It was at this time that Melgar, the enthusiastic young poet of Arequipa, joined the national army, and became secretary to Vicente Angulo.
On the approach of Ramirez, Pumacagua evacuated Arequipa, and manœuvred for some days on the lofty plains between Apo and the post-house of Pati. Ramirez steadily advanced, and came in sight of the Indian army at a little hut called Chillihua, near the head of the "alto de los huesos;" but Pumacagua, avoiding a battle, retreated hastily into the interior, and Ramirez entered Arequipa without opposition on December 9th. His first act was to shoot Don José Astete, and other patriots who had compromised themselves during the time that Pumacagua was in the city.
The enthusiasm of the Indians was so great that, notwithstanding the affair at Chillihua, which one authority describes as a retreat,[269] and another as a disastrous defeat,[270] they again flocked to the standard of the old cacique at Pucara, where he soon had another undisciplined half-armed force around him, numbering 40,000 men. Ramirez organized a force at Arequipa of 1200 men armed with muskets, and fifty dragoons; and, commencing his march on February 11th, 1815, he encamped round the town of Lampa on March 1st. On that day he received a letter from Vicente Angulo, protesting against the war being carried on in a savage and relentless spirit, representing that, when a whole people rises in arms, the insurgents ought to be granted belligerent rights; and urging the duty of concluding the war by negotiation, and not by bloodshed. "It is not fear," Angulo continues, "that induces me to write thus, but a feeling of humanity."[271] Ramirez answered that he would accept nothing but unconditional surrender. On March 4th he advanced to Ayaviri, on the Vilcañota range, which separates the Collao from the valley of the Vilcamayu. Here he received a letter from Pumacagua. The cacique asked the Spanish general for whom he was fighting, seeing that Ferdinand VII. had been sold to the French, and that no man knew where he had been taken to; he declared that there was now no other king but the caprice of Europeans, and that, therefore, he desired to establish a national Government; and he told him that he was ready to meet the Spanish army on the field of battle.[272] Ramirez replied that a general of the king's army would not waste words with vile and insolent rebels, and that his bayonets would soon make them alter their tone.[273]
From the 6th to the 10th of March both armies marched in parallel lines, separated by the rivers Umachiri and Ayaviri. On the 10th Pumacagua drew up his army behind the river Cupi, which was much swollen by the rains. He had 30,000 men, of whom 800 only were armed with muskets, and forty field-pieces, said to have been cast at Cuzco by an Englishman named George ——,[274] some of them of very large calibre, with which he annoyed the Spaniards during the night before the battle. Ramirez had only 1300 men; but they were all disciplined and well-armed soldiers. He crossed the river Cupi, near Umachiri, in spite of opposition; charged and dispersed the Indians, killing a thousand men, and captured all their cannon. The rout was complete, and the chiefs of the patriot army sought safety in flight.[275]
The poet Mariano Melgar was taken prisoner, and immediately shot on the field of battle. The fate of this young man was very melancholy: an unrequited passion led him to join the desperate cause of the insurgents, and he is now chiefly remembered by his melancholy love-songs and despedidas.[276]
Ramirez, immediately after the battle of Umachiri, marched to Cuzco, where he arrived on the 25th; but he detached a portion of his troops in pursuit of the Indians, who were again defeated close to the town of Azangaro. The Spaniards cut off the ears of all their prisoners, flogged them cruelly, and sent them to tell their comrades that they would be treated in the same way unless they instantly laid down their arms. The Indians fled over the hills, followed by the Spaniards, who again defeated them on a hill near Asillo, six leagues to the north. Amongst the prisoners at Asillo were the mutilated Indians who had been sent to terrify the rest, still bravely fighting against their tyrants. Of such heroism is the usually meek and docile Indian capable.[277]
After the battle of Umachiri, Pumacagua had escaped to the heights of Marangani; but he was betrayed by an Indian whom he had sent down to buy some food, and brought a prisoner into Sicuani. After a sort of confession had been extorted from him, he was hung, not even with a respectable halter, but with a lasso, being seventy-seven years of age. José, Mariano, and Vicente Angulo, Gabriel Bejar, and many others were shot at Cuzco by Ramirez, who, in the following June, again united his forces with those of General Pezuela, in Upper Peru. Thus ended the last great rising of the Indians under one of their own chiefs, after a campaign which lasted ten months.
Ten years after the death of Pumacagua every Spanish soldier had been driven out of the country. Peru was independent, and the Indians received equal rights with citizens of Spanish descent in the new Republic, at least so far, and only so far, as the law could give them. The mita or forced labour was entirely abolished in 1825; but the tribute or capitation-tax continued to be exacted until 1854 in Peru, and is still the principal source of revenue in Bolivia, the Upper Peru of Spanish times. It is not, however, quite exact to suppose that this tribute was a capitation-tax; it was practically at least a rent or tax on the produce of the land, and more resembled the land-tax of India. The tribute was levied on every male between the ages of eighteen and fifty; but, in point of fact, nearly every individual between those ages cultivated his own piece of land, or shared the produce of a larger piece with several others. Latterly the tribute paid by each Indian generally amounted to five dollars a year; but, in some villages, the Indians paid double that amount, the exact rule being handed down by tradition, and known to the caciques. Those who paid most enjoyed a more dignified position. The department of Puno yielded 300,000 dollars; that of Cuzco, 400,000. The entire abolition of the tribute by General Castilla in 1854 is a portion of that mad and reckless system of finance by which the revenue of Peru is made to depend almost exclusively on the yield of guano from the Chincha Islands.
In Bolivia the tribute is still paid by men between the ages of eighteen and fifty: the amount being six to ten dollars a year for proprietors of land, and five dollars for strangers. The revenue from this source amounted, in 1850, to 4,595,000 dollars.
But though the mita, the reparto, and the tribute have all been abolished by law in Peru, the deplorable civil wars, and the system of keeping up a large standing army, which is not only unnecessary, but most mischievous, have entailed much oppression on the Indians in the shape of impressment for the army. Villages are frequently surrounded by a party of soldiers, and all the able-bodied men that can be caught are driven away to serve in the ranks. This deplorable waste of human life is rapidly reducing the already scanty population; and the system is more oppressive and cruel because it is done in defiance of the law, by the military presidents and generals who have hitherto been able to set the laws enacted by civilians at defiance, when it suits their purpose.[278] Yet on the whole the condition of the Indians is immeasurably more endurable under the Republic than it was when they groaned under the mitas of the Spanish corregidors.