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PREFACE

This history begins when Pizarro and Almagro, Valdivia and Benalcazar, led their desperadoes across the Isthmus to the conquest, massacre, and enslavement of the prosperous and civilised millions who inhabited the Pacific coast of South America. It ends with the United States opening a way through that same Isthmus for the ships, the trade, the capital of all the world; with American engineers laying railroad iron on the imperial highway of the Incas; with British bondholders forgiving stricken Peru's national debt; with their debtor bravely facing the fact of bankruptcy, and turning over to them all its railways.

The American people, alert, practical, keen, possessing in their press and congress admirable organisations for the collection and dissemination of exact knowledge, already fully appreciate the advantages that will accrue to the United States itself from the building of the Panama canal. Hardly less thoroughly do they understand the probable effect upon eastern Asia and the great commercial nations of western Europe. Few, however, have yet reflected upon the canal's vital importance to the peoples of the Pacific coast of South America—to four at least of the six countries whose stories I have tried to tell in this volume.

Cut off from all practicable communication with the rest of the continent by those yawning ravines which lead down the inner declivities of the Andes, gullied by gigantic torrents, and choked by impenetrable forests, the narrow strip of territory stretching along the mountain tops and shore plain from Quito to Central Chile, connects with the outside world solely through ports on the Pacific Ocean. Throughout colonial times the stream of greedy Spanish office-holders flowed down the coast from the Isthmus, and a scanty trickle of trade followed the same channel. For three centuries Panama was the entrepôt and Lima the metropolis of all Spanish South America except Venezuela and eastern New Granada. Magellan's famous discovery did not divert these currents because the stormy straits that bear his name are practically useless for sailing ships, and even Schouten's rounding of the Horn only blazed a path which proved too perilous for the vessels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But with the nineteenth century improvements in navigation and especially with the use of steam and the freighter built of iron, all was changed. Valparaiso became nearer to London or New York than Guayaquil, and during the last seventy-five years the ports of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Pacific Colombia have been little more than remote and unimportant stations on a trade route that stretches its interminable length from the commercial emporiums in the North Atlantic through Pernambuco, Rio, Buenos Aires, and around the southern end of the continent. For centuries Spanish tyranny denied the world access to those countries, and hardly had they shaken off the political system that strangled their development, when geographical considerations and the invention of iron steamships placed them at a disadvantage compared with their competitors. Their commercial, and therefore their industrial and political progress, has been ten-fold slower than it should have been.

The moment the first vessel floats through from the Caribbean to the Pacific the course of commerce will reverse its direction. Buenaventura, Esmeraldas, Guayaquil, Callao, Mollendo, Iquique, and even Valparaiso and Talcahuano will send their ships by the short route of Panama instead of around the continent and through the Straits of Magellan. Western Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile herself will be tied by rapidly strengthening bonds of mutual interest and intercourse to each other and to the great commercial nations; and a transformation will begin whose extent no man can foresee. Every patriotic American must hope that his own countrymen will devote the money, energy, and attention essential to secure that share of influence and trade justly due the United States' geographical proximity and political sympathy; that French literature, language, and ideas, British capital, and German commerce now so dominant in all South America, will be supplemented by American schools, money, and commercial enterprise; and that such influences will spread from Panama through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia down the coast to prosperous Chile and across into the fertile plains of Argentina and southern Brazil.

The author wishes to acknowledge his especial indebtedness to Sir Clement Markham's scholarly History of Peru, one of the very few complete and intelligent histories of a South American country available in the English language. The reader who commands Spanish will be interested in Torrente's Revolucion Sud Americana, Mackenna's Historiade la Independencia, Paz Soldan's Narracion Historica, Mitre's San Martin, and Bulnes's Expedicion Libertadora.

For Chile excellent books in both Spanish and English abound, among which are worth special mention, Barros Arana's Historia General, Mitre's San Martin, Bañados's Balmaceda, Hancock's History of Chile, and Hervey's Dark Days in Chile.

