Narrative and Critical History of America, Vol. 2 (of 8) / Spanish Explorations and Settlements in America from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century - Unknown

(p) Francisco Rodriguez de Villa Fuerte was the first to cross the line drawn by Pizarro. He was afterwards a citizen of Cusco, having been present at the siege by the Ynca Manco, and at the battle of Salinas. Garcilasso knew him, and once rode with him from Cusco to Quispicanchi, when he recounted many reminiscences of his stirring life. He was still living at Cusco in 1560, a rich and influential citizen. [Mr. Markham has given the number as sixteen in his Reports on the Discovery of Peru, p. 8, together with his reasons for it, which do not commend themselves, however, to Kirk, the editor of Prescott (History of the Conquest of Peru, edition of 1879, i. 303). Helps dismisses the story of the line as the melodramatic effort of a second-rate imagination. Cf. also Markham’s Travels of Cieza de Leon, p. 419.—Ed.]

[1473] See the section on “El Dorado,” post.

[1474] [Accounts of the space to be filled differ. Cf. Prescott’s Peru, i. 422; Humboldt’s Views of Nature (Bohn’s ed.), 410, 430.—Ed.]

[1475] [Prescott (History of the Conquest of Peru, i. 453) enters into an explanation of his conversion of the money of Ferdinand and Isabella’s time into modern equivalents, and cites an essay on this point by Clemencin in vol vi. of the Memoirs of the Royal Academy of History at Madrid.—Ed.]

[1476] [Atahualpa was hurriedly tried on the charge of assassinating Huascar and conspiring against the Spaniards. Oviedo speaks of the “villany” of the transaction. Cf. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, vol. i. p. 467. Pizarro’s secretary, Xeres, palliates the crime as being committed upon “the greatest butcher that the world ever saw.”

Prescott (Peru, ii. 473, 480) prints several of the contemporary accounts of the seizure and execution of Atahualpa. He says that Garcilasso de la Vega “has indulged in the romantic strain to an unpardonable extent in his account of the capture; ... yet his version has something in it so pleasing to the imagination, that it has ever found favor with the majority of readers. The English student might have met with a sufficient corrective in the criticism of the sagacious and sceptical Robertson.” There are the usual stories of a comet at the time of the death of the Ynca. Cf. Humboldt, Views of Nature, pp. 421, 429.—Ed.]

[1477] They are as follows:—

(a) Hernando de Soto, the explorer of Florida and discoverer of the Mississippi.

(b) Francisco de Chaves, a native of Truxillo. He was murdered at Lima, in 1541, in attempting to defend the staircase against the assassins of Pizarro. Zarate says that when he died he was the most important personage in Peru, next to Pizarro.