The Peruvians

by
Arthur H. Noll

Original Copyright 1905

All rights reserved. This book and all parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without prior permission of the publisher.

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Table of Contents

Front Matter
Introduction
The Incas
Civilization of the Peruvians
Break up of the Incariate
The Spanish Conquest
Under Spanish Rule
Evolution of Modern Peru
Appendix: Festival of the Sun

Introduction

"There arises before the prophetic eye a great picture in which the lofty roads of Peru, the sumptuous temples, palaces and gardens are . . . to be numbered with Babylon, Nineveh and the things that have been."

—SIR ARTHUR HELPS.

Confusion of Names.—Great confusion exists in regard to the names of the races and tribes occupying the western world at the time of its discovery, conquest and colonization by Europeans. It was due to an error that the native races of America came to be called Indians in the first place, and after the error was discovered it was thought unnecessary to devise another name by which to designate the red race. This but illustrates the first difficulty that confronts us in an attempt to write accurately and intelligibly, albeit briefly and concisely, of the people who are the subject of this book. We have called them in the title to the book, "The Peruvians," which is our English form of the Spanish "Peruanos." The latter means the natives of Peru. Looking at a modem map of South America, however, we may observe that the country, now called Peru, is bounded on the south by Chile, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the east by Brazil, and on the north by Ecuador, and has an area of about 450,000 square miles. The people of whom we are writing occupied in the early years of the Sixteenth Century a country which knew no such boundaries. It was not until the early part of the Nineteenth Century that the states of Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile were definitively partitioned off from a country which has retained the name of Peru.

The Piruas.—Previous to the Eleventh Century of the Christian era, there existed a people in the highlands of the Andes, in the vicinity of what is now the boundary between Peru and Bolivia, who departed, leaving behind them the evidences of their having been somewhat advanced in civilization. They were the Hatun Runas, or, as they are also called, the Piruas. Not unlikely the name of Peru was remotely derived from the Piruas. However that may be, Biru was the name of a chief in the territory south of the Isthmus of Panama. His country was visited by two Spanish explorers in 1515. For ten years thereafter the "land of Biru" or "Peru" was the most southerly land on the Pacific coast known to the Spaniards, and was much talked of among Spanish adventurers as a land supposed to be full of gold. As it was a long time after this that the name Peru was restricted to a single South American state, embracing but a small portion of territory which formerly went by that name, it seems quite as proper that we should call the people of whom we are writing, "Peruvians," as that we should designate them as Indians in the first place, or seek any other name to confer upon them.

If, however, we desired to be more scientifically exact, we might find a name in this manner: In the western portion of the South American continent are chains of mountains rising abruptly from the coast to an average height of about 12,500 feet. The length of these chains is about 4,500 miles, their average width about one hundred miles, and they contain many celebrated volcanoes. This mountain system is known to the Spanish-speaking people as "Los Cordilleros de los Andes"—the chains of the Andes—probably deriving the name Andes from anti, a word in one of the aboriginal languages of the region, meaning copper. Of late years a general name has been bestowed upon all the native races occupying this region previous to the advent of the Europeans. They are called Andesians, or Antesians, to distinguish them from the tribes occupying the other portions of the continent. Such a title is geographical rather than ethnological, signifying the region in which the people live rather than their racial characteristics.

The Quichuas.—Having thus discovered a term that can be used, for the sake of convenience, to designate the Indians of this region, it becomes necessary, for further convenience, to divide the Andesian Indians into groups of tribes related to each other through the languages they spoke. Under this ethnological classification, the most important group has received the name of Quichuas (spelled also Quechuas, Kichuas, or Kechuas). This name meant originally "mountaineers," and was never used by the Indians themselves as a tribal designation, but was first employed in a grammar published in 1560, by Fray Domingo de San Tomas, a Dominican monk, to designate the languages spoken with dialectic differences, in the Thirteenth and subsequent centuries, by the tribe of Andesians which became dominant in Cuzco about the year 1240 of the Christian era.

The Quichua language is still a common language in the interior of the country designated as Peru on the modem maps of South America. So widely was it spoken in the early part of the Sixteenth Century, when the Europeans first made their appearance in that region, that it was called by them "La Lengua General del Peru" the general language of Peru.

The Incas, or Cuzcans.—Quichua is, after all, a group name, and it would serve our convenience greatly if we could find a name by which to designate the tribe which settled at Cuzco, about the year 1240, and upon whose development the whole story we have to tell depends. Some writers allege that this tribe "assumed the name of Incas" as a special tribal title, and we read a great deal about the "Incas," as though that name were the equivalent of ancient Peruvians. Inca was the title of the tribal chief and the name of the office he held. Into the character of the office we shall inquire later. We can readily imagine that the Europeans might have understood the title of the tribal chief to have been a tribal name, just as they understood the name of a chief, Biru, to be the name of a territory. But we can scarcely believe that such a name was assumed by the tribe, or even accepted after it had been conferred by someone else. Such a thing would have been very unusual among Indians, and there seems to be no conclusive evidence that anything like it ever occurred until subsequent to the appearance of the Europeans.

We may do this, however. We may, to serve our present convenience, derive a name for the tribe from the locality it occupies, as has been so often done in Mexico and elsewhere. For example, we speak of the Texcucans, the Chalcans, the Tlatelolcans and others of the Mexican valley. So we might call the tribe in whose career at Cuzco we are so deeply interested, the Cuzcans.

The Incariate.—It has been repeatedly declared in books upon Peru and the Peruvians, that the settlement in Cuzco developed in the course of a few centuries into an Empire, which is usually called the "Empire of the Incas." This seems to have been a ready way of disposing of matters which might, with a little trouble, have been otherwise more accurately explained. Neither the Peruvians nor any other Indians knew anything whatever about monarchical government. It was wholly foreign to their conceptions. Their political institutions consisted at first of a military democracy, governed by a tribal council, in which the tribal officers were elective, never hereditary. In Mexico this form of government advanced one step in the formation of a confederacy of tribes. In Peru it advanced still further. How much further we do not know precisely. It seems improbable that it should have attained to the exalted height of an empire, or even to that of a kingdom, as we understand those words; or that its government ever lost its relation to the tribal council. It is evident, however, that the relation of the Cuzcans to other tribes brought under their dominating influence, usually by conquest, was superior to that established between the Aztecs and their surrounding tribes; and that this relationship, as it developed, increased the powers and extended the territorial jurisdiction of the Incas, and elevated the pueblo of Cuzco to the position of a capital or seat of government for a wide expanse of territory.

This dominance of the Cuzcans, under a succession of Incas, over other tribes, demands the use of a convenient term more accurate than Empire, by which it may be designated. There was no term in the Spanish language by which to designate it. Nor have we any in the English language, unless we coin one and call it an "Incariate." We call the government of a viceroy (Spanish virey), a vireinate. We speak of the functions of the Incas as Incarial. It seems proper, therefore, to use the term "Incariate" to indicate what is usually termed the "Empire of the Incas."

The American Indians.—When first observed by Europeans, early in the Sixteenth Century, the Cuzcans presented the highest plane of civilization reached by any of the native races in America. In no other part of the western world had the progress of an indigenous race advanced so far. The so-called "civilization" of the Cuzcans has had the misfortune to be exaggerated by the majority of writers. This has been due to the too recent application of the sciences of ethnology and anthropology to the American peoples. We properly approach a study of the Peruvians and their "civilization" by a study of some of the characteristics of the race to which they belonged.

With the exception of the Eskimos, the Indians of the western hemisphere constitute a single race, whose physical characteristics are remarkably alike throughout all tribes, though diverse conditions of life in various parts of the two continents have caused differences of stature, of color and development in certain directions. Yet these differences are of minor importance, and there is no wide variation, such as is to be found among the different groups of the white, black and yellow races of the other parts of the world. But though an Indian is always and wherever found an Indian, yet each tribe has its own characteristics. These characteristics may relate to the language the tribe speaks. There have been in North America, north of Mexico, nearly sixty distinct linguistic stocks or groups of languages spoken by Indian tribes; languages which, so far as known, had no relation to each other, and represented groups of Indians apparently unconnected by ties of blood with any other family.

As the families differed one from another, so the tribes differed in culture. Some were in the nomadic state. Some had become sedentary. Some were in savagery. Others had advanced to one or the other of the two earlier periods of barbarism. For all Indians below the art of pottery were in savagery. The making of pottery presupposes village life and more or less progress in the simpler arts. The stage of progress towards civilization known as barbarism has been divided into three periods. The transition from the lower status, or older period of barbarism, was marked by the regular employment of tillage of the soil and the use of adobe brick or stone in buildings. The middle period merged into an upper status, or later period, by the use of metals other than iron. The upper, or later period, was marked by a knowledge of the process of smelting iron ore. The end of this period, and the beginning of true civilization, is marked by the adoption of a phonetic alphabet and the production of written records.

This method of classification being employed, it will be observed that no American Indians of either continent had reached the upper status of barbarism, for none had attained to a knowledge of smelting iron. The Peruvians, though somewhat in advance of the Aztecs as regards the development of a system of government which rendered homogeneous many tribes within a wide extent of territory, and created something akin to national life, were, in common with the Aztecs, in the middle status of barbarism.

Indian Social organization.—Substantially universal in the Indian race in both continents was that system of social organization which is called gentile. This consisted of organization into gens (kin or clan), phratry and tribe. Gentile organization is one of the oldest and most widely prevalent institutions of mankind. It furnished the plan of government of ancient society in nearly or quite every portion of the world. It was everywhere the means by which society, in the beginning, was organized and held together.

Under this system the gens or kin furnished the unit of tribal existence. Briefly explained, a gens or kin is composed of a supposed female ancestor and her children, together with the children of her female descendants to the end of time. It includes her sons, but not their children, who must belong to the gentes of their respective mothers. Among Indians with whom a system of tribal subdivision denoted by totems prevailed, each member of the gens bore the name of the totem of the female ancestor; for the right of conferring names upon its members was one of the several rights, privileges and obligations by which the gens or kin was individualized.

The phratry was a collection of gentes or kins made for religious purposes and for social games. The tribe was the aggregate of the gentes, for it was possible for a tribe to exist without a division into phratries, but not without the existence of gentes. The three attributes of the tribe were, a particular territory, a common dialect, and a common tribal worship. Since the tribe was formed of gentes or kins associating voluntarily, the latter stood on an equal footing, and all had an equal share in the tribal government. This was vested in a tribal council composed of delegates elected by the kins to represent them. The council of chiefs was the supreme authority from whose decisions there could be no appeal.

With this knowledge of the social organization of Indian tribes, we are prepared to take up the study of that particular tribe which settled in Cuzco and developed into one of the most powerful and progressive peoples of either continent.

The Incas

The "Bolson" of Cusco.—The great plateau of the Andes north of the Titicaca Basin, (which was the seat of the Piruas before the Eleventh Century,) is broken up here and there by valleys, or, to use the Spanish term, bolsones, which means pockets. Among these, about the sixteenth parallel of south latitude, is the bolson  of Cuzco,—a Quichua word meaning the navel, or center. It is about seventy miles in length and sixty miles in width, and is blessed with bracing uplands and sunny slopes, and with a climate on the whole like that of the south of France, and which is quite remarkable considering its altitude—1,380 feet above the level of the sea. It was, all things considered, well adapted for the development of a people along the line of a progress, which, if not arrested, leads at last to civilization.

Manco Capac.—To this bolson, in the year 1240 of the Christian era, according to tradition, came a tribe of the Quichua stock, led by Manco Capac, or Manco the Ruler, and his wife, Mama Ocllo. They came from Peccari Tampu, which was "where, as seen from Cuzco, the sun appeared to rise." Tradition further avers that Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo were brother and sister, both being children of the Sun. They bore with them a wand or wedge of gold, having been sent by the glorious Inti, (the Sun,) to instruct the simple tribes in that locality. Wherever the gold wand or wedge, upon being struck upon the ground, sank into the earth and disappeared forever, there it was decreed that Manco Capac should, build his' capital. It was in the bolson  of Cuzco, where now stands the city of that name, that the wand disappeared in the earth, and there Manco Capac rested. And thence he and Mama Ocllo went their different ways in the bolson, "speaking to all people they met in the wilderness, and telling them how their father, the Sun, had sent them from heaven to be rulers and benefactors of the inhabitants of that land . . . and in pursuance of these commands they had come to bring them out of the forests and deserts to live in villages." Manco Capac instructed the men in agriculture and the arts, and gave them a religion and a social organization. Mama Ocllo taught the women to sew, to spin and to weave, and inculcated in them modesty, grace and the domestic virtues.

In this tradition we find another version of a story common to all primitive peoples, by which they seek to account for the beginning of their history. Manco Capac is the Peruvian version of the Chinese Fohi, of the Hindoo Buddha, of the Egyptian Osiris, of the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, and of the Central American Votan. It is not without its historic value, however, for rightly interpreted it would seem to fix the time when the Indian tribe that subsequently developed in Cuzco ceased to be nomadic, emerged from savagery, became sedentary, began the practice of agriculture, entered upon the lower status of barbarism, and took its earliest steps in human progress. Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo could not have been brother and sister and at the same time man and wife; for under the system of social organization universal among the Indians, and which the tradition tells us Manco Capac himself established in Cuzco, the law was inflexible prohibiting marriage within the gens. And although the statement is made by the best authorities that the office of Inca was hereditary, and that the Inca was required to marry his sister, that the oldest son of this marriage succeeded to the office—all in order that the blood of the Incas might be kept pure—the present writer is disinclined to believe it. Nor can he find any case in which proofs of it are adduced. Always the assertion is made without any other authority than the bare assertion made by someone else.

The tribal followers of Manco Capac were Sun worshipers and were totemistic. Garcilaso de la Vega, a Spanish writer of the seventeenth Century, in whose veins the blood of Manco Capac was supposed to flow, tells us that every Peruvian deemed himself "dishonored unless descended from a fountain, river or lake, or even the sea; or from a wild animal, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call a condor, or from a mountain, cave, or forest." The totem of the gens to which Manco Capac belonged was evidently the Sun.

