Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  his throne should go to the eldest: Sarmiento de Gamboa, History of the Incas, 165.

  The Lord Inca was hallucinating: Cobo, Historia, 1:161; Lastres, Historia de la viruela, 21.

  Supay, who answered that: Cobo, Historia, 1:161.

  possibly under psychotic delusions: Lastres, Historia de la viruela, 21.

  Lord Inca’s heart was gouged from his breast: Cobo, Historia, 1:161.

  his embalmed body was carried to Cuzco: Guaman Poma, 2:379.

  insisting he was still alive: Rostworowski, Historia del Tawantinsuyu, 90.

  after many months of travel: According to El Inca Garcilaso, it took four months to transport goods from Cuzco to Potosí and back, as it was all done on foot or on the backs of llamas. I have based this estimate on that fact. Royal Commentaries, 8:370.

  Four thousand family members, concubines, and servants: R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 63.

  Guaraquinga—a giant, solid gold: Cobo, Historia, 1:162.

  Epigraph; “There it was. The face of the sun”: Garcilaso, Royal Commentaries, 8:350.

  Almost five centuries later: As mentioned earlier, all information on Juan Ochochoque was gathered from interviews with his wife, Leonor Gonzáles, and his children, Senna, Mariluz, Jhon, and Henrry, in La Rinconada, Putina, Juliaca, and Puno, as well as weekly or monthly contact since 2014.

  lives of his wife and seven children: Ochochoque had two “compromisos,” or commitments, as Andean Indians call them. These are not wives by marriage. His compromiso with Leonor Gonzáles produced four children. He had three older children by his first.

  masked by the tanning process: Mark Cartwright, “Inca Mummies,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, last modified June 16, 2014.

  his mummy was ferreted out of Cuzco: W. H. Isbell, Mummies and Mortuary Monuments (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 54–55.

  CHAPTER 3: METAL HUNGER

  Epigraph; “Inca: ‘Is this the gold you people eat?’ ”: In Quechua—Kay quritachu mikhunki? Guaman Poma, 2:342.

  At the close of the fourteenth century, seven-eighths: Antonio Miguel Bernal, España, proyecto inacabado: Los Costes/beneficios del Imperio, 274.

  By 1475, they had become keen participants: Ibid.

  Isabella and Ferdinand called for a brutal and fanatical purge: This was inspired by Alonso de Hojeda, a Dominican friar, who consulted with Isabella when she was visiting in Seville in 1478 and warned her that heresy was rampant. Henry Kamen, 35; Joseph Pérez, The Spanish Inquisition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 19.

  filled the royal coffers: Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror, 82.

  a hundred thousand Moors were dead: Kamen, 17.

  more than half the Jewish population of Castile: Ibid., 37.

  an almost festive air: Ibid., 255, 272.

  the ancestors of Saint Teresa of Ávila: Anna Foa, “Teresa’s ‘Marrano’ Grandfather,” L’Osservatore Romano (Vatican), March 2, 2015. There is some debate about the converso roots of Cervantes, but many intellectuals, such as Carlos Fuentes, consider them a certainty. Fuentes, 173–74; William Byron, Cervantes: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 24–32.

  That hunger hardened: Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus), Relaciones y cartas de Cristóbal Colón, prologue, 24.

  the production of this metal would not be enough: Bernal, 269.

  written openly about his carnal appetites: Pope Pius II, to his father, Silvio, 1443, in Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius: Selected Letters of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, ed. and trans. Thomas M. Izbicki, Gerald Christianson, and Philip Krey (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 161.

  “The problem of money predominates”: Pope Pius II to the council at Siena, 1436. Ibid., 95.

  auri sacra fames: The saying “Quid non mortal pectoral cogis, Auri sacra fames” is a verse from Virgil’s The Aeneid, bk. 3, v. 56–57. Its meaning translated loosely is “To what lengths will man’s accursed greed for gold not lead him.”

  as thirty-five of her caravels returned: Malyn Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion: 1400–1668 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 39–40.

  more than 1,500 pounds of gold: It was 1,589, to be exact. Manuela MendonÇa—O Sonho da União Ibérica (Lisbon: Quidnovi, 2007), 101–3—cites 106,676 dobles of gold; a doble at that time weighed 6.77 grams. That would add up to more than 700 kilos, or 1,589 pounds—about three-quarters of a ton.

