Praise for The Last Days of the Incas
‘This is a wonderful book about one of the most epic struggles of history, a conquest that transformed a continent.’
Wade Davis, Anthropologist and Explorer-in-Residence National Geographic Society, and author of One River
‘A colourful, superbly crafted historical narrative that masterfully demonstrates that when cultures collide, unforeseen and tragic consequences follow … also a memorable adventure story, revealing the modern Indiana Jones-type characters that unearthed, and continue to discover, lost parts of the Inca Empire. The Last Days of the Incas is historical writing at its best.’
Broughton Coburn, author of Everest: Mountain Without Mercy
‘In addition to writing rousing and clear-eyed battle accounts and describing the Incas’ early form of guerrilla warfare, MacQuarrie also manages to spin the oft-told story of the discovery of Machu Picchu into narrative gold.’
Entertainment Weekly
‘MacQuarrie excels in his depiction of this guerrilla war, giving the lost city the honor it deserves.’
Forbes
‘The story of the European conquest of the fascinating and fabulously rich empire of the Incas is one of history’s most engaging and tragic episodes … Thanks to The Last Days of the Incas, Kim MacQuarrie’s superbly written new treatment of the subject, it is now accessible to the much broader audience it deserves.’
Vincent Lee, author of Forgotten Vilcabamba
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim MacQuarrie is a writer, an anthropologist, and a four-time Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker who has made films in such disparate regions as Siberia, Papua New Guinea, and Peru. MacQuarrie is the author of three previous books on Peru and lived in that country for five years, exploring many of the locations and hidden regions he chronicled in “The Last Days of the Incas.” During that time, MacQuarrie lived with a recently-contacted tribe of native Amazonians, called the Yora. It was MacQuarrie’s experience filming a nearby group of indigenous people, whose ancestors still remembered their contacts with the Inca Empire, that ultimately led him to investigate and then to write “The Last Days of the Incas.” MacQuarrie currently divides his time between Peru, Thailand, and the U.S.
Visit the author at www.kimmacquarrie.com or you can read his blog at www.lastdaysoftheincas.com/wordpress
ALSO BY KIM MACQUARRIE
Gold of the Andes: The Llamas, Alpacas, Vicuñas
and Guanacos of South America
Peru’s Amazonian Eden: Manu National Park
and Biosphere Reserve
Where the Andes Meet the Amazon
Copyright
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-1-40552-607-4
Copyright © 2007 by Kim MacQuarrie
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
To my parents, Ron and Joanne MacQuarrie
Contents
Praise for the Last Days of the Incas
About the Author
Also By Kim Macquarrie
Copyright
Dedication
Chronology of Events
Preface
1. The Discovery
2. A Few Hundred Well-Armed Entrepreneurs
3 Supernova of the Andes
4 When Empires Collide
5 A Roomful of Gold
6 Requiem for a King
7 The Puppet King
8 Prelude to a Rebellion
9 The Great Rebellion
10 Death in the Andes
11 The Return of the One … Eyed Conqueror
12 In The Realm of the Antis
13 Vilcabamba: Guerrilla Capital of the World
14 The Last of the Pizarros
15 The Incas’ Last Stand
16 The Search for the “Lost City” of the Incas
17 Vilcabamba Rediscovered
Epilogue: Machu Picchu, Vilcabamba, and the Search for the Lost Cities of the Andes
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
1492 Columbus lands in what is now called the Bahamas; this is the first of his four voyages to the New World.
1502 Francisco Pizarro arrives on the island of Hispaniola.
1502–1503 During his last voyage, Columbus explores the coasts of what will later be called Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.
1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa and Francisco Pizarro cross the Isthmus of Panama and discover the Pacific Ocean.
1516 The future Inca emperor Manco Inca is born.
1519–1521 Hernando Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire in Mexico.
