The Conquistadors (30 page)

Yet this is the turning point, the moment of real discovery – the sailing of this one small ship, with no troops on board, only sailors.

Pizarro was no longer at Isla del Gallo. Quite early in their long, lonely vigil off the coast of South America he and his companions had decided to leave the island. For what reason we do not know. The probability is that the loneliness and desolation of the place, the sense of having been utterly abandoned, so played upon their nerves that anything seemed better than remaining to die ultimately of starvation. They still had with them the Indians Ruiz had taken, men who could build and sail a raft. Probably it was these Indians who advised them to move to the island of Gorgona, seventy-five miles back up the coast. This is a beautiful island with magnificent sand beaches in the south, and the virgin forests of the interior, which now provide logging work for the penal settlement on the eastern side, gave them material for solidly constructed shelters. Even more important, the island is high, with three peaks, the highest of which is 1,296 feet, and since it is still in the high rainfall belt of this coast there were numerous streams giving them a plentiful supply of fresh water. Bitter experience, and the help of the Indians, had taught them to live off the land, and when Ruiz found them they were sufficiently organized in their small settlement to be maintaining their morale with a routine of prayers in the morning and hymns in the evening. Despite the long period of privation only two of the Spaniards were
so ill that they could not be embarked, and these were left in the care of the Indians. The two Peruvians, however, sailed with Pizarro.

South now. South again, into fair weather seas, the squalls all left behind – past Gallo, past Tacamez, the wind light, the sea calm. In a few days they crossed the equator and sighted Cape Pasado, the southernmost point previously reached by Ruiz. Barely three weeks out from Gorgona they reached the promontory of Santa Elena, a flat-topped mass of chert that is very conspicuous as you approach it from the north. Rounding the long, sandy point below it, they sailed into the great gulf of Guayaquil from which sometimes, in the morning on a clear day, before the usual rain clouds gather, you can see the 20,702-feet volcanic bulk of Chimborazo rising gigantic above the stratum of humidity that mists the lower slopes of the Andes. Here, in this shallow gulf, the flat mangrove-creeked delta is plugged at its seaward end by the sprawling green of the tree-clothed island of Puná, twenty-seven miles at its longest, from north-east to south-west, and fourteen miles wide. From seaward its flat fingers of mangrove merge into the similarly flat green of the delta, and since, on this first discovery voyage, they did not venture amongst the dangerous tide-swept shoals and muddy sandbanks of the Guayas river approaches, they could not have known that it was an island. Instead, they stood towards the high south-western end of Puna, which reaches over two thousand feet and is still to this day heavily wooded with laureola, the big Indian laurel which provides excellent timber.

So they came at last to the promised land, at the far southern end of the gulf, where they anchored for the night, clear of the reefs, in the lee of the shrouded, corpse-like bulk of the island of Santa Clara. In the morning they stood into the bay of Tumbes (3°30'S), with the town itself growing gradually larger, its towers and temples standing just above the irrigated green of the delta, a bright contrast to the dried-up brown of the hinterland. This Tumbes lies a few miles south-west of the present town, close to the río Corrales, which is the southernmost delta branch of the main Tumbes river. When Pizarro arrived there a fleet of balsa rafts was just leaving, packed with warriors, to raid the island of Puná. Filled with curiosity at the sight of his unusual vessel, they came alongside. Pizarro invited their chiefs on board, ordering his two Peruvians, whose long exile on Gorgona had given them a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, to show them round. A request for provisions soon brought other rafts from the shore, loaded with game, fish, and vegetables, including sweet potatoes, also maize – and apparently several llamas. This is surprising for the llama is native to the high Andes and Tumbes is at least a hundred miles from the nearest natural grazing. If this report is correct, then these were the first living examples of Peruvian ‘sheep' seen by the Spaniards.

