Spanish America, from the earliest period to the present time

Contents

PAKT I.

PREFACE 1

I. ONCE UPON A TIME 6

Part II. L The Age Of Cortes 105

IL PASSING UNDER THE YOKE .160

III. PIZ ARRO 196

IV. CHILI 233

V. MORE SPANISH CIVILIZATION 268

VL THE SEQUEL OF CORTES .805

\fll. THE WEST INDIES : 336

FART III,

I. THE REVOLT AGAINST SPAIN 375

n. THE FINAL STRUGGLE .....412

m. PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE 450

(iii)

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SPANISH AMERICA

Frontispiece — Primeval Forest in the Cordilleras Mountains, Salta, At- i/^ gentine Republic ..........

^ Bakairi Youths

- South American Indians ......... c

Bogota, Colombia (From a photograph) .....,:

The Pampas in the Argentine Republic . . , . . t

^Guayaquil Harbor, Ecuador «, ^

Preface

The close of this century witnesses a remarkable dramatic episode in the war between the United States and Spain, which has just been brought to an end. One of the oldest and once most powerful States of Europe, now worn out, and bowed with feebleness, relinquishes the empire in the west and in the east which it has held during four centuries, and retires within its original boundaries. And into its place, the inheritor of its burdens and responsibilities, steps the newest and strongest nation of the modern world, erect and confident, with the boundless future lying fair before it. It is a vivid illustration of Tennyson's profound apothegm —

"The old Order changeth, giving place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways.''

It is an opportune moment in which to pass in review the history of Spain's acquisition of her colonial empire, of the manner of her administration of it, and of the way she lost it. In the following pages an attempt has been made to throw upon the screen the series of pictures which tell the tale. It is not "a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Sound and fury indeed it contains in abundance; but its significance is deep and tragic, and its moral weighty. It is well that

2 PREFACE

we should ponder it, standing as we do on the threshold of our own career. Spain's pohtical deeds have been for the most part evil. Evil deeds, in men and in nations, are the result of predisposing conditions and qualities. All men inherit the same nature, and are prone to commit, under temptation, the same sins. The United States prides itself on its enlightenment, its civilization, its humanity and its democracy. It has the virtues of its era. But when Spain arose in her northern mountains and drove the Moor step by step from her peninsula, she too was enlightened and civilized; and whatever Christian virtues characterized the eleventh centur3", Spain possessed. She was religious, learned, artistic, and brave. From the eleventh to the sixteenth century she increased in power and wealih, but in character she became debased and corrupt. Her religion became bigotry, her strength tyrann}', her pride nourished itself on greed for wealth and for territory which breeds wealth. She perpetrated hideous cruelties in the name of God and of civilization. She became the deadliest foe of that human liberty which she had championed 60 valiantly in her Moorish wars. Every nation of Europe owed her a grudge; she obstructed commerce" and industry, and lay sullen and inert before the path of progress. The world, and the spirit of the new ages was against her, and inevitably she fell, contesting every inch with her old stubbornness, but without her old strength. She did not repent; she admitted the commission of no wrong. To-day, crushed without an effort by the Western Republic, she stands bleeding and beggared, and none is so poor to do her reverence. But her trao-ic fate mav well teach a lesson to

PREFACE 3

her conqueror. Great opportunities, and with them great temptations, are before us. Spain started with hopes as fair as ours. Let us so act before God and man that we may not end in despair as dark as hers! Already tendencies are visible in our social and industrial life which, if indulged, might easily bring us, too, to shame. Of the talents which God has intrusted to us, He will require a strict account.

The history of Spanish America could not be other than a record of bloodshed and oppression, which at last becomes monotonous to wearisomeness ; but it is not the less full of romance and interest. There is a rich picturesqueness about it which compels the attention; and striking figures throng its scenes and provoke our wonder and occasionally our admiration. It involves the story of the mightiest discovery of medieval times — the revelation of a new and unsuspected world. It illustrates the marvellous manner in which Providence compels the very selfishness of men to labor and build for others than themselves. "Our foes inherit us." It shows how impotent evil is to turn aside the stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.

In preparing the present volume, no attempt has been made to embody new material. The work is designed for the general reader, not for the curious scholar. To Prescott, Fiske, Bandolier, Hancock, Susan Hale, Theodore Child, W. H. Bishop, and many more, the author is indebted; and he has found much of value in current magazines and journals. The "Century Dictionary of Names" has proved itself of great use as an accurate and fertile book of reference His own

4 PREFACE

part in his volume has been that o£ an arranger and occasional commentator. Often, too, it has been that of an emitter; for the space at his -disposal made a careful selection indispensable; and in Spanish American history more than in many histories, events occur which are practically repetitions of one another.

