A HISTORICAL OUTLINE
It would be manifestly impossible, in the present work, to enter
in detail upon the wide field of the history of the Spanish
American States. Yet, just as in order to gain an intelligent idea
topographically of the region we must refer to its main geographical
features and disposition, so must we cast a glance at its historical
outlines. Those readers who are drawn on to fill in the detail have
ample material at hand in the books recently published on the Latin
American States.[4]
[4] Each volume of the South American Series contains such.
The beginnings of history and of geography are, of course,
inextricably interwoven, and in the case of America this is markedly
so. America, in a sense, was discovered by accident, and its first
discoverers did not know they had brought to being a new continent.
Columbus, to his dying day, believed it was India he had reached,
which he had set out to reach, and would not be persuaded to the
contrary.
On the maps of the earlier geographers there was, in fact, no
room for America. From the shores of Europe and Africa to those
of Cathay--the old, mediaeval, and still the poetical name for
China, the great Asiatic coast--stretched one sea, the Western
Ocean, broken by some small islands and Cipango, or Japan. Scholars
and dreamers, studying isolated passages in cryptic and classic
writings, or arguing from general principles, in which the wish was
at times father to the thought, believed that by sailing west India
could be reached.
These dreams of poets and the beliefs of scholars crystallized in
the mind of the Genoese sailor, Columbus, a man of humble origin,
and after many disappointments and disillusions, in the interviewing
of kings and high personages for aid and patronage (among them the
King of England, but England with characteristic lack of imagination
would have none of it, and the King of Portugal, who tried to cheat
him), was enabled to set sail by aid of the Queen of Spain--women
having more imagination than men--in three small vessels, and made
his great and memorable landfall in the New World on October 12,
1492, in the Bahamas.
These islands Columbus and his officers believed to be those
described by Marco Polo, as forming the eastern end of Asia; and
thus arose the name of "Las Indias," the Indies, which America long
retained.
As a result of this discovery, a controversy arose between Spain
and Portugal, for, in 1454, the Pope had given the Portuguese--by
what right he himself doubtless best knew--exclusive control of
exploration and conquest on the road to the Indies, although his
Bull had in view only the eastern route. Now, however, "spheres of
influence" might easily clash. The two Powers repaired again to the
Pope, successor of the former, and he, drawing a line across the
map of the world from north to south, in a position west of the
Azores a hundred leagues, awarded Spain everything that might lie
beyond it. The Pope was a Spaniard. The Portuguese did not think the
award fair. (It might have been mentioned that the Portuguese King,
his "especial friend," had treacherously endeavoured to forestall
Columbus by dispatching a caravel on his proposed route secretly,
instead of helping him, a futile errand, however.) They protested,
and by common consent the line was shifted to 370 leagues west of
the Cape Verde Islands, corresponding to-day to the 50th degree of
longitude.
Such a line cuts South America across the mouth of the Amazon, and
the Spaniards claimed the right to exclude all other people and all
trade but their own from beyond this line.
The subsequent conquest and discovery of America embodies some of
the most romantic and stirring episodes in history. In his last
voyage Columbus explored the West Indies and reached South America,
landing at the mouth of the Orinoco, and he sailed along the coast
of the Caribbean and Central America to Nombre de Dios--"Name of
God"--near Colon. Henry VII of England--who had declined to help
Columbus--now kindly permitted John Cabot to sail, in 1499, who
discovered Newfoundland and did other valuable exploits. Hispaniola
was the first Spanish Settlement, on the Island of Hayti, and this
spread to the mainland. In 1513 Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed
the Isthmus of Darien and Panama and beheld the "South Sea," as
described in our chapter upon Central America. The insistent hope
of a "strait" or passage through these lands, giving a way to the
Spice Islands of the Indies, was now given up, and when Magellan,
in 1520, passed through the strait which bears his name, and sailed
across the Pacific, it was understood that a vast continent and a
vast ocean divided the world from Asia here, a new world, and that
lying mainly within the sphere of influence which the Pope had so
generously assigned to Spain.
