Humboldt's Cosmos

by Gerard Helferich

  Pizarro had begun life about 1476 in Trujillo, Spain, as the illegitimate son of an aristocrat and a woman of more humble station. He was apparently abandoned by both parents and as a boy was left to scratch out a living as a swineherd. (According to one, mythologized version of his life, he was actually suckled by a sow.) As a young man, Pizarro had fled to Seville, then traveled to Colombia in 1515 with the conquistador Alonso de Ojeda. In 1513, he was in Panama with Vasco Nuñez de Balboa at the Spaniards’ discovery of the Pacific Ocean. Inspired by Cortés’s conquest of Mexico in 1521 and spurred on by stories of a golden land beyond the equator, Pizarro made three campaigns in South America.

  The first, from 1524 to 1525, ventured no farther than the San Juan River in Colombia and produced nothing but debts. But the second, from 1526 to 1527, made contact with the Inca at Tumbez, on the Peruvian coast, and later reached the mouth of the Santa River. Encouraged, Pizarro’s partners elected him to return to Spain, where he impressed Charles I with living llamas, samples of gold, and stories of fabulous wealth. The king agreed to advance the funds for a more extensive campaign, and in 1532, Pizarro sailed again. Landing his men at Tumbez, he marched south along the coastal desert plain, then turned inland toward the heart of the empire, where the Inca Atahualpa was waiting.

  Atahualpa’s father, Huanya Capac, had captured the Kingdom of Quito, which had rivaled the Inca Empire itself in wealth and power. Huanya Capac had taken into his harem the daughter of Duchicela, the last king of Quito, and she had given birth to Atahualpa. According to Inca law, the heir to the throne was to be the firstborn male of the coya, the Inca’s sister and principal wife. However, Atahualpa became his father’s favorite, and Huanya Capoc bequeathed to him the Kingdom of Quito, his mother’s homeland, while Huáscar, Atahualpa’s half-brother and the rightful heir, was to rule the remainder of the empire.

  Time would prove that an unwise decision. Though the two kingdoms lived in peace for several years, tensions escalated between Huáscar, who some sources describe as the more mild mannered of the two, and Atahualpa, who is sometimes described as the more aggressive and warlike. Eventually their hostility erupted into civil war, and in the spring of 1532, just months before Pizarro’s second landing, Atahualpa routed Huáscar’s army, first at Ambato, in the shadow of Chimborazo, then again on the Plains of Quipaypan, outside Cuzco. Imprisoning his half-brother, Atahualpa claimed both the northern and southern kingdoms for himself. However, the civil war had left the empire in disarray and ill prepared to meet the threat that was, literally, just over the horizon.

  Marching down the coast, Pizarro heard of a great Inca city in the mountains, and in November he and his men climbed the ridge of the Andes and had their first, awed sight of Cajamarca. The metropolis “looked like a very beautiful city,” wrote one of the conquistadors. “So many tents were visible that we were truly filled with apprehension. . . . It filled us Spaniards with fear and confusion. But it was not appropriate to show any fear, far less to turn back. For had they sensed any weakness in us, the very Indians we were bringing with us would have killed us. So, with a show of good spirit, and after having thoroughly observed the town and tents, we descended into the valley and entered the town of Cajamarca.”

  With fewer than two hundred men against thousands of Inca warriors, Pizarro decided to risk everything on a stealthy, preemptive blow. Drawing from the reservoir of daring and treachery that would characterize his entire career, he ordered his men to slaughter thousands of the stunned, unarmed Indians in the city’s main square. Then he seized Atahualpa.

