Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/132

principle of the sacred religion which they professed, scarcely one of them but was visited with retributive vengeance even in this life; and many of them fell miserably in the presence of the wretched people they had so ruthlessly abused, and not a few by each other's hands. We have already shewn the fortunes of Columbus and Cortez; that of Pizarro and his lawless accomplices is still more striking and awful. Almagro, one of the three original speculators of Panama, was the first to pay the debt of his crimes. A daring and rapacious soldier, but far less artful than Pizarro, he had, from the hour that Pizarro deceived him at the Spanish court, and secured honours and commands to himself at his expense, always looked with suspicious eyes upon his proceedings, and sought advancement rather from his own sword than from his old but perfidious comrade. Chili being allotted to him, he claimed the city of Cuzco as his capital;—a bloody war with the Pizarros was the consequence; Almagro was defeated, taken prisoner, and put to death, being strangled in prison and afterwards publicly beheaded. But Pizarro's own fate was hastened by this of his old comrade. The friends of Almagro rallied round young Almagro his son. They suddenly attacked Pizarro in his house at noon, and on a Sunday; slew his maternal uncle Alcantara, and several of his other friends, and stabbed him mortally in the throat. The younger Almagro was taken in arms against the new governor, Vaca de Castro, and publicly beheaded in Cuzco; five hundred of these adventurers falling in the battle itself, and forty others perishing with him on the scaffold. Gonzalo Pizarro, after maintaining a war against the viceroy Nugnez Vela, defeating and