybody in Peru and take the treasure. That's just a much more sensible way of proceeding. There's a huge argument. The council breaks up and this issue is unresolved. So they set off downstream again, deeper and deeper into the Amazon. Now, by this point, Aguirre has clearly realised what perhaps some of the others have not yet woken up to. There is no way actually that they're going to be able to get back upstream.

• 29:27Tom Holland?

  Because by now the current is getting stronger and stronger.

• 29:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's really strong. You know, the Amazon, these are big rivers. There is no way with these terrible rafts that they're going to be able to go back the other way.

• 29:36Tom Holland?

  You know, the more I hear about him.

• 29:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  The more you like him.

• 29:39Tom Holland?

  The more I like him and the more I think I would have rallied behind him.

• 29:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, we'll see if you could maintain that position in the second half.

• 29:46Tom Holland?

  I'm aware that it doesn't end well.

• 29:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  So they now discover they've got massive holes in their rafts. They have to stop by the side of the river and build new ships. That takes them three months. I mean, day after day, hammering and stuff, you know, cutting down trees to make nails and planks and things. They've got no food. They're living off wild fruit. And I have to say, their own horses, because they had horses on these rafts. So they're now eating them. And Aguirre actually is quite pleased about this, because he thinks, if we eat all our animals, there's no way we can sort of settle down, or be tempted to capture towns and, you know, all this stuff. We'll just have to keep going all the way to the Atlantic and get out of here, which is basically what I want to do. And I think it's about this point that the mood really, really starts to darken.

• 30:32Tom Holland?

  What do you mean starts to darken?

• 30:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, because that was all prelude. That was all quite jolly.

• 30:37Tom Holland?

  God.

• 30:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because previously, when they'd got on reasonably well with the native population, they had done a bit of trading. Of course, there'd been a bit of violence, but nothing completely off the scale. Now, there's a lot of fighting. And basically, the word spreads, the Spaniards are bad guys. And whenever they go out to look for food, they're often ambushed by Indians. There's also a huge row, one of endless huge rows inside the camp. Some of Don Fernando's friends say, look, you actually need to get rid of Aguirre. But he doesn't have the guts. He demotes him as second in command. And the problem is, Aguirre, as we've established, is a very vengeful man. So Aguirre just notes this slight. He hides his fury and resentment. But he's determined one day that he will get his revenge. So we

• 31:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  come to March 1561. Don Fernando and Aguirre call another meeting. You can sense that the mood is getting very paranoid. They begin by demanding that every man pledge his loyalty to Don Fernando by God and the Virgin. And then Aguirre addresses the men, and he says, look, we've been talking, the plan has changed. We are going to forget about El Dorado now. We are going to seize the wealth of Peru. And we will crown Don Fernando Guzman a general by the grace of God, Lord and Prince of Peru, the main and Chile, to whom by right these kingdoms belong.

• 31:53Tom Holland?

  Wow, there's a twist.

• 31:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  He says, we forswear our allegiance to the King of Spain. And Aguirre makes this huge pronouncement. He says, from this day forward. I pledge myself to my prince, king and natural lord, Don Fernando, and I swear and promise to be his faithful vassal and to die in his defence.

• 32:11Tom Holland?

  So that's a death sentence, isn't it?

• 32:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  And then he turns to Don Fernando, he bows and in front of everybody, he kisses his hand as the new prince of Peru. And Tom, I hate to tell you, but with that traitor's kiss, the real nightmare begins.

• 32:27Tom Holland?

  Brilliant, Dominic. Okay, so it's been an absolute pleasure, John, up until now. But in the second half, we will find out how, as Dominic just said, the nightmare begins.

• 32:40Tom Holland?

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 32:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months. Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 33:21Tom Holland?

  Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are with Aguirre, the wrath of God, the traitor, El Loco, the madman, the epithets are piling up. And Dominic, none of them are good. And none of them are looking good for Don Fernando, who is in nominal charge, has just been proclaimed by Aguirre, basically lord of the whole of South America. So he must be feeling pretty pleased, but I'm guessing, do you know, just something telling me he's not going to be around for long.

• 33:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  Guess what? The clock is ticking for Don Fernando, I think it's fair to say, Tom. So he's the prince of Peru, but they're lost in the middle of the jungle. So it's fair to say his title is purely nominal at this point. And Aguirre says, look, this is how we're going to get out. I've got my plan. We'll finish building these brigandines, these ships. When they're ready, we will sail all the way down the Amazon, another 2,000 miles or whatever to the Atlantic. Dead easy. Then we will head to an island called Margarita, which is off the coast of Venezuela. There, there's a Spanish base. We will take that base. We'll get supplies. We'll recruit people there. Then, he says, we'll sail up to Panama, we'll seize the capital, we'll kill all the royal officials, we'll take control of the Spanish fleet based in Panama.

