The Last Days of the Incas (19 page)

Atahualpa no doubt also realized that
if his present circumstances in Cajamarca were like one big game of chess, then this was probably his last game; he surely felt the sensation of being trapped in a sudden checkmate. Now, not only did Atahualpa not have even a proverbial pawn to protect him, but he was further hemmed in by forces more powerful than before the game had begun. Atahualpa must have also realized that all of the sacred gold and all of the sacred silver objects he had been so diligently collecting probably weren’t going to amount to much more than a silver vase full of llama piss, for all the good they were going to do him. For the first time, Atahualpa must have realized that he was destined for precisely the same end as his brother Huascar.

“When Almagro and these men arrived,” recalled Pedro Pizarro, “Atahualpa became anxious and … [feared] that he was going to die.” Upon hearing Francisco Pizarro’s reply, in fact—that the leader of the foreign invaders intended to divide up the empire among his followers—Atahualpa is said to have simply uttered, “[Then] I shall die.”

WHEN DIEGO DE ALMAGRO FINALLY ARRIVED WITH ADDI
tional men and supplies in Peru in 1533, like Pizarro he must have been surprised to have found the city of Tumbez lying in complete ruins. Traveling south along the coast, he and his men soon came upon the newly founded Spanish town of San Miguel, where Pizarro had left
some
eighty of the sick, young, or older conquistadors as citizens. Almagro learned from them that Pizarro was in the mountains and had somehow managed to capture the lord of what they believed was a powerful Indian empire. The natives were afraid to attack them, Almagro was told, because Pizarro held their lord prisoner. Almagro also learned that Pizarro was expecting his arrival and wanted Almagro to join him as quickly as possible.

The execution of Atahualpa inca.

By now, Almagro and Pizarro had been partners for at least fourteen years. Yet theirs had been a bumpy relationship as of late. When Pizarro had returned from Spain to Panama in 1529 with a royal license to conquer the Inca Empire—a realm that he was authorized to plunder for a distance of two hundred leagues, or seven hundred miles—he had also returned with the title of Governor of Peru. In addition, Pizarro had secured for himself the military title of Captain-General of Peru and had set in motion the process for being awarded the coveted Order of Santiago, a knighthood that would automatically pluck him from his lowly origins and deposit him securely among the elite of Spain.

In contrast to his own multiple titles, Pizarro had brought back just a single title for his loyal partner, Almagro—that of the Mayor of Tumbez, an area that, all told, covered a span of perhaps a few square miles and that now lay in ruins. This was despite the fact that, during their previous voyage, Almagro had rescued Pizarro and his starving followers on the island of Gallo, off the coast of Colombia, and despite the fact that it had been Almagro who had raised funds to send Pizarro to Spain in the first place. Not surprisingly, Pizarro’s short, swarthy partner had been furious upon hearing the news that he had been completely shortchanged.

Pizarro, however, still needed Almagro. He needed his organizational skills, he needed his ability to find and enlist fresh recruits, he needed his partner’s capacity to do the lion’s share of all the thousand and one things that outfitting an expedition of conquest in the New World required. Almagro, on the other hand, had clearly been outmaneuvered: it was Pizarro who had been granted permission to conquer Peru, not he. And even if he refused now to participate, there was nothing he could do to prevent Pizarro from leaving for Peru without him.

After their long and intimate association, however, Pizarro knew his partner exceedingly well. He knew the man’s strengths, weaknesses, and vanities. Like himself, Almagro was illegitimate. He therefore
no doubt had a deep-rooted need to prove himself. Pizarro also knew that Almagro wanted a partnership of equality, that he didn’t want to be treated as an inferior, and that he wanted respect. More than anything else, Almagro wanted a governorship, to be lord and master of his own realm.

In a deft negotiation, Pizarro ultimately succeeded in assuring his angry partner that, although the king had granted Pizarro the governorship of Peru, he would nevertheless do everything in his power to encourage the king to grant Almagro a governorship outside the territory of his own. With enough titles and promises now to go around, Almagro finally agreed to bury the hatchet and resumed preparations for their expedition.

Four years later, in April of 1533, when Diego de Almagro crested the final rise and rode with his men down into the city of Cajamarca, his partner, Francisco Pizarro, was there to meet them. The two leaders greeted each other warmly; it was easy, after all, to bury old animosities in light of the present exhilarating circumstances. Pizarro proudly introduced Almagro to a stunned Atahualpa, then led his old partner into the guarded chamber filled almost to Atahualpa’s white line with countless glistening objects of gold. The two men no doubt clapped each other on the back. That night, Pizarro ordered that extra llamas be slaughtered to feed Almagro’s men.

Underneath the outward display of comradeship, however, tensions between the two partners remained. Even before Almagro had arrived, Pizarro had heard rumors that his partner might attempt to conquer Peru on his own. Almagro showed no sign of making such a move, however, nor were such rumors ever discussed. In truth, Pizarro always had and always would consider Almagro his sidekick, a clear subordinate. Despite their legal partnership, to Pizarro, Peru and the titles that came with conquering Peru were his, and his alone. He was willing to share a certain amount of wealth and power with Almagro, but Pizarro would never consider his squat, one-eyed partner his equal.

