An illiterate swineherd's son drew a line in the sand and toppled the Inca Empire
Stranded on a Pacific island with orders to come home, Francisco Pizarro reportedly scratched a line in the sand: Peru and riches to the south, Panama and poverty to the north. Only 13 men crossed. Within six years he had captured the Inca emperor and entered Cuzco.
Pizarro was born in Trujillo, in today's Extremadura, probably in the mid-1470s, the illegitimate son of an infantry colonel and a poor woman. He never learned to read. Through his father he was distantly related to Hernán Cortés. He sailed for the Americas in 1509, and in 1513 went with Vasco Núñez de Balboa across the Isthmus of Panama, among the first Europeans to see the Pacific from the Americas. Later, on the governor's orders, he arrested Balboa, who was executed, and was rewarded with the mayoralty of the new Panama City.
Rumours of a golden land called Pirú, carried north by the explorer Pascual de Andagoya, together with news of Cortés in Mexico, set Pizarro's sights south. In 1524 he, the soldier Diego de Almagro and the priest Hernando de Luque made an oral pact to conquer and split whatever empire they found. The first voyage, with about 80 men and four horses, collapsed amid storms, hunger and fighting; the Spaniards named one stop the Port of Hunger, and Almagro lost an eye.
The second expedition changed everything when the pilot Bartolomé Ruiz seized a sailing raft from Tumbes laden with cotton cloth, gold, silver and emeralds. Panama's new governor still sent ships to bring Pizarro back, prompting the line in the sand at Isla de Gallo. The loyal Famous Thirteen waited seven months on Gorgona island before reaching Tumbes in 1528, where locals welcomed them and Pizarro first saw llamas, which he called little camels.
With royal permission granted in 1529, his third expedition found Peru torn by civil war. At Cajamarca in November 1532, relying on guns and horses, he seized the emperor Atahualpa, who filled a room with gold as ransom. Pizarro executed him anyway in July 1533, took Cuzco and founded Lima in 1535. Political feuds among the conquerors caught up with him, and he was assassinated in 1541.
Source: Francisco Pizarro
