The Conquistadors (27 page)

The king's fifth, together with carefully selected examples of the finest jewelry work, was sent to Spain by three caravels, which finally left Vera Cruz in December 1522. Fonseca had planned to seize the treasure on arrival in Spain. Instead, the ships were attacked by a French privateer, who delivered their contents to his own king, Francis I. It was one of those extraordinary twists of fate, for the treasure assumed much greater importance in the French king's hands than it would have done otherwise, and helped considerably in furthering Cortés' affairs at the court of the Emperor Charles.

Cortés was now the absolute ruler of a great slice of central America, extending from Vera Cruz west across the mountains to the rich volcanic uplands of the central lake area. It was doubled in size almost immediately by an alliance with the king of Michoacan. The territories of this Indian king stretched to the western coast, and his submission gave Cortés access to the Pacific, then known as the South Sea. But though his territorial conquest now far outstripped those of the island viceroys of Cuba and Jamaica, his position was founded solely on force and still had no legal basis, so that his old enemy, Fonseca, was able to dispatch Cristóbal de Tapia with the apparent authority of the Emperor to oversee the conquered territories for the crown. He was a worse choice than Narváez, for he was not only weak, but venal as well, and he had no force to back him up.

Cortés countered with the legal argument that he had used before – that he was the elected captain-general of a properly constituted Spanish settlement. He backed it up with personal bribes; and that was the end of it. The fame of his conquests, supported by his dispatches to the Emperor and the weight of gold he had sent back from Vera Cruz, now at last bore fruit. On October 15, 1522, he received two letters from the Emperor that finally confirmed his position. He was legally appointed Governor and Captain-General of New Spain. His position was thenceforth unassailable.

Even so, Garay, acting against orders from Spain, again descended on the Pánuco river area. It was a repetition of the Narváez débâcle, and in the end
Cortés received him in royal state in Mexico, their long-standing quarrel was patched up, and they attended mass together. This was on Christmas Eve 1523. Garay caught pneumonia – Gómara calls it
dolor de costado
and says he died two weeks later. Cortés was accused by his enemies of murdering him, but since Garay had been several years in Jamaica and had come straight from the tropical coastal area to the 7,000-feet high plateau of Mexico, it seems not unreasonable that he did catch pneumonia.

By now Pedro de Alvarado was marching south into what is now Guatemala. Sandoval was pacifying the Pánuco river area, seizing the Indian town of Coatzacoalcos and subduing all the coastal area, including the warlike Tabascans. The great province of Oaxaca had already submitted; the Spaniards were advancing into the land of the Zapotecs; and four ships were being built for the exploration of the Pacific, ‘which vessels – our Lord being willing – will sail down the coast at the end of July of this year 1524 in search of the same strait; for if it exists it cannot escape both those who go by the South Sea and those who go by the North Sea'. Cortés was dreaming the same dream that had motivated Columbus and all the other discoverers of that period – a strait that would lead through central America to the spice islands of the Moluccas. Far to the south Olid was marching into Honduras.

Meanwhile, the city of Mexico had been largely rebuilt and fortified, and gunpowder was being manufactured locally with sulphur taken from the crater of Popocatépetl. Mines were being opened, and breeding stocks of cows, sows, sheep, goats, she-asses, and mares brought in from the islands of the Caribbean. Grants of land and
encomiendas
of Indians were being allocated to the conquistadors on the basis that those granted up to five hundred Indians must have arms ready to serve at call as foot soldiers; above that number they must keep a horse and hold themselves in readiness to serve in the cavalry. Thus Cortes held New Spain on a feudal basis. By the beginning of 1524 he could write to his Emperor with complete confidence that, when Alvarado and Olid had completed their tasks, he would hold for the crown 400 leagues of the north coast and ‘on the southern coast the country extends from one sea to the other, without interruption, for 500 leagues' – an area bigger than Spain itself. All this within eighteen months of the final destruction of the Aztec empire.

