It was an image of knighthood to which few of Pizarro’s volunteers aspired; though many of the methods they would later employ in their colonisation mirrored their country’s reconquest from Muslim rule, in which their fathers and grandfathers had served. Theirs would be a crusade clothed in the mantle of the Church and a purpose aptly described by the conquistadore chronicler of Mexico, Bernal Díaz del Castillo: ‘to serve God and His Majesty, to give enlightenment to those in darkness, and to share in the riches for which all men search’.11
The dream of the wealth of the New World, inspired by the tales of the returning conquistadores of Mexico and the islands of the Caribbean, had gripped the imagination of the entire country. Between the years 1520 and 1539 some thirteen thousand men and seven hundred women sailed for the New World: townsmen, merchants and yeomen, some of their names hispanicised to hide their converso origins; prostitutes and penniless daughters of government officials; friars of the Orders of St Dominic and Merced, driven by the zeal of their mission or charged to live out their penances in the exile of an unknown world; former criminals and conscripts of the Italian wars; peasants and hidalgos with only their black capes to hide their penury, queuing in their hundreds for their passage to the Indies and the fortunes each believed awaited them. It was a dream few would ever realise.
It is not known when Pizarro left his native town, nor even the length of time he had stayed there. The town’s council had regarded his presence of such little importance that there is no official mention of him in any of its records, though the price of wheat and pigs for the season, and the repair of the town’s clock, are noted in detail.12 The journey south to the port city of Seville, possibly towards the end of the autumn of 1529, would have taken almost a week to complete along the road to the Roman city of Mérida. The men, many of them barefoot, followed the column of horsemen, mules and carts, and the small herd of pigs Hernando Pizarro is recorded to have brought with him, towards the distant farmlands and orange groves of southern Extremadura and its fortress town of Jerez de los Caballeros, once the fiefdom of the Templars. The town had been the birthplace of Núñez de Balboa and of the slaver Hernando de Soto, who would command Pizarro’s cavalry in the conquest. From there, the caravan would have headed due south to the great plain of Seville, its full contingent by then numbering only thirty-six men.
Pizarro’s volunteers would have camped outside Seville’s walls, setting their tents near the livestock of goats, pigs, mules and horses they had brought with them, and where they would have been prey to any number of wandering bands of brigands that thrived by attacking the unsuspecting caravans of would-be Indies colonists, most of whom carried all their worldly possessions with them. Pizarro had only received a fraction of the money he had asked for from the Crown’s treasurers at Toledo, and which had been mostly in the form of a loan. His purpose was to obtain not only the authority from Seville’s officials of its Casa de la Contratación, Custom House, for permission to leave the port, but to fit out his expedition and purchase ships, and to raise the 150 volunteers from Spain stipulated in his Capitulación of conquest.13
One of the few contemporary descriptions of Seville was left by the Venetian ambassador Andrea Navagero, who had visited the city three years previously for the emperor’s marriage to the Portuguese Infanta Doña Isabel, held in the old Moorish palace of the Alcázar:
The city is set in a plain on the left bank of the Guadalquivir river, its circumstance is some four or five miles, and resembles more an Italian city than a Spanish one; its streets are wide and elegant, though the greater part of its houses are not so fine; even though there are some palaces whose beauty cannot be rivalled in all Spain, in which there are numerous gardens … There are some fine churches, especially its cathedral, which is beautiful and far larger than the cathedral at Toledo, though not so richly decorated … its patio is planted with orange trees of great beauty, at the centre of which is a fountain; around the entire building there is a market place, enclosed by chains, whose steps descend into the street; here all day hidalgos, merchants and passers-by assemble, for it is the most lively place in all the city …
In the street and adjoining square a great number of people can be found, and where many thefts take place and rogues abound, and which is also a type of market place; the square is both wide and large. Beside the cathedral is a bell tower of much beauty, with fine bells; to reach its top one climbs a ramp, and not stairs as at the tower of St Mark’s in Venice, though the climb is comfortable and steady [Giralda Tower].
