The Conquistadors (32 page)

Pizarro's luck must surely be the envy of any general who has bothered to study his campaign. If he had attempted to conquer Peru on either of his earlier expeditions he would have failed. Indeed, if he had not been held up a year in Spain he would still have found it too tough a nut to crack with the forces at his command. He came to Tumbes at the precise moment when chance made his conquest of the Inca world just possible, at a time when the whole three thousand miles of empire was divided, yet on the verge, once again, of becoming docilely subservient to one man. This he learned when enquiring into the reasons for the derelict state of the city. It was the work of the people of Puná, they said; the Sun king – the Inca Huáscar – had been too busy warring with his brother Atahualpa to send them the help they needed; even the fortress garrison had been withdrawn.

This struggle for power had been resolved shortly before Pizarro landed at Tumbes. Atahualpa had won, and his army had captured Huáscar. The usurper
from Quito was now Inca, but this did not mean that the people of Tumbes, and all the other regions that had supported Huáscar, approved of the change. It was the same sort of situation that had given Cortés his opportunity in Mexico. But in Peru, Pizarro did not have to exploit and build up the situation; it was already made for him. The Inca empire was split, and once he had grasped the full implications, his whole attitude changed. The bright vision of total conquest now filled his mind.

Leaving part of his force in Tumbes, he marched with the pick of his men into the interior. His object was two-fold – to weld his tiny force into a disciplined fighting machine and to win over the native population. For the first time he adopted Cortés' mode of pacification. No looting was allowed. Everywhere his Dominicans proselytized the Christian faith. The march became a crusade, rekindling in his men the sense of a divine mission. The lust for gold was unabated, but concealed now under the cloak of the gospel of Christ.

As in their march down the coast, there was no difficulty about food. The sea provided them with all the fish they could stomach and, wherever the Incas had developed their marvellous system of irrigation, the tropical heat produced fruit and vegetables in profusion without regard for season. From May 16 onwards he kept his men moving from hamlet to hamlet, so that they had neither the time nor the energy to brood over the future. Indian chiefs who opposed him were burned as an example to others, so that, after a short campaign, the whole district was subdued and obedient to his commands. Here we see the first evidence of a policy of recruiting auxiliaries, and though Spanish accounts make no reference to Indian allies (nor does Garcilaso for obvious reasons) there is little doubt that, like Cortés, he took pains to augment his small force with local levies. In June he began work on a permanent settlement. The site chosen was at Tangarara on the Chira river, about eighty miles south of Tumbes. It was built on the usual colonial pattern, church, arsenal and law court all enclosed in fortifications. But though San Miguel was legally constituted with a proper municipal government, Pizarro did not have to descend to the political shifts that Cortés had employed, since his authority was already derived from Spain. This enabled him to grant each colonist a
repartimiento,
and as the Indians were accustomed to regimentation by their own government, they placidly accepted the situation. Later, the settlement
was moved a little further south to the Piura river for health reasons. All the gold and silver the Spaniards had obtained was now converted into ingots and, again like Cortés, Pizarro persuaded his men to forego their own share, so that, after deducting the king's fifth, he was able to send the treasure back in two vessels to Panama and thus settle the expedition's accounts.

It is not difficult to appreciate Pizarro's dilemma as he watched the sails of those two ships dwindle and drop below the horizon. The treasure they carried would surely substantiate the verbal reports of their commanders on the bright prospects now facing settlers in New Castile. Should he wait for the reinforcements that would undoubtedly pour in, or should he march with the force he already had? Three weeks went by whilst he tried to make up his mind, three weeks in which he discovered, as Cortés had before him, that inactivity breeds discontent. It was almost certainly the mood of his men that finally made up his mind for him. He decided to march.

This decision was reinforced by intelligence reports that Atahualpa was no longer at the Inca capital of Cuzco, but at Cajamarca. Cuzco was some thirteen hundred miles from San Miguel, and even today, using the fast Pan-American highway to Lima, the last stages of the journey through the Andes are so difficult that it would take several days' hard driving. In 1532, hampered by his baggage, it would have taken Pizarro several weeks, even though he kept to the Inca highways. Cajamarca, on the other hand, was only about three hundred and fifty miles away, and though it lies deep in the Sierra at a height of 9,000 feet, his newly-acquired Indian friends informed him that it involved no more than a twelve days' march. It was an opportunity not to be missed. Luck had put the reigning Inca within his reach.