Incidentally the tradition leads us to believe that the Cuzcans were from the first divided into two phratries. Garcilaso de la Vega, in relating the tradition, tells us that those who followed Manco Capac settled Upper Cuzco, and those who followed Mama Ocllo, settled Lower Cuzco. He thus accounted for the two wards of the "city" at the time it was brought to the notice of the Europeans. These two wards acted separately in all religious observances and in social games. We learn from another source that the tribe was composed of twelve gentes, five belonging to one phratry and seven to the other. The tribal council was composed of twelve members. The tradition implies that there were other tribes in the bolson  of Cuzco, but whether sedentary or nomadic does not appear.

The site where Manco Capac rested was strategically strong under the military system of the Indians. Its military strength rested upon a lofty eminence toward the north, where now stands the Sacsahuaman, or "Fortress of Inca," still among the interesting features of the architectural remains of the ancient Peruvians. Modern archaeologists are inclined to believe that the Sacsahuaman is a part of the remains of a Pirua settlement and of nearly the same age as the ruins of Tiahuanuco in the Titicaca basin, which attest the existence at one time of the Piruas and their progress toward civilization. If this be true, we may readily suppose that the tribal followers of Manco Capac were invited to this spot by what was especially attractive to them walls behind which they could entrench themselves and withstand the assaults of surrounding tribes.

Manco Capac appears in the tradition as the chief of his tribe—"Inca," he is called—a Quichua word meaning chief or ruler. In the organization of every Indian tribe that has been closely studied the tribal war chief was elected by the tribal council and held his office during life or satisfactory behavior. When a chief died or was deposed, the council elected another to take his place. The chief was selected for merit and had to justify the choice by deeds of prowess on the field of battle. It was usual to select the war chief from one particular gens, which may have been for totemistic reasons. There were in Cuzco (as in Tenochtitlan, the seat of the Aztecs), two elective chiefs. One was the Capac Inca, or dispensing chief; the other was the Uillac Umu, or speaking head, or the head which gives counsel. The first named was the chief military leader of the tribe. The latter was the chief of the tribal council and his functions were civil in character, though he is sometimes described as the chief priest of the tribal worship. Among all Indians who have become historic the war chief has attracted far more attention than his civil coadjutor. Of no Indian tribe do we possess any information regarding the civil chief, but the names of the military chiefs have been preserved to us, and such prominence has been given to them in the case of the Aztecs and also of the Cuzcans that they have been invested with royal attributes and circumstances.

Successors of Manco Capac.—We are supposed to have the names of the successors of Manco Capac, who were Sinchi Rocca, Lloque Yupanqui, and Mayta Capac in the Thirteenth Century, but we know very little of what they did or what progress was made by the tribe under them. It is said, however, that, in the period of their official lives, the Cuzcans began to establish a tribal predominance in the bolson, by "drawing in the surrounding tribes rather by peaceful means than by conquest;" which probably means that they confederated with the neighboring tribes for purposes of warfare defensive and offensive. They thus established the highest form of government known to the Indians at that time and laid the foundations of the future Incariate. The accession of Capac Yupanqui probably marks the completion of this confederation and the beginning of aggressive operations beyond the bolson.

With the Indians, war was a very important matter. Every able-bodied man of the tribe, (excepting the priests in some cases), was a warrior, trained to the use of arms from his infancy, and making fighting his business. He was accounted "idle" when no war was in progress. War was not, in the earlier periods of Indian history, waged for conquest of territory, for the Indians had no conception of ownership in lands or of expansion of territory. War was carried on for other purposes, however, of which subsistence was probably chief. Among tribes where human sacrifices were offered, war was waged at the demands of religion to secure captives for that purpose. Furthermore, only by warlike deeds on the battlefield was a warrior eligible to the office of chief; and when elected he was expected to prove the wisdom of the tribal choice by some especial act of bravery. He must, if possible, break his own record. And there were in many tribes certain warriors upon whom was conferred the honorary title of distinguished braves, not by heredity, but by reason of the capture of prisoners in actual combat. In consequence of all this pretexts were eagerly, sought for going to war, and were frequently found in some real or fancied insult offered by one tribe to another.

Capac Yupanqui, who succeeded Mayta Capac about the beginning of the Fourteenth Century, was successful in finding pretexts for war, and conquered the tribes of the west as far as the pass of Vilcanote, overlooking the Titicaca basin. Inca Rocca, the next Inca, is said to have given his attention to internal improvements, which would seem to imply that the development of the Incariate had begun, and that Cuzco was becoming wealthy. Yahuar Huaccac, the seventh Inca, was unfortunate and the period of his rule was disastrous. His successor bore the name of the Peruvian deity, Uira Cocha, and began a wonderful series of conquests which, within a century and a half, extended the Incariate over half of the western part of South America. By the conquest of the Collas he annexed to the Cuzcan Incariate the whole of the Titicaca basin, once the seat of the Piruas, but at that time occupied by tribes of shepherds being too high and cold for successful agriculture. There were copper mines in the region capable of furnishing materials for weapons and tools for the Cuzcans superior to those to which they had been accustomed. As a result of these conquests a system of colonization began, to be subsequently developed into what were called mitimaes, and these led to commercial enterprises whereby maize and cotton raised in one part of the country could be exchanged for the wool, potatoes, livestock and copper of the higher regions. Uira Cocha also annexed the tribes of the Yucay valley, and then turned his attention to the Chancas, who were at the head of a great confederation of tribes beyond the Apurimac river. But while his military operations in that direction were incomplete, he died.

He was succeeded by Urco, who, being defeated by the Chancas, was deposed by the tribal council, thus furnishing evidence that the office of Inca was still elective and had not passed beyond the control of the council of the tribe. The Chancas came within sight of Cuzco and the decisive battle in the history of the Incariate was fought on the heights above that famous seat of the Incas. Urco's younger brother, Yupanqui, had there gathered warriors from all parts of the territory already subject to the Cuzcans, and his brilliant victory over the Chancas gained for him the election to the office of Inca, from which his brother was deposed. He assumed, then or after his further victories, the title of Pachacutec, (he who changes the world). The memory of the great battle between the Cuzcans and the Chancas was fresh in the popular mind, a century and a half later, when the Europeans arrived in the country, and as they passed, over this ancient battlefield, they saw the stuffed skins of the vanquished Chancas set up as memorials by the roadside.

The "Mitimaes"—In the process of "changing the world," Yupanqui Pachacutec subdued the Huancas, allies of the Chancas, and thus extended the Incariate to the shores of the Pacific. It was also in accordance with his program of changing the world that the mitimaes  were fully developed and applied, as a stroke of policy on the part of the Inca and for the relief of the overcrowded portions of the Incariate. We are told by Pedro Cieza de Leon, in a book published in Seville in 1553, that, "as soon as a province was conquered (by the Cuzcans), ten thousand to twelve thousand men were ordered to go there with their wives; but they were always sent to a country where the climate resembled that from whence they came. If they were natives of a cold province, they were sent to a cold one; if they came from a warm province they went to a warm one.

These people were called mitimaes  which means Indians who have gone from one country to another." This account seems to have been verified by the discovery of colonists on the coast of Peru in the middle of the Nineteenth Century who still retained traditions concerning the villages of the Andes highlands whence their ancestors were transported as mitimaes. Only, these colonists from the cold highlands occupying the warm low-lands do not exhibit the great care for the hygiene of the people which Pedro Cieza de Leon would have us expect from the Inca. Undoubtedly, in many cases a war waged by the Cuzcans resulted in the extermination of a tribe. In such an event the depopulated Indian village was re-peopled by Cuzcans, but voluntarily and because of the advantage that was seen to be offered by such a course, and not in obedience to the edict of a despot.

The Coast Valley Tribes.—The Pachacutec was succeeded by Tupac Yupanqui, who completed the subjugation of the coast valley tribes, and extended his conquests south as far as the River Maule, three hundred miles beyond the site of the present city of Santiago in Chile. In that region the tribes are said to have retained their autonomy after the ancient manner, and became allies of the Cuzcans rather than their subjects. To the north of what is now the boundary between Peru and Ecuador dwelt tribes which were loosely attached members of a confederacy headed by the Caras of Quito. Their resistance to the warriors of Tupac was brief, and he was able to make these tribes the military base of a great war against Quito. In 1455 he won a great battle over the Caras. On the coast he extended his conquests to the Gulf of Guayaquil and returned to Cuzco in 1460. He died three years later, while in the midst of preparations to wipe Quito out of existence.

The contest in the Ecuadorean Andes was between peoples of the same degree of civilization and of nearly equal military strength. Tradition, which relates that the Caras reached this region about the seventh century of the Christian era, bringing with them a religion to which they were fanatically devoted and a tribal and military organization which insured their becoming the dominant peoples of all that region, begins to gather in clearness six centuries later. The military chief of the tribe was then named the Shiri, and his seat was at Quito. Under the twelfth Shiri, more by treaties of confederation and alliance than by conquests, a political system was established not unlike that of the Cuzcan Incariate, and embracing the mountain fastnesses of the Ecuadorean Andes. In 1430 Hualcopo became Shiri, and upon him was imposed the task of opposing the military operations of the Cuzcan Inca, Tupac Yupanqui. It is alleged that the victory of Tupac Yupanqui, in 1455, left sixteen thousand Cara warriors dead upon the field of battle. Hualcopo retired first to Riobamba and then to a well-fortified position further north and nearer to Quito. From this position Tupac Yupanqui was unable to drive him. He died in the same year that Tupac Yupanqui died, and was succeeded by Cacha, the fifteenth, and, as it proved, the last Shiri. He was a warrior and devoted the first years of his official life to recovering what his predecessor had lost to the Cuzcans.

Huayna Capac was the successor of Tupac Yupanqui. He was delayed in resuming his predecessor's campaigns against the Caras, by the necessity of conducting some military operations in the south. Returning thence in due time victorious, he devoted the remainder of his life to the conquest of Quito. He first reduced to absolute obedience the tribes of the Gulf of Guayaquil, whom his predecessor had left half independent, and extended his conquests on the northern shore nearly as far as the equator. Some of the tribes he exterminated. Having thus here and elsewhere secured lines of communication, he advanced against Quito. The Caras under Cacha fought stubbornly, but were overthrown in one battle after another, and were finally defeated, and their Shiri was slain. Huayna Capac entered Quito in triumph. The Caranquis, a warlike people living north of Quito, were overwhelmed and exterminated. Tradition states that twenty-four thousand Caranquis were massacred, and their bodies were thrown into the lake which now bears the name of Yahuarcocha (the pool of blood).

Size of Ancient Peru.—From about the year 1475, what had before been the political system of the Caras, was an integral part of the Cuzcan Incariate, whose borders now extended nearly two thousand seven hundred miles along the Pacific, from the River Maule, about the thirty-eighth degree of south latitude, to about the sixth degree of north latitude; and perhaps some distance down the eastern slopes of the Andes. This gave it an average breadth of from three hundred to three hundred and fifty miles, and an area therefore of about eight hundred thousand square miles, or equal to that portion of the United States lying between the Mississippi River and the Atlantic. Throughout this vast extent of territory there existed something like nationality, the only instance of its kind in America before the advent of the Europeans. And it is all the more remarkable as the only instance in the history of the world of the development of such a political system before that of any idea of private property.

The national life was not homogeneous throughout the territory embraced within the Incariate. In the southern and older portion it was more so than in the more recently subjugated regions north of the latitude of the site upon which the Spaniards subsequently established the city of Lima. The tribes north had been too recently conquered and brought within the political system to be counted upon to strengthen it. Garrisons were established among the coast tribes to keep them in subjection. The mountain tribes retained more or less autonomy. The Caras of Quito were so loosely attached to the Incariate of Cuzco as to appear to be but awaiting an opportunity to regain their old-time independence. All this despite the fact that Huayna Capac adopted a conciliatory policy toward the conquered Quitos. He caused the Shiri to be buried with funeral honors, married his daughter, and spent the remainder of his life in Quito.

In the south, from very early times, the conquest by the Cuzcans of a tribe had been followed by the sacking of the temple and the removal of the tribal gods to Cuzco. This had served to create a pantheon at Cuzco, and to turn the thoughts of every Indian in that direction as to a religious, if not a political, capital, and it must in time have led to a regard for Cuzco as the political center of Peruvian nationality. The effort, furthermore, to introduce the Quichua language into every conquered tribe had succeeded in this region, even though it has failed repeatedly where it has been tried among peoples much farther advanced in civilization.

The Civilization of the Peruvians

The Golden Peruvian Age.—The times of Huayna Capac were undoubtedly the Golden Age of the Peruvians and present to best advantage the opportunity for our study of what is often very carelessly called their civilization. We would speak more accurately if we called it a study of their culture, or of their institutions.

How much of the culture of the Peruvians was an inheritance from the Piruas it would be impossible to say. However, inasmuch as they were the only American aborigines that ever domesticated any other animal than the dog; and as they had produced several highly cultivated varieties of maize, and had developed the potato from its wild state and produced a great number of edible varieties, it is assumed that the process of this development must have begun considerably back of the time of Manco Capac. The llama was developed from the same stock with the wild guanaco, and was in the time of Huayna Capac a very useful beast of burden, though never used for riding, nor for any other draft purposes than in plowing. It yielded a coarse wool also. It is, to-day, as thoroughly domesticated as the cow or sheep in other countries. The alpaca was developed from the stock of the wild vicunya for its yield of fine, soft wool, and it has actually become so thoroughly domesticated that it is unable to live without man's care. Neither the llama nor the alpaca were cultivated for their milk. The guanaco and the vicunya are, to-day, as wild as the chamois, and refuse to recognize any kinship with the llama and alpaca, and we are assured that such a complete revolution in the nature of these animals could only have taken place through centuries of cultivation.