With regard to this obsession of Colombus that westward lay the
shortest route to India, and the insistent idea of a strait, have
not these been materialized in the Panama Canal, and are not these
ancient mariners vindicated to-day?
The New World now belonged to Spain. Perhaps the first purpose of
the Spaniards was trade with the Indies, but their main object
was that of gold, to be gained by slave labour. They could not
themselves work in the tropics, even if they had had any desire for
manual labour, which they had not. However, they began to introduce
European plants and animals into Cuba and Hispaniola, a service
which was of enormous value later to America, which possessed but
a meagre range of staple food products and no beasts of burden
or bovines. But gold--that was what they wanted. The shallow
deposits of the island were soon exhausted, as were the poor willing
Indians, killed off by forced labour. The barbarous treatment of the
aborigines of the New World by the Spaniards--and the Portuguese--is
one of the most dreadful blots on the history of America, indeed of
the world.
The easily gotten gold being exhausted, it was necessary to go
farther afield. The Darien Settlement was transferred to Panama, the
coasts of Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico were explored by Cordova
and Grijalva, from Cuba, and in 1519 the great Conquest of Mexico
was entered upon by Cortes.
So far the Spaniards had found little difficulty in subduing the
Indians to their will, the inoffensive islanders, and Caribs, which
latter became almost exterminated. The Indian folk of these islands
were generally a simple and credible race, who at first looked upon
the white man as a demi-god, but these simple children of the soil
were treated with utmost callousness and barbarity. There is an
example in the treatment of the natives of Watling Island in the
Bahamas, which, as before remarked, was the first point in the New
World trodden by Columbus. Of this land and its folk the explorer
wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella: "These beautiful islands excel
all other lands. The natives love their neighbours as themselves,
their faces are always smiling, their conversation is the sweetest
imaginable, and they are so gentle and affectionate that I swear to
your Highness there is no better people in the world." But what was
the lot of these folk? The Spaniards wanted further labour in the
mines of Hispaniola, and to get these natives there they, trading on
a characteristic love of the people for their ancestors and departed
relatives, promised to convey them to the heavenly shores, where
these were imagined as dwelling; and so, treacherously getting them
on board the ships, they were taken away to the mines, where it is
said 40,000 perished under starvation and the lash.
The natives of Mexico were people of a different stamp. The Aztecs
were _pueblo_ or town Indians, highly organized as soldiers, skilled
in arts and crafts, with a developed civilization and certain
intellectuality. They were highland folk, the Mexican plateau
lying at seven to eight thousand feet above sea level, protected
by mountain fastnesses. It was, in fact, an empire of the New
World such as, in some respects, might compare with those ancient
semi-barbaric empires of the Old World, in times more ancient. Its
conquest by Cortes was an affair of great enterprise and toil,
entailing heavy loss and suffering on the part of the Spaniards, and
at one time their defeat, from which only a superhuman rally saved
them, at the Battle of Otumba. There was one specially weak point
about the Aztec rule. It was a hegemony, exercised over various
other Mexican races, who hated Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor, and his
people. Cortes was skilful enough to take advantage of this flaw in
the Mexican armour, to fan the jealousies of the subject tribes, and
enlist them to march against Tenochtitlan, the capital of Mexico.
These allied Indians, when the place fell, themselves committed the
most unheard-of barbarities on the Aztec population, such as shocked
the Spaniards, who were unable to restrain them.
The Conquest of Mexico was effected by 1521, and the success, the
romance, the adventure, and the objects of gold and silver sent by
Cortes to Spain, and the loot of the soldiers, fired the imagination
of the Spaniards in Hispaniola and Darien to other quests. The
settlers at Panama had heard of another empire where gold was to be
had for the taking, perhaps richer and greater even than that of the
Aztecs. This was Peru, and Francisco Pizarro and Diego Amalgro set
sail from Panama to explore and conquer that unknown region along
the sunset shores of America to the south.
