Colonization and Christianity: A popular history of the treatment of the natives by the; Europeans in all their coloniesHowitt, William
History
Colonization and Christianity: A popular history of the treatment of the natives by the; Europeans in all their colonies
Howitt, William
Indians, Treatment of; Indigenous peoples
envenom contests amongst countrymen, avarice was added, and rendered
their enmity more ravenous. Eagerness to seize the valuable forfeitures
expected upon the death of every opponent, shut the door against mercy.
To be wealthy, was of itself sufficient to expose a man to accusation,
or to subject him to punishment. On the slightest suspicions, Pizarro
condemned many of the most opulent inhabitants in Peru to death.
Carvajal, without seeking for any pretext to justify his cruelty, cut
off many more. The number of those who suffered by the hand of the
executioner, was not much inferior to what fell in the field; and the
greater part was condemned without the formality of any legal trial.”
Providence exhibited a great moral lesson in the fate of these
discoverers of the new world. As they shewed no regard to the feelings
or the rights of their fellow men, as they outraged and disgraced
every principle of the sacred religion which they professed, scarcely
one of them but was visited with retributive vengeance even in this
life; and many of them fell miserably in the presence of the wretched
people they had so ruthlessly abused, and not a few by each other’s
hands. We have already shewn the fortunes of Columbus and Cortez;
that of Pizarro and his lawless accomplices is still more striking
and awful. Almagro, one of the three original speculators of Panama,
was the first to pay the debt of his crimes. A daring and rapacious
soldier, but far less artful than Pizarro, he had, from the hour that
Pizarro deceived him at the Spanish court, and secured honours and
commands to himself at his expense, always looked with suspicious eyes
upon his proceedings, and sought advancement rather from his own sword
than from his old but perfidious comrade. Chili being allotted to him,
he claimed the city of Cuzco as his capital;—a bloody war with the
Pizarros was the consequence; Almagro was defeated, taken prisoner,
and put to death, being strangled in prison and afterwards publicly
beheaded. But Pizarro’s own fate was hastened by this of his old
comrade. The friends of Almagro rallied round young Almagro his son.
They suddenly attacked Pizarro in his house at noon, and on a Sunday;
slew his maternal uncle Alcantara, and several of his other friends,
and stabbed him mortally in the throat. The younger Almagro was taken
in arms against the new governor, Vaca de Castro, and publicly beheaded
in Cuzco; five hundred of these adventurers falling in the battle
itself, and forty others perishing with him on the scaffold. Gonzalo
Pizarro, after maintaining a war against the viceroy Nugnez Vela,
defeating and killing him, was himself defeated by Gasca, and put to
death, with Carvajal and some other of the most notorious offenders.
Such were the crimes and the fate of the Spaniards in Peru. Robertson,
who relates the deeds of the Spanish adventurers in general with a
coolness that is marvellous, thus describes the character of these men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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