Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  Huayna Capac was dead, victim of a savage plague that had annihilated god-king and slave alike. His sons Atahualpa and Huascar, who ruled in the North and the South, respectively, were locked in a bitter war for the ascendancy. The conquered tribes of the Incas—reduced, traduced, and exploited—had come to see this royal breach as an opportunity to rebel. So it was that a providential instability was rocking Peru when Pizarro stepped out on its desolate coast, saw mutilated corpses swinging from trees, and marched to Cajamarca for his fateful first meeting with the Lord Inca.

  Gleaming from the written record of that initial contact is the ardently sought metal: the gold the Spaniards hoped to see dangling from ears, the silver curios for which they sacked houses, the pounded copper bits that had been so abundant in Mexico. They marauded their way through the countryside, doing what they knew best—enslaving locals, plundering villages for food and treasures, enlisting the loyalty of malcontents. When Atahualpa sent one of his nobles to investigate rumors of an approaching horde, the emissary returned to report “that there were about one hundred ninety, including ninety on horseback more or less; that they were lazy robbers . . . bearded thieves who had come from the sea, and that they came riding large llamas like those of [the fearsome tribespeople,] the Collao.” They were unruly, insubordinate, filthy. Atahualpa had more problems to worry about than a rowdy band of barbarians. They were pests, little more. “He took them for nothing,” it was reported. Even so, he was curious to see them. He allowed them to advance.

  Atahualpa was not in Cajamarca when the Spaniards finally arrived on Friday, November 15, 1532. He had repaired to his pleasure house several miles away to rest, fast, and take the thermal waters before resuming his bloody war against Huascar. Pizarro ordered his brother Hernando Pizarro and Captain Hernando de Soto to ride out to the rest house with twenty-four horsemen and announce themselves to the sovereign. Through a translator, they were to ask him where the Spaniards could lodge and when Pizarro could expect to meet him.

  They found Atahualpa sitting on a lavish stool in the middle of a courtyard, surrounded by a formidable assembly of guards and servants. Fearing for their lives, the Spaniards never dismounted. The emperor seemed utterly indifferent to the unkempt riders and their high-spirited, snorting horses. In a voice filled with disdain, he scolded them for pillaging the countryside and ransacking his storehouses. But his tone changed considerably when Hernando Pizarro offered to turn Spanish energies to fighting Huascar; soon Atahualpa was calling for his servants to serve the Spaniards a ceremonial drink. Fermented chicha, the favored strong drink of the Inca, arrived in elaborate golden chalices and was handed up to the two horsemen. Perhaps from the sheer elation of seeing such clear evidence of the Inca’s wealth, perhaps out of fear that the drink might be poisoned, the Spaniards turned the cups in their hands and spilled the chicha on the ground. Atahualpa was taken aback, offended, but young Pizarro and de Soto managed to allay the awkwardness. They went back to Cajamarca with three vital pieces of news: First, an enormous army attended the emperor, and it was flush with victory, in full battle order. Second, the delicately wrought golden goblets they had been proferred suggested great wealth and remarkable metallurgical sophistication. The news that exhilarated Francisco Pizarro most, however, was the third: Atahualpa had reassured them he would return to Cajamarca the next day. The Lord Inca had set his own trap.

  Atahualpa was so confident that the Spaniards posed no threat that he accepted the visitors’ assurances at face value. He didn’t bother to arm his soldiers. Indeed, in numbers alone, the Incan army had an overwhelming advantage. The Spaniards, huddled in their quarters on the plaza as the inky night blanketed Cajamarca, trembled at the prospect of the imminent encounter. They peered out from their high perch and saw row after tidy row of shining, white tents in the valley, the campfires beside them twinkling “like a brilliantly star-studded sky.” The advance party estimated Atahualpa’s army at approximately 40,000, but they had said that to mitigate the alarm. It was clear that Pizarro’s 170 men were looking at no fewer than 80,000. And, in their countryside escapades, they had seen evidence of the brutality of which those warriors were capable. “I myself witnessed,” recalled Pizarro’s cousin Pedro, “many Spaniards who, totally unaware, pissed themselves from pure terror that night.”