This adventure too was an arduous one, not by reason of the
opposition of savage natives, for the Incas of Peru were a gentle
and philosophical people, animated by a remarkable social system,
and they offered little resistance to the white men and the
formidable men-animals, or horsemen, and their guns. It was famine
that assailed Pizarro and his followers, and insufficient support.
Also he, like Cortes, had to contend with the jealousies and
double-dealing of the Spanish Governor of the Indies. As for Peru,
its coast was barren, as it is to-day, and only after surmounting
the dreadful fastness of the Andes, amid the inclement climate of a
region twelve to fifteen thousand feet above the level of the sea,
was the Inca Empire reached and subdued. Here lay Cuzco, the Mecca
of Peru, and Cajamarca, a more northern capital. The stores of gold
recovered seem to have filled these Spaniards' expectations, and
great renown was the result of this conquest, which was completed by
1533.
These exploits were followed by a period of strife among the
Spaniards, and Pizarro was murdered, after founding Lima, the
capital of Peru. But in 1536 the regions lying between Peru and
Panama, which to-day we know as Ecuador and Colombia, were explored
and conquered, the first by Sebastian de Benalcazar, the second
by Jimenez de Quesada. Here were dwelling other advanced people
or tribes. Quito, the capital of Ecuador, had been the home of
the Shiris, a cultured people who were overthrown by the Incas
before the Spanish advent. The city was joined to Cuzco, eleven
hundred miles to the south, by the famous Inca roads, one along the
Cordillera, the other along the coast. Some early Spanish historian
delighted to speak of these roads as equal to those of the Romans,
but this was an exaggeration. Colombia was the culture-area of the
Chibchas. The Spaniards had heard of a further great empire, a rich
El Dorado, in this region, and encouraged by the ease with which
Pizarro had conquered Peru, they made their way up the Magdalena
River from the Caribbean Sea. A pleasing land and much gold was
encountered, after severe hardships, the people being of some
considerable degree of civilization, although not of the status
of the Aztec or the Inca. The richest plums, in fact, had fallen.
Quesada named this region New Granada, with its capital at Bogota.
There still remained the conquest of the huge territory south of
Peru, known as Chile, and this, attempted by Almagro in 1537, was
carried out by Pedro de Valdivia, who, however, was checked by
the redoubtable Araucanian Indians. These form one of the chief
admixtures of the Chileans to-day, a hardy and enterprising nation,
in contrast with the Peruvians of a more sentimental temperament,
with a basis of the Quichua Indians of the Incas. Terrible excesses
were committed upon the Indians on these expeditions. A terrible end
was visited upon the Spanish leader by the Indians. "You have come
for gold," said the savage chief who captured him. "You shall have
your fill." And he caused _molten_ burning gold to be poured into
his mouth. Then he was cut to pieces with sharpened oyster shells.
From the Southern Andes, the Spaniards, in the following years,
descended to the great plains which now form the republics of the
River Plate, Argentine, Uruguay and Paraguay. The exploration
of Brazil had been begun in 1510, and the region was traversed
by Orellana in his descent of the Amazon from Quito, and it was
gradually settled by the Portuguese.
The lands lying between Panama and Mexico, which to-day form
the Central American States, Guatemala, Costa Rica and others,
were conquered after the fall of Mexico. Here were evidences of a
splendid past, in the beautiful temples of sculptured stone found in
their forests and deserts, ruins even then abandoned. These remains
astounded Europe, when they were first revealed.
Thus did all this enormous region of Latin America, from tropical
Mexico--indeed, from California--to the frigid extremity of
Patagonia, fall into the possession of Spain and Portugal. In
some respects it is a dreadful history. The Spaniards overthrew
civilizations in Mexico and Peru which in many respects were
superior to their own, civilizations that had developed marvellously
without the resources that the Old World commanded, for there was
neither ox nor horse, nor even iron nor gunpowder. The Spaniards
destroyed everything that these people had done. For centuries
unknown they had evolved their arts and crafts and laws; laws, in
the case of the Incas of Peru, far more beneficial and democratic
than anything Europe had produced at that period, and millions of
these people were most ruthlessly destroyed.
