Through South America
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Title: Through South America
Author: Harry Weston Van Dyke
Author of introduction, etc.: John Barrett
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THROUGH
SOUTH AMERICA
BY
HARRY WESTON VAN DYKE
WITH INTRODUCTION BY
JOHN BARRETT
DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE PAN AMERICAN UNION
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1912,
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY.
_Published October, 1912._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
MY FRIEND
JOHN BARRETT
IN TOKEN OF MY ESTEEM AND MY APPRECIATION OF
HIS MANY KINDNESSES
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
BY HON. JOHN BARRETT, DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF THE PAN AMERICAN UNION AND
FORMERLY UNITED STATES MINISTER TO ARGENTINA, PANAMA, AND
COLOMBIA
I have real pleasure in complying with the suggestion that I should
write an introduction to this interesting and instructive work by Mr.
Harry Weston Van Dyke. As it was through me that he was led to make his
studies and investigations which resulted in the preparing of this book,
I naturally find much gratification in the success with which he has
handled the responsibility. No one can read his travel story of South
America without being impressed with the importance of these countries,
the enjoyment and value of visiting them, and the advantage of the
development of closer relations between all of them and the United
States.
As the executive officer of the Pan American Union, an international
organization maintained in Washington by all the American republics,
twenty-one in number, including the United States, for the advancement
of commerce, friendship, and peace among them all, it is my lot to
realize, possibly better than any one else, the remarkable growth of
interest which is being manifested now, not only throughout the United
States but in all parts of the world, in the countries of the southern
portions of the American continent commonly classed as Latin America.
When the Pan American Union was reorganized about five years ago, and it
began an active propaganda for making the twenty Latin American
republics better known in the United States, and correspondingly, the
United States better known among them, there was little cause for
encouragement. The average newspaper editor, the man in public life, the
manufacturer, the exporter, the importer, the traveler, and the student
seemed to be largely absorbed in studying and watching the development
of our commercial relations with Europe and the Orient, and not with
Latin America. The persistent and continued effort, however, of the Pan
American Union in educating the world to the importance of the Latin
American countries and to an appreciation of the commercial
opportunities and moral responsibilities of the United States in its
relations with them, has now resulted in a complete change of conditions
which is indeed gratifying. To-day the manufacturers and merchants in
all parts of the world, the editors of American and European and even
Asiatic newspapers, special writers on foreign subjects, lecturers,
members of Congress, professors and students in universities and
colleges, librarians, professional and amateur travelers are
corresponding with the Pan American Union or visiting its headquarters
in order to gain accurate information about the Latin American
republics.
As an illustration of this growth of interest a few comparisons can be
made. Five years ago the total number of printed reports, pamphlets, and
other publications distributed by the Pan American Union was
approximately one hundred thousand. This year, the total will
approximate nearly one million. None of these have been sent broadcast
in a careless way. Five years ago there was little or no demand for the
“Monthly Bulletin” of the Pan American Union; now the demand for it is
greater than can be supplied. Then it was an uninteresting public
document; to-day it is an attractive and instructive illustrated
magazine, descriptive of the progress and development of the American
nations. Five years ago the Pan American Union was housed in a small
building, used formerly as a private dwelling, on the corner of
Lafayette Square and Pennsylvania Avenue; to-day it occupies a building
which a great French architect has described as combining beauty and
utility better than any other public building of its cost in the world.
The library of the Pan American Union, which is a practical collection
of books useful to all persons who wish to study those countries, has
been increased from twelve thousand to twenty-three thousand volumes,
while its collection of photographs has grown from one thousand to
eleven thousand.
During this same period the foreign commerce of Latin America has grown
from one billion seven hundred million dollars ($1,700,000,000) to two
billion three hundred million dollars ($2,300,000,000). Of this, the
share of the United States has increased from less than five hundred
million dollars ($500,000,000) to nearly seven hundred million dollars
($700,000,000).
The total annual contributions of all the American republics, including
the United States, for the maintenance of the Pan American Union in 1906
was $54,000; now the total of their quotas for support approximates
$125,000.
All these facts I mention, not to call attention to the Pan American
Union especially, but to emphasize with actual truth the evidences of
the growth of interest throughout the world in the countries which are
described in part by Mr. Van Dyke in this practical volume. If its
reading stimulates further interest in them, the Pan American Union will
be only too glad to furnish any information in its power.
While this book will perhaps be most appreciated by persons who are
contemplating a visit to Latin America, it should be read by all those
who wish to know more of what the American nations aside from the United
States are doing. What is their interesting history, what are their
resources, what are the characteristics of their peoples, what is the
progress being made by them in national and municipal government, in
education, and in solving social and economic problems? Most of the
people of the United States and even of Europe have been so absorbed in
their own histories, development, and general progress that they have
given little attention to the twenty republics of southern America.
After reading Mr. Van Dyke’s story they cannot fail to appreciate that
there are other important nations and peoples in the world than those of
northern America, Europe, and Asia.
Possibly a few general facts may be mentioned here which will enable the
reader better to appreciate what follows in the chapters of this book.
It must be remembered that the twenty republics lying south of the
United States in the Western Hemisphere occupy an area of nine million
square miles. This is three times greater than the connected area of the
United States. Their total population now exceeds seventy millions. This
is seven-ninths of the total population of the United States. Their
foreign trade—and commerce is often called the life blood of nations—now
exceeds two billion three hundred million dollars ($2,300,000,000) a
year, which in turn represents an increase of nearly one billion dollars
($1,000,000,000) during the last ten years. Nearly all of these
countries secured their independence under the leadership of generals
and patriots who were inspired by the example of George Washington.
Nearly all of them have written their constitutions with the
constitution of the United States as their example. All of them to-day
are watching the United States in its efforts to solve its endless
variety of social and economic problems, and they will profit by the
example which the United States sets them.
They are not to be classed as lands of revolution, because two-thirds of
all Latin America has known practically no revolution during the last
fifteen or twenty years. The revolutions which occurred should possibly
be called evolutions, and are efforts of their peoples, even though
sometimes crude, to improve their permanent conditions of prosperity and
progress. They are not by any means solely “tropical lands,” as is often
supposed or as may be judged from a glance at the map. The great
southern section of South America, including southern Brazil, Uruguay,
Argentina, Chile, and a large section of Bolivia, are in the South
Temperate Zone, where they have climatic conditions corresponding to
those of the United States. The countries, moreover, which are actually
under or near the equator have a mingling of high lands with low lands
which means much for their future development. There are high plateaux
ranging from three thousand to twelve thousand feet above the sea,
covering oftentimes individual areas as large as that of Connecticut or
Massachusetts, where the climate the year round is like that of New
England in June or September and where the white man can live in
corresponding climatic comfort.
Although, because of the slight seasonal changes, the average
temperature of the low-lying lands of the tropical sections is somewhat
trying to the resident of northern bringing up, yet under the influence
of modern methods of sanitation and practical methods of living, they
are being transformed into healthful sections of growing population,
commerce, and influence. The example which the United States has set at
Panama, and the demonstration which this government is giving there of
the possibility of white men thriving in the tropics, is having its
influence throughout the tropical belt of our sister republics and great
changes are resulting.
The approaching completion and opening of the Panama Canal gives a
special interest to this work of Mr. Van Dyke’s. Only the person who has
thoroughly studied what the Panama Canal means, its effect not only upon
the commerce of the world but upon the commerce and influence of the
United States, and what it will do for the Latin American countries, as
well as for the United States, can appreciate fully how important to the
future of the relations of North and South America is the completion of
this mighty waterway. Its opening should be followed not only by a great
development of the export trade of the United States to those countries
but of their export trade to this country. It should cause a remarkable
increase in the travel between North and South America. There is no
better influence for commerce and friendship than that of mutual
acquaintance of peoples of different countries. When the Canal is
completed there should be a great increase in the number of North
Americans going to South America and of South Americans coming to the
North.
When the shipping of the world goes through the Canal, it will have
direct access to a remarkable coast line which heretofore has been so
isolated that it could only be reached from the eastern part of the
United States and the western part of Europe by the long journey around
South America. The coast line which is made immediately accessible by
the Canal reaches for eight thousand miles from the California-Mexican
line south to Cape Horn, three thousand miles from Panama northwest to
San Diego in California and five thousand miles south from Panama to
Punta Arenas. This coast, without the Canal and in its isolated
position, conducts now an average foreign commerce valued at four
hundred million dollars ($400,000,000). With the opening of the Canal
this should be doubled or trebled in the next ten years. It is a safe
prediction that the Panama Canal will have the same influence upon the
western shore, comprising the following countries: Mexico, Salvador,
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and
Chile, which the construction of the transcontinental railways had upon
the Pacific coast of the United States. The fact that their population
and their commercial and industrial development to-day is somewhat
limited is no argument against their possibilities in the future. There
was a time when the best experts and judges in the public and official
life of the United States declared that the Pacific coast of the United
States was not only of little value but never would be of great
consequence. There were, however, some wise men like Seward who
recognized the mighty potentialities of our Pacific coasts and of the
Pacific seas. There is every reason to believe that western or Pacific
Latin America, in view of its varieties of resources and climate, will,
under the influence of the Panama Canal, experience a development and
progress that will astonish the world.
In conclusion, a word can be added of personal appreciation of our
sister republics which I believe will be shared by all those who read
this book and later visit Latin America and study carefully its
possibilities and potentialities. It was my privilege, before being
elected by the vote of all these countries to the position of
Director-General of the Pan American Union five years ago, to have
served as Minister of the United States in such representative countries
of South America as Argentina, Panama, and Colombia. My association with
the officials and the rank and file of the peoples of these countries,
and my travels both in a public and private capacity throughout the
Latin American countries, have developed in me a regard for them that
approaches real affection. The more I have learned and seen of them, the
more I have admired them. They have their faults and weaknesses, as have
the government and the people of the United States; but they have a
great many virtues and numerous favorable features which are too often
overlooked by the critics who have not studied Latin America from a
sympathetic standpoint.
If we of the United States will remember that they are our sister
republics, that they gained their independence under our example, that
they have written their constitutions upon that of the United States,
and that they will learn to love or hate us according as our attitude is
that of sympathy and love or of selfishness and material concern, we
shall in turn gain their confidence and sympathy and they will join with
us in that spirit of Pan American unity and of solidarity which will
make the Western Hemisphere the world’s leader in civilization, in
business, and in enduring friendship among all nations.
JOHN BARRETT.
WASHINGTON, _June 1, 1912_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. HISTORICAL SKETCH 1
II. BRAZIL 133
III. ARGENTINA 190
IV. URUGUAY 228
V. PARAGUAY 239
VI. BOLIVIA 257
VII. CHILE 275
VIII. PERU 314
IX. ECUADOR 352
X. COLOMBIA 375
XI. VENEZUELA 400
XII. THE GUIANAS 424
BIBLIOGRAPHY 429
INDEX 433
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ILLUSTRATIONS
“The Soldier’s Leap” _Frontispiece_
OPPOSITE PAGE
Map of South America 1
Francisco Pizarro 38
Inca Burial Tower near Lake Titicaca 56
Cloisters of Dominican Monastery, Cuzco 56
Cathedral at Lima, built by Pizarro 76
Pizarro’s Palace, Lima—Now the Government Building 90
San Martín’s Passage of the Andes 126
Statue of Bolívar, in Lima 132
The City of Bahia 156
Botafogo Bay, Rio Harbor _between_ 162 _and_ 163
Bay and City of Rio de Janeiro 166
Avenue of Royal Palms, Rio Botanical Gardens 170
Avenida Central, Rio de Janeiro 170
Coffee Plantation, Brazil 184
Colón Theater, Buenos Aires 204
Federal Capitol, Buenos Aires 204
Jockey Club’s Grand Stand at Race Track 210
Prize Winners from “the Camp” 216
The Uspallata Pass 222
Iguazú Falls 226
Solis Theater, Montevideo 232
Cagancha Plaza, Montevideo 232
Government Palace, Asunción 242
View of Asunción and River Paraguay 242
Shrine of Our Lady of Capacabana 266
Town and Mountain of Potosí, Bolivia 266
Church of the Conservidas, La Paz 272
Old Spanish Residence, La Paz 272
Punta Arenas 312
Plaza Mayor, Lima 326
Scene on the Oroya Railway 330
Church of La Merced, Lima 350
Street Scene in Guayaquil 362
Condor of the Andes 362
Room in Old Palace at Quito 374
Overlooking Bogotá 386
A _Posada_ or Country Inn 392
Battlemented Wall, Cartagena 392
View of Maracaibo 404
A Coffee Plantation, Venezuela 414
[Illustration: SOUTH AMERICA]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_Through South America_
I
HISTORICAL SKETCH
I
A little more than four hundred years ago, when Europe was emerging from
the darkness of the Middle Ages into the era of printed books, when the
Field of the Cloth of Gold had impressed the official stamp of culture
on her civilization, when gunpowder was changing the aspect of war—in an
age that produced such intellects as those of Machiavelli, Copernicus,
Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cardinal Wolsey, and John Werner—wise men were
still groping blindly for knowledge about the world in which they lived
that is regarded as elementary by the school children of our day. What
was its shape? What lay beyond the western horizon of the Atlantic, the
vast and stormy _Mare Tenebrosum_ of fabled terror to mariners? What was
south of the African countries bordering the Mediterranean? How far east
did Asia extend? No one knew.
In the year 150 A.D., the learned Alexandrian Claudius Ptolemy had made
a map of Europe and of those parts of Asia and Africa which were then
known, or supposed to exist; and on that map, for the first time in
history, the world was represented as a sphere—_though a stationary
one_. Therefore, speculated those who thought about it at all, assuming
Ptolemy’s theory to be correct, how could a mariner, even were he
successful in navigating his vessel down the awful declivity on one side
of the globe, hope to make it climb up again on the other? How could he
cross the equator, which Aristotle and Pliny had declared was an
uninhabitable zone, so torrid that the earth around was burnt up as with
fire and only marine salamanders, if such monsters existed, could live
in the super-heated waters? And, even if the equator were passable, how
could the frightful abysses into which the ocean was supposed to
discharge itself at the pole be escaped?
Some time in the sixth century a monk named Cosmas had attempted to
answer these questions by means of a theory evolved from a study of the
Bible and more consistent with its descriptions and metaphors. In the
map he made, the world was represented as a level rectangle, its sides
composed of blue walls, supporting a dome that separated the mortal
domain from the Paradise where dwelt the Creator and his angels; and,
fanciful as was this cosmos of Cosmas’ devising, his map was regarded as
the standard of geographical knowledge down to the time of Columbus.
Even after his time the famous astronomer Galileo was imprisoned as a
heretic partly for reasserting the theory of Ptolemy. No one but a few
scientists even imagined that the east could be reached by sailing west;
no one, not even they, yet knew that Africa could be circumnavigated and
the treasures of gorgeous Far Cathay (as China was then called) brought
to Europe’s doors by water. _Yet it was to accomplish that very object
that the series of voyages was begun that led eventually to the
discovery of America._
Venice and Genoa, grown rich and powerful through trade with India and
the nearer countries of the Orient, had for a space enjoyed a prosperity
and revival of culture that were felt throughout Christendom. Then had
come the conquest of Spain and domination of the Mediterranean by the
Moors, and, afterward, the wars of the Crusades, which had checked the
Saracen advance but interrupted all other commerce with the infidels.
Meanwhile, as though to compensate for this loss, the great Mongolian
conqueror Genghis Khan had fulfilled his remarkable destiny and, instead
of adopting measures to prevent it, invited western intercourse with the
countries he had brought under his sway, and China, about which almost
nothing was then generally known, was visited overland by traders,
adventurers, and missionaries. Marco Polo, a Venetian, after spending
more than twenty years in the far east, part of the time in the service
of the Great Khan Kubilay, had returned by way of India and Persia,
laden with jewels of enormous value, and had written a book descriptive
of the countries he had seen and the wealth and customs of the people.
In the fourteenth century, when the Mongolian dynasty was overthrown,
the Asiatics had again turned hostile and the land route was closed.
But during this open season it had become known that Cathay was not the
end of the world, as had been supposed—that there was an ocean beyond
and the wonderful Island of Cipango (Japan) and other islands rich in
spices and costly products; and Europe began to wonder, since the
Tartars barred the route by land, whether these desirable places might
not be accessible by water. “Between wondering and the attempt,” says
Hawthorne, “there was a considerable interval, for the idea was too
novel to be digested all at once. But it was an age of unbridled license
of imagination and of desperate courage. The mere possibility of
encountering perils never until then conceived of was allurement enough,
as, even to-day, our young adventurers go forth to die on the ice fields
of the north and south poles, or in the mysterious heart of savage
Africa, or on the ghastly plateaux of Tibet. In addition, there were the
fabulous rewards that success seemed to promise.”
At first, though, if the plan of sailing west was even thought of, it
would seem to have been regarded as less feasible than that of rounding
Africa. Prince Henry, a son of King John I of Portugal—for it was the
Portuguese, not the Spanish, who were the pioneers in this series of
discoveries—determined to devote his life to the work. Retiring from the
splendors of the Lisbon court, he built an astronomical observatory on
the promontory of Sagres (in southern Portugal), extended its
hospitalities to all the wise men of the age and sent out expedition
after expedition to the south. “Until then,” says Dawson, “nautical
knowledge was very meager. The compass served only to indicate
direction, not distance or position, and did not suffice for the
systematic navigation of the open Atlantic. The Portuguese first made
that possible by using astronomical observations and inventing the
quadrant and astrolabe.”
This knowledge, once acquired, was promptly applied. Madeira was
discovered in 1418, the Canaries in 1427, the Azores in 1432. To the
west the Portuguese ventured no farther, but, continuing south, they
reached Cape Blanco in 1441, Senegambia and Cape Verde in 1445, the Cape
Verde Islands in 1460, and the Gulf of Guinea in 1469. In 1471 they were
the first Europeans to cross the equator. The idea was then conceived
that they had only to keep on and they could round the southern
extremity of the continent and reach Abyssinia and India by sea—a hope
that was realized in 1487 when Bartholomew Dias arrived at last at the
Cape of Good Hope. A few miles beyond, however, he was compelled by the
condition of his crew to return and it remained for his compatriot Vasco
da Gama some years later to double the cape and complete the voyage up
the eastern coast and across the Indian Ocean to Hindustan.
II
The significance of these early voyages of the Portuguese lies in the
fact that thereby it was demonstrated that a shorter route was
needed—that with the very small and badly equipped vessels of the period
the trip around the Cape of Good Hope, at least for commercial purposes,
was impracticable; also in the fact that with Dias had sailed the
Genoese navigator Bartholomew Columbus, a brother of the discoverer of
America.
