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

it up, removed its lungs, and then looked carefully at the animal’s veins for an omen. The pattern of veins unfortunately appeared to foretell a bleak future for both Ninan Cuyoche and for Huascar. By the time the nobles returned with the news, however, the great Huayna Capac, ruler of the largest empire in the Americas, was already dead. As they had been instructed, the nobles dutifully went in search of the young king, “but when they arrived at Tumi-pampa, they found that … Ninan Cuyoche was [already] dead of the pestilence.”
    Ironically, as Huayna Capac had lay dying from the strange affliction, it was apparently at precisely this moment that he is said to have received the first reports of a strange ship, one that had arrived from the north and had moored before the conquered Chimu city of Tumbez. In his delirious state, the emperor was told of the passengers’ light-colored skin, of their full beards, and of the strange tools (harquebuses) they possessed, some of which made smoke and spoke like thunder. This, of course, was the native version of Francisco Pizarro’s second expedition of 1526–1528, during which he and a handful of men had anchored before Tumbez and an inquisitive Inca noble had climbed on board. Pizarro had no idea at the time that a pestilence from the Old World had preceded him to Peru. Or that even as he was marveling at the wealth and orderliness of Tumbez, that natives elsewhere in the Inca Empire were already being decimated—including the empire’s very ruler, Huayna Capac—by this disease.
    Diseases from the Old World had arrived in the Caribbean, however, as early as 1494, introduced by some of the passengers on Columbus’s second voyage. Columbus had not only begun to ferry people over from the Old World to the New, after all, but he unwittingly had also begun to transport microscopic pathogens that were as deadly as they were invisible. Eventually, smallpox, measles, bubonic and pneumonic plagues, typhus, cholera, malaria, and yellow fever arrived, either one by one or in clusters. They quickly spread among the native inhabitants,who, due to their isolation, had no natural immunities. A plague of smallpox even followed in the footsteps of Hernando Cortés’s expedition against the Aztecs, who called the frightening affliction
huey zahuatl
, or “the big rash.” Wrote the sixteenth-century historian Francisco López de Gómara:
    It was a dreadful illness and many people died of it. No one could walk; they could only lie stretched out on their beds. No one could move, not even able to turn their heads. One could not lie face down, or lie on the back, nor turn from one side to another. When they did move, they screamed in pain.
    After devastating the Aztecs and inadvertently helping Cortés to conquer their empire, the smallpox plague began moving southward, like a slowly moving wave, disseminating death through Central America and then finally onto the South American continent. There it was transmitted, always ahead of the Spanish advance, by natives who infected others before they themselves died. Sometime around 1527, the germs carried across an ocean by Columbus finally arrived at the outskirts of the Inca Empire, taking the life of Huayna Capac and his heir.
    Roughly two years later, as Pizarro journeyed to Spain in order to lobby for permission to conquer the land called Peru, the last thing he could have imagined was that the conquest he was hoping to lead had already begun. The smallpox virus introduced from Europe had not only killed the Inca emperor, but had set off a brutal war of succession that now threatened to destroy the very empire that Pizarro hoped one day to conquer.
    As in the kingdoms of Europe, Inca government was basically a monarchy in which the power to rule passed from father to son. Where it differed from the European version, however, was that the Inca emperor had multiple wives and Inca custom did not include the notion of primogeniture, that is, the