Jan. 1535 A.D. possessions had been seized or destroyed; dishonour had been laid upon them in their domestic relations; they themselves had been subjected to compulsory service so ruthlessly enforced that many of them died under the unaccustomed toil. They were now to make one supreme effort to cast off this oppression, which had already gone far to destroy the life of their nation. Pizarro-raised to the dignity of Marquis-had retired to the coast, where he occupied himself in founding and embellishing the city of Lima. His brother Fernando -a stout-hearted and skilful captain-was left in charge of Cusco. Danger was not apprehended, and the garrison of Cusco was no more than two hundred Spaniards and a thousand native auxiliaries. While the Spaniards enjoyed their lordly repose in the splendid palaces of the fallen monarchy, the Peruvian chiefs organized a formidable revolt. From all the provinces of the empire multitudes of armed natives gathered around Cusco, and took up position on hills where they were safe from the attack of Spanish horsemen. Many of them were armed with lances or axes of copper tempered so that they were scarcely less effective than steel. Every man in all those dusky ranks was prepared to spend his life in the effort to rescue the sacred city from this abhorred invasion. A. D. They set fire to the city; they forced their way into the Feb. streets, and fought hand to hand with the Spaniards in 1536 desperate disregard of the inequality of their arms. They fell slaughtered in thousands; but in six days' fighting they had gained the fortress and nearly all of the city which the flames had spared. The Spaniards held only the great square and a few of the surrounding houses. Some despaired, and began to urge that they should mount and ride for the coast, forcing their way through the lines of the besiegers. But the stout heart of Fernando Pizarro quailed not in presence of the tremendous danger. In his mind, he told them, there was not and there had not been any fear. If he were left alone he would maintain the defence till he died, rather than have it said that another gained the city and he lost it. The Spaniard of that day was unsurpassed in courage, and his spirit rose to the highest pitch of daring in response to the appeal of a trusted leader. The men laid aside all thought of flight, and addressed themselves to the capture of the great fortress. This strong position was fiercely attacked, and defended with unavailing heroism. Many Spaniards were slain, among whom was Juan, one of the Pizarro brothers, on whose undefended head a great stone inflicted fatal injury. The slaughter of Indians was very great. At length their ammunition failed them-the stones and javelins and arrows with which they maintained the defence were exhausted. Their leader had compelled the admiration of the Spaniards by his heroic bearing throughout the fight. When he had struck his last blow for his ruined country he flung his club among the besiegers, and, casting himself down from the height of the battlement, perished in the fall. "There is not written of any Roman such a deed as he did," says the Spanish chronicler. The defence now ceased; the Spaniards forced their way into the fortress, and slaughtered without mercy the fifteen hundred men whom they found there. May 1536 A. D. For several weeks longer the Indians blockaded Cusco, and the Spaniards were occasionally straitened in regard to supplies; but always at the time of new moon the Indians withdrew for the performance of certain religious ceremonies, and the Spaniards were able then to replenish their exhausted granaries. The siege languished, and finally ceased, but not till the Spaniards had practised for some time the cruel measure of putting to death every Indian woman whom they seized. But now misery in a new form came upon this unhappy country. Fierce strifes arose among the conquerors themselves. Pizarro had gained higher honours and ampler plunder than 1537 A. D. 1538 A. D. had fallen to the share of his partner Almagro, and it does not seem that he was scrupulous in his fulfilment of the contract by whose terms an equal division of spoil was fixed. Almagro appeared on the scene with an overwhelming force, to assert his own rights. For ten or twelve years from this time the history of Peru represents to us a country ungoverned and in confusion; a native population given over to slavery, and wasting under the exactions of ruthless taskmasters; fierce wars between the conquerors devastating the land. Tranquillity was not restored till a large portion of the native population had perished, and till all the chiefs of this marvellous conquest had died as miserably as the Indians they had destroyed. Almagro entered Cusco, and made prisoners of the two brothers Fernando and Gonzalo Pizarro; whom, however, he soon liberated. He, in turn, fell into the hands of Fernando, by whose orders he was brought for trial before a tribunal set up for that occasion in Cusco. He was condemned to die ;-partly for his "notorious crimes;" partly because, as the council deemed, his death "would prevent many other deaths." On the same day the old man, feeble, decrepit, and begging piteously for life, was strangled in prison and afterwards beheaded. Immediately after this occurrence Fernando Pizarro sailed for Spain, where his enemies had gained the ear of the King. Fernando was imprisoned, and was not released for twenty-three years, till his long life of a hundred years was near its close. Three years after the death of Almagro, the Marquis Pizarro, now a man of seventy, was set upon in his own house in Lima and murdered by a band of soldiers dissatisfied with the portion of spoil which had fallen to their share. The close of that marvellous career was in strange contrast to its brilliant course. After a stout defence against overwhelming force, a fatal wound in the throat prostrated the brave old man. He asked for a confessor, and received for answer a blow on the face. With his finger he 1541 A.D. 1548 A. D. traced the figure of a cross on the ground, and pressed his dying lips on the hallowed symbol. Thus passed the stern conqueror and destroyer of the Peruvian nation. A few years after the assassination of the Marquis, his brother Gonzalo was beheaded for having resisted the authority of Spain; and he died so poor, as he himself stated on the scaffold, that even the garments he wore belonged to the executioner who was to cut off his head. The partnership which was formed at Panama a quarter of a century before, had brought wealth and fame, but it conducted those who were chiefly concerned in it to misery and shameful death. From Peru the tide of Spanish conquest flowed southward to Chili. The river Plate was explored; Buenos Ayres was founded; and communication was opened from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Forty years after the landing of Columbus, the margins of the continent bordering on the sea had been subdued and possessed, and some progress had been made in gaining knowledge of the interior. There had been added to the dominions of Spain vast regions, whose coast-line on the west stretched from Mexico southward for the distance of six thousand miles-regions equal in length to the whole of Africa, and largely exceeding in breadth the whole of the Russian Empire. It has now to be shown how ill-prepared was Spain for this sudden and enormous addition to her responsibilities— how huge have been the evils which her possession of the new continent inflicted upon mankind. CHAPTER II. THE INDIANS OF SPANISH AMERICA. HE native populations with which the Spaniards were brought into contact differed widely, in respect of the degree of civilization to which they had attained, from the Indians of the Northern Continent. The first colonists of Virginia, Massachusetts, and the St. Lawrence valley found the soil possessed by fierce tribes, wholly without knowledge of the arts of civilized life. The savages of the north supported themselves almost entirely by the chase, regarding agriculture with contempt; their dwellings were miserable huts; their clothing was the skins of the beasts which they slew; they were without fixed places of abode, and wandered hither and thither in the forest as their hopes of success in hunting directed. They left no traces of their presence on the land which they inhabited-no cleared forest, nor cultivated field, nor fragment of building. They were still savage and debased in a degree almost as extreme as humanity has ever been known to reach. The inhabitants of the islands where Columbus first landed were the least civilized of the southern races. But the genial conditions of climate under which they lived, and the abundance with which nature surrounded them, seemed to have softened their dispositions and made them gentle and inoffensive and kind. They were scarcely clothed at all, but they lived in well-built villages and cultivated the ground. Their wants |