1524–1525 Francisco Pizarro’s first voyage heads south from Panama and explores along the coast of Colombia. The trip is a financial failure. Pizarro’s colleague Diego de Almagro loses an eye in a battle with natives.
1526 Pizarro, Almagro, and Hernando de Luque form the Company of the Levant, a company dedicated to conquest.
1526–1527 Pizarro and Almagro’s second voyage. Pizarro makes his first contact with the Inca Empire at Tumbez.
c. 1528 The Inca Emperor Huayna Capac dies from European-introduced smallpox. His death sets off a civil war between his sons Atahualpa and Huascar.
1528–1529 Pizarro journeys to Spain, where he is granted a license to conquer Peru by the queen.
1531–1532 Pizarro’s third voyage to Peru. Pizarro captures Atahualpa.
1533 Atahualpa is executed; Almagro arrives; Pizarro captures Cuzco and installs seventeen-year-old Manco Inca as the new Inca emperor.
1535 Pizarro founds the city of Lima; Almagro leaves for Chile.
1536 Gonzalo Pizarro steals Manco Inca’s wife, Cura Ocllo. Manco rebels and surrounds Cuzco. Juan Pizarro is killed, and the Inca general Quizo Yupanqui attacks Lima.
1537 Almagro seizes Cuzco from Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro. Rodrigo Orgóñez sacks Vitcos and captures Manco Inca’s son, Titu Cusi. Manco escapes and flees to Vilcabamba, the new Inca capital.
1538 Hernando Pizarro executes Diego de Almagro.
1539 Gonzalo Pizarro invades and sacks Vilcabamba; Manco Inca escapes but Francisco Pizarro executes Manco’s wife, Cura Ocllo.
1540 Hernando Pizarro begins a prison sentence of twenty years in Spain.
1541 Francisco Pizarro is murdered by supporters of Almagro. One of his assassins, Diego Méndez, flees to Vilcabamba.
1544 Manco Inca is murdered by Diego Méndez and six renegade Spaniards. Gonzalo Pizarro rebels against the king of Spain.
1548 Battle of Jaquijahuana; Gonzalo Pizarro is executed by representatives of the king.
1557 The Inca Emperor Sayri-Tupac leaves Vilcabamba and relocates near Cuzco.
1560 Sayri-Tupac dies. Titu Cusi becomes Inca emperor in Vilcabamba.
1570 The Augustinian friars García and Ortiz attempt to visit the capital of Vilcabamba; Titu Cusi refuses to allow them to enter. The friars burn the Inca shrine at Chuquipalta, and friar García is expelled.
1571 Titu Cusi dies; Tupac Amaru becomes emperor.
1572 The Viceroy of Peru, Francisco Toledo, declares war on Vilcabamba. Vilcabamba is sacked and Tupac Amaru—the final Inca emperor—is captured and executed in Cuzco.
1572 The Inca capital of Vilcabamba is abandoned; the Spaniards remove the inhabitants and relocate them to a new town they christen San Francisco de la Vic
toria de Vilcabamba.
1578 Hernando Pizarro dies in Spain at the age of 77.
1911 Hiram Bingham discovers ruins at Machu Picchu, Vitcos, and a place called Espíritu Pampa, which local Campa Indians refer to as “Vilcabamba.” Bingham locates all three of these sites within four weeks.
1912 Bingham returns to Machu Picchu, this time with the sponsorship of the National Geographic Society—its first sponsored expedition.
1913 National Geographic dedicates an entire issue to Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu.
1914–1915 Bingham’s third and final trip to Machu Picchu. He discovers what is now called the “Inca Trail.”
1920 Hiram Bingham publishes his book Inca Land, in which he states that Machu Picchu is actually the lost Inca city of Vilcabamba, the final refuge of the last Inca emperors.
1955 The American explorer/writer Victor von Hagen publishes High-way of the Sun, in which he argues that Machu Picchu cannot be Vilcabamba.
