The Last Days of the Incas (6 page)

The seagoing raft was the Spaniards’ first real proof that somewhere nearby a native kingdom must surely exist. Soon, the Spanish ship, with its cargo of plundered goods stowed securely in the hold, rejoined Pizarro. Then, with Pizarro once again aboard, the expedition turned toward the south. Anchoring alongside a jungle-covered island they named Gallo, off what is now the southwestern tip of Colombia, Pizarro and the rest of the crew waited on the mosquito-ridden shore for Almagro and his badly needed supplies to arrive from Panama.

As the ship’s stores dwindled, however, the Spaniards began to sicken; then, one by one, they began to die. By the time three or four
Spaniards were dying a week, the expeditionaries’ morale hit a low point. Not surprisingly, the men wanted to return to Panama. Pizarro, however, the co-CEO of an expedition that had just found evidence of a possibly wealthy kingdom, was undeterred. By now nearly fifty years old, it had taken Pizarro a quarter century of effort to command an expedition for which he stood to gain the lion’s share of the profits. As many later chroniclers noted, Pizarro normally did very little talking, but was strong on action. When sufficiently motivated, however, Pizarro could be counted upon to deliver a stirring speech. Thus, when the relief ships finally did arrive and his men made ready to abandon the expedition and return to Panama, Pizarro is said to have taken out his sword in frustration, to have etched a long line in the sand with its sharpened point and then, in his ragged clothes, to have dramatically confronted the emaciated men:

Only thirteen men are said to have crossed over the line, choosing to risk their lives and fortunes with Pizarro; they would later be known as “the men of Gallo.” The rest of the Spaniards, however, chose to return to Panama and to give up the quest for Biru.

With their one remaining ship, Pizarro and his small group of expeditionaries now continued down the coast, heading into territory that no European had ever before explored. The coast was tropical and flush with thick trees, mangrove swamps, occasional chattering monkeys, and impenetrable forests. Beneath them flowed the cold Humboldt Current, wending its way up the South American coast from the still undiscovered Antarctic. Slowly, as the Spaniards sailed south, the forests and mosquitoes
began to retreat until, at the very northern tip of what is now Peru, they finally sailed into view of what Pizarro and the one-eyed Almagro had been searching for and dreaming about for years—a native city, complete with more than a thousand buildings, broad streets, and what looked to be ships in the harbor. The year was 1528. And for the small band of bedraggled Spaniards who had been traveling for more than a year and many of whom were as gaunt as skeletons, they were now about to have their first real contact with the Inca Empire.

As the Spaniards moored offshore, they soon saw a dozen balsa rafts set out from shore. Pizarro knew that because his men were few in number, he couldn’t possibly try to conquer such a large city. Instead, he would have to rely upon diplomacy in order to learn more about who and what they had stumbled upon. As the native rafts drew nearer, the Spaniards buckled on their armor and readied their swords for battle. Were the natives going to be hostile or friendly? Were there more cities? Did they have gold? Was this a simple city-state or part of a larger kingdom?

One can only imagine the Spaniards’ relief to discover that not only were the natives on the rafts friendly, but that they arrived with gifts of food that included a peculiar kind of “lamb” (llama meat), exotic fruits, strange fish, jugs of water, and other jugs containing a tangy liquid now called
chicha
and which the Spaniards soon learned was a type of beer. One of the natives who climbed aboard the ship was a man who obviously commanded respect; the native was rather well dressed in a patterned cotton tunic and had elongated earlobes with large wooden plugs in them, something none of the other natives wore.

Unbeknownst to the Spaniards, this was either an ethnic Inca noble or a local native chief, both of which formed part of the ruling elite. The Spaniards would later call these nobles
orejones
, or “big ears,” because of the large, symbolic discs worn in their earlobes that denoted their elite status. This particular
orejón
had come to discover what this strange ship was doing in their waters and who these strange, bearded men were (the inhabitants of the Inca Empire, like the vast majority of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, had little if any facial hair). Unable to communicate except with hand gestures, the
orejón
was nevertheless so inquisitive that he astonished the Spaniards, using gestures to ask “where they were from, what land they had come from, and what they were
looking for.” The Inca noble then carefully examined the ship, studying its equipment and, according to what the Spaniards could decipher, apparently preparing some kind of report for his lord, a great king called Huayna Capac (Why-na KAH-pak), who the
orejón
indicated lived somewhere in the interior. The veteran Pizarro, who had been capturing, enslaving, killing, and torturing native Amerindians ever since his arrival in the New World, did his best to hide the true nature of their mission and to see how much he could learn about these people through feigned friendliness and diplomacy. In return for the natives’ gifts, Pizarro quickly presented the
orejón
with a male and female pig, four European hens and a rooster, and an iron axe, “which strangely pleased him, esteeming it more than if they had given him one hundred times more gold than it weighed.” As the
orejón
prepared to return to shore, Pizarro ordered two men to accompany him—Alonso de Molina and a black slave—the first European and African ever to step ashore in the area now known as Peru.
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No sooner had Molina and the slave arrived than they became instant celebrities. The excited inhabitants of the city, which the Spaniards later learned was called Tumbez, turned out in droves to marvel at the strange ship and at their two exotic visitors. They

Meanwhile, the Spaniard, Alonso
de Molina—apparently awestruck by coming face-to-face with an advanced native civilization—received similar treatment from the excited crowd. The two were, after all, the sixteenth-century equivalent of today’s astronauts—emissaries from a distant and alien civilization.

