Silver, Sword, and Stone
Page 9
The conflagration that followed would have monumental consequences, but most striking in that swiftly unfurling history were the many hundreds of thousands of gold pesos that Cortés stood to lose in the flight from Tenochtitlán. Gold had been foremost in his mind, as it had been in the minds of Velázquez, Narváez, and the soldiers who served them. It had been the aim, purse, bank—mover of armies. It had been uppermost, too, in the collective mind of the powers that drove them: the king, the pope, and the newly conceived Council of the Indies, founded precisely to manage all the riches Spain stood to gain in the New World. Mexicans quickly learned to play Spaniards for that weakness, set them against one another over it, and, through the many months they had spent in the company of those bearded strangers, they could only marvel at the intensity of that lust.
Shouting to his men, Cortés called for an immediate evacuation of the capital, and his besieged soldiers gathered their wits for a desperate exodus. With the assistance of their newfound collaborators, the Tlaxcalans, they attempted to make off with as much booty as they could carry. As one soldier described it:
Cortés ordered his . . . servants to bring out all the gold and jewels and silver, and loaned them many Tlaxcalan Indians for the purpose, and they placed all of it in the Hall. Cortés told the King’s officers . . . to take charge of the gold belonging to His Majesty, and he gave them seven wounded and lame horses and one mare, and many friendly Tlaxcalans, more than eighty in number, and they loaded them with parcels of it, as much as they could carry, for it had been melted down into very broad ingots, and much gold still remained in the Hall piled up in heaps. Then Cortés called his secretary and the King’s Notaries and said: “Bear witness for I can do no more with this gold. We have here in this apartment and Hall over seven hundred thousand pesos of gold, and, as you have seen, it cannot be weighed nor placed in safety. I now give it up to any of the soldiers who care to take it, otherwise it will be lost among those dogs of Mexicans.”
The soldiers made a run for the looted treasures, eagerly seizing the jade along with the solid gold bars, knowing full well that in this faraway land, the natives valued stone more than metal. They took what they could, tucking it wildly into their belts, shoving it under their armor. Narváez’s troops, newly arrived and electrified to see so much wealth piled in one place, loaded themselves with it. In the frenzy, they tried to lug away more in hastily improvised boxes. Rushing from the city, scrambling across the causeway bridges, the Spaniards were set upon by the Aztecs, and some were sent tumbling into the lake. Looking back, a Spaniard caught a glimpse of the dead horses, wounded Indians, and boxes laden with gold, bobbing briefly on the surface, only to sink out of sight.
For all the material losses Cortés suffered in that hasty retreat, he soon found that he had accumulated an abundance of soldiers and ammunition. With four thousand Tlaxcalans as reinforcement, Cortés handily drove back the Aztecs who chased him into the countryside. Along the way, he was able to recruit other disgruntled tribes—the Cholulas, the Tepeacas, and warriors from neighboring territories—who were anxious to settle scores with their Mexican overlords. Over the next months, as Spanish ships arrived from Cuba and Jamaica, and as the cohort proceeded to capture and enslave whole villages, Cortés soon had a formidable population under his control. It wasn’t long before he was planning to recover the capital.
First, however, he wanted the gold back. Gathering his troops at their first encampment, Cortés could see full well that they had carried off a good portion of the precious store. Even in those makeshift circumstances, ingots were being traded, gambled, fought over viciously among the ranks. Cortés issued a proclamation ordering his soldiers to produce all the treasures they had grabbed or pay a heavy penalty. He would take it by force if he had to, he told them, and when he had it all counted, he would allow them to keep one-third of what they had managed to haul away. “This order of Cortés’s,” one Spaniard groused, “seemed very wrong indeed.” After all, in the panic of their flight from the Mexican capital, he had urged them to have at it, pilfer whatever they could, and they had done so with every assurance that it was theirs now. A royal scribe had been present to make it law.
