other and began a harangue which, clumsily translated by an
Indian boy, the Inca hardly understood. But in a few moments he
realized that this uncouth jargon was meant to convey an
arrogant demand that he acknowledge himself a vassal of Charles
V and submit to baptism. With haughty surprise, he threw down
the book Valverde tried to force into his hand. The priest
shouted: ‘Fall on, Castilians—I absolve you!’ and into the
helpless crowd burst a murderous fire from the doors of the
houses all around. Aghast and bewildered by this display of
powers which to them seemed necromantic, the survivors
nevertheless stood manfully to the attack of the mail-clad
horsemen who rode into the huddled masses, ferociously slashing
and slaughtering. The Indians strove desperately to drag the
Spaniards from the horses with their naked hands and interposed
a living wall of human flesh between the murderers and their
beloved sovereign. At length Pizarro’s own hands snatched
Atahualpa from the litter. The Indian soldiers outside, hearing
the firearms and the noise of the struggle, tried to force their
way into the square, but the Spanish musketry and cannon mowed
them down by hundreds and they fled before the charges of the
cavalry, dispersing in the twilight.”
Atahualpa was then confined in a small stone house adjoining the palace
of the Virgins of the Sun (the latter is now a convent, occupied by
Sisters of Charity), and every precaution possible under the
circumstances was taken to prevent his rescue. Pizarro’s next move in
the conquest was to murder him. But, in the meanwhile, he had suggested
in conversations with his prisoner that Huascar’s followers would
probably take advantage of the opportunity afforded by his capture to
reorganize their scattered forces and make an effort to regain the
throne; he had hinted, too, at the advisability of arbitration, and
Atahualpa had taken alarm and secretly ordered Huascar’s execution;
whereupon Pizarro had feigned the greatest indignation and had contrived
to frighten his victim into offering his famous ransom. “I will fill
this room with gold,” he said, “as high as I can reach, if only you will
liberate me.” (The room in which he was confined was 32 feet 9 inches
long, 20 feet 9 inches wide, and 10 feet 9 inches high.) Pizarro
accepted, a truce was agreed upon, Atahualpa ordered all preparations
for war on the Spaniards to be suspended, and arranged for the
collection of the gold. When the amount stipulated for was at last
assembled, it was found to have a value equivalent to more than
seventeen millions of dollars in our currency. Some historians say much
more. Dawson, for instance, says it was more than twenty-two millions.
One-fifth was sent to the royal treasury in Spain and the rest was
divided among the adventurers. The share of the private soldiers even
was large enough to make each of them rich for life.
Nevertheless, Pizarro had not performed his part of the agreement by
setting his prisoner at liberty. Whether or not he had ever intended to
can only be conjectured. It is clear only that, even if he did enter
into the agreement in bad faith, as was charged by the chroniclers, he
was afterward confronted by a problem which, in the opinion of recent
writers, justified his perfidious behavior. Quizquiz, the general whose
ability had enabled Atahualpa so often to defeat his late rival, was
known to have taken the field with a large body of troops. Could a man
such as Atahualpa had proven himself to be, released and at the head of
a great army once more, be expected to permit these foreigners, who had
so treacherously captured him and slain his attendants while on a
friendly visit, to depart in peace with their loot? It did not seem
likely. On the other hand, retreat through a then hostile country with
the prisoner still in custody was out of the question, and, if he should
continue to hold him in Cajamarca, Quizquiz, who had only been awaiting
the word, would no longer hesitate to attack.
No; a bold _coup de main_ of some sort was imperative. If Atahualpa
could be gotten rid of altogether, for instance, there was a chance, in
the confusion that must follow, to reach Cuzco and form an alliance with
the partisans of the murdered Inca, with a view to ousting the usurper’s
party and restoring the throne to the legitimate line. Such a chance had
only to exist to be appreciated by one so clear-sighted and audacious as
Pizarro. It was his life and his friends’—and, of course, the Indian
treasure—against only the life of Atahualpa, and the prisoner’s fate was
sealed. There was a mock trial, wherein he was convicted of the murder
of Huascar, conspiracy against the Spaniards, and other high crimes and
misdemeanors, and then he was strangled to death in the public
square—strangled rather than burned, says Hawthorne, as an act of grace,
in consideration of his having professed at the last the Christian
faith.
