The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  Although cannibalism did exist on parts of the Atlantic coast of Brazil and some native warriors in Ecuador did shrink one another’s heads, the priest’s tales about the Antis Indians were fabricated—fantastic stories told about a people and an environment so alien to highland Incas and European Spaniards that they inspired fear and loathing among both. To the Spaniards listening to such tales, however—and who had now stepped off the edge of the Andes into a dark and otherworldly realm frequently punctuated by unexpected howls and screams—there was no reason not to accept these apocryphal stories as true. How far this forest stretched, in any case—and whether it contained rich empires adorned with gold or not—no one knew. Most of the continent was still terra incognita, after all, a no-man’s-land whose labyrinthine interior could only be imagined. Somewhere ahead might lie new empires and wealth beyond their wildest dreams—or else deaths so horrible that the Spaniards might be forced to watch themselves being literally eaten alive. Only God in heaven—or the devil in hell—really knew.

  Walking in single file, the Spaniards eventually arrived at a narrow canyon through which two streams flowed. Crossing over two bridges that had been recently constructed, they now emerged into a clearing that had high bluffs on either side and was filled with the sound of rushing water. Pedro Pizarro later recalled:

  [When] some twenty Spaniards had … [crossed the bridge], the Indians who were hidden hurled down … many boulders from the mountains above. These boulders are huge stones that they throw from above and which come rolling down with great fury. These boulders carried away three Spaniards, smashing them to bits and knocking them into the river. Those Spaniards who had already gone ahead into the forest found many Indian archers who began to shoot arrows at them and to wound them, and had they not found a narrow path from which they threw themselves into the river, they would have all been killed, for they could not … [come to grips with] these Indians who were hidden among the trees.

  The Spaniards had obviously blundered into a trap. According to Titu Cusi,

  [My father] had heard from the spies he had stationed on the roads how Gonzalo Pizarro … and many others were coming after him and that three of his own brothers were coming with them … [And] he [Manco] went there and found I don’t know how many Spaniards, because the forest was so thick you couldn’t count them … [and] he fought with them fiercely on the banks of a river.

  The bridges the Spaniards had crossed, it turned out, had recently been built by Manco’s warriors in order purposely to divert the Spaniards from the normal trail and to lead them into an area where they could be crushed by falling rocks. The ambush-by-boulder technique was the same that Manco’s general Quizo had successfully used in the Andes. Rather than wait until more of the Spaniards had crossed the bridge, however, Manco’s warriors had released the boulders too soon, crushing the front of the Spanish column but allowing the rest of the Spaniards to escape by retreating back up the trail.

  The ambush nevertheless caused the long Spanish and Inca column to stop dead in its tracks. After fierce fighting throughout the day and with the Spaniards hardly able to see their Antis attackers—so well did the native Amazonians use the forest to hide in—the Spaniards finally retreated. That night, Gonzalo and his men retraced their steps by torchlight back to where they had left their horses, in order to regroup and decide what to do and also because the Spaniards had “many wounded and many who had become unnerved.” During the day’s fighting, the Spaniards had suffered thirty-six dead.

  Demoralized by their recent casualties and by the shadowy Antis who could let loose volleys of arrows yet who could scarcely be seen, the Spaniards sent to Cuzco for reinforcements. Gonzalo Pizarro, meanwhile, hoping to prevent further ambushes before those reinforcements could arrive, now sent Inquill and Huaspar ahead to try to negotiate with their brother. If Manco would lay down his arms, the brothers were presumably told, then he would be pardoned; the Spaniards had also informed the two brothers that they were also prepared to reward Manco with encomiendas of his own.

