The Last Conquistador

by Stuart Stirling

  . . . in the desire to serve Your Majesty and to enhance the Crowns of Castile and León, the said Francisco Pizarro determined on the discovery and conquest of these realms of Peru at his own cost and mission, for which this witness neither saw, nor heard it said, that Your Majesty nor the Royal Treasury did aid him for the expense of the discovery and conquest, and that this witness, being one of the discoverers and conquistadors, would have known had it been thus . . . for the said Francisco Pizarro set on the conquest at his own cost, and there spent the patrimony of his years of labour, for it was known to me that he was a man of wealth in the realm of Tierra Firme [Panama] . . .36

  Pizarro, by this time middle aged, was described by his kinsman Pedro as dark featured, ‘tall and spare, and having a good face and a thin beard’.37 The illegitimate and abandoned son of a minor hidalgo from the Estremaduran township of Trujillo, he had spent his childhood in the peasant household of his mother’s family before leaving to serve in Spain’s army in Italy.38 In his early years in the Isthmus he had made a name for himself as a woodsman and Indian fighter, amassing a considerable fortune as a slaver, planter and trader: the principal sources of income open to the colonist encomenderos of Panama. A man of simple tastes, who preferred the company of his Indian slave women to the social pretensions of his fellow merchants and the hidalgo wives they imported from their homeland, he appears to have possessed no wish ever to go back and live in Spain, where, whatever his achievements or wealth, he would always be regarded as little more than a peasant. On his return to Panama he brought with him his four half-brothers, who were almost half his age. The chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo recorded that they were as ‘arrogant as they were poor’.39 The eldest was Hernando, the only legitimate son of their father, who Oviedo described as ‘of great stature and girth, his lips swollen, his nose veined’,40 who of all the men who would accompany his brother in the Conquest would prove to be the catalyst of his downfall and eventual murder.

  Diego de Almagro, who was from an equally humble background as Pizarro and was also illiterate, was older than him and had at one time been the foreman of his encomienda. Disfigured by the loss of an eye from an Indian javelin wound and by the facial warts that scarred the bearded features of many of the early colonists, he had been born in the township of Almagro in the Mancha of Castile, and had lived in Panama for almost as long as Pizarro. An Indian tracker by trade, it was said of him ‘he could follow an Indian through the thickest forests merely by tracing his tracks, and in the event the Indian might have a league’s advantage on him, yet would he catch up with him’.41

  Diego de Almagro. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

  The partnership of the two men had, however, virtually been dissolved after Pizarro’s return from Spain, and had further been hampered by the belated intervention of Arias Dávila, by then an elderly invalid, who prohibited any volunteers from Nicaragua or Veragua enlisting on their expedition. The behaviour of Pizarro’s brother Hernando, who had publicly referred to Almagro as a ‘circumcized Moor’,42 had done little to improve relations between them. Almagro, who had every reason to feel defrauded by his exclusion from joint command of the expedition, after a great deal of discussion agreed to serve under Pizarro with the promise of an independent governorship in the conquered territories. Due to his ill-health, though, he decided to remain in Panama and to recruit a second expeditionary force as a reinforcement, which he would command. Most of the men who had already been enlisted, including the volunteers Pizarro had brought back with him from Spain, were in their early twenties and had never had any conventional military experience or training. Only a handful, among them Pizarro’s brother Hernando, had ever served in Spain’s regular army, though many of them would in their old age describe themselves as ‘soldiers’, as is made evident in the Conquistador’s probanza. Each volunteer had been recruited with the promise of a share of booty, some were given captaincies because of their past experience as Indian fighters. More accustomed to labouring in the fields of their homelands than to soldiering, they presented a motley collection of unemployed slavers and die-hard adventurers, only a few of whom had taken part in the conquest of the Isthmus.