Years before that first great achievement, Christopher Columbus—who had
studied at the University of Pavia and had himself taken part in one or
more of Prince Henry’s African expeditions, and even ventured to the
northwest, probably as far as Iceland—had been converted to the theory
that the world was round and that the oceans west of Europe and east of
Cathay were the same. As a consequence, he had concluded, the East
Indies (as India, China, Japan, and the other countries and islands east
of the Indian Ocean were indiscriminately called) _could be reached from
Europe by sailing west_. Eighteen years before he was finally enabled to
put this theory to the test, he had written Toscanelli, one of the
foremost astronomers of the time, asking his opinion as to this
possibility. Toscanelli sent him a copy of a letter he had written
shortly before to King Alfonso of Portugal on the same subject, in which
he said:
“I have formerly spoken of a shorter route to the places of
spices than you are pursuing by Guinea. Although I am well aware
that this can be proved by the spherical shape of the earth, in
order to make the point clearer I have decided to exhibit that
route by means of a sailing chart, made by my own hands, whereon
are laid down your coasts and the islands from which you must
begin to shape your course steadily westward, the places at
which you are bound to arrive and how far from the pole or
equator you ought to keep away.” (Neither in the chart nor in
the description was there indication of anything whatever
resembling the continents of North and South America.) “From the
city of Lisbon as far as the very great and splendid city of
Quinsay” (Pekin), he continued, “are twenty-six spaces, each of
250 miles. This space is about a third of the whole sphere. But
from the Island of Antilia, which you know, to the very splendid
Island of Cipango” (Japan) “there are ten spaces. _So, through
the unknown parts of the route, the stretches of sea are not
great._”
In his letter to Columbus he congratulates him on having undertaken an
enterprise—
“Fraught with honor, as it must be, and inestimable gain and
most lofty fame among all Christian peoples. It will be a voyage
to powerful kingdoms” (he prophetically added, though he had
never even dreamed of the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas)
“and to cities and provinces most wealthy and noble. It will
also be advantageous to those kings and princes who are eager to
have dealings and make alliances with the Christians of other
countries. For these and many other reasons, I do not wonder
that you, who are of great courage, and the whole Portuguese
nation, which has always had men distinguished in such
enterprises, are now inflamed with a desire to make the voyage.”
Thus encouraged, Columbus began his efforts to secure patronage and
money for the expedition. He tried in his birthplace, Genoa, and in
Portugal and Spain, even in England, where he was accompanied by his
brother Bartholomew after the latter’s return from the voyage to the
Cape of Good Hope, and suffered many refusals. Toscanelli had been dead
eight years before he at last succeeded; and then, had he known that the
distance from Lisbon to the coast of Asia was in fact some 13,000 miles,
or twice that which the astronomer had estimated, and that, even so, the
route straight across was barred by the Isthmus of Panama—had he known
that Cathay did not, as his mentor believed, extend some thousands of
miles farther east than it does, even such a man as Columbus might have
abandoned the project as chimerical when the cockleshells then available
for ocean travel were taken into consideration. Nor, if she too had not
been misled by the same “valuable pieces of ignorance,” is it likely
that his plea would have prevailed on the practical Isabella of Castile,
however elated and invincible she may have felt over the taking of the
last of the Saracen strongholds at Granada and the expulsion of the
Moors from Spain, for in that she was engaged when Columbus finally
succeeded in securing her aid.
Fortunately, however, whatever might have happened if Toscanelli had not
held the voyage to be practicable, Columbus was not only a man of
indomitable spirit but possessed of a presence that inspired in others
the confidence he felt in himself. A man of striking personality, he is
said to have been about forty-five years of age at the time, tall, well
formed, and dignified, with sharp gray eyes, alight with “that divine
spark of enthusiasm which makes true genius,” and hair prematurely
white. And so, in spite of his many disheartening failures, he did not
abandon the project; so also was Queen Isabella sufficiently impressed
by his learning and appearance to agree, in consideration of a fifth
share in the profits, that he should have the rank of Admiral and
govern, as Viceroy, all the lands that he might discover and bring under
her dominion. With the great astronomer’s chart before him, therefore,
and vowing to devote his share of the profits to the rescue of the Holy
Sepulcher, he set out from Palos, Spain, on the 3d of August, 1492. His
vessels, the _Niña_, _Pinta_ (well named the “Pint Cup”), and _Santa
María_, bore a company of but ninety, including the crews.
After a voyage of ten weeks, filled with difficulties and hardships,
even threats of mutiny, that taxed his courage and diplomacy to the
utmost, he came to land on an island (now known as Watling’s) on the
outward bow of the Bahamas, to which he gave the name of San Salvador.
The wild beauty of the foliage, the tropical luxuriance, the clear,
fresh-water streams, the soft climate and perfume-laden breezes, more
than ever delightful to men who had given themselves up for lost, and
the natives themselves, bedecked with gold ornaments and dusky-skinned
as those of Cathay were said to be—all seemed what might have been
expected in the outlying spice islands of the east. So, supposing this
to be one of those islands of which they were in quest, the adventurers
cruised about for ten days more and finally arrived at Cuba, which they
assumed to be Cipango.
In his infatuation, Columbus now saw his journey’s end. He had, he
thought, but to sail a few courses farther to reach the mainland of
Cathay, exchange compliments with the Great Khan at Quinsay, and return
in triumph with the wealth he was to amass and herald the news of his
wonderful achievement to a skeptical Europe. _And all the while Cathay
was ten thousand miles away—due west!_ Sailing across the strait to
Hayti, he was directed south by the natives when questioned as to the
source of their gold; but there, for the time being, his explorations
were brought to an end. The flagship was wrecked on a sand bar and
Pinzon, captain of one of the remaining two, stole treacherously away,
to anticipate the Admiral in announcing the discoveries in Spain.
Leaving a volunteer colony of about forty men to await his return with
reinforcements, however, he at once set sail, overtook and captured the
deserters, and, on the way back to Palos, was driven into the port of
Lisbon by a gale.
“The news of his exploit set all Portugal afire,” says Hawthorne.
“The King was urged to have Columbus run through the body and to
appropriate his discovery; but John II perceived that there was
more peril than profit in such a scheme, and he invited him to
court and made much of him instead. In due time he resumed his
voyage and reached Palos on the 15th of March. This was
Columbus’ apogee. He was called to Barcelona and welcomed in
triumph; he was even allowed to sit down in the august presence
of Ferdinand and Isabella. The half dozen Caribs he had brought
with him were assumed to be East Indians and the Admiral’s
interpretation of his discoveries was accepted without question.
The little detail that nothing of oriental magnificence—no Great
Khans, no mighty cities—had yet been revealed, was passed over.
Land had been found and it could be nothing but Cipango and
Cathay. The short route to the Indies had been discovered for
Spain.”
This so completely overshadowed all that Portugal had accomplished that
an intense rivalry sprang up between the two powers. The Pope, as the
Vicar of Christ on earth, and accordingly the repository of the title to
all lands still occupied by infidel peoples, was appealed to to confirm
the discoveries to Spain. He issued a bull granting to His Most Catholic
Majesty the lands then, and such as might thereafter be, discovered in
the western sea, and to the Portuguese such as they might discover by
way of the African route. This was supplemented by a second to the
effect that only those lands lying west of a meridian of longitude a
hundred miles west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands should belong to
the Spaniards. Dissatisfied even with that division, the Portuguese
demanded a line still farther west, and, by a treaty signed at
Tordesillas in June, 1494, Spain agreed that it should be advanced in
that direction 370 leagues. This resulted eventually in giving Portugal
title to the then yet undiscovered country of Brazil.
Meanwhile, on the 25th of September, 1493, Columbus set out on his
second expedition—this time with seventeen ships and fifteen hundred
men, among them his brothers Bartholomew and Diego and many adventurers
of noble rank, for there was no lack either of men or money now. “Their
dreams,” Professor Fiske tell us, “were of the marble palaces of
Quinsay, of islands of spices and the treasures of the mythical Prester
John. The sovereigns wept for joy as they thought that such untold
riches were vouchsafed them as a reward for having overcome the Moor at
Granada. Columbus shared these views and regarded himself as a special
instrument for executing the divine decrees. He renewed his vow to
rescue the Holy Sepulcher, promising within seven years to equip, at his
own expense, a crusading army of fifty thousand foot and four thousand
horse.” When the fleet arrived at Hayti and the company landed at the
place where the little colony had been left, it was found that it had
been annihilated. Not a whit dismayed by that, however, Columbus ordered
a town to be built and the island, which he named Española (Little
Spain), became the base of hundreds of exploring expeditions undertaken
by the hordes of adventurers that followed in his wake and soon overran
the neighboring islands.
Columbus himself made two other voyages, in the course of which he
discovered Jamaica and the Island of Trinidad at the mouth of the
Orinoco, reached the southern shores of Cuba, and, having heard rumors
of another ocean to the west, coasted along the Central American
mainland in search of a passage through. There he found stone houses and
towns and what appeared to be a semi-civilized people, who wore clothes
and knew how to weave cotton, embalm their dead, and carve ornaments on
their tombs, and who had plenty of gold; and all this only confirmed his
conviction that he was drawing nearer the countries of his quest. During
this period, however, his fame was in turn overshadowed by that of Vasco
da Gama, who had at last succeeded in discovering the African route to
the Orient and had actually seen some of those spice islands and mighty
cities that Columbus was still only searching for on the other side of
the world so many thousands of miles away.
In 1506, soon after his return from his fourth expedition, he died at
Valladolid, discredited and defrauded of his viceregal powers, a victim
of treachery, jealousy, and intrigue, yet still believing that he had
found the western route to the Indies. Even then “nobody had the
faintest idea of what he had accomplished,” says Professor Fiske.
“Nothing like it was ever done before and nothing like it can ever be
done again. No worlds are left for future Columbuses to conquer. The era
of which this great Italian was the most illustrious representative had
closed forever.”
III
Having, in the interval between the second Columbian expedition and the
discovery of the African route by Vasco da Gama, induced Spain to agree
to the extension of the Papal meridian 370 leagues farther west, the
Portuguese continued their activities with renewed ardor. In March,
1500, on his way to the Cape of Good Hope, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, a
Portuguese nobleman in command of an expedition intended to resume the
work begun by Da Gama, was blown across the Atlantic to the coasts of
Brazil, where he touched at a point in the southern part of what is now
the State of Bahia. Under the impression that it was an island, and
assuming that it lay east of the Tordesillas treaty line, he landed and
took possession in the name of his King. The news having reached
Portugal in the Fall of the same year, no time was lost in asserting
title and sending out a small fleet to ascertain the extent and
resources of the region, also in the hope that a wealthy and civilized
people like that of Hindustan would be found.
This expedition was placed under the command of Amerigo Vespucci, a
Florentine astronomer and navigator, who had already made two voyages
for Spain and skirted the coast of Yucatan and the northern continent,
around Florida, as far north as the Chesapeake. Setting sail now to the
south, he made a systematic examination of the Brazilian coast for two
thousand miles. All he found that seemed to have any immediate
commercial value were immense quantities of a dyewood known in Europe as
“_brazil_” (the color of fire); it was from this, of course, that the
country took its name. The Portuguese, being by that time, however, too
engrossed in their African mines and sugar plantations and East Indian
trade to think it worth while to found colonies in such a region, did
nothing to develop it until thirty years had passed by and it became
necessary for them to protect their rights, particularly from the
French, who had been tempted by the great demand for the dyewood to
engage in coastwise poaching on a large scale.
For this reason, to his contemporaries, the most interesting feature of
Vespucci’s report was the conviction he expressed that this country
south of the equator was neither Asia nor an island, _but a new
continent_, or, as he himself called it, a “new world”—“for it
transcends the ideas of the ancients,” he said in a letter to his friend
Soderini, “since most of them declare that, beyond the equator to the
south, there is no continent but only the sea which they call the
Atlantic; but this last voyage of mine has proved that this opinion of
theirs is erroneous, because in these southern regions I have found a
continent more thickly inhabited by peoples and animals than our Europe
or Asia or Africa, and, moreover, a climate more temperate and agreeable
than any known to us.” In 1504 this letter was published under the title
“_Mundus Novus_.” The term “new world” caught the popular fancy, and
although, in 1497, Columbus first of all, and later Vespucci himself
with Alonso de Ojeda, had cruised along and touched at points on its
Caribbean coast, by virtue of his Brazilian explorations Vespucci was
acclaimed the discoverer.
And therein was the source of the confusion that gave to South America,
and eventually to the northern continent as well, the name they bear
rather than one commemorative of Columbus. No one suspected that there
were _two_ oceans instead of only the Atlantic between Europe and Asia;
that the land Amerigo Vespucci had explored south of the equator was of
a piece with that discovered by Columbus to the north. It was conceived
to be entirely detached from and to the south of _Cathay_, which
Columbus was still supposed to have reached, and to lie in a position
somewhat similar to that which Australia was afterward found to occupy.
Consequently, when in 1507 Mathias Ringmann published his “_Introductio
Cosmographie_,” he proposed that this (as he estimated it) “fourth part
of the globe” be called “_Amerigo_.” The following year Martinus
Waldseemüller published his map, whereon for the first time the name
“America” appeared. Investigation has made it clear that there was no
attempt, as Vespucci’s maligners charged, to immortalize his name at the
expense of Columbus. The southern continent was not named for Columbus
simply because it was thought to be distinct from his discoveries; the
northern, because it was thought already to have been named Cathay.
At last, when the existence across the Atlantic of a continuous stretch
of land had been comprehended, and when, in the light of the Portuguese
discoveries by way of the African route, it was realized that these
strange coasts did not in the least coincide with the ideas formed of
them by those who had assumed them to be Asiatic, the conviction grew
that the fabulous treasure lands of the Orient had not been reached by
this western route at all. _The whole stretch must be embraced in the
new world_, it was concluded; _there must be another ocean than the
Atlantic beyond_. “Rumors of it had been heard, or glimpses caught,
perhaps, at one time or another,” says Hawthorne, “before the actual
fact was understood. Meanwhile Spain was very anxious to get through or
around this singular barrier of islands, or whatever it was that was
keeping her from sharing the profits that Da Gama had brought to
Portugal from Hindustan, and she sent out expeditions to accomplish it.”
In 1505 Amerigo Vespucci (who had returned to the Spanish flag), with La
Cosa, explored the Gulf of Darien and penetrated two hundred miles up
the Atrato, thinking it might prove a strait leading to the Asiatic
waters. Juan de Solis was trying to find it when he explored the Rio de
la Plata and met his death at the hands of the natives. Jacques Cartier
was seeking it when he explored the St. Lawrence, D’Ayllon when he tried
the Chesapeake and James, and Hendrik Hudson when he ascended the river
that bears his name.
In 1513, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, Governor of Darien, a valiant adventurer
who had been prominent in the conquest and colonization of the Isthmus,
undertook by means of an expedition by land to ascertain whether such an
ocean did really exist. Starting with a company of about a hundred and
ninety Spaniards and a few Indians, he skirted the coast of Panama to a
point near Cape Tiburon, and there disembarked and headed inland. For
twenty days his party persevered over forest-clad swamps, valleys, and
mountains, fought a pitched battle with the natives, and finally cut its
way through the dense undergrowth to the heights overlooking what is now
known as the Gulf of San Miguel, on the Pacific side, and thus resolved
all doubt into certainty and completed an event which, declares Dawson,
“was second in its far-reaching consequences only to Columbus’ first
voyage.” Balboa dubbed it the Southern Sea, little thinking that it was
a body of water more vast than the Atlantic that he had found to bar the
way to Cathay. “So elated was he over his epoch-making discovery,” says
Mozans, quoting from an early chronicler, that—
“With no lesse manlye courage than Hannibal of Carthage shewed
his souldiers Italye and the promontories of the Alps, he
exhorted his men to lyft up theyre hartes and to behoulde the
land even now under theyre feete and the sea before theyre eyes,
which shoulde bee unto them a full and juste reward of theyre
great laboures and trauayles now ouerpassed. When he had sayde
these woordes, he commanded them to raise certeine heapes of
stones in the steede of altars for a token of possession. Then,
descendynge from the toppes of the mountaynes, lest such as
might come after hym shoulde argu hym of lyinge and falshod, he
wrote the Kyng of Castelles his name here and there on the
barkes of the trees, both on the ryght hande and on the lefte,
and raysed heapes of stones all the way that he went untyll he
came to the region of the nexte Kynge towarde the south, whose
name was Chiapes.”
“The act of taking possession was so typical of similar formalities of
the Conquistadores,” continues Mozans, “that I transcribe from Oviedo
his account of the manner in which Balboa and his companions claimed for
his sovereign the Sea of the South, all islands in it and all lands
bordering on it, in what part of the world soever. Armed with his sword
and bearing aloft a banner on which were painted an image of the Blessed
Virgin and the Divine Child and the arms of Castile and Leon, Balboa,
followed by his associates, entered the water until it rose above his
knees, when in a loud voice he said:
“‘Long live the high and mighty monarchs, Don Ferdinand and Doña
Juana, Sovereigns of Castile, of Leon and of Aragon, in whose
name and for the royal crown of Castile, I take real and
corporal and actual possession of these seas and lands and
coasts and ports and islands of the south, and all thereunto
annexed, and of the kingdoms and provinces which do or may
appertain to them, in whatever manner or by whatever right or
title, ancient or modern, in times past, present or to come,
without any contradiction; and if other prince or captain,
Christian or infidel, or of any law, sect or condition
whatsoever, shall pretend any right to these islands and seas, I
am ready and prepared to maintain and defend them in the name of
the Castilian Sovereigns, present and future, whose is the
empire and dominion over these Indias, islands and _terra
firma_, northern and southern, with all their seas, both at the
arctic and antarctic poles, on either side of the equinoctial
line, whether within or without the tropics of Cancer and
Capricorn, both now and at all times so long as the world shall
endure and until the final judgment of all mankind.’ And then
the Notary, who always accompanied such expeditions, was ordered
to make on the spot an exact record of what had been said and
done, which was duly signed and authenticated by all present.”
It was to the Portuguese navigator Fernão de Magalhães (Ferdinand
Magellan in the English rendering of the name) that the honor finally
fell of being the first, not alone to find the passage through the new
continent that was being so eagerly sought, but to cross by the western
route to the East Indies and thereby blaze the way to making geography
an exact science. He had already been to the Moluccas by the African
route, and, disgusted by the failure of his King suitably to reward his
services, had transferred his allegiance to Spain and managed to secure
from the Emperor Charles V a commission and five ships, the largest of
but 120 tons’ burden. On the 20th of September, 1419, he sailed from the
Guadalquivir, with a crew numbering 280, all told, and, having entered
the Plata River and satisfied himself that it was not a strait, ran down
the Patagonian coast through many storms until he found shelter in the
harbor of St. Julian, where, on Easter Sunday, a mutiny broke out that
only a man of such remarkable courage and resourcefulness as Magellan
possessed could have suppressed. It had been a hard voyage, the chances
of finding the strait seemed slim, there was only the prospect that
there they must remain throughout the antarctic winter in idleness and
discomfort; it is small wonder that they wanted to desert.
However, during the last week in August spring began (the seasons are
reversed south of the equator, it must be remembered) and the fleet,
without the _Santiago_, which had been wrecked, proceeded to the south.
After experiencing much more bad weather, they made Cape Virgins on the
21st of October and entered a large bay, which was flanked by lofty
mountains, crowned with glaciers and snow. This at last was the entrance
to the passage, but at that very point one of the vessels, the _San
Antonio_, seized an opportunity to make its escape and return to Spain.
“For five weeks,” as Hawthorne relates, “the remaining three ships wound
along through the tortuous channel. Provisions were running short, yet
Magellan would not turn back ‘even if he had to eat the leather off the
ships’ yards.’ At length his persistence was rewarded by a sight of the
open sea. ‘When,’ to quote Richard Eden, ‘the Capitayne was past the
strayght and saw the way open to the mayne sea, he was so gladde thereof
that for joy the teares fell from his eyes and he named the poynte of
the lande from whense he first saw that sea Cape Desiderato.’ And the
broad ocean which lay before him was so calm, after his many stormful
days, that he called it the Pacific.”
“But months of a voyage as trying as any they had encountered still lay
before them,” Hawthorne goes on. “Could the planet be so vast? Until
December they kept a northerly course, then struck out boldly across the
unknown waste. They ran across one or two islands, but erelong were
swallowed up in the seemingly endless immensity of ocean. They were
reduced to the utmost extremities for food and water; scurvy broke out;
nineteen men died and thirty were too ill to work. Finally, on the 6th
of March, they reached the Ladrone Islands, so named because of the
thievishness of the natives. Here they got fruit and other food, and the
worst was over. Ten days later the Philippines were sighted and Magellan
knew the extent of his achievement. He had sailed round the world.