Some weeks before this, Almagro had joined the Conquistadores at
Cajamarca with reinforcements that brought the Spanish force up to about
five hundred. As soon as Atahualpa had been disposed of, the commander,
with all his men, began his advance, by forced marches, on Cuzco, an
advantageous position near which he was fortunate enough to secure
without having encountered Quizquiz, though some of the cavalry under De
Soto were engaged by a detachment on the way; all efforts to interpose
the main body of the Indian army were frustrated by their speed.
However, though “the true heir to the crown was a second son of Huayna
Capac, named Manco, a legitimate brother of the unfortunate Huascar,”
says Prescott, “Pizarro had too little knowledge of the disposition of
this prince and he made no scruple to prefer Toparca, a young brother of
Atahualpa and to present him to the Indian nobles as their future Inca.”
So, to make assurance doubly sure, he did not, before he set out,
announce his purpose of driving off the enemies of the rightful heir,
but took the boy with him, “attended by a numerous retinue of vassals
and moving in as much state and ceremony as if in possession of regal
power.” Before they reached Cuzco, much to Pizarro’s chagrin, the boy
fell sick and died.
But the misfortune was soon repaired, for, sure enough, when the
adventurers went into camp outside the walls of the capital, no less a
personage than Manco Capac II himself called on the commander in person
and proposed the hoped-for alliance; and, just a year from the day he
had taken Cajamarca, he entered Cuzco as the protector of the real Inca,
whose coronation he permitted to be celebrated with all the splendor of
the ancient rites. The Indians of central Peru hailed him as their
deliverer from the tyranny of the usurper. Manco Capac, for his part,
soon assembled a great army, and, with the help of some of the
Spaniards, decisively defeated Quizquiz and drove him back to Ecuador.
VIII
But there was a sad awakening in store for the Inca on his return from
that victorious campaign. He had permitted these allies of
his—rapacious, recklessly daring as they were, and unscrupulous, cruel,
and fanatical in their attitude toward infidels—to obtain a foothold in
the very capital of the empire. And what manner of man was it of whom
the great body of his subjects was made up? He was brave,
yes—physically; he could fight, and conquer, too, when ably led, but
also he was morally utterly irresponsible, “a slave,” as Mozans puts it,
“utterly devoid of energy and individual initiative,” accustomed to look
to the ruling class for guidance, to regard the Inca “with superstitious
awe, as a being of a superior order.” Centuries of despotic government,
rigid religious ritual, communal ownership of property, and labor, not
for himself but for the commonwealth, had robbed him of all ambition and
instilled into him the habit of accepting with patient resignation
whatever fate might decree.
And now, after all these centuries of complaisance, what must have been
his mental attitude at the end of such a succession of events? First,
the late legitimate Inca Huascar, omnipotent as he was supposed to have
been, directly descended from the Sun-God and Moon-Mother themselves,
had been overthrown and put to death by an illegitimate rival. Then that
rival, also of the Inca blood, had in his turn been captured in the very
face of his army, and put to death despite another and much greater
army, by a little band of mysterious strangers, against whose mail-clad
bodies the battle-axes and spears of the Indians had been
powerless—strangers who had made fierce, “fleet-footed monsters”
(horses) subservient to their will and who carried terrible weapons that
went off with a noise like thunder and vomited fire and smoke, and with
which they killed their enemies before they could come near enough to
get in a blow. Had not these invincible strangers, and apparently by
supernatural means, overcome even the legitimate Inca’s conqueror?
Surely, then, they must be some still superior order of beings, sent by
the Sun-God to accomplish some wonderful purpose. Therefore they must be
obeyed. Pizarro himself could not have created a people more suited to
the carrying out of his designs had he had the power.