But there were other, more urgent troubles. A rabid war was afoot, and all the furies would be unleashed as Cortés and his armies, honed now by privation and combat, systematically worked their way back to Tenochtitlán, leveling the empire as they went. By the time Cortés forced a surrender from Emperor Cuauhtémoc in August 1521, many a Spaniard would have his beating heart ripped from his chest, and thousands of Indian corpses would lie strewn on the roads that led to that shining city on the lake. But Cortés would emerge from that abattoir a heroic figure, exalted in Europe, highly decorated by his king—an exemplar for every conquistador who followed.
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It was precisely during these years that Spain’s King Carlos I, the Holy Roman emperor, whose ambitions had spiraled vigorously after Cortés’s spectacular conquest of Mexico, decided to change his coat of arms so that the two rampant black eagles that characterized his insignia now paraded grandly through the Pillars of Hercules. He added the heraldic motto, “Plus Ultra,” or “Ever Beyond,” for not only had his Holy Roman Empire sailed well past “non plus ultra,” the perilous brink of medieval lore, “beyond” had become its dominion, cash cow, and playground. This ambition, coupled with the superstition of the age—that God would pardon any means, however cruel, to bring converts to the Church of Rome—was the fertile loam in which the subjugation of America flourished. The conquistadors’ aim was metal riches, but their agency was Christian conversion. As the great sixteenth-century writer Lope de Vega put it, “Under faith’s banners, they went searching for silver and gold.” The lure was irresistible; the alibi, unimpeachable. The animating war cry “Santiago! Y cierra, España!” (“Saint James! And charge, Spain!”), shouted at the start of every assault or skirmish, conjured, at least in their minds, the grand, noble crusades of yore. It pledged rapine to a higher cause; to the glory of God. It mitigated the greed.
And why not? In a time when Pope Julius II was riding into battle in full armor and paying for holy wars by selling “indulgences”—paper certificates that promised anyone rich enough to buy them a welcome relief from purgatory—it was clear that the Church had come to the realization that it needed the bullion and would use any means to raise it. There was a Basilica of Saint Peter’s to build, after all; a Protestant Reformation to stamp out. In time, King Carlos’s close ties to Rome would prove mutually profitable for Church and Spain alike. As the king’s navies appropriated the wealth of the Indies and established plantations, mines, and a thriving colonial economy, Spain and Catholicism grew hand in hand in power and dominion. Only Napoleon I and Adolf Hitler at the heights of rule have commanded a larger area of Europe. But Spain’s dominion would go on to radiate to far corners of the east and west—from the Americas to the Philippines, an empire on which the sun never set, as the Holy Roman emperor liked to put it—so that King Carlos’s authority would eventually surpass Alexander the Great’s and Julius Caesar’s. But that ongoing initiative would take not only gold, it would also take silver. It would take a Peru.
CHAPTER 4
TRAIL OF THE WHITE KING
Atahualpa had said there was a small mountain they lit with fire, and when that fire died out, there was melted silver in it.
—Pedro Pizarro, 1571
You might suppose that Spain’s conquest of the grand sweep of territory from Argentina to Colorado was a sprawling enterprise undertaken by hundreds of principals from radically different backgrounds. But it was not so. The conquistadors who succeeded Columbus and locked much of the Americas under Spanish rule were a tight circle of like-minded individuals, many of them from harsh boyhoods in the Extremadura, some even related by blood, and most schooled in indistinguishable realities. Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who discovered the Pacific; Hernán Cortés, who conquered the Aztecs; Pedro de Alvarado, who conquered Cuba, aide
d Cortés in Mexico, and then went on to subjugate much of Central America; Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Incas; Pedro de Valdivia, who founded what is now Chile; Francisco de Orellana, who explored the Amazon and founded what is now Ecuador; and Hernando de Soto, who explored Indian territory from Florida to Arkansas—all hailed from within fifty miles of one another in the impoverished, drought-ridden, impossibly torrid highlands of western Spain. The links can be surprising: Balboa claimed the same dusty little birthplace as De Soto. Pizarro was born an easy day’s ride from Cortés’s childhood home. Indeed, Pizarro, Cortés, and Orellana were all distant cousins and served in the same expeditions. Nicolás de Ovando, the governor who brought Pizarro and Cortés to the New World, was also related to both. Balboa was son-in-law to his commanding officer, Cortés was brother-in-law to his. But perhaps the greatest bond among these men was that they were sons of war: their fathers, uncles, cousins had battled the Italians, the French, the Moors, and they had all inherited a strong loyalist and fighting spirit. Conquering the Americas was truly an enterprise of brothers.
