Gonzales, a
score of years later, this promiscuous father had two more illegitimate
sons, one of whom he named Gonzalo after himself, and the third he
called Juan. Francisca Gonzales also bore a fourth son, of whom
Gonzalo Pizarro was not the father, who was known as Martin de
Alcantara. Thus Hernando, the second, was legitimate; Gonzalo and Juan
were his illegitimate half-brethren, having the same father but a
different mother; while Alcantara was a uterine brother to the three
illegitimate Pizarros, having the same mother but a different father.
There must have been marvelous qualities in the original Pizarro, for
such a family is rarely to be met with in history.

Such a mixed state of affairs was not so shocking in those days as it
would be at present. I do not find that anybody cast any stones at the
Pizarros on account of these irregularities in their birth. In fact,
they had plenty of companions in their anomalous social relations, and
it is a speaking commentary on the {55} times that nobody seemed to
consider it as especially disgraceful or even very remarkable.

Hernando, the second son, received a good education for the day. The
others were thrown mainly on their own resources. Legend says that
Francisco was suckled by a sow. The statement may be dismissed as a
fable, but it is more than probable that the assertion that he was a
swineherd is correct. It is certain that to the day of his death he
could neither read nor write. He never even learned to sign his own
name, yet he was a man of qualities who made a great figure in history
in spite of these disabilities, leaving behind him an immortal if
unenviable name. His career was humble and obscure to the vanishing
point for forty years, of which practically nothing is known. It is
alleged that he made a campaign in Italy with his father, but this is
doubtful. A father who left him to tend the swine, who did nothing for
his education, would not have bothered to take him a-soldiering.

We leave the field of conjecture, however, and meet him in far-off
America in 1510 as an officer under Alonzo de Ojeda--that Don Quixote
among discoverers. His qualities had obtained for him some preferment,
for when Ojeda left the miserable remnants of his colony at San
Sebastian on the Gulf of Darien, and returned to Cuba for help, Pizarro
was put in charge, with instructions to wait a certain time, and if
succour did not reach him to leave. He waited the requir