THE PERUVIAN INDIANS:

Their condition under Spanish colonial rule.

In reviewing the deplorable results of Spanish domination in South America, it may at once be conceded that the legislation which originated from the councils of the kings of Castile was always, except in matters connected with religion, remarkable for beneficence and liberality in all that concerned the natives; and that, in the words of Mr. Helps, "those humane and benevolent laws, which emanated from time to time from the Home Government, rendered the sway of the Spanish monarchs over the conquered nations as remarkable for mildness as any, perhaps, that has ever been recorded in the pages of history."[160] It may also be allowed that the Viceroys of Peru were generally earnest and zealous statesmen, who conscientiously strove to enforce the regulations which they from time to time received from the council of the Indies.

But it was almost as impossible for the viceroys to exercise efficient personal supervision over the government of so enormous a country, while residing at Lima, as it would have been if they had remained at the council-table in Seville; and their subordinates were, as a body, untrustworthy, extortionate, rapacious, and often remorselessly cruel. Thus the benign laws of the Spanish kings became a dead letter in South America, and the natives groaned, for three centuries, under a yoke which crashed them to the earth, and converted vast tracts of once thickly populated country into uninhabited deserts.

Yet the humane intentions of the Spanish government, and the labours of the Peruvian viceroys, were not wholly without results; and it is partly due to them that a system of worse than African slavery was not established in Peru, and that the native race has not long ago become entirely extinct.

At the time of the Spanish conquest Pizarro was empowered, in 1529, to grant "encomiendas," or estates, to his fellow-conquerors, the inhabitants of which were bound to pay tribute to the holders of the grants; and in 1536 these encomiendas were extended to two lives. The consequent exactions and cruelties were so intolerable that the good Las Casas, and other friends of the Indians, at length induced the Emperor Charles V. to enact the code so well known as the "New Laws," in 1542; by which the encomiendas were to pass immediately to the Crown after the death of the actual holders; all officers under government were prohibited from holding them; all men who had been mixed up in the civil wars of the Pizarros and Almagros were to be deprived at once; a fixed sum was to be settled as tribute to be paid by the Indians; and all forced personal labour was absolutely forbidden.

The promulgation of these beneficent laws excited a howl of furious execration from the conquerors,—the wolves who were thus to be dragged away, when their fangs were actually fixed in the flesh of their victims. Gonzalo Pizarro rose in rebellion in Peru, and defeated and killed Blasco NuÑez de Vela, the viceroy who had arrived to enforce these "New Laws;" while the more politic Belalcazar, at Popayan, though professing obedience, contrived to evade the execution of his orders, after a fashion which gave rise to the well-known saying—"se obedece, pero no se cumple"—"he obeys, but does not fulfil." Their unpopularity was so great that it was considered unsafe to persist in the attempt to enforce them, and they were revoked in 1545. The President Gasca re-distributed the "encomiendas" in 1550, and they were granted for three lives in 1629. Gasca, who showed more regard for his own safety and convenience than for the public service, arranged that his settlement of the encomiendas should not be promulgated until he had sailed for Spain, and he suspended the law prohibiting the forced personal service of the Indians. The latter enactment, however, was boldly promulgated by the Judges of the Royal Audience in 1552, and was, as might have been expected, immediately followed by a ferment amongst the conquerors and a formidable rebellion. Finally the Marquis of CaÑete arrived in Peru, as viceroy, in 1554; and, by a mixture of severity and prudent conciliation, trod out the last sparks of revolt amongst the Spaniards.

In 1568 the viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo established the system under which the native population of Peru was professedly ruled for the two succeeding centuries. Toledo was a bigot, without pity, and inexorably cruel. Justice or humanity had no weight with him if they stood in the way of any policy which he deemed to be advisable, as was shown in the judicial murder of the young Inca Tupac Amaru. But he was a faithful servant of his sovereign, and resolutely determined to enforce the edicts of the Council of the Indies; a statesman of considerable ability and untiring industry. He was so prolific in legislation that, on the subject of coca-cultivation alone, he issued seventy ordinances; and future viceroys referred to his rules and enactments as to a received and authoritative text-book. The viceroy Marquis of Montes Claros, in 1615, declared that "all future rulers of Peru were but disciples of Francisco de Toledo, that great master of statesmanship."