Happier than Columbus, he did not survive this mightiest exploit of his
time; in a fight with the natives the great sailor was killed.”
Only one of the little vessels ever got back to Spain. Returning by way
of Africa, she arrived at the Guadalquivir in September, a year after
she had set out, and with but eighteen survivors of the expedition.
“What a picture!” the historian exclaims—“those eighteen seaworn
mariners in their battered craft, survivors of the greatest feat of
navigation that has ever been performed. What a poem is their story,
what an event in the history of mankind! What reward did Magellan have?
None that mortal could bestow. He was dead and his wife and son had also
died. Del Cano, the captain of the ship, was given a crest, with the
legend, on a terrestrial globe, ‘_Primus circumdedisti me_,’ together
with a pension of five hundred ducats, and Espinosa was likewise
pensioned and ennobled. But every mariner who sails the seas knows
Magellan and the story of his exploit, and mankind accords him the honor
that Spain could not bestow. Of all the great explorers, he is perhaps
the one whose character and deeds we can contemplate with the most
unalloyed satisfaction.”
IV
Until the great Dutch navigator, Willim Cornelis Schouten, found the way
around Cape Horn nearly a hundred years later, however, no practical
advantage over her rival resulted to Spain from Magellan’s
discoveries—so far as trade with the East Indies was concerned, that is.
The passage through the Strait was too perilous for sailing vessels, the
distance across the Pacific too great. Yet only a year before Magellan
set out on his famous voyage an era began in her new possessions that
was to pour into her coffers a stream of gold in comparison with which
the profits Portugal was deriving from her trade with the Orient seemed
trivial. For in that year Hernando Cortés, the greatest soldier and
statesman Spain ever sent to the new world, began his conquest of
Mexico.
Except for the spirit of emulation it inspired, except for the knowledge
it brought of the existence in the newly discovered countries of a
people less barbarous than the aborigines of the Antilles, of mines that
were worth while and of enormous hoards of treasure, the story of that
conquest has no place in the history of South America, and, therefore,
will not be gone into here. It is related somewhere as an interesting
commentary that in an obscure little house in the City of Mexico still
lives a modest, well-educated gentleman who is directly descended from
the Emperor of the Aztecs. Señor Montezuma entertains no hope of a
restoration, it is said, but quietly accepts the meager pension allowed
him by the present government, while the heirs of Cortés receive immense
revenues from their Mexican estates and the Marquis del Valle, as the
present-day Cortés is called, lives in luxury and is a man of influence
and power in the land.
In 1526, Sebastian Cabot was commissioned by the King of Spain to locate
the Papal meridian in America and then to follow in Magellan’s track and
determine the corresponding longitude on the Asiatic side; but, when he
put in at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, he heard rumors of a great
and wealthy people who dwelt near the headwaters of the river—rumors
like those Grijalva had heard respecting the Aztecs and which had led to
the Mexican conquest by Cortés; only these wonderful accounts were of a
South American empire. In proof of what they said, the Indians of the
Plata exhibited silver ornaments that had passed from hand to hand from
the highlands of Bolivia and Peru, along the river to the Atlantic; and,
too strongly tempted to resist, and trusting that the discovery of the
rich mines from which this silver came would excuse their disobedience,
Cabot and his company abandoned their survey and spent three years
exploring and prospecting along the Uruguay and Paraná as far north as
the present site of the city of Asunción. As their forces and provisions
were inadequate to enable them to penetrate farther, the search was in
vain; and so, having found, on their return to a fort they had
established, that it had been taken by the Indians and the garrison
massacred, Cabot abandoned the effort and went back to Spain to make
what explanation he could.
The news of this supposed encroachment, added to the ever increasing
poaching of the French, proved what was needed to stimulate the
Portuguese at last to make a serious attempt at colonization in Brazil.
One Christovão Jaques and a few settlers had already established a small
sugar factory in the neighborhood of the present site of Pernambuco, and
it had been found that much of the land in the northern part of the
country was admirably adapted to the cultivation of that staple, the
demand for which in Europe was constantly increasing. Five vessels were
sent out, therefore, under the command of Martim Affonso da Souza. Early
in 1531 he drew near Cape St. Roque, captured three French ships laden
with brazil wood, sent part of his own fleet north to explore the coast
beyond, and with the other ships sailed south and dropped anchor near
the site of what is now the great coffee port of Santos. There he
established São Vicente, the first permanent colony in Brazil.
There also they came across one João Ramalho, a former sailor who had
been put ashore for mutiny years before by a ship on its way to India
and was living among the natives of the neighborhood with his half-breed
children. Glad enough to welcome his countrymen, he disposed the Indians
to peace and showed the Portuguese the way up the mountains to the vast
plateau that begins only a few miles from the sea. There, near the
present site of São Paulo, was founded another settlement, from whence
they could stretch out in all directions over what was destined to
become the greatest coffee-producing country in the world.
A year or two afterward, encouraged by Da Souza’s success, Duarte Coelho
set out with a carefully selected and more numerous company and founded
the colony of Pernambuco. Here, as in the south, the country back of the
coast was fertile and easily accessible and there was little trouble
with the Indians. Sugar planting proved wonderfully profitable, Coelho
turned out to be a good manager, and so politic was he in the relations
with the mother country that within a few years the colony had become
self-supporting and, like the other, possessed of all the elements of
permanence and prosperity. Soon afterward São Salvador da Bahia was
established. With such a beginning, it was not long before the
Portuguese began flocking to Brazil as the Spaniards had to the
Caribbean.
V
In the meanwhile in this region of the Caribbean much progress had been
made. Towns had been built, not only in Española, but in Cuba, Jamaica,
Porto Rico and in Darien and other places on the Isthmus, landed estates
(_repartimientos_) had been apportioned, as rewards for services, among
such as desired to cultivate them, mining rights had been allotted.
These plantations and the mines were being worked by natives impressed
into slavery, some of the communities had become large and thriving, in
Spain a Council of the Indies and in the islands local governmental
tribunals (_Real Audiencias_) had been created.
Whole fleets of ships plied back and forth across the Atlantic, those
setting out from Spain laden with implements of agriculture and war,
clothes, and fresh companies of adventurers, coming over as colonists,
or to continue the work of conquest and the search for treasure; those
returning, laden with the products of the tropics and with gold and
precious stones. Emeralds had been found near the coast of Colombia, and
Balboa had discovered in the Gulf of San Miguel—that famous group of
islands where, as Mozans tells us, “pearls were so common that the
natives used them for adorning the paddles of their canoes”—pearls “as
large as filberts and of exceeding beauty of form and luster,” many of
which, “found in the same fisheries a short time subsequently, at once
took place among the largest and most perfect of the world’s gems.”
Nevertheless, neither there nor anywhere else in the Caribbean region,
had any vast wealth and civilization comparable to that of the Mexicans
been discovered. Balboa, however, had married, according to the Indian
custom, the daughter of a _cacique_ (native chief), and, being in the
confidence of the Indians of his province, had heard rumors, even before
the conquest of Mexico, of a rich and powerful empire to the south (the
same that were afterward heard by Cabot); and, after he had been
succeeded as Governor by his jealous rival, the notorious Pedrarias
Davila, was commissioned to take charge of an expedition to go in search
of it. Already he had accomplished the unheard-of task of taking four
ships to pieces on the Caribbean shore, transporting them across the
Isthmus and reconstructing them on the shore of San Miguel, and, when
about to sail, had been arrested by order of Pedrarias, tried on a
charge of treason, and executed before he could appeal to Spain. Some
years later, having forestalled his great rival in that summary way,
Pedrarias entrusted the venture to one Francisco Pizarro, an
opportunist, without money, rank, or credit, and then nearly fifty years
old, yet one who startled the world by an achievement equaled only by
Cortés’ own.
Francisco Pizarro had been but a swineherd in his boyhood, but later had
served under Gonzolo de Cordova (_El Gran Capitan_) in that splendid
body of infantrymen which fought its way to the foremost rank in Europe,
and was a son, too, though an illegitimate one, of a Spanish officer of
noble blood. For such a man, as Dawson says, “an admirable soldier,
conscious that he possessed powers of the highest order yet hopelessly
handicapped in old Europe by his base birth and illiteracy, the
discovery of the new world opened up a field for his talents” that led
him “eagerly to embrace the opportunity to embark with Alonso de Ojeda
in 1509 for the Darien gold mines.” His first appearance in history is
as a member of the party that went with Balboa to search for the
Pacific; afterward he was among the first of “the adventurers that
flocked to the new city of Panama, looking over the mysterious sea, like
a pack of wolves eager for a share in the spoils of its unknown shores;”
later he happened to be the officer chosen by Pedrarias for Balboa’s
arrest.
As he had no funds of his own, and since it was the custom of the times
for the Conquistadores who undertook such expeditions to do so at their
own expense, he associated with him a priest named Hernando de Luque,
who had some capital, and Diego de Almagro, a soldier of still more
advanced age but of ability and good reputation. It was agreed that the
Padre de Luque should contribute the funds, that Almagro should attend
to the collecting and forwarding of troops and supplies, and that
Pizarro himself should have the active command. Whereupon they bought
one of the ships that had been carried across the Isthmus by Balboa and
set out on their first expedition in 1524. As so frequently occurred in
such cases, however, inadequacy of provisions caused the venture to
fail.
[Illustration: FRANCISCO PIZARRO.]
Eighteen months later they sailed again, with a much larger stock of
supplies and this time with 160 men. For hundreds of miles they found
nothing but the same swampy, forest-clad wastes along the Colombian
shore, inhabited only by naked tribes of savages. Pizarro’s disheartened
companions, too ready to believe that the country they were seeking was
but a myth, would have had him return; but one day the pilot, who had
been sent on ahead, suddenly reappeared with the news that he had
penetrated south of the equator and had there met a large trading raft
on its way north, bearing cloth, silver work, vases, and other things
pertaining to civilization and manned by a crew that wore clothes. These
men, the pilot reported, had told him that they came from a town called
Tumbez, which lay in a fertile valley behind a penetrable coast—that the
whole interior of the country was inhabited by a civilized people,
subjects of an emperor whose capital was a great city, high up in the
mountains still farther south. On this confirmation of their hopes, the
commander succeeded in inducing his men to push on until they had
reached nearly as far as the northern boundary of Ecuador, where he
landed most of the company on an island called Gallo and sent Almagro
back to Panama for more provisions and supplies.
At Gallo the climate proved unhealthful; fevers soon decimated the
party; even their clothes were rotted by the almost incessant rains and
steamy heat, and, as though that were not enough, when the Governor
learned from members of the crew who had returned that the men were
being held there against their will, he flew into a rage, instead of
sending supplies and reinforcements, and despatched a ship to bring back
all who wished to desert. Only emboldened by these misfortunes, Pizarro
“drew his sword and traced a line with it on the sand from east to
west,” says Montesino in his _Anales del Perú_. “Then, turning toward
the south, ‘Friends and comrades,’ he said, ‘on that side are toil,
hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this
side, ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here Panama
and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian.
For my part, I go to the south,’ and, so saying, he stepped across the
line.” He was followed by the pilot Ruiz, a Greek cavalier named de
Candia, and only eleven others. There is, indeed, as Prescott comments—
“Something striking to the imagination in the spectacle of those
few brave spirits consecrating themselves to a daring enterprise
that seemed as far above their strength as any recorded in the
fabulous annals of knight-errantry. A handful of men, without
food, without clothing, almost without arms, without knowledge
of the land to which they were bound, without even a vessel to
transport them, were left there on a rock in the ocean with the
avowed purpose of carrying on a crusade against a powerful
empire, staking their lives on its success. What is there in the
legends of chivalry that surpasses it?”
For weary months they awaited the return of Almagro with the provisions,
and the moment they arrived set sail for the Gulf of Guayaquil. Landing
at Tumbez, says Dawson, “with their own eyes they saw confirmation of
what the Indians of the raft had told them. Irrigated fields, green with
beautiful crops, lined the river bank; eighty thousand people, all
comfortably housed, lived in the valley; commerce was flourishing; large
temples, profusely ornamented with gold and silver, testified to their
wealth and culture; the government was well ordered and stable, and the
people received the visitors with open-handed hospitality.” It is easy
enough to imagine with what longing eyes these forlorn adventurers who
had risked and endured so much must have gazed on such a scene as this!
Yet, concluding that his force was too small even for a raid, and
thinking it wiser, anyway, after what had happened, to be invested with
independent powers before making any attempt at a conquest, Pizarro made
his way back to Spain and related his experiences to the King, who was
so greatly impressed both with the story and the petitioner’s noble and
commanding presence that he did more than merely commission him to
undertake a new expedition: he legitimized him and created him marquis,
appointed him _Adelantado_ (governor) of such countries as he might
conquer, created Almagro marshal, and made the thirteen who had so
gallantly stood by them gentlemen of coat armor.
On Pizarro’s return to Panama, he brought with him a few kindred spirits
selected from among the very flower of the fighting men of the
Peninsula, including his brothers Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo and his
half-brother, Francisco Alcantara, his equals in valor if not in
audacity and intellect. And then, as he believed from what he had seen
of the fighting on the Isthmus, that a few scores of good men, mail-clad
and well provided with artillery and horses—for these, unknown in the
new world before the advent of the Spaniards, had never failed to strike
terror to the natives—would be as effective as thousands in overcoming
undisciplined masses of Indians, armed in their inferior fashion,
instead of attempting to assemble an army he got together only a small
company composed of men of whose courage and experience he was well
assured. Having arranged with Almagro to follow with what reinforcements
he could recruit from among the unemployed adventurers in Nicaragua, he
set out once more.
This time he happened to land first among the less civilized tribes in
Ecuador, where he had the good fortune to find a rich store of emeralds
and gold, which he sent back to Almagro to encourage him in his work.
Then, marching down the coast to Guayaquil, he crossed to the island of
Puna to await the reinforcements, conquered the fierce inhabitants of
the place, and was afterward joined by a detachment sent out by his
associate under the command of Hernando de Soto, an adventurer who had
served with Cortés in Mexico and was later to attain still greater fame
as the discoverer of the Mississippi. Even with those De Soto brought,
the whole force numbered less than two hundred and fifty.
Though they had not the faintest idea of it then, the empire they were
destined to bring under the Spanish sway covered a territory along the
plateaux and eastern and Pacific slopes of the Andes extending from
Quito in Ecuador to the river Maule in Chile, a distance of nearly three
thousand miles, inhabited by hardy and warlike races, that numbered,
according to the estimate of the early historians, somewhere near twenty
millions of people.
VI
So great was the empire of the Incas. But from whom were these
remarkable rulers descended who brought their people to a state of
civilization relatively so superior to that of the savages east of the
Andes? To what race did they belong? From whence did they originally
come—Europe or Asia?—and, if so, how did they get to South America? How
did they acquire the knowledge of the arts and sciences that they
possessed? “Students of archæology have essayed in vain to answer these
questions,” says Mozans. “All is still shrouded in mystery—in mystery
even darker than that which veils the advent of the Toltecs and Aztecs
to the valley of Anahuac, more profound than that which obscures the
first beginnings of the civilizations on the elevated Pamirs and in the
valleys of the Nile and Euphrates. In all this uncertainty and mystery,
however,” he adds,
“One fact seems to remain incontrovertible, and that is that
Manco Capac and Mama Oello” (the founders of the dynasty) “first
appeared on the shores of Lake Titicaca” (a body of water nearly
as large as Lake Erie, lying between the two main Cordillera of
the Andes in southeastern Peru, two miles and a half up above
the level of the sea). “On this point tradition and the
concurrent testimony of the earlier historians are practically
at one.... Another fact, too, is unquestioned. Whether Manco
Capac, the Minos of Peru, was of foreign or of native birth, it
is certain that he was able, in the space of thirty years, to
lay the foundation of that vast empire which, under the Inca
Yupanqui, extended its conquests to the Maule in Chile, and,
under Huayna Capac, planted its victorious banners above the
fortresses of the Shiri” (the _Cacique_ of the Caras), “in the
extended territory of Quito, and which gave its laws and
religion and language to hundreds of conquered tribes.”
“What is one to do with no historical records to study over?” asks
Hawthorne.
“The Aztecs did have some sort of writing, and, though we have
not yet learned how to read it, we may solace ourselves with the
hope that enlightenment may sometime come; but the people of the
Andes did not even use hieroglyphics. Their sole documents were
knotted strings. These strings, which they called _quipus_, were
of course merely aids to memory—in the same way that a knot in a
handkerchief enables a husband to remember the instructions his
wife gives him when he sets out for the city, and which could
not be written down in many pages.... Nevertheless, we have
traditions in plenty.... Starting with the reasonable assumption
that there must have been a very considerable past before the
Spaniards appeared, we may construct various more or less
plausible surmises, based on the Cyclopean architectural ruins
which are distributed about the country. Marvelous works they
are, though their form, and the carvings with which they are
decorated, are less impressive than their mere size and
weight.... It has been very generally thought that they were the
handiwork of the prehistoric Piruas; yet, since the Piruas are
prehistoric, it is not to be expected that much historic
information concerning them is obtainable.... The ruins had been
abandoned long before the Spaniards came and the Indians knew
nothing of their origin.”
“Still, it is indisputable,” he goes on to say,
“that in Peru the grade of culture found in Mexico at the time
of the conquest must have been reached and passed many ages
earlier. In proof of this we have the fact that the Peruvians
alone had succeeded in domesticating animals. Only the dog had
been adapted to man’s service in other parts of America. Here
the domestic llama, for instance, was derived from the wild
huanacu and the alpaca from the vicuna. Many centuries would be
required in order to bring about these results. Several
varieties of maize were also produced under cultivation, and the
Peruvian species of cotton plant is known to exist only as it
appears under cultivation. Wild tubers were found in Peru from
which the potato was educed. Now, it has been proven by
experiment that wild potatoes require a very long time to put on
a civilized complexion. It was in Peru that the potato, as _we_
know it, was first discovered. It was not cultivated north of
Darien. Raleigh brought the first specimens to Ireland in 1568,
but it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that they
came into general use in Europe. The Peruvians practiced
irrigation and manured their crops with guano.”
And he continues:
“The materials for this nation were provided by the four
tribes—Incas, Quichuas, Canas, and Cauchis—scattered over the
northwest of South America. They were all mountaineers, short
but strong and active, with soft, brown skins, black hair, and
arched noses. At first the tribes were composed of clans, but
the Incas settled in the lofty valley of Cuzco and from that
coign of vantage gradually subdued the other tribes. Unlike the
Aztecs, they confirmed their conquests, not by exacting tribute,
but by military occupation of the subject territory. The town of
Cuzco was built about the end of the twelfth century and the
work of internal organization was begun. It is at this point
that solid historical information first comes to hand. A
succession of head chiefs or kings had already been instituted.
These monarchs were called Incas _par excellence_—_the_ Inca of
all minor Incas. To this general name, nicknames were added, by
way of distinguishing them. Finally, the eighth of the line was
called Viracocha, which means Sun-God, and indicated that by
that epoch the Incas had acquired something of the divinity that
doth hedge a king.
