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Give me but a hundred picked men, and I will engage to defend the pass against an army, and bring back the chaplain the name by which the president was known in the rebel camp -a prisoner to Cuzco." 16 "I cannot spare you, father," said Gonzalo, addressing him by this affectionate epithet, which he usually applied to his aged follower,17 "I cannot spare you so far from my own person"; and he gave the commission to Juan de Acosta, a young cavalier warmly attached to his commander, and who had given undoubted evidence of his valor on more than one occasion, but who, as the event proved, was signally deficient in the qualities demanded for so critical an undertaking as the present.
The principal ingredient of the Bang so much used by the Indians, as well as of the Maslac of the Turks is a species of the hemp plant. The Indians, says Acosta, masticate the seeds and leaves of several species of that plant, in order to increase their vigour in the venereal congress, and very frequently combine with it, ambergris, musk, and sugar, preparing it in the form of an electuary.
According to Acosta, heathenism is as a whole the work of the Devil; he has seduced men to idolatry in order that he himself may be worshipped instead of the true God. All worship of idols is in reality worship of Satan.
Pizarro sent back the monk with directions for Acosta to join him at a certain place.
No evidence appeared to connect Catalina in any way with the death of Fernando Acosta.
One of the most notable of these expeditions was made by the tug Leyden, which carried 50,000 rounds of rifle cartridges and two chests of dynamite. She left Key West with Colonel Acosta and some twenty-five other Cubans on board, who were to join General Gomez in Santa Clara Province.
Acosta did, indeed, meditate an ambuscade by night; but the design was betrayed by a deserter, and he contented himself with retreating to a safe distance, and sending for a further reinforcement from Cuzco. Three hundred men were promptly detached to his support; but when they arrived, the enemy was already planted in full force on the crest of the eminence.
Some of his limbs were thereby fractured, but he was in a fair way to recovery when there was a sudden relapse, soon ending in death. He was found to have been poisoned by radix aconiti indica, a rare Arabian poison not known in Europe at that time except to savants, and first mentioned by Acosta some months before. An attendant was accused and tried, but acquitted.
This mass threw itself impetuously on the coasts, and beat down a great number of houses; like the wave eighty-four feet high, which on the 9th of June, 1586, at the time of the great earthquake of Lima, covered the port of Callao. Acosta Hist. Natural de las Indias edition de 1591 page 123.
Worn out, world-weary, aged far beyond his years, beaten in the long fight, despairing of justice on earth and hopeless of any heaven, Uriel Acosta leaned droopingly against his beloved desk, put the pistol's cold muzzle to his forehead, pressed the trigger, and fell dead across the open pages of his Exemplar Humanae Vitae, the thin, curling smoke lingering a little ere it dissipated, like the futile spirit of a passing creature "a wind that passeth away and cometh not again."
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