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CHAPTER II
THE INDIANS OF SPANISH AMERICA

The native populations with which the Spaniards were brought into contact differed widely, in respect of the degree of civilization to which they had attained, from the Indians of the Northern Continent. The first colonists of Virginia, Massachusetts, and the St. Lawrence valley found the soil possessed by fierce tribes, wholly without knowledge of the arts of civilized life. The savages of the north supported themselves almost entirely by the chase, regarding agriculture with contempt; their dwellings were miserable huts; their clothing was the skins of the beasts which they slew; they were without fixed places of abode, and wandered hither and thither in the forest as their hopes of success in hunting directed. They left no traces of their presence on the land which they inhabited – no cleared forest, nor cultivated field, nor fragment of building. They were still savage and debased in a degree almost as extreme as humanity has ever been known to reach.

The inhabitants of the islands where Columbus first landed were the least civilized of the southern races. But the genial conditions of climate under which they lived, and the abundance with which nature surrounded them, seemed to have softened their dispositions and made them gentle and inoffensive and kind. They were scarcely clothed at all, but they lived in well-built villages and cultivated the ground. Their wants were few; and as the spontaneous bounty of nature for the most part supplied these, they spent their days in simple, harmless indolence. Land among them was “as common as the sun and water.” They gave willingly, and without hope of recompense, any of their possessions which visitors desired to obtain. To the pleased eye of Columbus they seemed “to live in the golden world without toil; living in open gardens, not intrenched with dikes, divided by hedges, or defended with walls.”

The natives of Central America were of a fiercer character and more accustomed to war than those of the islands. They had also made greater progress in the arts; and the ornaments of gold which the Spaniards received from them evidenced considerable skill in working the precious metals. They wore mantles of cotton cloth, and must, therefore, have mastered the arts of spinning and weaving. Their achievements in architecture and sculpture still remain to excite the wonder of the antiquary. Here and there, wrapped almost impenetrably in the profuse vegetation of the forest, there have been found ruined cities, once of vast extent. These cities must have been protected by great walls – lofty, massive, skilfully built. They contained temples, carefully plastered and painted; and numerous altars and images, whose rich sculptures still attest the skill of the barbarian artist.

It was, however, in the ancient monarchies of Mexico and Peru that American civilization reached its highest development. The Mexican people lived under a despotic Government; but their rights were secured by a gradation of courts, with judges appointed by the Crown, or in certain cases elected by the people themselves, and holding their offices for life. Evidence was given on oath, and the proceedings of the courts were regularly recorded. A judge who accepted bribes was put to death. The marriage ceremony was surrounded with the sanctions of religion, and divorce was granted only as the result of careful investigation by a tribunal set up for that special business. Slavery existed; but it was not hereditary, and all Mexicans were born free. Taxation was imposed according to fixed rates, and regular accounts were kept by an officer appointed to that service. The Mexicans had made no inconsiderable progress in manufactures. They wove cotton cloths of exceedingly fine texture, and adorned them with an embroidery of feather-work marvellously beautiful. They produced paper from the leaf of the Mexican aloe; they extracted sugar from the stalk of the Indian corn. They made and beautifully embellished vessels of gold and silver; they produced in abundance vessels of crystal and earthenware for domestic use. They had not attained to the use of iron; but they understood how to harden copper with an alloy of tin till it was fitted both for arms and for mechanical tools. Agriculture was their most honourable employment, and was followed by the whole population excepting the nobles and the soldiers. It was prosecuted with reasonable skill – irrigation being practised, land being suffered to lie fallow for the recovery of its exhausted energies; laws being enacted to prevent the destruction of the woods. The better class of dwellings in cities were well-built houses of stone and lime; the streets were solidly paved; public order was maintained by an effective police. Europe was indebted to the Mexicans for its knowledge of the cochineal insect, whose rich crimson was much used for dyeing fine cotton cloths. The Mexicans were without knowledge of the alphabet till the Spaniards brought it; but they practised with much skill an ingenious system of hieroglyphic painting, which served them fairly well for the transmission of intelligence. Montezuma was informed of the coming of the Spaniards by paintings which represented their ships and horses and armour.

