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

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I am the great traitor. There must be no other. Anyone who even thinks about deserting this mission will be cut up into 98 pieces. Whoever takes one grain of corn or one drop of water more than his ration will be locked up for 155 years. If I, Haki Ray, want the birds to drop dead from the trees, then the birds will drop dead from the I am the wroth of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble. Whoever follows me on the river will win untold riches. We will control all of New Spain, and we will stage history as others stage plays. I, the wroth of God, will marry my own daughter, and with her found the purest dynasty ever known to man. Together, we will move the whole of this continent. I am the Wroth, the Wroth of God. That was Klaus Kinski, the great German actor, as Lopé de Aguirre in the film Aguirre: The Wroth of God, which was made in 1972, directed by Fuenster Werner Hertzog. And loosely based on one of the most remarkable episodes of European exploration in history, a 16th century Spanish band of conquistadors venturing into the Amazon Forest in Search of El Dorado, and it doesn't end well.

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.

Obviously.

But also, Dominic, I guess because it ranks alongside Francis Ford's Coppola's attempt to finish Apocalypse Now as a cinematic folly de grandeur, doesn't it? It does indeed. Because they go into the jungle and it's all terrible. Herzog tries to kill Kinski. Kinski's going mad. He's got his great bulging eyeballs. The making of the film is carnage.

It is.

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

Exactly. It's very like Apocalypse now in that sense. They shot it in the early '70s, as you say. They shot it on location in the Peruvian Amazon. Herzog, at one point, threatened to shoot Kinski, his lead actor, and then turn the gun on himself. That's been reported as he was basically forcing Kinski It's a film scenes at gunpoint, which I think is a slight exaggeration. But the filming 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 It's a '16th century expedition. It's about European colonizers, colonialists, conquistadors. In Heart of Darkness, which we did a podcast on a few weeks ago, they go up the Congo, Joseph Conrad, his narrator, Marlo, goes up the Congo. He's in search 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 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.

Yeah, he did. So all those books with giant spaceships on the cover.

He wrote an absolutely brilliant book called The Golden Dream, a history of Quests for El Dorado. Very scrupulously research, very serious book. He describes Aguirre in this book. He says he's the single most villainous figure in the annals of the Spanish Conquest, which is quite a high bar to clear. Yes, it is. Then there's the great historian of the Amazon, John Hemming, who wrote a brilliant book about the fall of the Incas. He says of Aguirre, simply, Cruel, psychopathic, a man of unmitigated evil.

People are going to enjoy this. Yeah.

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

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 D, Elizabeth I's great magus. His great ambition is to track down secrets that will unleash untold wealth. The whole El Dorado quest, 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. It's a fusion of the two, isn't it?

It's absolutely part of the Aguirre story. Yet the mad thing about it is there's pretty much only one person in this story who thinks that El Dorado is a complete myth and nonsense. That's Aguirre. There's an argument, possibly he's the only sane man on the expedition.

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

Exactly. Well, we'll come to that. In fact, he tries to dissuade other people from trying to find it. Let's give everybody a bit of context because there'll be lots of people who are not familiar with this story at all. We're in the Spanish Empire in the late 1550s. 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. Spain itself, although it's very rich and powerful, it's in a world of trouble. The Emperor Charles IV 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. There's huge inflation, thanks to all of this silver. Spain has been fighting He's been in 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.

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 in explaining the political context of this story, his royal authority is very weak in the Spanish colonies. In Peru, for example, the Incas have, as it were, fallen, but there are still only about 4,000 European, Spaniards in Peru, in Lima and whatnot. They are fighting these endless civil wars, and there are little rebellions and feuds and things. In 1556, a new viceroy called the Marcus of Canete arrived in Lima from Spain.

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

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 a much darker world. The place is in chaos. There are unemployed soldiers and ruffians everywhere, total feuds and vendettas. He has to try to sort this out. He wants to find money to impress Philip second.

You can see why this scenario would appeal to a science fiction writer. It's a staple, isn't it? The new colony on a distant planet full of gun runners and smugglers and desperados.

