Amazon River

The Amazon River (occasionally River Amazon; Spanish: Río Amazonas, Portuguese: Rio Amazonas) of South America is one of the two longest rivers on Earth, the other being the Nile in Africa. The Amazon has by far the greatest total flow of any river, carrying more than the Mississippi, Nile, and Yangtze rivers combined. Its drainage area, called the Amazon Basin, is the largest of any river system. The Amazon could be considered the "strongest" (largest volume of water per second).

Name

Before the conquest of South America, the Río de las Amazonas had no general name; instead, indigenous peoples had names for the sections of the river they occupied, such as Paranaguazu, Guyerma, Solimões and others.

Related Topics:
Paranaguazu - Guyerma - Solimões

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In the year 1500, Vicente Yañez Pinzon, in command of a Spanish expedition, became the first European to explore the river, exploring its mouth when he discovered that the ocean off the shore was fresh water. Pinzon called the river the Rio Santa Maria de la Mar Dulce, which soon became abbreviated to Mar Dulce, and for some years, after 1502, it was known as the Rio Grande.

Related Topics:
Vicente Yañez Pinzon - Spanish

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Pinzon's companions called the river El Río Marañón. The word Marañón is thought by some to be of indigenous origin. This idea was first stated in a letter from Peter Martyr to Lope Hurtado de Mendoza in 1513. However, the word may also be derived from the Spanish word "maraña" — meaning a tangle, a snarl, which well represents the bewildering difficulties which the earlier explorers met in navigating not only the entrance to the Amazon, but the whole island-bordered, river-cut and indented coast of what is now the Brazilian state of Maranhão.

Related Topics:
Peter Martyr - Lope Hurtado de Mendoza - Spanish - Maranhão

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The name Amazon arises from a battle which Francisco de Orellana had with a tribe of Tapuyas where the women of the tribe fought alongside the men, as was the custom among the entire tribe. Orellana derived the name Amazonas from the ancient Amazons of Asia and Africa described by Herodotus and Diodorus.

Related Topics:
Francisco de Orellana - Tapuya - Amazons - Asia - Africa - Herodotus - Diodorus

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