The Conquistadors (31 page)

The mission got off to a bad start. Pizarro had no sooner set foot on Spanish soil than his old comrade Enciso had him seized and clapped into jail for a debt contracted in the early days of the Darién settlement. Fortunately for him, the public outcry was backed by court officials; they had become very much aware of the New World now that Charles's hungry coffers were constantly being augmented by the great wealth arriving in ship after ship from Vera Cruz. The administration was, therefore, most sympathetic to a man who was said to bring news of another, even richer country. They ordered Pizarro's release and he was brought at once to Toledo, where Charles had his court preparatory to leaving for Italy to receive the crown of the Holy Roman Empire from the Pope.

In appearance Pizarro was probably much what court circles expected of the new-style colonial crusader – hard-bitten, uneducated, but a veteran with a commanding presence and the ability to talk directly and fascinatingly of a world which they had only read about in reports. He was granted a royal audience, and the result of it was that he left for Cadiz in a mood of great elation. This mood did not last long, for though Charles had given the enterprise his royal blessing, Pizarro now had to deal with the Council of the Indies, a bureaucratic machine grown fat on the energies and hard work of others. His partners in Panama had scraped together 15,000 pesos to finance his embassy. This rapidly disappeared as the expenses of delay mounted. It was not until July 26, 1529, almost a year after he had landed in Spain, that the Queen, who was acting for Charles in his absence, finally agreed the terms of the capitulation that appointed him governor and captain-general of yet another Spanish colony overseas – New Castile.

Details of the capitulation are important, for it contained in it the seeds of disaster and his own ultimate death. He was made Governor, Captain-General,
Adelantado and alguacil mayor,
or chief constable, for life, granted a salary of 750,000 maravedíes to cover the maintenance of law officers and an occupation force, given the right to erect fortresses and to assign
encomiendas.
But Almagro got nothing, except the governorship of Tumbes, the rank of
hidalgo,
and 300,000 maravedies for the support of the necessary garrison. There is no reliable record that Pizarro did, in fact, press the claim of his associate, and if he did, it was probably done half-heartedly. He had been a year battling alone in the jungle of the Spanish court. He probably felt he had earned whatever he could get for himself. After all, Almagro had not been on the final voyage, which was the basis for the capitulation, and if Pizarro felt a twinge of conscience, it was readily squared by the memory of how very similar it had been when Almagro had been the negotiator and he had waited at Chicama.

The rest of his associates were better served. Luque was made Bishop of Tumbes
and ‘Protector' of all the natives of Peru, Ruiz was given the title of Grand Pilot of the Southern Ocean with a salary to match its grandiloquence, Candia became commander of the artillery and the eleven
⁵
others were given titles such as
hidalgo
or
caballero,
though there is some reason to believe that Pizarro juggled a little with the names. All this, which sounded fine on paper, was subject to his raising a properly equipped force of two hundred and fifty men, a hundred of whom were to be drawn from the colonies; little more than token financial assistance was offered him by the home government. In other words, the expedition was to be self-financing, Spain retaining all the advantages of conquest without risking anything much in the way of money or even men.

Having finally got his capitulation signed by Charles's mother, Joanna the Mad, Pizarro left at once for Trujillo. To flaunt his success in the town of his birth was very natural. A foundling and a bastard, who had grown up as a swineherd, he was now a knight of the military order of Santiago, with the right to add to the Pizarro escutcheon an Indian city with a vessel standing off and a llama. More practically, he thought that the stock-grazing uplands of Estremadura, which had already produced some of the hardiest of the colonial settlers, would be a good recruiting centre. But Estremadura was already drained of its most enterprising men. A lew joined him, and these included four of his kinsmen, Francisco Martín de Alcántara, who was a half-brother, and the three Pizarro brothers – Gonzalo, Juan and Hernando – ‘all poor, and as proud as they were poor'. The only certainly legitimate one of the three was Hernando. Ruthless, arrogant, full of temper and courage, but without pity, this man was to become Pizarro's dreadful right hand.

