The Last Days of the Incas (2 page)

NEARLY FIVE
HUNDRED YEARS AGO, ROUGHLY ONE HUNDRED
and sixty-eight Spaniards and a handful of their African and Indian slaves arrived in what is now Peru. They soon collided with an Inca empire ten million strong, smashing into it like a giant meteor and leaving remnants of that collision scattered all over the continent. The modern-day visitor to Peru, in fact, can still see the results of that collision almost everywhere: from the dark brown skins of the very poor to the generally lighter skins and aristocratic Spanish surnames of many of Peru’s elite; from the spiked silhouettes of Catholic cathedrals and church spires to the presence of imported cattle and pigs and people of Spanish and African descent. The dominant language of Peru is also a forceful reminder. It is still referred to as
Castillano
, a name derived from the inhabitants of the ancient Spanish kingdom of Castile. The violent impact of the Spanish conquest, in fact—which nipped in the bud an empire that had existed for a mere ninety years—still reverberates through every layer of Peruvian society, whether that society exists on the coast, or in the high Andes, or even down among the handful of uncontacted indigenous tribes that still roam Peru’s Upper Amazon.

Determining precisely what happened before and during the Spanish conquest, however, is not an easy task. Many of the people who actually witnessed the event were ultimately killed by it. Only a handful of those who survived actually left records of what occurred—and not surprisingly most of those were written by Spaniards. The literate Spaniards who arrived in Peru (only about 30 percent of Spaniards were literate in the sixteenth century) brought with them the alphabet, a powerful, carefully honed tool that had been invented over three thousand years earlier in Egypt. The Incas, by contrast, kept track of their histories via specialized oral histories, genealogies, and possibly via
quipus
—strings of carefully tied and colored knots that held abundant numerical data and that were also used as memory prompts. In a relatively short period of time after the
conquest, however, knowledge of how to read the
quipus
was lost, the historians died out or were killed, and Inca history gradually grew fainter with each passing generation.

“History is written by the victors,” the adage goes, and indeed, this was as true for the Incas as it was for the Spaniards. The Incas had created an empire 2,500 miles long, after all, and had subjugated most of the people within it. Like many imperial powers, their histories tended to justify and glorify both their own conquests and their rulers, and to belittle those of their enemies. The Incas told the Spaniards that it was they, the Incas, who had brought civilization to the region, and that their conquests were inspired and sanctioned by the gods. The truth, however, was otherwise: the Incas had actually been preceded by more than a thousand years of various kingdoms and empires. Inca oral history was thus a combination of facts, myths, religion, and propaganda. Even within the Inca elite, divided as they often were by different and competitive lineages, histories could vary. As a result, early Spanish chroniclers recorded more than
fifty
different variations of Inca history, depending upon whom they interviewed.

The record of what actually occurred during the conquest is also skewed by the sheer disparity of what has come down to us; although we now have perhaps thirty contemporaneous Spanish reports of various events that occurred during and within fifty years of the initial conquest, we have only
three
major native or half-native reports during that same time period (Titu Cusi, Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala, and Garcilaso de la Vega). None of these three chronicles, however, were written by native authors who had personally witnessed any of the events during the critical first five years of the conquest. One of the earliest of these sources, in fact—a report dictated by the Inca emperor Titu Cusi to visiting Spaniards—dates from 1570, nearly forty years
after
the capture of his great uncle, the Inca emperor Atahualpa. Thus, in trying to determine who did what and to whom, the modern writer encounters a historical record that is inevitably biased: on the one hand we have a pile of Spanish letters and reports and on the other we have only three indigenous chronicles, with perhaps the most famous of them (by Garcilaso de la Vega) written in Spain by a half-native writer who published his chronicle more than five decades after he had left Peru.

Of the Spanish records that have survived, there is a further barrier in trying to determine what happened: the Spaniards wrote most
of their early reports in the form of documents called
probanzas
or
relaciones
, which were largely written in an attempt to try and impress the Spanish king. The authors of these documents, often humble notaries temporarily turned conquistadors, were well aware of the fact that if their own exploits somehow stood out, then the king might grant them future favors, rewards, and perhaps even permanent pensions. The early writers of the Spanish conquest, therefore, were not attempting necessarily to describe events as they actually occurred, but were more inclined to write justifications and advertisements about themselves to the king. At the same time, they tended to downplay the efforts of their Spanish comrades (the latter were, after all, competitors for those self-same rewards). In addition, Spanish chroniclers often misunderstood or misinterpreted much of the native culture they encountered, while they simultaneously ignored and/or downplayed the actions of the African and Central American slaves the Spaniards had brought along with them, as well as the influence of their native mistresses. Francisco Pizarro’s younger brother Hernando, for example, wrote one of the first reports of the conquest—a sixteen-page letter to the Council of the Indies, which represented the king. In his letter, Hernando mentioned his own accomplishments repeatedly while mentioning the exploits of only
one
other Spaniard among the 167 who accompanied him—those of his elder brother Francisco. Ironically, it was these first, often self-serving versions of what had occurred in Peru that became instantaneous bestsellers in Europe when they were published. It was also from these same documents that the first Spanish historians fashioned their own epic histories, thus passing the distortions of one generation on to the next.