By his Libro de Tasas, or Book of Rules, Toledo fixed the tribute to be paid by the Indians, exempting all men under the age of eighteen, or over that of fifty. The Indians were governed by native chiefs of their own people, whose duty it was to collect the tribute, and pay it in to the Spanish corregidor or governor of the province, as well as to exercise subordinate magisterial functions. These chiefs, called Curacas in the time of the Incas, were ordered by Toledo to be named Caciques, a word brought from the West Indian islands;[161] and under them there were two other native officials—the Pichca-pachacas, placed over 500 Indians, and the Pachacas over 100. These offices were inherited from father to son, and their possessors enjoyed several privileges, such as the exemption from arrest, except for grave offences, and they received a fixed salary. The native Caciques were often men of considerable wealth; some of them were members of the royal family of the Incas; they were free from the payment of tribute and from personal service; and thus occupied positions of importance amongst their countrymen.[162] They wore the same dress which distinguished the nobles of the Inca's court, consisting of a tunic called uncu, a rich mantle or cloak of black velvet called yacolla, intended as mourning for the fall of their ancient rulers; and those of the family of the Incas added a sort of coronet, whence a red fringe of alpaca-wool descended as an emblem of nobility. This head-dress was called mascapaycha. They had pictures of the Incas in their houses, and encouraged the periodical festivals in memory of their beloved sovereigns, when plays were enacted, and mournful music was produced from the national instruments, drums, trumpets, clarions, and pututus, or sea shells.[163] All these customs were left unchanged by Toledo, and the system so far resembles that which now prevails in the Dutch colony of Java.[164]

But, in addition to the tribute, the amount of which as established by Toledo was not excessive, and which was rendered still less objectionable to the Indians from being collected by their native chiefs, there was the mita or forced labour in mines, manufactories, and farms,[165] which became the instrument of fearful oppression and cruelty. Toledo enacted that a seventh part of the adult male population of every village should be subject to the mita, and ordered that the Caciques should send these mitayos, as they were called, to the public squares of the nearest Spanish towns, where they might be hired by those who required their services; and laws were enacted to regulate the distance they might be taken from their homes, and their payment.[166] It appears, however, that this seventh part of the working men who were told off for forced labour was exclusive of those employed in the mines, so that, even in theory, the mita condemned a large fraction of the population to slavery.[167]

There was a class of Indians, numbering about 40,000 souls in the time of Toledo (1570), called Yanaconas, who were scattered over Peru, and forced to work on the lands of Spaniards, or as domestic servants. They may have been descendants of captives in war, or of persons who had been condemned to slavery in the time of the Incas, and thus became the property of the conquerors; but in 1601 an enactment was promulgated to ameliorate their condition, and fix the terms of their service.[168]

In matters connected with religion the Spanish legislators allowed of no temporizing policy. All signs of idolatry must disappear, and with the new religion came additional exactions, in the shape of fees for masses, burials, and christenings. Toledo enacted many laws for the suppression of the old religion of the Incas: any Indian who married an idolatrous woman was to receive one hundred stripes, "because that is the punishment which they dislike most;" the people were prohibited from using surnames taken from the names of birds, beasts, serpents, or rivers, which was their ancient custom; and no Indian who had been punished for idolatry, joining in infidel rites, or dancing the dance called arihua, could be appointed to hold any public office.[169]

On the whole, however, the legislation of the Spanish kings, and the reports of the viceroys of Peru, display an earnest desire to protect the Indians from tyranny, and to render their condition tolerable. In 1615 the Marquis of Montes Claros impressed on his successor the importance of obliging all classes of Spaniards to treat the Indians well, and of chastising oppression with rigour. In 1681 the Count of Castellar states that one of the points most dwelt upon in the instructions given to the viceroys, and in repeated royal enactments, was the humane treatment of the Indians; and he declares that he always sought to enforce these orders from the day that he landed in Peru; and words to the same effect are to be found in the reports of most of the other viceroys.[170]

But side by side with these evidences of the good intentions of the Government, is the testimony of the viceroys that their efforts to comply with these beneficent orders, and enforce these humane laws, were fruitless, and rendered of no effect by the unworthiness of their subordinates; and almost all complain of the rapid depopulation of the country. In 1620 the Prince of Esquilache reported that "the arm of the viceroy was not powerful against the negligence and maladministration of the corregidors;" in 1681 the Count of Castellar said that he had to correct and punish the excesses both of the corregidors and the curas; in 1697 the Duke of La Palata speaks of the depopulation of the villages and towns, caused by the forcible detention of the Indians to work at the mines, in cloth and cotton workshops, and in farms; and another viceroy attributes the rapid depopulation of the country to the same causes, and also to drink, and urges a closer supervision of the conduct of the corregidors and curas.

I have, in a former work, given a brief account of the treatment of the Indians, and of the way in which the laws intended for their defence were evaded; from the evidence of the brothers Ulloa, who were commissioned to make a special and secret report on the subject to the King of Spain in 1740.[171] I have since collected abundant testimony to the same effect, printed and in manuscript, both at Madrid and in Peru; but I have only space for a few brief notes, which must serve to illustrate this part of the subject.

