The civil-marriage law was pushed through in spite of the sullen

resistance of the conservatives and clericals. The women of Chile, the

old-fashioned elements of society, and the clergy would not accept the

result. The priests refused to perform a religious ceremony for any one

who had been married by the civil law, and excommunicated the president

and his cabinet. Devout Chileans of all classes would not yield on this

point of conscience, and cursed the liberal politicians as betrayers of

their God. All other political questions were held in abeyance. Urged by

their wives and the priests, the conservatives abandoned the attitude of

abstention from politics which they had so long maintained, and went to

the polls to do what they could to secure a majority for the repeal of

the law. But ladies' entreaties and priests' absolutions availed little

against the government's control of the election machinery, and the law

remained on the statute books. Opposition centred against the

presidential candidacy of Balmaceda--the radical, the Anti-Christ, the

uncompromising. In vain Santa Maria tried to unite the four liberal

groups--the government liberals, the radicals, the nationals, and the

new division called dissidents. They refused to meet in a general

convention. However, a majority, composed of the government liberals,

the nationals, and a portion of the radicals, decided to support

Balmaceda and he was triumphantly elected in 1886.

The dissidents, conservatives, and opposition radicals formed a

formidable minority, determined to obstruct his administration. In the

closing days of 1885 scenes were enacted on the floor of the Chilean

congress which resembled recent sessions of the Austrian parliament. The

revenue and appropriation bills were about to expire, and fresh ones for

a new fiscal period had to be adopted. Under the regulations every

member had a right to speak twice on each section, and the minority

filibustered until the constitutional period for adjournment had

expired. Santa Maria would have to finish out his administration and

Balmaceda begin his without supply bills. Under a strict construction of

the Constitution all government would cease, but Balmaceda was not the

man to shrink from enforcing the right of self-preservation inherent in

all governments. The executive calmly proceeded to collect taxes and pay

expenses according to the provisions of the expired law until a new

congress met shortly after Balmaceda's inauguration, and this solution

was peacefully accepted by the country.

Chile had never known a time of such material prosperity as the first

three years of Balmaceda's administration proved to be. The revenues,

well-nigh doubled by the nitrate and copper of the provinces wrested

from Peru, were further increased by the flourishing condition of

commerce and industry. The administration initiated and carried forward

many important public works. Large sums were voted for railways,

colonisation, and schools. Public salaries were raised, the Araucanian

country colonised, and the Indians finally incorporated as real citizens

of Chile. The clericals made the best of their defeat, and the liberal

majority in congress, inspired by Balmaceda's energy, pushed forward

rapidly on the road of reform and change. A new election law was passed

and a beginning made toward making the Constitution more democratic.

Balmaceda's first idea was to unite all the liberal factions, conciliate

the conservatives, and devote himself to a policy of material

development. Although owing his election to three political parties out

of the six, he was unwilling and perhaps unable to govern solely by

their assistance. Instead of regarding himself as the chief of a

combination of parties, entrusted by it with the direction of affairs

and under obligations to act in harmony with it, he did not hesitate to

accept the help offered by his former political opponents when that help

was needed to carry into effect his personal ideas of what was best for

the public interest. On the other hand, the party which had elected him

was really no party at all--it was only a temporary coalition of three

discordant factions. It is not necessary to follow the many changes in

his cabinet, the continual substitution of one group for another, the

details of the efforts which he made during three years to govern as he

pleased, and at the same time to govern in harmony with congress. His

difficulties lay not so much in reconciling conflicts of opinion on

matters of policy as with the personal rivalries and ambitions of the

factions. Suffice it to say that toward the end of 1889 he found himself

without a majority in congress and with no prospect of obtaining one.

Heretofore the rival groups had been only too anxious to trade their

votes in exchange for a share of patronage. Now, satisfied that the

president was determined upon depriving them of their secular influence

in public affairs, all the factions of the ruling aristocracy fought him

bitterly. They feared that the president was plotting the formation of a

personal party, cemented by hopes of office, responsible to him alone,

and that the system of parliamentary government which had grown up by

tacit consent and long-continued custom, would be replaced by a real

presidential government in which the executive would be the source of

power and not merely its channel.

Indeed, circumstances and his own characteristics were rapidly forcing

Balmaceda into this position. Conscious of his own integrity and the

disinterestedness and patriotism of his motives, his irritation against

the stubborn self-seeking of the cliques ended in convincing him that

the old interpretation of the Constitution must be abandoned, and the

president in person in reality vested with all the powers given by the

letter of the fundamental law. He devoted the remainder of his life to

an effort to free the presidency from the practical control which

congress had exercised since the days of Portales. In January, 1890, he

threw down the gauntlet by appointing a cabinet composed exclusively of

personal supporters. The new ministers announced that, considering their

power to be derived from the president, they would hold office so long

as they continued to be satisfactory to him, regardless whether or not

they were supported by a parliamentary majority. In May, Balmaceda went

a step farther by selecting another cabinet at whose head he placed San

Fuentes, his own intimate friend and a man regarded with particular

hatred by the president's opponents because it was understood that he

had been selected as the president's successor, pledged to the

continuance of the same policy. Congress replied by passing a vote of

censure. Balmaceda insisted that the cabinet should remain in power.

Congress refused to pass any appropriation bills and summoned the

ministers to the bar of the House. But the president was confident that

he could carry the elections, and, sure of ultimate victory, felt he

could afford to make present concessions. In August a compromise was

agreed upon by which Balmaceda dismissed the San Fuentes cabinet and

selected one composed of neutral men, while congress consented to pass

the appropriation bills. The truce did not last long. The new ministers

soon found that they were mere figureheads and that the Balmacedist

executive committee was the real power in the administration. They

resigned and Claudio Vicuna formed a ministry which was a re-edition of

the May cabinet. The announcement of its appointment was in effect a

notification that the armistice was at an end. Congress accepted the

gage of combat and immediately began to organise for civil war.

The wealth, social distinction, and professional classes of the country

were mostly on the side of the congressionalists, and all who were

conservative and fearful of disturbance in the established order rallied

around them. The democratic elements, the reformers, the radicals, the

dissatisfied, supported Balmaceda, but the great mass of the common

people, used for centuries to political subordination to the upper

classes, remained inert. His opponents met with no encouragement in

their efforts to suborn the army and General Baquedano refused the

leadership of the insurrection which they offered him. However, the

officers of the navy, recruited from among the aristocratic classes,

enthusiastically assured their undivided support, and Jorge Montt, who

held a high position in the navy, was chosen as chief of the revolution.

The congressionalists resolved to make the issue upon the point whether

the president had a right to maintain any military force, land or naval,

after the 31st of December, the day upon which the existing

appropriation law expired. Balmaceda did not hesitate an instant, but

issued a proclamation that he would follow the precedent established in

1886--collect taxes and maintain the public service by executive

authority until the assembling of the next session of congress. He

expressly disclaimed any designs of establishing a permanent

dictatorship, while expressing his firm determination not to permit the

refusal of congress to interrupt the functioning of government. The

issue was sharply drawn; neither side would recede; either congress

would cease to exercise its immemorial control of the executive or would

depose him.

[Illustration: JOSE MANUEL BALMACEDA.]

Five days after Balmaceda's proclamation the congressionalist chiefs

embarked on board the war-ships lying in Valparaiso Bay, and the civil

war was on. The army remained faithful to Balmaceda and he was in

undisputed possession of the whole country, although his opponents had

powerful sympathisers everywhere. The latter's plan of campaign was

simple. Once again power on the sea was to decide the fate of the

Pacific coast. The navy sailed away to the nitrate provinces, a region

separated from the rest of Chile by the impassable Atacama desert and

to which, therefore, Balmaceda could not send re-inforcements. The small

garrison under Colonel Robles made a desperate resistance, but was soon

overpowered, and there the revolution established its base of

operations. The population of sturdy miners, used to discipline under

their bosses, furnished an admirable supply of recruits, and a revenue

of two millions a month fell at once into the hands of the

congressionalists. Possessing the sinews of war, it was only a question

of a few months to equip an army with the most modern weapons and have

it thoroughly drilled and organised by experts. The blockade of the

southern ports intercepted Balmaceda's supplies and the congressionalist

partisans escaped by hundreds to make their way up the coast and join

the revolutionary army. By August they were ready with a force of more

than ten thousand men.

In the meantime Balmaceda had been making desperate efforts to get a

navy, but iron-clads cannot be improvised, and the congressionalist

agents in New York and Europe had money enough to outbid him and to

command influences which effectually hindered prompt action. In Chile

itself he adopted stern repressive measures against the plots of his

enemies and vigorously recruited his army, putting into the field nearly

thirty thousand soldiers. But the blockade prevented his procuring

modern arms and they had to go into battle with old-style rifles whose

range was only half that of those carried by their opponents. He was

also at a disadvantage in that the enemy could strike where he pleased

on a coast nine hundred miles long. Balmaceda was obliged therefore to

keep his forces divided. Nine thousand were at Coquimbo, three hundred

and fifty miles north of Santiago; as many at Concepcion, four hundred

miles south of the capital; and five thousand at Valparaiso, a hundred

miles north-west. At Santiago he kept the remainder as a reserve to be

sent to the assistance of whichever of the three divisions might be

attacked.

On the 20th of August the fleet of seventeen vessels carrying the whole

revolutionary army suddenly appeared a few miles north of Valparaiso.

Balmaceda had short warning and was not able to oppose the landing,

which was skilfully conducted by Colonel Canto, the able strategist who

commanded the congressionalist forces, with the valuable assistance of

Colonel Koerner, a Prussion tactician of the first rank whose services

had been hired. There was no time to get troops from Coquimbo and

Concepcion. The congressionalist generals moved so rapidly that the best

the president could do was to send the Santiago division, which, united

with that at Valparaiso, made a force nearly equal in numbers to the

enemy. The revolutionists landed with their rations in their haversacks

and within a few hours were marching straight south along the seashore

on Valparaiso. The Balmacedists tried to defend the passage of the

Aconcagua River, which enters the ocean twenty miles north of the city,

but they had hardly got into position on the heights which overlook its

southern bank when the enemy was upon them. The latter's artillery was

twice as strong and his infantry more numerous besides being armed with

longer range rifles. In spite of the advantage of position and the

fatigue of their opponents the Balmacedists were flung back in complete

defeat by the volleys of the Mannlichers and the furious cannonading

from both batteries and ships. The battle lasted the whole day and at

its close two thousand of the government troops lay on the field, three

thousand had been dispersed or deserted to the enemy, and scarcely three

thousand held together for the retreat to the neighbourhood of

Valparaiso, where three regiments of the Santiago division who had taken

no part in the fight were waiting. Canto followed, but failing in a

tentative attack on the strong northern defences of Valparaiso, he

determined to make a circuit to the east, cut the railroad between

Santiago and Valparaiso, and either take the latter place in the rear or

march on the capital as seemed best. The movement, so masterfully

conceived, was skilfully carried out without a moment's loss of time.

The essential thing was to act so promptly that Balmaceda could not

concentrate his forces. On the 25th the whole congressionalist army had

reached Quillota, on the railroad twenty-five miles back of Valparaiso.

But Balmaceda had also been active, and during those three days the

Concepcion division had arrived at Santiago, and reinforcements had been

got through to Valparaiso which raised the army to nearly ten thousand

men. Four thousand troops defended Santiago and more were momentarily

expected from Coquimbo.

Canto resolved to give him no time for any further concentration, but to

fall upon the Valparaiso army before the railroad could be repaired and,

by destroying Balmaceda's largest force, end the war. A forced march

across country brought him to the old carriage road which comes into

Valparaiso from the south. By the 27th his army had covered the

incredible distance of forty miles and was within six miles of the

government forces, who occupied a strong position between the

congressionalists and Valparaiso. Tired though the congressionalists

were, they were forced to attack without delay. The only provisions

which they could count on were the rations that they had brought in

their haversacks; and Balmaceda might at any moment receive

reinforcements from Santiago. So they advanced resolutely to the

assault. The Balmacedists fought with little enthusiasm or hope; the

desertion of part of their cavalry and the inactivity of the rest

discouraged the infantry and artillery, but at first they met the

charges with the steadiness characteristic of the race. The battle was

decided by a flank movement executed by Koerner, who turned the

Balmacedist left, while the cavalry charged recklessly up the hill.

Thrown into confusion, the government troops were simply swept out of

existence by furious volleys and determined charges. Some had stood

steady long enough to kill and wound a sixth of the enemy who charged up

the hill, but more than a quarter of their own numbers perished in the

battle and the pursuit.

The fight was over at half-past ten in the morning, but the news of the

utter ruin of all his hopes did not reach Balmaceda until half-past

seven. It was his wife's saint's day and friends were coming to dine at

his house. Characteristically he did not recall the invitations, and not

until the dinner party was over did he arrange to turn over the

government of the city to General Baquedano. Then he quietly walked to

the Argentine legation and received asylum. Vicuna, the recently elected

president, who would have succeeded Balmaceda on the 18th of September,

was in Valparaiso and fled to a foreign warship followed by the

principal Balmacedist chiefs. No further resistance was made and the

congressionalist junta, with Jorge Montt at its head, assumed the

supreme direction of affairs. Balmaceda's fall was followed by some

riots, but the arrival of the responsible chiefs of the victorious party

ensured the re-establishment of order. Like the Anglo-Saxon, the Chilean

fights desperately on the field of battle, and when his blood is up he

is relentless, but when beaten he phlegmatically accepts the

consequences, and when victorious he is not cruel. The Chileans resemble

their prototypes of the northern hemisphere in lacking the vivid

imagination which makes the inhabitants of warmer climates vengeful.