With Almagro’s arrival, there were now over three hundred Spaniards in Cajamarca and these belonged to two very obvious and distinct groups. Those who had participated in the capture of Atahualpa and in the slaughter on the square—168 of them—would forever more be known as the “Men of Cajamarca,” the mythical founders of Spanish Peru. They had the right to share in Atahualpa’s ransom and thus would soon become the equivalent of modern-day millionaires. The Spaniards who had just arrived
with Almagro, on the other hand, even though they were now part of a force expected to subdue the rest of the empire, would receive only a token amount of Atahualpa’s treasure. That was because they had not participated in the conquest’s key event. According to Pedro Pizarro,

One of those who came “afterwards” and who was given next to nothing was Pizarro’s own partner, Diego de Almagro.

As the newcomers eyed the roomful of gold and watched as more gold and silver continued to arrive each day, they were naturally both jealous and also impatient to finish the ransom process. Only once the ransom had been collected and they left Cajamarca would they have the chance of seizing plunder for themselves. Meanwhile, the disconsolate Atahualpa observed the Spaniards with growing desperation.

On June 13, 1533, two months after Almagro’s arrival, the two Spanish scouts who had stayed behind in Cuzco finally arrived, escorting a convoy of 223 llama loads of gold and silver. If each llama were carrying an average load of fifty pounds, then that convoy alone would have added more than eleven thousand pounds of precious metals to Atahualpa’s treasure.
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One can only imagine how the second group of Spaniards must have reacted when they realized that not a bit of the newly arrived treasure would be theirs. Although they had traveled just as far as their companions
and had endured their own assortment of dangers, they had arrived five months too late to partake in the ransom.

Four days later, with tensions growing among the Spaniards and a roomful of gold on his hands, Pizarro ordered that the job of melting and assaying the gold begin. He also ordered that the silver, which had already been melted down, now be distributed. Eventually, during a four-month period, from March to July 1533, the Spaniards fed more than forty thousand pounds of sacred Inca gold and silver into the furnaces. Roughly half of the Spaniards watched this process with mounting joy while the other half watched with mounting envy. Pound after pound of the finest objects created by the empire’s craftsmen were fed into the fires—gold and silver statues, jewelry, platings, vessels, ornaments, and other works of art—all reduced to formless, red-hot puddles, then poured steaming into molds to make ingots. Today, Inca objects of gold and silver are a supreme rarity—the lion’s share having disappeared nearly five hundred years ago into the furnaces of Cajamarca.

At long last, the moment Atahualpa’s captors had been waiting for arrived. As notaries watched the careful weighing process and busily wrote everything down before signing and stamping the documents with a flourish, each horseman stepped forward and received 180 pounds of silver and ninety pounds of 22½ karat gold—gold and silver pure enough to be melted down instantly into coins. If one calculates that a single pound of gold represented roughly two years of a common sailor’s salary, then ninety pounds of the dense yellow metal represented 180 years’ worth, not even counting the silver. And even though the foot soldiers received only half of this amount—ninety pounds of silver and forty-five pounds of gold—it was clear that all of the 168 Spaniards who had arrived with Pizarro in Cajamarca were now richer than they could ever have imagined. If expeditions of conquest were all about the search for an easy retirement, then Atahualpa’s captors had just won the richest lottery in the world. They could, if they so wanted, now pack up their scanty belongings and return to Spain—and would never have to work another day in their lives.

Francisco Pizarro, however, had no thoughts whatsoever of retiring. Having just allotted himself seven times the amount of gold and silver of a horseman in addition to awarding himself as a present the golden throne that Atahualpa had been traveling on the day of his capture
(which itself weighed 183 pounds), Pizarro had come to Peru not to retire but in order to create a feudal kingdom—a kingdom over which he himself would rule. To conquer, control, and administer such a kingdom, however, Pizarro desperately needed conquistadors who, like himself, were willing to become permanent residents. Although Pizarro allowed a few of the married conquistadors to leave immediately after the distribution of the treasure, he ordered the rest to remain in Peru, at least until the conquest was complete.

One of those slated to leave was Pizarro’s thirty-two-year-old brother, Hernando, whom Pizarro now charged with the task of shepherding roughly half of the king’s “royal fifth” back to Spain. Pizarro trusted no one else to transport the king’s profits—the 20 percent standard cut that was the price all conquistadors paid if they wanted to carry out plunder in the New World with the blessing of a royal license. From this one massive gathering of precious metals in Cajamarca, and with little more effort on their part than signing a few royal documents, the king and queen of Spain received 5,200 pounds of Inca silver and 2,600 pounds of Inca gold.

As Hernando Pizarro and the small group of departing Spaniards prepared to leave, many of the conquistadors who were staying behind hurriedly wrote letters to send with them. The only surviving letter from that group was written by one of Francisco Pizarro’s pages, Gaspar de Gárate, a young Basque in his early twenties from northern Spain. Like his compatriots, Gaspar was eager to relate to his family the surprising news of his recent good fortune.