Probably realizing this, he promptly abandoned all subterfuge. As a
consideration for the help he had been given in the campaign against
Quizquiz, the Inca had been induced by stress of circumstances to
acknowledge the supremacy of the King of Spain. It was only as a matter
of form, he had been led to believe, but Pizarro now exacted the fullest
compliance. As Adelantado by appointment of the overlord, he established
a municipal council to govern the city, transformed the great temple
into a church, made use of certain of the public buildings as officers’
quarters and barracks for the soldiers, seized all the treasure that was
to be found—even the private dwellings and tombs were searched and
stripped of it—and required the authorities to supply troops and
carriers to accompany the exploring parties he sent out. “Pizarro, on
entering Cuzco, had issued an order forbidding any soldier to offer
violence to the dwellings of the inhabitants,” says Prescott:
“But the palaces were numerous and the troops lost no time in
plundering them of their contents as well as in despoiling the
religious edifices. The interior decorations supplied them with
considerable booty. They stripped off the jewels and rich
ornaments that garnished the royal mummies in the temple of
Coricancha. Indignant at the concealment of their treasures,
they put the inhabitants, in some instances, to the torture and
endeavored to extort from them a confession of their hiding
places. They invaded the repose of the sepulchers, in which the
Peruvians often deposited their valuable effects, and compelled
the grave to give up its dead. No place was left unexplored by
the rapacious conquerors, and they occasionally stumbled on a
mine of wealth that rewarded their labors. In a cavern near the
city they found a number of vases, richly embossed with figures
of serpents, locusts, and other animals. Among the spoils were
four golden llamas and ten or twelve statues of women, as large
as life, some of gold, others of silver, ‘which merely to see,’
says one of the conquerors, with some naïveté, ‘was truly a
great satisfaction.’... The magazines were stored with curious
commodities—richly tinted robes of cotton and feather work, gold
sandals and slippers of the same material, for the women, and
dresses composed entirely of beads of gold.’... In one place,
for example, they met with ten planks or bars of solid silver,
each piece twenty feet in length, one foot in breadth, and two
or three inches thick. They were intended to decorate the
dwelling of an Inca noble.... The amount of booty is stated
variously by those present at the division of it. According to
some, it considerably exceeded the ransom of Atahualpa.”
Fully appreciating also the desirability of establishing a capital of
his own at some strategic point much more easily accessible from Panama,
Pizarro made a careful study of routes and possible sites and finally
chose one beside the river Rimac, on a fertile, elevated plain near the
base of the Cordillera, only about three leagues from one of the best
harbors on the coast, and at the point where the Inca military road
began its ascent to the plateau. Here, only about a year after he
entered Cuzco, he founded _La Ciudad de los Reyes_ (the City of the
Kings), so named in honor of the Three Kings or Wise Men of the East,
because their feast day, Epiphany, occurred at that season of the year.
Soon it became known as Lima. “Before the erection of a single house was
permitted,” he had a plan drawn up, Mozans tells us, providing for large
squares and streets unusually wide, “and in making this plan he had in
view, not the small number (only sixty-nine) of those who were then
prepared to make their homes there, but the future greatness of ‘The
Empire City of the New World.’ Moreover, as the city had to be in God
and for God and in His name—_en Dios y por Dios y en su nombre_—to use
his own words, work was first begun on the church, which was named
_Nuestra Señora de la Asunción_. The first stone and the first pieces of
timber were put in place by the hands of the Adelantado himself, who
wished, like the other Conquistadores, to emphasize his zeal for
religion and his devotion to _La Santissima Virgen, Madre de Dios_.”
In the meanwhile his brother Hernando had gone to Spain with the King’s
fifth of the loot, and on the way had spread the news. Once more all was
excitement on the Isthmus. It was not long before Pizarro’s forces were
augmented by three or four hundred soldiers that had been led into
Ecuador by Pedro de Alvarado, Governor of Guatemala, who consented to
abandon his expedition when persuaded by Almagro, who went at once to
meet him, that he was trespassing on Pizarro’s preserves, for which act
of grace the Spanish King added the province of Honduras to Alvarado’s
jurisdiction, and Almagro gave him a large sum of money; and, when
communication was established between Lima and Panama by sea,
adventurers of every degree began to flock to the new city as they had
before to Mexico and Central America.
This enabled Almagro, with an army of nearly six hundred Spaniards and
fifteen thousand Indians, the latter under the command of one of the
Inca’s brothers, to make an excursion into Chile for purposes of
exploration, for it had been agreed that he should have the southern
half of the territory they might conquer and Pizarro the northern.
Sebastian de Benalcázar, another of Pizarro’s lieutenants, went to
Ecuador with a force of two hundred Spaniards and a large Indian
contingent and completed the defeat of Atahualpa’s adherents, took
possession of Quito and founded the city of Guayaquil at the mouth of
the Guayas River, which provided for that country, too, independent
access from the sea.
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL AT LIMA, BUILT BY PIZARRO.]
Also by this time any illusions the Inca may have had as to the
continuance of the ancient dynasty under the protection of the Spaniards
were dispelled. By this time even his complaisant subjects must have
discovered that these superhuman deliverers, as they had thought them,
were mere men—or else, if they were indeed a different order of beings,
that order, they must have concluded, was infernal rather than divine.
