h, storehouse, hall of justice, fort and
dwellings, and organized a government. The gold they had collected he
sent back to Panama, and waited several weeks hoping for recruits. But
none came, and it was evident that he must give up the conquest of Peru,
or undertake it with the handful of men he already had. It did not take
a Pizarro long to choose between such alternatives. Leaving fifty
soldiers under Antonio Navarro to garrison San Miguel, and with strict
laws for the protection of the Indians, Pizarro marched Sept. 24, 1532,
toward the vast and unknown interior.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] A Spanish historian of the sixteenth century, a relative of
Francisco Pizarro.

IV.

PERU AS IT WAS.

Now that we have followed Pizarro to Peru, and he is about to conquer
the wonderful land to find which he has gone through such unparalleled
discouragements and sufferings, we must stop for a moment to get an
understanding of the country. This is the more necessary because such
false and foolish tales of "the Empire of Peru" and "the reign of the
Incas," and all that sort of trash, have been so widely circulated. To
comprehend the Conquest at all, we must understand what there was to
conquer; and that makes it necessary that I should sketch in a few words
the picture of Peru that was so long accepted on the authority of
grotesquely mistaken historians, and also Peru as it really was, and as
more scholarly history has fully proved it to have been.

We were told that Peru was a great, rich, populous, civilized empire,
ruled by a long line of kings who were called Incas; that it had
dynasties and noblemen, throne and crown and court; that its kings
conquered vast territories, and civilized their conquered savage
neighbors by wonderful laws and schools and other tools of the highest
political economy; that they had military roads finer than those built
by the Romans, and a thousand miles in length, with wonderful pavement
and bridges; that this wonderful race believed in one Supreme Being;
that the king and all of the royal blood were immeasurably above the
common people, but mild, just, paternal, and enlightened; that there
were royal palaces everywhere; that they had canals four or five hundred
miles long, and county fairs, and theatrical representations of tragedy
and comedy; that they carved emeralds with bronze tools the making of
which is now a lost art; that the government took the census, and had
the populace educated;