“Viracocha annexed the land of the Aymaras” (in Bolivia), “who
are suspected of descent from the builders of Tiahuanucu” (where
are some of the most interesting of the ruins). “In the next
reign the strong tribe of the Chancas, living close to the
equator, resisted the march of conquest, but were finally
defeated under the walls of Cuzco and their country afterward
annexed. The Chimus, who gave its name to Chimborazo, were the
next victims of the Incas, who now ruled the region from Lake
Titicaca to the equator and from the Andes to the sea. It was
under the Inca Yupanqui that this conquest took place, and he is
regarded as the great hero of Peruvian history. To him was
applied the name Pachacutec, Changer of the World. The successor
of this champion extended the dominion of his people so much
farther that it became necessary to found the city of Quito to
keep watch over the northern portion of the empire. He brought
in the valley of Pachacamac, where there was an ancient and
desirable temple, and also penetrated far into Chile....
“The Inca language was spoken throughout the empire. Garrisons
were distributed at strategic points and were connected by the
famous roads which have been the wonder and admiration of the
world.... There was a central highway from Quito to Cuzco, and
thence southward, which is thus described by the historian
Cieza” (de Leon): “‘I believe that since the history of man has
been recorded there has been no account of such grandeur as is
to be seen on this road, which passes over deep valleys and
lofty mountains, by snowy heights, over falls of water, through
the living rocks and along the edges of furious torrents. In all
these places it is level and paved, along mountain slopes well
excavated, through the living rock cut, along the river banks
supported by walls, in the snowy heights with steps and resting
places, in all parts clean-swept, clear of stones, with posts
and storehouses and temples of the sun at intervals. Oh, what
greater thing could be said of Alexander, or of any of the
powerful kings that have ruled in the world, than that they had
made such a road as this and conceived the works that were
required for it! The roads constructed by the Romans in Spain
are not to be compared with it.’ The post houses were some four
or five miles apart and in each were two Indians who carried
messages to and from the next house in line, whereby the
government was kept constantly informed of what was going on in
all parts of its dominions. In this way messages could travel at
the rate of nearly a hundred and fifty miles a day.”
The Inca deities were the Sun and Moon. The Sun they regarded as God the
Father and the Moon (believed to be the Sun-God’s sister and wife) as
the Goddess-Mother. The people called themselves Children of the Sun.
The reigning Inca was at once the Chief Priest and absolute temporal
ruler. Following their conception of the divine relationship, he could
marry only his sister of the full blood and only their eldest son could
inherit the throne. If no son was born of this first incestuous
marriage, or if he died and no other was born, the Inca married the next
sister, and so on until there was one capable of inheriting. But there
were morganatic marriages, as a result of which each of the reigning
Incas left numerous sons and daughters, whose descendants constituted a
privileged class, and in the course of ages the throne came to be
surrounded by thousands of men of the royal blood who were devoted from
their birth to warfare, learning, and state-craft. A subject, however,
could have more than one wife only by favor of the Inca. The government,
though exercised in a _kindly_ spirit, as we are told by the ancient
chroniclers, was in form a military despotism.
There was no money or other medium of exchange; gold and silver were
used only for purposes of adornment; such trade as there was, was by
barter. Every man was obliged to work for the common good at some form
of industry or occupation suitable to his strength and age and, if able,
to take his turn at the maintenance and extension of the irrigation
systems, which in that way were brought to such a state of perfection
that modern Peru still lives on the half-ruined fragments of their
canals and conduits and reservoirs. Hardly a spot of arable soil was
left uncultivated. Whole mountains were terraced for thousands of feet
up their sides.
Private ownership in land did not exist; it belonged to the communes.
The custom was to divide it into tracts, each large enough to support a
family, and parcel it out; for every child born there was an additional
allotment, and, at intervals, a general revision and redistribution. The
produce was divided into three parts: one for the Inca and his
establishment, one for the priesthood, and one for the commune. When one
section of the country was impoverished by war or some other casualty,
its needs were supplied by assessments levied on the others. The
occupations of the women, both in town and country, were essentially
domestic. Some were brought up from childhood and specially educated to
serve in the religious rites and in the household of the reigning Inca.
These were known as Virgins of the Sun.
The capital, Cuzco, was located in a valley about two hundred miles
northwest of Lake Titicaca and at a lower elevation, yet still more than
two miles up above the level of the sea. A colossal, massive-walled
citadel loomed over it from the heights of Sacsahuaman above the town.
Strong walls and towers inclosed it on every side. In its midst was a
great square, from which started the remarkable roads leading to the
four corners of the empire, referred to by Hawthorne. One whole side was
occupied by the temple, and near by were the dwellings of the priests
and the palaces of the Inca and the Virgins of the Sun. This sacred
space was a citadel in itself, protected by five heavy walls.
Describing the temple, the historian of the conquest, Garcilaso de la
Vega (and there was no one better qualified to write on the subject, for
he was himself, on the maternal side, a grandson of one of the last of
the Inca kings), says that “All the four walls were covered from roof to
floor with plates and slabs of gold. In the side, where we should place
the altar, they placed a figure of the Sun, made of a plate of gold of a
thickness double that of the other plates which covered the walls. The
figure was made with a circular face and rays of fire issuing from it,
all of one piece, just as the sun is represented by painters. It was so
large as to occupy one side of the temple from one wall to the other.”
Even the doorposts were of gold. One door, encased in silver, led to a
hall dedicated to the Moon-Goddess, where the images and furnishings
were all of silver, as were also the decorations of the mummies of the
Incas’ wives.
“The walls of their palaces,” Markham says, “were built of stone, of a
dark slate color, with recesses and doors at certain intervals, the
sides of the doors approaching each other” (narrowing toward the top)
“and supporting huge stone lintels. The side walls were pierced with
small square windows, as in the ruins of Manco Capac’s palace, and the
roofs were thatched with the _ycha_, or long grass of the Andes. The
interior consisted of several spacious halls, with smaller rooms opening
into them, and the interior walls were adorned with golden animals and
flowers, executed with much skill and taste. Mirrors of a hard stone,
highly polished, hung on stone pegs, while in the numerous recesses were
utensils and _conopas_ (household gods) of gold and silver,
fantastically designed. The couches were of vicuna cloth of the softest
and finest texture.”
Of the palaces of the Incas, Francisco Lopez de Gomara tells us that
“all the service of their house, table and kitchen, was of gold and
silver, or at least of silver and copper. The Inca had in his chamber
hollow statues of gold, which appeared like giants, and others naturally
imitated from animals, birds, and trees, from plants produced by the
land and from such fish as are yielded by the waters of the kingdom. He
also had ropes, baskets and hampers of gold and silver and piles of
golden sticks to imitate fuel prepared for burning. In short, there was
nothing that his territory produced that he had not got imitated in
gold.”
Cieza de Leon says of the magnificence of the harvest festivals
celebrated in the great plaza of the temple: “We hold it to be very
certain that neither in Jerusalem, nor in Rome, nor in Persia, nor in
any other part of the world, was such wealth of gold and silver and
precious stones collected together.” In his later years, while living in
Spain, Garcilaso de la Vega, who had been just as enthusiastic in his
description, and seemed to fear that he might be suspected of romancing,
took occasion to write that “this is not hard for those to believe who
have since seen so much gold and silver arrive here from that land. In
the year 1595 alone, within the space of eight months, thirty-five
millions of gold and silver crossed the bar of San Lucar in three
cargoes.”
“Many generations of culture and Inca rule had produced men of a very
different physical type,” Markham tells us, “from the Peruvian Indian of
to-day. We see the Incas in the pictures at the church of Santa Ana at
Cuzco,” he continues.
“The color of the skin was many shades lighter than that of the
downtrodden descendants of their subjects. The forehead was
high, the nose slightly aquiline, the chin and mouth firm, the
whole face majestic, refined, and intellectual. The hair was
gracefully arranged, and around the head was the _llantu_, the
sign of sovereignty. The _llantu_ appears to have been a short
piece of red fringe on the forehead, fastened around the head by
two bands. It was habitually worn, but, when praying, the Inca
took it off and put it on the ground beside him. The ceremonial
headdress was the _mascapaycha_, a golden semicircular miter on
the forehead, to which the _llantu_ was fastened. Bright colored
feathers were fixed on the sides and the plume” (of black and
white falcon feathers, he says in another place) “rose over the
summit. Long golden eardrops came down to the shoulders. The
tunic and mantel varied in color and were made of the finest
vicuna wool. On the breast the Incas wore a golden semicircular
breastplate, representing the sun, with a border of signs for
the months.
“The later Incas wore a very rich kind of brocade, in bands sewn
together, forming a wide belt. The bands were in squares, each
with an ornament. The material was called _tocapu_. Some of the
Incas had the whole tunic of _tocapu_. The breeches were black
and in loose plaits at the knees. The _usutas_, or sandals, were
of white wool. The Inca clad for war had a large square shield
of wood or leather. There was a loop of leather at the back to
pass the arm through. In one hand was a wooden staff, about two
feet long, with a bronze star, of six or eight points, fastened
at one end—a most formidable warclub. In the other hand was a
long staff with a battle axe fixed at one end. The Ccoya, or
Queen, wore the _lliclla_ or mantle fastened across the chest by
a very large golden _topu_ or pin, with head elaborately carved
with ornaments and figures. The _lliclla_ or mantle and _acsu_
or skirt varied as regards color. The head was adorned with
golden circlets and flowers.... The nobles wore headdresses of
egret feathers and gold breastplates over their tunics. The
princesses wore long mantles of various colors, and the Virgins
of the Sun long white mantles, secured across the bosom by large
gold pins.”
[Illustration: INCA BURIAL TOWER NEAR LAKE TITICACA.]
[Illustration: CLOISTERS OF DOMINICAN MONASTERY, CUZCO.]
Mozans, writing of the spot they held most sacred of all, says:
“It would be difficult to find any place in the world richer in
legends and traditions than is Lake Titicaca. Every cove and
inlet, every rock and island has its myth, and many of these
places were held in special veneration by the Incas for long
generations. This was especially true of two islands—Titicaca,
sacred to the Sun, and Coati, sacred to the Moon, the Sun’s
sister. What a fascination there was about these two islands!
Beholding the cradle and sanctuary of Inca civilization, it was
easy to fancy oneself a spectator of one of those long
processions of reed _balsas_” (boats) “conveying the children of
the Sun from the mainland to the sacred islands of their race,
where were the rich temples dedicated to their Sun-Father and
Moon-Mother. Adorned with gorgeous trappings of gold and
silver—royal colors—the Inca’s barge, manned by stalwart young
oarsmen, specially selected for this service, led the way.
Immediately following the Sphinxlike Inca came the members of
his court arrayed in gaudy vesture. Next to them were the
ministers of the temple and the officers of the army, gleaming
in barbaric attire. The rear of the procession was made up of
the humble tillers of the soil, who had gathered from all parts
to greet their idolized ruler and to swell the number of
worshipers congregated about the effigies of the Sun and Moon,
or in front of the sacred rock decked with richest tissues and
plates of burnished silver and gold....
“In these temples and palaces, according to the old chroniclers,
were immense treasures, rivaling those in the temples of Cuzco.
The riches in the temple of the Sun were especially great, for
‘here,’ writes Garcilaso, ‘all the vassals of the Inca offered
up much gold and silver and precious stones every year, as a
token of gratitude to the Sun for the two acts of grace that had
taken place on that spot. This temple had the same service as
that of Cuzco. There was said to be such quantity of gold and
silver heaped up in the island, besides what was worked for the
use of the temple, that the stories of the Indians concerning it
are more wonderful than credible. Father Blas Valera, one of the
earliest Spanish chroniclers, says that the Indian colonists,
called _Mitimaes_, who lived in Copocabana, declared that the
quantity of gold and silver heaped up as offerings was so great
that another temple might have been made of it, from the
foundations to the roof, without using any other materials. But
as soon as the Indians heard of the invasion of the country by
the Spaniards, and that they were seizing all the treasure they
could find, they threw the whole of it into the great lake.’”
VII
Fortunately for Pizarro, at the time he made his appearance on the
scene, it happened that these people were either still engaged in or had
only just terminated a civil war that had been brought on by an attempt
of Huascar, the then reigning Inca, to impose his will on his
half-brother, Atahualpa, a rebellious vassal. It appears that Huascar’s
father, the Inca Huayna Capac, having completed the subjugation of the
Caras and their brave allies in Ecuador, had found it necessary to
remain in Quito nearly all the rest of his life, to keep the inhabitants
in subjection and suppress revolts that frequently occurred. As a
political move, perhaps, he had married the daughter and heiress of the
defeated Shiri and by her had had a son. This was Atahualpa. As he, too,
had continued to live in Quito, he had come to be regarded rather as a
scion of the ancient Shiri dynasty than as a prince of an alien
conquering house.
And so when in 1525 Huayna Capac died, he left this northern kingdom to
Atahualpa and only the southern to Huascar, his eldest son of the full
Inca blood, born of his sister-wife; but, to preserve some sort of unity
in the empire, he commanded that Huascar, as the only legitimate heir,
should be paramount. Huascar, nevertheless, had declined to acquiesce in
any such virtual division of dominions that he regarded as his by right
of succession, and at the first opportunity had quarreled with Atahualpa
and invaded the territory apportioned to him. In the battles that
followed Atahualpa’s forces had been uniformly victorious, for, always
superior in prowess to the now more effete soldiery that had defeated
them in their former less organized state, years of Inca rule had taught
these northerners how to make better avail of their energy and courage.
Suffering enormous losses in every engagement, the forces of Huascar had
been driven farther and farther south, until at last, in spite of
reinforcements which, it is said, brought his army up to fully seventy
thousand, he was beaten before the walls of his capital and made
prisoner.
As soon as his capture had become known, what was left of his army had
dispersed, the city had surrendered, and Atahualpa, if we are to believe
the chroniclers, had taken a terrible revenge, first causing all
Huascar’s subjects that were of royal blood, and who could be found, to
be put to death, and afterward the captured officers who had fought for
him. His cruelty, Garcilaso de la Vega tells us, “was greater than that
of the Turks. Not content with the blood of his own two hundred
brothers, the sons of the great Huayna Capac, he passed on to drink that
of his uncles, nephews, and other relations, so that none of the blood
royal might escape, whether legitimate or not. They were all murdered in
different ways.... He ordered all the women and children” (of royal
blood) “to be assembled, of whatever age and condition, reserving only
those who were dedicated to the Sun in the convent of Cuzco. He ordered
that they should be killed outside the city, by little and little, and
by various cruel tortures, so that they might be long in dying.”
When Pizarro and his party reached Tumbez, Atahualpa, accompanied by a
small army, was at the baths near Cajamarca, a town on the Peruvian
plateau not far from the Ecuadorian boundary. It was to him there that
the report came that strangers had landed—strangers of a different
color, who had long hair on their chins and wore strange clothing and
armor, who had weapons different from any that had been seen in the land
and bestrode terrible monsters that carried them over the ground with
incredible speed. The effect of such startling news may be imagined.
Pizarro, however, after having fully informed himself respecting the
political status of affairs, thought he saw an opportunity to further
his ends by diplomacy and protested that his mission was a friendly one.
It would seem that Atahualpa must have realized that the strangers were
far more formidable than was indicated by their mere number, for he sent
his brother Titu to welcome them and make inquiries as to their desires
and the purpose of their visit. By him Pizarro, having first expressed
his thanks, sent a message to the effect that he would go at once to
Cajamarca and call on Atahualpa in person. What then occurred is thus
related by Dawson:
“On receiving Pizarro’s answer to his friendly message,
Atahualpa resolved to await the promised visit, apparently
suspecting no evil. The audacious Spaniard had, however,
conceived the design of capturing the victorious claimant of the
throne of the Incas, well knowing that in its actual distracted
condition the country would be left without a center about which
it could rally. Open war, no matter how overwhelming his first
victory might be, could hardly be ultimately successful.
Atahualpa, once safe at Cuzco or Quito, and surrounded by the
disciplined soldiers who had overthrown Huascar, a defensive
campaign might be undertaken in which Pizarro would find every
step toward either capital bitterly disputed. Hundreds of
thousands of Peruvians pouring up from the numberless provinces
of the empire would be thrown in a never ceasing succession of
armies against the little band of Spaniards and the latter would
infallibly be driven back to the coast by starvation and
fatigue, if not by defeat in the field.
“Apparently foolhardy, in fact Pizarro’s plan offered the only
chance of success. Never dreaming that such a step was in
contemplation, Atahualpa took no precautions. Leaving fifty-five
men at the little port of San Miguel in the Paita valley to
secure his retreat, Pizarro marched south with one hundred and
two foot soldiers, sixty-two horses, and two small cannon, two
hundred miles along the coast plain to a point opposite
Cajamarca, and ascended along an Inca military road, meeting a
friendly reception from the wondering natives, and supplied with
provisions by Atahualpa’s orders. On the 15th of September,
1532, he entered Cajamarca. He found an open square in the
middle of the town, surrounded by walls and solid stone
buildings, which he received permission to occupy as quarters.
From his camp outside Atahualpa sent word that on the following
day he would enter the town in state and receive the Spaniards.
“Marvelous good fortune favored Pizarro’s designs. The Indians
had furnished a trap all ready made, and now Atahualpa
deliberately walked into it. On the morning of the 16th the
Indian army broke camp and marched to Cajamarca, followed by the
Emperor, who was borne in a litter and surrounded by his
personal attendants, the great chiefs and the nobles belonging
to his own lineage.” (Those belonging to Huascar’s he had caused
to be killed.) “At sunset he entered the square, accompanied
only by these unarmed attendants and found Pizarro and a few
Spaniards awaiting him. The rest were hidden in the houses
around the square with their horses saddled, their breastplates
on, and musketry and cannon ready charged. From among the group
that surrounded Pizarro, stepped forward Friar Valverde and
approached the Inca monarch, who, reclining in a litter raised
high above the crowd on the shoulders of his attendants, waited
with dignity to hear what these strangers had to say.
“The priest advanced with a cross in one hand and a Bible in the
other and began a harangue which, clumsily translated by an
Indian boy, the Inca hardly understood. But in a few moments he
realized that this uncouth jargon was meant to convey an
arrogant demand that he acknowledge himself a vassal of Charles
V and submit to baptism. With haughty surprise, he threw down
the book Valverde tried to force into his hand. The priest
shouted: ‘Fall on, Castilians—I absolve you!’ and into the
helpless crowd burst a murderous fire from the doors of the
houses all around. Aghast and bewildered by this display of
powers which to them seemed necromantic, the survivors
nevertheless stood manfully to the attack of the mail-clad
horsemen who rode into the huddled masses, ferociously slashing
and slaughtering. The Indians strove desperately to drag the
Spaniards from the horses with their naked hands and interposed
a living wall of human flesh between the murderers and their
beloved sovereign. At length Pizarro’s own hands snatched
Atahualpa from the litter. The Indian soldiers outside, hearing
the firearms and the noise of the struggle, tried to force their
way into the square, but the Spanish musketry and cannon mowed
them down by hundreds and they fled before the charges of the
cavalry, dispersing in the twilight.”
Atahualpa was then confined in a small stone house adjoining the palace
of the Virgins of the Sun (the latter is now a convent, occupied by
Sisters of Charity), and every precaution possible under the
circumstances was taken to prevent his rescue. Pizarro’s next move in
the conquest was to murder him. But, in the meanwhile, he had suggested
in conversations with his prisoner that Huascar’s followers would
probably take advantage of the opportunity afforded by his capture to
reorganize their scattered forces and make an effort to regain the
throne; he had hinted, too, at the advisability of arbitration, and
Atahualpa had taken alarm and secretly ordered Huascar’s execution;
whereupon Pizarro had feigned the greatest indignation and had contrived
to frighten his victim into offering his famous ransom. “I will fill
this room with gold,” he said, “as high as I can reach, if only you will
liberate me.” (The room in which he was confined was 32 feet 9 inches
long, 20 feet 9 inches wide, and 10 feet 9 inches high.) Pizarro
accepted, a truce was agreed upon, Atahualpa ordered all preparations
for war on the Spaniards to be suspended, and arranged for the
collection of the gold. When the amount stipulated for was at last
assembled, it was found to have a value equivalent to more than
seventeen millions of dollars in our currency. Some historians say much
more. Dawson, for instance, says it was more than twenty-two millions.
