By the time this had come about, the power of the Incas had been broken for good and all, so far as practical purposes were concerned. Driven from their temples and strongholds, certain sections of the race survived, although among them were remarkably few of the noble families who had formed the salt of the land. Great numbers of the rank and file of the race met with the fate which was at that time so universal throughout the country, or rather in its metal-bearing lands. They were sent to the mines, and, worked and flogged to death, their numbers diminished with a ghastly rapidity. Some sections, more fortunate, were at a rather later age set to agriculture, and, forced to somewhat more congenial tasks than the first workers, they continued to serve the Spaniards.
CHAPTER VI
SPANIARD AND NATIVE
The collisions with the various peoples of the Continent had now afforded the conquistadores an opportunity of testing the power of each. The force of the impact had, it is true, swept into the background the first peoples with whom they had come into contact; but, as the scanty numbers of the pioneers filtered across the new territories, they found that the task of annexation was by no means so easy in every case.
So far as a warlike spirit was concerned, the difference between the aboriginal tribes of the tropics and those of the southern regions was most marked. The Incas were, in many respects, a warlike race—that is to say, they had possessed themselves by force of arms of the country in the neighbourhood of Lake Titicaca, wresting this from whatever tribe of the Aymaras it was which, highly civilized, had held the land before them. This nucleus of empire, once obtained, they had spread to the south and to the north, and to a certain extent to the east, conquering all with whom they had come into contact, with the notable exception of the Araucanians in Southern Chile.
The Chibchas, too, in the far north, whose civilization in some respects equalled that of the Incas, might be termed a conquering race. They dominated the north of the Continent, and upheld their empire securely by force of arms. Yet it is curious that both these nations, representing the chief civilizing and inventive powers of the Continent, presented nothing beyond the most futile resistance to the invaders. Their gods desecrated, their faith outraged, stung to utter fury and hate, even these passions failed to lead them to a single victory of consequence, notwithstanding the fact that their tens of thousands of warriors were faced by no more than a few dozen Spaniards. Disheartened by the terrifying onslaught of the men in mail mounted on gigantic horses, they appear to have reconciled themselves with melancholy submission to a fate which only on two or three occasions during the following centuries they endeavoured with any earnestness at all to disturb.
How different were the battles of the south! The Spaniards who found themselves face to face with the Araucanian Indians, and with those of the Pampa on the other side of the Andes, had a far more strenuous tale to tell. The armour which had resisted with such contempt the more delicate weapons of the Peruvians and of the northern warriors in general was crushed in and dented beneath the tremendous blows dealt by the clubs of the muscular and warlike Araucanians, who charged into the battle with a wild joy that left them as drunk with triumph at the end of the combat as they had been with their native spirit at the beginning.
These Araucanians were, indeed, born fighters. In common with the general run of mankind, it was their lot to be defeated from time to time. Nevertheless, they repaid the defeats frequently with very tragic interest; in any case, subdued by force of arms they certainly never were. Much the same may be said of the Indians of the Argentine and Uruguayan plains. The aggressive tactics here were by no means confined to the Spaniards. On the first landing of the conquistadores, these found themselves, after having given provocation in the first instance, cooped up within the flimsy walls of their new settlements, surrounded by fierce and vindictive enemies, who charged on them from time to time with bewildering fury, choosing as often as not for the purpose the hour just before dawn, which they would make horrid with their warlike cries and shrill yells. These, too, remained entirely unsubdued to the last. They had the ill-fortune to be favoured with fewer natural advantages than the Araucanians. They had neither woodland valleys nor mountains in which to take shelter in the time of need. They fought on a plain which was as open as day, and as flat as a table from horizon to horizon. No crude strategy was possible—at all events, in the daytime—and the attack of the charging Indians was necessarily visible from a distance of leagues.