Passing next to him before whose golden sun the star of Cortez waned, we find that the ruthless valour and iron perseverance of Pizarro subjugated Peru[7] in 1531; while one of his followers, who most resembled him in the cruelty of his life, as he did in the untimeliness of his death (caused by a quarrel with his old master about the spoil), after the seeming consummation of his ambition—Diego Almagro—having committed horrors till then almost unheard of, over-ran Chili[8] in 1535. He exterminated the family of Atahualpa, the last of the Incas, in a mode which only the most hardened familiars of the Inquisition, in the mother country, could read of without emotion; and to this day the records of such revolting transactions constitute probably the foulest blot on the Columbian escutcheon of the country of Du Guesclin and the Cid. But the sins of these men may be said to have been avenged by heaven in the noon of their iniquities. Pizarro, having defeated Almagro at Cuzco, and put many of his officers to death, in cold blood, had his old comrade strangled and then beheaded in Lima, where the despot himself was assassinated by young Almagro, who, in his turn, being defeated in battle, also at Cuzco, by Vaca de Castro, was likewise put to death by decapitation.
Passing next to the Portuguese discoveries, that of Brazil was effected by Alvarez de Cabral, he having landed, by accident, through stress of weather, at Porto Seguro, on the 24th of April, 1500, calling the country Santa Cruz (Holy Cross) in gratitude for his delivery from shipwreck; but the appellation was afterwards altered to that which it at present bears, signifying redwood, the well-known substance familiar to us as Brazil wood; yet it was the subsequent exploration of this coast, some four years afterwards, that enabled Amerigo Vespucci to eternise his own name as the accepted discoverer of the continent itself.