So with regard to the cultivation of maize, cotton and the potato. The latter was introduced into Europe from Peru in the latter part of the sixteenth century and was very slow in coming into general favor there. The high state of perfection to which the Peruvians brought it implies the lapse of considerable time since they began to work upon its wild form.

In cultivating such vegetables the Peruvians practiced irrigation on a large scale and enriched their soil by the use of guano brought from the islands of the Pacific. As we have seen, it is this careful and methodical tillage of the soil, with the use of domesticated animals for other purposes than hunting, that marks the arrival of the Peruvians at the middle period of barbarism. They must have reached this status at a much earlier date than any other known native people of either American continent.

This cultivation of the soil must be called horticulture rather than agriculture. Nature had not been profuse in the provision of arable land, and the Peruvians were of necessity exceedingly economical of what they had. They built their houses upon the rocky hills, and the deserts or sides of barren cliffs were used for burial-places in order that no spot of cultivable land should be used for any other purpose than for the raising of such vegetable productions as they found useful for the support of life.

By artificial means more cultivable lands were created. The mountain sides were terraced up for thousands of feet, and earth was brought in baskets on the shoulders of men and laid upon the bare rocks, until, by the patient labor of years, garden spots were made. And without any knowledge of iron; or of any labor-saving implements, they applied irrigation more successfully and more extensively than any other people. Many of their canals, reservoirs and terraced gardens have been allowed to crumble by their Spanish successors; yet modern Peru is living largely upon the half-ruined fragments of the mighty works wrought by aborigines who were in the middle status of barbarism.

Private property in land did not exist. All belonged to the tribe and was from time to time allotted to the kins. Each kin received a portion of land called a topu, which was sufficient to produce enough for the support of the members of the kin. All lands capable of being cultivated within easy reach of each settlement were divided into three parts. One was devoted to the Sun, or to the support of the tribal religion; one was devoted to the Inca, who was thus supported out of the common tribal property; the third part was devoted to the people at large. Every person was obliged to work, all males being divided into classes according to age and strength, and suitable labor was assigned to each. Turns were taken at the irrigation works according to fixed rules. By this community of interest in the products of toil store houses became necessary, and scarcity in one section was made up from the plenty in others.

This horticulture was carried on by means of the crudest kind of implements. Iron mines were in existence in the Andes, but the Peruvians knew not how to work the ore. Their use of copper was as a stone, to be wrought as they had in their Stone Age worked flint and other stone into axes and spearheads. Their ploughs were made of hard wood, and were dragged through the ground by men, possibly sometimes by the llamas. Yet, with all their successful domestication of animals, the Peruvians knew no pastoral life. There was no such property in animals as that which rendered Abraham, the great patriarch of the book of Genesis, rich. The llamas and alpacas were the common tribal possession, as was the land and apparently everything else.

The Arts.—The Peruvians had developed the art of spinning cotton and the long hair of the alpaca to a high degree of excellence; the dying of the yarn to perfection; and their skillful weaving of the figured cloths and tapestry furnished employment to a great number of people, owing to the quality and variety of the fabrics for which there was demand. Many of the fabrics they produced were of double cloth, showing the same colors and patterns on both sides. Some of them were decorated with embroidered designs, in which they made free use of feathers. They made a pleasing selection of the colors they used, and among the ornaments they applied were geometrical figures repeated in long lines after the manner of the Greeks. Peculiar to the decorators of the Peruvian fabrics was the conventional treatment of the human figure, of birds, fishes and animals. It is somewhat curious that the beautiful flora of the country was altogether absent as an element of their decoration. They wove coarser cloth of llama wool, and still coarser fabrics of animal sinews and aloe fiber.

The art of the weaver was influenced by the dress of the people. We are fortunate in having some description of the dress of the Inca, which probably differed from the dress of the common people only in the character of the ornaments it carried. This dress consisted of a shirt of cotton, a tunic of the same material dyed in patterns, and a mantle of fine vicunya wool woven and dyed. There were certain rich ornaments of gold by which some of these garments were adorned. The special insignia of the Inca's office consisted of the llantu, or crimson fringe around the forehead, and the black and white wing feathers of the Andean vulture, the two together forming what was known as the sacred head-dress. He carried in his hand usually something like a wand or mace, perhaps a weapon, to indicate his military character.

In times of war the warriors wore head-dresses to designate the tribes to which they belonged. One tribe wore a puma's head; another adopted macaw feathers; still another, deer's antlers; still another, falcon's wing feathers. The Peruvian defensive weapons were the hualcanca, (shield), and the umachucu  (helmet), and sometimes a breastplate. The helmet usually took the form of a most hideous mask, imitating some ferocious beast, and was, perhaps, intended more for the purpose of terrifying the beholder than for protecting the head of the wearer. Masks which have been found in graves were probably such as had been worn in religious ceremonials.

Pottery.—The art of pottery reached its highest period among the Peruvians about the fourteenth century, when the designs exhibited a considerable play of fancy. Many of the vases made at this period were molded into forms to represent animals and vegetable products, evidently to be used as conopas, (household gods). Others were made in imitation of different portions of the human body; or were made double, triple or quadruple, with a single neck branching from below. Some were intended to be interred with the dead. Others were for household use. Some exhibit an appreciation of the beautiful, while others are made purposely grotesque in form. That the Peruvians were not devoid of a sense of humor is evident from the number of vessels they made, from which the contents flowed out from a most unexpected portion, probably for the perpetration of a practical joke. Other vessels were so constructed as to give forth a not unmusical sound, as the air or water passed through them. These were probably for some use in the temples.

Metal Work.—Gold was plentiful and was obtained by the placer method. Silver was likewise obtained but not by mining. The beauty of these metals was appreciated and they were regarded as belonging to the gods, or to the Inca, who was the child of the Sun. Innumerable dishes, vases and implements were made of these precious metals, as well as personal ornaments for the use of the Inca. These were probably made by hammering the metal into the required shape, though there is evidence that there were Peruvian workmen who had a knowledge of the difficult art of casting copper. Metal vessels have been discovered which, upon analysis, have been found to contain a combination of copper, tin, silver and gold.

It is unfortunate that little of the gold and silver work of the Peruvians has been preserved to exhibit the art of their gold and silversmiths. The Spanish conquerors valued the precious metals only as standards of wealth. Perhaps from the promptness with which they reduced to ingot all the various artistic productions which came into their hands, it is implied that they were not much more beautiful in the form in which they first received them.

Metal workers were required for the production of the stamped or chased ceremonial breast-plates and chains in use at the religious feasts; also to fashion vessels for use in the temples and for the Inca; and to forge the arms of the warriors. Among the last named was the chumps, a weapon peculiar to the Peruvians. It consisted of a long club, having a star-shaped head of copper. It was heavy enough to require both hands to wield it.

Architecture.—The interesting ruins found in Peru are divisible into two classes—those which prove the existence of the Piruas, and those which are the remains of the later occupants of the land. The former merit somewhat particular notice because of their relation to the buildings of the later period. They are to be found at Tiahuanuco, on a plain near Lake Titicaca, at an elevation of 12,900 feet above the level of the Pacific. The site is sometimes called "The Thibet of the New World." The ruins cover an area of more than a square mile, and are the remains of many small and several large structures. The latter were built of very large stones, some of them twenty-five feet long, fourteen feet wide and more than six feet thick. They are of fine red sandstone, or of hard basalt, which must have been brought from some place at considerable distance from Tiahuanuco. These immense blocks of stone are fitted together so accurately that a knife-blade can scarcely be inserted between them. Neither mortar nor cement was used to keep the stones in place, but they were secured in some instances by mortised joints, or by copper dowels, traces of which still exist. The larger structures have been named the Temple, the Fortress, the Hall of Justice, and the Palace, from fancied resemblances to edifices for such purposes elsewhere.

The so-called "Temple" forms a rectangle of 338 by 445 feet, defined by lines of erect stones, partly shaped by art, standing fifteen feet apart. A wall of uncut stones built between them supports a platform of earth eight feet above the surrounding level. The erect stones are paneled, the sides and edges being slightly cut away, leaving projections of about an inch and a half, as though intended to receive slabs. The Temple seems to be the most ancient of all the structures of Tiahuanuco. The stones composing it are rough and frayed by time and long exposure to the elements. Although constituting the most elaborate single monument among the ruins, and notwithstanding that the erect stones of its portal are the most striking of their kind, the structure shows signs of antiquity discoverable in none of its kindred monuments. Its vast area could never have been roofed over. It is not infrequently compared to the stone circles in Avebury (England), in Brittany and elsewhere, but there is no conclusive evidence of the purpose of the builders in either case.

The fortress is an artificial mound of earth, 620 feet long by 150 feet wide and 50 feet high, the sides being terraced. On its summit are sections of foundations of rectangular buildings. On its slopes lie blocks of stone sculptured with portions of elaborate designs.

The so-called Hall of Justice consists of a rectangle, 420 feet long by 370 feet wide, defined by a wall of cut stones supporting a platform of earth in which is enclosed a sunken area. What is called the Palace is a platform of well-cut blocks of stone, about 240 feet long by 160 feet wide, held together by means of copper clamps, with traces of an exterior corridor. On the eastern side of this stone platform there are three groups of seats cut in stone. One of the groups is divided into seven compartments. Between the central and side groups were monolithic doorways. One of these doorways stands at the entrance of an ancient burial mound, about three hundred feet long by sixty-seven feet wide and twenty feet high. The doorway (or gateway, as it is more generally called), is the most remarkable of the Tiahuanuco monuments. It is formed of a block of stone originally cut with precision, though now broken and somewhat defaced. It is eighteen inches thick, thirteen feet wide and stands seven feet out of the ground. An opening is made in it four feet six inches high and two feet nine inches wide. Above this opening is a sculptured design, partly in low and partly in very high relief. On the reverse side of the doorway the design consists of a frieze and cornice. The designs on both sides appear to be symbolical of primitive Nature-worship.

There are indications, chiefly in the partially sculptured stones on the sides of the so-called fortress terrace, that the buildings at Tiahuanuco were never completed as they were intended to be. The erect stones are of admirable workmanship; the long sections of foundations with piers and portions of stairways, the blocks of stone with moldings, cornices and niches, are cut with geometrical precision. The masses of stone partially hewn all imply some gigantic plan in the minds of the builders, upon which the work was arrested by some cause not now known. The Titicaca Basin is sterile and unfitted for the support of a large population. It is consequently conjectured that the buildings were intended for some religious or ceremonial purpose.

Two styles are apparent in the architecture of the later Peruvians as exhibited by the remains. The earliest is imitative of the cyclopean work of the Piruas, though on a smaller scale. Walls are built of polygonal-shaped stones with rough surfaces, but the stones are of reduced size. In the later style the stones are laid in regular courses. The ruins show pyramidal structures, usually terraced on the sides of natural elevations, and stone circles, probably open-air temples devoted to Sun worship, in shape symbolizing the Sun, and being provided with upright columns intended to show the time of the equinoxes; buildings requiring the exercise of considerable engineering skill. Yet there is no evidence that any of the Peruvians, early or late, ever grasped the principle of the arch in building. A few openings in their walls, which appear to be arched at the top, may have been cut after the same was completed.

They had no way of uniting timbers excepting by tying them with cords of aloe fibers. The sculptural ornaments of the buildings assumed a conventional form, with crude attempts to represent the condor, the serpent and the face of the Sun, on the front walls of their temples and on the gateways to their cemeteries. Nor did they ever devise any covering for their buildings other than thatch. The roofs were sometimes peaked, even in a region where rains were infrequent. Nor were they able to build bridges across the ravines which interrupted their travel through the country, excepting those suspension bridges made of withes, and upholding a single log or two, and swaying in the wind, or as any one crossed over.

This inability to build bridges would seem to contradict the story that is told of their magnificent military roads leading out from Cuzco to all parts of the Incariate. As the Peruvians had no wheeled vehicles, and no draft animals, such roads as are described would be of no value to them. Modern travelers do not usually find any remains of these roads. Humboldt, indeed, observed them in northern Peru, but this was the last region to become subject to the Cuzcans, and that but a short time before the subjugation of the Peruvians to the Spaniards. Would it not have been strange for the Cuzcans to have built roads in this region when the other parts of the Incariate were destitute of them? Whatever may have been seen by Humboldt in the way of roads must have been of European construction. That the Peruvians had a rapid and very efficient system of posts is not at all unlikely, inasmuch as running and carrying burdens were matters in which all Indians were especially trained, in the chase and in war, even in their nomadic state. The roads they required were trails worn into footpaths.

The Temple of the Sun.—The Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was probably the greatest of their structures to come under the observation of Europeans. It was called Curicancha, a Quichua word meaning "court of gold." It was two hundred and ninety feet long by fifty-two feet wide, was enriched by the spoils of war for two centuries or more and was richly decorated with gold. The fortress of Sacsahuaman has been pronounced "without comparison the grandest monument of an ancient civilization in the New World. Like the Pyramids and the Coliseum, it is imperishable."

We have already seen that it is claimed by modern archaeologists to be the work of the Piruas. Early Spanish writers claimed to have heard the tradition that it was begun in the time of Yupanqui Pachacutec and that it was unfinished in the time of Huayna Capac. It may be that in the time of these later Incas work was resumed upon the foundations laid by the Piruas, which led, as we have surmised, Manco Capac to lay the foundations of Cuzco at that place. The stones of the Sacsahuaman are unhewn, are often quite irregular in shape and very unequal in size, and fit together so as to retain their places without the use of mortar. Some of them are of huge size—fourteen to sixteen and a half feet in length, and from six to twelve feet in width. Tradition states that these huge stones were dragged to their places by twenty thousand Indians by means of stout cables. One huge monolith was left to one side and not employed in the building, and is known as the "Tired Stone," because "it became tired and could not reach its place." Not unlikely the Peruvian workmen made use of the inclined plane in their transportation of immense stones.