Few authorities exist for Bolivia. Valdes's Estudio Historico is admirable for the period which it attempts to cover. Sanjines's Historia, Mitre's San Martin and Belgrano, Torrente's Revolucion, and D'Ursel's Séjours et Voyages, as well as Fernandez's recent Campaña del Acre have been found valuable.

Wolf's Geografia del Ecuador is more than a geography, and no one interested in that country can afford not to study this work carefully. Suarez's Historia General, and Cevallos's Compendio give a good account of military and political affairs but do not bring them down to recent years.

For Venezuela Tejera's Manual de Historia has been of much use, as also Scruggs's Colombian and Venezuelan Republics, Jenny Tallenay's Souvenirs, and in the war of independence Mitre's great work on the life of San Martin.

Perez's wonderfully condensed book, Geografia Politica, has been the main reliance for Colombia, but Mitre's San Martin, Torrente's Revolucion, Holton's New Granada, and Scruggs's Republics, have supplied much information on points not covered by Senor Perez's work.

Intelligible details about comparatively recent times are proverbially the hardest to obtain, and the author feels that whatever of accuracy these pages may boast is due principally to his friends among present South American diplomats—men who understand South American history because they have been a part of it. Salvador de Mendonça, Joaquin Godoy, Oliviera Lima, Claudio Pinilla, Estanislao Zeballos, Manoel Gorostiaga, and Carlos Tobar have kindly tried to help him thread his way through the tangled mazes of Latin-American politics, and his principal reluctance at giving these pages to the public now is that he has not had the good fortune as yet to know and converse with men of like ability from Colombia and Venezuela.

T. C. D.

Petropolis, Brazil, March 29, 1904.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

THE INCA EMPIRE

For many centuries before the Spanish conquest and before the rise of the Incas a succession of great empires existed in Peru. Ruined edifices of unknown date prove that at some remote period advanced civilisations and powerful nations were developed in the coast valleys and on the Andean plateau. In tombs which vastly antedate even these megalithic palaces and fortresses, cotton twine, woven cloth, and cobs of maize have been found. The domestication and breeding to perfection of the llama as a beast of burden, and the alpaca as a fleece-bearer, the development of potatoes, maize, and the quinoa grain, must have consumed untold cycles of time. There is no doubt of the remote antiquity of the civilisation of the Indians who inhabit the Andean plateau south of the equator, nor that their culture was wholly self-developed, owing nothing to outside influences.

About the year 1000 the Incas were merely one of several tribes living on the high, beautiful, and fertile plateau of Cuzco, which lies on the eastern edge of the gigantic uplift of the Andes. Down the precipitous gorges into the steaming and impenetrable forests of the Amazon plain the civilised Indians never cared to go. The maize, quinoa, and potatoes upon which they depended for food could not flourish in the intense heat and heavy rainfall of those regions. Neither themselves nor their llamas and alpacas could thrive in the montaña or forested plain. Their natural habitat was the rough plateau, broken by numerous valleys, which lies between the Eastern and the Central Cordilleras, and extends from the Vilcañota "nudo," shutting it off from the Titicaca basin, to the transverse range of the "Cerro de Pasco," in the North. The ocean lies two hundred and fifty miles south-west, beyond the Central and Maritime Cordilleras and the bleak plateau which lies between them.

This great central section, on whose eastern edge near its southern border we first find the Incas, is the heart of Peru. Although the climate of a few of its gorges is almost tropical, the valleys have the temperature of Italy or Spain; higher up the crops of northern Europe flourish; then are pasture lands, and above all bleak wilds and peaks covered with perpetual snow. At the dawn of authentic Peruvian history this favored region was thickly inhabited by many independent tribes; probably all speaking dialects of the same language, and certainly very similar in their industrial life and social customs.

