The Conquistadors (29 page)

This is one of the worst jungle and swamp areas of this very unpleasant coast. The shore is low and the estuaries full of mud banks at low water, with solid jungle growth extending into the flat delta interior. To the north it is all the same low country, a flat hell of jungle green, the rain swamps breeding a virulent insect life. Southwards lie the first of the Cordilleras, and, when the clouds lift for a while and the rain-washed air gives clear visibility, you can see the chain of tree-clad mountains extending south-westward along the coast, veiled with the white puffs and trailers of the clouds that cling to their slopes like mildew. These moisture-laden clouds are banked up by the prevailing northerlies to give
the flat lands one of the highest rainfalls in the world, about 350 inches per year, and though this helps to freshen the atmosphere (the air temperature is around 90°, rather higher than Panama), it does mean that the rain is almost incessant, particularly in the latter part of the day and during the night.

It is hardly the country in which to mount an expedition, yet Pizarro, with his ships anchored in the shelter of the sand banks, made a quick thrust inland and from one village alone collected a considerable quantity of gold in the form of ornaments, as well as capturing several Indians. The banks of the river had many small Indian settlements, their palm-thatched houses built on stilts over the swamps or in small clearings in the thick-fronded tree growth. It was clear from the number of these family settlements, and the movement of dugout canoes and log rafts on the estuary, that they had reached a more populated area of the coast where people had contact by water with the interior. Pizarro was no doubt conscious that he was now on the threshold of the powerful and well-organized people about which he had so often heard. It was decided, therefore, that the vessels should part company, Almagro returning to Panama to flaunt the precious booty they had so quickly acquired and drum up reinforcements, and Ruiz, in the other ship, to reconnoitre further to the south.

As soon as the two ships had sailed, Pizarro marched inland, where the Indians had told him he would find open country suitable for a permanent camp. They were probably referring to the high Andean plateau, and since even a twentieth-century peasant can be highly confusing in the matter of distance, it is hardly surprising that the Spaniards never reached their goal. Instead, they lost themselves in the impenetrable jungle growth of the tropical rain forest that clothed the
foothills, their laborious progress constantly barred by deep ravines. Men died, became ill, sank with exhaustion, and in the end they struggled back to the coast, thankful to be out of the humid jungle hell in which they had become entangled, clear of the dangerous night life, the jaguars, panthers and other tropical beasts that were strange to them, the alligators and the snakes. Amongst the mosquitoes of the river swamps Pizarro and his men once again eked out a precarious existence on the edge of starvation, until at last Ruiz brought his ship back into the estuary.

He had a very different story to tell. His cruise had been as successful as Pizarro's march inland had been disastrous. He had had a favourable wind down the coast for fully 2° of latitude, had reconnoitred the island of Gallo, but finding the islanders hostile had sailed serenely on south-westward for a further eighty miles, across what is now called Bahía Ancón de Sardinas. Here, just to the east of the Esmeraldas river, he had found good shelter in a little bay he called San Mateo (St Matthew). All along the coast he had seen signs of increasing population, increasing civilization and, close-in to the shore, had seen the people watching without fear or any sign of hostility. It was whilst he was well off-shore, presumably to get a better slant of wind, that he came up with a balsa trading raft constructed on what we now know as the Kon-tiki pattern. Not only had it gold and silver articles on board, of more elaborate design than any he had seen before, and finely woven cloth embroidered with birds and flowers in bright vegetable dyes, but also two Peruvians from the Inca port of Tumbes. Their accounts of the flocks of llama and alpaca, of palaces sheeted with gold and silver, so excited his imagination that he continued on south as far as Punta de Pasado. He was then in latitude ½°S, only 220 miles from Tumbes itself. But he was a prudent mariner and he did not push his luck. Instead, he turned back, content that he was the first Spaniard to take a ship across the ‘line' in the Pacific and that he had seen the Cordilleras of the Andes marching on to the south'ard, a staggering infinity of peaks disappearing into the haze like some colossal rampart. Not only did he bring back to Pizarro and his starving and dispirited men news of wonderful discoveries, but he had with him the evidence – the gold and silver, the cloth, and, more important still, the two Peruvians and several other Indians he had taken from the trading raft. He had been absent seventy days.

And then Almagro came in from Panama. In place of Pedrarias, he had found Pedro de los Ríos installed as governor, and since the expedition showed promise the new governor was not disposed to interfere. Almagro had been free to recruit. Men just out from Spain, with little knowledge of the hardships involved in opening up new lands, had enlisted eagerly, so that, besides provisions, he had on board at least eighty reinforcements. Full bellies and new comrades once again lifted morale. The two ships sailed in company, first to the island of Gallo, where they spent a fortnight repairing storm damage, and then to St Matthew's Bay. The weather improved and they coasted as far south as Tacamez, now called Atacames, but at that time quite a large port with some two thousand houses, proper streets
and other indications of a much higher standard of civilization. They were now on the very edge of the Inca empire, not Peru itself, but the recently-conquered state of Quito, the territory of which is broadly equivalent to present Ecuador. They were anchored off a country rich in gold and emeralds, with the evidence of an advanced system of agriculture plain before their eyes. Yet at this point they turned back, discouraged by the hostility of the natives. It is a decision that needs explanation in view of what Pizarro was to achieve later with an equally small force.

The hostility of the inhabitants was apparent the moment they anchored. Armed canoes full of warriors put out, with a golden mask as their battle sign, and when Pizarro landed in an attempt to parley in sign-language, his force was set upon by hordes of warriors. Pizarro only extricated himself because the Indians were shocked into momentary inactivity by the sight of one of his caballeros becoming separated from his horse.