One-fifth was sent to the royal treasury in Spain and the rest was
divided among the adventurers. The share of the private soldiers even
was large enough to make each of them rich for life.
Nevertheless, Pizarro had not performed his part of the agreement by
setting his prisoner at liberty. Whether or not he had ever intended to
can only be conjectured. It is clear only that, even if he did enter
into the agreement in bad faith, as was charged by the chroniclers, he
was afterward confronted by a problem which, in the opinion of recent
writers, justified his perfidious behavior. Quizquiz, the general whose
ability had enabled Atahualpa so often to defeat his late rival, was
known to have taken the field with a large body of troops. Could a man
such as Atahualpa had proven himself to be, released and at the head of
a great army once more, be expected to permit these foreigners, who had
so treacherously captured him and slain his attendants while on a
friendly visit, to depart in peace with their loot? It did not seem
likely. On the other hand, retreat through a then hostile country with
the prisoner still in custody was out of the question, and, if he should
continue to hold him in Cajamarca, Quizquiz, who had only been awaiting
the word, would no longer hesitate to attack.
No; a bold _coup de main_ of some sort was imperative. If Atahualpa
could be gotten rid of altogether, for instance, there was a chance, in
the confusion that must follow, to reach Cuzco and form an alliance with
the partisans of the murdered Inca, with a view to ousting the usurper’s
party and restoring the throne to the legitimate line. Such a chance had
only to exist to be appreciated by one so clear-sighted and audacious as
Pizarro. It was his life and his friends’—and, of course, the Indian
treasure—against only the life of Atahualpa, and the prisoner’s fate was
sealed. There was a mock trial, wherein he was convicted of the murder
of Huascar, conspiracy against the Spaniards, and other high crimes and
misdemeanors, and then he was strangled to death in the public
square—strangled rather than burned, says Hawthorne, as an act of grace,
in consideration of his having professed at the last the Christian
faith.
Some weeks before this, Almagro had joined the Conquistadores at
Cajamarca with reinforcements that brought the Spanish force up to about
five hundred. As soon as Atahualpa had been disposed of, the commander,
with all his men, began his advance, by forced marches, on Cuzco, an
advantageous position near which he was fortunate enough to secure
without having encountered Quizquiz, though some of the cavalry under De
Soto were engaged by a detachment on the way; all efforts to interpose
the main body of the Indian army were frustrated by their speed.
However, though “the true heir to the crown was a second son of Huayna
Capac, named Manco, a legitimate brother of the unfortunate Huascar,”
says Prescott, “Pizarro had too little knowledge of the disposition of
this prince and he made no scruple to prefer Toparca, a young brother of
Atahualpa and to present him to the Indian nobles as their future Inca.”
So, to make assurance doubly sure, he did not, before he set out,
announce his purpose of driving off the enemies of the rightful heir,
but took the boy with him, “attended by a numerous retinue of vassals
and moving in as much state and ceremony as if in possession of regal
power.” Before they reached Cuzco, much to Pizarro’s chagrin, the boy
fell sick and died.
But the misfortune was soon repaired, for, sure enough, when the
adventurers went into camp outside the walls of the capital, no less a
personage than Manco Capac II himself called on the commander in person
and proposed the hoped-for alliance; and, just a year from the day he
had taken Cajamarca, he entered Cuzco as the protector of the real Inca,
whose coronation he permitted to be celebrated with all the splendor of
the ancient rites. The Indians of central Peru hailed him as their
deliverer from the tyranny of the usurper. Manco Capac, for his part,
soon assembled a great army, and, with the help of some of the
Spaniards, decisively defeated Quizquiz and drove him back to Ecuador.
VIII
But there was a sad awakening in store for the Inca on his return from
that victorious campaign. He had permitted these allies of
his—rapacious, recklessly daring as they were, and unscrupulous, cruel,
and fanatical in their attitude toward infidels—to obtain a foothold in
the very capital of the empire. And what manner of man was it of whom
the great body of his subjects was made up? He was brave,
yes—physically; he could fight, and conquer, too, when ably led, but
also he was morally utterly irresponsible, “a slave,” as Mozans puts it,
“utterly devoid of energy and individual initiative,” accustomed to look
to the ruling class for guidance, to regard the Inca “with superstitious
awe, as a being of a superior order.” Centuries of despotic government,
rigid religious ritual, communal ownership of property, and labor, not
for himself but for the commonwealth, had robbed him of all ambition and
instilled into him the habit of accepting with patient resignation
whatever fate might decree.
And now, after all these centuries of complaisance, what must have been
his mental attitude at the end of such a succession of events? First,
the late legitimate Inca Huascar, omnipotent as he was supposed to have
been, directly descended from the Sun-God and Moon-Mother themselves,
had been overthrown and put to death by an illegitimate rival. Then that
rival, also of the Inca blood, had in his turn been captured in the very
face of his army, and put to death despite another and much greater
army, by a little band of mysterious strangers, against whose mail-clad
bodies the battle-axes and spears of the Indians had been
powerless—strangers who had made fierce, “fleet-footed monsters”
(horses) subservient to their will and who carried terrible weapons that
went off with a noise like thunder and vomited fire and smoke, and with
which they killed their enemies before they could come near enough to
get in a blow. Had not these invincible strangers, and apparently by
supernatural means, overcome even the legitimate Inca’s conqueror?
Surely, then, they must be some still superior order of beings, sent by
the Sun-God to accomplish some wonderful purpose. Therefore they must be
obeyed. Pizarro himself could not have created a people more suited to
the carrying out of his designs had he had the power.
Probably realizing this, he promptly abandoned all subterfuge. As a
consideration for the help he had been given in the campaign against
Quizquiz, the Inca had been induced by stress of circumstances to
acknowledge the supremacy of the King of Spain. It was only as a matter
of form, he had been led to believe, but Pizarro now exacted the fullest
compliance. As Adelantado by appointment of the overlord, he established
a municipal council to govern the city, transformed the great temple
into a church, made use of certain of the public buildings as officers’
quarters and barracks for the soldiers, seized all the treasure that was
to be found—even the private dwellings and tombs were searched and
stripped of it—and required the authorities to supply troops and
carriers to accompany the exploring parties he sent out. “Pizarro, on
entering Cuzco, had issued an order forbidding any soldier to offer
violence to the dwellings of the inhabitants,” says Prescott:
“But the palaces were numerous and the troops lost no time in
plundering them of their contents as well as in despoiling the
religious edifices. The interior decorations supplied them with
considerable booty. They stripped off the jewels and rich
ornaments that garnished the royal mummies in the temple of
Coricancha. Indignant at the concealment of their treasures,
they put the inhabitants, in some instances, to the torture and
endeavored to extort from them a confession of their hiding
places. They invaded the repose of the sepulchers, in which the
Peruvians often deposited their valuable effects, and compelled
the grave to give up its dead. No place was left unexplored by
the rapacious conquerors, and they occasionally stumbled on a
mine of wealth that rewarded their labors. In a cavern near the
city they found a number of vases, richly embossed with figures
of serpents, locusts, and other animals. Among the spoils were
four golden llamas and ten or twelve statues of women, as large
as life, some of gold, others of silver, ‘which merely to see,’
says one of the conquerors, with some naïveté, ‘was truly a
great satisfaction.’... The magazines were stored with curious
commodities—richly tinted robes of cotton and feather work, gold
sandals and slippers of the same material, for the women, and
dresses composed entirely of beads of gold.’... In one place,
for example, they met with ten planks or bars of solid silver,
each piece twenty feet in length, one foot in breadth, and two
or three inches thick. They were intended to decorate the
dwelling of an Inca noble.... The amount of booty is stated
variously by those present at the division of it. According to
some, it considerably exceeded the ransom of Atahualpa.”
Fully appreciating also the desirability of establishing a capital of
his own at some strategic point much more easily accessible from Panama,
Pizarro made a careful study of routes and possible sites and finally
chose one beside the river Rimac, on a fertile, elevated plain near the
base of the Cordillera, only about three leagues from one of the best
harbors on the coast, and at the point where the Inca military road
began its ascent to the plateau. Here, only about a year after he
entered Cuzco, he founded _La Ciudad de los Reyes_ (the City of the
Kings), so named in honor of the Three Kings or Wise Men of the East,
because their feast day, Epiphany, occurred at that season of the year.
Soon it became known as Lima. “Before the erection of a single house was
permitted,” he had a plan drawn up, Mozans tells us, providing for large
squares and streets unusually wide, “and in making this plan he had in
view, not the small number (only sixty-nine) of those who were then
prepared to make their homes there, but the future greatness of ‘The
Empire City of the New World.’ Moreover, as the city had to be in God
and for God and in His name—_en Dios y por Dios y en su nombre_—to use
his own words, work was first begun on the church, which was named
_Nuestra Señora de la Asunción_. The first stone and the first pieces of
timber were put in place by the hands of the Adelantado himself, who
wished, like the other Conquistadores, to emphasize his zeal for
religion and his devotion to _La Santissima Virgen, Madre de Dios_.”
In the meanwhile his brother Hernando had gone to Spain with the King’s
fifth of the loot, and on the way had spread the news. Once more all was
excitement on the Isthmus. It was not long before Pizarro’s forces were
augmented by three or four hundred soldiers that had been led into
Ecuador by Pedro de Alvarado, Governor of Guatemala, who consented to
abandon his expedition when persuaded by Almagro, who went at once to
meet him, that he was trespassing on Pizarro’s preserves, for which act
of grace the Spanish King added the province of Honduras to Alvarado’s
jurisdiction, and Almagro gave him a large sum of money; and, when
communication was established between Lima and Panama by sea,
adventurers of every degree began to flock to the new city as they had
before to Mexico and Central America.
This enabled Almagro, with an army of nearly six hundred Spaniards and
fifteen thousand Indians, the latter under the command of one of the
Inca’s brothers, to make an excursion into Chile for purposes of
exploration, for it had been agreed that he should have the southern
half of the territory they might conquer and Pizarro the northern.
Sebastian de Benalcázar, another of Pizarro’s lieutenants, went to
Ecuador with a force of two hundred Spaniards and a large Indian
contingent and completed the defeat of Atahualpa’s adherents, took
possession of Quito and founded the city of Guayaquil at the mouth of
the Guayas River, which provided for that country, too, independent
access from the sea.
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL AT LIMA, BUILT BY PIZARRO.]
Also by this time any illusions the Inca may have had as to the
continuance of the ancient dynasty under the protection of the Spaniards
were dispelled. By this time even his complaisant subjects must have
discovered that these superhuman deliverers, as they had thought them,
were mere men—or else, if they were indeed a different order of beings,
that order, they must have concluded, was infernal rather than divine.
The sovereignty of the Inca had become little more than a fiction. As in
the islands of the Caribbean and elsewhere, the fairest lands in the
country had been divided into vast estates and great numbers of natives
practically reduced to slavery and set to work them for the benefit of
their new masters. With respect to their treatment in general, though
Pizarro himself seems to have been guilty of few acts of wanton cruelty,
he either could not, or did not if he could, restrain the oppression of
them by his followers. If their behavior was not quite as atrocious as
that of other Spaniards toward the tribes in the north, there was an
utter lack of considerateness in it and disregard of their property and
rights that galled even them.
Roused at last, the Inca took advantage of the opportunity afforded by
the scattering of the Spanish force and made his escape from Cuzco,
where Hernando Pizarro and his younger brothers Juan and Gonzalo were in
command, and, finding his subjects ripe for revolt, had no difficulty in
raising two large armies. One he sent against the Adelantado, who was in
Lima; with the other he returned to Cuzco and took the great citadel of
Sacsahuaman, overlooking the town, and began a siege that was to last
more than six months, and during which Juan Pizarro was killed in an
attempt to recapture the citadel. The army that went to the coast was
ambushed and defeated by the Spaniards and their local adherents before
ever it reached Lima. All that what was left of it could do was to
prevent the sending of reinforcements to Cuzco despite the desperate
straits to which the Spanish force there was reduced. Pizarro was
himself compelled to send to the Isthmus for help. Just before it was
too late, however, he managed to get away two hundred and fifty men to
the relief of his brothers, and just at that juncture also, Almagro, on
his way back from Chile, turned up with his followers, and, caught
between Cuzco and these two new detachments of the enemy, the Inca was
overwhelmed and concluded to retire into the wild region of Vilcabamba,
where the Spaniards could not follow with any hope of success, and there
held out for some years. But with his retreat all that remained of the
Inca dominion came to an end. There were a few other attempts, but
neither he nor his descendants ever succeeded in recovering the throne.
As for Almagro, he had had a frightful experience during his excursion
into Chile and had met with nothing but disappointment and disaster. The
route unwittingly chosen had been over the bleak Bolivian plateaux and
across the mountains where the Cordillera reaches its highest, at a
season when the passes are buried in snow and swept by furious storms,
and his men had perished by thousands, some of the best of his Spaniards
among the number. When he had at last made his way to the beautiful
central valley between the Cordillera and the coast range and down to
the river Maule, he had found nothing of the opulence of Peru, but only
a poor but brave, warlike people who in a fierce battle had succeeded in
checking his advance. And now, disgusted with this country of his to the
south, he returned and made claim to Cuzco as being within his half of
the conquered territory and demanded of the Pizarros its surrender. On
their refusal, he promptly carried it by assault, made Hernando and
Gonzalo his prisoners, and went out to meet the troops that had been
sent to their relief by the Adelantado and defeated them.
And then, as Hawthorne puts it, “had he cut off the heads of both of
these gentlemen on the spot, he would have saved himself years of
struggle, with a death on the scaffold at the end of them. But he was
not of the right fiber for the work that was laid upon him; he was not
what the English would call ‘thorough’”; he temporized and listened to
his wily associate. “Civil disturbances went on for eleven years,”
continues Hawthorne, “‘in the course of which,’ as Professor Fiske
remarks, ‘all the principal actors were swept off the stage as in some
cheap blood-and-thunder tragedy. It is not worth while to recount the
petty incidents of the struggle—how Almagro was at one moment ready to
submit to arbitration and the next refused to abide by the decision; how
Hernando was set at liberty and Gonzalo escaped; how Almagro’s able
lieutenant, Rodrigo de Orgoñez, won a victory over Pizarro’s men at
Abancay but was totally defeated by Hernando Pizarro at Las Salinas and
perished on the field; how at last Hernando had Almagro tried for
sedition and summarily executed. On which side was the more violence and
treachery it would be hard to say. Indeed, as Sir Arthur Helps observes,
“in this melancholy struggle it is difficult to find anybody whom the
reader can sympathize much with.”’”
Then, once more Francisco Pizarro entered Cuzco in triumph, this time
wearing an ermine robe that had been presented to him by Hernando
Cortés, and again he devoted himself to organizing his government and
extending the Spanish dominion over the distant provinces. The number of
his compatriots had increased to eight thousand. Gonzalo was appointed
Governor of Quito, from whence he strayed to make a disastrous journey
down the eastern slope of the Andes in search of the mythical Eldorado,
which he did not find, but which resulted in the discovery of and voyage
down the Amazon, from the mountains to the sea, by Francisco de
Orellana, his second in command. Hernando went to Bolivia to search for
the mines from which the Incas were supposed to have gotten their
wealth, a labor that was rewarded by the discovery of Potosí, which has
yielded more than two billions of ounces of silver—_and silver and gold
were of equal value in Europe in those days_. Pedro de Valdivia
undertook the conquest of Chile and Alonso de Alvarado, one of the most
generous and humane of the Conquistadores, that of the mountains of
northern Peru. The Adelantado himself traveled over most of the empire,
founding cities at strategic points in the more populous and fertile
valleys, among them Arequipa, and here in Bolivia as in the country
about Cuzco he divided the most desirable of the lands into
_repartimientos_ and apportioned them among his favorites.
In the meanwhile Almagro’s adherents, helpless and impoverished, were
burning with envy of their more fortunate comrades, who were, by favor
of the successful rival, rapidly enriching themselves with Indian
tribute and gold and silver taken from the mines. At last, unable to
stand it, they sent the news of their leader’s illegal execution to
Spain, with a demand for justice against the Pizarros. The rest of the
story is told by Dawson as follows:
“The Spanish government was not unwilling to secure a selfish
advantage from the disputes among the original conquerors and
sent out Vaca de Castro to investigate and report. When the
Royal Commissioner arrived at Panama early in 1541, the latest
news from Peru was tranquilizing. Pizarro was busily engaged in
enlarging and beautifying Lima, in regulating the revenue and
the administration, in distributing ‘_encomiendas_,’ and in
restraining the rapacity of his Spaniards. However, Lima was
full of the ‘men of Chile,’ as Almagro’s adherents were called,
all bitter enemies of the Governor. They passed him in the
street without saluting, and their attitude was so menacing that
Pizarro received repeated warnings and was urged to banish them.
Absolutely incapable of personal fear, magnanimous when his
passions had not been aroused, he only replied: ‘Poor fellows.
They have had trouble enough. We will not molest them.’ He even
sent for Juan de la Rada—the guide, counselor, and guardian of
the young half-breed who was Almagro’s heir—and condescended to
try to argue him into a better frame of mind, saying, at
parting: ‘Ask me frankly what you desire;’ but the iron had
entered too deeply into Rada’s soul. He had already organized a
conspiracy to assassinate Pizarro.
“At noon, on Sunday, the 26th of June, 1541, Pizarro was sitting
at dinner in his house with twenty gentlemen, among them his
half-brother Francisco Alcantara, and several of the most
illustrious knights who had taken part in the conquest. The
great door into the public square was lying wide open. The
conspirators, to the number of a score, had assembled in a house
opposite. All of a sudden they rushed into the square fully
armed and carrying their swords naked in their hands. A young
page standing in front of the Governor’s house saw them and ran
back shouting: ‘To arms! All the men of Chile are coming to kill
the Marquis, our lord.’ The guests rose in alarm from the table
and all but half a dozen fled to the windows and dropped into
the garden. Pizarro threw off his gown and snatched up a sword,
while the valiant Francisco Chaves stepped forward through the
ante-room to dispute the passage at the staircase. The ferocious
crowd of murderers rushed up and laid him dead on the stairs.
Alcantara checked them for a few moments with his single sword,
but was soon forced back into the dining-room and fell pierced
with many thrusts. The old lion shouted from the inside: ‘What
shameful thing is this! Why do you wish to kill me?’ and, with a
cloak wrapped round one arm and his sword grasped in the other
hand, he rushed forward to meet his assassins and strike a blow
to avenge his brother before he himself should fall. Only two
faithful young pages remained at his side. Though over seventy
years of age, his practiced sword laid two of the crowd dead
before he was surrounded. The two boys were butchered, and, in
the mêlée, Pizarro received a mortal wound in his throat, and,
falling to the floor, made the sign of the cross on the boards”
(with his blood) “and kissed it. One of the ruffians had
snatched up an earthen water jar and with this pounded out the
old man’s brains as he lay prostrate, disdaining to ask for
mercy.