Notwithstanding the industrial progress of this remarkable people, their social condition was, in some respects, inexpressibly debased. It was their custom to offer to their gods multitudes of human sacrifices. Their most powerful motive in going to war was to obtain prisoners for this purpose; and the prowess of a warrior was judged by the number of victims whom he had secured and brought to the sacrificing priest. Wealthy Mexicans were accustomed to give banquets, from which they sought to gain social distinction by the culinary skill exercised and the large variety of delicacies presented. One of the dishes on which the cook put forth all his powers was the flesh of a slave slaughtered for the occasion.³⁰ The civilization of the Mexicans was fatally obstructed by their religion. The priesthood was numerous, and possessed of commanding authority. The people regarded the voice of the priest as that of the deity to which he ministered, and they lived under the power of a bloody and degrading superstition. Here, as it has been elsewhere, a religion which in its origin was merely a reflection of the good and the evil existing in the character of the people, stamped divine sanction upon their errors, and thus rendered progress impossible.

For two or three centuries before her fall, Peru had constantly extended her dominion over her less civilized neighbours. Her supremacy was widely recognized, and many of the surrounding tribes were persuaded to accept peacefully the advantages which her strong and mild government afforded. It was her wise policy to admit her new subjects, whether they were gained by negotiation or by force, to an equality of privilege with the rest of the people, and to present inducements which led quickly to the adoption of her own religion and language. By measures such as these the empire was consolidated while it was extended, and its tranquillity was seldom marred by internal discontent. When the Peruvian empire received its sudden death-blow from the Spanish conquerors, it was doing the useful work which England has done in India, and Russia in Central Asia – subjugating the savage nations whose territories lay around and imparting to them the benefits of a civilization higher than their own.

Peru was governed according to the principles of Communism. A portion of land was set apart for the Sun – the national deity – and its revenues were expended in the support of temples and a priesthood. A second portion belonged to the Inca – the child and representative of the Sun. The remainder was divided annually among the people. All shared equally. When a young man married he received a fixed addition; when children were born to him further increase was granted. He might not sell his land or purchase that of his neighbour; he could not improve his condition and become rich. But neither could he suffer from want; for the Government provided for his support if he could not provide for it himself, and poverty was unknown. It was equally impossible to be idle, for the Government enforced the exercise of industrious habits.

Agriculture was the national employment. To illustrate its dignity, the Inca was wont on great public occasions to put his own divine hand to the plough and reveal himself to his people in the act of turning over the fruitful sod. The Peruvians were acquainted with the virtues of the guano, which was piled in mountains upon the islands lying along their coasts, and were careful to protect by stern laws the sea-fowl to which they were indebted for the precious deposit. Between the sea and the mountains there stretched a level expanse on which rain never fell. This otherwise profitless region was nourished into high fertility by an elaborate system of irrigation. On the mountains the solid rock was hewn into terraces and covered with soil laboriously carried up from below. In the valleys flourished the tropical banana and cassava tree. On the lower ranges of the mountains grew the maize. At a greater height appeared the American aloe, the tobacco plant, and the coca, the favourite narcotic of the Indian. Yet further up the mountain-side Europeans first saw the potato, then largely cultivated in Peru, and destined at a later time to attain vast social and even political significance in the Old World.