The chapter of our administrative experiences with our new West Indian possessions remains to be written, because the experiences themselves are still to come. One can only wish that, should the chapter in question ever appear, its contents may be such as to make it the brightest and most agreeable of the book.

JULIAN HAWTHORNE.

HAWTHORNE'S HISTORY OF SPANISH AMERICA

PART I

TELLERS of mediaeval fairy-tales were wont to be chary of fixing their dates, probably from a feeling that dates were incompatible with the free conditions of fairyland. Therefore they devised that phrase, "Once upon a time," with which all the legitimate stories which enchanted our nursery days begin, and which may mean eitlier any period of the unmeasured past, or else some instant of the eternal Now upon \7hich the mysterious ship of Humanity is launched. Traditional usage has conferred upon the quaint form of words a charm of satisfaction which no more definite formula could convey ; we love it because it gives the imagination scope, and takes us out of the iron routine of the material world, where all things must occur in right order and sequence, and one day omitted or out of place upsets the balance of an entire chronology. Anything may have happened "once upon a time"; but at any specitiod time, only one thing could have happened in any given place ; and the impalpable horizons of fancy become an adamantine dome, which fits accurately over the landscape, and will not budge a hair-breadth upon any consideration. Man is justified in feeling restive under the tyranny of time; for the soul is immortal, and has no concern with arbitrarj'' measurements. And the soul looks forward to a state of freedom from material limitations, wlieu past and future shall be fused in an ever abiding present, and the life of the passing instant shall fill the confines of the univei*se.

Upon the relatively vast extent of this planet's duration, the recorded history of mankind makes but a little mark. A few thousand years are set off upon a line of many millions. The times before man are so immeasurable when compared with the time of his existence, that we might regard him, from the chronological standpoint, as the creature of but a moment. It is not until we think of him as a spirit embodied that he assumes his proper stature. All that preceded him was as nothing; "Darkness was upon the face of the Deep." Those semi-infinite geologic epochs lapsed and succeeded one another for his sake; the blind cells that drifted in the wash of prehistoric oceans; the strange serpent-forms that fought one another in the slime ; the amorphous beasts that roamed the uuimagined forests of the Prime, and dragged their ponderous length along the ghastly coasts, breathing a turgid, torrid atmosphere, through which the images of sun and moon showed dim-red ajid ominous: — i\il these Avere but prophetic of the human being to come, and owe to him alone their excuse for being. Vainly do we attempt to conceive of a period when man Wiis not; nor, in truth, has such a period ever existed, for man was ever implied, though not yet actually present. In the incandescent gases revolving in the vast of space were contained the elements destined at last to be f iishioned into his body and limbs ; and the uncouth and imperfect shapes of geologic animals were the obscure forecast of what he was to be. Mineral, vegetable and animal slowly and unconsciously perfected themselves while far off his coming shone. When the hour was ripe, and his kingdom ready, the monarch of all appeared, and rose erect upon his feet, with his brow toward heaven, and looked abroad, and gave to each living thing its name. The world— the universe, which spread around him, was his, for it was he; he wj^ its epitome, its cause, its end. Nothing in it was alien from him ; no remotest star in the

ONCE UPON A TIME t

firmament but was made of the identical stuff which constituted his body and bones. Time and space, those master twin-iUusions of the mortal senses, began with him — v^ith the workings of that brain which first perceived the relations of phenomena, and translated the conditions of the immortal spirit into the language of transient matter. AH that heretofore had been dead and purportless sprang, beneath his comprehending glance, into life and meaning. When did man begin? Not when the clay of the earth first assumed the image of the Creator and received into its nostrils the breath of life; but when the pregnant thought of the human race was launched from the mind of Deity andj guided by eternal law, set forth on its stupendous journey from the whirl of fiery vapors to the shapes of the men and women of to-day. Was it a thousand million years ago, or Was it yesterday? It is all one ; since the real man is a spirit, which has no concern with time ; and his experience of matter is but a passing incident of his everlasting development and progress. Let us use again the ancient, homely phrase^ and say that it all happened Once upon a time !