One of these balsas had on board an Inca nobleman. He clambered over the side of the Spanish ship wearing a short tunic that covered his breech clout, with a llama wool cloak slung over one shoulder like a toga, so that he might have passed for a Roman patrician – except for the mahogany impassivity of his
features and the large gold ear-lobe plugs. It is doubtful whether the two ‘tongues' were as yet competent to explain that the Spaniards represented a distant and powerful king who claimed Peru as part of his domains, or to interpret Pizarro's sermon on the Christian faith; but at least Pizarro had made contact with a representative of the Peruvian government. The Inca chief dined on board, and when he left, mellowed by wine and the gift of an axe, he invited the Spaniards to visit the city.

The following morning Pizarro sent Alonso de Molina with a present of pigs and poultry to the city's
curaca,
or head-man. On his return Molina reported that the Peruvians had been childishly excited by the crowing of one of the cocks, by his own bearded appearance, and by the blackness of the negro who had accompanied him. He had been taken first to the chief's house, which was guarded and where he had been served from gold and silver dishes, and then on a tour of the city, including a fortress of great unmortared blocks of stone and a temple, which he described as ‘blazing with gold and silver'.

Distrusting this account, Pizarro then sent Pedro de Candia ashore in full armour with his arquebus and instructions to demonstrate the power of this weapon to kill at a distance. Having duly impressed the inhabitants, he, too, was taken on a tour of the city, and on returning to the ship his report was, if anything, even more fantastic than Molina's. He described the temple as ‘literally tapestried with plates of gold and silver', and his more detailed description of the fortress indicated that it was strongly guarded with a triple wall and a large garrison. He then went on to describe a convent that housed some Virgins of the Sun, where the gardens were decorated with gold and silver replicas of fruits and vegetables; moreover, he had been shown gold – and silversmiths working on such decorations for the religious houses.

Pizarro briefly went ashore to verify these accounts, meeting the chief and an Inca noble, then sailed once more. Ten miles to the south-west the lush green of the rain country ceased; the coast dry now, with cactus almost the only plant. They were approaching the Sechura Desert. There was a sea change, too, the temperature dropping abruptly, from around 84° to 64°, as they reached the northern limits of the cold Humboldt current. The frigate birds, with their bat-like wings and long stick of a tail that fans raggedly out as they swoop for fish, gave place to pelicans flying in long lines. Suddenly there was a great profusion of sea birds. They rounded Cabo Blanco, the high point of the cape all white with guano, and put into the port of Paita, which is flanked on three sides by tall, sandy bluffs. Again, the Spaniards were met by balsas loaded with provisions, and after a friendly exchange of gifts, they continued south along the arid shores of the Sechura, and, with the wind apparently still favourable, they rounded Punta de Aguja (6°S), the ship threading its way among the barren islets, with the coast now trending away south-south-eastwards. No problem of food now. They were sailing into seas brown with plankton, teeming with fish, and between the great
swathes of dead desert and rock were the green oases of the snow-fed rivers. It was water that was now the problem, for it seldom rains close in to the shore here, and both wind and current were against them, the wind having settled almost permanently out of a bearing of 211° and the long ground swell at about 235°.

These adverse winds held them up for a time. They called it a gale, but it is doubtful whether the wind speed rose much above 20 knots, for this is an area in which gales, and even squalls, are almost non-existent. It was probably the variance in direction of wind and swell, and the consequent rolling, that caused men with little knowledge of the sea to exaggerate the circumstances. When conditions eased they were able to beat slowly south-east past the great adobe complex of Chan-Chan.

Without knowing it Pizarro was now sailing past a fortune in gold lying buried with the mummified remains of the Chimú nobles. Thé burial chambers, or
huacas,
now mostly rifled, contained not only personal adornments, usually of gold, but also the most perfect of those beautifully designed and decorated ceramics that are now so avidly sought after by private collectors in Peru. In fact, from the Sechura south, great temple mounds, built of adobe – sun-dried mud bricks – and some of them as big as a fair-sized Egyptian pyramid, mark the irrigated areas of population, many of them the work of pre-Inca cultures. Further south-south-east he sailed past the place where he would later found the city of Trujillo, naming it after his birthplace. And so finally to the last river oasis of his coastal reconnaissance, the Santa. He had now reached latitude 9°S, 500 miles south of Tumbes, and all the way down the coast he had been received with friendliness mixed with curiosity. He had made no attempt to trade for gold. Indeed, he had seen little of it, except as the thin, beaten covering to temple walls, and his force was far too small to risk acts of desecration. Moreover, he had caught only occasional glimpses of the great mountain wall of the Andes which he would later have to scale, for though he was sailing in cooler waters and in a fair-weather area, here, in the cold current flowing up the coast from the Antarctic, it is always hazy, often foggy.

