Through South America

by Harry Weston Van Dyke

CATHEDRAL AT LIMA, BUILT BY PIZARRO.

Also by this time any illusions the Inca may have had as to the continuance of the ancient dynasty under the protection of the Spaniards were dispelled. By this time even his complaisant subjects must have discovered that these superhuman deliverers, as they had thought them, were mere men—or else, if they were indeed a different order of beings, that order, they must have concluded, was infernal rather than divine. The sovereignty of the Inca had become little more than a fiction. As in the islands of the Caribbean and elsewhere, the fairest lands in the country had been divided into vast estates and great numbers of natives practically reduced to slavery and set to work them for the benefit of their new masters. With respect to their treatment in general, though Pizarro himself seems to have been guilty of few acts of wanton cruelty, he either could not, or did not if he could, restrain the oppression of them by his followers. If their behavior was not quite as atrocious as that of other Spaniards toward the tribes in the north, there was an utter lack of considerateness in it and disregard of their property and rights that galled even them.

Roused at last, the Inca took advantage of the opportunity afforded by the scattering of the Spanish force and made his escape from Cuzco, where Hernando Pizarro and his younger brothers Juan and Gonzalo were in command, and, finding his subjects ripe for revolt, had no difficulty in raising two large armies. One he sent against the Adelantado, who was in Lima; with the other he returned to Cuzco and took the great citadel of Sacsahuaman, overlooking the town, and began a siege that was to last more than six months, and during which Juan Pizarro was killed in an attempt to recapture the citadel. The army that went to the coast was ambushed and defeated by the Spaniards and their local adherents before ever it reached Lima. All that what was left of it could do was to prevent the sending of reinforcements to Cuzco despite the desperate straits to which the Spanish force there was reduced. Pizarro was himself compelled to send to the Isthmus for help. Just before it was too late, however, he managed to get away two hundred and fifty men to the relief of his brothers, and just at that juncture also, Almagro, on his way back from Chile, turned up with his followers, and, caught between Cuzco and these two new detachments of the enemy, the Inca was overwhelmed and concluded to retire into the wild region of Vilcabamba, where the Spaniards could not follow with any hope of success, and there held out for some years. But with his retreat all that remained of the Inca dominion came to an end. There were a few other attempts, but neither he nor his descendants ever succeeded in recovering the throne.

As for Almagro, he had had a frightful experience during his excursion into Chile and had met with nothing but disappointment and disaster. The route unwittingly chosen had been over the bleak Bolivian plateaux and across the mountains where the Cordillera reaches its highest, at a season when the passes are buried in snow and swept by furious storms, and his men had perished by thousands, some of the best of his Spaniards among the number. When he had at last made his way to the beautiful central valley between the Cordillera and the coast range and down to the river Maule, he had found nothing of the opulence of Peru, but only a poor but brave, warlike people who in a fierce battle had succeeded in checking his advance. And now, disgusted with this country of his to the south, he returned and made claim to Cuzco as being within his half of the conquered territory and demanded of the Pizarros its surrender. On their refusal, he promptly carried it by assault, made Hernando and Gonzalo his prisoners, and went out to meet the troops that had been sent to their relief by the Adelantado and defeated them.

And then, as Hawthorne puts it, “had he cut off the heads of both of these gentlemen on the spot, he would have saved himself years of struggle, with a death on the scaffold at the end of them. But he was not of the right fiber for the work that was laid upon him; he was not what the English would call ‘thorough’”; he temporized and listened to his wily associate. “Civil disturbances went on for eleven years,” continues Hawthorne, “‘in the course of which,’ as Professor Fiske remarks, ‘all the principal actors were swept off the stage as in some cheap blood-and-thunder tragedy. It is not worth while to recount the petty incidents of the struggle—how Almagro was at one moment ready to submit to arbitration and the next refused to abide by the decision; how Hernando was set at liberty and Gonzalo escaped; how Almagro’s able lieutenant, Rodrigo de Orgoñez, won a victory over Pizarro’s men at Abancay but was totally defeated by Hernando Pizarro at Las Salinas and perished on the field; how at last Hernando had Almagro tried for sedition and summarily executed. On which side was the more violence and treachery it would be hard to say. Indeed, as Sir Arthur Helps observes, “in this melancholy struggle it is difficult to find anybody whom the reader can sympathize much with.”’”