  The Spaniards arriving at the Bay of San Mateo. (Herrera: BL, 783. g. 1–4)

  In the last week of the year 1530, a few months before Arias Dávila’s death at the age of eighty in his capital at León, the first of the three caravels that would transport the 180 men and horses of the expeditionary force shed its mooring and sailed out of Panama’s small harbour. Among the colonists of Nicaragua who had already been recruited for the expedition, but who had yet to sail, was the wealthy slaver Hernando de Soto, a hidalgo from Estremadura, who like Almagro had arrived in the Isthmus in Arias Dávila’s armada. Though aware of Arias Dávila’s opposition to the expedition, he had nevertheless accepted Pizarro’s offer to command his horsemen also with the promise of a governorship, and had agreed to provide him with two of his slave ships for his expeditionary force, which he would join the following year after the departure of Sebastían de Benalcázar, another of the Nicaragua colonists. Six months after Soto had sailed from Nicaragua, Almagro and the witness Ribera entered the province of Veragua to enlist more men to supplement their reinforcements. Among the volunteers they recruited was the eighteen-year-old Mansio, who records in his testimonial he brought with him his own ‘horses, armour and servants’.43 Almost two years after Pizarro’s departure, the small armada of caravels, carrying some 150 volunteers and a small contingent of Negro and Isthmian slaves and 50 horses, finally set sail from the port of Panama.44 It was December 1532.

  2

  THE REALM OF THE HUMMINGBIRD

  I was born as a flower of the field,

  As a flower I was cherished in my youth.

  I came to full age, I grew old;

  Now I am withered and die.

  Inca memory poem1

  The Inca empire of Tahuantinsuyo, containing some 7 million people, comprising the Andean regions of the present day republics of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, northern Chile and southern Colombia, had been established by military conquest in less than a hundred years.2 It was a society ruled by an hereditary nobility of the Quéchua tribe, known as Inca, which by their prowess had dominated the central Andean cordillera, instilling in their conquered tribes a cult of sun worship, from whom they claimed they derived their divine origin.3 The chronicler Agustín de Zárate recorded that at Cajamarca the Inca Atahualpa told the Dominican Friar Vicente de Valverde that he believed in the deities of the sun, the Pachamama, earth mother, and Pachacámac, the creator.4 Three Indian elders, in a testimonial on behalf of the descendants of their royal house, recorded of their rulers:

  The Incas of the eleven ayllu [clans of the dead emperors] never laboured for any one, for they were served by the Indians of all Peru . . . and they were lords who commanded all others . . . for none of their caste and tribe, poor or rich, nor any other who was a descendant of the Incas of the eleven ayllu were servitors in any manner, for they were served in all the four provinces of this realm . . . their sole office being to assist in the court of the Inca [emperor] where he resided, to eat and walk and to accompany him, and to discharge his commissions in war and peace, and to inspect the lands as great lords with their many servants . . .5

  The civilizations whose distant vestiges the Incas had inherited had left only the remnants of their monuments and artwork to mark their existence: the Chavín of the central Andes (1200–400 BC), the image of whose puma god ornamented their pottery and masonry; the Nazca of the mid Pacific coast lands (400 BC–1000 AD), who portrayed their religious iconography in the giant linear earth – carvings of sacred animals, insects and birds; and the Tiahuanacu of the highland plateau on the southern shores of Lake Titicaca (AD 400–1000), whose monolith building and monuments had been erected some thousand years before the advent of the Incas. Of all the ancient Andean cultures the Tiahuanacu, a military religious community, had held the greatest influence in t
he evolution of their people. All that remains of Tiahuanacu’s former lake city, part of which lies under the colonial township of that name, near La Paz, are its ruined wall enclosures and giant stone figures and Gateway of the Sun.

  Map of Peru, engraving by Bleau. (Private Collection)

  The lake of Titicaca, situated 12,725 ft above sea level and covering an area of some 3,500 square miles, bordering Peru and Bolivia, had been the spiritual epicentre of Tiahuanacu and was held sacred by the Incas as the birthplace of the progenitors of their dynasty. It was also the region from where their bards, that the Spaniards interviewed, recorded the existence in their legends of white-bearded gods, known to them as Viracocha, and because of which they had at first believed the conquistadors to have themselves been gods. The chronicler Pedro de Cieza de León recalled that when he had visited the ruins at Tiahuanacu he had asked the Indians there whether the lake city had been built during the time of the Incas, ‘but that they had laughed at him, saying they had been told by their forebears it had been constructed overnight from one day to the other, and that they had seen bearded white men on one of the islands of Titicaca’.6 The Spanish missionaries were to capitalize on the legend by equating Viracocha, also known as Thunupa, with a bearded Andean Christ, and even St Thomas, the apostle of India: an iconography still evident in the colonial mestizo church carvings and paintings of the Cuzco and Titicaca region. The myth of the white man was also evident in the northern Andean region of the Chachapoyas, whose tribesmen various chroniclers recorded were as white as any Spaniard, and which may possibly prove a far earlier connection between Andean America and the Caucasian world.7