  A prisoner in his own palace, the Inca soon recognized the Spaniards’ inordinate love of gold and presented his captors with a proposition. The story is related in William H. Prescott’s nineteenth-century classic, The Conquest of Peru, which, though surpassed by more recent historical research, still stands as a masterpiece of vivid storytelling. Atahualpa, writes Prescott, “one day told Pizarro, that, if he would set him free, he would engage to cover the floor of the apartment on which they stood with gold. Those present listened with an incredulous smile; and, as the Inca received no answer, he said, with some emphasis, that ‘he would not merely cover the floor, but would fill the room with gold as high as he could reach’; and, standing on tiptoe, he stretched out his hand against the wall. All stared with amazement; while they regarded it as the insane boast of a man too eager to procure his liberty to weigh the meaning of his words.” Though skeptical, Pizarro realized that he had nothing to lose and hastily accepted the Inca’s offer. Meanwhile, even as he negotiated with Pizarro for his own release, Atahualpa, fearing that Huáscar would take advantage of the situation and bribe his way out of prison, ordered his half-brother drowned in the river of Andamarca. Prophetically, Huáscar declared “with his dying breath that the white men would avenge him, and that his rival would not long survive him.”

  In the coming weeks, huge quantities of gold were stripped from the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, as well as other palaces, and carried by the wagonload to Cajamarca. Then, while the ransom was still being collected, Spanish reinforcements arrived on the coast and joined their comrades at Cajamarca. When a comet appeared over the city at about the same time, the Inca, Prescott tells us, “gazed on it with fixed attention for some minutes, and then exclaimed, with a dejected air, that a similar sign had been seen in the skies a short time before the death of his father, Huayna Capac. From this day a sadness seemed to take possession of him, as he looked with doubt and undefined dread to the future.”

  Atahualpa had cause for dejection. With his ranks swelled with reinforcements, Pizarro chose to renew his campaign of conquest. Instead of waiting in Cajamarca for the promised ransom, he decided to go on the march and seize the gold himself, before the Inca could raise an army against him. Thus, having received a tremendous ransom in gold, the conquistador failed to release Atahualpa as promised and instead had him tried on a dozen charges, ranging from the assassination of Huáscar to bigamy to idolatry. After a sham trial, the Inca was condemned to be burned alive in the great square at Cuzco.

  When the sentence was conveyed to Atahualpa, Prescott writes, “the overwhelming conviction of it unmanned him, and he exclaimed, with tears in his eyes, ‘What have I done, or my children, that I should meet such a fate? And from your hands, too,’ said he, addressing Pizarro; ‘you, who have met with friendship and kindness from my people, with whom I have shared my treasures, who have received nothing but benefits from my hands!’” Then “Atahualpa recovered his habitual self-possession and from that moment submitted himself to his fate with the courage of a warrior.”

  Prescott continues, “The doom of the Inca was proclaimed by sound of trumpets in the great square of Caxamalca; and two hours after sunset, the Spanish soldiery assembled by torch-light in the plaza to witness the execution of the sentence. It was on the twenty-ninth of August, 1533. Atahualpa was led out chained hand and foot. . . .” As he was bound to the stake, a Dominican friar, Father Valverde, “holding up the cross, besought him to embrace it and be baptized,” promising that if he did, his execution would be by means of the less painful garroting. Atahualpa agreed, and at the moment of his death forsook the religion of his ancestors for Christianity.

  Pizarro permitted Huayna Capac’s eldest remaining legitimate son, Tupac Hualpa, to be crowned Inca, with the intent of ruling through him, but the young man complicated things by dying soon thereafter. However, as the Spanish marched from Cajamarca toward Cuzco, they were met by Manco Capoc, legitimate half-brother of Huáscar, who now pressed his claim as rightful heir to the throne. “Pizarro listened to his application with singular contentment,” Prescott writes. “He received the young man, therefore, with great cordiality, and did not hesitate to assure him that he had been sent into the country by his master, the Castilian sovereign, in order to vindicate the claims of Huáscar to the crown, and to punish the usurpation of his rival.”

  Manco Capoc was crowned in 1534, but did not prove the pliable puppet that Piz
arro intended. He ultimately escaped in 1536 and, at the head of a huge army, laid siege to Cuzco. The months-long battle terrified the Spanish and virtually destroyed the city. However, the defenders managed to hold out till spring, when the Indians were forced to disband to plant their crops or face certain starvation. Fleeing to the mountains, Manco Capoc conducted a brilliant guerrilla war for another eight years, before finally being slain in 1544 by Spaniards to whom he had offered refuge after they themselves had rebelled against Pizarro. Thus, like Atahualpa before him, Manco Capoc, the last Inca, fell victim to betrayal at the hands of white men to whom he had shown mercy.

