Abstrakt
Emotions form an essential part of the eye-witness accounts of Lope de Aguirre's rebellion which took place in the middle of the 16th century, during a voyage that set out from Peru to discover and colonize the mythical lands of El Dorado and Omagua supposedly situated in the depths of the Amazonian rainforest. After a general mutiny and under the newly established order of Aguirre and his marañones, a frightful regime was put in place and maintained by harsh punishments, cruel treatment and continuous murders.
The goal of this article is to explore the function of emotions in the eyewitness testimonies: from hope, through frustration and love to the all-present fear. In the texts, emotions, and fear in particular, constitute a strong motivation for the protagonists' actions and present them in a light more favorable to the narrators, which one would expect to be the desired effect, taking into account the investigation of colonial authorities for whom the testimonies were probably meant.