THE COLONIAL PERIOD
The Spanish occupation of Peru was a conquest, not a colonisation. The
narrow plateau from Colombia to Chile and the adjacent dry valleys on
the Pacific and in north-western Argentina had been found fully
populated by civilised races. The work of subjugating them was
practically accomplished within eight or ten years after Pizarro landed
in Ecuador, and this marvellous result was achieved by private
adventurers who, though they held commissions from Madrid, really acted
on their own responsibility. A very few appreciated the advisability of
well treating the Indians and thereby preserving the effective
industrial organisation, but the vast majority concerned themselves only
with immediate profit. For eighteen years the original conquerors and
the adventurers who followed in their track fought over the spoils. When
the Marquis of Canete was appointed viceroy he found eight thousand
Spaniards in Peru alone, four hundred and eighty-nine of whom had grants
of lands and Indians.
We can never know the sufferings of the Indians during these civil
wars. The chronicles tell us minutely the stories of the battles,
marches, sieges, surprises, assassinations, and deeds of military
prowess, but little of the destruction and abandonment of the irrigating
canals and terraces, the ruin of the magnificent roads, the breaking up
of the ancient socialistic system, the impressment of natives into the
rebel bands, the death by exhaustion of thousands dragging artillery
over the steep mountain paths, the starvation of whole villages robbed
of their crops. But the sturdy physique of the Andean Indians and their
perfect adaptation to the climatic conditions saved them from
extermination. In the midst of the devil's dance of Spanish carnage, the
Inca officers reported minutely the crops stolen or destroyed, and the
deficiencies were made up as far as possible from the villages which had
escaped for the time being.
Naturally the Spanish government was anxious to put an end to such a
state of affairs. Considerations of self-interest reinforced the
eloquent indignation of Las Casas, but the New Laws could not be put
into effect, notwithstanding the sentiment of fidelity to the Castilian
king and the growth of considerable cities in which Spanish law and
custom were dominant. The only real cities which the Incas had built
were Cuzco in central Peru, Quito in Ecuador, and Charcas in Bolivia,
and after the conquest they continued a village-dwelling people, but the
Spaniards, true to the instinct inherited from Roman times, preferred to
live in cities. Within a few years they had established municipalities
not only at the three Inca capitals, but at Piura, Lima, Trujillo, Loja,
La Paz, Guamanga, Jauja, and numerous other places.
The enlightened advisers of Charles V. came to the conclusion that Peru
could never become a loyal and profitable appanage of the Crown until
freedom of action was granted to its government. Don Andres Hurtado de
Mendoza, Marquis of Canete, accepted the difficult post of viceroy. He
was a scion of the noblest House of Spain, distinguished alike in arms
and letters, capable and resolute, of mature years and wide experience.
His salary was fixed at the then fabulous sum of forty thousand ducats
in order to enable him to maintain regal state, and, accompanied by his
vice-queen and an imposing retinue, he assumed power with ceremonial
splendour. He prohibited further immigration from Spain and ordered that
no Spaniard in Peru should leave his district without permission. Though
the encomienderos were left in possession of their estates, they were
made to understand that they must cease the more outrageous forms of
oppressing the natives. He sent for the most notorious disturbers, and
they came joyfully expecting to receive grants, but were summarily
disarmed and banished. He employed the more adventurous in expeditions
to the interior and in completing the conquest of Chile. All the
artillery in the country was gathered under his eye, and the corregidors
were required to dismiss most of their soldiery. Finally, the viceroy
continued Pizarro's policy of founding cities into which were gathered
the Spaniards who remained scattered over the country.
He did much to alleviate the lot of the natives, though he dared not
venture on giving them all the rights guaranteed by Spanish law. No
efforts were spared to Hispaniolise the Inca nobles, and native chiefs
who could prove their right by descent were formally allowed to exercise
jurisdiction as magistrates. Even the rightful emperor, Sayri Tupac, who
had maintained his independence in the wilds of Vilcabamba, was induced
to swear allegiance and accept a pension and estates in the valley of
Yucay. When the Inca had attested the documents by which he renounced
his sovereignty, he lifted up the gilded fringe of the table-cloth,
saying: "All this cloth and its fringe were mine, and now they give me a
thread of it for my sustenance and that of all my house." Retiring to
Yucay, he sank into a deep melancholy and died within two years.
In the meantime Charles V. had been succeeded by Philip II. The Marquis
of Canete's liberal and enlightened policy did not wring money from the
unhappy country fast enough to suit the greedy despot. He listened to
the slanders against the "good viceroy" brought home by disappointed
Spaniards, and Canete's reward for five years of brilliant service was a
recall. Only his death saved him from hearing with his own ears the
reproaches of his ungrateful sovereign.
