South America: Observations and Impressions / New edition corrected and revised

by Viscount James Bryce Bryce

Considerable skill had been attained in weaving. Handsome woollen ponchos, apparently designed for use as religious vestments, have been found, the colour patterns harmonious and the wool exquisitely fine. The Chimu tapestries and embroideries shew taste as well as technical skill. Copper, the metal chiefly used in Peru, was mined and smelted in large quantities; and the reduction of silver ores was also understood, yet the age of stone implements was not past, either for peaceful or for warlike purposes. As no cementing material had been discovered, walls were rendered exceptionally strong either by carefully fitting their stones into one another or fly clamping them together by metal. Of this latter method there are examples at Tiahuanaco.

Taking Peruvian art as a whole, as it appears in pottery and pictures and carvings, it is inferior in grace of form and refinement of execution both to Egyptian and to early Greek work, such as that of the Mycenæan period. Neither is there anything that shews such a power of drawing the human figure and of designing ornament as the ruined temples of Yucatan display.

The most signal excellence the Peruvians attained seems to have been in building. The absence of wood turned their efforts towards stone, and gave birth to works which deserve to be compared with those of Egypt, and far surpass in solidity any to be found in North America. Of the temples, too little remains to enable a judgment to be formed, either of their general design or of their adornment. But the stonework is wonderful, indicating not only a high degree of manual expertness, but the maintenance of a severe standard of efficiency through every part, while the skill shewn in the planning of fortifications so as to strengthen every defensive line and turn to account the natural features of the ground would have done credit to the military engineering of fifteenth-century Europeans.

But the race was also in some ways strangely inept. Both the Quichua tribes and the subjects of the Chimu sovereign on the Pacific coast seem to have shewn no higher invention than the Aymarás, who launched their rush balsas on Lake Titicaca, for the Spaniards found them using nothing but small canoes on the rivers and clumsy rafts for creeping along the shore with the help of a rude sail, though the Caribs of Venezuela, otherwise far less advanced, carried on a brisk trade in large sea-going canoes all the way along the line of the Antilles from the mouth of the Orinoco to the peninsula of Yucatan.

The few songs that have been preserved do not commemorate events or achievements like the ballads of Europe, but are mostly simple ditties, connected with nature and agriculture. There were, however, dramas which used to be acted, and among them one considerable work which, long preserved by oral recitations, was written down in the seventeenth century by Dr. Valdez, a Spaniard, the priest of Sicuani, and generally held to be in the main of native authorship, though perhaps touched up by Spanish taste. This is the so-called drama of Ollantay. It has a fresh simplicity and a sort of romantic flavour which suggest that there was something more than prosaic industry in this people.

In the absence of literature, one seeks in the mythology of a race a test of its imaginative quality; and in its religion, an indication of its power of abstract thinking. In both respects, the Peruvians seem to have stood as much below the primitive Celts and Teutons, as they stood above the negro races, with their naïve animism and childish though often humorous fables. Whether the Spanish ecclesiastics were right in finding in the worship of the earth god Pachacamac a belief in a supreme deity, creator of the world, may be doubted. But that the worship of Sun, Moon, and Stars should have coexisted with ancestor worship, and with a sort of fetichism which revered and feared spirits in all objects, need excite no surprise. Such a mixture, or rather such a coexistence without real intermixture, of different strata of religious ideas, finds plenty of analogies in the ancient Helleno-Italic world as it does to-day in China and other parts of the East. There was a worship of the ghosts of the progenitors of the family and the tribe, a worship of various more or less remarkable natural objects, or rather of the spirits that dwelt in them, a worship of animals such as the strongest beast and largest bird of prey, the puma and the condor, and of the supremely useful llama (a devotion which was compatible with the sacrificing of the animal), a worship of plants, and especially of the maize and of the power which bade it grow, the Maize Mother. Above all these forms, congenial to the humbler classes, rose the worship of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (especially the Pleiades), representing a higher range of ideas, yet connected with the more primitive nature superstitions by the sense that the Sun evoked life from the earth and by the finding, in the constellations, the shapes of the animals that were sacred on the earth. Nor were these the only points in which we discover resemblances to Old World religions. Peru rivalled Egypt in the care taken to preserve the bodies of the dead as mummies,[35] and these, so skilfully dried as not to offend the senses, were sometimes placed in their dwellings. The Quichuas practised divination by the flight of birds (like the Dyaks of Borneo), and by the inspection of the entrails of victims, as the Romans did down to the end of the Republic. They had oracles delivered from rocks or rivers, like the Greeks, and the Huillca through whom the spirit spoke could, like the Delphic Pythia, sometimes be guided towards the answer desired. Men, and especially children, were sacrificed (though to a far smaller extent than in Mexico or among the Phœnicians). If cannibalism existed on the Plateau, it was rare, though it still remains among some of the wildest of the Amazonian tribes.