Tradition recounts that the Incas had migrated to Cuzco from unknown ancestral seats—by some conjectured to have been the shores of the prehistoric fresh-water sea of the Amazon plain—under the leadership of Manco Capac, the first of an unbroken line of sovereigns who claimed descent from the Sun-god and ruled the Incas until the Spanish conquest. The Incas developed a religion whose elaborate and rigid ritual, which regulated every act of their lives, finds its best parallel among the Hebrews. Each family had its household god; each sept worshipped an imaginary ancestor; the whole nation adored the sun as the progenitor of the reigning family, and the monarch's person was revered as divine. So profound was the religious feeling of this people that they finally rose to the conception of a supreme deity—a creator of the universe. His temple filled one side of the great square at Cuzco.

Even more remarkable than their religious system was the social and industrial organisation of the Incas. Private property in land did not exist. It belonged to the septs and was from time to time allotted to the heads of families. Every person was obliged to work, all males being divided into classes according to age and strength, and suitable labour assigned to each. The produce, whether crops or livestock, was divided between the government, the priesthood, and the communes. Scarcity in one section was made up from the plenty in others; public officers annually revised the allotments, and turns at the irrigation works were taken in accordance with fixed rules. Not a spot of cultivable land was left unused. Habitations were built on rocky hills; deserts or the sides of barren cliffs were used for cemeteries; whole mountain sides were terraced up thousands of feet, and land was literally created by years of patient labour employed in bringing earth in baskets and laying it on the bare rocks. By no people has irrigation been more extensively and successfully applied, and in spite of their ignorance of iron and steam, of labour-saving appliances and instruments of precision, the Incas constructed a system which in real effectiveness has never been surpassed. Many of their canals, reservoirs, and terraces were allowed to crumble by the Spanish conquerors, but modern Peru still lives upon the half-ruined fragments of the mighty works of the Incas.

Secured from want by this intelligent socialism, their lives and rights safe under laws administered with inflexible severity, bound closely by family and governmental ties, trained from childhood in industry and obedience, the Incas seemed destined to dominate and absorb the more loosely organised tribes with whom they came in contact, provided that they did not become inert, stationary, and unwarlike, and cease to produce individuals possessing initiative. The dynamic elements indispensable to expansion were furnished by the ruling clan and by fanaticism. The offspring of Manco Capac partook of his divinity and each emperor left numerous sons, whose descendants constituted a privileged class. In the process of time there gathered around the emperor thousands of men of his own kindred, devoted from their birth to warfare and statecraft.

Under the fourth emperor the Incas were successful in a life and death struggle against a tribe with whom they had hitherto shared the valley that surrounds Cuzco. Under the two succeeding emperors they extended their dominions south to the transverse range of mountains which separates the Peruvian from the Titicacan plateau. Yahuar Huaccac, the seventh sovereign, conquered the tribes on the eastern slopes, and by the beginning of the fourteenth century the Inca domain included the southern third of the great valley of Peru—an area of fifteen thousand square miles, containing probably two millions of people. Uira Cocha, the eighth emperor, began that wonderful series of conquests which within a century and a half extended over half of South America. On the other side of the Vilcañota "nudo" lay the vast basin which takes its name from Lake Titicaca. Too high and too cold for cereals, the plateau was inhabited by tribes of shepherds, who made no prolonged resistance when attacked by the armies of the Inca. Their rapid and complete incorporation into the Inca system followed. Colonies swarmed from the over-populated provinces of old Peru into the newly acquired territories. The Titicacan copper mines furnished the material for weapons and tools, and a great commerce in exchanging the wool, potatoes, and livestock of the higher regions for the maize and cotton of the lower added to the prosperity of the whole empire. This conquest doubled the extent of the Inca domain and opened up a vast field for colonising expansion within their own territory. Once achieved, the nation turned its attention to the conquest of the North. Beyond the gorge of the Apurimac—the Inca boundary in that direction—lay the rival nation of the Chancas, a vigorous and expanding people who were at the head of a great confederation of tribes which covered the northern two-thirds of the central plateau of Peru, and probably also included the Quichua-speaking tribes of the coast.