  Meanwhile, Pizarro took as a mistress Atahualpa’s fifteen-year-old daughter Quispe Cusi, also known by her Christian name Inés, with whom he had a daughter, Francisca, and a son, Gonzálo. Later, by the Princess Anas, a wife of Atahualpa also known as Angelina, he had two more sons, Francisco and Juan. In 1534, Pizarro proclaimed the Spanish city of Cuzco on the ruins of the Inca capital, and the following year founded two new cities on the coast, Trujillo, named after his own birthplace in Spain, and Lima, his new capital, whose location he’d chosen for its proximity to the sea and its good supply of fresh water. Having grown fabulously wealthy from his conquests, Pizarro was created a marqués by King Charles in 1539. But his riches and his title could not protect him from the enemies he had made among his own countrymen. Having relied on deceit and cruelty so often himself, he was assassinated on June 26, 1541, by Spanish rivals.

  The fatal confrontation is described by William Prescott. As the assassins stormed through his palace in Lima crying, “Death to the tyrant!” Pizarro struggled to buckle his armor. When the intruders broke into his chamber, where he had been having his midday dinner, the sixty-five-year-old marqués “threw himself on his invaders, like a lion roused in his lair, and dealt his blows with as much rapidity and force, as if age had no power to stiffen his limbs. ‘What ho!’ he cried, ‘traitors! Have you come to kill me in my own house?’ The conspirators drew back for a moment, as two of their body fell under Pizarro’s sword; but they quickly rallied. . . .” One of the assassins, Rada, called out, “‘Why are we so long about it? Down with the tyrant!’ and taking one of his companions, Narváez, in his arms, he thrust him against the marqués. Pizarro, instantly grappling with his opponent, ran him through with his sword. But at that moment he received a wound in the throat, and reeling, he sank on the floor, while the swords of Rada and several of the conspirators were plunged into his body. ‘Jesú!’ exclaimed the dying man, and, tracing a cross with his finger on the bloody floor, he bent down his head to kiss it, when a stroke, more friendly than the rest, put an end to his existence.”

  HUMBOLDT found Cajamarca, the scene of Pizarro’s first great triumph, evocative and poignant. His guide, a “pleasing and friendly youth of seventeen” named Astorpilco, claimed to be a descendant of the emperor, and he and his family were living “among the melancholy ruins of ancient departed splendor . . . in great poverty and privation; but patient and uncomplaining.” Nevertheless, the young man “had filled his imagination with images of buried splendor and golden treasures hidden beneath the masses of rubbish upon which we trod.” He told Humboldt how one of his forefathers had blindfolded his wife and taken her through the rocky labyrinths to a fabulous underground garden of the Inca, which had “skillfully and elaborately imitated, and formed of the purest gold, artificial trees, with leaves and fruit, and birds sitting on the branches,” similar to those found at the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, as well as the golden sedan chair of Atahualpa himself. “The man commanded his wife not to touch any of these enchanted riches, because the long foretold period of the restoration of the empire had not yet arrived, and that whoever should attempt, before that time, to appropriate aught of them would die that very night.” Astorpilco assured Humboldt that beneath their very feet, just a little to the right of where they were standing, was buried a tree made of solid gold, which had once spread its branches over the Inca’s throne.

  Humboldt was impressed “deeply but painfully” by the force of Astorpilco’s faith, “for it seemed as if these illusive and baseless visions were cherished as consolations in present sufferings.” He asked him, “Since you and your parents believe so firmly in the existence of this garden, are not you sometimes tempted in your necessities to dig in search of treasures so close at hand?” But “the boy’s answer was so simple, and expressed so fully the quiet resignation characteristic of the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, that [he] noted it . . . in [his] journal. ‘Such a desire does not come to us; father says it would be sinful. If we had the golden branches, with all their golden fruits, our white neighbors would hate and injure us. We have a small field and good wheat’” with which they must content themselves, though they believed themselves descendants of one of the greatest rulers in the history of the world.