• 34:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  We will rally the colonists of Central America and we will cross the isthmus of Panama and launch a seaborne invasion of Peru and seize the gold of Peru. Now, if you were standing in the middle of the jungle soaked with rain, you've only eaten kind of overripe fruit for the past month and a horse.

• 34:47Tom Holland?

  And Dominic, I'm imagining a lot of leeches.

• 34:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, loads of leeches. When someone outlined this plan to you, which involves a lot of travel, a lot of capturing of implausible capturing of fleets, crossing of isthmuses and multiple South American countries. You might say, I find this implausible.

• 35:08Tom Holland?

  You might equally say, well, what's the alternative?

• 35:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, well, that's what they say. They say, fine, let's give it a go. Why not? What's the worst that could happen? I think it's fair to say they haven't really thought that through because the worst that can happen is probably a lot worse than they're imagining.

• 35:21Tom Holland?

  Well, I'm not sure about that, actually. I mean, being proactive is better than just sitting there and being eaten by leeches and dying in the middle of nowhere.

• 35:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's true.

• 35:28Tom Holland?

  I mean, at least to try.

• 35:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  And as we'll see, maybe they had a few laughs along the way. So they set off. They go into the river network again of Amazonia. Eventually they've built the ships. We're in April 1561. This is the point at which Robert Silverberg says in his book, "In all the records of South American conquest, Aguirre stands out as the only man who ever went to great lengths to avoid finding El Dorado." Because whenever they see a tribute, an interesting looking tributary, he says, don't even look at it. Keep going. He's got his plan. He doesn't want anything to interfere with it.

• 35:57Tom Holland?

  Again, he's right.

• 35:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of course he is. They don't want to get lost in this maze of rivers. It's a terrible sort of labyrinth, sort of riverine labyrinth. They're eating fish. They are living off turtles and manatees.

• 36:08Tom Holland?

  That's terrible.

• 36:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Manatees are endangered. Perhaps this is why.

• 36:11Tom Holland?

  El loco.

• 36:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're all incredibly emaciated. They're all going a bit mad. After a few weeks, Don Fernando, who's still hanging around, some of his friends. Say to him, this is mad. I mean, the El Dorado thing was pretty mad, but this idea about looping around and conquering Peru is absolutely bonkers. It's never going to work. Let's get rid of Aguirre, but they delay too long. They talk about it, but they don't do it. They have a sort of complicated plan. They're going to invite him aboard a ship and stab him and all this. And in the meantime, word leaks out. And so Aguirre finds out about it and he decides he will strike first. So the first person that he gets rid of is his friend Senor Salduendo, who had been his ally earlier on. He's started sleeping with Doña Inés and Aguirre finds that disgraceful.

• 36:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he denounces his former friend as a traitor. He sends his men to overpower him and to butcher him with knives, which they do. He says, actually, Doña Inés is a massive drain on this expedition and a distraction. She's got to go. And he sends two of his henchmen who are called Carrion and Yomoso. Yomoso will be reappearing in this story in a colorful manner. These two guys turn up with daggers to kill Doña Inés. And the various chroniclers and eyewitness accounts really go to town on this. They're said to have stabbed her so ferociously that she drowned in her own blood. One account says they took an unnatural delight in mangling what had once been so beautiful. Another, even the most hardened men in the camp at the sight of the mangled, that word again, the mangled victim, were brokenhearted.

• 37:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  For this was the cruelest act that had ever been perpetrated.

• 37:45Tom Holland?

  But Aguirre, he doesn't mind.

• 37:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  He thinks it's great. I mean, that's what he wanted. It's what he ordered.

• 37:50Tom Holland?

  So that's not true, because he's clearly the most hardened man in the camp and he doesn't care.

• 37:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that's true. Actually, you're quite right. And you've pointed out a terrible discrepancy in the sources.

• 37:59Tom Holland?

  I have.

• 37:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, Tom, this is the kind of forensic detail that marks us out as a great history podcast. So Don Fernando has been sort of watching all this impotently and is horrified. But as our sources say, he now has just become a quivering jelly of a man. He became fearful and changed in appearance, but he didn't protect his person with more care, nor take Aguirre's life, nor seek to rally more friends. For he had become so timid and listless that for care of his own life, he took but little note. It seemed that he carried death in his eyes. So the end comes for him a few days later, they're camped on an island in the middle of the river. Aguirre's men burst into his hut, they kill his chaplain first, stabbed him so ferociously that the sword pinned him to the mattress. Then they go by Don Fernando's kind

• 38:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  of hammock and he wakes and Aguirre said to him very gently, "Don't be alarmed, your excellency." And then they killed all Don Fernando's friends while he was just sort of lying there in his hammock looking mournful. And then they shot Don Fernando with their arcobuses and hacked him to pieces with their swords and threw him in the river.

• 38:59Tom Holland?

  So that's the end of him. So he never becomes king of Peru?

