Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume LXII., No. 381, July, 1847

by Various

The world’s history contains no chapter more striking and attractive than that comprising the narrative of Spanish conquest in the Americas. Teeming with interest to the historian and philosopher, to the lover of daring enterprise and marvellous adventure it is full of fascination. On the vast importance of the discovery of a western hemisphere, vying in size, as it one day, perhaps, may compete in civilisation and power, with its eastern rival, it were idle to expatiate. But the manner of its conquest commands unceasing admiration. It needs the concurring testimony of a host of chroniclers and eye-witnesses to convince succeeding generations that the hardships endured, the perils surmounted, the victories obtained, by the old Conquistadores of Mexico and Peru, were as real as their record is astounding. The subjugation of vast and populous empires by petty detachments of adventurers, often scantily provided and ignorantly led—the extraordinary daring with which they risked themselves, a few score strong, into the heart of unknown countries, and in the midst of hostile millions, require strong confirmation to obtain credence. Exploits so romantic go near to realise the feats of those fabulous paladins who, cased in impervious steel and wielding enchanted lance, overthrew armies as easily as a Quixote scattered merinos. Hardly, when the tale is put before us in the quaint and garrulous chronicle of an Oviedo or a Zarate, can we bring ourselves to accept it as history, not as the wild invention of imaginative monks, beguiling conventual leisure by the composition of fantastical romance. And the man who undertakes, at the present day, to narrate in all their details the exploits and triumphs of a Cortés or a Pizarro, allots himself no slight task. A clear head and a sound judgment, great industry and a skilful pen, are needed to do justice to the subject; to extract and combine the scraps of truth buried under mountains of fiction and misrepresentation, to sift facts from the partial accounts of Spanish jurists and officials, and to correct the boastful misrepresentations of insolent conquerors. The necessary qualities have been found united in the person of an accomplished American author. Already favourably known by his histories of the eventful and chivalrous reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of the exploits of the Great Marquis and his iron followers, Mr Prescott has added to his well-merited reputation by his narrative of the Conquest of Peru. In its compilation he has spared no pains. Private collections and public libraries, the archives of Madrid and the manuscripts of the Escurial, he has ransacked and collated. And he has been so scrupulously conscientious as to send to Lima for a copy of the portrait whose engraving faces his title-page. But although his materials had to be procured from many and distant countries, their collection appears to have occasioned him less trouble than their abundance. The comrades and contemporaries of Pizarro were afflicted with a scribbling mania. They have left masses of correspondence, of memoranda and personal diaries, contradictory of each other, often absurd in their exaggerations and childish in their triviality. From this farrago has Mr Prescott had to cull,—a labour of no trifling magnitude, whose result is most creditable to him. And to our admiration of his talents are added feelings of strong sympathy, when we read his manly and affecting account of the painful circumstances under which the work was done. Deprived by an accident of the sight of one eye, the other has for years been so weak as at times to be useless to him for all purposes of reading and writing. At intervals he was able to read print several hours a-day, but manuscript was far more trying to his impaired vision, and writing was only possible through those aids by which even the stone-blind may accomplish it. But when he could read, although only by daylight, he felt, he says, satisfied with being raised so nearly to a level with the rest of his species. Unfortunately the evil increases. “The sight of my eye has become gradually dimmed, whilst the sensibility of the nerve has been so far increased, that for several weeks of the last year I have not opened a volume, and through the whole time I have not had the use of it, on an average, for more than an hour a-day.” Sustained by love of letters, and assisted by readers and amanuenses, the student and scholar has triumphed over these cruel disadvantages, surmounted all obstacles, and produced three long and important historical works, conspicuous by their impartiality, research, and elegance; entitling him to an exceedingly honourable position amongst writers in the English tongue, and to one of the very loftiest places in the as yet scantily filled gallery of American men of letters. The last of these works, of which Pizarro is the hero and Peru the scene, yields nothing in merit or interest to its predecessors.

