Explore "The Spanish Pioneers" by Charles Fletcher Lummis on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Somewhere between the years 1471 and 1478, (we are not sure of the exact date), an unfortunate boy was born in the city of Truxillo,[19] province of Estremadura, Spain. He was an illegitimate son of Colonel Gonzalo Pizarro,[20] who had won distinction in the wars in Italy and Navarre. But his parentage was no help to him. The disgraced baby never had a home, -- it is even said that he was left as a foundling at the door of a church. He grew up to young manhood in ignorance and abject poverty, without schools or care or helping hands, thrown entirely upon his own resources to keep from starving. Only the most menial occupations were open to him; but he seems to have done his best with them.
How the neighbor-boys would have laughed and hooted if one had said to them: "That dirty, ragged youngster who drives his pigs through the oak-groves of Estremadura will one day be the greatest man in a new world which no one has yet seen, and will be a more famous soldier than our Great Captain,[21] and will divide more gold than the king has! " And we could not have blamed them for their sneers. The wisest man in Europe then would have believed as little as they such a wild prophecy; for truly it was the most improbable thing in the world.