• 39:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  He never became king of Peru at all. He just floated down the Amazon in bits.

• 39:05Tom Holland?

  It's a warning never to have dreams above your station. That's what it is.

• 39:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's exactly what it is. It should always be kept in check.

• 39:12Tom Holland?

  Accept your lot, don't aim high, don't follow your dream.

• 39:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  So the next morning, everybody wakes up and Aguirre addresses the whole camp and he says, "Look, I did this for the safety of the army, because if Don Fernando had been allowed to live, we'd all have perished." He says, "Please, everybody," he says, "please consider me from now onwards, your friend and companion. You will not be disappointed, for you can scarcely conceive how much I desire to administer to your pleasure and contentment."

• 39:40Tom Holland?

  Of course he does.

• 39:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he says, "To maximize everybody's pleasure and contentment, a few quick ground rules. From now on, all private conversations are outlawed and you can no longer go around in groups."

• 39:53Tom Holland?

  To stop conspiracy.

• 39:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  To stop conspiracies. We can have no more of this plotting. I mean, that's rich, given from the chief plotter, but he says, "Look, there's been far too much plotting." And he also appoints a kind of praetorian guard for himself of Basques with arcobuses. So actually behind that, I think there may be a sort of serious point, which is that there are clearly internal feuds and rivalries. Aguirre is a Basque himself, and it may well be that, very hard for us to detect, there is perhaps an issue here between Castilians and Basques, or something like that.

• 40:22Tom Holland?

  And the sources, are they Castilian or Basque?

• 40:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  They are Castilian by and large. And as we will see, the sources, I do believe that a lot of this happened, that a lot of what is being reported is true, but I think the spin they are putting on this is very particular, as we shall see, because these are eyewitnesses who have been part of a rebellion against the king of Spain and want to excuse themselves by explaining how they were being misled by a madman.

• 40:49Tom Holland?

  So it may be that Aguirre isn't...

• 40:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Less mad.

• 40:53Tom Holland?

  Less mad. I mean, more like Unai Emery. The Basque manager of Aston Villa.

• 40:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right, not a madman.

• 41:00Tom Holland?

  Not a madman at all, a very good manager.

• 41:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  But you would follow him into the jungle, Tom, would you not?

• 41:04Tom Holland?

  I absolutely would. I'd do whatever he said. But I mean, if it all went wrong.

• 41:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Would you then smear him as a loco, claim that he had a limp and stuff?

• 41:12Tom Holland?

  I'd like to think I'd stay loyal.

• 41:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. Well, some of Aguirre's people did stay loyal right to the end.

• 41:17Tom Holland?

  That would be me. I mean, if he was like Unai Emery. I mean, not if he was like Kozkinsky.

• 41:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes.

• 41:21Tom Holland?

  Just putting that on the record.

• 41:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  Fine. Yeah, you wouldn't follow a German, is what you're saying.

• 41:24Tom Holland?

  I wouldn't follow a very sweaty guy with bulgy eyeballs who's wearing too much armour. But I would follow a twinkle-eyed, charismatic leader of men in a tracksuit. Or actually, Emery's very kind of dapper.

• 41:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's never wears a tracksuit.

• 41:39Tom Holland?

  No, he doesn't. Very kind of dapper coat and scarf.

• 41:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you know what he is? He's courtly.

• 41:44Tom Holland?

  Yeah, he is.

• 41:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  A word one would often use of a Spaniard.

• 41:46Tom Holland?

  Yeah, courtly is absolutely the word. You're right. He actually has kind of quite a 16th century face, I think, like a kind of cavallero in a El Greco painting.

• 41:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. They're now in, I guess, where are they? They are in northern Brazil. They've got completely lost.

• 42:00Tom Holland?

  Do we know how far they've got to get to the Atlantic now?

• 42:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  They're well over halfway. They are now probably go round about a river called the Rio Negro. So they're heading across the border into what is now Venezuela.

• 42:11Tom Holland?

  And just to ask, no one has ever done this before?

• 42:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, they have no idea where they are. Now, actually, at one point, they see campfires, they see lights burning on the horizon. And they have a few guides left, a few native guides. Some of the guides say, God, this could be it. This could be the land of the Amagua, these people who are very rich. And Aguirre is furious at this. He says, on pain of death, nobody is to look at this town or talk about it or mention the Amagua again. Because he's really wedded to this plan of sailing around the top of South America in some way, and then crossing the Isthmus of Panama and then seizing the gold of Peru.

• 42:48Tom Holland?

  He's right.

• 42:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, he's also at this point very, very paranoid. So Fré Simone says, so many were the fears that disturbed the wicked conscience of Aguirre. But although he had killed those whom he feared, he never felt secure from the survivors. And I think that's definitely true. At this point, he really starts getting into his garroting. So there hasn't been a lot of garroting so far, but now. I mean, I can't stop the narrative every five minutes for all the garroting. Just assume that it's constant.