  When Atahualpa marched toward them the next day, the Spaniards were all too alert to the spectacle unfolding before them in that valley. There were roughly eight thousand Peruvians in his immediate retinue, parading in perfect formation, with gold and silver headdresses glinting in the late-afternoon sun. They sang as they marched, their voices reverberating through the hollows. As dusk began to throw long shadows over the landscape, they entered the city square, a vast, empty space of about fifty acres, embraced by long, squat buildings. Atahualpa was aloft on a colossal litter fitted with silver handles and carried by eighty richly dressed lords. His seat was surrounded by shimmering gold plates and riotously colored parrot feathers. Circling his head was the Lord Inca’s traditional crown: a band with a red tassel at the brow and a cockscomb of pounded gold trembling above it. A heavy necklace of emeralds gleamed from his ample chest. He was a handsome man of about thirty, burly in stature, solemn in demeanor, with unnaturally bloodshot eyes.

  Atahualpa was surprised not to find the Spaniards waiting for him in the plaza. He thought perhaps his mighty army had scared them off. In truth, they were battle ready in their armor and chain mail, hunched over their horses, hiding inside the massive buildings and lurking within the narrow alleyways. The most strapping among them, expert artilleryman Pedro de Candía, stood guard behind the imposing dais at the deepest part of the square. Puzzled, Atahualpa halted his advancing litter and called out, “Where are they?”

  The first to emerge was Friar Vicente de Valverde, who hurried out toward the emperor with one of the young translators. Holding a crucifix aloft in one hand and a breviary in the other, the priest invited Atahualpa to come forward from his litter and dine with Governor Pizarro, but the emperor did not take the lure. He told the priest that he would not budge until the Spaniards had repaid him for everything they had stolen or consumed in their rampage through his kingdom. Valverde then launched into a recitation of the requerimiento, the mandatory cry of conquest that declared King Carlos their new ruler, Jesus Christ their savior, and warned that any effort to resist would be met with harsh measures. The translator dutifully rendered the words in Quechua. Flustered, Atahualpa stopped him midsentence and barked that his people needed no new rulers or gods. He asked what the priest was holding. Valverde came forward and handed him the holy book. The Inca turned it over in his hands but did not succeed in opening it. Ignorant of the strict etiquette demanded in the presence of a sun king, the priest reached out to assist him, and, furious, Atahualpa thwacked him on the arm. When the emperor did manage to flick open the volume, he glanced briefly at its pages, then flung it angrily to the ground. Terrified, the boy translator scurried to pick it up and hand it to the friar.

  Valverde was outraged. He gathered the folds of his robe and hurried back to Pizarro. “Did you not see what just happened?” he seethed. “Go at those enemy dogs! March out! I absolve you!” That was all the provocation Pizarro needed. Just as Atahualpa stood on his litter and called to his guards to make ready to withdraw, the conquistador signaled to his artilleryman to fire the cannons into the square. The Spaniards spilled out of the buildings on horse and on foot, shouting the ancient battle cry against infidels: “Santiago!” The Peruvians, unarmed and defenseless against this onslaught, were mowed down by blades and guns where they stood, readily massacred. Pizarro’s overriding goal was to take Atahualpa alive, as Cortés had taken Montezuma. He tried to pull the emperor from his seat, hacking off hands and arms as the noblemen struggled to maintain their grip on the litter. Even so, the Indians labored to carry their king, holding him up with their bleeding stumps. “Their efforts were of little avail,” one chronicler reported. “Every one of them was s
laughtered.” Eventually, as the chaos and carnage mounted, Atahualpa was toppled to the ground and Pizarro was able to frog-march him into one of the buildings.

  Panic stricken, the Peruvians tried to flee the square, but the gate was too small to allow so many thousands through at once. The conquistadors made easy victims of the rest. Those who weren’t trampled were beheaded or shot. Those who broke free were chased and lanced out in the fields. As Titu Kusi Yupanki—Atahualpa’s nephew—described it:

  They pulled him from his litter by force, turned it upside down, seized his insignia and headband, which among us is the crown, and took him prisoner. . . . That square was enclosed by walls and all the Indians were inside like llamas. There were a great many of them and they could not get out, nor did they have any weapons—they had not brought them because of the low opinion they held of the Spaniards; all they had were slings and ceremonial knives. . . . The Spaniards killed them all—with horses, with swords, with guns—just as one might slaughter llamas, for nobody could defend himself. From more than 10,000 men there did not escape 200. And when all were dead they took my uncle Atahualpa to a cell, where they kept him bound all night, with a chain around his neck.

