by Edmund Burke
Since I am on the subject of these cruelties, and since they are things so frequently mentioned, I cannot help observing, that the accounts are by no means founded upon any tolerable methods of calculation, but thrown down at random in a declamatory way, with a design yet further to blacken the Spanish adventurer; men certainly wicked enough, tho’ represented without any heightening colours. The truth is, that great numbers, perhaps almost as great as are charged, have really perished; but then it was in a series of years, by being reduced to slavery in the mines, and other laborious occupations, to which the Americans are of all people, by their constitutions, the most unequal, and by being disheartened by a state of unpolitical and desperate slavery, the greatest enemy in the world to increase.
There is a notion likewise pretty common, that these cruelties were committed partly, if not wholly, upon a religious account, and at the instigation of the priests; but in reality it was quite otherwise. This unfortunate people found their only refuge in the humanity which yet remained in the clergy, and the influence they had on the Spaniards, though the clergy, who went on these adventures, were generally not the most zealous for religion, and were, as the Spanish clergy commonly are, ignorant enough, and so little principled in the spirit of the religion they professed, or indeed in the nature of the human mind, that they could boast as a very glorious thing, that one of them had baptized several thousands of Indians in one day, without the help of any miracle for their conversion, and with a degree of good life, which, to say the best, was nothing more than common. But of any murders committed by them, or at their instigation, I find little or no proof at all.
CHAP. XV.
BESIDES Mexico, there was but one country in America which in any sort deserved the name of a civilized kingdom, and that was Peru. During the latter part of the Mexican war, the Spaniards became acquainted with the fame and wealth of this country. After Pedraria was appointed governor over the conquests of Balboa, his lieutenants reduced all that large tract which is now called Terrafirma, committing barbarities worthy the man under whose authority they acted. Amongst all the adventurers who acted under his commission, none have made themselves so famous as those of whom we are going to speak.
As if it were destined that every thing in this new world should be carried on in a new and extraordinary manner, three citizens of Panama, private men, and advanced in years, undertook the conquest of Peru, a country known to them only by report, but by the same report said to be rich, extensive, populous, and powerful. The names of these adventurers were, Francis Pizarro, Almagro, and Ferdinand Lucques, a priest, and a man of considerable fortune. They entered into this engagement in the most solemn manner. Lucques said mass, an oath of mutual fidelity was plighted, the sacrament was divided into three parts, Lucques took one, and delivered the other two to his confederates. The first expedition, in consequence of this confederacy, was made under extraordinary difficulties, and with very little success. Pizarro, who commanded, spent two years in the short navigation between Panama and the Northern extremity of Peru, a voyage now made frequently in two weeks, since the winds and currents are known. He landed, and found that the wealth of the country was as great as he imagined; and that the resistance he was like to meet in endeavouring to possess himself of it, would be full as considerable. This he put to the proof very early, by taking the rash step of attacking the inhabitants at his first landing; and thus letting them see all at once the worst of his intentions. The difficulties he met with, and the resistance his ill conduct occasioned in the country, obliged him to return without effecting any thing considerable. But neither he, nor his associates, after such a length of time, or such greatness of expence, were deterred from the prosecution of their scheme. It was agreed that Pizarro should go into Spain to obtain an exemption from the government of Pedraria, and to get for themselves the grant of whatever they should conquer. Pizarro (who, though not the monied man, was the soul of the enterprize) was to be chief governor, with the property of two hundred leagues along the sea-coast. Almagro they agreed should be adelantado, or king’s lieutenant; and Lucques, who was a priest, was to be first bishop and protector of the Indians. The other profits of the enterprize were to be equally divided. But as this was an enterprize of ambitious avarice, there was little faith observed. Pizarro sollicited only his own suit in Spain, and obtained for himself alone the property of the land, the government, the lieutenancy, every thing which he was capable as a layman of taking; Almagro was forgot, and Lucquez was left his eventual bishoprick.
On his return, this too early discovery of breach of faith was like to ruin all; but Pizarro, who knew how to retreat as well as to advance, yielded up to Almagro every thing he could reasonably desire, and nothing now obstructed the embarkation, which, after all, did not exceed one hundred and eighty men.