The discovery of America infected Europe with a fever of exploration. Scarce a country was there, possessing a sea-frontier, whence expeditions did not proceed with a view to appropriate a share of the spoils and territory of the new-found El-Dorado. In these ventures Spain, fresh from her long and bloody struggle with the Moor, and abounding in fierce unsettled spirits, eager for action and adventure, took a prominent part. The conquests of Cortes followed hard upon the discoveries of Columbus: Dutch, English, and Portuguese pushed their investigations in all directions; and, in less than thirty years from its first discovery, the whole eastern coast of both Americas was explored from north to south. The vast empire of Mexico was added to the Spanish crown, and the mother country was glutted and intoxicated by the Pactolus that flowed from this new possession. But enterprise was not yet exhausted, or thirst of gold satiated, and Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific gave fresh stimulus to both. Rumour had long spoken of lands, as yet untrodden by European foot, where the precious metals were abundant and worthless as the sand upon the sea-beach. Years elapsed before any well-directed attempt was made to reach these golden shores. With a view to discovery and traffic in the Pacific, a settlement was made on the southern side of the Isthmus of Darien, and the town of Panama was built. But the armaments that were fitted out took a westerly direction, in hopes to realise a fixed idea of the Spanish government relative to an imaginary strait intersecting the Isthmus. At last an expedition sailed southwards, but soon returned, owing to the bad health of its commander. This was in 1522. The moment and the man had not yet arrived. They came, two years later; Pizarro appeared, and Peru was discovered.

But the discovery was comparatively a trifling matter. There lay the long line of coast, stretching south-eastwards from Panama; the navigator disposed to explore it, had but to spread his sails, keep the land in sight, and take the risk of the hidden shoals and reefs that might lie in his course. The seas to be crossed were often tempestuous; the country intervening between St Michael’s Gulf and the southern empire, whose rumoured wealth and civilisation wrought so potently upon Spanish imagination, was peopled by fierce and warlike tribes. Shipwreck was to be dreaded, and a landing might for weeks or months be unsafe, if not impracticable. But what were such secondary dangers contrasted with the perils, doubly terrible from their unknown and mysterious nature, incurred by the sanguine Genoese and his bold companions, when they turned their brigantine’s prow westward from Europe, and sailed—they knew not whither? Here the path was comparatively plain, and the goal ascertained; and although risks must be dared, reward was tolerably certain: for further tidings of the Peruvian empire had reached the ears of the Spaniards, less shadowy and incomplete than the vague hints received by Balboa from an Indian chief. Andagoya, the officer whom illness had compelled to abandon an expedition when it was scarcely commenced, had brought back intelligence far more explicit, obtained from Indian traders who had penetrated by land into the empire of the Incas, as far (so he says in his own manuscript, comprised in Navarrete’s collection) as its capital city of Cuzco. They spoke of a pagan but civilised land, opulent and flourishing; they described the divisions of its provinces, the wealth of its cities, the manners and usages of its inhabitants. But had their description been far more minute and glowing, the imagination of those who received the accounts would still have outstripped reality and possibility. Those were the days of golden visions and chimerical day-dreams. In the fancy of the greedy and credulous Spaniards, each corner of the New World contained treasures, compared to which the golden trees and jewelled fruits of Aladdin’s garden were paste and tinsel. The exaggerated reports of those adventurers who returned wealth-laden to Spain, were swoln by repetition to dimensions which enchantment only could have realised. No marvels were too monstrous and unwieldy for the craving gullet of popular credulity. “They listened with attentive ears to tales of Amazons, which seemed to revive the classic legends of antiquity, to stories of Patagonian giants, to flaming pictures of an El-Dorado, where the sands sparkled with gems, and golden pebbles as large as birds’ eggs were dragged in nets out of the rivers.” And expeditions were actually undertaken in search of a magical Fountain of Health, of golden sepulchres and temples. The Amazons and the water of life are still to be discovered; but as to golden temples and jewelled sands, their equivalents, at least, were forthcoming,—not for the many, but for a chosen and lucky few. Of the fortunes of these the record is preserved; of the misfortunes of those comparatively little is told us. We hear of the thousands of golden castellanos that fell to the lot of men, who a moment previously, were without a maravedi in their tattered pouches; we find no catalogue of the fever-stricken victims who left their bones in the noxious districts of Panama and Castillo de Oro. And those who achieved riches, earned them hardly by peril and privation, although, in the magnificence of the plunder, past sufferings were quickly forgotten. Thrice did Pizarro and his daring companions sail southward; countless were their hardships, bitter their disappointments, before the sunshine of success rewarded their toils, revealing to them treasures that must in some degree have appeased even their appetite for lucre. They came suddenly upon a town whose inhabitants, taken by surprise, fled in consternation, abandoning their property to the invaders. It was the emerald region, and great store of the gems fell into the hands of the Spaniards. Pizarro had one as large as a pigeon’s egg. A quantity of crowns and other ornaments, clumsily fashioned, but of pure gold and silver, were more to the taste of the ignorant conquerors, who were sceptical as to the value of the jewels. “Many of them,” says Pedro Pizarro, whose rough, straightforward account of the discovery and conquest of Peru is frequently quoted by Mr Prescott, “had emeralds of great value; some tried them upon anvils, striking them with hammers, saying that if they were genuine, they would not break; others despised them, and affirmed that they were glass.” A cunning monk, one of the missionaries whom Pizarro had been ordered by the Spanish government to take out in his ships, encouraged this opinion, in order to buy up the emeralds as their market value declined. The specie, however, was of immense amount, if the authority just quoted may be depended upon. He talks of two hundred thousand castellanos, the commercial value of which was equivalent to more than half a million sterling. This from one village, of no great size or importance. It was a handsome earnest of future spoils, and of the mountain of gold which, as an Inca’s ransom, awaited the Spaniards at Cuzco.

