who had formed the salt of the land. Great numbers of the rank and file
of the race met with the fate which was at that time so universal
throughout the country, or rather in its metal-bearing lands. They were
sent to the mines, and, worked and flogged to death, their numbers
diminished with a ghastly rapidity. Some sections, more fortunate, were
at a rather later age set to agriculture, and, forced to somewhat more
congenial tasks than the first workers, they continued to serve the
Spaniards.




CHAPTER VI

SPANIARD AND NATIVE


The collisions with the various peoples of the Continent had now
afforded the _conquistadores_ an opportunity of testing the power of
each. The force of the impact had, it is true, swept into the background
the first peoples with whom they had come into contact; but, as the
scanty numbers of the pioneers filtered across the new territories, they
found that the task of annexation was by no means so easy in every case.

So far as a warlike spirit was concerned, the difference between the
aboriginal tribes of the tropics and those of the southern regions was
most marked. The Incas were, in many respects, a warlike race--that is
to say, they had possessed themselves by force of arms of the country in
the neighbourhood of Lake Titicaca, wresting this from whatever tribe of
the Aymaras it was which, highly civilized, had held the land before