1957 Gene Savoy arrives in Peru.
1964–1965 Gene Savoy, Douglas Sharon, and Antonio Santander discover extensive ruins at Espíritu Pampa, which Savoy claims is the location of Vilcabamba the Old.
1970 Savoy publishes Antisuyo, an account of his explorations at Espíritu Pampa and elsewhere. Savoy leaves Peru and relocates to Reno, Nevada.
1982 Vincent Lee visits the Vilcabamba area while on a climbing trip.
1984 Vincent and Nancy Lee discover more than four hundred structures at Espíritu Pampa, confirming that it was the largest settlement in the Vilcabamba area and thus was undoubtedly the site of Manco Inca’s capital of Vilcabamba—home of the last Inca emperors.
2002–2005 Peris Instituto Nacional de Cultura (INC) conducts the first archaeological excavations at Vilcabamba.
2011 The one-hundredth anniversary of Hiram Bingham’s “discovery” of Machu Picchu.
PREFACE
NEARLY FIVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, ROUGHLY ONE HUNDRED and sixty-eight Spaniards and a handful of their African and Indian slaves arrived in what is now Peru. They soon collided with an Inca empire ten million strong, smashing into it like a giant meteor and leaving remnants of that collision scattered all over the continent. The modern-day visitor to Peru, in fact, can still see the results of that collision almost everywhere: from the dark brown skins of the very poor to the generally lighter skins and aristocratic Spanish surnames of many of Peru’s elite; from the spiked silhouettes of Catholic cathedrals and church spires to the presence of imported cattle and pigs and people of Spanish and African descent. The dominant language of Peru is also a forceful reminder. It is still referred to as Castillano, a name derived from the inhabitants of the ancient Spanish kingdom of Castile. The violent impact of the Spanish conquest, in fact—which nipped in the bud an empire that had existed for a mere ninety years—still reverberates through every layer of Peruvian society, whether that society exists on the coast, or in the high Andes, or even down among the handful of uncontacted indigenous tribes that still roam Peru’s Upper Amazon.
Determining precisely what happened before and during the Spanish conquest, however, is not an easy task. Many of the people who actually witnessed the event were ultimately killed by it. Only a handful of those who survived actually left records of what occurred—and not surprisingly most of those were written by Spaniards. The literate Spaniards who arrived in Peru (only about 30 percent of Spaniards were literate in the sixteenth century) brought with them the alphabet, a powerful, carefully honed tool that had been invented over three thousand years earlier in Egypt. The Incas, by contrast, kept track of their histories via specialized oral histories, genealogies, and possibly via quipus—strings of carefully tied and colored knots that held abundant numerical data and that were also used as memory prompts. In a relatively short period of time after the conquest, however, knowledge of how to read the quipus was lost, the historians died out or were killed, and Inca history gradually grew fainter with each passing generation.
“History is written by the victors,” the adage goes, and indeed, this was as true for the Incas as it was for the Spaniards. The Incas had created an empire 2,500 miles long, after all, and had subjugated most of the people within it. Like many imperial powers, their histories tended to justify and glorify both their own conquests and their rulers, and to belittle those of their enemies. The Incas told the Spaniards that it was they, the Incas, who had brought civilization to the region, and that their conquests were inspired and sanctioned by the gods. The truth, however, was otherwise: the Incas had actually been preceded by more than a thousand years of various kingdoms and empires. Inca oral history was thus a combination of facts, myths, religion, and propaganda. Even within the Inca elite, divided as they often were by different and competitive lineages, histories could vary. As a result, early Spanish chroniclers recorded more than fifty different variations of Inca history, depending upon whom they interviewed.