It seems singular that in accounting for the Western Coatinent, which we call the New World, we should find ourselves forced back not only into the half-legendary epochs of early Asiatic and European history, but further still toward that dark backward and abysm of time which far antedate all records. ' Taking the point of view that America was to be discovered, we find the movement toward it beginning at almost any point we please. But by a common agreement we have assumed that the race of man commenced a migration, in a westerly direction, from somewhere in the heart of Asia. A very leisurely migration it was, the stages of which were measured by hundreds or even by thousands of years. It had no defined object, beyond the desire, or the necessity^ to escape from a present environment. Of its first movements we know nothing save by inference ; nor can we teli why the movement was westward instead of eastward. Possibly there ti HISTORY OF SPANISH AMERICA

was a va^ue ciiriositj^ in the huuian mind to find out where tho sun wont to on his daily journey; his sotting: was in splontlv>i', and porhaps thoso who shouUl discover the hind of the ji^oUlen west wouUl meet with glorious experiences. But the risini>" of the sun is also glorious; and why should not prinuiive man have sought fortune in that direction? Perhaps, indeed, he did ; but so long ago that iu> memory of it remains. For aught Ave can say, the pressure of population in the Asiatic valleys may lirst have sought relief by sending out pioueors toward the rising sun ; and it may be these people who iX'cupied the American continent. At that time it is probable that a. man might walk dry-shod from Asia to America, by the northerly route ; there were no straits of Bering in those days. In fact, the geography of the world was doubtless very ditferent tlien from what it is now. Continents wei^e broader, and islands fewer. Europe extended fai* into the Atlantic ; and the legend of Atlantis may have better warrant tlifm modern historians and geographers are willing to admit. It was rumored to extend from near the west coast of Africa to the neighborhood of Central America, and to have been inhabited by a powerful and civilized race. But in some mighty convulsion of nature the great isUind sank beneath the sea, with most of its inhabitants. We might surmise, however, that some of them, forewarned of the destruction to come, may have succeeded in escaping to the African and American slioi*es. or to one of them. And since imagiiuvtion is frtv. we may suppi.>se that the moi'e civilized races of America, of whom at pi-esent only a vague tradition remains, sucli Jt* the Toltecs. and Piruivs, may have been the survivoi^ of rhat appalling catat^tivphe. There is, to be sure, no foundation for such a hypothesis; but, on the other hand, the chief reason adduced for disbelieving in Atlantis is the ascertained fact that the Atlantic is two niiles deep over the tireiv which the island is said to have occupied. The lu-gument can haa-dly be consideivd conclusive; a subsidence of two miles is little more remarkable than one of half a mile. Xevertheless. the existence of Atlfmtis must be conceded to be very doubtful, to say the most of it ; and as for the Toltecs and Piruas, there is in their traditions nothing suggestive of their having come ashore from a submerged island. When asked their origin, they commonly pointed toward the North ; — or to be more precise, those who purported to be their descendants did so.

For a time, theories founded upon this hint obtained general credence with historians. Books have been written to prove that America was settled by the lost tribes of Israel. The lost tribes must have gone somewhere: why not eastward by way of Siberia? But the enlarged views of later days make it seem probable that the Israelites were still in the womb of time long after- America had been settled by the Red Men. It would seem more hopeful to identify our Indians with the Biblical Adam, whose name means red men; and accordingly a recent enthusiast has discovered the site of the Garden of Eden in Central America, and even declares he has found the self -same club with which Cain wreaked his vengeance upon Abel for being more favored by the Almighty than himself. This prompts the reflection that there may be such a thing as discovering too much. Such speculations incline to fade in the light of late geological revelations. These inform us that during the Pleistocene period a large portion of the northern hemisphere of the earth was covered with a thick coat of snow and ice. In America, the limit of the glaciers was as far south as North Carolina. How long ago was this? Obviously there must be a limit, since we know that there was an epoch when tha earth was still so hot that such a phenomenon as the freezing of water was inconceivable. Experts seem inclined to the opinion that the Glacial epoch was coincident with the last period of high eccentricity of the earth's orbit, which began some two hundred and forty thousand years ago. Our globe swung so far away from the neighborhood of the sun that the climate was profoundly affected; and variations occurred which it is anything but comfortable even to imagine. Anything beyond imagination will not be required of us ; since the ice age is well past, and is not scheduled to return until after some eight hundred thousand years hence, more or less. But during its presence, it made its mark, which is still legible.

