The South American Republics, Part 2 of 2

by Thomas Cleland Dawson

TRAVELLERS DESCENDING A MOUNTAIN ROAD.

Quesada had lost three-fourths of his men in reaching the promised land, but once there he encountered fewer difficulties than any of the other great Spanish conquerors. The numerous nation of the Chibchas inhabited the southern plateaux, who acknowledged allegiance to the zipa of Meuqueta. But their so-called empire possessed no military force or cohesion, although they had carried agriculture to a high degree of perfection. They manufactured cotton cloths, mined gold and emeralds, worked artistic ornaments, had a circulating medium and a calendar, lived in houses, built splendid temples, and had tools hard enough to carve stones into elaborate sculptures. Their government was absolute; crimes were severely and relentlessly punished; the caste of priests wielded great power. Altogether they appear to have reached a stage of material civilisation not much inferior to the aztecs of Mexico, the caras of Ecuador, or the incas of Peru, but in efficiency of governmental and military organisation they fell far below those great peoples. Spanish chroniclers have amused themselves with recording traditions of great wars in which the Chibchas had assembled armies of hundreds of thousands not long before the conquest, but the fact remains that less than two hundred Spaniards overcame them and reduced them to unquestioning obedience within a few months and without serious loss. Indeed, Quesada's successors had more difficulty with the smaller nations who inhabited the northern plateaux of Tunja, Socorro, and Tundama, and the most serious resistance was made by the semi-savage tribes of the upper Magdalena, who fought nearly as desperately as the Indians of Antioquia and the Caribbean coast.

Quesada chose the site of the ancient Chibcha capital for his city and there Bogotá was founded on the 7th of August, 1538. It lies on the eastern border of a magnificent level plain, the bed of the largest of the prehistoric lakes, thirty miles broad and sixty long, and nearly nine thousand feet above sea-level. One hundred and fifty thousand people live on that plain to-day, and the population in Chibcha times was probably even larger. The same year Benalcazar reached the neighbourhood of Bogotá, having come down the valley of the Magdalena from Quito and Pasto, and at the very same moment arrived an expedition from Coro in Venezuela, which had crossed the mountains south of Maracaibo and followed south along the llanos lying at the eastern base of the Colombian Andes, thence climbing the sierra to Bogotá. Remarkable as it may seem, these three bands of indomitable Spaniards, starting from widely separated points on the coast, met each other in the remote interior of the continent, brought to the same place by the fame of the fertility and riches of the Chibcha kingdom. The Venezuelans under Federmann, and the Ecuadoreans under Benalcazar, accepted the bribe which Quesada offered them not to interfere with his conquest, and the three chiefs, laden with gold, returned to Spain in the same ship.

Quesada left his brother in nominal command of the colony, but each of the conquerors was a law unto himself. When the governor of Santa Marta came up to Bogotá they refused to recognise his authority. Tunja and Velez were founded in 1539 on the plateaux north of the capital, and a year or two later Quesada's brother wasted a great part of his forces in a fruitless expedition to the mountains of Pasto in search of the Eldorado. Meanwhile, in 1539, the Portuguese Geronimo Mello had succeeded in entering the mouth of the Magdalena, making his way for a considerable distance upstream. The great river proved to be perfectly navigable from the sea to a point nearly as far south as Bogotá, and the Spaniards immediately utilised it as a route to Santa Marta and Cartagena far preferable to the track through swamps and foothills which Quesada had followed. Each of the plateau provinces lying on the mountains which follow its eastern bank had its own paths down the slopes to the river, and a practicable though tedious and expensive communication with the Caribbean was developed.

NATIVE BOATS, MAGDALENA RIVER.

In 1542 Lugo, an adventurer who had successfully intrigued against Quesada, arrived with a commission as adelantado and considerable reinforcements. New cities were founded among the gold mines of the upper Magdalena at Tocaima, Ibague, and Neiva, as well as at Pamplona at the northern end of the plateaux. The tribes of Bogotá, Tunja, Velez, Socorro, and Pamplona submitted without appreciable resistance, and their fertile fields were divided into great estates among the Spaniards. But the more savage tribes in the gold-bearing valleys of the Upper Magdalena and Cauca and in Antioquia struggled hard to escape impressment into the mines, and war almost exterminated them. The same thing happened on the plains of the Caribbean coast, although in that region some tribes maintained their independence. To work the mines and plantations negro slaves had to be imported, with the result that black blood predominates in the lower regions of Colombia, while the descendants of the aborigines are in a majority on the eastern plateaux.

Within twenty-five years after the establishment of the first permanent Spanish post at Santa Marta, the whites were in undisputed control of practically all Colombia which is now inhabited by civilised people. Three great territorial divisions corresponded to the three directions in which the conquest had been effected. From Cartagena, Antioquia and the lower Cauca had been settled; from Quito, Popayan, Pasto, and the upper Cauca; and Bogotá was the centre of the region extending from Pamplona south along the plateaux and into the valley of the upper Magdalena. This division of the country soon brought on disputes as to pre-eminence and jurisdiction between the authorities, foreshadowing the demand for local independence which desolated Colombia with civil war during so many years of the last century. Lugo, the new adelantado, who had displaced Quesada, deprived many of the original conquerors of their grants of lands and Indians, and the old and new comers fell to fighting among themselves. But their numbers were too small to make their disagreements really threatening to the interests of the Spanish Crown. In 1545 the Spanish government sent out a commissioner to reduce the country to order. The first royal commissioner was replaced by a second in 1553, who carried things with a high hand, depriving proprietors of their grants, nominating members of his own family to the lucrative posts, and finally even exiling Quesada himself and executing some of the most famous of the original conquerors. Under instructions from Madrid he promulgated many laws for the protection of the Indians from the exactions and tyrannies of the encomenderos—regulations which, as in Peru, excited great dissatisfaction among the colonists and were constantly evaded. It was forbidden for any encomendero to be military governor of his district, and the original conquerors were replaced in all positions of authority by officials newly brought out from Spain. However, the office of commissioner was an irregular and extraordinary one and his powers ill-defined. Even at Bogotá his authority was defied by the audiencia and the municipal councils, and over the remote provinces of Antioquia and Popayan, Cartagena and Panama, his power was a mere shadow. The Spanish government resolved to erect Quito and Bogotá into presidencies, whose governors would be responsible directly to Madrid and have greater authority over subordinate officials.