A subsequent landing party, which Pizarro sent to verify what Molina and the black slave had reported, stated that they:

With their ship now loaded with fresh food and water, Pizarro and his men continued their exploration of the coast. At a spot near what is now called Cabo Blanco, in northwestern Peru,
Pizarro went ashore in a canoe. There, looking up and down the rugged coast and then at his gathering of men, Pizarro is said to have stated, “Be my witnesses as I take possession of this land with all else that has been discovered by us for the emperor, our lord, and for the royal crown of Castile!”

To the Spaniards who witnessed Pizarro’s speech,
Biru
—which was soon corrupted into
Peru
—now belonged to a Spanish emperor living twelve thousand miles away. Thirty-five years earlier, in 1493, Pope Alexander VI—a Spaniard who had bribed his way into the papacy—had issued a papal bull that had eventually resulted in the Spanish crown being granted all lands 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. All undiscovered lands to the east of this longitudinal line would go to Portugal, the other European maritime power at the time, which gave Portugal Brazil. With one simple pronouncement from this pope, the Spanish crown had received a divine grant that bequeathed to it an enormous region of lands and peoples that had as yet to be discovered. The inhabitants of these new lands, according to the proclamation, were already subjects of the Spanish king—all that remained was that they be located and informed of this fact.

In 1501, Queen Isabella had ratified this arrangement: the “Indians” of the New World were her “subjects and vassals,” she said. Thus, as soon as they were located, the Indians would have to be informed that they owed the Spanish monarchs their “tributes and rights.” The corollary of this mind-set, of course, was that the inhabitants of the New World had no right to resist the pope’s edict, which was clearly God’s will. Anyone who refused to submit to what God himself had commanded was thus by definition a “rebel” or an “unlawful combatant.” It was a theme and argument that was to crop up over and over again in the conquest of Peru, all of the way down to the last Inca emperor.

Pizarro’s expedition had been a successful one, as far as he was concerned. On board they now carried never before seen creatures called llamas, which may have reminded some of the Spaniards of scenes of camels they had seen in woodcuts in the Bible. They also carried finely crafted native pottery and metal vessels, intricately woven clothing of cotton and of an unknown material the natives called
alpaca
, and even two native boys, whom they baptized Felipillo and Martinillo. The Spaniards had asked for and had been given the boys, whom they intended to train for later voyages as interpreters. Pizarro now had proof positive of a contact
with what appeared to be the outskirts of a wealthy native empire.

Pizarro was worried, however, for as his ship drew nearer to Panama, word would soon get out about what they had seen. Other Spaniards might soon get the idea of heading south themselves and of stealing from him a potentially lucrative conquest. There was only one thing for Pizarro to do—he had to return to Spain. Only by petitioning the king and queen in person could he hope to obtain the exclusive rights to conquer and sack what appeared to be an untouched native kingdom. If not, then some other hastily thrown together corporation of plunder might beat him to it. Leaving Almagro behind in order to begin the preparations for their next voyage, Pizarro crossed the Isthmus, booked passage on a sailing ship, then set off for a land he hadn’t seen in thirty years—Spain.

Fifty-one-year-old Francisco Pizarro arrived in the walled city of Seville in mid-1528. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who had sponsored Columbus, had died more than a dozen years earlier; now their grandson, twenty-eight-year-old Charles V, was on the throne. Pizarro quickly made his way to Toledo, where he asked for an audience with the king. It had been nearly three decades since an impoverished, twenty-four-year-old Pizarro had set off to find his fortune in the New World. Pizarro now had three decades of experience in exploration and conquest, had helped to discover the Pacific Ocean, and had sailed further south than any other European along the unknown coast of the Southern Sea. Having carefully transported with him some of the llamas, jewelry, clothing, a small amount of gold, and the two native Amerindian boys, who were rapidly learning Spanish, Pizarro was now about to try to leverage what he hoped would be his trump card: that he had discovered a heretofore unknown native empire in a land he called Peru.

Pizarro, however, soon discovered that he wasn’t the only conquistador who had come to lobby the king. Forty-three-year-old Hernando Cortés, who had conquered the Aztec Empire some seven years earlier, had just dazzled the royal court with a procession of treasures that would have rivaled those of Alexander the Great. An excellent showman, Cortés had brought forty native Amerindians with him, including three sons of Montezuma, the Aztec lord whose empire he had conquered and who had
lost his life in the struggle. Cortés had also brought native jugglers, dancers, acrobats, dwarfs, and hunchbacks, fabulous feather headdresses and cloaks, fans, shields, obsidian mirrors, turquoise, jade, silver, gold, and even an armadillo, an opossum, and a brace of snarling jaguars, none of which had ever before been seen.