On September 24, 1532, about six months after his first landing on the coast, Pizarro marched out of the tiny settlement, drums beating and his own standard and that of Castile fluttering in the sunlight. His force consisted of a hundred and ten foot, of whom not more than twenty were armed with either crossbows or arquebuses, and sixty-seven horse. It was a pitifully small array with which to confront the Inca, for though Atahualpa was reported to be taking a cure in the hot volcanic springs of Cajamarca – a wound received during the battles against his brother had turned septic – there is no doubt that he was also making a royal tour
of his new dominions to ensure their utter obedience to his rule, for he had with him an army that some reports put as high as forty thousand to fifty thousand warriors.

The Spaniards crossed the Chira river on rafts, spent the night at the Indian settlement of Poechos, and then marched south to the Piura river. Here they turned east, following the banks of the Piura inland. They had no alternative. Indian reports that the desert to the south represented an impassable barrier would have been confirmed by their own reconnaissance parties. This desert, the Sechura, is so utterly arid that not even cacti will grow there. It is the worst of the many desert areas along the Peruvian coast; it is also the widest, the distance from the Piura to the next river oasis being a hundred and twenty-five miles. The line of march along the river took the Spaniards in a wide north-sweeping curve, the flat country on either side green with the irrigated crops of many dusty Indian settlements. For those who had looked across the heat-miraged aridity of the Sechura, this was indeed a ‘paradise of plenty' – an apt description of Prescott's, though he had never been there. And beyond the irrigated areas, the hills, too, were green with thick stands of algarrobo, a higher, denser forest than it is now, for it has been much cut over in recent years. These trees, the long bean-like fruit of which provides fodder for animals, must have reminded the Spaniards of the carob trees of the Mediterranean.

Despite the relatively pleasant conditions there was grumbling in the ranks. Some of the men were beginning to lose their nerve. At the end of four days, Pizarro halted to make ‘preparations for the march'. The first thing he did was to parade his entire force and make the malcontents an offer. Any man whose heart was not in the enterprise could go back to San Miguel, and he would receive exactly the same grant of land and Indians as the men of the garrison. Whether he had prepared the ground as well as Cortés when he sank his boats, we do not know, for we have no equivalent of Bernal Díaz in the ranks of the conquistadors of Peru. The fact remains, however, that only nine men – four foot soldiers and five horse – opted to return to base. It was probably the setting, as much as Pizarro's speech of exhortation, that encouraged the remaining 168 to go on. They would then have been well past Tambo Grande, back on the main Inca road from Tumbes, probably about where the hacienda of Santa Leticia is now situated. Here the river is a broad, dried-out expanse of white stones, the rubble deposits of the hills after being rounded and polished by flood waters. But though the flat irrigated lands were already narrowing to the first foothills of the Andes, and ahead they could see the mountains that were the source of the Piura closing in, the slopes were still clothed in the green of the algarrobo and did not look impassable; the cold white peaks of the great ranges they would have to scale to reach Cajamarca were conveniently hidden from view.

In that place, where they stayed ten days, with the normality of settled Indian life all about them, mud brick and thatched villages huddled in the dust beside deep irrigation ditches, men's hopes outran realities. The promised land of
temples hung with gold acted like the prospect of a heaven filled with houris upon the troops of Mohammed. Finally, rested, and with morale high, they marched on down the Inca highway to Zarán. Here a connecting road branched off to Huancabamba in the mountains to link up with the great Andean highway joining the colonial capital of Quito to the old Inca capital of Cuzco.