Not very far from the cathedral is the Alcázar, which is the palace that once belonged to the Moorish kings and very beautiful, its masonry richly decorated in the style of the Moors, and with magnificent marble and fountains, the waters of which pass through various chambers and bath houses. It has a patio filled with orange and lemon trees, and gardens of the greatest beauty, among which there is a wood of only orange trees, where not even the sun can penetrate, and which is possibly the most beautiful sight in all Spain. The Casa de la Contratación is also situated in the city, and to which are brought all the goods and produce from overseas, for no shipping is allowed to unload in any other port.14
Shortly before her death, the emperor’s grandmother, Queen Isabella of Castile, had awarded the city the sole right to administer and regulate Spain’s American empire, establishing the Casa de la Contratación, which also served as its school for mariners and pilots. Among those who studied there were cartographers and ship builders, some of whom had received their early training at the Portuguese naval academy at Lisbon, founded by King Henry the Navigator, responsible for Portugal’s great maritime discoveries. Sailors and soldiers of fortune from every region of Spain had over the years made their way into its tiled and mosaic-floored chambers, in what had once been a palace of the city’s Almoravid Muslim dynasty, situated behind the Alcázar. Even the maps required by Magellan, who circumnavigated the world in the years 1519 to 1522, had been submitted to its authority. ‘So many men abandon the city to seek their fortune in the New World,’ Navagero recorded, ‘it is virtually in the possession of its women.’ It was a scarcity that would plague Pizarro’s attempts to find volunteers in a city that had shown him little hospitality on his arrival from the New World, and where for a short time he had been imprisoned because of a debt it was claimed he owed an Indies veteran who had denounced him.
Within three months three ships were purchased and provisioned by Pizarro: the Santiago, the Trinidad and the San Antonio. One hundred and twenty Spanish volunteers, horses, mules, mastiffs, goats and pigs boarded the vessels. Among the new recruits was his other half-brother, Pedro de Alcántara, his mother’s son, whom he had also met only recently for the first time, and the treasurer appointed by the Crown, Alonso de Riquelme. Six Dominican friars made up the contingent of missionaries the Crown had also ordered should accompany the expedition, including the 28-year-old Extremaduran Fray Vicente de Valverde.
The ever present threat that the Contratación would prevent their departure, due to their inability to raise the stipulated number of volunteers, forced Pizarro to sail ahead on a skiff from San Lúcar de Barrameda, Seville’s port of entry into the Atlantic, leaving his brother Hernando and Candía to deal with the authorities. Eventually, they too were able to slip anchor and, under cover of darkness, follow him out to sea. It was January 1530.
It was the third time Pizarro had sailed across the Atlantic, and each time he would have sensed its endless solitude and its vast expanse, which within an hour could change in colour and shape, its calm turned to grey, and its seas rising like mountains, breaking across the fragile wooden decks of his ships, and scattering his few frightened horses and animals, some of which would have been lost overboard. The small flotilla took a route by then well established for crossing the Atlantic: of some thirty days to the Canary and Windward Islands, where they would have taken on fresh water and food, and a further twenty days to the Caribbean port of Nombre de Dios in the Isthmu
s of Panama. It was the route the Isthmian Governor Don Pedro Arias Dávila, a converso, had himself taken when he had led an armada of 17 ships and 2,000 men in the conquest of the Isthmus fifteen years earlier, piloted by Juan Vespucci, nephew of the Florentine navigator Amerigo whose name would be given to the continent of the New World.
Spain’s right to lay claim to the Indies had been established by the Valencian Pope Alexander VI in his bull Inter Caetera, issued in May 1493 in Castile’s favour and amended a year later to include Portuguese rights of conquest – 300 miles to the east of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. During his tenure as governor of the Pacific port of Panama, whose colony he had founded in 1519 as the settlement of Our Lady of the Assumption, Arias Dávila had succeeded in exploring and conquering its tropical terrain and its westerly regions of Nicaragua and Veragua, an enterprise in which lesser men would certainly have failed. A veteran of the reconquest of Granada, he had imposed his authority on a ruthless and often corrupt administration, and had not flinched from ordering the execution of Núñez de Balboa, his own son-in-law, on a charge of sedition, and whose capture had been carried out by Pizarro.