The public works of Peru furnish striking evidence of the industry of the people and the enlightened views of their rulers. Two great roads traversed the country from north to south. One of these, whose length is estimated at fifteen hundred miles, ascended the mountains and passed along the plateau, at a height occasionally of twelve thousand feet; the other ran parallel in the plain which was bordered by the sea. The construction of the upper road was necessarily a work of prodigious difficulty. Vast ravines had to be filled with solid masonry; lofty masses of rock had to be pierced by galleries or surmounted by a long succession of steps; bridges formed of osiers twisted into huge cables had to be hung across rivers. The roadway was formed of massive paving-stones and of concrete; and although no wheeled vehicle or beast of burden other than the llama passed over it, the Spaniards remarked with grateful surprise on its perfect smoothness. There was no road in Europe so well built and so well maintained. Since the conquest it has been suffered to fall into ruin; but here and there, where mountain-torrents have washed the soil from underneath, massive fragments of this ancient work are still to be seen hanging in air, so tenacious were the materials used, so indestructible was the structure produced.

The Peruvians had gained no inconsiderable skill in textile manufacture. Cotton grew abundantly on the sultry plains. Large supplies of wool of extreme fineness were obtained from the Peruvian sheep. Two varieties of these – the llama and the alpaca – were domesticated and carefully watched over by Government officers. Two other varieties roamed wild upon the mountains. But once in the year a great hunt was organized under royal authority; the wanderers were caught and shorn; and the wool thus obtained was carried to the royal store-house. Thence it was given out to the people, to be woven into garments for themselves and for the Inca. The beauty of the fabrics which were produced awakened the admiration of the Spaniards, as greatly superior to the finest products of European looms.

The sons of the great nobles were instructed in the simple learning of the country, in seminaries erected for that purpose; beyond the narrow circle of the aristocracy education did not pass. Some of these youths were to be priests, and they were taught the complicated ritual of the national religion. Some would have to do with the administration of public affairs, and these were required to acquaint themselves with the laws. Many would become subordinate officers of Government, having charge of revenues; recording births and deaths – for the registration system of the Peruvians was painstaking and accurate; taking account of the stores received and given out at the royal magazines. These were instructed in the Peruvian method of keeping records – by means of knots tied upon a collection of threads of different colours. The education of the nobles did not extend further, for little more was known; and as the Peruvian intellect was devoid of energy and the power to originate, the boundaries of knowledge were not extending. The masses of the people lived in contented ignorance; pleased with the Government which directed all their actions and supplied all their wants; enjoying a fulness of comfort such as has seldom been enjoyed by any population; without ambition, without progress, but also without repining; wholly satisfied with the position in which they were born and in which they lived; experiencing no rise and no fall from one generation to another.

Such were the people upon whom there now fell, with awful suddenness, the blight of Spanish conquest. Their numbers cannot be told with any approach to accuracy, for the estimates left by the conquerors are widely diverse. The population of the city of Mexico is set down by some writers at sixty thousand; by others, with equal opportunity for observation, at six hundred thousand; and a divergence equally baffling attends most of the statements which have been supplied to us. There is, however, abundant evidence that the Southern Continent was the home of a very numerous population. The means of subsistence were easily obtained; in Peru marriage was compulsory; the duration of life and the increase of population were not restrained, as in Northern America, by severity of climate and the toil necessarily undergone in the effort to procure food. Cortes, on his way to Mexico, came to a valley where for a distance of twelve miles there was a continuous line of houses. Everywhere near the coast the Spaniards found large villages, and often towns of considerable size. Peru was undoubtedly a populous State; and the great plateau over which Mexico ruled contained many tributary cities of importance. One Spanish writer estimates that forty million of Indians had perished within half a century after the conquest; – beyond doubt an extravagant estimate, but the use of such figures by an intelligent observer is in itself evidence that the continent was inhabited by a vast multitude of human beings.

The power of resistance of this great population was wholly insignificant. The men were not wanting in courage; the Peruvians, at least, were not without a rude military discipline: but they were inferior in physical strength to their assailants; they were without horses and without iron; their solitary hope lay in their overwhelming numbers. They were powerfully reinforced by the diseases which struck down the invaders; but their own poor efforts at defence, heroic and self-devoted as these were, sufficed to inflict only trivial injury upon their well-defended conquerors. A vast continent, with many millions of men ready to die in defence of their homes, fell before the assault of enemies who never at any point numbered over a few hundreds.