As the great historian of Latin American conquest John Hemming once wrote:
The men who went on these ventures were not mercenaries: they received no pay from the expedition’s leader. They were adventurers who took passage to the Americas in the hope of making their fortunes. In the early days of conquests, any reward for these desperadoes had to come from the Indians themselves. They were predators hoping for easy plunder. Their food and personal service came from the Indians they hoped to rob. . . . The Spanish adventurers were like packs of hounds, roaming the interior to pick up a scent of gold. They sailed across the Atlantic full of bravado and ambition and then filled the tiny coastal settlements, hoping to grow rich as parasites on the native population.
It stands to reason, then, that these men—far from home, tied by blood, fueled by personal ambition—were well aware of one another’s successes and failures. Pizarro had studied Cortés’s strategies of conquest meticulously. He had pored over every move and countermove his young cousin had employed to bring the Mexican Empire to its knees. By 1522, when he first heard about Cortés’s remarkable exploits, Pizarro had been a stolid, reliable soldier of fortune with extensive lands, one of the wealthiest residents of Panama. He had worked his way into Governor Pedrarias Dávila’s confidence by conquering the Pearl Islands. He had proven his loyalty by arresting his own leader, Balboa, and bringing him to a harsh justice. He had raided villages, capturing Indians for the lucrative slave trade. But Pizarro was nearing fifty and still answering to others, waiting for destiny’s doors to fling open and offer a greater prize. That opportunity arose in 1523, when Pascual de Andagoya, a Basque colleague, returned to Panama from an exploratory trip down the San Juan River in what is now Colombia. Andagoya’s reports were transfixing. He told of great wealth just beyond reach—just south of the most southerly point he had reached—and he described how he had “discovered, conquered, and pacified Pirú.” The Pirú Andagoya had found was a pugnacious chieftain who ruled the wilds of Chochama and had attacked him in vicious battle. Once vanquished, Pirú had become useful to Andagoya, schooling him in the region and informing him about the powerful “White King” of the south, whose colossal empire, he said, was bursting with metal riches. But for all Andagoya’s successes—his foothold on the continent, his self-appointed rule over the green valleys of Cali and Popayán—he had returned to Panama wasted by battle and illness, too frail to return to the realm of Pirú.
Here was the opening Pizarro had longed for. Electrified by rumors about Pirú—the name now for all land south of Panama—and its powerful, rich White King, Pizarro angled to buy Andagoya’s ships and conduct a more purposeful exploration of the region. But he was working against time. King Carlos had already contracted explorer Ferdinand Magellan to find a sea route to the coveted spice islands of Asia, and, by 1520, Magellan’s fleet had skirted Brazil and reached a great river that coiled south from the Andes. They called it Río de la Plata, the river of silver. Magellan, too, had heard of the legendary emperor: the Guaraní Indians had told of a sovereign whose throne, garment, and emblem were made of a shimmering metal, and whose very essence was forged from silver. But for all the Portuguese forays into that river, the White King was nowhere to be found.
All the same, in 1535 Pedro de Mendoza, who had already made a fortune in the mutinous sack of Rome, sailed to the southern tip of the American continent, looking for the White King’s gold. What he found instead was syphilis and starvation, and his men ended up in the swamps of Buenos Aires, eating the soles of their boots. Yet no one was deterred. Soldiers of fortune continued to be enchanted by the siren song of silver, Pizarro not least among them. Like many of his cohort, he claimed he was serving Catholic Spain, bringing Christianity to benighted Indians—the politically correct pablum of the time—but he was an avid participant in the race for worldly riches, as captivated by the myth of the White King as any of his predecessors, and he knew full well that whoever got there first stood to win them for himself.