In these days, when the rumoured existence of a land previously unknown provokes expeditions authorised and fitted out by half the maritime powers of Europe, and when great nations risk the peace of the world for the possession of a paltry Pacific islet, the small degree of vigour shown by the Spanish crown in pushing its American discoveries fills us with surprise. Take Peru as an instance. The isthmus of Darien was colonised by Spaniards; Mexico was theirs, and the armaments sent by Pedrarias from Panama to explore in a north-westerly direction, had met at Honduras the conquerors of the Aztecs, the brave and fortunate companions of Hernan Cortés. One empire had received the Spanish yoke; at Panama the foot of the European was on the threshold of another; but there it paused, desirous, yet fearing, to proceed. No aid or encouragement to enterprise was afforded from Spain; it was left to private capital and individual daring further to extend colonies already so vast. A priest found the money; two veteran soldiers, of low extraction, desperate fortunes, and brave spirit, undertook the risk. The most remarkable of the three men who thus formed a partnership for the conquest of kingdoms, could neither read nor write, was illegitimate, and a foundling. “He was born in Truxillo,” says Gomara, in his Historia de las Indias; “was left at the door of a church, and for a certain number of days he sucked a sow, none being willing to give him milk.” Young Pizarro subsequently requited this porcine nourishment by taking care of his foster-mother’s relatives. The chief occupation of his youth was that of a swineherd. Gomara’s account of his birth, however, is only one of many, various and contradictory in their details. The fact is that very little is known of the early years of Francisco Pizarro. His valour and soldierly qualities he doubtless inherited from his father, a Spanish colonel of infantry, who served with distinction in Italy and Navarre. Neither from him nor from his mother, a person of low condition, did he receive much parental attention. Even the date of his birth is a matter of doubt, and has been differently stated by different chroniclers. He cannot, however, have been far from fifty when he started on his Peruvian expedition. During the fourteen previous years he had followed the fortunes of Ojeda, Balboa, and other Spanish-American adventurers, until at last the opportunity offered for himself to assume a command to which he proved in every way competent. His rank was that of captain, and the number of men under his orders made but a slender company, when, in the month of November 1524, he left the port of Panama, on board a small vessel, indifferently provided, and of no great seaworthiness. About a hundred adventurers, (some accounts say eighty, others a hundred and twenty,) stalwart, stout-hearted fellows, for the most part of no very reputable description, composed the powerful army destined to invade a populous empire. They started under many disadvantages. Almagro, Pizarro’s partner in the undertaking, who was to follow in another ship, as soon as it could be got ready, had had the victualling of that on which his colleague embarked, and he had performed the duty in a slovenly manner, reckoning that, upon a coasting voyage, supplies might be obtained from shore. Landing for this purpose, a few leagues south of the river Biru, Pizarro could procure nothing besides wood and water. A tremendous storm came on; for ten days the ship was in imminent danger, tossed by the furious waves; rations ran short, and two ears of Indian corn were each man’s daily allowance. Thus poorly nourished, and in a crazy ship, they struggled with desperate energy against the fury of the tropical tempest. Only a miracle, as it seemed, could save them, and yet they escaped. The vessel bore Pizarro and his fortunes.

This first expedition, however, resulted in nothing, except much suffering and discontent. On landing, after the storm, the voyagers found themselves in a desolate and unproductive country, covered with tangled forests, untenanted even by beasts or birds. No living creatures were visible, except noxious insects—no food was obtainable, save herbs and berries, unpalatable, and often poisonous. The men desponded, and would fain have returned to Panama; but Pizarro, with much difficulty, appeased their murmurs, and sending back the ship to the Isle of Pearls for provisions, attempted to explore the country. On all sides stretched a gloomy forest, matted with creepers, and penetrable only with axe in hand; habitations there were none; the bitter buds of the palm, and an occasional stranded shell-fish, were the best entertainment offered by that inhospitable region to the weary and disheartened wanderers, some of whom actually perished by famine. At last, after many weeks’ misery, an Indian village was discovered. The Spaniards rushed upon it like starving wolves upon a sheep-fold, and got a small supply of food, chiefly maize and cocoa-nuts. Here, also, they received further tidings of the golden southern realm that had lured them on this luckless voyage. “Ten days’ journey across the mountains,” the Indians told Pizarro, “there dwelt a mighty monarch, whose dominions had been invaded by one still more powerful—the Child of the Sun.” They referred to the kingdom of Quito, which the warlike Inca, Huayna Capac, had added, some thirty years previously, to the empire of Peru.

