Colonization and Christianity/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SPANIARDS IN PERU.
Their quiver is an open sepulchre; they are all mighty men.
Jeremiah v. 16.
They are cruel and have no mercy, their voice roareth like the sea; and they ride upon horses set in array as men of war.
Jeremiah vi. 23.
The scene widened, and with it the rapacity and rage for gold in the Spaniards. The possession and the plunder of Mexico only served to whet their appetite for carnage, and for one demon of avarice and cruelty to raise up ten. They had seen enough to convince them that the continent which they had reached was immense, and Mexico filled their imagination with abundance of wealthy empires to seize upon and devour. Into these very odd Christians, not the slightest atom of Christian feeling or Christian principle ever entered. They were troubled with no remorse for the horrible excesses of crime and ravage which they had committed. The cry of innocent nations that they had plundered, enslaved, and depopulated, and which rose to heaven fearfully against them, never seemed to pierce the proud brutishness of their souls. They had but one idea: that all these swarming nations were revealed to them by Providence for a prey. The Pope had given them up to them; and they had but one feeling,—a fiery, quenchless, rabid lust of gold. That they might enlighten and benefit these nations—that they might establish wise and beneficent relations with them; that they might enrich themselves most innocently and legitimately in the very course of dispensing equivalent advantages, never came across their brains. It was the spirit of the age, coolly says Robertson—but he does not tell us how such came to be its spirit, after a thousand years of the profession of Christianity. We have seen how that came to pass; and we must go on from that time to the present, tracing the dreadful effects of the substitution of Popery for Christian truth and mercy.
Rumours of lands lying to the south came ever and anon upon the eager ears of the Spaniards,—lands still more abundant in gold, and vast in extent. On all hands the locust-armies of Moloch and Mammon were swarming, "seeking whom they might devour:" and amongst these beautiful specimens of the teaching of the infallible and holy Mother Church, were three individuals settled in Panama, who were busily employed in concocting a scheme of discovery and of crime, of blood and rapine, southward; and who were destined to succeed to a marvellous degree. These worthy personages, who were occupied with so commendable and truly Catholic a speculation as that of finding out some peaceful or feeble people whom they might, as a matter of business, fall upon, plunder, and if necessary, assassinate, for their own aggrandizement—were no other than Francis Pizarro, the bastard of a Spanish gentleman, by a very low woman, who had been employed by his father in keeping his hogs till he run away and enlisted for a soldier; Diego de Almagro, a foundling; and Hernando de Luque, schoolmaster, and priest! a man who, by means which are not related, but may be imagined, had scraped together sufficient money to inspire him with the desire of getting more.
Pizarro was totally uneducated, except in hog-keeping, and the trade of a mercenary. He could not even read; and was just one of the most hardened, unprincipled, crafty, and base wretches which history in its multitudinous pages of crime and villany, has put on record. Almagro was equally daring, but had more honesty of character; and as for Luque, he appears to have been a careful, cunning attender to the main chance. Having clubbed together their little stock of money, and their large one of impudent hardihood, they procured a small vessel and a hundred and twelve men, and Pizarro taking the command, set out in quest of whatever good land fortune and the Pope's bull might put in their way. For some time their fortune was no better than their object deserved; they were tossed about by tempestuous weather, exposed to great hardships, and discouraged by the prudential policy of the governor of Panama; but at length, in 1526, about seven years after Cortez had entered Mexico, they came in sight of the coast of Peru, and landing at a place called Tumbez, where there was a palace of the Incas, were delighted to find that they were in a beautiful and cultivated country, where the object of their desires—gold, was in wonderful abundance.
Having found the thing they were in quest of—a country to be harried, and having the Pope's authority to seize on it, they were now in haste to get that of the emperor. The three speculators agreed amongst themselves on the manner in which they would share the country they had in view. Pizarro was to be governor; Almagro, lieutenant-governor; and Luque, having the apostle's warrant, that he who desires a bishopric, desires a good thing, desired that—he was to be bishop of this new country. These preliminaries being agreed upon, Pizarro was sent off to Spain. Here he soon shewed his associates what degree of faith they were to put in him. He procured the governorship for himself, and not being ambitious of a bishopric, he got that for Luque; but poor Almagro was dignified with the office of commandant of the fortress of Tumbez—when such fortress should be raised. Almagro was, as might be expected, no little enraged at this piece of cool villany, especially when he compared it with the titles and the powers which Pizarro had secured to himself, viz.—a country of two hundred leagues in extent, in which he was to exercise the supreme authority, both civil and military, with the title of Governor, Adelantado and Captain-general. To appease this natural resentment, the greedy adventurer agreed to surrender the office of Adelantado to Almagro; and having thus parcelled out the poor Peruvians and their country in imagination, they proceeded to do it in reality. But before we follow them to the scene of their operations, let us for a moment pause, and note exactly what was the actual affair which they were thus comfortably proposing to themselves as a means of making their fortunes, and for which they had thus the ready sanction of Pope and Emperor.