The Aztecs had indeed passed out of history. Their religion may have been a filthy one, their rites and practices abominable in our eyes, but their morality was no worse than that of many American and even South Pacific communities of that time. Their vanished civilization remains a remarkable one. In Mexico today there is no vestige remaining of the exquisite Venetian beauty of their waterborne city; the Spaniards destroyed it utterly. Worse, in their determination to root out idolatry and plant their own religion, their priests destroyed much of the Indian civilization, the idols, the featherwork, the jewelry, the libraries of their sacred records, the picture writings. And the people themselves were enslaved.

PART THREE
Pizarro

The Emperor Charles was now beginning to realize that, though he might still regard Spain as the least attractive of his European dominions, the lands beyond the Western Ocean that his Spanish subjects were discovering and opening up had great possibilities as a source of much-needed revenue. Whilst Cortés was adhering to the policy implicit in the offer he had once made to Moctezuma, sending his captains on wide-ranging expeditions of conquest designed to enlarge the already considerable territory of New Spain, new horizons were beginning to open further south, in the small port settlement of Panama. Colonization of the isthmus had been a by-product of the ill-fated Nicuesa-Hojeda expedition of 1509. This was the expedition that Cortés would have joined if he had not been suffering from syphilis at the time it sailed. It is of particular interest because Francisco Pizarro did sail with it, and he is the man with whom we will now be concerned. It not only gives us the first clear record we have of his qualities in command, that quite remarkable courage and ruthless determination that was to take him to the pinnacle of power in Peru, but it also shows the penalties paid by the Spanish soldier adventurers for ineffective leadership at the top.

Both Hojeda and Nicuesa had made full use of their court connections to get themselves colonial appointments. As a result, the president of the Council of the Indies, Bishop Fonseca, had named them governors of two great slices of unexplored territory on either side of the gulf of Darién – Hojeda taking New Andalusia on the eastern side (the north coast of what is now Colombia and Venezuela) and Nicuesa Castilla del Oro on the western side (Nicaragua and Honduras). This was all very fine on paper in Castile, but three thousand miles away in Hispaniola the blood and sweat of Spanish settlers had still to translate these two new colonies into fact. Moreover, the appointments quite ignored the hereditary claims of Diego Columbus who, as soon as they began fitting out their ships, put legal obstacles in Nicuesa's way, singling him out no doubt because he was already a rich man. Thus, the impecunious Hojeda, who was backed by the cosmographer, Juan de la Cosa, sailed first, heading south across the Caribbean to Cartagena on the north coast of South America with about three hundred men.
Nicuesa, with a force of some seven hundred, finally got away ten days later, but by the time he reached Cartagena Hojeda had already fallen foul of the Caribs, Juan de la Cosa was dead, stuck full of poisoned arrows, and seventy men had been lost as well as many wounded.

It was a bad opening to what was to prove one of the most disastrous expeditions ever launched in the New World, and even when they had founded the settlement of San Sebastián, further to the east in the gulf of Urabá, they were little better off than on shipboard, since the hostility of the natives forced them to shut themselves up inside their wooden palisades. It was here, in a brush with the Caribs, that Hojeda got an arrow in his thigh and survived somehow his self-imposed treatment of white-hot iron sheets pressed to his inflamed flesh.

If we accept Las Casas' account of this as accurate, the story is a vivid illustration of the fortitude of the conquistadors. In this period, and for several centuries after, sailors accepted as normal the amputation of a limb without any form of anaesthetic, but this particular cure for a wound inflamed by poison was regarded as so drastic that Hojeda had to threaten to hang his surgeon before he would undertake it. He then applied the white-hot iron sheets to both sides of Hojeda's thigh, ‘in such a way that not only did he burn through the thigh and leg and the fire conquered and expelled the evil of the herb, but it penetrated his body to such a degree that they had to consume a whole barrel of vinegar, imbibing sheets and wrapping his body in them'. And the patient suffered all this without being either held or tied. It sounds incredible, but there is little doubt that these men, born to the saddle and a hard life of fighting, were peculiarly scornful of pain. They were men of endurance and action, incapable of expressing themselves except by their deeds. Thus most of them remain shadowy figures who come to life for us mainly in their achievements, occasionally in personal incidents such as this.

