Inca Land

Excerpt: ... After forty years in Europe he wrote, partly from memory, his “Royal Commentaries,” an account of the country of his Indian ancestors. Of the Inca Manco, of whom he must frequently have heard uncomplimentary reports as a child, he speaks apologetically. He says: “In the time of Manco Inca, several robberies were committed on the road by his subjects; but still they had that respect for the Spanish Merchants that they let them go free and never pillaged them of their wares and merchandise, which were in no manner useful to them; howsoever they robbed the Indians of their cattle llamas and alpacas, bred in the countrey …. The Inca lived in the Mountains, which afforded no tame Cattel; and only produced Tigers and Lions and Serpents of twenty-five and thirty feet long, with other venomous insects.” (I am quoting from Sir Paul Rycaut's translation, published in London in 1688.) Garcilasso says Manco's soldiers took only “such food as they found in the hands of the Indians; which the Inca did usually call his own,” saying, “That he who was Master of that whole Empire might lawfully challenge such a proportion thereof as was convenient to supply his necessary and natural support”--a reasonable apology; and yet personally I doubt whether Manco spared the Spanish merchants and failed to pillage them of their “wares and merchandise.” As will be seen later, we found in Manco's palace some metal Page 175 articles of European origin which might very well have been taken by Manco's raiders. Furthermore, it should be remembered that Garcilasso, although often quoted by Prescott, left Peru when he was sixteen years old and that his ideas were largely colored by his long life in Spain and his natural desire to extol the virtues of his mother's people, a brown race despised by the white Europeans for whom he wrote. The methods of warfare and the weapons used by Manco and his followers at this time...