While thus employed, I fell into the water, and if it had not been for the chief, who took me in his arms and pulled me on to the canoe, I should have been drowned. I remained in this position until a ship came to succour me, and while they were helping the others, I remained for more than two hours wet through. What with the cold air and the quantity of water I had drunk, I was laid up next day, unable to turn.[1] Seeing that I could not now conduct this discovery along the coast in person, and that the expedition would thus come to an end, I resolved to return to Panama with the chief and interpreters who accompanied me, and report the knowledge I had acquired of all that land.[2]
This land had never been discovered either by Castilla del Oro, or by way of the gulf of San Miguel, and the province was called Pirú, because one of the letters of Birú has been corrupted, and so we call it Pirú, but in reality there is no country of that name.
As soon as Pedrarias heard the great news which I had brought, he was also told by the doctors that time alone could cure me, and in truth it was fully three years before I was able to ride on horseback. He therefore asked me to hand over the undertaking to Pizarro,[3]
- ↑ Montesinos says that the illness of Andagoya arose, not from a ducking, but from a fall from his horse, while showing off his horsemanship to the natives. But Andagoya himself must certainly have known best.
- ↑ Thus Andagoya was the first pioneer of the discovery of Peru.
- ↑ Francisco Pizarro was born at Truxillo, in Estremadura, in about the year 1471, the illegitimate child of a colonel of infantry. It is not known when he first crossed the Atlantic, but at 1510 he was at Hispaniola, and enlisted as a man at arms in the expedition of Alonzo de Ojeda to the gulf of Darien. Ojeda formed a settlement which he called San Sebastian de Uraba, and returned to Hispaniola for assistance, leaving the main body of his following under the command of Pizarro. The Spaniards suffered from famine and disease, and at last Pizarro embarked them all in two small vessels; but outside the harbour they met a ship which proved to be that of the Bachiller Enciso, Ojeda's partner, coming
