Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist (33 page)

I have held this old sinner’s skull in my hands. The trauma marks still visible on Pizarro’s remains bear astonishing witness to the terrible fury of his attackers. Modern assassins have the tremendous explosive force of firearms at their disposal. Pizarro’s slayers wielded swords alone; but what sword steel could do to the human skull and skeletal frame it did to Francisco Pizarro. He died brutally and painfully, as the multiple nicks and scorings of his bones attest. His skeleton can stand comparison with several modern murder victims I have examined, for the atrocity of the wounds it reveals.

There is a powerful magic in the past. When we touch a human artifact from centuries or millennia ago, we seem to behold our brother human beings from across the deeps of time. If we are not careful, we fall into dreams of bygone days and the light of sunsets long extinguished. I have seen cool, analytical, clear-brained colleagues, especially my archaeologist friends, practically swooning with admiration over some small potsherd, all but overcome by the mere physical presence of human antiquity. “Just think!” they will say in hushed voices. “This is the very such-and-such that once belonged to so-and-so!”

I envy them this second sight, this gift of imaginative reverie; but I cannot afford to share the mood. I have been called to far countries to examine remains of considerable age, and have handled things vested with exceptional historical significance, but I can’t permit myself the luxury of time travel on these occasions. The clock is ticking. Work has to be done. Accuracy is all. As Margaret Thatcher admonished George Bush in the emergency days after Iraq invaded Kuwait: “Now, George, this is no time to go wobbly!” On such occasions I am more likely to worry about electric voltage and adapters, whether our equipment will work, whether we have brought enough film and instruments, whether we have sufficient spare parts if something breaks. I cannot spare time to muse about vanished greatness and departed glory. I cannot afford to go wobbly.

Yet when I look back on the case of the misplaced conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, I am struck by how neatly the pieces fell into position, and how the remains dovetailed exactly with historical accounts of the man. Pizarro’s were the first really famous bones I handled, and the investigation into his death marked my first foray into historical forensic anthropology. Together with several colleagues, I was able to unmask an impostor mummy, which for years had been displayed and reverenced as the body of the conquistador. At the same time, I was able to help authenticate another set of skeletal remains as belonging beyond any doubt to the man who conquered Peru for Spain. A careful reconstruction of facial features, built up from the true skull, has given us a reasonable portrait of what Pizarro looked like in life. The verified bones have been put in their rightful place of honor in Lima’s Cathedral of San Agustín, and a case of mistaken identity has been solved for good.

There was a time when every schoolchild knew of the astonishing exploits of Francisco Pizarro, the self-made soldier of fortune from Trujillo, Spain, who went to Panama with Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, the first European discoverer of the Pacific Ocean. At the age of fifty, an old man by the reckoning of his time, Pizarro embarked on the conquest of Peru. This climaxed in 1532 with his famous march to Cajamarca, deep in the Peruvian interior, with sixty-seven horses and a mere hundred and ten soldiers, not more than twenty of whom were armed, and these only with crossbows or arquebuses. Atahualpa, the Inca King, was waiting for him there with an army of 40,000 to 50,000 men, but was strangely paralyzed by indecision. Atahualpa allowed Pizarro to take possession of the citadel of Cajamarca and camped with his Inca army on the plains below. Invited to a parley, the Inca chief entered the citadel with only a few hundred followers. There he was ambushed and captured by Pizarro’s men, who slaughtered the King’s courtiers and raped his concubines. Overnight, almost at a stroke, the empire of the Incas was laid low, its King taken prisoner.

Then comes the famous tale of the Room of Gold. In return for his life and freedom, Atahualpa offered to fill with gold a room twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet wide to a height of seven feet. Pizarro agreed but also demanded that an adjacent room, somewhat smaller, be filled twice over with silver.

Five months later the larger room was still not quite full, even though a total of 1,326,539 gold pesos had been amassed. One fifth of the treasure was sent back to Spain and the remainder was divided among Pizarro and his men. Once the gold was disposed of, Atahualpa had no further value to Pizarro. To get rid of him, Pizarro had the Inca tried on trumped-up charges of insurrection, embezzling funds, adultery and idol-worshiping. He was found guilty and, two hours after sundown on July 16, 1533, was led to the stake to be burned. Atahualpa only avoided this atrocious mode of execution by “converting” to Christianity at the stake, and being baptized as “Juan de Atahualpa.” Pizarro then had the Inca chief garroted.