The Chancas defeated Urco, Uira Cocha's oldest son and successor, and their army advanced toward Cuzco, subjugating the northern allies of the Incas. The victors came within sight of the capital, where meanwhile the energetic Yupanqui, Urco's younger brother, had gathered the whole force of the empire. The battle which decided the fate of Peru was fought on the heights above Cuzco; the Chancas were defeated, and fell back only to be pursued and overwhelmed by Yupanqui. He returned in triumph and was installed as emperor in place of his incompetent brother, assuming the title of Pachacutec, or "Reformer of the World." The Incas pressed their advantage relentlessly; all the tribes of the Chanca confederacy were subjugated; and Pachacutec's generals even extended their conquests north of Cerro de Pasco. The Incas had now conquered a practicable route to the Pacific, and the coast tribes about Lima soon also fell under their control. Pachacutec built a great military road from Cuzco north along the fertile plateau, through the smiling valley of Jauja, and down the short descent to the neighbourhood of Lima. Colonies were established at strategic points, and the new territory became so rapidly welded to the Inca system that, when the Spaniards arrived a hundred and fifty years later, they found the whole of central and southern Peru occupied by a homogeneous people, perfectly loyal to the Inca dynasty.

Pachacutec's successor, Tupac Yupanqui, proved even more successful than his father. The five hundred miles of rainless coast from Lima to the Ecuador border was inhabited by a mysterious race, in civilisation and origin entirely distinct from the Quichua-speaking mountain tribes to which the Incas belonged. Short rivers, rushing down from the Andes, each irrigated a portion of the desert, which only requires water to become extremely fertile. The irrigation works of this people were on a gigantic scale, one of their reservoirs having its lower end guarded by a dam eighty feet thick at the base. The valleys were cultivated to the highest degree of perfection, and filled with a swarming and industrious population housed in cities whose ruins still survive to attest the skill of their builders. Enervated by centuries of peace, the inhabitants had long confined their warlike operations to building defensive fortresses. Nevertheless, when Tupac advanced up the coast he met a desperate and prolonged resistance, until one after another the fortresses fell. The capital of the confederacy was laid in ruins and great numbers of the people were transported to distant provinces. Garrisons and Inca colonies were established and a military road was constructed along the coast. However, the country was really held only by force, and even in Spanish times Quichua had not displaced the Mochica tongue in half the northern coast valleys.

Tupac next turned his attention to enlarging the southern limits of his empire. From Titicaca his armies advanced over hundreds of miles of bleak plateaux and barren deserts and down the steep Andean slopes into the fertile valleys of central Chile. His conquests extended as far south as the river Maule,—three hundred miles beyond Santiago,—but the tribes retained their autonomy and became rather allies than subjects. On the eastern side of the Andes he obtained the allegiance of the peoples living in the mountain valleys of north-western Argentine, and he completed the incorporation of the vast and fertile plateau which extends from the Titicacan basin to the present Argentine border.

Returning to the northern frontier, he reduced the peoples who lived in the confused tangle of mountains and gorges which lies between the two Cordilleras north of Cerro de Pasco, thus extending his boundaries nearly to the present Ecuador line. The rest of northern Peru and all of southern Ecuador belonged to tribes who were loosely attached members of the confederacy headed by the Caras of Quito. They opposed only a short resistance to the arms and diplomacy of Tupac, and he made their territory the base for the great war which he proposed to undertake against the ancient kingdom of Quito. About the year 1455 he advanced with a great army, largely recruited from the tribes recently wrested from the Quito monarch, and defeated the Caras in a great battle. The whole plateau as far north as Riobamba submitted, reducing the Shiri's domain to the neighbourhood of Quito itself and a small region north of that city. However, all of Tupac's efforts to force the last barrier which interposed between him and the Cara capital failed, and he was compelled to content himself with extending his conquests on the coast as far as the Gulf of Guayaquil. In 1460 he returned to Cuzco, where three years later he was enraged to hear that the Shiri was making a desperate and partly successful effort to recover the lost provinces. Tupac's preparations for a final campaign to wipe the Quito kingdom out of existence were interrupted by his own death.