  Manco, however, had previously issued a standing order that any natives who collaborated with the Spaniards were to be summarily executed. He was also aware that the Spanish force was large and well armed and that his three half-brothers had led them here. Manco was already furious with Paullu for having rejected his invitation to join him in his rebellion and also for the fact that Paullu had accepted the royal fringe and had allowed himself to be crowned as emperor. When his brothers Inquill and Huaspar arrived at his camp, therefore, Manco was in no mood for either pleasantries or negotiations. According to Titu Cusi,

  My father became so angry that he [Huaspar] had come to see him that the negotiations cost him his life. And [because] my father wanted to kill him due to the anger he had, Cura Ocllo tried to stop him, because she loved him [her brother] so much. [But] my father, not paying attention to her pleas, cut off his head and that of his other brother, Inquill, saying these words: “better that I cut off their heads than for them to depart with mine.”

  Manco’s wife—who had already been kidnapped and raped by Gonzalo Pizarro and had somehow escaped, and who was now confronted with the bodies of her two brothers lying on the ground before her, with their severed heads on either side—was devastated by their deaths. Other than Paullu and Manco, these were the last sons of her father, the great Huayna Capac. Now five of her brothers were dead—among them Atahualpa and Huascar—and all had died as a result of the struggle that had ensued due to the death, presumably by European smallpox, of her father. According to Manco’s son, Cura Ocllo “was so upset by the death of her brothers that she refused to move ever again from the place where they had been executed.”

  Manco, however, had little time to worry about his wife’s grief. With hundreds of armed Spaniards now only a little more than a dozen miles from his capital and, according to his spies, with more Spanish reinforcements gathering in Cuzco, he had to find a way to destroy his enemies or else make life so difficult for them that they would give up and return to the Andes. All that remained between the Spaniards and his new capital city was a single canyon blocked by a large stone outcropping that formed a natural barricade, blocking the Spaniards’ access. Within the canyon high ridges cloaked in dense vegetation rose up on either side. The Incas themselves normally surmounted the barricade with ladders, which they had now of course removed. In addition, Manco had ordered a stone wall to be erected on top of the barricade, leaving small, windowlike openings.

  Gonzalo Pizarro soon decided to mount a frontal attack against the barricade, sending a force ahead with orders to seize it. As the Spaniards began attempting to scramble up the stone outcrop and reached the wall, Manco chose this precise moment, however, to reveal his latest military innovation. Loud explosions suddenly erupted and blasts of smoke issued from the perforations in the wall directly before the attackers. Spanish prisoners, apparently, had shown Manco’s warriors how to fire his stockpile of captured harquebuses, seized from slain Spaniards. It was for this reason that Manco had left the small openings in the wall atop the barricade. After the stunned Spaniards had retreated and then began to examine the wall carefully, they could see the barrels of harquebuses manufactured in Spain drawing direct beads on them. According to Pedro Pizarro, however, the instructions the warriors had received in the use of gunpowder and reloading were less than ideal:

  At the entrance of this narrow [canyon] … [Manco] had made a stone wall with some openings in it and through which they shot at us with four or five harquebuses that … he had taken from Spaniards. And as they did not know how to load the harquebuses, they could do us no harm, because they left the [lead] ball close to the mouth of the harquebus and so it fell to the ground as it came out.

  Nevertheless, after days of skirmishing during which the Spaniards were unable to breach Manco’s barricade, the Spaniards found themselves stalemated. Finally, however, reinforcements from Cuzco arrived and, with a fresh infusion of troops, Gonzalo now devised an
innovative strategy of his own. Ordering half of his force to conduct a rather halfhearted yet prolonged attack against Manco’s troops defending the stone barricade, Gonzalo ordered the rest of his men to secretly ascend the back side of the ridge in an attempt to gain the heights above. As gunshots signaled the barricade attack, Gonzalo’s second group began crawling up through the dense, tangled vegetation, often having to hack their way forward with axes. Eventually, the Spaniards gained the top of the ridge without being noticed. Now, as the natives focused their efforts on repelling the Spanish attack below, they suddenly found themselves in the unenviable position of being fired upon from above with both harquebuses and crossbows. Recalled Pedro Pizarro:

  Seeing how the Spaniards were coming down from above, the Indians came to give Manco Inca news of it at the fort … and when he had understood three Indians took him by the arms and hurriedly carried him over the river … which runs close to this fort, and they carried him down alongside the river a ways and hid him in the jungle. And the rest of the Indians who were there disappeared and fled in many directions, taking refuge in the forest.

