food and gold, and when there were no native warriors left to fight, they turned their swords against one another. And when, in 1543, the Emperor Charles V, urged by the good bishop Las Casas, decreed in his "New Laws for the Indies" that no more Indians must be enslaved or cruelly treated, Spain nearly lost America at that time, instead of two centuries and a half later. A fleet from Peru captured and plundered Old Panama, and, when reinforced and joined by the Panamanians, the Peruvians seized the whole Isthmus and held it in the name of Pizarro.[1] Instead of an army, Charles V sent Pedro de la Gasca, a clever, smooth-tongued priest, who won back the leaders at Panama to allegiance to the emperor, and with their aid put down the rebellion in Peru. As Pedro de la Gasca was about to take ship for Spain at Nombre de Dios, after his triumphal return from Peru, the Contreras brothers, turbulent grandsons of old Pedrarias, came down the Pacific coast after raising a successful rebellion in Nicaragua, suddenly captured Old Panama and started to march across the Isthmus. But the citizens rose behind them, and the Contreras "revolution" came to a sudden and bloody end.
These old, half-forgotten fights among the early Spanish colonists in America were the children of all the feudal wars of Spain, and the fathers of all the nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions of Spanish America. Fear of Drake and the bucaneers made the once-turbulent colonists glad to submit to the royal will for as much protection as the King could give them. He ruled like a feudal overlord,—a big bully over a crowd of little ones,
- ↑ Gonzalo Pizarro, brother and successor of the conquerer of Peru
