Jean-Paul Faguet

Half the Spanish who are there are still convinced that they're on the coast of India, right? And they start to suffer from their clean water gets contaminated. They've been marauding around digging up graves to steal the gold and ship it back to Spain. But that's running out. They're not really finding any more graves. The Indians already have decided.

At the beginning, they were kind of hedging their bets, saying, can we work with these people who are these weird people? They saw the Spaniards, a Spaniard knight mounted on a horse and thought this was one animal. They thought it was a godlike messenger, literally, because their cosmology predicted that the gods would send messengers who would have some sort of fantastical form.

And they thought these people were some other kind of either a spirit or a new animal that they'd never seen. But by 1536, 37, they figured out they don't like the Spaniards, and they're not cooperating, and they're often killing them. And the whole colony is on the verge of collapse, which means that the entire colonial project in northern South America is on the verge of collapse.

And in order to try to save colonialism and save these Spaniards from basically being wiped out, there's a guy called Jimenez de Quesada – who decides to lead an expedition south trying to get to Peru because they've heard news of fantastic riches, like unbelievable amounts of gold that Europeans and possibly in the world had never been seen before that are coming out of Cusco and the Inca Empire.

And this sort of, the flows of gold, A, sustained the entire Spanish Empire, and B, was all that Europeans talked about for about a century. It's unimaginable riches. So they're on the northern coast. Those of you who know your Latin American geography, they're on the northern coast of Colombia, which is pretty much the northern tip of the continent. And they're trying to get down to Cusco.

And so they set off walking, right? Because they're going to do this walking. And after 11 months, the 800 soldiers, the expedition of 800 people that left Santa Marta, after 11 months, they finally struggle up onto the savannah of Bogota. And only 170 of them have survived. 630 have died of drowning, of diseases, of hunger and being killed by the Indians. Right.

And they're really not very close to Peru at all. This idea they're going to walk there is just crazy. They had no idea where they were. Many of them thought that all of South America was an island and that they could just sort of walk from one end to the other.

And they get there and they meet a much, much, much larger force of indigenous warriors controlled by the chief of Bogota, who is the top chief, the first chief in a confederation. It's not an empire unlike the Aztecs in Mexico and unlike the Incas in Peru and Bolivia. It's more of a confederation of chieftains, but the one from Bogota is the biggest and most powerful one.

And these guys could have crushed the Spanish, and somehow they didn't. And this is one of the great historical mysteries. No one knows. In Mexico, it was a closer run thing, and they were basically defeated, and they came back and triumphed. In Peru and Colombia, no one can understand.

In Cajamarca, Peru, where Pizarro defeated the Inca Empire, and in Bogota, Colombia, nobody can understand how this happened. Because they had something like 30,000 warriors in Peru and more than 10,000 warriors in Colombia. And in both places, there were about 170 Spanish, 176. in Peru, 170 in Colombia. And they won because of the element of surprise, psychology.

They had gunpowder and they had steel. And the indigenous warriors that they were fighting had slings where they threw rocks and they had clubs and bows and arrows. And that's all they had. They didn't have swords because they didn't have steel. So they had clubs, right? But even so, 10,000 people with these arms could have beaten 170.

Maybe many of them would have died, but they could have just destroyed them, and they didn't. And the answer has something to do with the psychology and also the cosmography in the sense that they were convinced, many of them were convinced that these people were from the gods, so they had to listen.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the history is written by the winners. The only written records we have is from the Spaniards.

Yeah, that's right. So the... It's kind of, it's hard to think ourselves, it's a big exercise to think ourselves back into the 16th century. because the entire world was different, right? It's like all of our norms and expectations about individualism, about the kind of things that motivate people to do the things that we do, about how people relate to each other were completely different.

The Spaniards that were conquering Colombia were basically coming out of a late medieval culture where they were intensely religious. They really believed in God. They believed that the Christian and Catholic God was superior, you know, the one true God. And if you didn't believe, you're going to hell. And that the Spanish emperor was the agent of the one true Catholic God and so on and so forth.

And that's just like that's so alien to the world that we live in today. It's kind of hard to think ourselves back. Now, the Spanish American empire was something like, you know, 50 times the size of Spain, and they're trying to run it from across the ocean with 16th century technology, right? So, you know, imagine that. It was not the Spanish army, like the U.S.

army goes and conquers Afghanistan or conquers Iraq. That's not how it happened. These were privateers that had a license from the emperor to come and explore, and they got that legal right and sort of, you know, the support of Spain on the high seas against English and other pirates, et cetera.

But basically they came here, they mounted their own expeditions with private investment, and they were going to get to keep the explicit terms of these legal agreements with the crown is that they would get to keep 80% of all the treasure, et cetera, that they found, and 20% had to go back to the crown.

So, you know, the license was an exchange for la quinta, which is a fifth, right, of everything. So the Spanish come, they conquer, they take over the whole savanna around Bogota, which is the major population center in what is today Colombia.

And so then these conquistadores who have been risking life and limb, 630 of them died just in the expedition from Santa Marta, not including those who never made it to Santa Marta from Spain, right? is incredibly risky, at huge cost to themselves. They have invested directly in this, their own money, the senior people, and huge amounts of effort and risk, the more junior people.