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

A weapon with a personal nickname.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Gut splitter. Yeah. The widow weeper or something of that kind. Anyway, at about this point, when the Marcus of Quignete arrives in Lima, an Amazonian Indian chieftain arrives in Peru from the east. It's very like the 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. It's caused chaos among the tribes. This bloke, the leader of this tribe, is taken to see the Spanish authorities. He says, We've traveled a long way. We've traveled along the Amazon, and I have seen lands rich in gold. The Marcus of Canete's eye, he raises his eyebrows to this. Yeah, he's, Oh, brilliant. This tallies with two things that people in the two great colonial cities of the western side of the continent, which are Lima and Quito, now in Ecuador. This The Calles 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. He had traveled for 1,000 miles. 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.

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 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, a lot of them by disease and things. They've been discounted ever since. But archeologists now think there's a lot of truth in this. Then the second thing is that in Lima and Quito, people have been swapping stories about this place called El Dorado. 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. These Muisca were quite rich. This basically became embellished and garbled into a story of a land so rich that the king could paint himself in gold dust, throw a lot of gold into the lake every year in a religious ritual. There's gold everywhere, and there's a lake full of gold and all of this business.

Because El Dorado is literally the golden man, isn't it? The golden one.

Exactly. The Marcus Tkenete, anyway, he arrives in Lima, and there's all of these different rumors hanging around, all the stuff out there in the Amazon, who knows? His great brainwave is, and it's really smart. I'll get rid of all these neerdo 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 man who saved Spain's finances. He can send all the gold back to Philip II, and that's great. If they don't find it and they will die. Brilliant. Brilliant. He's rid of them. It's win-win. To command the expedition, he appoints a fellow called Pedro de Assua, who is a night from Navar, 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. He is appointed to lead the expedition. He is called, When you conquer the province of Amagua and Dorado, you will rule it as governor.

He thinks, Well, brilliant. Because this is, of course, what conquistas 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. It's what Cortés, Pizarro, all of these people. So Assua, over the next year or so, he gathers his team. 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. 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 gangsters, mercenaries, ex They're hard men, I think it's fair to say, Tom. They start building all these rafts and brigantines on the edge of Amazonia that they will use to go into the river network.

It's a spaghetti western only in a jungle.

Exactly. It's a spaghetti western, or We're going to be doing some episodes about Harold Hardroja going into the lands of the Rooce. I think there's a slight Viking element to this, slightly terrifying men who would be no strangers to a facial tattoo venturing in search of gold and hopefully some slaughter.

A lot of stub, 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, a sewer 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? Donya Inyes de Atienza.

Please tell me she is incredibly ugly. Please tell me she's not absolutely gorgeous.

Tom, so gallant.

But it's for her own good and for the good of the expedition.

No, she's said to be the most beautiful woman in all of Peru.

That is mad. Disastrous. Four hundred desperades in one woman.

Yeah, so she's a young widow. She's probably mixed race and mestizo. There are four or five ironness accounts written after the event. On this issue, they're frustratingly inconsistent. Some say she's a woman of unimpeachable honor. Others say she's a little bit free with her affections. It's hard to say. It's hard to know the truth there, Tom. I think the listeners just make up their own minds. Anyway, Asuas mate says, You are mad to take her with you. Nothing good will come with it. I quote, Greater evils will follow than you can possibly suppose.

I have a sense. They're not right.

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. He says the worst is a man called Lope de Aguirre. We know from a letter that Aguirre later wrote to Philip II, which we shall come on to. Aguirre had been born in 1510 in the Basque country. He'd come to Peru in his early 20s. He'd worked as a horsebreaker and a general enforcer.

That's a terrifying CV, isn't it?

There's a wonderful account based on other accounts by a Francisco monk called Fré Simon. 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. He's generally a slightly unsettling presence. All the chroniclers agree that he talks a lot, he's very roughly spoken, he's incredibly bad-tempered, and he's incredibly vengeful. When you think this is in the context of the Spanish- The conquest of South America. People are saying, Now, this bloke, he's crossed the line. That's very disturbing. He's always been kicked out of towns. He really is a spaghetti Western character. 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. Of course, yeah. Fray Simon says, he was driven from one province to another and was known as Aguirre El Loco, the madman. He's signed up to this tradition. The other thing is he's brought with him his daughter. He had a daughter with an Indian woman, and his daughter was called Elvira.

