Roberto Vittorio Lisinicchia Binda

There is an epic of a people forgotten for centuries. There are some characters, among the greatest of mankind, who have been completely neglected. There is a great story never told before.

That is what this book does, breaking oblivion and leading readers on an adventurous journey across the American continent. We are in the decades between the 15th and 16th centuries and the protagonists of this adventure are the Incas, the people of the most important and powerful empire of the pre-Columbian era. An empire driven, in its expansionist aims, by an immense thirst for power, but also by the frantic search for gold, the sacred metal sent by the God Inti, the Sun God, the most important divinity of the Inca pantheon. Exploring, for the ＂Children of the Sun＂, meant seeking new riches, new gold: a way to get closer to the divine. It was probably Túpac Yupanqui, the Inca emperor in those years, and, subsequently, his son Huayna Cápac who wanted these explorations. As disclosed by Vittorio Binda, Túpac Yupanqui certainly carried out incredible sea expeditions and long land campaigns before and during his reign. Sailing in the Pacific Ocean, he reached Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia in 1465, before the Europeans and before the discovery of America itself. He personally led military campaigns beyond the borders of the empire, going as far as the extreme south of Chile, what he considered the ＂end of the Earth＂. A lust for conquest which seemed to have no limits in the decades of the reign of Túpac Yupanqui and his son Huayna Cápac, with the empire turning its attention to the rest of the American continent. The Inca troops thus embarked on an unprecedented series of exploratory journeys, from the lands of South America to Central America, from the Caribbean islands to North America and perhaps even as far as Alaska. The Author takes us side by side with the men of the Inca army, the military mitimaes, along the probable exploration routes undertaken in those decades. He does so by reporting historical evidence, archaeological clues and proofs, demonstrations of linguistic heritage, tales and valuable knowledge collected directly on the territory over years and years of research. From the central-northern Colombian departments, we follow the path of the Incas to Venezuela, and then to the Caribbean islands; we accompany their journey through the dense and still impenetrable jungle of the ＂Tapón del Darién＂ towards Panamá and Costa Rica, with their rich gold mines, and from there into the Honduran Mosquitia jungle, also called ＂Little Amazonia＂ because of its wild and inaccessible forest, where a real city was founded, Yuraq Llaqta (Ciudad Blanca), the Inca El Dorado of Central America. The book shows us the Inca military mitimaes set up a large colony in western El Salvador and southern Guatemala. According to the Author’s estimates, at the time of the Spaniards’ arrival, some fifty thousand Inca soldiers lived in those territories, ready to invade Central America and the Aztec empire, a plan that failed only due to the unexpected and tragic arrival of the conquistadores in the decades following the European discovery of America. The legacy of their presence is the so-called Xinca language, nowadays practically extinct, but spoken until a few decades ago by indigenous communities in south-eastern Guatemala, who still mistakenly define themselves as ethnic Xinca. This language, as the Author himself discovered, is nothing more than a dialect of Quechua (the thirty-eighth), the language spoken by the Incas. From that founded outpost in Mesoamerica, the same military mitimaes probably reached, in various exploratory expeditions, Mexico, the South-West and North-West of the United States, and, in all probability, even icy Alaska.

After five centuries, this book restores to the world the knowledge of one of mankind’s greatest adventures: the exploration of the American continent by the Inca