On the seventeenth Lord Cochrane entered Lima amid the loudest acclamations of the inhabitants. The Marquis of Monte-mira had sent his carriage for Lord Cochrane to Chorrillos; but a deputation from the cabildo and others from different corporations having met his lordship on the road, he alighted from the carriage, and mounted a horse, brought for the occasion.
The inhabitants of Lima being desirous of seeing the naval hero of the expedition, a levee was held on the same evening at the palace, where the Admiral received the compliments of the principal personages of the city; but General San Martin judging it more decorous to be absent when a "subaltern" received the thanks of the cabildo of Lima, and the compliments of its inhabitants, remained at la Legua, half-way between Lima and Callao, where he had established his head quarters. On the eighteenth in the morning the archbishop visited his lordship, which visit was immediately returned; when Lord Cochrane left the city to wait upon the general in chief at his head quarters.
On the seventeenth an order was published for the abolition of the Spanish royal arms in any part of the city where they had been placed; and this proclamation was accompanied by another, as follows:
"Having been informed, with great horror to my delicate sentiments, and in violation of my humane principles, that some passionate individuals vex and insult the Spaniards with threats and taunts, I order and command, that all persons who shall commit such kind of excesses, in opposition to American gentleness of manners, to decorum, and to good and rational education, be denounced to the political and military governor of the city, that, the fact being proved, he may be punished for such reproachful conduct."
On the eighteenth a civic guard was ordered to be formed, to supersede the Spanish regiment de la Concordia, and the gran mariscal Marquis of Torre Tagle was appointed colonel of it.
On the twenty-second of July a proclamation was issued, ordering that the public act of the declaration of the independence of Peru should take place on the twenty-eighth of the same month, with all the solemnity due to so memorable a transaction.
After the Spanish troops left Lima on the sixth, their march into the interior was marked with the most horrid outrages: from Lurin to Bujama, a distance of nine leagues, thirty-four dead bodies were left on the road; some had died of disease, others had been shot; and, according to the uniform statements of the deserters from the Spaniards, Colonel Rodil was the executioner of the greater part of these victims. On the thirteenth, thirty-nine sick and five dead men were found near to Bujama, and carried to a temporary hospital. From the village of Huaycan advices were received on the twenty-first that La Serna had issued an order imposing capital punishment on every individual belonging to, or under the protection of the Spanish army, who should leave the route assigned a distance of twenty yards; notwithstanding which, upwards of three hundred deserted at Huaycan, and at Lunaguaná upwards of six hundred. In a skirmish near the latter place the Spaniards lost twenty killed, and more than fifty prisoners, and La Serna was completely surrounded in the ravine of Pilas. The efforts of the Guerilla parties in harassing the Spanish troops were constant and successful; and had a division of the liberating army been sent to co-operate with the Guerillas, it is most probable that the entire Spanish army would have been annihilated; but the whole of the army was disposed of in the barracks of Lima, or at Bellavista, where they were stationed to watch the operations of about eight hundred men, under General La Mar, in the batteries of Callao. A small division under General Arenales stationed in the province of Yauyos was ordered to Lima, and the whole of the interior was abandoned to the protection of the Guerilla parties, who had to act against the organized Spanish army, so that the towns which had declared their adherence to the cause of independence, when they believed themselves under the protection of the liberating forces, were abandoned, to experience all the rigours of their constituted enemies, the Spaniards, and thus pave the way to the state of affairs which subsequently took place in Peru.
INDIAN MULETEER OF MEXICO. INDIAN OF SAN PEDRO,
western shore of Mexico.