That there is nothing of which men are so tenacious as their superstitions may perhaps be ascribed to the fact that life is ruled more by emotion and habit than by reason. The Peruvians made no fight for their religion, which, to be sure, was not necessarily inconsistent with such Christian rites as the friars demanded. They submitted to baptism with that singular passivity which marks nearly all the South American races. They threw into the lakes or hid in the ground all the temple gold that could be got away before the Spanish plunderers fell upon them, but made little attempt to defend their sacred places or images. Nevertheless under a nominal, not to say a debased, Christianity, they long continued to practise the ancient rites, and to this day wizardry and the devotion to the local huacas (sacred places or objects) are strong among the people. These primeval superstitions, which existed long before the Inca Sun worship had been established, have long survived it. If all the people who now speak Spanish were to depart from Peru and Bolivia, and these regions were to be cut off from the world and left to themselves, pagan worship, mixed with some few Christian words and usages, might probably again become, within some twenty generations, the religion of the Andean countries, just as tribes in the Caucasus which were converted to Christianity in the days when the Roman Empire reached as far east as Tiflis were found to have retained of it, after twelve centuries, nothing but the practice of fasting in Lent and the use of the sign of the cross. Nature worship still holds its ground, though no doubt in a highly extenuated form, in every country of Europe.[36] Habit and emotion are the most universal and the deepest-down things in human nature, present where reason is feeble, and gripping the soul tighter than do any intellectual convictions. Religious sentiment may hold men to old beliefs and practices long after the origin and grounds of the belief have been forgotten.

Comparing the Indians of the Andes with those of the plateau of Anahuac, and especially with the Aztecs, the former appear a less vigorous and forceful people, and distinctly inferior as fighting men. The North Americans generally, including not only the Mexicans, but such tribes as the Sioux, the Comanches, and the Iroquois, loved war, and were as brave and fierce in it as any race the world has seen. The South Americans, except of course the Araucanians of Chile, the Charruas of Uruguay, and perhaps also the Caras of Quito, were altogether softer. They still make sturdy soldiers when well led, and do not fear death. But they shewed little of the spirit and tenacity of the Red Men of the North. Even allowing for the terror and amazement inspired by the horses, the firearms, the armour, and the superior physical strength of the Spanish invaders, who were picked men, some of them veterans from Italian wars, the resistance of the Peruvians was strangely feeble. They were also mentally inferior. The Spaniards thought the Mexicans far more intelligent. Neither race had made the great discovery of alphabetic writing, but those of Anahuac had come much nearer to it with their quasi-hieroglyphic pictures than had the Peruvians with their Quipus, knotted strings of various colours. On the other hand the rule of the Incas and their more pacific type of civilization represent a more fully developed and better settled system of administration than the military organization of those allied pueblos which were led by the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). These latter did no more than exact tribute and require contingents in war from the tribes who dwelt round them on the Mexican plateau and between the plateau and the Gulf, while the Incas not only exercised undisputed suzerainty for a thousand miles to the south of Cuzco and nearly another thousand to the north, but had devised, in their own domain of central Peru, a scheme of government whose elaboration witnesses to the political capacity of the rulers. Even if we discount a good deal of the description given by the early writers of the "State Socialism" established by the Incas, it seems probable that more was done in the way of regulating the productive activities of the subjects than in any other primitive people, either of the ancient or of the modern world. Public officials, it is said, regulated the distribution and cultivation of the land, its produce being allotted, partly to the Inca, partly to the service of the Sun, his temples and ministers, partly to the cultivator or the clan to which he belonged. Thus State Socialism was strengthened by its association with a State Church, and as everybody was free to worship his local huacas as well as the Sun there was nothing to fear from heresy or non-conformity. The Incas maintained roads, some of which are said to have been paved,[37] and tambos or rest-houses along the roads, together with a service of swift messengers whose feats of running excited the admiration of the Spaniards. They made plans in relief of their cities, and some accounts declare that they adorned their walls with pictures of former sovereigns. By the general testimony of the early Spanish writers, the country was peaceful and orderly. Other vices, including that of drunkenness, are charged upon them, but theft and violence were extremely rare. Indeed, the habit of obedience was cultivated only too successfully, for it made them yield, after a few scattered outbursts of resistance, to a handful of invaders.

The political astuteness of the Incas, visible in their practice of moving conquered tribes, as did the Assyrian kings, to new abodes and replacing these by colonists of more assured loyalty, was perhaps most conspicuous in the success that attended their scheme of basing imperial power upon national Sun worship, making the sovereign play on earth the part which the great luminary held in the sky, and surrounding his commands and his person with an almost equal sanctity. The Inca was more to his subjects than any European or Asiatic monarch has ever been to his, more than was the Mikado in Japan or the Czar to the peasantry of Russia a century ago.

When the Spanish invasion broke like a tornado upon Peru, it was natural that the Inca throne should be uprooted and the ancient Sun worship with it. But the Conquerors also therewith destroyed, in the thoughtless insolence of force and greed, the whole system of society and government. Some of them, writing twenty or thirty years later, expressed their regret.[38] Wretchedness had replaced prosperity; such virtues as the people had possessed were disappearing, their spirit was irretrievably broken. The serfdom to which the peasantry were by the Conquest subjected was not paternal, as that of the Incas had been, and was harsher, because the new master was a stranger without sympathy or compassion. There was no one to befriend the Indian, save now and then a compassionate churchman; and even if he could get the ear of the Viceroy or bring his appeal to the Council of the Indies in Spain, the oppressor on the spot was always able to frustrate such benevolent efforts. How far the people died out under these new conditions is matter of controversy, but it seems clear that the coast valleys (already declining as the result of frequent wars) were soon almost depopulated; and in place of the eight millions whom the Viceroy Toledo's enumeration reported in 1575,[39] there were in 1794 only 608,000 Indians and 244,000 mestizos within the seven Intendancies of Peru (excluding what is now Bolivia).