The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie Read Free Book Online Page A

natives who climbed aboard the ship was a man who obviously commanded respect; the native was rather well dressed in a patterned cotton tunic and had elongated earlobes with large wooden plugs in them, something none of the other natives wore.
    Unbeknownst to the Spaniards, this was either an ethnic Inca noble or a local native chief, both of which formed part of the ruling elite. The Spaniards would later call these nobles
orejones
, or “big ears,” because of the large, symbolic discs worn in their earlobes that denoted their elite status. This particular
orejón
had come to discover what this strange ship was doing in their waters and who these strange, bearded men were (the inhabitants of the Inca Empire, like the vast majority of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, had little if any facial hair). Unable to communicate except with hand gestures, the
orejón
was nevertheless so inquisitive that he astonished the Spaniards, using gestures to ask “where they were from, what land they had come from, and what they werelooking for.” The Inca noble then carefully examined the ship, studying its equipment and, according to what the Spaniards could decipher, apparently preparing some kind of report for his lord, a great king called Huayna Capac (Why-na KAH-pak), who the
orejón
indicated lived somewhere in the interior. The veteran Pizarro, who had been capturing, enslaving, killing, and torturing native Amerindians ever since his arrival in the New World, did his best to hide the true nature of their mission and to see how much he could learn about these people through feigned friendliness and diplomacy. In return for the natives’ gifts, Pizarro quickly presented the
orejón
with a male and female pig, four European hens and a rooster, and an iron axe, “which strangely pleased him, esteeming it more than if they had given him one hundred times more gold than it weighed.” As the
orejón
prepared to return to shore, Pizarro ordered two men to accompany him—Alonso de Molina and a black slave—the first European and African ever to step ashore in the area now known as Peru. * No sooner had Molina and the slave arrived than they became instant celebrities. The excited inhabitants of the city, which the Spaniards later learned was called Tumbez, turned out in droves to marvel at the strange ship and at their two exotic visitors. They
    all came to see the sow and the boar and the hens, delighting in hearing the rooster crow. But all that was nothing compared to the commotion created by the Black man. Because they saw that he was black, they looked at him over and over again, and made him wash to see if his blackness was color or some kind of applied confection. But he laughed, showing his white teeth, as some came to see him and then others, so many that they did not even give him time to eat … [he] walked here and there wherever they wanted to see him, as something so new and by them never seen before.
    Meanwhile, the Spaniard, Alonsode Molina—apparently awestruck by coming face-to-face with an advanced native civilization—received similar treatment from the excited crowd. The two were, after all, the sixteenth-century equivalent of today’s astronauts—emissaries from a distant and alien civilization.
    “They looked at how the Spaniard [Molina] had a beard and was white. They asked him many things, but he understood nothing. The children, the old, and the women all looked at them delightedly. Alonso de Molina saw many buildings and remarkable things in Tumbez … irrigation channels, many planted fields, and fruits and some sheep [llamas]. Many Indian women—very beautiful and well attired and dressed according to their customs—came to talk to him. They all gave him fruits and whatever they had in order for him to take to the ship. They used gestures to ask where [the Spaniards] were going and where they had come from…. Among those Indian women who were talking to him was a very beautiful lady, and she