The Conquistadors (45 page)

He was seventy when he wrote that opening to his long and fantastically detailed account of discovery, adventure and hardship, and six years later he made his fair copy of it. He was born in 1492, the same year that Columbus discovered America, and he went to the New World as an ordinary soldier of fortune in 1514 when he was twenty-two years old. He was in Darién, then in Cuba. He served with Córdoba, Grijalva, finally with Cortés. What is so astonishing is his memory for detail. His is an uncomplicated, unpolitical mind, and the things he saw were so strange, the hardships he suffered so great, that they appear to have become indelibly imprinted on that simple mind. He had
already written sixteen chapters when his attention was drawn to Gómara's work. It riled him that this man, who had never been near the events he described, should have ignored the men who fought so long and so bravely, with so little reward, and given all the credit for the conquest to Cortés. The result is unfortunate in that Bernal Díaz, in his determination to correct the balance, sometimes appears biased in reverse – Cortés never takes a decision that is not first recommended to him by his men, every rumour of misappropriation of loot, every accusation against the leader is given undue prominence, and Bernal Díaz himself appears as more important than he really was. He is too unpractised a writer, however, for the truth not to be read between the lines, and since he was there – the only eye-witness, other than Cortés himself, to write at length of the Conquest – he does not attempt to detract from his leader's bravery in battle. And though it is probable that he glosses over some of the crueller excesses of his companions, nobody reading his book can think of him as other than an honest writer. His True History is a complement of Gómara's political history, the two together giving as complete a picture as one can ever expect to obtain of a campaign of that period. His detail is so remarkable, the background to it so strange, that his work will always remain a classic.

So, too, will the work of William Hickling Prescott. No note on the bibliography of the Conquests would be complete without a reference to this brilliant American historian, who ruined the sight of his one remaining eye in original research of the material for his two masterpieces of descriptive writing,
The Conquest of Mexico
and The Conquest of Peru. He continued working right up to his death in 1859, and though much source material has been unearthed since, this and the digs of archaeologists have tended to confirm rather than to detract from Prescott's writings of more than a century ago.

In the actual discovery and conquest of the Inca empire, centred on what is now Peru, every student is faced with the difficulty that Pizarro wrote no dispatches to his Emperor. Unlike Cortés, he was illiterate. Nor was there in the ranks of his adventurers any equivalent of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, though as early as 1534 an account of the capture and death of Atahualpa, written by an unnamed soldier, was published in Seville under the title –
La Conquista del Peru.
Nevertheless, there are again two main pillars available: Pedro de Cieza de León and Garcilaso de la Vega. The life of each of these writers is a fascinating story in itself.

Cieza de León was born at Llerena, an almost Arab town in Southern Spain, in 1520. At the age of fourteen, travelling with his father, who was a merchant, he saw Atahualpa's ransom treasure unloaded at Seville. A year later, in 1535, he sailed for Cartagena. He was sent straight into battle against the Indians. By the age of twenty he was writing as well as fighting. By 1547 he was in the north of Peru. He fought through the civil wars of the conquistadors, riding with Belalcázar. Having covered Colombia, he went on to cover the whole of Peru in a period when the history of the Conquest was still being hammered out and the whole structure of the Inca empire and civilization was still fresh in the minds of the Indians and largely visible to the eye of this Spanish soldier-reporter. In 1548 he was appointed the official Indian chronicler. By 1550, when he returned to Spain, the whole great work was complete – eight histories, approximately 8,000 foolscap sheets. In the fifteen years he had been in South America he had marched and ridden thousands upon thousands of leagues, fighting, suffering, writing – one of the most dedicated reporters ever to put pen to paper. It was from the manuscripts of this man that most of
the later historians drew their material, not bothering to acknowledge the source – this is particularly true of the manuscripts not published before his death in 1554; these included his ‘official' account of the discovery and conquest and also of the civil wars.

The second pillar of Inca history is the equally classic
Commentarios Reales
of Garcilaso de la Vega. He is often referred to as ‘el Inca', for his mother. Princess Isabel Chimpu Occlo, was of the blood royal. His father. Captain Garcilaso de la Vega, was an
hidalgo
and a conquistador; he was governor of Cuzco from 1533 until his death in 1559. Garcilaso was born in 1539 and he left for Spain shortly after his father's death. It is the twenty years of his youth that provided the material for his books, for he never went back to Peru. The impact of those early years is demonstrated by the wealth of detail about his mother's people that he could reproduce in the Commentaries, published forty-eight years after he left Peru. This work was regarded as the literal truth about Peru for almost two centuries. But he was a highly imaginative writer, and biased, so that later his reputation as an authority became suspect. ‘However, the consequence of Garcilaso's prejudices, the omissions, exaggerations, and confusions, did not alter the fact that in his philosophy and in his very conception of history he remains astonishingly original and ahead of his time.' This is a comment from Alain Gheerbrant's introduction to his French edition. Garcilaso is now lauded in Peru as the original writer of a glorious past. As Gheerbrant reminds us, he died in 1616, in the same year as Shakespeare and Cervantes – he is not only irreplaceable as a source of information about the Inca people and their customs, but in style and in story-telling ability he is one of the great writers of the period.

¹
A Spanish league is in theory 1/25th of a degree of latitude – i.e. about 2.6 miles. Seven leagues was generally regarded as a day's march on horseback.

²
Gómara's date. Bernal Díaz gives July 10.

³
Bernal Díaz – the customary drums for sacrifice were wooden.

⁴
Xeres says sixteen of Pizarro's companions crossed the line. Garcilaso gives thirteen, so does Herrera; Zárate nine. In the capitulation signed by Queen Joanna on July 26,1529, thirteen names are mentioned. The names given here are those recorded on a tablet in the Pizarro chapel in Lima cathedral. They are not necessarily correct, an obvious and very important omission being the name of Ruiz. And since one of them died on Gorgona, Xeres may well be right in giving the total as sixteen.

⁵
In the capitulation Ruiz was included amongst the thirteen, but not Villafuerte.

⁶
Records in the Biblioteca at Cajamarca show that the confusion over the shape of the ‘square' was due to the fact that orders were given early in the nineteenth century for the demolition of the old triangular plaza and its replacement by a new rectangular one. Hernando Pizarro, in his letter to the Royal Audience of Santo Domingo, confirms that it was triangular.

⁷
Prescott gives the date as August 29. The earlier date is that given by Padre Rubén Vargas Ugarte of Lima in his
Historia del Perú
Vol I and is based on MSS in the hands of Dr Rafael Loredo.

Ralph Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex in 1914. He was educated at Cranbrook School in Kent, which he left in 1931 to work as a journalist, initially with the Financial Times. He went on to become a prolific author, penning over thirty novels as well as children's and travel books — his first novel,
The Doppelganger
, was published in 1937.
Innes served in the Royal Artillery during WWII, eventually rising to the rank of Major. During the war a number of his books were also published. After being demobbed in 1946 he worked full-time as a writer, achieving a number of early successes. He produced books in a regular pattern: six months travel and research and then six months of writing. With this quick turnover, he had sixteen further novels published before 1960, many of which featured the sea. From the 1960s his rate of work was reduced but was still substantial, and he became more interested in ecological themes. Innes continued writing up until his death in 1998.

Discover books by Hammond Innes published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/HammondInnes
Medusa
Solomon's Seal
The Angry Mountain
The Conquistadors
The Trojan Horse

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First published in Great Britain 1969 by William Collins, Sons & Co. Ltd
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