As mentioned, it is a period of Pizarro’s early life for which there are virtually no known sources other than a few references by his great detractor and enemy the chronicler Fernández de Oviedo; he claimed that not only did Pizarro betray Núñez de Balboa to Arias Dávila, but that he played a full part in his capture and hanging. Whatever the truth of Pizarro’s involvement in Balboa’s death, and irrespective of Oviedo’s animosity towards him, what is certain is that for several years Pizarro served the elderly Arias Dávila, a sadistic psychopath and one of the most bloodthirsty individuals ever to have governed Spain’s colonies, as one of his militia captains, acting under his orders in the Isthmian Indian wars and slave trade.
In the years of his governorship Arias Dávila had transformed what had been little more than an outpost on the borders of the great Mayan empire of Central America into one of the most lucrative settlements in the Indies. The commodity that had enabled him to achieve his ends was neither the by then diminishing deposits of gold from which the Isthmus had earned its name – Castilla del Oro – nor the spices its early explorers had believed existed in its hinterland, but the human gold of slavery. In an age when scholars at the universities of Salamanca and Bologna were deliberating the theological implications of recognising the natives of the New World as human beings, while others were advocating the theory that they were one of the lost tribes of Israel, under the guise of an evangelising mission slaves would become the labour force supplying Spain’s colonial wealth.
Queen Isabella of Castile had prohibited the enslavement of the Isthmians unless they were prisoners of war – a code to which her grandson Charles V would also in principle adhere – but it was an interdict that would never be implemented with any rigour, nor possess any real validity. Its irrelevance had been marked even further by the introduction of the encomienda system, which would be far more apparent in its function as a slave labour force than in its other manifestation, in the Muslim land enclosures of southern Spain, whose subject people would rise in rebellion in the later part of the century. It was a trade from which both the Crown and the colonists would acquire their principal revenue, augmented over time by the importation of Africans from Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands, and a means of organisation which would eventually dominate the society and economy of Central America and the Caribbean.
The natives of the early Spanish settlements, moreover, faced an even greater threat to their survival – their vulnerability to disease imported from Europe and Africa, principally smallpox. Within the space of fifty years, nine-tenths of the indigenous people of Mexico, Central and Andean America would be wiped out by the epidemic.15 Syphilis, which had been introduced into Spain by Columbus’s mariners, and which had spread to King Ferdinand’s army in Italy between the years 1494 and 1495, had also taken its toll on the lives of the Isthmian colonists: its name derived from an allegorical poem, written c. 1520 by a physician from Verona, Girolamo Fracastoro. The work describes the odyssey of an explorer in search of King Solomon’s mines who discovers a tribe in the Indies stricken by a disease given them by a shepherd called Sypilius.
The most authoritative account of Pizarro’s return to the Isthmus and of the events that took place there was left by his young kinsman Pedro Pizarro:
Finally we arrived at the port of Nombre de Dios, where Don Diego de Almagro had come to meet us, but once he learnt that Don Francisco Pizarro had not brought him the joint command of their future governorship, even though His Majesty had not wished to do so in order to have one single commander, he told Don Francisco that the money and provisions he had collected during his absence were his as he had already spent his share in his voyage to Spain; and this also was said by the priest Luque, because the bishopric he had asked for himself had not been awarded him; ignoring that His Majesty had first desired to be informed of his character before making such an appointment. And for all these various reasons we were left in great deprivation, and even some of our men died; and for the time it was impossible to continue with our expedition.16
In the small shanty harbour township of Nombre de Dios, Pizarro’s reunion with his two partners was so heated it could well have led to their deaths. It was they who had helped finance his journey to Spain; in return he was to have secured for them at court an equal share of the honours and privileges for their discovery and right of conquest. Pedro Pizarro, who patently disliked Almagro, described him as ‘a profane man, foul mouthed, and who when roused to anger maltreated those around him, even if they were gentlemen; physically strong, he was a brave fighter and popular, a spendthrift though miserly in rewarding his men’.17 Almagro’s background was equally as humble as Pizarro’s and he had at one time been the foreman of his encomienda. Disfigured by the loss of an eye from an Indian javelin wound and by the facial warts that scarred the bearded features of many of the early colonists, he had been born in the township of his name in the Mancha of Castile, and had lived in Panama for almost as long as Pizarro. An Indian tracker by trade, it was said that ‘he could follow an Indian through the thickest of forests merely by tracing his tracks, and in the event the Indian might have a league’s advantage on him, yet would he catch up with him’.18 Not much is known about the priest Hernando de Luque. An Andalucian who had spent many years in the Isthmus and Caribbean islands, though only a schoolmaster by profession he had accumulated a considerable fortune, possibly as a trader or by ignoring the prevalent promiscuity of the colonists in exchange for commercial favours.
