WHOLE VOL. THE WEST INDIES VAZQUEZ DE ESPINOSA 31 



words of some of them, with their meanings, and tell in what provinces 

 and kingdoms they belong. 



75. By divine permission and righteous judgment of God, the 

 Devil kept those blind tribes deceitfully in slavery under his tyran- 

 nical sway; and with their multitude of different languages, they 

 lived like savages and barbarians for long centuries, worshiping idols, 

 without God, law, or reason. They worshiped mountains, cliffs, 

 trees, rivers, animals, serpents, and other objects as unreasonable 

 and barbarous; they lived like beasts of the field, not to be distin- 

 guished from unreasoning brutes, staying out in the open like wild 

 animals, without houses or cultivation of the fields, until in the year 

 1030 there arose in the Kingdoms of Peru one of those savages 

 whom Heaven had endowed with unusual intelligence. Mango Capac 

 by name, from whom are descended the Incas, the kings who conquered 

 and governed that empire. 



76. This Mango Capac founded the city of Cuzco at the date men- 

 tioned, capital and imperial court of those kingdoms ; deceiving those 

 savages with his claim to be child of the Sun, by the shrewdness of 

 his character, the friendliness of his bearing, and the excellence of 

 his reasoning, he won over those wild creatures to a better manner 

 of life, rescuing them from their animal existence in the fields and 

 on the hills. He taught them how to build houses, how to plant and 

 cultivate their land, and how to lead a different life more in harmony 

 with reason and the law of Nature ; he continued to bring them 

 under allegiance to him, increasing his authority every day and win- 

 ning over new adherents ; at the same time he taught his own language 

 to those whom he annexed. This was continued by his sons and suc- 

 cessors for the period of over 500 years of their reign and administra- 

 tion of that far-flung monarchy ; all the provinces and nations which 

 they conquered formed a bloc of over 1,300 leagues from N. to S., 

 beginning with Pasto, which lies on the northern frontier, down as 

 far as the Rio de Maule on the S., in the Kingdom of Chile, which 

 they adopted as a boundary on that side, and the Kingdom of Tucu- 

 man on the E. to a point over 400 leagues from Cuzco ; they kept 

 introducing their language into all those nations, to make themselves 

 understood to the Indians living in them. For as they kept winning 

 them over and subduing them, they commanded and ordained that 

 the sons of the ruling class and of the caciques should come to Cuzco 

 and grow up in the imperial court, both for the purpose of using 

 them as hostages to hold the conquered territory securely under their 

 sway, and to have them learn the language of the court and its laws. 



