On March 12th, 1781, the army under General del Valle marched out of Cuzco. A detachment of 2000 men was sent against the insurgents, commanded by the Caciques Parvina and Bermudez,[227] in the province of Cotabambas, who were both killed in a desperate action. Tupac Amaru used to call these brave chiefs his right and left arms. Meanwhile the main body of the royalist army advanced slowly along the mountains to the westward of the valley of the Vilcamayu, suffering much from the snow-storms, the want of food and fuel, and the shameful neglect of all commissariat arrangements by Areche. On the 18th the Inca sent a message to the Spanish General, saying that the morrow, being the festival of San José, would be an appropriate day for settling their differences; and that he should prepare his troops for a movement of which, in compliment to the name-day of both himself and Del Valle, he deemed it courteous to apprise his adversary. In consequence of this message the Spaniard kept his men under arms all night, but no attack took place, and in the morning the Inca's army was found to be gone. Tupac had intended a stratagem, and had retired into an unfrequented ravine: on the 21st a snow-storm favoured his design, and his plan would have succeeded, had not a traitor, named Zunuario de Castro, given Valle notice of his movements. The Spaniards changed their position, and the Inca passed the night in vainly searching for it.
General del Valle was upwards of seventy years of age, and, unable longer to endure the excessive cold of the mountains, he descended into the valley of the Vilcamayu, and captured Quiquijana, hanging the Cacique Luis Poma Inca, who defended it. On the 6th of April the Spanish army advanced up the valley, meeting with considerable opposition, and reached Checacupe early in the day. Near this village the Inca had taken up a position, defended by a ditch and parapet stretching across the valley, and manned by 20,000 men, but he had neglected to provide any defence for his flanks. A Spanish division stole unperceived to the back of the position, while the main body assaulted it in front; and after an heroic defence the Indians, attacked both in front and rear, fell back to another entrenched position at Combapata, a league from Tinta, where the village was surrounded by a mud wall, covered at the top with thorny bushes. The Spaniards, following up their success, played upon the village with their field-pieces for several hours, then carried the position at the point of the bayonet, and made a bloody entry into Tinta.
Tupac Amaru, with his wife and three sons, fled to Lanqui, a village about twenty miles to the westward, on the shores of a wild Alpine lake. Here he intended to have rallied his disordered troops, but he was betrayed by one of his own officers, named Ventura Landaeta, who, assisted by the cura of the place, basely delivered the illustrious Inca and his family into the hands of the Spaniards. On the same day General del Valle hung sixty-seven Indian prisoners at Tinta, whose heads he stuck on poles by the road-side.[228] Diego Tupac Amaru, his nephew Andres Mendagure, and Mariano, the second son of the Inca, fortunately escaped.
On the 8th of April Francisco, the aged uncle of the Inca,[229] was also seized, and the prisoners were marched bareheaded into Cuzco, the visitador Areche coming out as far as Urcos to meet them. They were all separated from each other, and told that they would not meet again until the day of execution.
The chief prisoners were the Inca Tupac Amaru, his wife, his two sons Hipolito and Fernando, his uncle Francisco, his brother-in-law Antonio Bastidas, his maternal cousin Patricio Noguera, his cousin Cecilia Tupac Amaru with her husband Pedro Mendagure, a number of captains in the Inca's army and other officials, and Aliaga's executioner named Antonio Oblitas,[230] a negro slave.
It is necessary to record the diabolical cruelties of the visitador Areche, and his assistant Matta Linares, in order to complete the narrative of the ill-fated Inca's life, and to show into whose hands the fate of the Peruvian Indians was placed by the Spanish viceroy, and of what devilish atrocities they were capable. On the 15th of May, 1781, the visitador Areche pronounced a lengthy sentence, in which he declared that it was necessary to hasten its execution, in order to convince the Indians that it was not impossible to put a man of such elevated rank to death, merely because he was the heir of the Incas of Peru. He then accused the Inca of rebellion, of destroying the obrajes, of abolishing the mita, and of causing pictures to be painted of himself dressed in the imperial insignia of the uncu or mantle, and mascapaicha or head-dress; and others representing the triumph of his arms at Sangarara. He condemned his victim to behold the execution of his wife, his son, his uncle, his brother-in-law Antonio Bastidas, and of his captains; to have his tongue cut out, and afterwards to have his limbs secured to the girths of four horses dragging different ways, and thus to be torn in pieces. His body to be burnt on the heights of Picchu, his head to be stuck on a pole at Tinta, one arm at Tungasuca, the other in Caravaya, a leg in Chumbivilicas, and another in Lampa. His houses to be demolished, their sites strewn with salt, all his goods to be confiscated, all his relations declared infamous, all documents relating to his descent to be burnt by the hangman, all dresses used by the Incas or caciques to be prohibited, all pictures of the Incas to be seized and burnt, the representation of Quichua dramas to be forbidden, all the musical instruments of the Indians to be destroyed, all signs of mourning for the Incas to be forbidden, all Indians to give up their national costumes, and dress henceforth in the Spanish fashion, and the use of the Quichua language to be prohibited.
In the annals of barbarism there is probably not to be found a document equalling this in savage wickedness and imbecile absurdity: and this was written by a Spanish judge only eighty years ago.[231]
This hideous cruelty was literally carried into effect, in all its revolting details. On Friday the 18th of May, 1781, after the great square had been surrounded by Spanish and negro troops, ten persons came forth from the church of the Jesuits. One of these was the Inca Tupac Amaru, who had, in the early morning, been visited in prison by Areche, and urged to betray all the accomplices in his rebellion.[232] "You and I," he replied, "are the only conspirators: you for having oppressed the country with exactions which were unendurable, and I for having wished to free the people from such tyranny."[233] The Inca's companions in misfortune were his wife Micaela, his sons Hipolito and Fernando, his brother-in-law Antonio Bastidas, his uncle Francisco Tupac Amaru, Tomasa Condemaita the Cacica of Acos, José Verdejo and Andres Castelo, captains in the Inca's army, and the executioner Oblitas.
Verdejo, Castelo, Oblitas, and Bastidas were hung at once. The rest were heavily chained, tied up in the bags which are used for carrying the maté or Paraguay tea, and dragged backwards into the centre of the square by horses. Francisco and Hipolito Tupac Amaru, the one an old man verging on fourscore years, the other a youth of twenty, then had their tongues cut out, and, with Tomasa Condemaita, were garrotted by an iron screw, the first that had been seen in Cuzco. Micaela, the wife of the Inca, was then placed on the same scaffold, her tongue was cut out, and the screw was placed round her neck in presence of her husband; but she suffered cruelly, because her neck was so small that the screw failed to strangle her. The executioners then placed a lasso round her neck, and pulled different ways, at the same time kicking her in the stomach and bosom until they succeeded in killing her. The Inca was then taken into the centre of the square, his chains were taken off, and his tongue was cut out. He was then thrown on the ground; lassos, secured to the girths of four horses, were fastened to his wrists and ankles, and the horses were made to drag different ways, "a spectacle never before seen at Cuzco." As the unfortunate Inca's body was thus raised into the air, his youngest son Fernando, a child of ten years, who had been forced to witness this horrible massacre of his relations, uttered a heartrending shriek, the knell of which continued to ring in the ears of those who heard it to their dying day.[234] The horses did not pull at the same time, and the body remained suspended like a spider for many minutes, until at last the brutal miscreant Areche, who was looking on from a window in the College of the Jesuits, caused the head to be cut off.[235] The child Fernando was then passed under the scaffold, and sentenced to be banished for life to one of the penal settlements in Africa.
Many of the Spanish citizens were present, but not an Indian was to be seen. They afterwards declared that, while the horses were torturing the Inca, a great wind arose, with torrents of rain, and that even the elements felt the death of the Inca, whom the inhuman and impious Spaniards were torturing with such cruelty.[236]