Other Great Ruins.—A study of some of the ruins in other parts of the country would be interesting. About eight degrees south of the equator, in the valley of Chimu, about two miles from the coast, near a town founded by the Spaniards in 1535, and named Trujillo, are some ruins which are among the most remarkable in Peru. The ruins "consist of a wilderness of walls, forming great enclosures, each containing a labyrinth of ruined dwellings and other edifices." One of the enclosed spaces is usually called the "Palace," which, in view of what we have already seen, is a misnomer. The so-called "Palace" ruins embrace about thirty-two acres. The walls surrounding the enclosure are double and sufficiently heavy to resist the attacks of light artillery. These walls are at the base fifteen feet thick in some cases and gradually diminish as they rise, and are but three feet thick at the top. They are of varying height, the highest from thirty to forty feet. They are of adobe.

Within the enclosure are three open spaces or courts of considerable size, and a number of cross-walls dividing the remaining space into smaller courts. Around the sides of each of these courts are the ruins of houses grouped with the utmost regularity. "Some are small as if for watchmen or people on guard; others are relatively spacious, reaching the dimensions of twenty-five by fifteen feet inside the walls. These walls are usually about three feet thick and about twelve feet high. The roofs were not flat, but, as shown by the gables of the various buildings, sharply pitched, so that although rain may not have been frequent, it was, nevertheless, necessary to provide for its occurrence. Each apartment was completely separated from the next by partitions reaching to the very peak of the general roof. There are no traces of windows, and light and air were admitted into the apartment only by the door."

The Chimu ruins are characterized by a number of similar enclosures, some of them three or four times the size of the one above mentioned. And it is generally concluded that Chimu was the seat of a powerful tribe which finally succumbed to the Cuzcans, and that each of these enclosures was the home or communal residence of a gens of the tribe. The only adequate explanation of architecture, such as these ruins imply, is to be found in what we have seen of the social organization of the Indians.

All the buildings at Chimu were protected, on one side at least, by a heavy wall, several miles of which were standing in the past century. From this wall at intervals cross-walls extended inward, thus enclosing large areas which were never built upon. These were evidently tracts devoted to gardens, cultivated by the common labor of the gens or tribe for the sustenance of such gens or tribe. Near one end of the so-called "Palace" enclosure is a court, containing a mound, which is deserving of especial mention. The mound is known as a huaca, which is a general name among the Peruvians for a sacred object of any kind. The construction of this mound, like many other artificial mounds found in Chimu and in other parts of Peru, is curious. It consists of a large group of rooms filled with clay. In one of the Chimu huacas  large numbers of gold vessels have been found, and it is not improbable that in others treasures are concealed, though it is supposed that the majority of huacas  are burial-mounds. Burial in huacaswas the custom of the coast tribes generally in disposing of their dead. In the central regions the bodies of the dead were frequently mummified. Huacas  abound in the coast region and are often of great size, having an area at the base, in some cases, of more than seven acres, and containing masses of human bodies arranged in strata showing that the huacas  have been used as burial-places for a long series of years. Some of the huacas  are surmounted by chulpas  (towers), which constitute another characteristic architectural feature of Peru. Treasure hunters have penetrated the sides of the most famous of the huacas, which consist of rooms, and have found numerous large, painted chambers built in successive diminishing stages, ascended by zigzag stairways and stuccoed over and painted in bright colors. It is supposed that the Cuzcans, after the conquest of the tribe making use of such a pyramidal structure, filled up its chambers with earth and recast the edifice with a thick layer of adobe.

The Chimu people, as were all the coast tribes of Peru, were supposed to be advanced in the art of the potter and in that of the metal worker, and also in their architectural decoration. They ornamented the inner walls of their edifices with stucco in patterns. They also, in laying up their adobe walls, permitted some of the bricks to project from the surface of the wall in geometrical patterns. Because of these, one of the passage ways at Chimu, about fifty feet wide and twice that in length, is called the Hall of the Arabesques. The patterns resemble those found upon the textile fabrics of the Peruvians.

A short distance south of where the Spaniards built in the sixteenth century the city of Lima, are to be found the ruins of Pachacamac, where once stood the sanctuary of the deity of that name. A huaca  at this place is supposed to have been regarded with such sacred awe that it was the object of pilgrimages for thousands of years from all parts of the country. It was evidently considered a great privilege to be buried there. It at least furnishes evidence that the spot has been the abode of man for a long time. The temple has passed through many changes in its long history. The structure of a very early period was destroyed and its ruins covered a cemetery once lying at its foot. A large temple was erected covering the same site and new terraces were added in front. A temple was standing there in the early half of the Sixteenth Century, as we shall have occasion to see in a subsequent chapter.

Religion.—The Peruvians were never monotheistic. They were primarily Sun worshipers, but they also worshiped the moon, the stars, (especially Venus,) and dedicated temples to thunder and lightning, to the rainbow, and to various objects in Nature the elements, the winds, the earth, the air, great mountains and rivers, which impressed them by their sublimity and power, and which were regarded as inferior deities of local, or, it might be, of individual interest. For the Peruvians had their household gods, (conopas), and each kin had its tutelary deity, who, under their totemistic system, stood in the relation of ancestor to it. In addition to all these, in the case of the conquest of a tribe, the tribal gods were among the spoils of war, and the removal of these local deities to Cuzco in a manner constituted that place a religious community.

It is sometimes alleged that the religion of the Peruvians was advancing toward the acknowledgment of a Supreme God, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe. But all that they held regarding the deity, known as Uira Cocha, in no way interfered with the worship paid by them to the other deities. Uira Cocha was sometimes known as Illatiosi, which means Eternal Light, (and might apply to the Sun); sometimes as Pachacamac, which means Ruler of the World. He was described as a creator of all living things. Temples were dedicated to him, and the festival of Capac Raymi was held in his honor in the middle of the year, which, in a country south of the equator, answers to our midwinter—December 22 to January 22—at the period of the summer solstice.

Capac Raymi was a thanksgiving for the harvest and one of four great festivals having reference to the Sun. Praises were offered to the sun, moon and stars; there were solemn dances from the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco, and feasting and rejoicing for many days. Animal sacrifices were offered. Some writers declare, while others as positively deny, that a child or maiden was sacrificed at this feast. This was scarcely possible in the Golden Age of which we are writing, for the Cuzcans are said to have prohibited such sacrifices in the tribes which they conquered. It was furthermore contrary to the religious ideas of the Peruvians, whose sacred ceremonies were for thanksgiving and not for expiation. Animals were offered in sacrifice, as has been said, and some of the writers, who assert that human sacrifices were offered, may have been misled by the words used for young and adult llamas, and by the fact that the youths offering these animals gave them their own names.

This religion, with its complicated ritual and numerous festival ceremonies, presupposes some sort of religious order qualified to perform all of its religious functions. The religion of the Indians is usually known as "medicine," and what answers to the priests of other religions, is the shaman  or "medicine-man." This is because he performs by incantation or religious rite whatever is done for the relief of the sick. It is also usual to connect his office in some way with that of the tribal chiefs and to regard the head chief as high priest. We are told, however, that the Uillac Umu was the high priest of the Cuzcans, and that under him there were various officers charged with different details of the wonderfully complicated system of worship.

One class of "medicine-men," we are told, made it their special business to bring lovers together. They may have been wizards, however, rather than recognized officers of the Peruvian religious system, for their work seems to have been very similar to that of the African voodoo. They prepared talismans made from the roots of certain plants, or from feathers, and introduced them secretly, if possible, into the clothes or beds of those whose inclinations were to be won. Sometimes hairs of the person whose love was sought were used, or else highly colored birds from the forest, or their feathers only, were employed. They also sold to the lovers a stone which they said could be found only in places that had been struck by lightning mostly black agates, with white veins—and these medicine-men prepared infallible and irresistible love-potions.

Precisely what healing arts were practiced by the medicine-men in Peru is unknown. But one of the most curious things revealed by search among the remains of the ancient Peruvians are a number of skulls upon which trephining has been practiced. This was in some cases upon the skulls of the dead, for the purpose, doubtless, of obtaining amulets and charms, always in demand among superstitious primitive people. Later on trephining was practiced upon those whose lives were deemed useless, that is, upon living captives—for what purpose is a puzzling question, but possibly in search of knowledge of the spiritual or mental parts of man, or for purposes of experiment. The reader will remember that it is only in relatively modern times that, as a very bold experiment, trephining has been practiced among the most advanced of civilized races.

The elaborate religion of the Peruvians seems not to have inculcated a very high moral sense among them, according to our ideas. In earlier times the union of the sexes was voluntary, unregulated, save by the general Indian law which prohibited marriage within the kin or outside of the tribe. It was accompanied by barbarous usages, many of which survive among some of the uncivilized tribes of South America to the present day.

The later marriages seem to have been founded upon no sentiment of love, and women were treated among them as slaves. Upon the women devolved much of the agricultural work and all of the domestic duties. The "Sun virgins," often referred to as being maintained in the temples and as indicating a high regard for moral purity among the Peruvians, were really maintained as concubines for the Incas, or for the priests, and made the temples nurseries of immorality rather than teachers of morality. It was one of the functions of the kin to regulate the marriage of all its members. The law that there must be no intermarriages within the kin is conclusive as to the impossibility of the Inca being compelled to marry his sister, though he might have married his niece. The Peruvians had no laws prohibiting polygamy. Their marriage ceremony was a very simple one.

That the Peruvians believed in spiritual existence and in the resurrection of the dead is evidenced by their practice of embalming their dead. They buried with the dead various broken articles and often face-masks, which had been used in war or in religious dances.

The amautes, or learned, men were undoubtedly connected with the religion of the Peruvians, and their principal duty it was to preserve the traditions of the tribes. It is said there were yaravecs  (bards) who reduced these traditions to rhythmical sentences, or to poetical form, and recited them at their public festivals. This constituted a sort of "literature" for a people who had no knowledge of letters, as we shall see. More properly, they constituted the folk lore of the people.

It is said that the Peruvians had many musical instruments, and certain it is that dancing was an important element of their religious ceremonies. And inasmuch as, in 1781, a Spanish judge prohibited the performance of certain Indian dramas, it is supposed that the ancient Peruvians had something like dramatic representations. They may easily have been quite equal to the mediaeval miracle plays in England. One of their dramas is said to survive to this time under the title of "Ollantay" and is based upon events in the time of Yupanqui Pachacutec. In its present form it shows that Spanish editors and playwrights have been at work upon it. Many Indian games still in vogue in Peru may be traced back to the greater religious festivals of the Peruvians.

The Quipus—The Peruvians, as we have thus described them, had reached the highest degree of culture of any people on either continent of the Western Hemisphere. But in one respect they fell far short of the earliest stage of civilization; short indeed of the Aztecs, who had a system of picture-writing by which to record events and convey their ideas to others. The Peruvians had not advanced to the practice of the art of writing. It is said that there are a few pictographs to be found among the remains of their temples, but they were probably no more than symbols of some of the mysteries of their religion. They brought, however, the cord system of mnemonics to the greatest perfection of any known people. The ropes by which they kept their records were called quipus, (from the Quichua word quipu, meaning a knot). They were often of great length and of varied thickness. From the main ropes depended smaller ones, distinguished by colors appropriate to the subjects of which the knots treated: white for silver, yellow for gold, red for soldiers, green for corn, parti-colored when the subject treated of required sub-division. The dependent cords had other cords hanging from them upon which exceptions were noted.

In their system of numeration one knot meant ten; a double knot one hundred; two single knots, side by side, meant twenty; two double knots, two hundred. The position of the knots on the string and their forms were significant, so that the quipus  were capable of conveying other information besides that of numbers. Yet the art of reading the quipus  must have been a difficult one to acquire. It was practiced by special functionaries called quipucamayocuna, or knot-officers. These appear to have been able to expound their own records only, and when quipus  were sent from one tribe to another, the tribal quipucamayocuna  was compelled to travel with it to read and explain its meaning. It seems, therefore, that the quipus  were simply aids to memory, "about on a par with Robinson Crusoe's notched calendar, or the chalked tally of an illiterate tapster." They had no value as historical records.

The Breaking Up of the Incariate

The Incariate War.—Huayna Capac died in Quito in 1525, and thus was furnished the opportunity for which the Charas of Quito had been looking to reassert their independence. According to some accounts Huayna Capac disposed of the two grand divisions of the Incariate according to his own ideas of how things should be. The northern portion he gave to Atahualpa, a son born to him by the daughter of the chief who had been defeated and slain in the final capture of the northern tribe. To Huascar, a son by a legitimate Cuzcan wife, he bequeathed the southerly portion of the Incariate, but without any intention of disrupting the Incariate, proposing that the paramount authority should reside in the Cuzcan Inca. It is in accordance with such an understanding of the events following upon the death of Huayna Capac, that the subsequent history of the Incariate is usually written. Yet it would have been utterly at variance with Indian social customs for Huayna Capac thus to dispose of tribal offices or territorial government; it seems far more likely that Atahualpa was elected chief of the Quitus by the tribal council, and that the tribal council in Cuzco elected Huascar (or, as he is also called, Inti-Cusi-Hualpa) Inca; and that with the election the Quitus expressed a decided determination to take advantage of the death of Huayna Capac and reopen the war with the Cuzcans. Thus is explained the war which broke out almost immediately. It was a war to determine where lay the balance of power. Undoubtedly this question would have been settled in favor of the Quitus, had it not been for the advent of the Europeans and the subjugation of both Quitus and Cuzcans to the crown of Spain.

The struggle is alleged to have been at first for the predominance in the Incariate. It is said that Atahualpa made overtures to Huascar to have his authority recognized within a limited jurisdiction, and that these overtures were answered to the effect that Huascar could demand no less than immediate and unconditional obedience on the part of the northern tribes. In the first campaign the northern territory was made the seat of war and the Cuzcans assumed the aggressive. Both sides suffered severely, but the final advantage lay with the Quitus, and the Cuzcans were forced to retire in the direction of Caxamarca. In a subsequent campaign the Quitus under Chalcauchima and Quizquiz, noted war-chiefs, took the aggressive, poured into the northern coast regions of the Incariate, ascended the mountains, defeated the Cuzcans in a battle near Caxamarca, and followed them as they retreated south of the Cerro de Pasco. A decisive battle took place at Cuzco in which the Cuzcans were defeated and scattered and Huascar was made a prisoner.

