Besides these mutual janglings amongst the governors, the whole body of the people were extremely dissatisfied, they being fully persuaded that the affairs of Spain for many years before had been managed by the influence of a particular foreign interest, which was altogether detached from the advantages of the Spanish nation: so that the inhabitants of these distant provinces believed themselves to be sacrificed to an ambition which never considered their convenience or emoluments nor paid any regard to the reputation of their name or the honour of their country. That this was the temper of the Creolian Spaniards at that time might be proved from a hundred instances; but I shall content myself with one which is indeed conclusive: this is the testimony of the French mathematicians sent into America to measure the magnitude of an equatorial degree of latitude. For in the relation of the murther of a surgeon belonging to their company in one of the cities of Peru, and of the popular tumult thence occasioned, written by one of those astronomers, the author confesses that the multitude during the uproar universally joined in imprecations on their bad government, {260} and bestowed the most abusive language upon the French, detesting them, in all probability, more particularly as being of a nation to whose influence in the Spanish counsels the Spaniards imputed all their misfortunes. And whilst the Creolian Spaniards were thus dissatisfied, it appears by the letters we intercepted that the Indians on almost every frontier were ripe for a revolt, and would have taken up arms upon the slightest encouragement; particularly the Indians in the southern parts of Peru, as likewise the Arraucos, and the rest of the Chilian Indians, the most powerful and terrible to the Spanish name of any on that continent. For it seems in some disputes between the Spaniards and the Indians, which happened a short time before our arrival, the Spaniards had insulted the Indians with an account of the force which they expected from Old Spain under the command of Admiral Pizarro, and had vaunted that he was coming thither to compleat the great work which had been left unfinished by his ancestors. These threats alarmed the Indians, and made them believe that their extirpation was resolved on. For the Pizarros being the first conquerors of that coast, the Peruvian Indians held the name, and all that bore it, in execration; not having forgot the destruction of their monarchy, the massacre of their beloved Inca, Atapalipa, the extinction of their religion, and the slaughter of their ancestors, all perpetrated by the family of the Pizarros. The Chilian Indians too abhorred a chief who was descended of a race which, by its lieutenants, had first attempted to inslave them, and had necessitated the stoutest of their tribes for more than a century to be continually wasting their blood in defence of their independency.