Part 59 (2/2)
[Footnote 38: Zarate, Conq. del Peru, lib. 7, cap. 8.]
Thus terminated the battle, or rather rout, of Xaquixaguana. The number of killed and wounded - for some few perished in the pursuit - was not great; according to most accounts, not exceeding fifteen killed on the rebel side, and one only on that of the royalists! and that one, by the carelessness of a comrade. *39 Never was there a cheaper victory; so bloodless a termination of a fierce an b.l.o.o.d.y rebellion! It was gained not so much by the strength of the victors as by the weakness of the vanquished. They fell to pieces of their own accord, because they had no sure ground to stand on. The arm, not nerved by the sense of right, became powerless in the hour of battle. It was better that they should thus be overcome by moral force than by a brutal appeal to arms. Such a victory was more in harmony with the beneficent character of the conqueror and of his cause. It was the triumph of order; the best homage to law and justice.
[Footnote 39: ”Temiose que en esta batalla muriria mucha gente de ambas partes por haver en ellas mill i quatrocientos arcabuceros i seiscientos de caballo i mucho numero de piqueros i diez i ocho piezas de artilleria, pero plugo a Dios que solo murio un hombre del campo de S. M. i quince de los contrarios como esta dicho.”
Relacion del Lic. Gasca, Ms.
The Ms. above referred to is supposed by Munoz to have been written by Gasca, or rather dictated by him to his secretary.
The original is preserved at Simancas, without date, and in the character of the sixteenth century. It is princ.i.p.ally taken up with the battle, and the events immediately connected with it; and although very brief, every sentence is of value as coming from so high a source. Alcedo, in his Biblioteca Americana, Ms., gives the t.i.tle of a work from Gasca's pen, which would seem to be an account of his own administration, Historia de Peru, y de su Pacificacion, 1576, fol. - I have never met with the work, or with any other allusion to it.]
Chapter IV
Execution Of Carbajal. - Gonzalo Pizarro Beheaded. - Spoils Of Victory. - Wise Reforms By Gasca. - He Returns To Spain. - His Death And Character.
1548-1550.
It was now necessary to decide on the fate of the prisoners; and Alonso de Alvarado, with the Licentiate Cianca, one of the new Royal Audience, was instructed to prepare the process. It did not require a long time. The guilt of the prisoners was too manifest, taken, as they had been, with arms in their hands.
They were all sentenced to be executed, and their estates were confiscated to the use of the Crown. Gonzalo Pizarro was to be beheaded, and Carbajal to be drawn and quartered. No mercy was shown to him who had shown none to others. There was some talk of deferring the execution till the arrival of the troops in Cuzco; but the fear of disturbances from those friendly to Pizarro determined the president to carry the sentence into effect the following day, on the field of battle. *1
[Footnote 1: The sentence pa.s.sed upon Pizarro is given at length in the ma.n.u.script copy of Zarate's History, to which I have had occasion more than once to refer. The historian omitted it in his printed work, but the curious reader may find it entire, cited in the original, in Appendix, No. 14.]
When his doom was communicated to Carbajal, he heard it with his usual indifference. ”They can but kill me,” he said, as if he had already settled the matter in his own mind. *2 During the day, many came to see him in his confinement; some to upbraid him with his cruelties; but most, from curiosity to see the fierce warrior who had made his name so terrible through the land. He showed no unwillingness to talk with them, thought it was in those sallies of caustic humor in which he usually indulged at the expense of his hearer. Among these visiters was a cavalier of no note, whose life, it appears, Carbajal had formerly spared, when in his power. This person expressed to the prisoner his strong desire to serve him; and as he reiterated his professions, Carbajal cut them short by exclaiming, - ”And what service can you do me? Can you set me free? If you cannot do that, you can do nothing. If I spared your life, as you say, it was probably because I did not think it worth while to take it.”
[Footnote 2: 'Basta matar.” Fernandez, Hist. del Peru, Parte 1, lib. 2, cap. 91.]
Some piously disposed persons urged him to see a priest, if it were only to unburden his conscience before leaving the world.
”But of what use would that be?” asked Carbajal. ”I have nothing that lies heavy on my conscience, unless it be, indeed, the debt of half a real to a shopkeeper in Seville, which I forgot to pay before leaving the country!” *3 [Footnote 3: ”En esso no tengo que confessar: porque juro a tal, que no tengo otro cargo, si no medio rea que deuo en Seuilla a vna bodegonera de la puerta del Arenal, del tiempo que pa.s.se a Indias.” Ibid., ubi supra.]
He was carried to execution on a hurdle, or rather in a basket, drawn by two mules. His arms were pinioned, and, as they forced his bulky body into this miserable conveyance, he exclaimed, - ”Cradles for infants, and a cradle for the old man too, it seems!” *4 Notwithstanding the disinclination he had manifested to a confessor, he was attended by several ecclesiastics on his way to the gallows; and one of them repeatedly urged him to give some token of penitence at this solemn hour, if it were only by repeating the Pater Noster and Ave Maria. Carbajal, to rid himself of the ghostly father's importunity, replied by coolly repeating the words, ”Pater Noster,” ”Ave Maria”! He then remained obstinately silent. He died, as he had lived, with a jest, or rather a scoff, upon his lips. *5
[Footnote 4: ”Nino en cuna, y viejo en cuna” Ibid., loc. cit.]