To read the accounts of the happenings of those times is enough to
break one's heart. To-day, throughout the length and breadth of
this vast territory--of which not an acre now belongs to Spain--the
spirit of the Indian has so far remained faithful that there is not
a single statue raised to Cortes or Pizarro. Columbus, of course,
is commemorated by his monuments in every capital.
These great New World territories, by virtue of the papal Bull,
were held as the peculiar property of the Sovereign. The Spanish
possessions were divided into two "kingdoms," the Kingdom of
New Spain, consisting of Mexico and all lands to and including
Venezuela, and New Castile, later called Peru. This last viceroyalty
was found unwieldy, and New Granada and the River Plate regions were
constituted apart under viceroys. The administrative powers of these
functionaries were very great, but they were held in some control by
the Laws of the Indies: measures passed for native protection. Even
the frightful dominance of the Inquisition did not extend to the
Indians, who were regarded as merely catechumens. Queen Isabella of
Spain, by whose imagination and aid discovery of the New World had
been rendered possible, would not permit--and her memory should be
revered for it--the enslavement of the Indians, if she could prevent
it, and when Columbus returned home with a cargo of natives, whom
he proposed to sell as slaves, Isabella interfered. Let them be set
at liberty, she said, and sent back to their homes. Columbus has in
general been represented as a protector of the Indians, and must not
necessarily be judged in the light of this incident.
In the general condemnation of Spain at that period, these facts
should be recollected. It was declared by the home government that
the Indians were to enjoy the privilege of free subjects, and
that their native princes were to be upheld in their authority.
Censure was frequently visited upon the conquerors and governors
of Mexico and Peru, from home, for their displacement or execution
of these, as any who will study Spanish colonial history may see.
Some modern writers, in their democratic zeal, have overlooked
this. The declaration was opposed by the colonists, as well as the
colonial authorities, and indeed by the clergy. Some compulsion was
necessary, of course, if civilization was to make its way among
the Indians, for they were often loath to work, and stood sullenly
aloof from the white race. The _System of Repartimientos and
Encomiendas_--the assigning of bodies of Indians to the industrial
charge of colonists--was well meant, but the greed of the colonists
and their callous habit as regarded human life offset these
influences.
Another side of the question also presents itself. Under Philip
II, the colonies were governed not so much in their own interests,
as for the enrichment of Spain and its predominance. He yearned to
injure Protestant England, and the colonists were taxed and goaded
to produce wealth, and their interests sacrificed in the furtherance
of this end. Those into whose hands the unfortunate Indians had been
delivered body and soul, drove the unfortunates into the mines,
branded them on the face, flogged them to death, chucked their
miserable carcasses aside, when they fell from exhaustion, a prey to
the dogs.
We know what these things led to. England and other European
nations refused to recognize the exclusive control of the American
continents by the Peninsula Powers, and hardy buccaneers and
privateers streamed forth to dispute Spanish pretensions. Drake
intercepted the stream of gold with which Philip was enabled to
equip his armadas and thus performed a marked strategic service for
England.
Moreover, such pretensions would never have been respected,
especially under the influence of the Renaissance and the
Reformation.
The restrictions upon colonial trade by Spain were, we see further,
an element in the downfall of the empire. The natural development
of South America was seriously hindered. All trade must come via
Panama, and anything opposed to Spanish interests was suppressed.
The growing trade between Acapulco and China was suppressed;
Hidalgo's vineyard in Mexico was destroyed by the Spanish
authorities because Spain alone must grow grapes. "Learn to be
silent and obey, and not to discuss politics," ran the proclamation
of a Mexican viceroy, near the end of the eighteenth century.
