d nor write, but had to "make
his mark,"--a striking contrast with the bold and handsome (for those
days) autograph of Cortez. But Pizarro--who had this lack of education
as a handicap from the first, who went through infinitely greater
hardships and difficulties than Cortez, and managed the conquest of an
area as great with a third as many men as Cortez had, and very much more
desperate and rebellious men--was beyond question the greatest Spanish
American, and the greatest tamer of the New World. It is for that
reason, and because such gross injustice has been done him, that I have
chosen his marvellous career, to be detailed later in this book, as a
picture of the supreme heroism of the Spanish pioneers.

But while Pizarro was greatest, all four were worthy the rank they have
been assigned as the Caesars of America.

Certain it is that the bald-headed little great man of old Rome, who
crowds the page of ancient history, did nothing greater than each of
those four Spanish heroes, who with a few tattered Spaniards in place
of the iron legions of Rome conquered each an inconceivable wilderness
as savage as Caesar found, and five times as big. Popular opinion long
did a vast injustice to these and all other of the Spanish
_conquistadores_, belittling their military achievements on account of
their alleged great superiority of weapons over the savages, and taxing
them with a cruel and relentless extermination of the aborigines. The
clear, cold light of true history tells a different tale. In the first
place, the advantage of weapons was hardly more than a moral advantage
in inspiring awe among the savages at first, for the sadly clumsy and
ineffective firearms of the day were scarcely more dangerous than the
aboriginal bows which opposed them. They were effective at not much
greater range than arrows, and were tenfold slower of delivery. As to
the cumbrous and usually dilapidated armor of the Spaniard and his
horse, it by no means fully protected either from the agate-tipped
arrows of the savages; and it rendered both man and beast ill-fitted to
cope with their agile foes in any extremity, besides being a frightful
burden in those tropic heats. The "artillery" of the times was almost as
worthless as the ridiculous arquebuses. As to their treatment of the
natives, there was incomparably less cruelty suffered by the Indians who
opposed the Spaniards than by those who lay in the path of any other
European colonizers. The Spa