But what relation does the ice age bear to human history? Simply this — that many traces of the existence of man on this continent during the last ice age have been discovered. Stone weapons and todls, made by human hands, have been found in the Glacial drift ; stniy fragments of the bones of the makers themselves are not unknown; and some five and twenty years ago there was found by Dr. Abbott a number of paleolithic objects in Glacial drift along the banks of the Delaware River. These tools and utensils were last in use about one hundred and fifty thousand years ago. As for the famous Calaveras skull, found in the county of that name in 18G6, it has been assigned a date twice as remote as the above ; and there are not wanting persons- who affirm that the man who wore it may have lived not less than a million years before this age. Plainl^^, Science, in this matter, is open to the charge of indulging in a little guess-work. Practically, however, in the present infantine condition of historical knowledge, it can make no difference whether we say that the Calaveras man is one hundred and fifty, or three handred thousand years old; or whether we go the full limit of a million. In any case, the gap between him and anything relating to mankind that is matter of historic certainty, is so prodigious as to make the hope of ever spanning it seem fantastic. The only assurange to be derived from these discoveries is, that pian lived here in the west indefinite ages before the earliest traces of him in the written records of Asia and Europe. This, of course, is not to say that prehistoric man in America antedates prehistoric man on the eastern hemisphere. No doubt they were contemporaneous — six of one and half a dozen of the other. The real question of interest is, what was man doing between the time that we find him in geology, and the time that we find him in written records'? And the problem is even more puzzling

ONCE UPON A TimiE 11

in this continent than in the eastern one, for the reason that our red Indians are so nearly primitive a race even yet as scarcely to have emerged above savagery, and still to be in the midst of barbarism. They are to-day in the condition of some of the elder Asiatic peoples before the Egyptian pyramids were built. "What is the cause which rendered them so much more backward than their Asiatic contemporaries?

To this, as to many a similar query, the Evolutionists are ready with an answer, and a plausible one. These disciples of Darwin have made their views conspicuous of late, and they will by no means be ignored here; though it may as well be stated at the outset that we shall not always accept their conclusions implicitly. The philosophy which they exploit is a new one, and to many minds has the charm of novelty ; it seems to explain so much that they are fain to believe it capable of explaining everything. Their cardinal principle is, that the future is involved in the past. And it is their leading contention that man was immediately derived from the ape. So positive are their affirmations, and so beguiling their arguments, that persons of culture and prudence are very shy of opposing them. If, for example, man is not the offspring of the ape, of what is he the offspring? That the connecting link still delays to be discovered (in spite of many false alarms) is nothing; he will be discovered some day. That the attempt to generate life from inanimate matter has hitherto failed is nothing ; somebody may so generate it at any moment. Or if you profess a difficulty in comprehending how more can be taken out of the bag than has been put into it in the first place — ^how man can be derived from monkey unless he was previously contained in him — how there can be evolution without anterior involution, in short — you get answers which, if not perfectly clear, are at least sufficiently voluble. Meanwhile it is abundantly plain that, even as nature is said to abhor a vacuum, so does the evolutionist abhor the alternative of conceding what he is pleased to term a miraculous creation. If one order of animals does not spontaneously grow out of another, in consequence of the law of the survival of the fittest, and of the influence of environment, then, manifestly, we are driven to assume that God must have created all creatures in a series, one above another, and yet distinct and independent. Instead of having set Creation going with one initial bang, and ever after taking His ease, He must be supposed to be constantly at work, and to be, if anything, busier now than during the Biblical Seven Days. Instead of deftly sliding the instinct of the last ape into the reason of the first man. He must have endowed the latter with a distinct and unprecedented gift, bearing just enough resemblance to instinct to mislead the impulsive evolutionist. And to revert to the point whence this digression began, He must have delayed the development of the American red men for other reasons, and in other ways, than the ingenious evolutionists imagine. They say that it was simply a matter of the lack of cattle.

It is a very shrewd suggestion. But there was once an evolutionist who observed that a dog, before sitting down on the rug before the fire, turned round upon himself twice or thrice as if undetermined which side of his circle should ie fire ward, and which away from it : or perhaps with the hope of getting all sides toward the fire at once. Now why (said the evolutionist to himself) does the dog do this? It must be the survival in him of some ancient habit, when things were different from what they are now. And forthwith he sent his educated intelligence back along the stream of time, until he reached the primal dog, in his primal environment. That • environment, the evolutionist felt safe in assuming, had been partly grass; and, indeed, grass of an unusually tall and stubborn sort. When the primal dog, Inexperienced as yet in the luxuries of downy hearthrugs, wished to lie down, he was inconvenienced by this tall grass sticking up all round him, antagonizing his comfort and obstructing his view. But he was equal to the occasion ; he turned himself round and round until the tiresome grass was flattened down into a sort of nest, devoid of sharp upstarting

ONCE UPON A TIME lb

points, upon which he could repose in peace and security. How long it took the primal dog to hit upon this clever device we are not informed; but having once hit upon it, he repeated it so often, that even till this day, several hundred thousand years later, and upon rugs which are innocent of the discomforts which appertained to the primal grass beds, the habit sticks to him, and round and round needs must he revolve, in unconscious subservience to his own prehistoric ingenuity. Thus, at least, reasoned the evolutionist — or so it was pretended by the practical joker who, witli satirical intent, invented the illustration.

