forbidden by all the laws of gallantry, and Pedro Alcon demanded that he should be suffered to take up his residence in her dominions. Pizarro was inflexible, and the brain of the man of gallantry instantly took fire; but his flame was now changed from love to ambition. He declared against all further obedience, flourished round the shore with a broken sword, with which he threatened to conquer his companions, and pronounced them 'villanous usurpers of the land which belonged to him and the king his brother.' But his sceptre was remorselessly wrung from his hand; his royal person was seized in all its finery of velvet doublet, goldnet head-dress, and medalliard cap; he was fettered and placed under the deck. This judicious treatment,which might have been advantageously tried with many a candidate for empire, cured Alcon of both love and glory. He returned with his companions to Panamà, was 'viceroy over the king' no more, and the reign of Trinculo was at an end.

Pizarro was now to re-enter the world on a statelier scale. He sailed for Europe, armed with the rights and fame of a great discoverer, the most resistless claim of the age to the respect of kings and people. His demands were high in proportion. He required the government of the newlydiscovered lands for himself, the Captaincy for his companion Almagro, and the Bishopric for his partner, Hernando Lucque.

His first reception in Spain was an ill omen. He was arrested at the suit of an individual, for a debt incurred by the settlers of Darien; but Pizarro had not sailed across the Atlantic to perish in a Spanish prison. He applied to the government, by whom he was released, and when free he journeyed direct to the presence of Charles the Fifth at Toledo. There was no sovereign of his day on whom fortune had so long, so steadily, and so munificently poured her favors. But this period found Charles at the height of his prodigality. France had just fallen before him at the battle of Pavia; Italy was his conquest, the French king his prisoner, the Pope his vassal; and he was on the point of receiving the imperial crown at Bologna. At this moment Pizarro came, to confer on this Master of Europe, and its iron strength, the supremacy of a kingdom, almost its equal in size, and overflowing with the richest produce that earth offers on its surface, or in its bosom. Cortes and Pizarro, the brother-conquerors, had come to deposit at the foot of the throne the keys of Mexico and Peru. Pizarro's handsome figure, bold countenance, and dignified demeanor, won for him the universal admiration of a court crowded with all that was noble, brave, or lovely in Europe. His address to the Emperor was full of the grave magnificence that habit and nature have taught the Spaniard to feel beyond all other men. Charles suffered his reserve to give way, and the hero was named Pacificator of the new empire, without a superior, and without an equal.

Pizarro, now at the fountain-head of honors, determined to slake his thirst to the full, if the ambition of such a man was ever to be satisfied. To obtain for himself the order of St. Jago, and a coat of arms which exhibited in a singular degree his conception of his own high merits, he adopted the imperial device of the Black Eagle grasping the two Pillars of Hercules; and as an emblem of his South American triumphs, the city of Tumbez, walled and towered, with a lion and tiger at its gates, and in the distance the sea on one side, with the rafts of the country, and on the other the flocks and herds. Round the blazon was the inscription-' Caroli Cæsaris auspicio, et labore, ingenio, ac impensa Ducis Pizarro, inventa, et pacata.' This extraordinary stream of fortune, flowing in upon an obscure individual, may entirely excite our wonder. But there was a moment

of his triumph which may justly excite our envy. In the interval of preparation for his return to Peru, Pizarro made a visit to the place of his birth. His parents were still living, and their gallant and fortunate son had the rare delight of giving them honor in the sight of mankind. He found his four brothers in Truxillo, offered them all appointments, and subsequently took them all with him to Peru, in chase of wealth and honors like his

own.

Still, those honors were for a conquest that existed only in anticipation. And when Pizarro at last sailed from Panamà, he could muster, for the conquest of one of the mightiest regions of the globe, but three small ships and 183 men.

The empire which Pizarro now sailed to conquer, was the most extensive, powerful, and civilized of the south; extending from north to south along the Pacific more than 2000 miles. All the nations of Paganism begin their history by a fable, yet the fable has some features of strong resemblance in them all. A legislator, a soldier, or prophet suddenly appears, from some unknown region, suddenly reconciles the people to civilization, instructs them in the useful arts, furnishes them with a government and laws, and then as suddenly takes wing, leaving the world to wonder whence he came, or whither he goeth. Manco Capac and Mama Oello were thus the beneficent Genii of Peru. They came from an unknown country. Manco taught the people to till the ground, and Mama taught them to spin flax. They founded the city of Cuzco. The tradition went further, that they built a temple to the Sun, established his worship, and gave a code of laws. They transmitted the kingdom to a line which pronounced themselves to be the pure blood of the Sun, and preserved the purity of their blood by the extraordinary precaution of marrying their own sisters, the offspring of those unnatural unions being alone eligible to the throne.