The sovereignty of the Inca had become little more than a fiction. As in
the islands of the Caribbean and elsewhere, the fairest lands in the
country had been divided into vast estates and great numbers of natives
practically reduced to slavery and set to work them for the benefit of
their new masters. With respect to their treatment in general, though
Pizarro himself seems to have been guilty of few acts of wanton cruelty,
he either could not, or did not if he could, restrain the oppression of
them by his followers. If their behavior was not quite as atrocious as
that of other Spaniards toward the tribes in the north, there was an
utter lack of considerateness in it and disregard of their property and
rights that galled even them.
Roused at last, the Inca took advantage of the opportunity afforded by
the scattering of the Spanish force and made his escape from Cuzco,
where Hernando Pizarro and his younger brothers Juan and Gonzalo were in
command, and, finding his subjects ripe for revolt, had no difficulty in
raising two large armies. One he sent against the Adelantado, who was in
Lima; with the other he returned to Cuzco and took the great citadel of
Sacsahuaman, overlooking the town, and began a siege that was to last
more than six months, and during which Juan Pizarro was killed in an
attempt to recapture the citadel. The army that went to the coast was
ambushed and defeated by the Spaniards and their local adherents before
ever it reached Lima. All that what was left of it could do was to
prevent the sending of reinforcements to Cuzco despite the desperate
straits to which the Spanish force there was reduced. Pizarro was
himself compelled to send to the Isthmus for help. Just before it was
too late, however, he managed to get away two hundred and fifty men to
the relief of his brothers, and just at that juncture also, Almagro, on
his way back from Chile, turned up with his followers, and, caught
between Cuzco and these two new detachments of the enemy, the Inca was
overwhelmed and concluded to retire into the wild region of Vilcabamba,
where the Spaniards could not follow with any hope of success, and there
held out for some years. But with his retreat all that remained of the
Inca dominion came to an end. There were a few other attempts, but
neither he nor his descendants ever succeeded in recovering the throne.
As for Almagro, he had had a frightful experience during his excursion
into Chile and had met with nothing but disappointment and disaster. The
route unwittingly chosen had been over the bleak Bolivian plateaux and
across the mountains where the Cordillera reaches its highest, at a
season when the passes are buried in snow and swept by furious storms,
and his men had perished by thousands, some of the best of his Spaniards
among the number. When he had at last made his way to the beautiful
central valley between the Cordillera and the coast range and down to
the river Maule, he had found nothing of the opulence of Peru, but only
a poor but brave, warlike people who in a fierce battle had succeeded in
checking his advance. And now, disgusted with this country of his to the
south, he returned and made claim to Cuzco as being within his half of
the conquered territory and demanded of the Pizarros its surrender. On
their refusal, he promptly carried it by assault, made Hernando and
Gonzalo his prisoners, and went out to meet the troops that had been
sent to their relief by the Adelantado and defeated them.
And then, as Hawthorne puts it, “had he cut off the heads of both of
these gentlemen on the spot, he would have saved himself years of
struggle, with a death on the scaffold at the end of them. But he was
not of the right fiber for the work that was laid upon him; he was not
what the English would call ‘thorough’”; he temporized and listened to
his wily associate. “Civil disturbances went on for eleven years,”
continues Hawthorne, “‘in the course of which,’ as Professor Fiske
remarks, ‘all the principal actors were swept off the stage as in some
cheap blood-and-thunder tragedy. It is not worth while to recount the
petty incidents of the struggle—how Almagro was at one moment ready to
submit to arbitration and the next refused to abide by the decision; how
Hernando was set at liberty and Gonzalo escaped; how Almagro’s able
lieutenant, Rodrigo de Orgoñez, won a victory over Pizarro’s men at
Abancay but was totally defeated by Hernando Pizarro at Las Salinas and
perished on the field; how at last Hernando had Almagro tried for
sedition and summarily executed. On which side was the more violence and
treachery it would be hard to say. Indeed, as Sir Arthur Helps observes,
“in this melancholy struggle it is difficult to find anybody whom the
reader can sympathize much with.”’”