  Frustrated and distraught over his failure to hold the barricade, Manco is said to have paused on the other side of the river long enough to have shouted back at his tormentors, “I am Manco Inca! I am Manco Inca!” as if to say “how dare you!” One of the Spanish attackers, Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, also remembered Manco shouting across that “he and his Indians had killed two thousand Spaniards before and after the uprising, and that he intended to kill them all and retain the land that was his and had belonged to his forefathers.” Nevertheless, now no longer able to prevent the Spaniards from advancing toward his new capital, Manco turned and fled, assisted by his naked Antis warriors.

  Gonzalo and his troops presently followed the stone causeway until they finally reached Vilcabamba, a city that, until now, they had only heard stories about. The Spaniards found the new Inca capital spread out below them in a large forest clearing more than a mile in length; the city, however, appeared deserted, as the frightened inhabitants had fled. As the Spaniards descended the long stone stairway into the city, they were followed by Paullu Inca, wearing the royal fringe and carried in his litter. Smoke still curled up from recently abandoned cooking fires while spider monkey trills sounded in the distance. The excited Spaniards now began ransacking the city, plunging with drawn swords into various buildings and storehouses and emerging with gold and silver plates, goblets, and idols. Several Spanish captains and their native auxiliaries also went in search of the missing emperor, yet found only Manco’s wife, Cura Ocllo. Still in shock over the death of her two brothers, the grieving woman apparently had made no attempt to escape.

  In July 1539, after two long fruitless months of searching for the rebel emperor, Gonzalo Pizarro gave up and the joint Spanish-Inca expedition began its return journey to Cuzco. They carried with them the spoils of their plunder, their various captives, and with Cura Ocllo, queen of the Incas, bound in cords. Angry no doubt that Manco had once again managed to escape, Gonzalo allowed his fellow Spaniards to brutalize the captured coya, the same woman who only a few years earlier Gonzalo had desired so much that in seizing her he had ultimately helped to unleash a deadly native rebellion. According to Titu Cusi, some thirty miles from Vilcabamba, in the village of Pampaconas, Cura Ocllo’s captors tried to rape her.

  She refused, defending herself fiercely in any way she could, even resorting to covering her body with filthy and despicable things, so that those who were trying to rape her would be nauseated. She defended herself like this many times during the journey until they reached [Ollantay] Tambo.

  While the expedition paused in Ollantaytambo, Francisco Pizarro had meanwhile received a message in Cuzco, supposedly from Manco Inca, that Manco now wanted to negotiate his terms of surrender. Hoping to put an end to the rebellion once and for all, Pizarro hurried to Ollantaytambo, where Cura Ocllo was currently being held, and from there sent Manco a variety of gifts, including a fine pony and an assortment of silk clothes. An African slave and two natives who had been baptized as Christians transported the gifts to the jungle. Instead of accepting Pizarro’s gifts, however, Manco had the three envoys and their pony killed, as “the Inca placed no value on the friendship of the Spaniards nor on what they promised him.”

  Furious at Manco’s rebuff and no doubt frustrated that after hundreds of Spanish deaths and three years of warfare that Manco Inca was still on the loose, Pizarro chose to vent his fury on the next best person—the Inca queen. “[As] the Inca [Manco] would not make peace, the greatest pain that could be inflicted upon him was to kill the wife he loved most,” wrote Cieza de León. The Spaniards thus brought out Cura Ocllo, daughter of the great Huayna Capac, stripped her of her clothes, then tied her to a stake that had been erected for that purpose. As Pizarro and his captains looked on, native Cañaris—historic enemies of the Incas—now began to beat her, although the Inca queen said not a word. They next readied their bows and, fitting bamboo-pointed arrows onto their corded strings, stretched them back and began firing at her, impaling her limbs. Many of the Spaniards present—hardened conquistadors though they were—were taken aback at this treatment, the torture and murder of an Inca queen. It was, commented one chronicler, an act “completely unworthy of a sane Christian man”; in the words of another, it was punishment for a rebellion that “was not her fault.” Nevertheless, the torture continued as Pizarro and his men—all baptized as Christians—continued to watch and made no effort to stop it.