Before we proceed, it may not be unnecessary to say something of the persons who had the conduct of this great undertaking. Francis Pizarro was the bastard son of a gentleman of good family. His education was as irregular as his birth, he could not even read; but then he had a great deal of that capacity and fitness for the world, which is obtained by much struggling in it, and by being early made dependant on a man’s own industry. Hardened to life, dexterous in affairs, never setting his heart upon a part of his designs whilst the total was at stake, of a penetrating sagacity into the nature of man, artful, bold, dissembling, and cruel. Almagro had likewise enough of that desperate bravery and toughness of body and mind, so necessary in a design of this sort. In their birth there was no considerable difference. Pizarro was a bastard, Almagro a foundling. Pizarro owed nothing to education; Almagro depended wholly upon his natural parts. But Almagro, bred from his infancy in the camp, had all the soldierly qualities, patient, laborious, and temperate; far from the craft and dissimulation of Pizarro, he was all openness and generosity, knew not what avarice was, and his cruelty, the common distemper of all the adventurers in this part of the world, was much mitigated by the intercourse he had with an Indian woman, who, by degrees, softened the rigour of a veteran seasoned to blood, into some compassion to her unhappy countrymen.
The empire of Peru was governed by a race of kings, which they called yncas. The twelfth in succession was then upon the throne. The first of this race, who was named Mango Capac, was a prince of great genius, with that mixture of enthusiasm, which fits a man to make great changes, and to be the legislator of a forming nation. He observed that the people of Peru were naturally superstitious, and had principally a veneration for the sun. He therefore pretended that he was descended from that luminary, whose authority he was designed to bear, and whose worship he was by that authority to enforce. By this persuasion, easily received by a credulous people, he brought a large territory under his jurisdiction, a larger was subdued by his arms; but he made use both of the deceit and the force for the most laudable purposes. He united and civilized the dispersed and barbarous people; he bent them to laws and arts; he softened them by the institutions of a benevolent religion; in short, there was no part of America in which agriculture and the arts were so much and so well cultivated, nor where the people were of a milder nature, and more ingenuous manners. The yncas descended, as they imagined, from so sacred an original, were themselves respected as divinities. In none, even of the Asiatic countries, was there so entire an obedience to the royal authority. But here it was rather filial than slavish. As to the character of the Peruvians themselves, they seem to have had a strong resemblance to the antient Egyptians; like them, under a sky constantly serene, they were a people industrious and ingenious; cultivating the arts, but without bringing them to perfection; inclined to superstition, and of a soft unwarlike temper.
The ynca Guaiana Capac having conquered the province of Quito, which now makes a part of Spanish Peru, to secure himself in the possession, married the daughter of the natural prince of the country. By her he had a son called Atahualpa, or Atabalipa. By a former marriage he had a son named Huescar, heir of his other dominions. On his
death Huescar, his eldest son, claims his whole dominions, both hereditary and acquired. Atabalipa, the youngest, without pretending to the rest, would keep Quito as his right by the double title of son to the conqueror, and to her whose inheritance that kingdom was, forfeited besides by the will the dying ynca had made in his favour. This dispute kindled a civil war, which, after various turns of fortune, ended at last in favour of Atabalipa, and he not only routed his brother’s armies, and over-run his dominions, but actually held him a prisoner in the castle of Cusco. Such was the face of affairs when the Spaniards arrived in Peru, whose remarkable appearance and surprizing feats of arms were every where spread about the country, and caused a general alarm. As usual in frightful rumours, new superstitions begin, or old ones are revived to increase the confusion. There subsisted a tradition amongst the Peruvians, that one of their antient princes had a dream, which he ordered carefully to be recorded. He imagined that he saw a man cloathed all over, even to his feet, with a long beard, and leading in his hand an animal, such as he had never seen before; and that at the same time he was clearly informed of the will of the gods, that such a man should rule that country. A Spaniard, whom Pizarro had sent upon an embassy to Atabalipa, as soon as he was discovered leading his horse upon some occasion that made him dismount, agreed so well with this dream, that it is incredible how soon it spread into the remotest parts of the country, and with how great a terror it struck the whole nation.
Atabalipa, newly seated upon a precarious throne, was not the least alarmed at this event, for a new erected power has every thing to fear from whatever sets the people’s minds, still unsettled, upon new motions. He resolved, if possible, that his enemies should take no advantage of the arrival of those strangers, by engaging them by all means to his own interest. He therefore received the embassadors which Pizarro had sent with the greatest marks of honour, though their discourse, consisting itself of very impertinent matter, was very ill interpreted to him, as was his to them. He even went out to meet Pizarro with a vast number of attendants, to whom he gave the strictest charge upon no account to offer the least injury to the strangers, as they were those of whom his predecessor had foretold, and of the same divine original, children of the sun. But Pizarro, who advanced with other notions to the interview, soon convinced him that a contrary caution was more necessary. They met near a celebrated temple, the Spaniards drawn up in order of battle, and a party in ambuscade. This circumstance leaves us in no doubt as to the design of Pizarro. The first person who addressed himself to the ynca, was father Vincent, a friar, who was not ashamed to make his character the instrument of so base a crime. He advanced with a cross in his hand, and began a most unseasonable discourse upon the birth and miracles of Christ, exhorting him to become a christian, on the pain of eternal punishment. Then he spoke with equal eloquence of the emperor of the Romans, pressing him with the same good argument to become a subject to that emperor, threatening him in case of obstinacy, that God would harden his heart as he did Pharaoh’s, and then punish him with the plagues of Egypt, with other miserable stuff, worse interpreted. The ynca, tho’ utterly astonished at matter so unaccountable, behaved with decency and gravity, telling him, that he believed that he and his companions were children of the sun, recommended himself and his subjects to their protection, and made no doubt but they would behave to them in a manner worthy the offspring of so beneficent a deity.
