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In 1524, an
illiterate former swineherd and onetime soldier named Francisco Pizarro set out in quest
of the land of "Biru." For more than one reason, Pizarro made an unlikely
choice; he had already retired, establishing his headquarters on a cattle-ranch in Panama
after spending his youth soldiering in the armies of Cortes, Ojeda, and Narvaez. Moreover,
the retirement was working unusually well -- for the times. In partnership with another
old soldier, Diego de Almagro, Pizarro had joined forces with a renegade priest, one
Hernando de Luque, who bore two sterling recommendations: one, he was wealthy; and two, he
stood on the best of terms with the ruthless Panamanian dictator Pedrarias. Using such
"connections," the three built up a profitable business involving mining, stock
breeding, and brokering Black African slaves.
Their complacent prosperity was jarred, however, in 1522, when Captain Pascual de Andagoya
returned from a voyage to reconnoiter the Peruvian coast with tales of high civilization
and gold to be had for the taking. Well-trained as they were in the mechanics of conquest,
Pizarro and his friends petitioned Pedrarias for permission to invade Peru. Within two
years, they had two ships afloat fitted out at Luque's expense, one captained by Pizarro
and the other by Almagro. For four years, they raided along the Colombian coast, battling
tribesmen and scurvy and returning only when so many of their men had died or been killed
that the boats were dangerously undermanned.
With new recruits and equipment they set sail again in 1528. This time, after a few
successful forays, feeling that fortune was with them and that they now knew the best
route to take, Almagro turned north to fetch reinforcements while Pizarro for the first
time crossed the equator southward. There he found stone architecture and tribesmen
bedecked with heavy gold. Almagro soon returned, but the sheer numbers of native warriors
proved too great for them, and once again they were forced to retreat northward.
Meanwhile, Pedrarias had been removed from his post and Pizarro and his friends were
ordered by the new governor of Panama to put away their ambitions, since the expeditions
to "Biru" had already cost many lives and had yielded little gold. Frustrated,
Pizarro took himself directly to the Spanish court. There he was able to display proofs of
the riches of the country: fine woven textiles made of vicuna wool along with some of the
"sheep-camels" from which the wool had come; wrought gold and silver; and most
important, tales of a vast, beautiful, and fertile land taking in almost all of the modern
republics of Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and northern Chile.
The only thing that was required, he said to his monarch, was to take it from the natives.
In Pizarro, ignoble and uneducated but hard, ambitious and persistent, Charles V found a
tool ready to hand. Better, he found one willing to work on terms: unlike most previous
conquering expeditions, Pizarro's was to be funded almost entirely from proceeds. Thus the
Spanish crown, claiming its customary one-fifth of booty, was to have all the advantages
of conquest without risking either money or men, while Pizarro looked forward to retaining
four-fifths of whatever treasure he accumulated.
"Pizarro and his conquistadors," notes historian Ian Cameron, "resembled
not so much a state-financed army of invasion, as a privately-financed band of
mercenaries. Their concern was not conquest but loot." Pizarro, complete with royal
license and loaded down with the titles of Governor, Captain General, Royal Delegate and
Marshall, arrived in Peru in 1531. Because he did not have operating funds to pay soldiers
"up front", he had trouble recruiting men despite his tales of glorious
opportunity. Nevertheless, he was able to take advantage of much better supplies and
logistics than Cortes had been able to muster twelve years earlier in Mexico.
Although horses were still at that time scarce and expensive in the Caribbean and Central
America, they were easier for him to acquire than they had been for Cortes: Pizarro's own
ranch and other Panamanian ranches were able to supply at least some of them. Francisco de
Jerez, Pizarro's secretary and an eyewitness of events, states that Pizarro took
thirty-six horses from Panama "from stock-farms established there in 1514." This
can only mean stock-farms located on the Panamanian side of the Gulf of Uraba, in the
colony of Darien, where horses were first imported and bred on the mainland. In the royal
capitulation, Charles V also authorized Pizarro to take up to 25 horses and some
additional mares from the royal stud-farm in Jamaica, and although there is no record of
his having made port there on the way back to Panama, it took him two years to assemble
his expedition and in that time Jamaican horses may have been shipped to him.
The expedition assembled in Panama in January of 1531 boasted only 180 men and 27 horses.
Pizarro's resources were greatly increased, however, by the arrival of the dashing
cavalier Hernando de Soto -- whom historian Ricardo Palma calls "the only noble heart
to take part in the conquest of Peru". The wealthy and influential Soto sailed in
from Nicaragua with two boatloads of horses, so that when the expedition at last sailed
for Peru, it could boast some 106 infantry backed by sixty-two mounted lancers and a few
small cannon.
They made for the fortified town of Tumbes, a minor capital along the Inca Road in what is
today southwestern Ecuador. Tropical storms soon forced them to put ashore and slog
through steaming tropical jungle and mangrove swamp, enduring hordes of biting insects,
poisonous snakes, and suppurating wounds inflicted by the sharp-edged jungle foliage.
