As We Must Believe That The Inhabitants Of These Islands Practised Navigation, Which They Must Have Learned By Intercourse With The Great Island, In Which Plato Expressly Says There Were Many Ships, And Carefully Constructed Harbours.

These, in my opinion, are the most probable conjectures which can be formed on this obscure subject of antiquity; more especially as we can derive no lights from the Peruvians, who have no writing by which to preserve the memory of ancient times.

In New Spain, indeed, they had certain pictures, which answered in some measure instead of books and writings; but in Peru, they only used certain strings of different colours with several knots, by means of which and the distances between them, they were able to express some things in a very confused and uncertain manner, as shall be explained in the course of this history.

So much of the following history as relates to the discovery of the country, has been derived from the information of Rodrigo Lozan, an inhabitant of Truxillo in Peru, and from others who were witnesses of and actors in the transactions which I have detailed.

[1] Even the orthography of the name of Pizarro is handed down to us with some variety. In the work of Garcilasso de la Vega it is always spelt Picarro: Besides which, the Inca Garcilasso, in his almost perpetual quotations of our author Zarate, always gives the name Carate; the _c_, or cerilla _c_, being equivalent in Spanish to the _z_ in the other languages of Europe.

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