Slow, silent, serious, practical-minded, hard to themselves as well as

to others, they turned at once to the work of reconstruction.

No one suspected that the defeated president was at the house of the

Argentine minister. It was supposed that he had escaped in disguise, but

on the 18th of September, the day upon which his legal term as president

expired, the country was astounded to hear that he had shot himself that

very morning. The unhappy man feared that he might get his generous host

into danger, and his theatrical temperament could not bear the

humiliation of a public trial or the risk of being torn to pieces by a

mob in case he were discovered. He offered himself as an expiatory

sacrifice, knowing that his death would save his friends from further

persecution and hoping that it might do for the cause of democratic

government in Chile that which his life had so signally failed to

accomplish.

An election had been called and Jorge Montt chosen president of Chile

with all due regard to legal forms. The aristocratic and parliamentary

form of government, under which Chile had so long lived in peace, order,

and prosperity, growing at home in intellectual and moral graces and in

material welfare, while abroad the nation had waxed great in the

consideration of the world, was restored as it had been before Balmaceda

attacked it. Not only the arbitrament of battle, but the verdict of the

people, so far as the latter can be gathered from the convinced

enthusiasm shown by the congressionalists and inferred from the

passiveness of the masses, had decided that there should be no radical

change; that the president should be advised by the congress and rule in

harmony with its majority; that the ballot should be guarded by both an

educational and a property qualification; that political evolution

should proceed by slow amendment and not by radical innovation--by

experiment, not by theory.

The last twelve years of Chile's internal political history offers

little of special interest to the foreign student. Jorge Montt, though

raised to power by force of arms, proved a modest and non-aggressive

president. For two years the anti-Balmacedist groups managed to keep a

majority together, but incompatible ambitions rather than differences

of principle soon divided them. Balmaceda's old partisans quickly

rallied and elected nearly a quarter of the members of the congress of

1894, holding the balance of power amid the warring factions. Curiously

enough, it was with the conservatives that the Balmacedists formed a

combination, and though they held no cabinet position in Montt's time,

they were a principal factor in the coalition which elected Errazuriz to

the presidency in 1896. The jealousies among the rival factions of the

liberals were too bitter to permit the bulk of that party to make any

effective combination against the conservative-Balmacedist-liberal

alliance, and the latter remained in power during most of Errazuriz's

administration. At its end, the liberals having failed to agree, German

Riesco was nominated and elected by much the same influences over Pedro

Montt, son of the old president.

The present Chilean parties do not embody any definite and conflicting

political principles. Each one derives its origin from some great

conflict which took place under a former administration. Once welded

together in battling for a common cause, friendship, gratitude, the hope

of mutual aid in their ambitions have kept the members united. The

latter-day Balmacedists are not enemies of parliamentary dominance; the

nationals are now classed as liberals, though they started as

ultra-conservatives under Montt; the conservatives do not especially

oppose reforms, though they defend the Catholic universities against

radical attacks. The property qualification for suffrage is liberally

construed; any one who has an income of a thousand pesos is legally

entitled to vote, and if the elector can read and write he is not

rigidly cross-examined as to the exact amount of the wages he receives.

However, this wide extension of the suffrage has not brought about any

material change in the personnel of congress. Discussion of the

advisability of changing the present system is purely academic, and if

dissatisfaction exists it ferments far beneath the surface. Like the

English aristocracy that of Chile is truly representative, wielding its

power with a keen sense of its responsibility to the nation, and rarely

refusing to adopt a reform which is clearly demanded by the country.

[Illustration: THE PLAZA VICTORIA VALPARAISO.]

Chile recovered with some difficulty from the industrial disorganisation

and tremendous expenditures caused by the civil war. Balmaceda's vast

issues of paper money disturbed government finances and made the returns

of private enterprise uncertain. The world-wide fall of prices in the

years following 1893 hurt Chilean exports, and an era of economy made

necessary by closely balanced budgets succeeded the flush times.

Meanwhile, the marvellous material growth of the Argentine Republic

began to make Chileans doubt if their country could retain that military

and naval hegemony which she had possessed since her great victories

over Peru and Bolivia. Shut in between the Andes and the sea, on the

north an uninhabitable desert and on the south the bleak Antarctic

waste, Chile naturally envied the limitless and fertile plains over

which her neighbour might spread her population, and the Argentine navy

was fast approaching her own in size and efficiency.

By the year 1895 Argentina's revenue exceeded Chile's nearly twenty per

cent., while the former's foreign commerce was seventy per cent. and her

population fifty per cent. greater. Their rivalry, none the less real

because tacit, explains the seemingly unreasonable bitterness of the

dispute over the differing interpretations of the treaty of limits. That

treaty fixed the boundary at the crest of the Andes, but when the joint

commissioners appointed to make the surveys reached southern latitudes

where the range becomes ill-defined and runs off into the sea they found

it difficult to determine just where the crest was. The Argentines

insisted on a line drawn between the highest peaks because that would

give them more territory, while the Chileans contended for the watershed

between the two oceans. Another dispute also arose about the line which

ought to divide the Argentine from the province which Chile had taken

from Bolivia. Though in both cases the disputed territory was

comparatively valueless, national feeling rose to an extraordinary pitch

and more than once war has been imminent. The northern dispute was at

length settled in 1898 by the arbitration of the American minister to

Buenos Aires, but, though a similar method of settlement had been agreed

upon as to the other and more important question, its final submission

was delayed from year to year, and meanwhile each nation suspected the

other of aggressions. Argentina ordered new iron-clads, which she could

ill afford; Chile ordered still better ones, and Argentina kept pace. In

1898 and again in 1901 the two countries were on the brink of a war

which certainly would have ruined either one or the other. Happily,

better counsels prevailed and arbitration by the English government was

hurried forward, resulting in 1902 in a settlement with which both

parties are in reality satisfied, and the fine iron-clads building in

Europe are now for sale.

BOLIVIA

CHAPTER I

THE CONQUEST AND THE MINES

Between latitudes fourteen and a half and twenty-three and a half, the

mighty Andean chain is massed into a plateau five hundred miles wide,

over twelve thousand feet high, and interspersed with a complex system

of mountains and ridges, parallel, transverse, and interlaced.

Geographers estimate that this central portion of the Andean system

contains nearly five hundred thousand cubic miles of matter above sea

level, and that it would, cover the entire area of South America to an

average depth of four hundred feet. The great ranges which stretch north

to the Caribbean and south to Cape Horn are mere arms of this massive

elevation of the earth, the highest and largest in the new world. Within

a few miles of the coast rises a lofty and continuous range of mountains

which can be scaled only over a few passes, none of which fall far below

fourteen thousand feet. From the top a vast plateau stretches to the

lofty chain which forms the inland rim of the Andean massif. This

plateau is Bolivia. The northern portion forms the Titicaca basin, the

whole of which was formerly covered by an immense fresh-water sea, fed

by the snows of the surrounding mountains, and draining south-east into

the Plate Valley. Now, however, the rainfall has so decreased that the

great lake is shrunk to a mere tithe of its original dimensions, and

none of its waters escape out of the dry plateau. In its southern part

the plateau is bifurcated by a high central range, which divides

southern Bolivia into two portions, the western of which, called the

Puna, is too high, cold, and dry for cultivation. To the east the plains

are lower and moister, sloping very gradually toward the east until they

plunge off abruptly into the great central valley of South America.

The northern part of the Titicaca basin was the cradle of civilisation

in South America. On the shores of the lake are ruins of great buildings

erected by a race who occupied this plateau unknown centuries before the

rise of the Inca power. One doorway exists in an almost perfect state of

preservation, carved out of a single block of stone seven feet high and

twice as long, covered with figures elaborately sculptured in high

relief, while dozens of heroic statues, and walls containing hewn stones

twelve yards long, remain to attest the skill of the old workmen.

[Illustration: MONOLITHIC DOORWAY AT TRAHUANACO.]

Bolivian history emerges from the realm of conjecture with the invasion

of the Incas, a warlike and civilised tribe who inhabited the slightly

lower plateaux and valleys north-east of the Titicaca basin. The ancient

Titicacan civilisation had long since fallen from its high estate and

the Inca armies easily overcame the resistance of the scattered

shepherd tribes. The conquered aborigines were incorporated with the

Incas and Quichua became the principal although not the only language.

Great colonies of the dominant race spread south and east over the

massif into the fertile regions of Yungas, Cochabamba, and Charcas.

Bolivia became one of the principal seats of the Inca power. There they

built their most magnificent palaces; in the northern mountains they

found the copper for their tools and weapons, and the gold which they

used to ornament their temples. Over the higher plains roamed flocks of

llamas and vicunas. The slightly lower parts of the plateau produced

potatoes and quinoa, and the warmer valleys maize, cocoa, and cotton.

The broad lake, the rivers, and the roads over the comparatively level

country favoured intercommunication and social and industrial

consolidation.

In the terrible civil war which broke out about 1525 between Atahuallpa

and Huascar, Bolivia suffered less than the Peruvian and Ecuadorean

provinces, but thousands of her sons were drafted into the armies which

Huascar successively launched against Quizquiz and the horde of northern

tribes which relentlessly marched from Quito to Cuzco, and after five

years of slaughter captured the southern capital and the legitimate

emperor. But before Quizquiz had had time to pursue his conquering way

into Bolivia, news came that Pizarro had imprisoned and murdered

Atahuallpa, and that the Spaniards were on their way to Cuzco to give

battle to Quizquiz and restore the legitimate succession. The northern

Indians were defeated and at the close of 1533 Pizarro entered Cuzco in

triumph riding at the side of Huascar's heir. The people of southern

Peru, Bolivia, Tucuman, and Chile regarded the Spaniards as deliverers

and allies. Within a few months after the occupation of Cuzco the

strangers rode out of the city along the splendid stone-flagged Inca

roads, crossed the transverse range into the Titicaca basin, and

followed south-east to the extremity of the plateau, encountering little

resistance and regarded as ambassadors from the Inca emperor. They found

the country teeming with a docile and prosperous population, and the

mountains on its borders were reported to abound in silver, gold, and

copper. Almagro, Pizarro's partner and associate, to whose share had

fallen the southern half of the empire, resolved not only to take

possession of Bolivia, but also to conquer the great province which the

Indians told him lay far to the south in fertile valleys on the western

side of the Andes and hard by the Pacific Ocean.

In 1535 Almagro marched from Cuzco with five hundred Spaniards and ten

thousand Indians, the latter under the command of a brother of the

Emperor. After crossing the Titicaca basin, he surmounted the

difficulties of the bleak and icy Puna, the snowy passes, and the

Atacama desert, and descended finally into Chile. But he found the

people poor and warlike, and encountered little gold. Returning in 1538

to make war on Pizarro, he was defeated and died strangled in prison by

his relentless rival. Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro, Francisco's

brothers, became dominant on the Titicacan plateau, and began

establishing great feudal lordships, dividing the country among their

followers and exacting tribute and forced labour from the Indians. In

1540 the great Marquis himself visited Charcas, the southern capital and

only large Indian city in Bolivia.

Late that same year his quartermaster, Pedro de Valdivia, led another

expedition along the route over the Bolivian plateau into northern

Chile. Meanwhile the Spaniards were diligently searching Bolivia for the

Indian gold mines. Though the Incas were known to have extracted immense

quantities of the metal from the placers around Lake Titicaca, the

surface deposits had been pretty well exhausted, and the Spaniards were

disappointed. Silver, however, existed in abundance and the strangers

began to work the mines shortly after they reached the plateau. About

1545 the great deposits of Potosi were discovered on a bleak

mountainside four hundred miles south-east of Titicaca and near Charcas,

in the regions where Gonzalo Pizarro possessed immense estates. At that

time Gonzalo was virtually independent monarch of the whole Inca empire,

having headed a successful revolt against a viceroy sent out to

reorganise the country and put a stop to Indian slavery. But he did not

long enjoy his riches, for in 1548 he risked his all in a hopeless

battle with a new Spanish governor and ended his stormy life on the

scaffold.

The discovery of Potosi revolutionised Upper Peru--as Bolivia was then

called. It is probable that the high and inaccessible plateau would

have largely escaped Spanish settlement if it had not been for the

marvellous riches now offered to Spanish cupidity. Pizarro's original

followers came as conquerors and not as settlers. They overran a great

and civilised empire whose revenues they proposed to absorb and whose

inhabitants they subjected to tribute, but after they had obtained all

the gold accumulated in the hands of the Indians there would have been

little to have induced them to remain in Bolivia. But as soon as the

unprecedented extent of the silver deposit at Potosi was recognised,

Bolivia became the greatest source of that metal in the known world and

the most important province of the transatlantic dominions of the

Castilian king. That one mountain has produced two billion ounces of

silver. Even by the early rude processes which the Spaniards found in

use among the Indians seventy million ounces were taken out in the first

thirty years, and the discovery of quicksilver in Peru, with the

invention of the copper-pan amalgamation process in 1575, quadrupled the

output. A great mining camp sprang up on the Potosi mountainside; royal

officials, contractors, and merchants flocked to this Eldorado; the

mountain roads to Lima swarmed with mule trains, carrying down silver

and painfully toiling back again laden with supplies; the routes of the

Bolivian plateau became the greatest arteries of travel in Spanish

America.