Rather than beg for succor, however, when Pizarro at last emerged from the jungle he
attacked and looted the first village he saw. It contained gold, silver, and emeralds to
the value of 20,000 pesos -- a small sum, but better than medicine for keeping his men
interested.
It was from the inhabitants of this village that Pizarro first learned that the Incas were
in the aftermath of a bitter civil war. Partisans of the Inca king Atahualpa had only
recently vanquished those of his brother, the prince Huascar, and tributary tribes of the
outlying provinces stood in revolt.
"This," as Ian Cameron observes, "is the sort of situation that a would-be
conqueror dreams of...where the invading army, by offering its help, can find ready-made
allies."
The situation also carried some disadvantages: Tumbes, Pizarro discovered, had already
been sacked and was deserted. It became obvious that to satisfy their objectives the
Spaniards would have to penetrate deeper into Inca territory. They went, borne on their
hardy steeds, now enduring the rigors of Andean altitude and the interior desert. Yet for
all their persistence, the Spaniards might have floundered in the vast territory of Peru,
if fortune had not brought Atahualpa himself within Pizarro's reach. In September of 1532,
his Indian allies reported that the Inca king, making a triumphal tour of his newly-won
domains, was camped less than 300 miles away at the hot springs of Cajamarca.
The route there skirted the Sechura Desert, a vast plain of blasted rock and sand; and at
the sight of it, Cameron notes, "the desolation of the landscape and the uncertainty
of their future began to prey on men's minds." Nine men -- five on horseback --
turned back. The rest, including 57 mounted troopers, held on.
Their task was to outface Atahualpa at the head of an encamped army consisting of more
than 80,000 warriors. Upon their arrival at Cajamarca, Pizarro found the town prudently
evacuated, for Atahualpa's scouts and emissaries had been aware of the Spaniards'
movements for months. Despite his fear of the well-ordered Inca army, Pizarro made camp
and dispatched his brother Hernando Pizarro and Captain Soto with a small troop to parley
with Atahualpa and summon him.
The audacity of such a thing is today almost unbelievable: to invade another country, even
with superior arms and equipment, and then peremptorily call upon its king to yield
himself up -- when with the gesture of a single hand Atahualpa could have ordered the
whole Spanish force obliterated. But the highly civilized Incas apparently underestimated
their enemies, while Pizarro and his men were willing to trade on their beliefs -- and
they believed in their superiority, even invincibility.
Pizarro, as Cortes before him, counted on horses as display-pieces, and planned to take
maximum advantage of the natives' fear of animals unfamiliar to them -- and no flashier
horseman could he have found than Soto, not even in Europe. On the day of the parley, Soto
rode a stallion which he had raised to the very apogee of haute ecole. Eyewitnesses who
knew the horse reported that he could jump a length of twenty Castilian feet (about 18
feet) with perfect ease while bearing his fully-armed rider. That, as historian Angel
Cabrera reminds us, would mean that the horse "bore more than twice the weight
carried today by any horse in jumper competition."
While both Hernando Pizarro and Soto regaled the king with prepared speeches, Atahualpa
remained still and impassive. Through these tense negotiations, Soto sat fretting upon his
stallion, the hot sun beating down upon his cabacete and quilted cuirass. Finally, losing
his patience in face of the apparent impassability of the dignified Inca monarch, yet
observing that Atahualpa eyed his war horse with keen interest, Soto broke off
formalities. Suddenly spurring his mount to a flashing gallop, he proceeded to display
leaps and curving figures, finishing with a hard stop which slid the stallion right under
the Inca's nose. Atahualpa -- bespattered with mud and the horse's foamy slaver -- never
flinched, but some of his attendants shied away, terrified. The tale is told that the Inca
king had them executed on the spot. Only then did he consent to visit Pizarro's camp the
next day. Atahualpa retaliated with his own display: he came as for a ceremonial parade.
Borne on a royal stretcher by muscular attendants, surrounded by courtiers bedecked with
gold and feathers, and followed by some 7,000 loyal but unarmed troops, he entered the
town's stone-walled plaza. There he was met by the friar Vicente de Valverde, who, bearing
a cross in one hand and the Bible in the other, proceeded to declare to the Inca king from
an Inquisitorial document called the Requirement. This demanded that any non-Christian to
whom it was read must submit himself to the King of Spain and to the Pope. To refuse was
to lay the hearer open to attack, the enslavement of his family, and the confiscation of
his property. Moreover, the document declared, "any deaths or losses that may result
from this will be your own fault." Predictably outraged, Atahualpa threw Valverde's
Bible on the ground.
At the same moment, Pizarro, watching from a doorway, dropped his handkerchief, letting
loose wholesale ambush and slaughter. Cannon blasts mowed down ranks of unarmed Incas.
"The Indians," says eyewitness Francisco de Jerez, "were thrown into
confusion and panicked as we fell upon them and began to kill ... They were so filled with
terror that they climbed on top of each other, forming great mounds and suffocating one
another ... our horsemen rode over the top of them, wounding and killing..." When
several thousand Incas managed to escape from the plaza by pushing down one of its stone
walls, the Spanish horsemen "jumped the rubble, and with cries of 'After them! Spear
them! Let none escape,' continued to hunt down and lance (the Incas) long after it was
dark. Very many were killed, before they sounded a trumpet for us to reassemble."