Several years elapsed before Philip found a man who possessed the
courage, capacity, mercilessness, and obstinacy to devise and apply a
system which would make Peru a mere machine to produce gold and silver
for the Spanish Crown. Such a one was Don Francisco de Toledo, a member
of the same ancient house to which the Duke of Alva belonged. To him
belongs the distinction of founding the infamous colonial system--the
origin of the misery and disorder from which Spanish South America has
suffered ever since, and a potent if not the principal cause of the
decline of Spain herself and the loss of her magnificent colonial
empire. Toledo reached Lima 1569, leaving Spain just after the news had
been received that William the Silent and his Hollanders had risen in
revolt against the cruelties of Alva and gained the victory of
Groeningen.
[Illustration: PROMENADE OF THE ALAMEDA, LIMA.]
The new viceroy first devoted himself to the destruction of the native
dynasty. Sayri Tupac's younger brothers, Titu Yupanqui and Tupac Amaru,
still roamed free in the forests of Vilcabamba. The Spaniards had
hitherto not interfered with the Indians' celebrating their national
festivals with the ancient solemnities, and Toledo came to Cuzco to be
present at one which he had determined should be the last. As soon as it
was over he sent for Titu to come in and take the oath of allegiance.
Titu died of an illness, but the chiefs swore fealty to the boy Tupac
Amaru, and refused to put him in the power of the Spaniards. The
exasperated viceroy sent a force which captured the young emperor.
Brought to Cuzco, Toledo ordered him to be decapitated, and the head was
stuck upon a pike and set up beside the scaffold. One moonlight night a
Spaniard went to the window of his bed-chamber, which overlooked the
great square, and saw the whole vast space packed with a crowd of
kneeling, silent people, their faces all turned to the Inca's grisly
head; it was the Indians devoutly worshipping the last relic of their
beloved and unfortunate sovereign. But there was no spirit left in them
for rebellion--and no centre for them to rally around. Toledo's
executions exterminated the leading Incas and half-castes; the
celebration of Indian rites was forbidden, and everything which might
remind the people of the fallen _regime_ destroyed or removed.
Toledo's "Libro de Tasas," or code of regulations, is the basis of the
system under which the Spanish colonies were governed for more than two
centuries. The Spaniards were practically recognised as belonging to a
privileged and governing caste. The country was divided into about
fifty districts, called "corregimentos," each under the rule of a
corregidor. This official was substantially absolute so far as the
Indians were concerned, although an effort was made to keep up parts of
the ancient Inca organisation, and in practice the hereditary village
chiefs administered justice and exercised considerable power.
Every male Indian between the ages of eighteen and fifty was compelled
to pay a certain tribute or poll-tax, for whose collection their chiefs
were responsible. About one-sixth of the Indians belonged to estates
already granted, and these paid their tribute to the proprietors, the
Crown deducting one-fifth. The other five-sixths paid directly to the
representatives of the government. In consideration of this tribute,
general and indiscriminate personal service was declared to be
abolished, but the commutation was not in full. One-seventh of the
Indians were required to work for their masters, and the wretched
victims of this "mitta" were sent by their caciques to the nearest
Spanish town, where they could be engaged by any one who required their
services. But these were not all the burdens. The natives of the
provinces near the mines were compelled to furnish the labour necessary
to work them, and the poor creatures to whose lot it fell to go might
never hope to return. Oppressive as was the letter of these laws, their
practical application was made infinitely worse by evasions practised
with the connivance of the corregidors. Hundreds of Indians were hunted
down and carried away to work on farms and in factories under the
pretext that the "mitta" returns had not been honestly made, and though
the population decreased, the survivors were required to furnish the
same number of victims every year.
In spite of the slaughter during the civil wars, the Peruvian Indians
numbered eight millions in 1575. Including the outlying provinces, the
population of the Inca empire must have reached twenty millions in the
heyday of its prosperity. Horrible as had been the decrease of the first
forty years of Spanish domination, it was a trifle to that which
followed the establishment of Toledo's system. In 1573 the impressment
for the Potosi mines produced eleven thousand labourers; one hundred
years later only sixteen hundred could be found. In the non-mining
provinces the destruction was not so stupendous, but some encomiendas,
originally containing a thousand adults, were reduced to a hundred
within a century, and the miserable survivors were compelled to pay the
same sum as had been assessed to their ancestors. The total population
of Peru proper had fallen to less than a million and a half within two
centuries and that of the whole empire to not more than four millions.
