The Conquest of the Incas

"Though I’m reluctant to promote a book covering such an endlessly written-about subject, this work remains unrivalled as a vivid, readable and detailed account of Andean history. The story of how a small group of Spanish soldiers manage after 1532 to destroy a civilisation is an undeniably fascinating one, and still difficult fully to grasp. The blind Bostonian historian William Hickling Prescott, in his History of the Conquest of Peru, told the same story with considerably panache, but did not have access to all the chronicles and massive archival material that Hemming had. Nor did he have Hemming’s firsthand explorer’s knowledge of South America. Hemming, though a persuasive chronicler of Westerners’ destruction of South America (he has subsequently devoted his attention to the Amazonian rain forest), is also a rigorously objective historian keen to separate fact from fiction, and capable of creating memorable rounded portraits of the conquistadors. He has, as well, a novelist’s eye for detail, such as his description of the way the Spaniards led by Pizarro were literally pissing themselves with fear when they first confronted the Inca emperor Atahualpa (a detail delicately omitted by Prescott)."