Amazon River, Early European exploration

In the early days the river was the only means of access into the forest. Francisco de Orellana descended the main course of the river from the Peruvian Andes to the Atlantic in 1541–42. Nearly a century later, Pedro Teixeira went from Belém to Quito, Ecuador, and the region increasingly became known through the explorations of the Portuguese. In 1743 the French naturalist Charles-Marie