In the course of four centuries from the days of Manco Capac, the Peruvians counted twelve princes, who continued to conquer the provinces adjoining to Cuzco, until Huayna Capac, the prince contemporary with the arrival of the Spaniards in America, completed the empire by conquering Quito. The empire now extended from Chili to Quito, and the vigorous administration of the Inca promised to civilize the rude tribes which composed the chief population with great rapidity. His reign was said to have been the means of establishing three great features of civilisation-a common language, a chain of posts for the conveyance of the government orders through his kingdom, and high-roads, two great lines of communication which reached from Cuzco to Quito, a distance of more than 1500 miles, passing over mountains, through marshes, across deserts, and furnished at intervals with caravanseras large enough to contain thousands of troops; and so far was this system of accommodation carried, that in some instances these caravanseras were furnished with the means of repairing the equipments and arms of the troops and travellers.

One of the most curious questions of the antiquarian, though one with which the present volume does not perplex itself, is the origin of those vast nations. That America was peopled from the north of Asia seems now beyond all doubt. The discoveries in the higher latitudes, by our own immortal Cook, and by his adventurous and scientific followers, establish the perfect facility with which a navigation, even by canoes, could be carried on between the northern dominions of Russia and the west coast of North America. The intercourse even now is common

as it has probably been from the earliest ages. The Russian colonist settles as freely on the American shore as in Siberia; and the Esquimaux is in every feature, in every habit of life, and perhaps in every traditional remembrance, the twin brother of the Tartar. The common stimulant of early emigration, hunger, might easily drive successive hordes of the Siberian wanderers to seek for food on a coast covered with the beauties of nature, and which they continually reached in their fishing excursions; and the settlement once made, the young fertility of the continent must have drawn them constantly towards the south.

But America seems palpably to have owed its inhabitants to at least two distinct races of progenitors, as it contains two totally distinct classes of mankind; one portion exhibiting the most inveterate rudeness, savage ferocity, and repulsion of all improvement; the other, inventive, luxurious, plastic. The former poor, hating the cultivation of the soil, and living in a state of fierce disunion; the latter opulent, covering the soil with produce, and assembling in great politic communities. Nothing can be a stronger contrast than the whole scale of manners, pursuits, and principles of the Americans of the North, and the Americans of the regions bordering on the line, and to the south of the line; the Red man, athletic, violent, and sanguinary, living in the forest, incapable of living in community, making perpetual war, but making it on the most isolated and individual scale, a wanderer, destitute of a settled place of worship, of a legislature, or of a king; and the sallow son of Mexico and Peru, slight, patient, and peaceable, living in large quiet villages, or regularly ordered cities, seldom making war, but then making it by armies, and not for revenge, but for conquest; building great temples, with a numerous priesthood, and observances of high public sanctity, with known codes of law, and with hereditary successions of kings, held in the most solemn and Oriental reverence. Their passion for personal ornament, the gaudier parts of painting and sculpture; their religion, the worship of the heavenly bodies; their writing, hieroglyphic; all are full of the evidences of an Oriental origin; but of an origin derived from nations of the south of Asia. Humboldt quotes an old Chinese tradition of a tribe of their nation, which, having revolted, had marched to the north, and had never been heard of after. The South American visage is certainly not Chinese; but in the convulsions of the immense and unknown territories which lie to the east and south of China, and which have shared in the convulsions of that empire, nothing is more probable than the total emigration of one of the nations of Birmah, Pegu, Malacca, or even of the Japanese territories to the north, where no enemy would be likely to pursue them, from the north with its snows and tempests to the new region on the opposite shore of the ocean, and from the north of that new region down successively to Russia, and the regions below the Isthmus. By this conduit, the arts, laws, and worship of Asia might have gradually passed through the New World, until they found their establishment in the fertile, and especially the metalliferous regions of the south. The interior of North America still contains evidences of the dwelling, or rather of the passage of great multitudes of men, in a land long almost destitute of inhabitants; the mounds and remnants of intrenchments in the country west of the Mississippi, are indications of the sojourn, though probably a brief one, of nations who were making a progress to the south. There are no remnants of the massive and formal architecture of cities. All is the temporary fortification, the rough mound, which was necessary for the defence of the settlement against

rival migrations, or, in some instances, was raised as barriers against the inundations of the numerous lakes and rivers. The descendant of the Tartar remained in the forest, both because he there found the location best suited to his original savagery, an easily formed habitation, and food for the trouble of killing it, and because, at the moment of emerging from the forest, he found himself in the presence of nations, his superiors in civilisation, his masters by discipline, and possessing resources for war to which his rude and dislocated assaults were utterly unequal. The more intelligent Asiatic, on the contrary, continually passed on from region to region establishing kingdoms, until he had reached that point beyond which he must again descend into a wilder, poorer, and more repulsive country. Thus, as the Mexican founded his empire in the rich region to the north of the Isthmus, the Peruvian fixed his royal seat on the table land to the south, and there, under a horizon of clouds, which, by one of the simplest, yet most singular contrivances of nature, perpetually shields him from the fervor of the vertical sun, and on an elevation which gives him health and freshness, in the midst of a region of pestilential vapors and airs of fire, he has built cities which rival some of the noblest in the Old World.