• 43:14Tom Holland?

  I mean, it's a more merciful way to go than stabbing someone to death. So perhaps he's.

• 43:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  Coming round to him. Well, this, I think you would disagree with Tom, because I think there's a hint of a kind of satanic nihilism. I love a satanic nihilist. So Fray Simon says that Aguirre, at this point, banned his men from praying. And he said, throw away your rosary beads, you don't need them. He said, if you're worried about your souls, you should play dice with the devil. It's a good phrase. And then he says, he's very Friedrich Nietzsche, actually. He said, he told his men that God had heaven for those who chose to serve him, but that the earth was for the strongest. He knew for certain there was no salvation, and that being in life was to be in hell, and that he would commit every species of wickedness and cruelty, so that his name might ring throughout the earth, and even to the ninth heaven.

• 44:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's like the judge in Blood Meridian. Yeah, Blood Meridian, or the Marquis de Sade or something. There's a kind of ideological sadism to him, I think of this, but if this is to be believed. They now enter the Orinoco River, and the river is widening, which is, you know, which is great news for them, because it means that they're clearly approaching the Atlantic. It's really hot and humid in Venezuela in July, which is when they're there. And Aguirre is very hot tempered. He says, we've got all these porters and guides with us, let us abandon them here. So they abandon them on the riverbank, and they're crying and they're desperate. And there's nothing there. I mean, there's nothing there at all. Kind of dangerous animals and mud flax. And a couple of the Spaniards say, come on, this is a bit harsh. I mean, we've been travelling with these guys for months.

• 44:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Aguirre says, right, you've got to go. And he has then garrotted or shot people who tried to protest. And then at last, on the first of July, 1561, they enter the Atlantic. This incredible voyage, they've covered 4,000 miles in nine months. They've lost about half of the original party at this stage, but they're still alive. Seventeen days later, they glimpse the island of Margarita. When they see the island, Aguirre says, brilliant, and he celebrates by garrotting two more of his men, who he thinks could conceivably betray him to the authorities when he gets there. And then they sail to the island. And he sends a messenger ashore to ask for help with the words, we are ordinary sailors lost at sea.

• 45:29Tom Holland?

  And presumably this is quite convincing because they must look an absolute mess after.

• 45:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 45:34Tom Holland?

  How long have they been in the jungle?

• 45:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Nine months.

• 45:36Tom Holland?

  Nine months.

• 45:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  They've been there nine months, they're emaciated, they're sodden, they're filthy. The governor completely believes this, so he turns up with his officials and it's all very, very friendly. And Aguirre says, you know, would it be all right if we came on shore? Can we take some exercise and bring our weapons just to practice? And the governor says, yeah, great. So they march ashore as though they're kind of on parade. It's very well planned. And then they sort of unsheathe their swords and level their guns and they take the governor and his officials hostage. So this is obviously not a huge place, you know, you're talking about hundreds of people rather than thousands. But because as we said at the beginning, the Spanish presence is quite thin, it's quite thinly spread. So they march into the main town of Margarita.

• 46:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  They seize the fort, they lock up the governor and all the other bigwigs. They break into the treasury, they steal all the gold that's been stored, ready to be shipped to Spain. They burn the account books, which to me is sign that there is clearly some kind of serious political motive behind all this. It's not just kind of insane nihilism. Because clearly there, this is an attack on the idea of authority and royal authority. And what I think was, we'll see runs through this is Aguirre and some of the others clearly have a deep resentment. He's already said, if we capture El Dorado, Philip the second will take it from us and give it to aristocrats and viceroys and bureaucrats.

• 47:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And of course, that had, you know, for Cortez in Mexico, when we did that episode, that that series a couple of years ago, that had kind of happened to him. He'd conquered it all and then been sort of pushed out. And so I think that's at the back of their mind.

• 47:15Tom Holland?

  I wonder also, is there a kind of element of Basque nationalism would be binocularistic? Because the Basques are proud mountain people.

• 47:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, a lot of these people are from a kind of Spanish periphery. So, you know, famously Cortez and his allies in Mexico, a lot of them had come from Extremadura, the sort of borderlands. And again, Aguirre is from a borderland. He's not from metropolitan Spain, Castile, from, you know, one of the great cities. And I think there probably is a fair bit of resentment, actually, of kind of royal officials. But also Spanish Castilian kind of authority. Exactly. And actually, we'll see, there'll be more proof of this in a second. One great problem for them is that a missionary is visiting Margarita, has stopped at Margarita. While they're there, a man called Montesinos, a guy from Santo Domingo. And he has a big ship and he gets away in this, in this, in the chaos. Bad news for Aguirre. It's very bad news.