The year of Gonzalo's execution the city of La Paz was founded in a

valley lying in the open plains just south of Lake Titicaca, and soon

became a great emporium of Spanish trade. On the fertile plateau to the

east of Potosi the city of Charcas flourished and was made the political

and ecclesiastical capital of Upper Peru, Potosi being too high for

Europeans. Soon other great mines were found, among which those of

Oruro, on the south-eastern edge of the Titicaca basin, proved

especially rich. Nearly ten thousand abandoned silver mines testify to

the activity of the Spaniards in hunting the precious metal, and the

total production of silver in Bolivia during the colonial period

exceeded three billion ounces. To work these mines the Spaniards

ruthlessly impressed the helpless Indians. Each village was required to

furnish a certain number of labourers annually. Lots were drawn as if

for a proscription, and the unhappy creatures who drew the bad numbers

went off to meet a certain death in the dark wet pits and galleries,

bidding good-bye to their wives and children like men stepping on the

scaffold. The destruction of life was frightful, the official returns

made by the officials charged with the impressment demonstrating that in

the neighbourhood of Potosi the Indian population fell within a hundred

years to a tenth of its original numbers.

The influx of Spanish adventurers and officials also stimulated the

extension of the system of agricultural encomiendas--that is, the grants

of large tracts of land with the privilege of enslaving the Indian

occupants. Sheep were introduced from Spain within twenty years of the

conquest, and immense herds belonging to the Spanish proprietors and

tended by Indian slaves soon covered the vast pasture grounds which are

found even on the higher and colder portions of the plateau. Horses had

come with the first conquerors and the breeding of mules flourished,

especially in Cochabamba, the great agricultural centre which was

founded in 1573, as well as in Charcas and the far southern districts of

Tucuman. Cattle spread quickly over these same regions, and their beef,

maize, mules, and horses found a good market in the mining districts.

By the year 1580 the Spanish colonial system affecting the natives had

been perfected, codified, and put into general operation. The whole

country was divided into about thirty districts, each governed by a

corregidor who in theory was controlled by a complicated and carefully

drawn system of regulations, but who in practice was a petty tyrant

against whom the white Creoles had little chance of redress, and who

held the Indians absolutely at his mercy. The regulations framed by the

distant viceroy at Lima for the protection of the natives were evaded by

the corregidors, intent solely on extorting money from the poor

creatures committed to their charge. Encomiendas had nominally been

abolished, but landed proprietors still exercised the right to exact

tribute from the Indians on their estates and great numbers were forced

to serve as life servants under various pretexts. Those Indians who

retained a semblance of freedom obeyed their own caciques, who were

often the descendants of the royal Inca family. The principal duty for

which the Spaniards held these chiefs responsible was the collection of

the head-tax in their respective villages.

The letter of the law required a seventh of the adult male population to

work for the benefit of the Government, and in practice this resulted in

an unlimited farming out of Indians as slaves to the rural proprietors.

As much as possible the Indians retired to their villages to escape the

notice of the officials, hoping to find under their own caciques a

measure of security and a chance to live in modest poverty. Misrule,

slavery, labour in the mines, neglect of that intensive and

government-directed agriculture which had alone rendered it possible to

sustain the dense population of Inca times, decimated the Indians.

Few parts of the plateau escaped coming under Spanish rule, but the

white conquerors, like their Inca predecessors, stopped short when they

reached the dense forests and steep valleys, eroded by wildly rushing

rivers, which cover the eastern slope of the great mountain region. Down

these terrific gorges no progress was made, and only occasionally did

some devoted priests manage to establish a mission among the intractable

Indians who inhabit the open prairies interspersed among the beautiful

forest-covered plains drained by the tributaries of the Madeira. The

roads the Incas had built to the Pacific continued even in Spanish times

to be the only practicable way of communication between Bolivia and the

outer world. Transportation over the steep and tedious route from Potosi

to La Paz, thence around Titicaca, and along the high valleys of

southern Peru to the beginning of the tremendous descent to Lima, was

too expensive to permit any export except of the precious metals. To

the south there was a somewhat easier route to the valleys of

north-eastern Argentina, into which the Spaniards had spread within a

few decades after the discovery of Potosi, and whence food and pack

animals were drawn for the mining regions. Spanish law forbade the use

of the Atlantic ports at the mouth of the Plate, and for more than two

centuries Bolivia continued under both administrative and commercial

subordination to Lima.

Jesuit missionaries arrived in Bolivia within twenty-five years after

Loyola had founded the order. They established an important mission on

the banks of Lake Titicaca in 1577, and five years later introduced the

printing-press in order to distribute among their proselytes grammars

and catechisms in the native tongues. In the seventeenth century they

succeeded in penetrating down the eastern slope of the Andes and across

the great central plain to the outlying hills of the Brazilian mountain

system where they established several missions among the Chiquitos

Indians. They even reached the grassy prairies which lie three hundred

miles north of the inner angle of the great plateau, converted the

Mojos, and taught them to herd cattle. But in the forests and along the

base of the Andes the fierce tribes held their own as they had against

the Incas and as they have continued to do against the Spanish-Americans

to this day.

In 1619 another great silver find was made, this time near Lake

Titicaca. A few years later civil war broke out among the Potosi miners

caused by the rancorous greed of the speculators who worked the mines

under contract. Official authority could do little to suppress the

bloody encounters, and the factions were only reconciled after three

years of fighting. The discovery, in 1657, of another very rich silver

mine near the lake brought on desperate fights among the miners who

flocked to the place. The chief contractor enraged the other Spaniards

by his exactions, and the situation became so serious that in 1665 the

viceroy went in person and summarily tried and executed forty-two

persons, among them the contractor's own brother.

For one hundred and fifty years the Spaniards had failed to find gold

deposits equal to those from which the Incas had drawn the fabulous

treasures that paid Atahuallpa's ransom, but about the end of the

seventeenth century rich placers were discovered in the mountains east

of Lake Titicaca. The town of Sorata soon rivalled Potosi in opulence.

Shortly thereafter other great gold deposits were found on the eastern

slope of the inner Andes by adventurous Brazilians who had made their

way across the continent to the eastern headwaters of the Madeira and

ascended the Beni River as far as the escarpment of the great plateau.

The news of the discovery brought a crowd of Spanish miners from Chile,

and as the placers were rich and Indian labour abounded, fortunes were

rapidly accumulated. The gold was sold in annual fairs which continue to

be held to this day, but as is always the case in gold washings the

first results were the best. The region is too difficult of access for

quartz mining, and the production rapidly fell off. Activity in that

part of Bolivia ceased in the eighteenth century and only a few Indians

continued to wash a little gold in the remoter streams. In 1781 Sorata

was destroyed and the gold country virtually abandoned.

CHAPTER II

THE COLONIAL SYSTEM AND TUPAC'S REVOLT

During the two hundred years which followed the Spanish conquest, life

on the Bolivian plateau was vegetative and changeless except for the

occasional excitement caused by the discovery of a rich new silver mine.

The Indians lived in their villages, herding their masters' sheep or

cultivating maize and potatoes, paid tribute to the encomenderos or the

Crown collector, and submitted with dull patience to all the exactions.

They reverenced their caciques, listened submissively to the parish

priests, and meekly suffered the tyranny of the corregidors. The

language of the conquerors was unintelligible to most of the people.

When summoned to work in the mines they went to slow misery and certain

death with the stoicism of their race. The South American Indian changes

his attributes but slowly, and we find a moral resemblance in tribes

differing widely in material culture. The Inca emperor exacted and

received the same blind, unquestioning obedience which the Paraguayans

gave to Lopez four centuries later, and the rude Guaranies on the banks

of the Parana, who had hardly entered the stone age, were no more

readily submissive to the Spaniards than the Quichuas of Bolivia, whose

engineering, agriculture, and architecture had reached a high degree of

development.

Except the floating population of miners, the Spaniards and their

descendants lived in the cities--La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Charcas,

Tarija, Santa Cruz. Each city had its plaza, its townhouse, its

officials, and its law-courts. Administrative centres for the

surrounding districts, their inhabitants were mainly functionaries and

hangers-on, who varied the sleepy monotony of their existence by

factional quarrels and political intrigues. In these cities the slow

process of amalgamating the white and red races began, and the dynamic

restlessness of the Caucasian infiltrated by degrees into the static

calm of the Indian. The lower classes of the towns became half-breed,

while in the country districts pure Indians predominated. Late in the

colonial period the Spaniards were still occupying the position of alien

taskmasters, and the process of fusing the different races into a

homogeneous mass had made little progress after two centuries and a half

of contact. In a word, the social and political organisation of Upper

Peru was largely a continuation of the Inca system, but that system had

been deformed and deprived of its efficiency and was subject to constant

arbitrary interference from the Spanish corregidors, while the cities

were separately governed by military governors and their own cabildos.

Until the middle of the eighteenth century the authority of the Lima

viceroy nominally extended over the whole of Spanish South America.

However, boards of high judicial and civil functionaries called

audiencias, responsible directly to the Crown, exercised very important

and independent judicial and administrative functions, each over a great

division of Spanish America. Hardly had the conquest been completed when

an audiencia was established at Charcas and that city became the

political and ecclesiastical capital not only of all Upper Peru but of

the vast regions to the south. The viceroy was too far away to

interfere, and in effect a great semi-independent province was created,

whose boundaries extended indefinitely south and east from the

transverse range which separated the Titicaca basin from the region

immediately governed by the viceroy and known as Lower Peru. To the

jurisdiction of this province the governors of Tucuman, Paraguay, and

Buenos Aires were subject, as well as the missions among the Chiquitos

and Mojos on the headwaters of the Paraguay and Madeira.

The Bourbon kings, who succeeded the House of Austria early in the

eighteenth century, were forced to abandon the effort to centralise the

administration and commerce of the whole continent at Lima. The Atlantic

and Caribbean coasts could not be effectively governed from the Pacific

and the rising currents of trade and immigration must be allowed more

liberty to follow their natural channels. The viceroyalty of Bogota was

created in 1740 including the northern and north-western portions of the

continent, and in 1776 the south-eastern parts were erected into the

viceroyalty of Buenos Aires. The whole audiencia of Charcas was

separated from Lima, and to its territory was added that portion of

Chile which lay east of the Andes. Though the Bolivian plateau was the

most populous and important division of the new viceroyalty, Buenos

Aires, far away on the Atlantic and in a region then considered of

little value, was chosen as the capital.

In spite of prohibitive regulations goods had long been smuggled into

Buenos Aires and thence carried over the Argentine plains up the

comparatively easy passes leading to southern Bolivia, and the selection

of the Plate city was a recognition by the Spanish government of the

futility of longer trying to divert the trade of the Atlantic slope from

its natural channels. But the greater length of the Atlantic route

largely overcame the advantage of easier gradients, and social and

commercial habits centuries old could not be revolutionised by statute.

Most of Bolivia's small intercourse with the outside world continued to

be conducted along the old Inca routes to the Pacific, and political

union brought about no organic and commercial incorporation with the

provinces near the mouth of the Plate.

Before the new viceroyalty was in good running order, a great Indian

insurrection broke out which involved a large proportion of the Indians

of the plateau. Tupac Amaru, the legitimate heir of the Inca emperors,

and a wealthy and influential cacique in one of the valleys between

Cuzco and the Bolivian border, had received a good Spanish education

and possessed many friends among the whites. But his heart went out to

his own people, and he had the courage to protest against the

intolerable oppressions of the corregidors. Failing to obtain redress

after repeated prayers to the Spanish authorities at least to enforce

their own laws honestly, he resolved to appeal to arms, and in 1780 he

captured and killed a particularly demoniacal corregidor, his own

immediate superior, and summoned the Indians of southern Peru to fight

for their rights under his banner. Tupac had secured some firearms and

out of the vast multitudes which assembled at his call he equipped three

thousand men. The Spaniards advanced from Cuzco with a force of twelve

hundred men, but Tupac defeated them and hastened across the range to

arouse the population around Titicaca. At every village he addressed the

people from the church steps, saying that he was come to abolish abuses

and punish the corregidors, and the Indians responded with acclamations

for the Inca and redeemer. Meanwhile the Spanish officials were

assembling a large force in Cuzco which, strange as it may seem, was

mostly composed of Indians. The race possessed little instinctive

capacity for organisation, was deficient in initiative, moral courage,

and independence, and had not the resolution to refuse to follow the

Spanish officers. There were only a few like Tupac who possessed the

mental energy and originality to plan and to fight on their own account.

Receiving news of the Spanish preparations, the Inca hurried back to his

home province and attempted to negotiate. He recounted to the Spanish

authorities his own earnest endeavours to obtain a measure of justice

for his people, the habitual violation of Spanish law by Spanish

officials, and the intolerable oppression of the system of impressment.

He proposed a negotiation by which reforms might be attained without

further bloodshed. Tupac's fame as an enlightened and unselfish patriot

rests securely on the contents of the noble and able despatch which, on

this occasion, he sent to the Spanish authorities. But the latter

refused all compromise and ordered an advance on Tupac's position. He

was surrounded, his army destroyed, and he himself sentenced to be torn

in pieces by horses after witnessing with his own eyes the fearful

tortures and death of his innocent and harmless wife and children.

