How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (37 page)

But were it not for a second factor, the Aztecs enjoyed such a numerical advantage that they might have, quite literally, stomped the Spanish to death. Cortés responded by enlisting several thousand warriors from local tribes.
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He was able to recruit local allies because the Aztecs were brutal tyrants who every year sacrificed tens of thousands of men, women, and children seized from subordinated tribes. When the Spaniards arrived in Mexico they were astounded by the immense ritual slaughters taking place. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who accompanied Cortés, wrote that “in the plaza [of Mexico City] where their oratories stood, there were piles of skulls so regularly arranged that one could count them, and I estimated them at more than one hundred thousand. I repeat again that there were more than one hundred thousand of them.… We had occasions to see many such things later on … for the same custom was observed in all the towns.”
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These monumental piles of skulls represented the huge numbers put to death each year atop the Aztec temples.

For most of the twentieth century it was claimed, especially in textbooks, that tales like that of Díaz were falsehoods, told to justify Spanish imperialism. But these Spanish reports are verified by Aztec frescoes, by their sacred texts, and, most of all, by archaeology. Indeed, Harvard’s Davíd Carrasco was moved to write a remarkable book on human sacrifice among the Aztecs after viewing a ritual receptacle where the “skeletal remains of forty-two children lay as a messy remnant of a fifteenth-century, precious offering to the rain gods.”
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The victims were all around five years old and had been sacrificed, probably by having their throats cut. Carrasco noted that human sacrifices were conducted in more than eighty different places in the Aztec capital and in hundreds of other ceremonial centers. Every year there were eighteen major ceremonies that required extensive human sacrifices.

Although most victims were men, Carrasco reported that “women and children were also sacrificed in over a third of” the ceremonies, which were “ritually choreographed” and performed before large crowds.
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An adult male victim usually was held down on a sacrificial stone atop a pyramid, his chest was slashed open, and the priest snatched his still-beating heart and held it aloft to the sun. The head of the victim was usually severed and placed on a rack—soon to be a skull added to the
ceremonial collection. Then “the body, now called ‘eagle man,’was rolled, flailing down the temple steps to the bottom where it was skinned and dismembered.”
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The choice cuts were distributed to the onlookers, who took them home and ate them. When females were sacrificed they sometimes had their living hearts ripped out, too, but more often their necks were stretched back over the edge of the stone and then they were slowly beheaded, after which their hearts were extracted. At that point the priest often skinned the victim and wore her skin as the slaughter continued.
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How many victims were consumed by these ceremonies? In 1487, well before any contact with Europeans, the Aztecs inaugurated their great new Templo Mayor. The day began with four lines of victims, each line stretching for two miles. The historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen has estimated the total number sacrificed on that occasion as twenty thousand, although others have placed the number as high as eighty thousand.
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This was, of course, a onetime occasion. During regular festivals, the numbers killed at a particular temple probably ran around two thousand a day,
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and there were hundreds of these sacrificial sites. Hence, piles of skulls numbering into tens of thousands were widespread, just as Díaz reported.

Little wonder, then, that Cortés could enlist warriors from tribes eager to overthrow the Aztec Empire. Granted, the Spanish Empire that replaced the Aztecs had many unpleasant aspects. But at least the days of human sacrifice and cannibalism were over.

Pizarro Seizes Peru

Cortés’s victory over the Aztecs pales in comparison with that of his second cousin Francisco Pizarro’s defeat of the Incas.
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With 167 conquistadors, only about 8 of them having arquebuses, and four very small cannons, Pizarro marched on the huge Incan Empire, which stretched for 2,500 miles along the West Coast of South America. There, faced with about 80,000 battle-hardened Incan warriors, Pizarro triumphed without losing a single man.

Prior to his victory, Pizarro had led two expeditions to Peru. The first started from Panama in 1524, consisting of 80 men and 40 horses. It sailed as far as present-day Colombia and then turned back after a skirmish with hostile natives. The second expedition set out in 1526 with two ships, 160 men, and a few horses. Pizarro’s forces reached Peru and went ashore at Tumbez, a small Incan coastal city, where they were amazed at
the fine buildings, the friendliness of the people, and the amount of gold and silver on display. Then, taking aboard several llamas, some fine cotton and alpaca fabrics, and two boys (whom Pizarro taught Spanish and then used as interpreters), he sailed back to Panama.