The Spaniards proceeded to tear the Inca Empire to shreds and divide its spoils. A puppet king installed by Pizarro, Toparca, died mysteriously. Atahualpa’s bravest general, Challcuchima, was burned at the stake. The last Inca army, led by a general named Quizquiz, was destroyed utterly by Pizarro’s bitter rival, an old, one-eyed veteran named Diego de Almagro. On November 15, 1533, the Inca capital, Cuzco, fell. With it came more than half a million pesos’ worth of gold. The victorious conquistadors rampaged across the land, using the Incas’ own highways to travel, all the while slaughtering flocks, confiscating crops, despoiling temples and causing farm land and irrigation systems to fall into ruin. The unrestrained cruelty of the conquest of Peru still arouses our horror and pity.

Deprived of most of the booty by Pizarro and his brothers, Almagro and his men were understandably outraged. Pizarro offered Almagro the country of Chile, and the old soldier marched off, hoping to duplicate Pizarro’s success. But Chile held no gold to compare with the riches of Peru. Almagro and his men endured two years of terrible war and physical hardship, emerging from Chile empty-handed and furious with Pizarro and his brothers, who were now in possession of all the Inca wealth. After a series of battles and double crosses, Almagro was defeated at Las Salinas on April 26, 1538, captured and executed by the garrote, on the orders of Pizarro’s brother, Hernando. Pizarro himself later stripped Almagro’s son of his lands, leaving the young man and his followers penniless and desperate for revenge. Pizarro was now governor of Peru, ruling from Lima, which he had founded in 1535.

The younger Almagro and his supporters spun a plot to kill Pizarro at mass on Sunday, June 26, 1541. One of the conspirators whispered of the plot while confessing his sins to a priest, who broke the sacred and confidential seal of confession and informed Pizarro of the danger. Pizarro seems to have shrugged off the warning but, as a precaution, feigned illness and did not attend mass that Sunday. He shared the story with the vice-mayor, Juan Belásquez, who assured the governor that he was safe as long as the “rod of justice” was in Belásquez’s hands. With these assurances, Pizarro sat down to his Sunday dinner with about twenty guests seated around the table, including his half brother, Francisco Martín de Alcántara, Belásquez and other cavaliers.

It was the last meal he would ever eat. While he was yet at table, a tumult was heard outside the governor’s palace. The conspirators charged across the Plaza de Armas outside the governor’s mansion, shouting their intentions. There is confusion about their number: some accounts say there were as few as seven, some as many as twenty-five. Pizarro kept his head and calmly ordered the front door of the palace to be locked. The officer sent to do this, Francisco Hurtado de Hevia, unwisely chose to negotiate with the aggressors through the half-open door. They forced their way in with a great clamor. Hearing this uproar, most of Pizarro’s dinner guests promptly deserted him, among them Belásquez, who climbed down into the garden with his “rod of justice” firmly grasped in his mouth.

Now began Pizarro’s last battle. The old conquistador attempted to buckle on his armor breastplate, but the bulky leather straps would not fasten in time. Dropping the armor and wrapping a cloak around his left arm for a shield, he rushed to meet his assailants, who were already fighting with Alcántara and three or four loyal men.

Because several of the conspirators survived to be interrogated under torture, we know more or less what happened next, blow by blow. By the time Pizarro joined the fray, most of his defenders were dead or dying, including Alcántara. Finding himself alone, the doughty old warrior taunted his opponents and killed at least two of them. After he ran his sword into a third, a man standing behind this conspirator shoved the transfixed body forward, impaling the dying man further on Pizarro’s weapon. While Pizarro was wrestling with the blade, trying to pull it free, he received a rapier wound in his throat, which disabled him. Falling to the floor, bleeding, he was swiftly surrounded by the remaining conspirators, who plunged their blades into him. He may have been shot with a crossbow bolt as well. According to one account, he asked for water as he lay dying, and a soldier named Barragan broke a water jug over his head, telling him he could have his next drink in hell.

“He fought so long with them that with very weariness, his sword fell out of his hands, and then they slew him with a prick of a rapier through his throat: and when he was fallen to the ground, and his wind failing him, he cried unto God for mercy, and when he had so done, he made a cross on the ground and kissed it, and then incontinent yielded up the ghost,” wrote a contemporary historian, Garcilaso de la Vega in his
Royal Commentaries
.