When--unlawfully--the throne of Spain came to be occupied with
kings having French sympathies, these short-sighted methods were
modified. _Audiencias_ or law courts, of which, from the reign of
Philip IV there were eleven, in Santo Domingo, Mexico, Panama,
Lima, Guatemala, Guadalajara, Bogota, La Plata, Chile, and Buenos
Ayres, acted as counsel to the Governors, with civil and criminal
jurisdiction. Appeal could be had to the Council of the Indies, that
great colonial body at Seville. For centuries the history of Spanish
America is made up of the deeds and misdeeds of the viceroys.
The political and commercial control of the colonies was thus
entirely in the hands of the Crown. The territories were expected to
send quantities of gold and other precious metals home to Spain with
regularity, and indeed Spain later became a mere sieve into which
this treasure from the Indies was poured. They were also bound to
send raw material and to take all their manufactured goods from the
Mother Country.
It must be recollected that the ill-treatment meted out to the
natives of these lands was mainly the work of the Spanish settlers.
They generally both despised the Indians, and wished to enrich
themselves from their labours. They were, for the man of Iberian
race, inferior creatures, to be used at his will, and the forced
labour in the mines was a cause of the reduction of the population.
Questions have been raised by historians as to whether the dreadful
treatment of the American native by the Spaniard was worse than that
meted out to him by the Anglo-Saxon settlers in North America. There
have been grave abuses in the latter field. The Indians in Spanish
America, however, numbered many millions, as against a few hundred
thousand elsewhere. The Spanish Crown and Government certainly did
not countenance the excesses carried on by the colonists, but
strove to protect the Indians.
As for the English colonies in America, they enjoyed a greater
measure of self-government and had taken firm root under more
prosaic but more fruitful form. The same policy, however, on the
part of the Mother Country was enacted in commercial matters; that
trade should consist almost exclusively of exchange of colonial
raw material for English manufactured articles. French colonies in
America were less noteworthy or prosperous, but they played their
part in history, for the fall of French control in North America
was in reality the beginning of independence for all colonies in
the New World; as did the ideas of the French philosophers, which
found a ready soil in the Spanish American folk. The establishment
of the United States was but the precursor to the establishment
of the numerous Latin American States. The Spanish Government saw
its danger, but was too apathetic to move. However, some reforms
were introduced, and it may be said that Spanish America was well
governed at the time of revolution, and was prosperous.
But it has been said that "across the face of all human reform are
written the words 'too late,'" and this is in effect what happened
in Spanish America. The French Revolution, and the defeat of
British expeditions to Buenos Ayres by the colonists in 1806 and
1807 had their effect. The struggle for Independence lasted from
1810 to 1826, until the flag of Spain was entirely ousted from
the vast territory of Spanish America, upon which she had stamped
her individuality, language, laws and all else, with much that was
splendid and enduring, and much that in the future development of
the world may have a value so far scarcely apparent.
The dark pictures of misrule of the century of republican life of
the twenty Latin Republics are interspersed with pages of a more
pleasing nature, but it is a chequered history, whose end we cannot
yet foresee.
Among elements making for disorder and bloodshed in Spanish America,
religion has played a prominent part. Many States developed bitter
antagonism between clerical and non-clerical parties. Some would
overthrow the Church and the all-pervading priestly power; others
would uphold it, whether out of pious conviction, whether because
it was a convenient party upon which to hang their own pretensions
and ambitions. Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Central America,
Chile--in fact, all have as part of their history the deadly
struggles between these factions. To-day this very fierceness
has flamed out, in the main, to be succeeded by a thinly veiled
materialism. What more can be expected of a hemisphere which was
cursed by the Inquisition?
In many instances the "reform" parties of these States having
triumphed by force of arms, confiscates all Church property--and
this often was enormous--which was handed to secular and public
purposes, or enriched the pockets of politicians. In Mexico,
where at one time it was not safe to pass along the street unless
seeming to be muttering a prayer, the power of the Church was
entirely overthrown, and convents, monasteries and other religious
establishments were forbidden to exist. In Ecuador similar
things were brought about, accompanied by massacre and other
dreadful deeds. But it would be unjust to pick out any state as
over-prominent in these acts.