The modern writer—especially the writer of a historical narrative—must therefore and by necessity often choose from among multiple and conflicting accounts, must rely sometimes by default upon some authors not known for their veracity, must translate from misspelled and often verbose manuscripts, and often must use third and fourth person sources, some of which have come down to us as copies of copies of manuscripts. Did the Inca emperor Atahualpa really do such and such or say such and such to so and so? No one can say with certainty. Many of the quotations in this manuscript were actually “remembered” by writers who sometimes didn’t commit their memories to paper until decades after the events they described. Like quantum physics, we can thus
only
approximate
what actually happened in the past. The abundant quotations used in the book, therefore—the vast majority of them dating from the sixteenth century—have to be viewed for what they are: bits and fragments of colored glass, often beautifully polished, yet which afford only a partial and often distorted view onto an increasingly distant past.

All histories, of course, highlight some things, abbreviate others, and foreshadow, shorten, extend, and even omit certain events. Inevitably, all stories are told through the prism of one’s own time and culture. The American historian William Prescott’s 1847 tale of Pizarro and a handful of Spanish heroes defying the odds against hordes of barbaric native savages not coincidently mirrored the ideas and conceits of the Victorian Age and of American Manifest Destiny. No doubt this volume also reflects the prevailing attitudes of our time. All a historical writer can really do, to the best of one’s ability and within one’s own time, is to momentarily lift from the dusty shelves of centuries these well-worn figures—Pizarro, Almagro, Atahualpa, Manco Inca, and their contemporaries—clean them off, and then attempt to breathe life into them once again for a new audience so that the small figures can once again replay their brief moments on earth. Once finished, the writer must then lay them gently back down in the dust, until someone in the not-so-distant future attempts to fashion a new narrative and resuscitates them once again.

Some 400 years ago, Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala, a native from a noble family that lived within the Inca Empire, spent much of his life writing a more than 1,000-page manuscript, accompanied by 400 hand-drawn illustrations. Poma de Ayala hoped that it would one day cause the Spanish king to rectify the abuses of the Spaniards in post-conquest Peru. Somehow, Poma de Ayala managed to carry his bulky manuscript about the country with him, wandering through the wreckage of the Inca Empire, interviewing people, carefully recording on his pages much of what he heard and saw, and all the while guarding his life’s work from being stolen. At the age of eighty he finally finished his manuscript, sending the lone copy by ship for the long voyage to Spain. The manuscript apparently never arrived at its destination or, if it did, was never delivered to the king. More than likely it was filed away by some low-level bureaucrat and subsequently forgotten. Nearly three hundred years later, in 1908, a researcher accidentally discovered the manuscript in a library in Copenhagen and
with it found a treasure trove of information. Some of its drawings have been used to illustrate the narrative in this book. In his accompanying letter to the king, an aged Poma de Ayala wrote the following:

To which the present writer, having undergone a similar yet far less imposing challenge, can only ask for the same.

Kim MacQuarrie

Marina del Rey, California

Sept. 10, 2006

July 24, 1911

THE GAUNT, THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD AMERICAN EXPLORER,
Hiram Bingham, clambered up the steep slope of the cloud forest,
on
the eastern flank of the Andes, then paused beside his peasant guide before taking off his wide-brimmed fedora and wiping the sweat from his brow. Carrasco, the Peruvian army sergeant, soon climbed up the trail behind them, sweating in his dark, brass-buttoned uniform and hat, then leaned forward and placed his hands on his knees in order to catch his breath. Bingham had been told that ancient Inca ruins were located somewhere high up above them, nearly in the clouds, yet Bingham also knew that rumors about Inca ruins were as rampant in this little explored region of southeastern Peru as the flocks of small green parrots that often wheeled about, screeching through the air. The six-foot-four, 170-pound Bingham was fairly certain, however, that the lost Inca city he was searching for did not lie ahead. Bingham, in fact, had not even bothered to pack a lunch for this trek, hoping instead to make a quick journey up from the valley floor, to verify whatever scattered ruins might lie upon the jagged peak rising above, and then to hurry back down. As the lanky American with the close-cropped brown hair and the thin, almost ascetic face began to follow his guide up the trail again, he had no idea that within just a few hours he would make one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries in history.

The air lay humid and warm upon them, and, looking up, they saw the ridgetop they were seeking stood another thousand feet above, obscured by sheer-sided slopes festooned with dripping vegetation. Above the ridge, swirling clouds alternately hid and then revealed the jungle-covered peak. Water glistened from freshly fallen rain, while an occasional mist brushed across the men’s upturned faces. Alongside the steep path, orchids erupted in bright splashes of violet, yellow, and ocher. For a few moments
the men watched a tiny hummingbird—no more than a shimmer of fluorescent turquoise and blue—buzz and dart about a cluster of flowers, then disappear. Only a half hour earlier, all three had carefully stepped around a
vibora
, a poisonous snake, its head mashed in by a rock. Had it been killed by a local peasant? Their guide had only shrugged his shoulders when asked. The snake, Bingham knew, was one of many whose bite could cripple or kill.