When the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors began to occupy the New World they found it peopled everywhere by native tribes whose physical characteristics and, to some extent, their languages also, indicated that although they had inhabited America during countless ages, they probably all had the same, and that an east Asiatic, origin. No part of the two continents from Behring's Straits to Cape Horn (except a few hopelessly barren deserts) was quite untenanted, but some regions were far more populous than others. These regions were the high plateaus of Anahuac (Mexico) with the adjoining lower regions of Yucatan and Guatemala, the plateau of Bogotá, and the plateau of Peru. It was in these that the greatest progress had been made toward civilization and a settled agricultural life; while the lower woodlands and the more or less arid prairies, such as those of the Missouri and of southern Argentina, were more thinly inhabited. There may well have been in Anahuac and Yucatan as many people as in all the rest of North America, and in the Peruvian realm of the Incas as many people as in all the rest of South America.
Now the existence of this aboriginal population has been and still is a factor of the first magnitude in all parts of the continent (except Argentina and Uruguay, where it hardly exists), and in this fact lies one of the most striking contrasts between the northern and southern halves of the Western Hemisphere. The importance of the native Indian element in South America—and the same thing holds true of Mexico and Central America—resides partly in the fact that it furnishes the bulk of the labouring people and a large part of the army, partly in the influence which it has exerted, and still exerts, on the whites, commingling its blood with theirs and affecting their habits and life in many ways.
When the Spaniards came to the New World, they came mainly for the sake of gold. Neither the extension of trade, the hope of which prompted the Dutch, nor the acquisition of lands to be settled and cultivated, thereby extending the dominion of their crowns, which moved most of the English and French, nor yet the desire of freedom to worship God in their own way, which sent out the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England,—none of these things were uppermost in the minds of the companions of Columbus and Ponce de Leon, of Vasco Nuñez and Cortes and Pizarro. No doubt they also desired to propagate the faith, but their spiritual aims were never suffered to interfere with their secular enterprises. Few settlers came from Spain to till the land. The first object was to seize all that could be found of the precious metals, much to the astonishment of the natives, who thought that gold must be to them a sort of fetich. The next was to discover mines of those metals and make the Indians work them. The third was to divide up the more fertile districts into large estates, allotting to each adventurer his share of labourer-natives along with his share of the lands. No settlers came out to clear the ground from wood and build homes upon it, as did the colonists of New England, and those also who sought to create a New France on the St. Lawrence. No Spaniard thought of tilling the soil himself. Why should he, when he could make others till it for him? Where it was already under cultivation by the native peasants, they were turned into serfs attached to the encomienda. Where there was forest, the conquerors seldom troubled themselves to fell it, and that which they found as wilderness remained wilderness in the hands of the savage tribes. Where it was open prairie, there was as little reason for disturbing the nomads who wandered over it. Accordingly, the invaders became a ruling caste, living on the labour of their Indian serfs, and for a long time they confined themselves to the lands on which the latter were already established. So it befell that the aborigines, who in the northern parts of North America were either destroyed or driven out to the west, continued to be in Spanish America one-half or more of the population, those who were already semicivilized being kept as labourers, those who were savages being left to themselves in their forests or half-desert prairies. No agricultural European population grew up in the settled districts. As there were aborigines on the spot to cultivate the land already improved, comparatively few negroes were transported from Africa, and these chiefly to the shores of the Caribbean and to Peru. It was only in the tropical regions of the Antilles and (somewhat later) of Brazil that negro slavery grew up on a large scale; and even there mining, rather than agriculture, was the first cause of their being brought from Africa. The need for negroes was not great in Mexico or Peru, because the native Indians were of a hardier stock than the feeble Arawaks of the Antilles, and lived on under their European masters, though ground down and reduced in numbers by ill treatment. Thus when at last the Spanish colonies asserted their independence, they started without that incubus of a mass of negro slaves which brought so much trouble upon the southern states of the North American Union.
