by the English under the Earl of Essex in 1596. But the Jesuits were allowed to depart with their papers. Blas Valera died soon afterwards.
Blas Valera had qualifications and advantages possessed by no other writer. The Inca Garcilasso knew Quichua, but he was a child, and only twenty when he went to Spain. It was after an interval of forty years that he thought of writing about his native country. Blas Valera, like Garcilasso, was half a Peruvian, and Quichua was his native language. But unlike Garcilasso, instead of going to Spain when he was twenty, he worked for Peru and its people for thirty years, devoting himself to a study of the history, literature, and ancient customs of his countrymen, receiving their records and legends from the older Amautas and Quipucamayocs who could remember the Inca rule, and their lists of kings. His perfect mastery of the language enabled him to do this with a thoroughness which no Spaniard could approach.
Blas Valera brought his writings with him to Spain, doubtless with a view to publication. He had written a 'Historia del Peru' in Latin which, after his death, was given to the Inca Garcilasso, who made very extensive use of it.[1] According to the bibliographers, Antonio and Leon Pinelo, another work by Blas Valera was 'De los Indies del Peru, sus costumbres y pacificacion.' It was lost. But in 1879 Jimenez de la Espada found a most valuable manuscript on the same subject
- ↑ See his life, which forms the subject of another chapter, p. 260.