• 48:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  He goes off to the mainland. And this is the point at which word of Aguirre's return and his kind of misconduct begins to spread across the Spanish colonies. So from this point onwards, he has lost the element of surprise that I think was so important to him. And I think this is the point at which, dare I say, he really does begin to lose the plot. So up to this point with all the garrotting, I think there has still been an element of rationality. But we're told that at this point, some of his men tried to defect and he was, quote, furious and raved like a madman, foaming at the mouth with rage and passion. He has them captured, he garrotts them, their bodies are displayed with the message, these men were executed because they were faithful vassals of the king of Castile. Perhaps another bit of evidence for your point, Tom.

• 48:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Or of kind of class resentment, perhaps. I think there definitely is a bit of class resentment. And actually, sort of jumping ahead, in the 20th century in particular, some Latin American historians said, this guy's not a madman, he's a class warrior, he's a socialist, he is a Marxist avant la lettre. Right, possibly going a little bit far, is it, based on the evidence so far? But he issues orders, he says, we must round up all the, and I quote, bishops, viceroys, presidents, auditors, governors, lawyers and procurators, as well as the caballeros of noble blood. In other words, the gentlemen, these people have been sucking the Indies dry. What he, and he doesn't mean from the native inhabitants, he means from us.

• 49:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  We have won this, you know, through our sweat and our violence, we have won this land and this gold. And it has been sucked from us by pen pushing bureaucrats, you know, elitist establishment types, chinless toffs. And I think that is definitely there. So at this point, there's a bit of a reign of terror in Margarita. The richest citizens are locked up, their money is stolen, the governor is garrotted and his officials are garrotted. Aguirre is now ruling with a kind of rod of iron. So if anybody hesitates to garrot somebody, he garrotts them as well. He says, you know, if you you've got to be in on this. And now there's a really, really terrible moment. We talked about this on stage, didn't we? And I always used to really enjoy this part of the story.

• 50:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  He hears a rumor that the royal troops have landed, which is not true. And he goes out to face them and he leaves his chief lieutenant, who's a guy called Martin Perez, in charge of the fort. And when he gets back after this false alarm, one of his other men, they're all feuding the whole time. One of his other men says, Martin Perez has been plotting against you, which is not true. Aguirre says, right, bring him in. He comes in. Aguirre's men kind of leap out from behind the furniture or something and stab this man and shoot him with an arcobus. But Perez is not killed. He's hideously wounded, kind of blood and entrails are everywhere. And he manages to, like a sort of Frankenstein's monster, he lurches out of the room, then it's kind of, I imagine this lovely colonial mansion. Yeah, holding in his guts.

• 50:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  A wooden balustrade, leaving this, and he's like, lurching like a monster down the corridor, people screaming and running in terror and stuff. And Aguirre's men are chasing, I shouldn't laugh, it's a terrible scene. Aguirre's men are chasing him, like still trying to stab him and shoot him and stuff. And eventually they corner him, I mean, literally in a corner, and they manage to finish him off. They cut his throat. And it's a terrible scene. I mean, his entrails are everywhere. Aguirre spots one of the men clearly looking a little bit green. Yeah. And this is a guy called Anton Yamoso, who had been one of the murderers of Dona Inez. And Aguirre says, you don't look like, you know, you don't seem to be enjoying this. Were you part of his conspiracy? Do you hold so lightly the love that I feel for you?

• 51:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yamoso is terrified and he protests his innocence and Aguirre seems completely unmoved and you know he's kind of reaching for the garrote and Yamoso drops to his knees by the disemboweled body of Martin Perez. You know, he basically wants to prove his loyalty and he shouts, curse this traitor, I will drink his blood. And then, as Frey Simon reports, putting his mouth over the wounds in the head with more than demoniac rage, he began to suck the blood and brains that issued from the wounds and swallowed what he sucked as if he were a famished dog. And Aguirre says to him, oh brilliant, you know, you and I are very much on the same page. You're clearly on the side of the angels. And so Yamoso has proved his loyalty, which is great. On the one hand, it seems so grotesque as to be an exaggeration. And on the other

• 52:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  hand, so kind of revoltingly unspeakable that you'd think someone wouldn't make that up. They wouldn't make it up and it's a very detailed story. It's a very detailed story with names, kind of dates, places. So it's so hard to tell what the truth of this is, but undoubtedly there is a lot of very genuine violence. And I don't think there's any doubt that they have gone, because he would often say to his men, if you're thinking now the King of Spain can take us back, you are greatly mistaken. We are in so deep now that we just have to keep going. Well, that signature, the traitor, I mean, that's really what kicks it off, isn't it? It is. I mean, he's not wrong. He recognized, I think, straight away, there's no way back from this. When we're in, we're all in. So now he decides, right, we're going to have to carry on with the rest of the plan. We'll cross to the mainland. He has an exciting

• 53:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  new flag, which he's had specially made, a pirate flag, of course. It's black with red crossed swords on it. I mean, honestly, if you were, you were at some New World port and you saw a ship with that flag sailing towards you. Huge run of a mile. I don't want to be having to either have my brains drunk by somebody or drinking somebody else's brains. No. I mean, I wouldn't even drink your brains, Tom, to be frank. Oh, I'm glad that's on the record. So they cross to the mainland. It takes them eight days. On the 7th of September, 1561, they arrive on the coast of what's now Venezuela. And it's deserted. The word has spread that he's coming and the people have been told, evacuate the towns, we're sending troops, that this madman is on the loose, we'll sort this out. He burns his ships, a very kind of, you know. Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great.