Shortly afterwards the expedition had its one stroke of good fortune – a dubious character named Talavera, with seventy other desperadoes, came in from Hispaniola in a Genoese ship they had ‘requisitioned'. It was full of cassava bread and meat, and Talavera was only too happy to trade this welcome change of diet with the settlers for gold. By then Nicuesa had left, and Hojeda followed as soon as he had recovered, sailing with Talavera to get help at Santo Domingo. It was a disastrous voyage and in the end they beached their vessel at the western end of Cuba. For a month they marched eastward, stumbling through swamps and cutting their way through jungle; at the end of four hundred miles only about a dozen of them were still alive. They were eventually taken off by a caravel commanded by Pánfilo de Narváez. Talavera was hanged in Jamaica. Hojeda died penniless in hospital at Santo Domingo.

Meanwhile, the little settlement of San Sebastián had been left in the charge of Pizarro. By the end of two months the situation had become desperate. Evacuation was the only answer, but he had sixty men and only two tiny brigantines. Coolly he
decided to wait until poisoned arrows, disease and starvation had done their work. It did not take long, and within six months of their landing in the gulf of Urabá the settlers were sufficiently reduced in numbers for him to cram the survivors into the two vessels, one of which sank almost immediately. His own ship reached Cartagena safely, and there his incredible luck came to his aid: Enciso, an associate of Hojeda, who had sailed from Santo Domingo in 1511, had just arrived with a relief force of a hundred and fifty men. They sailed back again to Urabá, where Enciso promptly lost his ship on a sandbank. After this exhibition of incompetent seamanship Pizarro might have seized command if another, even bolder, adventurer from Estremadura – the man who was about to write his name in history as the discoverer of the Pacific – had not been there. Vasco Núñez de Balboa had shipped out in Enciso's ship, a stowaway hidden in a wine cask, escaping from his creditors. He had been in the gulf of Darién before and knew of an estuary where there was food to be had and the Indians were friendly and did not use poisoned arrows. Together Balboa and Pizarro sailed for Darién, where they founded a settlement they called Santa María de la Antigua. Here Nicuesa, having established the settlement of Nombre de Dios further up the coast, finally joined them with the pitiful remnants of his force. He attempted to assume command, and interfere with the gold trade, with the result that the settlers shipped him off in a leaking ship. They could then get on with the business of trading with the Indians, their gold lust having already been whetted by vague reports of a land to the south agleam with the metal they so urgently coveted.

So ended the Nicuesa-Hojeda expedition. Out of a total of some 1,250 men – more than treble the number Cortes had on his march to Mexico, more than six times the force Pizarro would command in his advance on the Inca stronghold of Peru – barely two hundred survived, most of them with Balboa and Pizarro in Darién. Disastrous as it was, it nevertheless produced the most startling result since Columbus had first crossed the Western Ocean.

On September 1, 1513, Balboa and a handful of men headed south from Nombre de Dios, hacking their way through the lush tropical green of the swamp edges, up over hills that were covered with some of the densest jungle growth in the Americas, and across the crocodile-infested Chagres river. Twenty-five days later they caught their first distant glimpse of the Pacific. The line of their march was well to the east of the present canal, east even of the Camino Real, the pack mule route that was to bring the gold from the Pacific to the Atlantic shore. Bearing in mind that 370 years later the French were to lose thousands to malaria and yellow fever in their abortive attempts to build the canal, and that the jungle density was a much greater obstacle than it appears today following the clearance operation that was the American preliminary to the canal, this first crossing of the isthmus was a remarkable achievement.

On September 25 Balboa is supposed to have waded into the waters of the Pacific, waving his drawn sword and claiming the ocean for his emperor. It is
here, on the shores of the great South Sea – the Mar del Sur – that he is also supposed to have been given more precise information about a fabulous golden land to the south and to have been shown Indian drawings of a strange camel-like creature, the llama. With ships in sections, transported on the backs of Indians across the isthmus and assembled on the shores of the South Sea, he explored south; but as soon as he was beyond the gulf of Panama, he met adverse winds and currents. He got little further than the Pearl Islands, a fairly large group in the south-east part of the gulf.