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Updated: June 17, 2025
The Dominican made a last appeal to him in this solemn hour; and, when Atahuallpa was bound to the stake, with the fagots that were to kindle his funeral pile lying around him, Valverde, holding up the cross, besought him to embrace it and be baptized, promising that, by so doing, the painful death to which he had been sentenced should be commuted for the milder form of the garrote, a mode of punishment by strangulation, used for criminals in Spain.30
"In this book," replied Valverde, handing him his breviary. Atahualpa received it with eagerness and turned over some of the leaves with much curiosity, then, putting it to his ear, he exclaimed, "What you show me there does not speak to me, and tells me nothing." With this he flung the book upon the ground. This served as a signal for the combat, or rather for the massacre.
How feebly he appears when contrasted with the great Aztec Guatemotzin, calmly enduring the tortures of the red-hot gridiron and resolutely refusing to gratify either his captors' lust for treasure or desire for revenge by vouchsafing them a single fact or a single moan. By Inca's side was Valverde, who had been assiduous in his endeavors to make him a Christian.
On February 21, 1862, Sibley defeated Colonel E.R.S. Canby at Valverde near Fort Craig. But his further advance was hindered by the barrenness of the country, by the complete destruction of all Union stores likely to fall into his hands, and by the fact that he was between two Federal forts when the battle ended. On the twentyeighth of March there was a desperate fight in Apache Canon.
The trade in cattle with the French part of the island absorbed all the business and enterprise that remained. Still Valverde will not admit that the Spanish Creole was indolent: it is in consequence of a deficiency of negroes, he explains, that they cannot labor more! A great injury was inflicted upon the colony by the exclusive commercial spirit of the mother-country.
The same assurances respecting the marshal's safety were given by the governor to Bishop Valverde, and some of the principal cavaliers who interested themselves in behalf of the prisoner.2 Still Pizarro delayed his march to the capital; and when he resumed it, he had advanced no farther than the Rio de Abancay when he received tidings of the death of his rival.
Valverde was a Dominican friar, and, like Father Olmedo in the suite of Cortes, had been by his commander's side throughout the whole of his expedition. But he did not always, like the good Olmedo, use his influence to stay the uplifted hand of the warrior. At least, this was not the mild aspect in which he presented himself at the terrible massacre of Caxamalca.
But the greatest incentive to the search had always been the detailed account left by Fray Pedro Simon, who for twenty years lived among these tribes as missionary, preceding Valverde, known as the Priest of the Hills. "But the great treasure was in the lake," he wrote in his letters.
Mass was publicly performed by Father Valverde, and the Inca Manco received the fringed diadem of Peru, not from the hand of the high-priest of his nation, but from his Conqueror, Pizarro.
Thereupon, according to some accounts, Valverde picked up the book through which Atahualpa had offered such a deadly insult to his religion and rushed back to Pizarro, exclaiming, "Do you not see that while we stand here wasting our breath in talking with this dog, full of pride as he is, the fields are filling with Indians? Set on at once! I absolve you for whatever you do!"
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