benefactress, they made their escape across the Atacama desert to Cuzco. This treachery the Copiapans avenged three years afterward by massacring a party of forty Spaniards.
Vaco de Castro was at that time at the head of the Peruvian government, and having been informed by the emissaries of the condition of affairs in Chile, dispatched thither a company under Monroy, and further sent recruits, under Juan Bapista Pastene, by sea.
Pastene upon his arrival was immediately dispatched by Valdivia to explore the southern coast of Chile as far as the Straits of Magellan. Having accomplished this task, he thereupon sent back to Peru for more recruits, for the Indians were warlike and seemed likely to cause further trouble. They had succeeded by a bold stratagem in massacring all the soldiers in the Quillota mines. As the Inca Manco had at one time led the credulous Spaniards out of Cuzco into an ambush to look in a thicket for a golden statue of Huayna Capac, so the Quillotanes had deluded Gonzalo Rios and his companions at the mines and led them a will-o'-the wisp chase after a fanciful pot of gold. They found not the pot of gold, more than Soto did El Dorado, but they did fall tumultuously into an ambuscade, which had been cunningly prepared for them, from which only Rios and a negro escaped. The arsenal and the new frigate which had shortly before been built, were thereupon destroyed by the Indians.
The indomitable Valdivia immediately punished the natives, built a fort to protect the miners thenceforth, and continued the mining operations.
Sometime afterward (1544), the commander founded the city of La Serena at the mouth of the Coquimbo, naming it in honor of the place of his birth. The
