The Last Days of the Incas (5 page)

With Hispaniola and other nearby islands becoming increasingly depleted of natives due to slaving (already by 1510 the first African slaves began to be imported into the Caribbean in order to replace the quickly disappearing native population), Pizarro made his way around 1509 to the newly discovered mainland of Central America. Pizarro was again following in Columbus’s footsteps, as the great Italian mariner himself had discovered the coasts of Honduras and Panama on his fourth and last voyage of 1502–1504.
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By 1513, at the age of thirty-five, Pizarro had risen still further; he was now second-in-command on an expedition led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa that eventually crossed the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean. As Balboa waded into the waters of that vast ocean, claiming it for the Spanish monarchs, Pizarro must have realized that at last he was nearly in the same position that Columbus had been in years earlier. Now he, too, was exploring lands that no European had ever seen. And this was only the beginning.

The expedition cut short by stumbling upon a vast ocean was a far cry from the later Baroque portraits of handsome, noble Spaniards in armor wading out into the Pacific, unfurling colorful flags as a scattering of naked Indians watched in admiration. From the beginning, the Isthmus expedition had been one of pure brute economics. Balboa and Pizarro’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean, in fact, had occurred as a by-product of a military campaign, one that had been carried out in order to find a tribe of natives reputedly rich in gold. Elsewhere in that very same year, another Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León, had discovered a land he called
Florida
while on a slaving expedition amid the islands of the Bahamas. It was through slaving
and plundering expeditions that the Spaniards were discovering more and more of the New World.

Unsuccessful in their search for gold, Balboa and Pizarro became increasingly brutal as they trudged their way back empty-handed through the mosquito-infested jungles. Along the way, Balboa captured some local chiefs and demanded that they reveal to him the location of the rumored gold. When the chiefs replied that they were unaware of any, Balboa had them tortured. After the chiefs still failed to supply any useful information, Balboa had them killed. Six years later, in January 1519, and as the result of a struggle for power with the new Spanish governor, Balboa was himself arrested and subsequently beheaded. Pizarro, once Balboa’s second-in-command, was the arresting officer.

By 1521, the now forty-four-year-old Francisco Pizarro was one of the most important landowners in the new city of Panama, living on the coast of the very same ocean that he and Balboa had discovered. A part owner of a gold mining company, Pizarro had also received an
encomienda
, or Indian grant, of 150 natives on the island of Taboga, just off the Pacific coast. As an
encomienda
holder, Pizarro received both labor and tribute from the Indians. The island also had fertile soil for crops and abundant gravel that Pizarro sold to newly constructed ships as ballast.

Still, Pizarro was not satisfied. What good was owning a tiny island and living off a mere 150 natives when another Spaniard, Hernán Cortés, from the same region of Extremadura in Spain, had just conquered an entire
empire
at the age of thirty-four? In Spanish culture in the sixteenth century, the ages between thirty and forty-five were considered the prime years for men, that is, those were the years in which a man was considered to be both mature and to have the most energy.

Pizarro, however, at forty-four, was already ten years older than Cortés had been when the latter had begun his conquest of the Aztec Empire, an enterprise that had taken three long and grueling years. Pizarro thus had only one prime year left. The question no doubt on Pizarro’s mind then was: had Cortés found the only empire in what was now known to be a New World? Or could there be more? For Pizarro, time was running out. It was either now or never. And since everything of value seemed to have already been discovered to the north and east, and since the west was
bounded by what appeared to be a vast ocean, the only logical direction to look for new empires was toward the unexplored regions to the south.

By 1524, three years after Cortés’s conquest, Pizarro had formed a company with two partners, Diego de Almagro—a fellow
extremeño
—and a local financier, Hernando de Luque. The three men were following an economic model that had originated in Europe and that by now was spreading throughout the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean—that of the private corporation, or
compañía.

By the early sixteenth century, Spain had gradually transitioned from the age of feudalism to the age of capitalism. Under feudalism, all economic activities centered upon the manorial estate, owned by a lord who had been given his land grant, or benefice, by a king, to whom the lord owed his allegiance. Other than the lord and his family, the parish priest, and perhaps a few administrative officials, the entire population of a feudal estate consisted of serfs—those who worked with their hands and created the surplus upon which the noble and his family lived. It was a system as rigid as it was simple: the lord and his family did no manual labor, living at the peak of the social pyramid, while the peasant masses scratched out a meager living below.

Eventually, however, with the advent of gunpowder, the lords’ castle walls were no longer impregnable; thus, they could no longer offer protection to their retinue of serfs. Gradually, the serfs migrated to towns and cities where commerce, and the notion of working for a profit, had begun to flourish. Men now often joined forces, pooling their resources, setting up companies, and hiring workers who were paid a wage. All profits now flowed to the owners, or capitalists, and anyone with the requisite skills and the right connections could become an entrepreneur. The acquisition of wealth had now become a motive in itself. In sixteenth-century Spain, therefore, if an individual could somehow scrape together a substantial pile of wealth, he could then purchase the equivalent of a manorial estate, he could use some of that wealth in order to receive various titles and pedigrees that would increase his social status, and he could hire a stable of servants and perhaps even buy a few Moorish or African slaves. The individual could then retire to a life of luxury and could pass all his capital on to his heirs. A new world order had emerged.