“Thus perished by the sword this great man of blood. The measure
he had meted out to Atahualpa and Almagro was measured to him
again. He who had shamelessly broken his oath times without
number to gain his own high ends was slain by treacherous,
cowardly assault. But his great vices should not blind us to his
greater virtues. Courageous, indomitable, far-sighted,
patriotic, large-minded, public-spirited, possessing a God-given
instinct to see straight into the center of a problem and the
energy to strike at the psychological moment, he was equally
great as an explorer, a soldier, a general, a diplomatist, and
an administrator. Even his shocking moral delinquencies lose
something of their turpitude when we consider the greatness of
his aims and the baseness of his origin.... But that his real
nature was magnanimous, generous, and truthful is proven by the
many instances in which he forgave his enemies and kept his word
to his serious loss, and that his ambition was not too sordid is
shown by his self-sacrificing devotion to the public good during
the later years of his life. Formed in nature’s grandest mold,
circumstances and environment had much deformed his character,
but the original lineaments are plain.”
Pizarro thus disposed of, young Almagro assumed the governorship and
transferred his headquarters to Cuzco, where his father’s party was
stronger than at Lima, and the Royal Commissioner, appointed Governor by
the King, sailed from Panama, got together an army with the help of
Pizarro’s friends, and proceeded to Guamanga, to which point the usurper
was advancing with his forces from Cuzco. The battle that ensued was
more hotly contested than any that had theretofore been fought. Of the
twelve hundred Spaniards engaged, less than five hundred escaped death
or wounds. Almagro’s troops were practically annihilated. Two days
afterward those of the Adelantado’s murderers who had survived were
executed in the public square and young Almagro himself, who had
succeeded in making his escape, was recaptured and put to death. Then
for the time being Vaca de Castro administered the office without
further opposition.
Before this, the great-hearted Padre Bartolomé de las Casas, the
Indians’ indefatigable champion and friend, had written his famous book
exposing the horrors of their treatment and had so successfully appealed
to the King in their behalf that it had been decided to abolish native
slavery and gradually do away with the system of _repartimientos_ and
_encomiendas_ (allotments of land and Indians); and, since manifestly
such a course would result in trouble with the Conquistadores, it seemed
best to appoint a viceroy who would not be subject to their influence
and invest him with absolute power. This dangerous office was bestowed
upon Blasco Nuñez de Vela, whose integrity, piety, and rigid obedience
to the King had already gained for him high positions. Arriving in Peru
early in 1544, he promulgated the new laws abolishing personal service
by the Indians, providing that _encomiendas_ might not be sold or
descend by inheritance, and, worst of all, that those granted to
participants in the war between Pizarro and Almagro should lapse. To set
the example, in his journey down the coast, the Viceroy sternly insisted
that no Indian be compelled to carry a burden against his will.
To the Spaniards this seemed an outrageous violation of the natural
order of things. The whole fabric of their fortunes was based on
enforced Indian labor. Without it how could they work their mines and
estates or transport their goods? In the general dismay, armed
resistance was decided on, and Gonzalo Pizarro was called from his
estate in southern Bolivia and induced to take the lead. He seized the
artillery and stores at Cuzco and was soon at the head of some four
hundred desperate men, well armed and provided. “The Viceroy retreated
north beyond Quito to Popayan,” says Dawson—
“But, being joined by more recruits, rashly returned to the
neighborhood of Quito to offer battle. He was defeated and
killed. Pizarro went back to Lima, while his lieutenant,
Carbajal, hunted down and put to death every loyalist who
remained under arms in southern Peru. Gonzalo’s administration
lasted three years. They were golden ones to the Spanish
adventurers. The marvelous silver mines of Potosí and the gold
washings of southern Ecuador were discovered. _Encomiendas_ were
lavishly granted; the Indians were sent back to their fields;
the mining industry began that marvelous development which soon
made Peru the treasure box of the world and Potosí the synonym
for limitless wealth. But the dazzling sunlight of prosperity
was dimmed by the shadow of Pizarro’s scaffold slowly creeping
across the Atlantic and down the coast. His chief lieutenants,
knowing that they had sinned past forgiveness, urged him to
declare himself King of Peru, but he was at once too proud and
too patriotic to fling away his right to die a loyal Spaniard.
Philip, the leaden-eyed, close-mouthed despot, was regent of
Spain. Bitterly chagrined that the stream of Peruvian gold had
ceased to flow into the royal treasury, his vindictive heart had
no mercy for the gallant soldier whose sword had helped win the
riches now temporarily diverted. He selected a man after his own
heart—Pedro de la Gasca, an ugly, deformed little priest,
hypocritically humble, though astute and untiring, whose success
as an inquisitor was a guarantee that he would be as pitiless
and cruel as even Philip could wish.”
This man, says Hawthorne, was—
“A real diplomatist, with a tongue capable of making the worse
appear the better reason and of winning support from the ranks
of the enemy. He was endowed with official powers, but chiefly
with brains and with the tongue aforesaid. His first step was to
repeal such parts of the abolition laws as were hardest upon the
colonists, and thereby he won their favor. Not until after these
good news had been promulgated did Gasca venture to leave Panama
for Peru. The captains of Pizarro’s fleet had been despatched to
Panama to meet and watch the new emissary and either stop or
bribe him, as might seem most expedient. But allowance had not
been made for that tongue. Gasca wagged it with such good effect
that they thought perhaps they were not Pizarro’s captains after
all; at all events they put their fleet at his disposal and to
Peru he came, landing at Tumbez in June, 1547.... Captain Diego
de Centeno, acting for Gasca, captured Cuzco, but was defeated
in the battle of Huarina. Hereupon Pizarro pressed on, nothing
doubting—and indeed one can hardly blame him for his confidence,
since it lay not in human foresight to anticipate the magical
seductiveness of this Gasca’s conversation. The armies met, but
Gasca did but open his mouth and Pizarro’s soldiers began
deserting by troops. The thing was inexplicable; it was uncanny.
We would call him a magnetic man nowadays, and Pizarro’s men
were the iron filings. Even those who stood by him could not be
induced to fight. By great efforts fifteen men contrived to get
themselves slain, and then Pizarro, losing patience, got on his
horse, rode over to Gasca’s camp, and gave himself up.”
With his execution, Spain’s conquest of Peru was complete.
IX
In 1525, at the foot of the great outlying mass of mountains on the
peninsula that lies between the Gulfs of Maracaibo and Darien, and not
far from where the Magdalena River empties into the Caribbean Sea, the
town of Santa Marta had been founded—the first Spanish settlement in
Colombia beyond the Isthmus. It was nothing more than a slave station
for a time, from whence kidnaping parties made raids into the country
round about and captured natives to sell to the gold miners in Española.
Real attempts at colonization were not begun until Pedro de Heredia
founded Cartagena, farther west, in 1533; but it was from these points
that the explorations were undertaken that led to the discovery of the
next great stores of gold and also to fresh, and this time seemingly
trustworthy, affirmations of the truth of the story told by the Indians
of the Isthmus, of the king the Spaniards called _El Dorado_ (the Gilded
Man), in whose country the rivers were said to run over sands of silver,
where the palaces were of gold, with doors and columns studded with
precious stones and the king bathed in aromatic essences and covered his
body with gold dust.
[Illustration: PIZARRO’S PALACE, LIMA—NOW THE GOVERNMENT BUILDING. IT
WAS HERE THAT THE GREAT CONQUISTADOR WAS ASSASSINATED.]
Heredia had found that the hills south of Cartagena contained profitable
gold washings and had learned from the Indians of a region called
Zenufana back in the mountains of the interior where the deposits were
more valuable still, and this story, having proven true, had brought
about the conquest of the rich valley of the Cauca and the development
of mines that have yielded hundreds of millions in gold. The shares,
even of Heredia’s men in the first outcroppings, are declared by the
chroniclers to have been greater than those of the followers of Pizarro
in the ransom of the Inca. And, at about the same time, Pizarro’s
enterprising lieutenant, Sebastian de Benalcázar, the conqueror of
Quito, had continued north and fought his way through the warlike,
semi-civilized tribes that inhabited the high plateaux around Pasto to
the lower country now known as Popayan, where the Cauca gathers its
headwaters, and, in rapid succession, had overcome the tribes that
opposed his progress until he had met the expedition from Cartagena,
after which he had gone back to Peru.
His purpose was to return and undertake the conquest of the region of
the upper Magdalena and the rich Indian communities on the broad
table-land on top of the eastern Cordillera; but, before he could set
out, an expedition from Santa Marta, under the command of the gallant
young Gonzalo Jiminez de Quesada—ranked by many as the greatest of the
Conquistadores after Cortés and Pizarro—had forestalled him. Quesada too
had heard the stories of El Dorado and had been directed to a lake
called Guatavita, two miles high in the mountains, that was supposed to
be in the country over which El Dorado ruled, and also the dwelling
place of a powerful goddess to whom the people offered jewels and gold
by throwing them in the water. “They had a legend,” says Hawthorne—
“To the effect that the Goddess of the Lake had been the wife of
a former chief who had thrown herself into the lake to escape a
whipping, and, like the maidens of Greek mythology, had been
made one of the immortals. Pilgrims came from afar to add their
offerings of gold and emeralds to the divinity. At every
installation of a chief there was an imposing ceremony. First
marched a squad of naked men painted with red ocher, as
mourners, then men adorned with gold and emeralds, with feather
headdresses, then warriors in jaguar skins. These shouted and
made an uproar on horns, pipes, and conch shells. Black-robed
priests accompanied the procession, with white crosses on their
breasts, and in the rear came the nobles, bearing the new chief
on a barrow hung with gold disks. He was naked, his body
rendered sticky with resinous gums and then smeared over with
gold dust. Having reached the shore of the lake, he got on a
barge and was rowed to the center, where he dived into the water
and washed off his gold, while the assemblage on the shore
shouted with joy and flung their offerings into the transparent
abode of the Goddess.”
This, it seems, had once been true, but, although the Indians of the
lowlands may not have known it, the custom had ceased to exist long
before the coming of the Spaniards. Many of the bravest were lured to
their death in the vain quest, not only in the Colombian Andes but in
the valleys of the Orinoco and Amazon, and even south along the Paraguay
and Paraná, before the discovery was made that the custom was a thing of
the past.
In the belief that it still existed, therefore, Quesada and his company
of nearly eight hundred men had left Santa Marta sometime in 1536, and,
harassed by bands of savages, forced their way, with almost
inconceivable difficulty, through the wild forests and undergrowth,
along the foothills bordering the Magdalena and up the steep side of the
Cordillera to the delightful series of plateaux which were then, as they
are yet, the populous heart of the country and the principal seat of her
wealth and culture. In the continual fights with the Indians and from
starvation and fatigue, three-fourths of the company had died, but here
the survivors found themselves at last in a beautiful, fertile region,
where the climate is perfect and all the products of the temperate zone
grow luxuriantly, and where the inhabitants, the Chibchas, had reached a
state of civilization not much inferior to that of the Aztecs of Mexico
and the Caras of Ecuador. Quesada, after having subdued them, had
founded Bogotá near the site of the Chibcha capital, on the 7th of
August, 1538.
Later the same year, to his dismay, Benalcázar, who had come down the
Magdalena from Pasto, in the opposite direction, reached this same
plateau, and, a few days later, to the confusion of both, another
expedition, under the command of Nicolaus Federmann, which had started
from Coro in Venezuela, crossed the mountains south of Maracaibo,
continued in that direction along the _llanos_ (plains) at the eastern
base of the Cordillera and ascended at that point, also put in an
appearance. Thus these three adventurers, believing they had almost
reached the goal for which many were yet to search, found themselves
simultaneously in the very neighborhood of the former domain of the
gilded chiefs, but each confronted with the prospect of losing all that
he had toiled so hard for unless he could overcome his rivals.
What was to be done? Undoubtedly Quesada had the right to possession by
virtue of his prior discovery and conquest, but the other two made claim
on plausible grounds, and he had not been commissioned by the King. With
his depleted force he could not hope to defeat their forces combined.
Besides, as all realized, if they should fight, there would probably not
be enough of the men left to hold the country against the natives, who
would only be emboldened by such a dissension. So when it was found that
Quesada had already gathered in all the spoils in sight—which consisted
of several thousand emeralds and gold vases and ornaments that made a
pile so high that a man on horseback could be concealed behind
it—Benalcázar and Federmann allowed themselves to be persuaded to accept
shares in the loot and submit to the King’s arbitration their respective
claims to the country. Soon afterward the three captains set out for
Spain in the same ship, leaving Quesada’s brother in command. None of
them ever returned. Federmann and Benalcázar were censured for exceeding
the authority given them by their superiors and undertaking conquests on
their own account, and, instead of appointing Quesada Adelantado, the
King sent over another governor with considerable reinforcements, after
which the process of assimilation and settlement went on about as it was
going on in Peru.
X
Very different was the experience of Pedro de Valdivia in Chile. Unlike
these other adventurers, when he set out it was not in the expectation
of finding any great store of gold, since Almagro had reported that the
inhabitants were poor, but with the intention of conquering the country
and converting it into a province of Peru. In accomplishing only a part
of this purpose, he was to have a far more difficult task, had he but
known it, and many more Spanish lives were to be sacrificed, than in all
the other conquests put together. It had already been discovered by
Almagro, however, that as far south as he had gone, the natives were
subjects of the Inca and that their civilization and system of
irrigation and agriculture had been brought to almost as high a
standard. He had advanced down the great central valley as far as the
river Maule, finding everywhere a population as dense, probably, as that
which exists to-day, and had met with little resistance, probably
because of the presence in his party of the brother of the Inca, until
he reached the boundary of the empire and encountered the independent
tribes beyond, and there met his reverse.
As a consequence, misled by this favorable experience with the northern
tribes and his own with the easily conquered natives of Peru, Valdivia
took with him, besides his Indian auxiliaries, only about two hundred
Spaniards and a number of women belonging to their families. He soon
found that, since they had learned of the execution of Huascar and
Atahualpa and that the new Inca, Manco Capac, was little more than a
mere puppet of Pizarro’s, the disposition even of these northern tribes
had changed; that they now regarded themselves as released from their
vassalage. He found also that, although they all spoke the same language
and appeared to belong to the same race, they still maintained their
tribal organizations, each with its own Cacique and entirely distinct
from the others; that the Inca socialistic system had not been adopted,
and that individually they were democratic, resentful of encroachments
on their liberty, and self-reliant. Hardly had he entered their country
when his troubles began. To this second invasion, these people, who had
only looked askance at Almagro, now promptly showed their hostility.
Their lack of efficient military organization and concert of action made
it easy, however, to overcome what resistance they could offer on the
spur of the moment, and Valdivia succeeded in pushing on for several
hundred miles until he came to the section of the valley through which
flows the river Mapocho.
There, fascinated doubtless by the gorgeousness of the environment, he
selected a site at the river side, at the base of an isolated hill
(called Santa Lucia), in the midst of the broad plain that lies between
the two great mountain ranges, two thousand feet above the level of the
sea, and founded the city of Santiago, which has ever since remained the
capital. Following Pizarro’s example, among the first buildings he
caused to be erected were the Cathedral and Bishop’s house, and
afterward, and only just in time to save the colony from annihilation,
he fortified Santa Lucia, for the town itself was soon attacked by an
overwhelming force of Indians and half the houses burned to the ground
before they could be driven off with the help of an exploring party that
opportunely returned. This was only one of many such vicissitudes, in
the course of which, so beset were the invaders and so reduced did their
number and the health of the survivors become by privations and
fighting, that all but Valdivia were for abandoning the conquest and
making a dash for Peru.
Mutiny was only prevented by the discovery of gold in the mountains near
by and the arrival of reinforcements from Lima. After that he was
enabled to found the town of Coquimbo on the coast about two hundred and
fifty miles north of the capital, and visit Peru to arrange for the
sending of more colonists and supplies. While there he assisted in the
suppression of Gonzalo Pizarro’s revolt, and had no difficulty in
inducing a large body of adventurers to go back with him, for Lima now
was swarmed with men who were eager enough to win lands and slaves or
take their chance of making their fortunes in the mines. “With their
help,” says Dawson, “the conquest and settlement of all Chile as far
south as the Maule was effectually completed. The land was apportioned
among the cavaliers, each becoming a sort of feudal baron, and in effect
creating a landed aristocracy which has continued to rule the country to
the present day.”
In 1544, Valdivia founded Valparaiso, the seaport of the capital, and
rebuilt Coquimbo, which had been taken and burned by the neighboring
Indians during his absence in Peru. He then devoted several years to
making good his conquest and firmly establishing the colony, and in 1550
turned his attention to the country south of the Maule. Between the
Maule and the Bio-bio were the Promaucians and their kindred tribes, and
south of the Bio-bio was a confederacy composed of tribes, also related
by blood and language, which inhabited the forests and mountains and
lake region for a stretch of two hundred miles. Chief among these were
the Araucanians—the one unconquered aboriginal race in the new world,
the one aboriginal race in America, North or South, that never was
conquered by Europeans, the one race that checked the victorious march
of the Spaniards and compelled them, after more than a hundred years of
almost incessant warfare, to acknowledge their independence and accept
the Bio-bio as the southern boundary of the Spanish possessions—not
warfare of the usual desultory, treacherous Indian sort, but warfare
abounding in formal campaigns and sieges and pitched battles, in which
large armies were engaged, in numbers often evenly matched.
Inferiorly armed with clubs, spears, and bows and arrows, their bodies
protected only by leather cuirasses, they met the Spaniards and their
native auxiliaries in open field and charged and fought them hand to
hand, and defeated them too in many a Homeric fray in spite of the steel
armor and swords of the Conquistadores and their cavalry, artillery, and
firearms. Inspired by admiration, a chivalrous Castilian, the
soldier-poet Alonso de Ercilla, who was himself in some of the fights,
has told the first part of the story in his historical epic in
thirty-seven cantos—the story of how their lion-hearted chief,
Caupolican, undismayed by defeat in the first encounter, persisted until
he had destroyed an army of the invaders and driven the survivors back
to Santiago; how, when wounded and helpless, he was captured at last and
underwent torture and death with the stoicism of a Mohawk; how his wife,
indignant at his having permitted himself to be taken alive, ran to the
scaffold and threw their baby at his feet, crying out that she would no
longer be the mother of the child of a coward; how the brilliant young
Lautero took three Spanish strongholds, invaded the country north of the
Bio-bio, defeated every army that was sent against him, and laid siege
to Santiago itself; how the fiery Tucapel, while besieging a Spanish
fort, scaled the wall alone, ran the gantlet of the garrison, killed
four mail-clad Spaniards in fighting his way through, and escaped by
leaping from a cliff; how another of their chiefs, moved to pity by the
straits to which he had reduced a town he was besieging, gallantly
challenged the Spanish commander to single combat, on condition that if
he should defeat him the town must be surrendered, but that if he were
himself defeated the siege would be raised, and how, when he was killed,
the Indians kept the compact and withdrew—and many other such stories,
some of them rivaling those told of the Scottish chiefs.[1]
-----
Footnote 1:
The story of the Araucanian wars is told in full in Hancock’s “History
of Chile.”
-----
These Araucanians “had not felt the influence of Peruvian culture,” says
Hawthorne; they were “still in their healthy, primitive condition. In
person,” he goes on—
“Most of them were tall, strong, and active, with a complexion
of light, reddish brown, sometimes approaching white. They had a
copious language, cooked their food, made bread and brewed a
dozen kinds of spirituous liquors. Cities, in the Peruvian
sense, they had none, but lived in patriarchal hamlets, ruled by
_ulmens_, who were in turn subject to a _cacique_ of the tribe.
Each farmer was master of his own field; there was none of that
land ownership by the state that obtained in Peru.... They made
cloth garments, which their women adorned with embroidery and
dyed with vegetable or animal extracts. They manufactured a kind
of soap, and their utensils were of well-fashioned pottery, wood
and marble.... They went to sea in canoes and fished with fish
hooks. They knew something of astronomy and physics and had some
rather crude notions of drawing and carving. They called
themselves Children of the Sun, and are supposed to have
worshiped the sun and moon; they had the red man’s vision of
happy hunting grounds after death, and believed that those who
died fighting in battle were certain of a happy immortality....
