CONQUEST OF PERU
INCA ADVENTURE, by Bernard Flornoy; _. Allen and Unwin, English price 21/-; ‘] HREE men planning a bid for wealth and power make a good enough opening for any adventure, particularly when one of the trio is Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru. Although the sequel of his first four years. of voyaging and gold-seeking is told ‘calmly, the interest holds and we nod -assent when Charles the Fifth rewards him with a governorship even as we disenero his pitiless methods. | So ‘far Pizarro was governor of ‘nothing; only of what he could now win. It may be that it is Flornoy’s same leisurely meditative style, with its amusing asides and shrewd shafts of comment, that lessens our squeamishness where Pizarro had none-in the four further years of fighting, diplomacy (euphemism for treachery), ruthless piety and conquest. Were they fairly rewarded: Diego the lieutenant with imprisonment and execution, Pizarro with assassination? The third, Padre Fernand, had stayed at Panama. Conquest became colonisation. The conquistadors gave their sons Spanish learning, their mothers taught them Inca history and a love of their people. Some few lads, like our own Peter Buck for the Polynesians and Maoris, were fired with ambition to become historians for their race. It is their story Flornoy gives us, as he explains in a chapter that touches on bibliography and hints at history so lightly and pleasantly as to make us want to read them all. sInca history follows, again unhurriedly but never monotonously. A key event or two expresses the character of successive empire builders; again, although the Indian methods of conquest were little removed from those of the Spanish destroyers, our sympathies remain with the "rightful occupants" of the land. Inca Adventure \is a well arranged story attractively told. and we readily pass over the dubious "corderillas" (cordirella -dressed lambskin); loyal Australians, however, might boggle at the anachron-
istic eucalypts.
Gilbert
Archey
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 897, 12 October 1956, Page 14
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317CONQUEST OF PERU New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 897, 12 October 1956, Page 14
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