The Mapmaker's Wife by Robert Whitaker Read Free Book Online Page B

shrink from sharing the dangers of our glorious enterprise,” he told them, “let them go home, in God’s name. They can tell there how they deserted their commander and their comrades, and patient wait till we return loaded with spoils of the Aztecs.”
    Cortés and his men were Amadís knights on the march. Their adventure soon unfolded like the plots in the novels they read. As they neared the central plateau of Mexico, Aztecs greeted them with glittering gifts from their ruler, Montezuma. The goods were meant as bribes—the Aztecs hoped that the Spaniards would take them and leave—but the treasures simply hastened Cortés’s march. He demanded to see Montezuma, and on November 8, 1519, he and his men were escorted along a great causeway into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which was built, in the manner of a fairy tale, upon islands in Lake Texcoco.“We were amazed,” marveled Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier in Cortés’s army, in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain . “We said that it was like the enchanted things related in the Book of Amadis because of the huge towers, temples and buildings rising from the water and all of masonry. Some of the soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream.”
    Within three years, the men of Castile had defeated the Aztecs, and while they were disappointed in the amount of gold and silver to be had, they took the place of the Aztecs as ruling overlords of Mexico. The legal method that the Spanish Crown had established for rewarding conquistadors was known as the encomienda system. A native village or group of villages would be “commended” to the care of an individual Spaniard, who was obligated to protect the inhabitants and bring in a priest to convert them to Catholicism. In return, the governing Spaniard, who was known as an encomendero , was authorized to collect a “tribute” from the Indians in the form of food, goods, clothing, and labor. Cortés became the master of 23,000 Indian families, while others in his army were awarded encomiendas of 2,000 households.
    The conquest of Mexico inspired Spaniards to new heights offancy. While the Amazon women first spotted on the Yucatán coast had never materialized, their location was now better known. A tribe of women warriors, Cortés explained in a letter to King Charles V, was living on an island further west, where“at given times men from the mainland visit them; if they conceive, they keep the female children to which they give birth, but the males they throw away.” There were also rumors circulating of an “otro Mexico” waiting to be discovered south of Panama, this one said to be even richer in gold and silver. The people there, the Spaniards believed,“eat and drink out of gold vessels.”
    In 1531, Francisco Pizarro, a soldier of fortune who was living as an encomendero in Panama, set out with 180 men and thirty-seven horses to conquer this empire to the south. He had the good fortune to arrive while the Incas were bogged down in a civil war. The Incas were a mountain people from the Cuzco region who had begun to conquer neighboring tribes in the middle of the fourteenth century. Over the next 150 years, they had extended their control over a territory that stretched more than 2,000 miles along the spine of the Andes, from Quito to the Maule River (in central Chile), with a total population of more than 10 million people. The Incas were skilled potters and weavers, and they had utilized advanced irrigation techniques to turn desert coastal areas into thriving agricultural regions. They had built more than 15,000 miles of roads. They also maintained warehouses of clothing, food, and weapons, and had a communication system, composed of relay runners, that could deliver a message from Cuzco to Quito, a distance of 1,230 miles, in just eight days. But around 1525, the reigning Inca, Huayna Capac, died of smallpox (a plague that had begun to creep south from Panama), and two