Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/161

Rh Gallego says: “We were much wearied, and suffered from hunger and thirst, as they did not allow us more than half a pint of stinking water and eight ounces of biscuit, a few very black beans and oil; besides which there was nothing on the ship. Many of our people from weakness were unable to eat any more food.” After terrific storms the Capitana, on 24th January 1569, entered the Mexican port of Santiago, and three days later, by some strange chance, the Almiranta, without masts, boats, and in the last extremity, and not knowing where she was, joined her consort—a truly remarkable thing. They left on the 10th of March, sailed down the Mexican coast, and at “Guatuleo” sent a boat ashore; but all the people fled, “because”," he says, “they had heard in Mexico that we were a strange Scotch people.”

Now what do you make of that? Here were these people in Mexico, a country conquered by the Spaniards, visited by other Spaniards belonging to the other conquered country Peru, and they run away in fear because they think they are Scotch! Even if they did wear kilts, that could scarcely have shocked people who wear, some of them, nothing at all! Cortez and Pizarro, the respective conquerors of Mexico and Peru, were friends and relatives, and so you might imagine they knew in Mexico about the expedition of the Peruvian Spaniards, as they would hear of it from Spain if no other way. The Germans have a theory that the white people, or fair-haired, blue-eyed people who came from Titicaca calling themselves the Sun and Moon, conquered all the Indians, and became the famous Yncas of Peru, were “Irish.” I say they were just as likely to be Scots and these people in Mexico must have Scots, had some traditional idea that the Peruvians were Scots—or else why imagine these Spanish