So great had been the mortality among the feebler inhabitants of the
warm coast valleys that they had practically died out, and their places
were taken by negro slaves whose importation began shortly after the
conquest.
The Indians were the worst but not the only sufferers. The Creole
descendants of the early Spanish settlers, though they nominally enjoyed
the same rights as the later arrivals, in reality had small chance to
participate in the offices and fat concessions. Each new viceroy brought
a new swarm of needy noblemen, who regarded the Creoles with lofty
disdain. Commerce except with Spain was forbidden, and even that was
burdened with almost intolerable burdens. As time went on new taxes were
devised until it seemed the deliberate purpose of the Spanish government
to transfer all the gold and silver in Peru's mountains to the royal
treasury. Not only were both imports and exports taxed, but also every
pound of provisions sold in the markets and shops. One-fifth of the
products of the mines and one-tenth of the crops went directly to the
Crown. All kinds of businesses had to pay licences; quicksilver and
tobacco were monopolies; and offices were regularly sold to the highest
bidder.
Nevertheless the Spanish occupation brought many incontestable benefits
to South America. To say nothing of the civilised system of
jurisprudence, the letters and the religion which have made the peoples
of the continent members of the great western European family, the
introduction of new and valuable animals, grains, and fruits raised the
level of average well-being among the surviving inhabitants. Horses,
asses, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, pigeons, wheat, barley,
oats, rice, olives, grapes, oranges, sugar-cane, apples, peaches and
related fruits, and even the banana and the cocoa palm were introduced
by the Spaniards. In return Europe owes to Peru maize, potatoes,
chocolate, tobacco, cassava, ipecacuanha, and quinine.
Toledo had put his colonial system in full operation by 1580, and from
that time to near the close of the Spanish epoch the story of Peru
offers little of interest. Expansion ceased; the colonists made no
effort to spread over the Amazon plain, or to prevent the Portuguese on
the Atlantic coast from occupying the interior of the continent almost
to the foot of the Andes. On the seacoast of Venezuela and the plains of
the lower Plate the Spanish race still showed a scanty fraction of that
vigour and enterprise which had enabled the early conquerors to spread
over half the continent in a few short years, but in Peru, Ecuador, and
Bolivia the country slowly decayed. Though the viceroys who followed
each other in rapid succession were selected from among the greatest
grandees of Spain, they were held to an increasingly rigid account, and
the smallest concession to commerce or a failure to send home the utmost
farthing which could be wrung from the people was severely and
peremptorily punished. Their jurisdiction extended over all Spanish
South America; the captains-general of New Granada, Venezuela, and
Chile, the royal audience of Bolivia, the president of Ecuador, and the
governors of Tucuman, Paraguay, and Buenos Aires being all nominally
subject to their orders. But in practice these widely separated
divisions of the continent were largely independent. Lima was, however,
the political, commercial, and social centre of South America. To its
port came from Panama the goods destined for Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and
even Paraguay and Buenos Aires. Many of the viceroys were lovers of
letters, and the university produced scholars and authors not unworthy
comparison with those of the Old World. The continual influx of
Spaniards of distinguished Castilian ancestry and gentle training made
the language of even the common people singularly pure, and the sonorous
elegance of the Spanish tongue as spoken during the classical period has
been best preserved in the comparative isolation of Peru. The influence
of the bishops and priests, the Jesuits and the Franciscans, was hardly
inferior to that of the officials. The clergy controlled education;
every village had its parish priest who compelled the Indians to go to
mass and made them pay heavily for the privilege; the Inquisition was
early introduced and performed its dreadful functions without let or
hindrance.
[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF LIMA, SHOWING THE CATHEDRAL.]
The regulations which attempted to confine the oppression of the Indians
within bearable limits were persistently violated, not only by private
individuals, but by the corregidors themselves. Kidnapping was reduced
to a system, and often all the male adults of a village were dragged off
to work in the mines, leaving only the women and children to till the
fields. The corregidors went into partnership with merchants, and the
poor Indians were compelled to purchase articles for which they had no
use, and thrown into slavery to work out the debt if they failed to pay.
