(Ibid.,
Parte 3, lib. 9, cap. 40.) Oviedo says that Huayna Capac left a
hundred sons and daughters, and that most of them were alive at
the time of his writing. "Tubo cien hijos y hijas, y la mayor
parte de ellos son vivos." Hist. de las Indias, Ms., Parte 3,
lib. 8, cap. 9.]
[Footnote 15: I have looked in vain for some confirmation of this
story in Oviedo, Sarmiento, Xerez, Cieza de Leon, Zarate, Pedro
Pizarro, Gomara, - all living at the time, and having access to
the best sources of information; and all, it may be added,
disposed to do stern justice to the evil qualities of the Indian
monarch.]
That Atahuallpa may have been guilty of excesses, and abused the
rights of conquest by some gratuitous acts of cruelty, may be
readily believed; for no one, who calls to mind his treatment of
the Canaris, - which his own apologists do not affect to deny,
*16 - will doubt that he had a full measure of the vindictive
temper which belongs to
'Those souls of fire, and Children of the Sun,
With whom revenge was virtue."
But there is a wide difference between this and the monstrous and
most unprovoked atrocities imputed to him; implying a diabolical
nature not to be admitted on the evidence of an Indian partisan,
the sworn foe of his house, and repeated by Castilian
chroniclers, who may naturally seek, by blazoning the enormities
of Atahuallpa, to find some apology for the cruelty of their
countrymen towards him.
[Footnote 16: No one of the apologists of Atahuallpa goes quite
so far as Father Velasco, who, in the over-flowings of his
loyalty for a Quito monarch, regards his massacre of the Canares
as a very fair retribution for their offences.
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