The Conquistadors (41 page)

The mood of the camp was rapidly building up to the point where the men themselves would demand what Pizarro wanted most – to be rid of Atahualpa. The Inca had now become an encumbrance. He had served his purpose. The expedition had paid off. Pizarro had the gold. Now he wanted power. An empire was within his grasp, but as long as the Inca lived he constituted a rallying point for Indian resistance. His death had become both a political and a tactical necessity.

Pizarro's first move was to dispatch de Soto, the one man who might effectively oppose his plan, with a small force to Huamachuco, which rumour had again given as the place where the Indian forces were gathering. De Soto almost certainly undertook this mission voluntarily, since he was well disposed to Atahualpa and presumably took the view that the rumours were unfounded. With his departure the way was clear for Atahualpa's murder. But for the record Pizarro had still to make it appear that he was yielding to the demands of his men, and there must be legal justification. The first was not difficult to achieve. Rumour is an insidious weapon where men have been locked up too long in a camp high in a lonely, hostile world. For the second, the Inquisition had already provided the precedent. Thus, yielding, apparently reluctantly, to the clamour of his men, he set up a court, with himself and Almagro as judges. The twelve charges included usurpation of the royal
borla
of the Incas, the murder of Huáscar, incitement to insurrection, even misuse of the revenues of the crown following the conquest of his country by lavishing them on his family and friends. But the really vital charges were that he was an adulterer, in that he had many wives, and that he worshipped idols. Thus the case was given a religious twist – ‘a badly contrived and worse-written document, devised by a factious and unprincipled priest, a clumsy notary without conscience, and others of like stamp, who were all concerned in this villainy': that is the verdict of one Spanish writer. But he does not accuse Pizarro, the prime mover and stage manager of the whole horrid farce.

The ‘trial' was a summary one, the result a foregone conclusion. Atahualpa had the benefit of a ‘counsel', but the prosecutor had the benefit of Felipillo, who interpreted the answers given by Indian witnesses for his own ends. Atahualpa was found guilty, but of which charges we do not know. Certainly the religious
charges were proved, since the sentence was one of death by burning. However, Pizarro did not have it all his own way. Twelve of the Spanish captains, headed by the Chaves brothers of Trujillo, protested at this travesty of justice. They eventually acquiesced on grounds of expediency. ‘I myself saw the general weep', Pedro Pizarro writes. He could afford a few crocodile tears, for two hours after sundown on July 16, 1533,
⁷
Atahualpa was carried by torchlight to the stake.

It was a true
auto de je,
for when he realized that his body was to be consumed by fire – a fact which would damn him utterly in his life after death – he agreed to become a Christian in return for the kind favour of being garrotted. He was christened Juan de Atahualpa, and then strangled like a common criminal. Even his request that his body be taken to Quito was ignored. It was buried in the newly-constructed cemetery at Cajamarca, and his women, who according to Inca custom wished to die with him, were excluded from the funeral, which was held in the church of San Francisco, Pizarro and his officers all in deep mourning.

A few days later de Soto returned. There had been no gathering of Indian warriors at Huamachuco. No uprising had been planned. ‘I have met with nothing on the road but demonstrations of good will, and all is quiet.' Angrily he pointed out to Pizarro that if Atahualpa had to be brought to trial, then he should have been sent to stand his trial in Spain before the court of the Emperor. The argument was pointless. Atahualpa was dead.

Now at last the Spaniards were free to march on Cuzco. But it was as though at Cajamarca they had called down a curse upon themselves. The manner of Atahualpa's capture, the charade of his trial and execution may have been expedient, but it was also symbolic of the nature of these gold-hungry adventurers. Throughout the months when they had been waiting on the arrival of the ransom gold they had been living off the prudently accumulated wealth of the Indians, slaughtering something around 150 llamas a day as though there were no end to the flocks of these animals, plundering the army supply depot at Cajamarca for cloth, demanding and getting a steady supply of food from local chiefs. They
were men without thought to the future and the curse they carried with them was the curse of their own greed. They were embarked now upon the destruction of a whole brilliant civilization without possessing the organization to replace it with anything comparable.

