The Last Days of the Incas Read Online Free PDF Page B

unmistakable message to the island’s inhabitants to do as they were told.
    With Hispaniola and other nearby islands becoming increasingly depleted of natives due to slaving (already by 1510 the first African slaves began to be imported into the Caribbean in order to replace the quickly disappearing native population), Pizarro made his way around 1509 to the newly discovered mainland of Central America. Pizarro was again following in Columbus’s footsteps, as the great Italian mariner himself had discovered the coasts of Honduras and Panama on his fourth and last voyage of 1502–1504. * By 1513, at the age of thirty-five, Pizarro had risen still further; he was now second-in-command on an expedition led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa that eventually crossed the jungles of the Isthmus of Panama and discovered the Pacific Ocean. As Balboa waded into the waters of that vast ocean, claiming it for the Spanish monarchs, Pizarro must have realized that at last he was nearly in the same position that Columbus had been in years earlier. Now he, too, was exploring lands that no European had ever seen. And this was only the beginning.
    The expedition cut short by stumbling upon a vast ocean was a far cry from the later Baroque portraits of handsome, noble Spaniards in armor wading out into the Pacific, unfurling colorful flags as a scattering of naked Indians watched in admiration. From the beginning, the Isthmus expedition had been one of pure brute economics. Balboa and Pizarro’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean, in fact, had occurred as a by-product of a military campaign, one that had been carried out in order to find a tribe of natives reputedly rich in gold. Elsewhere in that very same year, another Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León, had discovered a land he called
Florida
while on a slaving expedition amid the islands of the Bahamas. It was through slavingand plundering expeditions that the Spaniards were discovering more and more of the New World.
    Unsuccessful in their search for gold, Balboa and Pizarro became increasingly brutal as they trudged their way back empty-handed through the mosquito-infested jungles. Along the way, Balboa captured some local chiefs and demanded that they reveal to him the location of the rumored gold. When the chiefs replied that they were unaware of any, Balboa had them tortured. After the chiefs still failed to supply any useful information, Balboa had them killed. Six years later, in January 1519, and as the result of a struggle for power with the new Spanish governor, Balboa was himself arrested and subsequently beheaded. Pizarro, once Balboa’s second-in-command, was the arresting officer.
    By 1521, the now forty-four-year-old Francisco Pizarro was one of the most important landowners in the new city of Panama, living on the coast of the very same ocean that he and Balboa had discovered. A part owner of a gold mining company, Pizarro had also received an
encomienda
, or Indian grant, of 150 natives on the island of Taboga, just off the Pacific coast. As an
encomienda
holder, Pizarro received both labor and tribute from the Indians. The island also had fertile soil for crops and abundant gravel that Pizarro sold to newly constructed ships as ballast.
    Still, Pizarro was not satisfied. What good was owning a tiny island and living off a mere 150 natives when another Spaniard, Hernán Cortés, from the same region of Extremadura in Spain, had just conquered an entire
empire
at the age of thirty-four? In Spanish culture in the sixteenth century, the ages between thirty and forty-five were considered the prime years for men, that is, those were the years in which a man was considered to be both mature and to have the most energy.
    Pizarro, however, at forty-four, was already ten years older than Cortés had been when the latter had begun his conquest of the Aztec Empire, an enterprise that had taken three long and grueling years. Pizarro thus had only one prime year left. The question no doubt on