THE TREASURE REVEALED 217 



camp at Holy Ghost farther down the river, reached the 

 Andes and the edge of the Inca domain. These attempts to 

 find and exploit the fabled wealth of the Incas are interesting 

 to the study of the Caribbean only because they illustrate 

 how the curiosity and energy of exploration was now passing 

 out of range of the islands. Pizarro, cruising south from 

 Panama, learned of the Peruvian empire in 1528, and wrote 

 the final chapter to this quest when in 1536 he came to Peru 

 by the most direct, practical route and opened the years of the 

 fabulous looting of American treasure that for a time made 

 Spain the greatest world power. 



But this drive to the west drained the energy needed for 

 the proper development of the Caribbean island empire. A 

 sort of a frontier of aftermath, a ''frontier of the rear" it might 

 paradoxically be termed, developed for the West Indies. The 

 Buccaneers temporarily took over to fill the vacuum that 

 might better have been filled with hardy Spanish and Euro- 

 pean colonists; and after them, when sugar was introduced, 

 came the flood of African slavery. Cortez, Alvarado, and 

 Pizarro sealed the doom of the West Indies for centuries to 

 come. The Spanish adventurers were neither maritime nor 

 agricultural — they were looking for loot. 



The roots of the Gulf Stream, the source of the great Atlan- 

 tic gyre, were probably too warm, and gendered a cHmate 

 too enervating, to have developed an effective European type 

 of civilization, even if the main potential of energy had not 

 suddenly drained through the Isthmus to Peru and up from 

 the coast of Yucatan to Tenochtitlan and the Aztec treasur- 

 ies. As with most historical phenomena we shall never know 

 the reasons completely because we seldom find parallel oppor- 

 tunities for development, and therefore a means of measure- 

 ment. But one thing was certain: by 1520 the news was out, 

 and Spain could no longer maintain exclusive access to the 

 wealth of the New World. The voyage of Sebastian Cabot to 

 Brazil, backed as it was by merchant adventurers of three 



