and
exhausted by their difficult march and suffering from the effects
of the altitude (16,000 ft.), his men found themselves ambushed by
the Inca, who with a small party, "little more than eighty Indians,"
"attacked the Christians, who numbered twenty-eight or thirty, and
killed Captain Villadiego and all his men except two or three." To any
one who has clambered over the passes of the Cordillera Uilcapampa
it is not surprising that this military expedition was a failure or
that the Inca, warned by keen-sighted Indians posted on appropriate
vantage points, could have succeeded in defeating a small force of
weary soldiers armed with the heavy blunderbuss of the seventeenth
century. In a rocky pass, protected by huge boulders, and surrounded
by quantities of natural ammunition for their slings, it must have
been relatively simple for eighty Quichuas, who could "hurl a huge
stone with such force that it would kill a horse," to have literally
stoned to death Captain Villadiego's little company before they could
have prepared their clumsy weapons for firing.

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FIGURE

The Urubamba Canyon

A reason for the safety of the Incas in Uilcapampa.
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The fugitives returned to Cuzco and reported their misfortune. The
importance of the reverse will be better appreciated if one remembers
that the size of the force with which Pizarro conquered Peru was less
than two hundred, only a few times larger than Captain Villadiego's
company which had been wiped out by Manco. Its significance is
further increased by the fact that the contemporary Spanish writers,
with all their tendency to exaggerate, placed Manco's force at only
"a little more than eighty Indians." Probably there were not even
that many. The wonder is that the Inca's army was not reported as
being several thousand.

Francisco Pizarro himself now hastily set out with a body of soldiers
determined to punish this young Inca who had inflicted such a blow on
the prestige of Spanish arms, "but this attempt also failed," for the
Inca had withdrawn across the rivers and mountains of Uilcapampa to
Uiticos, where, according to Cieza de Leon, he cheered his followers
with the sight of the heads of his enemies. Unfortunately for accuracy,
the custom of displaying on the ends of pikes the heads of one's
enemies was European and not Peruvian. To be sure, the savage Indians
of some of the Amazonian jungles do sometimes decapitate their enemies,
remove the bones of the s