The wiser viceroys did not waste their energies in vain efforts to
mitigate the profitable abuses. They devoted their attention rather to
the exaction of the last penny of taxes, to be spent in maintaining the
horde of office-holders, or to be remitted to Spain. So rigidly was
taxation enforced and so successful were the Spaniards in finding rich
mines of silver, gold, and mercury, that early in the seventeenth
century the revenue had reached the sum--enormous in those days of low
prices--of nearly five hundred thousand pounds, of which about half was
regularly sent to Madrid. Foreign nations could not effectively
interfere with Spain's commercial and fiscal monopoly. The Isthmus was
in her hands, and the voyage through Magellan's Straits or around Cape
Horn was too stormy and uncertain for the slow, clumsy ships of that
age, and only a few English and Dutch expeditions, half-trading,
half-piratical, ravaged the coast towns in the seventeenth century.
The most memorable event of Peru's history during the seventeenth
century was the revelation of the sovereign virtues of quinine. The Lima
physicians were unable to cure the Countess of Chinchon, the viceroy's
wife, of a stubborn attack of malarial fever, but the rector of the
Jesuit college had received some fragments of an unknown bark from a
Jesuit missionary to whom they had been given by an Indian in the
mountain wilds of southern Ecuador. Doses of this quickly restored the
vice-queen, and when Linnaeus named the world's plants in scientific
order, he called the genus to which the tree belongs chinchona, from the
viceroy, through whom its virtues had come to notice.
The succession of the Bourbons to the Spanish Crown, at the beginning of
the eighteenth century, brought about a considerable change of colonial
policy. To England was conceded the privilege of exporting negroes to
South America, and French vessels were permitted to come round the Horn
and trade at Peruvian ports. The latter concession was soon revoked and
the commerce of the Pacific coast again became a monopoly for the ring
of merchants at Cadiz. The Atlantic, however, by this time swarmed with
ships of all the European maritime Powers, and it was impossible to
prevent smuggling at the Caribbean and Argentine ports. The Madrid
government reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was impossible to
administer effectually from Lima the provinces which were commercially
tributary to the Caribbean Sea. In 1740 Bogota, on the populous plateau
of eastern New Granada, was made the capital of a new viceroyalty, under
whose jurisdiction were placed the captaincy-general of Venezuela and
the presidency of Quito. Buenos Aires was a resort for contraband
traders under non-Spanish flags, and smuggling through that port so
increased that goods coming from Spain by the Panama route were
undersold in the markets of Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, and
even Peru itself. In 1776 the southern Atlantic region was detached from
Lima, and to the new viceroyalty of Buenos Aires were attached not only
the Plate provinces--Buenos Aires and Paraguay--but also that part of
Chile which lay east of the Andes, as well as Tucuman and the audiencia
of Charcas as far north as Lake Titicaca. By these changes Peru was
reduced to its present dimensions, except that Chile remained attached
as a semi-independent captaincy-general.
Three times since its foundation had Lima been nearly destroyed by
earthquakes, but none of them was to be compared with the convulsion
which in 1746 reduced the whole city to a shapeless mass of ruins. More
than a thousand people perished; a great wave engulfed Callao, drowning
half the population and carrying great ships far inland.
The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 was effected without difficulty. In
the neighbourhood of Lima alone they owned five thousand negro slaves
and property to the value of two million dollars, and every penny of
their immense accumulations was confiscated by the government.
The great Indian rebellion which had so long been expected broke out in
1780 under the leadership of Tupac Amaru, the lineal descendant of the
last of the reigning Inca emperors. In Peru proper it did not spread
beyond the southern frontier provinces and the story of its suppression
belongs to Bolivia. The authorities were so alarmed that the reforms, to
procure which Tupac had risked and lost his life, were shortly after
voluntarily adopted. The vitality and fighting qualities of the
half-breeds now stood revealed, and the Creoles, jealous of imported
officials and dissatisfied at their exclusion from places of honour and
profit, realised that a weapon lay ready to their hand when they should
determine upon revolution.
General Theodore de Croix, a Fleming, was entrusted with the
reorganisation and reform made necessary by the Indian rebellion. The
corregidors, petty tyrants over whom no effective control could be
maintained, were abolished; the country was divided into a few great
provinces, each ruled by an intendente to whom were responsible the
subdelgados who had charge of local affairs, and measures were taken for
the enforcement of the laws intended to protect the Indians.
By the year 1790 these valuable reforms had been put into effect, but
they came too late. Ideas of liberty had begun to infiltrate into the
educated classes, and among the Creoles the abstract right of Peru to
autonomous government became the subject of secret though widespread
discussion. A succession of able and liberal viceroys, however, averted
the danger for the time, and the outbreak of the revolution in the rest
of South America found Peru ruled by Abascal, whose energy, foresight,
and determination not only prevented an insurrection at Lima, but nearly
saved all South America to Spain.