VALVERDE’S GOLD: IN SEARCH OF THE LAST GREAT INCA TREASURE
By Mark Honigsbaum
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 348 pages
REVIEWED BY BART McDOWELL
This treasure tale is true. And the treasure itself is dazzlingly documented, with words to whet one’s greed.
Historians have long known that in the Peruvian Andes in the year 1532, Francisco Pizarro took prisoner the ruling Inca, Atahualpa, and demanded that his subjects pay a huge ransom in gold and silver — “more than fifteen thousand men could carry on their backs,” it was reported. After the Indians paid much of the ransom, Pizarro murdered Atahualpa.
William Prescott describes the metalwork — “goblets, ewers, salvers … curious imitations of various plants and animals” and even a garden with “a fountain in gold and silver that … sent up a sparkling jet of gold, while birds and animals of the same material played in the waters at its base.”
The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega noted that not all the treasure was seized by Pizarro, that “most of the riches were buried by the Indians … so carefully concealed that they have never been found.”
Many adventurers have tried, among them, the author of this book. Mark Honigsbaum is a Briton who went to South America seeking information about botany. Mr. Honigsbaum was writing a book about a 19th-century scholar who had come to Ecuador in 1857, seeking plants that might cure malaria, one Richard Spruce.
It seems that on his botanical expedition, Spruce had come upon a treasure map and a manuscript that told the story of a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador named Valverde. The soldier had met an Inca princess and the two fell in love and were married. The bride’s chieftain father was impressed by the kindness
Valverde showed his daughter and other Indians, and at last confided to the soldier the location of a cave where Atahualpa’s missing ransom was hidden. Valverde took portions of the loot from time to time so that he and his bride could live grandly in their Andean village. Eventually Valverde returned to Spain, and on his deathbed bequeathed his map and manuscript to the King of Spain.
Such was Spruce’s information.
One man’s quest leads to another man’s riddle. The botanist Spruce had a nephew in the Royal Navy who, a full generation later, told two sailor friends — Capt. Barth Blake and Lt. George Chapman — about the treasure map. These mariners, in turn, came to Ecuador in 1887 aboard a four-masted schooner, which was conveniently shipwrecked near the port of Guayaquil.
While the ship was being repaired, Blake and Chapman went into the Andes, treasure hunting. There Chapman died and was buried in the mountains. Blake returned to his ship and set sail for North America. At Panama he dispatched a card to Spruce, saying he had found the treasure. But his shipmates had become suspicious, so at Boston, Blake arranged for the maps to be delivered to an old seafaring friend, a captain named Albertson.
Blake’s plan was to return to England, report to Spruce, and have certain jewels and gold objects appraised by the British Museum, then return to Boston, pick up Albertson, and arrange an expedition to Ecuador.
“It is impossible … to describe the wealth that now lies in that distant cave … I could not remove it alone, nor could a thousand men,” Blake wrote. But after reporting to Spruce in England, and on his way back to North America, Blake fell or was pushed overboard and was lost at sea.
The author of this book now picks up the search in a modern treasure hunt. His tools are more sophisticated than Robert Louis Stevenson’s pick and shovel. Mr. Honigsbaum turns to the internet and Google searches. Furthermore, he finds living, breathing — and colorful — adventurers who share their knowledge, and conceal other important pieces of the puzzle.
In Ecuador, while the author goes into physical training for his Andean travels, he finds old press clippings in the vaults of the National Bank of Ecuador. He follows other leads. There is even a National Geographic photographer named Mike Dyott who figures in the story. It is Dyott who wrote, “Everyone lies and everyone tries to weasel information out of everyone else.”
Has the treasure already been found? Some Ecuadoran families think so and also believe the loot was deposited in the Royal Bank of Scotland. But the archivists in Scotland have no record of the treasure. The author travels to Spain to dig in the dusty files of the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. Today, however, there is much less dust. “Two-third of the archive is now available online,” the librarian tells him. “That’s nearly 60 million documents.” Things have changed since I dug there in 1962, but the results were similar: no luck.
People speak of the treasure’s curse, and they cite not only Atahualpa himself, but Blake and Chapman, an Indian who toppled into a gorge, a priest whose grave is drawn onto the famous map, an American geologist named Bob Holt, whose death won him some fame with a mountain named Mount Holt. The cursed list is a long one.
But clues and hints come in many forms — a document hidden in a “hollow tree,” a family Bible where words are pin-pricked with a message, a mountain that resembles a reclining woman and an entrance to a cave “shaped like a church door.” A human skeleton is found propped upright and standing against a cliff. Fact imitates lurid fiction.
The reader can quibble, of course. Even with map, notes, and a careful index, there are some bobbles. For example, the Aztec ruler Cuauhtemoc had a totem of an eagle, not an owl. And then there are uplift-noble-savage touches, deploring a church service: “There was something terribly sad about the way these proud Indian people had been reduced to prostrating themselves before an imported God.”
Sorry. Though I am not comfortable taking a missionary’s position, I do recall that indigenous American religions included human sacrifice and cannibalism, so I am quite unsaddened.
The author has an animated way with characters he meets. The story comes into sharp focus as he and companions climb up and off into a forbidding part of the Andes. What do they find? Mostly, they find what the reader will find — a good adventure and perhaps an itch to go to Ecuador. With a pick, shovel, and Google.
Bart McDowell is is a former editor of Natioinal Geographic.
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