The mines of Potosi were supplied with labourers from the nearest provinces, by enforcing a mita of a seventh of the adult male population. In 1573 this mita consisted of 11,199 Indians, in 1620 of 4249, and in 1678 of 1674,[172] a decrease which marks the rapid depopulation of the country; and, at the latter date, when the authorities at Potosi failed to receive a sufficient number of labourers by the ordinary mita, they kidnapped people in their homes, and on the roads, and carried them off to forced labour in the mines. The law was that the mitayos should be paid for coming and going, and that they should not be forced to work at night; but these laws were habitually set at nought, and Potosi became an exhausting drain to the surrounding country.[173]

The mines of Huancavelica, which supplied the quicksilver necessary for extracting the silver of Potosi from its ores,[174] also desolated the ten adjoining provinces. In 1645 the mita or seventh part of the adult male population amounted to 620, and in 1678 to only 354 Indians. The mita was a service which was abhorred and dreaded by the people, and mothers maimed the arms and legs of their children to deliver them from this slavery. Don Juan de Padilla relates that, in 1657, when he was at Santa Lucia, in the province of Lucanas, he saw the women of the village go out to assist each other in sowing their fields, and, at the end of their labour, they returned hand in hand, singing a most melancholy song, and lamenting the cruel fate of their husbands and brothers, who were slaving in the mines of Huancavelica, while they were obliged to work in the fields like men. They declared that when a man was once taken for the mita his wife seldom or never saw him again, unless she went herself to the place of his torments.[175]

The oppression of the owners of obrajes or manufactories of coarse woollen and cotton cloths, in enforcing the mitas, was as crushing as that of the miners. These people employed men, called guatacos, to hunt the Indians, and drive them into the obrajes. If they could not find the particular men for whom they were in search, they took their children, wives, and nearest neighbours, robbed them of all they possessed, and frequently violated the women and young girls.[176] The masters, in the obrajes, then forced their victims to get deeply in debt to them, and thus obtained an excuse for keeping them in perpetual slavery. In many obrajes there were Indians who had not been outside the walls for forty years and upwards. The law was that the natives should be free from tribute and personal service until they attained the age of eighteen; but it was the general practice to drag children from their homes at the ages of six or eight, force them to work hard at twisting woollen and cotton threads, and flog them cruelly.[177]

Thus the work of depopulation went on until, in 1622, many encomiendas which originally contained a thousand adult male Indians, and yielded eight thousand dollars of tribute, were reduced to a hundred; yet these unfortunate survivors were forced to continue the payment of the original tribute, or to render personal service instead. There was an encomienda in Huanuco where the Indians had paid more than one hundred thousand dollars over and above what was legally due, during fifty years.[178]

It may well be asked of what use were the humane and beneficent laws enacted by the kings of Spain if this was the way in which they were universally evaded by corregidors, curas, and Spanish settlers of all ranks? The caciques sorrowfully watched the gradual extinction of their people, perhaps secretly hoped for an opportunity of revenge, but were without power to prevent the cruel oppression which they deplored, though they did not neglect, from time to time, to protest against the lawless exactions and cruelties of the Spaniards.[179]

But the Indians did not endure their fate without occasional attempts at resistance. On one occasion the people on the western shore of lake Titicaca rose against the mita of Potosi, and retreated amongst the beds of rushes on the shores of the lake, which, in some places, are nine leagues long and one broad. In the midst of these rushes there was an island, whence secret lanes were cut through the tangled mass, which the fugitives navigated in their balsas. Secure in their retreat, they continued to make inroads on the Spanish towns near the lake, until at last, in 1632, the viceroy Count of Chinchon ordered his nephew, Don Rodrigo de Castro, to chastise them. Five of their leaders were captured and hung at Zepita, and their heads were stuck on the bridge over the Desaguadero. This only exasperated the Indians, who elected a brave and enterprising leader named Pedro Laime, and, suddenly attacking the bridge over the Desaguadero, they carried off the heads of their former chiefs. The Spaniards marched along the shore and waded to some islets, while the Indians hovered round them in their balsas, and prevented them from advancing further. At length the Spanish troops were embarked in twenty balsas, and came in sight of the hostile squadron commanded by Laime. The Indians went in and out of the lanes of rushes only known to themselves, baffled their oppressors, and cut off several of the Spanish balsas. A party of cavalry advancing into the swampy ground was suddenly surrounded and cut to pieces, the Indians only losing three men.[180]

Thus the fugitive Indians retained their liberty for many years in these inaccessible fastnesses of lake Titicaca, and the Augustine friar Calancha confesses that "the rebellion was caused by the injustice and tyranny of the Spaniards, who forced the Indians to work without pay, and seized on their goods."

