reversed south of the equator, it must be remembered) and the fleet,
without the _Santiago_, which had been wrecked, proceeded to the south.
After experiencing much more bad weather, they made Cape Virgins on the
21st of October and entered a large bay, which was flanked by lofty
mountains, crowned with glaciers and snow. This at last was the entrance
to the passage, but at that very point one of the vessels, the _San
Antonio_, seized an opportunity to make its escape and return to Spain.
“For five weeks,” as Hawthorne relates, “the remaining three ships wound
along through the tortuous channel. Provisions were running short, yet
Magellan would not turn back ‘even if he had to eat the leather off the
ships’ yards.’ At length his persistence was rewarded by a sight of the
open sea. ‘When,’ to quote Richard Eden, ‘the Capitayne was past the
strayght and saw the way open to the mayne sea, he was so gladde thereof
that for joy the teares fell from his eyes and he named the poynte of
the lande from whense he first saw that sea Cape Desiderato.’ And the
broad ocean which lay before him was so calm, after his many stormful
days, that he called it the Pacific.”
“But months of a voyage as trying as any they had encountered still lay
before them,” Hawthorne goes on. “Could the planet be so vast? Until
December they kept a northerly course, then struck out boldly across the
unknown waste. They ran across one or two islands, but erelong were
swallowed up in the seemingly endless immensity of ocean. They were
reduced to the utmost extremities for food and water; scurvy broke out;
nineteen men died and thirty were too ill to work. Finally, on the 6th
of March, they reached the Ladrone Islands, so named because of the
thievishness of the natives. Here they got fruit and other food, and the
worst was over. Ten days later the Philippines were sighted and Magellan
knew the extent of his achievement. He had sailed round the world.
Happier than Columbus, he did not survive this mightiest exploit of his
time; in a fight with the natives the great sailor was killed.”
Only one of the little vessels ever got back to Spain. Returning by way
of Africa, she arrived at the Guadalquivir in September, a year after
she had set out, and with but eighteen survivors of the expedition.
“What a picture!” the historian exclaims—“those eighteen seaworn
mariners in their battered craft, survivors of the greatest feat of
navigation that has ever been performed. What a poem is their story,
what an event in the history of mankind! What reward did Magellan have?
None that mortal could bestow. He was dead and his wife and son had also
died. Del Cano, the captain of the ship, was given a crest, with the
legend, on a terrestrial globe, ‘_Primus circumdedisti me_,’ together
with a pension of five hundred ducats, and Espinosa was likewise
pensioned and ennobled. But every mariner who sails the seas knows
Magellan and the story of his exploit, and mankind accords him the honor
that Spain could not bestow. Of all the great explorers, he is perhaps
the one whose character and deeds we can contemplate with the most
unalloyed satisfaction.”
IV
Until the great Dutch navigator, Willim Cornelis Schouten, found the way
around Cape Horn nearly a hundred years later, however, no practical
advantage over her rival resulted to Spain from Magellan’s
discoveries—so far as trade with the East Indies was concerned, that is.
The passage through the Strait was too perilous for sailing vessels, the
distance across the Pacific too great. Yet only a year before Magellan
set out on his famous voyage an era began in her new possessions that
was to pour into her coffers a stream of gold in comparison with which
the profits Portugal was deriving from her trade with the Orient seemed
trivial. For in that year Hernando Cortés, the greatest soldier and
statesman Spain ever sent to the new world, began his conquest of
Mexico.
Except for the spirit of emulation it inspired, except for the knowledge
it brought of the existence in the newly discovered countries of a
people less barbarous than the aborigines of the Antilles, of mines that
were worth while and of enormous hoards of treasure, the story of that
conquest has no place in the history of South America, and, therefore,
will not be gone into here. It is related somewhere as an interesting
commentary that in an obscure little house in the City of Mexico still
lives a modest, well-educated gentleman who is directly descended from
the Emperor of the Aztecs. Señor Montezuma entertains no hope of a
restoration, it is said, but quietly accepts the meager pension allowed
him by the present government, while the heirs of Cortés receive immense
revenues from their Mexican estates and the Marquis del Valle, as the
present-day Cortés is called, lives in luxury and is a man of influence
and power in the land.