Whilst these discourses continued, the Spanish soldiers, whose least business to Peru was to listen to sermons, observing a considerable quantity of gold in the neighbouring temple, had their zeal immediately stirred up, and a party of them began to pillage it. The priests made some opposition. A disturbance ensued, and a great noise, which so alarmed our adventuring apostle, that he let fall his cross and breviary in his fright, and turned his back upon his intended proselyte. The Spaniards who were not concerned in the pillage, seeing him fly, either that they judged the heathens had offered their priest some violence, or that Pizarro made use of this signal to them to fall on, immediately drew their swords, attacked the guards and attendants of the ynca, defenceless through a religious obedience to their sovereign’s command, and with every circumstance of the most deliberate and shocking barbarity, slaughtered five thousand, which was near the whole number of the Indians, who fell without any anxiety for their own lives, pressing forward with all the zeal and officiousness of a most heroic loyalty, to the chair of their prince, to expire at his feet; and as fast as one set of his supporters were slain, the others succeeded with eagerness to supply their places, and share their fate. The ynca at last was dragged down, and made a prisoner, by an act of the most unparallelled treachery, executed with a cruelty that has hardly an example, and can admit of no excuse. The plunder of his camp, rich beyond the idea of any European of that time, was their reward.
The unfortunate prince was not wanting to himself in his captivity. Seeing that his liberty had fallen a sacrifice to their avarice, he hoped to relieve himself by working upon the same disposition. He began to treat of his ransom, and promised such sums as astonished the Spaniards into an agreement, nor was the performance unequal. On this occasion not only the antient ornaments and valuable furniture, amassed by a long line of magnificent kings, were brought out; but the hallowed treasures of the most venerated temples were given without scruple, to save him who was the support of the kingdom and the religion. Whilst these were preparing, three Spaniards, who were sent to Cusco to superintend in the work, had means of conferring with Huescar, who quickly finding their foible, and the use his brother had made of it, made bitter complaints of the injuries he had suffered, begging the Spaniards, as the patrons of the oppressed, to embrace his cause, promising threefold the treasure for their assistance, which Atabalipa was to pay for his ransom. He received a very favourable answer. Mean time the Spaniards treated the ynca with all manner of civility, admitted his attendants to him, but no talk of his liberty. As soon as he had been apprised of Huescar’s negotiation with the Spaniards, and Almagro’s arrival with an additional force, he began to be under great apprehensions. To ease himself upon one side, he sent immediate orders to have Huescar put to death.
The arrival of Almagro, on the other hand, caused some embarrassment in Pizarro’s affairs. This commander finding that Pizarro had seized the ynca with immense treasures, and having already experienced his ill faith, consulted with his principal officers about leaving his part to himself, and seeking their fortune elsewhere. Whilst this was in agitation, his secretary, who was averse to him, gave Pizarro notice of the design. In an instant Pizarro saw how disadvantageous such a step must prove to him, with so small a force, all resources at a distance, and the country exasperated by the detestable action he had lately committed. He saw that all depended upon removing every suspicion of him from the breast of Almagro. For this purpose, and as something of an ill mind appeared in his most masterly actions, he began by sacrificing the secretary. He informed Almagro of his treachery. Next, though gold was the great object of his undertakings; yet he knew how to relinquish some part to secure the rest. He agreed to divide the spoil equally between Almagro and himself, and to make no distinction between the soldiers of either in the distribution. This made an entire and hearty reconciliation, which was no sooner concluded than the ynca’s ransom came in. But this vast treasure, the capital object of all their labours and villainies, no sooner came into their possession, but in it’s consequences it was very near being the utter ruin of their affairs. It is said, and not improbably, that the whole exceeded the sum of one million five hundred thousand pounds sterling, a sum vast at the present time; then it was a prodigy. On the dividend, after deducting a fifth for the emperor, and the shares of the chief commanders and officers, each private soldier had above two thousand pounds English money. They had now made a fortune even beyond their imaginations; but the soldiery was ruined, the greatest part of the army insisted upon being discharged, that they might enjoy their fortunes in quiet. This proposal ill suited with
the ambitious views of the commanders. Almagro was for proceeding in the usual way, to enforce obedience by the severity of military discipline; but Pizarro opposed him.