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in the skull to relieve the fluid caused by head wounds. The survival rate was 80 percent.
    They believed they had conquered the whole civilized world. Pizarro went looking for them.
    Early in 1527 a Spanish ship was coursing down the west coast of South America when it spotted a sail. It changed course and overhauled the craft, a balsa raft. The boat had cotton sails and an advanced design. Of the captured vessel’s crew of twenty, eleven threw themselves into the sea and drowned. The rest submitted. “They were carrying many pieces of silver and gold as personal ornaments,” said the Spanish report, “including crowns and diadems, belts and bracelets, armour for the legs and breastplates; tweezers and rattles and strings and clusters of beads and rubies; mirrors decorated with silver . . . emeralds and chalcedonies and other jewels and pieces of crystal.”
    The ship rejoined its consort, a vessel carrying expedition commander Francisco Pizarro. His men were in a pitiful state, three dying every week from hunger or disease. The coast was barren or impassable mangrove. Pizarro gave his men the option to go home, and most of them took it. Thirteen remained.
    The next year Pizarro and this remnant sailed on and reached a coastal town, Tumbrez. From there they made excursions further south until they understood what they had found.They had “glimpsed the edges of a great civilization,” wrote John Hemming in The Conquest of the Incas , “the product of centuries of development in complete isolation from the rest of mankind.”
    Pizarro returned to Spain to raise an expedition. He found thecourt dazzled by the latest treasure from Mexico. The queen gave him a charter of conquest. He returned to Panama, took ship, and on September 24, 1532, after long voyages and persistent sickness, after desperate marches and misadventure, sixty-two horsemen and 106 foot soldiers turned their backs on the Pacific and struck away into the Inca empire.
    Tawantinsuyu, as the Incas called their country, stretched 3,000 miles from the center of modern-day Chile to Colombia. The Spaniards marching into it could not have conceived its size. The Inca ruled a population of 10 million. Runners brought news from different parts of the empire, racing in relay along the stone-paved roads. Generals rode in golden chairs carried by liveried servants. Stone silos and warehouses held the empire’s food store. The mountainsides shot up like walls.
    Tawantinsuyu meant “four parts together”—a federal state bound into a unified whole. But it was a fractious realm, and the Inca spent heavily on gifts to keep the leaders of conquered people loyal to his rule.
    The Inca’s ancestors also needed gifts. A dead Inca did not lose the prerogatives of state. Each had his own palace in the imperial capital of Cuzco, complete with gold ornaments and decorations, earplugs and feather cloaks and coronets and jade. Treasure chests bulged with their possessions and courtiers waited on them. The ruling Inca paid for it all. He conducted wars of conquest to get the wealth that he had to distribute to maintain his authority.
    The throne did not pass from one Inca to the next according to strict rules of inheritance. Wars of succession among competing members of the royal family could divide the country. Pizarro marched into Peru at such a moment.
    A powerful Inca, Huayna Capac, had died in about 1527, aftera thirty-year reign, leaving two heirs. One son, Huáscar, took the throne in Cuzco while his brother Atahualpa, who had been campaigning with his father, remained in command of the main armies in the north. Tensions drove the brothers into civil war. Huáscar attacked northward, but Atahualpa’s general defeated him, capturing Cuzco in 1532, killing Huáscar’s family and taking the Inca prisoner. This was the moment that Pizarro began his march into the empire.
    It is hard not to think that Atahualpa