The natives adapted fast, but the learning curve was too steep

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 32:00

   The Inca sought to put in place countermeasures to negate the advantages that the conquistadors had. One of the critical exemplars is confined space. The Aztecs, when the Cortes showed up in 1521 for round two, by drawing them into their city, which was a network of islands connected by bridges and causeways, that minimized the advantages of the horses because that's not good horse country. They would learn to fight from rooftops and pelt the enemy with stones or whatever they could from heights.

2. 32:31

   They built man-sized holes in buildings so they could slip from one to the other where the horses couldn't chase them. And so they learned to use those kind of advantages. They learned the stopping power of water. Interestingly, both completely under-connected. They had no relationship with each other. But against Cortez, when he was taking one of the smaller cities on Lake Tlaxcoco, it's Culpa. The Aztecs broke the dikes in the lake and flooded the city, which took out a number of the conquistadors and their allies. In that environment, of course, the metal armor works to the disadvantage of the conquistador. It drags them to the bottom. If they'd waited until nightfall when the Spaniards were sleeping, they might have bagged all of them. And so the Inca too, later, when the conquistadors moved on Olatintambo, again, the Inca flooded the river. They allowed

3. 33:20

   it to burst its banks and again bog down the conquistador cavalry so that they were adapting. They took captured enemy weapons. They learned to fix conquistador swords to the end of long wooden poles, improvising pike tactics. Again, without being instructed to, they just intuited that keeping horses at a distance with long spears would be a way to negate the advantages that they had. Inca employed the bolas, which they'd used for hunting the great birds of South America to tangle the legs of horses. One famous incident, an Aztec warrior allowed himself to be speared by a conquistador and gripped hold of the spear, the lance, as it was in his body, fixing the conquistador in place so his supporters, his colleagues, could swarm and take him out of the saddle. So they were trying to improvise. The Aztecs, with

4. 34:09

   their captured Spanish prisoners, used them to learn how to use captured crossbows. The them to give instruction on how to use these firearms. And Manco Inca, the leader of the Inca resistance, made a point of learning to ride a horse himself, to demonstrate to his people that we can do this. So they were trying, but the learning curve was so steep and the timeframe to internalize foreign technology and foreign tactics was too short for them to really be able to deploy it to their advantage. And this is worth emphasizing. Cortez takes over the Aztec empire in what is now Mexico in two and a half years. So a couple hundred men, an empire of six