The South American Republics, Part 2 of 2

by Thomas Cleland Dawson

Toledo had put his colonial system in full operation by 1580, and from that time to near the close of the Spanish epoch the story of Peru offers little of interest. Expansion ceased; the colonists made no effort to spread over the Amazon plain, or to prevent the Portuguese on the Atlantic coast from occupying the interior of the continent almost to the foot of the Andes. On the seacoast of Venezuela and the plains of the lower Plate the Spanish race still showed a scanty fraction of that vigour and enterprise which had enabled the early conquerors to spread over half the continent in a few short years, but in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia the country slowly decayed. Though the viceroys who followed each other in rapid succession were selected from among the greatest grandees of Spain, they were held to an increasingly rigid account, and the smallest concession to commerce or a failure to send home the utmost farthing which could be wrung from the people was severely and peremptorily punished. Their jurisdiction extended over all Spanish South America; the captains-general of New Granada, Venezuela, and Chile, the royal audience of Bolivia, the president of Ecuador, and the governors of Tucuman, Paraguay, and Buenos Aires being all nominally subject to their orders. But in practice these widely separated divisions of the continent were largely independent. Lima was, however, the political, commercial, and social centre of South America. To its port came from Panama the goods destined for Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and even Paraguay and Buenos Aires. Many of the viceroys were lovers of letters, and the university produced scholars and authors not unworthy comparison with those of the Old World. The continual influx of Spaniards of distinguished Castilian ancestry and gentle training made the language of even the common people singularly pure, and the sonorous elegance of the Spanish tongue as spoken during the classical period has been best preserved in the comparative isolation of Peru. The influence of the bishops and priests, the Jesuits and the Franciscans, was hardly inferior to that of the officials. The clergy controlled education; every village had its parish priest who compelled the Indians to go to mass and made them pay heavily for the privilege; the Inquisition was early introduced and performed its dreadful functions without let or hindrance.

GENERAL VIEW OF LIMA, SHOWING THE CATHEDRAL.

The regulations which attempted to confine the oppression of the Indians within bearable limits were persistently violated, not only by private individuals, but by the corregidors themselves. Kidnapping was reduced to a system, and often all the male adults of a village were dragged off to work in the mines, leaving only the women and children to till the fields. The corregidors went into partnership with merchants, and the poor Indians were compelled to purchase articles for which they had no use, and thrown into slavery to work out the debt if they failed to pay. The wiser viceroys did not waste their energies in vain efforts to mitigate the profitable abuses. They devoted their attention rather to the exaction of the last penny of taxes, to be spent in maintaining the horde of office-holders, or to be remitted to Spain. So rigidly was taxation enforced and so successful were the Spaniards in finding rich mines of silver, gold, and mercury, that early in the seventeenth century the revenue had reached the sum—enormous in those days of low prices—of nearly five hundred thousand pounds, of which about half was regularly sent to Madrid. Foreign nations could not effectively interfere with Spain's commercial and fiscal monopoly. The Isthmus was in her hands, and the voyage through Magellan's Straits or around Cape Horn was too stormy and uncertain for the slow, clumsy ships of that age, and only a few English and Dutch expeditions, half-trading, half-piratical, ravaged the coast towns in the seventeenth century.

The most memorable event of Peru's history during the seventeenth century was the revelation of the sovereign virtues of quinine. The Lima physicians were unable to cure the Countess of Chinchon, the viceroy's wife, of a stubborn attack of malarial fever, but the rector of the Jesuit college had received some fragments of an unknown bark from a Jesuit missionary to whom they had been given by an Indian in the mountain wilds of southern Ecuador. Doses of this quickly restored the vice-queen, and when Linnæus named the world's plants in scientific order, he called the genus to which the tree belongs chinchona, from the viceroy, through whom its virtues had come to notice.

The succession of the Bourbons to the Spanish Crown, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, brought about a considerable change of colonial policy. To England was conceded the privilege of exporting negroes to South America, and French vessels were permitted to come round the Horn and trade at Peruvian ports. The latter concession was soon revoked and the commerce of the Pacific coast again became a monopoly for the ring of merchants at Cadiz. The Atlantic, however, by this time swarmed with ships of all the European maritime Powers, and it was impossible to prevent smuggling at the Caribbean and Argentine ports. The Madrid government reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was impossible to administer effectually from Lima the provinces which were commercially tributary to the Caribbean Sea. In 1740 Bogotá, on the populous plateau of eastern New Granada, was made the capital of a new viceroyalty, under whose jurisdiction were placed the captaincy-general of Venezuela and the presidency of Quito. Buenos Aires was a resort for contraband traders under non-Spanish flags, and smuggling through that port so increased that goods coming from Spain by the Panama route were undersold in the markets of Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, and even Peru itself. In 1776 the southern Atlantic region was detached from Lima, and to the new viceroyalty of Buenos Aires were attached not only the Plate provinces—Buenos Aires and Paraguay—but also that part of Chile which lay east of the Andes, as well as Tucuman and the audiencia of Charcas as far north as Lake Titicaca. By these changes Peru was reduced to its present dimensions, except that Chile remained attached as a semi-independent captaincy-general.

Three times since its foundation had Lima been nearly destroyed by earthquakes, but none of them was to be compared with the convulsion which in 1746 reduced the whole city to a shapeless mass of ruins. More than a thousand people perished; a great wave engulfed Callao, drowning half the population and carrying great ships far inland.

The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 was effected without difficulty. In the neighbourhood of Lima alone they owned five thousand negro slaves and property to the value of two million dollars, and every penny of their immense accumulations was confiscated by the government.

The great Indian rebellion which had so long been expected broke out in 1780 under the leadership of Tupac Amaru, the lineal descendant of the last of the reigning Inca emperors. In Peru proper it did not spread beyond the southern frontier provinces and the story of its suppression belongs to Bolivia. The authorities were so alarmed that the reforms, to procure which Tupac had risked and lost his life, were shortly after voluntarily adopted. The vitality and fighting qualities of the half-breeds now stood revealed, and the Creoles, jealous of imported officials and dissatisfied at their exclusion from places of honour and profit, realised that a weapon lay ready to their hand when they should determine upon revolution.

General Theodore de Croix, a Fleming, was entrusted with the reorganisation and reform made necessary by the Indian rebellion. The corregidors, petty tyrants over whom no effective control could be maintained, were abolished; the country was divided into a few great provinces, each ruled by an intendente to whom were responsible the subdelgados who had charge of local affairs, and measures were taken for the enforcement of the laws intended to protect the Indians.