In 1526, Sebastian Cabot was commissioned by the King of Spain to locate
the Papal meridian in America and then to follow in Magellan’s track and
determine the corresponding longitude on the Asiatic side; but, when he
put in at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, he heard rumors of a great
and wealthy people who dwelt near the headwaters of the river—rumors
like those Grijalva had heard respecting the Aztecs and which had led to
the Mexican conquest by Cortés; only these wonderful accounts were of a
South American empire. In proof of what they said, the Indians of the
Plata exhibited silver ornaments that had passed from hand to hand from
the highlands of Bolivia and Peru, along the river to the Atlantic; and,
too strongly tempted to resist, and trusting that the discovery of the
rich mines from which this silver came would excuse their disobedience,
Cabot and his company abandoned their survey and spent three years
exploring and prospecting along the Uruguay and Paraná as far north as
the present site of the city of Asunción. As their forces and provisions
were inadequate to enable them to penetrate farther, the search was in
vain; and so, having found, on their return to a fort they had
established, that it had been taken by the Indians and the garrison
massacred, Cabot abandoned the effort and went back to Spain to make
what explanation he could.
The news of this supposed encroachment, added to the ever increasing
poaching of the French, proved what was needed to stimulate the
Portuguese at last to make a serious attempt at colonization in Brazil.
One Christovão Jaques and a few settlers had already established a small
sugar factory in the neighborhood of the present site of Pernambuco, and
it had been found that much of the land in the northern part of the
country was admirably adapted to the cultivation of that staple, the
demand for which in Europe was constantly increasing. Five vessels were
sent out, therefore, under the command of Martim Affonso da Souza. Early
in 1531 he drew near Cape St. Roque, captured three French ships laden
with brazil wood, sent part of his own fleet north to explore the coast
beyond, and with the other ships sailed south and dropped anchor near
the site of what is now the great coffee port of Santos. There he
established São Vicente, the first permanent colony in Brazil.
There also they came across one João Ramalho, a former sailor who had
been put ashore for mutiny years before by a ship on its way to India
and was living among the natives of the neighborhood with his half-breed
children. Glad enough to welcome his countrymen, he disposed the Indians
to peace and showed the Portuguese the way up the mountains to the vast
plateau that begins only a few miles from the sea. There, near the
present site of São Paulo, was founded another settlement, from whence
they could stretch out in all directions over what was destined to
become the greatest coffee-producing country in the world.
A year or two afterward, encouraged by Da Souza’s success, Duarte Coelho
set out with a carefully selected and more numerous company and founded
the colony of Pernambuco. Here, as in the south, the country back of the
coast was fertile and easily accessible and there was little trouble
with the Indians. Sugar planting proved wonderfully profitable, Coelho
turned out to be a good manager, and so politic was he in the relations
with the mother country that within a few years the colony had become
self-supporting and, like the other, possessed of all the elements of
permanence and prosperity. Soon afterward São Salvador da Bahia was
established. With such a beginning, it was not long before the
Portuguese began flocking to Brazil as the Spaniards had to the
Caribbean.
V
In the meanwhile in this region of the Caribbean much progress had been
made. Towns had been built, not only in Española, but in Cuba, Jamaica,
Porto Rico and in Darien and other places on the Isthmus, landed estates
(_repartimientos_) had been apportioned, as rewards for services, among
such as desired to cultivate them, mining rights had been allotted.
These plantations and the mines were being worked by natives impressed
into slavery, some of the communities had become large and thriving, in
Spain a Council of the Indies and in the islands local governmental
tribunals (_Real Audiencias_) had been created.