• 53:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Detail, exactly. He burns his ships and he says, he orders, he's got heralds and he says, go and proclaim a war of fire and blood against the king of Castile and his vassals. He marches on this town called Valencia and he's in a very sort of Mr. Kurt's mode at this point. So he's been carried in a hammock. It's incredibly hot. He's got a fever. He's completely emaciated. We're told by the sources, he was reduced to a skeleton at the point of death. And I suspect at this point, some of his men are thinking, oh, I really hope he dies. If there's some way we could get out of this, but he doesn't die. Unfortunately, he recovers from the fever, madder than ever.

• 54:28Tom Holland?

  You keep saying this, that he gets madder than ever.

• 54:31Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. You don't think he was mad before?

• 54:33Tom Holland?

  I think he's reached a certain level of madness a few pages back, to be honest.

• 54:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you?

• 54:36Tom Holland?

  I think he's reached a certain level of madness several minutes ago.

• 54:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think there's still some way to go, frankly.

• 54:41Tom Holland?

  I mean, the whole drinking the brains stuff.

• 54:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Drinking your brains is poor. I agree with that.

• 54:45Tom Holland?

  I think you have to be pretty mad to be madder than that.

• 54:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  He let the Basque Country down there, I think, is fair to say.

• 54:50Tom Holland?

  Yeah, he did.

• 54:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  So he celebrates his recovery by executing a man called Gonzalo. And Gonzalo's crime is that he'd gone off without permission to catch some parrots.

• 55:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's the laugh.

• 55:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think at this point, there's a lot of, there's a lot of crazy laughter as parrot fancy is slaughtered. Around him. They get to Valencia and he writes this mad letter to Philip the Second, which many historians have written about this, say is one of the maddest letters in Spanish history.

• 55:22Tom Holland?

  Well, all history, you might say. I mean, let's pick it up. It is properly mad.

• 55:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  He says, King Philip, son of Charles the Invincible, I, Lope de Guirre, thy vassal, am an old Christian of poor but noble parents of the town of Anyate in Biscay. Actually, an old Christian is an interesting line because it's a reminder that actually Spain was not entirely Christian until relatively recently.

• 55:42Tom Holland?

  Yeah. So he's contrasting himself with the Jews and the Muslims who've converted.

• 55:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. So his identity, he's saying, I am of loyal, you know, Spanish stock. And he says, for 54 years, I did the great service in Peru in the conquest of the Indians. And I did all this in your name and I didn't ask your officers for payment, but you have been very cruel and ungrateful to me and my companions. Such good service. Again, the hint of the political resentments that may lie behind this. We won these lands while you remained quietly in Spain. Remember, King Philip, that thou hast no right to draw revenues from these provinces since their conquest has been without danger to thee. Again, that point. He complains a lot about the cruelties which thy judges and governors exercise in thy name, the oppression of thy ministers, who give places to their nephews and their children, who dispose of our lives, our reputations and our fortunes. So,

• 56:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  you know, there are all these kind of nepo babies coming over here and taking the big jobs. Also, in a very 16th century theme, resentment of the religious orders. The corruption of the morals of the monks is so great. They pretend, they tell you that they're converting Indians, but actually they are enemies of the poor. They're avaricious, gluttonous and proud.

• 56:48Tom Holland?

  The poor by that, he's again not speaking about the Indians. He's speaking about Aguirre and his compadres.

• 56:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes, exactly. And then there's an ending which I very much enjoy. Because the great thing about this is he lurches from one thought to another in the same sentence. So he says, "My comrades and I pray to God that thy strength may ever be increased against the Turk and the Frenchman, and all others who desire to make war against thee. But because of thy ingratitude, I am a rebel against thee until death. Signed, Lope de Guerre, the Wanderer." So, as John Hemings says, "An extraordinary document, a mixture of rebellious defiance, megalomania and self pity." Robert Silverberg says, "Few kings had ever received such a message from a subject." Shifting kind of attitudes within the space of sometimes the same sentence. And the tragedy is Philip the Second probably never even got to read it.

• 57:37Dominic Sandbrook?

  Because there's no evidence that he did read it. It must have been intercepted by a royal official and who filed it under M for mad.

• 57:44Tom Holland?

