The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America

by Hugh Thomas

  They had intended to sail to Tumbes, but that seemed impossible because of a strong south wind. After a preliminary look for the emeralds that Bartolomé Ruiz assured his comrades were to be found in substantial quantities, the force then moved southward by land to what is now Atacames, along the coast. There were new difficulties, with mosquitoes and a severe shortage of water. The Spaniards took formal possession of the place following the reading of the Requirement, in the town of Cancebi, whose inhabitants were not enthralled at hearing the incomprehensible if threatening declaration. The expedition by land continued, with Pizarro trying to educate his men in the complexities of a new landscape. The land was barren but intersected by large rivers. These Pizarro and his men crossed by making rafts of wood, rushes, or osiers, built according to the captain’s instructions. Pizarro was a real example, for “he often carried the sick over rivers on his back, being experienced in such tasks and he went about them with a patience and a courage that stimulated the others’ spirits.”16

  These Spaniards’ first obvious act of pillage was at the town of Coaque, which they reached on February 25, 1531. They found a place of about four hundred houses. They were met by very surprised Indians, who had not realized that they were threatened in any way: Pedro Pizarro recalled that the Spaniards attacked suddenly without warning, for “had it been otherwise, they would not have captured the quantity of gold and emeralds which was found there.”17 Pizarro distributed this treasure “in conformity with each man’s merits and services.” There was, it seems, “a shameful mistake on the part of certain members of the expedition who did not know the value of things … Others scorned the emeralds saying that they were glass.”18 They also seized 2,000 pesos of gold and silver, and Pizarro ordered Hernán Ponce de León, with one of his ships and some of his treasure, to return to Panama in order to show what he had found and encourage the people there to volunteer to join him.19 Bartolomé de Aguilar, one of Pizarro’s recruits from Trujillo, also returned. While waiting in Coaque, Pizarro seized the local chief of the town. The prisoner seems to have been treated humanely, with the result that he ordered his people to supply the Spaniards with the food that they wanted. But then the Spaniards “bothered and offended the natives so much that … they took to the forests.”20

  The Spaniards remained at Coaque seven months.21 The news spread about “the arrival of bearded men who came in floating houses.”22 Also a strange disease of growths (verrugas) developed. It was either Oroya fever or verruga peruana—probably the latter. The attacks began with pains in the muscles, bones, and joints, and were followed by the growth of large nodules or boils like nuts.23 No one knew how to treat these things, and many died. Garcilaso says that “at first a wart appeared as large as a black fig. It hung from some kind of stem, produced a great deal of blood and caused pain and nausea. The growths could not be touched and made the appearance of the sufferer most repulsive.”24 Pedro Pizarro suggested that the fault lay with some unusual fish that the Indians gave the Spaniards to eat. But it also could have been the woolen mattresses that the Indians had. If the Spaniards threw themselves down on them, they rose crippled, for if the arm or the leg were to be doubled up during sleep, “it could not be straightened without great difficulty.”25

  At Coaque, Pizarro was joined by reinforcements. But still Almagro did not come. He was apparently continuing to seek “supplies and men.” One cannot avoid supposing that he may have been waiting to see how the expedition would turn out. But those who did come now included the royal treasurer, Alonso Riquelme; the official supervisor, García de Salcedo, who came from Zafra; and the royal accountant Antonio Navarro.26 The whole force set off on October 12 for the South, again by land. They crossed the equator just short of Pasao, where they came on excellent fields of maize and where the chief gave Pizarro girls: Both were welcomed. The expedition soon found itself in Puerto Viejo, on what is now the Bay of Manta.

  Here, Cieza tells us, the Spaniards realized for the first time that the great Inca kingdom, their object and their destination, had been torn apart by the civil war between the brothers Huascar and Atahualpa. Spaniards, of course, with their memories of La Cerdas fighting Trastámaras, knew all about such wars. The news of the arrival of the Spaniards also reached the Inca Princes. Atahualpa—who had, to begin with, been his brother’s Viceroy for Quito—commented that, since there were so few Spaniards, perhaps they could serve him as superior servants (yanaconas). But the rumor soon spread that the Spaniards wanted “to rule over them and take their land.”27

  Moving down this Pacific coast, the Spaniards were provided by the Indians with food and water. They passed strange places and sights. In a city not far from the modern Guayaquil, for example, the chief was a woman, and according to Juan Ruiz de Arce, a conquistador from Alburquerque, the people were all homosexuals.28 Here a Spaniard named Santiago was killed, and Pizarro caused the chief to punish those responsible. One of these was tied to a pole and allowed to die in that position.