The perpetration of such atrocities goaded even the dull and stoical

Indians into a fury. They rose everywhere on the plateau and the

Spaniards in northern Bolivia fled for refuge to La Paz and Puno. The

Spanish army which had overcome Tupac advanced into the Titicaca basin,

but was compelled to retreat before overwhelming numbers. Puno was

evacuated and in 1781 the Spaniards had lost all foothold in northern

Bolivia. But the habit of obedience was too strong; their first fury

over, the Indians listened to promises of fair treatment and offers of

compromise. Tupac's cousin, who had been made chief of the insurrection

after the former's murder, was persuaded to submit on the promise of

pardon, only to be arrested, tried, and executed as soon as his

followers had laid down their arms. The family of the Inca was

extirpated, ninety of its members, including women and children, being

sent on foot, loaded with chains, over the hundreds of miles of mountain

road to Lima and thence conveyed to Spain, where they rotted away in

prison.

Many of the reforms to secure which Tupac had lost his own life and

devoted his kin to destruction, were voluntarily put into effect by the

Spanish government a few years later. The office of corregidor was

abolished, and the district governors were made directly responsible to

the governor of the province, who was in turn responsible to the viceroy

and audiencia. Courts were established to protect the rights of the

Indians and the higher authorities made a sincere effort to secure the

enforcement of the laws. However, the reforms did not materially change

the condition of the country, and the Indians apparently settled back

into the same apathetic obedience to the whites. The anti-Spanish

feeling took no active form for the present, but the events had proved

that the Indian population had become a field well prepared for the

springing up of a crop of bloody insurrections.

CHAPTER III

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

The South American war of independence began and ended on the plateau of

Upper Peru. On Bolivia's soil the first blood of the great revolt was

spilt and there the last Spanish soldiers laid down their arms. Lying on

the great route from Lima to Buenos Aires, her territory inevitably

became the battle-ground for the hardest and most continuous fighting on

the continent, and her population, having been the most oppressed by

Spanish misrule, showed itself the most tenacious in efforts to drive

out the Spanish authorities.

From 1809 to 1825, with scarcely an intermission, battle succeeded

battle, campaign campaign, and insurrection insurrection, as the

Spaniards and patriots, alternately victorious, marched and

counter-marched along the great mountain road that winds through the

plateau from Humahuaca on the Argentine frontier to the barrier north of

Lake Titicaca. Not a village but what was captured and pillaged, not

merely once but many times, and the tale of garottings and hangings, of

massacres, burnings, and depredations, of heads and hands spiked up by

hundreds along the highways, wearies in the telling. The Indians and

half-breeds who formed the bulk of the Bolivian population joined by

tens of thousands the bands that were continually being recruited by the

patriot caudillos, or were impressed into the Spanish armies. Like

Missouri in the American Civil War, Bolivia furnished more than her

contingent to both sides, and her geographical position was similar to

that of Virginia. The fighting on her soil was the longest continued and

the severest, although the decisive battles were fought outside her

territory. Suipacha, Huaqui, Ayohuma, Viluma correspond to Seven Pines,

Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg; while Chacabuco, Boyaca, and

Ayacucho, like Donelson, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, were the fights

that brought the real results.

The patriots from the Argentine wished to carry the war to the seat of

Spanish power and made continual efforts to get to Lima by way of

Bolivia, but though they often reached the plateau they could never long

maintain themselves. The farthest that they ever penetrated was to the

south end of Lake Titicaca, where they were still distant from their

goal by more than a thousand miles of difficult mountain road. The

Spanish generals were more successful, but any army in possession of the

plateau was immediately impelled to dissipate its forces in keeping open

lines of communication with the seaboard and in tedious marches.

The news of the French usurpation in 1808 and the consequent civil

disturbances in Spain demoralised the Spanish authorities in the

Bolivian cities, and the Creoles immediately conceived the hope that

they might possess themselves of the offices and the revenues. Early in

1809 a few influential native Bolivians and disaffected Spaniards took

forcible possession of the government buildings in Charcas and La Paz

and deposed the Spanish officials. The insurgents managed to arm a few

troops, but were able to make no effective resistance to the forces

which the viceroys at Buenos Aires and Lima promptly sent to quell the

movement. The rebellion was quenched in blood. Goyeneche, the Lima

general, ordered wholesale executions among those who had taken part,

and the news of his dreadful cruelties roused a bitter desire for

revenge in the hearts of the Creoles of all South America.

The deposition by Buenos Aires of her viceroy on the 25th of May, 1810,

was shortly followed by the advance of an Argentine army into Bolivia,

and the forces which the Spanish authorities at Potosi and Charcas had

been able to collect were defeated at Suipacha, near the southern border

of the plateau. All the cities of Bolivia fell into the hands of the

patriots, while the villages rose in revolt against their Spanish

tyrants. The Buenos Aireans wished to subject the Bolivian provinces to

a centralised government and rule them from the capital on the Plate,

but every town in Upper Peru had its ambitious Creole leaders who wished

to control their own country. These disagreements had much to do with

the crushing defeat which the Argentine army shortly suffered at Huaqui

on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca. The projected triumphal advance

through Cuzco and Lower Peru to Lima was turned into a precipitate

retreat through La Paz, Oruro, and Potosi into the Argentine. Alone the

Bolivian patriots were not strong enough to prevent the re-establishment

of the Spanish authority in the cities along the main route. But in the

villages and the outlying cities like Cochabamba and Santa Cruz the

insurgent bands kept up a desperate resistance.

The main body of the victorious Spanish army pursued the fleeing

Argentines into their own territory, only to be defeated by General

Belgrano in the battle of Tucuman--a victory which probably saved Buenos

Aires from capture and the South American revolution from extinction. In

1813 the Argentines again invaded Bolivia, but they had not proceeded

far beyond Potosi when they were met and routed in the battles of

Villapugio and Ayohuma. The Bolivian patriots were once more left to

their own resources, and their country subjected to the most awful

devastations. Though unable to concert a general plan of action or to

assemble one large army, nevertheless they had courage to die in battle

or on the scaffold. The most famous leaders in the south were Camargo

and Padilla, whose daring forays helped prevent the Spaniards from

advancing into the Argentine, while Arenales at Santa Cruz and other

patriot leaders farther north continually threatened the line of

communication to Titicaca, Cuzco, and Lima.

[Illustration: BALSAS ON LAKE TITICACA.]

Late in the year 1814 the region north of Lake Titicaca to and beyond

Cuzco burst into insurrection under the lead of an Indian cacique and

an indefatigable agitator of a priest named Munecas. The Indians rose

_en masse_ and the Spanish army in southern Bolivia was cut off from

Lima. Twenty thousand insurgents assembled near the north end of Lake

Titicaca, but they possessed neither arms, officers, nor organisation.

Not one in twenty had a musket, and though their invasion down the

Maritime Cordillera to Arequipa was at first successful, a comparatively

small force of Spanish regulars chased them back over the passes to the

region of the lake and there dispersed them at the battle of Humachiri.

Meanwhile the guerilla bands in southern Bolivia and the Argentines in

Salta had been more successful. The Spaniards were compelled to retire

from the Argentine border back beyond Potosi. The Argentines again

invaded the plateau and advanced in force on the road to La Paz and

Lima. Once again the Spanish forces which concentrated to meet them were

victorious and the allied patriots were completely overthrown in the

battle of Viluma, November, 1815, which marks the end of the first

period of the war of independence. Thenceforward for seven years the

Spanish generals were dominant on the plateau, and the Bolivian patriots

made only a desultory and scattered resistance.

With admirable foresight the victorious Spanish general, Pezuela, went

to work to subdue thoroughly the whole of Upper Peru. The viceroy,

Abascal, backed him up in establishing in this natural fortress a strong

military state, whence money and soldiers could be drawn for offensive

operations against the insurrection in any part of the continent. The

mines supplied the funds of which the viceregal government stood in such

desperate need, and the hardy, sturdy Indians of Bolivia afforded a

stock of excellent recruits whose fidelity might be enforced by white

officers and severe discipline. Pezuela remorselessly pursued the

patriot chiefs; Camargo was finally run to earth, captured, and

garrotted; Padilla fell in the midst of his little band and was brutally

beheaded as he lay wounded on the ground. Garrisons occupied all the

towns and important positions, the irregular excesses of the Spanish

soldiery were sternly forbidden, a measure of order and security

replaced the confusion of the previous years, and the whole resources of

the people were carefully husbanded and devoted to the upbuilding of an

army. Before the end of 1816 Pezuela had a well-equipped and efficient

force of eight thousand men ready for an advance into the Argentine.

The year 1816 was the blackest for the patriot cause since the beginning

of the revolution. Chile had been reduced to obedience; the Argentine

was convulsed by civil war; Uruguay had fallen into the hands of the

Portuguese king; the Spaniards were triumphant in Venezuela, and New

Granada, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia were making no resistance. Pezuela

had been promoted to be viceroy at Lima and La Serna in the beginning of

1817 led the Spanish army into the Argentine and advanced far beyond the

frontier. But he made his campaign according to the rules of regular

European warfare, and though the gauchos of Salta did not venture to

give him battle they kept up a harassing series of night attacks,

ambushes, and daring forays into his very lines. Mounted on their fleet

and hardy plains horses, living on wild cattle, and needing no baggage

or provision train, their mobility was phenomenal, and they rendered the

advance of the Spanish army through the long stretches of desert and

pampa almost impossible.

Meanwhile San Martin's great victory at Chacabuco in Chile completely

changed the situation throughout the continent. It was necessary for the

viceroy to drain the other provinces of troops to attempt Chile's

recovery. Even if La Serna did succeed in pushing toward Buenos Aires,

San Martin could recross the Andes and strike him in flank with a

victorious army. So the Spanish general withdrew from the northern

Argentine and took up the old position near the Bolivian border. The

Argentines never attacked him in force, although they kept up a war with

incursions over the frontier, and the indomitable Bolivian patriots rose

in one local revolt after another during the next four years. The

country was never pacified, although the relentless vigilance of the

Spanish commanders prevented the insurrection from becoming general.

In 1820 San Martin sailed from Valparaiso and landed his army of

Argentines and Chileans on the Peruvian coast near Lima. His masterly

dispositions soon compelled the Spaniards to evacuate the capital and

thenceforth their power was confined to the Andean region which extends

south-east from the Cerro de Pasco to the southern boundary of Bolivia.

The patriots had the advantage of being able to land troops at any point

on the coast, and the Spanish generals, to meet these invasions, were

compelled to move their armies over the tortuous mountain paths. Late in

1822 an expedition attempted to reach the Bolivian plateau by the pass

which leads directly up to La Paz. Valdez, the Spanish general, managed

to get to the threatened point before the patriots had pushed their way

up the mountain. They attacked at a disadvantage, and their army was

destroyed.

A year later a similar effort was made by an army of five thousand

Peruvians under the command of Santa Cruz, a Bolivian half-breed of

noble Inca lineage who had been engaged in the Spanish service until

1821, and then, deserting, had risen to supreme power in the patriot

army after the retirement of San Martin. Northern Bolivia had been

denuded of troops by the Spanish generals in the course of their

operations near Lima. No army disputed the pass, and Santa Cruz

penetrated to La Paz without opposition. Valdez hastened from Peru, and

the Spanish army in southern Bolivia moved toward the threatened region.

Santa Cruz's position lay directly between them; his forces were

superior to either of the Spanish armies and apparently it would not be

difficult for him to whip them in detail. But he made the mistake of

dividing his own forces, and Valdez came up with such unexpected speed

that he failed to unite his two divisions before the Spaniards reached

La Paz. He retreated to the south in order to join his other division,

closely followed by the enemy, and scarcely had he effected the junction

when Valdez skilfully outflanked him and united his forces to the army

of southern Bolivia. By this manoeuvre the patriot army found itself

hopelessly outnumbered and fled north in disorder. By the time it

reached the coast it had been practically annihilated. One body of

Spaniards resumed at its leisure a position threatening Lima, while the

Bolivian division occupied itself with crushing the insurgents who had

risen at Cochabamba and other points during Santa Cruz's stay upon the

plateau.

This disastrous campaign seemed to destroy all hope of Bolivian freedom

for years to come. But Olaneta, the renegade Argentine who commanded the

Spanish army in Bolivia, quarrelled with La Serna and the northern

generals. They sent a force to fight him, and while the Spaniards were

thus warring among themselves word was received that Bolivar had arrived

on the Peruvian coast, accompanied by his great lieutenant, Sucre, and a

large army of Colombian veterans. To meet this pressing danger the

viceroy abandoned his efforts to reduce Olaneta to submission, recalled

the troops he had sent into Bolivia, and sent north as large a force as

he could muster. Bolivar climbed the coast range unopposed and met the

Spanish army not far south of Cerro de Pasco. On the 24th of August,

1824, he won the cavalry action of Junin, and the Spaniards were

compelled to retire to Cuzco. Bolivar went to Lima to consolidate his

political position, leaving the command with Sucre. Four months later

the viceroy suddenly broke out of Cuzco, outmanoeuvred Sucre, and

marched toward Lima closely followed by the Colombian forces. The two

armies finally met at Ayacucho, December 9, 1824, and though the

royalist army fought on a field of its own choosing and had the

advantage in numbers and artillery, it was annihilated.