Then, once more Francisco Pizarro entered Cuzco in triumph, this time wearing an ermine robe that had been presented to him by Hernando Cortés, and again he devoted himself to organizing his government and extending the Spanish dominion over the distant provinces. The number of his compatriots had increased to eight thousand. Gonzalo was appointed Governor of Quito, from whence he strayed to make a disastrous journey down the eastern slope of the Andes in search of the mythical Eldorado, which he did not find, but which resulted in the discovery of and voyage down the Amazon, from the mountains to the sea, by Francisco de Orellana, his second in command. Hernando went to Bolivia to search for the mines from which the Incas were supposed to have gotten their wealth, a labor that was rewarded by the discovery of Potosí, which has yielded more than two billions of ounces of silver—and silver and gold were of equal value in Europe in those days. Pedro de Valdivia undertook the conquest of Chile and Alonso de Alvarado, one of the most generous and humane of the Conquistadores, that of the mountains of northern Peru. The Adelantado himself traveled over most of the empire, founding cities at strategic points in the more populous and fertile valleys, among them Arequipa, and here in Bolivia as in the country about Cuzco he divided the most desirable of the lands into repartimientos and apportioned them among his favorites.

In the meanwhile Almagro’s adherents, helpless and impoverished, were burning with envy of their more fortunate comrades, who were, by favor of the successful rival, rapidly enriching themselves with Indian tribute and gold and silver taken from the mines. At last, unable to stand it, they sent the news of their leader’s illegal execution to Spain, with a demand for justice against the Pizarros. The rest of the story is told by Dawson as follows:

“The Spanish government was not unwilling to secure a selfish advantage from the disputes among the original conquerors and sent out Vaca de Castro to investigate and report. When the Royal Commissioner arrived at Panama early in 1541, the latest news from Peru was tranquilizing. Pizarro was busily engaged in enlarging and beautifying Lima, in regulating the revenue and the administration, in distributing ‘encomiendas,’ and in restraining the rapacity of his Spaniards. However, Lima was full of the ‘men of Chile,’ as Almagro’s adherents were called, all bitter enemies of the Governor. They passed him in the street without saluting, and their attitude was so menacing that Pizarro received repeated warnings and was urged to banish them. Absolutely incapable of personal fear, magnanimous when his passions had not been aroused, he only replied: ‘Poor fellows. They have had trouble enough. We will not molest them.’ He even sent for Juan de la Rada—the guide, counselor, and guardian of the young half-breed who was Almagro’s heir—and condescended to try to argue him into a better frame of mind, saying, at parting: ‘Ask me frankly what you desire;’ but the iron had entered too deeply into Rada’s soul. He had already organized a conspiracy to assassinate Pizarro.

“At noon, on Sunday, the 26th of June, 1541, Pizarro was sitting at dinner in his house with twenty gentlemen, among them his half-brother Francisco Alcantara, and several of the most illustrious knights who had taken part in the conquest. The great door into the public square was lying wide open. The conspirators, to the number of a score, had assembled in a house opposite. All of a sudden they rushed into the square fully armed and carrying their swords naked in their hands. A young page standing in front of the Governor’s house saw them and ran back shouting: ‘To arms! All the men of Chile are coming to kill the Marquis, our lord.’ The guests rose in alarm from the table and all but half a dozen fled to the windows and dropped into the garden. Pizarro threw off his gown and snatched up a sword, while the valiant Francisco Chaves stepped forward through the ante-room to dispute the passage at the staircase. The ferocious crowd of murderers rushed up and laid him dead on the stairs. Alcantara checked them for a few moments with his single sword, but was soon forced back into the dining-room and fell pierced with many thrusts. The old lion shouted from the inside: ‘What shameful thing is this! Why do you wish to kill me?’ and, with a cloak wrapped round one arm and his sword grasped in the other hand, he rushed forward to meet his assassins and strike a blow to avenge his brother before he himself should fall. Only two faithful young pages remained at his side. Though over seventy years of age, his practiced sword laid two of the crowd dead before he was surrounded. The two boys were butchered, and, in the mêlée, Pizarro received a mortal wound in his throat, and, falling to the floor, made the sign of the cross on the boards” (with his blood) “and kissed it. One of the ruffians had snatched up an earthen water jar and with this pounded out the old man’s brains as he lay prostrate, disdaining to ask for mercy.