It was time to turn back, time to raise an army, to shed the cloak of discoverer, and assume the armour of conqueror, for he had now done what he had set out to do three hard years ago – he had discovered Peru. More, he had proved to his own satisfaction that the stories Andagoya had been told fell far short of the marvellous truth. The things he had seen, sailing south through 18° of latitude, had been sufficient to stir the imagination of the dullest. He had glimpsed the rain-green heights of the Andes piled up beyond the desiccated brown of the foothills, the wind-blown sand of the coastal desert reaching as high as six thousand feet, had seen the bright green of irrigated crops, where the rivers debouched from gorges cut in the frightful tumble of arid, disintegrating rock, the towns with their gold-hung temples, their palaces, their ordered, civilized life, and the great roads built like causeways through desert and over rivers. But this he now knew was only the periphery of a great Indian empire; the towns
of the coast were mere outposts. All the way from Tumbes to the Santa river oasis he had been receiving accounts through his interpreters of the Inca king who ruled the high fantastic world of the Andes from a city of gold and silver that was remote as the stars, high as the hot, hazy, humid dome of the sky.

The Sun God king! It was enough, he felt, to set all Panama aflame with enthusiasm, to bring him the money and the men he needed to make this fabulous world his own. And in his haste to get back he stopped at few places – at Santa, at Tumbes, were he left Alonso de Molina and several others who had succumbed to the Indian way of life and the charm of the Indian women, at Gorgona to pick up the two sick men he had left there, one of whom had died. When his ship put in to Panama it had been away, not six months, but eighteen, and he and all his companions had long since been given up as dead.

That he had achieved so much with one small vessel was due in the main to the fact that it was not overcrowded with troops. Apart from himself and eleven of the thirteen soldiers of fortune who had crossed the sword-drawn line with him on the sandy shore of Isla del Gallo, together with several Indians, there had been only sailors on board, so that the ship, by accident rather than design, had been manned as for a true voyage of discovery. But if Pizarro thought that he had only to tell his story, and show the Indians and llamas he had brought back from Tumbes, for the whole of Panama to flock to his standard, he was bitterly mistaken. They were fêted, yes, and everyone duly marvelled at their achievements; but when he and Almagro proposed a full-scale expedition for conquest the veterans took the view that the task was beyond the colony's capacity. The conquest of Mexico was no longer a two-years' wonder, it was established fact, the territory of New Spain occupied by thousands of Spaniards. That Cortés had penetrated and held the city of the Aztecs with only four hundred men was now forgotten. And Pedro de los Ríos was not of the stuff of a conquistador. He baulked at the magnitude of the task and had no wish to be recalled to Spain to account for a disastrous expedition. He was, however, prepared to shift the burden of responsibility on to the home government, and when Luque proposed that they approach the crown direct, he put no obstacle in their way

Now the roles of Almagro and Pizarro are reversed. Whereas, on previous occasions, Pizarro had been content to remain in the background, it was now Almagro who was reluctant to be their ambassador. Perhaps he was conscious of his limitations. He was a typical Spanish soldier of fortune, a proud, boastful little man, a rough diamond who could talk bluntly and persuasively to a colonial governor, but who probably knew the sort of figure he would cut at court, his face maimed by the loss of an eye. Pizarro, on the other hand, seems to have gained vastly in confidence as a result of his long and highly successful voyage. In any case, as Almagro pointed out, the success of such a mission must depend on its presentation by one of those directly concerned; and of the three, Pizarro
was the only one who could give a first-hand account of Peru. He left Panama, overland for the north coast, in the spring of 1528, taking with him Pedro de Candia, several natives of Tumbes, some llamas, also examples of Peruvian gold and silver work and of their finely woven cloth.