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Ecuador DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST
The discovery and conquest of Ecuador by Spanish forces in the
early sixteenth century are adjuncts to the history of the conquest
of Peru, the richest of the New World prizes won for the Spanish
crown. The central figure of that history is Pizarro, an illiterate
adventurer from Trujillo in the Spanish region of Extremadura, who
had accompanied Vasco Núñez de Balboa in his crossing of the
Isthmus of Panama to discover the Pacific in 1513. Eleven years
later, Panamanian governor Pedro Arias de Avila ("Pedrarias")
authorized Pizarro, in partnership with an equally questionable
character, a Castilian named Diego de Almargo, and a priest named
Fernando de Luque, financing to explore southward down the west
coast of South America. Their first two voyages, in 1524 and 1526,
ended in failure; not until the third voyage, launched in 1531,
would the Peruvian prize be won and the Inca be conquered.
The first European to set foot on the territory of modern-day
Ecuador was probably Bartolomé Ruiz de Estrada, the pilot for
Pizarro on his second voyage, who pushed southward while Pizarro
explored the Colombian coast and Almargo returned to Panama for
supplies. Pizarro himself landed on the Ecuadorian coast later
during his exploratory voyage and traveled as far as Tumbes in the
extreme north of present-day Peru, in defiance of official orders
to return to Panama.
Having thus lost the favor of the king's representatives in
Panama, Pizarro was forced to return to the royal court in Spain to
petition King Charles I personally for authorization of a third
voyage. Flush with the success of Hernán Cortés in Mexico and
tantalized by the gold pieces brought by Pizarro from Tumbes and
growing fables of great wealth in the South American interior,
Charles granted Pizarro authorization and much more: the titles of
governor and captain-general of Peru, a generous salary, and
extensive territorial concessions. Almargo was granted important,
although less generous, titles and privileges; his resentment of
this slight would affect relationships for the rest of the
conquest. At the time that Charles granted various titles to
Pizarro and Almargo, he named de Luque Bishop of Tumbes. Before
returning to Panama in 1530, Pizarro recruited for the conquest
several immediate family members, including two full brothers named
Gonzalo and Juan as well as two half-brothers. The participation of
so many of Pizarro's relatives further strained relations between
the two partners in conquest.
Pizarro then embarked from Panama with some 180 men while
Almargo remained there to gather additional recruits. After
thirteen days at sea, Pizarro landed once again on the coast of
Ecuador, where he procured some gold, silver, and emeralds, which
were dispatched to Panama and put to good use in Almargo's efforts.
Although the capture of the Inca stronghold of Tumbes was Pizarro's
first objective, he was forced to spend several months in Ecuador,
first nursing a rash of ulcers and then fighting the fierce
warriors of the island of Puná. By the time the conquerors arrived
in Tumbes, it had been destroyed by the Puná warriors and its
population dispersed. Just to the south, they founded the first
Spanish settlement in Peru, San Miguel de Tangarará. Upon their
fateful departure to Cajamarca on September 24, 1532, Pizarro left
a lieutenant, Sebastián de Benalcázar, in charge of protecting and
developing San Miguel as a Spanish base of operations. Two years
later, Benalcázar would lead the conquering forces that moved
northward into Ecuador.
Meanwhile, Atahualpa was resting near Cajamarca, in the Sierra
of northern Peru, following the defeat and capture of his brother.
He had known of the arrival of foreign invaders for several months;
it is not clear why he did not order their obliteration before they
could penetrate into the heart of the empire. After a march of
almost two months, Pizarro arrived in Cajamarca and summoned
Atahualpa from the nearby thermal baths known today as the Baños
del Inca. Reluctantly, accompanied by several thousands of his best
troops, Atahualpa went to Cajamarca's central plaza, where he was
met, not by the conquistadors, but by their chaplain, Fray Vicente
de Valverde, who called upon the Inca emperor to submit to the
representatives of the Spanish crown and the Christian god.
Atahualpa replied disparagingly and, upon his throwing a Christian
prayer book to the ground in contempt, concealed Spanish soldiers
opened fire, killing thousands of Atahualpa's defenders and taking
the Inca emperor captive. This slaughter, called "the decisive
battle" of the conquest of Peru by historian Hubert Herring, took
place on November 16, 1532.
A panic-stricken Atahualpa, fearing that Pizarro might be
planning to depose him in favor of his rival brother, summoned
Huascar, at this time imprisoned in Cuzco, to Cajamarca, then
ordered him to be executed along with hundreds of Huascar's nearest
of kin. It served the Spaniards' purposes to allow Atahualpa the
freedom, from his cell, to command his forces. Thus continued the
rapid annihilation, through a vicious civil war that now overlapped
with the Spanish conquest, of the army and leadership of one of the
great polities of modern history. Pizarro was not planning to
depose Atahualpa, of course, but to execute him. First, however, he
had Atahualpa fill his cell, once with gold, then twice with silver
(estimated at 4,850 kilograms of gold and 9,700 kilograms of
silver) supposedly as ransom for his release. Instead the Spaniards
garrotted Atahualpa on August 29, 1533, following a mock trial at
which he was convicted of every charge that Pizarro could invent
for the occasion. Having deprived the Inca empire of leadership,
Pizarro and another conquistador, Hernando de Soto, moved south to
Cuzco, the heart of Tawantinsuyu, which they captured in November
1533; they then led their men in an orgy of looting, pillaging, and
torture in search of more precious metals.