  Pizarro was shortly joined by a new Spanish force from Panama led by Sebastián de Benalcázar. Like Pizarro, Benalcázar was illiterate. He probably came from a place that his surname reflected, even if it was slightly differently spelled: Belalcázar, a village in the Sierra Morena. He was from a family of muleteers. He probably went out to the Indies in 1505, first to Santo Domingo in the days of the iron proconsul Ovando. He joined Pedrarias in Panama and served with Gaspar de Espinosa in a brutal expedition to Azuero, in Central America, in 1519.29 He was present at the execution of Núñez de Balboa. He became an encomendero of Natá, Panama. By then he had already known Almagro and Pizarro for some years. Cieza considered that he was “a man of little knowledge, poor origin and a low intellect.” But all the same, he was brave and instinctively clever in battle, and liberal in his relations with his men; and he had real qualities of leadership, which were to serve the Spanish cause well, virtues that he had in common with Pizarro himself. He also realized sooner than other Spaniards how the Cañari Indians could become Spanish allies against the Inca.

  Benalcázar came to Peru with thirty men: among them, the first conquistadora in Peru, his sister, Anastasia. Pizarro’s expedition was thus staffed by adventurers from families that had distinguished themselves in Spain in the fifteenth century. But none of those with Pizarro had been in New Spain with Cortés, even if Cortés’s memory was green among them.

  Pizarro, Benalcázar, and their friends moved on to Santa Elena, where they suffered a serious shortage of water. Many of the men were disaffected and wanted to go back to a town that they had left a few days before, Puerto Viejo. Pizarro refused to allow it, saying that to turn round would look like a defeat. They continued to the island of Puna, in the Gulf of Guayaquil. There they remained four months. To begin with, the local chief was benign, but, after a few days, he ordered and persuaded his men to rise and to try to destroy the visitors. Their attack began with the organization of a great noise—said to be a preparation for dancing but in fact a mobilization. Some conquistadors were wounded, among them Hernando Pizarro. The attack quickly ended when the Spaniards took the chief, Tumala, prisoner with several of his lieutenants.30 Nothing the Indians could do had the slightest effect on the Spaniards’ swords and horses.

  In Puna on December 1, 1531, the expedition was enhanced by the arrival of further reinforcements from Panama. This was a force in two ships of nearly one hundred, led by Hernando de Soto, a hidalgo who had gained much credit for his conduct in Nicaragua and who had helped to finance Pizarro’s ships.31 Soto was considered “dashing,”32 and he was certainly brave. He was small in build but, said Pedro Pizarro, “dextrous in warfare and affable with soldiers.”33 He probably went first to the Indies in 1513 with Pedrarias, whose daughter Isabel he later married. He explored part of what is now Colombia in 1517. He had a company with Hernán Ponce de León from 1517. In the 1520s he was in much brutal conflict in Central America and gained good encomiendas in León. To chart his trajectory among the squabbling conq
uistadors in that new territory is a hard task, but we know that he and Hernán Ponce de León were busy selling slaves from Nicaragua in the Caribbean and in Panama also. Before they set off, Soto concluded an informal agreement with Pizarro whereby he would receive the lieutenant governorship of “the main Peruvian city”—Cuzco, we assume. Pizarro promised good encomiendas, too. Soto’s hundred men were financed by himself or by some of those taking part, some of them selling their property in order to be able to participate.

  In Puna, for the first time, Pizarro and his friends encountered obvious signs of the Peruvian civil war between the two royal brothers, Huascar and Atahualpa. Thus they found six hundred prisoners from the port of Tumbes. They were in a loose form of confinement. The chief of Tumbes, Tumala, sued for peace and presented the Spaniards with gold and silver presents. He also gave them presents of rafts maliciously devised to disintegrate by allowing the ropes that held the timbers together to unfasten when they had been at sea a few minutes.

  Pizarro with his expedition now had nearly four hundred Spaniards and one woman, Benalcázar’s sister. They were hated by the local Indians, who could not understand their motivation. Those Indians devised a hunt of deer. While the Spaniards were watching the conclusion, it was supposed, the Indians would fall on them. But by a fatal weakness in Peruvian discretion, one of the Indians told of this scheme to Pizarro’s Quechua interpreter, “Felipe,” a boy who had been captured in 1527 and trained in Spanish.34 Pizarro seized sixteen chiefs who had been engaged in the plot. A large body of Indians then tried to attack the Spaniards—3,500 of them, according to Cieza. “They attacked in three directions, with determination and boldness.” The Spaniards awaited the charge with horses and shield-bearers well placed. As usual, the Indians made little impact. Many were killed, and they wounded only two Spaniards and three horses. Pizarro requested Tumala to order his men to call off the battle. He refused, saying that wild beasts would not make them accept peace with people who had done them such damage. But for the moment, there was no more fighting, and the Spaniards assembled a great quantity of gold, silver, and cloth, the first two items in sheets, as if ready for use as linings of the interior walls of temples.35

  The expedition set off by raft and ship from Puna to Tumbes. Pizarro assumed that the people of that port would help him since he had returned six hundred prisoners there. But the Indians under Quillemin organized a conspiracy to kill all the Spaniards there and then. One small raft-borne expedition included a certain Hurtado, who was captured and murdered when he landed, with two boys, both of whose eyes were gouged out and their penises cut off. But the Indians did not have the courage to attack the main body of Spanish expeditionaries. Cieza says that the Indians wanted to leave “without hearing the snorting of the horses.”

  Pizarro found Tumbes desolated. In the civil war, the place had been laid waste. All the same, the temple of the sun remained there, painted with large pictures, which Miguel de Estete claimed were of a “rich variety of colour.”36 (Estete was from Santo Domingo de la Calzada, a well-known halt on the pilgrim route from France to Santiago. He was a notary and had come to Peru with Benalcázar.) This temple had in 1527 much impressed Alonso de Molina, and his description of the sheets of silver and gold there, confirmed by Candía, was one of the decisive reports that led to Pizarro’s expedition in 1531.

  Pizarro and his men camped in two fortresses in Tumbes, one of which he commanded himself, the other being controlled by his brother Hernando. An expedition was sent out to “punish” the murder of Hurtado. They found few Indians upon whom to wreak revenge, but the Spaniards pillaged what they could, stealing llamas as well as other treasures. With them, they returned to the camp. But Pizarro’s anger remained, and he ordered Soto, his newest captain, to pursue the local Indians where he could.37 Soto was always adept at finding Indians to kill, and he drove one enemy leader, Quilterosa, into the mountains. At last, the Peruvians agreed to beg pardon for what they had done and to offer peace, realizing that otherwise Pizarro would destroy their settlements. They therefore asked the Spanish commander to have mercy on them in the name of the sun. Pizarro agreed: Drily, he commented that “he needed them to give him guides and to help the Spaniards to carry their baggage.”38

  At some point, in the empty city of Tumbes an Indian came up and said that he had no wish to flee with all the others since it seemed to him that the new arrivals, being “men of war and of much power,” were destined to conquer everything. He begged that his house not be sacked. Pizarro told him to put a white cross on his house and instructed his men that no one was to attack a place so marked. This was the Indian who told Pizarro for the first time of Cuzco and its great riches.39 Pizarro learned, too, at this time of such great centers of Peru as Vilcas, with its stone temple and many open squares, and of Pachacamac, whose magnificent buildings were said to be coated with gold and silver.

  The chiefs of Tumbes, having been sought by Soto and his seventy horsemen, then appeared and thanked Pizarro for his patience with them. They had been impressed by the Spaniards’ superior qualities when they saw the horsemen ride uphill!40 At a town nearby, which the Spaniards christened San Miguel because it was then Saint Michael’s Day (April 10), these chiefs offered a rich booty of gold and silver jewels. Thereafter, the chief Quillemesa (Chilimasa) was mucho nuestro amigo. At that time, there was a halfhearted rebellion against Pizarro by Soto, who wanted to go up to conquer the Peruvian sub-capital of Quito. Soto was betrayed by Juan de la Torre, a survivor of the famous “thirteen” of 1527, and thereafter Pizarro made a point of ensuring that Soto was customarily accompanied by his brothers Juan and Gonzalo, who acted as a combination of jailers and bodyguards.41

  The news that Pizarro heard of the dazzling riches of Peru and its interior caused him to change his strategy. He had intended to proceed to the heart of the country—including Cuzco, for example—by continuing down the coast. But then he heard that Atahualpa was not far off in Cajamarca, a town in the mountains some fifty miles from the sea. Pizarro resolved to seek a meeting with Atahualpa. Pizarro left Tumbes on May 16, 1532, leaving behind about twenty-five sick Spaniards and fifteen others, forty in all, under Captain Antonio Navarro, who had been the accountant of the expedition for the previous year. He also left there two other royal officials, Alonso Riquelme and García de Salcedo and, as his own representative, his half brother, Francisco Martín de Alcántara, a younger son of his mother, whose devotion to him was lifelong. Pizarro made his first grants in this settlement to these stay-behinds, and he planned squares, public buildings, and some private houses in San Miguel, this first Spanish city of Peru.42 Four soldiers and two Franciscans also returned from Tumbes to Panama.

  Pizarro’s army—now of about two hundred men, of whom about half were horsemen—pressed on through fertile lands. Thus Miguel de Estete reported: “The Tallan river is heavily populated with pueblos and has a very good fruit-growing sector, of a better kind than Tumbez. There is an abundance of food and native livestock. All the area to the sea was well exploited because it seemed to have a very good port.”43 They continued to cover about four to six leagues (twelve to eighteen miles) every day, passing through Huauillas, Silar (el Tambo de la Sed), Cerro Prieto, Jagay Negro, and the banks of the rivers Chira and Poechos. They saw many unusual people, such as the Tallares, who, according to Pedro Pizarro, dressed in cloaks of cotton with woolen shawls round their heads, which they tied under their beards. The women had lip ornaments, as the Mexican natives had also had. They worshipped the sun and would send it a large supply of dried lizard to eat.44 They were great drinkers and ate maize. Their priests dressed in white and fasted by abstaining from salt as well as garlic. They cultivated watermelons and other fruit. They tended llamas and were fishermen and shellfish enthusiasts. They danced and made music, the leaders lived in adobe palaces, and they were polygamous as well as patriarchal. Their lords traveled by hammock. Coming originally from the mountains, they now lived on the coast. Their conquest by the Incas
in about 1470 had not yet led to their speaking Quechua.45

  In this zone, the Spaniards noted an Indian who wore the ample cloak of the desert as well as a great shawl on his head and shoulders, and who carried a basket full of wares. He spent the whole day in the Spanish camp seeking to sell his objects, yet at the same time, he was admiring the work of the expedition’s blacksmith, the shaving by the expedition’s barber, and the horse taming by the skillful Hernán Sánchez Murillo.46 Hernando Pizarro guessed that this Indian was more than he at first sight seemed. Indeed, he turned out to be Apoo, a spy for Atahualpa, to whom he reported that the Spaniards were not gods. Rather, they were bearded robbers who came out of the sea and who could probably be both conquered and enslaved.47 There were only 190 of them.

  Atahualpa seems to have thought it best to allow these “robbers”—the Spaniards—to advance, and then he would seize them and make them work for him. It was surely for that that the gods had sent the Spaniards.48 Apoo made the Spaniards show him their swords, and he pulled the beard of one, who gave him many blows in return.49

  Then Pizarro received a messenger from the Inca Huascar, the defeated Prince of the civil war, who asked for the Spaniards’ protection since they had claimed to have come to Peru to undo injustices. Pizarro rather drily replied that he was always ready to put such things right.50

  This was a hard march, even if some presented it as if it were a carnival. There was much sun, little shade, much sand, and no water except what was carried. Yet they encountered one vast royal house that had an abundance of freshwater, and both the soldiers and the horses refreshed themselves. They saw, too, a river and a beautiful and cheerful valley through which the broad highway of the Inca passed, with elegant resting places and marked by brilliantly contrived swinging bridges.