Atahualpa was at Tumibamba, near the site of the present city of Cuenca, when he received the news that his warriors had not only gained a decisive victory over the Cuzcans, but had also the person of the Inca in their hands. He started at once for Caxamarca, the first place of importance on the great plateau south of the southern boundary of what is now the South American state of Ecuador. He was accompanied by a small body of warriors. It was while he was waiting near Caxamarca that he heard the wonderful news that two hundred bearded white men had landed on the coast at Tumbez, on the southern side of the Gulf of Guayaquil. They wore garments and bore arms different from those of the Indians, and they were carried over the ground at a terrific speed upon the backs of beasts much larger than the llama or the alpaca.

Some years previously, that is to say, in the year 1527, a ship carrying some of these strangers had landed at various points along the Pacific coast, to beg provisions and to ask questions regarding the character of the land. Two of the strangers had been left behind when the ship finally departed, and were taken to the interior of the country. What otherwise became of them no one knows. They must, however, have given to the Quitan leaders much information regarding the character and purposes of the white men. At all events, Atahualpa appears by his actions to have realized that the power and importance of the Europeans was greater than was indicated by their meager numbers. He sent one of his brothers, (according to the usual accounts), to the white men to assure them of his goodwill and to inquire as to their wishes and intentions. He received in reply a message from the white men to the effect that their leader appreciated Atahualpa's kind assurances of regard and that the white men would proceed at once to Caxamarca and pay their respects to him in person. And thus began the series of events which resulted in the subjugation of the Peruvians to the Spaniards.

The Spanish Conquest

About Pizarro.—In order to give an intelligible account of the conquest of Peru, we must give our attention to the Europeans who now began to take the dominant position in affairs. It is necessary, furthermore, to go back, at least to that dramatic incident in the history of discovery and exploration in the new world, when Balboa stood upon a mountain peak on the Isthmus of Darien and looked out upon the great western ocean, and then took possession thereof in the name of the King of Spain.

Among the followers of Balboa on that occasion was Francisco Pizarro, a native of Trujillo in Estremadura, Spain. Trained to a soldier's life under "The Great Captain," Gonsalvo de Cordova, he became a colonist in the New World in 1509. He was among those who settled in Panama after Balboa's discovery, and there he heard the reports brought back in 1522 by Pascual de Andogoya of wealthy lands lying far to the south. Andogoya had entertained a scheme for the exploration and conquest of this rich southern country, but, being obliged by ill-health to abandon it, he turned it over to a tri-partnership consisting of Pizarro and Almagro (two daring adventurers), and a priest named Luque, who was the moneyed man of the concern.

A small vessel was purchased at Panama, and in 1524, Pizarro made a voyage down the coast which brought no results. In a second voyage, eighteen months later, he and his crew were about to turn back discouraged, when their pilot, who had been sent ahead, returned to them and reported that he had crossed the equator and had fallen in with a large sea-going raft from further south, laden with cloth and various articles of silver, all of intelligent workmanship, and managed by crews who wore clothing, in striking contrast to the naked savages whom they had seen elsewhere along the coast.

These Indians were reported to come from Tumbez, which was about two hundred miles further south. Almagro thereupon turned back with his ship to Panama to secure reinforcements, while Pizarro pushed on and landed his men upon the island of Gallo, where he waited for months for Almagro's return. Things reached a pretty low ebb on the island of Gallo, but no sooner did Almagro return with provisions, than Pizarro set out with his few men, and, twenty days later, arrived in Tumbez. Here he found the reports he had received fully confirmed. He explored the coast for two hundred miles further south, and in the autumn of 1527 returned to Panama, taking with him some of the natives of Tumbez and some other products of the country.

Borrowing in Panama what money he could, Pizarro went to Spain in 1528, and there reported to the Spanish king what he had discovered on the western coast of South America. At the court of the Spanish monarch he met Hernando Cortes, who had marvelous tales to tell of what had befallen him in Mexico but a few years before, and so Pizarro's tales of further wealth to be obtained in Peru were readily believed at the Spanish court. To Pizarro was granted the right of discovery and conquest in Peru, (or New Castile, as it was determined to call it), and to exercise therein functions little inferior to those of a viceroy. Thus commissioned, Pizarro hastened back to Panama, taking with him his brothers, Hernando, Juan and Gonzalo, and a small body of fighting men from Spain.

From Panama, in December, 1531, he sailed south upon the Pacific, upon his third, and, as it proved, his final voyage of discovery and conquest, leaving Almagro to follow later with reinforcements. The small army landed among the coast tribes of Ecuador, where Pizarro had the good fortune to find a store of gold and emeralds to be sent back to Almagro for the latter's encouragement. Down the Ecuadorean coast the little army of Spaniards advanced, until it reached the Gulf of Guayaquil. Upon the island of Puna the fierce inhabitants were overcome with great slaughter, and there the little army of Pizarro was joined by a reinforcement of men and horses under the command of Hernando de Soto.

Pizarro's Campaign of Conquest.—Thus reinforced Pizarro felt strong enough to cross over to Tumbez, and begin an actual campaign for the conquest of the rich country of Peru. From Tumbez he marched south to Paita, and that admirable strategic point he made the base of his military operations. He established a garrison there under the name of San Miguel, and formed the plan, which had undoubtedly been suggested to him by what he had learned from Hernando Cortes, of his method of procedure in the conquest of Mexico.

With one hundred and two foot soldiers, sixty-two horses, and two small cannon, he left San Miguel on the 24th of September, 1532, and marched south two hundred miles along the coast plain, to a point opposite Caxamarca; and then ascended the mountains by one of the Peruvian trails, being received in a friendly manner by the natives whom the army encountered. Already Pizarro had acquired information regarding Atahualpa and Huascar, and the victories won by the warriors of the former over those of the latter. He had received the message of Atahualpa and had replied as we have seen. He was now to receive Titu Atauchi (said to be Atahualpa's brother), with presents and a message to the effect that the Quitu chief desired friendship with the white men. Pizarro and his army were in fact being supplied with provisions by Atahualpa's orders. Under such happy circumstances the Spaniards advanced and entered Caxamarca on Friday, the 15th of November, 1532.

The Spaniards found at Caxamarca, according to the best accounts, a place capable of accommodating ten thousand inhabitants. The houses were built of sun-dried brick (adobe), with roofs of thatch or timber. There was a Sun temple and a house for the virgins of the Sun, who were charged with the care of the sacred fire. And in one quarter was a triangular court of immense size, surrounded by low buildings, consisting of capacious halls with wide doors or openings communicating with the court. These were supposed by the Spaniards to be the barracks of the garrison of the Incarial army. More likely they composed the communal residence of one of the kins or gentes of the tribe originally occupying Caxamarca. The entire place was deserted, and the Spaniards took possession by permission of Atahualpa, and made themselves at home in what they were pleased to call the barracks.

Imprisonment of Atahualpa.—Atahualpa and his warriors—several thousand "Indians in quilted cotton doublets, with bucklers of stiff hide, long bronze-pointed lances and copper-headed clubs (chumpis), as well as bows, slings and lassos (bolas), in the use of which these warriors were expert"—occupied a magnificent military position on rising ground some two miles distant across a mountain stream. The curiosity of these Indians in regard to the approaching Europeans must have triumphed over their fears. The image of Uira Cocha in the minds of the Peruvians was that of a bearded white man. Such was Pizarro and to that type conformed most of his followers. They might all be regarded as children of the Sun. The early hero-god of every Indian tribe was usually a white man with flowing beard. It is often argued that this is but a form of the dawn-myth—a veiled parable of the morning light, bringing joy to the world and then vanishing, to return from the east with the dawn. Horses were a novelty to the Peruvians, as we have seen. Their beasts of burden were never used for riding purposes. Fire arms and weapons of iron were also new to them.

A visit was made by a detachment of Spanish horsemen, under Hernando de Soto and Fernando Pizarro, to Atahualpa—a visit marked by the extreme of ceremonious politeness on both sides; and this served to increase the curiosity and superstitious dread of the Indians. The Spaniards on their part fully realized the perils in which they were placed, and Pizarro determined that there should be no delay in carrying out his scheme for getting possession of Atahualpa's person.

To those who have read of the Conquest of Mexico, the account of what Pizarro did in Peru must seem as though the whole drama of the conquest of the latter place was but a reiteration of what had gone on in Mexico about a decade before. There was this notable difference, however: Pizarro was a man of no education and was inferior in many ways to Hernando Cortes, the hero of the Mexican campaigns. There was a total lack of originality in the scheme of Pizarro for hastening the conquest of the country. Cortes had arrested the one whom he mistook for the Emperor of Mexico, hoping thereby to rule the country through him. Pizarro would arrest him whom he mistook for a claimant for the imperial throne of Peru. In carrying out his program, however, Pizarro was far less subtle and far more brutal than Cortes.

Atahualpa was invited to be the guest of the Spanish Captain on the morrow of the latter's arrival in Caxamarca. Curiosity prompted the Quitu to accept and he came followed by other Indians actuated by the same motive. Much fine writing has been expended upon descriptions of the gorgeousness of Atahualpa's apparel and his train. He may have assumed some personal finery on this occasion, but his most probable ornaments marking his rank, or that to which he aspired, were a head-dress of feathers and large ear pendants. The latter extended the lobes of his ears and thus entitled him and all Peruvian warriors of rank to the nickname given them by the Spaniards of origones  (big ears). The wand, or baton, which Indian war-chiefs held upon the battlefield, may well have been mistaken by the Spaniards, in the hands of Atahualpa, for an imperial scepter.

It was in accord with the spirit of the age that Pizarro should make an effort for the conversion to Christianity of the Indian chief. Once get him to accept the tenets of Christianity and the Indian would find that one of the obligations of Christianity on his part would be to accept the political theory that he belonged of right to the King of Spain. So a priest (and no Spanish army in those days was without its priest—which may not have seemed at all strange to Atahualpa, for medicine men usually accompanied the Indian warriors on their campaigns), approached the Indian war-chief, and, with the aid of an interpreter, delivered a long discourse, in which he sought to explain to Atahualpa the abstruse principles of the Christian religion. Atahualpa listened, but declined to make at once a change in the religion in which he and his people had been trained; and, as the story goes, when the book, to which the priest had frequently referred, was shown to him, finding nothing remarkable in it, after his first feelings of curiosity had been gratified, he threw it on the ground with contempt.

His action, and it may have been more particularly his general manner, furnished Pizarro with a pretext for setting his plans in motion, and he gave the signal for the onslaught. With guns and swords the Spaniards slew many of their guests, drove the remaining Indians from Caxamarca, and scattered all of Atahualpa's army. The number of the slain has been variously estimated at from two to ten thousand. Even the lesser number may have been an exaggeration. In the massacre Pizarro was copying Cortes at Cholula. Atahualpa was taken into custody and his life was spared that he might be made of further service to the Spaniards.

That his followers should have been defeated and slaughtered does not appear to have affected Atahualpa as seriously as that he should himself be deprived of his liberty. For the first few weeks Pizarro treated him with kindness. But he took every precaution to prevent the escape or the rescue of his prisoner. Any Indian would chafe under confinement. Supposing Atahualpa to have been a war-chief, his defeat and imprisonment were especially irksome because of the effect they must have upon his reputation with his tribe. To the Indian captive, taken in war, the lot of slavery was appointed.

The Offering of Gold.—Perhaps there were surviving traditions among the Quitus, of the offering of such captives in sacrifice, and there was no knowing what the white men might do. So Atahualpa made the astonishing offer for his freedom which is the most prominent feature of the conquest of Peru. He would, within two months, fill for Pizarro the room in which he was then standing, with silver and gold to the height to which he was able to reach when standing on tip-toe, if the Spaniards would release him from captivity. The room was said to be twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet wide, which would give a cubic measure of 2766 feet. The offer was accepted by Pizarro, though it was subsequently modified by allowing that the metals need not be reduced to ingot to fill the room, but would be accepted in the forms in which they appeared. We have already seen that the Indians treated gold and silver as stones and not as metals, and whatever shape they formed them into was by means of hammering.

From far and near came burdens of the precious metals, and the room began to fill up with the most curious pieces of gold and silver. But it came in more slowly than Atahualpa had expected, or than Pizarro had hoped, and in June, 1533, the stipulated amount had not been fully made up. The Peruvians may not have had clear ideas regarding individual property, but the priests had very distinct ideas as to what was due to the gods, and so they dismantled the temples and hid their treasures until the impending crisis should pass.

Meanwhile Hernando Pizarro and a body of men—twenty horsemen and half a dozen arquebusiers—made a trip to the famous temple of Pachacamac, four hundred miles distant, in order that they might despoil it. They found Pachamac of considerable population and of substantially built edifices. The temple was a vast stone building or pile of buildings, grouped around a conical hill, seeming more like a fortress than a religious establishment. The guardians of the sacred edifice at first refused admittance to the Spaniards, but the latter forced the entrance and wound their way along the passage-way leading to the summit of the mount, where was the sanctuary. Here their progress was again opposed by the Indian priests, when an earthquake shock was felt, and the natives fled in alarm. Pizarro tore open the door, entered the sacred place with his party, and found it a place of sacrifice. Standing in one corner was a grotesque looking wooden idol, which had been used as an oracle by the priests of the temple. This the Spaniards delayed not to demolish and in its place they erected a large cross.