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. This is his real soft spot. He takes Elvira very seriously.

But 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 with a group of neer-do-wells.

No.

Pedro de Assua, the Commander of the Expedition, completely ignores this letter, which is madness. On the 26th of September, 1560, he sets off with his expedition into the tributaries of the Amazon. Right from the start, surprise, Arise, 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 It's great to fix them?

Because it takes ages, and because the people are getting very impatient. 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.

Right. They all cram into these rafts, but Stuart insists on keeping one cabin just for himself and Donia Inès, 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.

This is before they've left.

This is before they've left. Anyway, they set off. After a few weeks, they reach a river called the Marañón, which is the main source of the Amazon. That runs from the Andes down and eastwards deep into the jungle.

If they follow it, they will be swept along ultimately towards the Atlantic.

Yes, they're going from West to East, from left to right, exactly. I mean, it's a heck of a way. It's 4,000 miles. They're not intending to go to the Atlantic by any means. They think they'll go into Amazonia and there'll be a Aztec-style kingdom, and they can seize its gold make themselves the masters of it, then go back to Peru and say, Brilliant, we've done it.

They're not particularly worried about how they're going to go to get back coming upriver against the current.

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? 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. Fracimon reports that the people were very impressive. They had woven cloth shirts and things. This is not a totally unsophisticated civilization by any means, but they don't find any gold. 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 Assua is more interested in dallying with Donia Inès than finding gold. There's no hint of gold. What's going on? Clearly, Assua finds it very difficult to impose his authority on all these hundreds of ex-cons.

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

Yeah, and he has a series of lieutenants that he employees who are constantly bickering and feuding among themselves. I mean, these are people This is 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 adventurers. I don't want to speak out of turn, Tom. I feel that you would be very uncomfortable in this environment.

I wouldn't like it at all. No. I'd stand on the margins wringing my hands.

I've been on tour with you when there was just four of us. I just can't see you enjoying this atmosphere, the sweat and the lack of shaving, if nothing else, because you're always a clean, shaven man. I am. Anyway, they proceed down the river. Fray Simon says of Ursula, he's too merciful, and at times, his act savored of weakness. But then he does that classic thing that quite weak leaders do, which is from time to time, he lashes out and afflicks severe punishments on people randomly. People say, Well, you don't know where you stand with him. 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, all these years ago when he went down the Amazon, where are they? She says, Well, I've never heard of these people. They realized with a sense of horror, we could be hundreds of miles from where these people live. If El Dorado exists, it could be 2,000 miles away.

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

No proper map. No sense of anything, really. But just the the green vastness and the sound of the sound of snakes slithering in the undergrowth and strange monkeys screaming in the night. That's basically what-Sloathes. Snoring. Exactly. Now, after a while, this other brigantine, their ship rights were clearly massively incompetent because this other brigantine springs a leak and they have to move everything out of there onto these rafts. The German film version has very little resemblance to reality. But the one thing it does have is a lot of raft action. That is true to life because they are on these rafts, starts pouring in rain. It's in the rainy season. 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. 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. First of all, Aguirre says, This business about El Dorado is clearly absolute total tosh. 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.

Secondly, he says, Tessua is a terrible leader. He spends all his time with his mistress, Donia Inès, 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. He is going force us to stay in the jungle until we're grey-haired old men. 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.

He's got a point with both, hasn't he?

He's not wrong there. Aguirre is a madman in many ways, and we shall see he does behave unbelievably badly, even by rest his history standards. But in this, he's not actually wrong. 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 A young nobleman who's traveling with us called Don Fernando de Guzman. His birth and merits are worthy of greater honors. He goes to Guzman, he says to him, Look, if we get rid of Ursula and you take over the leadership of the expedition, Philip II may well initially be annoyed, but when he hears the circumstances, he would consider it a good service and he will specially reward you. He says to Don Fernando at this point, Look, we won't kill Ursula. We'll just leave him by the side of the bank or something. By the way, that would be effectively to kill him, I'd imagine. It's not like he's going to make a new life for himself in the jungle. Anyway, Don Fernando, as I think you can expect with a man who goes around calling himself Don Fernando, he's a very vain man.