Between the numerous aboriginal tribes there were the greatest differences not only in their degree of advancement toward civilization, but in intelligence, in virility, in fighting quality, and in that kind of resisting power which enables a people to survive under oppression. The best fighters seem to have been—I am not now including the tribes of eastern North America—the Aztecs of Mexico and the Mapoche or Araucanians of Chile. The Caribs in some of the Lesser Antilles and in Venezuela were fierce and tenacious, while their neighbours, the Arawaks of the other Antilles, seem to have become extinct under Spanish severities in half a century. We have no materials for even the vaguest guess at the numbers of these tribes, but it is evident that some disappeared altogether, and that others were greatly reduced. The Chibchas of Bogotá, who were estimated at a million when first reached by the Conquerors, are said by a Spanish annalist to have been almost exterminated in twenty years. Of the Mochicas or Yuncas on the Peruvian coast, still numerous at the coming of Pizarro, though many had perished during their conquest by the Incas, few were left after half a century, and their cities have long been heaps of ruins, perhaps partly because the irrigation works which brought water to them were allowed to perish. A census taken in Peru by the Viceroy Toledo in A.D. 1575 is said to have shewn eight millions of Indians in what is now Peru and Bolivia. Two centuries later there were less than half that number. So it is stated that the Indians round Panama rapidly declined in number when the Spaniards established themselves there. The natives of northeastern Brazil were killed off in the end of the sixteenth century, though the tale that two millions were destroyed in about twenty years is scarcely credible; and the less numerous tribes of central Argentina and Uruguay have entirely vanished. The process still goes on, though to-day the means are usually less violent. It is intoxicating liquors and European diseases, not any ill treatment by the Chileans, that have been reducing the stalwart Araucanians to a fourth or fifth part of what they were eighty years ago, and the Tehuelches and other Patagonian tribes, including the wretched Fuegians, are dying out largely from natural causes. But in the Amazonian forests along the Putumayo river—and that within the last few years—the cruelties and oppressions practised by the rubber gatherers upon the helpless Indians have destroyed many thousands of lives and apparently altogether blotted out some tribes.
How many aborigines now remain in Latin America, it is impossible to ascertain. Even in such advanced countries as Mexico and Peru, there are no trustworthy figures, not only because it is impossible to find means of counting the wild nomads of northwestern Mexico and the still wilder savages of eastern Peru, but also because, even in the civilized districts, it is hard to determine who is to be deemed an Indian and who a mestizo, or half-breed. However, any estimate, if clearly understood to be merely conjectural, is better than none at all, so I may say that in Mexico[108] there are probably, out of fifteen millions of people, about eight millions of Indians, with at least six millions of mixed blood, and the rest Spaniards; while in Peru and Bolivia, out of a total of about six millions, three and a half millions are Indians, one and a half millions mestizos, and the rest more or less pure Spaniards.[109] The one state which is almost wholly Indian, so that the Guarani language is the prevailing tongue, is the inland country of Paraguay, and the one which has no Indians at all is Uruguay, lying on the coast, not far from Paraguay. Of the total population of South America, estimated at forty-five millions, probably eight to nine millions may be pure Indians. Besides these there are, possibly, thirteen millions of mestizos or half-breeds, and fifteen of persons who deem themselves white, even if a good many have some infusion of aboriginal blood.[110] But if we omit Argentina, almost entirely, and Uruguay entirely, white, as well as Brazil, and confine our view to the other eight republics in which the Indian element is larger, a probable estimate would put the number of pure Indians at more than double that of the whites, and a little less than that of the mestizos. Upon such a computation the total quantity of native blood would much exceed the European. Such an estimate, however, can make no claim to accuracy. I give it only because it seems, from all I could gather, to represent, in a rough sort of way, the proportions of the races. Anyone who chooses to consider all the more educated mestizos as whites, and all Indians with any touch of white blood as mestizos, would, of course, bring out different figures. The tendency of official statistics is in that direction, for everybody wishes to be reckoned as a white man, but such a method does not truly represent the racial facts.
