Historic fiction examines clash of empires
Salt Spring Island’s Ronald Wright, author of A Scientific Romance and other novels, has written a new novel of exploration and invasion, of conquest and resistance and of an enduring love.
Q Tell us about your book.
A Set during the Spanish conquest of Peru in the 1500s, and based closely on real events, The Gold Eaters imagines what it was like to live through one of history’s greatest turning points. At that time, the Inca Empire was the second largest on Earth (after China) and the last great civilization unknown to the outside world. The conquistadors’ vast haul of Peruvian gold and silver transformed the economy of Europe, laying the foundations of our modern world. Yet, as far as I know, nobody has ever explored this story before in a literary novel, either in English or Spanish.
This surprised me when I began the book, but as I delved into the history and sought to transform it into fiction I began to appreciate the difficulties. Despite spending a long time in Peru when I was studying its archeology and culture, and having learned Spanish and Quechua (the Inca language, still spoken by 10 million), it took me five years to shape the tangled skein of events into a narrative consistent with the known past yet alive with fiction’s drama and humanity.
The breakthrough came when I realized that my main character would be the youth whom the Spaniards captured from an Inca ship in 1526, took to Spain, and brought back as their interpreter during the invasion in the 1530s. This man, whom they called Felipe (I give him also the Peruvian name Waman), becomes the bridge between worlds. As he grows up and witnesses the tragic conflict at first hand, meeting all the key players, he must decide who he truly is and where he belongs. Meanwhile, he searches the broken highways of the fallen empire for his scattered family and lost love.
Q Can you explain t he meaning of the title?
A The conquerors, desperate to escape poverty in a Spain where money was everything, sought the land of Peru for its fabled gold. Some would succeed beyond their dreams, while many lost their lives. But in Peru, where gold was more plentiful than iron, the metal had no monetary worth; it was used for religious and artistic purposes — jewelry, statues, and adorning great stone buildings. The Incas were baffled by the invaders’ consuming hunger for the metal, a cultural incompatibility dramatized in an early chronicle written by a native lord. In one of the fine drawings with which he illustrated his book, he shows the Inca ruler confronting a Spaniard. “Do you eat gold?” the emperor asks sarcastically in Quechua. The answer (in Spanish) is yes: “We eat this gold!”
And in a way, we’ve all been living on it ever since.
Q It could be said the Inca culture was culturally and militarily superior to that of the invading Spaniards. What made Pizarro’s army so successful?
A Smallpox. This Eurasian disease (and others, such as measles and influenza to which American peoples had little or no immunity) reached the New World with the Spaniards, and raced ahead of their conquests. They won no major victories, either in Mexico or Peru, until a plague had done its work. It burned through the Inca Empire like a terrible germ weapon sometime between the Spaniards’ first reconnaissance and their main invasion, killing more than half the population, a shrewd and respected emperor in his prime, his chosen heir, and countless key figures in the chain of command.
By the time Pizarro launched his attack, a power struggle had broken out among the survivors. The new Emperor Atawallpa, arrogant from victory and still consolidating his position, failed to take the invasion seriously or to crush the Spaniards when he easily could have — in the icy passes and steep ravines of the Andes.
Pizarro also brought a few crude muskets and small cannon, but the main military advantages the Spaniards had were tactics ( especially sudden massacre), cavalry (armoured horses were the tanks of their day), and better armour and swords. But none of that would have been enough to conquer an Empire of 20 million were it not for plague.
Q What lessons on humanity do you hope readers will extract from this novel?
A That wars seldom end well, even for the winners. And that societies live and die by their values. The Inca Empire was no democracy, but it did take good care of its subjects. The Spaniards were both amazed and horrified to find no hungry, homeless, slaves, or beggars when they first saw Peru; this struck them as unnatural, even blasphemous. The Peruvians became equally alarmed when they discovered that the Spanish rulers, unlike the Inca, forced them to work in mines and haciendas without caring for their basic needs.
Andean nations are still recovering from the five centuries of exploitation that the conquest brought.
Meanwhile, Spain squandered her Inca treasure on European wars, only to lose her empire and sink back into poverty.
Similarly, our modern world is still blighted by the needless First World War, which led to the Second War, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, etc. This is nowhere clearer right now than in the Middle East, where chaos unleashed by the American invasion of 2003 has set off a human catastrophe comparable in many ways to what happened in Peru 500 years ago.