The record of what actually occurred during the conquest is also skewed by the sheer disparity of what has come down to us; although we now have perhaps thirty contemporaneous Spanish reports of various events that occurred during and within fifty years of the initial conquest, we have only three major native or half-native reports during that same time period (Titu Cusi, Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala, and Garcilaso de la Vega). None of these three chronicles, however, were written by native authors who had personally witnessed any of the events during the critical first five years of the conquest. One of the earliest of these sources, in fact—a report dictated by the Inca emperor Titu Cusi to visiting Spaniards—dates from 1570, nearly forty years after the capture of his great uncle, the Inca emperor Atahualpa. Thus, in trying to determine who did what and to whom, the modern writer encounters a historical record that is inevitably biased: on the one hand we have a pile of Spanish letters and reports and on the other we have only three indigenous chronicles, with perhaps the most famous of them (by Garcilaso de la Vega) written in Spain by a half-native writer who published his chronicle more than five decades after he had left Peru.
Of the Spanish records that have survived, there is a further barrier in trying to determine what happened: the Spaniards wrote most of their early reports in the form of documents called probanzas or relaciones, which were largely written in an attempt to try and impress the Spanish king. The authors of these documents, often humble notaries temporarily turned conquistadors, were well aware of the fact that if their own exploits somehow stood out, then the king might grant them future favors, rewards, and perhaps even permanent pensions. The early writers of the Spanish conquest, therefore, were not attempting necessarily to describe events as they actually occurred, but were more inclined to write justifications and advertisements about themselves to the king. At the same time, they tended to downplay the efforts of their Spanish comrades (the latter were, after all, competitors for those self-same rewards). In addition, Spanish chroniclers often misunderstood or misinterpreted much of the native culture they encountered, while they simultaneously ignored and/or downplayed the actions of the African and Central American slaves the Spaniards had brought along with them, as well as the influence of their native mistresses. Francisco Pizarro’s younger brother Hernando, for example, wrote one of the first reports of the conquest—a sixteen-page letter to the Council of the Indies, which represented the king. In his letter, Hernando mentioned his own accomplishments repeatedly while mentioning the exploits of only one other Spaniard among the 167 who accompanied him—those of his elder brother Francisco. Ironically, it was these first, often self-serving versions of what had occurred in Peru that became instantaneous bestsellers in Europe when they were published. It was also from these same documents that the first Spanish historians fashioned their own epic histories, thus passing the distortions of one generation on to the next.
The modern writer—especially the writer of a historical narrative—must therefore and by necessity often choose from among multiple and conflicting accounts, must rely sometimes by default u
pon some authors not known for their veracity, must translate from misspelled and often verbose manuscripts, and often must use third and fourth person sources, some of which have come down to us as copies of copies of manuscripts. Did the Inca emperor Atahualpa really do such and such or say such and such to so and so? No one can say with certainty. Many of the quotations in this manuscript were actually “remembered” by writers who sometimes didn’t commit their memories to paper until decades after the events they described. Like quantum physics, we can thus only approximate what actually happened in the past. The abundant quotations used in the book, therefore—the vast majority of them dating from the sixteenth century—have to be viewed for what they are: bits and fragments of colored glass, often beautifully polished, yet which afford only a partial and often distorted view onto an increasingly distant past.
All histories, of course, highlight some things, abbreviate others, and foreshadow, shorten, extend, and even omit certain events. Inevitably, all stories are told through the prism of one’s own time and culture. The American historian William Prescott’s 1847 tale of Pizarro and a handful of Spanish heroes defying the odds against hordes of barbaric native savages not coincidently mirrored the ideas and conceits of the Victorian Age and of American Manifest Destiny. No doubt this volume also reflects the prevailing attitudes of our time. All a historical writer can really do, to the best of one’s ability and within one’s own time, is to momentarily lift from the dusty shelves of centuries these well-worn figures—Pizarro, Almagro, Atahualpa, Manco Inca, and their contemporaries—clean them off, and then attempt to breathe life into them once again for a new audience so that the small figures can once again replay their brief moments on earth. Once finished, the writer must then lay them gently back down in the dust, until someone in the not-so-distant future attempts to fashion a new narrative and resuscitates them once again.
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