It was not only men Pizarro lacked. He had great difficulty in raising funds. The rich were as chary of risking their money in such a wild enterprise as the poor were in risking their lives. Whether Cortés did, in fact, come to his aid is by no means certain. He was undoubtedly in Spain at the time, endeavouring to obtain full recognition from a none too grateful government and settlement of the many injustices that are part of the aftermath of any conquest. Only three weeks before Pizarro had finally obtained his capitulation Cortés had at last been confirmed as Governor and Captain-General of New Spain and granted the title of Marqués del Valle. He must have met Pizarro at court. Certainly he knew of his exploits. But it is unsafe to assume that, even at a time when he felt himself to be both wealthy and powerful, he would have given assistance to a man embarked upon a similar enterprise, even though he were from the same province. Pizarro might after all become a competitor for interest at court.

At the end of six months Pizarro had three vessels lying at Seville and rather less than the hundred and fifty men stipulated. Warned that the Council of the Indies proposed to inspect the vessels for their seaworthiness, he hastened his own
departure, slipping down the river and out across the bar at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, leaving Hernando to follow him with the other two vessels if he could. Thus, when the Council inspected them, it was possible for Hernando to claim that the deficiencies, particularly in men, were due to their having already sailed in the first ship. The fleet rendezvoused at Gómera in the Canaries and thence proceeded to Nombre de Dios. It was here that Pizarro was joined by his two associates and had the difficult task of explaining to Almagro why he had failed to get him named as joint governor and chief constable. Almagro must have known it was not the policy of the Spanish administration to divide command in this way – they had long since discovered that this was always fatal to the success of an enterprise. But though he finally accepted the situation with an appearance of good grace, it rankled, and the behaviour of Hernando did not help, for he showed scant respect for the ageing veteran with his damaged face and slower ways. Thus from the start the three chief personalities were at odds.

Pizarro had sailed from Spain in January 1530. It was January 1531 before the expedition finally left from Panama – three vessels, two large and one small, 180 men, 27 horses, arms, ammunition and stores. The force stipulated in the capitulation was small enough for the conquest of an empire that stretched two thousand sea miles south from Cabo Blanco, included one of the world's greatest mountain chains and extended inland to the rain forests of the Amazon. But Pizarro was seventy men short of even this totally inadequate number. Knowing the difficulties he faced, knowing that the whole enormous area of Inca territory was linked by military roads, that there were great fortresses heavily garrisoned, and that the whole country moved with absolute obedience to the command of a single ruler, it is difficult to understand what drove him on, how he thought he could possibly succeed. Was he so stupid, so unimaginative, that he could not comprehend the impossibility of such a gigantic task? It was not only the people who would be against him, but the fantastic terrain itself. Was he so puffed up with pride, so driven by greed for gold and power that he refused to see how the odds were piled against him? Nobody can say now. It is probably a mixture of all these things, plus the sense of mission, the same crusading zeal that had driven Cortés. The letters of Cortés to the Emperor had all been published, and, though he could not read them himself, Pizarro would undoubtedly have heard the full details of the conquest of Mexico whilst in Spain. He may even have got them direct from Cortés. In his pride and his new-found state he probably convinced himself that what one Estremaduran could do, another could emulate. His age may have had a bearing on it, too – the sense that time was running out and that he had nothing to lose; incredibly, he was bordering on sixty when he embarked on this third and final expedition.