Huaina Capac succeeded to the throne and continued his father's preparations. Bad news, however, from the far southern provinces compelled him first to undertake a campaign into Chile, in which he was victorious. He then proceeded north and devoted the rest of his life to conquering and incorporating the Cara empire. He first constructed a military road from the northern Peruvian coast to the plateau in southern Ecuador; then he exterminated or reduced to obedience the tribes on the Gulf of Guayaquil, and the coast beyond, nearly as far as the equator. Returning south, he defeated the wild savages of the regions where the Amazon leaves the mountains. Having thus secured himself against an interruption of his line of communications, he advanced against Quito in overwhelming force. The Caras and their allies among the brave tribes of northern Ecuador made a desperate resistance, but were overthrown in battle after battle, and Huaina Capac entered Quito in triumph. All the tribes of the confederacy submitted except the Caranquis, a warlike people who lived north of Quito. These achieved some minor successes, but were finally overwhelmed and exterminated.

The Inca empire, now at its greatest extent, included all the inhabitable portions of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, three-fourths of Chile, and a large part of the Argentine, stretching two thousand two hundred miles north and south, and from the Pacific to the eastern foot of the Andes. Except for the plateaux of Colombia practically the whole Andean region had been united under one government. The rest of South America was occupied by savage peoples, divided into small bands, who picked up a precarious existence along the streams; and the Inca empire was safe from any serious attack on its continental boundaries. But the later conquests of Tupac and Huaina Capac had incorporated peoples in civilisation and warlikeness hardly inferior to the Incas themselves. Indeed, in the light of subsequent events, it is clear that the later campaigns weakened the real military power and homogeneity of the empire. While the older parts, southern Peru and Bolivia—the heart of the Inca domain—formed a homogeneous and thoroughly loyal centre whose inhabitants all spoke the same language and where socialism and the worship of the sun according to the Inca rites prevailed, from the latitude of Lima north the country had been too recently subdued to be counted upon. The northern coast still required to be kept down by permanent garrisons; the mountain tribes of northern Peru retained a certain measure of autonomy; and the vast territories where the Shiri of Quito had held sway for so many centuries were very loosely attached. Tupac, the first conqueror, found it advisable to remain there almost continuously during the last half of his reign, and Huaina Capac, his heir, was born in Ecuador, and devoted his whole life to that region. He married the daughter and heiress of the defeated Shiri, and was regarded rather as the legitimate successor of the ancient dynasty than as an alien conqueror.

In 1525 Huaina Capac died at Quito, leaving a will by which he bequeathed the northern kingdom to Atahuallpa, a son born to him by the Shiri's daughter. Peru, with the southern provinces, fell to Huascar, his son by a princess of Inca blood. As the eldest and the legitimate heir according to the rules of succession which governed in the Inca dynasty, the latter was to be paramount, thus retaining a semblance of unity. Huascar and the Inca nobles who surrounded him at the old Peruvian capital were unwilling to acquiesce in this virtual division of the empire. The chief of the Cañaris, a tribe always hostile to Quito, sent a messenger to Cuzco offering to swear allegiance to Huascar. As soon as Atahuallpa heard of this derogation of his authority he ordered an army to march and unseat the recalcitrant prince, and despatched an ambassador to his brother with a conciliatory message, at the same time unequivocally asserting his claim to the lordship of all the ancient domain of the Shiris. Huascar insisted that southern Ecuador, a region which had been wrested from the Caras by their grandfather, and whose tribes had only been allies of Quito, should not be included. His bitter feeling against his brother was increased by reports that Atahuallpa had assumed Incarial insignia which only a legitimate emperor was entitled to use. He returned a harsh answer, demanding immediate and unconditional obedience. Seeing nothing was to be hoped for from Huascar, Atahuallpa began gathering the forces of the Quito kingdom.