Totora reed boats on Lake Titicaca, southern Peru. Boats such as these have
been used for millennia in the Andes. Sebastián Turpo. TAFOS Photographic
Archive/PUCP, Lima, Peru.A variety of small marine craft were instrumental in opening up the
exploitation of inshore coastal resources. Some craft depended on inflated sea
lion skins as flotation devices. The natural buoyancy of totora reeds was also
used to advantage by tightly binding bundles together to fashion the famed reed
boats depicted on Moche pottery vessels 1,500 years ago (see Chronology, Pre-
Inca), and still used to this day for artisanal fishing at Huanchaco near Trujillo
on Peru’s north coast. The same technology was also used to build substantial
totora reed rafts that the Incas would have commandeered to reach their
sanctuaries on the islands of the Sun and Moon in Lake Titicaca. Similar
journeys on balsa rafts were made to offshore shrines in the Pacific such as
Macabí Island and Isla de la Plata. It is clear that the Incas, as highlanders, were
dependent on the skills and knowledge of coastal and lacustrine dwellers to
venture onto lakes and oceans.
Nowhere was this more apparent than on the far north coast of Peru where
large oceangoing balsa sailing rafts brought in the most valued material of all,
the precious red-rimmed thorny oyster Spondylus princeps (mullu), a marine
shell extricated by specialist divers from the ocean depths that held immense
symbolic value for the Incas. It is precisely this shell that is found in high-
altitude capac hucha burials as offerings to the mountain deities that were a vital
source of life-sustaining springs and flowing streams. In terms of Andean
cosmology, the shell offerings affirmed the essential connection between
mountains and sea. The Incas’ political and economic ambitions were closely
bound up with an ideological imperative to assert ritual control over the sources
of life, including, ultimately, the “world ocean” at the limits of the known world.
It was the effort to procure mullu in ever increasing quantities that must have
been a prime motivating factor in their attempts to conquer and control the coast
of what is today Ecuador.
In his northern campaigns, Topa Inca Yupanqui established the garrison town
of Tumbes, lying on the southern shores of the Guayas estuary, as a vital port of
trade for state-controlled production of valued marine shells. The waters north of
Tumbes, including the Guayas estuary and the open seas beyond, were traversed
with ease by coastal populations, but were an unfamiliar environment for the