Peru,—a splendid country, stretching along the coast of the Pacific from Chili to Quito, a space of fifteen hundred miles. Inland, the mighty Andes lifted their snowy ridges, and at once cooled and diversified this fine country with every variety of scene and temperature. Like Mexico, it had once consisted of a number of petty and savage states, but had been reduced into one compact and well-ordered empire by the Incas, a race of mysterious origin, who had ruled it about four hundred years. The first appearance of this race in Peru is one of the most curious and inexplicable mysteries of American history. Manco Capac and Mama Ocollo, a man and woman of commanding aspects, and clad in garments suitable to the climate, appeared on the banks of the lake Titiaca, declaring that they were the children of the Sun, sent by him, who was the parent of the human race, to comfort and instruct them. They were received by the Peruvians with all the reverence which their claims demanded. They taught the men agriculture, and the women spinning and weaving, and other domestic arts. Who these people might be, it is in vain to imagine; but if we are to judge from the nature of their institutions, they must have been of Asiatic origin, and might by some circumstances of which we now can know nothing, be driven across the Pacific to these shores. The worship of the sun, which they introduced; the perfect despotism of the government; the inviolable sanctity of the reigning family, all point to Asia for their origin. They soon, however, raised the Peruvians above all the barbarous nations by whom they were surrounded; and one by one they added these nations to their own kingdom, till Peru had grown into the wide and populous realm that the Spaniards found it. That they had made great progress in the arts of smelting, refining, and working in the precious metals, the immense quantity of gold and silver vessels found by the Spaniards testify. Their agriculture was admirable: they had introduced canals and reservoirs for irrigating the dry and sandy parts of the country; and employed manures with the greatest judgment and effect. They had separated the royal family from the public, it is true, by the very singular constitution of marrying only in the family, but they had given to all the people a common proportion of labour in the lands, and a common benefit in their produce. They had established public couriers, like the Mexicans, and constructed bridges of ropes, formed of the cord-like running plants of the country, and thrown them across the wildest torrents. They had at the time the Spaniards entered the country, two roads running the whole length of the kingdom; one along the mountains, which must have cost incalculable labour, in hewing through rocks and filling up the deepest chasms, the other along the lower country. These roads had at that time no equals in Europe, and are said by the Inca, Garcillasso de la Vega, to have been constructed in the reign of Huana Capac, the father of Atahualpa, the Inca whom they found on the throne. In some of the finest situations, he says that the Indians had cut steps up to the summits of the Andes, and constructed platforms, so that when the Inca was travelling, the bearers of his litter could carry him up with ease, and allow him to enjoy a survey of the splendid views around and below. These were evidences of great advances in civilization, but there were particulars in which they were far more civilized than their invaders, and far more Christian too. Their Incas conquered only to civilize and improve the adjoining states. They were advocates for peace, and the enjoyment of its blessings. They even forbad the fishing for pearls, because, says Garcillasso, they preferred the preservation of their people, rather than the accumulation of wealth, and would not consent to the sufferings which the divers must necessarily undergo. When did the Christians ever shew so much true philanthropy and human feeling?
And these are the people whom Robertson, falling miserably in with the views, or rather, the pretensions of the Spaniards, says, appeared so feeble in intellect as to be incapable of receiving Christianity. The idea is a gross absurdity. What! a people who, like the Mexicans and Peruvians, had cities, temples, palaces, a regular form of government; who cultivated the ground, and refined metals, and wrought them into trinkets and vessels, not capable of receiving the simple truths of Christianity which "the wayfaring man though a fool cannot err in?" The Mexicans had introduced their hieroglyphic writing, the Peruvians their quipos, or knotted and coloured cords, by which they made calculations, and transmitted intelligence, and handed down history of facts, yet they could not understand so plain a thing as Christianity! It is the base policy of those who violate the rights of men, always to add to their other injuries that of calumniating their victims as mere brutes in capacity and in the scale of being. By turns, Negroes, Hottentots, and the whole race of the Americans, have been declared incapable of freedom, and of embracing that simple religion which was sent for the good of the whole human family. If such an absurdity needed any refutation, it has had it amply in the reception of this religion by great numbers of all these races: but the fact is, that it would have been a disgrace to the understanding of the American Indians to have embraced the wretched stuff which was presented to them by the Spaniards as Christianity. A wooden cross was presented to the wondering natives, and they were expected instantly to bow down to it, and to acknowledge the pope, a person they had never heard of till that moment, or they were to be instantly cut to pieces, or burnt alive. No pains were taken to explain the beautiful truths of the Christian revelation—those truths, in fact, were lost in the rubbish of papal mummeries, and violent dogmas; and what could the astonished people see in all this but a species of Moloch worship in perfect keeping with the desperate and rapacious character of the invaders? Garcillasso de la Vega, the Inca, tells us that Huana Capac, a prince whose life had more of the elements of true Christianity in it than those of the Spaniards altogether, being full of love and humanity, was accustomed to say, that he was convinced that the sun was not God, because he always went on one track through the heavens,—that he had no liberty to stop, or to turn out of his ordinary way, into the wide fields of space around him; and that it was clear that he was therefore only a servant, obeying a higher power. The Peruvians had, like the Athenians, an unknown god, to whom they had a temple, and whom they called Pachacamac, but as he was invisible and was everywhere, they could not conceive any shape for him, and therefore worshipped him in the secret of their hearts. How ridiculous to say that people who had arrived at such a pitch of reasoning, and at such practice of the beneficent principles of love and humanity which Christianity inculcates, were incapable of embracing doctrines so consonant to their own views and habits.