Now, the strange — the wellnigh inconceivable feature of this story is, that it was accepted ever since in sad earnest by too credulous evolutionists, who have quoted it with eagerness and applause, and instanced it in their books. The patent and preposterous absurdity of the notion has never once come in contact with their sense of humor; and it is to be feared that this imbecility on their part has caused widespread distrust in the lay mind as to the soundness of their conclusions in general. For if men could be found who Would swallow such a camel as that, how many a gnat might they not have inadvertently assimilated? — Of course no dog ever does or ever did turn round in grass in order to make a better lair for himself ; and consequently, no dog turns round on the hearthrug to-day because of the survival in his brain of the habit then acquired. Nor, for that matter, would he do so in any case ; the habits due to environment wear off, when the environment changes, as quickly as they were adopted.

Now, as to the assertion that cattle are the first cause of civilization, it is, as has been admitted, a shrewd one; but it is pure assumption. A condition and a relation are found, and an explanation of them is invented. But it is just as reasonable to say that civilization causes cattle, as the reverse. It is true that the domestication of animals is a concomitant of civilized life; it is true that cows and horses existed in the eastern hemisphere and not in the western; it is true that civilization in the former greatly antedates it in the latter part of the world. But it by no means follows that civilization in America might not have been accomplished without the cows and horses of Europe and Cathay. There was an epoch when there were no domestic cattle in the old world; but in the course of thousands of years certain animals were caught and tame.d, and by and by they appeared as horses, cows and sheep. The cattle did not come ready-made to the savage man, and induce him to be civilized; but he, feeling within himself the impulse toward civihzation, transformed wild beasts into cattle. In other words, civilization began in man, and not outside of him. In America, the animals which we now know as cattle did not exist. But there were other animals, in America, which might have been made-over into cattle, if our red men had felt the disposition to do so. There is the reindeer, for example, the buffalo, and, in the south, the llama. And, as a matter of fact, the llama was domesticated, after unnumbered ages' of training ; and so was the reindeer. Did civilization follow? In the case of the Piruas and Incas, a partial civilization did follow (or accompany) the achievement ; in the case of the Esquimaux it did not. Meanwhile it seems evident that the domestication of both llamas and reindeer was the outcome of necessity ; the people needed the creatures in their business; but there is nothing to show that the llamas civilized the Piruas, while on the other hand it is manifest that the reindeer failed to soften the manners of the Esquimaux. As for the buffalo, they have never been tamed, and the Indian tribes of North x4.merica have remained barbarians. But will any one assert that it was impossible to tame buffalo? In the course of two hundred and forty thousand years, more or less, might not this feat have been accomphshed? Is the wild buffalo any wilder than the primitive llama or reindeer? That they were not domesticated, then, must be owing to the fact that our red men did not care to domesticate them. With the alleged material for civilization at hand, they declined to avail themselves of it. And what judgment can we pronounce thereupon, but that the impulse toward civilization did not exist in the Indian's soul? Nor has it been created in him since the advent of civilized Europe four hundred years ago. He is either as wild as he was at first, or he is moribund.

Upon the whole, therefore, we miist regard the theory that cattle make civilization as not proven, to say the best of it ; and consequently we are still in the dark as to the causes which advanced man in the east and kept him in statu quo in the west. But as to the fact itself there is no question. . The northern tribes of our continent are wholly uncivilized ; so are those in the extreme south ; but in the semi-tropic regions we find a sort of civilization, conformable to the leisure which a warm and fertile climate makes possible, and to the sedentary habits which a relaxing temperature fosters. It must be borne in mind, too, that the population in the southern regions was denser in the given area than it was further north, compelling the people to adjust themselves one with another, and thus promoting the development of stable villages or cities. Central America is narrow; and Peru arid Chih are so hemmed in between the Andes and the Pacific as to be practically scamped for room. And it is in the crowded valleys of Mexico and the Isthmus, and along the ocean shores further south, that we find the greatest development in the arts of life among the original denizens of this continent. But are our Indians original denizens of the continent in the full sense of the term? And has there been, in former times, a comparatively civilized race in the north, which gradually moved southward, whose relics we find among the Aztecs and Incas of a recent day? Do the mounds which are found in many places in the north represent the work of a people possessed of science and power, which disappeared so long ago that no memory of them remains? Is the Cyclopean architecture of Yucatan and Peru the monument of an affluent civilization superior to anything known at the time of the Spanish conquest, which has left no other record of itself than this?