At Jauja, Pizarro had Challcuchima put in irons on the grounds that it was he who had raised the country against them. The Spaniards were meeting with organized resistance now, but it was Atahualpa's death, not Challcuchima, that was the cause of it. Pizarro's proposed puppet Inca, Toparca, died mysteriously. Again Challcuchima was blamed. High in the lonely valley of Xaquixaguana, about a dozen miles north of Cuzco, Pizarro had him ‘tried' and burned at the stake.

On November 15, 1533, just a year after they had arrived at Cajamarca, the Spaniards entered the Inca capital. Here, and on the march, they accumulated a further 580,200 gold pesos' worth of loot, including ten planks of silver, twenty feet long, one foot broad and two or three inches thick. But now in their greed they were beginning to defraud their own Emperor, for the loot must have been considerably more valuable if, as Pedro Pizarro says, each of the 110 horsemen got 8,000 and each of the 460 soldiers 4,000 pesos. At Cuzco another puppet, a legitimate son of Huayna Capac, named Manco, was crowned with the
borla
as Inca, and shortly afterwards, on March 24, 1534, Cuzco was inaugurated as a Spanish settlement by the election of municipal officers. Two of Pizarro's brothers were among the eight
regidores,
Valverde became Bishop of Cuzco and Pizarro himself Governor of the whole province. Meanwhile, the war clouds were gathering. Quizquiz, the last of Atahualpa's generals, was finally moving to the attack. Almagro went out to meet him, accompanied by a large levy of warriors led by the new Inca. Since Quizquiz's force was composed mainly of men from the north, Manco and his warriors were eager for battle. Quizquiz retreated to Jauja, and there Almagro, that old war horse of countless battles, destroyed his army utterly. The wretched general fled to Quito and was finally murdered by his own men because he insisted on continuing a war which they regarded as futile.

His destruction should have marked the final pacification of Peru. Instead, the curse of Spanish greed was only just beginning to work.

The first sign of the terrible retribution to come was the sudden appearance of Pedro de Alvarado in the north. This was the same red-bearded, reckless captain who had lost Cortés the city of Mexico, the hero of Alvarado's Leap. Now, in March 1534, he arrived off the Ecuador coast with a large fleet which had been fitted out for yet another attempt to reach the Spice Islands. Peruvian gold, however, had proved a greater lure than pepper, and he was secure at home in his recent marriage to a noble heiress. He had with him two hundred and fifty horse and the same number of foot soldiers, and after crossing the Andes in the depth of winter and in the face of an eruption, he marched on Quito. But whilst he had been struggling through the Andes, Benalcázar, who commanded the
garrison at San Miguel, had taken to the Andean highway with a hundred and forty Spaniards and a large force of Indians, and by an incredible forced march reached Quito before him. Whether Benalcázar ever considered joining him is by no means certain, but if he did, he changed his mind when Almagro appeared on the scene. Pizarro had sent his partner to reinforce the garrison at San Miguel as soon as he received the news of Alvarado's landing, but, finding the city almost empty of troops, Almagro had immediately started out in pursuit of Benalcázar. The two captains joined forces at Riobamba, Benalcázar maintaining he had no intention of deserting to Alvarado. When Alvarado arrived the two forces mingled amicably and the final result was that for 100,000 pesos, to be paid ostensibly as the price of his arms, equipment and fleet, Alvarado would gracefully retire.

The effect of this settlement was to make Pizarro absolute master of Peru. But the writing was on the wall. Where Alvarado had led others would follow. The lure of gold was drawing the adventurers south, and the gifts Hernando had taken to Spain would bring more adventurers, as well as government officials in droves to administer laws that would gradually strip the conquistadors of most of what they had fought to gain.

Nevertheless, Pizarro was lord of the greatest of all the Spanish American provinces for eight years. Had he been possessed of any real administrative ability, he could have had the whole-hearted co-operation of the Indians. They were a stoic race, accustomed to passive subservience rather than active loyalty to the central government of their Incas. With little effort, he could have turned their indoctrinated obedience to the support of his own administration, and, standing as he was at the uttermost limits of the home government's reach, could have made his position impregnable. But the seeds of disaster were ingrained in his own nature and in the nature of the men who had come out with him. His soldiery mistook Peruvian subservience to authority for cowardice, and just as cringing encourages the bully, so the passivity of the Indians brought out the worst in them.