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.

There was something in the air that night. There was. The stars were so bright.

Alan Partridge's son is called Fernando. I imagine these people as being very similar. Don Fernando says, Right, I'm in. Okay, let's get this plot started. At that point, Aguirre says, Yeah, there's one slight change, actually. We probably will kill a sewer after all. Don Fernando is shocked by this, but he's in too deep. He's implicated in the plot, so he can't back out.

But it's ridiculous to be squamish, 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.

You and I are completely on the same page on this. On New Year's Day, 1561, they're camped in this village by the side of the river. Asuwa has sent some of his key lieutenants to out ahead, and that gives his opponents the perfect opportunity. As darkness falls, a group of Aguirre's men gather outside Asuwa's hut, and they find him lying in his hammock talking to a page boy. He says to them, in a friendly but suspicious way, Caballeros, what seek ye here at this hour? I imagine there's a lot of cackling. They draw their knives and swords, plunge them in, and that is the end of Pedro de Asuwa. He is dead. Then When they start shouting. It's interesting what they shout, actually. They start, Liberty, liberty, long live the king, the tyrant is dead. At this point, they're trying to dress it up as an act of loyalty to Philip II. They've had a bad leader, they've got rid, and the king will be very happy.

Semper tyrannis.

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

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

And wearing a quilt in a film just looks ridiculous.

That's not intimidating. No, no, no.

Then, of course, with staggering predictability, they immediately break into the wine stores. They all drink this wine, get absolutely wasted. They round up us, you as other mates. They kill them as well. They don't kill Donia Inès.

I was going to ask about her.

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

I mean, these don't seem the guys who would necessarily be 100% chivalrous towards the mistress of someone they've just killed.

I have to tell the listeners, if they've already formed a great attachment to her as a character, the second half will make challenging listening. 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. 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 Mexico. Do you remember when we did that series? Yes. They're always drawing up requirements and reading out legal documents to people who don't understand them and things.

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 blow pipes and all that stuff. Why would they ever confess to having murdered this guy? Why don't they just say, Oh, he died of some disease or something? It just seems a bit odd.

There's a lot of them. Remember, they were in trouble with 400 people. I suppose they think the news will come out. I suppose, yes, I suppose. Because some of the people there were not parted to the plot and perhaps a little bit displeased about it, so they think it's better to have an excuse. 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. There's great gasps and shock, and Aguirre laughs.

How does he laugh, Dominic?

I imagine a demonic laugh at this point. I'll do a variety of laughs later on. There'll be a lot of opportunities.

That was terrifying.

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.

Again, he's not How long is he?

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

There is a Shakespearean quality to this, where it's the villain who speaks the truth, like Richard III or Yago or whoever.

Yeah. Well, because of what he says next, he then says to the assemble company, This business about El Dorado is demented. Even if we found it, there is no way Philip II would allow us to keep it. He would send in viceroy's 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 realized 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.

Because by now, the current is getting stronger and stronger. It's really strong.

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.

The more I hear about him-The more you like him. The more I like him and the more I think I would have rallied behind him.

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

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

They now discover they've got massive holes in their rafts. They're going to have to stop by the side of the river and build new ships. That takes them three months. I I mean, day after day, hammering and stuff, 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. Aguirre actually is quite pleased about this because he thinks, If we eat all our animals, there's no way we can settle down or be tempted to capture towns and all this stuff. We'll just have to keep going all the way to the Atlantic and get out of here, which is This is basically what I want to do. I think it's about this point that the mood really starts to darken.

What do you mean starts to darken?

Yeah, because that was all prelude. That was all quite jolly. Because previously, when they 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. 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. 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. We 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. 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 Guzmán, our general, by the grace of God, Lord and Prince of Peru, the Maine and Chile, to whom by right these Kingdoms belong.

