“Do you know what Gary wanted me to see?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. There is a dead volcano at the head of the River of Ruin. It has a lake in its center that feeds the river from over a tall waterfall. He had been looking up there recently. Maybe he found something. I don’t know.”
The river valley they’d been traversing had been shallow but soon began to grow steeper, with high hills of thick jungle that hemmed in on the water. The ribbon of sky hadn’t shrunk, yet somehow looked farther away. The river seemed more claustrophobic and the humidity level shot up brutally.
“We are close,” Maria called.
The river branched, the spill from the smaller fork completely brown, like the discharge from an industrial outlet. Mercer saw that a number of trees had lost their upstream foliage, as if a storm had raged here recently. The muddy tributary was partially blocked by a set of small rapids, nothing the boat couldn’t negotiate, but they struck Mercer as odd. The boulders in the stream were the first rock he’d seen since leaving El Real. Then he saw partial stone walls on each bank. The artificial breastworks ran from the valley’s flanks right to the water’s edge. They were ancient, worn and near collapse. Sections of the walls had been recently cleaned of vegetation and dirt, exposed to the daylight for the first time in centuries.
The boat swung into the right branch of the river, powering through the short stretch of cataracts. This part of the river was even narrower than before, darker and more ominous.
“Those rocks back there made a ten-foot-high waterfall,” Maria said. “They dammed off this whole river until Gary cleared them away. He thinks that the stones were quarried from someplace else and set there so no one could travel farther up this valley by boat. We’re on the River of Ruin now.”
“Who laid them?” Mercer noted that the valley floor didn’t appear to be as thickly covered with jungle. This area had been underwater until just a short time ago—back-flooded by the ancient dam.
“Gary believes it was the Incas who robbed the Spanish mule trains of gold and jewels and created what is called the Twice-Stolen Treasure. It was those stones that convinced him the treasure was close by. That is why he called it the River of Ruin, for the ruins of a dam he had discovered.”
Mercer recalled the fantastic story Gary Barber had pieced together over the past five years that led him to this isolated stretch of water.
Following the dazzling success of Hernan Cortes against the Aztecs in 1519, Spanish conquistadors turned their attention to South America in pursuit of the massive gold reserves held by the mighty Inca empire. After an earlier exploration that gained him the favor of King Charles I, Francisco Pizarro arrived in Peru in 1531 with 180 men and 27 horses just as a long Inca civil war was coming to an end. He immediately left his coastal garrison of San Miguel to meet with the new ruler, Atahualpa, in Cajamarca. Backed by a thirty-thousand-man army, Atahualpa felt he had nothing to fear from the small Spanish band. He continued to believe that right up to the moment he was taken prisoner. His people paid his ransom by twice filling a room eighteen feet by twenty-two feet with silver and once more with gold, an estimated twenty-four tons of precious metal. The bullion was shipped back to the coast for its journey to Spain and the Inca ruler was murdered anyway on August 29, 1533. Three months later Pizarro completed the conquest by occupying the Inca capital of Cuzco and made Atahualpa’s brother, Manco Capac, a puppet ruler.
In 1536, Manco Capac finally began a belated revolt against the Spanish, laying siege to Cuzco and eventually burning the city. But he could not maintain his revolt and eventually retreated to the mountain stronghold of Vitcos, where he engaged in a harassment campaign against Pizarro’s soldiers until his murder by the Spanish in 1544. By this time a steady supply of gold, silver and emeralds was being drained from the Inca empire, loaded on ships in the new city of Lima, where it was sent to warehouses in Panama City. From there the treasure was moved to the Caribbean coast trading centers of Nombres de Dios or Porto Bello by pack mule on El Camino Real, the King’s Highway. Once a year, galleons from Spain arrived to take the loot back to Europe.
As part of his guerrilla campaign against the conquistadors, Manco Capac dispatched a small expeditionary force to Panama in an effort to stem the flood of gold, silver, and gems. Although the Incas did not have Spain’s rapacious hunger for precious metals, they considered gold to be the Sweat of the Sun, the central deity in their religion, and silver to be the Tears of the Moon. Manco’s plan was that this force would attack the mule caravans in the densest part of the jungle as they traversed the isthmus, and recover as much of the treasure as they could. Once taken back from the Spanish, the treasure would then be hidden until such time as the conquistadors were thrown out of Peru and the Inca empire was reestablished.
With the help of Cimaroons, escaped slaves living as small tribes in the jungle, Manco’s troops established a number of hidden villages in Panama where they prepared to carry out their commando raids. Using information gathered by the Cimaroons, the warriors learned the routes and schedules and began their attacks. The early assaults were small-scale and cautious, netting little in the way of treasure, but teaching the rebels a great deal about Spanish arms and tactics. They would strike quickly and just as quickly flee with what they could carry to their forest redoubts, far from where the Spanish would pursue them. Soon, however, they were attacking the larger mule trains the Spanish sent across the isthmus, wending caravans of three hundred or more animals laden with bullion from the newly opened mines at Potosi and Huancavelica.
Back in Peru, Manco Capac’s rebellion against Pizarro ended with his assassination. His son Sayri Tupac became ruler, and the Inca warriors in Panama continued to raid the mule trains. Sayri was poisoned in 1561, and still the raids continued. Isolated in the Panamanian jungle, the band of warriors didn’t know that their once mighty empire was dying by degrees. They interbred with Cimaroon women, creating new generations of rebels to maintain their harassment of the caravans. In 1572, the last Inca revolt in Peru, led by another of Manco Capac’s sons, Tupac Amaru, ended with his beheading in Cuzco. What followed was two hundred uninterrupted years of colonial rule by the Spanish, and for much of that time they shipped the riches of the New World back to the Old through Panama. And all that time the descendents of Manco’s original band of soldiers continued to plunder the mule trains.
While the attacks by pirates such as Henry Morgan and Francis Drake against the Spanish strongholds of Nombres de Dios and Panama City were better known, the secret raids by Incas long cut off from their homeland amassed fortunes far beyond the dreams of even the most bloodthirsty privateers. An estimated billion dollars in silver from just one mine in Bolivia was transported on the King’s Highway, and nearly every shipment across the isthmus was attacked by the rebels. Untold tons of silver and gold and millions of carats of Colombian emeralds were hijacked from the caravans and cached someplace in the Panamanian jungle.
Gary Barber, like others who’d followed the legend, believed the hoard, stolen once from the Incas and once by them, to be worth hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in today’s market.
The problem, of course, was that there exists no actual proof that these raids ever took place. Journal entries written at the time were sketchy at best and much of what was known came second- and often thirdhand. Most scholars discounted the idea of a tribe of Incas living in the Panamanian jungle for two hundred years. They felt the tales were merely cover stories told by conquistadors who stole from their own mule trains to avoid turning over the loot to the Spanish crown. Because nothing of the Incas had ever been found, and certainly no trace of a fabulous treasure had ever turned up, they believed the legend likely grew from a single documented Cimaroon raid. This tale was then embellished to hide a systematic looting by the Spanish of their own royal caravans.