The natives, seeing that the wrath of the gods, as manifested by the earthquake, was not visited upon the Spaniards, inclined to the belief that they must in some way be in the enjoyment of the special favor of the gods. So they came in to become better acquainted with the strangers, and to offer their allegiance. But Pizarro found that the wily priests, who had been advised in advance that his mission to Pachacamac was not so much for the purpose of converting the heathen as for securing the property of the gods, had sent most of the treasure away. The rest was found, after diligent search, buried in the ground. This proved considerable, however, amounting to nearly eighty thousand castellanos of gold and with that Hernando Pizarro had to be content. He was able to return to Caxamarca unmolested by the Indians.

Three soldiers were subsequently sent to Cuzco to hurry forward the treasure from that rich place. But they behaved with so little discretion that they endangered their own lives and the success of their mission. Hernando de Soto and another officer had to be sent to repair the mischief. On the 3rd of May, 1533, Pizarro determined to melt down and distribute the gold and silver that had already arrived. Another large installment arrived on the 14th of June. Altogether the officially recorded amount realized was 3,933,000 ducats of gold and 672,670 ducats of silver, or £4,500,000 sterling ($21,870,000) in modern money. One-fifth was sent to the royal treasury. The remainder was divided among the followers of Pizarro, giving to each man enough to make him rich for life.

At once the money market became glutted. What the soldiers did not spend in gambling they paid out lavishly for the necessities of life and, in a land where iron was unknown, the rough soldiers had their horses shod with silver and went to like foolish extravagances. The price and purchasing value of silver went down at once in Peru, and it was not long before the money markets of Europe were seriously affected by the influx of silver from the mines of the New World.

Whatever bonds had held together the government of the Quichua tribes was broken, and every chief and every subjected tribe acted independently. Huascar was murdered at the command of Atahualpa, as was generally supposed. Quizquiz tried to defend Cuzco, but with no apparent success. Manco Capac Yupanqui, apparently elected Inca in the place of Huascar, surrendered to the Spaniards, evidently seeking their protection.

Atahualpa Garroted.—Pizarro basely failed to keep his promise regarding the release of Atahualpa. The Indian spent the time of his captivity in learning the Spanish language and some of the Spanish gambling games. He learned also something about Spanish character, which must have increased his confidence in his own good judgment in rejecting the religion of the white men offered him before his arrest. After the payment of the ransom, it became a problem which the coarse, uneducated Pizarro was incapable of solving, what to do with him. Large bodies of troops were on their way from Cuzco, undoubtedly determined to expel the invaders, who had by this time shown that they were either very human, or else very unfriendly gods. Pizarro was afraid to release Atahualpa, lest he add to the strength of the rising forces of the enemy. But, if he kept him a prisoner, the gathering hosts of warriors, regarded by the Spaniards as Atahualpa's partisans, would fight for his release. The execution of the prisoner was proposed as a measure of good policy. It was determined upon by Pizarro, by Almagro (who had reinforced the Spaniards in Peru in April, 1533), and by the priest who had failed to convert Atahualpa the day of his arrest.

On the 29th of August, 1533, Atahualpa was subjected to the mockery of a trial and adjudged guilty of the murder of Huascar, of conspiring against the Spaniards, of polygamy and of idolatry, and was sentenced to death. He was promised, however, that this death should be by strangulation rather than by burning, if he would abjure his religion and be baptized into the Christian faith. He was thereupon baptized, taking the name of Juan. Then, in the great square of Caxamarca, he was garroted. His body was afterwards burned. This dark tragedy should not be related without noting that sixteen Spaniards protested against it. One of them, Hernando de Soto, was absent from Caxamarca at the time, but declared, when he learned what had been done, that if he had been present he would have prevented the execution. He soon afterwards withdrew from an enterprise which was stained with so much blood, sought adventure in the northern continent, explored Florida, and discovered the Mississippi river.

It is related that Pizarro put a younger brother of Atahualpa in his place, Toparca by name, and that the high-spirited youth refused to serve and died of humiliation within two months. We can readily understand that it was impossible for anyone to serve without the election of the tribal council, and that Toparca was placed in an embarrassing position by the ignorance of the Spanish leader. He would especially dread the punishment that would be meted out to him by his tribe for any assumption of authority on his part.

Pizarro's Continued Cruelty.—Soon after the execution of Atahualpa, Pizarro evacuated Caxamarca, resolving to strike at Cuzco, while the inter-tribal war was in progress. On his march thither he was attacked in the rear by Titu Atauchi, the brother of Atahualpa, who had been a messenger to Pizarro's camp, and eight Spaniards were taken prisoners and carried back to Caxamarca. The captors exercised a wise discrimination with these prisoners, treating with kindness two of them, who had been among those who had protested against the execution of Atahualpa, and strangling, upon the spot where Atahualpa had suffered death, one who had acted as clerk of the court which had adjudged him guilty. The greater part of the Spanish army under Pizarro and Almagro took up a position on the plain of Sacsahuamana, near Cuzco, and there another savage act was committed by Pizarro. Chalcachima, a war chief, was arrested and charged with having caused the attack of Titu Atauchi, and was burned alive in expiation of his alleged crime.

Pizarro was opposed by Quizquiz and his warriors, but the incredible speed of the Spanish cavalry gave him every advantage. The Spanish lost heavily in the neighborhood. But Quizquiz was in a hostile country, where the tribes had been partisans of Huascar, and were inclined to regard favorably the murderers of Atahualpa. Fancying that the inter-tribal war was for the purpose of settling a disputed succession, such as he was accustomed to in Europe, Pizarro favored Manco Capac Yupanqui, treated him as the legitimate Inca, and assured him that the sole object of the march of the Spaniards from Caxamarca was to crush the enemies of the Cuzcan Inca. Quizquiz was finally obliged to retire before the combined forces of Spaniards and Cuzcans, leaving the way open for the Spaniards.

Pizarro Enters Cuzco.—On the 15th of November, 1533, Pizarro entered Cuzco. Under his protection Manco Capac Yupanqui was formally installed as Inca, "with all the ancient rites." The new Inca set out with all the warriors he could raise, including some Spaniards, in pursuit of Quizquiz, overtook and defeated him some distance north of Cuzco. After another repulse, in an attempt to cut off Pizarro's communication with the sea, Quizquiz made his way back to the north. The tribes in the central portion of what had been the Incariate found that the Spaniards regarded their conquest of the country as complete and the land as their own.

A Spanish municipal government was established in Cuzco the following March; the Dominicans received the Temple of the Sun as a monastery; other buildings were taken to serve as churches, private dwellings and barracks, and the Indian pueblo was transformed into a Spanish city. Tombs, temples and private residences were carefully searched for gold. The natives were impressed into military service for the Spaniards, and it was not long before the Peruvians found themselves the slaves of those whom they had supposed were their allies and protectors.

Pizarro gave his attention to matters of administration in his conquered country. He established the city of Lima to be his capital; strengthened San Miguel, and built a city which he named after his own birthplace, Trujillo. These three cities were so located as to give him control of the entire country. But scarcely had this government of the Conqueror been established than civil war broke out among the Spaniards. Almagro had entertained no very cordial feelings toward Pizarro since his return from Spain with rank and assured fortune for himself, and with the Bishopric of Tumbez for Padre Luque, but with scanty provision for his other partner in the enterprise.

His feeling of bitterness was increased when he and his men were left out of the division of the spoils at Caxamarca, notwithstanding he had arrived before the ransom of Atahualpa was fully made up. And now that the conquest of the country was considered complete, he was coolly informed that he was to be governor of lands beginning two hundred and seventy leagues south of Tumbez! So he was forced to set out for the conquest of his province, and, after toilsome journeys, he reached the fertile valleys of Chile. But he found little gold there and so returned and tried to establish a claim to the city of Cuzco. It was before the war had begun between Almagro and the Pizarros for the possession of Cuzco, and the territories which naturally went with it, that the Peruvians, under Manco Capac Yupanqui, revolted, and, with the knowledge they had gained of Spanish war methods, attempted to throw off the yoke imposed upon them by the higher civilization.

Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo Pizarro with two hundred Spaniards occupied Cuzco. The rest of the Spaniards were scattered. Francisco Pizarro was in Lima. Almagro was in Chile. Manco Capac Yupanqui gathered all the native warriors in the neighborhood and besieged the city in 1536 and maintained the siege for several months. During that time there were numbers of fights in which both sides lost heavily and in one of them Juan Pizarro lost his life. The advantage was mostly with the Spaniards. As the planting season approached (September), it became necessary for the Indians to raise the siege, and Manco Capac Yupanqui retired in the direction of Vilcabamba and encountered Almagro on his return from Chile to assert his claim to Cuzco. A battle ensued in which the Peruvians suffered another defeat and slaughter.

Manco Capac Yupanqui established himself in the mountain fastnesses of Vilcabamba. With stoical resignation, characteristic of the Indians, he and his followers, in these almost inaccessible defiles of the mountains north of Cuzco, made the best of their sad situation, and left the conquerors to fight among themselves over the division of the spoils which had, as though by a miracle, fallen into their hands.

Death of Pizarro.—In the bitter feuds among the Spaniards, Cuzco was seized by Almagro and subsequently recovered by the Pizarros. Almagro being then captured, was tried for sedition and summarily executed in July, 1538. In June, three years later, Francisco Pizarro, whom the King of Spain had created a Marquis, was assassinated by Almagro's half-breed son, who was proclaimed Governor of Peru. But his day was a short one, for the King of Spain sent out a judge, Vaca de Castro by name, to advise with Pizarro concerning the government. As he arrived subsequent to Pizarro's assassination, he assumed, as had been provided for, the government. In 1542 he defeated young Almagro and had him beheaded in the great square at Cuzco.

In the meantime the conquest had been extended into the Ecuadorean region. With the death of Atahualpa and the defeat of Quizquiz, the tribes of that region had been left without a leader, having already been drained of their able-bodied warriors. But the survivors of the various tribes fought among themselves. Some of them applied to the Spaniards, as Manco Capac Yupanqui had done, for protection and assistance, and with a similar result. Sebastian de Benalcazar led a force of two hundred Spaniards from Pizarro's garrison at San Miguel, and, being assisted by various Indian tribes, after a terrible fight at Tiocajas, took possession of Quito in December, 1533. Benalcazar was disappointed in his search for gold. He therefore divided the country, after the manner of the feudal system to which he had been accustomed in Europe, enslaved the Indians and compelled them to pay tribute; and then proceeded to other scenes of conquest beyond the territories in which we are at present interested. Quito subsequently became the scene of disorders similar to those which marked the history of Cuzco under the rule of the conquerors. With the conquest of the Chilean region under Pedro de Valdivia subsequent to 1540 we have little to do, as that conquest was of Araucanians rather than of the Peruvians.

Vaca de Castro was succeeded in 1544 by Blasco Nunez Vela, who was sent to Peru as governor, charged with the enforcement of the "New Laws" promulgated for the immediate abolishment of the slavery of the Indians. Against the arbitrary enforcement of these laws the Spaniards rose in rebellion, and the Viceroy was slain in battle near Quito in January, 1546. He was succeeded by Pedro de la Gasca, an ecclesiastic, an inquisitor and a shrewd politician. He repealed so much of the "New Laws" as required the immediate abolition of slavery. This for a while propitiated the Spaniards, but after a time a rebellion broke out, in which Gonzalo Pizarro ("the last of the Pizarros") was leader. It gathered strength for a while, but was eventually put down.

Gonzalo Pizarro was executed in 1548. Gasca returned to Spain in 1550. Peru was left in confusion and the governments ad interim  had rebellion after rebellion to encounter, until the arrival, in June, 1550, of Don Andres Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Canete, who will ever be known as the "good Viceroy" of Peru. His goodness consisted in his efforts to alleviate the lot of the natives. He dared not venture to give them all the rights guaranteed by the Spanish "New Laws", but he made the Spaniards understand that their more outrageous forms of oppressing the Indians must cease. The native chiefs were allowed to exercise jurisdiction as magistrates under a modification of the Spanish system.

The Peruvians under Spanish Rule

Viceroy Government.—In 1558 Manco Capac Yupanqui died in his mountain fastness, and was succeeded in his shadowy office by his son, Sayri Tupac, who continued with the remnant of his tribe in the mountains. The Viceroy induced him finally to come to Lima to swear allegiance to the Spanish government, and accept a pension and estates in the Yucay valley. As he signed the documents by which this arrangement was made, he lifted up the golden fringe of the table cover before him and said: "All this cloth and its fringe were once mine; and now they give me a thread of it for my sustenance and that of all my house." He sank into a deep melancholy and died within two years.

The "good Viceroy" was in office for five years, and it was several years before the King of Spain found a successor to his liking. He was Don Francisco de Toledo, and he arrived in Peru in 1569. His first task was to destroy the surviving remnant of the Incarial office. The Spaniards had not previously interfered with the celebration by the Indians of their annual festivals with the ancient solemnities; and the Viceroy went to Cuzco to be present at one of these festal celebrations, determined that it should be the last. Titu Cusi Yupanqui, the brother of Sayri Tupac, was bearing the tile of Inca in Vilcabamba. He sent to the new Viceroy to beg that ministers of religion might be sent to him. A friar was sent and almost immediately Titu Cusi sickened and died. The superstitious Indians held the friar responsible for Titu Cusi's death, rose up against him and killed him. Tupac Amaru, a boy, was proclaimed Inca in succession to Titu Cusi.

A Famous Execution.—A pretext was found in these events by the Viceroy for the arrest of Tupac Amaru and others, who were brought to Cuzco, tried for murder and sentenced to death. Tupac Amaru was wholly innocent of the crime laid at his door, and his conduct at his execution gave to that scene the semblance of the martyrdom of a saint. He was instructed in religion by two monks for several days, and was then taken to the scaffold erected in the great square at Cuzco, to be beheaded. Dense crowds of people covered the open spaces in the city and the hills above the town, and these attested their grief and horror in such manner as to affect even the hard-hearted Spanish soldiers and cause them to hesitate. The boy himself was perfectly calm. He raised his right arm, and, in the profound silence which followed this gesture, he spoke a few simple words of resignation. The scene was so heartrending as to make it impossible for the Spaniards to act the cruel part assigned to them.