  Archaeology has established the traces of Inca government in the Huatanay valley at Cuzco in the central Andes in about AD 1200, and which would later expand across the southern and northern cordillera, introducing to their subject tribes a totalitarian government and a social structure of communal wealth. Though possessing neither the wheel nor the written word, by their mastery of masonry and engineering, their road building and collective system of farming, their craftsmanship of metal, textiles and pottery, their understanding of astronomy and medicine, and in the oral traditions of their poetry, they created one of the greatest civilizations in the Americas. It was a regime as enlightened in its social welfare as it was despotic in its totalitarian adherence to its ruling Inca nobility and Emperor, Sapa Inca. It also shared with other Amerindian civilizations, such as the Maya of Central America and the Aztec of Mexico, the practice of human sacrifice, which the few surviving elderly conquistadors, among them Mansio Serra de Leguizamón, would recall at an enquiry held in Cuzco almost half a century after the conquest: ‘[The Incas] instructed them [their subject tribes] in the veneration of their idols of the sun and of the stars, teaching them how to make sacrifices in the mountains and holy places of each province . . . forcing them to kill their sons and daughters to this effect . . . and to sacrifice their women and servants, so that they could serve them in the afterlife . . .’.8

  Viracocha, silverwork, late nineteenth century, Potosí School. (Private Collection)

  Statue at Tiahuanacu. (Author)

  Tiahuanacu figure. (Author)

  The Inca practice of human sacrifice, as in pre-Christian Europe, was in effect a ritual worship of nature and part of a code of a religion governing every aspect of their lives. It also affected the laws by which they lived, as recorded by the Jesuit mestizo chronicler Blas Valera: ‘. . . from the detailed instructions given to each province’s need of supplying artisans and agricultural workers for its sustenance, to the distribution of its land, to the punishments inflicted on adulterers, rapists and thieves, punishable in most cases by death’.9 It was an image of a morality the Conquistador would depict in his last will and testament, which he addressed to his sovereign King Philip II.10

  It was a society integrally linked to the spiritual life of its people and its belief in the supernatural: a world with which they communicated in their worship of nature and venerated in their huacas, holy places, of their mountains and valleys, and which brought them in communion with an invisible world. The mystical pre-eminence of their capital at Cuzco, cacooned in a valley 10,500 ft above the level of the sea, was reflected in the person of their Emperor, and maintained in the afterlife by the panacas, houses of the dead, of each Emperor, the living shrine to his immortality. Each Emperor in his life time established his panaca in one of the city’s palaces, numbering some thousand of his relatives and attendants, to oversee his personal wealth and lands after his death. At the time of the Conquest eleven panacas were venerated at Cuzco, to which all the princes and higher nobility belonged through their maternal or paternal descent, entitling them to privileges and a prestige among the Quéchua and their subject tribes that the Conquistador compared to the nobility of his homeland:

  Mansio’s Will. (Patronato 107, AGI, Seville)

  They were people of great importance, great lords and sons of kings, who governed this realm. And as such they ruled at the time I entered in the discovery of this kingdom and witnessed the Incas command and govern this land . . . for the term Inca is what we would call in Spain lords of vassals, dukes and counts, and other such gentlemen of that kind . . . and being as they were absolute rulers they ordered and received tribute, and this is known and is publicly held, and which this witness himself knows, for it is what I saw with my own eyes . . . for they were persons of great knowledge and by the government they held, though possessing no written word, they ruled like the Romans in ancient times.11