This was not a solitary instance of rebellion, though, on the whole, the Indians endured their cruel fate with meekness and long suffering. Yet they are not a mean-spirited people, and at length they showed their oppressors that it was possible to press the yoke down too hard even for their powers of endurance.

The tribute, the mita, the exactions of the curas, and the alcabala, or excise duties,[181] were all patiently borne; but another method of extortion, the "repartimiento," or "reparto,"[182] at length exhausted the patience of the over-tasked Indians. The reparto was a system, ostensibly for distributing European goods to the Indians, which was converted into a means of wholesale robbery by the Spanish corregidors, and finally led to a general rebellion. An Indian chieftain thus describes the reparto system:—"Abandoning their souls for their avarice, the corregidors have the assurance to distribute (repartir) by force, and against all reason, baize and cloths worth two rials for one dollar, and in the same proportion with knives, needles, dice, pins, cards, trumpets, rings, and pewter mirrors, which are all quite useless to the Indians; besides velvets and silks, which the poor people cannot use; for they are obliged to dress in the coarsest clothes, to sleep on beds of rags, and feed on roots; while the corregidors and their dependants commit the most unjust extortions and outrages. They even exceed the legal quantity of repartos assigned to their respective provinces; for example, that of Tinta was ordered to be 112,500 dollars, and the corregidor made it 500,000 dollars, as was proved by his books and papers."[183] General del Valle, who commanded the troops employed to put down Tupac Amaru's rebellion, complained that the avarice of the corregidors, in recovering their claims on the Indians for repartos, was such that they refused him the aid of their people in pacifying the country. Their obstinacy and avarice, he declared, had reached to such a point that, if they were informed that the rebels had reached the very suburbs of their towns, they would rather see the defeat of the king's troops than send away a single Indian who might owe them a yard of cloth.[184]

This unblushing dishonesty and extortion, which was winked at by the Royal Audience at Lima, the highest court of judicial appeal, drove the Indian population to a state of desperation, which only required a spark to set it in a blaze. The humane laws, and the elaborate system of legislation for the Indians, had, after 200 years of hopeless inefficiency, ended in this. The careful enactments to limit the amount of tribute, to prevent the Indians from suffering by forced personal service, the laws of ecclesiastical councils to protect them from the exactions of the curas, the benevolent intentions evinced in declaring all Indians to be minors in the eye of the law, the "residencias," or arrangements for examining the conduct of every official at the close of his term of office; all these provisions, which have justly called forth the praise of Mr. Helps, Mr. Merivale,[185] and other modern writers, had become dead letters, absolutely and hopelessly, towards the end of the last century. The laws remained the same, but they were habitually set aside by those whose duty it was to administer them. The tribute fixed for villages when they contained a thousand men was continued the same when the population had decreased to a hundred;[186] the mita was enforced so mercilessly that whole districts were left without a single adult male inhabitant;[187] the curas extorted exorbitant fees from their victims, in spite of the law;[188] and the judges, who were sent to take the "residencias," received bribes to overlook all offences, and usually handed over the complaints which were submitted to them to the officials who were complained of in exchange for a sum of money, the price of their silence.[189] These evils were long borne patiently; but when the shameless enormities of the Repartos were superadded, the poor remnant of the descendants of the subjects of the Incas at length rose as one man against their oppressors.

There were not wanting, amongst the Spaniards in Peru, as well as amongst the native Caciques, many good and humane men who raised their voices against the lawless cruelty of the majority of the officials, and earnestly warned the Government of the inevitable consequences. Don Ventura Santalices, the Governor of La Paz, devoted his time and fortune to the cause of the oppressed Indians, and was appointed to a seat in the Council of the Indies, but he was poisoned on his arrival in Spain: the energetic remonstrances of Blas Tupac Amaru, a descendant of the Incas, caused him also to be summoned to Spain, where he obtained promises of many concessions, but he was assassinated at sea, during the return voyage: and the names of other bold and fearless defenders of the Indians deserve to be recorded, such as Don Manuel Arroyo, Don Ignacio Castro, Don Agustin de Gurruchategui, Bishop of Cuzco, and Don Francisco Campos, Bishop of La Paz.

