Within fifty years of the first sighting of San Salvador, the Spaniards had plundered and conquered the New World from California to the tip of South America. The work of these courageous and brutal conquerors planted the word conquistadores in our vocabularies. By 1521 Hernando Cortes, equipped with horses, armor, and gunpowder, had destroyed the great Aztec empire in Mexico, and by 1533 Francisco Pizarro had treacherously murdered Atahualpa, the monarch of the Incas, and brought the once mighty empire to its knees.