No provision was made for the maintenance of the advanced system of irrigation on which the country depended for its crops. The flocks of llamas were slaughtered in feast after feast without regard for the future. Wherever the Spaniards went the story was one of looting, rape and murder, and the profligate waste of the carefully accumulated wealth of the Inca storehouses. Worse still, from the Spanish point of view, the differences between Almagro and Pizarro had only been driven underground in the obvious need to present a common front to an enemy numerically vastly superior.

In the following year, the country appearing more or less settled, the differences between the two partners came out into the open once again. Whilst Pizarro was on the coast, founding his new capital of Lima, Almagro was governing in Cuzco. His agents had accompanied Hernando Pizarro to Spain, and as a result he was now
informed that the Emperor Charles had given him command of a huge slice of territory extending for two hundred leagues to the south of Pizarro's province. He was thus by royal command made independent of Pizarro. Charles and his advisers had little real knowledge of their distant empire. At this early stage there was almost certainly no map, so that the spheres of influence – distances were all measured from the island of Puna – were extremely vague. Almagro claimed that Cuzco was in his sphere. Pizarro ordered his brothers, Gonzalo and Juan, to resume command. The city was split into factions. Even the Indians took sides. Not until June 12, 1535, was the matter finally resolved and their differences patched up, the two contracting to pursue their aims amicably, sharing the costs and the rewards of all future conquests. Almagro thereupon advanced into Chile and for nearly two years disappeared from the scene as he endeavoured to take command of the area his Emperor had allotted him and, at the same time, to satisfy the demands of his own men for their full share of the loot of conquest.

Meantime, at Cuzco, the patience of the Indians was finally exhausted. Manco himself was involved. He escaped from the city and joined the insurgents. Peru was at last in revolt against the senseless brutality of its foreign masters. Juan Pizarro, searching the surrounding country for the missing Inca, was forced to retreat from the banks of the Yucay river. Swarms of armed warriors now advanced on Cuzco, and for the first time the Spaniards in Peru were faced with the same fanatical opposition that Cortés had battled with in the Aztec city of Mexico. The siege, which began in February 1536, lasted for nearly six months. Most of Cuzco was destroyed by fire. Repeated attempts by Pizarro to relieve the garrison failed. The whole country was in revolt, and it was only the impregnable strength of the great fortress of Sacsahuamán that enabled the Spaniards to hold out. Then, in August 1536, the revolt subsided as suddenly as it had begun, the young Inca having exhausted the supplies of the storehouses which had kept his army in the field for so much longer than the traditional three weeks. But the country remained in arms, the Spaniards mured up in Cuzco and isolated on the coast.

This was still the situation when Almagro returned from Chile by way of the Atacama desert. His march is not to be compared with that of Topa Inca Yupanqui, but it was still a considerable achievement for a force that numbered about five hundred soldiers, and his men had got little reward for the incredible hardships they had suffered. Hernando Pizarro was now back from Spain and acting as governor of Cuzco. Discovering that the young Inca Manco was camped with a considerable force of warriors not far from Cuzco, Almagro immediately arranged a meeting. He probably had some sort of an alliance in mind, but Manco, with the memory of what had happened to Atahualpa, suspected a trap; he attacked Almagro's men with fifteen thousand warriors. He was defeated and Almagro turned his attention to Cuzco itself. Even now he seems to have been unwilling to be the cause of internecine strife between men of his own race, particularly with
the whole country still in arms. His men, however, thinking in more personal terms, broke the uneasy truce agreed between Hernando and their leader, and on the night of April 8, 1537, they invaded the city. The Pizarros and more than a dozen other Spanish captains were imprisoned. Almagro, now in command of Cuzco, sent emissaries to demand obedience of the only Spanish commander who could threaten him – Alonso de Alvarado, who commanded a force as big as his own at Jauja. His emissaries were arrested. Almagro marched and at the battle of Abancay on July 12 forced Alvarado to surrender. But Pizarro himself was now moving up from the coast with 450 men, half of them cavalry. Almagro had a thousand men, but despite his advantage in number, he did not fight. Once again the quarrel was patched up; Almagro would take over in Cuzco and Hernando Pizarro would be released on the understanding that he left for Spain again within six weeks.