Volume II Part 1 (1/2)

The South American Republics.

Part II.

by Thomas C. Dawson.

PREFACE

This history begins when Pizarro and Almagro, Valdivia and Benalcazar, led their desperadoes across the Isthmus to the conquest, ma.s.sacre, 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 ca.n.a.l. 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 ca.n.a.l'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 sh.o.r.e 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 _entrepot_ 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 s.h.i.+ps, 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 steams.h.i.+ps placed them at a disadvantage compared with their compet.i.tors. 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 s.h.i.+ps 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_, Banados's _Balmaceda_, Hanc.o.c.k'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 _Sejours et Voyages_, as well as Fernandez's recent _Campana 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 princ.i.p.ally to his friends among present South American diplomats--men who understand South American history because they have been a part of it. Salvador de Mendonca, Joaquin G.o.doy, 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 princ.i.p.al 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.

PERU

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 montana 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 Vilcanota ”nudo,” shutting it off from the t.i.ticaca 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 sh.o.r.es of the prehistoric fresh-water sea of the Amazon plain--under the leaders.h.i.+p of Manco Capac, the first of an unbroken line of sovereigns who claimed descent from the Sun-G.o.d 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 G.o.d; each sept wors.h.i.+pped 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.