This enabled Almagro, with an army of nearly six hundred Spaniards and fifteen thousand Indians, the latter under the command of one of the Inca’s brothers, to make an excursion into Chile for purposes of exploration, for it had been agreed that he should have the southern half of the territory they might conquer and Pizarro the northern. Sebastian de Benalcázar, another of Pizarro’s lieutenants, went to Ecuador with a force of two hundred Spaniards and a large Indian contingent and completed the defeat of Atahualpa’s adherents, took possession of Quito and founded the city of Guayaquil at the mouth of the Guayas River, which provided for that country, too, independent access from the sea. [Illustration: CATHEDRAL AT LIMA, BUILT BY PIZARRO.] Also by this time any illusions the Inca may have had as to the continuance of the ancient dynasty under the protection of the Spaniards were dispelled. By this time even his complaisant subjects must have discovered that these superhuman deliverers, as they had thought them, were mere men—or else, if they were indeed a different order of beings, that order, they must have concluded, was infernal rather than divine. The sovereignty of the Inca had become little more than a fiction. As in the islands of the Caribbean and elsewhere, the fairest lands in the country had been divided into vast estates and great numbers of natives practically reduced to slavery and set to work them for the benefit of their new masters. With respect to their treatment in general, though Pizarro himself seems to have been guilty of few acts of wanton cruelty, he either could not, or did not if he could, restrain the oppression of them by his followers. If their behavior was not quite as atrocious as that of other Spaniards toward the tribes in the north, there was an utter lack of considerateness in it and disregard of their property and rights that galled even them.