There is no real basis for comparison, however, between Cortés and Pizarro. Pizarro was neither a diplomat nor a great general. The only characteristics they had in common were courage and determination of a very high order. Consider Pizarro's first positive action as commander of his new expedition. Ruiz had planned to sail direct to Tumbes, probably by the off-shore route; but gales,
headwinds and adverse currents forced him, after thirteen days, to put in to San Mateo Bay. They were still one degree north of the equator and Tumbes almost 350 sea miles away, yet Pizarro disembarks his men and starts to march south with his ships keeping pace with him along the shore. After thirteen days cooped up in three small ships, plugging to windward in poorish weather, his troops were no doubt in a fairly dispirited state. Cortés would have got his men ashore, flexed their muscles and instilled a little discipline into them, and then re-embarked and proceeded to his original objective. He certainly would not have shown himself in his true colours by an unprovoked attack on a small town. For Pizarro, however, the bird in the hand seems to have been worth any number in the bush. After a difficult march across the swollen rivers of the Coaque district, he allowed his men to fall upon a small, undefended town. They were lucky in that they were able to loot gold and silver to the value of 20,000 pesos. Most of it was in the form of clumsily-wrought ornaments. There were also emeralds, but only Pizarro and a few others, including the Dominican, Fray Reginaldo de Pedraza, appreciated their worth. For this small immediate gain Pizarro traded the goodwill of the natives and any hope of achieving surprise. He sent the treasure back to Panama in his ships, hoping that the sight of such quick fortune would encourage others to join him, and then continued his march south.

They got no more loot. The few villages they came upon were deserted, empty of people and chattels. As in New Spain, all the troops wore protective clothing of quilted cotton, and the caballeros were in armour. The heat was appalling and their skin, soaked by the tropical rains, bitten by insects, broke out in great septic ulcers. Men died, dropped fainting in their tracks; it was the most senseless start to a campaign that any general could have conceived, and it says much for the toughness of Spanish soldiery that they did, in fact, reach the gulf of Guayaquil. Puna seemed to offer a suitable base. The warlike inhabitants were hostile to Tumbes, which lay only thirty miles beyond the high southern end of the island. Since they had made friendly overtures, Pizarro had his whole force transported across by balsas. Here, on this big, tree-covered island, safe from surprise attack, he set up camp to await reinforcements. Already, in the course of the march south, he had been joined by two ships, the first carrying the Royal Treasurer and other officials of the administration, who had been too late to join the expedition when it sailed from Seville, the other bringing thirty men under the command of a captain named Benalcázar.

Almost everything Pizarro does at this stage gives the impression of a bone-headed lack of imagination. Indians from Tumbes came over, and, though he knew they were bitter enemies of the inhabitants of Puna, he received them in his quarters. And then, when his two interpreters, who were themselves from Tumbes and had been with him to Spain, warned him that the Puná chiefs were meeting to plan an attack, he immediately surrounded them in their meeting place and handed them over to their Tumbes enemies. The result was a bloody massacre
that stirred up the very revolt he had been trying to forestall. Several thousand Puna warriors fell upon his quarters. Cold steel and the cavalry eventually forced them to seek refuge in the forest. Casualties were relatively light – several men killed and Hernando Pizarro with a javelin wound in the leg – but thereafter the quarters were subjected to incessant guerilla attacks, all of which could have been avoided with a little tact and some slight recognition of the feelings of the Indian inhabitants of Puná. In the end, evacuation of the island became imperative, and when two more vessels arrived with a hundred volunteers and horses, under the command of Hernando de Soto, Pizarro felt himself strong enough to return to the mainland. By then the people of Tumbes seem to have recognized him for the sort of man he was, but the opposition to his landing was slight and was dealt with quickly by Hernando and the cavalry. The main body crossed the gulf in two vessels, and these were probably removed later to the sheltered anchorage we know as Puerto Pizarro, a few miles north-east of the present town.

The Spaniards were now at last in Tumbes – Tumbes of the Sun King's Virgins, of the gardens hung with golden fruit and the temples tapestried with gold and silver. The reality was utterly different. Tumbes was an empty shell. Nothing remained of the town except the fortress, the temple and a few of the more substantial houses. To men who had sailed seven hundred miles and then marched over three hundred miles through a dreadful hell of mangrove swamps and humid jungle, feeding their minds all the time on visions of a golden city, these pitiful ruins came as a tremendous shock. The suggestion that it also came as a shock to Pizarro is hardly tenable. The Peruvians, who had massacred Puna's captured war chiefs before his eyes, must have given him, through his interpreters, some explanation for their bloodthirsty vindictiveness. Though he had lost the quick profit that the looting of Tumbes would have yielded, he soon discovered, as he probed the reasons for its desolation, that he had gained much more – the key to conquest.