The only Spanish troops which remained in the field were Olaneta's in

southern Bolivia. He struggled desperately to hold his men together and

make another stand, but the news of Ayacucho was the signal for an

uprising of the patriots all around him. The royalist officers and

troops had no heart for a hopeless fight, and as Sucre approached the

detached garrisons deserted. In March Olaneta received word that one of

his lieutenants, Medina Celi, who was in command at Tumusla near

Potosi, had declared for the patriots. The Spanish general promptly

marched with the few troops who remained faithful, and, on April 1,

1825, fought the last action of the war of independence. Olaneta was

defeated and himself slain, probably by a ball fired by one of his own

men.

CHAPTER IV

BOLIVIA INDEPENDENT

After his great victory at Ayacucho, Sucre advanced rapidly to Cuzco and

thence into the Titicaca basin. By February he had reached Oruro in what

is now central Bolivia, and Upper Peru rose as one man to welcome the

deliverer. The next step was to decide upon the future government. For

thirty years before the beginning of the revolution this country had

been part of the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires, and when the city on the

Plate had expelled its Spanish rulers the patriots there had expected

that Upper Peru would continue to be connected with the new nation.

Although in the early years of the war these provinces sent delegates to

congresses which assembled in the Argentine cities, the Creoles of the

plateau never showed any anxiety to incorporate their country with the

Argentine, and the successes of the Spanish generals virtually renewed

Bolivia's ancient connection with Lima. Now that the Spaniards were

expelled, the Bolivian Creoles were no more willing to unite with Lower

Peru than with Buenos Aires, and Bolivar encouraged this sentiment. The

ambitious and lucky soldier had formed the Napoleonic conception of

making himself supreme dictator of a confederation of small states, each

of which was to be ruled by a subordinate dictator named from among his

creatures. To organise Upper Peru into a separate country with Sucre at

its head would be a long step in this direction. Bolivar himself was

president of the confederation of Venezuela, New Granada, and Ecuador,

as well as dictator of Lower Peru, and at the head of a victorious army

of Colombians. Argentina's influence was nullified by civil war. Chile's

strength was as yet unsuspected. For the moment Bolivar was supreme in

South America. At his dictation Peru and Buenos Aires promulgated

decrees leaving to the provinces of Upper Peru the right "to decide

freely and spontaneously as to what form of government would be most

conducive to their prosperity and good government."

When Bolivar himself reached the country he was received in a delirium

of joy and gratitude, and the enthusiastic Bolivians acclaimed him

father of their country. In a literal sense he deserved the title, for

his intervention had conferred independence on Bolivia, and his decrees

now fixed her boundaries. In general he followed the ancient limits of

the audiencia of Charcas. Peru retained the seacoast directly to the

west as well as all the Titicacan basin north and west of the lake,

compelling Bolivian commerce to pass through foreign territory in order

to reach the ocean. Far to the south Bolivia was conceded a little

ribbon of coast, but the route thither lay over the bleak and barren

Puna and was too long to be of any practical service.

On the 11th of August, 1825, official proclamation was made that the new

republic had begun its existence, taking the name "Bolivia," in honour

of the liberator. Congress said in the act of independence that: "Upper

Peru is the altar upon which the first blood was shed for liberty, and

the land where the last tyrant perished. The barbarous burning of more

than a hundred villages, the destruction of towns, the scaffolds raised

everywhere for the partisans of liberty, the blood of thousands of

victims that would make even Caribs shudder; the taxes and exactions, as

arbitrary as inhuman; the insecurity of property, life, and of honour

itself; an atrocious and merciless inquisitorial system; all have not

been able to extinguish the sacred fire of liberty and the just hatred

of Spanish power."

Early in the following year Bolivar presented a Constitution all ready

for the approval of congress. Written in his own hand, it stands a

curious proof of his political ideas. After laying down the somewhat

vague principle that liberty is a mere island which the waves of tyranny

and anarchy alternately threaten to engulf, and establishing a

legislative system, too complicated to be workable, he shows the cloven

hoof by providing for a president elected for life and possessing the

right to nominate a successor. Sucre was made the president as a matter

of course, but hardly had he begun his regular government when troubles

broke out. His own character, the internal conditions of Bolivia, and

the international jealousies felt against him as the friend and

representative of Bolivar, combined to make his position untenable. A

general of the first order, a statesman of enlightened ideas, and a

single-minded and unselfish patriot, Sucre would not deign to impose

himself by force of arms on a reluctant people, nor make undignified

compromises with the turbulent caudillos. He had accepted the presidency

only after it had been repeatedly pressed upon him by the Bolivian

congress, and though he was probably influenced by his loyal wish to aid

Bolivar in the latter's scheme of uniting all Spanish-America under a

strong, semi-monarchical government, he was unselfishly anxious to

restore peace and order. The heterogeneous population of about a million

who lived upon the plateau was, however, demoralised by the terrible

experiences through which it had passed in the previous fifteen years.

Three-fourths were Indian, a stoical, docile race which would not make

much trouble, but which was divided into two nations speaking different

languages and possessing little capacity for organisation. The few

whites and the more numerous people of mixed blood were the dominating

elements, and these had been trained to lawlessness and ferocity by the

long war.

Sucre vainly tried to replace anarchy by some semblance of orderly

government. The revenues of the country had fallen from the two millions

annually of colonial times to almost nothing. His attempt to substitute

a rational system of direct taxation for the countless Spanish imposts

failed. Money to pay the Colombian troops could not be raised and the

mercenaries became mutinous. At the same time symptoms of rebellion

appeared among the Bolivian caudillos. Troubles in Colombia and

Venezuela had forced Bolivar to retire from Peru and the troops he left

behind almost immediately mutinied, and Santa Cruz pushed himself to the

head of affairs at Lima. The Bolivarian Constitution of Peru was

overthrown, and Santa Cruz and Gamarra advanced upon Bolivia to expel

Sucre. The latter's Colombian troops mutinied and bands of

insurrectionists rose in various parts of the country to aid the

Peruvian invaders, while Argentina and Chile plainly showed their desire

for Sucre's overthrow. On the 28th of July, 1828, a little more than

three years after his triumphant entry into Bolivia, Sucre made a treaty

with the leader of the Peruvian army agreeing to withdraw from Bolivia

with all the natives of Colombia. General Santa Cruz was named

president, and the Peruvians occupied many of the Bolivian provinces for

several months, only to withdraw when it became evident that their

continued presence would surely provoke a universal uprising. Santa Cruz

soon triumphed over all opposition and established himself as master of

the country.

The new president was a man whose general intelligence and ability and

knowledge of diplomacy, law, and economics gave the country a successful

and rational government. Though he abandoned Sucre's premature attempt

to reform the taxing system, he energetically applied and improved the

old imposts and soon brought some order out of the financial chaos. His

army was the best organised, disciplined, and equipped in South America.

He also tried to attract European immigration and to improve

agricultural, commercial, and social conditions and methods. The

difficulties of communication and the conservative and industrially

unenergetic character of the population, however, prevented any rapid

development. Peru was distracted by civil commotions, and Santa Cruz

pressed hard on the northern country. He probably could have forced the

cession of adjacent seacoast to the inestimable and lasting benefit of

Bolivia, but his ambition led him farther. Appealed to for help by one

of the rival Peruvian factions, he gave it upon the condition that that

country should be divided, the two parts uniting with Bolivia in a

confederation of which he was to be the supreme head. In 1835 he invaded

Peru and made himself master of the country.

The creation of the Peru-Bolivian Confederation was an especial menace

to Chile and the Argentine. The latter country, still a prey to the most

lamentable civil disorders, was in no position to undertake any

effective intervention, but Chile's already strong and well-established

government determined to restore the balance of power. Pretexts for war

were soon found, and the more solid texture of Chile's social and

political organisation, the energy of her people bred in cold regions,

and her command of the sea, quickly made themselves felt. The first

expedition sent to Arequipa in 1837 was compelled to retire by an army

which Santa Cruz despatched down the Cordillera from La Paz. The

factions in Peru, however, rose and in the following year Chile renewed

the war. On the 20th of January, 1839, with the aid of the Peruvian

auxiliaries, the Chileans overwhelmingly defeated an army of Bolivians

and Peruvians under Santa Cruz at the battle of Yungay.

The fragility of the foundations upon which Santa Cruz had rested his

system was now apparent. The "Peru-Bolivian Confederation" disappeared

from the map. Peru re-established her independent existence with her old

boundaries. Santa Cruz's enemies in Bolivia rose in rebellion and he

fell without a struggle. As a matter of fact the ten years of his more

or less orderly government had not changed the character of the Bolivian

Creoles and mixed-bloods. His government had been military, reactionary,

and a mere makeshift; the Indians still occupied their inferior

position, the lower classes regarded the ruling coteries as self-seeking

aristocrats, a dull discontent fermented among the whole population, and

the ambitious chieftains found little difficulty in seducing the

soldiery. Bolivia, definitely cut off from the Pacific, helpless to

defend her interests in the plains surrounding the plateau, unable to

attract the fertilising and civilising currents of commerce and

immigration, entered upon an epoch of civil war, pronunciamentos, and

dictatorships which lasted nearly half a century. A recital of the

literally countless armed risings, and of the various individuals who

exercised, or claimed to exercise, supreme power, would throw little

light on the progress of the country. Foreign commerce and domestic

industry were so small that the government was always poor and unable to

meet its expenses. Peru's possession of the seaports held Bolivian

commerce at her mercy, and the military and naval power of Chile was a

continual menace. Either of Bolivia's larger neighbours could easily

bring on a revolution by opportune aid to ambitious factions, and the

turbulence of the Creole military classes was not restrained by any

powerful and intelligent commercial and industrial population.

In the midst of the fighting which followed the overthrow of Santa Cruz,

a liberal Constitution was proclaimed which attempted to take from the

executive his preponderance in the government. Negro slavery was

abolished and the movement was altogether in the direction of democracy

and against the property-holding classes. In 1840 General Ballivian

overcame all his rivals and gained supreme power. In the following year

the dictator of Peru, taking advantage of the continual disputes over

questions of transit through Peruvian territory, and thinking that in

Bolivia's enfeebled condition she would not be able to resist

incorporation, led a large army over the border and occupied the

province of La Paz. But the Bolivians rallied around Ballivian and

defeated the Peruvians in the battle of Yngavi near the end of 1841, a

victory which definitely assured the independence of Bolivia.

Ballivian had risen to power by brute military force and crushed out the

feeble attempt at popular government made after the fall of Santa Cruz.

Despotic, irritable, and ambitious, he had not the wide knowledge or

administrative capacity of Santa Cruz, and he gave the country a much

worse government. The pride of the turbulent half-breeds was roused by

the victory over the Peruvians, and conspiracies and insurrections

occurred more frequently. Ballivian ordered the liberal Constitution of

1839 to be repealed and the preponderance of the executive in the

governmental system was restored by the Constitution of 1843. He ruled

until 1848, but the partisans of Santa Cruz grew bolder and bolder. In

spite of the president's efforts to surround himself with officials of

talent and intelligence, the power of the government decreased. The

irrational and artificial boundaries given to Bolivia by Bolivar

continued to involve her in disputes with Peru, and in 1847 the

imposition of practically prohibitive duties nearly brought on war.

Ballivian assembled an army, but Castilla, the Peruvian president, found

means to foment an insurrection, and the Bolivian president was soon

engaged in a desperate conflict with the very men whom he had expected

to lead against the foreign enemy. Successful at first in his

operations, one mutiny was suppressed only to be followed by others more

formidable, and he finally gave it up in disgust and retired to exile.

A year of confused struggling followed and at last General Belzu

succeeded in establishing himself as dictator. Of low origin and

uneducated, passionate and violent, the new ruler owed his elevation to

his popularity with the common soldiery and the lowest classes of the

population. His so-called policy of conciliation amounted in fact to

permitting the guerilla bands to do as they pleased. Rapine, robbery,

and riot became almost the normal condition of the country, while the

better elements never ceased their conspiracies. Doctor Linares, a man

of probity and learning, though stubborn and uncompromising, persisted

untiring in his efforts to rid the country of the dictator. For seven

years, however, Belzu maintained himself, while Bolivia fell lower and

lower into the pit of anarchy, disgraced abroad by the actions of an

ignorant tyrant who broke treaties, refused to listen to the protests of

foreign ministers, and finally bundled them all out of the country,

secure that on his mountain-tops no army could reach him to avenge the

insult. The British foreign office literally wiped Bolivia from the map,

declaring that she could no longer be recognised as a civilised nation.

At last the dictator tired of his place and voluntarily resigned it,

leaving as his successor a bastard son-in-law, named Cordova. The latter

suppressed nine revolutionary movements in three years before he was at

last overthrown by the indefatigable Linares.

The new dictator started in with the good wishes of the respectable

elements, and earnestly tried to raise his country from the abyss into

which she had fallen. But the nation had been so thoroughly demoralised

that there was no foundation to build upon. The public offices were

filled by political favourites, but when he threw them out and tried to

put honest and competent men in their places he lost the good-will of

the office-holding class. He tried to reform the army and dismissed the

useless swarm of officers without commands, but this gained him the

enmity of the military. The very ministers whom he had selected to aid

him in putting reforms into effect plotted against him, and it was a

conspiracy led by Fernandez, the member of his cabinet in whom he placed

his greatest confidence, that brought about his fall after he had ruled

three stormy and anxious years.