Although the popular myth is that conquistadors were professional
soldiers sent out and financed by the Spanish king in order to extend the emerging Spanish Empire, nothing could have been further from the truth. In reality, the Spaniards who bought passages on ships headed for the New World formed a representative sample of their compatriots back home. They were cobblers, tailors, notaries, carpenters, sailors, merchants, ironworkers, blacksmiths, masons, muleteers, barbers, pharmacists, horseshoers, and even professional musicians. Very few had ever been professional soldiers and, in fact, permanent professional armies had not yet even appeared in Europe.

The vast majority of Spaniards, therefore, traveled to the New World not in the employ of the king, but as private citizens hoping to acquire the wealth and status that had so eluded them at home. Men joined expeditions of conquest in the New World in the hopes of getting rich, which invariably meant that they hoped to find a large population of natives in order to strip them of their wealth and live off of their labor. Each band of conquistadors, usually led by an older conquistador who had the most experience, was composed of a disparate group of men trained in an assortment of professions. None received a payment or wage for participating, but all expected to share in the profits gained by conquest and pillage, according to what they themselves had invested in the expedition. If a potential conquistador showed up with only his own weapons and armor, then he would receive a certain amount of any future plunder. If that same man provided these things plus a horse, then he would receive a larger share, and so on. The more one invested, the larger the share that he was entitled to if the expedition enjoyed success.

The leaders of most conquest expeditions, beginning in the 1520s, actually formed a company that was normally drawn up as a contract and was duly notarized. The participants thus became partners in the company and were the equivalent of shareholders. Unlike companies dedicated to providing services or manufactured goods, however, it was understood from the outset that the conquest company’s economic plan was predicated upon murder, torture, and plunder. Conquistadors thus were not paid soldier-emissaries of a distant Spanish king, but were actually autonomous participants in a new kind of capitalist venture; in short, they were armed entrepreneurs.

By 1524, forty-six-year-old Francisco Pizarro and his two partners had formed a conquest company called the
Company of the Levant and were busy interviewing potential conquistadors to share in their first planned venture.

The two captains of the venture, Pizarro and Almagro, had participated in expeditions together since at least 1519, and had forged a solid business relationship. Both were from Extremadura and hence were countrymen. Pizarro had always had the leading role in the partnership and also had ten more years’ experience in the Indies than did Almagro, who had been in the New World only since 1514. Almagro, as second-in-command, was nevertheless a talented organizer and thus was placed in charge of all matters regarding the provisioning of the upcoming expedition. Unlike his tall, lean compatriot, Almagro was short and squat. As one Spanish chronicler later put it, Almagro was

Like Pizarro, Almagro was both illiterate and a bastard. His unmarried mother had spirited him away not long after birth, refusing to allow his father to have any contact with their son. Eventually she disappeared, leaving Almagro with an uncle who routinely beat him and who at one point even chained the young boy by his legs and kept him in a cage. When Almagro eventually escaped, he traveled to Madrid where he at long last found his mother living with another man. Instead of taking him in as he had hoped, however, his mother had stared at him through the partially opened door, then whispered that it was impossible for him to stay. His mother then disappeared for a moment, returning briefly to give her son a piece of bread before permanently closing the door. Almagro was on his own.

The details of the future conquistador’s life after this are sketchy but eventually Almagro made his way to Toledo where he stabbed someone, left that person badly wounded, and then fled south to Seville in order to escape the consequences. By 1514, having reached a dead end
in his own country, thirty-nine-year-old Diego de Almagro embarked on a ship headed for the New World, twelve years after Pizarro’s departure. He was bound for Castilla de Oro, or Golden Spain, as Panama was then called. There he would meet his future partner and by 1524, ten years after his arrival, he and Pizarro would finally find themselves traveling in two ships, with eighty men and four horses, heading south toward the unexplored regions along the Southern Sea. The Company of the Levant was at last striking out on its own.

For a number of years before their expedition, rumors of a fabled land of gold lying somewhere to the south had been circulating in Panama City. In 1522, two years before Pizarro and Almagro set sail, a conquistador named Pascual de Andagoya had sailed two hundred miles southward along the coast of what would later be called Colombia (after Columbus) and had ascended the San Juan River. Andagoya was seeking a wealthy tribe he understood to be called “Viru” or “Biru.” Eventually, the name of this tribe would be transmogrified and would come to refer to a land much further south: Peru—home to the largest native empire the New World would ever know.

Andagoya, however, had discovered little, and had returned to Panama empty-handed. Pizarro and Almagro fared little better, succeeding only in retracing some of Andagoya’s previous voyage while engaging in skirmishes with natives along the way. At a place the marauding Spaniards no doubt fittingly called “burned village,” forty-nine-year-old Almagro had one of his eyes permanently blinded in a clash with local natives. Here, the inhabitants were hostile, the land barren, and Pizarro and his band of armed entrepreneurs eventually returned to Panama with no booty whatsoever to show for their efforts. The voyage had lasted for nearly a year.

It was during their second expedition south, however—a two-year voyage in two ships with 160 men that lasted from 1526 to 1528—that Pizarro and Almagro sensed for the first time that they might be on to something at last. At one point, Almagro and one of the ships returned to Panama for reinforcements while Pizarro camped alongside the San Juan River. The expedition’s second ship, meanwhile, headed further south, to do some additional exploring. Soon, off what is now the coast of Ecuador,
the crew was surprised to see a sail in the distance. As the Spaniards drew nearer they were astonished to find a giant, oceangoing balsawood raft, powered by finely woven cotton sails and manned by numerous native sailors. Eleven of the twenty-two natives on board immediately leapt into the sea; the Spaniards then captured the rest. After seizing the contents of the mysterious vessel, the delighted entrepreneurs later described their first haul of booty in a letter sent to King Charles V: