River of Darkness

by Buddy Levy

  Still Gonzalo led his men on, bludgeoning a slow trail through the land, encouraged and drawn forward by finding Pineda’s marks as he went.

  Just as Pizarro’s situation was most dire, Pineda and Bustamante returned in their canoe-raft. Amazingly, it had taken them only a day and a half to descend the stretch of the Aguarico that had required eleven days to ascend, so strong was the current. Pineda and Bustamante found their captain at the rear guard, spurring the stragglers on and trying to keep their morale from flagging. It was a joyous reunion in the forest, though one tempered by the deaths of many of their compatriots in the intervening weeks.

  Pineda dutifully and enthusiastically reported his encounter and clash with the Indians, the likelihood of small villages upstream, and, most important, the great high mountains they had seen, beyond which he believed “they would find inhabitants, or a road which would lead to the land of Christians.” At this point, after all that he and his men had been through, Gonzalo Pizarro was content to have any kind of hope to cling to, and he cheered at the news and shared it with his men, extolling their courage and bravery and asking that they make speed now, for their troubles would soon be over.

  But Pizarro had enough of his wits left about him to know that his men were terribly vulnerable, and he feared an attack by the very Indians that Pineda had encountered, who now knew the Spaniards were in the area and would have had time to organize and prepare for a battle. Captain Pizarro called upon Juan de Acosta to take eighteen of the healthiest Spaniards, “armed with their swords and bucklers,” and forge ahead, defending themselves at all costs.

  After a few days of marching, Acosta indeed came to a village, which to his alarm sat on an elevated promontory and was well defended. Reasoning that surprise and a show of force was their only option, Acosta led what he could mount of a foot charge, battling hand to hand with the few armed Indians who had been stationed to protect the perimeter of the village. Although Acosta and two other Spaniards suffered deep wounds during the encounter, their assault paid off, as the villagers fled, leaving behind a good deal of food. This haul of food sustained them as well as Pizarro and the rear guard, who arrived later, though eight more of his men had died in getting there.

  Rejuvenated, they now looked beyond the canopy and could see that Pineda had been right—the Andes indeed loomed in the distance. They could even see the smoldering dome of the nearly 12,000-foot Reventador volcano spewing blackened cloud plumes, for it had erupted just the year before and remained active and angry. Although they were encouraged by the prospect of finding Quito, they also remembered how difficult climbing over the high Andes passes had been the first time, when they had been fresh, strong, and well fed. The return over the pass would test the very limits of their will.

  They slogged upward, steadily gaining elevation as they climbed through the mountains. By a stroke of good fortune they came to a village of friendly Indians who took them in and fed them, and here Pizarro decided to rest for ten days for a final push over the mountains. Through sign language and much gesticulating Pizarro learned that there was a shortcut to Quito, which he determined to take. But the shortcut proved no bargain, for along this track they arrived at rapids much too swift to wade. Pizarro knew his men would not have the strength or will to backtrack or go around. Instead, they spent four days building a bridge to cross the churning current, sleeping on the cold, hard ground at night, or staring up at the flickering stars. During one of these nights, guards reported seeing “a great comet traversing the heavens,” and that morning Gonzalo Pizarro awoke to describe a bizarre nightmare that he had experienced the night before: a fierce dragon had attacked him, tearing his heart from his chest with its sharp teeth.

  Superstitious, as many of the Spaniards were, Pizarro called on one of his men, Jerónimo de Villegas, who dabbled in astrology and could read dreams. Pizarro described the dream to Villegas and asked him to interpret it. With vague but ominous foreboding, Villegas told him that he would soon discover that “the object he most prized was dead.” At the time, Gonzalo Pizarro could only shudder and guess at its meaning.

  Pizarro rallied his men to finish the bridge, which they did, and then they made one final surge over the mountains and reached the outskirts of Quito. Word of their return traveled fast throughout the city, and people came out to meet them, bringing pigs and horses and clothes for Pizarro and his captains, who were a dreadful lot to witness. They came, according to officials who watched their arrival, more like animals than men. Agustín de Zárate, a Spanish official, recorded what he saw as Gonzalo Pizarro and his miserable band arrived at the end of June 1542:

  They were traveling almost naked, for their clothes had rotted long ago with the continuous rains. All they wore was a deerskin before and behind, some old breeches and leggings and caps of this same skin. Their swords were sheathless and eaten with rust. They were all on foot, and their arms and legs were scored with wounds from the thorns and bushes. They were so pale and disfigured that they were scarcely recognizable.

  Of the nearly two hundred men who had parted ways with Francisco Orellana’s group, only eighty made it back to Quito. They had traveled, mostly on foot, more than two thousand miles, and literally everything they had started the expedition with—200 horses, 2,000 to 3,000 swine, 2,000 dogs, and more than 4,000 native bearers—was gone, dead and gone, along with the 120 of their companions who had perished en route.

  As Gonzalo Pizarro, now nearly bereft of his dignity, approached Quito, he was offered a horse, but he refused to mount, wishing to show the suffering shared among infantry and captain alike. Instead he walked, leading the pathetic, salt-deficient, half-crazed remnant of his “expeditionary force” into the heart of Quito. Arriving at the gates of the city, Gonzalo and his men knelt to kiss the ground, then proceeded straight to the church to thank God for delivering them from their hardships.

  As he walked toward the cathedral, now more like a common foot soldier than a decorated captain and celebrated cavalryman, Gonzalo Pizarro might well already have been plotting revenge on Francisco Orellana. Then someone whispered to him the disastrous news. While he had been away, his brother—knight of the Order of Santiago and marquis of His Majesty’s kingdom of New Castile, Francisco Pizarro—had been murdered.

  * The documentation that Gonzalo Pizarro’s men had crossbows and firearms directly contradicts his charge against Orellana, which claims that Orellana took or carried off “all the arquebuses and crossbows and munitions and iron materials of the whole expeditionary force.” See Gonzalo Pizarro, letter to the king, September 3, 1542, in José Toribio Medina, The Discovery of the Amazon, 248.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Assassination of Francisco Pizarro

  AFTER HEARING MASS AND RECOVERING AS BEST they could, Gonzalo Pizarro and his men met with some of the Pizarro allies of Quito, who initially wept to see their countrymen in such a pitiable condition and to learn that so many of their friends would never return to them. They showered the members of the nearly two-year expedition with food and other comforts, and the company “began to eat with such a desire to stuff themselves that they had to use restraint so as not to burst.” The men fell on any salt they could get their hands on with particular voracity, claiming that “what they had lacked most had been salt, of which they had found no more than a trace” for more than one thousand miles. All of them, Gonzalo Pizarro included, suffered from salt deficiency, or hyponatremia, whose symptoms—muscle cramps, severe headache, nausea, disorientation, seizures, even coma—many of them exhibited.

  Taking precedence over all else, Gonzalo pressed his friends for the precise details of his brother’s downfall. He discovered that Francisco had died nearly a full year before, in late June 1541, while Gonzalo had searched for gold and cinnamon under his brother’s aegis. At that time, Francisco Pizarro had been governor and military commander of New Castile, essentially having been granted a personal appointment by the king to serve as representative of all Spanish power and deal
ings in Peru “and to govern the millions of new vassals that the king had acquired by virtue of Pizarro’s own sword.”

  But rather than sit idly by like the moneyed marquis that he now was, and enjoy the leisure he had earned through his labors, the sixty-three-year-old conquistador instead spent much of his time in the field, working wheat crops right alongside native laborers, for Francisco loved the physicality of the work, and he eschewed the standard pursuits of Spanish nobility, pastimes such as falconry or game hunting. And of course he governed his newly won realm to the best of his abilities, though from the outset his reign was contested and beset with political impediments and challenges.

  Highest on the list, there was the unsavory and politically complicated Almagro business to contend with. Brother Hernando Pizarro, thirty-eight and ambitious, had recently traveled to Spain to make his case before the king, a case aimed at defending his actions of 1538 during the notorious Spaniard-on-Spaniard Battle of Las Salinas. In that pitched battle between the rival factions, 120 Almagro men fell to only 9 of the Pizarro faction (700 infantry and cavalry, it will be remembered, had been led by Francisco Orellana), and Diego de Almagro himself had been captured, imprisoned, and ultimately ruthlessly garroted by Hernando Pizarro for acts of treason. Hernando arrived with a ship full of gold and other Inca treasure, hoping the booty might bolster his case with the king, but an Almagro captain named Diego de Alvarado had beaten him there and had already filed legal charges against Hernando for what he characterized as Almagro’s unjust assassination.

  As a result of this poor timing, Hernando was denied the chance to plead his case to the king and was instead immediately arrested and thrown in jail, where he would remain for the next twenty years, not knowing freedom again until he was sixty. Though he would live for nearly another twenty years after his release, he was by then a broken and pathetic half-blind man who walked with a cane and was unable to assist his brother Francisco’s cause in Peru. He never returned there again.

  With Hernando then imprisoned in Spain, and Gonzalo Pizarro off on his expedition to the land of La Canela and beyond, the Almagristas—about two hundred men who had fought alongside Diego de Almagro—seized their opportunity. Though they had traveled to the farthest southern reaches of the Inca Empire, as far south as Chile, thinking they had won lands and encomiendas, their efforts had thus far garnered them little. The Pizarros denied them the kinds of rights and privileges required to raise their station, such as holding political offices, and thus they were barely making suitable livings in Peru, hardly better than the natives. As long as Francisco Pizarro remained in power, they could see no chance for a change in their economic situation.

  So in June 1541, with two of the Pizarro brothers at least temporarily out of the way, a small group of Almagristas met in Lima and began rather brazenly hatching a plot to rid themselves of Francisco Pizarro. Living in Lima at the time was Diego de Almagro the Younger, the nineteen-year-old son of Pizarro’s former business partner. While young Almagro was said to be brave enough and not lacking heart, he was also thought “so boyish that he was not adapted for personally ruling over people, not to command a troop.” Still, he proved a useful symbol and rallying point, and the Almagristas used him as incentive and further justification for their plans, claiming that they would avenge his father’s murder. They planned to use the young Almagro’s house as their base of operations. Their plan was dangerous, dark, cold-blooded, and calculated. They would murder Francisco Pizarro.

  The group of about twenty of the so-called Chile Faction, the coconspirators in the plot, decided that on Sunday, June 26, 1541, while Pizarro was on his way to attend mass and therefore most likely to be unarmed and lightly guarded, they would fall upon him and kill him.

  But the Almagristas did not count on one of their own losing his nerve. As it happened, the day prior to the deed, while Francisco de Herencia, one of the plotters, was at confession, he developed a conscience and spilled the entire plan to his priest, who in turn relayed the assassination plot to the marquis himself.

  A man in Francisco Pizarro’s position of wealth, fame, authority, and power certainly knew he had plenty of enemies, and death threats were commonplace. Pizarro even knew that the disgruntled Almagristas had been meeting in secret, for he had spies all over the land, constantly reporting back to him. Still, this plot appeared sufficiently real to Pizarro that rather than leaving his house to attend mass the morning of June 26, he asked that the priest come to his house instead. He would hear mass at his home, then proceed with an elaborate feast for his many guests, such as he often hosted on Sundays.

  At dawn that morning, while Pizarro dressed and prepared for mass, the would-be assassins strapped on their armor and chain mail and armed themselves with swords and daggers, just as they would for battle. As they were set to depart, some of their spies arrived with word that their plan must have been discovered, for Pizarro had remained at home, claiming that he was too ill to attend mass.

  The plotters barely paused before they made their crucial decision. Their leader, Juan de Herrada, explained that their choice had practically been made for them:

  If we show determination and … kill the Marquis, we avenge the death of [Almagro] and secure the reward that our services … merit, and if we do not go forward with our intention, our heads will be set on the gallows which stand in the plaza. But let each one choose the course he prefers in this business.

  If they failed to kill Pizarro, they stood to be hanged publicly for plotting to do so anyway, they reasoned. So, like men inflamed with patriotic duty, heavily armed with crossbows, halberds, and at least one harquebus, they rushed into the streets shouting “Death to tyrants!” and “Long live the king!” They stormed past the plaza and ran directly toward Francisco Pizarro’s home, a few of their men mounting horses and riding after them in support. Shouts echoing the name “Almagro!” rang through the streets as they went.

  For his part, whether he had believed the death threats or not, Pizarro had gone about his daily routine at home, first hearing mass and then proceeding as planned with the noontime repast. About twenty of his friends, as well as his half brother Francisco Martín de Alcántara, had assembled upstairs in the great dining room and were enjoying their meal when they first heard the ruckus below in the streets. Francisco Pizarro’s page, having seen the men charging across the plaza, burst into the dining room shouting “Arm! Arm! The men of Chile are coming to murder the Marquis!”

  Alarmed, Pizarro and a number of his guests leaped up and rushed to the top of the stairway to see what was happening. At precisely this moment, the first of the Almagristas arrived in Pizarro’s courtyard, fully armed and with weapons waving. There, they instantly stabbed one of Pizarro’s pages, impaling him and heading for the stairs into the main house.

  Pizarro turned, grabbed his brother, and sped for one of the nearby rooms to procure weapons. His guests, meanwhile, showed considerably less courage. Some ran back through the house seeking escape routes, and a number leaped through windows into the garden below, “most of them,” recorded Cieza de León, “showing great cowardice and taking to flight in a dastardly way.” A huddle of terrified dinner guests remained in the dining room.

  By then, Francisco Pizarro, Francisco Martín, and another friend were nearly armed, and they were joined by two more pages, Vargas and Cardona. Pizarro threw off the purple robe he was wearing, grasped the sword that had helped him to win Peru, and unsheathed it.

  He did not have to wait long. The Almagristas quickly made their way to the dining room, where they were met by one of Pizarro’s guests, a man named Chávez, who tried reasoning with them, begging them not to attack their fellow Spaniards. Their answer was to run him through, stabbing him repeatedly with their broadswords and daggers, then tossing his bloody body aside. “He instantly fell in a death struggle, and his body went rolling down the stairs and into the courtyard.”

  The Almagristas pushed their way into the dining hall, shouting now for
the tyrant Pizarro to show himself. Francisco Pizarro, certainly no coward, appeared in the doorway to the adjoining room; his breastplate had been hurriedly half buckled, and he was flanked by Francisco Martín, the two pages, and the only guest who had chosen to stand and fight. The five stood in the doorway, swords brandished.

  Though the numbers were uneven—twenty of the Chile Faction to only five for Pizarro—the clever marquis knew how to make a battle of it, and he and his supporters held their ground even as wave after wave of the Almagristas surged forward, swinging their swords wildly. In the first few violent skirmishes Pizarro and his men mortally wounded two of the attackers, who fell to the ground moaning in agony, clutching at their gushing wounds. “At them, brother!” Pizarro shouted. “Kill them, the traitors!”

  Finally, some of the Chile Faction grabbed one of their unfortunate mates and, using him as a human shield, rushed forward, the rest pushing him from behind like a battering ram. Pizarro managed to run the first man through, but as he did so, the rest of Almagro’s men swarmed the sides and overwhelmed the five defenders.

  The Pizarro brothers fought valiantly, trading sword thrusts and parries, the clang of steel on armor ringing through the halls, but in the end they were outnumbered. First Francisco Martín de Alcántara fell in a heap, slain. Then, one after another, the two pages and the remaining friend of Pizarro collapsed from their wounds. At last it was Francisco Pizarro alone facing his challengers:

  Those of Chile … delivered blows on that Captain who had never tired of discovering kingdoms and conquering provinces, and who had grown old in the Royal service.… At length, after having received many wounds, without a sign of weakness or abatement of his brave spirit, the Marquis fell dead upon the ground.