A period of frightful confusion, known as the presidency of General

Acha, ensued. The chiefs fought among themselves with such ferocity that

in Chile and Peru the partition of Bolivia was seriously discussed.

Finally, at the end of 1864, a remarkable man came to the front out of

the tangle. This was the celebrated dictator, Melgarejo, who frankly

abandoned all pretence of governing by any sanction except that of brute

force and terror. He kept up a great army of spies, and the conspiracies

which they reported were ruthlessly crushed by the well-paid ruffians

who composed his army and blindly obeyed his capricious commands. One

day the dictator, drunk, as was his habit, called the guard and ordered

them to jump out of the windows in order to show a visiting foreigner

the superior discipline of the Bolivian soldier. Several had broken

their arms or legs, but he did not even look to see, and continued his

demonstration by ordering his aide-de-camp to "lie dead" like a poodle

dog. Taxes were arbitrarily levied; peaceable citizens were exiled and

shot; around him circulated a crowd of parasitic functionaries. But in

spite of his extravagances and cruelties Melgarejo gave some solidity

and consistence to the governmental structure. The production of silver

had been declining until about 1850, but at the beginning of Melgarejo's

administration had again reached ten millions annually, and thereafter

rapidly increased with the encouragement given by him to the investment

of foreign capital. Money was freely spent on public works, and the

Mollendo railroad, extending to the head of Lake Titicaca, dates from

this time. It is the principal route for Bolivia's foreign commerce,

though it does not touch Bolivian territory. The isolated desert region

on the coast began to be exploited and the guano, nitrate, copper, and

silver found there vastly increased the country's revenues, although a

considerable foreign debt was incurred.

Melgarejo's enemies succeeded in overthrowing him in 1871, and their

leader, General Morales, succeeded to the supreme power. There followed

some relaxation of the system of personal tyranny, but in the main the

form of the administration changed little, either under Morales or his

immediate successors. The first named was able to negotiate a European

loan to be employed in the building of railways, and in fact one was

constructed--running from Antofagasta on the nitrate coast over the

Cordillera and across the Puna table-land to the centre of the country

at Oruro. Heavy gradients, the unproductive character of the region

along the line, and its length, have prevented its furnishing the cheap

and practical outlet to the sea which had been hoped for. Insurrections

continued to break out from time to time, and in 1876 General Daza

usurped supreme power. His rule lasted until the Chilean war of 1879,

but the first decisive defeat was the signal for his fall.

Narciso Campero became president, and the Bolivian nation, hopeless of

recovering its coast provinces by force of arms, began the task of

re-adjusting itself to the new conditions. The Constitution was

re-written in its present form, and a succession of presidents have

since ruled the country in a peace and security which forms a happy

contrast with the anarchy that preceded Melgarejo's advent. The

production of silver rapidly increased, reaching fifteen million dollars

in 1885, when Pacheco was president, and growing to twenty millions in

1888 with Arce in the executive chair. Potosi still yields three million

ounces per annum, and the great Huanchaca mines far surpass Potosi,

making Bolivia the third silver-producing country in the world. But her

great resources can never be profitably utilised until a practical

outlet to the sea has been found. On the Pacific she has been absolutely

shut in since the Chilean war--Peru controlling the northern fourth of

the coast which separates her from that ocean and Chile the remainder.

Bolivia is without a seaport, though she retains a hope of receiving

compensation for the loss of her nitrate territory in the cession of one

such outlet, when Chile and Peru are able to come to an agreement about

the province of Arica. But the explorations of Heath on the upper

tributaries of the Madeira resulted in discoveries which may ultimately

enable Bolivia to utilise the magnificent fertile plain lying just at

the foot of the table-land, but so far well-nigh as inaccessible as the

South Pole. Broad and navigable rivers meander through this vast region,

needing only the construction of a railway around the Madeira rapids to

communicate with the Amazon and the Atlantic.

[Illustration: LOADED LLAMAS.]

Since the days of the Jesuit missionaries the Mojos Indians in the

prairies on the Mamore north of Santa Cruz have retained a measure of

civilisation, breeding cattle and keeping up a connection with the

Creoles at Santa Cruz. Lately the latter have pressed on into the rubber

regions of the lower Mamore and even crossed into the valley of the Beni

and founded the town of Riveralta where the Orton joins the Beni. From

La Paz daring men painfully made their way down the roadless gorges of

the great Cordillera and reached navigable water where the Beni emerges

from the mountains. Thence to Riveralta the way was comparatively easy

and little steamboats now ply those waters. This region is permanently

inhabitable by civilised man, but to the north-east the country drops

off into swampy plains drained by the Acre, a tributary of the sluggish

Purus. Up the latter river the Brazilian rubber hunters had come from

Manaos and found the banks of the Acre unprecedentedly rich in the

finest gum. Thousands poured into the territory and by the early

nineties it was furnishing a large percentage of the world's supply.

Though the Bolivian boundary had long been believed to cross the Acre

near the 9th degree, the Brazilian rubber gatherers did not hesitate to

enter an entirely unoccupied territory and even penetrated as far south

as the 12th degree in a region undisputably Bolivian. The authorities at

La Paz attempted to assert their political control, but since it was

well-nigh impossible to get troops into the country except by way of the

Atlantic, the rubber gatherers defied them. The Brazilian government

intervened to protect the interests of its citizens; President Pando

headed an expedition in 1902 which was met at the borders of the Acre

valley, and after some fighting with the insurgent Brazilians, which

seemed likely to bring on a war between the two powers, a treaty was

agreed upon by which Brazil takes the territory, paying a money

indemnity, agreeing to build the railroad around the Madeira Falls, and

ceding a port on the Paraguay.

Internally the condition of Bolivia has in the main been quiet since the

Chilean war, and the contest between clericalism and radicalism has lost

much of its bitterness. General Camacho led an unsuccessful insurrection

in 1890 and afterwards fled to Valparaiso. Three years later he planned

another insurrection and the government had great difficulty in

obtaining arms and money for operations against him. Chileans finally

furnished rifles and a loan, and shortly afterwards a treaty was

negotiated by which Bolivia abandoned its alliance with Peru and came

under Chilean influence. Peru resented this and the following year her

restrictions on Bolivian commerce nearly brought the two countries to

blows. The crisis, however, passed, and Bolivia has returned to the

policy of avoiding entangling alliances, while pressing Brazil, Chile,

or Peru to give her outlets to the ocean. In 1896, Alonso, leader of the

conservatives, and that energetic general and explorer, Jose Manuel

Pando, chief of the liberals, contested the presidential election. In

this contest the geographical jealousies which exist between northern

and southern Bolivia played a considerable role. Alonso was successful

and served as president during three years, but early in 1899 Pando

began warlike operations and in April overthrew Alonso in a decisive

battle. Under his vigorous administration the country has been quiet.

The plain of the Madeira has been opened up to settlement, and the

international position of the government is now vastly improved.

ECUADOR

CHAPTER I

THE CARAS

The irrigated valleys of Chile lie open to the ocean or are easily

accessible over the low coast range. The sea-board of Peru is likewise

defenceless, and though the Andean passes are high they are dry and

practicable and offer a way of approach to the table-land behind. The

want of rain from Valparaiso to Paita is explained by the Antarctic

current whose waters cool the breezes so that the warmer land condenses

no moisture. But at the northern boundary of Peru the coast bends

abruptly to the east; the cold current follows its original north-east

direction and lets the warm tropical waters wash the land. From the Gulf

of Guayaquil to Panama the coast and mountainsides are covered with

luxuriant vegetation and the ascent of the passes becomes well-nigh

impracticable. Therefore the Andean plateau in Ecuador is accessible

from the Pacific only on the south and the Colombian plateaux are

virtually cut off from communication with the western ocean.

Tradition relates that about the seventh century of the Christian era a

nation of Indians, bearing the name of Caras, invaded the sea-board of

central Ecuador. They were warlike, aggressive, conquerors by instinct,

and their civilisation was superior to that of the barbarous tribes upon

whom they descended. They came by way of the sea, most probably from the

south, bringing a complicated religion to which they were fanatically

devoted, and a military and tribal organisation which gave them an

overwhelming advantage. In all probability the Caras were akin to those

highly civilised nations who lived in the valleys of the northern

Peruvian coast. Be this as it may, there is no doubt that the Caras were

not long content with dominance along the coast, and succeeded in

forcing their way up the slopes of the Cordillera through a zone

uninhabitable on account of the perpetual rain, and only penetrable

along defiles where the soaked clay of the steep mountainsides affords

no footing and the tangle of vegetation leaves no path.

At six thousand feet above sea-level the roads became better, the

vegetation ceased to be tropical, and when they emerged through the

passes to the comparatively level plains about Quito, some eight

thousand feet above the sea, they found themselves in a country where

the cereals and fruits of the temperate zone flourish and no forests

interrupt communication. Two lines of great mountains stretched north

and south and between them lay a plateau less than forty miles in width,

and though much of it was bleak and arid, at least half lay below the

elevation where the successful cultivation of the cereals and the

potato becomes possible. At regular intervals transverse ranges of

mountains, called "nudos," or knots, cut the plateau into separate

divisions, each measurably protected from attack by its neighbours.

Andean Ecuador has been aptly compared to a great ladder four hundred

miles long, with the "nudos" forming its gigantic rungs. Beginning at

the northern boundary of modern Ecuador, Quito lies in the second of the

eight sub-plateaux, which is one of the largest and most fertile. Into

it descended the Caras and began to conquer and absorb the aborigines.

These inter-Andean valleys were inhabited by numerous tribes speaking

distinct languages, who had developed considerable skill in agriculture.

The compact and efficient military organisation of the Caras gave them a

great advantage over more loosely organised peoples, but for three

hundred years they were occupied in extending their power over the

valley of Quito and thence over Latacunga and Ibarra, which adjoin it

north and south.

From the year 1300 the Cara traditions gather more clearness and

precision. By a law handed down from immemorial times each Shiri was

succeeded by his son, or if he had no son by the son of a sister,

daughters and other female descendants being absolutely excluded. The

eleventh Shiri, whose reign corresponded with the last years of the

thirteenth century, had no male heir, and he asked the general council

of the nation for permission to name as successor the husband he might

choose for his daughter. Each one of the different chiefs, hoping to be

selected, voted for the proposition, but the Shiri diplomatically went

outside of his own dominions and proposed to the monarch who ruled in

Riobamba that his eldest son, Duchisela, marry the Princess Toa. The

proposition was accepted and the Quito kingdom doubled its territory and

power.

Duchisela reigned seventy years, and upon his death was succeeded by his

son Autachi, the thirteenth Shiri. This monarch raised the Cara power to

its highest pitch, extending his dominions south over the plateaux of

Alausi, Canar, Cuenca, Jubones, Zaruma, and Loja, and thence far beyond

the present Ecuadorian boundary over the Peruvian provinces of

Huanacabamba, Piura, and Paita. This vast increase of territory was due

more to treaties of confederation and alliance than to conquest. None of

the new provinces were ever thoroughly incorporated into the Cara

confederacy, and their allegiance to the Shiri in far-away Quito sat

lightly upon them. By the end of the fourteenth century the Cara

influence was dominant along the Andean plateau from the first degree of

north latitude to the sixth south, and extended to the arid coast plain

of northern Peru. The humid and forested coast region north of Guayaquil

remained in the hands of barbarous tribes, nor were the Caras ever able

to extend their power down the wooded eastern slopes of the Andes into

the Amazon plain.

Cara expansion was suddenly checked by the Incas. In the latter part of

the fourteenth century these fierce and indomitable Islamites of the

western continent under the lead of Tupac Yupanqui conquered the coast

nations from Lima to Paita, and the ruder tribes who lived in the

mountains from Cerro de Pasco north to the Ecuadorian border. Tupac did

not respect the southern confederates of the Caras, and the Shiri

appears to have made little resistance when his allies were rapidly

reduced. The Inca system was the far better adapted for conquest. The

emperor could equip and lead to invasion armies numbering tens of

thousands, well disciplined, blindly obeying their generals, marching

over carefully prepared roads, and supplied by an admirable

commissariat. The Caras had contented themselves with treaties of

alliance; they were only the chief tribe in a confederacy, and warlike

as were the members they could not combine to offer any effective

resistance to the first onslaught of the great military empire.

A fairly homogeneous civilisation had grown up in the Ecuadorian

Cordillera during the four hundred years of Cara influence. Bringing

with them from their unknown original home a capacity for military and

political organisation far superior to that of most American aborigines,

the Caras were like a ferment introduced into the heterogeneous and

inert tribes of the plateau, which gradually transformed the latter into

a vigorous people so well fitted to their surroundings that they

survived the Inca conquest, even turning the tables and becoming the

dominant element in the empire, and then outlived the decimating tyranny

of the Spaniards, so that ninety-five per cent. of the present

population is composed of their descendants. That this civilisation was

in the main self-developed can hardly be doubted. There is no evidence

of any intimate contact with the Incas; with the peoples of Yucatan and

Mexico the Caras had no connection, and the conjectures as to

communication with the peoples of eastern Asia have no historical or

archaeological basis. Their civilising and consolidating mission was

aided by exceptionally favourable surroundings. The climate was healthy,

agreeable, and conducive to bodily and intellectual vigour; the soil

reasonably fertile and well adapted to the production of eminently

nourishing food crops, while requiring hard labour in its cultivation.

The potato, the quinoa grain, and maize played no insignificant role in

the history of the Caras; they might never have risen above the level of

Caribs if they had lived in a region where savoury and poorly nourishing

esculents grow wild. Not less important was the physical configuration

of Ecuador. Dry and open valleys, some of them large enough to sustain

two hundred thousand people, and easily penetrable in every part, while

surrounded by high mountains and bleak "paramos," shut off from the

outer world by the forest-covered declivities of the Cordilleras, were

admirably adapted to favour the growth of compact little states, whose

inhabitants would retain their individual initiative and local pride

even after incorporation in a larger political system.

Hualcopo, the fourteenth Shiri, ascended the throne of Quito in 1430.

Tupac Yupanqui had completed the reduction of the coast tribes of

northern Peru and the mountain tribes as far north as the present

Ecuador border had ceased to resist him. From the coast valleys of Piura

and Paita, he marched up the easy pass which leads over the Cordillera

into the fertile plateaux of southern Ecuador, and after a few victories

all the tribes as far north as the nudo of Azuay submitted, and

transferred their allegiance from Quito to Cuzco. Loja, Zaruma, Jubones,

the great valley of Cuenca, and Canar were taken away, and Hualcopo was

deprived of all but his hereditary dominions--the old kingdoms of

Riobamba and Quito. The Shiri possessed no army capable of undertaking

an offensive campaign against the Incas, but, although terrified at

Tupac's rapid advance, the ancient possessions of the Shiri remained

faithful. Tupac spent two years in the province of Canar, erecting

fortifications and recruiting his army by new arrivals from the south

and enlistment among the recently conquered tribes. Meanwhile Hualcopo

was fortifying himself in the valley of Alausi, which lies north of

Azuay, and in the passes that lead over the Tiocajas nudo into Riobamba.

About the year 1455 the Inca army advanced in force. Defeated in several

minor actions, the Shiri abandoned Alausi and concentrated his forces in

the passes of Tiocajas. After three months of skirmishes and sieges in

which the forts fell one by one, the Caras were compelled to accept a

pitched battle. The conflict was well sustained, but with the death of

the principal Cara general, victory declared for the Incas and the Caras

fled from the field leaving sixteen thousand dead.

Hualcopo retired to Riobamba, but there it was impossible to maintain

himself, and he was forced to retreat to the fortress of Mocha in the

nudo which divides Riobamba from the valley of Latacunga. Here he made a

determined and successful stand, and all Tupac's efforts to force his

way over the last line of natural fortifications which kept him out of

the northern valleys were in vain. The Inca emperor was forced to

content himself with assuring his possession of the provinces already

conquered. In 1460 he returned to Cuzco, leaving the territory

garrisoned. Three years later the heroic Hualcopo died, and was

succeeded by his son, Cacha, the fifteenth and last Shiri. The young man

signalised his accession to the throne by an aggressive campaign for the

recovery of the lost provinces. He passed south into the valley of

Riobamba, surprised the Inca garrisons, and put them to the sword,

revindicating all the country as far south as the nudo of Azuay. Beyond

that range he was unable to go, for all his efforts failed before the

obstinate resistance of the inhabitants of Canar. Tupac began

preparations to lead an overwhelming army against Cacha, but his own

death interrupted him, and it was not until 1475 that his son, Huaina

Capac, surnamed the "great," was able to take the road for the north,

determined to put an end to the Shiri dynasty. He first consolidated his

power among the tribes on the coast south of Guayaquil, whom his father

had left half independent, and then extended his conquests along the

northern shore among the barbarians of Manabi. On the island of Puna he

put to the sword all the male inhabitants, and one tribe in Manabi,

notorious for its abominable and unnatural practices, he extirpated.

Returning south, he crossed the mountains in northern Peru, and

descending their eastern slopes, waged a bloody war against the

Pacamores, who inhabited the forests where the Upper Amazon debouches

into the plain. Having thus secured his line of communications he

devoted himself to the main object of the campaign--the conquest of

Quito.

Disproportionate as appeared the resources of the contending nations,

the war which ensued was well contested. The Caras had resumed their

warlike habits and the imminence of the danger animated them and their

allies to a desperate resistance. For months the Caras held the great

Inca army at bay in the defiles of the Azuay, but finally they were

defeated and retreated to the line of Tiocajas. The Incas followed and

in a great battle vanquished their opponents so decisively that not only

was Riobamba lost, as had happened after the former defeat, but likewise

Latacunga and Quito itself. No stand could be made at Mocha, and the

Shiri fled to Ibarra, through Quito, where the Caranquis, the most

warlike members of the confederacy, were determined to resist to the

last. A considerable number of Cara warriors had escaped the slaughter

at Tiocajas, and a formidable army assembled to defend the last

fortresses in the extreme north of the kingdom. Huaina himself laid

siege to Otavalo, the principal stronghold of the Caranquis, but was not

able to reduce it. Their successes encouraged them to take the

offensive, and in a sortie the Inca emperor narrowly escaped losing his

life. Compelled to retire to suppress a mutiny among his southern

troops, he left the northern army under the command of his brother,

Auqui Toma, and the latter was killed in an assault on the redoubtable

fortress of Otavalo. This, however, was the last victory which the Shiri

won. Huaina's reinforcements had come up and he advanced with an

overwhelming army to avenge his brother's death. Otavalo was taken and

its garrison put to the sword; the Shiri fled to another fortress, where

he was defeated and slain. The victorious emperor took a fearful

vengeance on the Caranquis, whose obstinacy had cost him so dear.

Tradition tells that twenty-four thousand were massacred, and their

bodies thrown into a lake which has ever since borne the name of

Yahuarcocha--the "pool of blood."

Thenceforth the provinces of the old Quito kingdom were integral parts

of the Inca empire. The southern valleys had readily accepted the Inca

rule, and the central ones appear to have abandoned the Shiri's cause

promptly after the second battle of Tiocajas. Though the Caranquis had

been exterminated and the Caras had suffered greatly, the other tribes

remained intact. The Inca emperor saw that a policy of conciliation

would best insure the obedience of these formidable peoples. He spent

the remainder of his long life in Ecuador, married the daughter of the

dead Shiri, and ruled rather as the legitimate successor of the ancient

dynasty than as an alien conqueror. So far as possible the religious,

political, and social customs of the Incas were introduced, but it does

not appear that the work of amalgamation had proceeded very far in the

fifty years which intervened until the advent of the Spaniards. The

Quichua had not displaced the native tongues to any great extent, and

while the Ecuadorean tribes became loyal subjects, they did not regard

themselves as in any way inferior to the older subjects of the empire.

Rather had the balance of power passed to them; they had acquired the

skill in regular warfare once the exclusive property of the Incas; and

the issue of the civil war between Huascar and Atahuallpa seems to prove

that they would have played the principal role in the Inca system if the

advent of the Spaniards had not altered everything.

Huaina Capac died in Quito in 1525, and his body was taken to Cuzco to

be laid with his ancestors. In order better to secure the northern

kingdom to his descendants he named Atahuallpa, a son by his marriage

with the Shiri princess, ruler of the old dominions of Quito. His eldest

son, Huascar, was given the rest of the empire with the title of emperor

and a suzerainty over Atahuallpa. But Huaina's wise provisions were

rendered valueless by the dispute which arose between the two brothers

about the boundaries of Atahuallpa's territories. The latter insisted

that they included the provinces south of the Azuay, which had been

wrested from Hualcopo by Tupac Yupanqui seventy years before, but

Huascar would not admit that they extended beyond the hereditary

dominions of the Shiri dynasty. The people of Canar, the most northerly

of the disputed provinces, had always been bitter enemies of Quito, and

their chief now refused to recognise Atahuallpa as overlord and sent a

deputation to Huascar. Atahuallpa despatched his uncle Caluchima and his

great general Quizquiz to occupy the province and dethrone the

recalcitrant chief. Huascar hurried up some of his Inca regulars to aid

the people of Canar, who won the first battles and advanced towards

Atahuallpa's capital. The northerners rallied around the grandson of

their old Shiri, and two great armies met on the banks of the Naxichi,

only fifty miles south of Quito. Atahuallpa gained a complete victory,

and followed it up by advancing over the Azuay into Canar, where he was

again overwhelmingly victorious over a second army which Huascar had

sent against him. The whole of southern Ecuador fell into his hands and

he took a fearful vengeance on the Canaris. Atahuallpa himself remained

in Ecuador while Quizquiz went on into Peru to achieve that crushing

series of victories which resulted in the taking of Cuzco and the

capture of Huascar himself. By the year 1532 the whole empire as far

south as Cuzco lay prostrate, and it seemed certain that the Cuzco

dynasty would be displaced by the illegitimate Quito branch.

CHAPTER II

THE SPANISH CONQUEST

The fratricidal war lasting seven bloody years exhausted the resources

of the northern and central provinces of the Inca empire, and raised the

spirit of faction to a bitter pitch. Hardly had the last battle been

fought when Pizarro landed on the northern Peruvian coast. The moment

could not have been more favourable. The story of Atahuallpa's capture,

of Pizarro's intrigues with the different Inca factions, and of his

triumphal march to Cuzco through a country distracted by civil feud,

belongs rather to the history of Peru than of Ecuador. With Atahuallpa's

death and the defeat of Quizquiz near Cuzco, Quito was left without a

master. The country had been drained of able-bodied men by Atahuallpa's

levies, and bands of troops who found their way back from Peru fought

among themselves. The indefatigable Canaris rose again against the Quito

authorities, and following the fatal example set by the Huascar party in

Peru, applied to the Spaniards. From San Miguel, the colony which

Pizarro had established at Piura, in the valley where the road from the

Ecuador table-land debouches into the coast plain, Sebastian de

Benalcazar led a force of two hundred Spaniards to their assistance.

Ascending the Cordillera he was joined by great numbers of Indians in

Loja, Cuenca, and Canar, and crossed the Azuay before he encountered the

meagre forces of the Quito generals. Horses and firearms gave the

Spaniards an easy victory, and their enemies retreated to the defences

of Tiocajas. This locality was once more fated to be the scene of a

battle decisive of Ecuadorean history. Benalcazar and his allies were

victorious, but at such a cost that he thought seriously of giving up

the enterprise. Tradition recites that the giant volcano Cotopaxi burst

forth into a terrific eruption after the battle, and that the midnight

explosions were heard scores of miles along the plateau. To the Indians

this was an infallible signal of the displeasure of the sun god.

Trembling with superstitious fear they retreated in disorder; Benalcazar

crossed Tiocajas without resistance, and overran the country as far

north as Quito, taking possession of the city in December, 1533.

Meanwhile Almagro had been hurrying up from Peru with reinforcements and

on his way along the plateau fell in with a third expedition under

Alvarado, governor of Guatemala. Coming from Panama on his own account

and landing on the coast a long distance north of Guayaquil, Alvarado

had succeeded in forcing his way through the dense forests and

rain-soaked defiles and debouched on the plateau near Riobamba. Almagro

paid him one hundred thousand dollars to withdraw, and Benalcazar was

entrusted with the completion of the conquest he had so well begun.

Disappointed in the search for gold, Benalcazar divided the country into

feudal lordships, enslaving the Indians and compelling them to pay

tribute. His restless energy was not satisfied with the conquest of the

old Cara kingdom, and he soon led an expedition of one hundred and fifty

Spaniards and four thousand Indians against the coast provinces and

founded the city of Guayaquil, whose magnificent and sheltered port, the

best on the Pacific coast, gave independent access to the sea. Though

the passes leading from Guayaquil to Riobamba were far more tedious than

the southern ones from Piura to Loja, they brought Quito two hundred

miles nearer the ocean, and their use made Ecuador independent of

northern Peru. Hardly had Benalcazar returned to the table-land and gone

north to conquer southern Colombia, when the tribes near Guayaquil

attacked and destroyed the settlement. His lieutenant at Quito

despatched another expedition; Pizarro sent reinforcements by sea; and

the place was re-founded. Again was it destroyed, and only in 1537, when

Pizarro sent up Orellana with an adequate force, was a permanent

settlement made on the site where to-day is the largest and richest city

of Ecuador.

Benalcazar had conquered Quito in the name and under the authority of

Pizarro, and the latter now named his brother Gonzalo governor.

Confident of finding another Peru in the unknown regions to the east of

his new domain, the young Pizarro enlisted hundreds of adventurers, and

in the beginning of 1541 led the largest and best-equipped expedition

yet assembled in South America down the declivities of the Andes.

Difficulties began as soon as he reached the sweltering, steaming forest

region. Rain fell unceasingly; the soft clay of the defiles afforded no

footing; instead of finding stone highways like those over which they

had marched in their conquest of the table-land, the Spaniards had to

cut tracks along the mountainsides through the matted vegetation.