How lamentable, that a British historian should suffer himself to follow the wretched calumnies of Buffon and De Paw against the Americans, with the examples of Mexico and Peru, and the effects of the Jesuit missions staring him in the face. The Spaniards and Portuguese, as we shall presently see, and as Robertson must have known, soon found that the Indians were delighted to embrace Christianity, even in the imperfect form in which it was presented to them, and by thousands upon thousands exhibited the beauty of Christian habits as strikingly as these Europeans did the most opposite qualities.
But the strangest remark of Robertson is, "that the fatal defect of the Peruvians was their unwarlike character." Fatal, indeed, their inability to contend with the Europeans proved to them; but what a burlesque on the religion of the Europeans—that the peaceful character of an innocent people should prove fatal to them only from—the followers of the Prince of Peace!
But the fact is, that the Peruvians as well as the Mexicans were not unwarlike. On the contrary, by their army they had extended and consolidated their empire to a surprising extent. They had vanquished all the nations around them; and it was only the bursting upon them of a new people, with arts so novel and destructive as to confound and paralyse their minds, that they were so readily overcome. A variety of circumstances combined to prostrate the Americans before the Europeans. Those prophecies to which we have alluded, the fire-arms, the horses, the military movements, and the very art of writing, all united their influence to render them totally powerless. The Inca, Garcillasso, says that at the period of Pizarro's appearance in Peru, many prodigies and omens troubled the public mind, and prepared them to expect some terrible calamity. There was a comet—the tides rose and fell with unusual violence—the moon appeared surrounded by three bands of different colours, which the priests interpreted to portend civil war, and total change of dynasty. He says that the fire-arms, which vomited thunder and lightning, and mysteriously killed at a distance—the neighing and prancing of the war-horses, to people who had never seen creatures larger than a llama, and the art of conveying their thoughts in a bit of paper above all, gave them notions of the spiritual intercourse of these invaders, that it was totally hopeless to contend against. The very cocks, birds which were unknown there before their introduction by the Spaniards, were imagined to pronounce the name of Atahualpa, as they crew in triumph over him, and became called Atahualpas, or Qualpas, after him. He assures us that even after the Spaniards had become entire masters of the country, the Indians on meeting a horseman on the highway, betrayed the utmost perturbation, running backward and forward several times, and often falling on their faces till he was gone past. And he relates an anecdote, which amusing as it is, shews at once what was the effect of the art of writing, and that the humblest natives did not want natural ingenuity even in their deepest simplicity. The steward of Antonio Solar, a gentleman living at a distance from his estate, sent one day by two Indians ten melons to him. With the melons he gave them a letter, and said at the same time—"now mind you don't eat any of these, for if you do this letter will tell." The Indians went on their way; but as it was very hot, and the distance four leagues, they sate down to rest, and becoming very thirsty, longed to eat one of the melons. "How unhappy are we that we cannot eat a melon that grows in our master's ground."—"Let us do it," says one—"Ah," said the other, "but then the letter."—"Oh," replied the first speaker, "we can manage that—we will put the letter under a stone, and what it does not see it cannot tell." The thing was done; the melon eaten, and afterwards another, that they might take in an equal number. Antonio Solar read the letter, looked at the melons, and instantly exclaimed—"But where are the other two?" The confounded Indians declared, that those were all they had received. "Liars," replied Antonio Solar, "I tell you, the letter says you had ten, and you have eaten two!" It was no use persisting in the falsehood—the frightened Indians ran out of the house, and concluded that the Spaniards were more than mortal, while even their letter watched the Indians, and told all that they did.
Such were the Peruvians; children in simplicity, but possessing abundant ingenuity, and principles of human action far superior to their invaders, and capable of being ripened into something peculiarly excellent and beautiful. Twelve monarchs had reigned over them, and all of them of the same beneficent character. Let us now see how the planters of the Cross conducted themselves amongst them.