The Last Days of the Incas Read Online Free PDF

as if they would give their hearts. They are content with whatever trifle of whatever kind that may be given them, whether it be of value or valueless. …
    Their Highnesses can see that I will give … [the king and queen] as much gold as they may need…. I will give them spices and cotton … and mastic … and aloe … and slaves, as many as they shall order…. I also believe that I have found rhubarb and cinnamon, and I shall find a thousand other things of value…. And thus the eternal God, Our Lord, gives to all those who walk in His way triumph over things that appear to be impossible, and this was notably one … with many solemn prayers for the great exaltation which they shall have in the turning of so many peoples to our holy faith, and afterwards for the temporal benefits, because not only Spain but all Christendom will have hence comforts and profits.
    Done [written] in the caravel [
Niña
], off the Canary Islands, on the fifteenth day of February, in the year one thousand four hundred and ninety-three. …
    The Admiral
    Columbus’s enthusiastic report no doubt fired the imagination of the teenaged Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro, of course, was already well aware of the fact that his future on his native peninsula would probably be a bleak one. The world that Columbus described, by contrast, must have seemed to offer so many more possibilities than his own.
    By the end of the fifteenth century, the class system in the kingdoms of Spain had been in place for centuries and was a very rigid one. Those at the top—the dukes, the lords, the marquis, and the earls—owned vast estates on which peasants worked. It was they who enjoyed all theprivileges and social prestige that the late fifteenth-century Spanish kingdoms had to offer. Those at the bottom—the peasants, artisans, and, generally speaking, all those who had to perform manual labor for a living—usually remained in the same class to which they were born. In the kingdoms of Spain, as else-where in Europe, there was little upward social mobility. If one were born poor, illiterate, and had no family pedigree, then one could read one’s future as plainly as a geographer could read one of Columbus’s finely drawn maps. There were only two ways to gain entrance to elite status: either through marriage to a member of the elite (which was exceedingly rare) or else by distinguishing oneself in a successful military campaign.
    Thus, in the year 1502, at the age of twenty-four, the impoverished, illiterate, illegitimate, and title-less Francisco Pizarro had perhaps not surprisingly found his way onto a ship that had set out from Spain for the Indies—the islands Columbus had declared were located in Asia (known at the time as the “Indies”) and thus were inhabited by “Indians.” The fleet was the largest yet to cross the Atlantic; it carried 2,500 men and a large number of horses, pigs, and other animals. Its destination, in fact, was the very same island that Columbus had described only nine years earlier: Hispaniola. As Pizarro’s ship arrived and set anchor before the lush green island rising up from a turquoise sea, a small boatload of Spaniards came out to meet them, soon informing the excited passengers that “You have arrived at a good moment [for] … there is to be a war against the Indians and we will be able to take many slaves.” “This news,” recalled one young passenger, Bartolomé de Las Casas, “produced a great joy in the ship.” *
    Whether Pizarro participated in that particularwar against the local natives is unknown. By 1509, however—some seven years after his arrival—Pizarro had risen to become a lieutenant in the local military of the governor, Nicolás de Ovando, a loosely knit force that was frequently used to “pacify” native rebellions. While Pizarro’s exact duties are unknown, he was working for a governor who at one point had rounded up eighty-four native chiefs and then had them massacred—simply to send an