The invaders claimed the continent and all that it held as the property of the Spanish Sovereign, upon whom these great possessions had been liberally bestowed by the Pope. The grant of his Holiness conveyed not only the lands but also the infidels by whom they were inhabited; and the Spaniards assumed without hesitation that the Indians belonged to them, and were rightfully applicable to any of their purposes. Upon this doctrine their early relations with the natives were based. The demand for native labour was immediate and urgent. There was gold to be found in the rivers and mountains of the islands, and the natives were compelled to labour in mining – a description of work unknown to them before. There was no beast of burden on all the continent, excepting the llama, which the Peruvians had trained to carry a weight of about a hundred pounds; but the Spaniards had much transport work to do. When an army moved, its heavy stores had to be carried for great distances, and frequently by ways which a profuse tropical vegetation rendered almost impassable. Occasionally it happened that the materials for vessels were shaped out far from the waters on which they were to sail. Very often it pleased the lordly humour of the conquerors to be borne in litters on men’s shoulders when they travelled. The Indian became the beast of burden of the Spaniard. Every little army was accompanied by its complement of Indian bearers, governed by the lash held in brutal hands. When Cortes prepared at Tlascala the materials of the fleet with which he besieged Mexico – when Vasco Nuñez prepared on the Atlantic the materials of ships which were to be launched on the Pacific, the deadly work of transport was performed by Indians. The native allies were compelled to rebuild the city of Mexico, carrying or dragging the stones and timber from a distance, suffering all the while the miseries of famine. Indians might often have been seen bearing on bleeding shoulders the litter of a Spaniard – some ruffian, it might well happen, fresh from the jails of Castile.

The Indians – especially those of the islands, feeble in constitution and unaccustomed to labour – perished in multitudes under these toils. The transport of Vasco Nuñez’s ships across the isthmus cost five hundred Indian lives. Food became scarce, and the wretched slaves who worked in the mines of Hispaniola were insufficiently fed. The waste of life among the miners was enormous. All around the great mines unburied bodies polluted the air. Many sought refuge in suicide from lives of intolerable misery. Mothers destroyed their children to save them from the suffering which they themselves endured.

Nor was it only excessive labour which wasted the native population. The slightest outrage by Indians was avenged by indiscriminate massacre. Constant expeditions went out from Spanish settlements to plunder little Indian towns. When resistance was offered, the inhabitants were slaughtered. If the people gave up their gold and their slender store of provisions, many of them were subjected to torture in order to compel further disclosures. Vasco Nuñez, who was deemed a humane man, wrote that on one expedition he had hanged thirty chiefs, and would hang as many as he could seize: the Spaniards, he argued, being so few, they had no other means of securing their own safety. Columbus himself, conscious that the gold he had been able to send fell short of the expectation entertained in Spain, remitted to the King five hundred Indians, whom he directed to be sold as slaves and their price devoted to the cost of his majesty’s wars. Yet further: there came in the train of the conquerors the scourge of small-pox, which swept down the desponding and enfeebled natives in multitudes whose number it is impossible to estimate. The number of Indian orphans furnished terrible evidence of the rigour of the Spaniards. “They are numerous,” writes one merciful Spaniard, “as the stars of heaven and the sands of the sea.” And yet the conquerors often slew children and parents together.

It was on the islanders that these appalling calamities first fell. They fell with a crushing power which speedily amounted to extermination. When Columbus first looked upon the luxuriant beauty of Hispaniola, and received the hospitality of its gentle and docile people, that ill-fated island contained a population of at least a million. Fifteen years later the number had fallen to sixty thousand. The inhabitants of other islands were kidnapped and carried to Hispaniola, to take up the labours of her unhappy people, and to perish as they had done. In thirty years more there were only two hundred Indians left on this island. It fared no better with many of the others. At a later period, when most of these possessions fell into the hands of the English, no trace of the original population was left. On the mainland, too, enormous waste of life occurred. No estimate lower than ten million has ever been offered of the destruction of natives by the Spanish conquest, and this number is probably far within the appalling truth. Human history, dishonoured as it has ever been by the record of blood causelessly and wantonly shed, has no page so dreadful as this.