Whole fleets of ships plied back and forth across the Atlantic, those
setting out from Spain laden with implements of agriculture and war,
clothes, and fresh companies of adventurers, coming over as colonists,
or to continue the work of conquest and the search for treasure; those
returning, laden with the products of the tropics and with gold and
precious stones. Emeralds had been found near the coast of Colombia, and
Balboa had discovered in the Gulf of San Miguel—that famous group of
islands where, as Mozans tells us, “pearls were so common that the
natives used them for adorning the paddles of their canoes”—pearls “as
large as filberts and of exceeding beauty of form and luster,” many of
which, “found in the same fisheries a short time subsequently, at once
took place among the largest and most perfect of the world’s gems.”
Nevertheless, neither there nor anywhere else in the Caribbean region,
had any vast wealth and civilization comparable to that of the Mexicans
been discovered. Balboa, however, had married, according to the Indian
custom, the daughter of a _cacique_ (native chief), and, being in the
confidence of the Indians of his province, had heard rumors, even before
the conquest of Mexico, of a rich and powerful empire to the south (the
same that were afterward heard by Cabot); and, after he had been
succeeded as Governor by his jealous rival, the notorious Pedrarias
Davila, was commissioned to take charge of an expedition to go in search
of it. Already he had accomplished the unheard-of task of taking four
ships to pieces on the Caribbean shore, transporting them across the
Isthmus and reconstructing them on the shore of San Miguel, and, when
about to sail, had been arrested by order of Pedrarias, tried on a
charge of treason, and executed before he could appeal to Spain. Some
years later, having forestalled his great rival in that summary way,
Pedrarias entrusted the venture to one Francisco Pizarro, an
opportunist, without money, rank, or credit, and then nearly fifty years
old, yet one who startled the world by an achievement equaled only by
Cortés’ own.
Francisco Pizarro had been but a swineherd in his boyhood, but later had
served under Gonzolo de Cordova (_El Gran Capitan_) in that splendid
body of infantrymen which fought its way to the foremost rank in Europe,
and was a son, too, though an illegitimate one, of a Spanish officer of
noble blood. For such a man, as Dawson says, “an admirable soldier,
conscious that he possessed powers of the highest order yet hopelessly
handicapped in old Europe by his base birth and illiteracy, the
discovery of the new world opened up a field for his talents” that led
him “eagerly to embrace the opportunity to embark with Alonso de Ojeda
in 1509 for the Darien gold mines.” His first appearance in history is
as a member of the party that went with Balboa to search for the
Pacific; afterward he was among the first of “the adventurers that
flocked to the new city of Panama, looking over the mysterious sea, like
a pack of wolves eager for a share in the spoils of its unknown shores;”
later he happened to be the officer chosen by Pedrarias for Balboa’s
arrest.
As he had no funds of his own, and since it was the custom of the times
for the Conquistadores who undertook such expeditions to do so at their
own expense, he associated with him a priest named Hernando de Luque,
who had some capital, and Diego de Almagro, a soldier of still more
advanced age but of ability and good reputation. It was agreed that the
Padre de Luque should contribute the funds, that Almagro should attend
to the collecting and forwarding of troops and supplies, and that
Pizarro himself should have the active command. Whereupon they bought
one of the ships that had been carried across the Isthmus by Balboa and
set out on their first expedition in 1524. As so frequently occurred in
such cases, however, inadequacy of provisions caused the venture to
fail.
[Illustration: FRANCISCO PIZARRO.]