Led by the Bishop of Cuzco and the heads of the monasteries, a deputation rushed to the Viceroy, threw themselves upon their knees before him, and begged that the youth might be sent to Spain to be judged by the King. The hard-hearted Viceroy sent the chief alguacil to carry out the sentence, and it was executed while the great bell of the cathedral was tolled and the popular protest was expressed in deafening shouts of horror and grief. By the Viceroy's orders the head of the youth was stuck upon a pike beside his scaffold. Looking out of his window in the moonlight that night, a Spanish soldier saw thousands of Indians prostrate before the livid head, and the Viceroy directed that it be taken down and placed with the body, which was interred in a chapel of the cathedral, after solemn funeral rites performed by the Bishop and his ecclesiastical staff. But there was no spirit left in the Indians for rebellion and no center around which they could rally. The celebration of Indian rites was forbidden and every effort was made to remove whatever might serve to remind the Indians of their former state.

Peruvians Reduced to Vassalage.—The Peruvians were now scattered throughout the land to the number of eight millions. They had been reduced to vassalage and crowded to the wall by the Spaniards from the time of Pizarro's earliest occupation. The system of slavery pursued in Peru was that known as encomiendas, whereby the Indians were assigned by the crown to certain Spaniards, theoretically to be given religious instruction, but virtually to be done with as the Spaniards pleased, so that encomienda  was a euphemism for the most outrageous form of slavery, as cruel and destructive as any that had ever been known. The system was founded upon the assumption that the King of Spain had an absolute proprietary right over the natives of the countries which were his by conquest, and could make assignments of their services to his Christian subjects, according to the rank and wealth of the latter. The assignment of Indians in encomienda  was called a repartimiento. The person upon whom the encomienda  was bestowed was called an encomiendero. The repartimiento  belonged to the estate of the encomiendero  and was sold with it or descended to the heirs thereof.

It was the purpose of the so-called "New Laws" to mitigate the evils resulting from this system. They entirely abolished in distinct terms the "personal services of the Indians," and forbade the selling of encomiendas  or their descent by inheritance. Blasco Nunez de Vaca was unable to enforce the "New Laws," and was defeated and slain in the war precipitated by his efforts on their behalf. Pedro de la Gasca promised to recommend their repeal and had authority to suspend them and never dared to enforce them. When a peremptory order came from Spain that enforced Indian labor must cease, he kept the order secret until he could resign the government and leave the country, and let his successor bear the brunt of promulgating the order. The "good Viceroy," Mendoza, as we have seen, did much to alleviate the lot of the Indians, and checked some of the more outrageous forms of oppression practiced upon them.

Don Francisco de Toledo put forth what is known as the "Libro de Tasas," or Book of Rules, which was the basis of the Spanish colonial system for the following two centuries. Though supposed to be founded in part on the unwritten law of the Incariate, the laws embraced in this system were far from favorable to the Indians. The office of corregidor (district magistrate) was created and his rule was made substantially absolute so far as the Indians were concerned; though in the effort made to keep up part of the supposed political organization of the Incariate, the Indian village chiefs administered justice and exercised some power.

But tribute or poll tax was exacted from every male Indian between the ages of eighteen and fifty. One-seventh of the Indians were required to work for their masters, and might be sent to the nearer towns to be engaged by anyone who required their services. Those in the neighborhood of the mines were compelled to furnish the labor necessary to work them, and, when the lot fell upon any Indian thus to work in the mines, he might never hope to return to the free life he had formerly enjoyed. All this was within the provision of the "Libro de Tasas." In the practical application of the laws they were made far more oppressive. Kidnapping was reduced to a system. Hundreds of the Peruvians were hunted down and carried off to work on farms, in factories, or in mines. Often all the male adults of a village were dragged off to the mines, leaving only women and children to till the fields.

Some of the decrees of the Spanish government for the amelioration of the condition of these Indians imply the extent of the oppression to which they were subjected. Such, for example, was the decree of 1584, intended to secure for those employed in mines "regular hours of repose, and some time to breathe the fresh air on the surface of the earth." The Indians died in droves under the cruel treatment they received. In a century the number working in the Potosi mines was reduced from eleven thousand to sixteen hundred. In non-mining districts the Indians were reduced to one-tenth the original number, while among the warm valleys of the coast region they practically died out and their place was taken by negro slaves.

Conquered, enslaved and crushed beneath the heel of the most despotic form of government ever devised, the Peruvians lived under Spanish rule for two centuries and a half, and joined with the Creoles in the struggle for independence from Spain and in the establishment of a republic. In the meantime they had given to Europe potatoes, cassava, ipecacuanha and quinine.

It was an important event in the history of Peru that the sovereign virtues of the Peruvian bark became known in the Seventeenth Century, and the manner of the discovery deserves mention. The wife of one of the viceroys, the Countess of Chinchon, had a stubborn attack of malarial fever and the physicians of Lima were unable to cure her. A Jesuit missionary had sent to the rector of the Jesuit College in Lima some fragments of a bark which had been given to him, the missionary, by an Indian. The vice-queen was dosed with this after the manner of the Indians, the fever was quickly broken and she was restored to health: Linnaeus, the botanist, called the genus to which the tree belongs, after the Viceroy, chinchona.

The New "Inca" of 1781.—One other event in the history of the Peruvians is worthy of mention. The Peruvians refused to believe that the last of their Incas had perished in the person of Tupac Amaru. For more than two centuries they cherished the tradition common to many peoples, (witness the German belief respecting Frederick Barbarossa), that he had only retired to another kingdom beyond the mountains, from which he would return in his own good time to sweep the oppressors of his race from the land.

In 1781 the slumbering hope found expression in an insurrection headed by Condorcanqui, who, though a mestizo, was descended in some manner from the family of Huayna Capac. He boldly proclaimed himself the long-lost Tupac Amaru, "the child of the Sun and Inca of Peru." With mad enthusiasm the Indians hailed him as their destined deliverer, and he was able to advance at the head of a considerable army to the walls of Cuzco, where he declared that it was his purpose to blot out the memory of the white men and re-establish the Incariate in the City of the Sun. After a bloody struggle, lasting for two years, the Spaniards regained the mastery, and consigned the insurgent leader and all his family to an ignominous and barbarous death. As Condorcanqui passed along the streets of Cuzco to the place of his execution, the Indians prostrated themselves in the dust at sight of him, thus testifying their veneration for the last representative of those whom they had been taught for many generations to believe were indeed the Children of the Sun.

The Evolution of Modern Peru

More About Spanish Rule.—The Spanish conquerors of Peru unquestionably brought some benefits to the country to compensate for the institutions which they destroyed. They brought a system of government and jurisprudence, which, while suffering by comparison with Anglo-Saxon institutions with which we are familiar, was far in advance of anything the former occupants of the land would have attained to for many a century if they had been left to work out their own progress toward civilization. They brought the letters, the religion and the civilization of the Latin peoples of Europe, and they introduced into the country new and valuable animals, grains and fruits hitherto unknown to the Peruvians.

The conquest was followed by what is usually known as the Colonial period, extending over nearly three centuries. The early portion of this period was marked, as we have seen, by quarrels among the conquerors, which should hardly be dignified by the name of civil wars. How much the progress of the country was set back by these quarrels, which ended in the violent death of nearly every one of the original actors in the drama, it would be impossible to say. Nor was the system of government to which the disturbed rule of the conquerors gave place calculated to advance the highest interests of the governed and produce in them the best type of civilization.

The policy of Spain in regard to her newly-acquired provinces in the Western Hemisphere was not precisely what we would understand as colonial. It was a system derived from the Romans and not from the Teutons, as in the case of Great Britain's colonies. Spain's Trans-Atlantic provinces—consisting of Mexico in the northern continent, and Peru, Chile and Buenos Ayres in the southern continent, all contributing to form the vast empire, whose sovereign was enabled thereby to call himself "King of Spain and the Indies"—were governed by codes of laws distinct from the laws of Spain and intended to suit what were regarded as the special exigencies of the provinces.

The Council of the Indies.—The Casa de Contratacion, (literally House of Contracts, and answering in Spain very nearly to the English India House), was established in 1503, for the purpose of directing the course of commerce and trade between Spain and the colonies in the west. It served as a court of judicature and had jurisdiction over the conduct of all persons connected with trade between Spain and the Americas. In 1511 the Consejo de las Indias, (Council of the Indies), was instituted and proved in some respects the most peculiar governing body known to history. Gradually it usurped exclusive control of the Spanish possessions in the New World. It enacted all the laws and regulations for the government of Spanish America, and made or confirmed all appointments for that country, civil, military and even ecclesiastical. It gave its orders and instructions to all the higher officials of the provinces in America, and these had to be explicitly obeyed. It served as a final court of appeal in all cases involving important questions arising in the New World, and, though the King reserved the right of veto over all its proceedings, the right was seldom exercised.

The laws enacted by the Consejo  had little or no regard for the needs of Spanish subjects in the New World, and, although involved in contradictions, they were arbitrarily enforced. The Consejo  soon became forgetful that it owed any obligations to the natives of the countries in America, or that those people were any other than beasts of burden bound to eternal vassalage to the Spanish people quite as much as to the Spanish monarch.

In no respect was the legislation of the Consejo de las Indias  more disastrous than in its dealing with the subject of the slavery of the Indians, already referred to in a previous chapter. The system of repartimientos  and encomiendas  had been established before the conquest of Peru. In fact the spoils of the conquest, consisting of territorial possessions, precious metals and repartimientos, were to be divided up between the conquerors in accordance with the terms of the agreement made between Pizarro, Almagro and Padre Luque. It prevailed therefore in New Castile or Peru immediately after the conquest, as a matter of course.

The system arose under Columbus while he was governor in the West Indies. Originally lands were apportioned to Spanish colonists who had authority to require a specified Indian cacique and his people to cultivate them. This constituted a repartimiento. Later an encomienda  of Indians might be granted wholly independently of a grant of lands. The kings of Spain, being constantly beset by suitors for royal favors, and some of them having nothing else to give, gave encomiendas. Some of the recipients of these gifts farmed out the encomiendas  to others and became themselves absentee proprietors of rights of property in human beings. Thus the condition of the Indians was changed from serfdom to slavery.

In the depths of misery into which the Indians were thus cast, a friend was raised up to them in the person of Bartolomeo de las Casas, a Dominican friar, who had lived in the Indies, and who had a thorough knowledge of the public affairs of America. He had at one time held an estate with Indian serfs, or slaves, and had liberated them in obedience to his convictions of the injustice done to them, and his voice was raised in defense of the Indians. He wrote his celebrated book, "The Destruction of the Indians,"  followed by "Twenty Reasons"  why the Indians should not be given to the Spaniards in encomienda. It was due to his preaching, writing and personal influence that laws were adopted by the Consejo de las Indias  intended to release the Indians from bondage and to ameliorate their condition. These were the famous "New Laws" about which we have already seen something.

While these laws were right in principle, they worked hardship to the Spaniards, in that they deprived the latter of the chief source of their revenue and, if executed, would entail on large numbers of Spanish settlers great losses. Hence the resistance to them on the part of the Spaniards and even of the ecclesiastics. And the opposition was so far successful as to obtain in October, 1545, a royal decree by which such parts of the "New Laws" as threatened the interests of the Spaniards in the New World were revoked. This action filled the Spanish colonists with joy and the enslaved Indians with despair.

The Viceroys.—The first form of government established in Peru was municipal. Cuzco was converted into a Spanish town, as we have seen, by the appointment of two alcaldes and eight regidors. Ecclesiastical government was likewise established. Padre Valverde, who had been prominent in the arrest of Atahualpa, was made Bishop of Cuzco. Padre Luque was made Bishop of Tumbez. The Spaniards established municipal governments at Piura, Lima, Trujillo, Loja, La Paz and numerous other places. The Indians continued a village-dwelling people.

The form of government adopted for the whole country was at first the Audiencia, and then the Vireinate, which latter had been successfully tried in Mexico since 1535. The salary of the Viceroy was fixed at first at thirty thousand ducats, after-wards raised to forty thousand ducats, in order that he might be able to maintain himself in the regal state expected of him. Until the establishment of a vireinate in New Granada and another in Buenos Ayres, the jurisdiction of the Peruvian Viceroy was co-extensive with the Spanish possessions in South America, and the several Captains-General in the other provinces were subject to his authority.

There were viceroys good, bad and indifferent, in the long list of those who served in that capacity and held their brilliant courts in Lima. Lima at that time was the political, commercial and social center of South America. The viceroys were selected from among the grandees of Spain. Many were lovers of letters, and the Universities of the New World produced scholars and authors not unworthy of comparison with those of Spain. The influence of Spaniards of distinguished Castilian ancestry and of gentle training kept the Spanish language, even as spoken by the common people, more than usually pure. Scarcely less influential than the viceregal government was the ecclesiastical, which was greatly aided by the arrival, at an early date, of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. The Jesuits followed in 1567. The clergy controlled education, and every village had its priest who compelled the Indians to go to mass and otherwise made the services of the church an oppressive burden. The Inquisition was established in Peru in 1571 and the first auto da f e  at Lima was held two years later. The Indians were, however, exempt from its operations.

From the Spanish viewpoint that government in Peru was considered good which gave Spain the largest revenue, while, on the other hand, Spain's insatiable demands for gold and silver were a constant hindrance to what we would call good government. For, to obtain the desired revenue, the Indians were not only cruelly oppressed in their bondage, but they were subjected to a burdensome tribute. Those Spaniards who were interested in Peru undoubtedly desired the conversion of the Indians to Christianity and the establishment of a beneficent political order, provided both could be accomplished without interfering with the production of the greatest possible revenue.