  I mean, to be fair to Philip, though, I mean, he does love reading a letter. That's basically all he's doing, isn't it?

• 57:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's sitting in a very gloomy in El Escorial.

• 57:51Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 57:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  This would have livened up his day, I think.

• 57:53Tom Holland?

  I know. Just endless stuff about tax returns and things.

• 57:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 57:57Tom Holland?

  And then suddenly you get that.

• 57:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Let's get to the end of the story. Aguirre ends up cornered in this town called Barquisimeto in Venezuela. A lot of his men have deserted. There's an awful lot of foaming at the mouth. There's a very famous incident while he's marching into Barquisimeto. It's pouring with rain and the horses are slipping and sliding in the mud. He shakes his fist at the heavens and he shouts, "Does God think that because it rains in torrents, I am not going to reach Peru and destroy the world? Then he does not know me."

• 58:25Tom Holland?

  Brilliant. I compared him to a Shakespeare hero, but actually he's now turning into a kind of Marlowe hero.

• 58:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  He totally is, isn't he? So he gets to Barquisimeto. They're surrounded by royalist troops outside the town. I mean, they are literally, Tom, they're literally eating the dogs. They're like the people of Springfield, Pennsylvania, supposedly. The local governor issues promises an amnesty to Aguirre's men. So some of them start to slip away. He says, "The time has come. I think we should garrot some more of my men, the sick and the unwilling. Let's have a little purge. We'll be a leaner, more efficient outfit." And even his lieutenants, his loyalists, say to him, "Oh, come on, that's going too far."

• 59:06Tom Holland?

  What about the bloke who drank the blood?

• 59:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  The bloke who drank the blood actually stays there. Well, you will see, he literally is the last person with him. So actually, the drinking of the blood.

• 59:15Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it was a genuine sacrament.

• 59:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, it kind of was. Aguirre has a massive meltdown in the middle of October. He summons all his men, what remain of them. He puts a dagger to his chest. He says, "Why don't you cut out my heart?" He says, "I have killed a lot of people, but I quote, 'I want you to understand that I did it in order to protect your lives and for the benefit of all.'" It's real kind of self pity here. This does not unfortunately impress them. So most of them defect. And on the morning of Monday, the 27th of October, 1561, those who are left say, "Could we please go out and make a last stand against the royalist army?" He says, "Fine." They go out to the town. And as soon as they get out of the town, they kind of drop their weapons and start shouting, "Long live the king, God save the king." And they defect as well. Aguirre is gutted by this. The only person who's left is this Yemozo, the blood and brains man.

• 1:00:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  And Aguirre says, "Why are you still here? You know, why haven't you left me?" And Yemozo says, so moving. He says, "We were friends in life. I will live or die with you." And Aguirre, we're told, "Made no reply. He was crestfallen and lost." So that I think is lovely. What follows perhaps lesser. Aguirre goes to his room and he gets out his arcbus, his gun. And he goes to find someone we haven't mentioned. El Vera, who has been there the whole time. Age, what's she now, 14? God, she must be so embarrassed. Yeah. Oh, dad. Cause he's really let her down.

• 1:00:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  And he goes in and he says to her. My daughter, my love, I thought I should see you married and a great lady. But my sins and my great pride have willed it otherwise. Commend yourself to God, my daughter, and make your peace with him. For I can't bear that you would be called the daughter of a traitor. And that's quite moving. Perhaps a little more prosaic is he then also says, I don't want you to become a mattress for the unworthy. Which, you know, you know what that means? Yes, of course. El Vera is extremely disturbed by this, falls to her knees and starts pleading. She says, Father, Father, Satan is misleading you. And she's got a maid called Juana, who manages to wrestle the gun from his hands. But then he really lets himself, El Vera and the Basque Country down. Because he pulls out a dagger and stabs El Vera through the heart. Stabs his daughter? Yeah, kills his daughter. There's a twist.

• 1:01:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  I thought that he was gonna kill himself. No, well, you would think it would be a more satisfying story in a way if he now turned the dagger on himself. But he doesn't. Actually, what happens is moments later, royal troops burst into the apartment. Aguirre picks up the arcbus again, but he's shaking so much that he can't fire it and he bursts into tears. After all that, he has a soft heart after all. The soldiers lead him outside, there was talk of a trial, but actually, here's important thing. Loads of his old cronies who defected are there. And they say, oh, no, no trial, no trial. We should just kill him straight away. Because they don't want the truth to come. Because of course, they don't want the truth to come out of their own complicity. And two of his old gunners volunteered to do it. You talked about Shakespeare or sort of Jacobean drama or something.

