His whole career shows him, whether for good
or for evil, to have acted with a cool and calculating policy.
A story has been often repeated, which refers the motives of
Pizarro's conduct, in some degree at least, to personal
resentment. The Inca had requested one of the Spanish soldiers
to write the name of God on his nail. This the monarch showed to
several of his guards successively, and, as they read it, and
each pronounced the same word, the sagacious mind of the
barbarian was delighted with what seemed to him little short of a
miracle, - to which the science of his own nation afforded no
analogy. On showing the writing to Pizarro, that chief remained
silent; and the Inca, finding he could not read, conceived a
contempt for the commander who was even less informed than his
soldiers. This he did not wholly conceal, and Pizarro, aware of
the cause of it, neither forgot nor forgave it. *43 The anecdote
is reported not on the highest authority. It may be true; but it
is unnecessary to look for the motives of Pizarro's conduct in
personal pique, when so many proofs are to be discerned of a dark
and deliberate policy.
[Footnote 43: The story is to be found in Garcilasso de la Vega,
(Com. Real., Parte 2, cap. 38,) and in no other writer of the
period, so far as I am aware.]
Yet the arts of the Spanish chieftain failed to reconcile his
countrymen to the atrocity of his proceedings. It is singular to
observe the difference between the tone assumed by the first
chroniclers of the transaction, while it was yet fresh, and that
of those who wrote when the lapse of a few years had shown the
tendency of public opinion.
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