  When the famous Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias rounded: Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession, 117.

  worrying his copy of Imago Mundi: German Arciniegas, America in Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse, 27; Markham, 30.

  a letter and a map he had sent many years before: Toscanelli sent a letter, dated 25 June 1474, and a map to Fernão Martins, a priest in Lisbon, detailing a westward course to the Spice Islands and Asia. Martins delivered that letter to King Afonso, whose advisors rejected its proposal. Columbus, 14; Markham, 31; Kirkpatrick, 6.

  The map placed the hulking island: J. G. Bartholomew, A Literary and Historical Atlas of America (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1911), commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlantic_Ocean,_Toscanelli,_1474.jpg.

  “This island is rich in gold, pearls, and gems”: Kirkpatrick, 7.

  Epigraph; “Gold and slaves. The first corrupts all it touches”: Simón Bolívar, Contestación de un americano meridional a un caballero de esta isla (“Letter from Jamaica”), Kingston, September 6, 1815, quoted in Marie Arana, Simón Bolívar: American Liberator, 310.

  Epigraph; “As centuries unfold”: “Venient annis saecula seris, quibus Oceanus vincula rerum laxet et ingens pateat tellus Tethysque novos detegat orbes nec sit terris ultima Thule.” Seneca, Medea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 84.

  in a frayed coat: James Reston Jr., Dogs of God (New York: Anchor, 2005), 238.

  prematurely white hair askew: According to Columbus’s son Fernando, his father’s “hair, which had been fair, snow-white at the age of thirty.” Kirkpatrick, 11; Markham, 136.

  little interested in personal riches: Markham, 57.

  sailed out of Lisbon secretly: Ibid., 9.

  prattling on to anyone willing to listen: Reston, Dogs, 238.

  weary of dealing with intermediaries: Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, 12.

  “Columbus’s enterprise . . . will add many carats”: Luis de Santálgel’s letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, in Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Obras Completas, 3:517.

  “Gold is a wonderful thing!”: Columbus’s letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, 1503, in Martin Fernandez de Navarrete, Colección de los viajes y descubrimientos que hicieron por mar los españoles, vol. 1 (Madrid: Imprenta Nacional, 1858), 456.

  “a handsome people: with hair not curly”: Ibid., 175. Columbus, 24.

  naked, guileless, seemingly “poor in everything”: Ibid. See also Letter of Christopher Columbus to Rafael Sánchez, Facsimile of the First Publication Concerning America, Published at Barcelona, May 1493 (Chicago: W. H. Lowdermilk, 1893).

  drank from goblets of gold: Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Vida de Cristóbal Colón, 87.

  no fewer than one hundred allusions to gold and silver: Columbus, 1–148; Bernstein, 120.

  The indigenous Americans, quick to see: Las Casas, Cristóbal Colón, 90.

  “They have no experience with arms”: Columbus, 1–148.

  gold his sailors raked from the riverbeds . . . “like chaff”: Fernandez de Navarrete, 1:456.

  nearing the River Ganges: Ibid., 367.

  “I have secured one thousand four hundred islands”: Ibid. 348–49.

  “This island is Tarsus, Scythia, Ophir, Ophaz”: He was implying that, in addition to Japan, he had found an equivalent source to that which had produced the riches of King Solomon, the most prosperous of biblical monarchs.

  sail triumphantly to the Spanish port of Palos: Las Casas,
Obras, 3:695.

  Columbus took his exotic caravan overland: Markham, 135–36.

  It was a grand show—a pars pro toto: Elvira Vilches, New World Gold, 65.

  Pope Alexander . . . was one of the first to receive a gift: Las Casas, Obras, 4:834–38; Markham, 137. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which set out the pope’s line of demarcation, was confirmed by the pope’s ambassadors in a meeting at Tordesillas. The line of demarcation was initially set by Alexander at 100 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. In 1506 it was shifted to 370 leagues west of those islands and sanctioned by Pope Julius II.

  given his own coat of arms: Las Casas, Obras, 4:839.

  equipment to facilitate metal mining: Ibid., 846–47.

  Sailors, swordsmen, gentlemen, miners: Ibid.

  “Get gold! Humanly, if possible”: Bernal, 279; Mario Arrubla, prologue in Ramiro Montoya, Crónicas del oro y la plata americanos, 11.