Despite this victory and the capture of Atahualpa, Pizarro immediately called for
reinforcements and within three months, Almagro arrived in Cajamarca with six ships
bearing 150 more men and eighty-four more horses recruited in Panama and Nicaragua. Before
Pizarro had the Inca publicly strangled to death in the marketplace, Atahualpa tried in
vain to ransom himself by filling a room sixteen feet by ten up to the level of his
outstretched arms with gold. Pizarro melted it all down, priceless artwork and artifact
alike. Then he rewarded his men with ingots; cavalrymen received double the infantrymens'
share, averaging about 8,800 pesos of gold plus 362 marks of silver (approximately
$100,000). The exact amount, however, varied according to the service each man had
rendered and with the quality of the horse which he brought. Historian Francis Haines
summed it up: "Seldom has the horse had so great a monetary value placed upon it as
at Cajamarca."
His forces now swollen to about 100 mounted men and many more footsoldiers, Pizarro
planned his next move -- to Cuzco. The Andean trail which led them there proved so steep
and rough that the packs had to be cinched on with extra straps, and the horses lost all
their shoes and arrived with fractured, bleeding hooves. Such was the value of horses
that, when several mares foaled on the journey, Pizarro ordered his native bearers to
carry the newborns up the trail, wrapped up in blankets. Despite these burdens and
hardships, Cuzco fell to the Spaniards in November of 1533.
Despite many losses, new horses came in continuously, enabling the Spaniards almost
immediately to establish breeding centers along the coast. And in contrast to Panama and
Mexico, horses arrived in numbers sufficient to offset the many losses: those thrown
overboard when ships ran out of drinking water in the windless "horse
latitudes"; those worn out or eaten by explorers and soldiers; those which fell down
chasms while crossing the narrow, slippery, and dangerous Andean passes. Losses of horse
were also heavy in 1536 when the Incas rebelled against Spanish domination in Cuzco, but
by then breeding had become so well established in the Caribbean and Central America that
replacements could quickly be brought. For example, records show that two hundred head
were shipped from Espanola to Peru between 1536 and 1537, though it seems that this was
the first big importation from the Antilles directly to Peru. A few horses were also
imported to Peru directly from Spain, beginning with an order of July 19, 1534, in which
the Consul of the Indies authorized Ilian Suarez de Carbajal to take a mare and a stallion
as a gift to Pizarro along with the title of Count of Atavillos.
Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Spanish nobleman and an Inca princess, traveled from
Peru to Spain in 1560. In reaction to ugly prejudice concerning the Inca civilization
which he heard at court, he wrote a history in its defense. The Royal Commentaries of the
Incas (1609) and The General History of Peru (1617) are idealized essays, and although
they too are sometimes one-sided, they shed much light on the early history of Peruvian
horse-breeding. After noting that the Spaniards brought horses to the New World mainly
from the province of Andalucia, Vega goes on to recount how "at first, when the
conquest of Peru was still proceeding, horses could not be bought. If one was ever sold on
account of the death of its master or because he was leaving for Spain, its price was
excessive -- four, five, or six thousand pesos." Since then, Vega notes, "...
prices have abated in Peru, for horses have greatly multiplied. A good horse is now worth
three or four hundred pesos and a nag thirty or forty." His opinion of both Antillean
and Peruvian horses was high, and he wondered why Europeans did not seem interested in
buying them. "When I think how much good horses cost in Spain and how excellent those
of the islands are in size and color, I have often wondered why they are not brought here,
if only in repayment of the benefits conferred by Spain in introducing them into
service."
At the time that Vega wrote, historian Antonio Vazquez de Espinosa estimates that some
four thousand excellent broodmares existed in Peru, distributed among ten ranches. Premier
among those were some in the village of Luya which belonged to the Marshal of the
district, one Juan de Pinedo. This breed was called Casta Rica ("rich caste" or
more loosely, "high class"). These were considered the best in all Peru and were
bred for the Vice-regent and other persons of high estate. Although a hundred years later
no Peruvian horses seem to have reached Spain, Vega's description of their fabulous
abilities had penetrated the consciousness of Miguel de Cervantes, as this tongue-in-cheek
dialogue between Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza shows:
"But this we know," (said Don Quixote), "that (the wizard) Malambruno
...begot (a Peruvian stallion) by his art; and has used him ever since, to post about to
all parts of the world. He is here today, and tomorrow in France, and the next day in
America: and one of the best properties of the horse is, that he costs not a farthing in
keeping: for he neither eats nor sleeps, neither needs he any shoeing; besides, without
having wings, he ambles so very easily thro' the air, that you may carry in your hand a
cup of water a thousand leagues, and not spill a drop; so that the fair (lady) Magalona
loves mightily to ride him." "Nay," quoth Sancho, "as for a pacer easy
and smooth, commend me to my Dapple. Indeed he is none of your high flyers, he cannot
gallop in the air; but on the king's highway, he shall pace ye with the best ambler that
ever went on four legs.
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