Wow, there's a twist.

He says, We forswear our allegiance to the King of Spain, and But Gary 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 defense.

That's a death sentence, isn't it?

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

Brilliant, Dominic. Okay, so it's been an absolute pleasure jaunt up until now. But in the second half, we will find out how, as Dominic just said, the nightmare begins. Hello, welcome back to the Rest is History. We are with Aguirre, the Wroth of God, the Traitor, El Loco, the Madman, the Epithets are piling up, and Dominic, none of them are good. None of them are looking good for Don Fernando, who is in nominal charge, has just been claimed by Aguirre, basically Lord of the Hold of South America. He must be feeling pretty pleased, but I'm guessing, don't know, just something telling me he's not going to be around for long.

Guess what? The clock is ticking for Don Fernando, I think it's fair to say, Tom. He's the Prince of Peru, but they're lost in the middle of the jungle. It's fair to say his title is purely nominal at this point. Aguirre says, Look, this is how we're going to get out. I've got my plan. We'll finish building these brigantines, 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. We will rally the colonists of Central America, and we will cross the Istmus of Panama and launch a sea-born 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 over-ripe fruit for the past month and a horse.

Dominic, I'm imagining a lot of leaches.

Yeah, loads of leaches. When someone outlined this plan to you, which involves a lot of travel, a lot of implausible capturing of fleets, crossing of isthmuses, and multiple South American countries, you might say, I find this an It's plausible.

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

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.

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

That's true.

At least to try.

As we'll see, maybe they had a few laughs along the way. They set off, they go into the river network again of Amazonia, eventually. They built the ships. We're in 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 an interesting-looking tributary, he It's like, Don't even look at it. Keep going. He's got his plan. He doesn't want anything to interfere with it. But again, he's right. Of course he is. They don't want to get lost in this maze of rivers. It's a terrible labyrinth, a riverine labyrinth. They're eating fish, they're living off turtles and manatees. That's terrible.

Manities are endangered.

Perhaps this is why. El loco. 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 complicated plan. They're going to invite him aboard a ship and stab him and all In the meantime, word leaks out. So Aguirre finds out about it and he decides he will strike first. The first person that he gets rid of is his friend, Seigneur Salduendo, who had been his ally earlier on. He's started sleeping with Doña Inés, and Aguirre finds that disgraceful. He denounced 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. He sends two of his henchmen who are called Carrión and Yomoso.

Yomoso will be reappearing in this story in a colorful manner. These two guys turn up with daggers to kill Doña Inés. 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 site of mangled, that word again, the mangled victim, were broken-hearted, for this was the crueless act that had ever been perpetrated.

But Aguirre, he doesn't mind.

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

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

Yeah, that's true, actually. You're quite right. And you've pointed out a terrible discrepancy in the sources. I have. Tom, this is the forensic detail that marks us out as a great history podcast. So Don Fernando has been 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 a gear in his 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. 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 hammock and he wakes. Aguirre said to him very gently, Don't be alarmed, your excellency. Then they killed all Don Fernando's friends while he was just lying there in his hammock looking mournful.

Then they shot Don Fernando with their arquebusses and hacked him to pieces with their swords and threw him in the river.

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

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

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

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

Except your lot, don't aim high. Don't follow your dream.

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 that 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. Of course he does. 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.

To stop conspiracy.

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. He also appoints a Praetorian guard for himself of Basques with arquebuses. Actually, behind that, I think there may a 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 Castillians and Basques, or something like that.

The sources, are they Castilian or Basque?

They are Castilian by and large. 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.

It may be that Aguirre isn't-Less mad Less mad. Less mad. I mean, more like Unai Emory, the Basque manager of Aston Villa.

Right. Not a madman.

Not a madman at all. A very good manager.

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

I absolutely would. I'd do whatever he said. But I mean, if it all went wrong- Would you then smear him as a loco?

You claimed that he had a limp and stuff.

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

Right. Well, some of the Geerais people did say loyal right to the end.

That would be me. I mean, if he was like Unai Emory, not if he was like Klaus Kinski. Yes. Just putting that on the record.