The new governor of Panama refused to allow Pizarro to mount another expedition, whereupon Pizarro returned to Spain and appealed to the king. The king authorized a third attempt on the condition that Pizarro raise a force of at least 250 men. Unable to obtain this total, Pizarro sailed clandestinely with only 180 men—106 foot soldiers and 62 cavalry. Back in Panama, he assembled his invasion forces and in 1532 headed to the coast of Peru.

Landing again at Tumbez, the Spanish were shocked to find the city in ruins. A civil war had erupted in which two royal heirs contested for the throne. Shortly before Pizarro’s arrival, Atahualpa had defeated his brother Huáscar and now was the emperor. He possessed a huge, battle-tested army.

Informed of Pizarro’s arrival on his coast, Atahualpa lured the Spanish deep into his mountain empire until they had entered Cajamarca. The city was largely deserted, but beyond Cajamarca, along a line of hills, Atahualpa had assembled his host—outnumbering the Spanish about four hundred to one. Pizarro held his nerve and sent an envoy to invite Atahualpa to meet him in Cajamarca the next day. The emperor accepted.

The Spanish were betting their lives on being able to take Atahualpa prisoner. Atahualpa had plans of his own, according to Kim MacQuarrie in
The Last Days of the Incas
: “to capture and kill the Spaniards, to make eunuchs out of the survivors, and to breed powerful and majestic animals” from the Spaniard’s warhorses. Although these were the only horses the Incas had ever seen, they immediately grasped their value.
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The meeting with the Incas was to take place in the town’s plaza, which was a square of about six hundred feet per side and surrounded on three sides by low stone buildings. In preparation, the Spanish concealed their four small cannons inside several buildings, where they would have unobstructed fields of fire across the plaza. They also found good firing positions for the arquebusiers. Pizarro hid his cavalry and infantry inside the buildings as well. It would be left to the Dominican friar Vincente de Valverde to meet Atahualpa.

At the appointed hour Atahualpa entered the plaza, borne on a huge litter carried by eighty of his senior chiefs and accompanied by thousands
of warriors, who packed the plaza.
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He was surprised that no Spaniards were in sight but relaxed a bit when Valverde came forward to meet him. Suddenly, at Pizarro’s signal, the cannons and the arquebusiers fired; the doors were flung open and both the cavalry and the infantry charged, slaughtering Incas with their razor-sharp cutlasses. Far exceeding their own expectations, the Spanish quickly reached Atahualpa’s litter and slaughtered the bearers; Pizarro himself dragged the Incan emperor into one of the buildings. The carnage continued in the plaza until the last living Incan warrior had managed to flee the city, leaving behind as many as seven thousand dead (many had been trampled to death by their comrades).
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No Spaniard was even wounded.
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And with the emperor now held hostage, the huge Incan army up on the hills was powerless to act.

Pizarro set Atahualpa’s ransom at a room full of gold. It was soon paid. But fearing to let him go, the Spanish—against Pizarro’s wishes—executed Atahualpa and installed his brother Túpac Huallpa as a puppet ruler. When Túpac died suddenly, another brother, Manco Inca, took the throne and allied himself with the Spanish. Meanwhile, the Spanish under Pizarro and Hernando de Soto (who later explored what is now the American Southwest) managed to conquer the Incan capital of Cuzco with the support of some tribes seeking to overthrow Incan rule. At this point many tribes joined the Spaniards, helping defeat a number of Incan rebellions.

Thus, forty years after Columbus’s first voyage, Spain had conquered the two mighty New World empires, precipitating what seemed to be an inexhaustible flow of gold and silver.

The Latecomers

The Spanish and Portuguese not only established New World colonies well before any other European nation; the Spanish also claimed by far the richest areas. The latecomers could settle a few Caribbean islands, but mostly they had to be content with the “leftover” Northern Hemisphere.

