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]
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Footnote 1:
The story of the Araucanian wars is told in full in Hancock’s “History
of Chile.”
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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—