Benalcázar, Pizarro's lieutenant and fellow Extremaduran, had
already departed from San Miguel with 140 foot soldiers and a few
horses on his conquering mission to Ecuador. At the foot of Mount
Chimborazo, near the modern city of Riobamba, he met and defeated
the forces of the great Inca warrior Rumiñahui with the aid of
Cañari tribesmen who, happy to throw off the yoke of their Inca
rulers, served as guides and allies to the conquering Spaniards.
Rumiñahui fell back to Quito, and, while in pursuit of the Inca
army, Benalcázar encountered another, quite sizable, conquering
party led by Guatemalan Governor Pedro de Alvarado. Bored with
administering Central America, Alvarado had set sail for the south
without the crown's authorization, landed on the Ecuadorian coast,
and marched inland to the Sierra. Pizarro had heard of this
competing expedition some time earlier and had sent Almargo north
to reinforce Benalcázar. Together, Pizarro's two representatives
managed to convince Alvarado, with the help of a handsome amount of
gold, to call off his expedition and allow the "legal" conquest to
proceed as planned. Most of Alvarado's men joined Benalcázar for
the siege of Quito.
Rumiñahui left Quito in flames for the approaching
conquistadors. It was mid-1534 and, after the customary orgy of
violence, in December the Spanish established the city of San
Francisco de Quito on top of the ruins of the secondary Inca
capital. Benalcázar was soon off on more conquests in Colombia to
the north; it was not until December 1540 that Quito received its
first captain-general in the person of Gonzalo Pizarro, the brother
of Francisco.
Benalcázar had also founded the city of Guayaquil in 1533, but
it had subsequently been retaken by the local Huancavilca
tribesmen. Francisco de Orellana, yet another lieutenant of
Francisco Pizarro from the Spanish city of Trujillo, put down the
native rebellion and in 1537 reestablished this city, which a
century later would become one of Spain's principal ports in South
America.
Orellana is chiefly remembered, however, for being the first
European to travel the length of the Amazon River. This journey,
one of the great adventure tales of Spain's conquest of America,
began in February 1541, when the lure of spices, particularly
cinnamon, led Pizarro's brother Gonzalo to set off from Quito to
the eastern jungle with a party that included 210 Spaniards and
some 4,000 Indians. Orellana was second in command. After several
months of hardship and deprivation during a crossing of the
Cordillera Oriental of the Andes that cost the lives of nearly half
the party, Gonzalo Pizarro placed Orellana in charge of building a
brigantine in the Coca River in present-day Ecuador. Together with
fifty-seven Spaniards and several hundred Indians, Orellana sailed
downstream in search of food and friendly natives. The explorers
never rejoined Pizarro, however, but set out on their own in search
of neither food nor spices, but gold. "Having eaten our shoes and
saddles boiled with a few herbs," wrote Orellana in a caricature of
the ruggedness for which the Extremaduran conquerors were noted,
"we set out to reach the Kingdom of Gold." The group reached the
mouth of the Amazon, a name given by Orellana because he believed
that they had been attacked by the legendary giant female warriors
at a point below the Negro River, and sailed northward along the
Atlantic coast as far as Venezuela, then back to Spain. The journey
completed by the expedition headed by Orellana was not to be
repeated for 100 years.
In the same August 1542, as Orellana reached the Atlantic,
Gonzalo Pizarro was stumbling back to Quito with the few surviving
members of his party. He found Peru in political chaos. Several
years earlier, Almargo had entered into open rebellion against
Francisco Pizarro and been defeated in battle, tried, and executed
in his newly founded capital city of Lima. The resentment among
Almargo's followers did not end, however, and in June 1541,
Francisco Pizarro had been assassinated by the remnants of
Almargo's army. In an attempt to try to control the unruly
conquistadors and to end the enslavement of the native population
of America, the Spanish crown had promulgated the New Laws in 1542,
which in theory though not in practice abolished
encomiendas, and two years later it sent its first viceroy
to head a newly created colonial administrative system.
Gonzalo, who had little interest in being controlled by anyone,
defeated and killed the first viceroy on a battlefield near Quito.
After a brief period of glory, however, the younger Pizarro was
himself defeated by the forces of a subsequent royal emissary, and
in 1548 he was tried and hung for treason. It was the end of the
tumultuous era of the conquistadors and the beginning of two and a
half centuries of relatively pacific colonial rule.
Data as of 1989
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