Of the total of about nine millions of Indians, two or three millions may be wild, Indios bravos, as the South Americans call them, and in little contact with civilized whites or mestizos. To this class belong many of the aborigines in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, as well as most of the far smaller number still left in Argentina. Of the more or less civilized and settled Indians, more than one-half, about three and a half millions, are in Peru and Bolivia; and it is of these that I shall now proceed to speak, as I had opportunities in these countries of ascertaining their position, and as they are themselves more interesting, because they are the descendants of what was, before the Spanish Conquest, a comparatively advanced people. What is true of them is, moreover, true, in a general sense, as regards the settled aborigines of the northern republics. In those states, however, there is no such solid mass of sedentary agricultural Indians as dwell on the plateaux and inter-Andean valleys of Peru and Bolivia.
Though at the time of the Conquest there were probably in the Inca empire many different tribes speaking different languages, all have now been fused into two, the Quichuas to the north of Lake Titicaca, and the Aymarás, both around its shores and to the south of it in Bolivia. Having given some account of both races in earlier chapters,[111] I need only add that the two languages are generally spoken all over the central Andes from the frontiers of Ecuador on the north to those of Chile and Argentina on the south. Comparatively few of these Indians, probably less than a fifth, are able to talk Spanish. Some few live in the towns and practise handicrafts. Three-fourths of the population of La Paz is Aymará, while in Cuzco at least one-third is Quichua. The vast majority, however, are country folk cultivating the soil as tenants or labourers or tending sheep and cattle as herdsmen for the landowners, who are, of course, either of Spanish or of mixed blood. Comparatively few Indians own small plots of their own. The landlords, who in the colonial times oppressed the peasants so atrociously as from time to time to provoke even this naturally submissive people to rebellion, no longer venture to practise the exactions and cruelties of those days. Authority is not feared as it was then, and could not be used to support such flagrant injustice. Neither do the clergy wring money from their flocks, as in those old bad days, though even now the fees charged for marriages are so high that the rite is commonly neglected. The ancient tribal system has melted away and the cacique, as the Spaniards called him, who was the head of a local community down till the end of the eighteenth century, is now gone, but the old organization of the dwellers in a village by brotherhoods, and resting, or supposed to rest, upon blood relationship, still exists, and local affairs are managed by the local officials mentioned in an earlier chapter.[112] Thus, the Indian is left very much to himself, except that he pays rent to the landlord and is often bound to render him personal service at his residence during part of the year. This is called the Mita. His food is not very nutritious, consisting largely of chuño, i.e. frozen potatoes, usually ground into flour. His clothing is scanty, his mode of life hard and wretched, especially on the bleak plateaux. Yet he is not in that abject poverty which fears starvation; perhaps, indeed, not so near the minimum level of subsistence as are millions of the people in China and India. He does not contrast his own evil case with the luxury of the rich, as do the slum dwellers of European cities, nor does he feel his case to be evil, for it is no worse than his forefathers have borne for ten generations, and he knows no other.
Not only the Quichuas and Aymarás, but the Indians of the northern republics and of southern Chile are quite illiterate, and, as respects education, just where they were under the Incas, perhaps rather farther back, because there was then a sort of national life which has been long since quenched. There seems to be among them little or no desire for instruction. Even should any seek to rise in life, he would find no means of doing so, unless perchance some kindly priest should give the rudiments of knowledge to a boy brighter than the rest. Religion does nothing to stir their minds. They are nominally Christians, but of many of them that may be said to-day which was said in 1746 by the humane and orthodox Spaniards, Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, whose secret report upon things in South America, and among others upon the condition of the Indians in Peru and Ecuador, made to the king of Spain, was published in England eighty years later. They say:—
"The religion of the Indians is no more like the Christian religion than it is to that which they had while they were pagans, for if the matter be well examined it will be found that notwithstanding the nominal conversion of these tribes, so small is the progress they have made in knowledge that it will be hard to discover any difference between the state in which they now find themselves, and that in which they were at the time of the Conquest."[113]
That the influence of the priesthood did not commend religion to the people nor relieve their misery may be gathered from this further extract from the same secret report:—