Eighteen months later they sailed again, with a much larger stock of
supplies and this time with 160 men. For hundreds of miles they found
nothing but the same swampy, forest-clad wastes along the Colombian
shore, inhabited only by naked tribes of savages. Pizarro’s disheartened
companions, too ready to believe that the country they were seeking was
but a myth, would have had him return; but one day the pilot, who had
been sent on ahead, suddenly reappeared with the news that he had
penetrated south of the equator and had there met a large trading raft
on its way north, bearing cloth, silver work, vases, and other things
pertaining to civilization and manned by a crew that wore clothes. These
men, the pilot reported, had told him that they came from a town called
Tumbez, which lay in a fertile valley behind a penetrable coast—that the
whole interior of the country was inhabited by a civilized people,
subjects of an emperor whose capital was a great city, high up in the
mountains still farther south. On this confirmation of their hopes, the
commander succeeded in inducing his men to push on until they had
reached nearly as far as the northern boundary of Ecuador, where he
landed most of the company on an island called Gallo and sent Almagro
back to Panama for more provisions and supplies.
At Gallo the climate proved unhealthful; fevers soon decimated the
party; even their clothes were rotted by the almost incessant rains and
steamy heat, and, as though that were not enough, when the Governor
learned from members of the crew who had returned that the men were
being held there against their will, he flew into a rage, instead of
sending supplies and reinforcements, and despatched a ship to bring back
all who wished to desert. Only emboldened by these misfortunes, Pizarro
“drew his sword and traced a line with it on the sand from east to
west,” says Montesino in his _Anales del Perú_. “Then, turning toward
the south, ‘Friends and comrades,’ he said, ‘on that side are toil,
hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this
side, ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here Panama
and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian.
For my part, I go to the south,’ and, so saying, he stepped across the
line.” He was followed by the pilot Ruiz, a Greek cavalier named de
Candia, and only eleven others. There is, indeed, as Prescott comments—
“Something striking to the imagination in the spectacle of those
few brave spirits consecrating themselves to a daring enterprise
that seemed as far above their strength as any recorded in the
fabulous annals of knight-errantry. A handful of men, without
food, without clothing, almost without arms, without knowledge
of the land to which they were bound, without even a vessel to
transport them, were left there on a rock in the ocean with the
avowed purpose of carrying on a crusade against a powerful
empire, staking their lives on its success. What is there in the
legends of chivalry that surpasses it?”
For weary months they awaited the return of Almagro with the provisions,
and the moment they arrived set sail for the Gulf of Guayaquil. Landing
at Tumbez, says Dawson, “with their own eyes they saw confirmation of
what the Indians of the raft had told them. Irrigated fields, green with
beautiful crops, lined the river bank; eighty thousand people, all
comfortably housed, lived in the valley; commerce was flourishing; large
temples, profusely ornamented with gold and silver, testified to their
wealth and culture; the government was well ordered and stable, and the
people received the visitors with open-handed hospitality.” It is easy
enough to imagine with what longing eyes these forlorn adventurers who
had risked and endured so much must have gazed on such a scene as this!
Yet, concluding that his force was too small even for a raid, and
thinking it wiser, anyway, after what had happened, to be invested with
independent powers before making any attempt at a conquest, Pizarro made
his way back to Spain and related his experiences to the King, who was
so greatly impressed both with the story and the petitioner’s noble and
commanding presence that he did more than merely commission him to
undertake a new expedition: he legitimized him and created him marquis,
appointed him _Adelantado_ (governor) of such countries as he might
conquer, created Almagro marshal, and made the thirteen who had so
gallantly stood by them gentlemen of coat armor.
On Pizarro’s return to Panama, he brought with him a few kindred spirits
selected from among the very flower of the fighting men of the
Peninsula, including his brothers Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo and his
half-brother, Francisco Alcantara, his equals in valor if not in
audacity and intellect. And then, as he believed from what he had seen
of the fighting on the Isthmus, that a few scores of good men, mail-clad
and well provided with artillery and horses—for these, unknown in the
new world before the advent of the Spaniards, had never failed to strike
terror to the natives—would be as effective as thousands in overcoming
undisciplined masses of Indians, armed in their inferior fashion,
instead of attempting to assemble an army he got together only a small
company composed of men of whose courage and experience he was well
assured. Having arranged with Almagro to follow with what reinforcements
he could recruit from among the unemployed adventurers in Nicaragua, he
set out once more.