But their remonstrances bore no fruit, and, in 1780, the Corregidor of Chayanta having exacted three repartos in one year, an Indian chief, named Tomas Catari, set the example of revolt; thousands flocked to his standard, and to those of his brothers Damaso and Nicolas; in a few months the whole of Upper Peru (the modern Bolivia) was in revolt, and an army of Indians under Julian Apasa, a baker of Hayohayo near Sicasica, besieged La Paz.[190] At the same time there was an uneasy feeling at Cuzco and throughout Peru, and whispers of a conspiracy amongst the Indians. Don Pedro Sahuaraura, the Cacique of Oropesa, near Cuzco, reported that one Ildefonso del Castillo had solicited him to join the conspiracy; suspicion was thrown on several other influential Indians; and in June 1780 this Castillo, Bernardo Tambohuacto, the Cacique of Pissac, and six others, were put to death at Cuzco.[191] In the following November the Cacique JosÉ Gabriel Condorcanqui, better known as Tupac Amaru, raised the standard of revolt, and the last desperate struggle for liberty was commenced by the descendant of the Incas.[192]

"It would be difficult," says Dean Funes, "to find in the history of revolutions one more justifiable and less fortunate than that of Tupac Amaru. America had, in those days, become the theatre of the most wide-spread tyranny; but the Indians of Peru were those on whose necks the yoke weighed heaviest. Mitas and repartos were, in Peru, the deadly plagues of Spanish invention, which devoured the human race."[193]

I am enabled to give a more correct and circumstantial account of the great rising of the Peruvian Indians in the end of the last century than has yet appeared in Europe; although, as this interesting subject is a digression from the main purpose of the present work, I shall be obliged to compress my narrative within the narrow limits of one or two chapters.[194] In this brief sketch of the state of the Peruvian Indians under Spanish rule, I have endeavoured to establish the fact that Tupac Amaru's rebellion was justified because the oppression of his people had become intolerable, and because all law was set at defiance by the Spanish officials. He protested, not against the tyranny of the laws, but against the infringement of laws, and the oppressive acts done in spite of the laws, by those whose duty it was to administer them.

In writing on this subject one is apt to be carried away by indignation against the Spanish rulers in South America; yet, if we look round at the systems of colonization pursued by other European nations, it will be found difficult to say who has a right to cast the first stone. The Spanish colonies, however, cannot properly be compared with those modern English settlements, to which thousands of the labouring classes have emigrated, and either annihilated the natives, or fenced them off by a system of reserves and isolation. No European labouring class was introduced into South America; the Indians still continued to be the cultivators, the shepherds, and the artizans; and the Spaniards were merely the dominant race. This state of things is more allied to the conditions which now exist in British India or Dutch Java, and there is thus no analogy between the South American settlements and any British colony in the proper acceptation of the word.

Yet to Spain the credit is due, in spite of numerous shortcomings, and notwithstanding the oppression of her subordinates, of having endeavoured to establish the wisest, the most humane, and the only successful system of treating natives of an inferior race. It is certain that such a race must either continue to form the mass of the population, amalgamate with their conquerors, or be annihilated. The two former of these three alternatives were adopted in Peru, partly from natural causes, but partly also owing to the incessant exertions of the earlier Spanish viceroys, and of the "Defenders of the Indians;" and this result was achieved in spite of the oppression and cruelty of their subordinates. The Indians have continued to form the labouring class of Peru; amalgamation has taken place, to a very large extent, with Europeans; and the native race has thus been preserved from extinction.[195] In the English colonies, on the other hand, owing to the influx of settlers of the labouring class, the aborigines have either been exterminated, or, through a system of isolation, are rapidly and inevitably advancing on the melancholy road to final annihilation.

But it was the intention of the Spanish system to do more for the aboriginal race than merely to preserve it from extinction. By adopting a system of tutelage, as regarded the Indians, the Spanish Government endeavoured to defend them, in legal matters, from the superior intelligence of a more civilized race; and Mr. Helps points out that it is hardly possible to carry legislation further, in favour of any people, than by considering them as minors in the eye of the law, in order to protect them from being imposed upon in their dealings with their conquerors.[196] The opposite plan, which has been adopted in some of the English colonies, of making native tribes equal to Europeans in the eye of the law, is a mere mockery, and cannot by any possibility exist in reality.[197]

It may then be readily allowed that the intentions of the Spanish Government towards the Indians were humane and just; that their legislation was invariably marked by tenderness and concern for the subject race; and that their policy, had it been carried into effect, was far more wise and generous than that by which modern nations have generally been influenced in dealing with the aborigines of their colonies. But I think I have clearly shown that, through the unworthiness of their subordinates, this policy was only very partially enforced; that the cruelty and oppression of the colonial officials at length became insufferable; and that no cause could be more just than that in which Tupac Amaru, the last of the Incas, at length drew his sword.