  The subject tribes and communities possessed also a similar government of their ayllus, clans, and in the veneration of their ancestors: spirits whom they believed would appear as sparks in the fires of their hearths, or in their huacas, guarded by the nature spirits of the mountains, trees, water and stones. Even in death it was a society governed by order and contained by an earthly structure that bound the supernatural to the living world. The Inca lords, who the conquistadors would call orejones because of the gold ear ornaments they wore, and who resided in the city’s 3,000 to 4,000 stone wall dwellings, were trained as administrators or as commanders of the imperial army either to expand the borders of the empire or to suppress the various tribal rebellions that would continue unabated even after the arrival of the Spaniards. Along Cuzco’s lower valley and river of the Huatanay were housed the yanacona, the nomadic caste of servant labourers, responsible for the cleaning of the city’s streets and the maintenance of its buildings. Also populating the lower valley were the mitimae, communities of subject tribes, who lived under the rule of their caciques, and who in their thousands had been brought to Cuzco from their tribal lands, and in a rotary system of tributary labour, known as mita, would serve in the four suyos, regions, of the empire: in either agriculture, mining or as warriors. An example of their service was given by the grandson of the great warrior chief Cariapasa, Lord of the Lupaca, from the northwestern shores of Lake Titicaca,12 who recorded that some 5,000 warriors of his nation had died under his grandfather’s leadership in the army of the Emperor Huayna Cápac in the northern region of Tumibamba. As tribute, he declared, his people’s children had been sacrificed in the Inca huacas, the daughters of their chiefs taken for their concubines and the men of the tribe forced to serve as mitimae.

  The lesser blood tie of Inca lords, among them tribal leaders from other nations, who were granted the privilege and status of Incas, were the administrators of the general government of the suyos, supervising the maintenance of its roads which covered an area of some 14,000 miles.13 They were also responsible for overseeing its tambos, rest houses, fortresses and toll bridges, and the distribution of the empire’s tribute: the crops, minerals, materials and clothing stored in the warehouses, and accounted for by the quipucamayoc, recorders, on their quipu, coloured string chords, which were used for numeration and also to record astronomical and magical formulae. The Conquistador recalled that their usage had been handed down from father to son for some 300 y
ears, and that they also chronicled the Inca genealogies and historical events, the quantity of crops and every article that was transported or stored in the warehouses, and even the measurements of the construction of buildings, ‘something that merits great admiration and is difficult to believe for those who have not examined them, or witnessed their usage’.14 Trains of llamas transported the empire’s produce on the four principal stone paved roads that led from its provinces to Cuzco, the Chinchasuyo to the north, the Cuntisuyo to the west, the Antisuyo to the east and the Collasuyo to the south. All told some 200,000 people, in an area of some 40 square miles, helped sustain the life flow of the Inca capital15 and the administration of its provinces, as recorded by an anonymous conquistador who had settled in the Collasuyo region of Bolivia:

  The cacique Cápac Apo Ninarua, of Antisuyo. (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno)

  The cacique Mallca Castilla Pari, of Collasuyo. (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno)

  In each of their provinces the Incas had governors, ruling with great account and order . . . there were others of lesser rank who were known as sayapayas: inspectors who gathered the ordinances of the Inca and of the realm, The cacique Mallca Castilla Pari, of visiting the storehouses and herds [of llamas] that belonged to the sun and to the Inca. And they would also inspect the mamacuna [virgins of the sun] and the veneration and sacrifices they would offer the sun and to the huacas, which were the idols they worshipped. In each village were located storehouses of every item and produce . . . for laziness and vagabondage were severely punished, and all laboured in the produce of these goods; and in the lands where maize was unable to grow, storehouses of chuño [dehydrated potatoes] were kept, as were other produce from each region, none of which were consumed unless in times of war or need: then they would be distributed with great order . . . the Inca [lords] who would visit the governors of the provinces would be received with great honour, as if they were the Inca [Emperor] himself, and they would be informed of all the labour commanded of the people . . . and those [caciques] who had served the Incas well would be rewarded with women and servants, livestock and fine clothing, and be granted the privilege of being carried in litters or hammocks, and be given yanaconas for that purpose; they would also be given the right to use parasols and be served with bowls and plates of gold and silver: something no one could make use of without the authority of the Inca . . . these privileges would also be granted them when they came to Cuzco each year with their tribute from as far as Chile or the Charcas . . . in the month and moon of May, which was known as Aymorayquilla, all the principal caciques from the different suyos would assemble before the emperor in the great square of Cuzco with their tribute of gold, silver, clothing, livestock . . . and also their tribute of women . . . after which they would hold their feasting and perform their ceremonies and sacrifices . . .16