Colonization and government by Viceroys resulted in the creation of various social classes in the South American provinces. First of all, there were the white colonists of pure Spanish blood, comprising the only recognized society in the social organization that existed in Spanish America. They numbered in Peru, at the close of the wars between the conquerors and the Viceroy sent out from Spain in 1555, about eight thousand. They regarded Spain as their country and looked upon Peru with contempt. Another class was called Creoles. These consisted of persons of European blood born in Peru. They were not recognized as having the same rights and privileges, nor as being in the same social status, as the Spaniards. Scarcely below them and often confused with them were the half-breeds or mestizos. Below these were the Indians. Spain adopted generally toward her American colonies a policy destructive of every interest save those of the "Old Spaniards." And as the nineteenth century dawned, there were signs everywhere apparent of the revolt of Spanish America, especially when Spain became involved in war at home and found her own nationality imperiled.

The Spanish-American Revolution.—After the revolt of the Indians, under the last Tupac Amaru in 1780, had been put down, a necessary reorganization of the Vireinate of Peru (then less extensive than formerly, by the establishment of the Vireinate of New Granada in 1740, and by that of Buenos Ayres in 1776), was accomplished in 1790 by the Viceroy Teodoro de Croix, who also instituted valuable reforms. But they came too late to check a growing desire for liberty among the educated classes in Peru, and the secret though widespread discussion among the Creoles of the abstract right of Peru to self-government. The two succeeding Viceroys (Francisco Gil de Toboado y Lemos and Ambrosio O'Higgins), who were able and liberal rulers, only postponed the revolution for a time.

The Viceroy of Peru in 1806 was Abascal. He foresaw the gathering storm that was to sweep over all of the Spanish American countries, and, by his coolness, promptness and energy, he held Peru for the King of Spain, dependent as he was upon his own resources. Not only was Spain too much occupied at home by a desperate struggle for the maintenance of her nationality and independence against the armies of Napoleon, to spare money or troops to protect her interests in Peru, but the Viceroy of Peru even managed to remit money to Spain, while he was recruiting armies from the native population and training them to become excellent soldiers in a cause for which they could feel no sympathy. For the pending struggle was between the Spaniards on the one side and the Creoles on the other, and the Indians, if left free to choose, would naturally have sided with the Creoles.

Abascal retired from the viceroyalty in 1816 and was succeeded by General Pezuela, who was about to institute a campaign for the suppression of an insurrection in Buenos Ayres before it could spread and reach Peru, when he learned that General San Martin, who was already posing as the "Saviour of Argentina," was marching to the assistance of Chile in its struggle for independence of Spain. San Martin was a military genius, as one must needs be to accomplish anything in the way of a campaign in South America, where there are lofty mountain ranges to be crossed and arid plains to be traversed in every warlike expedition. He quickly organized a small navy with which to contest the supremacy of the Pacific with Spain, and was so fortunate as to secure as the admiral of his fleet, Lord Cochrane, a Scotch adventurer of noble family, a daring fighter and skillful in strategic enterprises. His cutting out and capturing the Spanish frigate Esmeralda  from a number of smaller armed vessels under the protection of the guns of the fortress at Callao, on the night of November 5, 1820, is regarded as one of the most brilliant achievements of the kind on record.

Aided by the fleet under Lord Cochrane, San Martin, after repeated interruptions and disappointments, landed an army of 4,500 Argentines and Chileans in Peru, and the desolating war, which had raged in every other part of Spanish South America, was at last transferred to the one remaining stronghold of Spain in the New World. The Viceroy had between twenty and twenty-five thousand troops, of whom nearly nine thousand were in Lima; and at first glance it seemed absurd for San Martin to advance against such forces with so small an army. But it subsequently transpired that the army of the Viceroy swarmed with sympathizers with the cause of independence and the army of General San Martin became stronger every day.

Upon learning of the revolution in Spain and of the overthrow of absolutism there, Pezuela, at the demands of his generals, retired and was succeeded by General La Serna. The latter began negotiations with San Martin, who proposed, as had been proposed by independents in other Spanish American countries, the establishment of an independent, constitutional monarchy in Peru, with a Bourbon prince as king. At the end of these fruitless negotiations, La Serna evacuated Lima, on the 6th of July, 1821. San Martin entered the city a few days later, and, on the 28th of July, Peru was proclaimed an independent republic, with San Martin as temporary dictator under the title of "Protector."

The Peruvian patriots now found that they were still without self-government, their Protector being from a province practically foreign to them. In April, 1822, the royalists gave evidence that they had not disbanded, by capturing some of the patriot forces. To meet the trouble that was now imminent, outside help was necessary, and San Martin turned to Simon Bolivar, the famous soldier who had accomplished the independence of Venezuela (1817) and New Granada (1819), and had formed the Republic of Colombia, of which he was President. Bolivar answered the appeal of San Martin by setting out with a force of Colombians, and on his way captured Ecuador from the Spaniards and added it to the Colombian Republic.

He was joined by San Martin at Quito. The conference between the two generals led to the retirement of San Martin and the advance of Bolivar, whose offers of assistance were accepted by the Peruvians. In December, 1824, the battle of Ayacucho was fought, in its results one of the most important battles ever fought in South America. The victory was with the patriots. Fourteen hundred of the royalists were killed and seven hundred wounded. Of the patriots only three hundred were killed and six hundred wounded. By the terms of the capitulation arranged between the Viceroy La Serna and General Sucre, who was in command of the patriots, the whole Spanish army fourteen generals, 568 officers, and 3,200 soldiers—became prisoners of war, and all the Spanish forces in Peru were bound by the surrender. The war for independence was over. Callao Castle held out for thirteen months, and then surrendered; and the last Spanish flag floating over the South American mainland was hauled down.

The Republic of Peru.—If there was one thing more than another for which the patriots of Peru were unfitted, it was self-government. This was a natural result of Spain's colonial policy; and, after independence from Spain was secured through battles fought for the Peruvians by Argentines and Colombians, the country began a troubled career, similar to that of every Spanish-American country. After the battle of Ayacucho, Peru belonged to Bolivar to do with as he liked. He went through the form of summoning a congress and offering to resign his dictatorship, but there was nothing for the Peruvians to do but to beg him to retain the direction of affairs; and so he proceeded to lay the foundations of a great military confederation to include not only Venezuela, New Granada and Ecuador, already united under the name of the United States of Colombia, but all the remaining provinces of Spanish South America. In accordance with this plan in 1825, Bolivar created in Upper Peru a new nation named in his honor, Bolivia; and it seemed certain that he would soon be virtually Emperor of all South America. But being called back to Colombia for the pacification of his own state of Venezuela, the patriots began to assert themselves. They recognized General La Mar as their first president. He was succeeded by Gamara.

In 1833 anarchy prevailed throughout the country, which was partially quieted three years later by the establishment of a Peru-Bolivian Confederation, of which Santa Cruz was proclaimed protector. The peace secured by this arrangement was but temporary. Twenty years passed after the independence of Spain was secured, before anything like stable government was obtained for Peru. It would be difficult at any time during that period to tell who was the legitimate chief magistrate of Peru.

In 1844 General Ramon Castilla, a little, quiet, modest soldier, who had been one of the heroes of Ayacucho and had been engaged in all the revolutions since that time on the side of whatever promised the most stable government, returned from exile, and, entering into the conflict then pending in Peru, succeeded in restoring order to the country and was elected President. He proved in most respects an ideal chief magistrate, wise, sagacious and firm. Very opportunely new sources of wealth were disclosed at that time—guano and nitrate deposits on the desert islands off the coast and with these resources Castilla successfully solved the financial problems which had confronted Peru from the beginning. His successor inaugurated a period of national extravagance and corruption, but in 1854 Castilla headed a movement which placed him again in power until 1862, when he voluntarily retired to private life.

In 1860, under Castilla's wise influence, a constitution was adopted which is still the fundamental law of the land: It provides for a centralized government and gives to the executive, (consisting of a President and Vice-President elected for four years, assisted by a cabinet of five ministers), powers rather greater than those usual in a Republic. but it is liberal and humane in its guarantees to the citizens. It gives the suffrage to all Peruvians who can read and write, who own property and pay taxes. Slavery and Indian tribute were abolished and forced recruiting was declared a crime. The legislative branch of the government consists of a senate (composed of forty-four deputies from the provinces, with property qualifications), and a house of representatives (one hundred and ten in number), nominated by the electoral colleges of provinces and districts, one member for every twenty thousand inhabitants.

Castilla was succeeded in 1862 by his old friend General San Roman, a Peruvian Indian. San Roman died in 1863 and was peacefully succeeded by his Vice-President, General Pezet. The latter proving weak at a time when Spain was threatening war, he was ousted by a revolution, and General Prado was made acting-President. The latter quickly repelled the Spaniards and then gave up the presidency to Colonel Balta, who was inaugurated in 1868. Under his administration the Republic entered upon a career of public improvement, including the embellishment of cities, the creation of moles and harbors, the construction of railways, and the exploration of the Andes. It was also a career of extravagance and the creation of an enormous public debt. So great was the latter that two-thirds of the government revenues were insufficient to pay the interest on the foreign debt alone.

Balta's administration closed by his sudden and violent death a few days before his term of office expired. He was succeeded by Don Manual Pardo, the first civilian to reach the presidential office in Peru. At the close of his term his reputation was that of the best president Peru ever had. But his administration was one continual struggle with financial problems. In 1876, the payment of interest on the public debt was suspended and Pardo turned over the government to his successor apparently hopelessly bankrupt.

The Nitrate War.—In 1879 began a war with Chile over the possession of the nitrate territory along the coast. In January, 1881, the Chilean army took possession of Lima and for two years collected the customs revenue of the country, while the country at large was in a state of anarchy. Iglesias, one of the revolutionary leaders, had the strength and courage to proclaim himself President and arrange terms of peace with Chile in October, 1883. The Peruvian flag again waved over the capital. But scarcely had this been accomplished when General Don Andres A. Carceres headed a warlike movement to oust Iglesias, and, at the end of 1885, he succeeded. Carceres was elected President by a junta, and in 1886 began the task of re-organizing Peru. The country was in a sad plight. The treasury was empty, the guano and nitrate revenues were lost, the government was hopelessly weighed down by debt, and foreign creditors were pressing for a settlement. There was nothing to offer these foreign creditors but the railways. The "Peruvian Corporation" was formed which took over all of Peru's interests in the railways, the guano deposits, mines and public lands, under contract to release Peru from all responsibility for a sum amounting to more than £50,000,000 sterling.

Recent Leaders.—Carceres was succeeded by Colonel Bermudez, who continued his predecessor's policy but died in 1893 before the close of his term of office. A bloody insurrection ensued upon this event, Lima being the storm center. The insurrection reached its acute stage on the 18th of July, 1895. It then gradually quieted down. General Pierola was elected President and was succeeded in 1899 by Romana, who was in turn succeeded in 1903 by Candano.

Stable Government.—Two Presidents having thus been constitutionally elected and inducted into office, and both of them being civilians, would seem to imply that Peruvian government was at last becoming stable, and that the days of revolution, civil war and political unrest have passed away. The country is steadfastly Roman Catholic, yet there is a tendency toward popular government, though the dominant party is that of the old aristocratic element, composed of the intelligence and wealth of the nation.

The population of Peru is largely urban, and, to see the modern Peruvian, one would have but to visit some of the beautiful cities. Lima is not only the capital but the best representative city. Built, as we have seen, by Pizarro, it was adorned by the viceroys of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, after being nearly destroyed by earthquakes, was completely overthrown by that cause in 1746, when more than one thousand persons then perished. It was rebuilt, and is now the pride of the later day Peruvians, ranking among the most beautiful of the South American Capitals.

Appendix I:
Note on the Festival of the Sun

From the account given by Sir Arthur Helps, in his Spanish Conquest of America, vol. 3, p. 338, we extract the following account of the principal Festival of the Sun, celebrated in Cuzco, at the summer solstice:

"The eve before the festival, the royal priests of the reigning house inspected and prepared the sacrifices. The virgins dedicated to the Sun kneaded the bread (only used on these occasions), which was to be given on the ensuing day, in communion, to the host of royal and great personages, while innumerable maidens prepared a similar bread that was to be divided, in like communion, amongst the whole assembled multitude. The sacred fire was now to be relit. Accordingly, the High Priest took a large bracelet, on which was a burnished concave mirror, by the aid of which he collected the rays of Sun, and igniting some red cotton, received from "the god's own hand" the new fire that was to be burnt in the Temple, and by the Sacred Virgins, and that was to consume the sacrifices from which the auguries of good and evil for the coming year were to be divined.

"At last the day of the festival arrived. Early in the morning the great of the city was full of anxious beings, marshaled in due order according to their rank, unshod and reverently waiting the rise of their divinity. The hearts of all men there were beating high with hope and dread. Perchance he might not deign to appear on this his festal day. Suddenly a chill shudder of expectation ran through the crowd, and each man knew, though none had spoken, that the awful moment was at hand. Over the mountains came the silent herald, Dawn; and, then, swiftly following, the Sun himself. At the first sight of their god, the assembled multitude fell down before him, a waving mass of kneeling figures, who, with open arms and outstretched hands, blew kisses in the air their way of showing the humblest and most affectionate adoration. The brightness of the crowd lost none of its effect from their being encircled by the somber walls of the palaces and the Temple.

"Up rose the Inca the one erect amidst so many prostrate; the one dark spot, for he alone wore black (the sacred color) amidst that shining multitude. He then took two large golden vases full of wine, prepared by the Sacred Virgins. With the vase in his right hand, he pledged his great progenitor, the Sun. Having done this, he poured the wine into a wide-mouthed golden jar, from whence it flowed into a beautifully-wrought conduit-pipe, which led from the great square into the Temple. Thus it was that the Sun drank the wine that was pledged to him. The Inca then took a sip from the golden vase which he held in his left hand, and poured out the rest, drop by drop, into other golden vases, which the members of the Incarial family held in their hands. The chiefs, however great, who were not of royal race, did not partake of the wine."