  In 1495, in desperation, he issued an infamous edict: The edict is described in Brown, 11. The large containers, or “cascabeles grandes,” were generally hawking bells, tied to the legs of hawks in falconry. The equivalent amount of gold would be sufficient to make dozens of rings. Of the chopping of hands, Las Casas writes, “[A]ll this did I behold with my bodily mortal eyes,” Las Casas, Historia, 3:96.

  a commerce he knew well from his exploits in Africa: Ramiro Montoya, 22.

  By the end of that trade, as many as five million souls: Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, 5.

  “Slaves are the primary source of income”: Las Casas, quoted in F. P. Sullivan, Indian Freedom (Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1995), 60.

  Blamed for appalling cruelties: Bartolomé de las Casas, who had witnessed Columbus’s magnificent parade as a young man, joined the gold rush, and become a Dominican friar, would later lament the captain general’s excesses in his famously vivid A Short History of the Destruction of the Indies.

  Hadn’t Columbus’s dreams been a drain?: Washington Irving, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, vol. 1 (Paris: Galignani, 1828), 259.

  hadn’t a great fraud been perpetrated?: Ramiro Montoya, 25.

  teetotaling queen: Luis Suárez Fernández, Isabel I Reina, 114.

  one-tenth of all royal profits: Silvio Beding, The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 416.

  He had seen more parrots: German Arciniegas, Latin America: A Cultural History, 27.

  He had lost his riches, his reputation, his eyesight: Raúl Aguilar Rodas, Cristobal Colón (Medellín: Paniberica, 2006), 1.

  Epigraph; “Fateful omens in the sky. One like a spark of fire”: Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, testimony from a Nahua witness, year of 12-House, 1517, in León-Portilla, Visión de los vencidos: Crónicas indigenas, 7; León-Portilla, Reverso de la Conquista, 29.

  crippled by gout, fending off mutineers: Columbus, 303–23.

  Ten thousand pesos of gold had been harvested: Ramiro Montoya, 24.

  It didn’t take long for Cortés to grasp: J. H. Elliott, in Cortés: Letters, xiv.

  Cortés was perhaps first to recognize: Pagden, in Cortés: Letters, xli.

  sent by Queen Isabella with express instructions: Pagden, in Cortés: Letters, xliii.

  But once declared free, the Taíno refused to mine: Thomas Southey, Chronological History of the West Indies, vol. 1.

  “Forasmuch as my Lord”: Queen Isabel I, Decree on Indian Labor, 1503, in John Parry, New Iberian World: A Documentary History (New York: Times Books, 1984), 1:262–63; see also Arana, Bolívar, 471.

  one Machiavellian scheme after another: King Ferdinand was the model for Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Letters of Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1961), 52.

  romanced the island’s women: William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 109. This is admittedly something of a romantic view. He was either seducing the wives of his Spaniard cohort or taking rampant advantage of Indian females. Prescott describes them as “amorous propensities.” See also Díaz, Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva España, ch. 203.

  a quarter million more pesos of gold: 215,000, to be exact. Ramiro Montoya, 24.

  famine, disease, and suicide: When the Taíno were forced to work the mines, they did not plant or harvest crops, as they had been accustomed to, and so a famine ensued. Smallpox, too, became rampant. Pietro Martire D’Anghiera, De Orbe Novo, the Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D’Anghera, 1625; New York: Knickerbocker (1912); digital version, BiblioBazaar (2009), 160, 376.

  reduced that robust community of a half million to a feeble sixty thousand: The half-million figure comes from Karen Anderson Córdova, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico: Indian Acculturation and Heterogeneity, 1492–1550 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1990). Also: “sixty thousand”—“there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines.” Las Casas, A Short History of the Destruction of the Indies (London: Penguin, 1974). The claim of “three million” is generally regarded as an exaggeration, whereas the sixty thousand were accounted for when Las Casas arrived in 1508.

  “I came to get gold!”: Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, 109.

  slave hunters, returning to Cuba: Cortés to Doña Juana and Carlos V, 10 July 1519, in Cortés: Letters, 4.

  “If you’re so ravenous”: “Si tan ansiosos estáis de oro que abandonáis vuestra tierra para venir a inquietar la ajena, yo os mostraré una provincia donde podéis a manos llenas satisfacer ese deseo.” Jorge Guillermo Leguía, Historia de América (Lima: Rosay, 1934), 72.

  his father-in-law, Pedrarias: Balboa to King Ferdinand, 16 October 1515, in Archivo de Indias, vol. 2 (Madrid: Imprenta Española, 1864). Balboa was betrothed to Pedrarias’s oldest daughter—an arrangement suggested by the bishop, Fray Juan de Quevedo, to quell the jealousies between them.

  the “Wrath of God”: David Marley, Wars of the Americas: A Chronology (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998), 13.