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

I wouldn't follow a very sweaty guy with bulgy eyeballs who's wearing too much armor, but I would follow a twinkle-eyed, charismatic leader of men in a tracksuit. Or actually, Emory is very dapper Yeah, he's never wear a tracksuit. No, he doesn't. Very dapper coat and scarf.

Do you know what he is? He's courtly. Yeah, he is. A word one would often use of a Spaniard.

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

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

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

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

Just to ask, no one has ever done this before?

No, they have no idea where they are. Now, actually, at one point, they see campfires. They see lights burning on the horizon. 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. Aguirre is furious of 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 and then crossing the Istmas of Panama and then seizing the gold of Peru. He's right. Well, he's also at this point very, very paranoid. So Drey Simon says, So many were the fears that disturbed the wicked conscience of Aguirre, that although he had killed those whom he feared, he never felt secure from the survivors. I think that's definitely true. At this point, he really starts getting into his garroting. There hasn't been a lot of garroting so far, but now… I can't stop the narrative every five minutes for all the garroting, just assume that it's constant.

I mean, it's a more Merciful way to go than stabbing someone to death.

Perhaps he's coming round to him. Well, this I think you would disagree with Tom, because I think there's a hint of a Satanic nihilism.

I love a Satanic nihilist.

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 It's a good phrase. 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.

He's like the judge in blood meridian.

Yeah, blood meridian. Or the Marquis de Sade or something. There's a 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 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. Aguirre is very hot-tempered. He says, We've got all these porters and guides with us. Let us abandon them here. They abandon them on the riverbank and they're crying and they're disparate.

And there's nothing there. I mean, it's- There's nothing there at all. Dangerous animals and mudflax.

And a couple of the Spaniards say, Come on, this is a bit harsh. I mean, we've been traveling with these guys for months. And Aguirre says, Right, you got to go. And he has them garotted or shot people who tried to protest. 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. 17 days later, they glimpse the island of Margarita. When they see the island, I agree, it says, Brilliant. He celebrates by g rotting two more of his men who he thinks could conceivably betray him to the authorities when he gets there. 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.

Presumably, this is quite convincing because they must look an absolute mess after. How long have they been in the jungle?

Nine months.

Nine months.

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. It's all very friendly. Aguirre says, Would it be all right if we came on shore? Can we take some exercise and bring our weapons just to practice? The governor says, Yeah, great. They march ashore as though they're on parade. It's very well planned. Then they unsheath their swords and level their guns, and they take the governor and his officials hostage. This is obviously It's not a huge place. 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. They march into the main town of Margarita. 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 a sign that there is clearly some serious political motive behind all this. It's not just of insane nihilism, because clearly this is an attack on the idea of authority and royal authority.

What I think 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 II will take it from us and give it to aristocrats and viceroy and bureaucrats. Of course, for Cortés in Mexico, when we did that episode, that series a couple of years ago. That had happened to him. He'd conquered it all and then been pushed out. I think that's at the back of their mind.

I wonder also, is there a element of Basque? Nationalism would be anachronistic because the Basques are proud mountain people.

I mean, a lot of these people are from a Spanish periphery. Famously, Cortés and his allies in Mexico, a lot of them had come from extremajura, the borderlands. Again, Aguirre is from a borderland. He's not on Metropolitan Spain, Castile, from one of the great cities. I think there probably is a fair bit of resentment, actually, of royal officials.

But also Spanish, Castilian authority.

Exactly. 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 Santa Domingo. He has a big ship and he gets away in the chaos. Bad news for Aguirre. It's very bad news. He goes off to the mainland. This is the point at which word of Aguirre's return and his misconduct begins to spread across the Spanish colonies. From this point onwards, he has lost the element of surprise that I think was so important to him. I think this is the point at which, dare I say, he really does begin to lose the plot. Up to this point with all the garroting, 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, Furious and raved like a madman, foaming at the mouth with rage and passion. He has them captured. He garrots 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.

Or of class resentment, perhaps.

