But as to what concerns
devotion, observance of the laws, goodness, liberality, loyalty, and
plain dealing, it was of use to us that we had not so much as they; for
they have lost, sold, and betrayed themselves by this advantage over us.

As to boldness and courage, stability, constancy against pain, hunger,
and death, I should not fear to oppose the examples I find amongst them
to the most famous examples of elder times that we find in our records on
this side of the world. Far as to those who subdued them, take but away
the tricks and artifices they practised to gull them, and the just
astonishment it was to those nations to see so sudden and unexpected an
arrival of men with beards, differing in language, religion, shape, and
countenance, from so remote a part of the world, and where they had never
heard there was any habitation, mounted upon great unknown monsters,
against those who had not only never seen a horse, but had never seen any
other beast trained up to carry a man or any other loading; shelled in a
hard and shining skin, with a cutting and glittering weapon in his hand,
against them, who, out of wonder at the brightness of a looking glass or
a knife, would exchange great treasures of gold and pearl; and who had
neither knowledge, nor matter with which, at leisure, they could
penetrate our steel: to which may be added the lightning and thunder of
our cannon and harquebuses, enough to frighten Caesar himself, if
surprised, with so little experience, against people naked, except where
the invention of a little quilted cotton was in use, without other arms,
at the most, than bows, stones, staves, and bucklers of wood; people
surprised under colour of friendship and good faith, by the curiosity of
seeing strange and unknown things; take but away, I say, this disparity
from the conquerors, and you take away all the occasion of so many
victories. When I look upon that in vincible ardour wherewith so many
thousands of men, women, and children so often presented and threw
themselves into inevitable dangers for the defence of their gods and
liberties; that generous obstinacy to suffer all extremities and
difficulties, and death itself, rather than submit to the dominion of
those by whom they had been so shamefully abused; and some of them
choosing to die of hunger and fasting, being prisoners, rather than to
accept of nourishment from the hands of their so basely victorious
enemies: I see, that whoever would have