But although there prevailed among the conquerors a terrible unanimity in this barbarous treatment of the natives, there were some who stood forward with noble courage and persistency in defence of the perishing races. 1502 A.D. Most prominent among these was Bartholomew de Las Casas, a young priest, who came to the island of Hispaniola ten years after Columbus had landed there. He was a man of eager, fervid nature, but wise and good – self-sacrificing, eloquent, bold to attack the evils which surrounded him, nobly tenacious in his life-long efforts to protect the helpless nations whom his countrymen were destroying. He came to Hispaniola at a time when the island was being rapidly depopulated, and he witnessed the methods by which this result was accomplished. 1511 A.D. Some years later he was sent for to assist in the pacification of Cuba. In the discharge of this task he travelled much in the island, baptizing the children. One morning he and his escort of a hundred men halted for breakfast in the dry bed of a stream. The men sharpened their swords upon stones which abounded there suitable for that purpose. A crowd of harmless natives had come out from a neighbouring town to gaze upon the horses and arms of the strangers. Suddenly a soldier, influenced, as it was believed, by the devil, drew his sword and cut down one of the Indians. In an instant the diabolic suggestion communicated itself to the whole force, and a hundred newly-sharpened swords were hewing at the half-naked savages. Before Las Casas could stay this mad slaughter the ground was cumbered with heaps of dead bodies. The good priest knew the full horrors of Spanish conquest.

When the work of pacification in Cuba was supposed to be complete, Las Casas received from the Governor certain lands, with a suitable allotment of Indians. He owns that at that time he did not greatly concern himself about the spiritual condition of his slaves, but sought, as others did, to make profit by their labour. It was his duty, however, occasionally to say mass and to preach. 1514 A.D. Once, while preparing his discourse, he came upon certain passages in the book of Ecclesiasticus in which the claims of the poor are spoken of, and the guilt of the man who wrongs the helpless. Years before, he had heard similar views enforced by a Dominican monk, whose words rose up in his memory now. He stood, self-convicted, a defrauder of the poor. He yielded a prompt obedience to the new convictions which possessed him, and gave up his slaves; he laboured to persuade his countrymen that they endangered their souls by holding Indians in slavery. His remonstrances availed nothing, and he resolved to carry the wrongs of the Indians to Spain and lay them before the King. 1515 A.D. Ferdinand – old and feeble, and now within a few weeks of the grave – heard him with deep attention as he told how the Indians were perishing in multitudes, without the faith and without the sacraments; how the country was being ruined; how the revenue was being diminished. The King would have tried to redress these vast wrongs, and fixed a time when he would listen to a fuller statement; but he died before a second interview could be held.

The wise Cardinal Ximenes, who became Regent of the kingdom at Ferdinand’s death, entered warmly into the views of Las Casas. He asserted that the Indians were free, and he framed regulations which were intended to secure their freedom and provide for their instruction in the faith. He chose three Jeronymite fathers to administer these regulations; for the best friends of the Indians were to be found among the monks and clergy. He sent out Las Casas with large authority, and named him “Protector of the Indians.” 1516 A.D. But in a few months the Cardinal lay upon his death-bed, and when Las Casas returned to complain of obstructions which he encountered, this powerful friend of the Indians was almost unable to listen to the tale of their wrongs. The young King Charles assumed the reins of government, and became absorbed in large, incessant, desolating European wars. The home interests of the Empire were urgent; the colonies were remote; the settlers were powerful and obstinate in maintaining their right to deal according to their own pleasure with the Indians. For another twenty-five years the evils of the American colonies lay unremedied; the cruelty under which the natives were destroyed suffered no effective restraint.