After having governed Peru for six years and a half, the Marquis of Cañete begged to be allowed to return home. He was succeeded by Don Luis de Velasco, Marquis of Salinas, who came from Mexico, where he had been the viceroy. The Marquis of Salinas entered Lima on the 24th of July, 1596, and governed Peru until the end of 1604.
Chili had been comparatively quiet under the immediate successors of Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, although the war with the Araucanians had never actually ceased. In 1583 Philip II. selected a military officer of great experience and approved valor as governor of Chili. Don Alonso de Sotomayor left Spain for Buenos Ayres with seven hundred men, and made the journey across the Pampas and over the pass of Uspallata, reaching Santiago on the 22d of September, 1583. He and his brother Luis carried on a desultory war against the Araucanians for several years. During 1588 the attacks of the Indians were led by an intrepid heroine named Janequeo, who was resolved to avenge the death of her husband. The governor was superseded in 1592 and proceeded to Callao, where he commanded a ship, under Don Beltran de Cueva, in the fleet which attacked and captured Sir Richard Hawkins and his ship. Sotomayor then returned to Spain.
The new governor of Chili was Don Martin Garcia Oñez de Loyola, the same cavalier who married an Ynca princess, and captured young Tupac Amaru. He was a Basque, of the province of Guipuzcoa, and a near relative of Saint Ignatius. He arrived at Valparaiso, with four hundred soldiers and abundant supplies of warlike stores, on the 23d of September, 1592, reaching Santiago on the 6th of October. The Araucanians had elected the aged chief Paillamacu as their toqui, with two younger warriors named Pelantaru and Millacalquin as his lieutenants. Believing the subjugation of Araucaria to be practicable, the new governor traversed the country between Imperial and Villarica during the year 1597, but failed to discover his astute foes. In the spring of 1598 Loyola was at Imperial, where he received a letter from his wife, the Ynca princess Doña Beatriz Coya, urging him to retreat to Concepcion, as the Araucanians were rising. He set out for Angol, accompanied by only sixty officers, on the 21st of November, 1598, and stopped for the night in the valley of Curalaba. When all were wrapped in sleep, the tents were attacked by five hundred native warriors, and the governor was killed, with all his companions. His widow, the Ynca princess, went to Spain with a young daughter, who was given in marriage by Philip III. to Juan Henriquez de Borja, heir of the house of Gandia, and was at the same time created Marquesa de Oropesa.
SOTOMAYOR.
[Fac-simile of a part of a copperplate in Ovalle’s Historica Relacion de Chili. Rome, 1648.—Ed.]
The death of the governor was a signal for a general rising. Within forty-eight hours there were thirty thousand Araucanian warriors in the field under the toqui Paillamacu. All the Spanish towns south of the river Biobio were taken and destroyed, the invasion was hurled back beyond Concepcion, and the Spaniards were placed on the defensive.
The seventeenth century opened in Peru with a period of peace, during which the system of government elaborated by the viceroy Toledo was to be worked out to its consequences,—and in Chili, with the prospect of a prolonged contest and an impoverished treasury. In both countries the future of the native races was melancholy and without hope.