Cleanly they were in the extreme, in this respect offering a
sharp contrast to their invaders.... They took particular pains
to keep their magnificent teeth white and clean, and were
careful to remove all hairs from their faces and bodies. The
women were dressed in woolen garments of a green color, with a
cloak and girdle; the men wore shirts and breeches, woolen caps
and footgear, and over all capacious woolen _ponchos_ (capes).
The military system was efficiently organized.”
Having learned that the Araucanians and Promaucians were hereditary
enemies, Valdivia’s first step toward the conquest of the former’s
country was to form an alliance with the latter and to establish a base
of supplies at the mouth of the Bio-bio, where he founded the city of
Concepcion, and, during the year 1551, occupied himself in fortifying it
and making preparations for the invasion. On the arrival of
reinforcements he had sent for, he advanced a hundred and fifty miles
south, and, encountering but little opposition, founded the city of
Imperial, and from that point pushed on a hundred miles farther and
founded the city to which he gave his name. On the way back in 1553 he
built several forts and at Santiago found awaiting him a fresh body of
troops and horses. Two hundred of the men, with an Indian contingent, he
sent across the Andes to begin the conquest of what is now the Province
of Mendoza in Argentina; and then, as Hawthorne relates it—
“The Araucanians, uniting with local tribes, made ready to clear
the country of Spaniards. An army of four thousand Indians
crossed the bloody Bio-bio and gave battle to Valdivia, but that
stout warrior succeeded, after a desperate conflict, in driving
them back for the time. In the following year he carried the war
into the enemy’s country.... There was among them a remarkable
old Ulysses named Colocolo, who added to ardent patriotism a
wonderful sagacity in both war and intrigue. He traveled over
the country preaching a crusade against the invaders. A great
conference was held among the various tribes, and a chief named
Caupolican was, at Colocolo’s suggestion, chosen commander in
chief. This hero was modest and valiant, a giant in stature, and
wise in counsel as he was brave. His first exploit was the
capture of the fort of Arauco, which he accomplished by an
unexpected attack, compelling the garrison, after severe
fighting, to evacuate and retire to the fort at Puren. The
garrison at Tucapel fort was in like manner driven to Puren,
from which place word was sent to Valdivia of their peril.
“He started for the seat of war with two hundred men and five
thousand Indians.... The two armies came in sight of each other
on the 3d of December, 1553, and maneuvered for position. The
right wing of the Araucanians was led by Mariantu, the left by
Tucapel, the Murat of the host. At the opening of the battle
Mariantu attacked and cut to pieces the Spanish left, and served
in the same manner a detachment sent to their support. At the
same time Tucapel swept down on the Spanish right. The latter’s
artillery wrought terrible havoc among the Indians and they were
thrice repulsed, though without being thrown into confusion. At
the critical moment of the fight, a young man saved the day for
the Araucanians. His name was Lautero. He had been previously
captured by Valdivia, baptized and made a page, but he seized
this opportunity to escape from the enemies of his country and
join his friends. He called on them to follow him in a final
charge. They caught the contagion of his valor, and, collecting
themselves, swept the Spaniards and their allies from the field
with awful carnage.
“Valdivia himself was captured. He begged hard for his life,
even promising, if he were spared, to quit Chile with all his
followers. Nor did he scruple to entreat Lautero to intercede
for him. This the magnanimous former page did, but in vain. The
grim old _ulmens_ knew too well the worth of Spanish promises,
and, disregarding Valdivia’s screams for mercy, one of them
crushed his skull with his war club. And the next day the trees
that grew in the great plain again bore Spanish heads as fruit,
and Lautero was appointed Caupolican’s second in command. At the
council which was forthwith held, it was resolved, in accordance
with the advice of old Colocolo, to make a general attack upon
all the Spanish strongholds. Angol and Puren were promptly
abandoned by the invaders, who congregated in Valdivia and
Imperial. Lautero fortified himself on the precipitous mountain
of Mariguenu, in order to prevent possible Spanish incursions
southward. Of a band of fourteen Spanish cavaliers who were
riding from Imperial to Tucapel, seven were slain by the
Araucanian Lincoyan.
“The inhabitants of Concepcion were terrified at these
catastrophes. Villagran was chosen Valdivia’s successor. He made
careful preparations and advanced with a strong army of
Spaniards and native allies toward Mariguenu. In a narrow defile
Lautero fell upon him. The Spaniards tried to scale the mountain
but were checked by slings and arrows, and a body of the
Indians, falling furiously upon the Spanish cannoneers, captured
the guns. An attack was then delivered upon the Spanish front
and it gave way, Villagran flying headlong with the rest and
barely making good his escape. The remnant of the Spanish army
was pursued by Lautero to the river Bio-bio, where the
Araucanians paused, and the fugitives staggered into Concepcion.
There Villagran stayed only long enough to gather together what
property he could, and then, with all the inhabitants, he fled
to Santiago. When Lautero entered Concepcion the next day, he
found nothing but empty houses, which he destroyed. The seven
cities were having a hard life of it.
“An attempt some time afterward to retake and rebuild Concepcion
was prevented by the Araucanians, who met and defeated the
Spaniards in open plain and again drove them back to
Santiago.... In the next campaign Lautero went against Santiago,
while Caupolican attempted the siege of Imperial and Valdivia.
Lautero laid waste the country of the Promaucians and fortified
himself on the Claro. A Spanish reconnoitering party was
surprised and cut to pieces and Santiago was in danger.
Villagran, being ill, gave the command to his son Pedro, who was
led into an ambuscade by Lautero and his army slaughtered. But
this was Lautero’s last victory, for a few days later, standing
on his battlements to watch the approach of a Spanish party, he
was killed by a chance shot, and though in the battle that
followed the Araucanians fought valiantly, they were finally
overpowered. The death of Lautero was for three days celebrated
by the Spaniards; and indeed his fall meant much to them. He had
invariably defeated them in battle and outgeneraled them in
maneuvers, and at the age of only nineteen had made a reputation
as a warrior such as any veteran might envy.”
From then on the war continued with varying success, the Spaniards
stubbornly persisting in their efforts to conquer their indomitable
opponents, the Araucanians always resisting, and, when beaten for a
time, retreating to the mountains, only to recruit and return to the
contest with renewed vigor, and this even when their enemies had grown
so numerous that they could put thousands of their well armed and
trained soldiers into the field instead of hundreds. Gradually, in the
course of many years, the Spaniards secured more and more of a foothold,
until the great leader Paillamachu took command of the Indians and began
an uninterrupted series of victories. He burned Concepcion and Chillan,
a hundred miles to the north, ravaged the whole country as far up as the
Maule, carried Valdivia by storm and captured, besides the garrison and
inhabitants, $2,000,000 of booty and a large store of arms and
ammunition, afterward reduced Imperial, Osorno, Villarica, Cañete,
Angol, Coya and Arauco, and, by the time of his death in 1603, every one
of their cities and forts on the mainland; and, at last, when the
Spaniards, after many other attempts, had failed to recover the lost
ground they were forced to resort to a treaty. Says Hawthorne:
“Another term of raids and reprisals ensued, with no conclusive
results to either party. Spanish governors and Araucanian chiefs
succeeded one another year after year; the operations now
favored one side, now another, but the Spaniards on the whole
lost more than did the Indians. It was not until 1640, about a
hundred years since the outbreak of the war, that anything
approaching a settlement was made, and the initiative came from
the Spaniards. At the village of Quillin the Spanish Governor,
the Marquis of Baides, met the Araucanian chief Lincopichion,
both being attended by a great retinue. The treaty was ratified
by speeches and the sacrifice of a llama. The Spaniards and
Araucanians were mutually to refrain from incursions and the
Araucanians were not to permit the troops of foreign powers to
land on their coasts or to furnish supplies to the enemies of
Spain. This clause was inserted in view of recent attempts of
the Dutch to effect a lodgment in Chile. This compact was kept
by the Indians, in spite of temptations to break it, for ten or
a dozen years, when hostilities broke out afresh owing to bad
faith on the part of Spain. The Spanish were overwhelmingly
defeated in 1655 and during ten years the power of Spain in
lower Chile was broken. In 1665 the Spaniards were glad to make
another treaty with the Indians, which was kept for half a
century. The invaders from the first had gained much more by
their treaties than by their arms.”
“Thenceforward,” says Dawson—
“The Bio-bio remained the southern boundary of the Spanish
possessions. An army of two thousand men and a line of forts
guarded the frontier; and, though hostilities were frequent, for
centuries no real progress was made toward depriving the
Araucanians of their independence. In the progress of time the
slow infiltration of Spanish blood and Spanish customs modified
their characteristics, but it was not until 1882 that they
became real subjects of the Chilean government.”
It may be that the Spaniards ought not to be blamed for these efforts to
complete their conquest of Chile and the appalling amount of bloodshed
and distress they caused. After all, they only did what the Aztecs,
Caras, and Incas had already done to the peoples of their neighboring
countries, what the European peoples were constantly doing to each
other, what England soon afterward did in India, and what, within the
last century, our own people did in Mexico, the French in Algiers, and
the English in South Africa. It may be true, as is asserted by their
apologists, that the motive that actuated the Spanish in their conquests
was not alone greed of land and gold, but in large part to Christianize
a pagan people and bring them into the true fold; but for the long,
brave fight these Araucanians made, for their high standard of
patriotism, for their adherence to their convictions, both religious and
political, we can feel only admiration and sympathy. For these things,
as Hawthorne puts it, “they merit the thanks of all friends of manhood
and liberty.”
The northern areas of Argentina submitted more quietly to the
conquerors. In 1542, Diego de Rojas led the first expedition from Peru
down through the Humahuaca Valley. Though he was killed in a fight with
a wild tribe near the main Cordillera, his followers continued their
march. Near the site of the present city of Tucumán they passed out from
the mountain defiles, and, leaving the desert to their right, penetrated
through Córdoba to the Paraná River country beyond. Lured by the reports
of peaceful and wealthy native communities in the irrigated valleys and
the magnificent pasture lands in the pampas stretching away to the
east—now the scene of Argentina’s enormous stock-raising and wheat
industries—other adventurers soon followed from Peru and Chile and were
met by expeditions from the Atlantic coast, marching west in quest of
another Peru. No permanent settlement was made on the site of the
present city of Buenos Aires until 1580. The two parties that had
attempted it, the first commanded by Juan Diaz de Solis, the other by
Pedro de Mendoza, had been defeated by the Indians and driven off, but
Mendoza had penetrated into the interior, and his lieutenant, Domingo
Irala, who remained and founded a colony, became the dominant figure of
the new agricultural empire.
XI
The system adopted by Spain for the government of her vast colonial
possessions is set forth in the famous code known as the Compilation of
Laws of the Kingdoms of the Indies, framed in the reign of Philip IV and
published in 1680 in the reign of Charles II. The American possessions
had originally been divided into two great political entities by the
Emperor Charles V in 1542. These were known as New Spain and New Castile
and were governed only by _Real Audiencias_, (royal audiences, or
tribunals that had both legislative and judicial functions). Later they
were created Viceroyalties, and the name New Castile was changed to
Peru. “We order and decree,” said the King in Law 1, Title 3, Book III
of the Compilation, “that the Kingdoms of Peru and New Spain be ruled
and governed by Viceroys who shall represent our royal person. These
shall exercise superior power, do and administer justice equally to all
our subjects and vassals and apply themselves to all that will promote
the tranquillity, repose, ennoblement and pacification of these
provinces.”
At that time the Viceroyalty of New Spain embraced all the provinces of
Central America and the islands of the Caribbean, and Mexico and (west
of the Mississippi) pretty much all the land to the north, and in the
Viceroyalty of Peru were included Panama and all the land in South
America, except, of course, Brazil. These viceroyalties themselves were
subdivided into great provincial districts, each administered by a _Real
Audiencia_. These audiencia districts were in turn divided into lesser
governmental jurisdictions known as _Gobernaciones_ (provincial
sub-districts), _Alcaldias Mayores_, _Alcaldias Ordinarias_ and
_Corregimientos_ (municipal districts of greater and lesser extent),
and, in harmony with this political arrangement, there was also an
ecclesiastical division: into Archbishoprics, coextensive with the
audiencia districts, Bishoprics, corresponding with the _gobernaciones_
and _alcaldias mayores_; and Parishes and Curacies, corresponding with
the _alcaldias ordinarias_ and _corregimientos_. The Viceroys were
respectively Presidents of the Audiencias and Captains-General of the
military forces at Lima and the City of Mexico, the viceregal capitals;
the provincial audiencia districts were presided over by Gowned
Presidents (_Ministros Togado_) and were under the military command of
Captains-General, both of which officers were subordinate to the
Viceroys.
Within the jurisdiction of the Viceroy of Peru were seven royal
audiencias: Panama (created in 1535), Lima (created in 1542), Santa Fé
de Bogotá, now Colombia (created in 1549), Charcas, now Bolivia (created
in 1559), San Francisco de Quito, now Ecuador (created in 1563), Chile
(created in 1609) and Buenos Aires, now Argentina (created in 1661). In
the eighteenth century two more viceroyalties were created from
districts withdrawn from the Viceroyalty of Peru: New Granada and Buenos
Aires. That of New Granada, established in 1717, was made up of the
Audiencias of Santa Fé de Bogotá, Panama, San Francisco de Quito and
Venezuela; that of Buenos Aires, established in 1778, included the
territory now embraced in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Patagonia,
Bolivia (Charcas) and the southern part of Chile. Afterward the
Audiencias of Venezuela and Chile were constituted independent
Captaincies-General, subordinate only to the Council of the Indies in
Spain, and the Audiencia of Charcas was returned by royal decree of 1810
to the Viceroyalty of Peru. From these colonial divisions logically
sprang the South American republics as they exist to-day—of course,
again excepting Brazil, which, after she had secured her independence in
1822, retained a monarchial form of government until 1889, when she
became a republic like the others.
Under this Spanish colonial system, therefore, _the King was absolute
sovereign_, and governed, not through his ministers of the cabinet—for
the various provinces were regarded as appanages of the Crown—but
primarily through his Council of the Indies, to which his officers in
America reported directly, and secondarily through these officers
themselves—the Viceroys and Captains-General, and their subordinates. In
addition to these executive officers and the royal audiences, there were
_Cabildos_ (municipal councils), which had jurisdiction of local affairs
in their respective communities, but there were no _elective_ officers
or tribunals, or legislative bodies representing the people. The King
regarded the provinces as his personal property and their occupants as
instruments for their development for his benefit alone. Incidentally,
they might derive for themselves what profit out of it they could, but
only in ways consistent with his interests and policies.
Consequently, during this colonial period, the Spanish Americans had no
opportunity to develop a representative and self-sustaining body
politic, which, in the course of time, might by peaceful means have
altered this theory and corrected the evils of such a system—as was the
case in Brazil, where the Portuguese King in person resided in the
country for several years (during the period of Napoleon’s Peninsula
invasion) and in that way became familiar with local conditions and the
needs of his people. He, on his return to Portugal, opened the Brazilian
ports to the commerce of the world and created Brazil a vassal kingdom,
with a form of government almost wholly autonomous.
In contrast with this, no Spaniard (and certainly no foreign trader) was
allowed to freight ships for the colonies, or to buy a pound of goods
anywhere else, without obtaining special permission and paying well for
the privilege. Cadiz was the only port in Europe from which ships were
permitted to sail for America, and the whole trade was farmed out to a
ring of Cadiz merchants. Every port in Spanish South America was closed
to transatlantic traffic except Nombre de Dios on the Caribbean side of
the Isthmus of Panamá, near the present city of Colon. Not a merchant
ship could enter Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, Callao or Guayaquil. Imports
from Spain must first go to the Isthmus, there be disembarked and
transported over the Andean passes and the Bolivian plateaux on the
backs of llamas, and finally be carried down over the Argentina pampas
to Buenos Aires, or along the arid coast to the Peruvian and Chilean
settlements. Under such conditions in the southern provinces European
manufactures, agricultural and mining implements, and other essentials
for a people’s advancement were to be had only at fabulous prices.
On the other hand, also, the system made exports impossible, except the
precious metals mined in the north, and drugs, and other easily
transportable products. Hides, hair, wool, agricultural products and
hard woods would not stand the cost of such long and difficult hauls.
The Peninsula authorities acted upon the theory that America should be
confined to producing gold and silver. The Plata settlements,
especially, and all others south and east of the Peruvian-Bolivian
mining region, suffered from this ruinous suppression. Having no mines,
they were considered worthless, so far as the royal treasury was
concerned, and were in consequence ignored—until they came in conflict
with home industries by the cultivation of olives and grapes, and then,
to protect the Peninsula growers, the Argentinos were forced to cut down
their olive trees and uproot their vines. The inevitable results
followed. Smuggling, bribe-giving, evasion and contempt for all law, and
hostility to the fiscal authorities of the Peninsula grew up when, in
their stead, the colonists could have been developed into a bulwark for
Spain, which was so soon to totter from her proud position as the
greatest of the world powers. Where science of government and national
up-building should have been taught and fostered, revolution became the
only political refuge.
In 1808, when Napoleon forced the abdication of Charles IV, held him and
his successor, Ferdinand VII, prisoners in France, and established his
brother Joseph on the throne, came the colonists’ opportunity. In April,
1809, a _Junta_ (national assembly) was formed in Caracas; in July of
the same year the example was followed in Peru, and in August at Quito;
in May of the next year, Santa Fé de Bogotá and Buenos Aires followed,
and Santiago elected the Chilean _Junta_ in September. The colonists
expected by these steps to release the Indians from slavery in the mines
in the north and west; to restore and develop the cultivation of grapes,
olives and tobacco, and build up their grazing and agricultural industry
in the south and east; also to open their ports to commerce with Europe,
so that they might buy commodities essential to their growth, and export
their own products by way of exchange; also to lighten the crushing
imposts and internal taxation, to abolish the tithe system, and reclaim
and parcel out the vast feudal estates which had gradually been absorbed
by the Spanish officials in the course of an administration which could
only be likened to that of the rapacious Roman proconsuls against which
Cicero inveighed so impotently.
But the ambitious attempts at reform met with immediate and successful
opposition. The country was full of Spanish office-holders who saw in
them their dismissal and the death blow to their spoils system. In the
short struggle that followed, the success of the royal forces was almost
universal. The colonists had had no training in warfare, nor had they
yet developed as a people the unity of purpose and sturdy
self-dependence which was eventually to bring them their freedom. The
_junta_ governments were everywhere effectively suppressed, except in
Bogotá and Buenos Aires, where the fires of revolution smouldered during
the succeeding years of Peninsula chaos that preceded Waterloo, and the
colonists, with eyes opened at last to the true and only remedy for
their ills, were formulating their great resolve to separate themselves
entirely from the mother country; for, while their measures of reform
had been suppressed, the ideas that called them into being could not be
obliterated. Furthermore their unsuccessful clash with the viceroys and
lesser officials brought even more glaringly before their eyes the
extortions and brutal indifference of the ruling class. The attitude of
the Peninsulares toward the creoles and _mestizos_ of the colonies had
always been contemptuous, and now at last the creoles, being for the
most part of unmixed Spanish descent (they were called creoles only
because born in America) found their resentment of that attitude more
than they could endure.
The series of military successes that was destined to lead to the
desired result began with the fights at Tucumán in the northern part of
Argentina, in the fall of 1812, and at Salta, a little farther north, in
February, 1813. By these battles the persistent efforts of the royalist
forces in Peru to put an end, to the _junta_ government of 1810 in the
Plata settlements, were checked under the leadership of Manuel Belgrano.