I think there definitely is a bit of class resentment. Actually, 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. Just 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, viceroy's, presidents, auditors, governors, lawyers, and procurators, as well as the caballero of noble blood. In other words, the gentleman. These people have been sucking the Indies dry. He doesn't mean from the native inhabitants, he means from us. We have won this through our sweat and our violence, we have won this land than this gold, and it has been sucked from us by pen-pushing bureaucrats, elitist establishment types, chinless tofs. I think that is definitely there. At this point, there's a bit of a reign of terror in Margarita. The richer citizens are locked up. Their money is stolen. The governor is garroted and his officials are garroted. Aguirre is now ruling with a rauldify. If anybody hesitates to garrot somebody, he garrots them as well. He He says, You've got to be in on this. Now there's a really terrible moment. We talked about this on stage, didn't we? I always used to really enjoy this part of the story. He hears a rumor that the Royal troops have landed, which is not true, and he goes out to face them.

He leaves his chief lieutenant, who's a guy called Martin Perez in charge of the Fort. 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 Aguirre's men leap out from behind the furniture or something and stab this man and shoot him with an arquebus. But Perez is not killed. He's hideously wounded. Blood and entrails are everywhere. He manages to, like a Frankenstein's monster, he lurches out of the room. Imagine this lovely colonial mansion.

Holding in his guts.

Helped wooden balustrade, leaving this. He's lurching like a monster down the corridor, people screaming and running in terror and stuff. And Aguirre's men are I shouldn't laugh. It's a terrible scene. Aguirre's men are chasing him, still trying to stab him and shoot him and stuff. Eventually, they corner him, literally in a corner, and they managed to finish him off. They cut his throat. It's a terrible scene. His entrails are everywhere. Aguirre spots one of the men clearly looking a little bit green. This is a guy called Antonio Iommoso, who had been one of the murderers of Donya Inès. And Aguirre says, You don't look like… 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? And Iommoso is terrified and he protests his innocence. And Aguirre seems completely unmoved and he's reaching for the garrot. And Yamoso drops to his knees by the disemboweled body of Martin Perez. He basically wants to prove his loyalty. He shouts, Curse this traitor. I will drink his blood. Then, as Fray 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, Brilliant. 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 hand, so 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, dates, places, It's so hard to tell what the truth of this is, but undoubtedly, there is a lot of very genuine violence. 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 taken. We are in so deep now that we just have to keep going.

Well, that signature, the traitor, that's really what kicks it off, isn't it? It is.

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. 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 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 in some New World port and you saw a ship with that flag sailing towards you.

You'd run 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.

They cross to the mainland. It takes them eight days. On the seventh of September, 1561, they arrive on the Coast of what's now Venezuela, and it's déserted. 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... Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great 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 Mr. Kurt mode at this 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. I suspect at this point, some of his men are thinking, 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.

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

You don't think he was mad before?

I think he's reached a certain level of madness a few pages back, to be honest. Do you? I think he's reached a certain level of madness several minutes ago.

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

I mean, the whole drinking the brains stuff.

The drinking the brains is poor. I agree with that.

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

He let the Basque country down there, I think Tom is fair to say. Yeah, he did. He celebrates his recovery by executing a man called Gonzalo, and that Gonzalo's crime is that he'd gone off without permission to catch some parrots. That's the laugh. I think at this point, there's There's a lot of craze laughter. As parrot fancy as a slaughter around him. They get to Valencia and he writes this mad letter to Philip II, which many historians have written about this, say, is one of the maddest letters in Spanish history.

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

He says, King Philip, son of Charles the Invincible, I, lope de guire, thy vassal, am an old Christian of poor but noble parents of the town of Onyate 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. Yeah.

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

Exactly. So his identity, he's saying, I am of loyal 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 for 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 fortune. There are all these nepo babies coming over here and taking the big jobs. Also, 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.

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

Yes, exactly. 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. He says, My comrade and I pray to God that thy strength may ever be increased against the Turk and the Frenchmen 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 Giire, the Wanderer. As John Hemming 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 attitudes within this space of sometimes the same sentence. The tragedy is, Philip II, probably never even got to read it because there's no evidence that you did read it. It must have been intercepted by a royal official who filed it under M for mad.