The French

Amazingly, Italy played no role in the exploration of the New World despite the fact that Italians dominated the ranks of the initial voyagers. The first of the “Spanish” explorers was the Genoan Cristóbal Colón. The
first “English” explorer was the Venetian Giovanni Caboto. And the first “French” explorer was the Florentine Giovanni da Verrazzano.

Although neglected by Western historians until the 1950s, Verrazzano sailed west with the backing of King Francis I of France in 1524 and explored the Atlantic Coast from Newfoundland to the Carolinas, entering both New York Harbor and Narragansett Bay. On a second voyage, in 1527, Verrazzano went south and explored the coast of Brazil, returning with a cargo of brazilwood, a fine hardwood. In 1528 he made a third voyage, exploring Florida and the Bahamas before going ashore on Guadeloupe. There he was set upon and eaten on the beach by Caribs while his horrified companions looked on from their ship, too far from shore to intervene.
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Six years after Verrazzano’s death, Jacques Cartier sailed the northern route across the Atlantic and claimed an area in Canada for France, although he was under the misapprehension that he had reached Asia.
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In 1535 Cartier sailed west again, with three ships and 110 men. This time he sailed down the St. Lawrence River. He stopped at the site of what is now Montreal, prevented from going on because of a waterfall in the river. Cartier was convinced that beyond the waterfall lay the “northern passage” that would lead to the Orient. On a third voyage, in 1541, he founded a colony on the present site of Quebec and sent a ship loaded with what he thought were diamonds and gold back to France. The diamonds turned out to be quartz crystals, the gold to be iron pyrite (or fool’s gold, as it came to be known), and the colony failed. What did survive was Cartier’s designation of the area as Canada, based on the Indian word
kanata
(meaning “village”).

Next up was Samuel de Champlain.
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In 1608 he sailed with a group of settlers to reestablish the colony at Quebec. By this time, “Canada” was being referred to as “New France.” The settlement was a success, the fur trade boomed, and chronic wars began with the Iroquois Indians, the Huron Indians siding with the French. Champlain died and was buried in Quebec, which remains a French-speaking city even though the English seized Canada in 1759.

Robert de La Salle greatly expanded French territorial claims in the New World by canoeing down the Mississippi River to New Orleans in 1682 and naming the huge area drained by the Mississippi and north to Canada as Louisiana, in honor of Louis XIV of France. In 1763 Louisiana was ceded to Spain as part of the treaty ending the Seven
Years’ War. In 1765 several thousand French refugees from Nova Scotia (driven out by the English) settled in southern Louisiana—today they are known as Cajuns. In 1800 Napoleon Bonaparte reacquired Louisiana for France following a victory over Spain. In 1803 Napoleon sold the whole region—totaling 828,000 square miles—to the United States for $15 million.

The English

In 1576, eighty years after Cabot had sailed west from England, Martin Frobisher reached Baffin Island, just west of Greenland. It was a very brief visit during which several of his crew were taken captive by the Inuit and never seen again. Nevertheless, upon his return to England, Frobisher secured funds for a larger expedition from Queen Elizabeth and a merchant group chartered as the Company of Cathay. Embarking with three ships and 150 men, he did little exploring but brought about two hundred tons of ore back to England. Assays of this ore were contradictory (eventually the ore turned out to be fool’s gold), but local enthusiasm remained high. Hence, a large voyage of sixteen ships set out in June 1578 with plans to set up a colony. Frobisher’s third expedition landed in southern Greenland, but conflict among the participants prevented colonizing (which probably would not have survived an arctic winter). Back in England, Frobisher became involved with the flourishing privateers who preyed upon Spanish shipping and went out with a fleet headed by Sir Walter Raleigh, taking a rich Spanish prize. He died in 1594 after suffering a gunshot wound while taking part in the siege of the Spanish Fort Crozon in Brittany.

In 1587 Raleigh established the first major English colony in North America on Roanoke Island, just off the coast of present-day North Carolina.
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Three years elapsed before Raleigh returned to Roanoke, having delayed in part to help defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588. When Raleigh did reach Roanoke in 1590, no one was there. What happened to these colonists has been pursued ever since as one of history’s great mysteries. For a variety of other reasons, Raleigh was beheaded by order of King James on October 29, 1618, eleven years after the founding of the first successful English New World colony: Jamestown, Virginia.