Pizarro was now faced with his first major decision. He did not have to make up his mind immediately, for the tambo at Zarán was a large one that included not only rest houses for the Inca, and the large retinue that invariably accompanied him on his royal tours, but also a store house and arsenal for supplying his army with food, clothing and weapons. His men were well provided for, and in any case he had to wait for de Soto, whom he had dispatched with a small force to reconnoitre the possibilities of the mountain highway and to establish contact with, and if necessary subdue, an Inca garrison at Cajas, about ten miles north-north-east of Huancabamba. To understand Pizarro's position at this time we have to remember that, as yet, he had no real knowledge or understanding of the mountain Indians. The information he possessed was all secondhand. His was a practical mind that dealt only in realities, and though he lacked the imagination to initiate and operate a war of nerves, he knew he had to make contact with the Inca. With none of the qualities of Cortés, or even any comprehension of the subtleties that had made that general so successful, he was preparing to follow blindly in his footsteps.

That de Soto was able to reach Cajas in two and a half days' hard climbing is due to the fact that here, at the northern end of the Peruvian Andes, the mountains are much lower, the pass giving access to the Sierra being little more than five thousand feet high. He was away eight days. At Cajas, which was ‘in a small valley surrounded by mountains', he had found one of Atahualpa's tribute collectors. This official informed him that Cuzco was thirty days' march south along the Andean Highway and gave him a description of the Inca capital. Local Indians told him that Atahualpa had conquered the Cajas valley about a year previously, ‘exacting great tribute, and daily perpetrating cruelties' – they had not only had to provide goods as tribute, but also their sons and daughters. There was a large building in the village occupied solely by women spinning and weaving cloth for Atahualpa's armies. There were also, by the entrance, some Indians hung up by their feet. At Huancabamba, a day's march from Cajas, de Soto found ‘a fortress built entirely of cut stones, the larger stones being five or six palms wide, and so closely joined that there appeared to be no mortar between them'. This was the first indication the Spaniards had of the extraordinary stone-masonry of the Andean Indians, for the fortresses they had seen on the coast were all constructed of sun-dried bricks plastered over with mud.

On his return, de Soto was able to confirm that Atahualpa was still camped with his army by the hot springs at Cajamarca, for he brought back with him an Inca official who had instructions to welcome the Spaniards and to invite them to visit the
Inca in his camp. From this it was clear that Atahualpa was fully informed of their movements, and though Pizarro was aware that the real object of the embassy was to discover his strength and intentions, he did not mind. He had achieved his purpose. He had made contact with the Inca and was already much further advanced towards his goal than Cortés had been when Moctezuma's envoys had met him in the sand dunes at San Juan de Ulúa. He accepted the gifts Atahualpa had sent him – two ceramic drinking vessels cast, symbolically perhaps, in the form of twin fortresses, some llama-wool cloth embroidered in gold and silver thread and, strangest of all, perfume made from dried and pulverized gooseflesh – and sent the man back with a present of a cap of crimson cloth, a shirt and two glass cups, and also instructions to tell his king that the Spaniards, who were on a mission from the most powerful emperor in the world, offered their services against his enemies.

Despite de Soto's report that the mountain highway was ‘well made, being broad enough for six horsemen to ride abreast', Pizarro turned his back on the link road up through the mountains and marched south. This extraordinary decision can only be explained by adherence to the Cortés pattern of conquest. Pizarro needed Indian allies before committing his small force irrevocably to the mountains. This would also explain his four-day halt at Motupe, which would otherwise have to be put down to indecision, and indecision is certainly not characteristic of the man.

The march south had not been easy – three days without water, except for one poor well, and no sign of any habitation. They were skirting the edge of the Sechura, and where the windblown sand of the desert piled a quilted dune-scape against the flanks of the foothills, the comforting green of the deep-rooted algarrobo forest abruptly disappeared. They had entered the rainless belt that extends southwards along all the Peruvian coast for hundreds of miles. Everything was brown now; to the left the brown rock of arid, heat-eroded hills, to the right the paler brown of the desert, with outriders of the foothills standing miraged like islands in a sea of sand, and ahead the Inca highway shimmering in the heat. At the end of those three days they came to the flat land that had once been the home of the Olmos Indians. There was a fortress there, but the dykes were broken, there was no water, and it had been abandoned. Not until they reached
Motupe were they able to water their horses and slake their thirsts. But they were men accustomed to hardship, and though the march had been difficult, that in itself does not account for the four-day halt. Xeres gives no reason.