But on the first of October following, the Royalists, in violation of
the armistice entered into after Salta, almost destroyed Belgrano’s army
at Vilcapujio. Disastrous as was the reverse for the time-being, this
before long proved a distinct service to the colonists, for it placed in
command of the remnants of Belgrano’s army General José de San Martín,
one of the two great patriots who finally brought the war to a
successful issue, and who had then just returned with the experience and
prestige acquired by twenty years’ service in the Peninsula armies
against Napoleon’s famous marshals. The other of these great patriots
was Simon Bolívar.
San Martín recognized at once the futility of pursuing the campaign and
attacking the Royalists in the mountainous regions of Bolivia, with over
a thousand miles of difficult roads between his army and base of
supplies. He conceived, therefore, the idea of compelling Spain to
defend her own bases at Lima and Callao, and to this end elaborated a
plan for the invasion of Chile and capture of Valparaiso, and, from
thence, a combined military and naval attack on the capital of Peru, the
seat of Spain’s continental power. With this purpose in view, he
repaired to the almost inaccessible town of Mendoza on the Argentine
slope of the Andes, on about the same parallel with the Chilean capital,
Santiago, and remained there two years, recruiting and training a strong
force and accumulating equipment.
Shortly after he had established his camp of instruction, the Chileans
under General Bernardo O’Higgins had extorted from the Royalist General
at Talca a truce whereby the protracted struggle to maintain the _junta_
government in Chile was for the moment suspended. This truce of Talca,
however, was repudiated by the Viceroy at Lima, and General Ossorio was
soon on his way south with another Royalist army, against which,
weakened by local political dissensions, the Chilenos were unable to
prevail, and were decisively beaten at Rancagua in October, 1814. As
this meant a complete restoration of Spanish authority in Chile,
O’Higgins and a few of his officers made their escape with the wreck of
their army, crossed the Andes and placed themselves under the command of
San Martín.
In January, 1817, San Martín’s army, four thousand strong, was ready to
move against the unsuspecting Spanish in Chile, who had been led by a
stratagem to believe that he would enter the country through one of the
more easily accessible of the Andean passes to the south. San Martín,
however, chose the highest and most terrible of them all, one four
thousand feet higher than St. Bernard, and which lay to the north
instead of south of Aconcagua, and accomplished a feat which, in
endurance and skill, is thought by the historians to have surpassed
Napoleon’s famous crossing of the Alps. Descending the western slope, he
fell upon the Spanish outpost at La Guardia on the 7th of February, and
on the 12th, surprised and defeated Ossorio’s main force at Chacabuco.
Two days later the liberating army entered Santiago. The patriot
government was at once re-established and the directorship conferred on
O’Higgins after San Martín, refusing to be diverted from his plans for
the liberation of the entire continent, had declined the honor.
On the first day of the ensuing year the independence of Chile was
proclaimed. _De facto_ independence was not achieved until the decisive
defeat of the Royalists on the plains of Maypú, on the 5th of April,
1815, and then, with Chile cleared of Spanish troops, and the port of
Valparaiso at his service as a base of supplies, San Martín was ready to
enter upon the next stage of his work—the liberation of Peru.
[Illustration: SAN MARTÍN’S PASSAGE OF THE ANDES—FROM VILA’S FAMOUS
PAINTING.]
Another period devoted to recruiting, organizing, and drilling elapsed.
In August, 1820, his combined military and naval expedition set out from
Valparaiso with some 4500 troops. Thus far this stronghold of Spain had
undergone less violent revolutionary disturbances than any other part of
her American possessions. In 1820 it was fully under the control of Don
Joaquín de la Pezuela, the forty-fourth successor of Pizarro. But it was
three years now since Pezuela had reported to the Madrid government that
he stood over a volcano liable to burst into action at any moment, and
had received no aid, a situation San Martín understood. In this
expedition he was ably seconded by Lord Cochrane, a former British naval
officer, who was to render most valuable service in the naval warfare
that was at once begun against the Viceroy. Cochrane’s first success was
the capture of Valdivia, Spain’s best harbor on the Pacific south of
Valparaiso, in spite of the fact that his rockets were filled with sand
instead of powder, the Chilean authorities having imprudently employed
Spanish prisoners in the manufacture of ammunition.
Arrived off Callao, the seaport of Lima, the liberators entered upon
operations and negotiations lasting several months, during which
effective missionary work in the cause of independence was done
throughout Peru by San Martín’s lieutenants. At last, on the 6th of
July, 1821, the Spanish leaders, neglected by their home government, and
realizing the ineffectiveness of their forces, evacuated Lima, which was
at once occupied by San Martín. He did not come, he said, as a
conqueror, and it was with much hesitation that he accepted the supreme
power offered by the patriots; he styled himself Protector of Peru,
promising to surrender the government to the people as soon as the
Peruvian congress should be assembled to take over the burden, and
retained his control of the embryo republic for a year, notwithstanding
the hostility that was engendered by misconception of the high purposes
embodied in the title he assumed. The wisdom of his retention in power
at such a critical period is hardly to be contested.
This was the decisive campaign of the war of independence on the
continent. The future of Buenos Aires and Chile, of New Granada and
Venezuela, and of all the Spanish settlements depended on the battles
that were now to be fought in the mountains of Peru, where the Royalist
forces had concentrated, for this was the very heart of the Spanish
stronghold. San Martín was not to fight these final battles, but to him
is due the credit of conceiving the plan of action, of executing it
almost to the end, and of showing, by his retirement in favor of a more
convincingly popular fellow-patriot of the north, a modesty, soundness
of judgment, and generosity almost unparalleled among statesmen—for in
the meantime the northern movement, under the direction of Simon
Bolívar, was approaching Peru. It arrived at the coast town of Guayaquil
in the spring of 1822. San Martín immediately repaired to that port for
a conference, leaving his administration in the hands of the Marquis of
Torre Tagle, a member of the old nobility who had turned revolutionist,
and Bernardo Monteagudo.
The meeting of the two Liberators marked the close of San Martín’s
military career. He saw clearly that there could be no room for himself
and a brilliant, ambitious, magnetic leader like Bolívar in the same
sphere of action, that it was necessary for the welfare of the common
cause that one of them should retire. He was great and patriotic enough
to make the sacrifice. Returning to Lima, he resigned the supreme
authority and retired to Europe. There was no place for him in Buenos
Aires, except as a leader in the civil wars which by this time were
distracting the country, and this rôle he disdained. In 1850 he died in
France at the age of seventy-two, after a thirty years’ struggle with
sickness and poverty, but attended always by his devoted daughter. After
his death his body was brought to Buenos Aires and reverently placed in
a tomb, one of the handsomest in the world, about which stand three
marble figures representing Buenos Aires, Chile, and Peru.
Bolívar’s career had begun in Venezuela, where he was born. After
Spain’s suppression of the _junta_ established in Caracas in 1810,
Bolívar, with the revolutionist Miranda, had landed in Venezuela and
called into being the first congress of the people, and the independence
of the country was proclaimed. In the fighting that followed, the
movement thus started met a speedy end—literally shattered by an awful
earthquake that occurred on Holy Thursday of 1812, which the Royalists
claimed was a stroke of Divine vengeance against those who would have
overthrown the anointed of the Lord.
Miranda was captured and ended his days in a Spanish prison, but Bolívar
escaped into New Granada and soon had full sway in the revolutionary
councils of the northern provinces. In 1813 he founded at Bogotá an
active revolutionary _junta_ and a military organization. With the
latter he struck the Royalists at Cucutá, just within the eastern border
of Colombia, and passed over the mountains to Caracas, proclaiming war
to the death. Here his rôle of Dictator began. His career, however, was
punctuated by many disasters before the decisive battle of Boyacá placed
Bogotá permanently in his hands and gave assurance of eventual success.
But from this triumph Bolívar hurried to the revolutionary congress he
had some time before called at Angostura and procured the enactment of a
law providing for the union of Venezuela and New Granada, to form the
Republic of Colombia, and was elected President; and by the end of the
year 1821 all of this territory, except Panama and Puerto Cabello, near
La Guayra, had been freed from the control of Spain.
The famous battle of Pichincha, won on the 24th of May, 1822, by
Bolívar’s great lieutenant, Antonio José de Sucre, gave Ecuador also to
the northern federation; later it was formally incorporated into the new
Colombian Republic. Still for two years the final clash between the
Royalists and the patriots was deferred, during which time the confusion
of sectional interests and negotiations by the now desperate mother
country threatened to undo the great work of the liberators. But once
more Bolívar triumphed. By the withdrawal in his favor of San Martín,
harmony was restored; with his victory at Junín on the 6th of August,
1824, and the decisive battle on the plain of Ayacucho, midway between
Lima and Cuzco, on the 9th of December, the war came to an end. In that
brilliantly fought battle the patriot army, again under Sucre, defeated
a largely superior force commanded by the Viceroy in person in less than
eighty minutes. The Viceroy wounded and a prisoner, and his men having
deserted by hundreds, his second in command sued for terms, and that
afternoon fourteen generals, five hundred and sixty-eight officers of
other grades, and three thousand two hundred privates became prisoners
of war.
[Illustration: STATUE OF BOLÍVAR, LIMA.]
Following this victory, Sucre proceeded to Charcas and convened the
patriot congress which in August, 1825, proclaimed the Republic of
Bolívia, and became its first President. Bolívar was then at the head of
affairs in Peru. He soon, however, relinquished his dictatorship and
returned to Bogotá to resume, for a brief term, his functions as
President of the federation of Colombia. From that time on he sank
rapidly from his apogee and, beset on all sides by the enemies his
supposed imperial designs had made for him, died on his estate of Santa
Marta on the 17th of December, 1830, at the early age of forty-seven.
Disheartened, his personal fortune gone, he had abandoned any designs of
that character he might once have had and only a few days before the end
wrote to the Colombians: “My last wishes are for the country’s
happiness. If my death can contribute to the quieting of party strife
and to the consolidation of the union, I shall go down to the grave in
peace.” To him also in after years his people erected monuments in tardy
recognition of his matchless services.
The Portuguese provinces were the only ones to continue the monarchical
system. They too, however, declared themselves independent, and became
known as the Empire of Brazil, until 1889, when the present republic was
declared.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II
BRAZIL
I
The United States of Brazil, next to our own United States, form the
largest of the American republics. Brazil has an area fifteen times
greater than Germany’s, sixteen times as great as that of France,
250,000 square miles greater than ours, excluding Alaska and our island
possessions. At its greatest width, the country extends inland more than
2000 miles and its coast line on the Atlantic is more than 3700 miles
long, twice the distance from Portland, Maine, to Key West; yet the
population, although it has doubled in the last forty years, is not
quite a fourth as large as our own. It is estimated that if the whole
country were as densely populated as France, the inhabitants would
number 622,000,000, or, if as densely populated as Germany, 955,000,000.
Some time it may be. Except in the regions near the large cities, only a
small part is even sparsely settled now.
It argues well for the industry and enterprise of what inhabitants there
are, however, that Brazil’s international commerce is relatively nearly
as great in proportion to her population as ours. Some idea of the
remarkable progress she has made is given in the following extract from
a pamphlet recently published by the _Commissão de Expansão Economica_,
entitled “Do you Know the Wealth of Brazil?”
“In the colonial days, the foreign trade of Brazil was done
exclusively through Lisbon, under the protection of Portuguese
men-of-war.... The colonial produce was distributed among the
principal Portuguese commercial centers and the imports came
exclusively from Portugal to the ports of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro,
Pernambuco, Pará, and Maranhão. Until the end of the eighteenth
century, the foreign trade of Brazil was continued more or less
on this basis, but the exports were considerably more than the
imports. By decree of January 28, 1808, the King of Portugal,
Don João VI of Braganza, lately arrived at Bahia” (when he fled
from the Peninsula as a result of Napoleon’s invasion),
“resolved to open all the ports of Brazil to the commerce of
foreign nations, until then closed for the benefit of Portugal.
The first consequence of this decree was the establishment of
commercial relations with England. English agencies were opened
at Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco for the purpose of
importing manufactured articles and exporting sugar, alcohol,
gold, cotton, hides, coffee, cocoa, timber, and indigo. After
the proclamation of independence in 1822, the trade developed
enormously, France, the United States of America, Germany,
Holland, and Sweden following the example of England.... From
1846 to 1875 the imports increased 110 per cent. and the exports
175 per cent. From 1876 to 1905 the imports increased 175 per
cent. and the exports 272 per cent.... In 1909 its total value
was £101,844,549 (over $500,000,000).”
In 1910 it was $545,581,275, in which we participated to the extent of
$142,437,986, including $58,808,467 worth of coffee and $47,409,030
worth of rubber that were exported to us. For the principal industry is
still, as it has always been, agriculture, though in the mountainous
sections there are vast regions containing gold and precious stones and
minerals of incalculable value, millions of square miles in the interior
still covered with virgin forests; and yet even the relatively small
sections that have been cultivated produce more than three-fourths of
all the coffee consumed in the world and more than three-fifths of all
the rubber, not to mention the other products. But within the last few
years immigration has been encouraged and many conditions that were
preventing development have been improved. Wonders have been
accomplished in making the cities as healthful as any in the world. The
railroads have been, and are still being, extended tremendously and
facilities for commerce along the great inland waterways continually
increased.
The first of the important seaports of Brazil that are accessible by
steamer from New York is Belém, the capital of the State of Pará. It
ranks only as the fifth in size, but to the tourist it is of surpassing
interest because it is situated on the Pará River, the southern or
commercial mouth of the Amazon, that mightiest and most majestic of all
the rivers in the world.
Imagine!—a river more than 3400 miles in length, with its source in the
Peruvian Andes, 16,000 feet above the level of the sea—a river which,
with its vast tributaries, many of them themselves from a thousand to
two thousand miles in length, drains a territory of 2,300,000 square
miles, two-thirds as large as our United States, and so rich in
indigenous resources, and so fertile, that many years ago, when it was
wholly a wilderness, the great scientist Von Humboldt said of it that
“it is here that one day, sooner or later, will concentrate the
civilization of the globe”—a river that is a mile and a half wide at
Tabatinga, the last Brazilian port to the west, and gradually broadens
on its way to the sea until it attains a width of 150 miles at its
northern mouth alone, and discharges into the Atlantic a volume of water
more than four times as great as the outpour of the Mississippi—a river
that is navigable, that is now actually being navigated by _ocean
liners_, for 2000 miles, clear across Brazil to Iquitos in the frontier
of Peru.
Yet, although as early as 1541 Francisco de Orellana, one of Pizarro’s
little band of conquerors, who had crossed the Andes in quest of the
fabulous country of _El Dorado_, and, after having traversed the whole
course of the river through Brazil with a few companions in a canoe, had
made his way back to Spain and told amazing stories of the wealth of the
region he had discovered, and although a century later the astronomer La
Condamine, and still later Baron von Humboldt, Castelnau, and others had
successively published alluring accounts of their explorations in the
same region, it was not until 1867 that the river was opened to free
navigation.
It is gratifying to reflect that, probably more than to any other
outside influence, it was due to the publication of the report of an
expedition undertaken in 1851 by William Lewis Herndon, a lieutenant in
the United States Navy, and to the explorations of Louis Agassiz, a
Harvard professor, that the interest was aroused which at last brought
this about. Lieutenant Herndon, like Orellana, started from Lima, and,
braving the passes of the Andes, entered the Amazon from one of its
western affluents and made the journey in a canoe, with only a Peruvian
guide and a few Indian rowers, all the way to its mouth. Professor
Agassiz, whose explorations were begun fifteen years later, started from
Belém and traveled in a steamboat, such as it was, accompanied by his
wife and a corps of scientists, and was given every assistance possible
by the late Emperor Dom Pedro, who took a lively interest in the
expedition. But even then in Brazil, the Professor says in his book, “so
little was known of the Amazon that we could obtain only very meager,
and usually rather discouraging, information concerning our projected
journey. In Rio, if you say you are going to ascend their great river,
your Brazilian friends look at you with compassionate wonder. You are
threatened with sickness, with intolerable heat, with mosquitoes,
_jacaraes_ (alligators), and wild Indians.”
Lieutenant Herndon, however, had already made known to the scientific
world that the climate is healthful, notwithstanding the mosquitoes;
that, humid and hot as it is during certain hours of the day, the nights
are always cool, and that “the direct rays of the sun are tempered by an
almost constant east wind, laden with moisture from the ocean, so that
no one ever suffers from the heat;” and, when he got back to Rio de
Janeiro, Professor Agassiz assured the Brazilians that this was so.
Arthur Dias indignantly protests (in his _Brazil of To-day_) that “it is
not true, as they say, that the climate of this region prevents the
existence and the extending of the population.” “It is a legend, a
fiction,” he adds. Mozans, who made a similar journey to Herndon’s very
recently, also testifies to the same effect.
Here in this Amazon country, Lieutenant Herndon had reported, “we see a
fecundity of soil and a rapidity of vegetation that is marvelous and to
which even Egypt, the ancient granary of Europe, affords no parallel....
Here trees, evidently young, shoot up to such a height that no
fowling-piece will reach the game seated on their topmost branches. This
is the country of rice, of sarsaparilla, of cocoa, of tonka beans, of
mandioca, black pepper, arrowroot, ginger, balsam, tapioca, gum copal,
nutmeg, animal and vegetable wax, indigo and Brazil nuts, of India
rubber, of dyes of the gayest colors, drugs of rare virtue, variegated
cabinet woods of the finest grain and susceptible of the highest polish.
Here dwell the wild cow, the fish ox, the sloth, the anteater, the
beautiful black tiger, the mysterious electric eel, the boa constrictor,
the anaconda, the deadly coral snake, the voracious alligator, monkeys
in endless variety, birds of the most brilliant plumage, and insects of
the strangest form and gayest colors.”
More than forty years of progress and improvement have passed since Dom
Pedro decreed that the river should be open to international trade, yet
all these wonders may still be seen there—the vast expanses of water,
the shore lines varied by lofty bluffs and low plains of sand, rugged
rocks and dense masses of foliage, the river surface dotted by islands,
large and small—the magnificent forest still crowding to the banks and
teeming with all the exuberant life and brilliant hues of the
tropics—giant _sumaumeras_, their crests towering high above all other
trees, their huge, white-barked trunks and limbs standing out in
striking relief from the masses of green; tall cocoanut palms, tufted at
the top with fan-shaped leaves cut into ribbons and bedecked with creamy
blossoms; slender, graceful _assai_ palms, tall and clean-stemmed like
the cocoanuts, but with fluffy, feathery crowns; wine palms from which
the flowers hang in long, crimson tassels, studded with berries of
bright green; _jupati_ palms with plumelike leaves forty to fifty feet
long that start near the base of the trunk and curve upward on all sides
in the form of a vase; the familiar fan palm, and a legion of others.
And there are rubber trees, which resemble in this region our northern
ash; stately _castanhas_, the trees on which the Brazil nuts grow, and
_cacaos_, that look like our cherry trees, only they give us our
chocolate and cocoa beans instead and have blossoms of a saffron tint;
mahoganies, rosewoods and satinwoods and great sheaves of whispering
bamboo; myriads of ferns and exquisitely tinted orchids, acacias,
scarlet passion flowers, begonias, yellow and blue—flowers innumerable
in the wildest profusion. Not little ones like our violets hiding
modestly among the mosses and grass, but big blossoms growing
luxuriantly on bushes and on the parasite vines that twine about the
trunks of the trees and hang in festoons from their branches, until the
whole river border seems ablaze with their vivid lights; and there are
still the monkeys and beautiful butterflies and humming birds, and the
parrots, macaws, herons, egrets, toucans, and countless other gorgeou
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