Then, once more Francisco Pizarro entered Cuzco in triumph, this time
wearing an ermine robe that had been presented to him by Hernando
Cortés, and again he devoted himself to organizing his government and
extending the Spanish dominion over the distant provinces. The number of
his compatriots had increased to eight thousand. Gonzalo was appointed
Governor of Quito, from whence he strayed to make a disastrous journey
down the eastern slope of the Andes in search of the mythical Eldorado,
which he did not find, but which resulted in the discovery of and voyage
down the Amazon, from the mountains to the sea, by Francisco de
Orellana, his second in command. Hernando went to Bolivia to search for
the mines from which the Incas were supposed to have gotten their
wealth, a labor that was rewarded by the discovery of Potosí, which has
yielded more than two billions of ounces of silver—_and silver and gold
were of equal value in Europe in those days_. Pedro de Valdivia
undertook the conquest of Chile and Alonso de Alvarado, one of the most
generous and humane of the Conquistadores, that of the mountains of
northern Peru. The Adelantado himself traveled over most of the empire,
founding cities at strategic points in the more populous and fertile
valleys, among them Arequipa, and here in Bolivia as in the country
about Cuzco he divided the most desirable of the lands into
_repartimientos_ and apportioned them among his favorites.
In the meanwhile Almagro’s adherents, helpless and impoverished, were
burning with envy of their more fortunate comrades, who were, by favor
of the successful rival, rapidly enriching themselves with Indian
tribute and gold and silver taken from the mines. At last, unable to
stand it, they sent the news of their leader’s illegal execution to
Spain, with a demand for justice against the Pizarros. The rest of the
story is told by Dawson as follows:
“The Spanish government was not unwilling to secure a selfish
advantage from the disputes among the original conquerors and
sent out Vaca de Castro to investigate and report. When the
Royal Commissioner arrived at Panama early in 1541, the latest
news from Peru was tranquilizing. Pizarro was busily engaged in
enlarging and beautifying Lima, in regulating the revenue and
the administration, in distributing ‘_encomiendas_,’ and in
restraining the rapacity of his Spaniards. However, Lima was
full of the ‘men of Chile,’ as Almagro’s adherents were called,
all bitter enemies of the Governor. They passed him in the
street without saluting, and their attitude was so menacing that
Pizarro received repeated warnings and was urged to banish them.
Absolutely incapable of personal fear, magnanimous when his
passions had not been aroused, he only replied: ‘Poor fellows.
They have had trouble enough. We will not molest them.’ He even
sent for Juan de la Rada—the guide, counselor, and guardian of
the young half-breed who was Almagro’s heir—and condescended to
try to argue him into a better frame of mind, saying, at
parting: ‘Ask me frankly what you desire;’ but the iron had
entered too deeply into Rada’s soul. He had already organized a
conspiracy to assassinate Pizarro.
“At noon, on Sunday, the 26th of June, 1541, Pizarro was sitting
at dinner in his house with twenty gentlemen, among them his
half-brother Francisco Alcantara, and several of the most
illustrious knights who had taken part in the conquest. The
great door into the public square was lying wide open. The
conspirators, to the number of a score, had assembled in a house
opposite. All of a sudden they rushed into the square fully
armed and carrying their swords naked in their hands. A young
page standing in front of the Governor’s house saw them and ran
back shouting: ‘To arms! All the men of Chile are coming to kill
the Marquis, our lord.’ The guests rose in alarm from the table
and all but half a dozen fled to the windows and dropped into
the garden. Pizarro threw off his gown and snatched up a sword,
while the valiant Francisco Chaves stepped forward through the
ante-room to dispute the passage at the staircase. The ferocious
crowd of murderers rushed up and laid him dead on the stairs.
Alcantara checked them for a few moments with his single sword,
but was soon forced back into the dining-room and fell pierced
with many thrusts. The old lion shouted from the inside: ‘What
shameful thing is this! Why do you wish to kill me?’ and, with a
cloak wrapped round one arm and his sword grasped in the other
hand, he rushed forward to meet his assassins and strike a blow
to avenge his brother before he himself should fall. Only two
faithful young pages remained at his side. Though over seventy
years of age, his practiced sword laid two of the crowd dead
before he was surrounded. The two boys were butchered, and, in
the mêlée, Pizarro received a mortal wound in his throat, and,
falling to the floor, made the sign of the cross on the boards”
(with his blood) “and kissed it. One of the ruffians had
snatched up an earthen water jar and with this pounded out the
old man’s brains as he lay prostrate, disdaining to ask for
mercy.