Provisions ran short, clothes rotted, arms rusted, no villages or tribes

possessing food were encountered. Finally Gonzalo was obliged to halt

the main body, sending a detachment under Orellana, the second in

command, on ahead to find provisions. Orellana followed down a stream

which soon grew large enough to be navigable. He built boats and

proceeded, but still found no signs of civilised inhabitants. Fearing

that he could never ascend the river to the main body, he determined to

keep on, confident that ultimately he must reach the ocean. The river he

was descending is now called the Napo. After a course of nearly a

thousand miles, it flowed into the Amazon, and down the latter's broad

current Orellana and his little band floated to the Atlantic, there

built a little ship, and finally made their way to Spain.

Hearing nothing of Orellana, Gonzalo gave up and climbed back to Quito

with a starving and naked remnant of his men. There he learned of the

assassination of his great brother at Lima, and that Vaca de Castro, the

royal commissioner appointed to settle the disputes between the

partisans of Almagro and Pizarro, had passed through Ecuador on his way

south to Peru, appointing another governor for Quito. Gonzalo retired to

Charcas in southern Bolivia, whence he emerged a year later to head the

great rebellion. The viceroy was compelled to fly from Lima, and landing

at Tumbez made his way to Quito. The Spaniards in Ecuador and southern

Colombia were against Pizarro, but the latter chased the viceroy out of

Quito and north into Popayan, where Benalcazar took sides with him. Four

hundred Spaniards accompanied the viceroy in a counter-invasion, but

near the city he was completely defeated and decapitated as he lay

wounded on the field. Gonzalo, now undisputed lord of the whole Inca

empire, returned at his leisure to Lima. The tale of how Gasca, shrewd

old priest, by intrigue and conciliation, re-established royal authority

and brought Pizarro to the scaffold, does not especially affect the

history of Ecuador.

By 1550 the civil wars were over, the unruly original conquistadores had

been executed, banished, or reduced to obedience. Shortly afterward the

system of Indian tribute and slavery was modified so that although the

proprietors got rich the aborigines were saved from rapid extermination,

royal officials and functionaries were installed, an elaborate system of

taxation established, and Ecuador, with the rest of Spanish America,

entered upon a long period of exploitation under form of law, instead of

being the haphazard prey of irresponsible private adventurers.

[Illustration: ECUADOR INDIANS.]

For the next two hundred and fifty years Ecuador has no history. The

occasional eruption of a volcano or an Indian insurrection is all one

finds in the annals, except the interminable lists of the Spanish

officials sent out to enrich themselves and the Crown at the expense of

the hapless Indians. The Spanish occupation brought about no

colonisation of Ecuador in the true sense of that word, although it

worked a considerable revolution in the life and customs of the Indians

who continued to constitute the bulk of the population. Indeed, the

habitable area of the Andean plateau was so limited and the aboriginal

population so numerous, that there was no room for immigration without a

war of extermination. The cultivable area of Andean Ecuador barely

exceeds eight thousand square miles, and it is probable that more than

a million natives lived there in the time of the Caras and Incas. Even

at the present day these eight thousand miles contain more than

two-thirds of the total population, and not more than four hundred

thousand people inhabit the two hundred and eighty thousand square miles

of high, barren mountains, steep declivities of the Cordillera, and

wooded plains on the coast and in the Amazon valley, which constitute

the remainder of Ecuador.

One of the important results of the Spanish occupation was the

introduction of new food plants and domestic animals. Wheat and barley

were early planted by the Castilian proprietors who had divided the

country among themselves, and these grains quickly replaced the quinoa,

which, with the potato, had been the chief reliance of the Caras. The

cultivation of the potato and also of maize was, however, continued. The

Spanish invaders introduced the plantain and banana, which immediately

became the staples of the forested and tropical districts, making

possible a great increase of population. The plateau was found suited to

European fruits, and orchards were soon flourishing in its more favoured

parts. Rice, indigo, and sugar-cane were also introduced, and an export

trade in these articles grew up, as well as in the native cacao and

sarsaparilla.

The Spanish rulers effected radical changes in the political, social,

and religious life of the civilised Indians. A certain apathy and

fatalism seems characteristic of the American aborigine, and in

Ecuador, trained through countless centuries to the patriarchal rule of

his own chiefs, he submitted to the exactions and innovations of his new

masters. According to Spanish constitutional law and practice, America

was not a component part of the mother-kingdom, but the new continent

was regarded as the personal property of the king of Castile, its lands,

mines, and inhabitants being his to dispose of at pleasure. The viceroy

at Lima was the monarch's lieutenant, only responsible to the king

himself or to the advisory board known as the Council of the Indies. For

great territorial divisions like Ecuador this power was delegated to

governors, and the corregidors were likewise unrestrained within the

smaller subdivisions. The Indians were regarded as mere chattels, and

the tribute exacted from every adult was a logical consequence of their

legal status. In theory even the Spanish residents had no rights to

self-government, nor did any constitutional guaranties of life and

property exist.

But such a despotism largely existed only on paper. The Spaniards who

came to South America brought with them their characteristic

constitutional traditions and personal independence. Instinctively they

flocked into cities and organised municipal governments after the

time-honoured Spanish form. So a system came into existence which had

the sanction of the people's co-operation and was therefore workable.

The country districts were left to the Indians and as long as they paid

their tribute to the Crown or to the Spaniard who claimed the lands

they tilled, little heed was paid to the form of civil government among

them. The influence of their hereditary chiefs survived for centuries,

and their old laws and customs died out only by degrees. In the cities

contact between Spaniards and Indians was closer. In process of time the

increasing number of half-breeds aided in the process of amalgamation,

and even the pure-blood Indians of the fields and villages learned much

of what their masters had to teach them.

[Illustration: CHURCH OF SANTO DOMINGO AT GUAYAQUIL.]

The Church, however, operated more powerfully than any other influence

in making Ecuador Spanish. Within a few years after the conquest a

regular bishopric was established in Quito, and hundreds of priests and

friars flocked over to take part in the wholesale evangelisation of the

heathen natives. The gospel was preached everywhere, churches and

chapels built in even the smallest villages, the obdurate Indians were

treated with scant ceremony, and it soon became well understood among

the natives that a hearty acceptance of the Christian cult tended to

keep them out of trouble. Ecuador quickly became one of the most

devotedly Catholic countries in the world, and has ever since remained

so. The Crown and the landed proprietors made lavish gifts to the cause

of religion, and a great proportion of the property of the country

ultimately fell into the hands of the religious orders. Quito has

appropriately been called the city of convents, and if we are to believe

the accounts of travellers in colonial times half the population must

have been priests, monks, and nuns. The introduction of Christianity

among the Indians aided powerfully in spreading a knowledge of the

Spanish language, but was more effective in substituting the Quichua for

the ancient local tongues. The evangelists found it easier to preach to

all the tribes in one language, and Quichua was naturally chosen, since

it was already in the most general use as the official medium of the

Inca empire. The Spanish priests reduced it to written form and it

became a _lingua franca_ which was understood among all the nations of

the Andean plateau very much as Guarany was among the Indians of the

Atlantic slope.

The details of Spanish civil, military, and financial administration in

Ecuador did not differ greatly from those in the other provinces, and

there is no need to repeat them here. The peaceable character of the

Ecuador Indians made the maintenance of a standing army or even of a

militia unnecessary. A few companies of troops in each of the principal

towns and the natural military aptitude of the Spanish residents were

sufficient to suppress any symptoms of rebellion, and to keep the

Indians at work for their masters. Happily for the natives no great

finds of silver or gold were made except in the southern province of

Loja, and forced labour in the mines did not decimate the population, as

happened in Bolivia and parts of Peru. Spaniards did not immigrate to

any considerable extent, and negro slavery flourished on the seacoast.

The only schools were priests' seminaries in which little except

theology was taught and the level of intellectual culture among the

Creoles sank very low. Taxes were heavy, public employments and titles

of nobility were openly sold by the government, commerce amounted to

little, because little gold and silver was mined and other articles

would not bear the heavy transportation charges and the exactions and

restrictions of the Spanish colonial system. The magnificent stone

highways which the Cara and Inca monarchs had built were allowed to fall

into ruins, but their remains are to be seen even to this day on the

table-land near Cuenca, still solid in spite of the storms and

earthquakes of four centuries. Population on the plateau slowly

decreased. Quito had been a great city while it was the Cara

capital--the residence of Huaina Capac and Atahuallpa--and in 1735 Ulloa

estimated that it contained over seventy thousand people, but at the end

of the eighteenth century it had fallen to less than forty thousand.

However, the introduction of the plantain undoubtedly brought about an

increase of population in the coast provinces, and Guayaquil flourished

with the cultivation of cacao and sugar-cane.

No great figure of a soldier, reformer, or administrator stands out

among all the hundreds of officials who were sent over from Spain to

rule the country. Even records of the growth of jealousies between

Spaniards and Creoles, such as we encounter in other countries of South

America are wanting. The Creoles appear never to have been able to

interrupt the monotonous course of Spanish administration. In 1564 the

old kingdom of Quito, with the addition of some outlying Colombian and

Peruvian provinces, was erected into a presidency, and a royal

audiencia, or court of appeals, with important administrative functions,

was established. The viceroy of Lima continued to exercise nominal

jurisdiction over all Spanish South America until the year 1719, when

the viceroyalty of New Granada was first created. The Quito presidency

was attached to the new jurisdiction, and this emphasised the separation

from Peru. Twelve hundred miles of crooked, wretched road intervened

between Quito and Lima, while the distance to Bogota was less than half

as great. However, the natural outlet for the plateau from Cuenca north

to Popayan was the road to Guayaquil, and the Quito presidency was

therefore co-extensive with a natural commercial subdivision of the

continent.

In 1736 a party of scientists commissioned by the king of France came to

Quito for the purpose of measuring an arc of the earth's meridian at the

equator. These savants erected two pyramids to serve as a permanent

record of the line they had measured, and placed upon them an

inscription stating that the work had been done under the patronage of

the king of France. Years afterwards a Spanish official, offended in his

national pride by the wording of the inscription, obtained an order from

Madrid for the destruction of these monuments, so invaluable to the

science of exact geography.

The latter part of the eighteenth century was marked by a greater

interest in education. The seminaries widened their courses of study to

include something more than the canon law and the Fathers, and

public-spirited Creoles endowed new and better institutions of learning.

No press or periodical literature appeared, but poetry and

belles-lettres were cultivated with some success by native authors.

Though the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1765 was accomplished without

bloodshed, it resulted in no material weakening of ecclesiastical

influence. The revolutionary ideas which were transforming the political

thought of the world during the eighteenth century hardly penetrated

Ecuador at all, and whatever influence they had was confined to the

small percentage of the population that boasted of non-Indian blood.

The news of Lexington and Yorktown and the enfranchisement of British

North America stimulated no similar movement among the patient Indians

and devout Creoles of the Andean valleys, and even the tremendous

cataclysm of the French Revolution passed almost unnoticed.

CHAPTER III

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

The beginning of the nineteenth century saw Spain involved to her ruin

in the tremendous struggle between Napoleon and his enemies. Her fleets

were destroyed at St. Vincent and Trafalgar; her treasury was emptied;

her administration demoralised. Free communication with her American

colonies was impossible while British frigates commanded every sea, and

both on the Peninsula and in America, Spanish subjects lost their

traditional respect for the monarchy. Though the jealousy against their

imported rulers which always fermented among Creoles was not so strong

in quiet, isolated, and agricultural Ecuador as in the coast provinces

and mining regions, the news of Spain's defeats and humiliations

awakened ambitious lawyers and wealthy landowners to a realisation that

the Spaniards might be ousted from the lucrative offices.

The opportunity came in 1809 with the resignation of Charles IV., the

deposition and imprisonment of Ferdinand VII., the usurpation of the

Spanish throne by Joseph Bonaparte, and the occupation of the Peninsula

by the French. The viceroys and governors of Spanish America refused to

recognise Joseph. The many patriots on the Peninsula who resisted the

French usurpation organised provisional juntas which assumed to be the

supreme depositaries of power pending the expulsion of Joseph and the

return of Ferdinand, while the Queen claimed a regency for herself. The

Spanish authorities did not know who would come out on top and were

principally anxious to maintain themselves in their places, while

ambitious leaders among the Creoles immediately began to plot to turn

the confusion to their own advantage and to secure autonomy and even

independence for the colonies.

In 1809 Don Ruiz de Castilla was president of Quito. His jurisdiction

included not only all present Ecuador, but also the southern part of

Colombia, extending north three hundred miles along the great Andean

plateau through the populous regions of Pasto and Popayan and far down

the high and fertile valley of the Cauca. These portions of Colombia are

continuous with the table-land on which Quito stands and directly

accessible therefrom, while they are separated from the parallel series

of plateaux on which Bogota, Tunja, and Socorro lie, by the deep valley

of the Magdalena. Castilla's dependence upon the Bogota viceroy was

therefore largely nominal, and he could expect as little help from New

Granada as from Peru. He had only a few troops at Quito--probably not

more than two or three hundred,--while the governors of the subordinate

provinces, Popayan, Guayaquil, and Cuenca, each could muster only a few

dozen armed police. A number of wealthy Creole proprietors and restless

lawyers determined in the early part of 1809 to overthrow the president

and create a governing junta composed of residents of Ecuador. Castilla

was powerless to avert the storm. The handful of troops in barracks was

easily suborned by the conspirators, who included the persons of

greatest wealth, intelligence, and influence in the community. The mass

of the Indian population was inert and would naturally side with their

landlords, while the Spanish residents and Creole Tories had formed no

plans for common action.