(^110) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
The Inca empire was the biggest ever established in the New
World. It stretched from what is now Colombia in the north (2°N.)
to the area around today's Santiago in the south (35°S.), over 4,000
kilometers; and from the coast to the eastern side of the Andean
watershed and what is now the Bolivian plateau. Its limits, as for the
Aztecs in Mexico, were set pardy by nature—the Incas were never
comfortable in heavy forest—and pardy by the opposition of such
recalcitrant tribes as the Araucanians. These last long made
humiliating resistance to the Spanish and yielded only to repeating
weapons in the nineteenth century.^16
The size of the Inca empire astonishes for the barriers to land
travel and communication. South American valleys and hills run from
the mountains down to the ocean, cutting the routes from north to
south; and these natural obstacles were aggravated by the absence of
the wheel (all porterage was by llamas or humans) and a failure to
develop coastal shipping. The secret lay in communication by
runners and porters. All along the routes of the empire, about 1.5
Spanish leagues (about 4.5 miles) apart, were pairs of small
hutments, shelters for couriers, one on each side of the road. Each
runner looked only one way, waiting to relay to the next stage the
messages and packages that might come at any moment. The
couriers were trained from early age to do this work, and by running
around the clock, managed to average about 50 leagues a day (some
150 miles!). The chronicler Bernabe Cobo tells us that from Lima to
Cuzco, some 140 leagues of bad road, took three days.^17 About a
century later, the horse-drawn Spanish mail took twelve to thirteen
days. In the eighteenth century, coach service New York to Boston,
over two hundred miles of flat terrain, took a week. (Of course
wagons carry far more than pack animals and porters.)
The Inca emperor, then, could remain in close and rapid touch
- The peoples of the empire knew how to make boats, or rather rafts, of balsa wood;
also small barks and floats made buoyant by the use of inflated skins and the like and
propelled by swimmers. But however unsinkable the bigger rafts, they were small, un
stable craft, easily waterlogged, unsuited to the open sea. Cf. Rowe, "Inca Culture,"
p. 240: "The real limitation to Peruvian navigation was not lack of ingenuity but lack
of convenient supplies of suitable lumber." Which raises the question, why not bring
timber down from the mountains? The answer probably lies in the lack of iron or steel
cutting tools and hard transport.
t These runners, to be sure, relied on more than their own juices; the coca leaf was
there to stimulate and impart an artificial stamina. Indeed, it was not uncommon to
measure tasks by the amount of coca required (cocadas), just as the Chinese were
wont to measure in bowls of rice.