  In little more than two hours, which was all there remained of daylight, nearly the entire retinue was annihilated. During it all, no Indian had raised a weapon against a Spaniard. At the end of it, thousands lay dead in the square or out on the open plain, beyond Cajamarca’s gates. The living were hobbled or missing arms, left to bleed to death where they fell. With the emperor held hostage, a terrible dread gripped the army in the valley, little more than a mile away. Many thousands of warriors were there—skilled and battle ready—but they were stunned, leaderless, unwilling to attack, lest their god-king be killed in retaliation.

  Later, as Pizarro held Atahualpa captive in his own quarters, the Inca was asked why he had been so feckless, so trusting. He answered with a sad smile that he had anticipated a very different outcome. He had fully intended to seize the Spaniards’ horses, which were the assets he most admired. He would have bred them, mastered them, used them against his enemies. He would have sacrificed a few Spaniards to the great god Sun and castrated all the rest, reducing them to menials in his household or eunuchs for his concubines. At least one historian has conjectured that the Lord Inca could not imagine otherwise. He was flush with victory, ruler of his world. Besides, why would the Spaniards, with so much to lose, risk all in a suicide mission? The odds had been so compellingly against them. Nor could Atahualpa have imagined that they would strike first, without warning or provocation, or even before a token meeting between him and Pizarro. All he had seen or heard of the Christians bespoke a rank disorganization. A lazy disposition. He hadn’t imagined the guns and steel.

  * * *

  Pizarro’s first order of business was to get the gold. With Atahualpa as virtual puppet, issuing orders at his command, Pizarro disbanded the army that waited in the valley, sent the soldiers home, and enslaved the rest, forcing a harsh new reality on the empire. “The Spaniards took all who were brave and noble and reduced us to servants, yanakunas,” one Inca historian wrote. The complex social hierarchy of the Inca was toppled overnight, never to recover: Atahualpa’s courtiers were forced to menial roles; the women, including the virgin order of acllas, were systematically assaulted, creating an ongoing culture of rampant sexual abuse. Having brought no women with them, the Spaniards appropriated them at will, conjugating with them freely and creating a new breed of human: the mestizo. Throughout, what was uppermost in the conquistadors’ minds was the wealth they could take home. Pizarro’s troops raided Atahualpa’s rest house and military camp, making a clean sweep of all that was gold or silver. In a frenzy approaching delirium, Hernando de Soto seized “eighty thousand pesos of gold, seven thousand marks of silver, and fourteen emeralds. The gold and silver was in monstrous effigies, large and small dishes, pitchers, jugs, basins, and large drinking vessels. Atahualpa recognized these as his table service, and commented that the Indians who had fled the encampment had taken a great deal more.”

  Cajamarca was looted, its buildings scoured for anything that shone. The dead were stripped of their headdresses and jewelry; the living, forced to render up more. Spanish squadrons rode out into the countryside, demanding all precious metals, burning villages as they went. Atahualpa, who craved his freedom as urgently as Pizarro craved treasure, soon saw that the glittering stuff interested his captors far more than service to King Carlos or the forced imposition of Christianity. He understood that he himself was no more than a disposable convenience toward this burning goal; it was only a matter of time before they killed him and moved on. In a desperate attempt to save his own life, he offered his famous ransom: one large room stacked to the ceiling with gold; two more filled with silver. Pizarro eagerly agreed.

  Clearly, Atahualpa believed that all the metalwork of the kingdom would be meager recompense for his liberty. He also believed that Pizarro would honor the bargain—that he would take his booty and go home. The Inca ordered his people to systematically strip all temples and palaces of their treasures and bring them to Cajamarca under strict supervision. Llamas weighed down with the empire’s gold and silver streamed into the plaza for months, as Spaniards marveled at their good fortune. Never before in Spain’s thirty-five-year sack of the New World had such magnificent lucre been imagined, much less seen. All of Columbus’s dreams and Cortés’s plunder combined did not approach it. From the sacred Sun Temple of Cuzco’s Coricancha alone, a ton and a half of gold was hacked from the walls and sent to navigate the treacherous Andean passes on the backs of slaves and beasts. Huascar, reckoning Atahualpa’s enemies to be his friends, offered to send the Spaniards more, but Atahualpa, hearing about this from his spies, dispatched two generals and an army of forty thousand to stop him. Huascar was killed soon after, as he made his way to Pizarro in chains.