Like the assassins who murdered Julius Caesar centuries before, the victorious conspirators all dipped their swords in Pizarro’s blood, to share in the honor of the deed. Some discussed cutting Pizarro’s head off, but this was finally vetoed. A near riot broke out in Lima because of the murder, which the clergy attempted to quell by parading the holy eucharist in procession around the city. That night Doña Inés Muñoz, the wife of Alcántara, buried the body of her husband, together with that of Pizarro, behind the cathedral on the side facing the Plaza de Armas.

But Pizarro’s remains were not destined to rest in peace. Four years after his death, in 1545, came the first of many reburials and relocations: the conqueror’s bones and swords were exhumed and deposited in a wooden box under the main altar of the Lima cathedral, according to a wish expressed in his will. In 1551, Doña Francisco Pizarro Yupanqui, the daughter of the conquistador, and Doña Inés Yupanqui Huaylas, another relative, gave five thousand measures of gold to construct a special chapel in the cathedral for Pizarro’s remains. Money was also donated to assure perpetual care of the chapel. The bones were placed in a wooden box covered in black velvet and decorated with the cross of Santiago, church records show.

Meanwhile, the cathedral itself underwent a thorough reconstruction and on July 4, 1606, the remains were moved into the new church, which was severely damaged by an earthquake in 1609. Sometime between 1623 and 1629 the bones were moved again, inside the church.

In 1661 a verification process took place for the remains of St. Toribio, destined to become Peru’s first saint. In the records connected with St. Toribio, church documents mention a wooden box covered with brown velvet, enclosing a lead box with the inscription:
“AQVI ESTÁ LA CABEÇA DEL SEÑOR MARQVES DON FRANCISCO PIZARO QVE DESCVBRIO Y GAÑO LOS REYNOS DEL PIRV Y PVSO EN LA REAL CORONA DE CASTILLA
[Here is the skull of the Marquis Don Francisco Pizarro who discovered and won Peru and placed it under the crown of Castile].” More than two centuries later, this inscription would prove to be a crucial piece of evidence.

The cathedral was damaged anew in the earthquake of 1746. By 1778 a virtually new cathedral had been completed on the same site.

In 1891 came the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Pizarro’s death, and for the first time a committee of scientists was appointed to examine the well-preserved, mummified body from the crypt under the altar of the cathedral that had been identified by church officials as that of Pizarro. This mummy, it should be made clear, was a natural mummy, preserved by the exceptional dryness of the air at Lima’s high altitude; it was not, like an Egyptian mummy, artificially embalmed.

The source of the identification is an important detail: it was on the evidence of these priests and sacristans that the investigators relied. It was thought their testimony was unimpeachable, that they had carefully preserved Pizarro’s body and his identification over the centuries, handing down the evidence in an unbroken chain. Surely they could not be mistaken! And so the investigators in 1891 began their examination with a strong prejudice in favor of the remains before them.

An American anthropologist, W. J. McGee, was present at the exhumation and wrote a full account of the proceedings for the
American Anthropologist
, Vol. VII, No. 1 (January 1894). The commission lavished great pains on the desiccated corpse, describing it inside out, inch by inch. Three pages of measurements are part of McGee’s account.

The investigators were much struck by the fact that the mummy had no hands; that its skull was largely bare and exposed while dried flesh covered most of the rest of the body; that, even though it was male, it had no genitals; that there were gaping holes in the soft tissue at several points; and that, in their opinion, the skull looked like that of a criminal/with its jutting jaw and heavy-set base. It also seemed to possess an indented trench, known in those days as the “fossa of Lombroso,” which takes its name from a celebrated Italian criminologist. Such fanciful terms are no longer accepted today.

“In prognathism, in the general conformation of the cranium, in the breadth and fullness of the basal and occipital regions of the braincase, in the fossa of Lombroso, in all other important respects, the head is that of the typical criminal of today,” McGee wrote decisively. Interestingly enough, this was viewed as yet another proof that the skull was indeed Pizarro’s. Only a brute could have subdued Peru as bloodily as he did. Or, as McGee put it delicately, “The hero of history in earlier centuries is of rugged mold, and the heroism of the olden time is the crime of our softened lexicon. So Pizarro may well be judged as the representative of a class necessary and good in its age but not adjusted to the higher humanities of the present day.”