  The young queen, impaled with arrows yet still defiant, finally spoke, telling her tormentors bitterly, “You take your anger out on a woman? … Hurry up and finish me off, so that you can satisfy all of your desires.” It was the only outburst the proud Inca woman made, much to the surprise of those who had gathered to witness the event. Wrote Pedro Pizarro:

  In his anger … the Marquis ordered that the wife of Manco Inca be killed. Some Cañaris tied her to a stake and then beat her and shot arrows at her until she died. The Spaniards who were present said that this Indian woman never spoke a word nor uttered a single complaint, and in this manner she died from the beating and from the arrows they shot into her. One can only admire a woman who neither complains nor speaks nor makes a single moan from the pain of her wounds while dying!

  To further punish Manco, Pizarro now ordered that the dead queen’s disfigured body be loaded into a large basket and floated down the Vilcanota River, so that it would eventually be found and retrieved by Manco’s men. A few days later, Manco was shown Cura Ocllo’s body and was “grief stricken and despondent over the death of his wife. He wept and agonized over her, for he loved her very much, and he returned [with her body], withdrawing towards the site of Vilcabamba.”

  Pizarro’s anger over Manco’s rebellion had not yet been sated, however. Returning to Cuzco he soon learned that Villac Umu and some other chiefs, who were now prisoners in the capital, had bitterly denounced the execution of their queen. Pizarro promptly ordered that the high priest and the rest of his chiefs be brought out onto Cuzco’s main square, where he had them all burned alive. He next had General Tiso dragged out—Manco’s last great general, who had surrendered nine months earlier—and burned him alive as well.

  Having stamped out much of Manco’s second rebellion through a series of brutally efficient counterinsurgency campaigns, sixty-one-year-old Francisco Pizarro now returned to the coast and to his capital, the City of the Kings, where he soon resumed his duties as gobernador. Soon, however, the aging marquis was confronted with a new problem, one every bit as serious as any that had been posed by Manco’s rebellion. Rumors were now swirling through the streets of the city that some of its Spanish inhabitants had been secretly meeting together—and were planning on murdering the marquis.

  14 THE LAST OF THE PIZARROS

  “[The Spanish encomenderos] exude an air of success as they go from their card games to their dinners in fine silk clothes. Their money is squandered on t
hese luxuries, as well it may be, since it costs them no work or sweat whatsoever. … [They] and their wives have borrowed from the Inca the custom of having themselves conveyed about in litters like the images of saints in procession. These Spaniards are absolute lords without fear of either God or retribution. In their own eyes they are judges over our people, whom they can reserve for their personal service or their pleasure.”

  FELIPE HUAMÁN POMA DE AYALA, LETTER TO A KING, C. 1616

  “Et tu, Brute?” [“And (even) you, Brutus?”]

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR, C. 1600

  IN JUNE OF 1541 FRANCISCO PIZARRO WAS STILL THE SAME unpretentious man of simple interests that he had been when he first arrived in the New World thirty-nine years earlier. Although he had now spent more than two thirds of his life in the Americas, the sixty-three-year-old conquistador still bore the unmistakable stamp of his formative years in rural Extremadura. The son of a distinguished cavalry captain, Pizarro had grown up with his mother—a maid who came from a family of peasants—and her family and not with that of his father’s. Francisco’s three paternal half-brothers—Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo—by contrast, although born many years later, had grown up in their father’s household, while Hernando, as the eldest among them, had received both a formal education and had inherited his father’s estate.