  One of Balboa’s men . . . Francisco Pizarro: Jesús María Henao, Historia de Colombia (Bogotá: Librería Colombiana, 1920), 1:50–54.

  recruited five hundred of Velázquez’s men: To be exact, they numbered 508, not counting about 100 more shipmasters, pilots, and sailors. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 42.

  Cortés rushed to set sail: Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia General y Natural de las Indias, 1:539–41.

  “Fortune favors the daring!”: Hernán Cortés, Cartas del famoso conquistador Hernán Cortés al emperador Carlos Quinto, 213.

  roaring with rage, charging his brash young captain: Díaz, Discovery and Conquest, 39.

  he played on their greed for gold: Ibid., 33–41.

  They were, after all, eager recruits: Díaz, Historia verdadera de la conquista, 13–16.

  “God would see to it that the lands we found were teeming with gold”: Ibid., 17.

  Epigraph; “There she is, the mountain”: “La montaña Bella Durmiente, ahí en mi pueblo de lágrimas.” From interviews with residents of La Rinconada, Mount Ananea, Peru, February 2013.

  Epigraph; “That’s it?” said the captain: Testimony of messengers in Nahuatl, 1519, in Miguel León-Portilla, Visión de los vencidos, 68.

  They had lost eight hundred men: Ibid., 59.

  Cortés dashed all possible hope of desertion by scuttling his ships: Ibid., 109.

  he had seen cities here that matched Granada: Cortés: Letters, 67–68.

  From caciques, the tribal leaders who spoke candidly: Díaz, Historia verdadera de la conquista, 3:156–57, 174–75.

  gigantic discs of gold and silver: Ibid., 165–67, 171, 187–88.

  he and his troops crossed the towering Sierra Madre: Díaz, Historia verdadera de la conquista, 3:168 map.

  on a blue lake, radiating such brilliance: See ch. 2 epigraph—Domingue
z Hidalgo, Mitos, Fabulas, y Leyendas del Antiguo México, 215.

  The Spaniards were as dazzled: Díaz, Historia verdadera de la conquista, 3:190.

  “I do not know how to describe it”: Ibid., 191.

  an additional three thousand pesos of gold: Cortés: Letters, 69.

  annual tributes of these: Ibid., 69, 79–81.

  he was being given a courtesy: Ibid., 80.

  a diplomat would not: Ibid.

  Some chroniclers—including Cortés himself—have claimed: Anthony R. Pagden, commentary in Cortés: Letters, 42n, 467. The other chroniclers who promoted this notion are all Spaniards—Durán, chs. 53, 54, 394–408; Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, vol. 4, ch. 10. Also Don Antonio de Mendoza, the first viceroy of New Spain, quoted in J. H. Elliott, “The Mental World of Hernán Cortés,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 17 (1967): 41–58, 53.

  But these are Western projections on the Amerindian mind: The Quetzalcoatl myth was fabricated by Cortés in his second letter to King Carlos and then taken as fact by subsequent Spanish historians. There is no indigenous evidence for it. Bernal Díaz, the most reliable contemporary witness of the meeting between Montezuma and Cortés, never mentions Quetzalcoatl or any other god. He quotes Montezuma as saying, very simply, that his ancestors had predicted a foreign race of men would appear on his shores one day. Díaz, Historia verdadera de la conquista, 3:206; Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 149. Henry Wagner mentions the Indian custom of dressing newly arrived visitors in native regalia. Indian chiefs dressed Juan de Grijalva in Indian finery when he arrived at Rio Tabasco in 1518. It is said that Montezuma sent a reproduction of Quetzalcoatl’s clothes in which to dress Grijalva, but the Spanish conquistador had already departed. A priest in Grijalva’s expedition and subsequently in Cortés’s expedition, Juan Díaz, describes this, and it may be the source of Cortés’s inspired explanation to the king. Henry Wagner, The Discovery of New Spain in 1518 by Juan de Grijalva (Pasadena, CA: Cortés Society, 1942), 34–35.