This time he happened to land first among the less civilized tribes in
Ecuador, where he had the good fortune to find a rich store of emeralds
and gold, which he sent back to Almagro to encourage him in his work.
Then, marching down the coast to Guayaquil, he crossed to the island of
Puna to await the reinforcements, conquered the fierce inhabitants of
the place, and was afterward joined by a detachment sent out by his
associate under the command of Hernando de Soto, an adventurer who had
served with Cortés in Mexico and was later to attain still greater fame
as the discoverer of the Mississippi. Even with those De Soto brought,
the whole force numbered less than two hundred and fifty.
Though they had not the faintest idea of it then, the empire they were
destined to bring under the Spanish sway covered a territory along the
plateaux and eastern and Pacific slopes of the Andes extending from
Quito in Ecuador to the river Maule in Chile, a distance of nearly three
thousand miles, inhabited by hardy and warlike races, that numbered,
according to the estimate of the early historians, somewhere near twenty
millions of people.
VI
So great was the empire of the Incas. But from whom were these
remarkable rulers descended who brought their people to a state of
civilization relatively so superior to that of the savages east of the
Andes? To what race did they belong? From whence did they originally
come—Europe or Asia?—and, if so, how did they get to South America? How
did they acquire the knowledge of the arts and sciences that they
possessed? “Students of archæology have essayed in vain to answer these
questions,” says Mozans. “All is still shrouded in mystery—in mystery
even darker than that which veils the advent of the Toltecs and Aztecs
to the valley of Anahuac, more profound than that which obscures the
first beginnings of the civilizations on the elevated Pamirs and in the
valleys of the Nile and Euphrates. In all this uncertainty and mystery,
however,” he adds,
“One fact seems to remain incontrovertible, and that is that
Manco Capac and Mama Oello” (the founders of the dynasty) “first
appeared on the shores of Lake Titicaca” (a body of water nearly
as large as Lake Erie, lying between the two main Cordillera of
the Andes in southeastern Peru, two miles and a half up above
the level of the sea). “On this point tradition and the
concurrent testimony of the earlier historians are practically
at one.... Another fact, too, is unquestioned. Whether Manco
Capac, the Minos of Peru, was of foreign or of native birth, it
is certain that he was able, in the space of thirty years, to
lay the foundation of that vast empire which, under the Inca
Yupanqui, extended its conquests to the Maule in Chile, and,
under Huayna Capac, planted its victorious banners above the
fortresses of the Shiri” (the _Cacique_ of the Caras), “in the
extended territory of Quito, and which gave its laws and
religion and language to hundreds of conquered tribes.”
“What is one to do with no historical records to study over?” asks
Hawthorne.
“The Aztecs did have some sort of writing, and, though we have
not yet learned how to read it, we may solace ourselves with the
hope that enlightenment may sometime come; but the people of the
Andes did not even use hieroglyphics. Their sole documents were
knotted strings. These strings, which they called _quipus_, were
of course merely aids to memory—in the same way that a knot in a
handkerchief enables a husband to remember the instructions his
wife gives him when he sets out for the city, and which could
not be written down in many pages.... Nevertheless, we have
traditions in plenty.... Starting with the reasonable assumption
that there must have been a very considerable past before the
Spaniards appeared, we may construct various more or less
plausible surmises, based on the Cyclopean architectural ruins
which are distributed about the country. Marvelous works they
are, though their form, and the carvings with which they are
decorated, are less impressive than their mere size and
weight.... It has been very generally thought that they were the
handiwork of the prehistoric Piruas; yet, since the Piruas are
prehistoric, it is not to be expected that much historic
information concerning them is obtainable.... The ruins had been
abandoned long before the Spaniards came and the Indians knew
nothing of their origin.”
“Still, it is indisputable,” he goes on to say,