  With a civil war afoot and Peru’s difficult terrain to cross, it took far longer to fill the rooms than Atahualpa had hoped. For eight months, he endured a soul-crushing captivity, struggling to answer Pizarro’s demands and ingratiate himself with promises. He had assured the governor that it would take no more than two months to deliver the ransom, which meant he would be free by mid-January 1533. But by May, the metal was still in transit. By June, the mounting spoils had yielded a formidable collection of art and ornamentation—seven tons of gold and thirteen of silver—a pile no Inca would have valued for its inherent worth, but any European monarch would have yearned to have at his disposal. By 1534, the conquistadors had wrung an estimated ten metric tons of twenty-two-carat gold and seventy tons of silver from the cities of Cajamarca and Cuzco. In today’s market, that plunder would have been worth approximately a half billion dollars.

  The gleaming prize was guarded jealously by Pizarro himself in that adjoining warehouse; no other Spaniard could lay claim to it. As months passed, he ordered local goldsmiths to start melting the silver into tidy ingots, just as Cortés had commanded the Mexicans to do a dozen years before. In June they began the melting and assaying of gold. Every day, the Indian metalworkers were forced to render thousands of masterpieces into a quarter ton of shippable bullion, destroying the painstaking artistry they had achieved in the first place. By the middle of July, it was finished. With the exception of a few objects that were put aside for King Carlos as evidence, not a single piece survived. The raw, refined metal bricks that emerged from the furnaces were engraved with the royal stamp, ensuring that 10 percent of the precious harvest had been separated for delivery to the Crown.

  In the interim, the governor’s brother Hernando Pizarro was sent to find the fount of the Incan riches—the gold and silver mines—as well as raid the ancient Temple of the Creator God at Pachacamac. As it turned out, Pachacamac offered little more than an infinitely dark cave, a ghoulish sacrificial slab, and a startled cluster of holy men, one of whom was dispatched to Cajamarca to answer to Atahualpa for having failed to protect him. But the mine
s were a different story. As narrow a role as they’d had in the world of the Incas, they were now the be-all and end-all of the world to come. By the time Hernando Pizarro returned to report his findings, the ransom had been collected, Atahualpa had been garroted and killed, Almagro had arrived from the Caribbean with more troops and new demands, but the way of the future was lit and clear. Spain’s encounter with the Inca Empire would spur a flow of precious metals the likes of which the Old World had seldom seen. That influx from Peru and Mexico would go on to fuel the birth of global capitalism, establish the financial viability of Europe, pique the commercial appetites of Asia, and polarize the social dynamic of Latin America for centuries to come.

  POTOSÍ

  1545–1700

  Stone upon stone on a bedrock of rags? Coal upon coal, and in its depths, tears? Fire in the gold, and in that gold, a trembling drop of red blood?

  —Pablo Neruda, “The Heights of Machu Picchu”

  The conquest of America’s great civilizations—the Inca, Maya, Mexica, and Muísca—had a profound effect on Spain and, in time, the entire world. Rugged soldiers of fortune became affluent landowners; an ever-larger wave of adventurers and royal overseers poured into the hemisphere to win more wealth for themselves and the Crown. By 1542, America had been divided into two viceroyalties that answered directly to the king: the Viceroyalty of New Spain (composed of the colonies in North and Central America, as well as Venezuela and the Philippines) and the Viceroyalty of Peru (which took up the entire continent, from Panama to Patagonia, except for Venezuela and Brazil, the latter of which was Portuguese). There was still much money to make, more laurels and privileges to collect: Diego Alvarado left Cortés in order to get richer with Pizarro. Hernando de Soto left Peru to find greater treasures in Florida. Francisco Pizarro became so prosperous, having assigned one-fifth of all the Peruvian plunder to himself, that eventually he was in a position to extend personal loans to the king. The vast holdings of Hernán Cortés, from the sands of the Sonora Desert to the jungles of Lacandón, made him the most prosperous mogul in Mexico. The greed was infectious, and with it came rampant exploitation. Wherever gold, silver, or copper could be found, native populations were compelled to dig more, yield more, in hellish conditions that would have been deemed intolerable by Indian rulers. Any early restraints on human abuse that conquistadors imposed gingerly in the name of Jesus were abandoned, and, as Indians were killed off in alarming numbers, a brisk traffic in African slaves began. Between 1500 and 1800, five times more blacks than whites entered the Americas—all of them as human chattel.