  Humboldt’s party stayed in Cajamarca longer than they had planned, due to a lack of reliable guides and a shortage of mules to carry their growing collections. After five days, they headed southwest toward the coast and climbed down more than six thousand feet on a precipitous switchback trail, till they reached once again the Valley of the Magdalena, one of the deepest in all the Andes. It was a desolate area, where even a “few wretched huts . . . were called an Indian village.”

  As the travelers struggled up from the valley over the Pass of Guangamarca, Humboldt’s hopes of seeing the Pacific rose again. “As we toiled up the mighty mountainside,” he wrote, “with our expectations continually on the stretch, our guides, who were not perfectly acquainted with the road, repeatedly promised us that at the end of the hour’s march which was nearly concluded, our hopes would be realized. The stratum of mist which enveloped us appeared occasionally to be about to disperse, but at such moments our field of view was again restricted by intervening heights.”

  Finally, as they gained the top of the ridge, a sharp wind rose in the west and dispersed the fog. A cobalt sky appeared, and the whole of the western slope of the Andes lay before them “in astonishing apparent proximity. We now saw for the first time the Pacific Ocean itself; and we saw it clearly; forming along the line of the shore a large mass from which the light shone reflected, and rising in its immensity to the well-defined, no longer merely conjectured, horizon. The joy it inspired, and which was vividly shared by my companions Bonpland and Carlos Montúfar, made us forget to open the barometer” to measure the altitude.

  For Humboldt, not only was the sight of the ocean the crowning moment of a long overland journey, it was the fulfillment of a childhood dream. “The view of the Pacific was peculiarly impressive to one who like myself owed a part of the formation of his mind and character, and many of the directions which his wishes had assumed, to intercourse with one of the companions of Cook. My schemes of travel were early made known, in their leading outlines at least, to George Forster, when I enjoyed the advantage of making my first visit to England under his guidance . . . ,” Humboldt wrote. “Forster’s charming descriptions of Otaheite [Tahiti] had awakened throughout Northern Europe a general interest (mixed, I might almost say, with romantic longings) for the Islands of the Pacific, which had at that time been seen by very few Europeans.” In addition, Humboldt saw in this view of the great ocean a glimpse into his own future, as he planned to continue his expedition to the Philippines before sailing on to Europe around the tip of Africa.

  From the western Cordillera, the travelers descended to Trujillo, whence they trekked 250 miles southward through the coastal desert. On October 23, they entered Lima. Pizarro had christened his new capital la Ciudad de los Reyes, “the City of Kings,” in honor of the Magi, around whose feast day it was founded, but by the end of the sixteenth century the city became known simply as Lima, an adaptation of the Indian name for the place. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the city lived up to its earlier, royal appellation, when as capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru and thus the de facto capital of Spain’s New World empire, the place
had been synonymous with wealth and luxury. As a cultural center only Bogotá could compete in those palmy days, and in physical splendor and political might it was approached only by Mexico City, the capital of New Spain.

  However, the intervening years had not been kind to Lima. Laid out on the typical Spanish grid pattern, the city in 1800 had a population of about fifty thousand, of whom about thirty percent were slaves and another fifteen percent were Indians. The heart of the metropolis was the wide and graceful Plaza Mayor, where a great brass fountain dominated the center and the sumptuous cathedral and elegant palaces of the viceroy and the archbishop stretched along the perimeter. But the city had been destroyed by three earthquakes, in 1630, 1687, and 1746, had seen a disastrous Indian revolt in 1780, and now was clearly in a long period of decline.

  In truth, the city had always been hampered by its distance from Spain. Situated on the far side of South America, it could be approached by water only after a long and perilous journey through the Straits of Magellan at the southern tip of the continent. Havana, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires were far better situated for communication with the mother country, and by 1800 the latter port had surpassed Lima as the busiest in South America. In 1776, it had suffered another setback, when silver-rich Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia) had been incorporated into the new Viceroyalty of Río de La Plata, depriving Peru of much-needed revenue. With its agriculture struggling, its roads in notoriously poor condition, its continuing Indian troubles, the loss of Bolivia, and steadily decreasing production from the rest of its silver mines, Peru and its capital were suffering. No wonder Herman Melville, some years later, called Lima “the saddest city on earth.”