Among the traditions of the original settlements is one, that the lost tribes of Israel, after the fall of the Babylonian dynasty, had revolted, marched in a body to the north-east of Assyria, plunged into the vast inscrutable deserts and forests of the polar circle, and disappeared only to emerge in North America. A considerable number of observances, in which the Jews and the Indians curiously coincide, have furnished a groundwork for speculations on the subject, which seem, however, destined to rest forever in conjecture. But here antiquarianism finds what it best loves, an endless field for its labors, a history without facts, to substantiate a theory without foundations, obscurities that defy all research, and probabilities that no investigation can strengthen, and no reasoning overthrow.

The long delay of the Spanish invasion was among the most memorable instances of that fortune which gave the New World into the hands of the old. A few years earlier would have found Peru under the government of a vigorous, sagacious, and warlike king, by whom the adventurers might have been extinguished at a blow. But they came in at the time of a disputed succession. The mighty empire of Peru was laid open to them by a civil war. An inexperienced sovereign, a doubtful title, and a divided allegiance, broke down the chief barriers against the foreign enemy, and Spanish arms, and Spanish thirst of gold, did the rest. The history of the succession and the overthrow, alike prove that man is the same everywhere, and that the same causes will produce the same disasters at the Line as at the Pole. Huayna Capac, the conquering monarch, in whose reign the empire had risen to its greatest height, left at his death the sceptre to Huascar, his son, by the Coya or empress; and the province of Quito to Atahualpa, an elder, but illegitimate son by the daughter of the chief Cacique of Quito. Atahualpa raised the standard of rebellion in Quito, was overthrown, and flung into chains. From these he got free, pretending that the Sun, father of his fathers, had changed him into a lizard, and thus enabled him to escape. He now raised an army, marched to Cuzco, and took Huascar prisoner. At this period the usurper received the first intelligence of the approach of the Spaniards, against whom he marched without delay. Pizarro, after two months, occupied in a march, which, in later times, has occupied scarcely more than a week,

entered the Peruvian city of Caxamalca on the 15th of November, 1532. A formidable vision now rose before him on the range of the mountains; the army of the Inca lay encamped to bar his progress to Cuzco, and encamped with a regularity that told him he was at last to encounter an army that might task all his powers.

But Pizarro had probably even now intended to trust to a more effective weapon with a simple and generous people than the sword. Establishing his quarters in the principal square of the city, which, from its being surrounded with a high wall, served as a citadel, into this fortress he formed the design of alluring the Inca; and the steps by which he proceeded are well calculated to exhibit the remorseless craft and dexterous audacity of this celebrated man. Sending two of his officers with detachments of cavalry to bear his homage to the Inca, Atahualpa came forth in his pomp to meet those warlike envoys. Seated on a throne of gold and jewels, he sent to demand the purpose of their entering his country. They answered, that their captain, Don Francisco Pizarro, greatly desired to be admitted to his presence, to give him an account of his reasons for coming to Peru, and to entreat him to sup in the city on that night, or dine with him on the following day. The Inca replied, that it was then late, but that he would enter the city on the following day; that he should enter with his army, a measure, however, which ought not to disconcert the Spaniards.

That day was a memorable one in the annals of the Incas. Atahualpa, probably excited by a hazardous curiosity, proceeded to the city at the head of 20,000 of his warriors, attended by a multitude of women, as bearers of the luggage. The person of the sovereign was a blaze of jewels. He was borne on a litter plated with gold, overshadowed with plumes, and carried on the shoulders of his chief nobles. On his forehead was the Borla, the sacred tuft of scarlet which he wore as the descendant of the Sun. The whole moved to the sound of music, with the solemnity of a religious procession. At this moment there was remaining a chance of averting the fall of the empire. The slowness of the procession had brought it late into the evening, and the Peruvians began to pitch their tents, in evident preparation for halting for the night. But Pizarro had made preparations for treachery, which could scarcely fail of being discov ered by a multitude suffered to remain so close to the spot. He had placed musketry in ambush, planted his cannon so as to command the gates, divided his cavalry into squadrons, under his principal officers, for the attack; and, forming a body-guard of twenty shield-bearers, prepared to capture, or destroy, his unhappy guest. Some of the Spanish historians, solicitous for the honor of their country, argue, that the Inca was only caught in his own snare, that his object was to destroy the Spaniards, and that his request that the horses and dogs might be tied up, was a proof that he contemplated violence. But Spanish honor ought to be sustained on firmer grounds. The Inca's request that these animals should be kept out of sight, which most alarmed his people, and of course most easily disposed them to retaliation, was a perfectly natural one. His dismissal of threefourths of his escort was a sign of peace, when he might have brought his whole army with him. His personal entrance within the walls was an obvious risk, which he must have felt, and might have avoided by awaiting Pizarro in his camp. And the true place for practising any violence against the Spaniards would as obviously have been the open field; for, defective as Peruvian warfare might be, the Inca was a soldier, and must have known how much more important numbers are in the open field, than in narrow streets and among walls. The natural conclusion evidently is,