[Footnote 5: ”Murio como gentil, porque dicen, que yo no le quise ver, que unsi le di la palabra de no velle; mas a la postrer vez que me hablo llevandole a matar le decia el sacerdote que con el iba, que se encomendase a Dios y dijese el Pater Noster y el Ave Maria, y dicen que dijo Pater Noster, Ave Maria y que no dijo otra palabra.” Pedro Pizarro, Descub. y Conq Ms.]
Francisco de Carbajal was one of the most extraordinary characters of these dark and turbulent times; the more extraordinary from his great age; for, at the period of his death, he was in his eighty-fourth year; - an age when the bodily powers, and, fortunately, the pa.s.sions, are usually blunted; when, in the witty words of the French moralist, ”We flatter ourselves we are leaving our vices, whereas it is our vices that are leaving us.” *6 But the fires of youth glowed fierce and unquenchable in the bosom of Carbajal.
[Footnote 6: I quote from memory, but believe the reflection may be found in that admirable digest of worldly wisdom, The Characters of La Bruyere.]
The date of his birth carries us back towards the middle of the fifteenth century, before the times of Ferdinand and Isabella.
He was of obscure parent age, and born, as it is said, at Arevalo. For forty years he served in the Italian wars, under the most ill.u.s.trious captains of the day, Gonsalvo de Cordova, Navarro, and the Colonnas. He was an ensign at the battle of Ravenna; witnessed the capture of Francis the First at Pavia; and followed the banner of the ill-starred Bourbon at the sack of Rome. He got no gold for his share of the booty, on this occasion, but simply the papers of a notary's office, which, Carbajal shrewdly thought, would be worth gold to him. And so it proved; for the notary was fain to redeem them at a price which enabled the adventurer to cross the seas to Mexico, and seek his fortune in the New World. On the insurrection of the Peruvians, he was sent to the support of Francis Pizarro, and was rewarded by that chief with a grant of land in Cuzco. Here he remained for several years, busily employed in increasing his substance; for the love of lucre was a ruling pa.s.sion in his bosom. On the arrival of Vaca de Castro, we find him doing good service under the royal banner; and at the breaking out of the great rebellion under Gonzalo Pizarro, he converted his property into gold, and prepared to return to Castile. He seemed to have a presentiment that to remain where he was would be fatal. But, although he made every effort to leave Peru, he was unsuccessful, for the viceroy had laid an embargo on the s.h.i.+pping. *7 He remained in the country, therefore, and took service, as we have seen, though reluctantly, under Pizarro. It was his destiny.
[Footnote 7: Pedro Pizarro bears testimony to Carbajal's endeavours to leave the country, in which he was aided, though ineffectually, by the chronicler, who was, at that time, in the most friendly relations with him. Civil war parted these ancient comrades; but Carbajal did not forget his obligations to Pedro Pizarro, which he afterwards repaid by exempting him on two different occasions from the general doom of the prisoners who fell into his hands.]
The tumultuous life on which he now entered roused all the slumbering pa.s.sions of his soul, which lay there, perhaps unconsciously to himself; cruelty, avarice, revenge. He found ample exercise for them in the war with his countrymen; for civil war is proverbially the most sanguinary and ferocious of all.
The atrocities recorded of Carbajal, in his new career, and the number of his victims, are scarcely credible. For the honor of humanity, we may trust the accounts are greatly exaggerated; but that he should have given rise to them at all is sufficient to consign his name to infamy. *8
[Footnote 8: Out of three hundred and forty executions, according to Fernandez, three hundred were by Carbajal. (Hist. del Peru, Parte 1, lib. 2, cap. 91.) Zarate swells the number of these executions to five hundred. (Conq. del Peru, lib. 7, cap. 1.) The discrepancy shows how little we can confide in the accuracy of such estimates.]
He even took a diabolical pleasure, it is said, in amusing himself with the sufferings of his victims, and in the hour of execution would give utterance to frightful jests, that made them taste more keenly the bitterness of death! He had a sportive vein, if such it could be called, which he freely indulged on every occasion. Many of his sallies were preserved by the soldiery; but they are, for the most part, of a coa.r.s.e, repulsive character, flowing from a mind familiar with the weak and wicked side of humanity, and distrusting every other. He had his jest for every thing, - for the misfortunes of others, and for his own. He looked on life as a farce, - though he too often made it a tragedy.
Carbajal must be allowed one virtue; that of fidelity to his party. This made him less tolerant of perfidy in others. He was never known to show mercy to a renegade. This undeviating fidelity, though to a bad cause, may challenge something like a feeling of respect, where fidelity was so rare. *9
[Footnote 9: Fidelity, indeed, is but one of many virtues claimed for Carbajal by Garcila.s.so, who considers most of the tales of cruelty and avarice circulated of the veteran, as well as the hardened levity imputed to him in his latter moments, as inventions of his enemies. The Inca chronicler was a boy when Gonzalo and his chivalry occupied Cuzco; and the kind treatment he experienced from them, owing, doubtless, to his father's position in the rebel army, he has well repaid by depicting their portraits in the favorable colors in which they appeared to his young imagination. But the garrulous old man has recorded several individual instances of atrocity in the career of Carbajal, which form but an indifferent commentary on the correctness of his general a.s.sertions in respect to his character.]
As a military man, Carbajal takes a high rank among the soldiers of the New World. He was strict, even severe, in enforcing discipline, so that he was little loved by his followers.
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