• 1:02:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  So in true Jacobean drama style, the first shot doesn't quite kill him, but he's still able to talk. And he says, that has done the business, even though it hasn't. So then they have to shoot him again. He's now dead. They cut off his head and they put it in an iron cage. They cut off his hands, they wanted to send his hands on a kind of tour. So they sent his hands to the towns of Merida and Valencia. But the soldiers got bored of carrying them. One of the hands ended up being thrown in a river and the other one was thrown to the dogs to eat. So that's payback for his men eating all the dogs? Yes, I suppose so. So the dogs have had the last laugh, which is nice. They have, yeah. So that's the end of Lope de Aguirre, and I guess the question very briefly at the end is what it actually means.

• 1:02:48Tom Holland?

  Does it have to mean anything?

• 1:02:49Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think it does. I like a bit of a meaning. Do you not like a meaning, Tom? You love a meaning. What that, this is very out of character.

• 1:02:55Tom Holland?

  It's just the random madness.

• 1:02:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  But maybe it isn't, you see. So for some people, so I guess for Werner Herzog in that film, it's not random madness. You could say it's Joseph Conrad style heart of darkness. You go into the heart of the jungle, your complicity in colonialism leads you into evil. I mean, that's how some people have interpreted the story. Alternative explanation, of course, is that it's rather like Mr. Kurtz. It's about the human condition and it's about, you know, we've all got a Lope de Aguirre, a brain sucking, daughter murdering madman inside us, whether we like it or not. And that's actually how most historians, they have said, he represents human evil in its purest form.

• 1:03:34Tom Holland?

  Or there's the, he's a revolutionary.

• 1:03:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, that's, I think, the more interesting explanation. And there's a very recent book by an American writer called Evan Bulkin, I think it was his PhD, called Rother God. And he argues he was the first revolutionary, I mean, South America has loads of revolutionaries, Che Guevara most famously. He argues that Aguirre makes sense politically, that you put him into the context of mid-century Spanish America, very flimsy colonial control, endless feuds, endless revolts, huge resentment of royal authority. And Bulkin points out, all the accounts we have of him are from people who were complicit in the revolt. And what they needed to do afterwards was to convince the Spanish authorities that it hadn't been political, that they had been coerced by a uniquely demented and demonic leader.

• 1:04:19Tom Holland?

  Well, the demonic presumably, because then it would explain how they had been seduced, that effectively they've been the victims of witchcraft.

• 1:04:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly. That Aguirre represents, that's why that point, the thing about, oh, he, he doesn't want to go to heaven, he's determined to throw himself into this kind of Sardian pursuit of all that is cruel and brutal and all of this. That's why I think that's very important to them to make that point, to say there was no political context to this at all. It was an exercise in pure demonic evil by a madman.

• 1:04:47Tom Holland?

  But there clearly was a political context. It's the signing his name as a traitor that kicks off the whole, well, I mean, it's a coup, isn't it? It's an attempted coup.

• 1:04:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  It is. And as Evan Bulkin says in his book, Latin American history is a saga of rebels and populists and strongmen who appeal to the Common man against overweening royal or state authority, you know, Simon Bolivar or whoever it might, or Juan Peron, or whoever it might be, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the country with which Aguirre is most closely associated. So Hugo Chavez's Culture Ministry, I read in Evan Bulton's book, I think, had a section on its official website praising Aguirre as a quote, "soldier, traitor, pilgrim, father, lover, dreamer." I think father is a probably a bit ironic one there.

• 1:05:36Tom Holland?

  I mean, you could say that he kills her to preserve her honour and say that she, you know, a fate worse than death. I mean, I guess that's how you could frame it. I mean, that's how he's casting it. And there is clearly a very magical realist quality to the whole story.

• 1:05:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  There definitely is a magical realist, and maybe this would be our last, our closing point. The most famous of all European travellers who went to Latin America was a guy called Alexander Humboldt, German. He went to Venezuela in 1799, and he reported that the locals there said to him that at night, "strange ghostly fires danced over the plains." He wrote, "This fire, like the willow the wisp of our marshes, does not burn the grass. The people call these reddish flames the soul of the traitor Aguirre, and the natives believe that the soul of the traitor wanders in the savannas like a flame that flies the approach of men."

• 1:06:26Tom Holland?

  Well, Dominic, what an eerie note on which to end, and what a week it's been. We've had angelic voices and we have had the fires of demons. And in a sense, we will be having both next week because we are back with season three of The French Revolution.

• 1:06:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  And of course, Tom, members of The Rest is History Club will get all four episodes of that series on Monday. And if you want to join them, you merely have to sign up at therestishistory.com. Adios.

• 1:06:54Tom Holland?

  Very exciting. As to where we go, goodbye.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  There we are, getting the statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with three hundred and fifty passengers on board.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 1:07:26Speaker 05

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 1:07:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 1:07:34Speaker 06

  They took down a British passenger jet containing three hundred and fifty people.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 1:07:50Tom Holland?

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 1:07:53Speaker 04

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 1:08:01Speaker 07

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:08:08Speaker 07

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• 1:08:13Speaker 08

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• 1:08:27Speaker 07

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