Though Pedro Pizarro may well have exaggerated the plight of his comrades by claiming that several of them had died of hunger owing to the sudden departure of Almagro and Luque, taking with them the money they had gathered for financing the expedition of conquest during Pizarro’s year-long absence, the situation in which Pizarro found himself was unenviable. Not only did he face the near mutiny of his own men, but he had to contend with the opportunism of the port’s merchants and traders in securing sufficient funds from the sale of his ships in order to transport his small army across the Isthmus.
Eventually Pizarro was able to settle his affairs in the port and make the long trek across the Isthmus with his men to Panama. It was a journey travellers would record even into the eighteenth century as being both hazardous and unhealthy: the dirt road virtually hidden by jungle and swamp, its staging inns infested with mosquitoes and vermin, places where travellers, rich and poor alike, had no choice but to pay the extortionate charges in exchange for the paltry food and accommodation provided them. The port and township of Panama was itself little more than a stockade of wooden buildings and huts lying at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Its small central square was filled with traders, many of them barefoot and dressed in taffeta and lace; accompanied by their Indian women they would sell to one another for the labour of their land or the solace of their sexuality. It was a world
in which the senses were overwhelmed by the colour and sounds of its tropical vegetation, of exotic fruit and cane alcohol, parrots, and caged monkeys, and by the handfuls of African slaves, who had also made the long trek across the Isthmus from the caravels that had transported them from the Caribbean islands.
It was a world, however, that showed little prospect of gain for Pizarro’s disgruntled volunteers who with every passing week witnessed their hopes dwindle in the lengthy and often acrimonious meetings their commander and his brother held with Almagro, without whose support and money the expedition would founder. Pedro Pizarro recalled:
On a number of occasions Don Francisco and Don Diego de Almagro met; and on one of these occasions, when Hernando Pizarro was taken ill, Almagro went to visit him, and discussing the provisioning of the expedition Hernando told him that he wished he were able to afford a horse for his two squires whom he had brought with him, and Almagro told him not to preoccupy himself with this for he would find each of the squires Juan Cortés and [Alonso de] Toro a horse. But this he never honoured, and for this reason Hernando Pizarro spoke very ill of him, calling him a ‘son of a whore’, and other such insults. I have wished to mention this event so that the origin and cause be known of so much ill-feeling that has resulted in the future wars and killing of so many of Pizarro’s and Almagro’s men … And matters being as they were, it came to pass that Hernando Ponce de León, an encomendero of Nicaragua, came to this port of Panama with two of his ships laden with slaves to sell, and which belonged to him and to his partner Hernando de Soto. Hernando Pizarro then spoke to Ponce and persuaded him to loan us his two ships, for our greatest need was ships. Hernando Ponce agreed to this, though at a great price, securing for himself and for his partner Soto an award of the finest land in the territory we would conquer, and for his partner Soto the command and the governorship of its principal city. To all this Pizarro and his brother agreed. And seeing what had been arranged, and realising that the expedition could be mounted, Almagro decided to reach an accord with Pizarro and his brother, even though with much ill will on both sides, as future events would demonstrate.19
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