That this one skirmish should have so discouraged his men that most of them clamoured to return to Panama was due in part to the conditions in which they were operating and in part to the quality of the men themselves. They were not much more than five hundred miles from Panama, but for most of them each mile had been a step into the unknown, and though five hundred miles is no great distance for a voyage of discovery, their shipboard existence was very different from that of the men who had sailed with Columbus and Magellan. They were not sailors. They were soldier-adventurers who had little to do with the handling of ships at sea. The exact size of the two vessels is not known, but it is unlikely that they were larger than Columbus's
Santa María,
which was 78
feet overall, and in addition to the crew, each vessel carried almost a hundred men, as well as their horses and stores. Anybody who has sailed in a drifter or trawler of this size will understand what discomfort this implies, and in storm conditions life on board must have been almost intolerable. Moreover, because the veteran colonists in Panama had known only too well what hardships the expedition would have to face, both Pizarro and Almagro had been forced to recruit their men from amongst the colonial failures or from new arrivals from Spain, men made redundant by the cessation of fighting in Europe, who had come overseas in a mood of near-desperation to seek their fortunes. Unlike Cortés, Pizarro had had no opportunity to weld this unpromising material into a disciplined and effective force. Faced with the determined opposition of the natives he knew he had little chance of survival.

The course of action finally decided upon was a repetition of what they had done previously. Pizarro would remain camped at some suitable point, whilst Almagro returned to Panama, and, with a display of the gold they had won, beat up reinforcements. It was not a prospect that appealed to Pizarro, and the two of them nearly came to blows over it, but in the end he agreed that there was no alternative. They hoisted sail, and with wind and current once again behind them, coasted north seeking a suitable place for a camp. But everywhere now the natives
were alerted and hostile. Rather than repeat his wretched experience in the humid mosquito-ridden swamps of the north, Pizarro landed on the island of Gallo. The two barren hills of this red-cliffed island are almost the only conspicuous features in the dreary flatness of the Rada de Tumaco; it did not take long for the desolation of the place to complete his men's sense of disillusion. Soldiers trained in obedience to authority, they were not yet openly mutinous, but several
of them managed to smuggle a letter out in Almagro's ship, concealed in a specimen ball of raw cotton. The dispirited tone of this letter, and its implication that Pizarro was holding them on the island against their will, rapidly spread throughout the colony. As a result Almagro not only failed to get the governor's support for the reinforcements he needed, but two ships, under an officer named Tafur, were dispatched to Gallo to evacuate the rest of the expedition and bring them back to Panama.

When Tafur reached Isla del Gallo he found the remnants of the expedition in a state of near-starvation. Their numbers were much reduced, for soon after Almagro's departure Pizarro had rid himself of the most mutinous elements by sending them back with Ruiz in the second ship under the pretext that it was in need of repairs. Those that remained with him had finally been reduced to a subsistence diet of shell-fish. Drenched with tropical rain, their skin blotched with sores, burned by the sun, their clothes in rags and their bones staring, they had the appearance of animated scarecrows. Yet thirteen of them decided to ignore the governor's orders and remain with their leader in voluntary exile on this miserable, desolate island. Pizarro was learning from Cortés, and the tracing of his famous line in the sand with the point of his sword was a gesture every bit as dramatic as Cortés sinking his boats. His words, too: ‘Gentlemen, this line represents toil, hunger, thirst, weariness, sickness, and all the other vicissitudes that our undertaking will involve, until the day when our souls will return to God. …' Prescott's version of the speech differs somewhat from Garcilaso's and it finishes even more dramatically: ‘There lies Peru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part I go to the south.' With that he stepped across the line.

This was not entirely an empty gesture of bravado. Almagro and Luque had both sent letters out to him imploring him to hold fast to the original plan, pointing out that to return like a beaten dog at the governor's order would mean the loss of all they had achieved at such cost of hardship and money, and they assured him that they would move heaven and earth to provide him with the means of going forward. Pizarro in this moment of history presents an indomitable, quite extraordinary figure, standing there on the sands of the island's foreshore in his ragged clothes with his drawn sword, and the two ships riding off, the ships that would carry him safely back to Panama, to historical oblivion. Some thing – the quest for power, the sense perhaps of frustrated energy and ability, of a life wasted, yet on the verge of fulfilment – something much more than mere lust for gold was driving him at that moment.

Ruiz, who had returned as pilot of one of Tafur's ships to rescue his captain, did not hesitate. He followed Pizarro across the line. The Crete-born Pedro de Candia was next, and after him stepped twelve others – Cristóbal de Peralta, Nicolás de Rivera, Domingo de Soraluce, Francisco de Cuéllar, Alonso de Molina, Pedro Alcón, García de Jarén, Antonio de Carrión, Alonso Briceño, Martín de Paz,
Juan de la Torre and Francisco Rodríguez de Villafuerte.
⁴
These forlorn, abandoned men stood and watched as the two ships set their sails and, with the south wind behind them, disappeared over the horizon. Tafur was not an adventurer. He was an officer to whom obedience was the cardinal virtue and he had no intention of encouraging them in their madness by leaving them one of his vessels. With him went Ruiz to impress upon the governor the urgency of supporting the expedition, at least as far as Tumbes.

Determination is something all men respect, and in the annals of discovery, as in the annals of war, the reckless pursuit of an objective without regard for personal safety is more often attended by success than by disaster. So it was with Pizarro. Representations by Almagro and Luque, supported by Ruiz, eventually prevailed, and in the end the governor reluctantly agreed to the fitting out of a vessel, provided that no soldiers were included in the expedition and that, whether they reached Tumbes or not, the pilot would return at the end of six months, bringing Pizarro and his thirteen comrades with him. Even this limited and reluctant consent had taken months to achieve, so that when Ruiz finally sailed, he had no idea whether he would find Pizarro alive or dead.