Guns, Germs, and Steel: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Diamond describes the biggest population shift in modern times: the movement of Europeans to the New World. Europeans probably ventured to the Americas, though only to cold northern regions, as early as 900 A.D. More elaborate expeditions commenced in the early 1500s. Perhaps the quintessential “image” of the Europeans’ conquest of the New World arose when Francisco Pizarro, the Spanish explorer, met Atahuallpa, the king of the Incas, who lived in present-day Peru. Pizarro was leading less than 200 soldiers through Peru on an expedition, while Atahuallpa was surrounded by tens of thousands of soldiers and on his “home turf.” And yet Pizarro managed to kidnap Atahuallpa almost immediately and then ransom him for huge sums of gold. How?

Pizarro traveled across Peru, using torture to extract information from Inca people his soldiers captured. This information led the expedition to the center of the Inca kingdom, where Atahuallpa lived. Atahuallpa received Pizarro as a visitor and willingly walked into Pizarro’s camp without armed soldiers to protect him. But when Atahuallpa refused to open a copy of the Bible, Pizarro gave the order for his soldiers to capture Atahaullpa and, outside the camp, fire their guns and attack the Incas with their swords. Having captured the king and slaughtered many Incas, Pizarro soon rose to control the entire kingdom.

Diamond goes back to discuss the history of weapons. While some historians have tried to argue that the Spanish conquistadors prevailed in the New World because they were seen as intimidating, or even gods, the frank reality is that they won because they had better weapons than the Native Americans. Horses were also a huge advantage for the conquistadors: they could outrun their opponents, who had no horses of their own.

Guns didn’t play a huge role in Pizarro’s victory: he only had about a dozen of them, and they were difficult to load. His biggest advantage was steel: the steel swords and lances that his soldiers used to slaughter the Incas, and the steel armor that protected his expedition from the Incas’ clubs. The combination of horses, steel, and, to a much smaller extent, guns, helps us understand how Pizarro defeated the Incas.

Atahuallpa and his kingdom were based out of an area that Pizarro would later call Cajamarca. Atahuallpa had moved to Cajamarca because of an epidemic of smallpox to the north. Historians now know that earlier European explorers caused this epidemic. In all, European-borne diseases might have killed as many of 95 percent of pre-Columbian Native Americans. On the reverse side, diseases from the Americas, such as yellow fever, malaria, etc., were huge killers among the Europeans.

Why had Pizarro come to the Americas? Diamond asks. Why didn’t Atahuallpa sail to Europe? Pizarro’s voyage, Diamond explains, was the result of European maritime technology, as well as the complex political organizations that financed his travels. Pizarro’s voyage was also possible because of the existence of writing, which was used to spread information about travel and navigation. The Incas lacked all three essential precursors for maritime exploration (writing, centralization, and naval technology), or only had them in simplified versions.

Why did Atahuallpa fall for Pizarro’s trap? Why didn’t he come accompanied by soldiers? To begin with, Atahuallpa didn’t have any information about the Spanish. No writing about the Spanish had been passed to him. (There were some forms of writing in the New World, but they were simplified and not commonplace.) More importantly, Atahuallpa’s lack of a written language meant that he didn’t have a great breadth of knowledge of human behavior or history, and hadn’t heard or read about any other devious invaders.

Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire because of his superior technology, his horses, Europe’s diseases, and, less overtly, his knowledge of writing. But we still haven’t tackled the more fundamental question of why Europeans had such advantages while the Native Americans did not. Diamond will answer this question in the next two parts of the book.