The Church, in large degree, brought these troubles upon itself.
It sought for too much power, spiritual and temporal. The priests
exploited the superstition and needs of the poor, of the Indian,
and themselves often lived immoral and corrupt lives. But let us
do it justice. It protected the poor and oppressed often against
the grinding exactions of the civil authorities; its vicars often
exposed themselves in humane works. Often priests dashed in with
upraised crucifix to save the victims of dreadful passionate and
sanguinary revolutions, and themselves were torn to pieces. Often
the devout fathers spent their lives in the most desolate and savage
regions of the untamed wilderness, seeking by their piety and
devotion to better the lives of the poor Indians, the poor, ignorant
children of the mountain and the forest.
The Roman Catholic religion ingrafted itself with wonderful strength
upon the mind of the aboriginal of Spanish America. In some respects
it seemed a development of his own earlier superstitious culture,
and became blended with it. Tawdry images held for them and their
miserable lives the hope of eternal joy, of reprieve of sin, of
comfort in misery, and to-day we cannot enter a simple church of the
remote villages in those boundless Cordilleras and deserts without
stumbling over the prostrate forms, bent upon the earthern floors,
of poor, black-clothed Indian women passing their silent hour in
supplication and orisons. Men are not there: the women, as ever,
seem to link the material and the spiritual. May heaven succour
these poor Indian women-folk, and bring them a happier destiny yet.
A glance now at the earlier cultures of these lands and the earlier
religions of their people.
Who, upon beholding the beautiful ruined structures of the early
folk of America--for by America here we mean Spanish America, where
alone these vestiges are found--in the decaying sculptured walls
of their temples, or the massive stories of their fortresses and
palaces, or of the strange pyramids they raised, has not felt his
conception of the New World undergo a change? Nay, do we even study
the printed page which sets them forth, not having had the privilege
of journeying to where they stand, wrapped in the silence of the
jungle or stark upon the rocky ranges of the hills, we feel that
here is a page in the book of mankind whose turning opens to us a
vista little dreamt of.
The story of those strange old cultures of Mexico and Peru has
always fascinated us: the Aztec and the Inca stand forth from the
dry lore of archæology with a peculiar charm, which we may not have
felt even in contemplating the more wonderful and ancient cultures
of the Old World. For here we feel that the intellect and art of man
sprang unaided from the dust, to write his pathetic story in the
stones of a continent unvisited by the Jehovah of the Israelites,
unknown to history, unblessed of Christianity, unrecorded and
obscure. Here the reaction of man from his environment came forth
from no recorded Eden; no tree of knowledge, of good and evil,
opened his eyes; no Abraham here walked with God, no Pharaoh or
Nebuchadnezzar brought visions and dreams to these more sombre
pages, and no divine wisdom seemed to shed its light within these
sculptured walls.
There is the credit due to early America, to the ability of her
autochthonous cultures, even if they formed no permanent link in the
chain of human development, but were too early cut off and faded
away like the untimely fruit of a woman, that at least man rose
here, in accordance with the divine mandate, arose from the dust,
and if he did but build him "fanes of fruitless prayer" to strange
idols and savage deities, he had that in common with the majority of
the cultures of the Old World of Asia, Africa and India, where men
raised temples of the utmost beauty to shelter the most inane rites
or bloody religions.
Before Mitla and Palenque or Teotihuacan and Tiahuanako let us
mark the skill which carved these intricate walls or raised their
terraces and monoliths, the greater wonder because all that has
descended from those skilled craftsmen of a bygone age on the
American soil are the stolid Indian, incapable of squaring stone to
stone, ignorant of the bronze chisel, degenerate and fallen. The
skill and imagination which would have done credit to the Greeks
or the Chaldeans lies buried in the dust, nor is likely yet to be
resuscitated.
