Inferiorly armed with clubs, spears, and bows and arrows, their bodies protected only by leather cuirasses, they met the Spaniards and their native auxiliaries in open field and charged and fought them hand to hand, and defeated them too in many a Homeric fray in spite of the steel armor and swords of the Conquistadores and their cavalry, artillery, and firearms. Inspired by admiration, a chivalrous Castilian, the soldier-poet Alonso de Ercilla, who was himself in some of the fights, has told the first part of the story in his historical epic in thirty-seven cantos—the story of how their lion-hearted chief, Caupolican, undismayed by defeat in the first encounter, persisted until he had destroyed an army of the invaders and driven the survivors back to Santiago; how, when wounded and helpless, he was captured at last and underwent torture and death with the stoicism of a Mohawk; how his wife, indignant at his having permitted himself to be taken alive, ran to the scaffold and threw their baby at his feet, crying out that she would no longer be the mother of the child of a coward; how the brilliant young Lautero took three Spanish strongholds, invaded the country north of the Bio-bio, defeated every army that was sent against him, and laid siege to Santiago itself; how the fiery Tucapel, while besieging a Spanish fort, scaled the wall alone, ran the gantlet of the garrison, killed four mail-clad Spaniards in fighting his way through, and escaped by leaping from a cliff; how another of their chiefs, moved to pity by the straits to which he had reduced a town he was besieging, gallantly challenged the Spanish commander to single combat, on condition that if he should defeat him the town must be surrendered, but that if he were himself defeated the siege would be raised, and how, when he was killed, the Indians kept the compact and withdrew—and many other such stories, some of them rivaling those told of the Scottish chiefs.[1] ----- Footnote 1: The story of the Araucanian wars is told in full in Hancock’s “History of Chile.” ----- These Araucanians “had not felt the influence of Peruvian culture,” says Hawthorne; they were “still in their healthy, primitive condition. In person,” he goes on—