Pizarro had come far, in human terms as well as on the seas. Born the illegitimate son of a lesser nobleman and a servant girl, deprived of an education that typically accompanied higher birth, he had spent his boyhood tending swine. Illiterate, he would remain so for his entire life, but he grew tall, well made, confident—traits inherited from his father—and soon he was dreaming of life beyond the mire and moil of pigpens. By sixteen, Pizarro had escaped to Seville, where losers became sailors and the Guadalquivir River flowed seductively to the sea. Within a year, he decided to follow his father’s military example and sign on to fight in King Ferdinand’s armies, although the news of Columbus’s adventures had begun to fire his imagination. Lit by the fever of the day, Pizarro later joined Governor Nicolás Ovando’s fleet and sailed for Hispaniola in 1502. Within five years, half of his shipmates were dead and the entire native population of Hispaniola decimated by war and disease, but somehow Pizarro managed to survive. In fact, he was thriving, excelling at hunting gold and slaves—the grueling business of conquest. He was in his element.
Participating eagerly in feverish raids on the Indians of Hispaniola’s interior, Pizarro handily proved his martial prowess. He was bold, tenacious, surpassingly skilled at breaking rebellious natives and forcing them to work the mines. A trusted, personal guard to Governor Ovando, he was eventually moved along in the same capacity to Governor Pedrarias Dávila in Panama. Pizarro may not have been as lettered or learned or clever as his comrades Cortés and Balboa, but he was a loyal warrior, valiant in battle, and surprisingly resourceful under duress. A man of few words and impressive carriage, he was seen as a natural leader. In Panama, he added another advantage. His encomienda, or plantation—flush with grain and a thriving cattle business—became decidedly profitable. He was awash in money.
Eventually Pizarro merged his plantation with those of two other men he trusted: Diego Almagro, an illiterate soldier, who, like him, had been born illegitimate and shunned, but had gone on to make his mark as a fighter and spirited slaver; and Hernando de Luque, a clergyman possibly of Sephardic origin, who was rich, talented in finance, and a confidant of Governor Pedrarias’s. Together the three formed a company that combined properties and businesses, shared costs, and divided all profits. One for all, all for one. They formalized their pact according to old medieval tradition: by attending mass in Panama’s modest church, sharing a communion host three ways, and vowing undying loyalty to one another. They resolved to buy ships, outfit a crew of more than one hundred men, and undertake the exploration of Pirú. Pizarro would be captain and commander of the expedition; Almagro, in charge of assembling all arms and provisions; and Luque, manager of their funds. It didn’t take long to convince Pedrarias to authorize the voyage: the governor was not asked to contribute a penny to the enterprise but was promised a representative portion of all treasures found.
The first voyage was a rout. The two ships commissioned—a shabby b
rigantine pompously named Santiago (after the patron saint of Spain), and its creaky companion, a small caravel—were in perilous condition, unfit for the task. They slid out to sea on November 14, 1524, bearing 110 Spaniards, a few Indians, four horses, a dog of war, and no wind in their sails. Lagging to shore at the Pearl Islands, Pizarro waited for north gales to sweep them south, but he was forced to idle for three more weeks, his supplies dwindling. When the crew did manage to push off, fickle winds nudged them along as far as the mangrove swamps where Andagoya had begun his exploration inland. But in the interim, they had endured a wasting hunger, plagues of mosquitos, and debilitating tropical rains. By February, they had yet to see one Indian. Pizarro set off inland, but he was soon put off by the inhospitable mountains and an impassable tangle of trees. He returned to sea and navigated farther south, where they found an abandoned camp, a few trinkets of gold, and the ghoulish remains of a cannibal feast.