We have spoken of Teotihuacan--the name means in the ancient tongue
of Mexico the "house of God"--and this, the great pyramid of the
sun, the work of the shadowy Toltecs, may be seen by the traveller
to-day who, taking steamer and train, will convey himself to the
high plateau of Mexico, a few miles north of the capital. It is a
structure of stone and rubble seven hundred feet upon its broadest
side and two hundred feet high, and, anciently, upon its summit
stood the golden image of Tonatiuah, whose breastplate flashed
back the rays of the rising sun, what time the attendant priests
chanted their savage refrain upon the terraces beneath. Restored
by the Government of the Republic under President Diaz, the great
monument stands up much the same as it did in days of yore. How many
centuries have beaten upon it we can scarcely conjecture. It was in
ruins when the defeated Cortes and his Spaniards, after the dreadful
experience of the _Noche Triste_, the sorrowful night passed beneath
its shadow and wept thereunder for his fallen comrades and his
ruined enterprise.
If little we know of Teotihuacan, what shall be said of Mitla,
whose mysterious halls and corridors, scarcely defaced by time,
arise from the sands of Oaxaca.
And the builders of these temples, have they produced no songs of
beauty, no enduring psalms? Had their dreadful religious rites
nothing in common with the idea of a true Providence? Hear the psalm
of Nezahual-Coyotl, the Solomon of Mexico. This is what he sang:
Truly the gods which I adore--
The idols of stone and wood,
They speak not nor do they feel,
Neither could they fashion the beauty of the heavens,
Nor yet that of the earth and the streams,
Nor of the trees and the plants which beautify it.
Some powerful, hidden and unknown God--
He must be the Creator of the Universe,
He alone can console me in my affliction.
He alone can still the bitter anguish of this heart.
So spake Nezahual-Coyotl, in what has been termed the Golden Age
of Texcoco, whose historians, arts and poets were in their time
renowned among the nations of Anahuac, on the high Mexican Plateau.
This person was a philosopher and a poet, but the writings of
the period--the picture-writings--were perversely destroyed by
Zumarraga, the first Archbishop of Mexico after the Conquest--an
irremediable loss.
Hear also the Inca prayer to the Creator, as chanted by the priests
and nobles of Peru:
Oh Creator: Thou art without equal unto the ends of the earth! Thou
who givest life and strength to mankind, saying, let this be a
man and let this be a woman. And as thou sayest, so thou givest
life, and vouchsafest that man shall live in health and peace, and
free from danger. Thou who dwellest in the heights of heaven, in the
thunder and in the storm-clouds, hear us. Grant us eternal life and
have us in thy keeping.
[Illustration: THE ANCIENT CIVILIZATION: RUINS OF MITLA, MEXICO.
Vol. I. To face p. 60.]
This last is from the _Rites and Laws of the Incas_.[5] It is
but one of many similar prayers, which, as regards sentiment and
language, might be taken from the Bible and Church Service.
[5] _Molina_, Hakluyt Series, Markham translation.
These prayers to the Unknown God, written by the early people of
America, cut off from any contact with the Old World, would seem
to show that man, in the reaction from his environment, inevitably
develops within him the conception of a supreme deity.
It now remains for us to choose how we shall approach the Spanish
American lands. Shall we cross the Spanish Main, and land where
Cortes did at Vera Cruz, the city of the True Cross, and so enter
Mexico? Or shall we, still crossing the American Mediterranean, land
on the Isthmus of Panama and thence, as Pizarro did, voyage along
the great Pacific coast to mysterious Peru? Or shall we take steamer
to the River Plate, that more prosaic route to the lands of corn and
cattle? Or shall we go round the Horn? Perhaps the middle course is
best, and, at the isthmus, we will first explore Central America.
Then we may say with the poet Keats:
Oft have I travelled in the Land of Gold
... Or like stout Cortes ... and all his men
Gazed on the Pacific ... silent upon a peak in Darien.
Keats, however, was in error. It was not Cortes, but another who
gazed from the peak, as presently we shall see.