Inca highlanders. Smaller balsa rafts served for artisanal fishing, while larger
craft served to maintain long-distance trading contacts involving the exchange of
a range of exotic materials. While the rafts were the main means of pre-
Columbian maritime transport and exchange, they were controlled by coastal
seafaring populations and not directly by the Incas themselves. Initial attempts to
cross the Guayas estuary met with disaster when a party of high-ranking
noblemen borne on a balsa raft were set adrift and murdered at the hands of
mariners from the island of Puna—an act of betrayal that is said to have incurred
severe punishment.
Scholars have long agreed that an effective conquest and incorporation of the
coastal polities into the Inca domain was problematic, even during the reign of
Huayna Capac. An intriguing find of a high status Inca burial on Isla de la Plata
made over 100 years ago, however, assumes special significance, lying as it does
at the northern coastal extremity of the Inca Empire. We must surmise that the
Incas would have had to negotiate their visits to the island on local craft with
local sailors pressed into service. In 1891–1892, the North American investigator
George Dorsey excavated two skeletons accompanied by a suite of miniature
figurines and a set of paired miniature ceramic vessels. These elements identify
the find as a capac hucha burial designed to mark the formal incorporation of the
island, the surrounding sea, and the adjacent mainland into imperial sacred
geography.
The first European contact with Andean cultures occurred when Pizarro
ventured south from Panama in 1525 and made landfall near the San Juan River
in Colombia. In the waters off Ecuador his navigator Bartolomé Ruíz described a
vivid eyewitness encounter off the coast of Ecuador between the Spanish vessels
and an oceangoing balsa sailing raft (see Sámano Account). This provides a
compelling account of an advanced maritime capability and the list of goods “to
barter with those with whom they were going to trade” encompasses a range of
elite body ornaments and other accoutrements in gold, as well as finely woven
garments, all used to signal the status of high-ranking lords among the populous
trading polities of the Pacific coast. Fittingly, the account emphasizes that all
these goods were traded for mullu.
Further Reading
Cabello Valboa, Miguel. Miscelánea Antártica. Una historia del Perú antiguo. Lima: Universidad Nacional
Mayor de San Marcos, Facultad de Letras, Instituto de Etnología, 1951 [1586].
Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. Translated by
Harold V. Livermore. 2 vols. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966 [1609, 1617].