FRANCISCO PIZARRO.
Eighteen months later they sailed again, with a much larger stock of supplies and this time with 160 men. For hundreds of miles they found nothing but the same swampy, forest-clad wastes along the Colombian shore, inhabited only by naked tribes of savages. Pizarro’s disheartened companions, too ready to believe that the country they were seeking was but a myth, would have had him return; but one day the pilot, who had been sent on ahead, suddenly reappeared with the news that he had penetrated south of the equator and had there met a large trading raft on its way north, bearing cloth, silver work, vases, and other things pertaining to civilization and manned by a crew that wore clothes. These men, the pilot reported, had told him that they came from a town called Tumbez, which lay in a fertile valley behind a penetrable coast—that the whole interior of the country was inhabited by a civilized people, subjects of an emperor whose capital was a great city, high up in the mountains still farther south. On this confirmation of their hopes, the commander succeeded in inducing his men to push on until they had reached nearly as far as the northern boundary of Ecuador, where he landed most of the company on an island called Gallo and sent Almagro back to Panama for more provisions and supplies.
At Gallo the climate proved unhealthful; fevers soon decimated the party; even their clothes were rotted by the almost incessant rains and steamy heat, and, as though that were not enough, when the Governor learned from members of the crew who had returned that the men were being held there against their will, he flew into a rage, instead of sending supplies and reinforcements, and despatched a ship to bring back all who wished to desert. Only emboldened by these misfortunes, Pizarro “drew his sword and traced a line with it on the sand from east to west,” says Montesino in his Anales del Perú. “Then, turning toward the south, ‘Friends and comrades,’ he said, ‘on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure. 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,’ and, so saying, he stepped across the line.” He was followed by the pilot Ruiz, a Greek cavalier named de Candia, and only eleven others. There is, indeed, as Prescott comments—
“Something striking to the imagination in the spectacle of those few brave spirits consecrating themselves to a daring enterprise that seemed as far above their strength as any recorded in the fabulous annals of knight-errantry. A handful of men, without food, without clothing, almost without arms, without knowledge of the land to which they were bound, without even a vessel to transport them, were left there on a rock in the ocean with the avowed purpose of carrying on a crusade against a powerful empire, staking their lives on its success. What is there in the legends of chivalry that surpasses it?”
For weary months they awaited the return of Almagro with the provisions, and the moment they arrived set sail for the Gulf of Guayaquil. Landing at Tumbez, says Dawson, “with their own eyes they saw confirmation of what the Indians of the raft had told them. Irrigated fields, green with beautiful crops, lined the river bank; eighty thousand people, all comfortably housed, lived in the valley; commerce was flourishing; large temples, profusely ornamented with gold and silver, testified to their wealth and culture; the government was well ordered and stable, and the people received the visitors with open-handed hospitality.” It is easy enough to imagine with what longing eyes these forlorn adventurers who had risked and endured so much must have gazed on such a scene as this!
Yet, concluding that his force was too small even for a raid, and thinking it wiser, anyway, after what had happened, to be invested with independent powers before making any attempt at a conquest, Pizarro made his way back to Spain and related his experiences to the King, who was so greatly impressed both with the story and the petitioner’s noble and commanding presence that he did more than merely commission him to undertake a new expedition: he legitimized him and created him marquis, appointed him Adelantado (governor) of such countries as he might conquer, created Almagro marshal, and made the thirteen who had so gallantly stood by them gentlemen of coat armor.
On Pizarro’s return to Panama, he brought with him a few kindred spirits selected from among the very flower of the fighting men of the Peninsula, including his brothers Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo and his half-brother, Francisco Alcantara, his equals in valor if not in audacity and intellect. And then, as he believed from what he had seen of the fighting on the Isthmus, that a few scores of good men, mail-clad and well provided with artillery and horses—for these, unknown in the new world before the advent of the Spaniards, had never failed to strike terror to the natives—would be as effective as thousands in overcoming undisciplined masses of Indians, armed in their inferior fashion, instead of attempting to assemble an army he got together only a small company composed of men of whose courage and experience he was well assured. Having arranged with Almagro to follow with what reinforcements he could recruit from among the unemployed adventurers in Nicaragua, he set out once more.
This time he happened to land first among the less civilized tribes in Ecuador, where he had the good fortune to find a rich store of emeralds and gold, which he sent back to Almagro to encourage him in his work. Then, marching down the coast to Guayaquil, he crossed to the island of Puna to await the reinforcements, conquered the fierce inhabitants of the place, and was afterward joined by a detachment sent out by his associate under the command of Hernando de Soto, an adventurer who had served with Cortés in Mexico and was later to attain still greater fame as the discoverer of the Mississippi. Even with those De Soto brought, the whole force numbered less than two hundred and fifty.
Though they had not the faintest idea of it then, the empire they were destined to bring under the Spanish sway covered a territory along the plateaux and eastern and Pacific slopes of the Andes extending from Quito in Ecuador to the river Maule in Chile, a distance of nearly three thousand miles, inhabited by hardy and warlike races, that numbered, according to the estimate of the early historians, somewhere near twenty millions of people.