Six long weeks of hunger and misery had elapsed, when the ship returned with good store of provisions. Revived by the seasonable supply, the adventurers were now as eager to prosecute their voyage as they shortly before had been to abandon it; and leaving Famine Port, the name given by Pizarro to the scene of their sufferings, they again sailed southwards. When next they landed, it was to plunder an Indian village of its provisions and gold. Here they found traces of cannibalism. “In the pots for the dinner, which stood upon the fire,” says Herrera, in his Historia General de las Indias, “amongst the flesh which they took out, were feet and hands of men, whence they knew that those Indians were Caribs,”—the Caribs being the only cannibals as yet known in that part of the New World. This discovery drove the horrified Spaniards to their ships, from which they again landed at Punto Quemado, the limit of this first expedition. The sturdy resistance they there met from some warlike savages, in a skirmish with whom they had two men killed and many wounded, (Pizarro himself receiving seven wounds,) made them reflect on the temerity of proceeding further with such a scanty force. Their ship, too, was in a crippled state, and in a council of war it was decided to return to Panama, and seek the countenance and assistance of the governor for the further prosecution of the enterprise.

Without attempting to follow Mr Prescott through his detailed and interesting account of Pizarro’s difficulties, struggles, and adventures, during the six years that intervened between his first departure from Panama, and his commencement of the conquest of Peru, we will glance at the character and deeds of a few of his comrades. The principal of these was Diego de Almagro, a brave and honourable soldier, who placed a confidence in his leader which the sequel shows was scarcely merited. A foundling like Pizarro, like him he was uneducated, and unable to sign his name to the singular covenant by which the two, in concert with Father Luque, (the Spanish ecclesiastic, who found the funds for the expedition,) agreed, upon oath, and in the name of God and the Holy Evangelists, to divide amongst them in equal shares, all the lands, treasures, gold, silver, precious stones, and other property, that might accrue as the result of their enterprise. For in such terms “three obscure individuals coolly carved out, and partitioned amongst themselves, an empire of whose extent, power, and resources, of whose situation, of whose existence even, they had no sure and precise knowledge.” Contented at first with the post of second in command, it does not appear whether it was on his own solicitation that Almagro was named by the governor of Panama Pizarro’s equal in the second expedition. This domination greatly mortified Pizarro, who suspected Almagro of having sought it, and did not neglect, when the opportunity offered, on his visit to the court of Charles the Fifth, to repay him in kind. As far as can be gathered from the mass of conflicting evidence, Almagro was frank in disposition and straightforward in his dealings, but hasty in temper, and of ungovernable passions. When he had despatched Pizarro on the first voyage, he lost the least possible time in following him, tracing his progress by the concerted signal of notches on the trees. In this manner he descended the coast to Punto Quemado, and in his turn had a fight with the natives, whose village he burned, and drove them into the woods. In this affair he lost an eye by a javelin wound. Passing Pizarro’s vessel without observing it, he pushed on to the mouth of the river San Juan, whence he returned to Panama, having gone farther, suffered less, and collected more gold than his friend. At this time, however, great amity and mutual reliance existed between them; although not long afterwards we find them quarrelling fiercely, and only prevented by the interposition of their subordinates from settling their differences sabre in hand.

