Pizarro’s expedition came twice to Incan territory, both by sea, following the coastline. First, in 1526 they landed in Tumbez, off the northern coast of Perú, which is today frontier with Ecuador. He had come from Panamá, where he lived as a colonist with his own native workforce. Influenced by the tales of Cortés in Mexico, he set on an expedition, sailing from Panamá.

At that time Huayna Capac was still the Inca emperor, a man who had received a kingdom that extended from northern Chile to Ecuador, and which would even reach southern Colombia. At the time Huayna Capac was in this part of his empire.

Pizarro kept sailing south, finding more and more evidence of a highly advanced civilization. However, he lacked people and goods to push further, so he returned to Spain to ask for funding to the Crown, which he received, and in 1530 he mounted a new expedition.

This time, he landed on the Ecuadorian coast with a group of 160 men, with horses and gunpowder. He then pushed south, in a very difficult expedition. He had to fight the natives in the Puna islands in Ecuador, whose leader he executed. By the time he reached Tumbez in 1532 he found a very different status-quo than he had left. Huayna Capac had died, and his sons Huascar and Atahualpa fought for the title, dividing the empire in two parts controlled from Cuzco and Quite respectively, with Atahualpa the winner. The villages had been ravaged by the civil war. Initially Pizarro marched along the coastline, before turning inland after contacting an envoy from Atahualpa, and thus moving to Cajamarca.

Sources:

• De Sarmiento, Pedro. “LXIII, The Life of Huascar, The Last Inca, And Of Atahualpa.” History of the Incas, trans. B. Bauer; V. Smith. University of Texas Press, 2007

• Hemming, John. “Cajamarca”. The Conquest of the Incas. New York: Harvest Books, 1970.

• Kubler, George. “The Behaviour of Atahualpa, 1531-1533”. In The Hispanic American Historical Review, 413-427, 1945.

• Titu Cusi Yupanqui, An Incan Account of the Conquest of Peru, trans. R. Bauer. University Press of Colorado, 2005.

• De Cieza de Léon, Pedro. Crónica del Perú. Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2005.