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

He's sitting in a very gloomy in Eles Gareal. This would have livened up his day, I think. I know.

Just endless stuff about tax returns and things. Exactly. Then suddenly you get that.

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 déserted. 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 their 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.

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

He totally is, isn't he? He gets to Barquisimeto. They're surrounded by royalist troops outside the town. 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. Even his lieutenants, his loyalists, say to him, Oh, come on, that's going too far.

What about the bloke who drank the blood.

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

Yeah, it was a genuine sacrament.

Yeah, it was. Aguirre has a massive meltdown in the middle of October. He summons all his men Then, 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, I want you to understand that I did it in order to protect your lives and for the benefit of all. It's real self-pity here. This does not, unfortunately, impress them. Most of them defect. On the morning, on 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 of the town. As soon as they get out of the town, they 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 Yomoso, the blood and brains man. And Aguirre says, Why are you still here? Why haven't you left me? And Yomoso 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. That, I think, is lovely. What follows, perhaps less so, Aguirre goes to his room and he gets out his arquebus, his gun, and he goes to find someone we haven't mentioned, Elvira, who has been there the whole time. Age was she now? 14? God, she must be so embarrassed. Yeah. Her dad has He's really let her down. 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. 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 we know what that means. Yes, of course. Elvira is extremely disturbed by this, falls to her knees and starts She says, Father, Satan is misleading you. She's got a maid called Juana who manages to wrestle the gun from his hands. But then he really lets himself, Elvira and the Basque country, down because he pulls out a dagger and stabs Elvira through the heart.

Stabs his daughter? Yeah, kills his daughter. There's a twist.

I thought that he was going to 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 arquebus 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 is talk of a trial, but actually, here's the important thing. Loads of his old cronies who are 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 out.

Because of course, they don't want the truth to come out of their own complicity. Two of his old gunners volunteered to do it. You talked about Shakespeare or Jacobian drama or something. In true Jacobian 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. 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 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.

That's It's a feedback for his men eating all the dogs.

Yes, I suppose so. The dogs have had the last laugh, which is nice. They have, yeah. That's the end of Lope di Aguirre. I guess the question, very briefly at the end, is what it actually means.

Does it have to mean anything?

I like a bit of a meaning. Do you not like a meaning? Tell You love a meaning. This is very out of character.

It's just the random madness.

But maybe it isn't, you see. 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 When you're part of the jungle, your complicity in colonialism leads you into evil. That's how some people have interpreted the story. Alternatively, the explanation, of course, is that it's rather like Mr. Kurtz. It's about the human condition, and it's about we've all got a lope de guire, a brain-sucking, daughter-murdering madman inside us, whether we like it or not. That's actually how most historians, they have said, he represents human evil in its purest form.

Or he's a revolutionary.

Well, that's, I think, the more interesting There's a very recent book by an American writer called Evan Balkan. I think it was his PhD, called Wroth of God. 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. Balkan points out, all the accounts we have of him are from people who were complicit in the revolt. 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.

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

Exactly. That Aguirre represents... That's why that point, the thing about, he doesn't want to go to heaven. He's determined to throw himself into this Sardian pursuit of all that is cruel and brutal all of this. That's why I think that was 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.

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

As Evan Balken 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. Simon Bolivar or Juan Peron or whoever it might be. Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, the country with which Aguirre is most closely associated. Hugo Chávez's Culture Ministry, I read in Evan Balken's book, I think, had a section on its official website, praising Aguirre as a, soldier, traitor, pilgrim, father, lover, dreamer. I think father is a bit of an ironic one there.

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

There definitely is a magical realist, and maybe this would be our last closing point. The most famous of all European travelers who went to Latin America was a guy called Alexander Humboldt, German. He went to Venezuela in 1799. 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 savanas like a flame that flies the approach of men.

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

Of course, Tom, members of the Rest is History Club will get all four episodes of that series on Monday. If you want to join them, you merely have to sign up at therestishistory. Com. Adios.

Very exciting. Hasta luego. Goodbye.