Bartholomew Ruiz, an Andalusian pilot, a native of that village of Moguer which supplied Columbus with many seamen for his first voyages, also played an important part in the earlier researches of the discoverers of Peru. Upon the second voyage, when the two ships had reached the river of San Juan, he was detached in one of them to explore the coast, and soon made the little island of Gallo, in two degrees of north latitude. The hostile demonstrations of the natives prevented his landing, and he continued his course southwards, along a coast crowded with spectators. “They stood gazing on the vessel of the white man, as it glided smoothly into the crystal waters of the bay, fancying it, says an old writer, some mysterious being descended from the skies.” The account of Ruiz’s voyage, although it occupied but a few weeks, and was comparatively devoid of adventure, has a romantic and peculiar charm. The first European who, sailing in that direction on the Pacific, crossed the equinoctial line, he was also the first who obtained ocular proof of Peruvian civilisation. He fell in with a balsa or native raft, consisting of beams lashed together, floored with reeds, guided by a rude rudder and rigged with a cotton square-sail. On board this primitive craft—still in use on the rivers and coasts of South America—were several Indians, whose dresses and ornaments, showing great ingenuity and progress in manufacturing art, excited his surprise and admiration. “Mirrors mounted in silver,” says a Spanish narrator of Ruiz’s cruise, “and cups, and other drinking vessels, blankets of cotton and wool, and shirts, and vests, and many other garments, embroidered for the most part with very rich embroideries of scarlet, and crimson, and blue, and yellow, and all other colours, in various designs and figures of birds and animals, and fishes and trees; and they had small scales, in the fashion of a steelyard, for weighing gold; and many other things.” Right musical to the ears of the Spaniards were the tales these Indians told of the abundance of the precious metals in the palaces of their king. Wood, according to their report, was scarcely more plentiful than silver and gold. And they enlarged upon the subject, until their auditors hardly dared credit the flattering accounts which, as they were soon to find, little exceeded the truth. Detaining a few of the Indians, that they might repeat their tale to Pizarro and serve as interpreters after they should have acquired the Spanish tongue, Ruiz prosecuted his voyage to about half a degree south of the line, and then returned to the place where his commander and comrades anxiously awaited him.

As pilot and navigator, old Ruiz rendered eminent services, and his courage and fidelity were equal to his nautical skill. In the former qualities another of Pizarro’s little band, Pedro de Candia, a Greek cavalier, was no way his inferior, although his talents were rather of a military than a maritime cast. Soon after the return of Ruiz to the river San Juan, Almagro, who had been to Panama for a reinforcement, made his appearance with recruits and stores. The pilot’s report inspired all with enthusiasm, and “Southward, ho!” was again the cry. They reached the shores of Quito, and anchored off the port of Tacamez. Before them lay a large and rich town, whose population glittered with gold and jewels. Instead of the dark swamps and impervious forests where they had left the bones of so many of their companions, the adventurers beheld groves of sandal and ebony extending to the very margin of the ocean; maize and potato fields, and cocoa plantations, gave promise of plenty; the streams washed down gold-dust, and on the banks of one were quarries of emeralds. This charming scene brought water into the mouths of the Spaniards; but their wishes were not yet to be fulfilled; with the cup at their lips, they were forbidden to taste. A numerous array of armed and resolute natives set them at defiance. And that they did so, speaks highly for their courage, when we consider the notion they entertained of the party of horsemen who, with Pizarro at their head, effected a landing. Like the Mexicans and other races to whom the horse was unknown until introduced from Europe, they imagined man and beast to form one strange and unaccountable monster, and had, therefore, the same excuse for a panic that a European army would have if suddenly assailed by a regiment of flying dragons. Nevertheless they boldly charged the intruders. These, feeling their own inability to cope with the army of warriors that lined the shore, and which numbered, according to some accounts, fully ten thousand men, had landed with the sole purpose of seeking an amicable conference. Instead of a peaceful parley, they found themselves forced into a very unequal fight. “It might have gone hard with the Spaniards, hotly pressed by their resolute enemy, but for a ludicrous incident reported by the historians as happening to one of the cavaliers. This was a fall from his horse, which so astonished the barbarians, who were not prepared for the division of what seemed one and the same being into two, that, filled with consternation, they fell back, and left a way open for the Christians to regain their vessels.”

Doubting not that the account they could now give of the riches of Peru, would bring crowds of volunteers to their standard, Almagro and some of his companions again sailed for Panama, to seek the succours so greatly needed; Pizarro consenting, after some angry discussion, to await their return upon the island of Gallo. The men who were to remain with him were highly discontented at their commander’s decision, and one of them secreted a letter in a ball of cotton, sent, as a sample of Peruvian produce, to the wife of the governor of Panama. In this letter were complaints of privations and misery, and bitter attacks upon Pizarro and Almagro, whom the disaffected soldiers represented as sacrificing their comrades’ lives to their own ambition. The paper reached its destination; the governor was indignant and sent ships to fetch away the whole party. But Pizarro, encouraged by letters from his two partners, who promised him the means of continuing his voyage, steadily refused to budge. With his sword he drew a line upon the sand from east to west, exposed, with a soldier’s frugality of words, the glory and prosperity that awaited them in Peru, and the disgrace of abandoning the enterprise, and then, stepping across the line, bade brave men stay by him and recreants retreat. Thirteen were stanch to their courageous leader. The first to range himself by his side was the pilot Ruiz; the second was Pedro de Candia. The names of the eleven others have also been preserved by the chroniclers.